Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

There were bars over the windows and ripped dresses over the bars, so you couldn’t see inside. Strips of ripped fabric were tied everywhere, to the grates and wire mesh, the handle of the door covered in Spanish graffiti. The walls inside were written up in magic marker. Looking for a way in, she went inside a hallway like a cattle chute that ended in a steel mesh door. On the drop ceiling, she saw the writing: Viva Ei. There was no way in — the door was locked. Through the holes in the steel mesh, she heard the fans blowing and the machines running and saw the boxes, the piles of fabric in different colors, and the women at the tables. Going back outside, she passed a flex gate through which the interior was visible, but it was padlocked. A starved man with the cancerous sun-beaten skin of a farmworker was taping up boxes, cutting the packing tape with a tape-handled razor. He didn’t look at her when she asked the way in.

Around the corner, she found another barred entrance that had been left ajar. Chinese was written in magic marker all over the plaster. It said: This factory’s phone number is — and the numbers were crossed out, and there were more numbers and more names and messages in Chinese. Outside an alcove, beneath the pipes, someone had written: You cannot have a bowel movement in the toilet or you will be responsible for cleaning.

She stepped over cardboard boxes piled next to the breaker boxes, a copy of the minimum wage law taped to the bricks, and the whirring became louder and she saw the rows and rows of tables, the women back to front, working barefoot, pressing the pedals, operating the lever with a knee. Someone’s radio was playing and you could barely hear it in the pervasive hushing of the fans. The sewing machines clicked like telegraph machines. At the far back of the room, under the rafters, next to the padded ironing boards used to flatten the garments before they were boxed, there were piles of empty cardboard boxes and other junk, old sewing machines and metal chairs with strips of rotted fabric tied to them like sodden headscarves, and more garments piled in canvas bins, property of the postal service.

The factory smelled like old wood and cardboard. There was cardboard under the machines down with their bare feet to catch the oil from the Juki sewers furred in dust, strips of lucky red fabric tied to the spindle bobbins.

There were about seventeen women working, a few in their twenties or thirties, most appearing older. A large number of them wore glasses. They did not look at her, keeping their eyes on their work, backs hunched, the impression of a brassiere strap visible across their hunched backs. It was hot and they favored sleeveless rayon blouses or t-shirts. She saw them going gray.

One who was still young got up to go to the filthy refrigerator, apparently to look at her lunch in its red plastic bag, and her t-shirt showed a cartoon of someone sleeping next to the caption: Wake At Your Own Risk. She wore knee-length shorts like Zou Lei, was very thin, almost red-skinned, and had a jutting jaw and short wild hair, tripping along when she walked in her plastic sandals. She went into the bathroom you couldn’t use for a bowel movement and came out with a wet paper towel, which she rubbed over her skinny arms to cool off in front of a fan. She glanced at Zou Lei and gestured, spoke, gestured, barely able to be heard over the fan, saying:

Behind you, the man. See him.

Zou Lei turned and saw a man leaning back in an office chair with his feet up on a desk with an unplugged rice cooker on it. The wall above him had Ms. Asia Swimsuit Beauty contestants cut out from the paper taped to the bricks. The white-skinned women posed in one-piece bikinis, one hand to their 1960s hairdos, one hand to the hip. The man was wearing distressed jeans that were nearly iridescent.

He looked at her sideways and took a call on his cell phone. When he was done talking, he stood and felt his pockets for a lighter, picked up a pack of White Cotton cigarettes off the desk, put one in his mouth, felt his hips again for a lighter, and took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and scuffed his way to the office, his long arms hanging from his spine like wet laundry, as if everything was too much for him in this heat.

She followed him into the office, which was a small shed, and it was ice cold. There was an air conditioner set at sixty degrees blowing frigid air into the closet-sized space. He sighed and rotated his lighter in his hand, tapping it on the desk and rotating it with his fingers. His pinkie finger had a long sharp nail. He never looked at her directly. They were surrounded by boxes of main labels to be stitched into garments and tubs of machine attachments, needles, Pegasus bobbins and screws, fan belts, a jug of 80-weight gear oil, rolls of thread in black, white, blue, and glint, a fax machine with its green light winking, and a mini fridge. He spoke Toisan Cantonese; Mandarin annoyed him. She agreed with everything, even the things she couldn’t understand. She kept the military training to herself.

He asked: You a seamstress?

Naturally, she said.

He didn’t seem to care. He ran the different departments down for her: Lak gwat. He switched to English, annoyed she didn’t understand. Marrow. Baby hem. Binding. Pearl. Fifty cent a piece. Maybe ten cent. It depend. The different department grab the bundle. Sometime work overnight if they have to push the order out.

There were no days off. If you didn’t show up, you didn’t earn, that was all.

Any question?

She had no questions that she could ask him. There was no final statement made as to whether she was hired or not, or whether she would report to work tomorrow. This was neither asked nor answered. The conversation ended when she realized that he wasn’t going to say anything else to her.

One last thing happened. As she was trying to leave the building, she saw a man pulling the gate shut and putting a bike chain through it, locking them in, and she started yelling involuntarily: Hey! What’re you doing? I’m leaving!

He was an older guy, a bachelor type in an undershirt, the kind who knew the way things worked and didn’t have a problem with it. He gave her a look of crafty amusement.

Relax. The other door is open there, he said.

I wanted to speak to you about something, Skinner.

What’s that?

A prostitute from Flushing came here looking for you.

What do you mean? When?

I’m not sure of the day.

Wait a minute. I’m kind of confused. I don’t know any prostitutes from Flushing. I’m trying to figure out who it could have been. Was she Asian-looking?

I don’t know. My son said he spoke with her.

And he knows her how?

My son said he recognized her from Flushing.

You say he recognized her?

That’s correct. He recognized her. Coming to this house, looking for you.

Skinner had no reply to this.

I just thought you should know.

When he was lying in bed, he had a dream that someone was outside his window grating wearing MOP gear, releasing sarin down into the basement, that the gas was dripping all over him in his bed and he was breathing it in, and that by the time he woke up, it was already too late to save him. He gave himself both atropine shots to no avail. The green camouflaged figure came down into the basement in hood and gas mask and took Zou Lei away into the other room where Skinner couldn’t see what was happening. He was dying, paralyzed. He could hear her screaming and the table banging. Then she was brought back in with her head hanging. The figure straddled her like a goat on her hands and knees and began to strangle her with a hose. This went on for an extended period of time, punctuated by rests, during which one of the things she said was No. Then her air was cut off and her face went purple and her legs straightened out behind her. Skinner began weeping in his sleep. Stop, he sobbed. Don’t do that to her.