by Atticus Lish
We love you, Jake, his father said, still wearing the tie he taught high school history in, loosened, over a plaid shirt. He emailed Jake’s friends.
This was the news that Skinner received before he went to New York alone, holding to the idea that if he partied hard enough, he’d eventually succeed in having a good time and would start wanting to live again.
Broadway in the daylight. People streaming out of the subway, moving in clusters that broke apart into fragments and passed through other columns of people like a strainer. He smelled pretzels. A black Denali with the driver’s hand visible, resting on the steering wheel, an athlete’s hand, an expensive watch. All the girls wore Eskimo boots. Their hair bounced behind them. There were so many it was unbelievable. There were office chicks smoking outside the entranceways and there were guys in shirtsleeves coming out to smoke with them, young guys in slacks, just ordinary guys who had not drafted themselves after high school, and he heard the normal sound of their voices as he went by and the whole thing sounded strange.
He stayed at a hostel by the Port Authority, drinking and surfing the web. There were drag queens staggering sideways across the broken pavement when he went out for beer. He bought a bag of weed and smoked it with the window open wrapped in his poncholiner listening to the sirens. He checked his email, typed Hey dud whatsup, and hit send. No one wrote back from his unit. A block away, next to the peep shows and the Foo Ying Kitchen, he found a strip bar, the same blond hair and tan tits he had seen on the highway coming in. In a few days, his bank account was down a grand already. Awesome, he said, and toasted himself with a Red Bull. His clothes lay all over his bunk—jeans from American Eagle, shirts to go out and get laid in—bought with hundreds of dollars in hazard duty pay. He got dressed and went out drinking. At the Blarney Rock, where there was an American flag behind the bar and a memorial to the Towers and the faces of the fallen, a few guys bought him beers and clinked bottles with him and called him family. That’s it? he thought. But he stayed pleasant, watched the game. When he was falling down, they tried to offer him a ride. He left without speaking. Take it easy brother, they said. Let him go. Let him go. His mother emailed him from Pittsburgh to tell him he was wasting his life. He took his meds with beer and lay on his bunk with his tattooed arm over his face and his tan boot on the wall, the Chinese characters saying No Pain No Gain, and watched Sconyers convulsing in his head. The others at the hostel said, You were making noises in your sleep.
6
ONE DAY, THREE OR four days after arriving in the city, having just taken his meds, he went back down into the subway and sat down on the first train that came and didn’t move until after it had risen up out of the tunnel into daylight onto elevated tracks, passing the backs of billboards, train yards, and water towers. After a couple stops, he went up to the window and stuck his face against it and watched the rooftops coming. The stops kept coming. He had gotten a long way out. Across the field of rooftops, he saw cranes. Down below, he saw a car turning on the littered street and heard a burst of the hammer drill from an auto repair.
In theory, it might have been possible to figure out where he was from the map and how he could get back. Instead, he said to himself, No, let me go all the way to the end.
When they got to the last stop, he got off because he had to and went out on the street.
It was crowded and a woman bumped him with her shopping bags coming out of Caldor. He raised his hooded head and looked at her and she apologized. Along the curb, he noticed people sitting in the Asian squat, selling wallets, belts, New York hats, backpacks, and DVDs. It was very loud with people yelling. A truck was idling blocking the intersection, the engine spinning, and he could hear the diesel exploding in the shaking block of steel. Someone honked and Skinner twitched.
He lit a cigarette and watched pigs being offloaded onto the shoulders of Mexicans. They were carrying the heavy cold white carcasses through the crowd and in through the hanging plastic strips into the back of a Chinese market.
Vertical Chinese signs were everywhere. Someone tried to give him a flyer and he said, I don’t understand you, and dropped it. He went into a newsstand and got a Red Bull. In the back of the store, he stopped and stared at the magazines. All the metal slots were filled with porn. He saw a tan girl with her wet hair plastered to her face and her mascara streaked.
He kept getting pushed and it bothered him. He forced his way out through the people coming into the newsstand, and, once outside, drank his Red Bull moving with the crowd.
Another four-foot woman handed him a flyer.
Ma-sa-jee, she said.
The piece of paper said Bodywork 1 hour.
Awesome, he said, and stuffed it in his pocket.
The garbage on the street had a peculiar smell. In the windows, he saw red roast pork on steel hooks. A mother was squatting helping a boy urinate in the gutter. When he flipped his empty can into the garbage, an immigrant in flowered sleeve guards came behind him and picked it up with tongs. He heard a chanting, which was all their voices overlapping. The women wore black leather jackets and spike-heeled boots with buckles and fringe. One of them looked at him directly and she had eyeliner and a mane of dyed reddish hair and then he lost her in the crowd.
He went down the avenue, crossing under a railroad bridge, and searched down an alley, passing right by a doorway where each tread of the stairs said Table Shower, leading up to a massage parlor on the second floor. At night, the stairs would have been lit up like a runway and he would have guessed what it was then, but in the daytime you had to read Chinese to know what you were seeing. He came to the projects behind the train tracks. From here, he saw the bridge and the water and he went back down another alley until he was on the avenue with the crowd again.
