Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  Listen, man, I didn’t do anything.

  Sure, I believe that.

  No, said Jimmy.

  Skinner pulled the trigger from an inch away, and Jimmy’s head jumped. The bed got knocked away from the wall. An empty casing fell in the bedclothes. The lamp fell over and cast a cone of light sideways on the white plaster wall.

  He backed away from the scene in the room, stepping backwards through an invisible veil of powder smoke, blinking his eyes at the mannequin-body on the floor in the weird light. He backed away from what the light showed. His ears rang. There were no other lights. This floor of the house was dark, the real darkness of where the people lived, and the deeper in you went, the blacker it was. He smelled their house and saw their laundry on the floor.

  She told the emergency operator, Help me, there’s someone shooting in my house.

  Slow down, the operator said. Don’t hang up.

  Erin, who had run outside and was backing away from the house, was hyperventilating.

  I’m scared shit, she gasped.

  Skinner thumped downstairs in his boots aiming the pistol at everything he saw. He saw no one. As he crossed above the basement stairs, he wanted to call down to Zou Lei one more time to see if she would answer, but he couldn’t stand to hear his own voice. He thought of descending to the basement to look for her again, but he knew that if she wasn’t there, he would end his life, so he made the decision to leave the house.

  He emerged from the side of the house, hurried down the driveway and started walking fast and innocently towards the corner, stepping over the dumped-out trash, stepping on his own possessions, barely conscious that what he stepped on was his.

  As he reached the corner, he broke into a jog because he was hearing sirens.

  Sirens were distinctly audible, there was no doubt.

  He ran across the open vapor-lit space of the avenue to the black trees and the tracks and rocks on the other side.

  A short sturdy man walking on the other side of the avenue stopped when he saw Skinner running at him out of nowhere, backed up and put his hands up.

  Skinner ran by without looking at him, the pistol projecting from the end of his heavy forearm, his shins like broom handles going into his boots, picking them up and dropping them down, running, showing fatigue, a lack of coordination as if he might trip and fall. His damp black t-shirt was flapping on him, his close-cropped head turned sideways gazing in the direction of the racing sirens and the red and white sparks that were appearing down the avenue.

  After Skinner ran by, the man lowered his hands and made a wide berth around the area of darkness covered over by black trees into which Skinner had disappeared.

  The sirens got louder and louder and louder and more powerful until they had ballooned into whooping shock waves, and you could hear the engines and feel the tremor in the blacktop as the police cars climbed nearer along a parabolic arc through the intervening trees. The first speeding cruiser arrived in seconds, its electronic siren deafening, and pivoted and turned on 158th Street. Another cop car came streaking down through the dark from Bayside. More were coming now. Red lights whap-whapped on the houses and the man’s face, watching them arrive.

  Very soon, the street was full of police cars, too many for them to turn and they began stopping on the avenue. The officers jumped out and ran on foot towards the location, their belt gear bouncing, hands over their holsters. You heard their keys when they ran. Some walked purposefully.

  How many were there? someone yelled. Did you see him go?

  Away from the epicenter, Mexicans could be seen in doorways looking out, silent faces cast in the red glow, which alternated rhythmically with darkness.

  The man standing on the train-track side of the avenue was noticed by an experienced gray-haired cop.

  You see something?

  The man nodded, Sí, and pointed back into the tracks.

  55

  THE POLICE MOVED THEIR cars and waved the paramedics in.

  The house is clear! Come on! they yelled.

  They badly wanted to save somebody’s life.

  But, upstairs, Jimmy had been found with brain matter outside his skull. The cops who met the paramedics coming up the stairs said, Don’t bother.

  Really?

  As in really.

  They turned around and left.

  For Jimmy, the detectives were called. Distinguished-looking men, they came in suits and porkpie hats. One wore a lavender handkerchief in his pocket. They made the climb up to the bedroom.

  Jimmy had been killed face-down. One of the detectives wanted to turn the corpse over to see him. A digital picture was taken.

