Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  “Uh-oh,” Tony says. “You are not going to believe this. It’s a love letter from Penny’s mother to her brother.” He looks around, wondering where Amalia might be. “Do you think that’s her car?”

  He peeks through the front passenger-side window of the Taurus and sees bone amulets hanging from the rearview mirror on leather thongs.

  Rob walks through the house, saying softly, “Amalia? Amalia?” He opens doors, including that of the bucket monster. But she is not there. As he enters his room he perceives that Jazz and Matt believe they are alone.

  Amalia returns from the bodega, carrying a four-pack in a paper bag clutched to her hip, and sees Tony holding her note to Matt. Her grief is instant, utter, and uncontrollable.

  “You bastard!” she yells. “How can you do that! It’s a private letter! Bastard! Bastard!”

  “We’ve never met,” he says. “So you don’t know that. Here’s your note back. I didn’t read it. I thought they might have ticketed you for parking on the sidewalk. See how your car is partly on the sidewalk?”

  Amalia hovers, uncertain, because Tony’s claim makes no sense (the “ticket” was on Matt’s car). But she puts her receipt in her purse and says, “Thank you.”

  “You remind me of my friend Penny,” Tony says. “Are you her sister?”

  She looks down. “Mother. I’m her mother. But I’m not very many years older.”

  “You must be Amalia. You got an extra beer in there? I had a rough day.”

  “You! Ha.”

  “No, mine really was rough. A demo went south. A girl from DJD got hurt bad, and Penny and Sorry got arrested.”

  “Penny under arrest? Oh my god. Who cares. She will never find a job anyway. Why she studied business, I don’t know. She’ll never pass a criminal background check. My stupid baby.” She wipes her eyes. Holding her skirt with her hand in a ladylike fashion, she climbs the front stairs, sits on the top step, sets her purse down, and removes a beer from her paper bag.

  Tony smiles and says, “Don’t worry. Half the jobs out there, they want a criminal record, so they can pay you less than minimum wage. Gut rehab. Cook. Social worker in a halfway house. I did all that shit.”

  She rests her elbows on her knees as she opens her beer and takes a sip. Tony takes a beer out of the bag for himself. He opens it and drinks half in one gulp.

  “I’m a human resources professional,” she says. “I know what I’m saying. I know Penny will never find work. Just look at her, oh my god. But I was a bad example, always bitching about my job. Now she wants to be unemployed forever. I was a bad mother.”

  “‘Never work’ is classic anarchist tradition. She fits right in. Where’s the problem?”

  “Work can be so valuable. Her father had meaningful work, helping the sick. And all the time I was making money, as much money as I could. Why did I do it? Money can’t buy happiness!”

  “It’s a symbol. Like having a nice car.” He glances disapprovingly at the Audi, hoping to score points.

  “What I need now is dialectics. To overcome and break the false ideas.”

  “The ideologies?” Tony suggests.

  “Out with the ideologies! Time for revolution.” Knees primly together, she turns toward Tony and raises her beer. He raises his beer, and they drink a toast to revolution.

  “But that’s an individual decision we make for ourselves,” Tony says. “It’s too risky, dragging other people into it.”

  “One revolution is all I need. Revolution in my life. A return to meaningful work that brings happiness. Did you ever hear the saying ‘labor is value’? What I want—can I trust you?”

  “I’m a bastard, I really am. You got that right. But you can trust me.”

  “I want to work in my garden.”

  “I love gardening,” Tony says, finishing his first beer.

  Amalia and Tony continue talking on the porch while Anka adds titles to Sorry’s cell phone video and uploads it to YouTube. She writes that Sorry was an independent “legal observer,” and that the anonymous climber in the video suffered incapacitating injuries from police brutality.

  Amalia stays for dinner. Matt stays upstairs.

  Around eleven, Amalia drives home to Morristown with her emotions in a whirl. All sorts of interesting things she had thought dead jump upright and advance toward her en masse, like a dust devil with arms and a face, inside her head while she drives.

  At home she lies down wide-eyed. She thinks of Matt and doesn’t—to her relief—give a damn. She feels desexualized. All the dumb horniness drains from her body, and her unburdened soul rises curiously to check out this alluring inner demon of romance.

