Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  That’s better.

  And I’m gonna get a robe too.

  A robe?

  Yeah, like one of them long dresses. And a turban.

  Oh! she said. You should get a turban.

  I know, he said. I should. Gonna start praying five times a day. You know what that’s about.

  Oh, yes, she said.

  I’m gonna pray—and he brought his hands up to his face as if he were washing his face with God’s word or God’s water—and said: Allahu akbar.

  Good, she said. Very good. What else you will do?

  Well, I’m definitely going to blow myself up. I’m going to go into the Dunkin Donuts and blow myself up and kill, like, a good ten people. All the traffic is gonna get fucked-up for like 45 minutes. People will be late for work. And then of course I’ll go to heaven for my reward of 77 virgins. Only I won’t want virgins. I’m gonna ask for some hoochie mamas.

  You will be very busy in heaven, she said. I can visit you or you are too busy in this hoochie mama?

  It’d be nice to stay in touch, he said. Do you mind waiting in line?

  I wait in line. I think it is worth it. Because I am better than those 77. I think when you see me, you will pick me.

  I’d pick you, he said.

  You do?

  Yeah, I would.

  She sucked on her straw and finished her protein drink, which popped and rattled in the straw. She swung her foot, staring straight ahead, her tracksuit and her clothes beneath it wet and cooling. He laid his hand on her leg, which felt smooth and shapely and solid and naked under the thin polyester. He felt the muscles flexing in independent groups as her knee moved.

  Their palms were brown with rust from the bars. Even though her hands were calloused, she had torn her palm doing deadlifts. He held her sweaty palm and she squeezed her hand open and shut around him. He felt the metal, dirt, and sweat on her hand, which created a glue between them.

  In the afternoon, they went down to Jackson Heights where the whorehouses were. The whole street was meseras bars with Central American men sitting stone drunk at the tables, their hoods over their heads, sleeping on their arms, holding forties, using the bottle to climb up like a banister. Skinner told her at night the trestles in front of the fruit markets would move all by themselves—a sight to make you jump at two in the morning—and this seeming paranormal activity was because a body was sleeping under it.

  The men who slept out in the Park of the Americas had purple blackened faces. Their skin was puckered and quilted. They slept directly on the concrete, no shoes on, and urine running downhill from them, leaves and twigs in their hair.

  A Mazda with silver rims spun around the corner and drove away under the long shadow of the elevated tracks. All down the block, Guatemalans were cooking a hash of gray brains, black sausage and corn on the cob at their generator-powered trucks, the women in aprons and ball caps holding tongs, arranging a ring of pig’s heads turned to leather masks by roasting, black holes where the eyes were or had been before they were cooked out. An inside-the-animal-smell.

  They told her they had goat and she bought a taco and ate it, dripping hot grease over her fingers and licking up chips of onion and flakes of cilantro off her fingers, still tasting the rust on her hands.

  While she waited in the park, he went to a barbershop that had a hundred photographs of Latin heads with fades in the window and got his hair cut in a military high and tight. You could get a cesa, mohawk, or skinfade for ten dollars. The barbershop was located on 85th Street next to Nathaly’s Bridal. The barber was a Hispanic youth, younger than Skinner, with a fat white face. He had a small spiked stud in his chin. Males in white snap-back hats lounged all around the shop, texting on their cell phones. The Spanish music was turned all the way up, so that the drumbeats popped your eardrums. Skinner tilted his head forward under the pressure of the clippers, and the kid pushed the clippers up the back of his head. When he was done, he flashed a hand mirror behind his head.

  You want some alcohol on it, so you don’t catch no bumps?

  Skinner said go ahead, and the kid sprayed his scalp with cold alcohol, which he slapped and rubbed into Skinner’s skin.

  That shit’s gotta be mad burning.

  I got my ears back. My girl’ll like it.

  The barber asked if his girl was Mexican.

  No.

  You’re white though, right?

  Yeah.

  What’s your girl? She white too?

  She’s Chinese.

