Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  He picked up the nine, compressing the grip safety, and pointed it one-handed at the bedroom wall. The front sight wavered. He reached out with his weak side hand and cupped the grip to steady it. With his thumb, he switched the safety off—now you could see the red dot. He thought he heard the giant daughter talking, a male he didn’t know, maybe others, and the smoker’s voice of the woman. How many? Maybe four. Put his finger on the trigger. Gave it pressure. Just enough to make the hammer move.

  Bang, he said—and his heart was beating.

  He experienced a sense of wrongdoing. Took his finger off the trigger, extending it straight along the outside of the trigger guard, where it was supposed to be. Thumbed the safety back on. But his mind did not have a safety and there was no way to shut it off.

  Part II

  18

  THE WHITE LOOKED LIKE a long-legged biker, as if, instead of being inside these razor-wire-topped walls, he should be leaning back on a chopper going down the highway, with his long legs extended and his boots on the chrome footrests. He had soft brown hair and thin eyes. His mustache made him resemble a wolf. He was pale and large and when he walked, he rose up on his feet like the piston in a motor—up and down—chin always up, an eighth Cherokee, last name Turner.

  He was in the yard with gang foot soldiers who said you could get transferred anywhere in the gulag system, from state to state, and wind up in the SHU. The Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal had just come out on CNN. They said you’ve declared war on the State of Indiana, we’ve declared war on the United States. This organization is bigger than the United States. We go to the outside, two thousand, three thousand miles away. This is a structure. We’re like Al Qaida. They give us life, double life, life without. The state has our commanders in max segregation units, no human contact, twenty-four hours a day, and they’re still calling shots as far as politics, operations, whatever the case might be. Who goes in the hat. The state takes everything they can and we’re still going on like magic.

  We control the drugs, we control the individuals. We control ourselves. People fear us, in here and on the street. We control the nicotine, they said.

  Jimmy, smoking a cigarette under the blue sky, nodded.

  He had a laconic New York voice from Queens. He hadn’t always been here, he had started his bid in Rikers. I built up to it, he told his social worker. I passed through there, Rikers, doing skid bids. I had a life more or less. I didn’t see my opportunities.

  What about your behaviors do you need to watch out for?

  The drugs. Definitely the drugs.

  The social worker was an obese blond woman whose facial features were confined inside a small area in the center of her face.

  I ain’t like these other guys, he told her and glanced to check if her features relaxed and spread apart slightly.

  Positivity, he said.

  He had been a fifteen-year-old kid with an electric guitar slung across his pale flat torso, strutting back and forth in his bare feet, hair long, throwing his long leg out in a kick, making faces, making sounds with his mouth while the stereo played Led Zeppelin. He drew designs in blue permanent ink on his jeans, took his jeans off and drew directly on his naked legs. When asked why he had done it to himself, he said, because it’s artistic.

  Erin told her homegirls, I know he stole that thing.

  He didn’t know how to play but claimed he was teaching himself the way some musicians do. The symbols meant he would never do alcohol like his parents.

  Jimmy grew up wearing a plaid shirt, standing brooding silent with his mouth shut, the trace of a mustache over his lip, waiting for Patrick to say, Let me have the spanner. Then Jimmy would take the spanner out of the red tool box and hand it to him, in the basement of someone’s house in the neighborhood, down with the boiler and the risers.

  Patrick was a heroic-sized man. He looked like a man from a WWII movie. First of all, he was big. He had a big slab face like a sergeant-major with a cigar in his teeth. The word was that you could go into any bar in Belfast and they would tell you that Patrick Murphy was a mighty, mighty man. He was a hurler. He had the strongest hands of any man that you would ever shake hands with—he had a crushing grip, thick hands that came alive and turned to rock generating merciless compressing force. He must have gone about two-fifty, in his boots, more. You did not want him angry. His iron black-and-gray hair was combed back flat and handsomely on his head with a little obedient bend in it where it had been trained by the comb to bend back on itself, a little bit of a bump, a pompadour, but trimmed and barbered tight over his ears and at the nape of his brick-red neck, giving him an old-fashioned look.

