Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  There was a wild woman in the small shade beneath a juniper tree, her baby on the curb, a tiny filthy boy digging his fingers between the crumbling blue hexagons, trying to prize one up and find a scorpion.

  The road began from nowhere, out of the desert, built so that tanks could roll down it four abreast. Now she traveled down it, dribbling a ball. Things were being built or broken down and the stones they were made of lay in piles, huge wedges of concrete with rebar coming out, a tooth extracted from the earth, excavations in the dust. The edges of the road were crumbling. A highway went overhead and stopped in midair. In a vast ditch was a sea of tires and a man climbing through them, examining the treads.

  The spaces were wide and long, extending to the busy part of the city by the train station, a carnival of tan buses where the tunnel ended, the signs in Uighur and Chinese, migrants seeking work, sleeping wherever there was shade. In among the old adobe houses was the public security building and detention house made of tile, like a bathroom turned inside out. The sun sparked off the spire of a mosque above the construction sites. The dome was down below, but you could sense it, a bubble rising.

  They were going to move again, this time to the interior, to one of the factories that always needed migrants, in Shenzhen. A subsidy would be promised, an incentive for Uighur women. They would be told it was a fruit juice plant, but very little would be as advertised. The humidity of the rice-growing land south of the Yangtze River would be their first inkling of a mistake. A different heat from what they were used to in the desert. Haze everywhere, no horizon, the dull fields smudged into the sky. The factory produced polyethylene derivatives, without safety equipment except for surgical masks. If you put your head up, the Taiwanese bosses would make sure your head got pushed back down again. He did not have to pay you. You were an illegal immigrant in your own country, you found out. That’s how big China was.

  They would be sick, their own food would make them sick, bacteria in the water, unidentified meat on the tables along the surfaced road, flies and blood. No imams in the countryside; there was avian flu, malaria, and schistosomiasis. The whine in your ear whenever you dropped off. You smacked yourself. Scabs all over from scratching the bites. Her mother would not eat pork. They would squat in the wet village latrines next to the other girls. Fish in the scummed ponds. They would eat fish when they could get it, a farmer stepping on a live bream on the mud-covered floor of the bus. Her mother would have to ride the back of a motorbike with arms around a mototaxi man’s waist. There would be dogs in the roadway, a dead goat lying in the trash pile where she hunted for paper and plastic. They would eat lamb sometimes, mainly cabbage, cooking with round coal bricks, which they would gather, the half-burnt ones, whenever they found them. Mustard greens and potatoes and white rice and the bones of anything besides pork.

  From the factory, where they could not tolerate being locked in for their own protection, it was a short step to having nothing, to living in the brigade field, collecting paper and plastic for recycling. There would be no way to pay the fee for her mother to go to an infirmary. A lot of girls would have gone to work at the KTV bars to sing and drink with Party cadres, but at two in the morning, Zou Lei would gather beer bottles amid the litter of Styrofoam bowls dripping with chili oil and the throwaway chopsticks under the woven plastic tenting and the still-burning light bulbs strung over the unpaved street, then travel a kilometer back on the mud road with just a sense of the walls and huts in the blackness, turning into the paddy fields. Piles where the farmers dumped their shit. The horrible shit-stink in the dark. Stopping to set the clanking weight down, all alone on the mud lane that led out into the giant squares of water.

  If you wanted heaven, they would say, maybe you shouldn’t have come. There’s always America, if you think your feet will carry you. She met her mother in the crowd coming out of a mosque. They went to Liberation Boulevard and there were peasants, the sons of nomads, pulling enormous wooden wagons through the broken street. Desert people with gold teeth and leathery hands and faces. Men in white skull caps and dark suit jackets holding up flatbread, saying it is for sale. There were tubs of dates and nuts, watermelons cut open, the red flag of a butchered lamb hanging up, the spokes of cartwheels interlocking through the legs of people walking through the square, interlocking and scissoring, a hundred crossings. The late afternoon sun reflected off something bright at the edge of a mosaic fountain, one side for men, one side for women to wash their feet. A pair of cops with large oiled heads like seals went by.

  Her mother was recounting to her what the imam had said in his sermon. The loudspeaker said, If you suspect fundamentalism, tell your leaders. Zou Lei nodded at a group of young men and boys in tracksuits. One had a boa constrictor hanging around his neck, mirrored sunglasses, no shirt.

  Who are they?

  The children of the police.

  She saw razor blades and hypodermics in a bucket under a cart where her mother was buying apples. Zou Lei went up to the snake and touched it, the smooth, beaded surface slipping under her fingers.

  You cannot ask for the things of this life, her mother said.

  They went back to where they lived in a stinking concrete room next to a latrine, lay down in the same bed and couldn’t sleep. She was going to learn to march. She was going to practice in the field.

  In the night, she woke up. The bare bulb was on and her mother was turning in circles. She was chanting into her hands, her hair undone and swinging out, almost touching the wall. Zou Lei watched her mother spin, get dizzy and stagger. I’m on my horse. I’m in the larches. Zou Lei tried to get her back in bed. She claimed to have seen a stag. Zou Lei reached for the switch. They’ll charge us for the light.

