Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  Her shadow changed, the graffiti changed. She crossed Metropolitan Avenue and a thundering underpass. When she had found her way onto another northbound road, a plane flew overhead like the hawk leading the drum girl out of the desert. The sun snuck behind her other shoulder, it only fell on half the street. She sensed woods beyond the houses. In the windows, there were flowers, broken blinds, a Puerto Rican flag, a stone statue of a saint in a glass case in someone’s yard. On a garage, there was a poster for Tito Swing a la Semana.

  At 110th Street someone said Chinita and blew kisses. It was evening and there was music.

  She went into a pizza place, a handwritten sign on the door saying baño sólo para clientes. One of the short barrel-chested men behind the counter with their hats on sideways, thumping out the dough, asked if she was frío.

  Tire, she said. I very tire.

  She leaned her elbows on the glass and looked down at his hands dusting out the flour on the dough.

  Por qué?

  You know Jamaica? I walk from this one, very far.

  No, he said, too far. She hadn’t done that.

  I come very far.

  Really? he asked in Spanish.

  Yes. I don’t lie.

  Maybe, he allowed.

  Before, I in jail.

  This he believed from the way she looked, a short woman in jeans, hatless, with the plastic bag in her fist.

  They let her use the bathroom. Okay, mamacita, they said. She ran hot water in the sink and washed her hands with the coconut soap, used the paper towels. Closed her eyes. There were plastic flowers. It was a nice small room. The pizza baking out there, in the narrow store, the ovens.

  On the phone, a man told her where to come in Queens. He called it Queensie. He picked her up at a gas station on Roosevelt Avenue in view of the projects, the train yard, and the stadiums and derricks across a river. They accelerated down a boulevard that roughly followed the water. She was warm in his minivan. She hadn’t slept and had a headache. She watched building supply warehouses going by outside her window, thinking she could fall asleep.

  He turned into a back street and she sat up. He was a fat solid man in an expensive parka, his stomach touching the steering wheel, turning and accelerating, taking them zipping past graffiti-covered walls and courtyards. Slowing at a construction site, he said, Building. She reached for her bag, but he put out his large soft hand to stop her, not quite touching her. No. Not yet. He slowed again. Building. Everything new. There were weathered boards and scaffolding. Maybe I buy. Maybe the investment property. He insisted on speaking English with her in a soft delicate voice that back home would be called sweet, causing her to wonder if he was from Taiwan.

  They parked in an alley near the expressway surrounded by faded brick walls. She climbed out of his car and stood in the cold with her arms crossed, the wind blowing strands of her unwashed hair across her drawn face, waiting with her bag over her shoulder while he went through his keys. She saw people’s laundry hanging outside their windows. He got the paint-peeling door open and led her in, up a stair, close quarters, stale cigarettes, concrete-colored light filtering in from an angle. Nobody home, he said. She heard the dead silence of two-by-fours and wall board, his breathing after climbing the stairs. They were alone and she hung back, letting him go ahead. On the second floor, they picked their way among shower shoes and plastic sandals. It was a standard illegal apartment divided into sheds to accommodate eight or more people. The first kennel was made out of a shoe rack and plywood and see-through plastic film. The jury-rigged door was held shut with a bike chain. Through the plastic, she saw somebody’s mattress. She put her eye to the film and looked: a can of Kirin Afternoon Tea.

  The kitchenette was an alcove. In his parka, he filled the space entirely, turning in place, looking at things so that she would look at them too—the cupboard hanging open, the frozen explosion of clutter. No walls visible, just cardboard boxes, garbage bags stuffed with clothes, luggage. Mushrooms floating in a wok.

  Refrigerator, he said. He tried to open it and bumped his leg. Sink, he said. Everything very complete. He turned on the tap and put his large fingers in the water, rubbing them together like a man feeling silk. He looked at her. Lifted his fingers to his face and tasted the water, brushed the water off his brown lips, leaned in and drank from the tap, came up with his cheeks full, spit in the sink, brushed the water from his lips, twiddled his large fingers to shake the water off.

