Luster(43)

* * *



I stay up until I have the living room TV to myself, and halfway through a Rocko’s Modern Life marathon Rebecca comes home from work and falls asleep beside me, still in her boots and scrubs. At 1:00 a.m., when the Nicktoons segue into black and white, Rocky and Bullwinkle are in an air balloon and I move closer to her and she smells of formaldehyde and cigarettes, her hair damp and newly blond at the roots. I think of how my palms were dark for days after I dyed her hair. I lower the volume on the TV and watch her. She is like me, ordinary, prone to stretches where she looks bad, though unlike me, when she looks bad she looks soluble, her inertia fevered, Victorian. When the cartoon block loops back around and Jane Jetson shoots into space, I get up to leave and Rebecca grabs my wrist. You should be grateful, she says, the light from the TV illuminating her face, you have all the time in the world.



* * *



When the house is quiet, sometimes I put some newspaper on the floor and mix paint. I put on the post office episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and I collect my staple gun and stretcher bars. Sometimes I turn my phone off and hope that when I turn it on there will be terrible news beyond the assassinations I breathlessly await, something hurtling through space, an untethered moon or sleek machine full of race-ending cephalopods. Otherwise, there are things to paint. Rebecca’s boots and her half-eaten Granny Smiths, Rebecca in the garden, the six grainy pictures I took of Eric and Rebecca a month before.



* * *



On film it is even less abstract, even more anatomical, his scrotum and her knees, though there is a tenderness that gives me pause. I try to paint it, but none of the renditions are true. They are lurid and embarrassing in their attempt at scale. I have seen both Eric and Rebecca in various states of undress—Eric’s hard torso and heterosexual underwear, Rebecca as most people see their mothers about the house, the harried bits of nudity between terry cloth and the single functional hook of a Playtex bra—but this is different, proof they are more than where they have ended up. I wish it would stop. Every Tuesday, 11:00 p.m., Conan O’Brien on TBS. On these nights I let myself into Akila’s room and slip on a headset. I reload my rifle and clear German soldiers from the town church. I can’t get out of Normandy. My weapons are low-level and high-recoil and my avatar has tinnitus. After a blast, my controls stall and I have to wait until the ringing stops. Akila looks up from her computer and sighs, which is her passive-aggressive way of reminding me there are nobler gaming pursuits, games that require me to talk to villagers, that ask me to go out of my way to recruit crucial party members, but that have nothing on the instant gratification of blowing an enemy bunker to smithereens. Nigger! a kid from the Netherlands yells as a paratrooper falls from the sky. I slip off my headset, and Akila and I resume preparing for Comic Con, which, as she reminds me frequently, is two weeks away.



* * *



After we secure the tickets, Akila announces that she will be going to the con as an ifrit. There are immediate speed bumps—adapting the form of a canonically male Arabic fire lord to the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, fashioning armor and horns, and, in general, minding the mild body dysmorphia of a newly minted teenager. She pins a picture of an ifrit to the back of her door and measures her thighs. In its most common iteration, the costume is little more than a loincloth, and even with our adjustments, the costume is more skimpy than either Rebecca or Eric would like. However, because they have noticed Akila’s burgeoning disdain for her body, they don’t want to say anything to make it worse. Eric and Rebecca meet in the garden and have a hushed conversation about whether or not their reservations are unfeminist. I sit by my window and listen as Rebecca builds a case for opaque stockings and Eric frets about his whiteness and Akila’s agency. We can’t let her do whatever she wants just because she’s black, Rebecca says. That isn’t intersectional feminism, it’s bad parenting. Despite Rebecca’s protests, the cosplay moves along as planned, because ultimately both Eric and Rebecca are reluctant to tamper with the special climate that has made their somber daughter prone to smile. She comes to dinner and talks at length about how Stan Lee fought publishers over Spider-Man, how publishers did not feel it was feasible for a superhero to be a lower-middle-class kid from Queens, and she keeps a ledger of her calorie intake in a notebook with her Comic Con schedule, which is a persnickety thirteen-column document in cramped color-coordinated script.



* * *



Eric and I drive to Joann Fabrics and get four yards of brown pleather and a pound of multipurpose foam. We shop with our palms, sampling stiff brocade and hairy cashmere, and we look at each other to confirm if we are feeling the same thing. We try to make fire. He is not an artistic man, but he is a particular one, so serious about our materials that he stays up to make a call to a Chinese latex distributor that sent canary yellow instead of marigold. We stockpile mixed media in various yellows and reds, ask ourselves if we want the fire to be interactive or decorative. Eric asks Akila to join us on a trip to an archive in Mahwah, and when we get there, two archivists are waiting in a back room with an Arabic manuscript. They provide cotton gloves and between the steepled script there is an image of an ifrit razing a Persian town. Eric smiles as Akila goes carefully through the book, and back in the car he seems relieved. When we get home and Akila is out of the car, he turns to me and says that he needs this to be perfect. He says that Rebecca didn’t want to adopt and he wonders if Akila can feel it. We brainstorm more iterations of fire—cardboard, string lights, a rope of knotted handkerchiefs—and we only see Rebecca in passing, as she is on her way out for work.