Luster(36)

* * *



We look at each other through the mirror, and there are things I want to say, apologies and accusations that all convene into a strangled, inarticulate sound, though when he looks away and flicks the razor into the sink, when he turns up the weather report and continues as if I am not there, it surprises me, and immediately after the surprise comes disappointment for being caught off guard by a completely unsurprising thing, and when I catch my reflection in the mirror, I see how I am breathing through my mouth. I return to the guest bathroom, where I take a scalding shower and try to forget how I looked, the grime from the mosh making the water brown, more grass than seems possible coming out of my hair, the debris around the drain not enough to deter me from lying down in the tub and being dramatic, humiliation being such that it sometimes requires a private performance, which I give myself, and emerge from the shower in the next stage of hurt feelings. For me, this is denial.



* * *



I unpack my bag and arrange my belongings around the guest room. I sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee from my Captain Planet mug. Rebecca appears with wet hair. The tips of her ears are still tinted with dye. She fills a Tupperware container with fruit, puts it into a paper bag, and writes 305 Calories on the front. Akila runs down the stairs, takes the bag, and rushes out of the door. Outside I see the old woman who has been watching me. She opens her newspaper and looks up as one of the sheets takes to the air. Eric comes down the stairs with a suitcase and a piece of tissue above his lip. He doesn’t acknowledge me, and I go to my room and apply the fentanyl patch. I take a book from the small library in the living room. Thirty pages in, a duke, the black sheep of a dysfunctional Welsh duchy, is training a nearsighted handmaid in the tenets of aristocracy, crushing her bifocals beneath his boot and drawing her newly beautiful face into his hands. I try to busy myself. I do push-ups, alphabetize the books. I raid the fridge and cobble a few sandwiches from what I can find. I wrap one of the sandwiches in wax paper. I get on a Manhattan-bound train. I arrive at the library full of regret. The fentanyl has upset my stomach, and I need to go to the bathroom. I make it all the way to a limited exhibit on Nile River Valley Linguistics and Gene Flow in Nubia before I realize I’m in the wrong place. I take a moment and look at the collection because I like the smell of the place. There is a large infographic on mtDNA types and population sampling. There is a Nubian drawing of a man, and though the drawing has no perspective, the color of the water around him is carefully preserved, and I think about the resilience of that single pigment, the lapis lazuli, traversing time.



* * *



I take a bus to the correct library, and inside, I can smell the natural decay, the fermentation, the glue and twine and leather, paper as it degrades and betrays its origin, reminds you it comes from the trees. The library is mostly empty, though the few people who are around are intent on their work, a group of college students looking through reference section O–P, a woman hunched over a microfiche machine. I circle each floor until I get to an exhibit on Wartime Cognitive Dissonance and the Physiology of Dissent. After a brief dedication to the donors, there is a succession of helmets, cracked, blown out, covered in names of wives, children, and wry condemnations of God, a Vietcong bicycle on display backlit by warm, orange light, photographs of soldiers cleaning their glasses and tuning transistors, the helicopter blades and jungle brush foiling the camera’s aperture with movement and incomplete light, naked children and self-immolation and prisoners of war wilting on tarmacs, a daisy in the barrel of a gun having nothing on the unnatural look of a soldier’s smile, the look of the incomplete synthesis of fight or flight and the limbic system when it cannot compute. My father only ever smiled like this, like every morning he had to put on his skin and adhere to a code of behavior he could no longer understand, a highly functioning collection of pathologies with shrapnel in his back.



* * *



He was years removed from his service by the time I was old enough to misplace his Purple Heart, but during prayer meetings and birthday parties, it was apparent he was different, molecularly, like some fundamental human component had either been emptied out or on bad days, cranked up to eleven, the Fourth of July or a person entering his room too silently grounds for a survival response so disproportionate that as a kid you struggle to understand the blind anger and periods of profound withdrawal, though when you go to see the fireworks with your mother and he isn’t there, you understand that whatever keeps him away is scary, that it is sad. When my father was a soldier, his prefrontal cortex wasn’t yet complete. He could not grow a full mustache, and when he came back home he had a cane and a DIY tattoo of a woman’s name. The cane was mostly for show. The woman was his first wife, and my mother was his third.



* * *



He’d spent his formative years in various homes in the Bible Belt with grim aunts who could trace their American lineage to the original bill of sale. He kept chickens while his mother, the sibling his aunts didn’t talk about, was in Louisiana slowly going mad. These were terms of art my father gave to me as I was learning to swim, his old man’s vocabulary having none of the clinical tact of the DSM-5. There were asylums, there was madness, and in the place of Germans, there were Krauts. His mother did not have a chemical imbalance, she had something fickle, something female, and so she returned to him with a severed frontal lobe. He was afraid of her like I would one day be afraid of him, because children, like dogs, are attuned to the signs of an impending storm. He became a man who always had girlfriends but didn’t much like them, a strapping sailor with a dampened drawl and a center part, his unruly hair slicked back with pomade. Then the war, shit and mud and some fusion of the two, the shipwreck’s centrifuge and the axon unraveled to the center of the nerve, my father the civilian, alarming the neighborhood with his midnight walks, shining his medals and trying to fool doctors with a carefully crafted limp. While he collected disability, it was not enough, and he had done it, the thing that most animals do but which only a few animals grieve, he had been up close and found it fetid and strange, killing for his country—a country that, once he was back home, reminded him that patriots could be shell-shocked, could be spangled in Arlington grass, but absolutely could not be black. And after having walked around with a child’s blood underneath his fingernails, at home the banks, the churches, the women, were nothing. He saw that the people at home did not see black men like him among them, that they were unprepared. So he came to New York armed only with confidence, and after two dead wives, my mother appeared before him on Broadway and 143rd, pretty and young and high.