Luster(51)

Halfway there, everything is pudding and hands keep coming out of the dark. Because Eric is Captain America. Kids want to take pictures with him, and saying no feels very against the spirit of the thing. He lifts someone’s child into his arms, and in the moment before the flash, the kid looks at him and seems uncertain, aware of the pretend, that the eyes behind the mask belong to an archivist from New Jersey. Akila stands off to the side and looks at her watch, which she borrowed from Rebecca specifically for this day. Against the polyester of her Starfleet uniform, the watch is conspicuous, a grown-up piece of jewelry that makes her seem younger, but also like she has the right to be managing us, though Eric is enjoying the attention too much to care. When we get to the panel, we are fifteen minutes late. We stand in the back as an exclusive clip is coming to a close, and Akila pulls one of her eyelashes out. I want to tell her it’s okay, but I don’t know how to interact with her at this level of frenzy. I thought I had gotten the gist of it the previous week, after someone left an unkind review of her fan fiction regarding some point of canon she’d gotten wrong, and she was, for two days, too depressed to eat, but within this unique environment, her fandom is so violent it feels combustible.



* * *



Every person in the room is shiny and taut, breathing through their mouths and looking toward the stage, where the actors, writers, or producers are either very excited or very put off by the energy of the room. It’s my first time, a voice actor says, and everyone else on the panel laughs. I watch this show with my mom and I wondered how a lycanthrope can carry a robotic fetus to term, a fan says, and the room is silent. There is the feeling of conspiracy, glitches in the matrix abundant and kept like an inside joke, the same eight fans who make it to the mics, the villains who gather to admire themselves, universes flattened and set beside each other, long anime sagas truncated by the overlap, nine Gokus and three Kid Flashes, some costumes so professional that for a moment you believe a bandicoot might be able to wear jeans. And all the Harley Quinns. I keep thinking I see Rebecca, but none of them are her. I tap one on the shoulder and when she turns around, she is juggling three grenades filled with laughing gas. An associate at a VR booth wipes a headset down with an antimicrobial napkin and hands it to Akila, and Eric and I look over some paperwork. We confirm that Akila does not have epilepsy or paroxysmal positional vertigo, and Eric makes a show of reading the fine print, which says the VR company isn’t liable should something go wrong. When the game has started, Eric turns to me and his pupils are enormous.

“It isn’t what you thought it would be,” he says, raking his fingers through his hair.

“No,” I answer, and he nods and becomes preoccupied with a pretty VR tech who is standing by with a blue bucket until someone yells Veronica! and she rushes off with the bucket in tow. As we watch Akila play, it feels like we are witnessing half of a private conversation, the exaggerated physicality that is meant to compensate for what is not actually there, a little daffy, but kind of sweet when you see the moment she truly surrenders to this suspension of disbelief. A VR tech places a gun into her hands, and she shoots it into the air. Around us, the con is still seething, stormtroopers and wizards and gems funneling in from the street and bringing in that copper city air, the body positivity so palpable it feels boastful, like everyone has, for a moment, become the old man in the gym locker room whose scrotum you cannot avoid, though you feel the anxiety in it, that like Akila and her chunky, borrowed watch, everyone is sensitive to the time, a little worried about how Sunday is slowly closing in and so in the throes of a frantic, temporary state, high on some unseen communal steroid and trying to make the most of the day.



* * *



A few feet away, the silicon torso of a robot is open to the glittering transistors that form its heart. A robot’s heart is the brain, Eric mutters into my ear. Someone’s baby is crying. An antiseptic male voice comes from the ceiling and says willkommen! A reaper emerges from the crowd with glossy, black wings, and Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.



* * *



Before I go into the booth, I ask Akila to keep an eye on her father. I put on my headset, and at first the only sensation is the warmth of the cushion on my forehead, like a toilet seat that has only recently been vacated, but then I am standing in someone’s living room, and then there is a prompt that asks if I would like to watch TV. So I sit on a crudely rendered couch and watch three minutes of Law & Order: SVU in a vacated house where there are flowers on the coffee table that I can actually tear apart, which is more thrilling than Mariska Hargitay and Ice-T in the Hamptons interviewing a yuppie who almost certainly put all these women’s heads on sticks. In the next demo, I walk around an empty monochrome hospital, and some kind of mist is coming in through the vents. I go into the surgery theater, and a monkey in a blood-spattered apron is taking a Bing Crosby record out of a sleeve. When “White Christmas” comes on, I turn and run. I initiate the last demo, a space walk where I move between six of Jupiter’s seventy-nine moons. On the second moon, Europa, which is covered in ice, another explorer emerges from the dark and begins to walk toward me. Above my head, some kind of stellar void is developing. When the explorer reaches me, the sequence ends and when I take the headset off, Rebecca is there with her own headset in her hands. She looks rough, her makeup runny around the eyes.