“So did Tal get any vibrations? Any ghosts take a bite?”
“One of the kids had a Ouija board. He came up with the phrase ‘mon oil me damang.’ That almost spells, ‘My eye itches,’ in French. But Kimet got it to say, ‘First!’ So maybe he got trolled on a ghost message board. Whatever. It’s all silly.”
“You can joke, but we saw something.” Sun rolls over to her side, grabs me by my jeans pocket, pulls me closer.
I take off my socks. I believe firmly that sex should involve the removal of socks. “I saw something too. I never said I didn’t,” I tell her, but don’t go into the obvious junkie reality because I already know she’s not trying to hear that once more. “I don’t think if I was dead I’d be like, ‘Hey this afterlife thing is great, but let’s go over there and play with the cardboard square with the letters on it.’ It’s just my slant, but I think if there actually is an afterlife, it doesn’t involve games from Parker Brothers.”
My pants are down and out, and I’m beside her. Lifting off my shirt, I hit the ceiling. There’s just enough room for both of us. For love. For sleeping though, Sun comes back up to the house. Sleeping doesn’t cause noise. Sleeping doesn’t lead to another incident where Tal yells, “You’re shaking the house” at the top of her voice directly from the floor below.
“It was actually nice tonight, I guess. All those kids coming together. She’s really connecting. But it’s creepy.”
“What if they were ‘the first’?” Sun puts to me. “This is an historic area, you never know.”
“Then my daughter shot the mulatto equivalent of the Zapruder film.”
Sunita pulls me to her. “I know. Exciting, right?”
Sunita Habersham’s flesh, her hair covering my face, that excites me. Besides Tal, it’s all I live for. Even with this RV rocking, it’s still way bigger than the cab of the Beetle. There’s an added intimacy that comes from it not having a motor. But the best part is after, in the quieting of bodies after so much movement when, before either of us can drift off from consciousness, Sun rises, pulls her hair back into a bun, and pulls out the comic books. And we read. Together. The bliss of sharing a previously solitary act. We’ve upped our pull list to about thirty comics a month, and still go through everything new by the weekend. We’ve progressed in our relationship to reading graphic novels from our childhood, the ones that made us love the form in the first place. Books from the era when comics were for children. We don’t care. Or I don’t care and I’m amazed that she doesn’t seem to mind. My inner child has found a friend.
After an hour of reading digital bootlegs of The Micronauts: They Came From Inner Space on her laptop, Sun grabs her shirt, and I look at her ass, at panties that say TUESDAY even though it’s Friday night. She puts jeans over them, and I watch as she tries to discover where her socks are hiding. All this because her bed’s too small for both of us, and because I don’t want Tal sleeping in the house alone. And because Sun wants to literally sleep with me. Because Sunita Habersham says she’s my lady now — although she still insists there’s no ownership involved, so I don’t really know if this means we’re exclusive. Or more specifically, if she is. But I know she chooses to lie down for the night with me. For that honor, I can motivate myself to rise from postcoital bliss, dress, and walk out of her camper and into the cold to my father’s house each night. Because she’s my lady now.
“I’m not coming up,” Sun says. I’m standing with my hand on the door handle, now frozen. “I’ve got to make a social call tonight.”
I say, “You’re going to love this: there’s a black comic-book exhibit at the African American Museum, they’ve got Jack Kirby’s first illustrations for Black Panther. I’m taking Tal tomorrow morning. Tosha is bringing her kids. You want to come? I was hoping you guys could meet.” I shoot this out quick, to stop myself from asking who her social call is, if it’s a man or a woman, if it’s friendship or some other kind of unbearable intimacy.
“I can’t, sorry. What time are you coming back from the museum? You want to meet after?”
I look at the time on my phone. I don’t want to, I don’t mean to, but I get so far into the gesture that aborting it would be even more awkward. It’s 11:42 P.M. She’s going to see someone she doesn’t bother to name at 11:42 P.M.
“Are you leaving the grounds? Because if so, you really want to be careful,” I tell her, as if she specifically suggested walking the streets of Germantown at midnight and specifically intends to not be careful about it.
“Don’t worry, I’m just staying in Mixed Mews. But it’s sweet of you to be concerned.” There’s a kiss there. There’s a kiss in it for me, for my diligence in not being possessive.
“Who are you going to…?” I try to do it casually. Again, I am solely concerned with her safety, and protection is different from possession.
“Text me tomorrow, when you’re done, okay?” Sunita tells me, and nothing more. Because I already told her I didn’t want to know about anything but us. I’m trying to be free of history too. And I don’t want to know. But I have to know. I have to and I’ve waited this long and that alone should stand as a testament to my enlightenment. I have to know so I give another quick peck then hurry out.
My laptop’s on in the dining room, the screen is dimmed until I resuscitate it. I look over to the tent, wait to hear Tal stirring in response, but notice only the unchanged rhythm of her slow and unconscious exhalation. Even so, I tilt the monitor away from her side of the house. And then I pull up the feeds from the security cameras.
I switch through the camera feeds until I find the one focused in the direction of Sun’s trailer, then I zoom in. But not so far as to try to peer straight into Sun’s windows. Because that would be wrong. That would be beyond security measures. I am not a stalker, I am just a cautious man sitting in the dark watching my lover through a spy cam as she leaves her trailer in the dead of night to possibly go to another person.
Sun walks out. She stops. She looks up. She looks up at the camera. No, just at the night. She goes back inside again, comes back with a scarf this time, wraps it around her neck and then pulls a hat onto her head as if to cap the entire outfit. She has something with her. A bag. No, a box.
I shouldn’t care where she goes. I’m not worried about breeding, about protecting her womb from alien sperm. I don’t believe she can use up any love that she could give me. So I must be doing this to protect her. That must be this horrid feeling, a will to ensure against harm. That’s believable.
Sun walks toward the camera, up the hill, in the direction of my father’s house. She is coming to the house. It has all been a test. She’s coming to the house. I realize that I have to shut the equipment down and run upstairs before Sun actually gets to the house, but on the screen she turns in to a line of trailers and she’s gone.
—
“I’m not ready for college,” Tal says, all the materials her fat packet offers spread out on the table before us, my laptop open to a Walla Walla realtor’s page. “This is crazy. I’ve never left the east coast. I’ve never even been to California. And I just got here. I want to stay in this house. This house feels right. I mean, doesn’t this feel right? Like, this is where we’re supposed to be?”