Preparation for the Next Life (31 page)

When I was younger, I always wanted to be in love with somebody someday. The thought that that was over, that I couldn’t feel that anymore, this really hit me hard. It took my hope away.

She set up the steam table, dialed up the flame, mopped the kitchen, threw the breaker for the counter lights. The other women came and the noise began and she went back to the hallway behind the kitchen and dumped her tub of slop from yesterday into the garbage.

In midmorning, she checked her phone. No message. She shoved her cart down the hallway, accelerating past doorways that gave onto the insides of the kitchens, the cutaway inner works of the counter, the rodent dead beneath the steam table, the mass of customers on the other side, then the wall again. A skinny old man in a white apron splotched with yellow grease leaned out into the tunnel and dropped an armful of empty boxes in her way and she almost ran him over.

She blasted her trays with the sprayer before jamming them in the conveyor belt, which went into the dishwasher, a two-foot-square stainless aluminum box connected by a tube to a wall-mounted soap bladder. She threw the lever and let it run.

On the floor she stood over kids with North Face parkas and perm-up hair and sunglasses who were playing with their food, and waited for their trays. A Hong Kong boy was talking about banana boat people and laughing huhuhu.

You gotta let people eat, he told her.

Incorrect, she said and took his tray.

He followed along behind a young man in a Frontrunners jacket and baggy jeans with his drawers showing, who took him around the corner and said, Lemme see twenty. What you got? They traded what they were respectively holding, hand to hand. Then he went into the newsstand on Roosevelt and bought a pack of Dutch Masters. Dismissively, with an air of infinite superiority and languor, the Pakistani put his change on the counter, as if he were untouchable. Skinner raked the dimes and pennies into his hand and left without a word.

Under the expressway, he made a little staging area to get his baggy out and split one of the cigars open. He brushed the tobacco away, and blew it away, and the grains fell on the cardboard of a campsite, the used-up aerosol cans rusting in multicolored plastic bags.

Then Skinner climbed the ramp and smoked his blunt alone in the middle of everything, hiking back and forth over the overpass above the expressway. In the middle of the arch, he stuck his fingers through the fence and held himself. The traffic poured by underneath him. If you looked one way, among those fire escapes, Zou Lei was over there. Three klicks to the east, that was where he lived. Looking this way, past Manhattan in the smoky distance, if you went far enough, was his unit in the barracks, the guys in Warrior Transition, in the group rooms where their wheelchairs were placed in formation and they did modified PT.

And behind him—he turned to face the other way—out there, if you kept going and going, eventually, was the war.

Imagine if this was Iraq right now, he thought. You’d be lighting up all these cars. He gazed at the sliding chains of traffic. These people have no idea. He took a hit, squatting now, holding in the smoke. I’m high as fuck. If I was there, if this was the Box, I’d have a buddy to pass this to.

In his narcotic state, he saw the sand going on and on across the continent. The broken palm trees and mud buildings and corrugated steel lean-tos and dead trucks and the domes and spires of the mosques. He could hear the loudspeakers wired by a man who weighed twenty pounds less and looked twenty years older and who was the same age as he was, a goat herder with missing fingers. He
heard the static and the ram’s horn and the voices as they spoke together, wearing robes the same color as the landscape, kneeling together, rising together, chanting together. He could see them as if he were watching them through binoculars and the Arabian dusk was coming down. He saw the dim blue sky and smelled the sunbaked human waste and saw the dark forms of his many friends, their gear, their white eyes and very occasional smiles. He tasted the smell of burning tires, hashish, gun oil, animals, coal fire, chicken and rice and Tabasco sauce. The weight of the gear. The tearing down of the body. All the things you complained about. And the thing that was greater—the war itself. It was the one thing. You went outside the wire, and each time, either you died or you did not.

