Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  The deputy came and let a trustee in with a food cart. Everyone got up. She stood aside and let the blacks and Americans go ahead of her. When she received her tray, she took it to her cell and ate her boloney and cheese sandwich, looking resolutely away from the toilet.

  She spent the day walking back and forth to the window in the big room, keeping along the wall, until the lights went out in the facility.

  She had been there two or three days when she realized she wasn’t sure if it had been two or three exactly, which. It could have been either, or it could have been more. She tried to count the days, but there was no way to tell them apart. There were no clocks. She briefly thought of keeping a calendar, but she didn’t have anything to write with. There was nothing at all except themselves, her and the other females, in the loud, dirty sealed room.

  She tried to say to a woman, a white woman with a crushed nose, did they ever have a chance to watch TV in here?

  TV? Oh, yeah, sure, we got one. It’s over by the Jacuzzi.

  What there was was a payphone by the window. It had a bail bondsman’s card taped to it with an 800 number on it. She had watched people calling from it. Silvio, a voice said after she put the number in and the line clicked. She did her best to tell him who she was. He asked her where she was calling from, and she didn’t even know that. Well, no problem, he could call around. It would be one of two places if she had gotten herself picked up in Bridgeport. Do you know what you’re being charged with? No? It could be from the sound of it, they got a thing now where, if you entered the country under the radar, so to speak, you’re not eligible for bail. That’s the Patriot Act. He repeated it for her. Yes, she nodded. I know it.

  Do you have anyone who can bond you out?

  No, she said. I am just me in this country. I will work for you when I get out, if you just get me out, she struggled to express. I am honest. I pay everything. She said this into the receiver gripped in her hand, half bowing her head.

  Oh, he said. I don’t doubt that. But if it’s like that, there might be nothing I can do.

  She listened.

  That’s the way it is.

  He had to go.

  To keep her spirits up, she went back to walking up and down along the wall and distracted herself counting miles.

  She started doing walking lunges every three steps, counting in her head. There was yelling, but she didn’t think it was directed at her. It surprised her when someone got off the picnic table and came over. She went around them. They followed her, getting louder. Now they were really yelling and everyone was looking. They were yelling at her to stop. Don’t be doin that in here. I ain’t playin with you. She stopped doing lunges. The yelling stopped. You could hear the person who had been yelling at her breathing hard.

  Fuckin monkey-ass bitches playin like they don’t speak English.

  Something troubled her and she pushed it out of mind. No one told her anything. There were no lawyers. Then in the night, she dreamed her father came to the jail, short, tan, sharp, in uniform, saying nothing. The Americans deferred to him. He picked her out of the rest, and they had to let her go. The dream returned in a second version in which he had made a terrible mistake by entering detention and now he couldn’t leave. She sat uncertain on her bunk.

  She watched a woman who was being released walking away on the other side of the window, sashaying with one arm out, following the deputy towards the front of the facility, where she would be given back her clothes and let out on the winter street.

  Zou Lei ate a boloney sandwich and did knee bends in her cell next to the toilet.

  They were lined up to see a social worker, who asked her if she had STDs. This concept was explained. She thought it meant AIDS. No, she said.

  Are you pregnant?

  She shook her head.

  Do you know what day it is?

  She shook her head.

  It’s Tuesday. Do you speak English?

  She nodded, then shook her head.

  Are you gang-affiliated?

  She didn’t know. No.

  She said she wanted to know if she was going to get to see a lawyer. No one had told her what she had been charged with or on what basis she was being held. When she tried to ask what was going to happen to her, a deputy ordered her to move away and return to her side of the room.

  The Latinas had a gang they called the Niñas Malas for self-protection. And what are you? the white women with their stringy hair wanted to know. Someone said Al Qaida. I’m Chinese, Zou Lei said. She wet her hair in the sink and tied it back to make herself look another way.

