by Atticus Lish
No, I’m not in college.
So, what are you, here for work?
No, I’m more like checking it out.
That’s cool. Explore your world. So you don’t know anyone. You’re, like, who is everybody?
I know her and her daughter.
You met Pat, the father?
I don’t know.
You’d know. If you shook his hand, you’d know. When he took your arm off.
What’s he got, like an Irish voice?
Patrick Murphy? Yeah.
I might of heard him through the floor.
Through the floor? That sounds right, she said. That was him.
He glanced again at Erin, trying to get a look at her face, to see if she had any bruises, any black eyes or fat lips.
So where you from?
I’m from Pittsburgh.
That figures. I hear the twang. You don’t sound like you’re from the city.
We’re rednecks where I’m from.
Someone who overheard them mentioned that John Gambia from the neighborhood had come back from basic training sounding like a redneck.
Come on already. Get the sand out of your shoe, Vicky said.
He took another Michelob. When he opened it, the bottle cap fell and bounced on the linoleum. The star on the back of his neck showed when he bent to pick it up.
Indicating John, she said, You know this guy actually plays for the Jets.
Cool. I’m a Steelers fan.
Uh-oh, John said.
It’s all good.
Skinner tried to toast him, but the football player didn’t have a bottle. He held up his big fist and Skinner tapped it with his beer.
Everyone wanted to talk to the professional athlete, who, though not much of a talker, had an easy way about him, and spoke to everyone. Generally he didn’t stay too long speaking to any one person. Skinner made him stay and talk about strength and conditioning. I played ball in high school, Skinner said. John was polite. He acknowledged having had the clinic run on him in training. The two weeks in the preseason were tough, just as you have surely heard. He began to move away. Skinner kept saying, hold it dude, detaining him.
Squat, bench, chins, sprints.
Okay, said John.
Wait, what about power cleans, dips?
Okay, that’s good.
Dips are upper body squats.
Yup.
Burpees, hit-it’s, suicides. Six days a week, two times a day.
That’s a pretty heavy schedule. What are you doing all this for?
Skinner just shook his head.
I don’t know.
How many of those’ve you had, buddy?
Skinner took a while to answer. Someone else—an older woman with her hair in a scrunchy—came over and said hi to John and gave him a hug. Her voice was gone and half of what she said was whispery air.
It’s scary how different I look from one day to the next, isn’t it!
She adjusted her scrunchy to hold her pale blond hair up in a stalk above her head. The football player turned to speak with her. In so doing, he presented Skinner with his back.
I’ve had one.
The football player didn’t turn around.
I’ve had one, Skinner said more loudly. A nineteen-year-old iron-worker with a silver earring and a reflective orange stocking cap began looking at him steadily.
The general conversation turned back to John Gambia and what he was doing in Iraq. It was agreed that he was doing very well.
At this point, the cell phone by Mrs. Murphy’s coffee cup rang. It played the chorus from the song: I can’t go on, because I love you too much, baby. It was an important call. Everyone went quiet. It’s him, she said. He wants to talk to you. And she handed the phone to Vicky who took it into the hallway to talk. The conversation in the kitchen resumed while she was gone. Skinner’s eyes were getting heavy. He put his empty on the counter and rubbed his face. He listened to them talking about people he didn’t know. Then she came back a few minutes later and gave the phone to Mrs. Murphy. He wants to talk to you now. She turned herself away from the others as much as her size would allow, but anyone who was listening was going to hear her side of the conversation anyway. She said:
What’s wrong?… What is it?… Is it the same guard?… Can you do it on a different shift?… Listen to you… I hear you getting fresh with me… Just take it easy… Okay. Just take it easy. We’re going to see you soon. Just take it easy, will you?… All right. Goodbye.
The call ended. She set the phone down on the table. She reached for her Slims.
How’s he doing? John asked.
He’s upset over the phone schedule. That’s all the time he had.
He’s okay though.
He’s okay.
Erin asked, Is he still having a problem with the same guard?
Mrs. Murphy eyeballed her daughter.
Vicky, who was folded like a black cat on a kitchen chair, said, Yeah, and tapped her cigarette in the ashtray.
From across the room, Skinner said:
Who’re you talkin about?
The question caused a silence in the apartment. People stared at him, then they looked at Mrs. Murphy to see what she would say. From the back of the kitchen, Erin muttered something in a rising singsong voice that you didn’t have to hear to understand. The iron-worker with the silver earring exchanged a look with one of his male friends.
My son, Mrs. Murphy answered.
What, is he overseas? Skinner asked. Is he the Army Ranger?
You’re getting him confused.
You could say that, someone else said. Not exactly. Haha. Jimmy, no. Not the army. That would be someone else. Can you imagine Jimmy taking orders? No, let’s drop it.
But Skinner felt like he was missing something. I’m sayin, is he a brother soldier?
He’s not in the army. Put it that way.
He fucked up.
The cops fucked up, if you asked me, Vicky said and nodded at her cigarette.
He’s the place you go when you fuck up, John said and laughed. Leave it at that.
Thank you, Mrs. Murphy said. And would you quit the f-word in my kitchen. There was general laughter. And since we’re putting it in the street, yes, he’s upstate. We get him back in April.
