Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  Observers (the event draws a high-turnover crowd in constant rotation) speculate that once the last item leaves the curb, the smell will improve.

  When the curb is empty, a soft breeze carries the smell away, but it returns immediately. “Smells like pig manure,” one observer remarks. “Like living out in the country.”

  The day laborers accept one hundred dollars each and a tacit invitation to ransack the house. They discover a stash of clean clothing in Tony’s room. They wash in the kitchen, scrubbing their nails with dish soap and toothbrushes (the subcontractor forgot gloves), and put on the clothes Tony abandoned when he embarked on his new life. They agree to be picked up the next morning, same place, same time. They will continue cleaning the house the next day, at a new lower rate minus hazard pay.

  The subcontractor drives them to the bodega, where they stand leaning on his truck, drinking beer, in the gentle yellow light of a Meadowlands summer afternoon.

  JAZZ CALLS PENNY FROM THE road in Oklahoma the next morning.

  “It’s beautiful!” she says. “We’re in a landscape of total abstraction. Planet Earth re-imagined as a primitive computer graphic. We’re driving a black line bordered with green in the interstice between a gray plane and a yellow plane, with no landmarks except the bugs on the windshield.”

  Penny tells her that she’s very sorry, but she can’t fly to Santa Fe. She has a job interview.

  “Bummer,” Jazz says.

  “No, I think it’s a good thing. I need to be self-supporting. Everybody’s self-supporting in their own way, even if it’s just by getting somebody else to support them, like Tony. I don’t want to do that, not right now. I need a job. And this really might work out. It’s at my mom’s bank. They like her a lot. So maybe they’ll like me.”

  “They might even think you’re related, assuming you don’t open your mouth and speak.”

  “Believe me, letting my personality run free is not my first priority at job interviews. You wouldn’t even know it was me. I get all corporate.”

  “Sounds like a really meaningful use of your time.”

  “Don’t be a snob. Do you even work? I have no idea what you do for a living.”

  “Whatever it is, I haven’t done it since you met me. The money I have now, I got waitressing on a cruise ship last winter. Sometimes I lead these bus tours for retirees, to places like Atlantic City.”

  “And turn tricks with the old guys?”

  “Now you’re the snob,” Jazz says. “So get a corporate job, make some money, and chill out. You want to talk to Rob?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hey, Penny,” Rob says. “I’m sorry I blamed your brother on you. I’m still scared of him, but you should come see us when we get to Santa Cruz.”

  “Taos,” Jazz says.

  “I’ll tell you which it is,” Rob says to Penny.

  “What’s in Santa Cruz?”

  “I mean Santa Fe. I don’t know. Sorry wants to go to Cuba.”

  “Cuba is where the action is!” Sorry says. “The bicycle scene there is legendary! They use modified bikes to climb coconut palms!”

  “I don’t have a passport,” Rob says. “I’ve never been out of the country.”

  After the call ends, he says, “I can’t just go places, with no passport.”

  “You’ll love Taos,” Jazz says. “It’s full of hippie yuppie tourists who would buy a bike as a souvenir. Even if they never use it, it costs money and might turn out to be useful. Like owning a tent or an ice-cream maker. You never know when you might need it.”

  “The problem is raw materials. I need bikes. In JC I was scoring at least two free bike frames a week. I’m a scavenger. I can’t live in a place without trash.”

  “But won’t tourists pay more for your stuff than people in JC?”

  “Like hippie yuppies really buy recycled shit.”

  “So get a passport and come to Cuba!” Sorry says.

  “And get paid in—what do they have in Cuba?”

  “Free health care.”

  “That would be a sad ending to my story. Liberating poor people’s bikes, in exchange for the health care I’m going to need when they beat the shit out of me. Anyway, I already have free health care.” He turns and indicates his bandage.

  “Medicaid’s an instrument of oppression. We’d have had a revolution a long time ago if the poor were dying in the streets like they’re supposed to.”

  “You been downtown lately?”

  “Those people aren’t poor!” Sorry says. “They’re crazy, or drunks, or drug addicts, or subverting the dominant paradigm.”

