Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  She adjusted herself, pulled her shorts down. Getting her bearings, she figured out which way she had been going before she stopped and then she turned herself that way and slowly, stiffly, started moving on.

  For some time thereafter, she walked in a state of half-awakeness past things she half-perceived. Francis Lewis Boulevard. The Belle Aire playground. A black woman thin as an African with dyed blond hair prowling on a traffic island. A sprinkler was whisking in the grass. The public restroom door was open and you could see the sink and stall. Two cars drove by booming rap. She passed the on-ramp for the Grand Central Parkway. She passed the Satya Sanatan Dharma Mandir, a place of worship. A spiked iron fence. The Creedmoor Psychiatric Facility—the buildings set at random angles, an iron gate left open. She could see weeds in the asphalt like rice paddy squares. It looked abandoned. Ambulances parked in a fleet. A section of the fence hit by a car. Beneath the mercury lights, she saw a shadow that didn’t belong to her and looked around to see who was following her, but there was no one there.

  For what seemed like miles, she journeyed past old apartment houses with lawns and rusted placards for Fallout Shelters. Girish Bulsara, MD. Bala Ji Grocery. Apna Baza Cash & Carry. Patel Halal Meat. Great long stretches between anything. A Mexican taco truck serving two laborers. Graffiti on a traffic light box: NW$. The Cross Island Parkway.

  The landscape changed. The road divided and angled north. She passed a clean suburban high school. They had a black field of neatly mowed grass and football goal posts. She saw pine cones on the asphalt. The road was wide and flat and clean and there was nearly absolute stillness. It was cool and pleasant. She heard crickets.

  She had been walking for a long time now, and somewhere along the way, she had completely waked up. Thinking it was dawn, she looked at the sky, but there was no sign of it: It was still night, the sky was indigo-black and she could see the clouds. Whatever time it was, her mind felt fresh and clear and the rest of her was comfortable. Her legs were warmed up and she didn’t feel them. Her feet had stopped hurting her. She just felt pressure when she put them down, no pain, and the rhythm of walking. Passing someone’s house with a stake bed truck parked in front of it, she looked to her left and saw a wall of forest. She could go for miles like this, which meant she knew she was going to make it through to morning.

  She would hear cars coming before she could see them. The sound would build and build and then the car would break past her and she’d see the taillights going away. She started wondering what if someone was coming to find her. Each time a car came, the rising pitch of the sound created a feeling of suspense, which lingered in the silence after it was gone, during which she waited to hear the next one coming.

  What if the next one you hear is Skinner coming?

  A white Malibu sped by her without stopping and went on in a pool of light moving up the black road between the houses towards the night sky.

  No, no, of course that wasn’t him. He’s not out here, she said to herself. He doesn’t have a car. She would meet him further on. She would have to last the entire night. In the morning, when the sun comes up—that was when she would see him. She would have to walk a very long way, but if she did everything correctly and didn’t give in, then she would be rewarded. But for this to work, she would really have to push herself. She would have to keep going a long, long way. You’ll have to really move your legs this time, she said. It won’t be easy. He won’t just appear. She would have to go all the way to the mountains. That, finally, would make him appear.

  She started to form a plan of what she would do to make the distance long enough. She would keep pushing east until the time was right, and then she would go north when it was possible and then go back. She would go on foot all the way to his house, and when the door opened, Skinner would be standing there. He would open the door with his eyes worried and when he saw her, his eyes would relax in that instant and the weight would fall off his heart. She imagined the relief and joy of embracing him in his doorway. This made her long to be with him right now. It will happen soon, she said. And she had to keep her heart down as if it had wings in it and was going to fly out of her chest.

  She slapped a mosquito on her leg as she passed a white colonnaded funeral home surrounded by shaped hedges with a light box sign like a motel saying Have A Blessed Day and a name in flowery script. She passed a refrigerated shed for ice cubes outside a service station backed by trees. Voices reached her from someone filling up. She could smell the gasoline but couldn’t see who it was.

