Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  The man who gave her the DVDs took care to avoid arrest. He would not give her his name, so she couldn’t rat him out if she got caught. All she knew about him was that he was from Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province and people from Wenzhou knew how to survive. On the phone, he would say to meet him in the doorway and she would go to the place he meant. He would drive up in an Expedition, his ball cap on sideways, and give her the goods. He looked like a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime—all dark clothes, down vest, fingerless gloves, smoking Mild Seven cigarettes. His face was lopsided, the result of ingesting pesticide as a child, which gave him the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.

  When she went out selling, she rode the train in her navy tracksuit, the satchel over her shoulder, holding the bootleg movies fanned out like playing cards in their clear plastic envelopes, murmuring:

  Deeweedee, deeweedee. Hello, deeweedee.

  What you got? the truants asked.

  Nah, they said and gave her her movies back. A working man in corrective glasses shook his head, uninterested in kung fu comedies like Dream Return to Tang Dynasty.

  Having made one sale, she got off at Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, turned her back to the platform, counted the cash, and hid it. The graffiti on the station tiles said Ca$h $mells. Beast. LLL. Byron. Ruthless AKA Jie Burn.

  She caught the train going the other way and took it all the way to Brooklyn, getting off downtown by the federal court buildings. There were cops in neoprene gloves and balaclavas and Arabs selling shishkawap, coal smoke blowing in the street, police barricades in front of the wide white buildings that looked like the White House.

  For a time, she strolled casually, watching the cops to see if they were writing tickets to street vendors.

  Then she went into a Wendy’s and went table to table flashing her movies. Big black couples told her no politely. A woman whose child was dressed the same as her boyfriend down to tiny sneakers and a denim hat told him: Jamal, stop playing.

  A man asked if she had any kung fu.

  They looked through what she had together. This one is kung fu, she told him. He said this is all right, but I want Jackie Chan.

  Jet Li is good, she tried to tell him.

  Jackie Chan is my man.

  Howbout this one?

  She held up a Hong Kong movie called Black Society in Chinese and Buttonman in English.

  Gotta be Jackie Chan, he said. Let me tell you what’s wrong with this here. They doing side effects in this movie. Jackie Chan don’t have no side effects. He do all his own stunts. Look here—and he made a sudden flurry of blocks and strikes, smacking his own arms and shouting: Hut!

  He wheeze-laughed. You see that, baby? Look here! He showed her his knuckles, which were calloused like the palms of his hands. All this here is from my Shaolin style. He took her hand and had her touch his hand. I never took no shit off these gunslingers out here.

  Okay. I get for you. Next time.

  I tell them, if you bad, bring it, thundercat!

  She went back outside the restaurant. There was construction hammering in the street, a giant truck with cable on a reel. A man from Lahore, Pakistan, a city at the end of the Karakoram Highway which came out of Western China, was selling fruit on the corner of Fulton Street. His beard was red. He had a piece of cardboard that he prayed on. She watched an NYPD patrol car drive by him and the driver look at him, but they didn’t look at her. She felt throughout her body that she was protected.

  The broad-shouldered American blacks rolling along Fulton Street looking in the windows of Jimmy Jazz wore big leather jackets with wings and eagles and griffins engraved across the shoulders in much the same pattern as Skinner’s tattoo.

  He’s with you, she believed.

  The NYPD would not stop her. If they scanned her, they would see an American flag on the scan. She beat her drum and his shadow flew before her. He raised her above the iron ground so her feet would not be torn. He kept her from being destroyed and defiled in a shitsmeared cell.

  On Pennsylvania Avenue, there were low buildings, the huge space of the winter sky, a fence with a faded basketball behind it. She climbed through a hole in the mesh, stepping over empty twenties and forties, and cut downhill in the dead weeds, a figure in a hood and jeans, convinced she would not fall, and stood on the median beneath the interchange. When the cars stopped for the light, she went out to the driver’s side windows holding out her movies.

  A woman bundled in a hat and hood and plaid jacket was selling roses. The light changed, and they went back to the median.

