Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

What’s his name?

Jimmy. Jimmy fucking Murphy.

You know what he was in prison for? Was it narcotics?

For fucking his mother, for all I know. He’s a shitbag.

Okay, got it. Step in for me again. Watch the door.

The cop locked him in again.

I’m Brad, dude. What’s your name?

What it says on my uniform. O’Donnell.

The cop told him to sit tight and left, shutting the arrest room door. Three hours later, Skinner was still staring at the door through the wire X’s, waiting for him to come back. Skinner was propped up on the cage, his arms wrapped around his waist, holding his stomach, suffering with his hunger. Not moving, like an animal conserving energy, partly camouflaged by the steel mesh. Listening to the precinct outside the door, a cell phone ringtone playing a few bars of Billy Joel.

Plainclothes cops brought in an arrestee, a short young male with the creased face of a forty-year-old sharecropper, in his boxers, tripping with his pants around his ankles. They opened the holding pen and put him in in handcuffs. Y’all play hard, he said, in a voice both high and deep at once, as if there were a clarinet reed in his chest. He sat in the middle of the bench with his knees spread and raised his cuffed hands together and gave the cops the finger. Y’all see what I’m holding? The cage filled up with black males between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, making hand signs at the police and shouting out. The smallest had an afro that looked like the points of a star. One said, Hey, yo, cop, can I axe a question. He had his penis out. Skinner muttered, Shit, and looked away. They tried to get his attention by kicking his boot toe with their unlaced Jordans. He could smell them. One wedged his knee against Skinner’s knee and pretended not to notice he was there. Skinner moved away and cradled his head in his hand, waiting for time to pass until the cops would feed them, his eyes shut, hearing:

Glenmore niggas. Nigga runnin toward us pullin up. Started dumpin at us. Beek! Beek! Beek! That’s 8 block. Started throwin at him. They killt him. You know where the Pioneer be at. I know what you talkin bout. They used to call it 8 block. Almost caught my son in the stomach if I hadn’t duck. By Howard. My grandparents live over there. He run a blood gang. Nigga on the island. He ran up on one nigga and smoked that nigga. I was shook. Them niggas stay doin that. He got shot in the leg, both legs. His face, his face was like this, bleekin. He kicked me with his boot. Ain’t nothin I could do the way that nigga hit me so hard. My uncle came down. My shit was swollen. Buddha came down. I was shook, son. Almost two days later in the summertime. I know where he went. He went around the block again. We broke the bat in two pieces. I was kickin him in the face. Buddha like, That’s enough. You gotta go home. Niggas jumped me. I whaled on that sucka. Shorty tight with Buddha. She tried to take my ring off, nigga. Second time she wanna pop it off. We broke the coffee table, nigga. We threw this nigga into the coffee table and nigga stuck him. Beek. To the chess.

A plainclothes cop who looked like a short muscular white rapper in a baseball jersey, denim shorts, and a baseball hat worn low over his eyes, came in and called Skinner’s name.

Right here, Skinner said.

Step out for me. He opened the cage. Just you. Sit down, he told a youth.

But my mother waiting for me.

Skinner walked out.

White faggot.

You’re getting a get out of jail free card. The guy you had a fight with has some problems, so that’s in your favor.

Thank you! he shouted. His voice sounded aggressive.

Thank your arresting officer.

The cop gave Skinner a form to sign and then tore off the white and the yellow copies and gave them to him.

This is when your court date is.

That’s it?

Unless you wanna stay.

Skinner got his property back at the front desk. He took his envelope without a word and walked out through the turnstile and shoved out through the front door into the warm night air, the sudden noise lifting off the streets into the purple sky.

He sat down on the curb and laced his desert boots back up. He was very stiff and sore and to stand again, he had to get up on his hands and knees like somebody with muscular dystrophy.

Now what the fuck do I do? he begged.

The traffic flew by him leaving taillights in his retinas. The desk appearance ticket, which he had folded, dropped out of his pocket and he picked it up. When he stood up, he was facing the parking lot. Chinatown was on the other side of it. Come on, he told himself, and started hiking. By the time he thought of looking back at the police station, he was already blocks away from it, having turned downhill into the neon lights on Roosevelt Avenue. She’ll be there, he told himself. He had rolled the desk appearance ticket up and was twisting it into a hard stick in his hands, his palm prints on the paper.

On the way, he stopped at McDonald’s and ate his food standing up, mashing his sandwich into his face. The Coke made him groan and whisper, Goddamn. He took it with him, hurrying on, and side-armed it at a garbage can outside a furniture store when he was down to the ice. He weaved through the crowd, taking his shirt off as he went, wiping his face, wiping ketchup off his hands, exposing his tattooed white body in the headlights.

The block out to the freeway seemed to go on for miles. He would have run, but the most his legs could do was fast-walk. He scanned the laundry-hung windows of the identical brickface houses, identifying what he thought was her apartment, looking for a light. She was going to be there and she was going to fling her arms around him when she saw him.

He jogged the last ten yards to her door and started knocking.

Zou Lei! he called. He backed up in the street and looked up at the windows. He shouted her name again. No one answered. He heard a Chinese voice inside the walls. It wasn’t her. He banged on the door some more. Hello! he yelled.

Finally, he got someone to come to the window on the second floor. From in the street, he could only see a shadow of a head.

Zou Lei! Can you get her?

What?

Can you get my girlfriend? Let me describe her. She’s five foot three. Chinese. She lives right in there.

Nobody here.

You didn’t check. I’m asking you to check.

No here.

Just check for me. Knock.

The shadow went away, Skinner believed, at first, to check, but then, as the minutes went by, he knew no one was coming back.

Hey! he called.

There was no answer.

Can you talk to me?

He was yelling to himself on the street, amid the garbage cans, the wrought iron security grills, the shirts and pants and bras on the clotheslines, the general silence.

WHEN HIS BODY MOVED next to her, she woke immediately. She went from running in her dream-forest to watching him climbing over her and putting on his jockstrap. She watched him dressing in basketball shorts, tying up his boots, moving around and collecting up his things as if he had somewhere to be.

She tried to make sense of what he was doing.

Did he have a previous appointment? she wondered, something he had forgotten to mention when he had kneeled at her feet last night and told her of his renewed commitment?

Perhaps she sensed an inconsistency between the idea of his giving her everything and his leaving now, his face hidden from her.

She wanted to tell him about her dream, that she had just been dreaming of them running together. But she was afraid he wouldn’t want to hear it, so she kept silent. She told him to have a good workout.

He pulled the door shut taking the keys — the keys he had symbolically promised her last night — leaving her stranded in his room.