Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  She thinks a series of hastily jotted firecrackers and red heart shapes, mentally texting friends about her discovery.

  He turns his head and spits tobacco juice into a bush.

  She thinks again: redneck, but *CUTE!!!*

  Turning back toward her, he says, “Hi there. Can I help you?”

  She says, “My name is Penny. Do you live here?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “How long?” she asks.

  “Since the beginning,” he says. “I was the one who found this place. You want to check it out? Come inside and get the full tour?” He gestures toward the house.

  For a moment she wonders why his first reaction is to offer her a tour. Does the house get tourists? —No, but there’s no reason a stranger would show up on the doorstep unless she needed a place to stay. Right?

  Penny is not sure she wants a tour right this second. She is dressed for mass transit and walking through a bad neighborhood. Now she wishes for clean hair, littler shoes, and something on her ass that is not pants. She’s a short brown woman in athletic socks, carrying her purse in a plastic bag. To racists, a higher primate. To lefties, a Person of Color. To absolutely no one, the would-be heiress to the property, here to throw him out. Of course that has advantages. She slumps and squints to heighten her stealth. Maybe when she comes back dressed as herself, he won’t know it’s her?

  Her feeling that she is playing a role and playing it badly—that were he to assess her as poor, pitiable, and false, he would not be wrong—makes her droop even more as she agrees to the tour. Nothing could be more to her sinister purpose than a tour. She’ll be able to report back to Matt on the condition of the interior. She dislikes herself heartily.

  The man says his name is Rob. He confounds her expectations by assuming she’s smart.

  “This house we call Nicotine is one of a group of properties administered by Community Housing Action as housing for political activists,” he says. “CHA serves as an umbrella organization for housing co-ops located all over North Jersey. The requirement to live in them is that activism be your main occupation, but it’s from all over the progressive spectrum. The houses all have themes. Some are pretty trivial—bicycle activists like me, tree tenders, you know, small-time BS—and some are big mainstream political issues like environmental stuff, disarmament, different health issues, AIDS and TB and whatever. This house has a slightly different genesis, because we don’t actually share an issue—”

  “Except nicotine, I guess. I saw you spitting tobacco juice.”

  “I noticed you didn’t take it too hard.”

  “If you’d seen the stuff I’ve seen lately. Oh man! Also, I’m a smoker, not that I can afford it.”

  “Then welcome to Nicotine. Come on in.”

  He opens the front door to a hallway cluttered with winter boots. A narrow staircase mounts straight ahead. At the end of the hall, the barred transom of an overgrown and inaccessible back door filters greenish light through young trees that press against it from outside. To the left are carved wooden double doors, presumably leading to a living and dining area. The door to the right opens into a large, airy kitchen, with bay windows in two directions. He points the way there.

  A chubby woman, older and taller than Penny, stands at the counter in basketball shoes, peeling carrots. She wears a tiered skirt made of orange canvas with an elastic waistband, and a faded pink T-shirt with an iron-on image of a wolf. To Penny her clothing is thoroughly ridiculous. Her ears poke out through her long black hair. She faces Rob and grins, pushing its greasy strands back behind her ears without putting down the peeler.

  “Hey, Sorry,” he says. “We have a visitor.”

  “My name is Penny,” Penny says. “I like your house!”

  Rob picks up a bright red coffee cup promoting the anticholesterol drug Lipitor and spits in it. Sorry winces and shakes her head. She discards her carrot and peeler and asks Penny whether she would like some Turkish coffee. Penny says yes, please, and Sorry requests that she and Rob take seats in the dining room, back across the hall and through the double doors.

  “This room looks like you never use it,” Penny says to him. They sit down at a long wooden table that could easily seat fourteen. The veneer bubbles upward as though it had been left out in the rain. What once was a cut-glass chandelier, now missing all its glass elements, hangs overhead, three mismatched bulbs in its six sockets. The wallpaper is greenish, marbled in silver that echoes the black marbling on the smoked-glass mirror over the empty fireplace. On the mantelpiece are two statues: the Blessed Virgin Mary in latex (a fund-raising dildo for a feminist collective in Chicago, Rob tells her) and a similarly pliant My Little Pony in yellow with dirty hair. On the wall is a curling black poster: TEST DEPT. Beyond a broad archway that leads around the corner of the house, the room is dedicated to storage, filled with cardboard boxes, plastic containers, newspapers and magazines, and bicycles.