  Con cuidado, the woman told her.

  Yes. Sí.

  And you watching la policía. Siempre.

  The woman had a pretty face and conspicuous blackheads dotting her cheeks. She said she had a shopping cart that she could push away if the cops came, and she seemed to be saying that she had a van that she could put it in, but Zou Lei didn’t see one. The cops wrote her fines: one hundred, one-fifty, maybe two hundred.

  Yes. Sí. But what about that?

  The woman looked at herself where Zou Lei was pointing. She had a vendor’s license in a wallet strung around her neck. She held it in her mitten and said something about it. Then she tucked it in her plaid jacket pocket.

  It cost money? Dinero is a lot?

  The woman shook her head, talking Spanish. It was not a real license.

  Zou Lei bounced on her toes, waiting for the cars to stop, rubbing her hands.

  Mucho frío.

  Zou Lei nodded, Yes, sí, she knew.

  She was saying to herself: I will sell one more.

  You could do anything—sell toys, oranges, ice in the summer, phone cards so that people could call home. Singapore. Philippines. Yemen. Iraq. Ivory Coast. Salvador. You could give out flyers for all-you-can-eat, compramos d’oro—get a cart and roll it over hill and dale now that he is with you.

  She could take out a loan and buy a truck and then be truly free. And she fantasized that she and Skinner lived on the road together traveling from city to city, selling what they bought and traded. She saw them wearing sheath knives and cowboy hats and riding horses in a sun-filled land outside the reach of the authorities.

  13

  HE WANTED HER TO know that he was working too. I’m gonna follow the program that they got in here, start doin two-a-days. Doin my protein. All he had to do was find a gym without stupid rules and it was on.

  He was from a place called Shayler, which he described as pretty basic. There were bars, Lutheran churches, and a 7-11. When he said home, he pronounced it hoeme. The houses went up a hill, like a mining hill, close to West Virginia. Under the highway going into town were mountains of gray gravel. A lot of bars, a lot of drinking. Steel Town football was big. People were pretty racist. But they were open about it. They could be friends with anyone. That’s just how they were. Real patriotic. His house had a raccoon under it. They were poor. It was a poor area, basically. His mother, a lean energetic woman with short blond hair, had sat in their trailer reading a Reader’s Digest and drinking vodka out of a blue plastic cup. She was really big on anything unusual. Nothing unusual ever happened for the most part—except drinking. When he was five, probably his first memory, his mother showed him a picture of a two hundred-pound dog in TV Guide and said, Look at that. You ever see anything like that before? He would have signed up even if the recruiters hadn’t come right to his high school. 9/11 was the big reason, but he would have gone anyway, just to do something.

  As he talked, he had his tattoo-lettered arm around her and held his burning cigarette away from her while he smoked. He had played high school football, he said, and he remembered the stadium and the numbers on the score cards and the all-black team they played from the gangbanger area up the hill. A gas station outside the stadium was where they turned. All the white cars went down the hill to the white bars, and all the black cars went up the hill to the black bars on Lafayette Hill.

  Did you have a lot of boyfrie
nds?

  No.

  How do you say that?

  Nanpengyou.

  Nan-pong-yow. Did you?

  No. I fight with boys. What about you father?

  What about him?

  You don’t tell me about him.

  Skinner told her that once when he was seventeen, thereabouts, he was in a bar across the river and he realized the guy taking a leak at the urinal next to him was his father. He pictured him: Carhartt jacket and pants, incredibly hard hand when they shook hands, drinking with two women at the bar. That was his father. What about yours? Oh, yeah, I forgot. You told me all about him. The Chinese soldier. But girls? said Skinner. There’d been this one girl he’d liked, and the whole school had known he liked her. It had become a story that everyone talked about. It was the closest he ever came to being famous. When he would see her in front of school, they’d stare at each other with all this social pressure on them. She would just say hiiiiiiiiii, Brad. Nothing more than that ever happened. He never told her, I like you. There was no point in saying this since everyone else already knew it, including her. It was fifth grade and it was the beginning of the rumor mill.

