Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  LUCINDA WRITES PENNY BACK FROM a polytechnic university under development around a small artificial lake lined with PVC in a rocky portion of the interior of the United Arab Emirates.

  I’m sorry about your dad, I hope you’re feeling better. I have bad news too—my father-in-law Hamad doesn’t want us in contact because of your relatives in the (let me clear my throat) Zionist Entity. I know it’s insane, but he says Abdullah could lose his job over it and it’s such a big deal for him getting to build up a new department from scratch. We’ll be out of here in five years max. Abs says his career is riding on it. I will tell you one thing (top secret): I’m pg. I haven’t even told Abs (too early), but this might be my last mail for a while, so if I want to tell you it’s now or never. I won’t be naming it after you or raising it in this—greetings noble censors, think I’ll skip the descriptions of dust. Our servants (I’m pretty sure somebody pays them and they’re not really slaves) are great, they get that dust out so fast every morning, you’d never know it was ever there.

  See you soon. Don’t write me any secrets! I’ll call you if I get anywhere near NYC.

  Love you

  Lucie

  FONTAINE WRITES BACK FROM TERRE Haute.

  Come visit me. The bar around the corner has the best karaoke, all these fat guys dedicating metal ballads to their wives (home taking care of the kids but they make it sound like they’re off fighting in Iraq—probably makes more sense than you wish it did). Though you might have better luck here with your new medium height/build and medium hair/eyes . . . forget I said anything . . . You know you picked a hard row to hoe with that trashy Anglo-ass name! It makes you look so *adopted*. Your dad’s gone now (I was saddened to hear that, he was such an inspiring person and helped so many people, I’d be so proud if my dad were anything like him), so you could finally start calling yourself something that fits, like “Paloma Gellis.” Otherwise Terre Haute is pretty meh. Work is great. Respectable colleagues, responsible job, house I might buy, the usual: paradise on earth, once you drown your memories of NYC. I’m working on it.

  Stay cute

  Fon

  PENNY GOES DOWN TO THE Tranquility kitchen to make raw ginger tea. She feels slightly sick to her stomach. She envies Fon for having a job. She feels certain that if she can discover Rob in her grandparents’ attic—a very small sample of men indeed—Fon can discover her own perfect man in bustling, cosmopolitan Terre Haute.

  She imagines Fon’s perfect man as being sexually rather user-friendly when compared with Rob. She imagines him young enough to be slim in Terre Haute, but somehow already graduated from high school. She thinks of Rob’s body. She takes a sip of her tangy tea and remembers kissing him. The concentration in his kiss, how it lingered on her mouth, his indifference to both their tongues and her entire body. It dawns on her that he may not be the perfect man after all. She singsongs to Tranquility’s nameless gray cat in a baby-talk voice: “The perfect man for me wouldn’t be asexual. No he wouldn’t!”

  The cat, curled up on the seat cushion of a straight-backed chair, spreads and flattens without changing its pose, as though the earth’s gravitational pull had increased. Rufus enters the kitchen. “You like that cat,” he says.

  “I like a lot of things.”

  “You know whose cat that is? Girl who moved away. She just moved away and left her cat.”

  “Cat seems happy.”

  “Somebody should adopt that cat. It’s got nobody.”

  “That’s not true. It’s better off than any of us. People come and go, but the cat can stay. Nobody’s going to pressure it to take a job in Terre Haute.”

  “Lazy-ass anarchist cat,” Rufus says, taking a beer from the refrigerator.

  The cat balls one front paw into a fist as it stretches. It turns slightly on its axis and raises its chin. “It’s not the cat’s fault you feed it valerian,” Penny says, patting its belly.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, ANKA KNEELS on the kitchen floor, painting the hashtag #climbit on twenty sheets of blue poster board.

  “I’m searching for that hashtag, but there’s nothing there,” Penny remarks, thumbing her phone.

  “There will be,” Anka says. “You know that douche bag over at DJD who calls himself Sunshine?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Well, he has these friends in Greenpeace. You know how Greenpeace guys are all super-macho bros, and really into tech, and they’re all on like WhatsApp and Snapchat and everything else like that, so the cops know where they spend every waking moment and what all their friends look like before they even turn on the Stingray.”

