Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  He give everything to me.

  I know, Skinner agreed.

  Tears ran out of her eyes.

  It’s all right.

  She took another drink from her can and finding it empty, cracked open another. Whoa. Skinner stuck his cigarette in the side of his mouth and took it away from her. She took it back and took a slug out of it. Okay, he said. There’s always more beer. He took it away from her and put it as far away as he could reach.

  She had started sobbing, her face in her arms crossed on the table. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder and shook it gently. You’re gonna be okay. She said something he couldn’t hear. She repeated it:

  I never going to see him again.

  It sucks. I know.

  He helped her into his room and put his poncholiner around her.

  But she was happy after all. It was a long time ago, losing him. I drink too much. She indicated their empties all around the place. Shed blood, not tears was the rule in the northwest—except if you were drinking. Or you could show yourself through a song. However, she did not sing. She sang Skinner’s name at work and the boss-wife said, What are you so happy about?

  Frogs, she said.

  She showed herself through her actions, by coming over to his basement every day after work and then going all the way home at night. I have energy a lot. She did not buy him pots and pans. She was not the mother type. When she collected their empties one day and took them to the redeemer, it was because she was enterprising, not because she felt she should clean up after him. With the dollar and change she made, she bought a chicken skewer and saved it for them to eat together, half each, the meat cold by the time she had walked there with it through the small houses covered in Spanish graffiti. She was logging all these miles and it was good. Spring was coming, the big wheel of the city starting to turn.

  I can’t get rid of you. Maybe it’s the pizza. Or maybe it’s something else you’re getting from me, he said.

  It was his camouflage, she told him. His army jacket. It was his poncholiner. It’s your boots. I love your boots.

  Howbout this? he asked and pulled his shirt up. Is it the shrapnel in my back? Is it my war?

  I love your war, she said.

  11

  WHEN I AM A little kid, my father tells me all about it how to be the soldier. There is a lot of duty that you must perform. All the men live in poor conditions, but they must not mind it. The people live in poor conditions, so the soldier has to be the same. He cannot have more than they do. He will work to give them a better life. So they say: we are like the out-of-town cousin. When he comes to town, he comes to stay with us and we feed him. Only after he is fed does the army eat its dinner. So the army is skinny and society is fatter.

  A long time ago, the whole country is in disaster and we have enemies inside and outside the border. United States, Soviet Union, Japan all attacked because our country is weak. Criminals take advantage of this weakness to steal from us. The army saved us and punished the criminals.

  The people and the army are joined together, though they are not the same. Everyone when he gets to be eighteen is supposed to serve the army. I want to serve the army when I am eighteen. Actually, I cannot do it. There are so many Chinese, it is hard to join the army. Even though it is very hard, it is a good job and everyone wants to do it.

  I don’t know about the American army, but in the People’s Liberation Army, it is very strict. The soldiers come from poor places and they are all used to it. Some of them have never seen a toilet before in their lives. Don’t know how to read.

  But in those days, the quality of the soldiers is very high. They can survive on just a small ration of food. I don’t know about the American army if it can do that. The Americans have big bodies and I think they would be too hungry. But in China we are used to it.

  The situation is changing since I am a kid. Before, we don’t have any technology. Now, the technology is getting stronger. We can use cyberwarfare—it’s very popular now. And we have many nuclear weapons, almost equal. We depend less on the individual soldier. Maybe, as we become greater, the individual is getting weaker.

  Whenever disaster happens to our country, the army can do its best to save the people. If the river floods or the land slide. It happens countless times in our history. When it happens, no one will save us but the army.

  Really, all the people must thank them or we would not be able to exist. When a farmer drives a truck filled with vegetables, the oil to run the motor is coming from the pipeline. I think if you are a woman in the market and you buy vegetables, you must thank my father.

  I don’t think anyone remembers this. Even I forget, but I shouldn’t. Everything comes from somewhere.

  I’m saying my father, but of course it wasn’t him alone. I mean the Lanzhou Regiment and the Western Development Project are responsible for providing oil. They made sure we got it instead of Russia.

  They built the pipeline in the beginning with no equipment except shovels, picks, and baskets. The oil is covered by a mountain range called the Onion Mountains. If you can imagine, they dug through the mountains. It’s a little bit like when the Chinese built the railroad here, only in this case, they were serving their own people. So much dynamite was used that the herdsmen were superstitious. They believed a devil is trying to terrify them. Then they got used to them after a while. They called the soldiers the Thunders. This gave my dad an idea. He named me Thunder for good luck.

  In China, if you ask what is the most dangerous job, everyone will tell you the job of coal miner is number one. The truth is, this job was even worse. Sometimes you can be working and someone is putting dynamite right next to you, and you don’t even know it until it goes off. The mountain can collapse at any time. Once, it fell in and trapped a lot of men. My father is lucky that he went to drink some water. Just at that place where he was before, it fell in.

