Preparation for the Next Life (38 page)

How are you supposed to take this? Is it like MetRx where you just mix it in juice?

She read the bilingual directions on the box.

You make the tea.

Tea?

You would have to buy a pot finally to boil the water.

I could get one next door. Do you think I should?

She was thinking of the old expression, What kind of medicine are you selling me in your gourd? She didn’t say that she didn’t trust the pharmacist, but she did remark that the medicine cost a lot.

It’s only money.

He wanted to try something to see if it would work.

Then maybe yes, she said. After all so did she.

One of the associates came over and took Skinner’s bank card. Zou Lei said the pharmacist had agreed to give them ten percent off. But he told her that they only got the discount if they were paying cash. He rang up the sale with tax, and it was sixty-five dollars. He put the box in a plastic bag and left it on the counter and walked away from them with the receipt.

At midday it rained and they hid out under the scaffold where they had eaten shaokao. The rain passed over and the sun returned and they went over the hill and down the other side where the street spread out. They crossed Elder Avenue and went into the park. The street was wet and drying in the sun after the rain. In the immediate distance, she saw a group of buildings: Booth Memorial Hospital. Beneath a tree, a middle-aged woman was performing Chinese opera. They walked through the weed-grown field where Zou Lei had run all winter, the ground rutted by construction equipment. The woman pressed her fingers together and rotated her wrists in a way that would always look like Uighur dance to her. When they were closer, they heard her off-key song. They went up to the handball courts where there was no one else. A tennis ball was lying in a puddle and Zou Lei picked it up. She looked back at him and he was watching her, the plastic bag that contained his medicine hanging from his hand. The skyline was behind him.

What’s wrong?

Nothing.

Do you want to play?

No, he said.

She gave him the ball and he threw it. It hit the cement and left a wet mark.

34

J
IMMY WAS AT
F
EENEY’S
, where they were playing Keno, playing Boardwalk. If you held a piece of metal, you’d be more likely to get hit by lightning, Rick shouted. This machine don’t pay. Bad luck? No luck. They sang along with Dust in the Wind. It smelled like pot from somewhere, someone was blazing out.

Represent. You look like Mick Jagger stoned on heroin, Gladys said to Rick.

Bumpers stickers next to the jukebox said: I Heart the Red Lights. I’m Union and Proud of It. Steamfitters Local 683.
Drinkingwithbob.com
—The guy’s out of his freaking mind!!! Derrickmen. Elevator Constructors. New York and vicinity. My Goodness, My Guinness.

Ray, in jean shorts and white sneakers, was going to pick something on the jukebox, when a man with wiry matted hair shuffled up behind him.

Can you play some rock ‘n’ roll?

Don’t worry about it. Go sit down.

Yesterday someone tried to cut my hair, he mumbled.

What? Go sit down.

The man shuffled back to the bar and tried to climb back on his seat and got distracted by the women. He shuffled over to them and mumbled.

I can’t understand this guy. You know what? Go sit back down until you can talk.

The jukebox went on and Gladys, who had a gaunt masculine face, and Rosy and a third woman with white hair and a purse on the bar started singing: Heartbeat! Hot Stuff! A little louder, baby! They talked along with the talking part of the song: The lips that used to touch yours so tenderly.

The drunk lurched away from Jimmy, who had an empty stool on either side of him, who sat oversized and mountainous and unspeaking.

Ray went back behind the bar and met Jimmy’s eyes. Another? Jimmy’s response was an acquiescence with the eyes.

Absolut, was it? Absolut Blue. He served him and put the bottle back under the mirror and the photographs, stuck in the frame of the mirror, of people drinking in the bar.

A guy with shades on his head, a little mustache, and a short-sleeved shirt, came in grinning, dancing in through the doorway. He danced up to the bar high-fiving everyone and said, Hey, can I have a pint? He saw Jimmy and said, Jim. What’s up?

They conferred in low voices, Jimmy silent, unmoving, and forward-facing, the other talking eagerly in his ear.

You see all the counterfeit twenties out there? They’re beautiful and they move like water.

