by Atticus Lish
He popped open the bottom of his deodorant and put his finger in the space where he stashed his ball of foil. The ball of foil had been unrolled and rolled back up again many times. When it was unrolled, you could see it contained a chip of what looked like the wing of a cockroach. His cellie had a needle—a tiny tube like the ink tube from a ballpoint pen with a needle on the end. They dropped the blankets over the bars after lockdown and cooked up and got high.
When he was high, Jimmy sat nodding with his eyes shut, his marked-up white arms extended, folds of fat across his white belly. His cellie, shaved head gray, bulbous and helmet-like above his tan face, sat slumped forward, his state sneakers at odd angles to his legs. Speaking with his eyes closed, his cellie said:
This time a year, we used to slaughter a half dozen hogs and ever-body would come for miles. They come on bikes, trucks, ever which way. We had us a kinda moonshine a man couldn’t drink. I had me nigger braids in them days. My teeth was gone be all gold all across here…
Jimmy said, I was the biggest rocker…
What’s that?
Rock ‘n’ roll rocker… I play guitar.
My cousin plays anything you give him.
We used to go out to Nassau… where all the cool people went. There was like twenty girls there. They all used to listen to me rock.
Even high, they did not smile. Jimmy had not smiled for a year. The closest thing to smiling was a kind of short-term tolerance granted to the person talking to you. Then he lay down and covered himself with his sheet and lay like a sack of laundry.
When I get released, he mumbled, I’m gonna learn how to play for real.
When you was trippin, his cellie subsequently remarked (with an air of innocence), you was sayin you was gonna learn how to play guitar.
I know how to play, Jimmy said.
The Aryans were bikers, and choosing his moment, Jimmy let it be known that he had been a biker too. Not a biker, but he had ridden bikes in Bay Shore. He’d done stunts with them, wheelies, putting them up on the front wheel—little-ass rice rockets. One time his bike had flipped over and landed on him and everybody thought he was dead. It hurt like hell, but he’d stood up and walked it off and they were all amazed. Oh yeah, come to think of it, he had been a real biker now that you mention it. He’d ridden a Harley, one of those badass choppers with the long neck in front, him just leaned back like this, shades on, gloves on, cruising down the highway. No, he hadn’t been in any chapter or nothing. He’d been a lone wolf. He had gone to, let’s see, to Virginia Beach, if he remembered. He’d been out to Vegas, where the chicks went crazy for a guy on a bike. He’d been to this other place—he had a picture of it at home in a drawer—a green field, a barbecue somewhere he couldn’t remember, but he could remember the good time he’d had, the freedom and the honor and the good music and what it had all meant to him.
The mob’s communications went through the mail in code, on the inside of greeting cards, in ghost writing that showed up under laser light between the words I Love You. Their people on the outside took a piece of cloth and sandwiched black tar heroin into it and ironed it until it was paper-thin. They took two identical greeting cards and split the paper with a razor and reassembled them to form a single card with the contraband inside. The thin translucent brown sliver was worth eight hundred dollars inside the prison.
His birthday came and went in a rainy season, when the staff manned the perimeter of the vast yard wearing camouflage Gortex and the inmates tramped through the mud, doing dips and chin-ups in yellow foul weather gear. He didn’t receive the card his mother had sent until three months later, after it had been opened by the prison staff and scanned beneath a laser. It contained nothing but a picture of a cake and candles. There was no money. Money’s tight right now – XO Mom.
On their way to chow, they strolled by a cell with wadded bloody towels on the concrete floor. Correctional staff in bloody rubber gloves were lifting up a man who looked like yellow plastic. Crusted and streaked blood on his shaved head, stab holes with rubber tubes such as you would siphon gasoline coming out, like shark bites. He had been murdered with a sword.
A shame about you-know-who, they said when they were eating.
Some days he slept for up to twenty hours, but when he opened his eyes, it was still the same calendar day, the same bus station bathroom light was still flickering in his cell, and he was still hammered by the same sound of the place, the distant slamming and calling, the same disappointed sound of the place.