  I went a thousand miles, her mother said. I should be weary, but I’m not.

  She got back in bed, fending off her daughter with her thick strong hand.

  They went to court. It had a brown carpet. Someone told her to stand your ass up. A white woman in a pinstriped skirt with a manila folder said, The people have no objection. No one told her why. Later, they just told her she was leaving. Pick your things up there, the deputy pointed. A paper bag with her jeans in it sat on the counter. She took her clothes and changed under the fluorescent light, not counting her money until she got outside. They buzzed the glass door open and she went out past the bulletin boards, the thumb-tacked notice that said To See Your Prisoner in four different languages, and out towards the open space of the small city—it was seven in the morning—the train tracks, barbed wire, and the water.

  On the bus, she leaned her head against the glass to watch them leaving town. They traveled past the peeling houses, His Grace of Healing. It was cheaper than the MetroNorth. The driver, on the PA, looked in the rearview. There’s no smoking, thank you. The drifter in a black cowboy hat, a swastika on his neck, said, Ya got a light? At Roy Rogers everyone else got back on eating except for her. She closed her eyes on 95, hearing someone’s headphones. When she opened her eyes, they were rolling through projects, and there were cops with web gear and soldiers with assault rifles in the Port Authority.

  3

  HE GOT PICKED UP before it was light, down where there were trees dark and arrow-shaped along the highway.

  You goin AWOL? the driver asked.

  That’s what I should have done, Skinner said.

  The sun broke and irradiated them in the cab. It painted the endless forest along the highway in cherry light. He watched it happen. Slowly the highway curved like the arc of a planet. Sitting high over the road in the cab. The big steady noise.

  He was not a big guy, but he had a large skull and hands, which made him seem bigger than he was. He put his boot on the dash without asking if that was okay. The driver had the interior of the cab upholstered in velvet and chrome.

  You live in here?

  Only when I’m away from home, the driver said and went through the production of showing him a photograph of his kids and his plain blond wife, posed in front of a
swirly background. That’s Kyle and that’s Connor. I live for them. My boys are my whole life.

  Skinner dropped the photograph on the dash. The driver picked it up with his pale red-freckled hand and put it away in his folding wallet.

  You plan on stopping at all?

  For what?

  For Mickey D’s or something?

  I don’t eat until I get where I’m going.

  Must be a hardass.

  Call it what you want, the driver said.

  Skinner had bothered the driver somehow. The driver told him: You got two ways you can do this. I can either keep going or I can stop. If I have to stop, you can thumb a ride with somebody else.

  Whatever, Skinner said. Do what you feel.

  Skinner put his other boot on the dash and watched the road. Lit a cigarette. He put his shades on. Behind his shades, his eyes went from the cars to the roadside to the side mirror and back to the cars. The traffic increased as they travelled north. He put his feet on the floor and sat up. The landscape changed to bare trees and brown hills. He lit another cigarette. Both he and the driver smoked, the radio playing country.

  A black car overtook them, cut around in front of them, and went speeding on ahead, weaving in and out of other cars. Skinner’s jaw flexed. He started jiggling his foot.

  You need to take a piss or something?

  On the radio, a woman sang: she’s got family pride.

  No, said Skinner.

  He put his boot up on the dash again.

  Are those things comfortable?

  Pretty much.

  He stuck his thumb in the stitching, pulled at the laces.

  They’re holding up all right. But these aren’t my last pair. My last pair got someone’s brain all over them.

  The driver looked at him.

  Fuckin army took half a year to give me a new pair. Where are we?

  Virginia still, I think.

  Skinner took a white hexagonal pill with Gatorade. He watched a McDonald’s sign go by. There started to be snow on the hills and it got colder in the cab. He wrapped himself in his green poncholiner, his large tan boots sticking out, his head bent against the edge of the seat, shades still on, pallid sunburned face, large hands with broken nails. He looked unconscious. The driver glanced at him. The sun went in and out like shadow play, like time-lapse photography, something with the clouds.

  He slept through Pennsylvania, where his mother and brother lived, and woke to rap music. The sky had changed to gray. He rubbed his face.

  The driver turned the radio off.

  Slumped, Skinner watched the road, catatonic.

  How long you think we’ve got?

  Could be a while.

  He looked in the trash underfoot and found the Gatorade bottle. That’s all right. Used to do this all the time. He turned sideways, filled it up. I better not see that, the driver said. You won’t. He capped it, put it warm and beer-colored in his assault pack.

  They were in the approach to the city for a long time, an identifiable feeling, the road getting worse, fast and narrow and crowded, thudding over breaks in the surface. Graffiti began popping up, a flash of it here and there, and then it multiplied. Skinner lit another cigarette and sat leaning forward, jiggling his foot.

  I think you overshot it, dude. It’s gotta be back there.

  They swung around west when it was almost sundown. The sky had cleared and they were driving fast along fences, houses, the adjoining highway tapering, disappearing, coming back, dividing. He was searching up ahead. There it is. He saw the famous skyline minus the two towers. It was very distant still and when the highway dipped it went away. Then he saw it again, a precise silhouette, the lava sunset behind it.

