Preparation for the Next Life (9 page)

Zou Lei stopped reading and started doing sit-ups.

I’ll be fast, she thought. They’ll never get me.

All she needed was to make some money. Pay her rent. Eat shishkawap. The fresh air was free.

What you want? the girl said in English, in McDonald’s. I doesn’t speak Mandonese.

The hot water. No tea, only the water.

What?

One cup the hot water.

What does she want? the boy in a visor asked.

Forget it, I got it now. The girl made a hand gesture, hooks on her fingers, acrylic tips, filling and lidding the Styrofoam cup.

Zou Lei put her hand around the cup and drew it across the countertop.

You give me the spoon?

The girl gave her a plastic spoon.

A dollar nineteen.

Thank you.

No, a dollar nineteen.

Thank you. Zou Lei stepped back holding the cup.

The boy, who had wet-looking spiked hair above his visor, came over. What is it?

She got a water—I supposed to ring a tea. Now she ain’t—whatever.

Void, the boy said. Void, void.

She got a job on Main Street in a basement food court hidden under a 99-cent store, hidden among nested Chinese signs. You would never know it was here unless you were looking for it. Zou Lei ran down the steps in her tight jeans and went from one mini-kitchen to the next telling them she was looking for a job.

A woman asked her if she knew what she was doing. Can you make this noodle? Do you understand this flavor? One bowl sell one dollar. Nobody buy the cost, nobody has money. I don’t make money, so what I pay you with? You don’t make nothing working here. This the miscellaneous, pull the trash and dump it. We don’t use meat. Waste the money. Everything vegetable, you take a look, kabocha. Not like the one they have at home. Customer don’t care anyway, so I don’t care. He pays a dollar, already he knows it won’t be anything special. Just to hurry, eat, goodbye. All they care about is the dollar. We sell the southern taste as thin as hair—the noodle—you see that one. One hundred, I get fifteen, make right here in Brooklyn. By the time I sell, maybe three times the cost, I still make next to nothing. How cheap you work?

The boss-woman wore a baseball cap and was shorter than she was and talked with her mouth flexed in a tight O around her overlapping teeth. I learn business on the Mekong River. Between customers, Zou Lei picked up a rag and wiped the food service steel, the woman pretending not to see her. She wore a gold pendant, talking on her cell phone with the hands-free earpiece in. Eleven hours later, when the propane tank had been turned off and the flame was out, Zou Lei asked her, am I coming back tomorrow?

You can, the woman said.

When deliveries came in, she said look, to Zou Lei, I show you, and pointed with her ladle where the man had left the Goodyear Farms boxes at the top of the stairs. Zou Lei carried them down two at a time and stacked them behind the counter. When they slipped, she caught the boxes with her knee, grinned and regrabbed them.

She went back to the stairs and reappeared hurrying this way between the pillars, taking fast steps, leaning against the weight of a bucket, one arm out to the side, the other arm pulled straight down, the wire handle cutting into her fingers. Halfway, she set it on the rubber mat with holes between the fused strands so water could drain through to the linoleum and flexed her hand. Something thumped the plastic. Then she went around the bucket and picked it
up with her other hand and carried it the rest of the way. The boss-wife popped the lid and poked the frogs with her ladle.

Look, still living.

On her break, Zou Lei would go upstairs and look at the merchandise in the bins, while the vendors talked in their own dialect, pieces of what they said coming through to her and making a half kind of sense. She saw a denim-jacketed figure with a ponytail on a TV screen and it was her. They sold battery operated radios, the pink and blue words on the plastic package meaning Happy Sound. This is practical, the vendors said. And cheap. And you can learn English from it. Or she went out in the alley to be in the fresh air to do lunges under the fire escapes, but Fookienese teenagers with rat tails watched her, tried to get her attention, and after failing at this, began laughing at her. She get her ass big to fuck more tight.

Later, she tried another door and wound up in the shell of the building between the basement and the street, where she could be alone.

Mekong, that’s in the south, the boss-wife told her. On the Chinese side, I live. I live in South America, Ecuador. I see everything. They have a war there. I make money in the war, better in the war, better than here. Because people want to buy DVD, they want to drive away their life.

