Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

Everyone have to be careful, right? You know the saying, every man for self. The man, woman, kid, also. This is the life. You want me take my time, what you give me? Think about. That’s America. Everyone come here the same story. The one who take the boat, the fishing boat, the one who take the bus, get inside the truck, hiding, smuggle the people, Mexican. They die in there. Pay a lot of money the whole lifetime. The one is legal, the one is not legal. Everyone has the problem, the tears they cry — you no hear about it? I am the Cantonese. This one, she from my hometown. The same family. Don’t ask me for nothing, right? I don’t know you. This the life. You do the same to me. Don’t explain it, right? Just do it. America. The things is dead, the people is live. Everyday same thing, the things is dead. Chop the vegetable, chopping, peeling, washing. Maybe I tell you cut the meat, you cut the piece this big, supposed to be smaller. You get it wrong. That why I put you on the dish. You suppose to learn, daily, daily, the people is alive, supposed to change, right? You can’t get it right, basic common sense, I don’t need you. That’s fire. Fire. Hire the new one. The smart one get ahead.

He cleaned up some of the garbage in his room. He checked his pistol, put it back in his assault pack. He arranged his boots neatly next to his bed.

They had snow. When you looked up, you saw a plain of snow like an inverted image in the mountains. The snowfall covered the lots and rooftops and car tops and the fields adjacent to the highways. The plows came rumbling out at night. She stepped through the slush-filled gutters wearing plastic bags on her cheap new sneakers, which were already coming apart. Work had made her tired. She fell asleep on his bed — in his room, the boiler in the closet — water puddling on his floor beneath her plastic bags.

He pulled her socks off and laid them out like bacon strips on the floor. The ankles of her jeans had snow crystals on them. He unbuttoned her tight jeans and pulled them off. Even with the phone in her pocket and the water in the cuffs, they were light. He put the poncholiner over her.

She felt it snowing in her sleep — enormous heaven making snow above their heads, falling on the grate above his window in the sidewalk.

He sat next to her, plugged into his laptop, listening to anthem rock, and a sound — barely more than a premonition — reached him through the music. His eyes narrowed and he looked sideways at his door. Something was happening. He pulled the wires out of his ears like someone pulling off his EKG and listened to the house.

She had heard it too. She was waking up, her brown hair in her eyes, confused.

I hear somethings.

Then, overhead, there was a burst of running pounding feet. A man’s voice shouting. Another voice yelling faded and came back. The pitch of the yelling rose. They heard furniture legs. Then there was an impact to a stud and the thud vibrated the frame of the house. Zou Lei sat up and pushed the cover off. The yelling turned into the sound of a woman screaming.

Skinner got up and stood listening in the doorway. She tiptoed over to listen with him. The woman was screaming and screaming and screaming — and now they could hear that she was crying. They stared up into the dark at the origin of the sound. The man continued shouting at her. He had a brogue. Skinner cocked his head, trying to understand him. The man was shouting:

I don’t keep whores! I don’t keep whores!

The Murphy’s kitchen door smashed open and someone came running out breathless and slammed out through the side door of the house. At the bottom of the basement stairs, they heard whoever it was running away from the house and out into the snowy street.

Their daughter, he said.

They remained there, listening for whatever else would happen. They heard a voice say this:

All the rent is is another four hundred dollars a month drinking money for you.

Zou Lei asked what was being said.

That’s my landlady. She’s telling him off.

This was the last thing they were able to make out and then the voices faded.

HIS EPISODES OF WEEPING had not started yet, but they would. Her love, something he was so unused to, seemed to hasten the emotional outpouring. The not-sleeping and irritability were already there, were familiar. Her love was not to blame for any of it. But he looked around for something or someone to blame, and that was typical. He did not understand the process he was going through. He did not have a medical degree. It was not a healing process. The breaking down was the opposite of that. It was not catharsis. He didn’t know enough to be as scared as he should have been, or he might have gone to the VA.

The day he moved in was a Saturday. His duffel bag and his assault pack lay on the floor of his new room. Skinner was sitting on the edge of the bed. In his hand, he held the keys Mrs. Murphy had given him. The door of his room, which he had opened with the keys, was half-open, and through it, he could see the stairs that led up to the street and the March afternoon.

He spun the keys on a finger and caught them with a click. Yawned and rubbed his face. He dragged the duffel bag over to the edge of the bed and unzipped it and started digging through it, the insides coming out like the wadding of a car seat punctured by a round. He put the twisted jeans and t-shirts by him on the bed. Then he felt the significant dense weight of something L-shaped and the pistol tumbled out from a green army towel and thumped down on top of his socks.

For a while, he pretended not to see it. He pawed through his clothes, hunting for his hygiene bag and other things. There were pills he had that were supposed to knock him out and help him sleep and he could take one now, he thought. Maybe that would be the best thing. Or he could go out. Was it raining? He looked behind him at the window above his bed. It didn’t look like it. He could see the grating in the ground and the gray white sky above it. He squinted. There was no rain.

But his attention returned to the weapon. His foot was jiggling. He could hear the weight of people walking on his ceiling. This was their house. He listened to their voices, forming a picture of who was who, the woman presiding over her kitchen, smoking a Slim the same color as the gray white light coming in the window.

He picked up the nine, compressing the grip safety, and pointed it one-handed at the bedroom wall. The front sight wavered. He reached out with his weak side hand and cupped the grip to steady it. With his thumb, he switched the safety off — now you could see the red dot. He thought he heard the giant daughter talking, a male he didn’t know, maybe others, and the smoker’s voice of the woman. How many? Maybe four. Put his finger on the trigger. Gave it pressure. Just enough to make the hammer move.

Bang, he said — and his heart was beating.

He experienced a sense of wrongdoing. Took his finger off the trigger, extending it straight along the outside of the trigger guard, where it was supposed to be. Thumbed the safety back on. But his mind did not have a safety and there was no way to shut it off.

THE WHITE LOOKED LIKE a long-legged biker, as if, instead of being inside these razor-wire-topped walls, he should be leaning back on a chopper going down the highway, with his long legs extended and his boots on the chrome footrests. He had soft brown hair and thin eyes. His mustache made him resemble a wolf. He was pale and large and when he walked, he rose up on his feet like the piston in a motor — up and down — chin always up, an eighth Cherokee, last name Turner.