Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

  You’ve made it, she said and walked on not concerned by the pain. She looked for a hawk in the sky, an airplane perhaps, and saw pigeons. They were roosting under the trestles when she got there. She walked over white guano on her bleeding feet and it felt cool and wet. Now she had reached the gray sky that she had seen. It was warm and it would rain. On a board, someone had written: We Design Funeral Flowers. The Food Mart sold High Grade Cigars. Steve’s Coffee Shop. Fratelli’s Pizzeria. The 7&7 Deli Supermarket. We Accept WIC Checks. People were sleeping in the apartments up above with the windows open in squared-off brick buildings, pigeons on the ripped awnings. Beer Soda Lotto. Milk Barn Farms. Dairy Deli Grocery. Phone Cards. Metro Cards. A sun-faded ad for Boars Head meats. Adult males playing arcade games inside by the racks of potato chips. The New Asia Restaurant, here since 1989, the year of Tiananmen. Landscaping trucks. A run of boarded-up, burned-out storefronts. The notice said Victor Han Architects. The graffiti on the boards spelled Blunts. The T was devil’s horns. Die 666. Leiser’s Liquors. A sweatshirt tied around a broken parking meter. CSNR. Romer. Big Dick Fuck All Day. MS-X3. On the boards, the work order said construction by the Hua Fong Construction Corp. Feeney’s Tavern: two green turtles and a little green door, number 2401.

  She went down Sanford Avenue past an abandoned house sealed by the marshal, by a notice, and possibly used anyway, the siding covered in soot and graffiti too, the backyard teeming with weeds. Mexicans waited for the bus. Between the four-story ghetto apartment buildings was a sea of weeds, tall grass, tires, road cones, a piece of heavy construction equipment, the houses at angles to each other, everything coming apart. Next door there were Mexican men with engines in the yard fixing the door of a beat-up silver-gold Impala. There was the LIRR. The graffiti on the rocks said GLCS. Pocos Pero Locos. A heart and Brazalhax y Soldado.

  On the curb, she saw the strewn trash and the camouflage gear. There was yellow crime scene tape, a long strand of it stretched out in the driveway. She recognized some of her own clothes mixed with his. She made her way to the Murphy’s door and knocked. It was a city morning. You could hear both birds and cars. The train from Port Washington roared by through the trees across the avenue while she waited. She tucked her hair back and prepared to speak English.

  The daughter came to the door, red-eyed. Help you?

  Zou Lei tried to ask about Skinner.

  And who was he to you? the daughter asked.

  And you are?

  Yeah, excuse me, and can I get your information in case the cops wanna talk to you?

  Zou Who?

  Okay thank you very much.

  I’ll give them a description of you.

  What about Skinner? You mean the piece of shit that lived here? I don’t know anything about him.

  Epilogue

  SHE DISCOVERED A GREATER desert than any she had previously known. It must have been that she was a great explorer. All of this was barren territory of the most forbidding kind. Mineral formations. No drinkable water. It would probably take more than one lifetime to cross it, she estimated. More time than she would have anyway. Like a traveler in space, she thought. But she had entered it, so she kept going across it in the nomadic way that was natural to her. If she expected to see anything, it was the graves of other migrants, their bodies half interred among the shorn-off tree stumps. The land was so vast she had no hope of seeing anyone she knew, neither mother nor father. The figures she saw were too small to distinguish. No one called out, Daughter I remember you. Where are you going? Stay with us and eat.

  Not in this wasteland.

  She got off a Greyhound bus in a place where the sunshine forced your eyes shut. She put her baseball cap on—the faded navy cotton was hot—to give her eyes enough shade to see where she was going. She walked among Mexicans in jeans and straw hats, women with wide waists and big bosoms and eyes made up like Cleopatra of Egypt, carrying their bags of clothes, children’s toys, rice. They climbed into the cars of sometimes ominous family members who came to meet them in the desert.