  “At least they don’t tattoo their faces,” Sorry comments from her place at the table. “My favorite kind of revolutionary. Like wearing a fucking license plate.”

  “But these guys are worse. They go around with Bluetooth headsets, so the cops even know who they ran into and stood near and exactly when and where, because their phones register it—but anyway, they can’t do direct actions anymore, because the cops are all over them. So where do they turn? To Sunshine! To the man who doesn’t have any electronics because they might use electricity! He told me once he wrote his college term papers by hand with a pencil and natural light. Did you see him in wintertime?” She turns to Penny. “I guess not. You haven’t been around that long.”

  Penny says, “I saw him in this weird bunny suit—”

  “That’s his spring and fall outfit. When it’s cold out, he has this like bag thing he wears with reflective foil inside, and this hat. So anyway, for whatever reason, Sunshine always knows these athletic women, like snowboarders and climbers and stuff, so he single-handedly organized this action for Greenpeace, where Greenpeace is going to rally against climate change uptown as a distraction while these women climb the base of One World Trade Center with suction cups. That’s why the hashtag. Nobody’s going to know what it means until it’s already happening. None of you guys is an informant, right?”

  “We’ll know it when they raid DJD in ten minutes,” Rob says.

  Penny sets her phone on the table. “I had a line open to the FBI all this time, but I never imagined you guys would say anything interesting!”

  “Isn’t a phone a spy microphone even when it’s turned off?” Sorry says. “I read about that with Snowden. You’re supposed to put your phone in the refrigerator, with the battery taken out.”

  “They’re climbing the Freedom Tower,” Rob says. “It doesn’t matter whether anybody’s listening in. They’re not going to arrest us for talking about a peaceful public protest. They’ll wait until a suction cup touches glass. It’s more serious charges. They might intervene to stop us making a bomb.”

  “Or not,” Sorry says. “Depending on who we’re planning to blow up.”

  Anka finishes her last #climbit and Rob fetches the tack hammer from the silverware drawer.

  “So is this a Blue Bloc protest?” Penny asks him. “Because we’re not really the Blue Bloc anymore.”

  “Maybe you’re not, but I still value my pariah status,” Sorry says.

  “I was just asking because I think it might be fun to go downtown and check out the climbers, instead of hanging around the smoking section of a climate rally.”

  “It’s an idea,” Sorry says. “The rally draws police away from the climbers, and the climbers draw police away from the smokers.”

  “Who draw police away from people who don’t clean up after their dogs,” Rob adds. “That’s smokers’ role in this universe.”

  “Nobody walks dogs that far downtown,” Anka says. “But who’s smoking today?”

  “Just me, I think,” Sorry says.

  “Where’s Jazz?”

  “I know she’s around, but I haven’t really talked to her in days.”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE Nicotine residents depart for the rally. Rob suggests taking the Holland Tunnel, and Penny, Sorry, Anka, and Tony agree. They are glad for the change of plans: instead of waving signs toward the rear of a flash mob at Columbus
Circle—a rally that will be generously spiked with male volunteers in black balaclavas, to lend an air of urgent danger—they will loiter near the bay, enjoying the view. Perhaps then a beer on the waterfront.

  Rob parks in a semilegal spot just south of Canal, and they walk. The day is lovely, with a warm breeze and white clouds. The tower bends against passing clouds and changes shape like an illusion. They walk in circles, looking for Sunshine and his crew. The tower has four sides, and they don’t know where the action is planned.

  They find it by the commotion—or rather, by the one climber who has not yet fled. A young woman in green polypropylene clings to the West Street facade of the tower, her head perhaps fifteen feet above the sidewalk. While security guards look on, a policeman pokes her ankle with his nightstick. Leaping, he swats her calf. He aims carefully, to avoid damaging the valuable imported glass.

