Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

The room was set below ground level. The bed she lay on was under the sidewalk. The sunlight fell through a barred grating overhead. The basement housed the silent boiler, copper lines and the pipes for kitchen and bathroom, all of which were buried below ground. The water from the entire house ran down and drained into a sewer pipe beneath her in the rock. The floor tiles had been laid over ten years ago and the glue that bonded them to the concrete slab had chemically degraded. Tiles would slip sideways when they were stepped on, revealing the concrete slab, which drew up dampness from the earth. It was a strange shitty room, she thought, and it bothered her to be here alone. She wondered why anyone would have painted it this garish whorehouse purple unless they were using it as a set for pornographic filming.

She tried to sleep again, but instead ended up worrying about every particular and contingency of her situation. In an effort to control her anxiety, she got up and put on her bra and found the clothes she had run in.

As she was putting on her shorts, she was aware of noises from the people upstairs. It was the ordinary commotion of people gathering and going out together. She heard women talking, briefly loud as the apartment door opened and closed, their muted voices on the street.

It annoyed her that she was stuck here waiting for Skinner. Thinking of calling him, she checked the time and saw it was ten o’clock. She was getting hungry and considered going to look in the refrigerator.

From outside, the sound of cars reached her faintly. The insulation of the room was troubling, the degree to which it swallowed sound.

It distressed her that it was already ten o’clock and he hadn’t called her. She sat down on the bed again and dozed or tranced sitting up. She abandoned the thought of eating. She was getting very sad.

He had left her without making love to her.

I’m alone, she kept thinking. I’m alone. I’m alone. I’m alone. Alone. Alone. Death. Death. Alone.

You’ve been here before, she said.

She frightened herself, imagining what if the door was locked from the other side? What if the man she loved was a stranger? What if this was an isolation cell and you were never going to leave it?

She stood up in the sun-filled room and started getting organized. To stop herself from thinking about Skinner, to contain the thought of him, she zipped her cell phone in her belly pouch and set it on the nightstand. She straightened her hair and tied it back and looked around for her socks.

At this point, she heard a sound in the outer basement but thought it was coming from outside.

It occurred to her that she was missing something that belonged to her, and she realized it was her sneakers. Her hair was still tangled and she took a comb to it while looking around the floor. She heard something again and paused with her comb in her hand.

For a minute she wondered if it was Skinner coming back.

Skinner? she asked.

There was no answer.

She lowered the comb.

As she stood there, she felt a presence approach the other side of the bedroom door. It was such a strong impression, she almost thought she could see a man-shaped shadow through the wood. The hair rose on the back of her neck. She did not move. She thought it could have been her imagination.

A male voice spoke through the door.

She stood frozen and momentarily scared.

The doorknob was jiggled.

Open it, he said.

From the preemptory character of the voice, her first thought was that it was the police.

She glanced down at her belly bag on the bedside table, which contained her money, key, and now her cell phone — the things she couldn’t lose. She couldn’t see her Asics, which were hidden under the pizza box, and in her panic she couldn’t recall where they were.

The man said something else, uttering it as if his mouth was full, as if his tongue was thick, engorged.

She called out: My boyfriend sleeping, come back later!

Then she heard keys.

The lock clicked. When the door began opening, she yelled No! and ran to push it shut.

As soon as she saw his face, she knew what was going to happen and her heart sickened. He shoved her in the chest with both hands. The force threw her straight back across the room and onto the bed.

The instant her back hit the bed, she bounced up and dodged right past him. By the time Jimmy had reacted with his long loping body, she was already up the basement stairs, had ripped the door open, and was running barefoot in the street.

The next thing she knew, she was out on the avenue and she didn’t know how far she had run. The sun was in her eyes, cars were driving by, and she didn’t feel the pain of her heels hitting the cement, just impact.

Her momentum spun down from running to jogging to frantic walking. She was gasping for air. She turned and walked backwards, looking behind her, ready to run again. Something in her wanted to laugh. She stopped and stared back up the avenue looking for anyone following her and saw no one.

My heaven. My heaven, she thought.

Oh, my heaven.

She had trouble seeing the street signs. She recognized Kissena when she was already on it, the soles of her feet burned from the pavement, trying to avoid stepping on broken glass.

What now? Everything of hers had been left back there.

My heaven, what had happened?

At a ninety-nine cent store, she stopped and begged a woman in an umbrella visor to let her have a pair of shower shoes. A passerby overheard Zou Lei and gave her a dollar. She was a slender woman in her forties with luminous eyes, the kind of woman that wound up in detention in China. I am a Buddhist, she smiled. Zou Lei thanked her and popped the plastic thread that held the rubber sandals together and put her blackened feet in them.

She looked around for some idea of what to do. The Buddhist had disappeared in the crowd of heads with black hair, the short-sleeved rayon blouses, and the plastic toys and gadgets making sounds, the strains of swelling music, saccharin recorded women’s voices saying buy one get one free. A skinny man was cutting sugarcane with a knife, the long green peelings falling about his ankles.

She crossed Main Street and went downhill towards the freeway. At her house, she tried the door and it was locked. For a time, she paced with her arms crossed. It wasn’t that she even wanted to get inside. She wanted Skinner here. She whirled around in a circle, sighed and bit her lip. What on earth do I do? She held her head. She would make herself wait. When he found her gone, he would necessarily come here.

After she got tired of pacing, she squatted down in that deep Asian squat, monitoring the approach to the house from between parked cars, her work-stained hand holding the top of her head and her blackened feet pressed against the hot sidewalk, toes gripping her sandals. A wisp of hair hung across her face. Her mouth was half-open and her brown eyes rested on the trees at the end of the block, watching them for movement.

The sun moved. In the late afternoon, people who worked Saturdays too appeared out of the trees and began coming down the block and going into their houses. Another hour went by. She made herself wait. One of a thousand bachelor immigrants in a t-shirt and jeans came tripping down the hill with his shadow behind him, his head hung. His clothes and hands were covered in paint and plaster. They knew each other by sight, she had drunk his Sunkist. She watched him see her. He must have seen her distress. She watched him decide it did not involve him and go into his house.

When she couldn’t keep still any longer, she stood and lifted one foot and then the other, as if she had to urinate. Arms crossed, she hurried up a concrete path through a sea of ferns and weeds, which had grown deep in the hot weather, and stood at the boulevard’s edge to squint at the horizon. There was no more than an inch of evening sky between the gas station’s roof and the orange sun.