  On the table, a pack of American Spirit cigarettes—a British American Tobacco brand boasting all-natural poisonous alkaloids—lies next to a thirties-vintage tabletop lighter and matching ashtray.

  Sorry joins them, carrying a hanging brass tray with the coffee cups, Turkish-style. She takes a cigarette and taps it on the table many times. She leans forward to light it, inhaling deeply. The stoner-like concentration with which she does this impresses Penny.

  Like her housemate, she seems to assume their visitor is bright and curious. On exhaling, she says, “Here’s why I live at Nicotine. I got fucked over in my first drug trial. It was an antihistamine-SSRI phase one interaction thing supposed to run a month and pay eight thousand dollars. They had to let me go after four days. They gave me the whole eight thousand, but I was never the same. The drug interaction caused what you might call the onset of mania.”

  “She was clinical,” Rob says. “She was living at this feminist house, Stayfree, and let’s just say they’re not heavy into command and control, so they didn’t know how to deal with it. They called the cops. That was their creative way of getting her back into medical custody.”

  “First and last trial I ever did,” Sorry says. “Never again.”

  “I never did a drug trial, but I heard about them,” Penny says. “It’s supposed to be easy money.”

  “Massively easy,” Sorry says. “I left the ER and spent the night skulking around this vacant lot like I was in the partisan resistance. In the morning I took all my money out of the bank to go to Afghanistan. I know exactly what I was thinking, too. I was going to lead the revolution in Afghanistan. But thank God, I didn’t have a visa, so I got stuck at the airport and ended up back in the hospital. I came this close to being deported to Jordan.”

  “Why Jordan?”

  “That’s where I’m a citizen. Anyway, they put me on lithium. And I took that shit, for a while. But I found out there’s a less toxic substance that cools me down and lets me concentrate.” She glances at Rob over her cigarette. “Though I still don’t know how you can put wads of tobacco in your mouth and spit. Like constantly holding tobacco soup in your mouth.” She shakes her head. “Now cigarettes, you breathe in deep, you get your oxygen and everything you need, and when you breathe out you’re excreting all the bad stuff, like your lungs are a kidney or a liver or something.” She demonstrates.

  Rob removes a cigarette from the pack on the table and begins shredding its contents with some baking soda into a Paxil cup.

  “Maybe it’s just what you’re used to?” Penny suggests. “I don’t much like the smell of stale smoke, but it doesn’t bother me seeing him spit. Maybe because of the way I was brought up.”

  “How was that?” Rob asks.

  “My family is pretty weird.” Unconcerned about discretion—she can’t imagine the conversation taking a turn that would lead her to say her family owns the house—but intent on seeming as interesting and good-natured as possible, she says, “First off, my mom is Kogi. This people from Colombia.”

  “I’ve heard of them,�
� Rob says. “On the mountaintop, with the gourds. They keep the universe going.”

  “Now they’re more into slash-and-burn cattle farming in national parks.”

  “What’s their deal?” Sorry asks.

  “They used to be the ultimate weirdo tribe,” Penny says. “Their whole lifestyle was chewing coca. That’s all they did. I mean munch it like goats, all day every day. Wandering around chewing coca leaves with builders’ lime until their molars were flat, smearing their spit on these gourds. But that was just the men, obviously. The women cooked and cleaned and got traded between totemic clans or something. That’s why my mom blew out of there.” Sorry laughs, and Penny adds, “It wasn’t so great for guys, either! To get shamans, they would raise little boys in caves, like the Irish bards. It happened to my great-uncle. Mom says when he got out, he was certifiable.”

  “Like the Irish bards,” Rob says.

  “So when she met my dad, he was working on building up this clinic for indigenous herbal therapies in Manaus, in Brazil, on the Amazon. Can I bum a cigarette?”

  “Sure, help yourself,” Sorry says, offering her the pack. “So did he, like, heal people with coca?”

