by Atticus Lish
I saw she was scared.
We went to our First Sergeant, who ordered us to not do anything. We never saw the girl again. The next time I saw the Iraqi was two days later, and I asked him where she was. He asked me if I worried about dogs. She was a bad girl, a Ba’athist, an enemy of America, so he had found a husband for her.
The obvious solution was for Zou Lei and Skinner to work together, she said. They should combine forces and help each other with their respective problems.
She brought him around to talking constructively about the things that they should do. Above all, they should not dwell on sad things from the past. It would be the first of many similar talks that they would have in which they planned for the future. The bright side, she said, was that she had met him and they could form an army of their own, a two-person unit, to fight these difficult battles involving his mental recovery and her immigration status.
31
JIM. IF YOU’RE COMING, then come on.
It was five and the house was completely dark except downstairs where the kitchen light was on and Patrick, with small eyes and his hair combed back damp and flat, was wearing a plaid shirt and a diamond-stitched down vest and Dickies or something like Dickies—janitor’s pants—but without the brand name, all of his clothes faded and flattened, the puff taken out of the down, as if crushed out by the man who wore them. He was more impressive than his clothing. He spoke at a normal volume despite the hour. The effect was preemptory.
In his room, Jim knocked over his lamp looking for what he wanted to wear, cursed, and set the lamp upright and it fell again.
Mrs. Murphy appeared at the bottom of the stairs, her hair in curlers.
He’s coming. He’ll be right down. Do you men want coffee?
Patrick said something Irish.
Give him a minute.
Jimmy came down, not hurrying, no longer outweighed by his stepfather. There were four plaster buckets waiting in the kitchen to be carried out to the truck and a yellow four-foot level. The house creaked as the two large males carried everything outside. Mrs. Murphy went back to bed.
In the basement, Skinner heard the pickup cough to life and drive away.
There was no discussion between Mr. Murphy and Jimmy of what it was like to be freed after a long period of incarceration. They drove beneath the streetlights, which were still on, on 40th Road. Patrick remarked he didn’t want to hear jungle music. You didn’t pick it up in there, did you? No, said Jimmy, mildly. Then turn the radio on. The radio was tuned to a call-in program in which the host was defending American torture.
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s not torture. Stress positions, that’s not torture. That is nowhere near as bad as what these people have done for thousands of years. The beheading, stoning, burning, burying alive, flogging, flaying the skin, and so on. The cruelties inflicted on the members of their own religion. Maybe these liberals would feel differently if they had lost someone on September Eleventh: a beloved father, husband, wife, a son or daughter. Let’s open the phone lines. Hello, Ed, you’re on the air.
Hey, I just want to say I appreciate your show.
Thank you, my man.
My brother served in Operation Enduring Freedom, so he’s seen these lies we’re seeing now up close, how the media will take what they’re doing, which is, they might have built a school, and they don’t show that. They only want to know about the bad stuff. That’s what we’re seeing. And you get these people, for whatever reason, they want to believe the baby-killer hype. You give fresh water to Iraqi kids and you’re a baby killer.
Both the caller and the host laughed with exasperation.
I know, Ed. We’re at a time when it’s out-of-fashion to love this country apparently. And I want to extend my thanks to you and your brother. God bless him for his service. We are so grateful to our brave men and women in uniform. And the irony, Ed, is brave men and women like your brother go to this godforsaken country, they volunteered to go, while meanwhile people back here have the, the—they are complaining about them. When they don’t have to do it. They’re not the ones. The military goes and gets the job done and the armchair liberals complain. It’s just upside-down to me.
It is.
Thank you, Ed. We’ve got John in Maspeth.
They drove to a construction supply outlet on College Point Boulevard, next door to a Dunkin Donuts.