  He had been through the Troubles of course and had been starved when he was young. Now he did plumbing and medium-sized things and the like, nothing too grand. As he crawled on the floor looking into a pipe, a lock of hair fell forward over his forehead like Elvis.

  Jimmy got a tattoo of a clover on his hand when he was fifteen. But his hand was not as strong as Patrick’s. His hand would slip off the wrench, then Patrick would take the wrench from him and turn it further until the pipe opened.

  A woman teacher in Cardozo told him in front of the class, you’re not registered as Jimmy Murphy. I don’t know what to tell you.

  He thought he was on the edge of understanding a mystery in the lyrics of a song, so he played it over again in his small room, looking out the broken venetian blinds.

  The house was full of curios, bedding, scratch tickets, yard equipment, and vinyl records. Wearing a robe, his mother sat in the lace curtain living room, her feet up.

  Why am I registered as Turner? he asked her.

  She turned her impressive face towards him and said come here, I’ll tellya a story. She had a bag on and the story was about something else completely.

  The house was two houses. On the first floor, there were the lace curtains and plastic on the couch, the kitchen had a cuckoo clock on the wall, and there was a velvet picture of Elvis looking handsome above the couch his mother sat on. The saints and elves were in the yard. The rooms upstairs were a mess of clothes and junk where his mother and Erin lived among bottles of perfume and shampoo and tarot cards and curling irons and maxi pads and beer can empties and cigarettes and photo albums. You could open a drawer in a broken dresser and find a stack of Polaroids of people and scenes you did not recognize, then look at yourself in the mirror and wonder who you looked like. A seventies barbeque, sunshine and green fields and motorbikes. You might recognize your mother as one of the faces cut-off by the camera, eyes bright, lifting a beer, fifty pounds younger.

  Patrick was bigger than his real father, who had spent his life in prison and was now dying of AIDS in Morristown.

  I’ll give you carfare if you want to go to see him, if you should want to do that, his mother said. I wouldn’t stop you. Don’t ask me to go, though. Her voice broke. That, I’m not up for. She pressed her hand to her eyes and checked her palm for tears. She heaved herself up in her robe and t-shirt and massive drawstring shorts and moved from the living room to the kitchen for the whiskey bottle. After she took her belt, she steadied herself on the countertop and searched the room for him. She located him. He was not looking at her.

  My eye socket, she said, drawing a line along the side of her face with her finger. Cheekbone. Jaw. This tooth—she hooked her lip and pulled it back to expose her missing canine.

  What’s your point?

  My point is don’t ask me to go with you.

  But if she was implying that it had been Jimmy’s father Jerome Turner who had battered her, Jimmy remembered it differently. He remembered Patrick fighting with her right in this house not more than three years ago. They fought like two bears on their hind legs, leaning together gripping each other’s heads, until he knocked her down.

  They were going to renovate the basement and turn it into an apartment where someone could live.

