Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

He watched the man apply pressure until she stopped shaking, and then continue it far past that point, jamming a broom handle in the garrote to torque it. The man jammed it in and left it tight for several minutes. Her personality, her personhood were long lost. The garrote made the head bloated. A distorted face that was not the way she had ever looked before when it was her.

When Jimmy was with his crew, they saw Skinner coming and they waited until he got close. Guado was prepared to say something or do something. The point was to keep him guessing. What they said might be friendly. Have a good day, guy. Or they said something you could barely hear and half a block later you knew it was an insult. Sometimes just a word. Your brain would unfold it while you were walking. Or, depending, they would let you know you were being sized-up, and when you showed the slightest reaction, tensing up your shoulders or the way you walked, somebody would yell, Don’t fuck with me! all crazy.

Skinner got closer and Guado murmured, He ain’t shit. Then louder: What’s up, big boy!

Nothing, Skinner said.

Jimmy: A little fuckee suckee. And then Jimmy watched Skinner’s face as he kept walking.

It was perfectly true that Jimmy had a few things that did not belong to him and that one of them was a Hustler that had been purchased at a PX on a military base, the PX being next to the pharmacy where you received your Zoloft, Ambien, Valium, Risperidone, your psychotics and your anti-psychotics.

One of the girls bore a rough resemblance to her in that she had brown hair, the same small build, though she was perhaps a little airbrushed. Either way, she had not heard his footsteps on the basement stairs when she was getting done. Based on how she sounded, he thought she was uneducated and lower class. A beautiful feminine lady of an exotic arousal. The vet, her boyfriend, was a punk.

Once, the kid had tried to confront him, so to speak. Jimmy was prowling around the basement and the knothead came out of his room and started whining about how I know you took my shit.

But there was no nothing behind it, which is what Jimmy expected, so he did more little things as little tests, just as games, feeling all along, if you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be living here. You can’t even show your woman a good time.

On his stairs, Skinner found a business card for an escort service. It said Outcalls Only, there was a phone number, Flushing, New York, and the picture was a tan Asian woman in a thong, black-and-white palm trees. For Perfect Ass, it said.

Skinner kept it as evidence, storing it in his assault pack thinking, After I waste this motherfucker, I’ll show them.

FOR A SERIES OF days on and around July 4 th, when Monroe was at family picnics having roast pork with relatives he disdained, they let her work the front. By sometime in the afternoon, her feet would hurt from standing up all day and she would check the time, hipshot and bored in her tight jeans and the always-dirty food-encrusted uniform shirt. She dug the ladle into the rice, folded the rice over and glanced out over the counter, barely hearing the monotonous roar of the customers ordering in Chinese, the trays clattering, the kitchen racket, the syrupy pop songs. Only her predicament existed to her. She went round the elements of her life again: Skinner, papers, cops, marriage, lawyer, money, job, housing, Skinner, his illness, money. Every planet in the orbit was another unknown. At night, she turned the fan on in the hot plywood shed and couldn’t sleep until the room cooled off toward morning. Her head hurt. Periodically, day or night, she suffered a jab of panic: What if someone locked her up again just because he thought it was his job? And then she saw the cell. She tried to breathe and think of what to do. You will at least try to do something, she told herself. You will go with Skinner and get married. But should I get an ID in my legal name first? A good one? This reintroduced the problem of arrest. Or getting robbed or ripped-off. And money. Money. She was running out of money. If I can’t pay rent, then what? She lifted her foot and held the instep of her sneaker to stretch her thigh and a tremor such as you might see on a horse’s flank shot down her leg.

Above all, she wanted to do something she could control. She wanted to reject every solution that involved going through a government office. It wasn’t realistic, but she wished she could reduce everything to the simple physical test of running away.

That evening she went to see Skinner and he met her in a state of paranoia, pacing back and forth in the sunset shadows on the corner. The buildings across from the train tracks cast walls of gloom over the avenue. He greeted her by looking around her at the empty street, the train tracks, the sniper positions in the windows, the roofs, hitching up his beltless jeans and saying come on, let’s get inside. Then he went around the basement checking their perimeter, looking in the bathroom, peeking around the corner into the kitchen area, opening his closet and gazing at the boiler.

To her horror, she saw he had the gun in his hand, and she told him to put it away or she would leave.

He had taken something that made him manic, she thought.

We have to try to take it easy, she said, to make the right decision. She told him she had decided that, if he was still willing, getting married was probably the best thing they could do to ensure that she wouldn’t be deported and that they shouldn’t delay any longer. What did he think?

He was all for it. Good to go. Let’s go now. You never knew what might happen tomorrow.

She pointed out they couldn’t go now, the office would be closed.

Then we’ll go tomorrow. You never knew what was gonna happen the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or the day after that. They had to do it soon. He had a plan too. You wanna hear? I’ve decided I’m going back!

Back to where?

Where else? The Sand Box. I’m done here. Making all these thinking errors. All the problems. I used to be a highly locked-on soldier. I need to get back in there. And I know when I do, it’s going to be the best thing for everyone, instead of stewing over it from three thousand miles away.

He told her that in his first firefight he had been more excited than at any point in his life, before or since.

He told her he wanted to go back as a contractor. He would make one hundred forty thousand dollars in one year. Their problems would be over, he said.

Then the next day, Sassoon was back at work and Zou Lei was consigned to dishwashing duty again. As ever, she was reviewing her situation. Today was Friday. She would take action and go to the marriage office with Skinner first thing on Monday even if she had to miss a day of work. That was the first priority. The marriage registration fee was forty dollars. Her rent, a hundred dollars for the week, was due every Monday; so she needed one hundred forty dollars on Monday, plus another twenty dollars to eat. Payday was the following Friday. She didn’t know what they would be paying her exactly — she expected to be shortchanged — but as long as she had enough to live on with enough left over to pay the lawyer to open her case, she could then work on getting another job. Other jobs might be out-of-state — you had to go where the work was. Could she travel back and forth to see her lawyer and for court? No, she thought. She had to stay here. She’d look for another restaurant job in the city. Money wouldn’t be a problem if Skinner made one hundred forty thousand dollars, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had been on cocaine or amphetamines, she thought. Maybe she could get him to invest in a vendor cart and they could work together selling shaokao right here in Flushing. The investment for a cart was ten thousand dollars. They could get the license in his name. She saw them working together at the top of the hill, living in their own apartment with a refrigerator and TV. How clean she’d keep it! Together they would go to the gym.