With her calloused hands, Zou Lei put frogs in a pot and turned the propane on. She kicked the cardboard boxes flat and stacked them in the trash. I’ll include you one meal a day, the boss-wife said. When Zou Lei got paid, she did her laundry and came to work the next day eating a twisted piece of bread fried in oil and drinking hot milk. Business is a joke, the woman said. They played Cantonese radio. Zou Lei took condiment packets home at night.

On her break, she did a handstand against the wall and tried to do a vertical pushup, even just an inch. First she took her phone out, which she had felt slipping out of her back pocket, and laid it on the stairs. Then she went back to the wall and kicked up into a handstand, holding herself on her hands. Her hat fell off her head and her shirt fell down to her armpits, exposing her flat stretched abdomen. She rolled down to her feet to a squatting position, dusted her hands off, and tried again.

She went for a jog around the block, but there was no block. The neighborhood around her house was full of levels. Walls and fences. You went down the street and it closed behind you, it screened you off, the courtyards and the back alleys, straw in the frozen mud. The bricks were faded on the buildings, turning to pumice, grayed-out. The boards and barricades in the alleys were gray-weathered, the piles of leafless brush were gray, husk-dry, piled under the windows, woven into the rusted wire fences. You could look up from a back alley to an old wall, a tree on the wall, another tier starting, a building, one of the new condos, the foundations at eye level. You could climb it. The houses and walls were stairs. It was a terraced hillside, a maze on a slant.

Dirty white houses were tucked in under other buildings, red blessings on the doors, Chinese New Year’s just behind us. On the dashboards of their Caravans and Quests, there were Buddhas. You could always see their laundry hanging out to dry. They made projects. Plants of ascending sizes, little designs, a money cat, plastic bags woven together to make ropes, the ropes tied from beam to beam, a contraption, you never knew what for.

You might smell joss in the tumbledown alley. You might see a stolen Corolla. You might see it going up and down if a girl was in it. In the back, where the rust was dripping down and the grills were weeping black on the bricks, everything was tended, an arrangement of boards and plaster buckets, a small pyramid design. If you heard voices coming from a window they were saying… what were they saying in Zhejiang dialect?

The workmen coming home—they might be exhausted or look sly with a smoke, smoking out of the side of the mouth, paint on their hands. They talked on cell phones, waited in pickups. Orange extension cords coiled in the back, a crew of five or six, drinking coffee, vapor coming up from the manifold, idling—bachelors, cousins, one last name.

In the evening, they came back to the apartment and ate their takeout and she heard their battery radios tuned to Voice of Mainland, speaking the common language. Singing ballads. The moon is round, the moon is round.

Along with the Chinese, there were Guatemalans and Hondurans and other Central Americans, having left behind what they called the problems in their countries. They were here and everywhere, here
to work, across the expressway, beyond the globe from the world’s fair in Flushing Meadow Park and the stadiums over the river. Especially in Corona, except for the hole in the donut, the patch controlled by Italians. In the summer, in the park, she knew she would see the homeless Salvadorans burned black, see them playing soccer with a beer can, their shopping cart staked out under a tree like a horse grazing, the flags of their shirts hanging from it. The Chinese in jeans and jean jackets she saw here and now, coming home covered in plaster dust, or the odd one stoned, down here in the labyrinth of back streets.

There were people from India, the help desk people, the IT people. They had a string of businesses on the main artery: video, hairstyle, Punjab grocery. Neon signs, second-story porches and satellite dishes. Pakistanis living above their stores on the other side of Cherry, next to the tattered awning of Little Kabul.

You could take a wrong turn on Franklin, by the next lane over, by that courtyard with the cats in it, the trees with cancer, the ones that looked boiled, melted, cooled-off and hardened like that. The kind of high gates you see at a tow truck lot. The trash in the shed, the back of the building, an American flag with holes in it. Each unit had a steel door painted the color of Crest toothpaste. It said Nutty in spraypaint. On the chest-high foundations, Wreck, Remy, Slugz ‘92. The graffiti was faded. Asians lived in the low rises, but it said Murder in fresh paint and where did the alley go? You could climb into the windows, which were low on the first floor and unguarded, but you wouldn’t want to.