  Water, he said. Hot, cold, everything.

  Bathroom, he pointed. Laundry dripping in a doorway.

  He came towards her, his arms whispering on the body of his parka and she stepped back. This is it. He pulled open a pleated screen she had not noticed and pointed inside at a blackened mattress.

  It has everything, I think. Take a look. You have window. He pushed himself inside and pulled the chain on the bare bulb to show that the light went on and off, tugged the shade and it went up. She saw the gray houses tumbled down the slope outside, the clotheslines and antennas and tree branches. The sides of the shed were plywood construction barricades. There was no lock on the screen door.

  The mattress a little dirty. You put a sheet, I think. Turn it over. In the summer, put a fan. You don’t need much, I think. It is okay for you. You don’t have husband, he smiled. You don’t have baby.

  He was waiting for her, standing over the broken mattress.

  She shook her head from the doorway.

  It’s good, she said.

  She put her hand in her tight pocket and felt her money.

  You give me key.

  When she heard the door close downstairs, she went inside her shed and sat on the mattress, thinking she would finally sleep. She took her sneakers off, her socks off. She turned on her side and one of the hard rusted wires coming through the canvas snagged her jeans. She shifted. She kneeled up and checked what was left of her money, rubbing the bills apart with her shiny calloused fingers to make sure she counted them all. Her lips moved, counting. She took the classifieds out of her bag and spread them out and concentrated on what they said.

  She went back out to Roosevelt Avenue and, walking briskly with her arms crossed and her shoulders hunched, headed to the intersection where the subway was. People were teeming off the subway. She saw Pakistani women carrying their children outside a Dunkin Donuts. Then she lost sight of them. People bumped her. She started moving with the crowd, looking above their heads and seeing that she was going into a Chinatown, a thicket of vertical signs, the sails of sampans and junks, too many to read, a singsong clamor rising. No English. There were loudspeakers and dedications and banners for Year of the Dog. Voices all around her, calling and calling. Here, here, here, come and see! Someone spitting in the street. Crying out and running along next to her, pushing and pleading, grabbing the sleeve of her jacket. They put flyers in her hands and she dropped them. Missing teeth, younger than they looked. Illegals from the widow villages. Body wash, foot rub, Thai-style shower, bus to Atlantic City. A neon sign for KTV turned on in the dusk. She saw the endless heads of strangers, the crewcut workmen, running crates of rapeseed out the back of a van. The feet coming, the sneakers everyone wore, the work boots, the spike-heeled boots worn by the women. The square-faced workmen smoking Golden Crane, wearing Gortex, wearing military castoff. The women had black hair, black leather jackets, black purses, lion’s manes of hair dyed orange, teased and split and tinted. Faces glazed white with photo developer. She smelled the buckets and the hose. They were shoving by the scales. You give me a pound. You give me two for one. Give me three. Be honest a little.

  The crowd was a river with girls coming through it like flower-boats sailing along. The mothers were looking at the oranges in the market stands. The girls were pretending to be good. They had to let their mothers talk. They were looking at other things, at things that were happening on the street. The girls were part of a different society. She saw a Chinese girl with no one, with a scabbed ear and breast implants, her face flus
hed and sweat-greased and strung out.

  The crowd went under the train tracks. Billboards carried hepatitis warnings. Tall blue-black Africans gesticulated, selling something in the street. The way was narrow because of the vendors. A block of squid gelatin hissed on a grill. She smelled coal fire. Chicken skewers cost a dollar. But you can’t buy anything until you get a job, she said. In the crowd, she saw one American face, a guy in cornrow braids, looking sideways, sliding through the crowd, looking back at her. Then he was gone, headed for the projects, which were here before all these Asians like herself, the boat people and country people with gold teeth, the ones who grew up under communism, who took out loans and built something. The wet black bags of garbage were piled up in walls along the curb forming a channel that they moved through. There was too much to see and she noticed small things. She saw a hairstyle, a black mohawk, the brown scalp shaved on the sides, and when she saw his face, she was right, he was from Mexico and now he did deliveries for a man with a jade bracelet who had learned enough Spanish to tell him what to do. She passed ducks on steel hooks behind the grease-smoked windows of kitchens where she would ask for work. Everyone was like her, she thought, and she did not see any police.

