Preparation for the Next Life (59 page)

While unconscious, he found his way to a construction site somewhere down a dead-end street. He ripped the caution tape away from the rebar stakes in front of the house and stepped in wet cement. The house was covered in yellow exterior sheathing. He kicked his way through a plywood board that was supposed to keep people out and found the rubble where they were breaking up the old concrete slab. Under the streetlights, he started lifting up the stones and carrying them out of the house and down the road until he had to drop them. He left a scattering of one hundred twenty-pound stones strewn out on the asphalt.

Good to go, he said aloud and jogged away, his hands white with concrete dust, knuckles bleeding.

He had no awareness of doing any of this, or of running around the neighborhood and hiding, taking cover behind parked landscaping trucks. Still blacked-out, he followed the street signs to his address and woke up standing on the corner of 158
^th
Street, still so intoxicated he had no concept that he lived here. He thought he was here for Zou Lei, that she would be waiting for him. He thought he was going to see her standing there on her strong legs in her new shoes ready to run with him. But she was not there.

Rotted sneakers hung from the power lines like game. He focused on the statues in the Murphys’ yard. He remembered that he had been arrested here this afternoon. The house was not necessarily empty—there was a light on. Someone could be in there behind all the wood and aluminum, Sheetrock and fiberglass.

Skinner came lurching across the street and walked straight at the house until the waist-high yard fence stopped him. The trash barrels on the sidewalk attracted his attention. He bent his head over one of the barrels as if he were going to vomit in it. But he was not being
sick. He was staring at what was in it. After a minute, he reached inside and took out a handful of green camouflage silk and regarded it without comprehension.

He started pulling the rest of the camouflage material out of the barrel like a silk handkerchief from a magician’s hat, pulling it out on the ground. His thought and action alternated between drunk and lucid, as if a wheel were turning inside him and a different part of him was coming around on every revolution. By now, he must have recognized his poncholiner. He mumbled something, staring down at it.

Then he picked up the barrel and turned it over, dumping it out on the pavement, and all his gear came out in a slew of trash. Everything came out—jeans, camouflage, beer cans, his expensive clothes, his U.S. Army duffle bag with the American flag patch on it, his magazines. His belongings were soaked in rancid chicken. He dropped the barrel and it rolled away into the street. The reek hit him. Flies flew up and hit his face.

Some things had been reserved from the trash. He sensed their absence. No laptop or cell phone were there. He pawed around in the muck and the bad light and found a sneaker, but it was not hers; it was his own, and he dropped it.

Then his hands touched something that affected him and he started feeling what it was to be sure of it, clutching it, feeling what was in it. He had found his assault pack. He felt for the L-shaped weight of the weapon. It was there. He uttered an exultant sound. Flies settling on his face, he put his hand in the bag and drew the weapon out.

He stood up, and after peeking around the street, went up the driveway to the Murphy’s door. He pulled back on and released the part of the pistol called the top slide, putting a round in the chamber. In his drunken state, he studied the pistol closely in an effort to determine that it would work. He looked around the street again and seeing nothing but the whirl of lights, rang the doorbell.

Twenty seconds went by. Subaudible voices emanated from somewhere in the interior of the house. Then he heard footsteps thudding down the carpeted steps inside the vestibule. He held his hand behind his back and waited where he could be seen through the peephole like a suitor bringing flowers. His thumb took the safety off. Floorboards creaked and Jimmy’s presence coalesced behind the door.

You better get out of here.

I’ve got some things I’m missing.

There was no answer.

Look, Skinner said, sounding drunk, You can be a hardass and I’ll keep you up all night. Or you can be cool and just give me my laptop.

The silence continued one, two, three, four, five seconds.

The latch popped open. Skinner filled his chest. The door came open. He took a step and raised the gun in Jimmy’s face.

Jimmy threw the door shut and Skinner hit it open. Jimmy bolted up the stairs and through the kitchen door. Skinner caught himself in the doorframe, regained his balance, and vaulted after him into their apartment. Jimmy was through the kitchen and down the tunnel of the blue hall. He grabbed a banister and started going up the stairs. Skinner flew through the kitchen, the kitchen a flash of mustard yellow. His boot hit the linoleum. His next boot landed in the hall. Jimmy had disappeared. Skinner’s next stride carried him to the end of the tunnel, the shadow-blinders of the walls containing his view. He caught the banister and sprang up the stairs. Two meters away, Jimmy was climbing with all his might, bending over his legs and striding like a mountaineer. Skinner pointed the weapon at the back of Jimmy’s undershirt and pulled the trigger.

The boom of the first shot blew out like an overinflated tire exploding in the enclosed space. Skinner heard nothing. He did not hear the scream. A picture fell off the fake wood wall on the landing. Jimmy ran into a room. Skinner ran up behind him and pulled the trigger at the room. There was a dry-fire click. He yanked back the slide. A live round jumped out and landed on the carpet. He pointed into the room again, squinted, and squeezed.

The gunshot boom went through the Masonite to the foundations.

Skinner went into the bedroom. There was a stereo, a poster on the wall. The lamp was on. The venetian blinds were askew. Jimmy was half behind the bed, his long legs in jeans extending out. His chest was inflating and deflating.

Skinner pointed the gun at him and kicked his foot.

Jimmy’s head turned sideways on the floor and his jaw moved.

Just go.

Just what?

Just go, man.

In a minute, Skinner said. He leaned down and put the gun to the back of Jimmy’s head. Jimmy had soft brown hair of a lighter shade than his own.

Feel that.

Don’t, man.

