by Atticus Lish
Johnny staggered off to the bathroom he had cleaned, to use it, and while he was gone, the bartender took Skinner into his confidence again, telling him that Johnny should have been dead years ago. He shouldn’t be alive, he said with his voice lowered.
Skinner took another large swallow of his drink and felt it burn and make him slightly sick and then spread and commence the changes in his brain which felt like shades coming down.
I’ve been all over the world, the bartender was saying. Brazil, Amsterdam, China.
What were you doing over there?
Fucking whores.
No shit.
I’ve fucked whores everywhere. I call it touring and whoring.
Skinner didn’t understand the man’s brogue and made him repeat what he’d said.
Oh, touring. I get it now. You was touring! You never know with people what you’re gonna learn.
They toasted each other in formal style.
Another one for my man, Skinner said pointing at Johnny’s beer. He shook the bartender’s thin freckled hand. Get yourself one, dude.
Don’t mind if I do, the bartender said.
Another hour passed this way. The bartender, who wore a black t-shirt, came out from behind the bar, wearing black jeans and long black leather shoes that tapered to a squared-off toe, and went outside, taking a lighter from the black leather holster on his belt, to smoke a cigarette on what was now the street at night, taillights everywhere coming off the freeway, people going home from work, the subway rumbling underneath the bar. Johnny was leaning out of his chair talking to Skinner. The war was the subject of conversation once again.
Women and children, the old man said beseechingly. Women and children. I couldn’t understand it.
Skinner looked for the bartender.
Gimme another, dude.
As many as you want, guy.
There was no spout on the bottle and Skinner watched the clear liquor run back on the bartender’s knuckles when he poured. Then he drank it and tried to watch the blurry game. The players ran back and forth like herds of deer in a hunting program, like civilians in a hamlet. They fled across the court and then they stopped and smelled the air. They never knew who was going to hit them with the ball.
The commercial came on, the game having ended, and Skinner found himself alone.
Where’d he go?
Who, Johnny?
Yeah, him.
He had to go home, guy.
Skinner tried to stand and fell off his stool and hit his head on the bar. His cell phone and keys fell out of his jeans.
Shit, the bartender said. I thought you guys could hold a lot. I didn’t think you really had that much.
He was worried that the owner would see what was going on or, worse still, that they would have a cop come by. Looking over his shoulder, he came around the bar and helped him up.
Hold it. My keys.
I’ve got your keys. Let’s just get you on your way.
As the bartender was supporting him out the door, Skinner’s cell phone rang on the floor.
My phone.
The bartender went back and picked it up.
Hello? he said. Just a minute.
He gave the phone to Skinner.
Baby? He brought the phone up to his ear and heard her tiny voice against the sound of traffic. His eyes were closing. Zooey?
She said she hadn’t seen him, she had waited, and then had headed home.
Where are you, baby?
At home, she said.
There was silence on the line.
I was waiting for you, he said. That’s what I’ve been doing this whole time.
23
SKINNER THREW BACK A double and did his sarcastic dance. He had been drinking since noon, having taken the subway into the city to drink in the bars over by the Port Authority. Later he couldn’t dance. Now it was night and the traffic streamed by down the avenue into the glowing purple black between the buildings.
He went to the strip club on the billboard, not remembering how he navigated there among the theaters and bars, neon rainbows in his eyes. Security let him in, and in the light, the orange light, the waitress who came to get his one drink minimum could not get his attention. She touched his shoulder. Skinner startled. He stared at her narrow-eyed with condemnation. At the next table, he saw a little girl in nunlike habit screaming at her mother’s headless body.
What’s wrong? she said. I thought you were partying.
The lights went down and the dancer came out and Skinner left. The pill he took was medically not advised with all the alcohol he was consuming. Let me pick you up, he said to a guy with his two friends in the middle of Times Square.
Go fuck your mother, you fucking faggot.
No, not like that. Like this. He held his arms out. Fireman’s carry. Come on.