  If the corpse was a man, he appeared to have been compounded with another life form, turned into a hybrid with some kind of flora. A stalk was growing from the skull as if his head had been abandoned in a field and a tree had started growing through it over the course of many years. But in fact the stalk had grown to its length of several inches in under a thousandth of a second. It was splitting and curlicued like an exploded party popper, like fingernails that have been allowed to grow for decades, forming spirals.

  You eat dim sum? the detective said, referring to the slimy white tissue in the blood, which resembled the gelatinous noodles served as a snack by the Cantonese.

  Downstairs, a diligent rookie found Mrs. Murphy collapsed on her bedroom floor. She was able to talk and asked if her son was dead. The officers tried to find out as much from her as they could. The paramedics came back, saw her hands turning blue and ripped open the LifePak to restart her heart. They bagged her and rolled her on a board, but because of her size, it was very challenging to move her out and she arrested again in the ambulance before they had even left the scene.

  Later, the detectives stood outside consulting their notepads and talking to each other while the refrigerated van arrived, and three big black men in city coveralls and rubber boots went upstairs and put Jimmy in a body bag.

  The mother hears the door. The son goes to answer it. She hears them talking, doesn’t hear what they say. Then the shots fired. She hears them running in the house.

  This is from the mother?

  From the mother. She was in her room scared to come out, so she can’t identify nobody. She calls to the son, and there’s no answer. But she says she knows who did it.

  The downstairs neighbor.

  Right. They had an altercation earlier.

  But the mother is no more.

  She’s no longer with us unfortunately.

  But the daughter could identify him?

  That’s what she says.

  Erin was in the street, surrounded by people from the block, many of them strangers, foreign. A cop tried to talk to her and she walked away from him screaming. She was on the phone, she was sobbing, she was in the center of every question that people had, she was in hysterics. Barbara Gambia’s daughter, a broad-shouldered blond girl with a pigtail, ran up out of the onlookers in the red darkness calling Erin! and tried to hug her.

  Erin turned on her and screamed, Some fuck just destroyed my whole life! My father doesn’t even care enough about us to be here! Everybody else is dead!

  Skinner ran six feet up the rocks, dropped to his knees and pawed his way to the top, kicking loose a spray of dirt and gravel that spattered on the pavement. As soon as he was able, he jumped up and charged through a screen of snapping brambles, breaking through into an alley that followed the railroad tracks and ran as hard as he could. The pounding of his boots and his mouth sucking air drowned out everything.

  He was in the narrow gap between the back of several old six-story brick apartment buildings that were connected together in a long series and a concrete retaining wall that followed the tracks. It was so dark where he was running that he became disoriented. He could have collided into the side of a building and fired the weapon accidentally.

  Out on the avenue, the sirens blasted by casting flashes of red light on the trees and trash in the breaks between
the buildings.

  He stopped, gassed-out, panicked and staring at the hollows of reflected red. The alley felt protected but it wasn’t. There were too many straight lines back here. All the NYPD would have to do is shine a searchlight down here and they would see him.

  In a crouch, he darted to the retaining wall, set the pistol on the ledge and jumped up after it, grabbed the weapon and started racing up the railroad embankment, stepping through the mud and leaves and around vines and using trees as handholds.

  He ran into a cyclone fence between him and the tracks. The mesh had come detached from the horizontal crossbar on top and sagged backwards when he tried to climb it. Unable to negotiate the fence one-handed, he checked that he had the safety on and tossed the weapon over. It landed with a chunk in the gravel on the other side and he kept climbing. Tree branches got in his way. When he grabbed a wire, a barb punctured his palm. He jerked his hand away. Supporting his weight with his arms, he swung his leg over the barbed wire, wedged his boot toe in a diamond, and brought the other leg over. His shorts snagged, but he got them free. He dropped down on the gravel and fell on his ass. The pistol was lying by a railroad tie. He picked it up and started moving again, perceiving the tracks, trees and sky in different shades of darkness.