  She did not like exercising in her cell. When she was alone, her mind turned inside-out like an envelope. She would drift and come back and hours would have gone by. Once, her mind traveled to the clutch plate factory where she had been working, and she saw and heard them working and talking about this and that. They were saying, Remember that girl? What happened to her? And she knew they were talking about her. In her mind, it was a day of blue sky, and she could smell the asphalt and the field and the lunch truck.

  Some Latina girls asked her, Are you with it? Hey, yo, you wid it? And instead of ignoring them, she stared back at them and said, I don’t with nothing. She pretended she didn’t see them, but she was scared. The fear came in and out like a radio signal. When it faded out, she went back to being sick. She picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone and put it down, stared out the window and waited for anyone to walk by. Her sickness came from this sealed room. I cannot stand it, she thought. Deputies walked by from time to time in their green uniforms. Sometimes a male trustee would come by, a certain expression on his goateed face because one of the females would jump off the picnic table and rush the glass and pound on it and make signs at him.

  There was an aching in her eyes from loneliness. When she closed them, tears scattered down her face.

  Later in the artificial day, she stood by the others, who were talking on the stairs, gathered around a composed young woman emphasizing what she was saying by socking her fist in her hand. Zou Lei got as close as she could and tried to listen. The speaker was saying that she had been given thirty years for armed robbery.

  He had the gun and I was with him.

  Ninety-nine problems.

  For real. He doin life.

  You stay here? Zou Lei spoke up.

  The others looked at her, then at the armed robber to see what she would say.

  Will I stay here? No, I’m going to state prison.

  After a minute, the woman, as if vexed with children, lowered herself off the stair where she had been sitting and moved apart from the others. Zou Lei approached her and asked her what she had been waiting to ask.

  Deport you, the woman said. I don’t know. They might put your ass in Uncasville.

  This was the answer Zou Lei finally received: No one knows what will happen to you.

  Well, what would she probably be facing?

  Probably you’re talking a year. Zou Lei got a look of concentration when she heard this. A year and then? A year and then they decide what to do with you.

  Okay, she said. And what they do with me?

  That’s the thing. They can do anything they want, because of your status.

  I can be my life in here?

  A good part of it. Look at Gitmo.

  But there was more, she learned. This was just the beginning. Any deputy could take you by the elbow on a long walk through the jail to the other side. He could show you to a laundry room full of male trustees and say, Here’s your new helper. Howbout I leave her here? He would wait just long enough for your blood to run cold. Just kidding. You shit yourself? You wanna check? And he would march you back to the female wing. Along the way, he would say, Bet you feel like being nice now. He would lock you in the bathroom and come back for you later. If you fought him, he was authorized to rush you like a man, tackle you, pound your head on the floor, Taser your backside while you crawled, drag you out by the leg while you screame
d under the cameras recording all of this in black and white, strap you in The Chair, put the spit bag on your head and leave you there for up to twelve hours while you begged for water. And he could count to twelve any way he wanted. You could see a social worker who would look at your blackened eyes like plums and say, Why were you fighting with staff? and write Antisocial on her form. They would add time to whatever sentence you got, whenever you finally got a sentence, so they could help themselves to more of your life. All you had to do was give someone a reason. They were going to rape you unless you carried yourself a certain way, and even then, they could nail you anytime, misplace you in the laundry room. They did it to the small half-Indian girls in the Mexican gangs. If you cried too much afterwards, you got Trazodone. Then they wheeled you upstairs strapped to a folding bed and left you in a hall.

  Anyone who was here on immigration sweeps was in violation of the Patriot Act. If you were suspected of terrorism things got really interesting. There was a cell on the upper tier that no one ever left. Or had she failed to notice that?

