Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  Susannah’s friends fume. When they see Anka or Penny, they don’t say hi.

  Susannah’s circle includes all the youngest and prettiest women in the CHA community. Their clout is massive.

  Sunshine doesn’t bad-mouth Nicotine to anyone who lives at Tranquility. His strict honor code tells him it would be wrong to render Penny homeless. As for rendering Anka homeless, he figures it’s only a matter of time anyway, since she’s living at DJD provisionally, on Susannah’s furniture, and no one is talking to her. She’s going to get lonely and move out. Her work on HIV doesn’t fit the house’s profile anyway.

  THE SECOND MEETING AT DJD is sparsely attended: Anka, Penny, Rufus, Maureen, Stevie, and Barry—that is, Anka and all the Tranquility residents except Jacob. The DJD residents go about their business, upstairs or in the kitchen.

  “This is the perfect issue for Tranquility,” Anka says. “We have native people being driven from their homes by an entrepreneur. This isn’t like normal gentrification, where it’s just renters being priced out. Rob and Jazz built that house. They own it. It was a ruin before Rob moved in.”

  “But it was in that guy’s family,” Maureen says. “So he’s naturally more attuned to the spirit of the house. The genius loci, you know, the sense of place? That’s where his roots are. It’s part of his childhood.”

  “He let it fall down, and now he’s tearing it up. He doesn’t care about that house! He’s putting in new flooring and wallpaper, and repainting everything! It’s going to be unrecognizable. How is that like having roots? To him, that house is just one more investment. He’s probably getting primed to sell it.”

  Stevie says, “Anybody who would sell his own heritage doesn’t deserve to inherit it.”

  Penny doesn’t say anything, but she feels proud of her housemates.

  The committee reaches consensus that Rob and Jazz are indigenous to Nicotine and that Matt’s financial commitment cancels out his hereditary claims.

  But no one has a practicable suggestion for what to do about it. Sabotage plans keep running up against the (dummy) surveillance cameras, while plans to betray Matt to various authorities founder on the uncertain legal status of the CHA houses and/or Jazz’s gun. The committee agrees to reconvene.

  THE THIRD MEETING IS HELD at Tranquility. Penny finds herself alone with Jacob. Having skipped the first two meetings, he is now curious about the movement. He asks Penny to fill him in. She tells him everything she knows about Matt’s plans.

  In response he lauds Matt’s work on the house, which frankly was a dump, with the toilet in the kitchen and a room full of buckets of you-know-what, come on, admit it, that’s so weird it’s almost sick. He never met Rob but you have to admit—

  Penny says she doesn’t have to admit anything, and breaks the meeting off.

  SHE SITS AT THE KITCHEN table on Saturday morning with her chin in her hand, spinning a nickel on its edge. She does her best not to think about anything but commodities, because her competing thoughts, when she has them, tell her she is sad and stupid.

  Her campaign against Jazz’s thing with Matt, for instance—that was real bright. She got what she was after. They broke up! Nice work, Penny! What happened then was so obviously bound to happen, she feels like she did it herself. Drove Rob and Jazz into each other’s arms. Scared them into leaving town together. Why the big blind spot? What made her think Matt would ever submit calmly to frustration?

  She recalls her not-so-long-ago insight that even her father deferred to him. At the time she thought it meant Norm was weak. Now she feels—like a stomachache—how presumptuous she was to think Matt might be thwarted and threatened and placated and rendered harmless in due order like a normal person.

  When she thinks of him now, she imagines a stone idol that must be propitiated by regular sacrifice. She sees herself throwing marigold petals on the Matt statue and rubbing its feet with ghee. Nothing can hurt it. No knife can penetrate its stony power. “I hate you,” she says aloud.

  She opens her laptop and writes to her friend Fon in Terre Haute.

  Hey Fon, how’s it hanging? So much for a life of crime! I got a JOB. At Mom’s bank. FUCK! And that man I’m IN LOVE WITH is in WHERE THE FUCK, I DON’T KNOW. He had no reason to leave town or stop talking to me, unless you count my fucking brother trying to kill him. West Coast? With two of his housemates. One’s fat as a tick, not an issue, the other is this armed and dangerous love goddess

  She regards the draft e-mail. She realizes she may not be doing anyone a favor by sending it over the Internet. “Armed and dangerous.” Not good.