  She had come, this time, by way of Queens, where she had stepped over the police tape and tried to retrieve his blanket or anything else of theirs out of the trash that could be salvaged. Money had been the last thing on her mind. She had been thinking only of holding onto him somehow. But this was how she found her Asics, and in her Asics she found his bank card, which she discovered still tucked inside the right sneaker, where she felt it with her torn-up foot when she put the sneaker on.

  His PIN was something she found she could recall. After she withdrew two hundred dollars, she bought Singapore fried noodles and took a livery cab to the emergency room and sat there eating noodles and watching reality TV until they called out the fake name she had given them and a nurse examined her feet.

  This is scary. How’d you do this?

  Zou Lei left the hospital a few hours later with her feet bandaged and a blister pack of antibiotics and took another livery cab back to Cromellin Street.

  Over the next ten days, wearing her hat down low, she went back to the ATM on crutches and kept withdrawing the daily maximum until she had all Skinner’s savings.

  When her feet were healed and she could walk without crutches, she took her woven plastic bag, left her key with another of Har’s tenants, and headed to the Port Authority, where she bought a bus ticket to Phoenix, Arizona.

  In Phoenix, she worked at a Chinese fast food restaurant in a one-floor strip mall. The building exteriors were fashioned of a concrete shell coating sprayed over Styrofoam, which was used to sculpt archways and other Southwestern architectural motifs. The stucco was painted an adobe dried-mud color. It was an efficient, lightweight, if not necessarily eye-pleasing, building style, with the unintended consequence that you could put your foot through any building you wanted to.

  She almost tried to see if she could throw her manager through the stucco when he fired her for submitting a falsified social security number. It was the first time in her experience that she had worked for a white American boss at a Chinese restaurant. His remarks about immigrants, whom he called You People, had been exasperating to her. Also she felt he was far too proud of himself for having detected her crime by means of E-Verify, his favorite new tool. But what nearly made her violent was when he threatened to call Homeland on her.

  You do that and I’ll make trouble for you. I know people you don’t want to mess with. Put me in jail? I’ll put you in the ground. Try that for size.

  Since Skinner, she looked at men and thought: Has he ever killed anyone? Been shot at?

  She walked or hitchhiked to whatever work she was able to find, travelling on the shoulder of the long rolling roads while the golden sunrise, an event of galactic stillness, spilled across the desert still cold and blue from the night. Every half minute a Ford F-Series truck would blast by her, a kinetic storm and a rebuke to anyone walking. For a period, she took the bus through the downtown area to a plant that fabricated Styrofoam for use in construction, the bitter industrial burning smell of polystyrene in her clothes, lungs.

  She would be seen on foot in the lots in front of the giant clean spacious stores, which were polite and hostile at the same time. There was an edge to everything in the west.

  She bought a lifter’s magazine at the Fry’s Supermarket.

  At a horse ranch where she performed day labor, cleaning stalls, she met a different kind of American, a cowboy from North Dakota who had come to Arizona to date a lady rancher whom he had met online. He wore a Stetson hat, a silver-tipped cowboy string tie, and a black silk kerchief at the throat of his denim shirt.

  I’ve seen you work, he said. Are you Mexican or Indian?

  All of the above. I’m Uighur.

  You’ll have to tell me what that means.

  And when she had explained it to him, he said he found that fascinating. His own people had come a long way too. Us Grissoms showed up in the Dakotas in 1890. Henry Grissom fought in the Civil War. He brought everyone out here from Tenn
essee. They made their own whiskey. That was one of the things they did, and they did it pretty well. And then they came west and started ranching. They built their spread in the Black Hills, which is where it is to this day. I worked it all my life. My sons mostly run it now.

  Do you have any woman or girl working there?

  We do have one. She does very well and we appreciate her very much.

  He added, after he had heard why Zou Lei had been fired from her last job, that he didn’t think the government needed to be involved in everything it was involved in.

  It’s not all bad, he said, but there’s a lot of red tape now that does more harm than good.

  He gave her the ranch’s web address—yes, they had email—and told her to contact his son. Or just go up there anytime you want. If you work out there like you do here, they’ll take you on. There’s a lot of work. It’s hard work. And it’s pretty cold. But some people really like it.

