Preparation for the Next Life (12 page)

People laughed at him, watching him trying to lift the water bull.

Two Iraqi men came up to Skinner, ostensibly to try to tell him that they were not insurgents. Feeling threatened, Skinner began kicking out, his foot connected and a man fell back and Skinner fired his M4 and shot him. The other was trying to hold onto his weapon. Skinner’s buddies came running. They forced the barrel of the weapon around until it was on the man, who started writhing and shouting. Skinner triggered the weapon, killing him in cold blood.

His war went by one eighteen-hour watch at a time, feeling the jump of his own adrenaline-fed heartbeat, thinking how many more of these heartbeats he would have to wait through to get through the
next minute, the next hour, the next eighteen. His thinking was flattened by drugs, fatigue, repetitive thoughts. But the war led you into the mystical thinking of someone in a psych ward. He added time in new ways. Today he wouldn’t die if he did ten deadlifts with his rifle.

When he was rotated back to the United States, he ran into Freebird outside a mall with his family, and the man wouldn’t return Skinner’s greeting. He just looked at Skinner and spat on the asphalt and stared at him aggressively until Skinner walked away.

Jake emailed him:

Skin my friend it been a long time. i wanted to write but had to learn first. this device i use my mouth. u should c me. i seem retarded b/c my mind trapped. frustrating to be thot of as broken. especially for us grunts the doc talks to me like 5 yr old. !!!! let me c him do our job guy..

i cant stand when people use word brave hero ets. i would do all again

all my wheelchr, computer comes from donations made me cry

my plan to go to nyc w/ u – negative for reasons obvious. ive decided college is next war for me – want to untrap my mind. so focused on therapy havent had time think big picture. worried am i going to quit lots of thoughts of what we saw - surreal. yes anger. alos a gift something nobody else knows

i love you my brother

jake

Skinner went to an exit meeting in the base auditorium where GIs were told how to make their military service sound useful on a resume. It was a sunny winter day and the demobilized soldiers wore fleece tops over their leaf-patterned cammies and black watch caps like bank robbers in the movies. The blue sky was clear and cold. The bare trees poked up into the sky like bundles of wicker. During the intermission, the soon-to-be civilian soldiers stood smoking in groups, some with canes, holding glossy pamphlets bearing the words Once a Warrior, Always a Warrior.

The news came that Jake would not be making it to college. He’d had too many surgeries and, at last, an infection he had thrown off previously returned with renewed ferocity and attacked the sheathing
of his spinal cord. His parents came from Virginia to be with him for the last ten days while he existed in a coma. The machine that breathed for him moved its piston up and down. His parents slept on chairs in the waiting area by the elevators past the nurse’s station. They stood over Jake’s bed and touched their son’s tattooed arm and examined his yellowed face for signs of returning life. He had become aquiline. He had been given a tracheotomy and a hose went into a gauze-packed hole in his neck and was held in place by tape. The room smelled the way skin smells when it is covered by tape for months and starts breaking down. He was not coming back, and they made the decision to let him go. The nurse turned off three switches and they waited at the bedside while he stopped living.

We love you, Jake, his father said, still wearing the tie he taught high school history in, loosened, over a plaid shirt. He emailed Jake’s friends.

This was the news that Skinner received before he went to New York alone, holding to the idea that if he partied hard enough, he’d eventually succeed in having a good time and would start wanting to live again.

Broadway in the daylight. People streaming out of the subway, moving in clusters that broke apart into fragments and passed through other columns of people like a strainer. He smelled pretzels. A black Denali with the driver’s hand visible, resting on the steering wheel, an athlete’s hand, an expensive watch. All the girls wore Eskimo boots. Their hair bounced behind them. There were so many it was unbelievable. There were office chicks smoking outside the entranceways and there were guys in shirtsleeves coming out to smoke with them, young guys in slacks, just ordinary guys who had not drafted themselves after high school, and he heard the normal sound of their voices as he went by and the whole thing sounded strange.