Another intercepted letter read as follows:
You can’t sink my Zen man if you thought cannon stood acclaimed Crusader modus warrior in the great pine cabin broadsword.
After attempting to decode it without success, the prison’s gang intelligence unit sent it to the cryptography division at Quantico.
The most notorious convict in the structure was a reader. Jimmy met him while they were being held in adjacent freestanding cages inside an octagonal glassed-in bay. He had tattoos up his neck like a green turtleneck. He read Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Machiavelli, Miyamoto Musashi, von Clausewitz. I am a warrior, a knight. I study the bushido code. He had 333 years. You can love the game, but the game loves no one. He described being acquitted of the charge he had believed would send him to prison for life and then convicted for a second murder he had committed in the county jail while awaiting the first trial.
You have to laugh at the way that goes, the legend said—a five-foot-eight man in reading glasses.
I went up behind him, threw a rear naked stranglehold on him, put him to sleep. Snapped his neck. When you snap a neck, you feel the bone pop right here against your chest. Pop, just like that. I pulled out my piece and hit him up. Stuck him in the throat, heart, liver. Ran his gears. Hit him twenty-five times. He started gasping and shaking. I got a pipe and smashed his head until his skull broke. Blood everywhere.
Something else we did, which started the myth you may have heard. Completely untrue. What it was, we were hungry after the work. I made a stove with a piece of a towel rolled up tight. We called that a bomb. I lit the bomb and we cooked grilled cheese sandwiches on his body using him as a stand. The story got around the system. Rumor had it we ate his heart. A complete fabrication.
We had some way-out devils in the structure. All my life, I gave everything I had to be a hitter. Loyalty was my code. When I learned the mob put me in the hat, it shattered me. After the commitment, the work I had put in, the holes I put in enemies? Here I am betrayed. But I ain’t no coward, no. Despite my terror, fine, I said, I’ll stay on the tier. They were gonna nail me sooner or later anyway. So eventually they did. I got sliced down my face. Ran back to my cell, stuffed it full of coffee, a vasoconstrictor. I didn’t run to the infirmary or I would have been placed in protective custody. It took me three weeks and two days, but I finally got the guy who sliced me. Offered him a cigarette, said how about a truce? When he went to take it, I got him in the heart. Laters for him.
I don’t have any delusions. I know it’s over for me too. My time is coming. This is the life I chose and I accept it.
The code, a version of the Enigma Code from World War II, had been identified and cracked by the Federal cryptographers. The message, which came from an individual in maximum segregation, called for the murder of staff members. The author was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, no human contact. His letter was a triumph of ingenuity.
On the main line, the staff, as always, wore vests and batons, their keys connected to their belts on a long chain that hung down out of the pockets of their green trousers like skaters. Some were female, in green bomber jackets with gold emblems, who evaluated males in animal terms: strong or weak. They had families, no illusions about their safety outside the walls.
I don’t go to areas where there’s a gang presence outside work. I don’t bring my personal life to work with me.
Jimmy lifted his foot up behind him like a horse being shod while they ran a metal detector over the flat sole of his s
tate-issued sneaker. They felt down his clothing, his sweatshirt, the big canvas shorts.
Go, they pointed.
They waved him on and Jimmy joined what they called his family in the yard. He looked like a logger in his wool hat. It was a winter day and the sky was stratospheric blue. Expressionless, he watched the yard, occasionally turning to look over his shoulder, monitoring the other races filing out and going towards their respective camps, the whole time rubbing his hands together in wool work gloves, carrying on a laconic conversation and apparently at ease.
21
SHE WENT TO A store that sold South American soccer jerseys, located next to an abandoned lot and a house with a Pentecostal church on the first floor and the upper floors burned-out. The neighborhood was made up of Guatemalan families. The vans that parked on those streets, like the garage doors, were covered in a certain type of graffiti: just words, no colored pictures—just initials and numbers. MS! MSX3. MS13. GC13. Fuck S42. R2B. Niños malos. Sur 13. The Colombiana, whose sign showed a picture of a woman lying face-down with her hips raised so you could see her jeans, was five blocks away. You were not supposed to see into the soccer store. The window was covered by a flag depicting a hawk and the words Brown Pride.
