Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  Munggo, congee, Bullhead. She walked slowly deeper into the smell of refrigerant, root, earth, dry goods, wanting to linger near the front. Honey Flavoured Syrup, Old Fujian Wine, Squid Fish Sauce, Cane Vinegar, Coconut Sport, Sarap-Asim, Chicken Essence Drink. A metal tree with a jerky of shredded squid hanging from hooks. Sweet dried pork cost $7.99. They were selling dried powdery balls of pork in plastic cups and luncheon meat in tins. Spam, Ma Ling, Vitarroz, smoke flavor added. She squatted to see the cans, as if she were fascinated by them. Po-Ku mushrooms, young green jackfruit, loquat, lychee, toddy palms. Everything was the kind of thing you added to something else.

  On the middle shelves were the three-in-one instant coffees, Oldtown White Coffee, Milo Fuze, and Glow-San Kentucky. Chiu Cheow Sauce, wheat gluten, peanut gluten, pickled lettuce and Frentel. There was Kewpie mayonnaise, peanut butter, and Kool Aid. The Skippy felt good and heavy. She checked the calories. It cost two dollars and fifty-nine cents.

  Maybe, she thought. She didn’t know. She put it down.

  He came down the aisle when she was in canned fish. Sweet hot sardines were $2.50. The can felt empty, and she put it down.

  He picked up a can of smoked bangus.

  That’s original, he said.

  What?

  Nothin. Whatever this is.

  It’s fish. You should eat it, she recommended. She might have been a little angry. It was full of nutrition for the body, she told him. Good for long life.

  Cooking oil was stacked in a gold pyramid against a wall, fifty-pound bags of rice on forklift pallets. She decided to take her time in the store to punish him a little. She tried to figure calories per dollar for Plum Rose rice in her head. And then she made him follow her to the back of an aisle to look at the cooking gear: butane gas bottles, rice cookers, kitchen scissors, roach spray. A wok was $8.99. She got down on the floor and dug through what they had on the shelf, trying to see if she’d missed anything. She hadn’t. The cheapest rice cooker cost fifteen American dollars and that was too much.

  They went past the freezer case of soymilk, the black chickens, and the whole fish on ice. There was so much to eat, she thought. She wasn’t all that angry anymore.

  You get something? she asked, thinking they could combine ingredients.

  I’ll pass, he said.

  He had seen a tub of wriggling mucus-foaming fish with feelers, the dirty aquarium tanks with heavy things floating in the green water.

  They were coming up to the butcher counter and she thought of her father making a fire and butchering a lamb, and she took his arm again.

  There were gaunt butchers in pink-stained smocks selling chicken gizzards and feet. Skinner looked through the hanging plastic strips. A ribcage was being sectioned with a bandsaw. Bone meal sprayed out and Skinner flinched. The butchers yelled what you want? Women with long glossy black hair demanded organs. Small old women called out for the inside of the stomach, the sponge-like stomach lining, the bloodless color of cabbage. Hurry a little faster! The butchers stood on their toes to see them. A kidney in a paper wrapper was handed over the counter.

  Zou Lei looked at the price of lamb. She didn’t know, she said. She glanced at him, saw him looking away. To her, he appeared tired of being here. Maybe she didn’t need.

  Some days, she noticed, he would hug her when she came to see him, but he might just as easily open the door and turn his back on her without a word, as he did one evening, and leave her to follow him down the stairs alone to find him lying face-down on his mattress in the dark.

  Skinner? You playing hide and seek?

  She felt her way to him.

  I can put the light?

  He said nothing. She sat on his bedside and touched his leg. What has happen to you?

  He spoke into the mattress and she couldn’t understand him.

  What you say?

  I said I have a headache.

  She rubbed his leg.

  You drink too much alcohol. You go to party, it’s fine. I’m not jealousy. But too much, it’s bad. You are strong man lying in the bed. Look at this strong man. He is lazy man.

  She moved closer.

  While you go to party, I do some exercise you will like.

  She picked up his thick heavy hand and set it on her thigh and flexed her leg.

  You feel it?

  He took his hand away and rolled over to face the wall. He pulled his Goarmydotcom t-shirt over his face to block the light.

  She looked at him more closely and said now she could see how he truly might be sick.

  To be near him, she stayed and read his magazines instead of leaving. There was perfect silence except for her flipping the pages until late into the night.

  Have I done something to bother you? she asked.

  No, he said.

  Okay, she said. But I warn you, I’m very tough. Even you aren’t nice to me, I don’t go away.

  Where she was from, a man and woman might live apart for many years, due to economic reasons, only seeing each other once or twice a year when they were given permission by the authorities.

  22

  HE WENT TO SEE her at her job at eleven in the morning on a week-day. He went inside, but it was the middle of the rush and he couldn’t see her, so he left and smoked a cigarette on Main Street in front of Modell’s and Burger King.

  A cast of characters stood around under the awnings waiting for the bus, smoking, watching the street, going nowhere, not functioning, some of them with canes—the people they called Jerry’s kids in the army and razzed each other about being, because so much of the military, including its most outstanding soldiers, came from the lower end of civilian society. A female in pink terry cloth sweatpants was screaming on her phone.

