Nicotine (28 page)

The three of them go out to a fern bar on a picturesque square in central Morristown and eat Cajun salmon with glazed turnip risotto (Tony), mozzarella sticks (Amalia), and a Cobb salad (Penny). Tony remarks that he has died and gone to outlaw heaven, and that it shouldn't surprise him that all it takes is money. Penny doesn't feel the need to ask him what he means. Amalia toasts her new love and pays the bill.

IN HIS CAR IN FRONT
of Nicotine, Matt glowers. His windows are rolled up. He tries calling Jazz. The call won't go through. He gets out and stands up, creaking from the unaccustomed exertions of recent days. He wears navy blue sweats labeled
YALE
in white.

He comes close enough to see that no one has made any new tracks in the substance. It is drying to a potentially malleable sludge. The house stands open, an invitation to looters, pranksters, arsonists . . .

Imagining his ancestral home in flames, he limps to the garage. Two claw hammers still hang on random nails in wall studs, and there is a stack of old shelving on the floor.

Balanced with one foot in the plastic bucket and one in the salad bowl, he boards up the doorway.

He goes back to the garage and finds something else he wants—spray paint—in an ancient, rusting can encased in loose, illegible paper. The can is nearly empty, but it contains enough black paint to cover the squatter lightning bolt and the letters
i c o t i n e
. For spite, he drenches the doorbell as well. Paint drips down and pools on the greasy sludge. He turns and sees a neighbor watching him.

“You taking over the house?” the man asks. He is about thirty-five, in a jogging suit, walking a mastiff—a white ethnic Guido-type working-class greaser, Matt thinks.

“The squatters left, so yeah,” he says.

“You going to clean that up? You going to hire some poor asshole
to clean that up, you with your fucking Audi and your fucking Yale sweatshirt? You better do it today. That stink is all in our house. It's in my daughter's hair. Our whole fucking neighborhood smells like your
shit
.”

Matt struggles to leap gracefully from the bucket and bowl to the bare wooden section of the porch. He succeeds, and says, “Well, I don't like your fucking huge dog shitting everywhere either, but do I say anything to you about it? This is my property.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” the man says. Without missing a beat, he turns toward Matt's car, lowers his fly, and begins to urinate on the passenger-side door handle.

Frowning, Matt approaches the man and the dog. The man pees luxuriantly, as though he's been saving up. He relies on the dog to protect him.

And in fact the dog does protect him. It is the dog that loses an eye and spends the rest of its life wheezing. It lunges toward Matt, and he spray paints it—the entire head and neck region, inside and out.

He gets in the Audi and drives away. A few blocks later, he stops to check the finish for possible fine droplets from the mist of paint, but it appears that the breeze was in his favor. Except for the salty pee, his car is immaculate. He drives home and tips the guard in the parking garage to wash it.

ROB SAYS HE'D LIKE TO
pick the next motel for the night. He abandons the interstate for a fifties-era U.S. highway bypass with too many stoplights.

The motor lodge he selects is home to migrant workers, homeless families, couples in love—cash only, off the grid. The room key, made of brass, hangs from a plastic square that asks the finder to drop it in any mailbox. Its only Web presence is an urgent TripAdvisor warning about the showers.

Sorry calls Penny from the room after dinner (cornflakes) to say they're near St. Louis, headed for Oklahoma City. Final destination: Santa Fe.

Jazz says firmly, “Taos.”

Sorry repeats that they'll talk about where they're going after they get to Santa Fe.

Rob and Jazz make love under mustard-colored blankets on a lopsided queen-size bed. Because she is watching a violent TV series on a tablet computer in the other bed with earphones, Sorry is mostly oblivious to their humping, nuzzling, and coo-cooing. But as they approach simultaneous orgasm with sounds she would—if called upon to speak—categorize as cheerleading, she says, “Hey, you biohazards! Keep it down!”

“You were right,” Jazz says loudly. “We should have invited Penny.”

“Then tell her to fly to Santa Fe!”

Sorry takes her tablet into the bathroom for a smoke so they can finish in private.