  After what could have been another mile, she passed a CVS, brilliantly lit and silent, and then came to a stadium parking lot for a Super Stop & Shop, the asphalt buckled, carts left out at random.

  A digital sign in front of the Valley National Bank said 4:59, 70°. She decided that this was the sign she had been looking for. Now I’ll turn, she said.

  At the next street, she made a left, crossing behind a strip mall, hearing the hum of refrigeration out back of the loading dock and dumpsters, and started heading north.

  She was on a smaller road and it was very dark and quiet and felt like the country. The road was lined with hedgerows higher than her head, so she was walking along a dark wall. There could have been country houses behind the hedges. Sometimes she glimpsed them. And there were trees yet higher than the hedges and homes. The sidewalk was narrow and hard to walk on and sometimes you couldn’t walk on it and she walked in the street, looking above the treetops to see if dawn was coming. The moon was over her left eye. She passed a hospital. A lighted bus kiosk. Dark soft greensward, hedges, flag poles. A chapel in white. The hospital’s campus numbered like an airport parking lot with light box signs: 1A, 2C, and so on. There were beds of flowers, the hum of ventilation. Sprinklers clicked on and started whisking on the grass. They wet her legs.

  The eastern sky had shapes of light in it behind the puzzle pieces of clouds. A panel truck tore by and blew air over her. She crossed over a stone bridge above a parkway and saw her shadow on a Do Not Enter sign, posted at the onramp, meant for cars. She saw the morning star. The Lakeville Jewish Center. Countryside Montessori School. She got the sidewalk back—a thin ribbon between grass and fence. The sky had changed. Dawn was breaking. The blue gray light of dawn fell on everything—on her. The trees and leaves were silhouetted in sprays of leaves against the sky. She was passing through a vine-shrouded forest, willows, falling plants, beards of leaves, the giant faces of old bearded men rendered in leaves. She broke another spider web, actually saw the spider in the streetlight. It was very big: as big as two thumbs. They strung up nets from the telephone poles. She smelled the soil.

  Because the shoulder was uneven, she walked in sand and gravel between the uncut grass and the white line. The odor of trees and grass was very strong. Pine also. She had to run up on the grassy shoulder when the cars sped past, and her sandals slipped. Her foot slipped and she broke a sandal. The toe piece popped out. She put it back together, birds calling around her.

  Everywhere were trees. An oak had clouds of leaves. There were ivy cascades and split-rail fences. The moon looked like a tiny sun in the mist. In the east, she saw very pale pink on the clouds and pale blue where there was open sky. The pink was intensifying. All the light was different. She could see the road and herself in dim blue daylight.

  At a highway, the asphalt smelled like oil and vulcanized tires. A sign said West 495 New York. In the bushes, the other sign said East 495 Riverhead. She had a great vivid panorama of the sunrise sky. The clouds grew in vaporous streaks, some ribbed like the glossy belly of a fish, as if they contained linear bones. These clouds caught the sun, which was as yet unseen. They looked like x-ray images—gauzy, overlapping, transparent.

  She went under the highway and the air temperature in the underpass was warmer, like a dwelling. When she came out the other side, the new day was even brighter.

  The road was dangerous; she couldn’t see who was coming and had to cross to the other side owing to the cu
rve. She walked by a golf course, breaking through spider web after spider web and wiping them out of her hair. It seemed no one had walked here except for her. Four well-nourished older males in spandex and cleated shoes and protective helmets raced by on feather-light bicycles that whirred. The road began to go uphill and she was climbing now. She saw a gargantuan water tower on steel legs up ahead. A squirrel on the power lines. Leonardo’s La Dolce Vita. A circular driveway. Roman statues. Three-story office buildings. Vincent Jacone Laser Surgery. Marigolds, flowers, a basketball hoop. A forest-green truck with a yellow snow shovel. A tow truck: Appalachian. She smelled tires, gasoline. Saw a burned-out restaurant: Bombay Palace. The trees were far taller than the buildings, some of them firs. The Manhasset Fire Department was in a Dutch building. It was a lovely sunny early morning. At the top of the hill, she came to an intersection with a major road. She was breathing. She saw she had reached Northern Boulevard in Great Neck.