Somebody pushed him and he fell in the street and a cab almost hit him. He got right back up and did not seem to hear that anyone was laughing. This was outside another bar, a Con Ed truck nearby, compressor running.
Finally a teamster let Skinner lift him up, and Skinner ran down the block with him, then did a squat, then ran back, then walked. His breath was rising in the darkness. The teamster ordered Skinner to put him down and Skinner didn’t want to do it. The man shifted his weight, which was considerable, and forced Skinner to put him down.
I’m two thirty-eight. You all right.
Skinner tried to pick him up again and the teamster didn’t let him. He pushed him down. Be cool. Skinner tried to lift him again. There was a scuffle and other guys got between them. He’s strong, the teamster kept saying. A little mofo like that. I don’t want to kill him. The fight got broken up. Skinner was gone, they forgot him. The other teamsters started playing fireman’s carrying as a game, picking each other up and dropping each other. How much you weigh? How many wings you eat?
Skinner went back to the strip club and, at the door, security told him: Take your hood off. Lose the hood. The camera’s gotta see you. They wouldn’t let him in. He wandered back and forth in front of the doorway of the club, a black hooded figure, security ignoring him.
There were beginning to be news stories online—interviews with military wives and so on—about returning soldiers, which Skinner watched. And he watched videos uploaded by disaffected soldiers, in which his comrades-in-arms gave testimony about the folly and evil of what they had been a part of.
A National Guardsman who used to be a purchaser for Home Depot had been sent to Iraq as a logistics specialist and his convoy had struck an IED. Now his skull was partly missing. When he turned his head sideways, you couldn’t believe he was still alive. His nose and ears were gone. In his interview, he recalled a bad time just after his eighth surgery.
I was suicidal because I thought my daughter would be afraid of me.
Struggling not to cry on camera, he raised his hands to wipe his eyes and you saw his pink charred wrist bones and a finger-like appendage instead of hands.
Sometimes the interviewee was wearing a prison jumpsuit. Skinner watched video after video. He heard:
Scanning. Aware. Symptoms. Whenever I leave for somewhere, I check for guns.
Photograph of self after writing suicide note.
Losing balance. Getting angry. Trouble sleeping. Sleep two hours, stay up 48 hours. Sleep three hours—etcetera.
I took stimulants in Iraq that are illegal in the States, and when I got home the army took them away. There was no logical transition. Drinking took over from there. This is my only friend, I thought. I’ve had medical problems. Thrown keys through walls. Kicked in windows. Pushed her.
Triggers: door slam, someone yelling. Pins and needles of fear.
Self-isolation. Guilt. I can’t get this image of this child out of my head.
Antipsychotics, sleeping meds, tranquilizers.
Tattoos of M16s up and down his arms. Killed child. Killed spouse. At nightclubs. Rapes on base. Said I’m a nice guy with a gun. He put the cabdriver in the trunk of the car a
nd burned him alive in North Carolina.
No one knows what the families get dragged through. An army shrink told my husband that she couldn’t treat him for his nightmares. So I called his CO and was told the army doesn’t give out hugs to crybabies. And this was after he was already hitting me and had threatened to kill me once.
Traumatic brain injury. They still deployed him. I know I’ll never get him back. Our daughter’s, like, that’s not my father.
I’d say hopeless, lost, depressed. Beheadings. Monster. Laugh at overwhelming violence. Leg blown off.
I pushed her. She jumped away. Fell in the shower. When she stood up she screamed. Her hair was covering her face. It reminded me of things I had seen, of the screams of fear of being attacked, and I reacted. I had my hand over her mouth. This is the mother of my children (voice breaks). She wasn’t moving when I got off her (begins crying).
I tried to bring her back, but she was gone.
He came out of a bar and tried to remember where he was. The passenger door of a black sedan parked against the curb popped open and someone called to him.
Hey, guy.
Skinner peered at the vehicle.