MATT SITS ON HIS OFFICE
couch, considering his options. He calls a friend who is a building contractor. The contractor calls a friend who works in demolition.

The demolition subcontractor doesn't call anyone. At six o'clock the next morning, he swings by Home Depot in his pickup. From the crowd of migrant day laborers on the curb, he selects four Guatemalans who seem to be acquainted with one another. Two clamber into the cab with him and two into the back under his camper shell.

“
Es un trabajo corto con un gran montón de mierda,
” he explains
.

“
Eso es normal
,” the man next to him replies. “
Estamos acostumbrados a mucha mierda.
”

At the house, each man receives a snow shovel and two heavy garbage bags to tie around his legs. Each raises his tan bandanna
to cover his mouth and nose. The substance has dried somewhat. The demolition subcontractor calculates that it will fit easily into the buckets whence it came, give or take the extra plastic bucket he found on the porch.

The four men shovel the substance—still slippery, not like something dry—maybe things that oily never really dry—into the buckets. Full buckets are toted to the curb.

To forestall new extremes of neighborly hostility, Matt has commandeered a state-of-the-art prototype, currently beta testing in Saddle River, to visit Jersey City that evening. Around seven, the gracefully streamlined garbage truck in iridescent blue-green approaches the house. It hovers, compressed natural gas engine running near silence, then cuts the power with a sigh. Batteries drive the powerful motors that swallow, compact, and encapsulate the substance. All fifty-two buckets are soon on board, along with plastic buckets, pots and pans, trash bags, shoes, throw rugs, welcome mats, linoleum, ruined plaster, and many unidentified globs.

Observers (the event draws a high-turnover crowd in constant rotation) speculate that once the last item leaves the curb, the smell will improve.

When the curb is empty, a soft breeze carries the smell away, but it returns immediately. “Smells like pig manure,” one observer remarks. “Like living out in the country.”

The day laborers accept one hundred dollars each and a tacit invitation to ransack the house. They discover a stash of clean clothing in Tony's room. They wash in the kitchen, scrubbing their nails with dish soap and toothbrushes (the subcontractor forgot gloves), and put on the clothes Tony abandoned when he embarked on his new life. They agree to be picked up the next morning, same place, same time. They will continue cleaning the house the next day, at a new lower rate minus hazard pay.

The subcontractor drives them to the bodega, where they stand
leaning on his truck, drinking beer, in the gentle yellow light of a Meadowlands summer afternoon.

JAZZ CALLS PENNY FROM THE
road in Oklahoma the next morning.

“It's beautiful!” she says. “We're in a landscape of total abstraction. Planet Earth re-imagined as a primitive computer graphic. We're driving a black line bordered with green in the interstice between a gray plane and a yellow plane, with no landmarks except the bugs on the windshield.”

Penny tells her that she's very sorry, but she can't fly to Santa Fe. She has a job interview.

“Bummer,” Jazz says.

“No, I think it's a good thing. I need to be self-supporting. Everybody's self-supporting in their own way, even if it's just by getting somebody else to support them, like Tony. I don't want to do that, not right now. I need a job. And this really might work out. It's at my mom's bank. They like her a lot. So maybe they'll like me.”

“They might even think you're related, assuming you don't open your mouth and speak.”

“Believe me, letting my personality run free is not my first priority at job interviews. You wouldn't even know it was me. I get all corporate.”

“Sounds like a really meaningful use of your time.”

“Don't be a snob. Do you even work? I have no idea what you do for a living.”

“Whatever it is, I haven't done it since you met me. The money I have now, I got waitressing on a cruise ship last winter. Sometimes I lead these bus tours for retirees, to places like Atlantic City.”

“And turn tricks with the old guys?”

“Now you're the snob,” Jazz says. “So get a corporate job, make some money, and chill out. You want to talk to Rob?”

“Maybe.”

“Hey, Penny,” Rob says. “I'm sorry I blamed your brother on you. I'm still scared of him, but you should come see us when we get to Santa Cruz.”

“Taos,” Jazz says.

“I'll tell you which it is,” Rob says to Penny.

“What's in Santa Cruz?”

