Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

Preparation for the Next Life

Preparation for the Next Life

ATTICUS LISH

A Oneworld Book

First published in Great Britain and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2015

This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2015

Copyright Atticus Lish 2014

The moral right of Atticus Lish to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved Copyright under Berne Convention A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78074-777-4

ISBN 978-1-78074-778-1 (eBook)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events of locales is entirely coincidental.

Oneworld Publications

10 Bloomsbury Street

London WC1B 3SR England

Stay up to date with the latest books,

special offers, and exclusive content from

Oneworld with our monthly newsletter

Sign up on our website

www.oneworld-publications.com

For Beth
in this Life and the Next.

Part I

SHE CAME BY WAY of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.

They picked her up on the highway by a plain white shed, a sign for army-navy, tires in the trees. A Caravan pulled up with a Monkey King on the dash and she got in. The men took her to a Motel 8 and put her in a room with half a dozen other women from Fookien and a liter of orange soda. She listened to the trucks coming in all night and the AC running.

They gave her a shirt with an insignia and a visor, the smell of vaporized grease in the fabric. Everyone told her you have to be fast because the bossie watching you. They didnt speak each others dialects, so they spoke English instead. Her first day, her worn-out sneakers slipped on the grease. She dropped an order, noodles popping out like worms, and that night she lay with her face to the wall, her jaw set, blinking.

The Americans parked out front, their pickups ticking in the sun, and came in slow and quiet in bandanas and tank tops. They would lean an elbow on the counter and point a thick finger at the menu and say that one there. The blacks came in holding what they were going to spend in their hands, the wadded dollars and change.

Is yall gonna let me have them wings? Yall tell me what I can get with this then.

She knew how to say okay. When they pointed at the menu, she got it fine. In Nanuet, they wanted the all-you-can-eat. She could understand that. You need to get some more of this. Okay. She knew how to hurry up and get something, to work because she had to, to work fourteen hours a day every day until the tenth or eleventh day, until they got a smoking day, as the boss called it, because it was better than picking through the trash in the brigade field south of the river.

In the motel, they kept the TV running to practice English. They squatted on the carpet, moving their mouths in the blue light, seeing the grocery store aisles and the fast cars. Unbelievable, they said. This Tuesday on Fox. A grim day in Iraq. She watched goggled soldiers and radio antennas driving past adobe houses in the desert, which she had lived in.

Camel, she pointed. The animal, its very good.

Too hard, they said. It cant be absorbed. Mind is a wooden plank.

Someone yawned.

Have to practice it a lifetime.

When they had finished their work at night, they crossed the parking lot to the one car still there, the Caravan waiting to take them back to the motel. They gave the man his takeout, and he put it on the newspapers open to Hong Kong stories. She watched the large sweeps of the night go by as they drove home, the black areas of the forest, the slate highway and sky. He had a gold chain and a green card and he drove with the lights off, watching for cops.

The women were from Begin to Celebrate, Four Meetings, Connected Mountain, and Honesty Admired. She told them she was from south of the river.

But youre from somewhere else, they said.

Im Chinese, like you.

You dont look it.

In the sun, you could see Zou Leis hair was brown and not black. There was a waviness to it. She had a slightly hooked nose and Siberian eyes.

Our China is a big country, she said.

You sound like a northerner.

Northwesterner.

Shes a minority, one of the women said. You can teach me your language.

Thats meaningless. Youve got Peoples Terrace, Peaceful Stream, Placid Lake, Winding South, Cotton Fence, Zhangpu, Convergence of Peace, Swatow, Common Tranquility, Prominence, Samyap, Jungcan, Broad Peace, Three Counties, Next-to-the-Zhang-Family Dialect, and a hundred more. Which one we teach you?

Zou Lei thought for a moment. Then tell me how to say heaven is high. She smiled and pointed at the stained ceiling. Heaven is high and the earth is wide.

Some of them nodded, a few smiled, revealing bad teeth. Thats true, thats true, they agreed, and one of the women sighed.

What she learned instead was how to take an order. The fortune cookies were in the box under the Year-of-the-Goat calendar and the little plastic shrine. The napkins, straws, and chopsticks were all together on the shelf. Give everybody plastic fork no matter what. When a customer came in, you asked him what you having? Then you shout his order in the back: chick-brocc, beef-brocc, beef-snow, triple steam, like that, to make it fast.

No one had to teach her how to mop and take the trash out and go through a sack of greens, chopping off the part you didnt eat. They saw she was a hard worker. Most of what you did was something she already knew. Squatting, she washed her clothes in the bathtub, wringing them out with her chapped, rural, purple-skinned hands, and hanging them up on the shower curtain rod with the others dripping laundry, the wet sequined denim and faded cartoon characters.

At the counter, she put a piece of cardboard in the bottom of a bag, stapled the lips of a Styrofoam shell together, and set the shell in the bag on top of the cardboard. The other containers went on top with cardboard in between. She stapled the menu to the bag and handed it over the counter to a lean guy in a red baseball hat and long blond hair. Taking an extra menu, he said, Youre gettin a whole lot better. I timed you.

The boss said the women needed someone to supervise their well-being, a big sister who would report to him. He gave them a phrase to memorizeIts not a matter of time, its a matter of moneythat he wanted them to repeat a thousand times a day as fast as they could say it.

What does it mean? she asked.

It is not significant. Its significance is unknown.

One of the women was mentally imbalanced, given to bouts of silence, and then saying the police had given her a forced abortion in Guangxi.

When the weather turned cold, some of them slept together. They squatted in front of the space heater, their wet clothes hanging in the shower, all of them sick, coughing and spitting up in the wastebasket.

On TV, she saw girls surfing, driving trucks, boxing, and marathoning in the sun. When deliveries came in, she ran outside and carried the sacks of rice in on her shoulder. The women disapproved, saying let the men do that, the cook and his cousin. Dont go licking the bosss piles. Zou Lei told them that she liked to move her legs. At night, she did sit-ups. She took a paper from the van and read the classified ads for jobs in other states.