Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

I know. I was busy.

Like hell.

You don’t wanna believe me, don’t.

I don’t believe you.

Jimmy shrugged. Patrick’s eyes got smaller. He took a drink.

What business are you in?

What are you talking about?

You’re busy, I’m asking what business you’re in if you’re a fookin businessman.

Ends.

What? What the fook are they?

Ends. Making ends.

Is that what you’re doing here at one-thirty in the afternoon, making your ends?

Could be. Is that why you’re here?

Never mind me.

It’s one-thirty in the afternoon. Why’re you here?

I fixed a lady’s toilet while you were sleeping, that’s why I’m here.

I wasn’t sleeping.

You were fookin sleeping.

Get your facts straight.

You were sleeping or doing your fookin junk.

I wasn’t doing that either. Get your facts straight.

You tell me to straighten my facts again.

You’re the boss.

You’re goddamn right I’m the boss. And you better learn to live with it or you’ll get trown the fook out.

Thrown out of what?

You better wipe that cocky fookin smile off. You’re gonna get trown the fook out. Out of my house.

It’s not your house.

The fook it isn’t.

It’s not your name on the deed.

You’ll get trown the fook out.

So throw me out.

I will, so help me.

Have another first. Get your strength up.

I’ll shove it up your ass another. When I was your age, I could go through ten men like you! Twenty men like you! You little sonofabitch.

By now the bartender and several other men had come between Patrick and his stepson. Hey! Hey! they were yelling, and Patrick swore he’d kick to death the next man who touched him. Jimmy smiled at him.

Watch your ticker. You’re turning red.

You’re a fookin nigger. You’re a fookin waste and you’ve always been the same. All the time in there was wasted on you. You’re still nothing but a nigger.

Jimmy stood up and stopped smiling and the men in the bar finally convinced him to leave.

You’re the bigger man, they said.

Skinner had a dream and this was what he saw:

The house, the purple basement. The carpeted stairs going down into the basement. Someone is outside Skinner’s door, someone is in the basement. He sees this big guy moving around his kitchen. The guy doesn’t say anything to him.

Way up into the house: the front room, the sheets on things like a morgue. The parts of the house you do not see.

The back of the house: things are piled high. There are curios and yard equipment. You might open a door and it would hit a bed — a mattress on cinder blocks, there is laundry piled all over the room, a hamper, there is no floor space. There is a broken alarm clock. The screen is falling out of the window. It is ripped and it is in the room.

You go upstairs. First: The hallway. The hallway leads away from the mustard-colored kitchen. All the appliances: the stove, the refrigerator are mustard colored. They are old, from the eighties. The cupboards are from the seventies. There is a cuckoo clock, there are wooden things that are on the walls, there are sheets over the couches and chairs. Is someone lying under a sheet? No one has left by the front door of the house: we do not use it. There are things hanging from the eaves in front. The wind chimes hung by the six-foot daughter.

The hallway appears to have pictures on the walls, old pictures. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the walls are bare. It is blue.

THE HEAT WAS COMING. She believed she knew what to expect. The summer would be celebrated by people of every nation in the city. People marauding after work, discontented. Thugs surfing on the sides of cars, flagging. Going into the garbage cans and throwing bottles in the street. Immigrants working, forever working, watching people going by who have days off, time off, while they don’t. Trying to stay cool. Families with five young children going to Dunkin Donuts for a night out together in the air conditioning. The littered floors, the strange lone males reading the newspaper. Cabdrivers and dysfunctional individuals sitting in the window of the all-night Tropical. Messed-up guys with Puerto Rican flag hats talking to waitresses, high-fiving them, saying when do you get off? Spanish girls with Indian blood, slave blood, mopping floors at three a.m. Caribbeans saying we were brought here as slaves from India. We got together with the blacks and threw the British out. Now we listen to dub step. Let me tell you where it’s hot like fire burning. Where the party’s at. Where you can get robbed, stuck, shook, bucked and maybe fucked down on one hundred and ninth going towards Far Rockaway. Where no one’s gonna feel bad for you if you have problems.

The Wenzhounese will sit outside in folding chairs in their pajamas on Cromellin Street, talking on the steps, fanning themselves in the gleaming night. The women will be pregnant and still they will be taking out the garbage, collecting bags of recycling, saving little fistfuls of money, little investments that, like children, will turn into something later.

But for now, we’ll all have to deal with the heat first — all of us no matter where we’re from.

A seventeen-year-old holding a pit bull on a leash will have a wing of hair over her forehead, tight short shorts, bare legs, mascara, and she will regard Zou Lei with hatred when the males turn their heads to watch Zou Lei as she goes by beneath the tracks. Because Zou Lei will have found that you can literally buy a pair of shorts on 103 rdStreet for a dollar ninety-nine and all the girls of every flag will wear shorts, including her.

People will try to sell her anything they can. They will need the money, but so will she. A South American in a soccer jersey with blue eyes who speaks no English will try to sell her a watch on Corona Avenue, but she will not buy it. At the end of the season, it will be in her nature to move on. Six to nine months in a place, no more. The graffiti on the rocks where the LIRR roars by Skinner’s house says GLCS. Pocos Pero Locos. There’s a spraypainted heart and the words: Brazalhax y Soldado. She sees herself and Skinner leaving come fall.

They hired a new boy, a friend of Angela’s, who went to Cardozo, and Polo marveled how he understood everything right away, he knew computers too, he was a talent at the age of seventeen. The young man went by the name of Monroe. Sassoon put him in the front even though he was surly and openly rude to her. He had a loud voice and you could always hear him. He complained about everything, saying, This job suck dick. People liked him very much for his good looks.

On the schedule, Monroe’s name appeared where Zou Lei’s name used to. They had given him one of her afternoons. She asked Sassoon how this was going to affect her pay. Sassoon told her she wasn’t in charge of pay, just hours. The issue of pay was between her and Polo and Polo wasn’t available to speak with her. Zou Lei said that that was very convenient. Several other employees who were afraid that Sassoon would lose her temper interceded. They told Zou Lei not to worry about her money, the boss wasn’t about to steal from her. They told her that she was getting jealous of the talented young man.

There, there. It doesn’t do to be jealous.

Released from work early, Zou Lei went outside and found it raining on the street, the rain coming down so hard it turned white when it hit the asphalt. She ran four blocks with her jacket over her head and took shelter under the scaffold in front of Footlocker, the aluminum drumming overhead, and stared at the sneakers on Lucite pedestals. Water squished out of the holes in her sneakers when she went into the air-conditioned store. Hip-hop was playing. The back of her denim jacket was soaked through. She took it off and folded it over her arm and picked up a Nike women’s running shoe so light she could hardly feel it. When she tried to put it on, she found it anchored to the wall by an antitheft cable in a plastic sheath. She looked at another Nike and an Asics and then she checked the prices.