He stayed at a hostel by the Port Authority, drinking and surfing the web. There were drag queens staggering sideways across the broken pavement when he went out for beer. He bought a bag of weed and smoked it with the window open wrapped in his poncholiner
listening to the sirens. He checked his email, typed Hey dud whatsup, and hit send. No one wrote back from his unit. A block away, next to the peep shows and the Foo Ying Kitchen, he found a strip bar, the same blond hair and tan tits he had seen on the highway coming in. In a few days, his bank account was down a grand already. Awesome, he said, and toasted himself with a Red Bull. His clothes lay all over his bunk—jeans from American Eagle, shirts to go out and get laid in—bought with hundreds of dollars in hazard duty pay. He got dressed and went out drinking. At the Blarney Rock, where there was an American flag behind the bar and a memorial to the Towers and the faces of the fallen, a few guys bought him beers and clinked bottles with him and called him family. That’s it? he thought. But he stayed pleasant, watched the game. When he was falling down, they tried to offer him a ride. He left without speaking. Take it easy brother, they said. Let him go. Let him go. His mother emailed him from Pittsburgh to tell him he was wasting his life. He took his meds with beer and lay on his bunk with his tattooed arm over his face and his tan boot on the wall, the Chinese characters saying No Pain No Gain, and watched Sconyers convulsing in his head. The others at the hostel said, You were making noises in your sleep.

6

O
NE DAY, THREE OR
four days after arriving in the city, having just taken his meds, he went back down into the subway and sat down on the first train that came and didn’t move until after it had risen up out of the tunnel into daylight onto elevated tracks, passing the backs of billboards, train yards, and water towers. After a couple stops, he went up to the window and stuck his face against it and watched the rooftops coming. The stops kept coming. He had gotten a long way out. Across the field of rooftops, he saw cranes. Down below, he saw a car turning on the littered street and heard a burst of the hammer drill from an auto repair.

In theory, it might have been possible to figure out where he was from the map and how he could get back. Instead, he said to himself, No, let me go all the way to the end.

When they got to the last stop, he got off because he had to and went out on the street.

It was crowded and a woman bumped him with her shopping bags coming out of Caldor. He raised his hooded head and looked at her and she apologized. Along the curb, he noticed people sitting in the Asian squat, selling wallets, belts, New York hats, backpacks, and DVDs. It was very loud with people yelling. A truck was idling blocking the intersection, the engine spinning, and he could hear the diesel exploding in the shaking block of steel. Someone honked and Skinner twitched.

He lit a cigarette and watched pigs being offloaded onto the shoulders of Mexicans. They were carrying the heavy cold white carcasses through the crowd and in through the hanging plastic strips into the back of a Chinese market.

Vertical Chinese signs were everywhere. Someone tried to give him a flyer and he said, I don’t understand you, and dropped it. He went into a newsstand and got a Red Bull. In the back of the store, he stopped and stared at the magazines. All the metal slots were filled
with porn. He saw a tan girl with her wet hair plastered to her face and her mascara streaked.

He kept getting pushed and it bothered him. He forced his way out through the people coming into the newsstand, and, once outside, drank his Red Bull moving with the crowd.

Another four-foot woman handed him a flyer.

Ma-sa-jee, she said.

The piece of paper said Bodywork 1 hour.

Awesome, he said, and stuffed it in his pocket.

The garbage on the street had a peculiar smell. In the windows, he saw red roast pork on steel hooks. A mother was squatting helping a boy urinate in the gutter. When he flipped his empty can into the garbage, an immigrant in flowered sleeve guards came behind him and picked it up with tongs. He heard a chanting, which was all their voices overlapping. The women wore black leather jackets and spike-heeled boots with buckles and fringe. One of them looked at him directly and she had eyeliner and a mane of dyed reddish hair and then he lost her in the crowd.