  I’ll go to jail! she insisted. Yes, I will! I got a baby inside me. At least I’ll get fed… Stop talking! Stop talking! What happened to the twenty dollars I gave you?

  He finished his cigarette and went back to the mall. The mall was an office building that had been taken over by the Chinese. In its present state, everything had the half-finished, jerry-built appearance of transition from one thing to something else. There were cardboard shipping containers littered around the floor. Some units had bare concrete floors and raw cinder block walls, others had carpets and wall coverings and fluorescent lights. One room was being used to warehouse thousands of dried medicinal herbs, which were stored in a chaos of buckets, tubs, bins, bowls, cups, wooden drawers—containers of every description—anything that could be used to hold something else, even paper envelopes—none of it organized, all of it just lying there, while a twenty-year-old guy with a gold chain chewed wontons with his mouth open and watched a DVD. The sign over his head said Cohen’s Fashion Optical. You couldn’t tell what was old and what was new. You couldn’t tell whether something was coming or going. Things were in the middle of being built and destroyed at the same time. It was an environment he might have recognized.

  Senior citizens wearing Red Army hats, people who had lived through thirty years of war and revolution, paced around as if they were on inspection and approved of everything they saw.

  He put his shades up on his head and looked for her beyond the customers but could not see her: her counter was still busy in the food court. So he turned around and went back outside again.

  This time, he crossed Roosevelt Avenue and went under the train tracks, where two tall Africans were standing, the sun shining on their dull black faces and dusty looking clothes. Ahead was the building where she had first worked, where he had met her, and he saw a knot of men inspecting something, their hands clasped behind their backs. Between their legs he caught a glimpse of flesh. He thought they were staring at someone injured on the street, and he looked around automatically to see if there was more to it: anything burning, relatives crying, calling out for vengeance. But the traffic was flowing normally past the restaurants. He went over and looked over their shoulders and saw that they were looking at a series of blown-up photographs propped up on th
e sidewalk.

  The first one was of an Asian woman in her forties, face in profile, holding up her dress to reveal a blackened buttock, in the center of which was a deep abscess. There was another photo of a woman’s torso. Her breasts had been removed. Her chest looked like lasagna. In another image, you saw the white sheet she was lying on. From the attitude of her face, it was clear that she was dead. People had Chinese toe tags. Someone’s legs had been photographed to show bruises. In the shot, there was a hand holding a ruler indicating the dimensions. There was a photograph of wadded blood-soaked clothing on a cement floor near a drain.

  A woman came towards Skinner as if a magnetic force were pushing her towards him and asked him to sign her clipboard. Her eyes were luminous and although she did not have a forceful voice, she gazed blankly and steadily at him with her eyes and kept talking like a computer that could not be turned off.

  The human rights criminal, she said.

  I’m not signing anything.

  When she persisted, he said:

  I don’t know you. You can fake those. He shrugged from behind his shades. You’ve got, what, four bodies? I’ve got two hundred pictures like that on my camera at home.

  A man who was working with her told her in Chinese not to talk to Skinner, and she broke off talking to him immediately.

  Skinner looked at the pictures again before he moved on.

  No friends of mine, he thought.

  At a stand where you could see the models on the magazine covers, Skinner said, Now, that’s what I’m talkin about, and a Pakistani turned to watch him.

  He smoked a cigarette halfway and snuffed it on his boot sole.

  He went across Kissena to a takeout joint and ordered pork fried rice. There was a communication problem with the people who ran the place, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome by pointing, or so he thought. A man took the meat off the hook in the window and chopped it with a cleaver right in front of him. They charged him more than he expected. Roast pork. I thought I was getting that one there. See where I’m pointing?

  They brought someone else out to explain. You get roast pork. Look, there are two, you get expensive one.

  No shit, Skinner said. I bet that was an accident.

  He went and sat.

  The rice was cold and the grease was larded all throughout the rice and turning thick and white. When corpses burn, he remembered, the fat cooks out and you get wax congealed on everything. His fork was rancid. The smell triggered something inside him and he left his plate and went outside and thought he was going to be okay in the cold, but then two seconds later he bent and gagged and vomited a mouthful of orange stuff in the center of the sidewalk. People went around him and, from a safe distance, looked at him. He went back inside and started pulling napkins out of the dispenser, wiping up his face.

  When he was clean, he wiped his eyes and bought a soda somewhere else. He smoked another cigarette. His hands stopped shaking, he wiped his eyes, and he was fine again.

  At a newsstand, he made his way to the back and started looking at the magazines, not seeing them, picking them up and dropping them back in the metal slot, one after the other.

  The Pakistani’s dark face followed him like a radio dish as he was leaving.

  You need help?

  Not from you.

  He went back to her job again and sat at a table in the food court, his face impassive, his body slouched and motionless as if he were stoned—except for his foot jiggling up and down like a motor beneath the table.

  When she came out to collect trays, she saw him at once in the teeming crowd.

  Hey! I do not see it’s you! I’m surprising!

  Finally. He lifted up his shades, revealing his bruised-looking eyes. New-pong-yow. Where you been? He blinked at her like somebody waking up and seeing the sun.

