Authors: Nell Zink
Nicotine (37 page)
He goes to see some people and drops some business cards. Immediately he gets Hawaiian traffic on his Web site. He plumbs some bureaucrats by phone and hears the jangle of low-hanging contracts.
He has an urge to slap himself in the face and say, “What were you doing!” Some people were born to live out their lives in Jerseyâpeople like Amalia. He hereby grants those people leave to live and die in situ and play Billy Joel at their funerals. Others have the sense to move up and out.
Ever judicious, Matt blames his mistake on sibling rivalry. If only Patrick hadn't moved to the South Pacific first.
But that doesn't matter now. He's past all that. He's on a move.
But of course his assembly plant is in Bayonne, and his employees
(judging by what he knows of them) were born to live and die in Jersey.
It's a logistical challenge. It's daunting. He doesn't want to break in new contractors. And he doesn't relish moving his whole shop to Honolulu. Real estate there is out of sight.
But shipping is cheap. Shipping is in the basement.
He thinks day and night. The women he picks up think he must be very creative and important, because he jumps out of bed to write in a spiral notebook he keeps locked in the hotel room safe. He keeps his phone turned off, happy that industrial espionage hasn't yet mastered the remote monitoring of pencil points.
He doesn't go looking for Jazz. He thinks of her only tangentially, as a medium-term goal, like his new company. He defers gratification as never before. He has never wanted anything so much, and he has never been so methodical about waiting. It's a brand-new skill for him, though most children are said to develop it by the age of five.
When he gets back to New Jersey, he begins exploratory negotiations. He hopes to liaise with a certain publicly traded waste management company and site his new plant in a special economic zone near the Korean DMZ. His two senior engineers express interest in signing on. Matt is poised to become seriously rich and Hawaiian.
AT THE BAKER CENTER, THREE
weeks pass without a Matt sighting. Then, on a Wednesday night at eight, he is seen departing through the café, carrying a large cardboard box and a laptop case.
It's the talk of DJD. In general they don't pay much attention to Matt. When he passes through the café, he creates a faint ripple of bad vibes. What he does up in the apartment, nobody knows or cares. He doesn't seem to spend much time there. Just marking his territory, they guess.
But now he has departed the premises with a big box of stuff and
his home computer. That can only mean one thing: he means to rent his place out furnished.
A low sibilance is heard in Jersey City as anarchists begin to consider how much they would pay for a location that ideal and enviable, and who might work as a share. Strangers sidle up to bookstore staff and find roundabout ways of asking for Matt's contact information. They say it's confidential. Kestrel is designated to text him and ask about his plans.
He doesn't answer.
Four days pass before Anka hears about it from Sunshine. Evidently he is the only person she ever speaks with who doesn't hope to take over the apartment himself. Immediately, she calls Rob.
LATE THE NEXT MORNING, ROB
goes to the café.
He doesn't much like it there, since it used to be his kitchen and bathroom. To the DJD residents staffing it, he's still Rob the rat fink who put Susannah out of commissionâthat's Anka's theory on what they think, at least, and he has no reason to disagree with her. They don't look at him or talk to him.
All those sporty young women who used to be so nice! They treat him with disdain now. They ignore him. So he doesn't know whether his plan for the retaking of Nicotine can work.
Kestrel is their leading personality, and when he gets there she has a shift, just as Anka said she would. He asks her straight-out what she thinks of him. She responds by asking how things are going with Penny.
“Great,” he says. “Why?”
Kestrel looks sad.
“I said great. She's wonderful. We're perfect together. What's wrong?”
“I don't know.”
“Come on. What is it?”
“I'm sorry.” She turns back to the espresso machine and wipes her eyes.
“Please tell me. I came here to find out what my rating is with you guys.”
“I believed that you were asexual,” she says. “I guess it took a new kid on the block to see the obvious truth.”
“Kestrel.”
“I was so
blind
. And now you're a
couple
. You blew off Jazz for her. I mean, Jazz! You must be so in
love
.” Her tone is tragic. She turns away to clean dried froth off the milk steamer attachment with a rag, rather too vigorously.
“We're not a couple,” he assures her. “I was always polyamorous, and I still am. I'm just picky, and slow on the uptake. I never notice when women have crushes on me. It really helps to tell me flat out. Seriously. I'm grateful.”
She turns, and her look brightens. “You want some Cake Zero?” she asks. “It's free.” (The name is by analogy to Coke Zero, because when a recipe is free of that many allergens, it's easier just to say what's in it.)
He points at the millet-butternut-safflower variety and says, “This one looks good. You know, Kestrel, there's one kind of sexual freedom, which is doing whatever you want with whoever wants to. But there's also another kind, which is feeling relaxed enough to do anything at all. Sometimes I think I don't need a lot ofâyou knowâhousemates looking over my shoulder?”
