Preparation for the Next Life (34 page)

Move over your body, she told him, so she could sit. He moved over and watched her examining each of his pill bottles under the bedside lamp, studying the chemical names—Zoloft, Ambien, Seroquel. She tried to read the dosages in English. Blue, pink, yellow, white, red, she repeated, memorizing.

That’s what they gave me. You know anything about that stuff?

We should keep it well. Not messy.

So I don’t take the wrong one by accident.

We keep it all in one place from now on. If you take one, put it back.

I will.

If he wanted to lie down, first he had to arrange his boots next to his bed and put his assault pack where he could reach it. Then she was allowed to climb over him to the inboard side of the bed and hug him from there, so he would know where she was.

She stroked his ear. You can tell me your dream, she said.

At her urging, he began to reveal his symptoms, if not his dreams.

Have you seen how I get distracted, how my eye goes like this? He had her watch his eyes. Look at the right one. See how it’s shaking?

She could not tell.

How I can’t stop looking over there?

That she saw. He kept looking over her head, weak side-strong side, to the entrance of the room, which led out into the world where cars were always coming, always getting closer, approaching him and his brother soldiers at sandbagged roadblocks.

Chronic anxiety was something she understood.

Headlights coming at me, crowds, whenever I hear the intercom radio on the subway, he said. Potholes in the street. Car doors. You know what a bullet sounds like? Have you ever had a wasp flying really close to your ear?

They entered the search words Sick + Soldier on his laptop. From the screen, a man in a v-neck sweater talked to them from in front of a bookcase in a well-lit office. Skinner lit a Marlboro and listened with her. The video ran out, it froze. Their feed was bad. He reached over and hit a key on the machine and his ashes fell on the keypad to join the sand. This fucking busted thing, he said. The video was loading, they had to wait. It restarted and she watched it. He got up and finished his cigarette in the other room.

Have you seen the way I get mad even when I’m trying to be nice?

Something has shook your mind. It could be some bruise inside the head.

28

W
HENEVER
S
UNNIE NEEDED A
break, Zou Lei had an arrangement with her that she would take her place on the line. Frequently, she simply told Sunnie, You need a break, sister. Sunnie would laugh uncertainly and say, I don’t really.

Yes, you do. You shouldn’t work too hard. Here’s a cup of soup.

Oh, my. But I’m full already. You want to practice the menu, don’t you?

Yes, I have to practice.

Well, okay. Are you sure you understand the order?

If I practice, I’ll get it. The turkey is separate.

Okay, I guess there’s no harm then, as long as Sassoon won’t mind.

She’s not here, Zou Lei said, taking the big spoon from her. I got it from here. If you want, you can just hang out right there by the tea pot and have your soup, and if there’s any emergency, I can ask you what to do, so nothing’ll go wrong. Very tranquil.

Well, okay.

You’re the coach, I’m the trainee. Strictly criticize my mistakes.

I’m nobody’s teacher, Sunnie smiled shyly, taking her place by the hot water cistern.

You’re helping me, Zou Lei said.

You’re industrious, Sunnie would say.

Angela, in front of whom all this was taking place, said, Does anybody know what you’re doing?

Sunnie stared at her in great anxiety. She had second thoughts, but Zou Lei held onto the dipper.

You manage your register, Zou Lei told Angela, We’ll manage this.

He called her at four in the morning and started talking, his voice like a loud ant coming out of the cell phone, and her neighbor sighed through the boards. Just minute, she whispered. She took her
sweatshirt and found her sandals and went out on the stoop. The sky was a lighter shade of black than the park behind the gas station across the boulevard, the streetlights casting their peculiar glow on the pavement. He was saying he couldn’t sleep. She agreed to meet him at McDonald’s.

On her way to McDonald’s, the shuttered gates of businesses were covered in graffiti you never saw in daytime and she thought they resembled a thousand tattooed eyelids. The chairs were upside down on the tables so they could mop.

Skinner arrived ten minutes later, nearly invisible in his black hood. He behaved with an almost formal politeness, thanking her for coming, his eyes hidden.

I need a soda, if you don’t mind waiting a second.

It’s okay, she said.

He bought her a bacon egg and cheese biscuit, then started telling her about something and it became him telling her about Iraq and she stopped eating. He sat with his elbows on his knees, holding the drink cup under the table, talking in a low voice while she listened leaning towards him, twisted sidesaddle in her chair, her jacket riding up, showing her bare back. Every ten seconds his eyes scanned left and right and came back and rested on her face. He took a drink of his soda.

It was hard to fix his dry mouth, his headache, his memory of his friend exploding and the pieces of his body raining on his helmet.

We were about as far apart as there to here, he said, pointing at the trash can against the wall, which was gray and green with black trim. There was an ice cream cup on the floor that hadn’t made it into the trash can. The swinging lid was unable to shut and the trash was bulging out. He told her what a mortar was. It goes like this. He made an arc with his finger. So he was there. Boom, it hits him. I went to get him. We wound up back in the hospital here.

He went into a long digression about the hospital, then said:

I don’t know why I couldn’t lift him.

She watched him try and speak.

I feel like I know I could have tried harder.

She handed him her napkin and he blew his nose.

Like I let him die.

He wiped his eyes and they filled again.

They talked until the day shift employees began coming in. A white girl in a hairnet came out and started turning over the chairs, and a Central American man old enough to be her father took a dustpan and swept up the ice cream cup and changed the trash. People could be seen walking in the darkness past the window. A black man in padded Delta Airlines coveralls and corrective glasses came in and bought an orange juice before heading to LaGuardia. The sky was getting lighter. They moved to a booth and he put his arm around her and she lay on him. The restaurant got busy and loud. Chinese mothers came in yelling in Teochow dialect to their children, carrying them on their backs the way mothers do in the third world.