  54

  HE WENT UP THE hill, and when he came out of trees and the courtyard buildings, he passed the lot next to what used to be a drugstore, the broken glass on the asphalt under the amber streetlights. On the other side of the street there was a liquor store and he went into it. The store was a narrow tunnel. There was no door. You just went in, and the bottles went up to the ceiling. They sold McIvor in a gift box and Mr. Boston wine.

  The Asian woman behind the Plexiglas had been here since the eighties, and she was nice, sort of a mom. Her large eyelids rose smoothly up to her forehead, uninterrupted by eyebrows, making it look as if she were surprised and delighted to see you.

  Which one? she smiled, holding up different bottles of Bacardi. Skinner tapped the glass. That one.

  Three old black guys in skullies came in with cigarettes drooping out of their mouths and one was saying, This motherfucker wants Chivas. Who you talkin bout? Softee? And Skinner slipped out past them carrying his bottle and went around the corner.

  He went up the street looking for somewhere to drink. The side streets contained complexes of brown brick apartment buildings, a sun deck on every floor, seas of ferns in the alleys. He backed into a U-shaped hideout formed by three buildings and cracked his bottle and started drinking.

  Five minutes later, a group of males gathered around a double-parked Lincoln. Skinner put his bottle away, thinking they could be undercovers. He got out of there and walked up the block. On the next corner, there were liquor stores, Chinese restaurants, Salvadoran restaurants, laundromats and a bar. He went to the bodega on the corner for cigarettes. Just give me one. Do you sell them loose? I can’t think that far ahead for a whole pack. Under the yellow awning, he lit up and sat on the pavement with the cigarette in his busted-up fingers from fighting, and concentrated on the smoke, his small red ember, the fume of tar in his nostrils, throat.

  When his cigarette was over, he got up and crossed the avenue, which looked gray in the streetlights, and turned back onto one of the roads that ran parallel to the railroad—either Franklin or another one, but he did not care enough to tell which. After walking several minutes, he stopped where it was dark and took his bottle out again and started drinking alcohol as if it were spring water. He drank half, about 250 milliliters, in under five minutes. When the liquor hit his bloodstream, it staggered him—he couldn’t hold himself upright anymore. But this wasn’t enough for him. He drank the rest and then blacked out.

  While unconscious, he found his way to a construction site somewhere down a dead-end street. He ripped the caution tape away from the rebar stakes in front of the house and stepped in wet cement. The house was covered in yellow exterior sheathing. He kicked his way through a plywood board that was supposed to keep people out and found the rubble where they were breaking up the old concrete slab. Under the streetlights, he started lifting up the stones and carrying them out of the house and down the road until he had to drop them. He left a scattering of one hundred twenty-pound stones strewn out on the asphalt.

  Good to go, he said aloud and jogged away, his hands white with concrete dust, knuckles bleeding.

  He had no awareness of doing any of this, or of running around the neighborhood and hiding, taking cover behind parked landscaping trucks. Still blacked-out, he followed the street signs to his address and woke up standing on the corner of 158th Street, still so intoxicated he had no concept that he lived here. He thought he was here for Zou Lei, that she would be waiting for him. He thought he was going to see her standing there on her strong legs in her new shoes ready to run with him. But she was not there.

  Rotted sneakers hung from the power lines like game. He focused on the statues in the Murphys’ yard. He remembered that he had been arrested here this afternoon. The house was not necessarily empty—there was a light on. Someone could be in there behind all the wood and aluminum, Sheetrock and fiberglass.

  Skinner came lurching across the street and walked straight at the house until the waist-high yard fence stopped him. The trash barrels on the sidewalk attracted his attention. He bent his head over one of the barrels as if he were going to vomit in it. But he was not being sick. He was staring at what was in it. After a minute, he reached inside and took out a handful of green camouflage silk and regarded it without comprehension.

  He started pulling the rest of the camouflage material out of the barrel like a silk handkerchief from a magician’s hat, pulling it out on the ground. His thought and action alternated between drunk and lucid, as if a wheel were turning inside him and a different part of him was coming around on every revolution. By now, he must have recognized his poncholiner. He mumbled something, staring down at it.