You’ve got time to get yourself something, Patrick said as he got out. His thirty-two-year-old stepson declined, stayed in the passenger seat. Jimmy was putting up with something. He was not happy, this was clear. But he would not complain. You would have to beg him to know how you had offended him. You would have to draw him out. Patrick would not do this. Patrick went into Dunkin Donuts and waited in line, bigger and taller than anyone else in line, than the young muscular Puerto Rican repairmen with tattooed forearms and a stud in the earlobe. He was the primary figure you would notice through the window. But Jimmy had banished him. Jimmy was derisively going through the contents of the glove box. Parking tickets, receipts, the registration bearing Patrick’s full, three-word Irish name. It was expired. Wasn’t it? He smirked. He checked the date. What was the date? He turned the key in the ignition and the radio came on. Like a technician, a craftsman, a musician, Jimmy concentrated on the radio dial, turning it, tuning it. The stations were different than they used to be. If there was no Deep Purple, then at least there should be Elvis. When Patrick came back, Frankie Valli was playing and Jimmy was fine-tuning the dial. He was distracted now. He did not look up. Patrick put their coffees on the dash, smalls. There was a deal for two donuts in a crinkling wax bag. Jimmy received what he was given. He would be tolerant through the entire exercise, the shabbiness of the truck, his stepfather’s unwillingness to put two dollars in his hand directly out of fear that it would be spent on something other than coffee. Now it was time to assert himself.
Where we going today? he demanded.
Enormous crabs with long spider arms bent and hooked in in the tanks in the window of the Favor Taste Restaurant. At a lot where they did recycling called Andy Metal, a man in a dust mask threw a piece of aluminum up in the air and it landed on top of a mountain of other scrap and stayed.
Perma Base cement board, Super-Tek one-step thin-set mortar, Vision-Pro vinyl siding, Lehigh Portland cement, angle iron, hubless pipe UPC. All of it untended, Jimmy noticed.
Dark 5'3" kids with earrings went by. One wore yellow high-tops with a swoosh.
Golden Fields vegetables. North Shore laundry bags with black grease on the bottoms of the bags piled outside the side entrance of a restaurant where the kitchen boys were sitting on the concrete.
Women walked on high heels across the boulevard, walking as if they were sick, as if they had been sold into geisha slavery.
Jimmy watched.
The onrush of the Chinese. Their scuffing, heedless, lobotomized walking, as if retarded, as if forced to ingest pesticide as children. Women with wicked slant eyes, the faces of evil stepmothers. A pinched, insane or troubled face, the brow pinched, struggling with a constant problem, unable to think, blocked by something lodged in the brain above the eyes. They were pregnant. They pushed a baby carriage, held a child’s hand, pulling a chain of children holding hands across the sidewalk.
A sign outside a filthy doorway said Slimming Hot Wrap, Diamond Peel Facial, Acne Facial, Sensitive Facial, Bodywork.
He carried a sink into someone’s house and held it while Patrick spun the fasteners underneath. They put a bead of silicon between the porcelain and the wall. Patrick turned the faucet and the water came out, hit the sink, and went down the drain.
On the ride back, Jimmy said he was aware that they somehow had found the cash to renovate the basement while his room had holes in the walls. He understood—wink, wink. It was the same thing he would have done. It was a chance to make a buck.
Jimmy did not tell Patrick this—he watched who he said this to—but once when Erin and a few of her friends were hanging
around the house and the subject of the war came up, Jimmy said that it was a scam.
Like how?
Like anything. For money.
Like you think they’re profiting?
Jimmy, eyes narrowed, drinking a beer, made a face, a face that said of course, it was so obvious how could you be such a fool that you would think otherwise. His disgust was not with the profit motive but with the naivety of the question.
One of them said he knew someone who, because he had been in Vietnam, knew what happened when planes hit buildings and this was not what had happened on 9/11, the planes had not been vaporized completely, which would have happened. Rather, pieces of the fuselage had been found. This proved that it was not what we were all told it had been! Do you think 9/11 was an inside job?
Obviously.
That’s so fucked-up, they said with awe and delight.
