Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  What do you think I am? Jimmy asked. Frankie avoided his eyes. Jimmy ground out his cigarette on the asphalt making a gritty sound under his boot.

  Charlie was talking about the casino bus, saying it went to Foxwoods, reporting what they gave you. They gave you a coupon for the beef flambé and thirty dollars you could gamble. That ain’t bad. Whaddya say, let’s go. C’mon. I got you guys.

  You don’t got me, Jimmy told him.

  Yes, I do. C’mon.

  He had left his jersey on the fence, and Frankie shouted: I’m always babysittin him. Pick your shit up. He lost a 250-dollar phone.

  I got you, Charlie insisted.

  Put your money away. You got rent, nigga!

  Casting a glance at Jim, Frank said he was going home to roll a blunt. He stood up in the sun, his sweatpants pushed up above his fat calves. You need to go on a diet, motherfucker, Jimmy said, not getting up to go with him. I know I do, nigga. Frankie lingered for a minute. Jimmy pretended to find Charlie interesting. Charlie was still talking about common respect.

  Frankie went around the corner, as if to leave, and seconds later ducked back, snatched the jersey off the fence and ran with it.

  Charlie sprinted after him and Frankie stopped and they pushed their chests into each other as if they were guarding each other in basketball, threatening each other, whispering in each other’s faces: Do something. Do something. Do something. I’m not afraid of you, Charlie insisted, standing on his toes to be taller than him.

  The jersey got thrown on the ground and Frankie spit on it. You won’t give me your shirt, but you’ll leave it there for some nigger.

  Charlie picked his jersey up.

  Let’s go in the backyard. I wanna fight you now.

  I’m not afraid of you.

  The stand-off went on for three or four minutes. They went back and forth. Jimmy eyed the street for cops.

  Fuck you, I’m not afraid of you, Charlie said walking away, outweighed. He went over to a tree and kicked it and went away, swinging his jersey, turning back to flip Frank off, calling out: Fuck you! and then coming back, because he had thought of something else:

  Hey, enjoy those cigarettes I bought you.

  I will.

  Thanks for having my back. Thanks for that, after I bought you cigarettes. Thanks for your help.

  Hey, Frankie smiled. Help you never.

  Enjoy those cigarettes.

  I’m gonna smoke them.

  Fuck you.

  Loser! You’re a loser. Seig heil.

  Go preach your fuckin bible! Go home and whack off! I’ll never talk to you again, Charlie said and walked away. Then Frankie followed him, yelling, Yo! and Charlie went back to him and on the street where Indian women were pushing past with shopping carts they kept arguing.

  Then Charlie went to Jimmy, who was leaning on the weathered fence, his eyes closed, face lifted up to the morning sun, a foot propped up behind him, his arms out holding the fence, posed like Jesus in the crucifixion, the bandana around his head like the crown.

  It’s the drugs with him, Charlie said. He’s a druggie. The drugs come before everything.

  Then do somethin about it, Jimmy sneered.

  Frankie heard this.

  Do something about what? he asked.

  Ask your boy.

  I’m askin you, nigga.

  And I’m tellin you ask your boy.

  And I’m askin you.

  Jimmy made a derisive sound. He handled the situation that was developing a bit differently from either of them. I’m not getting excited like you tough guys, he said in his hoarse voice. He and Frankie went towards each other, but there was no chest-to-chest shoving. At one point, Frankie squared off with him and Jimmy dared him, Go ahead. Touch me. I’ll bury you right here. He spoke with his flat delivery, while Frankie argued with him at length. Jimmy cut him off.

  Nobody cares about your shit. I’ll leave youse out here with your fuckin gooks and your fuckin stories, the both a youse.

  You’re trippin.

  You’re talkin. Jimmy made a talking puppet mouth with his four-leaf clover hand.