  She was here in New York for a reason. She was never going to get arrested again. She was going to stay where everybody was illegal just like her and get lost in the crowd and keep her head down. Forget living like an American. It was enough to be free and on the street. She’d rather take the scams, the tuberculosis, the overcrowding. She knew how to get by. On the street, she watched for undercovers. The paper carried stories of deportations, secret detentions, prisoner abuse. A Morristown cabdriver of Syrian ancestry was thought to be held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. The Federal Bureau of Prisons had a list of detainees, but not all its detainees were on the list. A lawyer hired by the family said a person cannot simply vanish.

  Zou Lei stopped reading and started doing sit-ups.

  I’ll be fast, she thought. They’ll never get me.

  All she needed was to make some money. Pay her rent. Eat shishkawap. The fresh air was free.

  What you want? the girl said in English, in McDonald’s. I doesn’t speak Mandonese.

  The hot water. No tea, only the water.

  What?

  One cup the hot water.

  What does she want? the boy in a visor asked.

  Forget it, I got it now. The girl made a hand gesture, hooks on her fingers, acrylic tips, filling and lidding the Styrofoam cup.

  Zou Lei put her hand around the cup and drew it across the countertop.

  You give me the spoon?

  The girl gave her a plastic spoon.

  A dollar nineteen.

  Thank you.

  No, a dollar nineteen.

  Thank you. Zou Lei stepped back holding the cup.

  The boy, who had wet-looking spiked hair above his visor, came over. What is it?

  She got a water—I supposed to ring a tea. Now she ain’t—whatever.

  Void, the boy said. Void, void.

  She got a job on Main Street in a basement food court hidden under a 99-cent store, hidden among nested Chinese signs. You would never know it was here unless you were looking for it. Zou Lei ran down the steps in her tight jeans and went from one mini-kitchen to the next telling them she was looking for a job.

  A woman asked her if she knew what she was doing. Can you make this noodle? Do you understand this flavor? One bowl sell one dollar. Nobody buy the cost, nobody has money. I don’t make money, so what I pay you with? You don’t make nothing working here. This the miscellaneous, pull the trash and dump it. We don’t use meat. Waste the money. Everything vegetable, you take a look, kabocha. Not like the one they have at home. Customer don’t care anyway, so I don’t care. He pays a dollar, already he knows it won’t be anything special. Just to hurry, eat, goodbye. All they care about is the dollar. We sell the southern taste as thin as hair—the noodle—you see that one. One hundred, I get fifteen, make right here in Brooklyn. By the time I sell, maybe three times the cost, I still make next to nothing. How cheap you work?

  The boss-woman wore a baseball cap and was shorter than she was and talked with her mouth flexed in a tight O around her overlapping teeth. I learn business on the Mekong River. Between customers, Zou Lei picked up a rag and wiped the food service steel, the woman pretending not to see her. She wore a gold pendant, talking on her cell phone with the hands-free earpiece in. Eleven hours later, when the propane tank had been turned off and the flame was out, Zou Lei asked her, am I coming back tomorrow?

  You can, the woman said.

  When deliveries came in, she said look, to Zou Lei, I show you, and pointed with her ladle where the man had left the Goodyear Farms boxes at the top of the stairs. Zou Lei carried them down two at a time and stacked them behind the counter. When they slipped, she caught the boxes with her knee, grinned and regrabbed them.