The back of the store was filled with thrift store clothes in bags. The air smelled heavily of grease. A man she assumed was Mexican was eating fried pork out of a Styrofoam takeout shell. His hair was buzzed down tight all over his head the way they do in the military when they give you white walls, and a darker shadow had been left on the top of his head. He had fat cheeks like Buddha and an exact little mustache. When he lifted his lips, he had a gold tooth.
She gave him a hundred fifty dollars, which he put in the pocket of his red Adidas tracksuit jacket. In return, she got a Nebraska State ID in the name Suzy Lin Hong. Address: 1101 North Burdette Street, Omaha, Nebraska 68101. Hair: Blk. Eyes: Blk. Height: 5'2". DOB: March 3, 1979. You could see cut-off Japanese writing around the edge of her photograph.
The week after she bought the ID, the Sing Tao, El Diario, and the Pakistani Times carried the story of a worksite raid at a meatpacking plant in Greeley, North Carolina, in which ICE had detained over two hundred Hispanic workers suspected of immigration violation, separating them from their families and shipping them to federal detention centers in Pennsylvania and Texas. Zou Lei also read that American senators wanted identities to become electronic. To get a job, you would have to pass something called E-Verify.
Do you think it’s any good? Zou Lei asked, showing her ID to a woman who sold tofu cream out of a shopping cart without a license.
Good enough.
The woman, who had an out-of-state ID herself, said she had recently been arrested and sentenced to a half day of cleaning up the subway platform. Rather than being afraid of the police, she was angry with them, complaining that they interfered with her livelihood.
The cop discriminate me. I tell cop, You do your job, let me do mine.
But then a Guyanese Muslim who Zou Lei met north of Kissena Park had a different story to tell. An unshaven young man in a backwards ball cap, he was standing on the dead grass by the parking lot next to Golden City, where he had delivered jasmine rice. His truck was in the parking lot and he was smoking a cigarette.
My aunt’s husband who lives in Jersey? Forget some little ID—he had the real thing, a green card. It was in the mail and in the meantime he had the piece of paper they send you first to say that it was coming. The cops busted in on him, saying they were looking for someone else, and when they were there they asked him if he was legal. He was like, fuck yeah I’m legal, and shows them the paper, and the immigration arrested him anyway and put him in the Passaic County jail.
What happens to him? Zou Lei asked.
They fucked him up. The guards went after anyone who was Asian Muslim, Trini, black, brown, whatever—anything like Arab, because they’re so stupid and fucking racist, they think everybody with dark skin is the same. They’d come in with dogs at midnight, tear up the cell, and tear up your legal papers. My uncle has bad health and they left him handcuffed on the floor for eighteen hours before they let him go to the hospital. Then they deported him back to Guyana. It’s not like here there. Nobody has anything. They ruined his family. My aunt’s kids are in trouble. He can’t get back to the States. The lawyer told them she has to try and wait until George Bush is gone.
Zou Lei asked where he thought it was safe.
Canada! he said, throwing his cigarette away and blowing the last of his smoke out. I live in Ozone Park and there’s a lot of Hindu, a lot of Trini, but there’s no guarantee. I personally don’t have to worry, but my family has people who have to worry. I don’t know what to tell you.
Do you think I pay too much for the ID?
How much was it?
One hundred fifty.
See, everybody’s got these. The cops know they’re fake.
On a tip from the Guyanese, Zou Lei went to a two-level urban mini-mall where a crime ring was supposed to be selling counterfeit green cards. There was a nail salon and a Taekwondo school on the second floor. Spanish families took their children there to learn martial arts to protect themselves and hold their heads up. She waited around, leaning on the railing, trying to see what was what, while women got their nails silk-wrapped in the small salon. A half hour went by. A man who was working as a barker for a bar on the first floor kept observing her through his shades.