Listen up. I don’t know what you did with her.

I didn’t do anything with her, man.

Listen to me. I don’t know what you did with her and I’m going to accept that I’ll never know. Knowing doesn’t change anything. I already know.

Listen, man, I didn’t do anything.

Sure, I believe that.

No, said Jimmy.

Skinner pulled the trigger from an inch away, and Jimmy’s head jumped. The bed got knocked away from the wall. An empty casing fell in the bedclothes. The lamp fell over and cast a cone of light sideways on the white plaster wall.

He backed away from the scene in the room, stepping backwards through an invisible veil of powder smoke, blinking his eyes at the mannequin-body on the floor in the weird light. He backed away from what the light showed. His ears rang. There were no other lights. This floor of the house was dark, the real darkness of where the people lived, and the deeper in you went, the blacker it was. He smelled their house and saw their laundry on the floor.

She told the emergency operator, Help me, there’s someone shooting in my house.

Slow down, the operator said. Don’t hang up.

Erin, who had run outside and was backing away from the house, was hyperventilating.

I’m scared shit, she gasped.

Skinner thumped downstairs in his boots aiming the pistol at everything he saw. He saw no one. As he crossed above the basement stairs, he wanted to call down to Zou Lei one more time to see if she would answer, but he couldn’t stand to hear his own voice. He thought of
descending to the basement to look for her again, but he knew that if she wasn’t there, he would end his life, so he made the decision to leave the house.

He emerged from the side of the house, hurried down the driveway and started walking fast and innocently towards the corner, stepping over the dumped-out trash, stepping on his own possessions, barely conscious that what he stepped on was his.

As he reached the corner, he broke into a jog because he was hearing sirens.

Sirens were distinctly audible, there was no doubt.

He ran across the open vapor-lit space of the avenue to the black trees and the tracks and rocks on the other side.

A short sturdy man walking on the other side of the avenue stopped when he saw Skinner running at him out of nowhere, backed up and put his hands up.

Skinner ran by without looking at him, the pistol projecting from the end of his heavy forearm, his shins like broom handles going into his boots, picking them up and dropping them down, running, showing fatigue, a lack of coordination as if he might trip and fall. His damp black t-shirt was flapping on him, his close-cropped head turned sideways gazing in the direction of the racing sirens and the red and white sparks that were appearing down the avenue.

After Skinner ran by, the man lowered his hands and made a wide berth around the area of darkness covered over by black trees into which Skinner had disappeared.

The sirens got louder and louder and louder and more powerful until they had ballooned into whooping shock waves, and you could hear the engines and feel the tremor in the blacktop as the police cars climbed nearer along a parabolic arc through the intervening trees. The first speeding cruiser arrived in seconds, its electronic siren deafening, and pivoted and turned on 158
^th
Street. Another cop car came streaking down through the dark from Bayside. More were coming now. Red lights whap-whapped on the houses and the man’s face, watching them arrive.

Very soon, the street was full of police cars, too many for them to turn and they began stopping on the avenue. The officers jumped out and ran on foot towards the location, their belt gear bouncing, hands over their holsters. You heard their keys when they ran. Some walked purposefully.

How many were there? someone yelled. Did you see him go?

Away from the epicenter, Mexicans could be seen in doorways looking out, silent faces cast in the red glow, which alternated rhythmically with darkness.

The man standing on the train-track side of the avenue was noticed by an experienced gray-haired cop.

You see something?

The man nodded, Sí, and pointed back into the tracks.

55

T
HE POLICE MOVED THEIR
cars and waved the paramedics in.

The house is clear! Come on! they yelled.

They badly wanted to save somebody’s life.

But, upstairs, Jimmy had been found with brain matter outside his skull. The cops who met the paramedics coming up the stairs said, Don’t bother.

Really?

As in really.

They turned around and left.

For Jimmy, the detectives were called. Distinguished-looking men, they came in suits and porkpie hats. One wore a lavender handkerchief in his pocket. They made the climb up to the bedroom.

Jimmy had been killed face-down. One of the detectives wanted to turn the corpse over to see him. A digital picture was taken.

If the corpse was a man, he appeared to have been compounded with another life form, turned into a hybrid with some kind of flora. A stalk was growing from the skull as if his head had been abandoned in a field and a tree had started growing through it over the course of many years. But in fact the stalk had grown to its length of several inches in under a thousandth of a second. It was splitting and curlicued like an exploded party popper, like fingernails that have been allowed to grow for decades, forming spirals.

You eat dim sum? the detective said, referring to the slimy white tissue in the blood, which resembled the gelatinous noodles served as a snack by the Cantonese.

Downstairs, a diligent rookie found Mrs. Murphy collapsed on her bedroom floor. She was able to talk and asked if her son was dead. The officers tried to find out as much from her as they could. The paramedics came back, saw her hands turning blue and ripped open the LifePak to restart her heart. They bagged her and rolled her on a board, but because of her size, it was very challenging to move
her out and she arrested again in the ambulance before they had even left the scene.

Later, the detectives stood outside consulting their notepads and talking to each other while the refrigerated van arrived, and three big black men in city coveralls and rubber boots went upstairs and put Jimmy in a body bag.

The mother hears the door. The son goes to answer it. She hears them talking, doesn’t hear what they say. Then the shots fired. She hears them running in the house.

This is from the mother?

From the mother. She was in her room scared to come out, so she can’t identify nobody. She calls to the son, and there’s no answer. But she says she knows who did it.

The downstairs neighbor.

Right. They had an altercation earlier.

But the mother is no more.