He did sit-ups on the floor of his room, the dirt sticking to his back. He knew the grit was there from how it stuck to his scar tissue. He put his jeans on, his boots on, his hoodie and the camouflage. No laundry, no shopping. Sitting on the bus, then the train, not reading or thinking or even looking at anything. Just feeling the train rocking around the curve and going into the tunnel. The gray soot day smudged over everything, the tracks, the footprints all over the floor of the car. The decorative blue tiles said Hunter’s Point as the subway coasted by the platform underground. Like the antique tile-work that he had seen holes blown through, shards you crunched through, scraping and popping under their boots. Finding blood on the tiles. Building materials collapsed and torn open and out, the twisted rebar. When the walls were holed or sheared clean away, the cross-section looked like fish gills from the cavities in the cinder blocks. Sand in mounds that felt weird to step on because of something under it that slipped or rolled that wasn’t sand. The surface was oxidized black and when you kicked it up, the inside was yellow inside its cut edges like you had cut into an organ. Footprints left these yellow cuts in the sand. The smell of something foul came out. Shit or garbage or dead people with sand over it. He thought of that.

He went to the city and did nothing. Went back home and lay on the poncholiner, not doing anything except lying there with the small lamp on next to the bed, his magazines on the pressed-wood night table, the pornography right there if he turned his head to look,
but he did not. His earphones and his cell phone were mixed in with his possessions on the floor somewhere, the twisted jeans and socks and camouflage. Behind his head, the thing propping his head up was the pistol in a towel. He heard the thump of people or furniture upstairs. The window was a black square. What day is it, what month is it, what hour of the night? The one animate thing in the room was the boiler in the closet. There was nothing to eat or drink.

Eventually, he sat up. Then he pushed himself up to standing. Stood looking down at the mess on the floor, hunting for a final MRE. He gave up and felt the pockets of his jacket. A wrapper crinkled in his hand. He took it out, finding only the Indian’s head and the desiccant. A tiny chip of jerky. Skinner crushed the wrapper and let it go and it floated to the floor. Fuck it. There was no room inspection here. There was no point in going out to check inside the fridge, but he went anyway, jacked the door open—it was that old-fashioned pump-action kind of door—and the cold hissed out at him like the Arab voices, offering him hashish, calling him a dog.

He went back into the bedroom, now seeing the pornography and his bottles of medication. He shook out pills into his hand, blue diamond, white hexagon, pink oval. Slapped them into his mouth and went out to the kitchen with his lower jaw stuck out like a bird to hold them and bent and sucked water from the kitchen tap.

Where was his phone? It took effort to charge it up, especially when all he wants to do now is pitch himself down on the poncholiner. But if you don’t do A, then B doesn’t happen, and C, you die. So he made himself do it. Then he threw himself down in the bed—the feet scraped an inch on the floor. The poncholiner sticking to his skin where it remembered him, your body always losing water in the desert, the shadow of himself imprinted on the nylon. His head had a rock in it from the medication. Brad’s-eye-view of the world was just the slick green of the poncholiner, one of his hands—the other he felt trapped under him—the yellow spill of the lamplight, the table with his skyline of pill bottles. In the shine on the glossy cover, he could make out the trace of a beautiful woman’s leg and a spike heel.

The army had given him anti-anxiety medication, antipsychotic medication, and something to help him sleep. Whatever else these chemicals did to him, they did not stop him from having nightmares.

He was sleeping, but his head was running like an engine. The mortar was coming down at a thousand feet per second. He
reexperienced the detonation, his mouth open, a red light behind his eyes, which was neurological, not physical, and his ears bursting inward, and the difficulty breathing. He was confused, but he knew something.

In his bed, he bucked and started struggling.

He was trying to do something—he could feel it hurting his hands—but he didn’t know what it was yet, because he was disoriented. He knew it mattered more than anything else, and he knew he was going to fail at it. He had a feeling of love and anguish in his heart. He was clawing in the sand. He heard himself screaming for Jake.

He felt him, the chest was canvas over steel, the head was bare. He could not find his face, just sand. He had to get him up. He grabbed him by his harness, climbed to his feet and tried to lift him up.

They were carrying ninety pounds of gear per man, give or take, and Skinner could barely stand up on his own he was so fatigued. He strained with everything he had, and for a second he raised him up, but there was no way to hold him up. His back gave out, he got pulled down, and fell on him.