The streets had what some people called culture, one that preexisted the Asians. Franklin don’t quit, they said. It kept going, all the way from Hillcrest to Woodside to Sutphin. They were Spanish, black and Irish with their heads shaved and they compared their level to yours. You could follow it to the Rockaways, to South Suicide Queens. They meant street genius, notorious block parties, the deep five boroughs.

From here, the bus barreled downhill and the terrain opened out onto a field, a cemetery, into a wider form of shadow. You saw women in black burkas waiting for the bus, unwilling to speak with strangers. Or not waiting, taking whatever they had with them and getting farther away on foot, traveling with girls in burkas, pushing a grocery cart with a twenty-pound sack of jasmine rice in it. They
had WIC, asylum. Whatever skin of theirs was visible—the hands, around the eyes—having been tanned in a burning oil field.

The field was far more extensive than you might imagine. She ran and ran, under trees, bypassing ditches, areas where the ground was stamped with tire tracks of Bobcats, in the subliminal winter predawn, the gray grainy ground lapping under her feet, the houses a presence beyond the trees. In front of her, however, there was only distance. She crossed a street, the park kept going. As she ran, there was a transformation in the sky: dawn. At length, she stopped, somewhere in a baseball diamond, apparently no closer to the apartment towers that rose like mountains on the far horizon, exerting the same magnetic effect on her with which she had been familiar as a child.

Her tracksuit sweated through, she ran back, the sun behind her. The Chinese did t’ai chi in the botanical gardens.

5

H
IS BODY JERKED
. H
E
moaned. The bench was slippery and he moved his legs on it in his dirty jeans, one of his socks coming off, the denim and camouflage and the American flag, his body and gear strewn out.

His brain was on but he was not awake. The plate glass window was lit up with white sunlight coming through his eyelids. It was very hot. They were driving and he was seeing the road go by and feeling the vibration. Metal was hot to the touch. It was loud and the vibration surrounded him and filled his ears like the heat. There were palm trees in the ugly desert panning by.

He was watching the side of the road as it kept coming towards him, bouncing over his iron sights, the dark poor sunburned people by the side of the road, their animals and goats, the little white goats, the tents and rugs for selling whatever they had, bread, souvenirs, hashish, and then the stretch of nothing, the table land.

In his dream, he knew what was happening. When they had first arrived, they hadn’t known, having yet to learn. Their unit had provided security for a colonel on daylong sector-assessment missions called SAM’s that lasted into the night, and they had seen very little action. If this is war, I’m disappointed, Nowling said, pulling security in the spectacular heat. They looked up the line of vehicles at the senior men clustered around the colonel in his crisp camouflage pointing at features of the landscape. Occasionally, they heard battles being fought and at night they watched the lightning flashes and felt the thudding in the ground. It was hard to sleep. People said I miss my girl. I wanna get some. They manned a checkpoint and shot up a car. Their doc from Opa-locka poured a bag of clotting factor in an Iraqi’s chest. Mom’s head was gone. White-faced, Sconyers ran and got a beanie baby for their daughter. They poured canteen water on doc’s hands and it smoked on the road. Someone took a picture of the front seat.

They saw contractors and Special Forces guys wearing boonie hats and carrying different weapons, long-barreled sniper rifles. Dominguez said he had talked to them and they were British. The colonel was gone. Rumors abounded, what was being planned, what was said on CNN. They crossed paths with other units, soldiers who had been in heavy house-to-house fighting and there was a bad feeling, like they wanted to hurt somebody and you were it. Captain Friedman told them to take a knee. He briefed them on who the most wanted people in Iraq were at this time. Then they were ordered to each write an official postcard home. They found a corroded hangar in the desert that was supposed to have contained chemical weapons. The Special Forces men drove away smoking cigars and they moved into it. Rotting drums stood in the heat. The company was divided. They built shitters using the drums and burned their shit with diesel fuel, wearing their gas masks.