  He was thinking:

  I could just keep going, toss the strap. No one knows where I am. I could just keep going. Go back down and reenlist. I could buy a plane ticket to Iraq. I could go as a contractor. I could go as anything, just go, pick up where I left off. They’re not going to come get me out there. I’ll go back down tonight and say sign me up, sir, all I want to do is fight, sir, and I’m home free.

  And he looked around at the night and it felt as if the war, and the freedom it might have represented, was just outside the boundary of what he could see, as if it were in a suburb of the city.

  A half mile later, the tracks had dropped beneath street level. Sheer walls, slanted to create a deep V-shaped channel with him in the center, rose up on either side of him, and twelve-story condominiums projected up still higher from above those walls. The sky had grown farther away, and his view of it had narrowed. Ahead, an overpass crossed the tracks, and he could hear street traffic moving over it. He could not hear police sirens. Directly in front of him, the tracks led into the mouth of a tunnel, a black hole of nothing.

  He looked up at the overpass where cars were passing and at the lights of businesses that were hidden from this angle. He could see the halo of Chinese neon in the air. They were working late on a Saturday night, deep-frying chicken wings and french fries for people coming from the bars, couples going home to open a Styrofoam shell in the dark, eat something hot together.

  She sucks ketchup off his finger when he puts it in her mouth, the window open to cool the room, the street sounds floating in as she spreads her legs.

  She transmogrified into an Iraqi lying on her back in a ditch with her knees apart as if she were giving birth to the flies consuming her or the laughter of his platoon. Images of the war flew from his head and pasted themselves like text messages in the depthless black void of the tunnel. Each scene horrified and nauseated him. They culminated with Jimmy’s face pressed to the floor, the Berretta at his head, his mouth asking not to be killed, the comprehension of those words, the decision to fire anyway, the head jumping and blood pouring out his mouth and nose. The body was a plastic man. It became a faucet and blood kept pouring out of his mouth and nose as if that was his one purpose. The inanimate blood rushed loudly like a stream from a hose. It sounded lively, while the body was dead. The unseeing corpse twitched as if it was going to stand up. The eyes looked like those of a brain-damaged zombie or retarded person, like a soldier in the hospital with severe brain damage from an IED.

  The fast flow of blood lasted for about ten seconds. Pieces of brain tissue washed out in the foam. The mouth was open but did not breathe. The corpse stopped jerking. The stream stopped coming from the mouth but continued from the nose. Then it became a trickle and stopped entirely and the body lay still like someone sleeping.

  He had wondered, Are you okay? Did I hurt you? Are you just resting? Do you want me to call a doctor?

  Do you want me to call your mother? A woman who is close to you? Someone you cannot bear to leave?

  Or has she gone on as well? Has she run ahead of you? In that case you better chase her and stay with her on the avenues, through the parks. Be prepared for a long run, which will sweat everything out of you, purifying you and readying you for a new beginning. So drink water and a lot of it, friend.

  The overpass, he realized, led to the park where he had exercised this morning, which put him no more than two or three blocks from the precinct house on Union Street where he’d spent the afternoon. If he tried to climb up there and look for her in Chinatown, a patrol car would see him, and he knew what his future would look like then. An emotionally disabled twenty-three-year-old with a high-school education and a poor service record, he was standing in a chasm in his basketball shorts two miles from where he had murdered a civilian. Whatever else might happen, she was lost to him and he would never get her back.

  The V-shaped walls of the railroad cut were spraypainted with graffiti words, just visible, like a procession of elephants in the night. They had written MS-13 in giant humped fifteen-foot-high letters all down the wall as far as he could see. It was the same behind him, a giant written mega-scream, screamed over and over, all the miles back the way he had come. He heard the eerie howling of combatants who, having broken through its final defenses, are racing into a city.

  The tunnel entrance was completely black and he walked into it, gravel crunching under his boots. The graffiti continued in here but he could see nothing except total night, not even where he stepped. He stopped walking and the crunching stopped.