  Did she break your heart?

  Oh yeah. She tore it in two.

  She weighed whether to tell him she had been to jail. You know, I am surprising that you like me.

  Why’s that?

  Because I am old.

  No, you’re not.

  The immigrant.

  So?

  You can have American girl. The yellow hair. The tall beautiful woman.

  I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not that tall. Nobody like that’s gonna go out with me.

  Yes, she would. Of course. She will love you.

  Love’s what makes the world go round for some people, Skinner said.

  What makes the world go round?

  To be honest with you. War.

  War?

  Actually, I’d say money first. Money, then war. Everybody’s all, like, patriotism, the flag, all this happy horseshit.

  Society need brave men and women to fight.

  At her request, he rolled over so she could look at his scar again.

  She said she saw it getting better.

  She put her foot behind her on a park bench and did one-legged lunges, carrying her weight on the working leg, hands clasped behind her head, eyes looking up at the sky over Queens, whispering the repetitions, seeing if she would do them all today. She had strong legs. She did not have a gym, she had the park. She had a schedule of exercises, days, sets, and reps, a page from Skinner’s magazine with Ms. Fitness on it folded in her bag at home. And she would learn from anyone she saw, and there was a lot to learn that people had invented when they had nothing else but their imaginations. The Latins brought work gloves to the park and did calisthenics routines learned in correctional facilities, different kinds of chin-ups, pushups with the hands wide, hands out front, lat pushups, diamond pushups, one-armed pushups, Cuban pushups, incline pushups with the feet up on a bench. And then they jogged around, arms beefed-up and swollen. She did pushups and step-ups on a bench and back extensions by the bars and then she got down on the concrete and did a splits, holding herself off the ground, and then jumped back up, her thighs tight.

  Dirty guys kicked through the weeds looking for dope bags, swinging their legs like scythes. Women in sagging sweatpants walked their pit bulls, talking to men from the houses on Elder Avenue in rasping voices, smoking while they talked. He’s a Red-nose. Half Rednose, half American pit. They’re twins. The other one is Lucky. This is Flash. He wants his mommy. Be careful. He’s a sweetie, but he bites.

  Through the diamond fence, a woman with a hospital cane and a purse began yelling at an old stooped woman half her size. You lost my keys! You lost my keys! I can’t get in without my keys.

  The Chinese arranged themselves in military ranks and played waltz music. A recorded voice said: yi… er… san… si… They spread their arms and lifted imaginary handfuls of water, earth, raised their arms and spread their fingers and let it rain down on their upturned heads, to cadence. In the cities of China, travelling monks climbed off grain trucks and performed in putties and slippers. They broke bricks over their shaved heads and hit each other in the stomachs with sledge hammers. They directed their qi to a point over their hearts and bent swords against their chests. Feral teenaged disciples walked on their hands for a furlong, performed handstand pushups, did them clapping with screams of effort. Villagers watched open-mouthed, the roots of their teeth showing in sun-wizened faces. The Chinese police watched the villagers to make sure that not too many of them were gathering in one place at one time and that all their activities were healthy, politically healthy.

  For the first time in her life, Zou Lei saw the members of a banned sect, the Falungong, in Kissena Park. They were wearing matching white tracksuits and stood in a ring and they turned the dharmic wheel to New Age music playing on an audio player. This wheel was an orb that existed in the cosmos, and they also had miniature wheels in each of their abdomens. They believed that the act of turning the wheel would bring them health, cure their cancer, and change history. In Queens they were free to change history. In China they went to detention centers, labor camps. Ultimately, through their exercises, they would be able to throw the business-suited men, those bestial criminals, in Beijing right out of power, they said. The sect members had a great deal of literature and photographic evidence of what the Chinese authorities did in the name of state security—the kidnapping, sexual torture, organ harvesting, and so on.

