Preparation for the Next Life (19 page)

She took the magazine from Skinner and turned the pages until she came to Ms. Fitness Arizona, in turquoise spandex and white Reeboks, doing donkey calf-raises on a Cybex machine. There she was doing barbell squats, her dark eyes on the ceiling. She looked Mexican or Middle Eastern. And there she was on the beach in a bikini—hooking the spaghetti strap with her thumb—and just a touch of lip gloss, the waves around her thighs.

Zou Lei flexed her legs and looked at herself. Hey. They laughed. Not bad.

I like her.

You look like her.

She has very beautiful clothes.

One day when she wasn’t working, Zou Lei had Skinner meet her on Roosevelt Avenue. His grown-out hair rose up stiff and uncombed from his head, no longer military. It was a clear day after a rain and the trash was pulped on the street.

They hiked out of Chinatown until they were far enough away to see the red lacquered Chinese eaves and the fire escapes and then kept going. There was no plan, they just walked, walking down by the expressway and the autorepairs whose signs were in Chinese. The road took them by a cemetery, then a stretch of little houses with pitched roofs and falling-down siding.

The air was bright and cool and warm—a deceptive day, since they were still in winter. She thought she could smell the springtime in the street, in the air rising from the asphalt and from the soil in the broken bricks.

They fell into a rhythm, going for miles, and she lost herself, their hoofs beating the drum of the earth as they marched.

When they made it to the rise where Jewel Avenue crossed over the fields and they could see in all directions—the old condominium towers, the sheets of water, the rooftops and the distance—they stopped and looked at it all. They were at the center of a wheel. Skinner put his arms around her.

That’s a view, he said.

In it, she beheld what was possible. The city was uncontained. It covered a massive area and graded out into the world. There was no definite end at the horizon. There were more buildings, miles of them covering the earth on into the distance. She saw the areas of trees, the shade of wood, the intricate fuzziness of the branches from this distance in among the houses. The highways—massive, industrial,
and lonely—were to her left. To her right, there seemed to be still another city and then, past it, the skyline of Manhattan, which she identified by the Empire State Building, which she could cover with the tip of her finger. And she had a view between tenement rooftops of one of the suspension bridges that connected Manhattan to the other boroughs. It was ten cities all together. She saw things from this elevation that were normally hidden from her. In the direction of the water to the north, she saw a green dome, which had to be a mosque. She saw the spire next to it among the confused rooftops, fire escapes, and water towers. It was blocked and revealed again by the centipede of a subway pulling by. There were splinters of metal embedded in the blue stratosphere to the south: planes coming head on. Passing over her and Skinner, they elongated and became commercial jets, tracking towards the airport on the water. She saw the complicated shape of the shoreline, the lack of contrast between the brown city and the water, as if it were all part of one thing, which it was, the geography of the earth, which you could move across as you lived.

She asked him where he had been on this disk of territory that they were overlooking. You go there? It’s a Bronx.

I came in there. I went like this, he said, pointing out the trajectory he had walked across the brown horizon. Down to right around there where all them buildings are at.

I goes like this: down, down, down to Chinatown. You cannot see. I start up there—she turned thirty degrees to the east—where is Connecticut, all the way. I been out, out, out to there, to Long Island, Riverhead…

She squinted in the sun. Look! She patted his arm and got him to look where she was pointing to the west. I work there, where it’s Nanuet.

What’d you do out there?

Restaurant. She held his camouflage. If you keep going to that way, west, west, west, you will be the ocean, then China. No one will understand you. Everyone will be confusing. Maybe it’s different for you. In the morning, get up early to get the water. Burn the fire. The people is a billion. It is more big than here. Ride the bus. The train. Truck. Camel. Sleep the ground. See the mountain.

12

S
HE LOOKED AT HIM
in his roughed-up boots and the American flag on his sleeve—and began looking for another job to increase her productivity on days when she wasn’t working at the noodle stand. This demanded that she ride the subway with the cops, but she felt that she could risk it.

Among the jobs she tried, she collected bottles and cans and redeemed them at the Beer Center, a recycler on Parsons Boulevard across from a factory that made fan belts and timing belts.

On two occasions, she distributed coupons for the Western Beef grocery store, tossing the rolled-up booklets onto porches of row houses above the Grand Central Parkway. The rolled-up booklets were fitted into plastic sleeves. She pulled armloads of them out of the back of a van and heaped them in a shopping cart and rattled up and down the block, the only one who ran.

The other guys were homeless drug addicts in True Religion jeans. The man who operated the crew wore a gold chain and had no voice. He was completely and permanently hoarse. She outworked the others, but he didn’t pay her any more than them. He talked on the same level with the other guys. On the way back in the van, they would talk about buying a bottle.

Pointing out the window at the liquor store, they’d tell him, Lemme out here! and he’d pull over.

She got out too and didn’t go back. She got a number out of the Chinese paper and shortly started selling DVDs.

The man who gave her the DVDs took care to avoid arrest. He would not give her his name, so she couldn’t rat him out if she got caught. All she knew about him was that he was from Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province and people from Wenzhou knew how to survive. On the phone, he would say to meet him in the doorway and she would go to the place he meant. He would drive up in an Expedition, his ball cap on sideways, and give her the goods. He looked like a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime—all dark clothes,
down vest, fingerless gloves, smoking Mild Seven cigarettes. His face was lopsided, the result of ingesting pesticide as a child, which gave him the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.

When she went out selling, she rode the train in her navy tracksuit, the satchel over her shoulder, holding the bootleg movies fanned out like playing cards in their clear plastic envelopes, murmuring:

Deeweedee, deeweedee. Hello, deeweedee.

What you got? the truants asked.

