Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

He took the money out of her jeans, her cell phone, and ID. He patted her on the head. Smile, he said. She did not react.

You no call police, he told her in pidgin English, so she would understand. Some mechanical cam had flipped inside his brain, he realized: he wasn’t going to go any farther this time. He left the red room and his footsteps moved away down the black hallway.

The woman remained tottering where she was. Five minutes passed. She had heard him leave. She tried out her voice, making a sound, and it was a croak. In the hot room, she was shaking like someone naked in the snowy wilderness. She went through the curtain and began walking down the hall, stepping on broken linoleum in the darkness, groping her way.

On the street, in the afternoon sun, Jimmy bought a hotdog at a busy intersection under the tracks, among Spanish and Bangladeshi vendors selling spiritual guides, anatomical charts, novellas, tapestries of Aztec maidens and warriors, eagles, the words Brown and Proud. He kept his shades on. He was about ten blocks down from the scene and he felt secure. Expressionless, he watched the street as he ate by the hotdog cart. The intersection smelled like cotton candy. It was awash in a sea of people coming off the train, the Spanish mothers arguing with their daughters about what they could afford.

He noticed stains on his fingers and he thought it was ketchup, but he sniffed it and it was from fingering her.

Napkin, he said.

He went into a bar, a black hole in the street, and bought a beer using her money and went into the bathroom and took down his jeans and looked at the crusted red around his groin. He took out her ID and read the name. Li, Chiao-Yee, Vickie. The hologram was wrong, and her supposed address in Elmhurst was spelled without the r: Elmhust. The picture was of someone else, a younger woman with shorter hair and a serious expression. He stuck it in the garbage.

After another beer, he got in a Lincoln cab and rode back the way he had come, looking out for any kind of commotion. And, in fact, there was something: at a spot on the avenue, people were gathered watching something going on, but he could not see what. They were looking towards a building with graffiti on the roof and a massage sign in the window. He believed that this was the scene. He caught a flash of a uniformed cop holding his radio sideways and talking into it urgently. The cop, a young man, was looking over peoples’ heads. The attitude of someone focused on a task. The Lincoln accelerated and beat the light, leaving the other traffic behind. The knot of tension was back there. The car seemed to fly along more freely now, the tracks laddering overhead. They swooped up and down over the bridge into Flushing Chinatown. They broke out the other side into East Flushing, the ghetto buildings tagged in Spanish, the decaying houses of the Irish.

Jimmy got out of the Lincoln and went into his three-story house. His mother was on the phone. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. I’m doing subs, she said. You want one?

I wish, he said.

Then get something.

I would, but.

It’ll be on me, Jim, she said.

Jimmy hung out on the hot street, bought skewers from the Chinese, stood out by the Falungong tables, letting them proselytize to him while he looked at their medical photographs. He met guys he knew and they passed a bottle with him. One said, If I knew a job, I’d do it right now. Jimmy bit the meat off with his teeth, with his dog-muzzle jaw.

I know a job.

What job?

I can’t tell you that.

The Buddhist human rights protestors were handing out flyers that showed a genderless being holding a glowing circle in its abdomen: the dharmic wheel. They wore long-billed visors and large sunglasses. A poster showed people and bicycles all knocked over in a pile. Their white shirts were soaked in blood and there was blood splashed and splattered all over the ground. One of them who had not been killed yet was still trying to stand up — the photograph caught him as he was climbing to his feet. It had been taken in the grainy dark. There was a blurred violet city sky and streaks of light over the soviet city square. The headline asked, Why does the People’s Liberation Army only attack Chinese people?

Jimmy turned his head to hear music that was playing somewhere in the street, his wild long hair swung around his head, and he pretended to play guitar.

His friend was looking at photos of a woman on a steel table. She appeared to be resting calmly on a white sheet with her eyes swollen shut like eggs. The other pictures were close-ups of her injuries. They went down the length of her and ended with her toe, which had a tag on it.

Another photograph, taken earlier, showed her posing against a backdrop of parasol trees, wearing a summer dress and making V-signs with both hands. The caption in Chinese said: Wen Fengyu as an undergraduate studying forestry at Hebei Polytechnic College on school vacation to the Beijing Summer Palace in 1994 just after being introduced into the Falungong Great Way.

What is this shit? his friend said.

Remarkably, Jimmy was able to explain it to him. This is how she died. He indicated the Falungong members in their glasses. They told me what they did to kill her. They’ve got their politics, their different cliques. Chinese, Japanese, it’s all a different hustle depending on which one you deal with. They got organization. These guys with the tables right here, they got an organization. They’re out here collecting donations so they can start another crime wave. Gimme a drink a that.

The metal on his fingers struck the bottle when he took it and swigged from it.

Every time one of their people gets taken out, they put their picture up. Like take this one here in the picture. I knew her. She used to work around the corner.

Where?

Right over there.

Doing what?

Whaddayou think? In the massage joint over here on 41 stRoad. That’s where they all go. They run their whole game outta there. Smack, guns, girls, whatever you can name, Jimmy said. They was watching her. You better believe they knew everything she did.

He elaborated on how she had been completely unaware of any danger until the last minute. She would never have fallen for anything that was not professionally done, he asserted. He took another drink of the bottle. And then another. He said:

She thought she was smart. When she got caught, she said, All right, you’re good. But she had a nice ass. She had to give it up. I guess you caught me, so I have to go by the rules. So, they said okay, if that’s how you feel. So they fucked her. So far, so good. That’s legit. You got me fair and square. As a woman in her position she understood her duties. But she was spiteful. Oh no, she says, I ain’t gonna call the cops. Just let me go. She went to get her purse and it wasn’t there. Why’s there no clothes? Because there’s nowhere to go. They’re all the way underground. All right, now she gets her guard up. That’s when she knows she’s fallen for something, and now she wants to talk her way out of it like she’s talked her way out of everything before. Only now it’s not working. This guy don’t buy any of her crap about her hard life. He says, here’s what I’ll do. For every time you lied, you’re gonna get it. He beats her down like no man ever. She screams and cries for, oh, about two days. By the end, he gives her a mirror and she’s totally destroyed. She ain’t never gonna walk again. Ain’t never gonna have a kid. She’s begging for her mother. Mommy mommy mommy please don’t kill me. He told her the good news. You ain’t never getting out of here. And her eyes were just like this big. She begged to suck his dick. Nope. Want this? Nope. Want that? Nope. You ain’t leaving. You’re gonna die and it ain’t gonna be fun. Cry all you want. Jimmy raised his fingers adorned again with skull rings and pressed the corners of his eyes where the tears would go. Nobody cares about your sad brown eyes. That was the end of her and she could not believe it.