  14

  ON CANTONESE RADIO, SHE heard an ad for a shopping center called the Flushing Mall, located on 38th Road behind the Sheraton LaGuardia. The boss-wife said that’s where they’re making money. After work, Zou Lei went against the crowd towards Roosevelt Avenue and cut through a parking lot. She crossed the street and went inside a building—a general purpose office-retail space—with gold characters on the roof next to an Indian-run Holiday Inn.

  It was mobbed with kids, fifteen-year-old girls shouting, marching with their arms straight, screaming, telling off boys. They sat on the tables texting, wearing Eskimo boots, their jeans riding low. Adult men lifted their heads like horses, their long, hollow-cheeked skulls, staring. Putting their faces back in bowls, eyes over the rim. Plastic bags, black hair, and sneakers, eating with their long sharp fingers. The counters were spot-lit. You could see the wooden faces of the women in aprons, standing, waiting, waiting to serve somebody, and, behind them, the kitchens steaming like public showers.

  She went up to the first counter and said she was looking for a job.

  Talk to him. To that one.

  The boss had his hair Brylcreemed back. He was sitting in front of a tray of soaking wadded paper napkins, tendon, lotus, coughed-up tripe, wearing a pink shirt with the collar up. In the open V of his collar, he had a piece of jade. My name called Polo, he said. Coughed. Wiping his mouth and reddened nose. He had bracelet of wooden beads, the large hands of a northerner. He was slim and tall and placid.

  Where you work before?

  I work everywhere before. From here to Carolina. Fast food. I learn everything, work very hard. I’m fast, running. Open gate, light fire, pour oil, put the kettle on, dice meat, mince meat, parse meat, make rice, make sauce, pick greens, make dough, make dumplings, make french fries, carry in goods—because I’m strong, even though I’m female. I’ve had military training. Take order, shout order, deliver takeout, count the till, dump trash, sweep floor, mop floor, wipe counter, wash dish, bowl, pot, dipper, cleaver, shovel, chopstick, spoon, turn out the fire, shut the light, lock the gate. Every day, work hard, sleep sweet.

  You understand Cantonese?

  Of course, she lied.

  He stood up, leaving his tray. She picked it up and dumped it for him.

  That doesn’t matter, he said.

  I like to work, she said.

  He led her in past the counter. The other women stared at her.
She had a glimpse under the lights of wolf hair, eye shadow.

  I need people who can handle the big menu. We expand the item. His voice was drowned out by the exhaust fan as they went through the kitchen. Someone, his forearms pale and wet with sweat, jerked a wok, heaved it, and a burst of flame came up.

  They went out the back into a corridor that smelled like garbage, barrels of it, guts and rice. Kick marks, shoe treads on the walls. The caramelized filth, the dumpster. She followed him inside a storeroom where he started digging through papers in an empty Sun Disc vegetable box.

  You want the job, right?

  Of course.

  There was a health inspection certificate taped-up next to the Han May calendar. The typed-in name was Eugene Cheung D.B.A. Fong and Associates. Through the walls, she heard the people working on the other side.

  What is your surname?

  Zou.

  Given name?

  Lei.

  She watched him write it on a piece of paper that already had handwriting and phone numbers all over it, underlined, circled, and crossed-out.

  Not that Lei.

  Not flower-bud Lei?

  No. No grass top.

  This—lightning-thunder Lei? He wrote well.

  Yes.

  That’s not right for a girl. Are you a boy?

  That’s the way they named me.

  They want the son, I think. Or they do not recognize literacy. Many Chinese don’t recognize literacy. Right?

  She didn’t say anything.

  The Chinese people want a son. In America, girl power, right? You hear about it?

  Man-woman equality.

  You believe the girl power?

  Yes, she said.

  I think so, he smiled. The business expanding. This area getting bigger. A lot of money comes in. This just the beginning, so we try to change, capture the new wave. We import the ocean flavors, beef, eel, everything sa-cha. We want the team, like the army. He made a claw to show what he meant. Take over the market, make the market share bigger, bigger, bigger—