  “No. With this jungle vine that makes you trip your brains out. It will heal absolutely anything, because it makes you puke like there’s no tomorrow. That’s how it works. You go in thinking you’re sick, but by the time you’re tripping and losing every ounce of fluid in your body, you realize you didn’t know the meaning of the word. Your immune system gets a jump start out of self-defense. It’s called ayahuasca.”

  “I can’t tell whether you believe in it,” Rob says. “But the method sounds kind of Ayurvedic.”

  “That’s how traditional medicine always works,” Penny says. “They purge you, or bleed you, or take your body temperature up to a hundred and six, or whatever. It’s all like chemo, taking you down to zero for a reboot. Dad’s specialty was cancer patients. So anyway, that’s why I don’t get grossed out over tobacco juice.”

  “So your parents shared an interest in traditional medicine,” Sorry prompts her. “Or did your mom have cancer?”

  “No, no,” Penny says. “He met her in Cartagena. She made it from Kogi country all the way to the coast, and Dad found her taking care of these pigs at the dump. She was herding these fucking huge pigs that she was scared shitless of, and he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.”

  “Is the dump a tourist attraction?”

  She stares quizzically at her own hand as she taps an ash into the ashtray and says, “You know, I have no idea what he was doing at the dump.”

  “Picking up chicks,” Sorry suggests.

  “She was thirteen! Almost the same age as my brother Patrick. He took her in because she was homeless and starving. Then she fell in love with him, and he made her wait five years. She always says it really pissed her off. She thought if they waited that long, she’d be too old to get married.”

  “Like Soon-Yi Previn.”

  “I guess. But she got with the modern life program really fast. First she went to high school in Nyack. Then she married Dad, and had me in Brazil, and then she went to Barnard, and now she’s an HR exec in the city.”

  “She must be smart.”

  “She’s just funny.” Penny shrugs. “She doesn’t talk enough, so she still sounds Colombian. You can practically hear her squeezing these weird-ass Kogi ideas through a filter of Spanish and English. About half the time she just says”—she lowers her voice to say the phrase in Amalia’s rhythmic monotone—“‘Oh my god, oh my god.’ My dad was like not even from the same planet.”

  “Is he not alive?” Sorry asks.

  “He died recently. He was really old, and really sick.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sorry says.

  Penny adds, “At her HR department everybody thinks she’s this huge feminist, but it’s only because she’s still secretly so traditional, it weirds her out that men would apply for jobs. She’s like, what are they doing cluttering up our workplace? Don’t they have gourds to attend to?”

  Sorry and Penny take long, amused drags off their cigarettes, and Rob tucks his chew into his mouth.

  “Yeah, so, the idea behind this house,” Sorry says. “You know how smokers, in this society, we’re a step below meth-heads. I mean, say you shoot up heroin in the bathroom on an airplane. What happens to you?”

  “Nothing?” Penny ventures.

  “And if you smoke a cigarette?”

  “Air marshals?”

  “Summary execution!” Sorry says. “People walk around fucked-up on illegal drugs, on prescription drugs—on anything they want—and nobody cares. But smoke a cigarette, and you’re on everybody’s shit list.”

  “Preach,” Rob says.

  “You’re a baby killer,” Sorry says. “Same baby who’s sucking on a nipple full of phthalates, eating antibiotic chicken, breathing PCBs, playing in dirt made of tetraethyl lead and drinking straight vodka while it rides a fucking skateboard—when that baby dies at age eighty-six instead of ninety, it’s going to be because you lit a cigarette in a public park.”

  “I do kind of believe in that secondhand stuff, though,” Rob says. “That’s one reason I dip. It keeps the ill effects to myself.”

  “You’re just closeted,” Sorry says to him. “A closet smoker.” She taps her cigarette on the ashtray and pushes down on the black knob that makes its surface twirl, dumping the ash in an invisible receptacle. “I’ll never quit. It’s this or lithium. One smoker in three dies as a result of smoking, one in ten of lung cancer. Those are way better odds than I’d have leading the revolution in Afghanistan.”