  She considers G-chatting with Fon, or calling her. She remembers the dictation software in her phone that understands her every word.

  She deletes what she has written and starts again.

  Hey Fon. Things here are crazy. But I got a job! Mom’s bank. I’ll come see you in paradise after I get vacation days. My new Anglo name is Gypsy Lee Baker. Like it? Love, GLB

  She sends the e-mail and doesn’t get an answer.

  Her phone rings. It is Rob. Without the sadness lifting, she has an out-of-body experience, wound up so tight she can barely breathe.

  “We’ll be in Oakland soon,” he says. “You want to come out?”

  “I got a job.”

  “Already? You already working?”

  “No. I took an offer with a starting date next month.”

  “So come to Oakland.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Albuquerque. Lot of bikes, but no subway. It’s hot as fuck. I’m looking forward to the coast. Come join us.”

  “No. Bye, Rob.” She hangs up.

  She stares at her phone and feels her stress evaporate—the stress of being in love. It’s as if she ordered herself to cut it in half with scissors. She isn’t just one person anymore.

  Barry enters the kitchen. “Hey, Penny. Why you crying? I hear you got your reasons.”

  She wipes her nose and says, “What are you talking about?”

  “You were standing with the Blue Bloc at the Freedom Tower.”

  “Yeah, and I got arrested and spent twenty-four hours in the Tombs!”

  He snickers.

  She closes her laptop and goes up to her room. She goes online and shops for studio apartments.

  She hates her housemates now, and nearly everyone in CHA, with a hate that is conscious and rational. Given the choice between her and Matt, they have chosen Matt.

  Her hate for them flows parallel to her hate for Matt, so the two might reasonably be expected to unite into a single, stronger hate. Instead she broods about how much she hates anarchists. How much she would pay to get away from them. What a shitty apartment she would rent in Queens just to be sure she never sees them again.

  That is, she can’t consciously hate Matt without thinking of Rob and Jazz, so she hates anarchists instead.

  But she barely hates them at all, really. They’re such ineffectual live-and-let-live pseudo-revolutionaries, she has to laugh.

  She goes back to hating Matt, imagining him with Jazz. For a moment she forgets the issue of apartments.

  Seeing an opportunity, her mind jumps on the idle computing power and devotes it to the long-neglected task of remembering Rob. He flashes on her like a forgotten dose of LSD. She goes from staring at a listing for a studio in Inwood to feeling hot and cold and a little sick and like he’s right in front of her, so close they overlap. There’s a dull ache in her vagina, and her soul is banging on her breastbone from the inside.

  She calls him back and reaches him in the passenger seat of the minivan. Sorry is driving, and Jazz is sprawled out on the bench seat.

  “Tell me,” she says without saying hello. “Are you really moving to Oakland?”

  “I don’t know. Right now I’m afraid to come home. If I even had a home! It’s that simple.”

  “I love you and I want to be with you.”

  “Then come visit us in Oakland.”

  “Why are you saying that? Why? T
o hurt me? So I can come out there and hang with you and Jazz?”

  “We’re not a couple.”

  “They’re not a couple!” Sorry yells, so loud Penny can hear her clearly. “They have fucking wretched sex! When they fuck you can hear a pin drop!”

  “Tell Sorry thanks,” Penny says.

  “It’s you he loves!”

  “We can’t be described as a couple,” Rob reiterates. “We’re nonmonogamous.”

  “Let me talk to Sorry,” Penny says, and Rob gives her the phone. “Hey, Sorry. Do not fucking torture me. Don’t say that shit if it’s not true.” Penny hears a harrumph of confirmation. “I know Jazz is there. Hey, Jazz. Jas-mine!” Sorry hands the phone to Jazz. “Jazz, dude, tell me the truth. Do you and Rob have hot sex?”

  “I can’t stop thinking about Matt.”

  “God almighty!” Rob cries.

  “Cut me some slack,” Jazz says. “He’s a very intense experience.”

  “That’s all I want to hear,” Penny says. “I think I might come out and visit before I start my job.”

