Preparation for the Next Life (45 page)

Zou Lei leaned on the counter, holding her head, studying the requirements on the card. The young man looked at the line behind her.

If you need to think about it, you can wait over there.

Give her a second, Skinner said. We might have a question.

Are you the groom?

Yeah.

What if it’s some problem with the ID? Zou Lei asked.

Do you have a passport?

Maybe I have, but I want to use some ID from out-of-state.

That’s fine.

I think it over.

The clerk took the information card back from her.

She needs that, Skinner said.

He gave her the card back.

Sorry about that. Anything else I can help you with?

Zou Lei said no and she and Skinner left the office. Around back of the Metropolitan Detention Center there was a park and through the spiked iron fence you could see the signs for Bail Bonds and diseased old saloons with blackened windows. She took her ID out and rubbed it with her thumb and looked at it. Skinner sat on a green bench and smoked a Marlboro and watched Chinese people of an older generation playing mahjong among the pigeons.

If she registered her marriage using a fake ID and an alias, would the marriage be legally legitimate? She went to the law office to ask the Mandarin-speaking clerk with whom she had spoken earlier. The woman told her to get married using her real name. But how was she supposed to do that? The woman told her she could go to the DMV to apply for a New York State ID card. She had forgotten the details
of Zou Lei’s situation. Zou Lei reminded her that she didn’t have papers. The woman said she remembered now. The office was busy. She told Zou Lei she should come back later.

Zou Lei went to the City Clerk’s Office again, intending to ask about the requirements for applying for an ID card, and waited to speak to the assistant. He must have misunderstood her. He wrote an address on a scrap of white paper and gave it to her. She hurried outside and realized she didn’t know what it was for.

Skinner, medicated, depressed, and nihilistic, sat slumped in the basement watching IEDs exploding on his laptop, Iraqis getting shot and flopping down, the world ending one person at a time. The line shortening, getting closer to him, his turn approaching.

At work they cut her hours again. When there wasn’t enough for her to do, a frequent occurrence, she loitered in the back hallway that connected the kitchens, talking with the Mexicans, Tomas and Miguel. She wiped her hands, went over to the chopping table, spent the afternoon making dumplings and shelling snow peas or washing dishes. Her time up front was over.

If they cut her hours any more, she was going to have to go back to collecting cans, just as she had done to survive in the brigade fields of central China.

She took a bathroom break to read the classifieds.

Class A license, $Opportunity$, Mac Operator, see Ms. Chen, must speak a mouth of fluent English. Garment, Bayshine, ladies missy fashion, patternmaker, Cantonese preferred. Earnestly seeking Junior CAD. Brooklyn nanny, Heaven Pest Control, housekeeper, egg donor, masseuse.

The next morning, she went to the park late, sometime after nine, and started running, thinking about what to do. When she got to the basketball courts, she didn’t have a reason to stop. She crossed the fence line that demarcated the end of the field and kept running in the bright sun, her pace picking up. She didn’t have work
today. The grass and trees and the exhaust-filled atmosphere trapped the heat. She crossed a road where the cab of a tractor-trailer was parked alone. It looked like a mutant part, a head on wheels, whose weirdness could be seen now that it had broken off and escaped from the trailer. The parkland continued on the other side of the road, turned into a golf course, seen through trees to her right. The sun rose higher. She ran over a highway and through a factory lot, oil rags dried to the asphalt. She was headed for the buildings that she thought of as her mountains. She had stopped thinking about him. Sweat poured out of her, sweating her t-shirt across her breasts. She got a saddle-shaped patch of wet on the seat of her jean shorts as if she were riding a wet horse. It was approaching noon. The towers had been very far away after all. Where the grass ended, she gazed around her in the dazzling sun. She stopped. Her socks were soaked. She peeled her shirt away from her chest and flapped it. The garbage lay on the ground becoming part of it. The tall buildings that resembled mountains were simply government projects, silent in the ticking heat. That was all they were.

Part III

42

J
IMMY WAS OUT ON
Roosevelt Avenue, striding under the shadow of the elevated train, its trestles and piers, rivets and graffiti, trucks selling pigs’ heads and brains and intestines, with the Mexican voices and the sound of the generators. There were alleys going in from the street where immigrants could get their hair done or buy their kind of music. They sold jeans and lingerie and cell phones and high heels and glass pipes and Spanish romances in the street, a man with a mustache seizing a raven-haired woman by the hips, thrusting his hand down into the open neck of her peasant blouse. The mannequins had arched asses and torpedo breasts and stood on their toes and wore big black wigs and supersonic glasses. The bars came every doorway and they were dark. Loud music was playing inside, as if the world’s biggest fiesta were taking place. But if you looked into the music, you saw a room with the lights off and three or four disheveled men with their heads down on a table covered in an Olympic number of big beer bottles, and it was a scene of migrants getting plastered in a bus station.

It smelled like fried chicken and french fries and grilled corn. There was construction too—the city drilling in the street. The horns were honking, and a cheap ugly car gunned around the others. The occupants all wore the same red and black Bulls hats, black braids, white sleeveless undershirts, the males with zits and thick white biceps and tattoos. The big girls were dressed up the same as the boys, yelling, Yo, make a left, nigga, and the acne-covered driver bent over the wheel, gesturing, yelling, Move, nigga, to another car. Boxing gloves with the Puerto Rican flag hung from the rearview mirror, and the car, filled with the big bodies of these large young people, sped away on its cheap toylike rims.

And a woman with the spirit was holding up the bible and preaching with a microphone in the middle of an island under the tracks, speaking an unceasing, uninterrupted litany that grew faster
and louder and became climactic and deafening and violent coming from her loudspeakers.