  Rob says, “Nicotine’s kind of an outlier in CHA, because it’s the catchall house, with activists working on all different fronts. But we do have this one thing in common that gets us ostracized at every single march and rally and everywhere we go. That’s how we ended up banding together.”

  “They wouldn’t even let me smoke at a NORML smoke-in,” Sorry says. “They said nicotine is a nerve poison, and they were drinking fucking beer.”

  “It’s activism that’s poison,” Rob says. “The police are out there beating the shit out of people, breaking ribs and hip joints like they did to Jazz at RNC—the Republican National Convention—and nobody minds if she walks in their march with a fucking cane, but they don’t want her walking with a cigarette. And that’s where I say somebody’s consciousness is fucked-up.”

  “It’s because they’re good leftists,” Penny says. “They want to blame perpetrators, not victims. And everybody is the smokers’ victim. They’d triumph in the struggle and be living in the new Jerusalem, except we’re killing them with our cancer sticks.”

  Rob and Sorry trade admiring glances, as though Penny had jumped through a hoop. She is thrilled to be sitting with them at their big table, reaping spontaneous approval for spontaneous utterances. She beams with joy. Rob is so cute—and Sorry so not in the running as competition—that she sees herself getting very close to him very quickly.

  “I like you,” Sorry says.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how’d your name get to be Sorry?”

  “It’s Sarah,” she explains. “‘Sari’ for short. But people in this country think I’m saying ‘sorry.’ I grew up in a settlement on the West Bank, so I spend half my life saying ‘sorry.’ It’s a shortcut.”

  “You got any beer?”

  “Want to see our bodega?” Rob replies.

  He and Penny go on a beer run.

  When she comments that the empty brick “brownstones” could be crack houses, he says they are empty because they were built on fill. Rather than install a drainpipe to carry the stream he buried, the developer 120 years ago dumped it full of dirt and trash. “The back halves are in ruins,” he explains. “Every day they slide a little farther down into the creek.”

  “They could still be crack houses.”

  “I don’t know. This is more of a heroin-type neighborhood.”

  They
turn and walk for a few hundred yards parallel to a high chain-link fence separating them from an enormous asphalted schoolyard. The children have gone home, and the chain nets of the basketball court rattle in the wind. The afternoon is warm, but so dense with humid haze that the sun seems to have set already.

  Rob holds the door of the bodega open for Penny. A small silver bell rings as it closes. They stand in front of a tall refrigerator, studying the selection. Rob chooses a bottle of eight-ball, and Penny buys a can of Foster’s and three packs of American Spirits (an impulse buy, based on a sudden decision to quit Marlboros) because they cost five dollars less—each!—than they do across the river in New York City.

  Back at the house, the conversation deteriorates into open flirting. Sorry goes upstairs. Penny gives Rob a slightly buzzed kiss on the cheek. He touches her arm with a kind of tenderness, but does not kiss back.

  They make curry sauce with coconut shavings because it goes with carrots. When Sorry comes down to eat, they serve her in the dining room as though they were host and hostess and she the guest. They say very little but look at each other often. Sorry finishes her plate and excuses herself.

  Penny and Rob wash and dry the dishes. They do some nicotine, a bit drunkenly.

  Around eight, before the last bus, he takes her hand and leads her to the stairwell. He returns her peck on the cheek. His hands wander the outlines of her body, briefly. He enfolds her in his arms like a long-lost friend. “You look like the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,” he says.

  “I’m not sad.” It’s her first best honest answer.

  He draws away to look in her eyes. Then, hesitantly, aiming carefully, he kisses her on the mouth. His lips rest on hers without moving for a full five seconds. His eyes close and he squints a bit, as though lost in thought. Then he pulls back, seeming to have considered and reconsidered and decided he shouldn’t move too fast.

  Penny decides it’s sexy. It’s like he thinks really kissing her would pose a risk, so he’s slow to step on the slippery slope, take the bait, enter the trap. She feels spontaneous affection and trust, a sense of knowing him already forever. She notes that his genitals are pressed against her at waist level (he is a full twelve inches taller), and she wriggles, expecting a reaction—some kind of bulging—maybe a curl of something expanding in too-tight underwear?—some undeniable message that he likes her?