Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

JIMMY WAS OUT ON Roosevelt Avenue, striding under the shadow of the elevated train, its trestles and piers, rivets and graffiti, trucks selling pigs’ heads and brains and intestines, with the Mexican voices and the sound of the generators. There were alleys going in from the street where immigrants could get their hair done or buy their kind of music. They sold jeans and lingerie and cell phones and high heels and glass pipes and Spanish romances in the street, a man with a mustache seizing a raven-haired woman by the hips, thrusting his hand down into the open neck of her peasant blouse. The mannequins had arched asses and torpedo breasts and stood on their toes and wore big black wigs and supersonic glasses. The bars came every doorway and they were dark. Loud music was playing inside, as if the world’s biggest fiesta were taking place. But if you looked into the music, you saw a room with the lights off and three or four disheveled men with their heads down on a table covered in an Olympic number of big beer bottles, and it was a scene of migrants getting plastered in a bus station.

It smelled like fried chicken and french fries and grilled corn. There was construction too — the city drilling in the street. The horns were honking, and a cheap ugly car gunned around the others. The occupants all wore the same red and black Bulls hats, black braids, white sleeveless undershirts, the males with zits and thick white biceps and tattoos. The big girls were dressed up the same as the boys, yelling, Yo, make a left, nigga, and the acne-covered driver bent over the wheel, gesturing, yelling, Move, nigga, to another car. Boxing gloves with the Puerto Rican flag hung from the rearview mirror, and the car, filled with the big bodies of these large young people, sped away on its cheap toylike rims.

And a woman with the spirit was holding up the bible and preaching with a microphone in the middle of an island under the tracks, speaking an unceasing, uninterrupted litany that grew faster and louder and became climactic and deafening and violent coming from her loudspeakers.

He crossed 85 thStreet in the crowd. A Chinese man in gray trousers and a gold chain and a v-neck was leaning on a parking meter. As Jimmy approached, the man caught his eye and asked, Massage? He pointed out a pair of Asian women standing halfway down the block. Jimmy approached them. One looked like a farmer with a spotted weather-beaten face and a purse worn across her shoulder and a soft hat in the shape of a lampshade to keep the sun off. The other was wearing makeup and a t-shirt and had pineapple-sized breasts. She had heavy glossy black hair done up in a twist and pinned to the back of her head.

You, Jimmy specified. The t-shirt-wearer put on a smile and said, Oh yeah, and led him in a doorway. She was in her upper forties and acted intoxicated. He followed her up a low-ceilinged stairway, which led up to a single destination, an apartment where the lights were off and the door was always open. She had a wide flat rear end and the seat of her jeans had sequins. On the stairs she looked back over her shoulder to make sure he was still coming. She gave him a secret smile. Then they went into the apartment.

The apartment was hot: hotter than all the collected heat of the summer day. It was as if they had a space heater on as well: frightening hot, like you might not come out of it breathing. And there was no fresh air. It was air that had been used and breathed, like the atmosphere in a jail. He made the connection to jail immediately. The smell and texture of the air came from food and people’s bodies and other things which were never aired out and blown away but were re-breathed. The air had a weight and pressure that was different from outside air as a result. There was a strong smell of boiled ramen noodles and skin lotion. If there were windows, they were sealed and painted over. The apartment was a narrow pitch-black maze that got darker as you went in. She went down a tunnel towards a red glow, and Jimmy walked behind her. The glow came from a curtain, which she moved aside. He was twice her height. She looked at him and smiled. Dipping his head, he stepped into a red-lit compartment. There was barely room for both him and the massage table. The table had a hole for your face to breathe when you were face-down.

How much?

She told him. He took out his money and she watched the money in his hands until he handed it to her. She folded the money and disappeared.

He took his t-shirt off, an xxxl t-shirt with a faded logo for a tool brand across the mottled fabric, and exposed himself. He looked like a white meaty insect whose exoskeleton has been peeled away exposing the mechanical workings of muscles and white sacks of flesh, which had never been in the open air before. He took his jeans off, baring his long legs.

And he stood in the red glow, unclothed except for the bandana around his head, watching the curtain. He put his shades on and positioned himself facing the doorway with his legs spread and his chin back as if he were sunning himself in the red light.

Like a pitcher on the mound, he licked three fingers, then reached down and fiddled with the end of his uncircumcised penis.

She came back inside, wearing fuzzy pink slippers and carrying towels and sheets in her arms.

No, no, no, she tutted. You lie down.

His fist, the one with the rings on it, hit her in the mouth.

She went back into the wall and hit her head. The towels and sheets dropped out of her hands. The whites of her eyes showed and she tumbled to the floor. Her knees drew in and she covered her face and let out a grief-stricken sound.

Jimmy went around to where she was and hit her again.

Oh! she screamed. No! She crawled into the corner. The clip that held her hair in place had popped open and hung caught in her loose hair.

She was trying to hide from him. He wrenched her arm behind her back and almost broke it. She let out a scream. The sounds had nowhere to go. He punched the back of her head. He hooked his fist around in front and got her face. Oh! she screamed and started crying. He shoved her around to make her face him and got her back against the wall and wrenched her hands away from her face and hit her again.

Show me your face.

She flinched and he twisted her hands away again.

I’ll break the arm.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I do nothing.

Show me the face.

No, she pleaded.

It was impossible for her to overcome the reflex to cover up. She was too scared, but he improved her. He worked on her until he was getting where he wanted.

Why? Why? she said. It was a calm question. But she asked it blind, because her eyes were swollen in bulging hard blue hematomas.

She performed fellatio on him. She removed her clothing and underwear and got up on the table. He sodomized her and at his insistence she performed fellatio on him again. The way he did it, she was severely injured. He made an engine-revving noise when he was driving into her. She screamed into a towel. What he was doing sounded like a boxer hitting a heavy bag with wet gloves. He arched his back. When he rested, he blew air and got his wind back, his sides sweating in the hot room. He looked like a man on a child. The child’s head was mummified. Then he went into another frenzy when he had his wind back. She gagged and threw up in the towel he wrapped her head in. There were ramen noodles in her stomach.

You got the virus now, he told her as he was pulling up his jeans.

She was standing there half-bowing, her face unrecognizable as human. She appeared to be wearing a slick shiny bumpy thick eyeless mask, wetness around the eye slits.

HIV, he said. Better get checked.

You stink, he added.

Something was not finished in him. There was evil and crazy in the room. Possibly he was going to go all the way.