Rosy was yelling, The whole foundation of a relationship is loyalty! If you don’t got loyalty, you don’t got shit!

Would you stop hitting the bar? Gladys said.

They exploded with braying laughter.

Who’s the dumbest guy in this bar?

You are, Rick.

You’re fuckin right.

What’s the difference between White Castles and filet mignon?

Hey, I eat steak every night. If I can’t buy it, I steal it.

Jimmy went to the airshaft in the back, where they smoked drugs, and while he was gone, the house painter whispered to Ray:

Did you see him? He’s changed.

Not easy to come back after that, I expect.

Ten years.

Ray changed the subject, turned the lights off over the pool table. The house painter danced over to Gladys and Rosy and the third woman.

My good girls.

Give me a break, man, Rick was saying to the machine, sitting on his flat ass in dark blue jeans on the stool with his spine curved and his white Nikes on the rungs. I’ll pick this fuckin machine up and drag it out of this bar. I’ll piss on this machine. You couldn’t get a hit on this fuckin machine if you hit it with a fuckin stick. This machine don’t fuckin pay. Rick hit the button, kept hitting the button. That ain’t a hit. That ain’t nothin. I’d like to beat this with a stick. He jabbed the button. Aaagh. I swear I’ll never play this again. That’s a
nice hand. I seen alotta shit in my life, but this is the biggest piece a shit I’ve seen. The machine don’t flip you a bone. I put sixty-five dollars in it. They’re supposed to flip you a little bone to pacify you. I’m gonna cash this thing out. I’m gonna get out a this fuckin rat race. Oh, please, man. He hit the button. He hit the button. You give me nothin! Crooked bastards. I’m gonna have a heartattack. I’m gonna drop on the floor.

Jimmy went out to smoke on the street next to John Foley in his gold watch and sleeveless sweater. Bending over, sloppy, gyrating, broad-shouldered Emmett said, If you came to my house, I’d hide the valuables! and Jimmy looked at him, but he was talking to someone else, to Stan, a tall frame of man with a flat top and square black-framed glasses and a tie and a gray shirt untucked, as if he had just come from a telemarketing job.

It’s Section 8, Stan said. He was living with Haitians in Benson-hurst. In Flatbush. I don’t do nothin in Brooklyn if I can help it. I’m careful what I buy in Brooklyn.

Inside the bar, Rick was circling the pool table. Turn on the light. I wanna get a tan. I used to have a beautiful chain, he told the house painter who was showing him several pieces of jewelry, spreading them out on the pool table. Forty-two pennyweight. I had it in hock. I got the notice it’s in the pawnshop, they’re about to pawn it. I forgot all about it. A year later, my mother asks me, Where’s my chain? You lost my chain. It cost a hundred seventy-five dollars. I says, What are you, crazy? The price of gold is up now.

Emmett came inside and felt the chains, pouring them from one hand to another and draping them over his fingers, to see them in the light that Ray had turned back on.

Manhattan was bought from the Indians for less than that.

Where’d you get these? Emmett asked and laughed his queasy laugh.

What’d you say your name was? You from the DA’s office? Detective what?

Rick pulled out a roll of cash, all hundreds. Here: Take five hundred dollars. He threw money on the pool table. The house painter folded his jewelry up in a bandana, looked over his shoulder, folded it up and put it away.

Who’s the toughest guy in this bar?

You are, Rick.

On the street, Stan, from Alaska by way of North Carolina, was telling Jimmy about the automatic ninety days they gave you in Orlando. I was lying on a bench and there was a bottle nearby—it wasn’t mine. The biggest building in Orlando is the jail. Jail has gone corporate in this country.

The neighborhood has changed, Jimmy said.

The Chinese, they’re taking advantage of our religious freedoms. Why do you need thirteen churches on one block?

He had drunk boilermakers with Pat Murphy back in the day. That was his drink, your dad. A boilermaker man. Hey, Gladys, Gladdie. When was the last time you saw Pat?

