Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

He lit a cigarette and watched pigs being offloaded onto the shoulders of Mexicans. They were carrying the heavy cold white carcasses through the crowd and in through the hanging plastic strips into the back of a Chinese market.

Vertical Chinese signs were everywhere. Someone tried to give him a flyer and he said, I don’t understand you, and dropped it. He went into a newsstand and got a Red Bull. In the back of the store, he stopped and stared at the magazines. All the metal slots were filled with porn. He saw a tan girl with her wet hair plastered to her face and her mascara streaked.

He kept getting pushed and it bothered him. He forced his way out through the people coming into the newsstand, and, once outside, drank his Red Bull moving with the crowd.

Another four-foot woman handed him a flyer.

Ma-sa-jee, she said.

The piece of paper said Bodywork 1 hour.

Awesome, he said, and stuffed it in his pocket.

The garbage on the street had a peculiar smell. In the windows, he saw red roast pork on steel hooks. A mother was squatting helping a boy urinate in the gutter. When he flipped his empty can into the garbage, an immigrant in flowered sleeve guards came behind him and picked it up with tongs. He heard a chanting, which was all their voices overlapping. The women wore black leather jackets and spike-heeled boots with buckles and fringe. One of them looked at him directly and she had eyeliner and a mane of dyed reddish hair and then he lost her in the crowd.

He went down the avenue, crossing under a railroad bridge, and searched down an alley, passing right by a doorway where each tread of the stairs said Table Shower, leading up to a massage parlor on the second floor. At night, the stairs would have been lit up like a runway and he would have guessed what it was then, but in the daytime you had to read Chinese to know what you were seeing. He came to the projects behind the train tracks. From here, he saw the bridge and the water and he went back down another alley until he was on the avenue with the crowd again.

He took the flyer out of his pocket and checked it. The crowd was taking him like a conveyer belt past everywhere he had already been. After he had gone beneath the railroad bridge a second time, he saw a group of men hanging around in front of what looked like a condemned building, smoking cigarettes. There was a dead gray neon sign on an upper floor that spelled KTV. Skinner tried to see inside through the thick smeared glass doors.

The men eyed him. What’s the foreigner doing? Look at this clothing of his. A cop? A health inspector. A person with time on his hands. Pay no attention to him.

Skinner pulled the door open and went inside.

The building was occupied and there were utilities functioning inside it, he could feel them right away. A back door was open and a young male, by the sound of his voice, was in the alley talking on the phone in a rough loud Asian language. Stairs led up and down. When Skinner began checking the first floor, he discovered a maze filled with ninety-nine-cent-store-type goods. Backpacks and umbrellas hung from the ceiling. The vendors, eating noodles out of Styrofoam bowls and talking loudly, went silent as he moved down the aisle. When he looked back, he realized they were watching him on closed circuit TV.

What’s down here?

They ignored him to his face. He saw them exchanging looks, and a woman stared at him as if he were a monster. A man in a gold chain circled behind him, pretending not to look at him. When Skinner repeated his question, a thick-faced woman of about forty, who was knitting, shook her head. Then she turned to the others and said, Impotent.

No speakie English, huh? Good to go.

He stuck his large, broken-nailed hand in a cardboard shipping box, took out a padded bra and chucked it back.

Clumping upstairs in his boots, he found nothing but a locked door on the second-story landing and a table covered in takeout condiment packets and other trash. He jogged back down to the first floor and stuck his head out in the alley, catching a whiff of garbage, seeing fire escapes, and hearing exhaust fans. Whoever had been on the phone out here had gone. He went back inside and checked down the stairs, this time descending to the basement.

In the basement, there were food stands packed in together. Fires were hissing and it was loud. Napkins were soaking on the floor, the linoleum was rotting down to the wood beneath. He went around the rusting folding tables where Asians sat in jeans with keys on their belts, looking fixedly at their phones.

What you want? a woman yelled.

Where’s the massage at?

Where the who?

Where’s the massage spot at? The girls?

No! No girl! she yelled. Noodle!

Skinner tried to see inside her metal pot.

Well, what kind of noodles is it?

She pointed with the ladle at the sign overhead. Up there, she told him.

The sign said:

Feld poultry w/ family flavor northern hot $2.75.

He kept walking through the maze of tables and pillars holding up the bowing ceiling and the gas hissing and the yelling and the banging of woks. When there was nowhere else to go, he returned to a steel fire door with a half-lit exit sign askew above it, which he had noticed earlier, and checked it again. The alarm contacts were painted over. There was no handle on this side, but he could see the latch was not engaged. After glancing briefly over his shoulder, he wedged his fingers in the gap and pulled it open. Nothing went off. He held the door open and leaned inside, seeing a cinder block hallway.

The ceiling was half-ripped-down and there were acoustic tiles buckled, rotted, water-stained, and lying broken on the floor. He stepped inside. The fire door banged shut behind him. For a moment, he stood there listening. The air was cold. A sheet of plastic hung over a window in the cinder block wall and it puffed in when the air pressure changed. Through the plastic sheet, he could hear the street.

Something was humming, barely at the level of hearing, and his head turned towards the sound. He took a step, concrete shards popping under the heel of his boot. The humming was electricity, he thought. He moved down the hallway, past standpipes rising through the floor, the humming growing distinct. He went through a doorless doorway and began to see fluorescent light. Then the hallway angled and when he turned the corner, he saw someone.

She was sitting on the fire stairs in tight threadbare jeans. She had work-discolored hands and her dark hair was in a ponytail and he could see her thighs curve down to where she sat. A muscle ran up the side of her neck from her collar to her jaw. The brim of her hat tilted up and she looked at him.

Hey, he said.

She watched him coming towards her.

I’m cool. I just took a wrong turn.

You get lost, she said.

He came a little closer.

Yeah. I got lost.

She had not taken her eyes off him. At first, she had thought he was a cop. Now she was examining his camouflage.

You are army?

He glanced at himself.

Yeah. I just got out. I was down south until a couple days ago. I just got here. It’s my first time in New York.

She listened to this, put a lock of hair behind her ear.

You live here?

I live? she asked.

Yeah, you — do you live — he pointed at the ground — here?

New York? Yes, I live New York.

You like it?

Yes, good.

It’s supposed to be a good place to party.

Party?

You know, like beers, jamming out to music, whatever. Just partying…

He sang dahn dahn dahn da-dah and did a little goof-off dance.

I like, she smiled. This is very good.

Their eyes met and they looked away.

He took his cigarettes out.

You smoke?

No.

Good girl, huh?