  “Shit!” she cries out. “Shit!” She turns toward the Nicotine inhabitants. They know her; it’s Susannah—daughter of a poet and an essayist in Boulder, Colorado, ecology major at Reed, six-month veteran of life on the East Coast. “Stop hurting me!” she screeches. But she doesn’t climb down. She begins a difficult traverse toward the marquee. The policeman hits her shin hard enough to make a cracking sound audible above the shouting. She climbs farther aloft, instinctively trying to protect her hips, her torso, and her head from cracking sounds. She slips and catches herself by her suction cups.

  Anka screams, “Stop it! Stop it! Susannah, get down here!”

  Sorry says, “She’s going to fall.”

  Penny stands with her mouth open and her palms on her cheeks.

  Sorry raises her phone and begins to make a video. From behind, a policewoman seizes both her hands and ties them together with a cable binder (“zip-cuffs”). Her phone skitters across the pavement as she loses her balance and lets her weight fall, landing on her knees with a gasp. Penny picks it up.

  “Give me that,” the policewoman says to Penny, indicating Sorry’s phone.

  Penny turns and runs. She hears a scream. She glances over her shoulder and sees a crowd of police. Anka and Tony are running as well—scattering, behind her and to her left. She sprints. Her messenger bag on a long strap thumps on her hip. Sorry’s phone is still in her hand.

  She tears through a row of bushes and runs across traffic, down Vesey Street, and into a bagel place. She walks hurriedly to the rear. The restroom is locked, so she squeezes into a space reserved for cleaning supplies. Then a seat comes free at a booth, and she sits down. She looks up and sees Tony. He approaches her without looking at her. “Take it, take it, take it,” she whispers in a rush, putting the phone on the table. He slips it into his back pocket and leaves the deli.

  As he exits, two police officers enter. They do not recognize him as being connected with the case. He is older and nondescript.

  Penny might as well be wearing a license plate. They ask her to come along.

  They wait to put zip-cuffs on her until just before they load her into their big, high-walled van. In the van, she meets Sorry. “It’s cool,” she whispers. “I mean, I found a cool place for the thing.”

  “Cool,” Sorry says.

  “Where’s Susannah?”

  “Hospital. She has a compound ankle fracture, and she passed out and hit her head. Her mouth was bleeding.”

  “Oh shit. Fuck.”

  “It’s no big deal. She’ll spend the rest of her life as a cauldron of seething rage, and no mainstream citizen will ever take her seriously again as long as she lives. But she’ll bounce back, unless she ends up with slurred speech and a limp. Then her media career can really take off.”

  “Shit. And for what? The fucking climate?”

  “Most important challenge facing humanity today,” Sorry says. “But she was a foot soldier, a follower. She knew they were going to fuck her up. And that’s what I’ll never understand. College-girl cannon fodder. You’d think they’d save that shit for the provocateurs. But if you saw her ankle, you’d know she was not in it for the money. She got what she wanted. It makes me so sad.”

  “Fuck.” Penny is greenish, thinking about the ankle. There is silence as the police van trundles on worn-out shocks. It rocks like a cradle, forward and backward. “Where are we headed?” she asks Sorry.

  “Probably the Tombs.”

  “Is that like Rikers Island?”

  “It’s like a crusty squat without the rats. But you’re from the slums of Brazil. You’ll be fine.”

  “Our house had a wall and armed guards.”

  “Then you’re going to feel right at home.”

  “That’s it. If you liked the White House, you’ll just love the Tombs!”

  “I keep forgetting you’re a rich kid,” Sorry says. “It’s not the way you look. Maybe it’s that you’re careful? Or insecure? The other rich kids are out there laying their privilege on the altar of justice and burning it alive, and you just keep on creeping on, watching your back.”

  “That doesn’t sound too good.”

  “They’re not privileged. Susannah just found it out the hard way. She had a hard landing in reality. She’s going to be pissed when she wakes up and realizes Mommy and Daddy lied. She’ll be like, ‘But I’m entitled to do whatever I want, wherever I want, and the police can’t touch me!’ I don’t get the feeling you have that problem.”