  Frankie debated with him, saying Jimmy wasn’t the only motherfucker who’d been to jail. I met you in there, kid. He suggested that Jimmy was unfairly coming between him and his friend Charlie. All he had wanted was to go to the beach today. They could have gone to Rockaway. He appealed to Charlie James, holding out his arms with his numerical tattoos and his dirty hands. Not to mention that he wasn’t backing down, beloved.

  You’re gettin off the subject.

  What?

  You gotta problem, do somethin.

  Frankie wanted understanding.

  I got nothing for you. Do it or don’t, Jimmy said. Yeah, ten years he had done. It was the same as life to him. So go ahead. Nobody cares. I don’t.

  39

  SHE TOOK THE SUBWAY to East Broadway in Manhattan, where it seemed that there were more immigration lawyers than in Flushing, as well as more job- and housing-referral services. The explanation for this was that East Broadway’s Chinese community had been created, in large part, through illegal immigration from Fuzhou. She went up a stairway next to a woman boiling peanuts in an electric cauldron on the sidewalk and wandered into a maze of second-floor offices being used for an assortment of businesses. The sign over one doorway said Li the Accountant; down the hall there was the Black Dragon Blue Body Tattoo Studio. Behind a crystal clear pane of plate glass, a tattoo artist in his thirties was engraving an outline drawing on the chunky arm of a shirtless young man. The steady buzzing of the stylus came through the glass.

  Other businesses didn’t give their names, just bullet-point lists of services performed: Insurance, Register Marriage, Divorce, Government Housing, Apply For Benefit, Passport Without Needing Birth Certificate, H1 Visa, Send Baby To China. A clerk who sat alone at a computer in one of these offices, unattended by her employers, told Zou Lei that they weren’t real lawyers and that they couldn’t do everything the bullet points said they could do; Zou Lei should go to one of the many bona-fide lawyers in the area.

  Taking her advice, Zou Lei returned to the street. The buildings were all shoved in next to each other like books in an overpacked library shelf. A sign for a law office stuck out like an index tab. It was attached to a modern building tucked between two tenements. She went into a mirrored-glass vestibule under CCTV surveillance. An emerald green ring lit up around the elevator call button when she hit it. The elevator opened and she saw the inside was paneled in dark wood like a lounge where Hong Kong tycoons drank cognac in the movies, another security camera running in the ceiling. She rode it to the attorney’s office on the second floor, a vertical distance of ten feet, which she could have climbed faster than the elevator moved, had there been stairs. The elevator moved slowly because of the expensive heavy inlaid wood. She got off in a polygonal marble-floored reception area.

  They’ve squeezed a palace into this narrow building, she thought.

  There was no one behind the reception counter. Through a section of glass wall, she saw women working at a row of heavy metal desks. In addition to their computers and phones, their desks were weighed down with stacks of manila folders. It was a busy office; the women were all working continuously, entering data, answering phones, handing files to other women who came from other rooms. The level of tension was equal to that of a fast food restaurant at the rush. Unlike the restaurant business, silence predominated. The exception to this was an extended discussion one clerk was holding with a client seeking legal advice, a slump-shouldered woman in an Izod shirt.

  Zou Lei leaned around the glass wall partition and waited for several seconds looking in. When no one acknowledged her, she walked in and started down the line of desks, looking for anyone who was free. A young female wearing many-pocketed jeans asked, What do you want?

  I want to do immigration.

  Do you have a case open?

  Zou Lei wasn’t sure how to answer.

  So yo
u want to file an application?

  I don’t know. I think I can talk to a lawyer.

  The lawyer can’t see you now.

  Zou Lei asked when the lawyer could see her.

  The woman hung up her phone and got up and walked Zou Lei out of the office and back to the reception area and had her sit in one of three curvy rosewood chairs and knocked on the lawyer’s door and asked him in a tiny murmur when he’d be free. The man’s voice told her fifteen minutes. She closed the door and told Zou Lei fifteen minutes and marched back into the secretaries’ office.

