Luster(49)
When the neighbors have all returned to their houses and one of the officers has finally pried the doghouse from the old woman’s arms, Akila comes into my room with a hot comb and lets down her hair, which in a month has grown thick and kinky. She is already in her Starfleet uniform, which we purchased from the Party Supply store at the eleventh hour, and which she is not particularly happy about, though as I turn on the stove and put the hot comb to the flame, Akila summons Uhura, practices words in Tamarian, Ferengi, and, of course, Klingon. Over the last couple of months, we have updated her hair care through careful trial and error, even as we were routinely waylaid by suburban convenience stores stocked exclusively with Caucasian shampoos. Once, in Hoboken, we discovered a single bottom shelf with old pomade and congealed Cantu. There were a few trips to Brooklyn, one for oils and one for butters, the homemade and saran-wrapped, the saditty and petroleum-free, Akila’s sopping twist-outs transformed by a half percentage point of fall humidity until we forwent the apple cider vinegar and just cracked a few eggs over her head. Now we have a routine: coconut oil, manuka honey, and two firm Bantu knots before bed. As I go through her hair with the hot comb, I imagine its future iterations—the five-dollar ponies and mangled yaki and rainbow Kanekalon and the certainty of a post-breakup big chop, and I wonder where inside this spectrum she will ultimately land. As we are finishing up, Eric comes down the stairs and comments on the smell, but when he sees the source, he seems to gather that it is Something Black, and he is contrite.
* * *
He is already in costume, and out of all of us, his physique is closest to the material, a supple inverted triangle that is practically canon, though he has gone for the updated costume, the muted ballistic nylon instead of shiny spandex, which feels less patriotic, but along with his whole working-father vibe is maybe the Captain America you get when the country has, relative to the rest of the world, entered its surly teenage years. As he prepares a cup of tea, I imagine our child, Eric’s bone structure, my dysfunctional bowels. I have no doubt that a boy would be beautiful. A girl might have some things to overcome. When Akila is gone, he pours some whiskey into his tea and tries to secure the last component of his costume, a harness he is too drunk to put on. I offer to help and he waves me away, but after a while he gives up and sags into a chair.
* * *
He has been this way since his trip to the ER: squirrelly, prone to random displays of machismo, less discreet about how much he drinks. When we met, his drinking always felt situational, a thing he did because we were out. It felt like a necessary preamble, routine, like putting on a sock before a shoe. I should have noticed sooner that some things should not be routine. Looking at him now, it feels impossible that I ever could have missed it. I think about our child again, and this time a slew of predispositions undermine that gorgeous Punnett square. A child with profound narcotic inclinations, with generations of inherited trauma, with questionable brain chemistry and a lifetime of some ceaseless prefrontal seesaw, with my flat, rectangular feet and our mutual taste for disco, which in the year 2045 is likely to be even less cool, Eric’s giant umlaut genes meaning nothing if our child grows up in America and drowns in his or her allotted levels of racism-induced cortisol as the earth’s sun slowly dies. The only reason I want to tell him is because of the improbability of it, this miraculous fluke that has come about even through the severe limitations of our bodies, a fluke that makes me ill but also dreamy, like something can be different, new. It is not so bad to be an incubator. Everything I eat and drink feels like it amounts to something. Oysters, chocolate, mangos drenched in chili oil, all for a purpose and all excused, an education for the palate I am building with the most acute iterations of sugar and salt. But conversely, it is terrible being an incubator. Everything I do feels like it should amount to something.
* * *
As I am getting the harness over Eric’s head, Rebecca comes down the stairs in her costume, and like Eric, she has chosen the updated version, fishnets and coochie cutters instead of the jester’s romper, though she has stuck with the mallet instead of the baseball bat. Originally, it was meant to be a couple’s costume, but when Eric put on the clown makeup, for a night, no one in the house could sleep. Either way, Rebecca’s Harley Quinn is so primary, so sullen, it looks best without a counterpart, which is to say that this cosplay does not really suit her, and no cosplay in which she is supposed to be sidekick would. She puts the mallet down on the island, takes a sip of Eric’s tea, and wrinkles her nose. However, she says nothing. She opens the window and sprays pink dye onto the ends of her pigtails.
* * *
Outside, the police are interviewing neighbors and the old woman is wandering around the yard in a nightgown. With the window open, the room fills with bleating sirens and neighborhood chatter, but above it all, I hear the old woman wailing. Big, airless sobs that stop Akila as she is coming back down the stairs. She goes over to the window and watches with a knowing reverence. She has mentioned in passing the things that were lost in the storm, that one of these things was a dog. No doubt Rebecca is thinking of this as she steers Akila away from the window and into the car. We are late, and the drive into the city is already looking bad. Eric slings his shield over his shoulder and opens the route on his phone; it is red all the way to Thirty-Fourth Street. When we pile into the car, a police officer is two houses down, talking with the neighbor who, for the entirety of my stay, has never said hello. Rebecca waves to the police on our way out and the officer looks up at her, at the mallet between her knees, and slowly waves back.