  She shook his hand and he tipped his hat.

  The style of a man who is both decent and independent, who knows what he must do.

  She caught a ride home with a party of Mexican laborers in a pickup truck.

  She ate carne asada, refried beans, yellow rice and picante, now speaking Spanish more frequently than Chinese. Con todo, she told the Mexican women at the roadhouse. A small coffee was a chico.

  Naranja fresco ha muchas vitaminas.

  Down the road, the Circle K sold a paper called the Pinal County Slammer, carrying color mugshots of everyone who was currently locked up. Sullen American Indian women with unwashed hair, manic skinheads, long-faced cowboys, drifters who had worked across America from the Alaskan fish canneries, to Californian logging camps, to hog farms in South Carolina and been arrested in every state in between.

  She kept to a strict schedule, early to bed, early to rise. Not out like others, hunting love.

  Late one Saturday night in her trailer court after she had been asleep in her bed for several hours she was awakened by a truck outside her window playing a love song. She picked up her head and as soon as she heard the harmony, that aching sweet pain hit her and she clutched her own mouth and cried out.

  In the day, she told him she didn’t forgive him for anything—for leaving her in this world without him. Oh sure, she said, when he talked back to her. You had your reasons. So I’ve heard.

  Skinner, she said, I’m eating well. And look at this: you see this sun? This heat? Here I am. I look out over the factory roof and see the Superstition Mountains. Aren’t I doing well? Look in my pocket: you see that? It’s cash. I’m piss-poor, get paid like shit out here. Your money’s keeping me in steak for now. When it runs out, it’ll be rice and beans from then on. But aren’t I happy, Skinner? Don’t I look good?

  In the evening, she walked to the strip mall carrying an Adidas bag over her shoulder and went into the green glass-fronted gym. It was air-conditioned and there were complimentary freshly laundered white towels, which she had been stealing since she arrived. Athletes from ASU, bodybuilders and military personnel worked out here, along with a smattering of senior citizens, moms, eccentrics and regular guys mainly involved in the construction trades, retail management or telemarketing. The gym had a fleet of treadmills and a mirrored cathedral of Olympic weights.

  She went into the locker room and kicked off her dusty boots and jeans and whipped off her shirt, which smelled like the horses, and threw them in a locker. A lifetime of hard work had given her thick rough hands and since coming out west, her forearms and face had tanned dark red. She had a wild-looking face. She looked older, had gained weight in the bones of her jaws and the muscles of her temples. But when she stood before the mirror wearing nothing, she looked like the frieze of Diana on a temple wall.

  She unzipped her gym bag and took out her spandex and her Asics, old bloody footprints on the insoles, and got dressed.

  She put her headphones in, locked her locker, went out on the weight room floor, bypassing the smoothie counter and the drink case that contained bottled Isopure in green, orange, purple, and red, like liquid jewels—forty grams of protein, zero carbs, the color and succulence of apples, melons, grapes and plums, the entire bounty that poor people had carried out of orchards. All the protein a weightlifter needed, quicker and cleaner than lamb. You dropped the glass bottle in the recycling barrel and let someone else worry about the refund. You’d just swallowed your feast. The rug in this valley was spread with everything you could ever want as long as you didn’t mind the chemical aftertaste.

  She spoke to no one as she went to the squat rack, her iPod on in her ears as if she were getting instructions from the leader of a sniper team; she moved with concentration. Even if any of the lone men working out had wanted to speak to her, they would have been reluctant to disturb the focused woman. She loaded the bar carefully, hoisting the rubber-coated plates and sliding them onto the fat cylinders at either side of the bar.

  From beneath her hat brim, she surveyed the weight. It was a lot for her.

  But you never know if she was leaving town tonight. She punched one hand into the other. This might be your last chance.

  A hawk flew over the gym’s tarry roof, sailed across the Phoenix valley and alighted on a promontory in the mountains and waited for her to catch up. When she got there, the bird would spring off its perch and into the air again, leading out past the canyons into the open desert towards the faint but growing sound of voices.

  She put her shoulders under the bar, said a prayer to him and prepared to lift.