by Atticus Lish
He went to 162nd Street and looked at the bar’s green door, which seemed too small for the man as he pictured him. He went into Leiser’s Liquors, under its yellow awning, and selected a bottle of rum. They sold Asian wines and spirits, a sign of a changing neighborhood. He paid with his card. The guy behind the counter swiped it through the reader and Skinner felt the friction, the tug between the plastic and the magnet as it pulled money out of the bank a mile away. Zou Lei passed his branch location every day on her way to work. He hadn’t checked his balance in weeks. Would he have anything left for her?
Or would she share whatever he had, the cigarette, the hot canteen water, the sentence all of them had faced lying in the sand and garbage, keeping their heads below cover?
He drank in the basement until ten at night and traveled out again. Jake had shared it with him, he thought. His intoxication took away the Mexicans in front of their houses. When he almost blundered into them, they called him cabrón. The alcohol had taken away a great deal of his consciousness and still that was not nearly enough.
He vaguely perceived a group of large young males exiting the smoke shop. A Puerto Rican in a vest popped the cellophane off a cigar and tucked it above his ear. On Skinner’s way back with a Gatorade, Skinner saw them drinking out of paper bags outside the China Garden. Even in his stupor, he recognized the tall one as Jimmy from across the street.
Guado nudged Jimmy on the arm. You see this fool?
Skinner spat on the ground the way they had spit at him when calling him a shitbird.
The next day, he woke to find a piece of wadded up trash on his stairs. It was a chewing gum wrapper and it wasn’t his. The bit of litter had a piece of chewed gum in it.
Throw shit on my stairs, asshole.
He picked it up and tossed it up on the Murphys’ landing.
On more than one occasion during the ensuing weeks, when returning to the house after being away, he would find a kitchen chair had been moved or a cabinet door opened.
Around the same time, he was walking down 40th Road when youths in front of a corner store began shouting, Hey! Where you going?
He recognized one of the youths from around the neighborhood. He thought he had seen him take a cigarette from Jimmy. As he continued down the block, one of them yelled:
I thought you was hard! Come back here, etcetera. I thought you wanna head up with my boy!
At his landlady’s apartment, he had no contact with Jimmy; the two of them acted as if nothing was going on. He saw him on the street in Flushing. Nothing happened in the crowd. But the sidewalk next to the ocher buildings on Sanford Avenue was narrow. One night, Skinner saw Jimmy coming at him and knew he wasn’t going to move. He was carrying the Berretta nine millimeter in his army backpack. He had plans with Zou Lei, so he crossed the street.
As she drew near, the side of Skinner’s house opened and a man came out on long legs. He had a bandana tied around his head, and the bandana ends hung down with his hair as if they were a part of his hair and his beard and his hair was made of strips of cloth.
Without thinking, she stopped in mid-stride and put her head down, covering her face with her hat brim, and altered course, pretending to be going somewhere else, taking tiny time-marking steps, marching in place to keep away from him until he left. She felt him watching her, and she felt it when his stare was lifted from her.
Then he walked away and she looked after him while he was going, seeing him cross the street and lope around the corner and disappear. She wondered if he could see her even though he wasn’t looking at her, with eyes behind his head. He seemed to know that she would backtrack and go to the house that he had come out of. He pretended to be looking somewhere else, but they were the only two people on the street.
If a girl is traveling in the steppe and she sees nothing but a single moving dot in the great distance, the dot sees her. Stag, man, wolf.
At three in the morning, the avenue was dark except for a single house in which one window gave off a low frequency radiation, a glowing ambiguous rose-violet light emanating from white lace curtains, a nightlight left on in a woman’s bedroom.
The avenue was empty, wide, its vacancy inviting you to travel not merely two ways along the road but any way you wanted, into the sideways darkness. A penetrable wall of houses and stores, whose copings and parapets cut shadows against the sky. A giant supermarket by the freeway. At the other end, a railroad bridge and the projects. The dark spaces behind the tracks. Black ferns grew between the houses to eat the hot exhaust from the expressway.
Inconspicuous among other dark silent vehicles lining the curbs, there was a pickup truck parked near the softly glowing house.
