Luster(31)

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When I put the chessboard back, I notice another game a little farther back, underneath a pair of dirty gingham shorts. When I bring it out, I see immediately that it is Monopoly, which was my father’s favorite game. It was his favorite game because he always won, and he always won because he always played against me. He believed in the purity of competition. He did not believe that a child deserved to win simply for being a child. He scooped up my properties and smiled, showed the gold fillings in his teeth. Once, I tucked a few blue dollars into my dollhouse in the middle of the night. Now I look for my father’s favorite piece, the boot. But the game and the pieces are missing, and in their place is a Glock 19. This was one of Clay’s favorites. He owned three, and in his apartment, one was always nearby. When he held it, he held it casually. When I take the gun into my hands now, it does not feel casual. The gun itself is ugly. It is heavy and inelegant, but in my hand, I see how it is lethal, ingenious technology. Rebecca texts me from outside and says that she and Akila are going out for back-to-school supplies, and it occurs to me that it is September. I stand at the window, and I watch them drive away. I consider the gun and notice I have an incoming call.

“Eric,” I say, embarrassed by the apparent relief in my voice.

“She lives,” he says, and I sense his irritation. It should make me happy, but his anger is different when it is not theoretical, and I panic.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“You did?”

“Of course not. But I worried. I worry about you in that neighborhood.”

“You worry about me?” I say, because I like the idea of someone out there wondering if I’ve died, though in the moment his whiteness is unbearable. Also I know he is just trying to make me feel bad about not responding, but even this performative concern feels good. “It’s just Bushwick.”

“Have you looked at the crime map? They update it regularly. A good amount of forced sodomy in your area. Rebecca got mugged coming out of the supermarket eight years ago. Two miles away from our house. Guy took her ring and I had to get her a new one.”

“How’s the conference going?”

“It’s good. All these NARA nerds. I feel at home. But I miss you.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, putting him on speakerphone so I can hold the gun.

“No, I do. I mean that. I’ve had a lot of time to think up here. You know when you go to a hotel and get one of those rough towels, and the toilet is sealed and certified with a sticker? That’s Toronto. Clean. Everyone has great skin.”

“What have you been thinking about?” I ask, because I’ve never been to a hotel.

“A lot of things. I was working with some glass plate negatives. T. E. Lawrence. The negatives were so degraded I went back to the hotel and found flakes of the film inside my glove. I put them under a light and mostly it was a wash, but in one or two I could still see the desert, the color-reversed sand. And I just felt like, fuck, this exact thing is happening to me, you know, cellularly.” He laughs, and I can tell he is embarrassed. For a moment, I think I love him. I hold the gun with two hands.

“I totally get that.”

“I could leave my wife,” he says.

“What?”

“I could leave her. Easily.”

“Okay.”

“Listen, I have to go now but I’ll be home in three days. Let’s talk about it then?” He hangs up, and for a while I just sit there with the gun in my lap. I open my photo gallery and look at the picture of Rebecca and Akila in the garden. I put the gun back in the box, push it back under the bed, and wander around the house. I imagine all of it is mine. But even when I make myself comfortable, when I find an orange and eat it over the sink, I have the sensation of stepping into someone else’s shoes. I know that if Eric leaves his wife, we’ll have to move to another town. A suburb with rival high schools. A small apartment stocked with wax paper and bananas. A lightly used American car that we share. A place where our shoes appear side by side. A cabinet full of plastic Price Chopper bags and a nervous old dog that loves him more than it loves me. I could do it, though as I press the rind into the trash and see all the proof of life, the soggy cornflakes and chicken fat, I know that his declaration, the dangling carrot for which mistresses everywhere open their stupid mouths, is complete bullshit. Believing he will leave Rebecca is one of the few personal failures I can absolutely avoid, but then I see that picture of him in Greece again, his pit stains and passport necklace and vacation stubble, and I just eat it up. Because I have not been laid in a month, and everything looks good. Men in magazines who wear chambray and pretend to water plants. That self-portrait of Rembrandt where his collar is turned up. The Allstate insurance man and Stringer Bell. Thirty days have passed since Eric and I last fucked, and it is agony. I take the picture off the fridge and head to my room, but on the way I notice the door to Akila’s room is open.



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Inside it smells like body butter and Hot Pockets, like a rank, pubescent Yankee Candle, but otherwise, this is the most fantastic room in the house. The cutesy stay out sign on the door now seems out of step if not ironic, the room less the product of petulant stoicism and more a tribute to earnest fandom, the walls papered in dragons, wiccan infographics, and lithe Korean boys, quartz and drusy stones and dirty zirconia hanging from strategically placed tacks, Gothic illustrations of woodland faeries on linen, steampunk goggles strapped to a wig stand where seven wigs are stacked in accordance with ROYGBIV. On the TV there are several figurines, though the only ones I recognize are Robin and the Takashi Murakami miniature of a girl spraying milk from her tits. Because of my sexless career as a high school studio art kid, I was frequently adjacent to the prototypes for girls like this, girls who were horse-girls except with cats, girls with patches and pins who uploaded their Suicide Girl auditions with the translucent computer lab Macs, girls who were Goth-lite, in and out of Hot Topic and Torrid with their weepy, sallow boys, shy dabblers in anime and D&D, though in the years I have been away I see it has gotten sexier and more bleak, the interludes between Akila’s shrines to Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton dripping in intermediate sorcery and sex, bloody grindhouse stills framed next to fishnets and a wilted go-go boot, all the hairless CGI men with their hips canted, corollaries of the comic stacks and spell scrolls and everything else exalting the perfect and unreal.