She cuts him an extra-large piece and lets it fall on a plate with trembling hands. She takes a deep breath and says, “There's something I've been wanting to tell you.”
“What?”
“Matt moved out. He took his shit and left like five days ago.”
“That's interesting.”
“I'd see a lot more of you if you lived here like you used to. Everybody knows you built this house. You should occupy it.”
“Hmm,” he says. “And you don't think I sold out the climate march?”
She lowers her voice. “You know why the climate march was such a massive fail? The fucking Freedom Tower, that's why. And that was Sunshine's idea.”
“He's a dork,” he says through a mouthful of cake.
“I think he's a
cop
.”
He nods, busy eating.
He gathers his strength. He walks upstairsâpast the steamy yoga studio full of women high on the placebo effects of folic acid, past the legal aid office, where Rufus is revealing his identity to a law student who thinks he qualifies for the GI Bill, past the Internet radio station dispensing nutrition advice from an MP3 recorded in Tulsa in 1999, past the workshop full of puppeteers in various stages of blissful self-delusion. In their midst stands Stevie, dressed as a jubilant gray prophylactic. It's a dolphin costume that's not quite working yet, but there's still time until the oceans summit.
He kicks in the door of the elegant apartment on the roof, and he and Penny move in.
PENNY DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT IT
for several hours, because she has meetings. As soon as she hears Rob's message, she calls him back.
“Yay!” she says. “I never thought I'd get to move into Nicotine!”
“I wouldn't call this Nicotine exactly,” he says. “It's so pretty and sparkly. The furniture is all beech and birch and white suede and cashmere on random-width pine flooring, and this rug I'm lying on, it's so soft, I can't even describe it. You know I fucking hate Matt, but the first thing I did when I got in here was take off my shoes.”
“It's not surprising. He's a designer.”
“Well, my work is done. There's nothing I need to do on this apartment except try not to get it dirty.”
“How are the appliances?”
“You're the expert. I don't know what half of them are.”
“That's so great. You know what you could do? Landscape the backyard and open up the back door. The kids could play back there instead of spending all their time in the store. It would have access to the garage. You could teach them to fix bikes!”
“Like a sheltered workshop, but with toddlers.”
“Okay, maybe not. I was just thinking you could expand and employ somebody. The unemployed or whoever. Maybe you could get it subsidized?”
“There's a reason anarchist work is unpaid. Wages are for getting people to do stuff they don't like doing. That's why the minute a guy becomes your employee, he starts hating you. You know the IWW slogan? âThe working class and the employing class have nothing in common.' If somebody wants to fix bikes, they can borrow my tools and I'll show them stuff. I work with those people all the time. But I'm not going to bribe anybody to pretend to like doing what I do.”
“I'm sensing that your economic ideal is long-term sustainability rather than growth.”
“Yard work is unskilled. I'll go home and get our stuff, and tomorrow I'll found a collective to clean up the backyard so we can sit out there.”
WHEN PENNY IS DONE TALKING
to Rob, she calls Matt (on his cell, in what she assumes is Bayonne) to say she's taking her quarter of the Baker Center. “Because it's my fair share,” she explains.
“Like I need that kind of penny-ante distraction in my life,” he says. He is sitting in the lobby of an office building in Honolulu,
waiting to be escorted upstairs. “Take the whole house. See if I give a rat's ass.”
“All right! I will!” she says.
“You're welcome!”
Matt puts the phone in his pocket and types an e-mail on his laptop:
Hotness. Hope you're well. I just gifted your house to Penny and her boyfriend He-Man. Even Steven? Question: Spear fishing on East Asian partner's humble oceangoing yacht, weekend after next. Skill in harpooning sea turtles in the eye from 4-5 feet away de rigueur in these circles but not a strict requirement. We'll talk. The pros he hires are not brilliant conversationalists. Birth control is on the house.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, JAZZ REPLIES
to him.
I wrote some poems about ex-lovers like I sometimes do. Meaning you and Rob. I'm reading them Friday at 9 in that pinkish yurt you may have noticed when you came to visit. Sorry will be there. If you can sit still through that, we're cool. P.S. You'll need a real flashlight. It's the new moon. No phone is bright enough.
MATT WRITES BACK,
I'll be there. I won't be bored. Thank you. I'm already less bored. You know I was crazy about you. Literally insane. I might put some serious effort into making it tolerable for you to be around me. I'm not sure how yet, but I believe in my heart it can be done.
NELL ZINK
grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include
The Wallcreeper, Mislaid,
and
Private Novelist,
and her writing has appeared in
n+1
. She lives near Berlin, Germany.
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Cover design and illustration © Liana Finck
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
NICOTINE
. Copyright © 2016 by Nell Zink. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-244170-6
EPub Edition October 2016 ISBN 9780062441720
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