He took the flyer out of his pocket and checked it. The crowd was taking him like a conveyer belt past everywhere he had already been. After he had gone beneath the railroad bridge a second time, he saw a group of men hanging around in front of what looked like a condemned building, smoking cigarettes. There was a dead gray neon sign on an upper floor that spelled KTV. Skinner tried to see inside through the thick smeared glass doors.
The men eyed him. What’s the foreigner doing? Look at this clothing of his. A cop? A health inspector. A person with time on his hands. Pay no attention to him.
Skinner pulled the door open and went inside.
The building was occupied and there were utilities functioning inside it, he could feel them right away. A back door was open and a young male, by the sound of his voice, was in the alley talking on the phone in a rough loud Asian language. Stairs led up and down. When Skinner began checking the first floor, he discovered a maze filled with ninety-nine-cent-store-type goods. Backpacks and umbrellas hung from the ceiling. The vendors, eating noodles out of Styrofoam bowls and talking loudly, went silent as he moved down the aisle. When he looked back, he realized they were watching him on closed circuit TV.
What’s down here?
They ignored him to his face. He saw them exchanging looks, and a woman stared at him as if he were a monster. A man in a gold chain circled behind him, pretending not to look at him. When Skinner repeated his question, a thick-faced woman of about forty, who was knitting, shook her head. Then she turned to the others and said, Impotent.
No speakie English, huh? Good to go.
He stuck his large, broken-nailed hand in a cardboard shipping box, took out a padded bra and chucked it back.
Clumping upstairs in his boots, he found nothing but a locked door on the second-story landing and a table covered in takeout condiment packets and other trash. He jogged back down to the first floor and stuck his head out in the alley, catching a whiff of garbage, seeing fire escapes, and hearing exhaust fans. Whoever had been on the phone out here had gone. He went back inside and checked down the stairs, this time descending to the basement.
In the basement, there were food stands packed in together. Fires were hissing and it was loud. Napkins were
soaking on the floor, the linoleum was rotting down to the wood beneath. He went around the rusting folding tables where Asians sat in jeans with keys on their belts, looking fixedly at their phones.
What you want? a woman yelled.
Where’s the massage at?
Where the who?
Where’s the massage spot at? The girls?
No! No girl! she yelled. Noodle!
Skinner tried to see inside her metal pot.
Well, what kind of noodles is it?
She pointed with the ladle at the sign overhead. Up there, she told him.
The sign said:
Feld poultry w/ family flavor northern hot $2.75.
He kept walking through the maze of tables and pillars holding up the bowing ceiling and the gas hissing and the yelling and the banging of woks. When there was nowhere else to go, he returned to a steel fire door with a half-lit exit sign askew above it, which he had noticed earlier, and checked it again. The alarm contacts were painted over. There was no handle on this side, but he could see the latch was not engaged. After glancing briefly over his shoulder, he wedged his fingers in the gap and pulled it open. Nothing went off. He held the door open and leaned inside, seeing a cinder block hallway.
The ceiling was half-ripped-down and there were acoustic tiles buckled, rotted, water-stained, and lying broken on the floor. He stepped inside. The fire door banged shut behind him. For a moment, he stood there listening. The air was cold. A sheet of plastic hung over a window in the cinder block wall and it puffed in when the air pressure changed. Through the plastic sheet, he could hear the street.
Something was humming, barely at the level of hearing, and his head turned towards the sound. He took a step, concrete shards popping under the heel of his boot. The humming was electricity, he thought. He moved down the hallway, past standpipes rising through the floor, the humming growing distinct. He went through a doorless doorway and began to see fluorescent light. Then the hallway angled and when he turned the corner, he saw someone.
She was sitting on the fire stairs in tight threadbare jeans. She had work-discolored hands and her dark hair was in a ponytail and he could see her thighs curve down to where she sat. A muscle ran up the side of her neck from her collar to her jaw. The brim of her hat tilted up and she looked at him.
Hey, he said.
She watched him coming towards her.
I’m cool. I just took a wrong turn.
You get lost, she said.
He came a little closer.
Yeah. I got lost.
She had not taken her eyes off him. At first, she had thought he was a cop. Now she was examining his camouflage.
You are army?
He glanced at himself.
Yeah. I just got out. I was down south until a couple days ago. I just got here. It’s my first time in New York.
She listened to this, put a lock of hair behind her ear.
You live here?
I live? she asked.
Yeah, you—do you live—he pointed at the ground—here?
New York? Yes, I live New York.
You like it?
Yes, good.
It’s supposed to be a good place to party.
Party?
You know, like beers, jamming out to music, whatever. Just partying…
He sang dahn dahn dahn da-dah and did a little goof-off dance.
I like, she smiled. This is very good.