A black sedan glided off the Van Wyck, paused at the flashing red traffic signal by the supermarket and turned down the avenue. It passed the high-walled lot and the dumpsters outside the diner whose sign said Steaks – Chops – Seafood, cruised past the construction supply outlets with Chinese signs and stopped mid-block.
An Asian woman got out of the sedan: big purse, short skirt, high heels, a large animal tattoo on her upper thigh. Snapping her lighter, she lit a cigarette. The car with its large radio antenna she’d come in drove away. Balanced on her high heels, she walked across the empty avenue, heading for the house whose window pulsed with the same violet wavelength as her halter top.
As she walked around in front of the pickup, she was suddenly startled, her heels striking the asphalt in a series of quick steps. She had seen the man in the driver’s seat, his bearded mouth, his ringed fist on the steering wheel, where he had been sitting watching the house and now watching her. She threw away her cigarette and, before marching into the house, stared back at him with loathing.
41
THEY TOOK THE SUBWAY from Queens down to Canal Street in Manhattan. It was full of African, Bangladeshi, and Chinese vendors, selling I Love New York shirts and counterfeit Rolexes. From here they walked down to the city buildings. The big gray granite buildings took up block after block. At the criminal and family courts, the doorways were four stories high and there were crowds outside waiting to get in through the metal detectors. They crossed the street and walked parallel to a plaza with modern sculpture in it, and they passed the Supreme Court building. Down the side, they saw concrete barricades and fortifications and sentry posts. Those streets were not passable. They were empty canyons of concrete. They passed tourists and a different class of attorney, wearing a seersucker suit or a large hat with a round flat brim and a silk ribbon or some other stylish touch. They looked as if they were wearing costumes with their gold spectacles and straw hats. There was a coffee and organic muffin vendor on the corner. They saw paramilitary policemen in hats and jackets with the names of their units, in jump boots and bloused trousers, drinking coffee and talking with other security men in blazers and crewcuts. Then came the next city building with columns. They walked under the columns, which were stories high, and they saw flagstone courtyards and brass doors and pigeons and old stone bollards with anchor chains hung between them, from the days when the city was a maritime port.
When they tried to go inside, the security man at the doorway said, Can I help you?
Both he and his partner were wearing bulletproof vests and Police windbreakers. The second cop was Hispanic and stood with his jump boots planted wide apart.
Skinner said, We’re looking for the place where you get married.
That’s not here. He advised him of the correct address, but in a manner that was too rapid to be understood.
Where’s that?
Two blocks back that way. Give you five minutes to think about it.
I’ve thought about it.
That’s good.
Have a nice day, sir.
I’ve thought about it. I don’t need to think about it.
Both cops turned their attention on Skinner in a particular way, suggesting a potentially higher level of interest in him. With their guns and gear, they outweighed him by at least three hun
dred pounds.
Have a nice day, they told him.
Skinner rejoined Zou Lei, who was waiting for him at the end of the courtyard, out of sight.
You don’t have to fight with them.
She kept walking and he followed her. They went back through the plaza with the modern art and the colonnaded higher court buildings. The tourists joked in Dutch and Italian, and underneath their voices, the silence of the plaza was huge, ringed by empty streets and sentries drinking coffee.
They found they had been sent to the same building the criminal courts were in. There was a hot dog vendor on the corner where guys in suits—grooms and defendants—were eating pretzels. The marriage office was on the side facing south. The brass door was pushed open and an interracial couple came running out: a young woman holding up her wedding dress and a black guy wearing a pinstripe suit that was tight around his thighs. She had a white flower in her blond hair. Skinner moved in and grabbed the heavy door before it closed and opened it for Zou Lei, who entered in her jeans.
The granite floor in the lobby was the color of red earth and the shaded lamps gave the space a candlelit appearance. There was a velvet rope, as at a club. They got in line behind a large party of Spanish people who had come with a bride in a pink wedding dress who was taller than her mother. Someone was carrying a camera with a professional flash. The vaulted ceiling sent down the echoes of their footsteps and laughter. The brother and father were wearing black formal suits and cowboy boots. Zou Lei and Skinner didn’t speak. She looked past the information desk. Deeper inside the room, wedding parties were standing at touch screen terminals, applying for marriage licenses. The information desk was manned by a young Asian American man, a college graduate, who spoke accent-free English.