He fell face first in the sand, breathed it in, and coughed it up and spat it out. His own gear weight threatened to suffocate him. He pushed himself up. Big bench press. Their hands reached for each other. Skinner was trying to get his balance and took his hand away. He got his knees under him. Something metal bit his knee and sand was hanging in the shorts he wore, as if he had shit his pants, swaying between his legs, heavy, pulling them off. Sconyers was dying and he was reaching with his hand. They gripped hands. The feeling of the rough sand and the rough unmistakable live feeling of the man’s hand was what shocked Skinner awake—feeling as if his friend had literally reached out from the other side and grabbed his hand. Do it now or else. They gripped like two guys saying hey, and he felt the other’s weight and the great immovable weight of their combined battle rattle and pulled, and he woke up physically straining, clutching the edge of the mattress, as if he was going to put his arms around it and bend it in half against the steel springs and fold it around himself. Lift his entire bed into the air. The house out of its foundations.

He had a wild, drugged, unslept, disoriented feeling. He talked to the room. He checked his phone, looked out the window, listened to
the house. It was five-thirty and he hadn’t slept. I can’t do anything, he thought, even sleep. His urine striking the water in the toilet in the small bright bathroom. Turning away from the sight of his own face in the mirror. He snapped the light off. Stunned and stupid in the dark. His head ached.

The floor creaked up in the apartment overhead and Mrs. Murphy’s door opened and then somebody came out and down the three steps to the landing above the basement stairs, opened the side door of the house, and left. The door slammed. Boots on the ground—the weight of a big man leaving for the day. Skinner tracking the whole thing, frozen as if hidden waiting in a listening post or an ambush, until whoever it was (and it must have been Mr. Murphy with his brogue) got into the pickup and drove away.

If he could have slept, he would have, but he could not. He got dressed on automatic, in the same unwashed clothes as yesterday and the day before and the day before, as if he were living in the field. The pistol was in plain view on the bed. He put the Berretta in his assault pack and wore it out.

Halfway down the block, he stopped. Was he going to the gym? His fatigue was a massive heavy thing and he didn’t want to carry anything at all. He went back around the side of the house, head lowered in case anyone was watching him, and closed himself in. Clicked the lock. Went down into his room and took the assault pack off. He took the pistol out and laid it down in the open where he placed his head. I’m not going anywhere. You’re not going anywhere, he told himself. You had your chance. He fell down on the bed with his arm over his eyes. Lay there just taking shallow breaths. Not sleeping. Hearing his heart like it belonged to someone else. Eventually working his boots off. They dropped on the floor. He pulled the pillow over his head and the nine slipped and fell between the mattress and the wall.

Later, he rolled over and touched what the weapon had done, a white divot in the plaster. He ran his fingers over it and the tiny white grains snowed down. The chittering out there belonged to birds. A background noise combined with the drawn-out sound of a mile-long roll of tape being peeled up of tires going by between the buildings and the trees.

He thought about executing himself. Just being very quiet and still within his own mind. No grief at the moment. Should I do it
now? The thought actually calmed him once he faced it. It was something he could finally understand. Shortly it took a back burner to his just needing to eat.

The second time he left the house, he made it to the bus stop. The late winter sun was up and shining on us all, the unamused females who did medical billing, the guys in do-rags and sideways hats, either truants or going to some kind of gig in a stockroom. Strong-jawed Central American men who worked construction, a Timberland backpack over one shoulder, covered in dust. Skinner made it to the Dunkin Donuts by the subway and got a coffee. The nice Indian lady with the gold stud in her nose said, Regular, darling? Milk and sugar? Skinner said, Yeah, why not? She said, Why not, darling? You want special, one bagel cream cheese more for ninety-nine cent? Yeah, okay. Okay, darling, you got it. And he took his hot sweet coffee and his bagel and sat on the last high chair at the window with the bums and watched the crowd stream by in the sun. The Indian voice saying darling. Skinner warming up inside. The periodic roar from underground.