We want to ask you something, guy.
What do you want to ask me?
Come here for a minute.
Why can’t you ask me from there?
A shadow moved in the front seat and a different voice said, When did you get out, brother?
Oh. Hey. Like, real recently.
Skinner shuffled over to the vehicle.
The passenger wore a bomber jacket. The driver, who wore corrective glasses and a Jets hat, was leaning around him. They were both carrying pistols.
You deployed?
Did I deploy? Yeah, I deployed.
What were you? Not intelligence?
Maybe if I’d been smarter. I was in the infantry.
My man, the driver said. He reached his fist out the door and Skinner bumped it.
Hooah, brother.
Hooah, Skinner said. All the way.
I saw you in there, and I was, like, he’s one of my guys.
Definitely, Skinner nodded.
He thought you looked lost, the cop in the bomber jacket said.
No, I’m not.
You from around here?
No. I just came up from base.
You got somewhere to stay?
Oh, yeah. Hell yeah.
Cuz a lot of guys—it’s bad. They wind up, you know, like, making thinking errors when they get out.
Yeah.
They have the battle skills, but do they have the civilian skills.
Skinner nodded, his head lowered. Then he covered his eyes.
Both of the men in the car got quiet.
Skinner was having trouble controlling himself. Just a minute, he said. He walked to the back of the sedan, snorted up phlegm and hocked it on the pavement, wiped his eyes, and came back.
The wave had passed. Fuckin stupid, he said and hocked again.
Get in and talk.
I’m good.
You got any family?
Yeah, I mean, I do. I’m good though. I mean, I don’t need anyone worrying about me.
You gotta get over that.
I know.
If there’s a problem, you fix it, right?
I know.
Do you know who to call?
What, like the VA?
Anybody you can call if you get in trouble—the VA, your family, anyone from your unit, anyone like that. A friend, anyone. As opposed to—as opposed to—for example, drinking twenty-four hours a day.
The driver was staring at him, leaning out at him, neck stretched, mouth a clinched lipless line, glasses reflecting the vapor light.
Okay, Skinner said. Roger that. I appreciate it. I do. I’m good to go.
He’s good, the passenger cop said. He’s okay.
The driver took his Jets hat off. He was balding with long, dank strings of hair pasted to his dome, and when the hat came off some of them lifted away from his head. He gave a short nod.
Skinner looked across Roosevelt.
I think my bus is here.
His bus is here. Don’t miss it, guy, the passenger said.
The driver stuck his fist out the door one more time and Skinner bumped it again.
Be safe, bro.
Hooah, Skinner said, and went around their sedan and across the avenue towards the buses idling in the dark.
24
HE WENT UPSTAIRS TO pay his rent and found the apartment full of people drinking beers and eating subs from Fratelli’s pizzeria.
Mrs. Murphy was talking to several different people at once. She snapped her lighter, leaned back and aimed her smoke away from them up at her cupboards. She was wearing the same velvet house-coat that she had worn before and she had a cold cup of coffee sitting next to her on the table, as if she had just come out for breakfast. One of the people she was talking to was a big guy with red hair and the baritone voice of an athlete. He was wearing a Jets jersey in super extra large.
Come in, come in, she told Skinner, who came in. He gave her his rent check and she set her coffee cup on it. Take a beer.
This is Brad from downstairs. The tenant.
I’m John, the big guy said. I’m her stepson.
Yo, Skinner said and shook the guy’s hand.
There were about ten other people in the apartment: neighborhood women in sweatpants and hoop earrings, young men stopping off from work, their sweatshirts and jeans grimy with black dust from ironwork, faces red from the cold. They all talked with thick New York accents, which made everything they said sound Italian. Not everyone was quick to say hello. The males didn’t talk to people they didn’t know. It was unclear what the purpose of the gathering was. The big guy was Mrs. Murphy’s stepson. He had not grown up with her. He was Patrick’s son by another woman, and he was in the NFL.