Pat? Patrick Murphy? I saw him at St. Andrews. That’s his kid right there. Wait, he was right there.

He’s right here. I’m talkin to him.

Oh, my mistake. Hey. I thought you were there. What’s up, how you doin? Jimmy! Aw, c’mere!

She hugged him with her ropey arms, wearing a black tank top, with her large nose and ghoul’s face. Ya gotta light? So, she said, blowing out her smoke, When I heard you was back, I said it’s about fuckin time.

Jimmy blew out his smoke, nodded down to her, glanced at the street.

This is a good area, but we’re getting bought out.

Skinner was asleep in his room when he was awakened by a sound. It was eleven in the morning and the house was otherwise quiet. A diffuse gray light devoid of shadows came in the grating. He had fallen asleep four hours ago and his last memory was of birds trilling in the dawn. He heard the sound again, got up and opened his door and saw Jimmy looking under his sink.

You again, he thought.

He went behind him to the refrigerator, took a beer out. Neither man spoke in the fifteen-by-ten-foot kitchen. The other’s hunched shoulders and long hair moved beneath the sink. Skinner went back into his room and put his headphones on. He would forget everything staring at the wall. He would be like that for hours, dealing with his depression.

There was nothing ever wrong with the sink, he said later. Why mess with it?

And he crushed his empty beer can and dropped it on the floor.

As time went by, he would notice that sometimes during the quiet part of the day when no one was around, he would hear soft sounds coming from somewhere overhead, possibly the landing. They were very faint and subtle, so he didn’t pay any attention to them, but they would continue, their location seeming to shift, and he would think that they were coming from the basement. But this could have been his imagination. He was usually too depressed to get up and look. By the time he did, he never saw anything or anyone. He thought he was hearing things because of mefloquine. The whole thing was so vague, it didn’t mean anything until later.

35

S
HE WAS LEARNING
C
ANTONESE
because she had to. Gwat was bone and river rice meant slippery noodles, tuber stem of water lily, fatty meat and offcuts of the pork. She greeted Rambo in Cantonese and he ignored her, told her to mop the floor. She learned to say, Hougeng, which meant wonderful. Hougeng! she said as she fetched the mop. She said it whenever they made her do something. She found herself saying it all the time.

She took a place on line without asking and started serving in the middle of the rush. She felt Sassoon watching her dipping Thousand Island dressing on a customer’s chunks of iceberg lettuce. She piled rice next to the meat in its jellied brown sauce and handed the dinner plate across the counter.

In her heart, she believed she was more Chinese than they were because the army was the marrow of the nation and she stood at parade rest behind the line while they slouched and texted on their phones, but China was a big nation.

Satay, made with onions, garlic, krill, and soy sauce, was pronounced sa-de in their dialect.

She overheard Angela telling her friend he ought to come to work at the restaurant as a summer job. The friend was a tall young man from Hong Kong who had been in her sister’s class in high school in Jamaica, Queens. The boss would hire him on her say-so, Angela said. We’ve got lots of room here. Daifong meant room. Zou Lei understood this.

She had spent years surviving around people she didn’t like and couldn’t understand. Her coworkers believed that blacks had large but nonworking penises, like dragons in southern superstition. She learned they called them jiekwan.

She couldn’t understand what a customer was telling her—whatever he was saying sounded very strange, the f’s and h’s were switched—and she leaned over the counter and asked him as quietly as she could if he spoke the common language.

Midway through the rush, Sunnie bustled in and Sassoon told Zou Lei, You can go now.

Hahaha, Angela said. You should see your face.

When she left the mall in the evening, the streets were awash with people coming off the buses, coming out of the subway station with every roar of the train coming in, welling up onto the street in waves. After a long shift, she had a great feeling of disorientation and had to get reacquainted with everything. The markets stood tilted by the weight of the produce trucked in from Sinaloa in the dusk. There was the money she had saved in her pocket against her hip—the point of her sixty-hour weeks down in the kitchen. She could feel the folded bills through her worn-thin pocket liner, touching her underwear, her skin. The faint outline of her progress.