  The city disappeared behind the roadway, gravel pits, a mountain of sand, the sideways ladder of a crane. A glimpse of a sheet of water. The New York skyline came back. They were close now. Blond hair and tan tits on a billboard. Gentleman’s Club. He rubbed his hands. You catch the address? The driver said nothing.

  They barreled down an off-ramp, tenements rising around them like curtains, graffiti on the bricks. The piers of the highway flashed by outside the window. The elevated highway rose above them like an airplane lifting off over their heads. They were subject to the g-force pull of the big rig angling across the lanes, downshifting, cruising, decelerating neatly into a gas station. Airbrakes. Their bodies rocked forward. The driver thumped into low gear and made the rig crawl in next to the pump and when he killed the engine, there was a momentary quiet, though the engine seemed to continue running in Skinner’s head.

  This was as far as the driver was taking him, he was told—which was fine, he could see where he was going from here—and they climbed out. While the driver gassed the rig, Skinner went into the convenience store. He went directly to the jerky and pulled a bag of it off the metal tree and got a Red Bull out of the drink case. On his way to the register, he stopped at the magazines. There was a Haitian with blue-black skin reading car ads. Skinner reached across him and took a copy of Ironman, the bodybuilder on the cover holding so much weight the bar was bending and veins were webbed around his screaming neck. Skinner went up to the bulletproof window and dropped his bank card in the tray.

  Gimme a pack of Marlboros too.

  He went back outside and pulled his bags out of the cab. He shrugged into his camouflage field jacket and flipped his black hoodie over his head. The piss bottle he set by the curb for someone else to have. The driver, in nothing but a t-shirt, was still gassing the rig up. Skinner went over and asked him if he knew the way.

  That way somewhere.

  Skinner adjusted his pack straps, glanced at the highway. Then he picked up the military duffel at his feet, shook it, held it, gripping it. He looked at it. He did a curl with it. Then he slung it on.

  All right. Thanks for the lift.

  I don’t mind.

  The driver stuck out his hand at the last minute and they shook hands.

  Good luck.

  Later.

  Skinner went around the truck and disappeared.

  Now he was cutting through monumental project towers, his silhouette distorted by what he was carrying, a burdened figure moving steadily across the great barren landscape of giant shadows and building structures and cold lights filtering down. A single car was parked against a line of gated storefronts exploding with graffiti—huge, wild, blazing—the letters pumped up like muscles about to burst, like smoke bulging, billowing, swelling in a bubble over the steel and concrete walls, like everything was on fire. He crossed the open area, a solitary figure carrying his gear, and reentered the shadow on the other side.

  He was hiking by tenements so small you could reach in a window and put your hand out the door. They were burned-out and boarded-up and there were trash lots. Some of them were lived in. As he traveled, he was feeding jerky into his mouth and chewing. The Red Bull, which he had emptied down his throat and thrown at an oil drum, had frozen him to the core. Now his heart was pounding, his boots were whopping the concrete, steam was coming up from his face, and he was sweating in the cold.

  Hey, he said, when he saw somebody and tried to ask them where to go. Papi, they called him. Go there—and pointed towards the traffic lights ahead. Liquor store, groceria, Iglesias de Dios. From somewhere, there was Spanish music. Taillights shot by him and over a bridge. He crossed beneath the highway, in a great tall vault of dark, the steel being knocked by vehicles going over, and climbed pigeonshit-splattered stairs, coming to rooftop level, billboard level—cash for your car—and then he was looking at Manhattan across the black water, a postcard view with all the lights and just the sheer scale of it, the sky violet with energy.

  He took his cell phone out and took a picture of it. Steam was rising from his head from charging up the stairs. Then he turned around and took a picture of himself with the Empire State Building lit up laser green above his shoulder. His face was white and distracted in the phone flash.

  On the other side of t
he bridge, which spiraled down into a field, he came to a place where an avenue began, littered and dark, going long and straight for miles and getting brighter as it went, until it became dense with clustered lights in the distance, and he started down it, bent against his weight.

  He came to a wall mural of brown people working in the fields, wearing white dresses and straw hats, babies slung on their backs. He passed another mural of portraits of young men and their years of life and death. You Are in Our Hearts. There was a Salvation Army. A block later, he overtook two young women pushing baby carriages over the broken sidewalk, sparkling with broken glass. The Kingdom of the Almighty on a light box sign. A guy came out of a liquor store, wearing a cell phone earpiece, saying: Come uptown and check out what we doing. See how we provide. Skinner passed a fried-chicken restaurant. People moseyed into his way and he went around them. He was remarkably mobile despite the weight he carried, always slipping away and barely noticed in his faded, dusty-looking camouflage and boots, as if he had been doing farm work, head hidden under the black hood.

  A grand white car pulled up and a big woman climbed out wearing a short red leather jacket. Five guys on the corner in ski hats were looking at her. Damn, one of them was saying. Skinner stopped and spoke to them for a minute. They told Skinner where the action was.

  Forty-deuce.

  Is that where the hotels are at?

  That’s where the action at. Over here not really. It’s mad action down there. A hotel, I don’t know about. Beers, bitches, weed, good shit, I do know about, and they got it all downtown.