  Immediately, they all try to save the ones who are trapped. I think in a rich country, someone would bring some special equipment. Today, maybe in China they can have this equipment as well, but at the time, it is impossible. All that they can do is dig with tools in their hands. Of course, there’s no way it can work and the friends of theirs die. Actually, they have to let them die. The leaders cannot waste the time to save them. They were ordered to go back to work. It’s the same as war. The country is in a war to modernize, and many people have to give up their lives.

  Including my father had to give his life. So, by what he did, he taught me what it’s all about to be a hero.

  Look, it’s me and you.

  Yeah.

  Macky D.

  This is my screensaver.

  She reached over his arm, her breast against his arm, and clicked to the next photograph. It was Skinner with New York behind him at night. Empire Building, she said. She studied the solitary white face in the camera’s flash, surrounded by the black sky and galactic skyline, a week before she had met him.

  Then she clicked again and saw dull land and sky, blue over brown, dark palms, a blurred shadow of a vehicle, a striding figure in a robe. She clicked again and saw a haze of dust hanging over mud buildings. A mosque, a truck driving by in the glare. A goat lying on a rubble of bricks in a ditch, the blur of a child carrying a bucket, and a soldier looking the other way.

  He had gotten silent. She kept clicking.

  Those are the guys.

  An angry face in a helmet. She clicked. Someone giving the camera the finger. A laugh. A picture of a military vehicle with the hatches open and gear everywhere as if it had been torn apart in a hurricane. The soldiers’ heads were down. They looked confused and disorganized. A focused man spoke on the radio.

  The next picture was of a soldier sitting in a wooden latrine closet holding a roll of toilet paper in his filthy coal miner’s hands. He was speaking at the camera.

  Damn. That’s Sconnie.

  There was a picture of what was a human foot lying on the sand and another picture in which the ob
ject was shown from a greater distance and you couldn’t tell it was someone’s foot. But you could see something else, a pile of drenched clothing at a distance. In the pile, she made out a beard, a face—she thought. Blurred soldiers smoking. She saw animals, dogs. A woman covered in a nun-like robe, except for her fearsome face in mid-yell, her thick hands lifted and about to come down in the act of hurling curses at the picture taker.

  She tapped the key again. She saw a platoon all sleeping like homeless men in shallow graves that they had dug in clay, lying in a spill of camouflage, each man’s boots next to him.

  As she kept clicking, the disorder of everything seemed to reassemble itself in reverse. She saw them in shades, posing with their weapons, dressed as if for the beach in flip-flops and towels, sunglasses and guns.

  There was a photograph of a young man asleep with his mouth open and someone holding a hotdog in front of his crotch and putting it to the other’s mouth.

  Neither she nor Skinner laughed. She murmured, kept clicking. A photograph appeared of a young man, shirtless, in motion, close to the camera. He was extremely fit. Lines separated all the muscles of his torso. A gold light surrounded the subject. He bore a likeness to the man sitting next to her on the bed. A cousin, she thought. But his tattoos were the same.

  Yeah, that’s me, he said. I know I’m not as good now.

  Seeing a magazine under his bed, she said, Hm, what’s this? And she picked it up and started flipping through it. It contained pictures of people having sex in high resolution. There were two women having sex with one man, and two men having sex with one woman.

  Aw that’s nothing serious. Well, you know what that is.

  She knew what porn was, yes, she did. Chinese men had these kinds of magazines, showing Japanese women tied up with clothesline, men’s hands pinching their breasts. They included educational articles on the mechanics, significance, and health requirements of various sexual acts, such as so-called flute-blowing, which was described as the ultimate way to show appreciation of the man’s yang force by a devoted female on her knees. Bachelors read these stories when they came home from restaurant work and needed to relieve themselves. That was just men for you. The sound of them masturbating came through the plywood walls when she was trying to sleep.

  The Western magazine she was now looking at was a Club International. With a raised eyebrow, she examined the scenes of double penetration and gazed long and skeptically at a woman sticking out her tongue with a proud and satisfied expression showing that the men had ejaculated in her mouth.

  At length, Zou Lei tossed the magazine back on the floor. This kind of thing was fine for other people, but it was not for her.

  You sure? Skinner asked, and she hit him. But he was serious.

  You might not always know yourself.

  Well, anyway, he said, take a look at this. Check this out. He stuck his cigarette in his mouth and rummaged on the floor, eyes slitted against his smoke, and found his Ironman and opened it for her. See this is what I’m doin now. And she joined him in looking at the lifters: athletes dividing their anatomy into logical sections and applying resistance to each section in accordance with a disciplined schedule. The lifter on the cover was straining and bulging, his skin straining and flushed red, his teeth bared in a grimace of ultimate effort, his face flexed and flushed and bulging with veins as if even his forehead were yet another slab of muscle.

  Good, she said. How much is the weight?

  He’s got like 650 on the bar. See it bend. You don’t get like that on MREs.

  How can he do it? He use drug?

  He showed her the pages of supplements. Creatine, glucosamine, mass builder—that’s a protein bomb. When it goes off, you just get big.

  She pretended to stick a needle in her vein and made a popping sound with her mouth.