Then you gotta have another one of these, have everybody over.
We’ll do something. Do me a favor: next time, get Guinness and you can come. More general laughter. She lit a cigarette and smoked it, talking in a lowered voice to a friend. The episode was forgotten, it seemed. Erin examined the remaining food and asked her mother if she had eaten. No one asked if Skinner wanted something to eat. He had consumed three beers. Mrs. Murphy told her daughter to bring her something. Not the whole thing. Cut it for me.
Skinner’s eyes were nearly shut from dopiness.
You wanna see my workout? he asked the ballplayer. You can tell me if it’s good.
He was told: That’s okay, hoss. Another time.
25
HE TOOK A DRINK from a flask of Bacardi Scorched Cherry and watched an execution on his laptop. A man’s body tensed while his killer sawed at his neck. Two men kneeled on him. The audio was bad, and Skinner turned the volume up. That sound was him protesting. The clock was running. The film advanced. The man had become inanimate in the last thirty seconds. Now they lifted up the head, separating it from the corpse.
Skinner took another drink from his bottle. The audio was bad because there was sand in his laptop. His hearing was sixty percent in his strong-side ear, the side he held his weapon on. Battlefield dirt got in your body through the lungs and through wounds.
He watched IEDs detonating, the explosion blotting out the vehicle, the men, the road, then the brown cloud rolling down and spreading out, and you could see the vehicle at an angle. He watched guys who got hit by a sniper, getting punched down. He watched a wounded fighter lying in the dirt. The ground was smeared with a wide red swath of blood. The fighter lifted his AK-47 and t
he good guys shot him. The sparks went through his body at angles: through his shoulder, chest. Now he lay unmoving. He watched his guys shooting from a rooftop, ten minutes of jumping footage showing three or four guys, the M60 shaking in bursts, the guys talking, pointing over there, the M60 being turned, the casings falling out like dry feces, set to death metal.
He listened to cock rock, thrash metal, big rock ballads, country and western—the numbers they used to play in battle. He turned the decibels all the way up, and it still felt as if he couldn’t hear it. And it wasn’t because he was deaf, it was because nothing sounded like anything after battle.
In his mind, he knew that she was special. He could picture her lying on his bed with the poncholiner winding between her legs and across her bare hip like a green snake and her phoenix eyes on him, a combat fantasy. She was what he had ached for when he had been over there. When he had believed he was going to die, the idea of never having a woman to love him had summed up all his pain. Now, as he sat there with the flask empty on the linoleum at his feet, he checked himself and found his ache was missing. The world was dull or annoying to him, and she was just like any other female, he felt: she had certain functions. And he had seen those functions turned inside out by high explosives, he knew what was inside people, and there was nothing there. It was gross. It was boring. It was sickening and that was all.
The loss of this feeling horrified him. It was yet another thing that didn’t work on him.
When I was younger, I always wanted to be in love with somebody someday. The thought that that was over, that I couldn’t feel that anymore, this really hit me hard. It took my hope away.
She set up the steam table, dialed up the flame, mopped the kitchen, threw the breaker for the counter lights. The other women came and the noise began and she went back to the hallway behind the kitchen and dumped her tub of slop from yesterday into the garbage.
In midmorning, she checked her phone. No message. She shoved her cart down the hallway, accelerating past doorways that gave onto the insides of the kitchens, the cutaway inner works of the counter, the rodent dead beneath the steam table, the mass of customers on the other side, then the wall again. A skinny old man in a white apron splotched with yellow grease leaned out into the tunnel and dropped an armful of empty boxes in her way and she almost ran him over.
She blasted her trays with the sprayer before jamming them in the conveyor belt, which went into the dishwasher, a two-foot-square stainless aluminum box connected by a tube to a wall-mounted soap bladder. She threw the lever and let it run.
On the floor she stood over kids with North Face parkas and perm-up hair and sunglasses who were playing with their food, and waited for their trays. A Hong Kong boy was talking about banana boat people and laughing huhuhu.
You gotta let people eat, he told her.
Incorrect, she said and took his tray.
He followed along behind a young man in a Frontrunners jacket and baggy jeans with his drawers showing, who took him around the corner and said, Lemme see twenty. What you got? They traded what they were respectively holding, hand to hand. Then he went into the newsstand on Roosevelt and bought a pack of Dutch Masters. Dismissively, with an air of infinite superiority and languor, the Pakistani put his change on the counter, as if he were untouchable. Skinner raked the dimes and pennies into his hand and left without a word.
Under the expressway, he made a little staging area to get his baggy out and split one of the cigars open. He brushed the tobacco away, and blew it away, and the grains fell on the cardboard of a campsite, the used-up aerosol cans rusting in multicolored plastic bags.
Then Skinner climbed the ramp and smoked his blunt alone in the middle of everything, hiking back and forth over the overpass above the expressway. In the middle of the arch, he stuck his fingers through the fence and held himself. The traffic poured by underneath him. If you looked one way, among those fire escapes, Zou Lei was over there. Three klicks to the east, that was where he lived. Looking this way, past Manhattan in the smoky distance, if you went far enough, was his unit in the barracks, the guys in Warrior Transition, in the group rooms where their wheelchairs were placed in formation and they did modified PT.