She wanted a Shamrock Shake, and he bought one for her. He asked her how her job was going.

Anbu jiuban. It means you do the job like this: She imitated making a step with her foot, then another.

By the steps, she said. The tape she used to fix her shoes was coming out the heels.

He asked her if she wanted anything else, and she said no, she had more than enough already. She took a suck of her mint green shake and her cheeks hollowed and she smiled.

They were sitting under the No Loitering sign on the second floor where people came with their plastic bags to sit for hours and it smelled like BO. A young black junkie was sleeping with his mouth open in the corner, his yellow teeth showing. Pop music was playing softly. The bathroom door was token-operated, but the mechanism was broken, so you could use it.

Shangmian you zhengce, xiamian you duice. The leader has the policy, but the ones down below has another policy. The leader thinks he is in charge, but he only has two eyes. Two eye cannot watch twenty people.

If my boss yell at me, like this: and she demonstrated what she would do if she were yelled at: she put up a hand and deflected the force of the yell.

It make her very angry when I use this power so she can’t do nothing.

He couldn’t understand what anyone could be yelling at her about.

Any small thing. A sesame seed small thing. The small thread. Pull this thread, soon it’s the whole carpet come unwind.

There were many different ethnic groups in China and it was just a fact of life that they didn’t always get along. In my last job, the one where you met me, the boss was from Malaysia. In this job, Guangzhou, Hong Kong. The workers are from Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, Guangdong, Guangxi, many place. Mexico, Sinaloa. The men call me chiquita. Guatemalans. Those people that come on a long journey. Everyone needs this job so they will come here. Even the Arab. Even the terrorist.

A dark Indian-blooded Mexican man in slacks, a motorcycle jacket, dress shoes, and a red Yankees hat, sat with his daughters and wife at the next table. Outside across the street you could see the Footlocker sign next to Barone Pizzeria. Skinner sat with his boots planted on the gray tile floor, watching her dutifully.

Something bad had happened to her not long ago, she said. I believe my life is over, but somethings save me. Did he know? It is the end, I think. Instead it is the beginning.

You must keep on to your hope, for both of us, she told him, because maybe some good thing will happen.

29

J
IMMY’S MOTHER DID NOT
pick him up. He took the Greyhound bus from Krayville to the Manhattan Port Authority terminal with multiple stops on the way, a twenty-hour journey. There was some concern that he wouldn’t make it, that he would stop off somewhere and get sidetracked.

He showed up after eleven o’clock at night. Mrs. Murphy was still up in the kitchen, checking her cell phone for the time. Erin was reading the calorie information on a can of soup. The kitchen smelled like liver and onions that the father, Patrick, had cooked earlier. He had left the pan with water in it and the pan was in the sink. Gray things floated in the water. The father was not here.

Then Erin heard a sound and said, That’s him! and went to let him in. Jimmy, her brother, her mother’s son, entered the house: a stranger, smelling strange, smelling dirty, extremely weird and quiet, as if there were some great terrible thing contracting his vocal cords. He came in in clothes that he had last worn in the 90s. You heard Erin talking to him in the vestibule. The apartment door opened, Jimmy came in. Here he came—a large man walking behind Erin, carrying a cardboard box, like some kind of additional penance.

She’s gonna flip, Erin was saying. Look who’s here.

Mrs. Murphy held out her arms and said, Get over here. Jimmy put down his box on the floor and went over and bent down and hugged her. Hey, ma.

At the door, he didn’t presume that he would be allowed in. Apparently he thought it was possible that he might be turned away.

He took a seat at the kitchen table, and because he didn’t talk, his mother and half-sister debated what he could have, whether Fratelli’s was still open this late, and why they hadn’t ordered.

He’s not saying anything.

Please. The man just got here, Erin. He doesn’t have to say a thing.

I’ll take a cigarette.

Mrs. Murphy pushed her pack across the tabletop. There! she said, and he took one of the long women’s cigarettes and lit it. He smoked it by taking a quick hit and holding the cigarette cupped and hidden in his big hand.

That’s the most macho way any man has ever smoked a Slim, Erin remarked.

Gradually, he started talking, his voice so rough and hoarse, it sounded as if his vocal cords were dragging on concrete. Whatever he had to say had nothing to do with ordinary life. It was about the way the rules on the Greyhound to the city were poorly thought out and unfairly applied. He had seen the authorities being made fools of in their bus stations by people selling sex and drugs.

Eventually, Erin left them, climbed upstairs softly on her big white legs.

He said yes to a beer with a trace of amusement, as if he found it quaint to be offered anything for free, even by his mother. He drank his beer with self-satisfaction as if he had won a prize while his mother carried on a conversation with him.

She thought he had smelled like alcohol when he had come in. He admitted he had snuck one on the bus. The guy next to me was an alcoholic. They put me next to him and he offered me my first beer in ten years. What was I gonna do?

An old look of recognition passed between mother and son.

Very late at night, he confessed to his mother, I feel like I’m not ready to be on the outside. She heard his confession and told him it would be all right. She told him what some old acquaintance had said about restarting life on the outside after a long time behind bars, that the fear passes.

The way everybody’s got cell phones now, he said. I never had that. The only people who had cell phones used to be drug dealers when I went away. So I guess that’s what I should of done. I might of done a few drugs, but I never sold them. If I’d of sold them like they said I done, I would a been better off. Fifteen-year-old niggers don’t have nothing to make them feel special no more.