Skinner met Jimmy in the following way:
Skinner had become aware of someone new in the house. He had been hearing an unfamiliar voice through his ceiling, that of a man without a brogue. The man was just a set of footsteps to him, a weight on the floor. He didn’t know who he was.
He went to the bodega on the corner where the train tracks came in. The bodega sold waterpipes lined up in the window like rifles in an armory. Skinner paid for a pack of Camels. A trace of blue curled down the box like smoke to indicate the mentholated flavor. He put the pack in his pocket and smoked one cigarette, staring at Northern Boulevard. A broken parking meter had a jacket tied around it. After his cigarette, he began walking back to his basement. He went past the Dutch houses and down the line of still-bare trees under the rain-heavy sky.
He neared the Irish bar, where a guy in black urban combat gear—loose-fit denim, Timberlands, vest, and SWAT-style ball cap—had a chain wrapped around his knuckles, holding a tiger-striped pit bull on a leash.
A big guy came striding around the corner with the energy of a man about to chop down an entire forest singlehandedly. He bounced up and down as if on springs, his long hair swinging back and forth, the plane of his face lifted displaying the short lines of his mouth and eyes. He was over six feet tall, weighed two-twenty. The beard on his face made him look like a 70s biker. Skinner was struck by an unusual detail: he was wearing a red bandana tied around his thigh. He entered the bar, handing off his lit cigarette to the pit bull’s owner, who took it without a word, presumably to hold for him until he returned.
The same evening when Skinner went outside to watch for Zou Lei coming up Sanford Avenue, a figure caught his eye. It was a man walking far away down the avenue, passing in and out of trees—probably half a mile away in the dusk—nearly out of M16 range—but the way he walked was unmistakable. It was the man from the bar, and Skinner had seen him twice in one day.
Then on a weeknight towards the end of the first week in April, Skinner saw him a third time as he was coming home. This time, the Long Island Railroad had just roared by through the just-beginning-to-bloom trees. The noise had made Skinner flinch and when he looked up, the man appeared, passing in front of a white house. He was slightly ahead of Skinner, who recognized him and watched him indirectly. They crossed 158th Street together and their paths started converging on the Murphy’s driveway. It became obvious that they were both going into the Murphy’s house. Neither spoke. The man went first, and Skinner followed behind him.
Once they had gone in, Skinner would hear him talking to Erin, would hear his footsteps go into the upstairs apartment where they would become the footsteps with which he was growing familiar overhead, and he would realize who he was in the family: he was Mrs. Murphy’s son, and he was living here, he was the weight on the floor.
Before this, in the moments while they were negotiating the door and their sudden proximity to one another, Skinner would perceive him for the first time from close range. It was an indirect seeing, an impression of a stranger in the gloom of the entryway, a tall presence elevated above him by the landing.
The guy had left the door open for him but hadn’t held it.
Good looking out, Skinner said, and the man looked down at him as if the slightest pleasantry was unheard-of where he was from.
32
ZOU LEI TOLD SASSOON that she would cover Zhang Zhuojin’s shift on Sunday, as long as she would get paid for the extra hours. She made a specific point of asking Sassoon whether the extra hours would be recorded. Sassoon irritably dismissed her concerns, but on Sunday Zhang Zhuojin arrived anyway, which led Zou Lei to wonder which of them was getting paid. She urged Zhuojin to go home, but she refused and suggested that Zou Lei was attempting to con her in some way.
Zou Lei wrote both their names in the same square on the schedule and wrote We Are Both Here and drew an arrow to their names.
She asked Zhuojin if she minded letting her run the steam table.
I don’t control you, Zhuojin said.
Business was slow that afternoon and the bosses were not there, but despite this, an unaccountable stress prevailed. As Zou Lei stood at the line, she could hear Zhuojin in the back smashing steel pots around beneath the slow drip of the Taiwanese pop music coming out of the speakers in the ceiling. She claimed she had to make ten gallons of soup, a product that Zou Lei had never known them to sell. Only one customer came between two and four p.m. and he asked for yuk haam or mincemeat. Zhuojin understood his meaning and insisted that they make it for him. Towards quitting time, she came running from the back carrying a smoking steel pot, the veins in her throat standing out above her tendons, and dumped its liquid contents in a pickle bucket. A tongue of heat rose up on the stainless refrigerator door. Zou Lei told her she needn’t have carried that heavy thing alone. She could have burned herself. Looking in the bucket, she saw the liquid still turning over on itself, pieces of black material that she identified as fish skin churning up from the bottom.
