Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

At the bottom, he stuck his finger in his throat and vomited again. He stepped over his throw-up and staggered on, past a trash can tipped over in the street. The awnings were all in Spanish. He must have thought he recognized the cinder block building beneath the tracks, must have thought it was the lounge where he and Zou Lei had gone to drink together their first night. It was a locked warehouse. He put his hand on the building as if to keep it where it was, or to keep himself from leaving it.

Apparently, however, he wandered away from the tracks, down into the backstreets that cut the blocks into triangles. The fire escapes hung against the dirty buildings like lightning bolts. He passed vegetable markets with the shutters down and the produce put away, the wooden trestles chained to the wall with nothing on them. Behind them, men were sleeping, comatose from drinking, wrapped in blankets, lying on cardboard. Someone groaned. In the Park of the Americas, Skinner may have seen a man drifting like a zombie in the dark.

A rhythmic, low-frequency sound was coming from somewhere. There was music, which from a distance, sounded Romanian.

He held himself on the fence around the park and began urinating. There was yelling and a man came sprinting down the empty street, his leather shoes slapping, and ran around the corner of a dilapidated house. Several seconds later, another man came chasing after him, running very fast for a man his size, and followed him around the corner. Skinner, still urinating, stared after them. The second man had been carrying a ten-inch butcher knife. Nothing came back out of the darkness between the houses into which they had disappeared.

The low-frequency sound was coming from a truck idling. It was parked in front of a club with a blacked-out window. He went inside. A bath of blue light. There were people in the corners dressed in cowboy hats and boots. A fat man wearing an enormous LA Dodgers shirt stared at Skinner with drugged eyes. Skinner stared back at him and was acknowledged with a nod. It was so formal, it might have been mockery. A mirrored ball turned above their heads. A woman climbed up from her table by the door and tried to speak to him in Spanish. Skinner said, I don’t know. He fell into a table. She went to the bar and came back with an opened Coronita. He gave her what he had and it was four dollars. She took his dollars to the bar and showed them to the woman there who had the face of troll and big maternal breasts and, yes, it would be okay.

At the next table from Skinner, there were no women, only men. They had their backs to him. One man, who had an elongated body like a panther in mid-leap, was leaning in, talking to the others, talking in a self-punctuating way, gesturing with his long-fingered tattooed hand. A neatly folded and ironed bandana hung from his waist. All the men had neat short hair. Some were razor bald and their skulls were tattooed. Skinner saw a scorpion on someone’s cheek. They wore clean clothing and clean plain sneakers with rounded toes. The same ironed and folded bandana hung from all of their pockets.

When the speaker finished speaking, he tilted back in his chair and rested his arm on Skinner’s table. Skinner looked at the arm on his table. The smell of a different deodorant or laundry detergent brand was noticeable. The man seemed to be aware of Skinner. He seemed to be holding his head in profile to look behind him. He turned his head all the way back to look at Skinner directly. When he did, his entire face was black with tattoo ink except his eyes. There was a cross on his forehead, a skull with horns and Gothic letters, scorpions, webs and leaves and thorns and spiral lines, like tornadoes around his eyes. He acted handsome and confident.

Just doing something different, huh?

Gettin drunk.

Same as everybody. Everybody drunking. But it’s different, right?

What?

You is. You is different from everybody. Where you from?

Pennsylvania.

What you say?

Pennsylvania.

So, what you doin here instead of Pennsylvania?

Gettin wasted.

Qué? one of the others at the young man’s table asked. Skinner’s response was translated into Spanish. In the blue light, someone else, someone with his lip and the bridge of his nose tattooed, glared at Skinner.

What else?

That’s it.

The speaker in his white sweater let his chair tilt forward again and for several minutes they didn’t talk, while Skinner was left staring at the man’s elongated back.

Dude. Hey, dude.

Skinner nudged the man’s shoulder with his Coronita. The tattooed face turned back around.

Where the fuck are you from?

Why the fuck you wanna know?

Later, the man held his hand out and beckoned over one of the short women and talked to her commandingly — you could hear the cadence of how he talked and see the way he didn’t look at her when he talked. She took the neatly folded bills, folded like their bandanas, from between his long tattooed fingers and later returned from the bar with another round of beers and limes.

Hey, dude. Hey. Hey, motherfucker. You wanna know where I’m from.

I know where you from.

The fuck you do. I’m from Iraq.

What happen to Pennsylvania?

You tell me. What happened to your face?

What? Qué? the others asked.

All this shit. What’s that for?

It’s like religion. For him — the speaker pointed upwards in the dark. And that one too — he pointed down at the floor.

Who’s down there?

You know who is down there. Everybody knows.

Skinner swayed and the man pushed him off with his elbow.

Careful, carnal.

Hey. Hey, dude.

Skinner held out his hand until the guy shook it and threw it away. Skinner tried to get the others at the table to shake his hand. He was stared at and ignored. Someone told him to sit the fuck down before he got hurt. This wedo wants attention.

Are you a CI? the speaker smiled. Confidential informant?

I’m a trigger-puller, Skinner said.

The man’s eyes moved: the whites, which looked blue in the blue light, turned in his decorated face. And the last exchange that Skinner would recall having with him before Skinner found himself wandering through Flushing Meadow Park went something like this:

You kill people?

A few.

Which one?

The enemy. The Iraqis.

Anyones is fun?

A couple. We used to play chicken with them. Like one time, these two idiots were in a house. Our translator tells them to come out, it was okay. Then as soon as they came out, we’d light them up and they’d run back in. Then the translator would fuck with them. He’d say what did you do wrong? You must have showed a weapon. They were swearing on Allah, no, they didn’t have no weapons. So the translator tells them, okay, I’ll talk to the Americans for you. So then he goes, I’ve talked to the Americans and you can come out now. But this time, he tells them, you’ve got to sing a song. He teaches them a song right there on the battlefield. They’re hiding behind this piece of wall singing it. He’s like, no, you’re off-key. The United States didn’t come here to this fucked-up country to hear you motherfuckers singing off-key. He made them rehearse. So they come out. The translator was telling them to do their best, making like this was American Idol. He’s yellin at them: you’re being judged. Everything is cool. They’re coming out, so far so good, they’re singing. Everything is cool. Then, boom, we engage his friend. Now, one guy’s left. The translator tells the guy, your friend was making you sound bad. Now sing it by yourself. This one’s for all the marbles. How bad you want it? He sang the whole fucking thing, and we applauded.

We picked up a head on the battlefield and made somebody carry it. My sergeant put it between a body’s legs. He made it wink. We took corpses and made them do nasty shit. Like sit them up, like Weekend at Bernie’s, wearing shades. Or have them fuck and make a movie. Whatever you can think of. Dress them up. Play WWF. Body-slamming body bags. We shot their fuckin camels every chance we got. We shot their donkeys. I probably laughed at shit that no one would believe.