  Zou Lei sat there looking at the diplomas on the walls. The lawyer had been recognized by the mayor’s office and by the Amoy Freemason Society of New York City. A framed piece of calligraphy spoke of leaping horses as a metaphor for the lawyer’s ability and spring rain for the author’s gratitude. On the reception desk, he had a little display of business cards on heavy paper stock listing all the languages he spoke. His voice continued talking on the other side of his door in English.

  After a minute, she went back to the young woman to ask how much it would cost to talk to the lawyer.

  Without a word, the girl put down what she was doing and marched back to the lawyer’s door and whispered to him again. Zou Lei could hear the Cantonese word for hundred. She came back and reported to Zou Lei it would be a hundred dollars.

  Zou Lei was concerned by this, because it was a lot of money. How much time would he give her for a hundred dollars? Could she talk to the lawyer for a shorter time for less money?

  The young woman turned on her heel and went back to the lawyer’s door and murmured with him again.

  The lawyer stood up and came out of his office. He was an exceptionally tall man, wearing a white Brooks Brothers dress shirt, red and navy striped tie, and long black oxfords that clicked on the marble floor. He had a gold ring with a diamond in it on his little finger. He looked as if his feet could be rotated through 180 degrees—in other words that his knees were loose, like shopping cart wheels that spin around. He hurried out and stopped in the middle of the marble floor and said, Yeah, hi. So you can’t spend a hundred? He asked her what she needed help with.

  Before she could answer, the girl came back and interrupted them. Zou Lei waited while he went with her and told her how to do something related to filing a real estate case. He came back and spoke to Zou Lei again. She didn’t know where to begin describing her problem. He cut her short. How much do you want to spend?

  She tried to guess what to say.

  Thirty dollars.

  Fine. She’ll make you out a bill. I’ll talk to you when I’m done.

  He hurried back into his office and shut the door and started talking in English again. There were no windows, but there was a clock to watch the time. Another door opened and an American came out wearing a yarmulke and said goodbye to all the women in the office, who ignored him.

  Tell Alvin I’m going, he said.

  He hit the button on the elevator and waited, and when it came, two Chinese men who looked like deliverymen got off and sat themselves in the other two rosewood chairs and put their plastic bags between their feet and read the Sing Tao. The elbow of the one closer to her pushed into her arm. She leaned sideways and felt her wallet under her hip.

  She got up and went back into the clerk’s office and got the attention of a different, older clerk, a prim straight-haired woman with glasses and painful-looking acne. Zou Lei could tell she was from Mainland China and addressed her in Mandarin.

  I’m supposed to talk to the lawyer, but that girl never told him what I’m here to talk about, so how do I know if it will have any significance, and then thirty dollars will be gone for nothing.

  What do you want to see him about?

  I want to do immigration. I don’t want to get caught.

  By Immigration?

  Yes, by Immigration. I was caught once already and it’s fearful.

  The woman let her sit in the seat at the side of her desk. They spoke Mandarin.

  Do you have a case?

  No. This is the first time to see a lawyer.

  How did you come to this country? Did you have a visa?

  No, no visa.

  How did you come here? You…

  Snuck in.

  Snuck in from Mexico? In a truck?

  Yes, a truck.

  When they arrested you and let you go, they would have given you a piece of paper. Do you have it?

  I think so.

  Let me see it.

  No, on my body I don’t have it. I have it at home.

  Bring it next time, because that will make a difference when filing a petition. You want to file a petition?

  Okay. Yes. I think, whatever is possible. I don’t know what is possible right now. I want to stay in this country if it’s possible. An American says he can marry me. That’s the real thing I want to know. Can I get married with him even if I have no identity?

  The lawyer came out of his office to put a folder in a wire basket, saw Zou Lei and said, So you’re not going to talk to me after all? Okay. He asked a secretary for the 285 Broadway case and went back into his office.

  You should get married right away to help your petition, the woman told Zou Lei.

  Can I do it with no identity?

  Is he American?

  Yes, a soldier.