  SPRAWLED OUT ON THE BENCH seat, Jazz is texting. Out skinny-dipping I saw a panther, she writes. It reminded me of you. It had its claws in my heart and its teeth in my throat. It was unforgettable. Not in a good way. I don’t want to see you again in this life, but I’d be happy if you were the last thing I saw. She composes absent-mindedly, like a teenager drafting a diary entry he plans to delete—deep feelings, too worthless to matter much. She adds another Not good and makes the text go away by sending it to Matt.

  It is not a style of rhetoric calculated to calm him down. His wish to fuck her seems to take in not only his genitals but also his entire body, his office, several feet of the topsoil of Bayonne, and the sky. He wipes away a tear, feeling that unsatisfied lust such as his has never been known by any man.

  Guess you’re west of the Rockies, he types. Thanks to his friend on the police force, he knows roughly where she is and can find out her exact coordinates on short notice. But he assumes that simply knowing where she is won’t be much help, since it generally equates to knowing where Rob and Sorry are. What he wants is to make a date, and for that he needs the name of a city, so he can look up a highly recommended restaurant with a nice hotel upstairs.

  It doesn’t matter where we are, she writes. I don’t want what you want. It’s over.

  We need to talk before you know what I want. We never talked.

  Jazz can’t deny it. She taps out, I don’t want to talk. It’s too late. Think about what we did to each other. Make yourself THINK about it. You hurt my best friend so bad. I love Rob. You made me fuck up our house. I loved that house.

  He replies, You would have been within your rights to kill me, as an intruder in your home. It would have been self-defense. But you didn’t kill me. You didn’t even hurt me. You can’t. And I would never hurt you. I’m so sorry about your friend and your house. So sorry. Because I lost the best thing I ever had. Something I didn’t know existed until I met you. Love for a woman, of all things. I love you, Jasmine.

  Reading that gives her a strange sensation, as if her eyes had gained weight. She squeezes them shut, wanting to dive in. The memory of holding a gun on him is traced into the gesture of scrunching up her eyes. The hesitation before diving into blood. The same sense of power and mercy floods her mind, making her feel weightless. She squirms. Sorry turns and looks at her.

  We might make the suburbs of SF soon, she taps. You name the vegan lesbian coffee shop, I’ll give you a date and time.

  Never be scared of me again, he replies. I cannot make myself want to hurt you anymore. Tried. Can’t do it. Mea culpa!

  Nothing ever terrifies me but myself, she replies.

  A moment later she adds, And you’re the next best thing.

  Another moment later: Also mountain lions.

  In his office in Bayonne, Matt feels his balls tighten and flatten against his perineum. He shifts his weight and opens his fly just to give his dick some space. He touches himself with his index finger and thumb and rummages in his takeout bag for a napkin. He does not feel happy.

  LATE THE NEXT MORNING, WHILE Penny is drinking coffee in bed, Amalia calls her to say an old family friend is visiting from Baltimore, and can she come over.

  “Now?” she asks.

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  “I’m flying out Thursday to see some friends—some Jersey City friends who just moved to Oakland. I’m going to their housewarming party, to help them get set up. I’ll need to pack.”

  “What about Lorraine? She hasn’t seen you in so long.”

  “I’ll see her next time. You’ll have fun together. She’ll meet Tony. But, Mom, there’s something I have to tell you. You know Dad’s house that filled up knee-deep with shit? You know what Matt did? He kicked my friends out and squatted it, and cleaned it up, and he’s turning it into a community center called the Norman Baker Center.”

  “That is so nice! What a happy ending! Now you both have productive work!”

  “No. This is Matt, Mom. He kicked my friends out by trying to kill one of them, and they had to fight him off with a gun, and he trashed the place, and they went on a road trip because they were so scared of him, and now they’re hiding from him in California.”

  “That sounds like crazy psychodrama, and finally Matt is doing something worthwhile. He was always so selfish, working with garbage. Who needs garbage? But a community center for that terrible ghetto! Maybe he will grow up to be a man we can respect.”

  Penny pauses with a sense of reaching up into her brain and flipping a switch to turn her principles off. She has met her mother, after all. She knows the reality of Amalia—adaptability and pragmatism. Like Jazz, her mother dwells in the monadic real world, where the truth is just another way of manipulating people. The best way.