  19

  ERIN ALWAYS SAID SHE was the priestess. Her thing was magic. She
drew a picture of a woman who looked like Elvira with a cape standing in the wind under the moon with a wolf at her side. She showed her homegirl and reported back, Maria thinks it’s fresh. No man can touch her, Erin said of the woman in the picture. Because she’s got spells, nigga. And, standing on the corner of Utopia in the autumn with her homegirls, she said, My father can bite my dick. At sixteen, she said, I quit smoking. I don’t party no more. She listened to L7 on a Walkman. A year later, she talked about how after this, she was going to go to art school for my drawings. She spoke to a kid from LaGuardia who was going to FIT. She had a copy of the Chalice and the Blade. She had gotten very big and tall and there were things she never tried. I’m the high priestess, she said. She did not go out no more. A boy she knew was having problems with another girl and she provided a friend who cared. Once she lit candles for him and told his fortune in the dark, holding his hands. She knew that nothing would happen because they had to respect their friendship. I’ll kill you if you let her dog you, she told him. She avoided Patrick, her father, even when he was sober. The television played in the middle of the day, speaking for her, her back to him, the female on Jerry Springer screaming, screaming, crying and screaming: You’re a piece of shit! They bleeped it and kept bleeping. Jerry said, Oh wow. We can’t have that. She pretended to be absorbed in black magic, white magic. She ran into Maria after not seeing her for a year and she was a mother, she was married to a fireman, Kevin, and they were moving into a house at nineteen. I’m not good with kids, said Erin, who wore black, weighed roughly two-twenty in her cold white bare feet on the scale in the back of the house. The tight, depressing, spring-loaded silence that she lived in, decoding sounds, the way the boots sounded coming in the door, how drunk was he, and how enraged. She was her mother’s friend, but not her best one. She helped her put the figures in the yard, for the season. She put up Christ with his shirt off. She got the subs or cake from 162nd Street if something special was happening to someone else, if they were going through a change of life. She knew other people’s news. It was part of Wicca, it was part of her mastery. She told her friend once, There’s another side to life, another dimension. How did she know? Because when I was younger, I tried to kill myself. So I saw it. She hung a wind chime—wire circle, a circle within a circle—from the eaves of the house. When she was young, she came home from school high one day and something was not right. She was alone. Finally, she realized that she was not. A person came up from the basement. His footsteps came up the stairs, and she said: What the fuck were you doing, Jimmy? All she saw was the long hair covering his face so that there was no face and the pentagram he had drawn on his white chest. She was just a fat girl. Her father called her a whore. Her brother’s rock thundered from the upstairs. The cars came and went outside, she heard the engines and the yelling. The threats and the scuffling and then the fighting that could be felt in the street even when it could not be seen. People would be standing outside looking up the street. You heard echoed yelling, an energy. Something’s goin down. Sometimes you ran to see or help. She fought a girl in the middle of a mob of kids when she was in school and they all wore Raiders jackets. The red emergency lights whap-whapped through the windows. Sometimes someone banged the door, said, Hello? Police. And she heard them coming in to arrest one of them, or take her mother’s blood pressure, give her an ice pack, to look inside her lip with blue gloves and a flashlight, and say, You lost a tooth. The ceramic ornament her mother put on the porch said Take a Deep Breath, You’re Home. The violence came in cycles with the moon.

  But her brother came out of nowhere. He nearly got in serious trouble once when she was young. Charges were never filed, but they said he did something to a girl. The girl was one of Erin’s friends who had come over to the house. Jimmy played his guitar for her at her request, nothing more. Later when Erin heard what she was saying, she said, You’re lying about my brother. She was going around claiming he sexually assaulted her. Supposedly, the story was that she was so devastated that she had told her priest. Rather than reporting the incident to the police, out of a concern for privacy, the priest had called the girl’s mother. The girl’s mother called up Erin’s mother crying and screaming on the phone, and now it was all over the neighborhood and everyone knew at school. In the office at St. Andrews, the victim described her assailant’s body to the priest. Erin’s mother said she would talk to Jimmy. All she wanted was a fair hearing, not a lynch mob. She talked to him and now she was satisfied there were holes in the girl’s story. The girl had asked him to take his shirt off when he was playing. This she told the girl’s mother on the phone.

  The woman drove up outside with some men in the car and screamed fucking rapist scumbag and threw things at their house.

  I never liked her, Erin said. I never talked to her after that. She was a ho and I never trusted her no more after what she said about Jimmy.

  20

  JIMMY BECAME A UNION man in rubber coveralls, boots, and a World War I helmet, going down into the ground for the City. He’s made his bones, his mother said at the bar. The sandhog’s intricate patch depicted the figures of men inside a cutaway view of a multilevel excavation. The same families worked for generations on a dig. You would have father, son, and grandfather in the pit. At Feeney’s, Patrick had a shot with him.

  Good luck down there, lad.