  You are feeling better today, she said. Yesterday he had been sick. He had gotten better and that was good, she said. And you come to see me. I am so glad. Welcome. Welcome to my job.

  She cleaned tables near him so she could talk to him.

  Maybe it isn’t a good job, she expressed, as she leaned over a table, wiping it with her rag, Skinner watching her moving. It was all immigrants here—had he noticed? But everybody has to work at something, and there shouldn’t be any shame attached to a job. When her English was better, she would do something else. It cheered her that he was here, and she went around with a bounce in her step taking trays off the tables, dumping them in the trash, and stacking them on her cart. When she finished the tables near him, she circled out to tables farther away at the edge of the food court, collected their trays and circled back to him.

  She asked Skinner what he was doing today.

  Chest.

  Oh, she said. Your chest?

  Yeah. Chest and shoulders.

  You go to the gymnasium?

  Yeah, he was. He had to go, he said.

  I also go to the gymnasium.

  You do?

  Not now. Will be! I will be soon. For now, I will exercise by my work. You can tell? She squatted up and down fast and picked up a chopstick, winked at him and flipped it into a bucket.

  He wanted to know when she was getting off work so he could meet her.

  You won’t be tired? she asked.

  No, no way. That was yesterday, not today.

  She didn’t want to bother him if he was tired.

  It’s no bother. He wanted to see her.

  She wiped her swollen hands with her rag.

  Work is finish at six o’clock.

  All right, I’ll be here then.

  Okay.

  You good to go?

  Oh, I am exciting. Only five hour more.

  We’ll go back to the crib.

  It was partly a question. He glanced at her to see what she would say. She didn’t say she wouldn’t.

  After she pushed her cart through the restaurant counters to the dishwashing machine in the back and he had watched her go, he picked up his shades and walked out through the crowd and left. His leg had stopped shaking while they were talking, and his hood had fallen off revealing his seamed neck. But it had gotten colder since the morning, the clouds had come in, and he put his hood back up over his head and started walking to keep warm, passing businesses that were boarded-up or being run inside units that had been sealed and broken into, down where they threw the garbage down the stairs, below street level. He saw rolls of carpeting behind a half-shut hinging metal gate.

  He came to a bar, one of the few bars in Flushing, and went inside. There were arcade games in the corner. A microwave sat on a counter in an adjoining room that contained folding metal chairs. The power cords had dust on them. There were sofas in front of a supersized TV screen—the old kind with the three colored lights like traffic lights that project onto the screen like a slide projector. The bar itself was just a counter with liquor bottles behind it. There were no taps for draft beers in this bar. If you wanted a beer, they gave you a can out of a cooler, which also held a pack of hotdogs. The lights were off and the space smelled like cleaning solution from the bathroom, which an old man they called Johnny had just cleaned. When Johnny was done, he came out of the bathroom with his mop and asked the bartender what else he should do and the bartender told him, Nothing that I know of. The old man was putting the mop away when Skinner came in and asked for a drink.

  The bartender poured him a drink and Skinner sat sipping it watching basketball on TV.

  The bartender was a talker, and without an invitation, he started telling him a story. The other night, he said, he’d had to give a guy a ride home. I was pissed too, but he couldn’t do anything, he was blind, not a prayer that he could drive, so I said what the hell. We got my car and I dropped him off. It was four in the morning. I come out of his garage, and there’s this cop waiting right there after giving someone a DUI.

  The bartender had paused in Windexing the bar to tell his story, and he punctuated what he was saying by making faces of astonishment
at his own story.

  This was a Friday, so you know it would have been a long weekend. Monday or Tuesday before you get in front of the judge at least!

  He blew up his cheeks, as if to say, what a thing! Skinner nodded along when he had to. It had turned into a gray day outside. The bartender kept talking. He remarked that he could tell from Skinner’s accent that he wasn’t local. This led to his asking where Skinner was from and getting out of him that he was a vet. When he heard he was a vet, he took the bottle of Parrot Bay and topped him up.

  Skinner already felt the first one and didn’t plan on having anymore. Thanks, he said.

  It’s the least I can do, the bartender said and stood there for a minute with his arms propped on the bar and his head half-bowed holding a moment of silence for the armed forces. The old man Johnny had taken his place at the bar while they were talking and was sitting with a can of Budweiser. Now he turned on his seat and worked his mouth, trying to speak.

  You was over there?

  Skinner didn’t hear him.

  Johnny’s talking to you, the bartender said.

  He looked over at the old man moving his mouth.

  You was over there in Iraq?

  Yeah, Skinner said.

  Johnny’s a navy man, the bartender told him.

  Cool. Hey.

  I was in the navy. But what you guys are doing is… is unbelievable.

  Skinner threw back his drink and swallowed it. The bartender filled his glass again.

  It’s on me, chief.

  Good looking out, Skinner said, rubbing his face. His knee started bouncing up and down.

  This guy’s your friend, Johnny said. He’ll take care a you.

  Wherever you go in the world, look for the Irish bar, the bartender said. They’ll help you out. And if they can’t help you, they’ll know someone who can. He made an expression of taking you into confidence.