  She falls asleep while the demon and her soul hover over her, still whirling.

  ROB AND ANKA TEASE TONY.

  He defends himself. “She’s suffering from unrequited love. She’s so lonely she wants to garden.”

  “I thought you liked Penny,” Anka says.

  “She’s the mature, knowing version of Penny, with a past.”

  “And a mansion in Morristown,” Rob says. “And maybe a big house in Jersey City. Somebody needs to rescue this damsel in distress! And better you than me.”

  Jazz comes downstairs to fetch food and wine for Matt. He stays the night, forgotten by Amalia.

  OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS, the #climbit video receives a few viewings and a number of negative ratings. Sorry’s wobbly footage lasts only six seconds. Anka’s titles speak of her own shuddering at the sound of bone hitting concrete, but the clip ends before Susannah falls.

  THE TOMBS CELL PENNY AND Sorry share with two Chinese shoplifters is cold and uncomfortable. There is a toilet with toilet paper, a sink with no soap, nothing to eat (no appetite), no sanitary supplies, no medications, and no offer of phone calls, because they are supposed to be held for a maximum of twenty-four hours. The painted plaster walls are slimy with condensation.

  “This place reminds me of the first time I saw Nicotine,” Sorry says. “This was the kitchen.”

  Penny is bleeding, but not too badly. She tucks some toilet paper into her underwear and changes it every hour or so. She lies with her head on Sorry’s lap and concentrates on the pain. She knows that if she can descend into it with her mind and inhabit it, it will change into a feeling of pressure that’s not nearly as bad. She hasn’t experienced menstrual cramps in a long time.

  Sorry doesn’t pat or stroke her head. They both feel it’s better not to touch anything in the Tombs, especially anyone’s eyes or nose. She merely serves as a pillow.

  In pain, Penny recalls Norm’s death. But her mind skirts the usual chasms. Her surroundings tug her back toward problems that admit of political solutions: women without access to analgesics, women in countries where you can’t even get alcohol! Their pointless suffering—especially pointless because it might so easily be stopped. As if unstoppable pain automatically had a point. As if the agonies of strangulated hernia and cancer and appendicitis worked to deter people from getting them. She feels the logic of the hospice as never before. If death is inevitable—the logic says—it needs to mean something, like what happened to Job.

  As for her own pain, she doesn’t look for a point. She knows if she can inhabit it fully, it will eventually go away. And after ten or eleven hours, it does. It goes away.

  RIGHT AROUND THE TWENTY-THREE-HOUR MARK, Sorry and Penny are let go.

  Their valuables are returned to them, including Sorry’s cigarettes and Penny’s phone. “I am so fucking happy to hear from you,” Rob says when she calls. “You would not believe what’s been going on here. How’s Sorry?”

  “Defiant. Unbowed.”

  “She should be. I’ll tell you later.”

  Sorry appears elated enough to skip. “I’m so fucking relieved,” she says, inhaling deeply from her first cigarette on the sidewalk outside the facility. “They never even ran my driver’s license!”

  Penny, too, is pretty darn cheerful to be out of the Tombs. She uses her phone to summon an
Uber (gypsy cab), remarking that she will probably start receiving advertising aimed at petty criminals, based on her location alone—and it’s true. Ads on Google mail spontaneously offer her bail bond and mail-order weapons with no background check.

  “Are you sure you want to take a car all the way to JC?” Sorry asks. “I have enough cash for the train.”

  Penny says she’s allowed to use her mom’s accounts in emergencies. She orders the driver to drop her off at the nearest Duane Reade and circle the block. Getting back in the car, she sings “ibuprofen” to the tune of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” She washes one down with cola, even though the pain is gone. She offers Sorry an ethanol-drenched disinfectant wipe, and they scrub their hands, cheeks, foreheads, noses, necks, and ears.

  The driver steers toward the tunnel entrance. She searches for #climbit. She sees Sorry’s video. She feels surprised that there is no call to action from DJD.