And behind him—he turned to face the other way—out there, if you kept going and going, eventually, was the war.
Imagine if this was Iraq right now, he thought. You’d be lighting up all these cars. He gazed at the sliding chains of traffic. These people have no idea. He took a hit, squatting now, holding in the smoke. I’m high as fuck. If I was there, if this was the Box, I’d have a buddy to pass this to.
In his narcotic state, he saw the sand going on and on across the continent. The broken palm trees and mud buildings and corrugated steel lean-tos and dead trucks and the domes and spires of the mosques. He could hear the loudspeakers wired by a man who weighed twenty pounds less and looked twenty years older and who was the same age as he was, a goat herder with missing fingers. He heard the static and the ram’s horn and the voices as they spoke together, wearing robes the same color as the landscape, kneeling together, rising together, chanting together. He could see them as if he were watching them through binoculars and the Arabian dusk was coming down. He saw the dim blue sky and smelled the sunbaked human waste and saw the dark forms of his many friends, their gear, their white eyes and very occasional smiles. He tasted the smell of burning tires, hashish, gun oil, animals, coal fire, chicken and rice and Tabasco sauce. The weight of the gear. The tearing down of the body. All the things you complained about. And the thing that was greater—the war itself. It was the one thing. You went outside the wire, and each time, either you died or you did not.
He did sit-ups on the floor of his room, the dirt sticking to his back. He knew the grit was there from how it stuck to his scar tissue. He put his jeans on, his boots on, his hoodie and the camouflage. No laundry, no shopping. Sitting on the bus, then the train, not reading or thinking or even looking at anything. Just feeling the train rocking around the curve and going into the tunnel. The gray soot day smudged over everything, the tracks, the footprints all over the floor of the car. The decorative blue tiles said Hunter’s Point as the subway coasted by the platform underground. Like the antique tile-work that he had seen holes blown through, shards you crunched through, scraping and popping under their boots. Finding blood on the tiles. Building materials collapsed and torn open and out, the twisted rebar. When the walls were holed or sheared clean away, the cross-section looked like fish gills from the cavities in the cinder blocks. Sand in mounds that felt weird to step on because of something under it that slipped or rolled that wasn’t sand. The surface was oxidized black and when you kicked it up, the inside was yellow inside its cut edges like you had cut into an organ. Footprints left these yellow cuts in the sand. The smell of something foul came out. Shit or garbage or dead people with sand over it. He thought of that.
He went to the city and did nothing. Went back home and lay on the poncholiner, not doing anything except lying there with the small lamp on next to the bed, his magazines on the pressed-wood night table, the pornography right there if he turned his head to look, but he did not. His earphones and his cell phone were mixed in with his possessions on the floor somewhere, the twisted jeans and socks and camouflage. Behind his head, the thing propping his head up was the pistol in a towel. He heard the thump of people or furniture upstairs. The window was a black square. What day is it, what month is it, what hour of the night? The one animate thing in the room was the boiler in the closet. There was nothing to eat or drink.
Eventually, he sat up. Then he pushed himself up to standing. Stood looking down at the mess on the floor, hunting for a final MRE. He gave up and felt the pockets of his jacket. A wrapper crinkled in his hand. He took it out, finding only the Indian’s head and the desiccant. A tiny chip of jerky. Skinner crushed the wrapper and let it go and it floated to the floor. Fuck it. There was no room inspection here. There was no point in going out to check inside the fri
dge, but he went anyway, jacked the door open—it was that old-fashioned pump-action kind of door—and the cold hissed out at him like the Arab voices, offering him hashish, calling him a dog.
He went back into the bedroom, now seeing the pornography and his bottles of medication. He shook out pills into his hand, blue diamond, white hexagon, pink oval. Slapped them into his mouth and went out to the kitchen with his lower jaw stuck out like a bird to hold them and bent and sucked water from the kitchen tap.
Where was his phone? It took effort to charge it up, especially when all he wants to do now is pitch himself down on the poncholiner. But if you don’t do A, then B doesn’t happen, and C, you die. So he made himself do it. Then he threw himself down in the bed—the feet scraped an inch on the floor. The poncholiner sticking to his skin where it remembered him, your body always losing water in the desert, the shadow of himself imprinted on the nylon. His head had a rock in it from the medication. Brad’s-eye-view of the world was just the slick green of the poncholiner, one of his hands—the other he felt trapped under him—the yellow spill of the lamplight, the table with his skyline of pill bottles. In the shine on the glossy cover, he could make out the trace of a beautiful woman’s leg and a spike heel.
The army had given him anti-anxiety medication, antipsychotic medication, and something to help him sleep. Whatever else these chemicals did to him, they did not stop him from having nightmares.
He was sleeping, but his head was running like an engine. The mortar was coming down at a thousand feet per second. He reexperienced the detonation, his mouth open, a red light behind his eyes, which was neurological, not physical, and his ears bursting inward, and the difficulty breathing. He was confused, but he knew something.
In his bed, he bucked and started struggling.