  Jazz says, “You won’t see any of that bourgeois decadence in Cuba. They don’t even have artists or homosexuals.”

  “Okay, okay,” Sorry says. “Maybe I’ll go to Venezuela, or Bolivia. One of those places where the revolution’s working out, because they have crude oil instead of sugarcane.”

  “Oil is the key to autonomy,” Jazz says. “I say that in my capacity as an ethnic Kurd.”

  “Oil is death,” Rob says.

  “That’s right. Valuable enough to be worth fighting for.”

  “Nothing is that valuable. People need warmth and transportation, not oil.”

  “The IS and Boko Haram are fighting for God and virgins. Tell me how bikes and solar power are going to replace those, you anarchist peacenik.”

  Looking out the window at the featureless plains, Rob hums like Winnie-the-Pooh.

  Following a lengthy discussion, the three select a new destination: Oakland.

  None of them knows anything about Oakland, except that it is near rich places (San Francisco, Palo Alto), yet itself poor as Jersey City. They hope for Jersey City–like conditions.

  “I heard the squatter scene there is kind of embattled,” Sorry says.

  Rob says the market for bicycles rises and falls with mass transit, and that obviously squats aren’t going to be welcomed in a place with decent mass transit. You don’t get those same dead zones. But that’s life on the edge.

  “Also it’s way north. It’s in Northern California. We should be going via, like, Denver.”

  Rob pats the dashboard and speaks to the minivan. “Don’t be scared,” he says. “She doesn’t mean it.” Turning to Sorry, he adds, “We’re going south no matter what, because the Rockies are high. Really tall. It means we have to drive up the coast, but I’ve done worse things.”

  “I hate beaches,” Sorry says. “But it doesn’t matter. As long as we get there. We can go via Albuquerque and take I-5.”

  “Did you used to live out there?”

  She holds up her tablet computer. “I have this brain.”

  AFTER WORK, MATT DRIVES FROM his office to Nicotine to meet his contractor friend and survey the team’s progress. He pulls up around the corner, parking at a safe distance from the large green container into which workers with leather gloves are throwing handfuls of broken glass from a mortar pan.

  The work is going well and quickly. The four Guatemalans hired to do the demolition have been joined by a carpenter and a plumber with crews from Fiji and Ukraine. The house is empty of furniture and possessions such as Anka’s paintings (who knows where they went). Every floorboard, baseboard, and piece of plaster that was touched by the substance has been ripped out. An odor wafts from the container in the driveway, but the house smells unremarkable. The demolition crew works on the roof, knocking down Jazz’s room with hammers. By the time Matt and his friend the contractor arrive upstairs, it is a heap of wood and broken glass interspersed with leafless tobacco plants, textiles, and books.

  They enter Rob’s attic space and examine the chimney. It has one porthole for a Franklin stove, sealed up with a pie plate.

  “I could open this out into a fireplace,” the contractor says. “I’d just have to reinforce the stack below and cantilever it here.”

  “It’s too small,” Matt says. “I might want to build an extra chimney on the end of the house. A little bit of self-indulgence af
ter I insulate this place and put in a heat pump.”

  They walk downstairs. “You could fit more than one unit on each floor,” the contractor advises Matt. “Make these apartments too big, and you’re going to get families in here. Never trust a tenant to stay single. You have to put the squeeze on them from the start.”

  “It’s not apartments. It’s a community center. The first floor is an anarchist café bookstore. Above that we have our yoga classes, baby massage, all that shit. And I live on top. One apartment. The showers are for the yoga studio.”

  The contractor is silent. Finally he says, “That could work out pretty nice for you.”

  “It’s called the Norman Baker Center, after my father. He was born in this house. It’s a 501(c)(4) charitable institution.”

  “It’s going to revitalize this neighborhood right up, you old horn-dog.”

  That’s Matt’s plan. The name might attract donations or other support from his father’s cult, reducing his time to break even while freeing up cash for real estate speculation. Ultimately some neighbors may face rent hikes, but one anarchist in particular, if all goes well, will dwell rent-free in more comfortable surroundings than she has ever known. His own generosity moves him to tears, as he knows from hearing the Bread song “It Don’t Matter to Me” on the radio on the way over.