He went down the avenue, crossing under a railroad bridge, and searched down an alley, passing right by a doorway where each tread of the stairs said Table Shower, leading up to a massage parlor on the second floor. At night, the stairs would have been lit up like a runway and he would have guessed what it was then, but in the daytime you had to read Chinese to know what you were seeing. He came to the projects behind the train tracks. From here, he saw the bridge and the water and he went back down another alley until he was on the avenue with the crowd again.

He took the flyer out of his pocket and checked it. The crowd was taking him like a conveyer belt past everywhere he had already been. After he had gone beneath the railroad bridge a second time, he saw a group of men hanging around in front of what looked like a condemned building, smoking cigarettes. There was a dead gray neon sign on an upper floor that spelled KTV. Skinner tried to see inside through the thick smeared glass doors.

The men eyed him. What’s the foreigner doing? Look at this clothing of his. A cop? A health inspector. A person with time on his hands. Pay no attention to him.

Skinner pulled the door open and went inside.

The building was occupied and there were utilities functioning inside it, he could feel them right away. A back door was open and a young male, by the sound of his voice, was in the alley talking on the phone in a rough loud Asian language. Stairs led up and down. When Skinner began checking the first floor, he discovered a maze filled with ninety-nine-cent-store-type goods. Backpacks and umbrellas hung from the ceiling. The vendors, eating noodles out of Styrofoam bowls and talking loudly, went silent as he moved down the aisle. When he looked back, he realized they were watching him on closed circuit TV.

What’s down here?

They ignored him to his face. He saw them exchanging looks, and a woman stared at him as if he were a monster. A man in a gold chain circled behind him, pretending not to look at him. When Skinner repeated his question, a thick-faced woman of about forty, who was knitting, shook her head. Then she turned to the others and said, Impotent.

No speakie English, huh? Good to go.

He stuck his large, broken-nailed hand in a cardboard shipping box, took out a padded bra and chucked it back.

Clumping upstairs in his boots, he found nothing but a locked door on the second-story landing and a table covered in takeout condiment packets and other trash. He jogged back down to the first floor and stuck his head out in the alley, catching a whiff of garbage, seeing fire escapes, and hearing exhaust fans. Whoever had been on the phone out here had gone. He went back inside and checked down the stairs, this time descending to the basement.

In the basement, there were food stands packed in together. Fires were hissing and it was loud. Napkins were soaking on the floor, the linoleum was rotting down to the wood beneath. He went around the rusting folding tables where Asians sat in jeans with keys on their belts, looking fixedly at their phones.

What you want? a woman yelled.

Where’s the massage at?

Where the who?

Where’s the massage spot at? The girls?

No! No girl! she yelled. Noodle!

Skinner tried to see inside her metal pot.

Well, what kind of noodles is it?

She pointed with the ladle at the sign overhead. Up there, she told him.

The sign said:

Feld poultry w/ family flavor northern hot $2.75.

He kept walking through the maze of tables and pillars holding up the bowing ceiling and the gas hissing and the yelling and the banging of woks. When there was nowhere else to go, he returned to a steel fire door with a half-lit exit sign askew above it, which he had noticed earlier, and checked it again. The alarm contacts were painted over. There was no handle on this side, but he could see the latch was not engaged. After glancing briefly over his shoulder, he wedged his fingers in the gap and pulled it open. Nothing went off. He held the door open and leaned inside, seeing a cinder block hallway.

The ceiling was half-ripped-down and there were acoustic tiles buckled, rotted, water-stained, and lying broken on the floor. He stepped inside. The fire door banged shut behind him. For a moment, he stood there listening. The air was cold. A sheet of plastic hung over a window in the cinder block wall and it puffed in when the air pressure changed. Through the plastic sheet, he could hear the street.

Something was humming, barely at the level of hearing, and his head turned towards the sound. He took a step, concrete shards popping under the heel of his boot. The humming was electricity, he thought. He moved down the hallway, past standpipes rising through the floor, the humming growing distinct. He went through a doorless doorway and began to see fluorescent light. Then the hallway angled and when he turned the corner, he saw someone.