  She texts Sunshine, wondering if the DJD residents plan to do anything in response to the events at the Freedom Tower. He replies that Susannah’s parents interrupted a strategy meeting with urgent requests that all actions be halted, and that the DJD residents are complying, despite their rage. He is reliant on Susannah’s parents—who are staying at a hotel in Manhattan and not eager to talk to him—for information on Susannah’s condition, so he can say only that she has regained consciousness.

  THEY ARRIVE AT NICOTINE TO find Rob in the kitchen making macaroni and cheese with spelt rotini and Gruyère (soup kitchen donations nobody wanted). Sorry calls dibs on the shower, so he tells Penny the story of Amalia’s visit.

  He makes it brief, dry, and factual: Amalia came to Nicotine, stalking Matt. Tony led her aside, calmed her, persuaded her to reveal a set of values more indicative of a Maoist guerrilla than an HR manager at a bank . . . “Your family is full of surprises,” he concludes.

  During the story, Penny squirms in embarrassment and says “oh my god” many times. Repeatedly she glances at her phone, but she does not call her mother.

  She waits until after eating, and for the boiler to reheat completely following Sorry’s long shower, to take an extra-long shower herself.

  She falls asleep in Rob’s bed. Her own suffering is forgotten, but as she dozes off her body jerks awake with images of Susannah’s fall.

  Rob watches her and strokes her hair. When she is asleep, before nine o’clock, he grabs the bottle containing the last of his expensive bourbon and goes downstairs to chat with Sorry.

  AROUND 11:30 P.M., ROUGHLY TWENTY-FOUR hours after their parting, Amalia texts Tony, inviting him to visit her sometime in Morristown.

  Already in his sleepwear (too-large T-shirt, nothing on the bottom), in bed with his tablet computer, Tony volunteers to visit the very next day. He looks up the Kogi on Wikipedia and reads about them. He looks up Norm and finds him on Amazon and Google Books. He reads a few excerpts and decides that even alive, he would have been no competition, because he was a huge bore, obsessed with illness and purging.

  Long after midnight, he tries the search term “Kogi” on the environmentalist pornography service he subscribes to (“Fuck for Forest”). It offers no Kogi-themed videos.

  He watches an Italian teenager play with a dildo free of charge on YouPorn.

  THE NEXT MORNING, ROB MAKES boysenberry pancakes for Penny. He sees her off for her walk home to Tranquility in light rain with an umbrella from the FREE box. He returns upstairs and knocks on Jazz’s many-paned glass door. “Come in,” she says.

  “Hey, J. How’s the climate?”

  “Supreme.”

  “How’s the landlord?”

  “Hot. I’m reading this great book, the memoirs of Jean Cocteau.”

  “I heard he was good.”

  “He’s got that breezy, casual sophistication I’m always aiming for and never hitting. Like fucking a garbage truck designer who drives an Audi. He’s not really a princely prize. His art collection is the latest in porn tech. But he’s hot.”

  With a sigh, Rob sits down on the bed so that Jazz can read his mind.

  “You’re too paranoid,” she says all of a sudden, leaning toward him to rest her hands on his forearm. “It’s like you got your entire sex education from Houellebecq novels. Now you think it’s a heterosexual market economy and you’re overleveraged—like any woman who sees your dick is going to run out and write a blog post about the emperor’s new clothes. Well, guess what? It’s not a heterosexual market economy. Heterosexuality is over. Who even wants intercourse anymore? Me and the landlord, maybe! Every other woman I know wants head, not to mention every other man.”

  Reaching up tenderly to fix a stray bobby pin in her hair, he says, “But I always wanted to be a heavy-hung stud and impale women on my prong until they’re helpless, quivering protoplasm.”

  She frowns.

  “I mean, when I go down on a woman, it kind of makes me want to fuck.”

  “Happens to me all the time,” Jazz says. “It’s the hetero-normative paradigm in action. But”—she holds up a slender fist—“I can go right up most girls with my arm.”

  Rob looks down at his large hands and says, “It wouldn’t be the same for me. I have options.”

  “So use your dick!”

  “Jazz. That’s what I’m saying. Nobody wants it. Fucking happens in a woman’s mind. You can’t fuck alone. You know what I mean. You do the exact same thing, and depending on whether she wants it, it’s rape or the highlight of her life. Well, girls take one look at my dick and say, ‘Ooh, baby, I love it when you make me come with your mouth.’”

