Preparation for the Next Life (44 page)

She didn’t know who he was talking about and assumed he meant the man they heard yelling at his daughter.

Any indication of a problem with his landlord sent a vibration back up the network of her plans. She and Skinner had just been talking about her visit to the lawyer, which ultimately connected to everything, including where to live. She had speculated that she might move in with him here.

What you are going to do?

He shook his head as if it wasn’t worth mentioning. He took one of the six beers that remained out of the icebox and set it on the table and for a minute watched the water run down the outside of the cold can. Wasn’t he going to close the icebox door? Oh, yeah. He drew on his cigarette and closed the door and changed the subject back to the lawyer.

Skinner saw Jimmy in the crowd on the 7 train platform at the 42
^nd
Street stop. At the time, he didn’t care about the theft of the beer, or imagined he didn’t. He would have simply said hello. Great numbers of people going home from work stood between them. He lost him on the packed train and, getting off at the end of the line, he didn’t see him. When he got back to the house, he listened to the Murphys through their walls. A sense of familiar fear developed inside him, possibly set off by the act of listening. He thought of knocking on their door and explaining how his mind worked to Jimmy’s mother.

He went to 162
^nd
Street and looked at the bar’s green door, which seemed too small for the man as he pictured him. He went into Leiser’s Liquors, under its yellow awning, and selected a bottle of rum. They sold Asian wines and spirits, a sign of a changing neighborhood. He paid with his card. The guy behind the counter swiped it through the reader and Skinner felt the friction, the tug between the plastic and the magnet as it pulled money out of the bank a mile away. Zou Lei passed his branch location every day on her way to work. He hadn’t checked his balance in weeks. Would he have anything left for her?

Or would she share whatever he had, the cigarette, the hot canteen water, the sentence all of them had faced lying in the sand and garbage, keeping their heads below cover?

He drank in the basement until ten at night and traveled out again. Jake had shared it with him, he thought. His intoxication took away the Mexicans in front of their houses. When he almost blundered into them, they called him cabrón. The alcohol had taken away a great deal of his consciousness and still that was not nearly enough.

He vaguely perceived a group of large young males exiting the smoke shop. A Puerto Rican in a vest popped the cellophane off a cigar and tucked it above his ear. On Skinner’s way back with a Gatorade, Skinner saw them drinking out of paper bags outside the China Garden. Even in his stupor, he recognized the tall one as Jimmy from across the street.

Guado nudged Jimmy on the arm. You see this fool?

Skinner spat on the ground the way they had spit at him when calling him a shitbird.

The next day, he woke to find a piece of wadded up trash on his stairs. It was a chewing gum wrapper and it wasn’t his. The bit of litter had a piece of chewed gum in it.

Throw shit on my stairs, asshole.

He picked it up and tossed it up on the Murphys’ landing.

On more than one occasion during the ensuing weeks, when returning to the house after being away, he would find a kitchen chair had been moved or a cabinet door opened.

Around the same time, he was walking down 40
^th
Road when youths in front of a corner store began shouting, Hey! Where you going?

He recognized one of the youths from around the neighborhood. He thought he had seen him take a cigarette from Jimmy. As he continued down the block, one of them yelled:

I thought you was hard! Come back here, etcetera. I thought you wanna head up with my boy!

At his landlady’s apartment, he had no contact with Jimmy; the two of them acted as if nothing was going on. He saw him on the street in Flushing. Nothing happened in the crowd. But the sidewalk next to the ocher buildings on Sanford Avenue was narrow. One night, Skinner saw Jimmy coming at him and knew he wasn’t going
to move. He was carrying the Berretta nine millimeter in his army backpack. He had plans with Zou Lei, so he crossed the street.

As she drew near, the side of Skinner’s house opened and a man came out on long legs. He had a bandana tied around his head, and the bandana ends hung down with his hair as if they were a part of his hair and his beard and his hair was made of strips of cloth.

Without thinking, she stopped in mid-stride and put her head down, covering her face with her hat brim, and altered course, pretending to be going somewhere else, taking tiny time-marking steps, marching in place to keep away from him until he left. She felt him watching her, and she felt it when his stare was lifted from her.

Then he walked away and she looked after him while he was going, seeing him cross the street and lope around the corner and disappear. She wondered if he could see her even though he wasn’t looking at her, with eyes behind his head. He seemed to know that she would backtrack and go to the house that he had come out of. He pretended to be looking somewhere else, but they were the only two people on the street.

If a girl is traveling in the steppe and she sees nothing but a single moving dot in the great distance, the dot sees her. Stag, man, wolf.

At three in the morning, the avenue was dark except for a single house in which one window gave off a low frequency radiation, a glowing ambiguous rose-violet light emanating from white lace curtains, a nightlight left on in a woman’s bedroom.

The avenue was empty, wide, its vacancy inviting you to travel not merely two ways along the road but any way you wanted, into the sideways darkness. A penetrable wall of houses and stores, whose copings and parapets cut shadows against the sky. A giant supermarket by the freeway. At the other end, a railroad bridge and the projects. The dark spaces behind the tracks. Black ferns grew between the houses to eat the hot exhaust from the expressway.