  They showed her what was going on on the top tier, in the cell that no one ever came out of. They had a project they’d been working on. It was a woman lying in a bunk. The deputies gave her to us. We take care of her. Right after 9/11 they put her in a cell with like fifteen guys. She was in Al Qaida for real. I don’t know how they could get it up because she’s so nasty. Look at her. She’s old. Zou Lei looked at the woman. She couldn’t tell if she was breathing. They told her she was Lebanese, a mom. Her husband had been flown from New Haven to Syria for interrogation. Dried feces on the walls. Her feet were black, hair tangled wild over her face, going gray, going white. They threw wet toilet paper at her. Used tampons. A black girl screamed at her. Ugh. You stink so bad! and ran out cackling.

  The woman would not speak or move. The Americans had uncovered her head and she lay with her hands clutched over her face.

  Zou Lei wanted to leave.

  Scared? an inmate asked. I don’t blame you.

  In the northwest, she used to see men lying under the saplings on the medieval street in the desert town where she grew up, the dome of the mosque visible above the mud-brick houses. The men lay directly on the stone, face-down against the curb, faces sunburned, skullcaps still on their heads, their sandals sometimes having fallen off and lying a few feet away. The street where they were lying went uphill to the mosque, and when she was a little girl, before she knew what heroin was, she thought they had been climbing the hill to the mosque and had gotten tired along the way and laid down to sleep.

  God be with you, she said to the woman.

  2

  IF YOU TURNED AND looked downhill from the mosque, you saw the end of the city, the last stones of the wall, then the gravel on the ground and the red sand and the desert descending away from you. The land rushed out and away from your feet and opened out into the vast distance, to the snowcapped mountains on the horizon. There was a great desire to launch yourself out into that distance and fly out to the mountains, which were in sharp focus in the brilliant air.

  Until the call to prayer sounded from the mosque in the evening, the only thing you heard was the desert wind. It was quiet in the orchards. A donkey cart wheeled by, clop-clop-clop, with a suntanned old man sitting up front holding a lash, carrying melons, peaches or his daughters in the back. In some parts of the town, you could hear the hammering of tinkers, and if you went down west of the orchards, there were stone sheds with a fire roaring up and a bare-chested boy in a white skullcap working a bellows who would look up and grin at you, his face carbon-blackened.

  Her mother picked watermelon in the orchard by a ditch near a half-built section of roadway. It was so quiet you could hear the flies, the thump of a melon rolling into the cart, the creaking of the cart when the long-eared donkey shifted. The women worked in earrings and skirts and headscarves with flowers on them. At noon, they prayed on a rug. They worked slowly in the immense dry desert heat and their sweat dried immediately. They would go to the spigot by the mud wall and drink from the tin cup and you would hear them laughing with each other as they drank as a group.

  The city was on a route that came out of the desert and went on to the west. Trucks came in from Aksu and went back with sheepskins. She remembered the smell of animals and dung and wood fire, everyone putting out whatever they had to sell on the roadside, the pink plastic sandals her mama bought her, her dirty feet. Playing soccer on the clay behind the bus station.

  When the trucks came in, she ran out on the shoulder to see who it was. Someday it would be him, she knew—she hoped and prayed—her mother told her. God willing. Sometimes there were live sheep in a flatbed with a blue cab. Sometimes a soldier or a Mongolian, in ragged army surplus or bellbottoms, climbing down and squatting in the half-shade, eating lamb kawap, while Zou Lei hung around watching.

  Have you come from far away?

  A grown man ignoring her, squinting. Sometimes grunting, lifting his greased chin, at the distance. Shaking his head. Nodding. Waving the flies away or ignoring them. The sun reflecting on the mud houses on the roadside, the one thing built by man, and everywhere else the tremendous soaring vastness.

  The northwest was a territory of tribal nomadic herdsmen who did not recognize the borders between nations. They traded sheep and horses and spoke each other’s languages. In the vineyards, they grew their fruit. The word for man was adam. Apple was alma. Silk, yurt, camel, and khan were pronounced the same in Uzbek and in Uighur. Tibetan women hiked up from Qinghai, carrying blankets and silver things to sell, wearing black cowboy hats and sheath knives. They would not let you touch them. Her mother’s family’s ancient dead were buried in Siberia.