When it was their turn, Zou Lei and Skinner went up to the counter and Zou Lei asked how you got married. The young man placed an information card on the countertop and turned it so she could see it. You bring me your passport, driver’s license, then you go to the kiosk, apply for your license, and pay the fee. When the application prints out, you can come back and see the judge in 24 hours, unless you’re active duty military, then you can do it sooner.
Zou Lei leaned on the counter, holding her head, studying the requirements on the card. The young man looked at the line behind her.
If you need to think about it, you can wait over there.
Give her a second, Skinner said. We might have a question.
Are you the groom?
Yeah.
What if it’s some problem with the ID? Zou Lei asked.
Do you have a passport?
Maybe I have, but I want to use some ID from out-of-state.
That’s fine.
I think it over.
The clerk took the information card back from her.
She needs that, Skinner said.
He gave her the card back.
Sorry about that. Anything else I can help you with?
Zou Lei said no and she and Skinner left the office. Around back of the Metropolitan Detention Center there was a park and through the spiked iron fence you could see the signs for Bail Bonds and diseased old saloons with blackened windows. She took her ID out and rubbed it with her thumb and looked at it. Skinner sat on a green bench and smoked a Marlboro and watched Chinese people of an older generation playing mahjong among the pigeons.
If she registered her marriage using a fake ID and an alias, would the marriage be legally legitimate? She went to the law office to ask the Mandarin-speaking clerk with whom she had spoken earlier. The woman told her to get married using her real name. But how was she supposed to do that? The woman told her she could go to the DMV to apply for a New York State ID card. She had forgotten the details of Zou Lei’s situation. Zou Lei reminded her that she didn’t have papers. The woman said she remembered now. The office was busy. She told Zou Lei she should come back later.
Zou Lei went to the City Clerk’s Office again, intending to ask about the requirements for applying for an ID card, and waited to speak to the assistant. He must have misunderstood her. He wrote an address on a scrap of white paper and gave it to her. She hurried outside and realized she didn’t know what it was for.
Skinner, medicated, depressed, and nihilistic, sat slumped in the basement watching IEDs exploding on his laptop, Iraqis getting shot and flopping down, the world ending one person at a time. The line shortening, getting closer to him, his turn approaching.
At work they cut her hours again. When there wasn’t enough for her to do, a frequent occurrence, she loitered in the back hallway that connected the kitchens, talking with the Mexicans, Tomas and Miguel. She wiped her hands, went over to the chopping table, spent the afternoon making dumplings and shelling snow peas or washing dishes. Her time up front was over.
If they cut her hours any more, she was going to have to go back to collecting cans, just as she had done to survive in the brigade fields of central China.
She took a bathroom break to read the classifieds.
Class A license, $Opportunity$, Mac Operator, see Ms. Chen, must speak a mouth of fluent English. Garment, Bayshine, ladies missy fashion, patternmaker, Cantonese preferred. Earnestly seeking Junior CAD. Brooklyn nanny, Heaven Pest Control, housekeeper, egg donor, masseuse.
The next morning, she went to the park late, sometime after nine, and started running, thinking about what to do. When she got to the basketball courts, she didn’t have a reason to stop. She crossed the fence line that demarcated the end of the field and kept running in the bright sun, her pace picking up. She didn’t have work today. The grass and trees and the exhaust-filled atmosphere trapped the heat. She crossed a road where the cab of a tractor-trailer was parked alone. It looked like a mutant part, a head on wheels, whose weirdness could be seen now that it had broken off and escaped from the trailer. The parkland continued on the other side of the road, turned into a golf course, seen through trees to her right. The sun rose higher. She ran over a highway and through a factory lot, oil rags dried to the asphalt. She was headed for the buildings that she thought of as her mountains. She had stopped thinking about him. Sweat poured out of her, sweating her t-shirt across her breasts. She got a saddle-shaped patch of wet on the seat of her jean shorts as if she were riding a wet horse. It was approaching noon. The towers had been very far away after all. Where the grass ended, she gazed around her in the dazzling sun. She stopped. Her socks were soaked. She peeled her shirt away from her chest and flapped it. The garbage lay on the ground becoming part of it. The tall buildings that resembled mountains were simply government projects, silent in the ticking heat. That was all they were.