The red-haired bartender acted reserved when Skinner came in. After Skinner drank in front of him, he loosened-up, almost as if he were the one drinking. On Skinner’s second tumbler of Parrot Bay, the bartender came over and, suddenly lively, began telling him about his trouble with women.
I made the mistake of telling her my real name. Check the phone-book. There’re a lot of Chins and Kims, but there ain’t too many McIntyres in Flushing anymore. You know how many there are? One. That’s right, me. So there you have it, she calls me up. Is this the residence of John McIntyre, the dirty so-and-such and so forth?!
He pretended to hold a receiver away from his ear, bugging his eyes.
Never use your real name. Number one rule with women.
My girlfriend’s Chinese too, Skinner said.
Well then you better tell her your last name’s Kim or God help you.
She’s gonna get deported.
Well then you don’t have to worry, assuming you’re having trouble with her.
There’s no trouble. I want her to stay. It’s the government trying to take her away.
Have they started proceedings?
I don’t know what all they’re doing.
There’s a thing called detention and removal. I’m an immigrant myself, so I know all about it. They’ll detain somebody and then they’ll start the removal proceedings. First she’ll be arrested by Immigration or, now, it’s Homeland that’ll get her.
If they do that shit, Skinner muttered, I’ll burn the fucking flag of this fucking country and wipe my ass with the ashes.
So you like her and you want her to stay? Do you like her enough to marry her?
Skinner looked in his glass and said, Yeah.
Well then why don’t you marry her? You’re an American citizen, aren’t you? Because, you never know, there are some guys in the army who aren’t even citizens, but you are, right? If a citizen marries someone from another country, you can bring her over and she can stay here. Haven’t you ever heard of mail-order brides from Russia? Just ask her, if you want to do it. Of course, I’m not saying you do want to get married. I could never get married m
yself. I like to go from one to the next. I get tired of them and I can’t stay still. But if you want to keep yours here and you don’t mind it, just marry her. Though Homeland will make you jump through hoops, I imagine. But it’ll slow them down from getting rid of her.
The door to the back alley was open and the old navy man who should have been dead was half-visible in the doorway, putting the trash out. Along with the sound of garbage cans scraping concrete, his voice could be heard talking unintelligibly. John McIntyre, who could somehow tell what he was saying, replied to him.
Meanwhile, Skinner went over to the Flushing Mall, his phone to his ear, and called Zou Lei.
When she came outside in the purple dusk at quitting time, he was waiting. They ate pizza slices while the streetlights came on, went down past the gas station and walked along the river.
She was so moved she didn’t talk for nearly a mile.
What are you thinking?
You have a great heart, Skinner!
He liked it that she was happy.
Just you say you will marry to me, it’s incredible.
They were headed north in the direction of College Point and the river was getting wider and the buildings were getting smaller and sparser. Ahead, there was an elevated highway standing by itself above a wasteground. The wind picked up.
Today I know what is a real American, she said.
She breathed deep, took in the space, the distant lights across the black water. She could not believe her fortune. How life surprised her. She looked at him with new recognition in the dark.
I’m gonna quit smoking, he told her.
In the front of the house, the windows were covered by white shutters and lace curtains. In the back, there was lumber decaying in the yard next to a rusted can of flashing cement. The house had several stories, maybe three. There were too many windows to see them all. The ones on the upstairs floors were open gray squares reflecting the gray of the sky and the asphalt. The roofs rolled out like tongues, missing squares, tar showing. Rained-on yellow insulation and silver sheathing bulged out of an attic window.