  “Yeah, I have other problems,” Penny says. “Like the feeling that I’m getting my period, and I don’t have any ibuprofen.”

  “They wouldn’t book a woman with cramps,” Sorry says. “There’s no cramps in the CIA torture memos. Cramps would way exceed their mandate.”

  “Do they even torture women?” It’s a serious question. Penny can’t remember reading about any torture charges against the CIA involving a woman victim. “I mean like at Guantánamo.” She becomes pensive. “Were any of the fighters—wait, is this space miked?”

  “Yeah, maybe you should shut up about Al Qaeda,” Sorry says.

  AMALIA PULLS UP SLOWLY IN front of Nicotine, peering up from behind the steering wheel of her white Taurus sedan. To her it is her in-laws’ house, the house where she was never welcome. A house that filled with cinders and standing water—only fair after the way its inhabitants treated her.

  As she approaches, her heart sinks. But not because the house is intact. Her point of contention is Matt’s car. The black Audi stands in front of the garage where Rob’s minivan usually stands.

  She pulls up behind it and parks. She reads the license plate to make sure. She kills her engine and sits silently. She sets the parking brake, picks up her white purse, and walks to the front door. She wears a knee-length electric blue zebra-print dress. Her purse is a long, narrow “baguette,” significantly out of style.

  Her doorbell options: JAZZ, TONY, ANKA, ROB, SORRY. She hammers on the door with her fist. Nothing happens. She sets the switch to JAZZ, because it is the first name on the list, and pushes the button.

  “All my instincts,” Peter Gabriel sings. “The grand facade.” She hammers on the door. She cries.

  On the roof, Jazz disengages herself from Matt and walks out the open door of her conservatory to look down at the street. “You’re parked in,” she says. “There’s some guy’s car behind you.” She returns to bed.

  Matt gets up naked as a jaybird (a cliché that makes no sense until the jaybird has been plucked for eating) and looks down. “That’s my stepmother’s car.” The song keeps wafting up the stairwell. “Oh Jesus.”

  “She won’t make it inside,” Jazz says. “Come back to bed.”

  “You don’t know her,” Matt says. “She’s scrappy.”

  “I’ve heard a little bit about her from Penny. Like that she’s younger than you are.”

  “She’s passionately in love with me.”

  “Since your father died?”

  “Since I was sixteen.”

  They hear a window break.

  “Fuck,” Matt says.

  “Call the police.”r />
  “She owns the house.”

  Amalia seizes the bars on the front kitchen window—cheap telescoping bars, the kind you might install to keep a child from falling out of an upper floor—and shakes them like an ape protesting its cage. She is light and not strong. They don’t break.

  All the windows have similar bars. No number of broken windows can help her. She sits down by the FREE box of kittens. She calls Matt on the phone.

  “Take the call,” Jazz says.

  “No fucking way.”

  “This is going to get boring if she doesn’t leave soon. How passionately?”

  Matt exhales and rolls his eyes.

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “Not in a long time.”

  Jazz rocks from side to side on her knees on the bed, grinning. “I knew it, I knew it! I knew you were Penny’s father!”

  “Aw, ugh!” Matt returns to her and whacks her on the arm with a throw pillow. “Get your mind out of the fucking gutter!” He whacks her again. One more whack, and he is hard enough to forget Amalia, who writes a note on the back of a lengthy Best Buy receipt she finds in her purse, using a pen she also finds there:

  Dear Matt, you are breaking my heart. You don’t love me, that is my problem, but you are not honest, that is your problem. It is unworthy of the honor of a MAN. Tell me what is occurring. All my life, all your life, I was sure you are lonely. But maybe the life of a single man in New York is not so lonely. I am the stupid one, maybe your love turned to nothing many years ago. But at the least I never lied to you. Be honest with me Matt. I love you.

  She tucks the note under a windshield wiper on the Audi and walks to the bodega—she had noticed it as she drove past the school to the house—to buy beer. She intends to drink it on the porch and wait.

  ROB PARKS ON THE STREET because there are two cars in his driveway. Anka notices the broken kitchen window, and Tony reads the note attached to Matt’s car.