  Word? How come you ain’t goin out with a black girl? Don’t wanna jump in the mud?

  The barber made one of his boys laugh and they slapped hands.

  He turned back to Skinner. Ten, yo, he said. Skinner checked that his hair was even, then took his wallet out and paid him.

  When she saw him, she called him shuaige! handsome boy! and rubbed the back of his scalp in the same place the barber had done.

  They were so tired it was hard to climb the stairs up to the train. The seven came and they got on, and newspapers and dirt were all over the floor. She sat down and he sat sideways and put his boots up on the seat and lay back with his head in her lap and closed his eyes. She held his head and stroked his forehead. They spoke to each other under the roar of the train. What? she asked. She bent down to hear him and breathed the rubbing alcohol on his scalp.

  Come home with me.

  She stroked his now-cropped hair.

  Will you?

  She nodded, gazing down at him.

  People got on all around them as the train went down the line. They got on carrying their food, a bundle of parchment cornhusks like dried rattlesnake skins. Through their bags you could read the words Aztec Maize. Everyone sat all together around them, pressed against her side, wedged in at the end of Skinner’s feet. He moved his feet for them, to not step on them. Zou Lei rubbed his ears between her fingers. They rocked with the train. Both of them dozed, people’s legs bumping against their legs. Other people dozed as well, tattoos of crosses on their knuckles, the word Serena in italic script on the inside of a pregnant woman’s wrist.

  They went back to his room, he was very nice, and she fell asleep on him while he smoked a Marlboro and when the night came she didn’t want to leave.

  She was lying half on him with her leg on top of his leg. His arm was around her and her face was fitted like a jigsaw piece into the crook of his neck. When he tightened his arm around her, her back yielded supplely and she arched against him and her breasts pressed his chest. When he looked down, he could see the solid muscle of her rear divided by the triangle of her pink boy shorts.

  She asked him if it was okay if she stayed the night and, stubbing out his cigarette, he told her of course. He even joked about it, saying he wondered if this meant he was a pimp.

  She thanked him.

  You liked the gym?

  I love it. We had a good day today. You are so good today.

  Today was the way it should be.

  She agreed it was.

  We’re going to do that every day from now on.

  I want it to be. Imagine, she thought, how great it would be if they did.

  He had taken his pills and she could feel him going into a different state of consciousness beneath her.

  Every single day, he said.

  The house was quiet, the bedside lamp was on, it was a night in late winter.

  She felt the whole earth traveling across the cosmos. The cosmos was something like the Siberian steppe and the earth was a rider traveling across it. It came south out of the larch forest where the dead of her ancestors lived and hunted reindeer. The rider continued south on horseback to the endless grassland. She was riding behind him, and as they rode she saw little flowers coming out in bloom in the oatmeal-colored land. He wore a wooden mask with a heavy beak, so he could become a hawk and find the way. They were on the verge of descending into a valley. They would have ripe green pastures, apple trees to which birds flocked, singing.

  Someth
ing woke her in the night. She opened her eyes. She was looking at the speckled acoustic ceiling. The house was silent, but she believed that a sound had waked her. She moved her eyes. The yellow bedside lamp was dim through the parchment-colored lampshade. The far wall looked grainy in the shadow. She looked to see if the door was closed, the lock button pushed in. The closet door was open and the boiler visible.

  Something made her turn her head and look at Skinner. She put her hand out to touch him and his whole back was wet. The cotton stuck to him. Wherever she touched him, he was cold and wet. The poncholiner under them was wet too.

  A sense of strangeness came from his body, as if he did not know her. When she spoke, he answered her, but she could hear he was not there. She asked: Skinner, do you know where you are? and he said, Yeah, I’m fine. But the way he said it, she knew he was not awake and she was afraid to say anything else.

  He began making choking sounds in his sleep. She realized he was sobbing. She watched him with astonishment.

  What happened? he begged. Oh, what happened? Oh my God, why did this happen?

  She wanted to comfort him, but she had a premonition that he would spin around and strike her if she touched him.

