Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  From inside the cage, he saw everything outside the cage through the black lines of the wire mesh. The convex mirror on the ceiling showed a warped scene of stillness—fluorescent light and tile the color of an olive in a jar. Even when he moved, when he doubled over and rested his head on his knee, his movement was nowhere reflected in it. Nor when he raised his head and sighed Fuck at the yellow ceiling. Nothing moved except the clock. A poster on the wall said No Hope In Dope.

  An hour later, the door opened and the blond cop came back and let him out. He told Skinner where to stand and what to look at and took his mugshot from across the room with the click of a mouse on a computer just like the DMV. They went through the fingerprinting process together. The cop held Skinner’s finger on the platen glass of a copy machine-type scanner, and Skinner’s fingerprint appeared on the computer screen next to the image of his sweating face.

  How long am I gonna be here?

  Could be a couple hours depending on what else is going on. We do the paperwork, do what we gotta do, the DA does their thing. It varies.

  I mean how much time am I gonna get?

  That depends. You got priors?

  I had a disorderly conduct.

  When was that?

  Before the army. Way back when.

  You were in the army?

  Yeah.

  You a vet?

  Yeah.

  Iraq?

  Yeah. Three tours. This is my shirt. I thought you could see what it says. This is my shrapnel.

  Oh, shit.

  Ten-thousand feet per second, dude. Collapsed lung. Listen, that fucking motherfucking shitbag fuckhead I was fighting with. You gotta listen to me. That motherfucker’s bad news. He’s the one who oughta fuckin be here. He’s a fuckin convict.

  What’s his name?

  Jimmy. Jimmy fucking Murphy.

  You know what he was in prison for? Was it narcotics?

  For fucking his mother, for all I know. He’s a shitbag.

  Okay, got it. Step in for me again. Watch the door.

  The cop locked him in again.

  I’m Brad, dude. What’s your name?

  What it says on my uniform. O’Donnell.

  The cop told him to sit tight and left, shutting the arrest room door. Three hours later, Skinner was still staring at the door through the wire X’s, waiting for him to come back. Skinner was propped up on the cage, his arms wrapped around his waist, holding his stomach, suffering with his hunger. Not moving, like an animal conserving energy, partly camouflaged by the steel mesh. Listening to the precinct outside the door, a cell phone ringtone playing a few bars of Billy Joel.

  Plainclothes cops brought in an arrestee, a short young male with the creased face of a forty-year-old sharecropper, in his boxers, tripping with his pants around his ankles. They opened the holding pen and put him in in handcuffs. Y’all play hard, he said, in a voice both high and deep at once, as if there were a clarinet reed in his chest. He sat in the middle of the bench with his knees spread and raised his cuffed hands together and gave the cops the finger. Y’all see what I’m holding? The cage filled up with black males between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, making hand signs at the police and shouting out. The smallest had an afro that looked like the points of a star. One said, Hey, yo, cop, can I axe a question. He had his penis out. Skinner muttered, Shit, and looked away. They tried to get his attention by kicking his boot toe with their unlaced Jordans. He could smell them. One wedged his knee against Skinner’s knee and pretended not to notice he was there. Skinner moved away and cradled his head in his hand, waiting for time to pass until the cops would feed them, his eyes shut, hearing:

  Glenmore niggas. Nigga runnin toward us pullin up. Started dumpin at us. Beek! Beek! Beek! That’s 8 block. Started throwin at him. They killt him. You know where the Pioneer be at. I know what you talkin bout. They used to call it 8 block. Almost caught my son in the stomach if I hadn’t duck. By Howard. My grandparents live over there. He run a blood gang. Nigga on the island. He ran up on one nigga and smoked that nigga. I was shook. Them niggas stay doin that. He got shot in the leg, both legs. His face, his face was like this, bleekin. He kicked me with his boot. Ain’t nothin I could do the way that nigga hit me so hard. My uncle came down. My shit was swollen. Buddha came down. I was shook, son. Almost two days later in the summertime. I know where he went. He went around the block again. We broke the bat in two pieces. I was kickin him in the face. Buddha like, That’s enough. You gotta go home. Niggas jumped me. I whaled on that sucka. Shorty tight with Buddha. She tried to take my ring off, nigga. Second time she wanna pop it off. We broke the coffee table, nigga. We threw this nigga into the coffee table and nigga stuck him. Beek. To the chess.

  A plainclothes cop who looked like a short muscular white rapper in a baseball jersey, denim shorts, and a baseball hat worn low over his eyes, came in and called Skinner’s name.

  Right here, Skinner said.

  Step out for me. He opened the cage. Just you. Sit down, he told a youth.

  But my mother waiting for me.

  Skinner walked out.

  White faggot.

  You’re getting a get out of jail free card. The guy you had a fight with has some problems, so that’s in your favor.

  Thank you! he shouted. His voice sounded aggressive.

  Thank your arresting officer.

  The cop gave Skinner a form to sign and then tore off the white and the yellow copies and gave them to him.

  This is when your court date is.

  That’s it?