  She went back to the stairs and reappeared hurrying this way between the pillars, taking fast steps, leaning against the weight of a bucket, one arm out to the side, the other arm pulled straight down, the wire handle cutting into her fingers. Halfway, she set it on the rubber mat with holes between the fused strands so water could drain through to the linoleum and flexed her hand. Something thumped the plastic. Then she went around the bucket and picked it up with her other hand and carried it the rest of the way. The boss-wife popped the lid and poked the frogs with her ladle.

  Look, still living.

  On her break, Zou Lei would go upstairs and look at the merchandise in the bins, while the vendors talked in their own dialect, pieces of what they said coming through to her and making a half kind of sense. She saw a denim-jacketed figure with a ponytail on a TV screen and it was her. They sold battery operated radios, the pink and blue words on the plastic package meaning Happy Sound. This is practical, the vendors said. And cheap. And you can learn English from it. Or she went out in the alley to be in the fresh air to do lunges under the fire escapes, but Fookienese teenagers with rat tails watched her, tried to get her attention, and after failing at this, began laughing at her. She get her ass big to fuck more tight.

  Later, she tried another door and wound up in the shell of the building between the basement and the street, where she could be alone.

  Mekong, that’s in the south, the boss-wife told her. On the Chinese side, I live. I live in South America, Ecuador. I see everything. They have a war there. I make money in the war, better in the war, better than here. Because people want to buy DVD, they want to drive away their life.

  With her calloused hands, Zou Lei put frogs in a pot and turned the propane on. She kicked the cardboard boxes flat and stacked them in the trash. I’ll include you one meal a day, the boss-wife said. When Zou Lei got paid, she did her laundry and came to work the next day eating a twisted piece of bread fried in oil and drinking hot milk. Business is a joke, the woman said. They played Cantonese radio. Zou Lei took condiment packets home at night.

  On her break, she did a handstand against the wall and tried to do a vertical pushup, even just an inch. First she took her phone out, which she had felt slipping out of her back pocket, and laid it on the stairs. Then she went back to the wall and kicked up into a handstand, holding herself on her hands. Her hat fell off her head and her shirt fell down to her armpits, exposing her flat stretched abdomen. She rolled down to her feet to a squatting position, dusted her hands off, and tried again.

  She went for a jog around the block, but there was no block. The neighborhood around her house was full of levels. Walls and fences. You went down the street and it closed behind you, it screened you off, the courtyards and the back alleys, straw in the frozen mud. The bricks were faded on the buildings, turning to pumice, grayed-out. The boards and barricades in the alleys were gray-weathered, the piles of leafless brush were gray, husk-dry, piled under the windows, woven into the rusted wire fences. You could look up from a back alley to an old wall, a tree on the wall,
another tier starting, a building, one of the new condos, the foundations at eye level. You could climb it. The houses and walls were stairs. It was a terraced hillside, a maze on a slant.

  Dirty white houses were tucked in under other buildings, red blessings on the doors, Chinese New Year’s just behind us. On the dashboards of their Caravans and Quests, there were Buddhas. You could always see their laundry hanging out to dry. They made projects. Plants of ascending sizes, little designs, a money cat, plastic bags woven together to make ropes, the ropes tied from beam to beam, a contraption, you never knew what for.

  You might smell joss in the tumbledown alley. You might see a stolen Corolla. You might see it going up and down if a girl was in it. In the back, where the rust was dripping down and the grills were weeping black on the bricks, everything was tended, an arrangement of boards and plaster buckets, a small pyramid design. If you heard voices coming from a window they were saying… what were they saying in Zhejiang dialect?

  The workmen coming home—they might be exhausted or look sly with a smoke, smoking out of the side of the mouth, paint on their hands. They talked on cell phones, waited in pickups. Orange extension cords coiled in the back, a crew of five or six, drinking coffee, vapor coming up from the manifold, idling—bachelors, cousins, one last name.

  In the evening, they came back to the apartment and ate their takeout and she heard their battery radios tuned to Voice of Mainland, speaking the common language. Singing ballads. The moon is round, the moon is round.