Luster(37)

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At the end of the exhibit, I realize Special Collections is in the basement. I take the elevator down and my hands are shaking. I take off the fentanyl patch and put it in my purse. In the basement, I look through a thick pane of glass and count a dozen archivists. All of them are women. They don’t wear uniforms but they move uniformly, the microfilm and glass plate negatives poised in the hand without contact of the palm, the flatbed scanners and DSLRs splashing their faces with light. Beyond them, Eric removes his mask, pulls on a cotton glove. He opens a book underneath a mounted light, and when he lifts the page it is almost translucent, like onion skin. He beckons over the archivist closest to him, motions to the binding. She removes her mask and smiles. He puts his hand on her shoulder and how great is that, that in this shabby library basement, he is warm and involved, apparently the kind of boss who is also your friend.



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When I turn around there is a woman sitting at what a moment ago was a vacant desk. She is a natural black girl, bright and woowoo, a cluster of cloudy amethyst around her neck. She asks me if I need help. I tell her that I need to speak with Eric, but when I turn and look through the glass, he is gone. I tell her I brought him a sandwich, and she looks me up and down and tells me he is out.



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I take the sandwich and stop at a Duane Reade. I buy a Snapple and small bottle of Dr. Schulze’s Intestinal Formula #2, which boasts thirty-five million active cultures, and I ask for cash back. I check my email and there is a message from Panera Bread that reads, While there are currently no open positions as this time, we encourage you to apply in the future, a message from the Department of Education, from Bank of America, from my landlord, who has bad news about the security deposit, from a Nigerian prince, and from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which would like to remind me that per my firing, I will be uninsured in eleven days. On the bus back, I watch the road. The rain is heavy and there is a man running along the shoulder with a gas can in his hand. I think of my mother, who was sympathetic to a lot of things, to brown spider plants, to cats with alopecia, and most especially to car trouble. There was no hitchhiker she did not indulge, no man with a smoking Saab she was unwilling to help. Whenever I was in the car, I pleaded with her to keep going. I felt anxious around these men, and I struggled with what to say. But during her time as a dealer, an addict, and then a fervent Seventh-day Adventist, she was mellowed by the cosmic and by her prolonged chemical abuse, brimming with the grade of charisma you see in septuagenarian rock stars whose tepid late-career albums remind everyone they’re still alive, charisma that exists at the end of a liver, that has to do with acceptance, which incidentally is a tenet of Narcotics Anonymous and the SDA faith, wherein death is inevitable and complete. Except as a pious child, I could not feel casual about death. I had read Ecclesiastes, and the idea of death as nothingness terrified me. We picked up a man and he had a Bible in his hands. My mom was thrilled by the synchrony, but a mile away from the exit, I looked in the back seat and he was touching himself.



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I return to the house by noon and sit in the garden. I dig a hole and find a smooth gray stone. I wash it in the bathroom and hold it inside my mouth. In the end, I put it on the windowsill. I go to my room and masturbate angrily to that picture of Eric in Greece, and when it doesn’t make me feel any better I wander around the house. Rebecca is asleep with the door open, and for a while I stand there and watch her. I take pictures of different items around the house—the KitchenAid, a bowl of nuts that are primarily nigger toes, a drawer of old duck sauce packets and pens. I take a few of the ballpoints and a couple of pieces of paper from the printer that has, for the length of my stay, remained unplugged. I retreat to my room and try to render the photos as realistically as I can. At three, I hear Akila come home from school and run up to her room. By the time Eric comes home, I have the KitchenAid down, though the beater looks a little weird. The house is quiet. When Eric was away, the house was filled with sound, Akila’s and Rebecca’s routines textured and discordant, water and glass, sticky sounds of trash and sparring gear and doorjambs swollen with heat, the mailman and the democratic socialist at the door, all the toilets at the mercy of a houseful of women, the sensory meridian of tangled jewelry, of bobby pins and linoleum, of dubbed anime and the neighbor’s dog, otherwise a soft cosine of electricity and digital noise. With Eric home, there is none of that. I listen for any movement in the house, but none of it is distinct. There are no running faucets or noisy floorboards that precede feet. We all just materialize. Halfway through a long shower, through the curtain, I see Eric’s silhouette. I don’t hear him come in, but I hear him lock the door. He stands there silently as I wash my hair. When I get out of the shower, he is gone.



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The mornings are still and all the nights feel like Friday night, by which I mean they feel like the Sabbath, which, despite my hedonism, remains my body’s central quartz. When I kept the Sabbath, I did not yet have breasts. There were VHS tapes of devout animated cucumbers and my mother’s drawings of Lucifer, which bothered me until I had the vocabulary to know I was aroused. I was excited to explain the tenets of SDA to the kids in my new public school. I conceded that one of our early leaders invented cornflakes to treat masturbation, but asserted meditation on the natural environment as a form of self-love. It took a year before I realized my classmates’ questions were a sport. I didn’t take it personally. I tried harder, came to school with arguments already formed. A boy from the companion high school, an atheist who was four years my senior, pointed out my contradictions, and I went home and prepared more notes. The Sabbath itself was pristine. Of course I indulged loopholes. Sometimes I slept it away so I could avoid the boredom, sometimes I spent the day curating twelve-hour mixtapes of Christian rock. But most of the time, though I wasn’t allowed to dance and knew that everyone was having fun without me, I liked the quiet, the languor of a single hour, of a day when you are deliberate, thankful for what was made deliberately, retina and turnips and densely coiled stars, things so complex I could barely render them in paint. Though some things are not complex. Some things are accidents, and this is how it was filed with the insurance company when my mother wrecked the car. She didn’t come out of her room for four days. When I went inside, it smelled bad and she said that God was dead. My father took me to Friendly’s. A waitress dropped a tray of sundaes while he was holding my hand, and he crushed my fingers at the noise. He referred to my mother’s periods of catatonia as moods. He did not dare suggest we lift her up in prayer. Though he regaled each moony deaconess with stories of the work he’d done abroad, he did not pretend with me. My father did not believe in anything, and I was the only one who knew. To everyone else, my father was a God-fearing man. A charismatic servant with a troubled wife and a way of making women feel heard. On Friday nights such women would file into our home, and his office door would shut.