Inconspicuous among other dark silent vehicles lining the curbs, there was a pickup truck parked near the softly glowing house.

A black sedan glided off the Van Wyck, paused at the flashing red traffic signal by the supermarket and turned down the avenue. It passed the high-walled lot and the dumpsters outside the diner whose sign said Steaks – Chops – Seafood, cruised past the construction supply outlets with Chinese signs and stopped mid-block.

An Asian woman got out of the sedan: big purse, short skirt, high heels, a large animal tattoo on her upper thigh. Snapping her lighter, she lit a cigarette. The car with its large radio antenna she’d come in drove away. Balanced on her high heels, she walked across the empty avenue, heading for the house whose window pulsed with the same violet wavelength as her halter top.

As she walked around in front of the pickup, she was suddenly startled, her heels striking the asphalt in a series of quick steps. She had seen the man in the driver’s seat, his bearded mouth, his ringed fist on the steering wheel, where he had been sitting watching the house and now watching her. She threw away her cigarette and, before marching into the house, stared back at him with loathing.

41

T
HEY TOOK THE SUBWAY
from Queens down to Canal Street in Manhattan. It was full of African, Bangladeshi, and Chinese vendors, selling I Love New York shirts and counterfeit Rolexes. From here they walked down to the city buildings. The big gray granite buildings took up block after block. At the criminal and family courts, the doorways were four stories high and there were crowds outside waiting to get in through the metal detectors. They crossed the street and walked parallel to a plaza with modern sculpture in it, and they passed the Supreme Court building. Down the side, they saw concrete barricades and fortifications and sentry posts. Those streets were not passable. They were empty canyons of concrete. They passed tourists and a different class of attorney, wearing a seersucker suit or a large hat with a round flat brim and a silk ribbon or some other stylish touch. They looked as if they were wearing costumes with their gold spectacles and straw hats. There was a coffee and organic muffin vendor on the corner. They saw paramilitary policemen in hats and jackets with the names of their units, in jump boots and bloused trousers, drinking coffee and talking with other security men in blazers and crewcuts. Then came the next city building with columns. They walked under the columns, which were stories high, and they saw flagstone courtyards and brass doors and pigeons and old stone bollards with anchor chains hung between them, from the days when the city was a maritime port.

When they tried to go inside, the security man at the doorway said, Can I help you?

Both he and his partner were wearing bulletproof vests and Police windbreakers. The second cop was Hispanic and stood with his jump boots planted wide apart.

Skinner said, We’re looking for the place where you get married.

That’s not here. He advised him of the correct address, but in a manner that was too rapid to be understood.

Where’s that?

Two blocks back that way. Give you five minutes to think about it.

I’ve thought about it.

That’s good.

Have a nice day, sir.

I’ve thought about it. I don’t need to think about it.

Both cops turned their attention on Skinner in a particular way, suggesting a potentially higher level of interest in him. With their guns and gear, they outweighed him by at least three hundred pounds.

Have a nice day, they told him.

Skinner rejoined Zou Lei, who was waiting for him at the end of the courtyard, out of sight.

You don’t have to fight with them.

She kept walking and he followed her. They went back through the plaza with the modern art and the colonnaded higher court buildings. The tourists joked in Dutch and Italian, and underneath their voices, the silence of the plaza was huge, ringed by empty streets and sentries drinking coffee.

They found they had been sent to the same building the criminal courts were in. There was a hot dog vendor on the corner where guys in suits—grooms and defendants—were eating pretzels. The marriage office was on the side facing south. The brass door was pushed open and an interracial couple came running out: a young woman holding up her wedding dress and a black guy wearing a pinstripe suit that was tight around his thighs. She had a white flower in her blond hair. Skinner moved in and grabbed the heavy door before it closed and opened it for Zou Lei, who entered in her jeans.

The granite floor in the lobby was the color of red earth and the shaded lamps gave the space a candlelit appearance. There was a velvet rope, as at a club. They got in line behind a large party of Spanish people who had come with a bride in a pink wedding dress who was taller than her mother. Someone was carrying a camera with a professional flash. The vaulted ceiling sent down the echoes of their footsteps and laughter. The brother and father were wearing black formal suits and cowboy boots. Zou Lei and Skinner didn’t speak. She looked past the information desk. Deeper inside the room, wedding parties were standing at touch screen terminals, applying for marriage licenses. The information desk was manned by a young Asian American man, a college graduate, who spoke accent-free English.

When it was their turn, Zou Lei and Skinner went up to the counter and Zou Lei asked how you got married. The young man placed an information card on the countertop and turned it so she could see it. You bring me your passport, driver’s license, then you go to the kiosk, apply for your license, and pay the fee. When the application prints out, you can come back and see the judge in 24 hours, unless you’re active duty military, then you can do it sooner.