  PENNY CATCHES THE PATH TRAIN to midtown Manhattan for her job interviews at the bank. She feels sullen and rebellious, as well as tired. Those emotions keep her face still, her gait steady, her handshake firm, and her answers straightforward. She leaves with an appointment at an assessment center in Piscataway. She will spend the following Thursday and Friday taking IQ tests and vying with coapplicants for imaginary leadership roles.

  She arrives home fatigued. She dumps her briefcase by the door and heads straight to the kitchen. She longs for cigarettes and beer. She compromises on beer.

  Barry tells her the news. (Later she hears it from Maureen, Rufus, and Stevie.) “Did you hear Nicotine is being turned into an anarchist community center?”

  “What? Are they back?” Her mind flashes to the condition of the house when she last saw it, and she adds, “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s some guy we don’t know doing it. It’s going to be called the Norman Baker Center.”

  “The what?”

  “Don’t freak out, it’s just some local anarchist who happened to have the same last name as you, probably a hundred years ago. Anyway, there’s going to be a bookstore, and a bar, and meeting rooms. The Nicotine guys split, and nobody knows where they went, so it was up for grabs. I think it’s great somebody’s doing something for the community instead of just looking after their own interests by grabbing free real estate to live in it. You know what I mean? Squatting should be a means to an end, like with CHA, not just a way of saving on rent.”

  “Some people need to save on rent,” Penny says firmly.

  “Those people will always need help, until the revolution makes a clean slate. Giving activists a space to share strategies for effective resistance—that’s what will help us in the end. I worked at a bookstore in Arcata for a while. I’m going to talk to that guy. Maybe I can work at the store.”

  “If he’s putting money into fixing up the house,” Penny says, “maybe it’s not going to be a free store.”

  PENNY TEXTS ANKA, AND ANKA invites her to DJD to eat vegan pupusas.

  In the kitchen, Sunshine is singing Matt’s praises, sight unseen. He already has plans to co-opt the Center for educational events and films that celebrate energy efficiency—the climate change strategy that will finally make electricity too cheap to meter. (The feedback loop works by depressing demand so that coal-fired power becomes producers’ only economically viable option* [*under free market capitalism].)

  After dinner, Penny and Anka continue their talk upstairs, sitting on Susannah’s bed. Anka says, “Go back to the beginning, as if Sunshine hadn’t been in the kitchen. Tell me again.”

  “Matt is renovating—”

  “No! No! Bad! Wrong! Not happening!” They both laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” Penny says, “but if you had any idea what kind of thing Matt is capable of—”

  “He tried to kill Rob! Does he need to be capable of anything else? And now he’s taking over the house. He’s the scariest violent lunatic I ever saw, even including Jazz, and he’s rich, and good-looking, and obviously well connected in local government, if he can get a building permit that fast. We should go to the police.” They both laugh again. “I bet he has powder burns on his suit,” she adds. “Jazz would be so fucked.”

  “‘Norman Baker Center,’” Penny says. “You know what’s going to happen. All the jam-band kids that think my dad was a psychedelic drug wizard are going to show up and be tripping out and sleeping in the yard.”

  “Well, as long as they’re white,” Anka says. “They won’t mar Matt’s excellent investment.”

  “We should get a loan and buy DJD from CHA before the market takes off.”

  “Like CHA even has title. I mean, it’s possible. But I think they just do classic microfinance. Like three thousand bucks for two years at twenty-five percent, because everybody defaults. That kind of thing. It’s not on the scale of—where are you working again?”

  “Don’t make me say the name of Mom’s bank. It’s so embarrassing they might give me this job.”

  JAZZ RUNS DOWNHILL THROUGH GRAY badlands. Rob pulls on belts, checks oil, refills coolant. Sorry smokes a cigarette, sitting in the open side door of the minivan. The sun, behind a mountain, leaves the valley in shadow. A coyote crosses between the car and the low wall that divides the Petrified Forest parking lot from the surrounding expanse of talcum-powder-like dust.