  Then he picked up the barrel and turned it over, dumping it out on the pavement, and all his gear came out in a slew of trash. Everything came out—jeans, camouflage, beer cans, his expensive clothes, his U.S. Army duffle bag with the American flag patch on it, his magazines. His belongings were soaked in rancid chicken. He dropped the barrel and it rolled away into the street. The reek hit him. Flies flew up and hit his face.

  Some things had been reserved from the trash. He sensed their absence. No laptop or cell phone were there. He pawed around in the muck and the bad light and found a sneaker, but it was not hers; it was his own, and he dropped it.

  Then his hands touched something that affected him and he started feeling what it was to be sure of it, clutching it, feeling what was in it. He had found his assault pack. He felt for the L-shaped weight of the weapon. It was there. He uttered an exultant sound. Flies settling on his face, he put his hand in the bag and drew the weapon out.

  He stood up, and after peeking around the street, went up the driveway to the Murphy’s door. He pulled back on and released the part of the pistol called the top slide, putting a round in the chamber. In his drunken state, he studied the pistol closely in an effort to determine that it would work. He looked around the street again and seeing nothing but the whirl of lights, rang the doorbell.

  Twenty seconds went by. Subaudible voices emanated from somewhere in the interior of the house. Then he heard footsteps thudding down the carpeted steps inside the vestibule. He held his hand behind his back and waited where he could be seen through the peephole like a suitor bringing flowers. His thumb took the safety off. Floorboards creaked and Jimmy’s presence coalesced behind the door.

  You better get out of here.

  I’ve got some things I’m missing.

  There was no answer.

  Look, Skinner said, sounding drunk, You can be a hardass and I’ll keep you up all night. Or you can be cool and just give me my laptop.

  The silence continued one, two, three, four, five seconds.

  The latch popped open. Skinner filled his chest. The door came open. He took a step and raised the gun in Jimmy’s face.

  Jimmy threw the door shut and Skinner hit it open. Jimmy bolted up the stairs and through the kitchen door. Skinner caught himself in the doorframe, regained his balance, and vaulted after him into their apartment. Jimmy was through the kitchen and d
own the tunnel of the blue hall. He grabbed a banister and started going up the stairs. Skinner flew through the kitchen, the kitchen a flash of mustard yellow. His boot hit the linoleum. His next boot landed in the hall. Jimmy had disappeared. Skinner’s next stride carried him to the end of the tunnel, the shadow-blinders of the walls containing his view. He caught the banister and sprang up the stairs. Two meters away, Jimmy was climbing with all his might, bending over his legs and striding like a mountaineer. Skinner pointed the weapon at the back of Jimmy’s undershirt and pulled the trigger.

  The boom of the first shot blew out like an overinflated tire exploding in the enclosed space. Skinner heard nothing. He did not hear the scream. A picture fell off the fake wood wall on the landing. Jimmy ran into a room. Skinner ran up behind him and pulled the trigger at the room. There was a dry-fire click. He yanked back the slide. A live round jumped out and landed on the carpet. He pointed into the room again, squinted, and squeezed.

  The gunshot boom went through the Masonite to the foundations.

  Skinner went into the bedroom. There was a stereo, a poster on the wall. The lamp was on. The venetian blinds were askew. Jimmy was half behind the bed, his long legs in jeans extending out. His chest was inflating and deflating.

  Skinner pointed the gun at him and kicked his foot.

  Jimmy’s head turned sideways on the floor and his jaw moved.

  Just go.

  Just what?

  Just go, man.

  In a minute, Skinner said. He leaned down and put the gun to the back of Jimmy’s head. Jimmy had soft brown hair of a lighter shade than his own.

  Feel that.

  Don’t, man.

  Listen up. I don’t know what you did with her.

  I didn’t do anything with her, man.

  Listen to me. I don’t know what you did with her and I’m going to accept that I’ll never know. Knowing doesn’t change anything. I already know.