“I mean Santa Fe. I don't know. Sorry wants to go to Cuba.”

“Cuba is where the action is!” Sorry says. “The bicycle scene there is legendary! They use modified bikes to climb coconut palms!”

“I don't have a passport,” Rob says. “I've never been out of the country.”

After the call ends, he says, “I can't just go places, with no passport.”

“You'll love Taos,” Jazz says. “It's full of hippie yuppie tourists who would buy a bike as a souvenir. Even if they never use it, it costs money and might turn out to be useful. Like owning a tent or an ice-cream maker. You never know when you might need it.”

“The problem is raw materials. I need bikes. In JC I was scoring at least two free bike frames a week. I'm a scavenger. I can't live in a place without trash.”

“But won't tourists pay more for your stuff than people in JC?”

“Like hippie yuppies really buy recycled shit.”

“So get a passport and come to Cuba!” Sorry says.

“And get paid in—what do they have in Cuba?”

“Free health care.”

“That would be a sad ending to my story. Liberating poor people's bikes, in exchange for the health care I'm going to need when they beat the shit out of me. Anyway, I already have free health care.” He turns and indicates his bandage.

“Medicaid's an instrument of oppression. We'd have had a revolution a long time ago if the poor were dying in the streets like they're supposed to.”

“You been downtown lately?”

“Those people aren't poor!” Sorry says. “They're crazy, or drunks, or drug addicts, or subverting the dominant paradigm.”

Jazz says, “You won't see any of that bourgeois decadence in Cuba. They don't even have artists or homosexuals.”

“Okay, okay,” Sorry says. “Maybe I'll go to Venezuela, or Bolivia. One of those places where the revolution's working out, because they have crude oil instead of sugarcane.”

“Oil is the key to autonomy,” Jazz says. “I say that in my capacity as an ethnic Kurd.”

“Oil is death,” Rob says.

“That's right. Valuable enough to be worth fighting for.”

“
Nothing
is that valuable. People need warmth and transportation, not oil.”

“The IS and Boko Haram are fighting for God and virgins. Tell me how bikes and solar power are going to replace
those,
you anarchist peacenik.”

Looking out the window at the featureless plains, Rob hums like Winnie-the-Pooh.

Following a lengthy discussion, the three select a new destination: Oakland.

None of them knows anything about Oakland, except that it is near rich places (San Francisco, Palo Alto), yet itself poor as Jersey City. They hope for Jersey City–like conditions.

“I heard the squatter scene there is kind of embattled,” Sorry says.

Rob says the market for bicycles rises and falls with mass transit, and that obviously squats aren't going to be welcomed in a place with decent mass transit. You don't get those same dead zones. But that's life on the edge.

“Also it's way north. It's in
Northern
California. We should be going via, like, Denver.”

Rob pats the dashboard and speaks to the minivan. “Don't be scared,” he says. “She doesn't mean it.” Turning to Sorry, he adds,
“We're going south no matter what, because the Rockies are high. Really tall. It means we have to drive up the coast, but I've done worse things.”

“I hate beaches,” Sorry says. “But it doesn't matter. As long as we get there. We can go via Albuquerque and take I-5.”

“Did you used to live out there?”

She holds up her tablet computer. “I have this brain.”

AFTER WORK, MATT DRIVES FROM
his office to Nicotine to meet his contractor friend and survey the team's progress. He pulls up around the corner, parking at a safe distance from the large green container into which workers with leather gloves are throwing handfuls of broken glass from a mortar pan.

The work is going well and quickly. The four Guatemalans hired to do the demolition have been joined by a carpenter and a plumber with crews from Fiji and Ukraine. The house is empty of furniture and possessions such as Anka's paintings (who knows where they went). Every floorboard, baseboard, and piece of plaster that was touched by the substance has been ripped out. An odor wafts from the container in the driveway, but the house smells unremarkable. The demolition crew works on the roof, knocking down Jazz's room with hammers. By the time Matt and his friend the contractor arrive upstairs, it is a heap of wood and broken glass interspersed with leafless tobacco plants, textiles, and books.