He crossed 85
^th
Street in the crowd. A Chinese man in gray trousers and a gold chain and a v-neck was leaning on a parking meter. As Jimmy approached, the man caught his eye and asked, Massage? He pointed out a pair of Asian women standing halfway down the block. Jimmy approached them. One looked like a farmer with a spotted weather-beaten face and a purse worn across her shoulder and a soft hat in the shape of a lampshade to keep the sun off. The other was wearing makeup and a t-shirt and had pineapple-sized breasts. She had heavy glossy black hair done up in a twist and pinned to the back of her head.

You, Jimmy specified. The t-shirt-wearer put on a smile and said, Oh yeah, and led him in a doorway. She was in her upper forties and acted intoxicated. He followed her up a low-ceilinged stairway, which led up to a single destination, an apartment where the lights were off and the door was always open. She had a wide flat rear end and the seat of her jeans had sequins. On the stairs she looked back over her shoulder to make sure he was still coming. She gave him a secret smile. Then they went into the apartment.

The apartment was hot: hotter than all the collected heat of the summer day. It was as if they had a space heater on as well: frightening hot, like you might not come out of it breathing. And there was no fresh air. It was air that had been used and breathed, like the atmosphere in a jail. He made the connection to jail immediately. The smell and texture of the air came from food and people’s bodies and other things which were never aired out and blown away but were re-breathed. The air had a weight and pressure that was different from outside air as a result. There was a strong smell of boiled ramen noodles and skin lotion. If there were windows, they were sealed and painted over. The apartment was a narrow pitch-black maze that got darker as you went in. She went down a tunnel towards a red glow, and Jimmy walked behind her. The glow came from a curtain, which she moved aside. He was twice her height. She looked at him and smiled. Dipping his head, he stepped into a red-lit compartment. There was barely room for both him and the massage table. The table had a hole for your face to breathe when you were face-down.

How much?

She told him. He took out his money and she watched the money in his hands until he handed it to her. She folded the money and disappeared.

He took his t-shirt off, an xxxl t-shirt with a faded logo for a tool brand across the mottled fabric, and exposed himself. He looked like a white meaty insect whose exoskeleton has been peeled away exposing the mechanical workings of muscles and white sacks of flesh, which had never been in the open air before. He took his jeans off, baring his long legs.

And he stood in the red glow, unclothed except for the bandana around his head, watching the curtain. He put his shades on and positioned himself facing the doorway with his legs spread and his chin back as if he were sunning himself in the red light.

Like a pitcher on the mound, he licked three fingers, then reached down and fiddled with the end of his uncircumcised penis.

She came back inside, wearing fuzzy pink slippers and carrying towels and sheets in her arms.

No, no, no, she tutted. You lie down.

His fist, the one with the rings on it, hit her in the mouth.

She went back into the wall and hit her head. The towels and sheets dropped out of her hands. The whites of her eyes showed and she tumbled to the floor. Her knees drew in and she covered her face and let out a grief-stricken sound.

Jimmy went around to where she was and hit her again.

Oh! she screamed. No! She crawled into the corner. The clip that held her hair in place had popped open and hung caught in her loose hair.

She was trying to hide from him. He wrenched her arm behind her back and almost broke it. She let out a scream. The sounds had nowhere to go. He punched the back of her head. He hooked his fist around in front and got her face. Oh! she screamed and started crying. He shoved her around to make her face him and got her back against the wall and wrenched her hands away from her face and hit her again.

Show me your face.

She flinched and he twisted her hands away again.

I’ll break the arm.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I do nothing.

Show me the face.

No, she pleaded.

It was impossible for her to overcome the reflex to cover up. She was too scared, but he improved her. He worked on her until he was getting where he wanted.

Why? Why? she said. It was a calm question. But she asked it blind, because her eyes were swollen in bulging hard blue hematomas.

She performed fellatio on him. She removed her clothing and underwear and got up on the table. He sodomized her and at his insistence she performed fellatio on him again. The way he did it, she was severely injured. He made an engine-revving noise when he was driving into her. She screamed into a towel. What he was doing sounded like a boxer hitting a heavy bag with wet gloves. He arched his back. When he rested, he blew air and got his wind back, his sides sweating in the hot room. He looked like a man on a child. The child’s head was mummified. Then he went into another frenzy when he had his wind back. She gagged and threw up in the towel he wrapped her head in. There were ramen noodles in her stomach.

You got the virus now, he told her as he was pulling up his jeans.

She was standing there half-bowing, her face unrecognizable as human. She appeared to be wearing a slick shiny bumpy thick eyeless mask, wetness around the eye slits.

HIV, he said. Better get checked.

You stink, he added.

Something was not finished in him. There was evil and crazy in the room. Possibly he was going to go all the way.

He took the money out of her jeans, her cell phone, and ID. He patted her on the head. Smile, he said. She did not react.

You no call police, he told her in pidgin English, so she would understand. Some mechanical cam had flipped inside his brain, he realized: he wasn’t going to go any farther this time. He left the red room and his footsteps moved away down the black hallway.

The woman remained tottering where she was. Five minutes passed. She had heard him leave. She tried out her voice, making a sound, and it was a croak. In the hot room, she was shaking like someone naked in the snowy wilderness. She went through the curtain and began walking down the hall, stepping on broken linoleum in the darkness, groping her way.

On the street, in the afternoon sun, Jimmy bought a hotdog at a busy intersection under the tracks, among Spanish and Bangladeshi
vendors selling spiritual guides, anatomical charts, novellas, tapestries of Aztec maidens and warriors, eagles, the words Brown and Proud. He kept his shades on. He was about ten blocks down from the scene and he felt secure. Expressionless, he watched the street as he ate by the hotdog cart. The intersection smelled like cotton candy. It was awash in a sea of people coming off the train, the Spanish mothers arguing with their daughters about what they could afford.