  Jazz laughs.

  “But God forbid I should ask anybody to do so much as jerk me off. Even the virgins in high school were like, ‘Excuse me? This is not what I ordered.’ And you know women compare notes. If I get naked once, it’s over. My body image is fucked. I’m traumatized by rejection like a fat chick—like a hairy fat chick, with boils on her butt she drains with a shunt. I seriously cannot imagine getting naked with somebody who wasn’t in love with me—but you know what? I am not interested in that person. The woman who loves me no matter what, like she’s my fucking mom. I’d rather be a monk. There’s generations of religious in my family. It works for me. Sort of. Not really. I have problems. I’m not happy right now. I want to get bombed off my ass and dip tobacco until everything goes back to normal.”

  Jazz leans back to reflect. She says, “You ever done bondage?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s what you need. Tie a person up, and it’s all relative. Just look at her. After a while, she’ll come if you touch her nipple. If it’s protoplasm you’re after.”

  “Sounds like fun, for her—”

  “Then blindfold her before you take off your pants, if you’re so worried about the visuals! Keep your hand on her to confuse her. Don’t use rope or belts. Use scarves. And don’t say ‘impale.’ It’s gross.”

  He picks up a conch shell lying on a bookcase. He turns it this way and that, holds it to his ear, stretches his arms and back, and says, “I love you, Jazz.”

  “I love you, too, Robby.”

  “Anybody else might feel sorry for me for like one second. But you’re always like, ‘try my obvious solution, you whiner.’ I can’t talk to you without feeling better. And I didn’t even want to feel better.”

  “Did you hear the ocean?”

  “Yup. It’s right in there where you left it.” He returns the shell to its place on the bookcase.

  TONY COLLAPSES HIS FOLDING BIKE to take it on the bus. As a hostess gift, he packs one of Jazz’s tobacco plants into a garbage bag, tying it shut with a green ribbon liberated from Anka. (The ribbon has been lying on the kitchen floor for several days, so he feels it is fair game.)

  He rolls up to the house in Morristown, guided by the maps app on his phone. When he arrives, he sees that the black and maroon blobs on the green background around the black H are large hemlocks and copper beeches. He presses the solitary BAKER button on a black panel with room
for several more buttons, and Amalia buzzes him in.

  “So much space and no garden,” he says. “With acreage like this, you could keep a flock of pygmy sheep.” He hands over the tobacco plant.

  She sets it down on the brick front porch and laughs, flattered. “Yes, it’s big, no? Norm was a smart investor.”

  “I’m sorry about him,” Tony says. “I mean, that he died. Though I might not be standing here if he were alive—”

  “He was old and sick. I was his second wife, you know? A lot younger.” She smiles. She wears black leggings and a white T-shirt—a look inspired by Penny, or rather a look directly borrowed from Penny, some of whose clothes are upstairs in a drawer. “Coffee?” she asks.

  When the conversation flags, she takes him around the yard. He plants the tobacco in a shallow pit, adding neither water nor fertilizer. She warms up lunch. They eat, speaking at intervals with long gaps.

  After lunch Amalia drives Tony to the botanical garden, saying it might give her some ideas.

  She is very conscientious, reading the labels on roses and camellias. She stands transfixed by a potted palm and remarks, “How can it live in winter?” She touches the leaves to see if they are plastic. In the herb garden, she points out oregano with delight, saying she has eaten it with spaghetti sauce.

  “You don’t know jack shit about gardens, do you?” Tony asks, deep in the arboretum.

  “No! I told you, I work in HR.” Scampering, she grasps a young pine tree bole with one hand as she passes and swings around it like a teenager displaying herself. Her long hair sways. Tony feels an indistinct pleasure.

  “I thought you were from some primitive hill tribe. Subsistence agriculture or what-have-you.”

  “I learned to gather foodstuffs in the forest. That’s how I survived when I ran away.”

  “That’s amazing, that you ran away and survived.”

  “Ha. For girls, it’s always easier if you run away. You don’t have to share anymore! Ha, that sounds bad. But it’s a different life when you have nothing. Now I like to share.”