  Rob follows Jazz down one of the many paths scofflaw tourists have worn into the landscape. It twists and turns. He enters a cool wash with a flat floor made of sand. He looks around in the stillness. A bird pipes thinly. Uphill from him, she lies on the sand. Her arms are stretched out, scars showing pale against tan skin.

  “I don’t want to go to Oakland,” she says. “I want this. The desert. Crisp, subtle colors and animals that are shy. With this huge, high sky. Not noise and chaos and junk.”

  “I can relate.”

  “Young people go to cities to show off.”

  “Do you know anybody in Taos?”

  “I have an old friend who moved there years ago.”

  Rob is silent for a long time. With a stick, smooth as driftwood, he scrapes a J into the hard sand. “I’m guessing it’s a man, and you want to make love to him.”

  Still lying motionless on her back, she says, “Yes.”

  AT 9:00 P.M., WHEN SHE assumes no one will be working, Penny breezes past Nicotine on her bike. The house is sheathed in scaffolding. Romanians are replacing the windows with modern double-glazing. Hondurans are painting the newly installed window frames dark green. As she walks up the front steps, she can see that their foreman is drinking iced coffee. He wipes his sweaty forehead and addresses her in Spanish. Without answering, she reads a brass plaque on the freshly sandblasted brick of the facade: NORMAN BAKER CENTER. The plaque is about two feet square and very shiny. She takes a quick picture of it with her phone. She peers into the former dining room and sees tall built-in bookshelves mounting to the ceiling. The kitchen has acquired a long, curving display case for baked goods. She returns to her bike and rides away fast.

  At DJD she finds Anka watching Homeland with Sunshine (her program, so not his CO2 footprint) on a laptop in the kitchen. “Hey,” she says. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Anka follows her out to the living room and asks, “What’s your idea?”

  She shows her the plaque. “We go tonight and write ‘Nicotine’ on it, and take another picture, and send it to Sorry. Because I haven’t told her about this, and I don’t know how.”

  “What about telling Rob?”

  “Fuck Rob.”

  Anka regards her gravely and says, “Rob and Jazz didn
’t do anything wrong. I think you’re getting confused.”

  “I’m not confused,” Penny says. “I know exactly how I feel. I don’t miss Sorry or Jazz, but I miss Rob so bad I could fucking kill him.”

  “That’s not childish.”

  “It’s how I feel. It’s not my job to tell the story in a way that makes me look good.”

  “You might feel better if you did.”

  Penny acquires a stark and tragic look, with tears. “So I should cut my losses, and take a write-down, and find another guy where I can get in on the ground floor? No way! Rob was my idea. I’m not ready to settle. I want my day in court!”

  “He’s your intellectual property,” Anka says, laughing.

  AFTER DARK, THEY RIDE OVER to Nicotine with a thick black marker.

  “Whoa,” Anka says when she sees the scaffolding. She creeps toward the porch, marker in hand.

  Penny says, “Stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Look up. Look at the light fixtures.”

  Anka looks up. Surveillance cameras.

  In the ceiling of the porch, where lightbulbs ought to be, transparent bowls studded with (fake) cameras. Anka retreats. They ride away.

  Up in Susannah’s old room, Penny sends Sorry the earlier picture of the plaque by daylight, headed “NICOTINE. Not a joke.”

  SORRY SEES IT A BIT later. Feeling bored, she is reviewing recent messages, sitting on the white molded plastic chair outside a motel room in eastern New Mexico, smoking a cigarette. She calls Penny and says, “What the fuck? Hey, Penny. We’re in New Mexico. Explain.”

  “There’s not a lot to say. Nicotine has been squatted by Matt and a bunch of construction workers.”

  “It really looks real. You’re not putting me on, right? Is there a Norman Baker Center somewhere else? Shit. You mean Matt Matt? We have to fight this.”

  “Good luck. Everybody loves it. It’s going to be an anarchist community center with a café bookstore and meeting rooms and a yoga studio. It’s going to anchor political empowerment and economic development in the whole neighborhood. Anka and I are already discussing our real estate investments.”