  Despite being overcome by grief, he was far from innocent. He had traded her for something else, and while he regretted this, even his capacity for regret was compromised. This was the price of the gift that he and Sconyers had received. They had learned that everything could be destroyed and then they had destroyed it. And they had learned what that destruction looked like. Everything else was gone. She was gone. All he had was what he knew, but this knowing was substantial. Even with his eyes closed as he wept, he knew what was in the tunnel.

  He took the safety off, put the pistol to his head sideways, took a breath as if he were about to try for one more rep, and, telling himself there was only one way he was going to see her again, he pulled the trigger.

  I am so sorry. How sorry I am I cannot say.

  Against the pitch-blackness of the tunnel, a spherical white flash exploded next to his head with a blue ring around it. His head rebounded and his body fell to the ground, knees to face, in very fast sequence. His arm was flung out to the side by the recoil and the pistol tumbled.

  He died over the course of two minutes, different parts of him shutting down. His heart stopped pumping. He made a choking or sighing sound that no one heard. She did not visit him or take his hand. Five minutes later his temperature had dropped to 96 degrees and continued to cool throughout the night until it was the same temperature as the gravel beneath his body.

  56

  SHE DIDN’T FEEL LIKE walking anymore but she kept going. There was nothing in her stomach and her energy was all gone. Her legs didn’t want to move. During the night she had covered thirty miles, maybe more. She didn’t know how much further she had to go, only that it was a straight line. The road led downhill across marsh grass and uphill to a highway interchange, the highway signs reflecting the gold sun: JFK-Belmont Aqueduct, the Throgs Neck Bridge. Just the sight of it was hard to look at, the suspension bridge rising above the grass in the distance, pale against the blue sky—just the sight of the distance was hard for her now. She hobbled slowly at a two-mile-an-hour pace as the sun rose another inch behind her ear. Her feet were damaged, and she was afraid to look at them. If she stopped to rest, she might not get herself moving again. T
raffic passed her almost soundlessly. It was a quiet Sunday morning. The SUVs waited at lights and no one crossed the intersection. She was the only person walking on the street. The cars idled at the lights and she drew closer to them, walking painfully, and before she reached them, the lights changed and they took off, and she limped on in temporary silence, passing Korean businesses, automobile dealerships, showrooms. Everything was closed and in the white dilapidated houses down the side streets people were sleeping. Or they were quiet, getting up and going to the refrigerator for milk, their faces screwed up with sleep. But not with panic. They could sit down in their kitchens and drink coffee. They had their yellowing roof over their heads, an electric fan, a shower, a job on Monday, the grocery store this afternoon. She imagined red steak in a plastic package in the refrigerated section of the grocery store, the meat soft and cold and the fat hard under her fingers. Her fat was being drawn off her flesh—she felt it being taken—to operate her legs. I have to rest. She held herself on a parking meter. And the large vehicles hissed by on Northern Boulevard in the sun. There were Greek restaurants and tax and law offices and bus stop signs, a low roof of shadow under the awnings, and a Korean church the size of a hill on the corner. Behind her the sky was blue and there were puffs of clouds, a glare of white from the sun. Her shadow was losing its legs. She looked ahead up the boulevard where Skinner was, somewhere after all those closed businesses, low roofs going on and on into the uninhabited distance, and she began walking again. There was a cloud line on the horizon, and she was moving towards it.

  Her sandals broke when she crossed a street with a high curb. Utopia Parkway. She couldn’t put them back together, so she tried to tie them to her feet another way—if only she had some string—but she could not. She tried to walk holding the thong between her toes, but it made it harder. She threw them in the street and walked on without them, curling her feet to keep the blisters off the pavement. The sidewalk was going to take her skin off. She would need medical attention. Her face was drawn. The edges of her feet were ragged and black. She looked at her feet and saw them suppurating. She came to a place where another street began: it flowed off of Northern Boulevard at an angle like a river, and it was Sanford Avenue—among decaying buildings, a funeral home with Korean writing, park benches, small trees, broken glass, and the parked cars like rocks on the riverbank. A furlong ahead of her the railroad tracks crossed the boulevard above the newsstands and flower stands. The graffiti on the metal said DEN RIP.