  Unless you wanna stay.

  Skinner got his property back at the front desk. He took his envelope without a word and walked out through the turnstile and shoved out through the front door into the warm night air, the sudden noise lifting off the streets into the purple sky.

  He sat down on the curb and laced his desert boots back up. He was very stiff and sore and to stand again, he had to get up on his hands and knees like somebody with muscular dystrophy.

  Now what the fuck do I do? he begged.

  The traffic flew by him leaving taillights in his retinas. The desk appearance ticket, which he had folded, dropped out of his pocket and he picked it up. When he stood up, he was facing the parking lot. Chinatown was on the other side of it. Come on, he told himself, and started hiking. By the time he thought of looking back at the police station, he was already blocks away from it, having turned downhill into the neon lights on Roosevelt Avenue. She’ll be there, he told himself. He had rolled the desk appearance ticket up and was twisting it into a hard stick in his hands, his palm prints on the paper.

  On the way, he stopped at McDonald’s and ate his food standing up, mashing his sandwich into his face. The Coke made him groan and whisper, Goddamn. He took it with him, hurrying on, and side-armed it at a garbage can outside a furniture store when he was down to the ice. He weaved through the crowd, taking his shirt off as he went, wiping his face, wiping ketchup off his hands, exposing his tattooed white body in the headlights.

  The block out to the freeway seemed to go on for miles. He would have run, but the most his legs could do was fast-walk. He scanned the laundry-hung windows of the identical brickface houses, identifying what he thought was her apartment, looking for a light. She was going to be there and she was going to fling her arms around him when she saw him.

  He jogged the last ten yards to her door and started knocking.

  Zou Lei! he called. He backed up in the street and looked up at the windows. He shouted her name again. No one answered. He heard a Chinese voice inside the walls. It wasn’t her. He banged on the door some more. Hello! he yelled.

  Finally, he got someone to come to the window on the second floor. From in the street, he could only see a shadow of a head.

  Zou Lei! Can you get her?

  What?

  Can you get my girlfriend? Let me describe her. She’s five foot three. Chinese. She lives right in there.

  Nobody here.

  You
didn’t check. I’m asking you to check.

  No here.

  Just check for me. Knock.

  The shadow went away, Skinner believed, at first, to check, but then, as the minutes went by, he knew no one was coming back.

  Hey! he called.

  There was no answer.

  Can you talk to me?

  He was yelling to himself on the street, amid the garbage cans, the wrought iron security grills, the shirts and pants and bras on the clotheslines, the general silence.

  52

  WHEN HIS BODY MOVED next to her, she woke immediately. She went from running in her dream-forest to watching him climbing over her and putting on his jockstrap. She watched him dressing in basketball shorts, tying up his boots, moving around and collecting up his things as if he had somewhere to be.

  She tried to make sense of what he was doing.

  Did he have a previous appointment? she wondered, something he had forgotten to mention when he had kneeled at her feet last night and told her of his renewed commitment?

  Perhaps she sensed an inconsistency between the idea of his giving her everything and his leaving now, his face hidden from her.

  She wanted to tell him about her dream, that she had just been dreaming of them running together. But she was afraid he wouldn’t want to hear it, so she kept silent. She told him to have a good workout.

  He pulled the door shut taking the keys—the keys he had symbolically promised her last night—leaving her stranded in his room.

  The room was set below ground level. The bed she lay on was under the sidewalk. The sunlight fell through a barred grating overhead. The basement housed the silent boiler, copper lines and the pipes for kitchen and bathroom, all of which were buried below ground. The water from the entire house ran down and drained into a sewer pipe beneath her in the rock. The floor tiles had been laid over ten years ago and the glue that bonded them to the concrete slab had chemically degraded. Tiles would slip sideways when they were stepped on, revealing the concrete slab, which drew up dampness from the earth. It was a strange shitty room, she thought, and it bothered her to be here alone. She wondered why anyone would have painted it this garish whorehouse purple unless they were using it as a set for pornographic filming.

  She tried to sleep again, but instead ended up worrying about every particular and contingency of her situation. In an effort to control her anxiety, she got up and put on her bra and found the clothes she had run in.

  As she was putting on her shorts, she was aware of noises from the people upstairs. It was the ordinary commotion of people gathering and going out together. She heard women talking, briefly loud as the apartment door opened and closed, their muted voices on the street.

  It annoyed her that she was stuck here waiting for Skinner. Thinking of calling him, she checked the time and saw it was ten o’clock. She was getting hungry and considered going to look in the refrigerator.

  From outside, the sound of cars reached her faintly. The insulation of the room was troubling, the degree to which it swallowed sound.

  It distressed her that it was already ten o’clock and he hadn’t called her. She sat down on the bed again and dozed or tranced sitting up. She abandoned the thought of eating. She was getting very sad.

  He had left her without making love to her.

  I’m alone, she kept thinking. I’m alone. I’m alone. I’m alone. Alone. Alone. Death. Death. Alone.

  You’ve been here before, she said.