Their eyes met and they looked away.
He took his cigarettes out.
You smoke?
No.
Good girl, huh?
I am runner.
Runner? Like running?
Yes, runner.
Why’d you want to know if I was in the army? Skinner asked.
Why? Why I ask?
Yeah… why?
Because in my family, we are the army.
You were in the army? What army?
Not I am. My father. In the People’s Liberation of China. My father is the sergeant.
No way! Is that why you’re strong? You look strong.
Strong? Yes! She stood up and stepped forward into a deep lunge. Everyday I am doing running, gymnastic. Like this one—and she dipped up and down, touching her knee to the floor.
Skinner watched her legs flexing.
I do many of them. And… and yangwotui.
What?
Yangwotui, she said. Pushing, like this one—she mimed doing pushups.
Most girls can’t do them.
Yes! I can do.
I don’t know. I have to see this.
I show you.
She got down, brushed concrete shards away from her hands, and hooked one foot behind her ankle. Skinner gazed at her cell phone outlined in the back pocket of her jeans. She did a perfect pushup. Then she took a breath and did a series of them.
Wow, he said.
She got up smiling, dusting off her hands.
Ten, she said.
That was awesome.
Please! she said, stepping back with a sweeping gesture, offering him the floor.
Who me?
Yes! You are push! Please!
How many you want? he asked, pulling off his camouflage.
Oh! One hundred! In China army, boys can do one hundred. If you will be better than them, maybe, I think, one hundred twenty!
Is that all?
He got down and started pushing.
She watched the nape of his erect short-cropped head, the ridged plates of his shoulders going together and apart, his kinetic energy as he threw his body up and down. He counted off in a rapid mild voice. Her eyes went from the star on his neck down to the fulcrum of his boots. In the center of his spine, his shirt was getting damp. He paused with his tattooed arms locked out and his triceps twitching, sucked air and kept going. His neck turned red. He kept his voice even as he counted off the hard ones. Finally, he grunted, and his back bent and he came up slowly.
Fifty okay?
You are good! She gave him the thumbs up.
I don’t know. Used to be.
Yes, strong! Very strong! she said.
It’s nothing great.
She felt his arm. He flexed for her and she gripped his muscle.
You have Chinese word?
He pulled his sleeve up and showed her.
It says No Pain, No Gain. Can you read it? Is that what it says?
Somethings like this, she said.
Want to try this? he asked pointing at his chest. Soberly, she felt his chest.
How about you? You show me?
Yes. She flexed her bicep for him. They both looked at her bicep as he felt it through her long underwear shirt.
What about the leg?
Leg? Okay.
She took a step forward with a bent knee and he placed his large hand on her thigh. Man, he sighed. She let him slide his hand around to her hip. Good? she asked. She flexed for him.
Damn.
After a second, she hipped away.
Skinner stared after her.
I go to work now.
You have to go?
Yes, I go.
He grabbed his camouflage off the stairs and hurried after her. She led them back through the derelict hallway and pushed out through the fire door.
Hey, wait.
Zou Lei slowed for him.
I want to ask you something, Skinner said.
In the morning, on a steep side street lined with bushes and fences with the feeling of a mountain trail above a highway, Zou Lei sees a woman in a conical straw hat with her hair divided into three black rivers, one down her back and one over either shoulder, hanging down to her waist. She is pushing a laundry cart with her bottles laid up pointing in opposite directions, the necks interlocking. The forked hair hangs like a ragged black shawl. A thin woman whose age is hard to tell without seeing her face, just the romance of her hair, as if she has prepared herself for a lover and was waiting years for him, a lifetime.
The cell phone
rang in her pocket while she was in a tile-walled sink room, chopping. She dropped her cleaver, wiped her hands on her apron and took her phone out.
Wai? she said. High-lo?
She checked the bars and listened but there was nothing there.
When she got her break, she went into the back alley and tried calling back again. Phone pressed to her ear, she walked back and forth beneath the fire escapes, hugging herself, looking up at the sky. It was bizarre and incandescent, like magnesium burning behind boiling yellow clouds. The line clicked and Skinner’s voice said hey.
Hai! she said. I call you back. I can’t pick up before. You call me, right?
A piece of squash was stuck to the heel of her work-swollen hand, and she wiped it off on her thigh, laughing at something he was saying. She leaned against the alley wall and rested her sneaker on the bricks behind her. He was saying we could get together. She was nodding.
If you’re free, he said.
Yes, I am free. As soon as work finish, I am free.
Listening to him talking, she tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled, dimples appearing below her cheekbones, her strong teeth visible, the paper-thin smile lines around her mouth.
7
THEY WERE SURROUNDED IN neon and headlights, striding through the darkness, going in and out of darkness and light among the Chinese signs and lights, Skinner almost shouting. Asians went around them. Zou Lei was marching with her arms crossed across her chest and her hair blowing around her face and she was laughing.
It’s funny story!
I’m like, no, dude!
This animal.