by Atticus Lish
How much?
She told him. He took out his money and she watched the money in his hands until he handed it to her. She folded the money and disappeared.
He took his t-shirt off, an xxxl t-shirt with a faded logo for a tool brand across the mottled fabric, and exposed himself. He looked like a white meaty insect whose exoskeleton has been peeled away exposing the mechanical workings of muscles and white sacks of flesh, which had never been in the open air before. He took his jeans off, baring his long legs.
And he stood in the red glow, unclothed except for the bandana around his head, watching the curtain. He put his shades on and positioned himself facing the doorway with his legs spread and his chin back as if he were sunning himself in the red light.
Like a pitcher on the mound, he licked three fingers, then reached down and fiddled with the end of his uncircumcised penis.
She came back inside, wearing fuzzy pink slippers and carrying towels and sheets in her arms.
No, no, no, she tutted. You lie down.
His fist, the one with the rings on it, hit her in the mouth.
She went back into the wall and hit her head. The towels and sheets dropped out of her hands. The whites of her eyes showed and she tumbled to the floor. Her knees drew in and she covered her face and let out a grief-stricken sound.
Jimmy went around to where she was and hit her again.
Oh! she screamed. No! She crawled into the corner. The clip that held her hair in place had popped open and hung caught in her loose hair.
She was trying to hide from him. He wrenched her arm behind her back and almost broke it. She let out a scream. The sounds had nowhere to go. He punched the back of her head. He hooked his fist around in front and got her face. Oh! she screamed and started crying. He shoved her around to make her face him and got her back against the wall and wrenched her hands away from her face and hit her again.
Show me your face.
She flinched and he twisted her hands away again.
I’ll break the arm.
Okay. Okay. Okay. I do nothing.
Show me the face.
No, she pleaded.
It was impossible for her to overcome the reflex to cover up. She was too scared, but he improved her. He worked on her until he was getting where he wanted.
Why? Why? she said. It was a calm question. But she asked it blind, because her eyes were swollen in bulging hard blue hematomas.
She performed fellatio on him. She removed her clothing and underwear and got up on the table. He sodomized her and at his insistence she performed fellatio on him again. The way he did it, she was severely injured. He made an engine-revving noise when he was driving into her. She screamed into a towel. What he was doing sounded like a boxer hitting a heavy bag with wet gloves. He arched his back. When he rested, he blew air and got his wind back, his sides sweating in the hot room. He looked like a man on a child. The child’s head was mummified. Then he went into another frenzy when he had his wind back. She gagged and threw up in the towel he wrapped her head in. There were ramen noodles in her stomach.
You got the virus now, he told her as he was pulling up his jeans.
She was standing there half-bowing, her face unrecognizable as human. She appeared to be wearing a slick shiny bumpy thick eyeless mask, wetness around the eye slits.
HIV, he said. Better get checked.
You stink, he added.
Something was not finished in him. There was evil and crazy in the room. Possibly he was going to go all the way.
He took the money out of her jeans, her cell phone, and ID. He patted her on the head. Smile, he said. She did not react.
You no call police, he told her in pidgin English, so she would understand. Some mechanical cam had flipped inside his brain, he realized: he wasn’t going to go any farther this time. He left the red room and his footsteps moved away down the black hallway.
The woman remained tottering where she was. Five minutes passed. She had heard him leave. She tried out her voice, making a sound, and it was a croak. In the hot room, she was shaking like someone naked in the snowy wilderness. She went through the curtain and began walking down the hall, stepping on broken linoleum in the darkness, groping her way.
On the street, in the afternoon sun, Jimmy bought a hotdog at a busy intersection under the tracks, among Spanish and Bangladeshi vendors selling spiritual guides, anatomical charts, novellas, tapestries of Aztec maidens and warriors, eagles, the words Brown and Proud. He kept his shades on. He was about ten blocks down from the scene and he felt secure. Expressionless, he watched the street as he ate by the hotdog cart. The intersection smelled like cotton candy. It was awash in a sea of people coming off the train, the Spanish mothers arguing with their daughters about what they could afford.
He noticed stains on his fingers and he thought it was ketchup, but he sniffed it and it was from fingering her.
Napkin, he said.
He went into a bar, a black hole in the street, and bought a beer using her money and went into the bathroom and took down his jeans and looked at the crusted red around his groin. He took out her ID and read the name. Li, Chiao-Yee, Vickie. The hologram was wrong, and her supposed address in Elmhurst was spelled without the r: Elmhust. The picture was of someone else, a younger woman with shorter hair and a serious expression. He stuck it in the garbage.
After another beer, he got in a Lincoln cab and rode back the way he had come, looking out for any kind of commotion. And, in fact, there was something: at a spot on the avenue, people were gathered watching something going on, but he could not see what. They were looking towards a building with graffiti on the roof and a massage sign in the window. He believed that this was the scene. He caught a flash of a uniformed cop holding his radio sideways and talking into it urgently. The cop, a young man, was looking over peoples’ heads. The attitude of someone focused on a task. The Lincoln accelerated and beat the light, leaving the other traffic behind. The knot of tension was back there. The car seemed to fly along more freely now, the tracks laddering overhead. They swooped up and down over the bridge into Flushing Chinatown. They broke out the other side into East Flushing, the ghetto buildings tagged in Spanish, the decaying houses of the Irish.