  She frightened herself, imagining what if the door was locked from the other side? What if the man she loved was a stranger? What if this was an isolation cell and you were never going to leave it?

  She stood up in the sun-filled room and started getting organized. To stop herself from thinking about Skinner, to contain the thought of him, she zipped her cell phone in her belly pouch and set it on the nightstand. She straightened her hair and tied it back and looked around for her socks.

  At this point, she heard a sound in the outer basement but thought it was coming from outside.

  It occurred to her that she was missing something that belonged to her, and she realized it was her sneakers. Her hair was still tangled and she took a comb to it while looking around the floor. She heard something again and paused with her comb in her hand.

  For a minute she wondered if it was Skinner coming back.

  Skinner? she asked.

  There was no answer.

  She lowered the comb.

  As she stood there, she felt a presence approach the other side of the bedroom door. It was such a strong impression, she almost thought she could see a man-shaped shadow through the wood. The hair rose on the back of her neck. She did not move. She thought it could have been her imagination.

  A male voice spoke through the door.

  She stood frozen and momentarily scared.

  The doorknob was jiggled.

  Open it, he said.

  From the preemptory character of the voice, her first thought was that it was the police.

  She glanced down at her belly bag on the bedside table, which contained her money, key, and now her cell phone—the things she couldn’t lose. She couldn’t see her Asics, which were hidden under the pizza box, and in her panic she couldn’t recall where they were.

  The man said something else, uttering it as if his mouth was full, as if his tongue was thick, engorged.

  She called out: My boyfriend sleeping, come back later!

  Then she heard keys.

  The lock clicked. When the door began opening, she yelled No! and ran to push it shut.

  As soon as she saw his face, she knew what was going to happen and her heart sickened. He shoved her in the chest with both hands. The force threw her straight back across the room and onto the bed.

  The instant her back hit the bed, she bounced up and dodged right past him. By the time Jimmy had reacted with his long loping body, she was already up the basement stairs, had ripped the door open, and was running barefoot in the street.

  The next thing she knew, she was out on the avenue and she didn’t know how far she had run. The sun was in her eyes, cars were driving by, and she didn’t feel the pain of her heels hitting the cement, just impact.

  Her momentum spun down from running to jogging to frantic walking. She was gasping for air. She turned and walked backwards, looking behind her, ready to run again. Something in her wanted to laugh. She stopped and stared back up the avenue looking for anyone following her and saw no one.

  My heaven. My heaven, she thought.

  Oh, my heaven.

  She had trouble seeing the street signs. She recognized Kissena when she was already on it, the soles of her feet burned from the pavement, trying to avoid stepping on broken glass.

  What now? Everything of hers had been left back there.

  My heaven, what had happened?

  At a ninety-nine cent store, she stopped and begged a woman in an umbrella visor to let her have a pair of shower shoes. A passerby overheard Zou Lei and gave her a dollar. She was a slender woman in her forties with luminous eyes, the kind of woman that wound up in detention in China. I am a Buddhist, she smiled. Zou Lei thanked her and popped the plastic thread that held the rubber sandals together and put her blackened feet in them.

  She looked around for some idea of what to do. The Buddhist had disappeared in the crowd of heads with black hair, the short-sleeved rayon blouses, and the plastic toys and gadgets making sounds, the strains of swelling music, saccharin recorded women’s voices saying buy one get one free. A skinny man was cutting sugarcane with a knife, the long green peelings falling about his ankles.

  She crossed Main Street and went downhill towards the freeway. At her house, she tried the door and it was locked. For a time, she paced with her arms crossed. It wasn’t that she even wanted to get inside. She wanted Skinner here. She whirled around in a circle, sighed and bit her lip. What on earth do I do? She held her head. She would make herself wait. When he found her gone, he would necessari
ly come here.

  After she got tired of pacing, she squatted down in that deep Asian squat, monitoring the approach to the house from between parked cars, her work-stained hand holding the top of her head and her blackened feet pressed against the hot sidewalk, toes gripping her sandals. A wisp of hair hung across her face. Her mouth was half-open and her brown eyes rested on the trees at the end of the block, watching them for movement.

  The sun moved. In the late afternoon, people who worked Saturdays too appeared out of the trees and began coming down the block and going into their houses. Another hour went by. She made herself wait. One of a thousand bachelor immigrants in a t-shirt and jeans came tripping down the hill with his shadow behind him, his head hung. His clothes and hands were covered in paint and plaster. They knew each other by sight, she had drunk his Sunkist. She watched him see her. He must have seen her distress. She watched him decide it did not involve him and go into his house.

  When she couldn’t keep still any longer, she stood and lifted one foot and then the other, as if she had to urinate. Arms crossed, she hurried up a concrete path through a sea of ferns and weeds, which had grown deep in the hot weather, and stood at the boulevard’s edge to squint at the horizon. There was no more than an inch of evening sky between the gas station’s roof and the orange sun.

  She made a rule: if you thought he wasn’t coming and you were going to give up, then, if you waited a little more, you would be rewarded and he would come.