  It’s okay, nothing’s happen, she told him.

  He nodded with his eyes shut, and she believed he was conscious and had heard her. She got him to release the poncholiner from his fists and put it over him again. She curled up behind him, her own heart beating, and stared at his back. Gradually she calmed down because she felt him calming down and she fell asleep again.

  She woke up again and the room looked the same as it had looked all night. The light was still on, but when she looked up at the window, she could see blue-gray dawn coming in.

  She crawled over him and got out of bed, making an effort not to wake him, and looked back at him. His cropped brown hair, the white walls above his ears, pimples in his scalp. The faded green tattoo on his seamed neck. Bad skin on his forehead. Stubbled face. His mouth open against the pillow. He had taken another pill, and now he looked like someone drugged and dumped on the roadside, lying on a hill outside the mosque in Kashgar.

  She opened his door, listened to the strange house and, hearing nothing, went across the shadowed basement to the bathroom and she switched the light on. The royal blue walls sprang up. She locked herself in and put her clothes in a little pile on top of her sneakers and used his shower. It was a pristine bathroom and there was no sign that anyone used it except for his crushed tube of Aquafresh in the sink. When she was done, she put everything back the way she found it, straightening the bath mat, wiping up her wet footprints, and hanging his towel on the bar on the frosted glass door of the shower compartment. She straightened his towel, matching up the corners, smoothing out the wrinkles. It said Camp Manhattan, Kuwait, in all capital black letters. She put on her tracksuit, snapped her bra in place, opened the door to let the steam out, combed her wet hair. Her legs were so sore it was hard to kneel to tie her sneakers. She said, Goodbye, boy, when she left for work but he didn’t answer; he was still riding in the steppe.

  She called him in the afternoon. He did not answer. She left a message thanking him again. She was so sore, she could barely walk. I cannot hurry at my job. She said that she would see him.

  She called again that night, but he was very depressed and all of his responses were wooden. Still, she persisted. I am in your bed last night, she told him. Something is wrong.

  He said nothing.

  You are crying very bad at night.

  If you say so.

  I am next to you and I hear it. I am there, so I know.

  Okay. So?

  So, I’m telling you, I know it’s bad. I want to do somethings about it. What’s going on?

  I don’t know.

  What is it?

  He would not answer.

  I want to help this thing, whatever’s happening.

  You can’t help it.

  It’s the war?

  Yeah.

  You need someone to help you, she said.

  She rinsed the dried drips of Coca-Cola out of his Subway cup and filled it up with tap water and brought it to him so he could take his pills. There were four bottles of pills, but she had seen a fifth one. She saw the fifth bottle lying on the floor between the wheel on the foot of the bed and the wall and picked it up. He thanked her.

  That’s the one I sleep with.

  He took his blue hexagonal pill while she watched him. She was wearing her jeans and Hollister sweatshirt. The lacy black underwear she had stuffed in her back pocket. He swallowed and she took the cup out of his hand and set it in the kitchen.

  Move over your body, she told him, so she could sit. He moved over and watched her examining each of his pill bottles under the bedside lamp, studying the chemical names—Zoloft, Ambien, Seroquel. She tried to read the dosages in English. Blue, pink, yellow, white, red, she repeated, memorizing.

  That’s what they gave me. You know anything about that stuff?

  We should keep it well. Not messy.

  So I don’t take the wrong one by accident.

  We keep it all in one place from now on. If you take one, put it back.

  I will.

  If he wanted to lie down, first he had to arrange his boots next to his bed and put his assault pack where he could reach it. Then she was allowed to climb over him to the inboard side of the bed and hug him from there, so he would know where she was.

  She stroked his ear. You can tell me your dream, she said.

  At her urging, he began to reveal his symptoms, if not his dreams.

  Have you seen how I get distracted, how my eye goes like this? He had her watch his eyes. Look at the right one. See how it’s shaking?

  She could not tell.

  How I can’t stop looking over there?