  And he’s an American citizen?

  Yes. Citizen.

  You go to the marriage office and check. They will give you the requirements. But you should do that as fast as possible and then come back when you’ve gotten married. Then you can open a case.

  She told Zou Lei that she would have to leave the country and go back to China for a visa interview. It was possible that her application might take an unspecified length of time and might not be approved, leaving her stranded in China.

  Zou Lei questioned whether she’d even be able to fly back without her passport. The woman told her that you could apply for a passport at the Chinese consulate, but that doing so was risky, because, she said, I think they check, and it could make it easier to be deported.

  She echoed Zou Lei’s fear that it was very easy to get arrested, and that that was something she had to avoid at all cost, because since 9/11, there was no telling what immigration arrest could entail.

  Then she seemed to contradict what she had said earlier, now implying that at no point would Zou Lei have to go back to China. She mentioned that the laws had become very broad and that the government was unpredictable at this time. Things might become easier in the future.

  They talked for no more than three minutes—the woman spoke rapidly and expressionlessly, her eyes invisible behind her glasses—and then, as if a clock had run out, she stopped talking to Zou Lei and returned her attention to her computer. The phone bleeped, she picked it up, said, Yes, I’m doing that, and hung up.

  Thank you for your help, Zou Lei said. Do you have a card?

  The woman gave her a card, but when she looked at it, she saw it was the same business card they had up front: it was simply the lawyer’s card.

  As she was leaving, the lawyer came out and spoke to her while he put another folder in the wire basket. I overheard you. If you’re getting married, it better be a real marriage or you’ll be in big trouble. That I’ll tell you for free. Free advice.

  She didn’t understand what he meant. What do you mean? Maybe we’re ordinary people, but the feeling between us is real.

  40

  AFTER LEAVING THE LAWYER’S office, she went directly back to Flushing to see Skinner. While they were talking, he got up and opened his refrigerator. He stood for a full half a minute staring into it, not saying a word.

  What is it?

  Look.

  There was six-pack sitting in the fridge on the cruddy wire rack.

  It’s beer.

  Yup.

  She didn’t understand what the problem was. He made a circuit of the basement looking in the trash, kicking over his shirts, looking under them, c
hecking under the bed while she gazed after him, puzzled by his behavior. He circled back to the kitchen, flipping the cupboard doors open and shut. He finally came to rest by the counter with an expression on his face that said he knew something and wasn’t happy about it.

  She asked him what was going on. He shook his head.

  Nothing. Some bullshit.

  Had he lost something?

  I had two six-packs in there.

  So?

  Now there’s one.

  You drink it?

  Nope.

  You sure?

  Yup. He pointed at the trash. No empties.

  Someone take it?

  Roger that.

  Who?

  I know who.

  Who?

  He lit a cigarette.

  Dude who lives upstairs.

  She didn’t know who he was talking about and assumed he meant the man they heard yelling at his daughter.

  Any indication of a problem with his landlord sent a vibration back up the network of her plans. She and Skinner had just been talking about her visit to the lawyer, which ultimately connected to everything, including where to live. She had speculated that she might move in with him here.

  What you are going to do?

  He shook his head as if it wasn’t worth mentioning. He took one of the six beers that remained out of the icebox and set it on the table and for a minute watched the water run down the outside of the cold can. Wasn’t he going to close the icebox door? Oh, yeah. He drew on his cigarette and closed the door and changed the subject back to the lawyer.

  Skinner saw Jimmy in the crowd on the 7 train platform at the 42nd Street stop. At the time, he didn’t care about the theft of the beer, or imagined he didn’t. He would have simply said hello. Great numbers of people going home from work stood between them. He lost him on the packed train and, getting off at the end of the line, he didn’t see him. When he got back to the house, he listened to the Murphys through their walls. A sense of familiar fear developed inside him, possibly set off by the act of listening. He thought of knocking on their door and explaining how his mind worked to Jimmy’s mother.