  This is the shit I’m talkin about. He tapped it with his cigarette. I gotta remember to get this.

  You will look like him?

  I probably won’t.

  She took the magazine from Skinner and turned the pages until she came to Ms. Fitness Arizona, in turquoise spandex and white Reeboks, doing donkey calf-raises on a Cybex machine. There she was doing barbell squats, her dark eyes on the ceiling. She looked Mexican or Middle Eastern. And there she was on the beach in a bikini—hooking the spaghetti strap with her thumb—and just a touch of lip gloss, the waves around her thighs.

  Zou Lei flexed her legs and looked at herself. Hey. They laughed. Not bad.

  I like her.

  You look like her.

  She has very beautiful clothes.

  One day when she wasn’t working, Zou Lei had Skinner meet her on Roosevelt Avenue. His grown-out hair rose up stiff and uncombed from his head, no longer military. It was a clear day after a rain and the trash was pulped on the street.

  They hiked out of Chinatown until they were far enough away to see the red lacquered Chinese eaves and the fire escapes and then kept going. There was no plan, they just walked, walking down by the expressway and the autorepairs whose signs were in Chinese. The road took them by a cemetery, then a stretch of little houses with pitched roofs and falling-down siding.

  The air was bright and cool and warm—a deceptive day, since they were still in winter. She thought she could smell the springtime in the street, in the air rising from the asphalt and from the soil in the broken bricks.

  They fell into a rhythm, going for miles, and she lost herself, their hoofs beating the drum of the earth as they marched.

  When they made it to the rise where Jewel Avenue crossed over the fields and they could see in all directions—the old condominium towers, the sheets of water, the rooftops and the distance—they stopped and looked at it all. They were at the center of a wheel. Skinner put his arms around her.

  That’s a view, he said.

  In it, she beheld what was possible. The city was uncontained. It covered a massive area and graded out into the world. There was no definite end at the horizon. There were more buildings, miles of them covering the earth on into the distance. She saw the areas of trees, the shade of wood, the intricate fuzziness of the branches from this distance in among the houses. The highways—massive, industrial, and lonely—were to her left. To her right, there seemed to be still another city and then, past it, the skyline of Manhattan, which she identified by the Empire State Building, which she could cover with the tip of her finger. And she had a view between tenement rooftops of one of the suspension bridges that connected Manhattan to the other boroughs. It was ten cities all together. She saw things from this elevation that were normally hidden from her. In the direction of the water to the north, she saw a green dome, which had to be a mosque. She saw the spire next to it among the confused rooftops, fire escapes, and water towers. It was blocked and revealed again by the centipede of a subway pulling by. There were splinters of metal embedded in the blue stratosphere to the south: planes coming head on. Passing over her and Skinner, they elongated and became commercial jets, tracking towards the airport on the water. She saw the complicated shape of the shoreline, the lack of contrast between the brown city and the water, as if it were all part of one thing, which it was, the geography of the earth, which you could move across as you lived.

  She asked him where he had been on this disk of territory that they were overlooking. You go there? It’s a Bronx.

  I came in there. I went like this, he said, pointing out the trajectory he had walked across the brown horizon. Down to right around there where all them buildings are at.

  I goes like this: down, down, down to Chinatown. You cannot see. I start up there—she turned thirty degrees to the east—where is Connecticut, all the way. I been out, out, out to there, to Long Island, Riverhead…

  She squinted in the sun. Look! She patted his arm and got him to look where she was pointing to the west. I work there, where it’s Nanuet.

  What’d you do out there?

  Restaurant. She held his camouflage. If you keep going to that way, w
est, west, west, you will be the ocean, then China. No one will understand you. Everyone will be confusing. Maybe it’s different for you. In the morning, get up early to get the water. Burn the fire. The people is a billion. It is more big than here. Ride the bus. The train. Truck. Camel. Sleep the ground. See the mountain.

  12

  SHE LOOKED AT HIM in his roughed-up boots and the American flag on his sleeve—and began looking for another job to increase her productivity on days when she wasn’t working at the noodle stand. This demanded that she ride the subway with the cops, but she felt that she could risk it.

  Among the jobs she tried, she collected bottles and cans and redeemed them at the Beer Center, a recycler on Parsons Boulevard across from a factory that made fan belts and timing belts.

  On two occasions, she distributed coupons for the Western Beef grocery store, tossing the rolled-up booklets onto porches of row houses above the Grand Central Parkway. The rolled-up booklets were fitted into plastic sleeves. She pulled armloads of them out of the back of a van and heaped them in a shopping cart and rattled up and down the block, the only one who ran.

  The other guys were homeless drug addicts in True Religion jeans. The man who operated the crew wore a gold chain and had no voice. He was completely and permanently hoarse. She outworked the others, but he didn’t pay her any more than them. He talked on the same level with the other guys. On the way back in the van, they would talk about buying a bottle.

  Pointing out the window at the liquor store, they’d tell him, Lemme out here! and he’d pull over.

  She got out too and didn’t go back. She got a number out of the Chinese paper and shortly started selling DVDs.