Part III
42
JIMMY WAS OUT ON Roosevelt Avenue, striding under the shadow of the elevated train, its trestles and piers, rivets and graffiti, trucks selling pigs’ heads and brains and intestines, with the Mexican voices and the sound of the generators. There were alleys going in from the street where immigrants could get their hair done or buy their kind of music. They sold jeans and lingerie and cell phones and high heels and glass pipes and Spanish romances in the street, a man with a mustache seizing a raven-haired woman by the hips, thrusting his hand down into the open neck of her peasant blouse. The mannequins had arched asses and torpedo breasts and stood on their toes and wore big black wigs and supersonic glasses. The bars came every doorway and they were dark. Loud music was playing inside, as if the world’s biggest fiesta were taking place. But if you looked into the music, you saw a room with the lights off and three or four disheveled men with their heads down on a table covered in an Olympic number of big beer bottles, and it was a scene of migrants getting plastered in a bus station.
It smelled like fried chicken and french fries and grilled corn. There was construction too—the city drilling in the street. The horns were honking, and a cheap ugly car gunned around the others. The occupants all wore the same red and black Bulls hats, black braids, white sleeveless undershirts, the males with zits and thick white b
iceps and tattoos. The big girls were dressed up the same as the boys, yelling, Yo, make a left, nigga, and the acne-covered driver bent over the wheel, gesturing, yelling, Move, nigga, to another car. Boxing gloves with the Puerto Rican flag hung from the rearview mirror, and the car, filled with the big bodies of these large young people, sped away on its cheap toylike rims.
And a woman with the spirit was holding up the bible and preaching with a microphone in the middle of an island under the tracks, speaking an unceasing, uninterrupted litany that grew faster and louder and became climactic and deafening and violent coming from her loudspeakers.
He crossed 85th Street in the crowd. A Chinese man in gray trousers and a gold chain and a v-neck was leaning on a parking meter. As Jimmy approached, the man caught his eye and asked, Massage? He pointed out a pair of Asian women standing halfway down the block. Jimmy approached them. One looked like a farmer with a spotted weather-beaten face and a purse worn across her shoulder and a soft hat in the shape of a lampshade to keep the sun off. The other was wearing makeup and a t-shirt and had pineapple-sized breasts. She had heavy glossy black hair done up in a twist and pinned to the back of her head.
You, Jimmy specified. The t-shirt-wearer put on a smile and said, Oh yeah, and led him in a doorway. She was in her upper forties and acted intoxicated. He followed her up a low-ceilinged stairway, which led up to a single destination, an apartment where the lights were off and the door was always open. She had a wide flat rear end and the seat of her jeans had sequins. On the stairs she looked back over her shoulder to make sure he was still coming. She gave him a secret smile. Then they went into the apartment.
The apartment was hot: hotter than all the collected heat of the summer day. It was as if they had a space heater on as well: frightening hot, like you might not come out of it breathing. And there was no fresh air. It was air that had been used and breathed, like the atmosphere in a jail. He made the connection to jail immediately. The smell and texture of the air came from food and people’s bodies and other things which were never aired out and blown away but were re-breathed. The air had a weight and pressure that was different from outside air as a result. There was a strong smell of boiled ramen noodles and skin lotion. If there were windows, they were sealed and painted over. The apartment was a narrow pitch-black maze that got darker as you went in. She went down a tunnel towards a red glow, and Jimmy walked behind her. The glow came from a curtain, which she moved aside. He was twice her height. She looked at him and smiled. Dipping his head, he stepped into a red-lit compartment. There was barely room for both him and the massage table. The table had a hole for your face to breathe when you were face-down.