Jimmy got out of the Lincoln and went into his three-story house. His mother was on the phone. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. I’m doing subs, she said. You want one?
I wish, he said.
Then get something.
I would, but.
It’ll be on me, Jim, she said.
Jimmy hung out on the hot street, bought skewers from the Chinese, stood out by the Falungong tables, letting them proselytize to him while he looked at their medical photographs. He met guys he knew and they passed a bottle with him. One said, If I knew a job, I’d do it right now. Jimmy bit the meat off with his teeth, with his dog-muzzle jaw.
I know a job.
What job?
I can’t tell you that.
The Buddhist human rights protestors were handing out flyers that showed a genderless being holding a glowing circle in its abdomen: the dharmic wheel. They wore long-billed visors and large sunglasses. A poster showed people and bicycles all knocked over in a pile. Their white shirts were soaked in blood and there was blood splashed and splattered all over the ground. One of them who had not been killed yet was still trying to stand up—the photograph caught him as he was climbing to his feet. It had been taken in the grainy dark. There was a blurred violet city sky and streaks of light over the soviet city square. The headline asked, Why does the People’s Liberation Army only attack Chinese people?
Jimmy turned his head to hear music that was playing somewhere in the street, his wild long hair swung around his head, and he pretended to play guitar.
His friend was looking at photos of a woman on a steel table. She appeared to be resting calmly on a white sheet with her eyes swollen shut like eggs. The other pictures were close-ups of her injuries. They went down the length of her and
ended with her toe, which had a tag on it.
Another photograph, taken earlier, showed her posing against a backdrop of parasol trees, wearing a summer dress and making V-signs with both hands. The caption in Chinese said: Wen Fengyu as an undergraduate studying forestry at Hebei Polytechnic College on school vacation to the Beijing Summer Palace in 1994 just after being introduced into the Falungong Great Way.
What is this shit? his friend said.
Remarkably, Jimmy was able to explain it to him. This is how she died. He indicated the Falungong members in their glasses. They told me what they did to kill her. They’ve got their politics, their different cliques. Chinese, Japanese, it’s all a different hustle depending on which one you deal with. They got organization. These guys with the tables right here, they got an organization. They’re out here collecting donations so they can start another crime wave. Gimme a drink a that.
The metal on his fingers struck the bottle when he took it and swigged from it.
Every time one of their people gets taken out, they put their picture up. Like take this one here in the picture. I knew her. She used to work around the corner.
Where?
Right over there.
Doing what?
Whaddayou think? In the massage joint over here on 41st Road. That’s where they all go. They run their whole game outta there. Smack, guns, girls, whatever you can name, Jimmy said. They was watching her. You better believe they knew everything she did.
He elaborated on how she had been completely unaware of any danger until the last minute. She would never have fallen for anything that was not professionally done, he asserted. He took another drink of the bottle. And then another. He said:
She thought she was smart. When she got caught, she said, All right, you’re good. But she had a nice ass. She had to give it up. I guess you caught me, so I have to go by the rules. So, they said okay, if that’s how you feel. So they fucked her. So far, so good. That’s legit. You got me fair and square. As a woman in her position she understood her duties. But she was spiteful. Oh no, she says, I ain’t gonna call the cops. Just let me go. She went to get her purse and it wasn’t there. Why’s there no clothes? Because there’s nowhere to go. They’re all the way underground. All right, now she gets her guard up. That’s when she knows she’s fallen for something, and now she wants to talk her way out of it like she’s talked her way out of everything before. Only now it’s not working. This guy don’t buy any of her crap about her hard life. He says, here’s what I’ll do. For every time you lied, you’re gonna get it. He beats her down like no man ever. She screams and cries for, oh, about two days. By the end, he gives her a mirror and she’s totally destroyed. She ain’t never gonna walk again. Ain’t never gonna have a kid. She’s begging for her mother. Mommy mommy mommy please don’t kill me. He told her the good news. You ain’t never getting out of here. And her eyes were just like this big. She begged to suck his dick. Nope. Want this? Nope. Want that? Nope. You ain’t leaving. You’re gonna die and it ain’t gonna be fun. Cry all you want. Jimmy raised his fingers adorned again with skull rings and pressed the corners of his eyes where the tears would go. Nobody cares about your sad brown eyes. That was the end of her and she could not believe it.
43
WHEN SHE GOT TO work, she found out she wasn’t on the schedule—the high school kid Monroe was there instead of her—and so in the middle of the morning she left the mall and went to 158th Street. Before she arrived, she called Skinner but couldn’t reach him.
She knocked on the basement window. Skinner! she whispered. It was about eleven in the morning.
The door was opened by the man she had seen before, who she understood to be the landlord’s son. She had just jogged up a hot street and she was flushed. Her t-shirt, which came from a used-clothing rack on Junction Boulevard, had the words Hand Full across her breasts. The man looked down at her and told her:
He ain’t here.