The NYPD rolled down the street, slowing as they passed. She got a feeling she shouldn’t be here. Afraid of being mistaken for a prostitute, she left. As she was coming down the stairs, the barker told her she could drink for free, why not come in? And he gestured at the open doorway of the bar, a black space behind him in which she could see nothing.
She thought she might return another day, but then she read that you could be charged with identity theft for using someone’s social, and she decided that it wasn’t worth the risk.
Ducking a turnstile could land you in federal detention. Since 9/11, the smallest offense made you deportable, depending on what country you were from. According to the World Journal, there were different classifications of countries and immigrants. Zou Lei didn’t know if she would be classified with immigrants from China, a trading partner of the United States, or with those from Jamaica, Guyana, Mexico, Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
People said that going to English school was always a safe bet, it could only help you, you could budget thirty dollars a class.
But this was the price of a bus ticket, she thought. The price of a hotel for the night, if you were on the road. Meanwhile, she could practice English to her heart’s content with Skinner, a real American, and it wouldn’t cost a thing. She shelved the idea of school. For seven dollars, she bought a notebook and a used Chinese-English dictionary called the New Century, and made a half-hearted effort at teaching herself. She opened the notebook and wrote in it, knowing that she was forming her characters wrong, making geometric shapes that the Chinese had never thought of. It looked as if her first language was something else and it was trying to come out of her letters. So she only wrote a few incoherent words on the first page and, after that, stuck the notebook, which had a kitten on the cover, in her woven plastic bag.
Seven dollars would have bought her a pound and a half of lamb, which she now wished she were eating. To get something for her money, she tried reading in the dictionary at random, holding the onionskin pages in her calloused fingers, studying the words and sounding them out, sounding out the definitions, which were strange, quaint, or outmoded—although she may not have known this.
Warrior: One who is martial, a hero. Love: Two scalewings, the giving of the heart. Freedom: Up to the self. The United States is a freedom country.
She had a bad dream about Bridgeport in the night and called him the next day.
She dreamed that ICE agents came to Chinatown in the new white Homeland Security trucks and piled into the mall and closed off all the exit
s, shut everything down, and started checking all the workers with a biometric scanner. The agents put them all in line, made them raise their arms, and scanned their hands and retinas. Polo and Sassoon were cleared and allowed to go, but the scan caught everyone who wasn’t legal: the Mexicans and the illegal women. The agents made them lie down on their stomachs. There was nowhere to run and they were going to get her.
When she called him, he sounded remote, but he agreed to meet her after work.
On her way out of the mall, she stopped in the public restroom on the first floor and cleaned the food off her jeans, combed her hair, put on glitter lipstick from the 99-cent store, put on her New York hat, and turned and looked at herself from the back before she walked out. When she saw him in front of Caldor, she hurried over and took his arm.
He didn’t offer to take her anywhere and she didn’t want to invite herself to dinner, so she walked with him, looking at pawnshops, sneaker stores.
You are busy today? she asked.
He didn’t seem to hear questions about himself.
They reached the markets lit by bare bulbs in wire cages. At the cardboard boxes of produce, she pointed out the persimmons, knotweed, ginseng, a spiked fruit the size of a grenade whose name she could not translate, and the dragon eyes, which looked like olives on a vine.
You know this one? It’s call the dragon eye.
She made an OK circle with her thumb and forefinger and clucked her tongue, pointed at her eye, and looked at him.
Longyan. You say it?
A Mexican slashed a box open right behind him and she felt his whole body jump as if he’d been electrocuted.
Skinner?
Yeah. What?
You okay?
He nodded. He looked confused and angry.
The Chinese word is very hard.
Maybe he would like to see a true Asian market. He seemed to agree. She pushed inside and, somewhere in the doorway when they were getting shoved by everyone coming out, he let her arm go. Now she was alone in the store and she didn’t know if he was coming. She took a box off a shelf at random. Beijing Royal Jelly. She set it down. She didn’t see him.