  The songs were the same. The girls sang them turning around, looking over their shoulders, coins around their heads.

  The sun reverberating on the golden land, the snowcapped mountains—Afghanistan in the radiant air—no clouds—ram’s music—purely wondrous blue over this part of the earth. Her mother’s God above, causing the streams to flow from the snowcaps and make green the pasturelands and vineyards—the Kazak horses grazing!

  In Gulja, the Russian architecture was European, with white columns, like a palace in France, and then, over the tops of the conifers, you saw the blazing dome of the mosque. Her mother’s people came down from the steppe, before they were collectivized by the Chinese, who came from the east.

  The Chinese closed the border. They paved the highway and put up red banners and billboards for the good of everyone. In Altai Province, they established cotton plantations. The nomads were forced to curtail their trading. Now they were peasants, according to the Chinese, who found work for them picking cotton. Everything was being done for their own good. We are all one family. To prove that this was true, nomad girls were eligible for one hundred dollars if they divorced their husbands and married Chinese men. The new loudspeakers attached to the medieval buildings in the desert towns announced that we are very happy. Ration cards will be issued. Splittism is a serious offense.

  A convoy drove through the desert. The center of it was a massive flatbed trailer hauling a section of pipe for the oil pipeline. The other vehicles were camouflaged, soldiers sitting in the back. The convoy drove at speed, sending up a column of dust, bearing down on a settlement, not slowing. The people selling bread and water by the roadside moved out of the way. Zou Lei, who was five years old, opened her mouth and said oh and advanced, looking for the soldiers as they roared by and watching them as they sped away, packed in the back of the trucks in their steel helmets.

  An older girl ran up and pulled Zou Lei back from the roadside and held onto her until the convoy had passed and its dust had blown over them and settled. Then she took her by the hand and led her over to one of the adobe dwellings roofed in gray desert driftwood.

  She was playing too close to the road and I scolded her. A big truck came by.

  I heard it, Zou Lei’s mother said. She was standing at a table in her doorway, half
in the sun, making laghman. The sun sliced across the table. She was kneading the dough, wetting it with water from a blue plastic tub.

  It was the biggest truck ever. And she wanted to get squashed.

  What’s that?

  She wanted to get on it. She was running and if I hadn’t grabbed her, she would have run right to it.

  Zou Lei’s mother peered at Zou Lei.

  What did you do? she asked Zou Lei. To the girl, she said, Did you give her a swat?

  I gave her a swat on the leg.

  Give her one for me right now while I’m watching. Not to the ear, just the leg.

  The girl hit Zou Lei on the leg of her faded orange pants.

  You’ve got to put more pepper in it than that. That’s not going to do anything with her.

  The girl hit Zou Lei hard on the bottom and Zou Lei was driven forward two steps and put her hand back there to protect herself.

  Don’t do it again! the girl said.

  Listen good! her mother said.

  I tell her, her father is away in the steppe with the army. He isn’t on the truck. If he was on the truck, he would come down. Even if he was working, he would ask the officer for leave to see his family. If they couldn’t give him leave, then he would wave at least so you could see him. They would at least let him do that in the army, to wave.

  Her mother wet her hands and began forming the dough into a rope.

  Play a game with her, why don’t you? Or sing something. Can you sing anything yet?

  I can’t sing, but I know a little dancing, the girl said.

  The girl made movements with her hands, pressing her fingertips together, rotating her wrists, undulating her hands.

  That’s all I know.

  She tried to teach Zou Lei, who did not want to learn.

  Pretend I’m a wolf, Zou Lei said.

  In the afternoon, after the girl had left and Zou Lei’s mother was resting on the rugs, it was just the two of them in the dwelling while the noodles boiled. Zou Lei crawled over and played with her mother’s hair. Her mother waved a fly away from them. For a time, they played made-up games where they would hold hands and her mother would say, where’s the bread and salt? It’s in the mountains. It’s in the river. It’s in the pasture with the horses.