  That she saw. He kept looking over her head, weak side-strong side, to the entrance of the room, which led out into the world where cars were always coming, always getting closer, approaching him and his brother soldiers at sandbagged roadblocks.

  Chronic anxiety was something she understood.

  Headlights coming at me, crowds, whenever I hear the intercom radio on the subway, he said. Potholes in the street. Car doors. You know what a bullet sounds like? Have you ever had a wasp flying really close to your ear?

  They entered the search words Sick + Soldier on his laptop. From the screen, a man in a v-neck sweater talked to them from in front of a bookcase in a well-lit office. Skinner lit a Marlboro and listened with her. The video ran out, it froze. Their feed was bad. He reached over and hit a key on the machine and his ashes fell on the keypad to join the sand. This fucking busted thing, he said. The video was loading, they had to wait. It restarted and she watched it. He got up and finished his cigarette in the other room.

  Have you seen the way I get mad even when I’m trying to be nice?

  Something has shook your mind. It could be some bruise inside the head.

  28

  WHENEVER SUNNIE NEEDED A break, Zou Lei had an arrangement with her that she would take her place on the line. Frequently, she simply told Sunnie, You need a break, sister. Sunnie would laugh uncertainly and say, I don’t really.

  Yes, you do. You shouldn’t work too hard. Here’s a cup of soup.

  Oh, my. But I’m full already. You want to practice the menu, don’t you?

  Yes, I have to practice.

  Well, okay. Are you sure you understand the order?

  If I practice, I’ll get it. The turkey is separate.

  Okay, I guess there’s no harm then, as long as Sassoon won’t mind.

  She’s not here, Zou Lei said, taking the big spoon from her. I got it from here. If you want, you can just hang out right there by the tea pot and have your soup, and if there’s any emergency, I can ask you what to do, so nothing’ll go wrong. Very tranquil.

  Well, okay.

  You’re the coach, I’m the trainee. Strictly criticize my mistakes.

  I�
��m nobody’s teacher, Sunnie smiled shyly, taking her place by the hot water cistern.

  You’re helping me, Zou Lei said.

  You’re industrious, Sunnie would say.

  Angela, in front of whom all this was taking place, said, Does anybody know what you’re doing?

  Sunnie stared at her in great anxiety. She had second thoughts, but Zou Lei held onto the dipper.

  You manage your register, Zou Lei told Angela, We’ll manage this.

  He called her at four in the morning and started talking, his voice like a loud ant coming out of the cell phone, and her neighbor sighed through the boards. Just minute, she whispered. She took her sweatshirt and found her sandals and went out on the stoop. The sky was a lighter shade of black than the park behind the gas station across the boulevard, the streetlights casting their peculiar glow on the pavement. He was saying he couldn’t sleep. She agreed to meet him at McDonald’s.

  On her way to McDonald’s, the shuttered gates of businesses were covered in graffiti you never saw in daytime and she thought they resembled a thousand tattooed eyelids. The chairs were upside down on the tables so they could mop.

  Skinner arrived ten minutes later, nearly invisible in his black hood. He behaved with an almost formal politeness, thanking her for coming, his eyes hidden.

  I need a soda, if you don’t mind waiting a second.

  It’s okay, she said.

  He bought her a bacon egg and cheese biscuit, then started telling her about something and it became him telling her about Iraq and she stopped eating. He sat with his elbows on his knees, holding the drink cup under the table, talking in a low voice while she listened leaning towards him, twisted sidesaddle in her chair, her jacket riding up, showing her bare back. Every ten seconds his eyes scanned left and right and came back and rested on her face. He took a drink of his soda.

  It was hard to fix his dry mouth, his headache, his memory of his friend exploding and the pieces of his body raining on his helmet.

  We were about as far apart as there to here, he said, pointing at the trash can against the wall, which was gray and green with black trim. There was an ice cream cup on the floor that hadn’t made it into the trash can. The swinging lid was unable to shut and the trash was bulging out. He told her what a mortar was. It goes like this. He made an arc with his finger. So he was there. Boom, it hits him. I went to get him. We wound up back in the hospital here.