Nah, they said and gave her her movies back. A working man in corrective glasses shook his head, uninterested in kung fu comedies like Dream Return to Tang Dynasty.

Having made one sale, she got off at Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, turned her back to the platform, counted the cash, and hid it. The graffiti on the station tiles said Ca$h $mells. Beast. LLL. Byron. Ruthless AKA Jie Burn.

She caught the train going the other way and took it all the way to Brooklyn, getting off downtown by the federal court buildings. There were cops in neoprene gloves and balaclavas and Arabs selling shishkawap, coal smoke blowing in the street, police barricades in front of the wide white buildings that looked like the White House.

For a time, she strolled casually, watching the cops to see if they were writing tickets to street vendors.

Then she went into a Wendy’s and went table to table flashing her movies. Big black couples told her no politely. A woman whose child was dressed the same as her boyfriend down to tiny sneakers and a denim hat told him: Jamal, stop playing.

A man asked if she had any kung fu.

They looked through what she had together. This one is kung fu, she told him. He said this is all right, but I want Jackie Chan.

Jet Li is good, she tried to tell him.

Jackie Chan is my man.

Howbout this one?

She held up a Hong Kong movie called Black Society in Chinese and Buttonman in English.

Gotta be Jackie Chan, he said. Let me tell you what’s wrong with this here. They doing side effects in this movie. Jackie Chan don’t have no side effects. He do all his own stunts. Look here—and he
made a sudden flurry of blocks and strikes, smacking his own arms and shouting: Hut!

He wheeze-laughed. You see that, baby? Look here! He showed her his knuckles, which were calloused like the palms of his hands. All this here is from my Shaolin style. He took her hand and had her touch his hand. I never took no shit off these gunslingers out here.

Okay. I get for you. Next time.

I tell them, if you bad, bring it, thundercat!

She went back outside the restaurant. There was construction hammering in the street, a giant truck with cable on a reel. A man from Lahore, Pakistan, a city at the end of the Karakoram Highway which came out of Western China, was selling fruit on the corner of Fulton Street. His beard was red. He had a piece of cardboard that he prayed on. She watched an NYPD patrol car drive by him and the driver look at him, but they didn’t look at her. She felt throughout her body that she was protected.

The broad-shouldered American blacks rolling along Fulton Street looking in the windows of Jimmy Jazz wore big leather jackets with wings and eagles and griffins engraved across the shoulders in much the same pattern as Skinner’s tattoo.

He’s with you, she believed.

The NYPD would not stop her. If they scanned her, they would see an American flag on the scan. She beat her drum and his shadow flew before her. He raised her above the iron ground so her feet would not be torn. He kept her from being destroyed and defiled in a shitsmeared cell.

On Pennsylvania Avenue, there were low buildings, the huge space of the winter sky, a fence with a faded basketball behind it. She climbed through a hole in the mesh, stepping over empty twenties and forties, and cut downhill in the dead weeds, a figure in a hood and jeans, convinced she would not fall, and stood on the median beneath the interchange. When the cars stopped for the light, she went out to the driver’s side windows holding out her movies.

A woman bundled in a hat and hood and plaid jacket was selling roses. The light changed, and they went back to the median.

Con cuidado, the woman told her.

Yes. Sí.

And you watching la policía. Siempre.

The woman had a pretty face and conspicuous blackheads dotting her cheeks. She said she had a shopping cart that she could push away if the cops came, and she seemed to be saying that she had a van that she could put it in, but Zou Lei didn’t see one. The cops wrote her fines: one hundred, one-fifty, maybe two hundred.

Yes. Sí. But what about that?

The woman looked at herself where Zou Lei was pointing. She had a vendor’s license in a wallet strung around her neck. She held it in her mitten and said something about it. Then she tucked it in her plaid jacket pocket.

It cost money? Dinero is a lot?

The woman shook her head, talking Spanish. It was not a real license.

Zou Lei bounced on her toes, waiting for the cars to stop, rubbing her hands.

Mucho frío.

Zou Lei nodded, Yes, sí, she knew.

She was saying to herself: I will sell one more.

You could do anything—sell toys, oranges, ice in the summer, phone cards so that people could call home. Singapore. Philippines. Yemen. Iraq. Ivory Coast. Salvador. You could give out flyers for all-you-can-eat, compramos d’oro—get a cart and roll it over hill and dale now that he is with you.

She could take out a loan and buy a truck and then be truly free. And she fantasized that she and Skinner lived on the road together traveling from city to city, selling what they bought and traded. She saw them wearing sheath knives and cowboy hats and riding horses in a sun-filled land outside the reach of the authorities.

13

H
E WANTED HER TO
know that he was working too. I’m gonna follow the program that they got in here, start doin two-a-days. Doin my protein. All he had to do was find a gym without stupid rules and it was on.

He was from a place called Shayler, which he described as pretty basic. There were bars, Lutheran churches, and a 7-11. When he said home, he pronounced it hoeme. The houses went up a hill, like a mining hill, close to West Virginia. Under the highway going into town were mountains of gray gravel. A lot of bars, a lot of drinking. Steel Town football was big. People were pretty racist. But they were open about it. They could be friends with anyone. That’s just how they were. Real patriotic. His house had a raccoon under it. They were poor. It was a poor area, basically. His mother, a lean energetic woman with short blond hair, had sat in their trailer reading a Reader’s Digest and drinking vodka out of a blue plastic cup. She was really big on anything unusual. Nothing unusual ever happened for the most part—except drinking. When he was five, probably his first memory, his mother showed him a picture of a two hundred-pound dog in TV Guide and said, Look at that. You ever see anything like that before? He would have signed up even if the recruiters hadn’t come right to his high school. 9/11 was the big reason, but he would have gone anyway, just to do something.