Skinner popped the cap off a Michelob, hooked the neck of the bottle in his trigger finger, and lifted it to drink, his lips rolled under. His face was covered in stubble and he was in his socks. His heels were standing on his jeans, his boxers showing. He had just taken sertraline half an hour ago and it created a distance between him and the world. He heard the football player’s baritone across this distance.
He was talking about his tires. He had left them in the yard behind the house. A guy had done some work, some plumbing, for the family. Through some kind of fast talking, he had gotten the tires from Pat, who hadn’t known what they were worth.
Mrs. Murphy said, I know, I saw them. They were here six months. They were covered in mud.
New, they went six hundred dollars apiece.
They weren’t new.
Even old, you were talking nineteen hundred, two grand in tires.
Okay. Let’s call it that. What did you do about it?
I called the guy. I left messages on the phone. Finally he tells me he doesn’t have them.
Well, I doubt he does. He probably sold them.
That doesn’t help me much.
I know it doesn’t help you. She rolled her eyes. It doesn’t help me either.
I know.
If I knew what Patrick was going to do before he did it, I’d be a mind reader. I didn’t know what he was doing.
I know that.
I hope you do.
It’s just something that happened. Life goes on, the football player said.
Let’s hope it does.
How’s everything with that situation?
That’s what we’re gonna find out. At this point, we’re hearing April. But the system is so bad.
It’ll work out.
Yeah, well, we’ll see.
There was a woman with black hair sitting at the kitchen table next to Mrs. Murphy smoking a cigarette. She was sitting folded on the chair with her knees up and her feet pulled in. Sometimes her eyes took a quick measuring look at you and then went back to looking at the ashtray she was sharing with Mrs. Murphy. Her skin was yellowish
and rough and she had high cheekbones. Her name was Vicky.
We’ll see, she echoed.
And turning to Mrs. Murphy:
Who was the guy he had a problem with?
Some guy named Rick.
Rick from Brooklyn?
From the bar right here.
Yeah. That’s Brooklyn Rick. They’re the same.
If you say so.
Real skinny? No ass?
That would be him, she said. You know him?
Vicky nodded and let the smoke out of her lungs and blew it upwards.
Oh yeah, she said. He’s a thief.
Okay. Figures I let him in my house. Look, he went by the book with me.
He did major time in the pen.
We all have something. Come on. If I was gonna go by that, nobody would be left in this house for a party. You know what I’m saying, Vicky? Let’s get real. The guy’s a sixty-year-old man with white hair. And him? Mrs. Murphy dropped her voice and looked across the kitchen at her stepson, who was talking to two short wide girls. The size of him?
No doubt. No doubt.
In my younger days, I could have shaken it out of him, thief or no thief.
We know the deal.
There’s a whole history, Vicky. I’m not going into it.
Let it lie.
Mm-hm. I’m waiting for the call.
What time is it?
Mrs. Murphy checked her cell phone, which was lying on the table by her coffee cup.
Should be any minute.
Skinner finished his beer and put it in the sink. The bottle fell over when he put it down. He said whoops and, deliberately, set it upright again and watched it to see if it would tip. The woman Vicky had gotten up and was standing with one foot on her chair. I gotta get a bite, she said and she came around the table to the counter and took a half a sub out of the aluminum foil and put it on a paper plate, the shredded lettuce falling out. She cut her eyes sideways at him.
Hey. You Greg’s friend?
Who’s that?
He’s the guy they had before you. I thought he was your friend.
No. Don’t know him. I’m not from here.
What are you, in college?
No.
Like LaGuardia? She wants to go there.
Vicky indicated Erin, who was standing with one foot on top of the other foot, her heavy hip leaning against the counter. She was wearing an oversized shirt that came down covering the widest part of her. She had taken the bread off a sandwich and she was picking at the cheese. Her face was angled down. She had an expression of complete equanimity on her face. Since he had arrived, she had ignored him.