  What began as grounds for celebration became his daily life. Autumn after summer, Jimmy drove a wide, dull gold Buick Skylark through the houses with gapped siding and the leaves turning to soil bounded by rusted fences. The irrelevant sun rose and fell over his windshield, as he drove to work and back, Led Zeppelin playing on the stereo.

  He had a confined space certificate. The sandhogs changed into coveralls in a low-ceilinged trailer with beige lockers and an OSHA poster tacked to the fake-wood-patterned wall and trooped out into the sonic drone. The drilling equipment, which moved on train tracks, cost 30 million dollars. You could feel the rock being pulverized seven times per second. Under the noise frequency, an Irish voice and a West Indian voice sounded identical. They ate their lunches underground, by lantern light, Jimmy’s blackened hands leaving fingerprints on his white bread.

  He wore death’s head silver rings on his fingers. After work, his eyes hurting in the daylight, he put his rings on again and put the Zeppelin on again, a mysterious version in another language of the great underground music of the drill. The excavation site was in Mid-town Manhattan by the river. He drove through the flickering channel formed by the suspension cables of the bridge and headed back to the rusted fences and dilapidated houses to a bar where there were union bumper stickers on the wood and the brogue was distinct. Still more music was playing. When he entered, Jimmy! they said.

  How’s your father? they said.

  Fine.

  Jimmy went to play Keno.

  He would go from the cave of the dig to the dark peat-hollow of the bar. Drinking opened tunnels in his head that led into the third tomb of the night.

  He watched an amateur video of guys doing stunts on bikes, set to hip-hop by a white DJ crew. They did wheelies, burnouts, endos. The backdrop was a heavy tree line. Jimmy put his hand in the plastic bowl of Doritos. The guy whose house it was came in from the kitchen and sat down in his chair and said to the TV, She’s making hotdogs. They watched without speaking. Not taking his eyes off the screen, Jimmy rubbed his fingers together to brush the salt off. A helmeted rider tilted his bike forward, elevating his rear wheel, and drove past the camera balanced on his front wheel. Dismounting, he pointed to the Wheelz logo on the back of his jacket. That’s dope, the guy whose house it was said. In the kitchen, you could hear a woman boiling water.

  The TV was an enormous sleek cabinet-sized piece of equipment. The picture was very bright and sharp. A set like that cost fifteen hundred dollars, assuming you paid for it. The three men watching it were Jimmy, a plumber, and the guy whose house it was. The plumber was the intermediary who knew both of them separately. To Jimmy, he had said
why don’t you come out? We’ll hang out, smoke a bone… He sat between them now, wearing a black-and-white sweater over an iridescent green shirt, having placed his beer on the carpet next to his feet in white Nikes.

  One of the riders lost control and wiped out and his bike flipped over. It landed on him and went sliding down the road. All three men said, Whoa! That’ll leave a mark. Holy shit. That hurt my balls from here. Hahahahaha.

  Where do they do this? the plumber asked.

  Bay Shore. That’s my boy filming it. He gets money from like the promotion.

  The money these guys can get in Vegas is unreal.

  Watch this. He’s gonna wipe.

  Oh shit.

  Hahahahahaha.

  Oh shit, my man came down hard. Homeboy’s out.

  Here they come. They’re gettin him up.

  What you gotta say about that, Jim-bo?

  He got messed up.

  Here’s the next one.

  The guy whose house it was’s woman brought out a tray of hotdogs and set it on the coffee table, which was behind them. The plumber turned around and said thank you, hon.

  There’s relish, she said.

  She sat down on the couch, which was behind the coffee table, and spooned relish on a hotdog and bit into it with her hand cupped under it and chewed.

  You want one? she said to the back of her guy’s head.

  No.

  The video was ending. The words Strong Island Wheelz scrolled by on the screen. The guy aimed the remote at the TV and the game came on.

  Who is it? she asked.

  Philly, he said.

  The plumber said: Darius Johnson, number 44. Fastest man in the NFL.