But she hadn’t said who she was looking for.
The man asked her if she wanted to come in anyway.
She turned around and walked several blocks away, and when she couldn’t get Skinner on the phone, she went back to Main Street, eventually wandering down to the park by Elder Avenue.
On East Broadway, she went to the Fuzhou Fan-Meaning Work Introduction Corp.—the name was a play on the word Benevolent—and waited to speak to someone behind the old-fashioned railway ticket window. Men in white socks and waiters’ pants stood all around talking on their phones, discussing monthly salaries. A man shouted into his cell phone: Two thousand four hundred. But the cook is dishonest! A sign said No Spitting On Floor. You received a free map of Fuzhou down to the sea. A job introduction cost thirty-five dollars. The options were tail cook, main cook, takeout, delivery, cashier, miscellaneous, and wet nurse. You could also get a social security card without a birth certificate. It said this right on the wall in Chinese next to the minimum wage law printed in English.
When it was her turn, the woman who spoke to her through the cutout in the Plexiglas told her she had work available in a number of different states.
I can’t go out-of-state, Zou Lei said. I’ll think about it.
She went outside and bought the Chinese newspaper and called a number from the classifieds but couldn’t make sense of what they were saying on the other end. Every call cost minutes on her phone. She hung up and made another call and then another. It was late afternoon and she’d burned off everything in her stomach. She bought a seventy-five-cent roll containing meat floss. Give me two of those, she said. She took them in their wax paper sleeves and ate them on the steps by the stands selling cured squid and yellow croaker, the antique flower shops with dark red doors, and the basement rooms for playing mahjong.
Not far beyond the projects at the end of the park, nearby her towers, she found Muslim kids playing in the street. They were playing in the hydrant spray, sharing a bicycle, having water fights. She put her hand in the water and put water on her face. A group of men in coveralls was working on a car. She stepped over the compressed air hose as she passed their garage, which smelled like oil rags, her leg muscles tight from running. The asphalt shone and she saw rainbows in the street. Little girls in headscarves, tiny nuns, stood on a fire escape, pretending they were in jail. They threw a cup of water down on a boy who dodged away, ran back screaming. She passed forklifts parked in front of warehouses, which were scrap yards. A rusted sign above a storefront showed a green flag and crescent moon for Islam. The sign was covered in spores of dirt. Three Central American men wearing string backpacks came rolling a shopping cart down the sidewalk carrying a long piece of aluminum from a street lamp. They went into a warehouse to have it weighed.
Ahead she saw a gas station whose roof was covered in hundreds of small American flags, the kind for waving at parades. The space on the roof had run out and then whoever ran the gas station had put more flags on the next roof up, making two decks of flags, thereby creating a great two-tiered raft of red white and blue, the result of a thousand trips up and down a ladder to fetch more flags.
She came to a window filled with photographs of Pashtun nomads. In the photographs, women sat on chairs strapped to a camel’s back. Another photograph showed men running horses on a brown field playing polo, the field unbounded except for mountains, true mountains, in the geographic distance, allowing you to see the seams and sections of the land. The men, who looked Mongolian, in turquoise, red, and black costumes, were playing polo with the carcass of a calf, ringed by a massed fringe of spectators. The nomads were like something not of this world. They appeared both African and Caucasian in their stiff kabuki-like robes and blankets. They wore blankets on their heads. Three of them were women and a girl who appeared as tall and forbidding as the turbaned men. Behind them were their tents made of camel skins.
The grocer had a business license in the window in the name of Tesha Noor, Ramzy Grocery and Meat, and a poster giving the ninety-nine names of Allah, including th
e Preserver, the Delayer, the Last, and the Reckoner. And in the bottom of the window, pressed to the glass by a stack of Cortas chickpeas, he had a crumpled leaflet from the NYPD, which said, If You Suspect Terrorism, and the number to call.
She went in the open door and down the aisle of sultan oil, stacks of bread, sacks of rice, and barrels of pistachios and almonds. In the back of the store, she found the owner cutting meat behind the meat case, which held sheep’s ribs, legs, head, and gray intestines. He wore a white doppa like a little cake on his head and an embroidered vest and a shirt with no collar. He was a short stocky man. His fleshy Caucasian face was round like a bread. When he saw her, he put his knife down and wiped his hands on his apron.
I help you something?
Yahshimusiz, she said.
Oh, he smiled, wiping his wet muscular hands again. Yahshimusiz. You talk a little bit different from me.
I’m Uighur people.
I’m Uzbek.
He was an Uzbek tribesman from Afghanistan, from Aqcha. Twenty years of war, going on thirty. Picture the green pasture and the small trees like little puffs from far away with a little snake of mist sneaking out of the hills, a single isolated flat-roofed mud-brick dwelling like a mountain pueblo. His family lived across the river on the other side of the heavily fortified border with its concrete barriers and electrified fences. They were from Bukhara, a place he had never been and yet was proud of. In the air, he drew the outline of the great mosaic tile mosque.