  And what’s even stronger than the truth? Warm bodies to defend it. Facts on the ground. She sees a way to tip the balance of power away from Matt, if only for one day.

  She says, “You know, Mom, I was thinking—I don’t know exactly when the Center’s opening—but you should spread the word in Norm’s network. All those people who came to the memorial service. They’re going to be just thrilled about the Center.”

  “Oh yes, I’ll do that.”

  “I bet Matt will do a really nice grand opening party.”

  After the phone call, Penny lies back. To clear her mind of thoughts of Matt and her mother, she entertains sexual fantasies of Rob. The landscape of San Francisco plays a central role. Rob does not come to her bed; he stands wreathed in fog on a grassy promontory, behind him a huge red suspension bridge. She floats toward him, disembodied. The bridge remains visible out of the corner of her eye, whatever the imaginary Rob does to her with his mind.

  THE SIGN GOES UP: BAKER BOOKS. The relevant permits have been expedited. The remodeling of Nicotine has taken less than six weeks. The grand opening is scheduled for a Sunday afternoon in September.

  The sign is pale green, with pink lettering. Between BAKER and BOOKS stands a variant of the circle-A emblem of anarcho-syndicalism—a capital A in a heart.

  ROB, JAZZ, AND SORRY APPROACH Oakland from the south, via Alameda, and as the first highway signs begin to point the way to the airport, Sorry says, “Take me there. The airport. My shit is packed, I have the cash, and I’m going to Venezuela. I’ll fly standby. Take a right.”

  Rob puts on the turn signal and says, “This is sudden.”

  Jazz asks, “Don’t Jordanians need a visa for Venezuela?” She takes her phone out of her bag.

  The minivan slows into a curve. Rob says, “I wish you wouldn’t do this so suddenly. You know how many years we lived together? And now you’re blowing us off, just like that. It’s upsetting.”

  “Your heart’s on the left, and you’re clutching the middle,” Sorry says. “That’s not your heart. It’s your Rob sappiness, which I treasure more than any bodily organ in the world. You’re a great guy, and I’m going to
miss you. But I’ll be back! It would be stupid to insist on having input on where we’re staying and all that, when all I want to do is leave. And this is San Francisco. I could end up broke before we even get settled.”

  As they approach the terminal for international departures, Jazz finishes reading the relevant information from the Venezuelan consular Web site. “You need to apply for a visa in advance,” she says, “and provide evidence of regular income in your country of residence.”

  “Shit! What about Cuba and Bolivia?”

  “Isn’t North Korea Communist?” Rob asks. “What about Turkmenistan?” Jazz titters. Sorry frowns. He glides past the stopped cars and the people unloading baggage without slowing down. “I swear,” he says to Sorry, “Oakland is not going to cost you a dime. And you know why? Because you’re with us. And we’re broke.”

  “We don’t even know where you hide your cash,” Jazz adds.

  She goes on Twitter to ask Oakland anarchists about a place to stay. Not having signed on in weeks, she is surprised by the tenor of tweets addressed to her, many with the hashtag #climbit. “That’s weird,” she says.

  “What’s weird?” Sorry asks.

  “Look at your Twitter.”

  Sorry reads a bit and says, “Fuck.” She calls Anka and puts her on the speaker.

  “Where have you been?” Anka almost screeches. “You’ve been off the grid for weeks! Do you have any idea what’s been going on? People are saying we set up Susannah! They think Rob’s a snitch. You know who they love? Penny’s brother Matt! I have to get out of here.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Everybody. It’s common knowledge.”

  “Who started tweeting it?”

  “Barry at Tranquility. But I think it can be traced back to Sunshine, who’s my fucking housemate.”

  “Pack your bags,” Rob says. “We’re almost in Oakland. You should come to Oakland! Penny’s coming.”

  “You’ve never been to Oakland. It’s like West Philly. It’s gangland, with Crips and Bloods and Mara Salvatrucha. I mean the real West Philly, not the part near Penn they’ve been buying up. I mean like Sixty-Fifth Street! Promise me you will not go into any empty houses in Oakland. Swear it to me, right now.”