After he was finished eating, he pushed his tray away and sat there looking at his Ironman. His eyelids closed and he opened them again. He stood up. Taking his gear, he went down the line of homeless people at the tables to the restroom and urinated in the shitsmeared toilet.
The door banged. In a minute, he said.
He pulled off his jacket, hoodie, and polypro, and laid everything on his bags. Beneath his clothes, his skivvie shirt was stinking and sweat-soaked. He peeled the skivvie off, revealing his upper body, and wrung it out in the sink. A metallic smell came off him. He had a farmer’s tan. His torso was grayish white and there were zits on his skin. He started giving himself a canteen shower in the sink. He had vertical tattoos down his forearms. With a handful of paper towels, he washed his armpits. His face and hands were covered in half-healed cuts. Then he undid his jeans and wiped himself down. Lifting his scrotum, he held a hot towel between his legs, his eyes half-shut. Crotch rot. He winced. On his tricep, there were Chinese characters.
Across his back, above his scar, he had a tattoo of a skull and death wings, spanning his shoulders. He had a star on his neck, which predated his enlistment, and a U.S. flag on his shoulder, the original idea being for it to look like he was wearing his uniform even when he took it off. He pulled the skin down taut over his abdomen and flexed his stomach, trying to see his six-pack. He raised his arms and flexed his biceps. You could see the Chinese characters wrapping around the tricep. He could also see the bright pink scar wrapping around his ribs. Turning, he looked at his back in the mirror. The area of the scar was of a color that did not look like flesh at all. It looked like a melted plastic toy.
He got himself organized, changed his shirt. The new one said Army Strong. In his assault pack, he had a handgun wrapped in a faded green army towel, a Berretta nine-millimeter, and he took it out and checked it. He released the magazine, locked back the slide, checked the chamber with a finger, dropped the slide, squeezed the safety, decocked the pistol, reinserted the magazine, and switched the safety on. He wrapped it in the towel again and stuck it back in his bag.
Someone banged the door and he ignored them.
They banged again.
Chill, he said.
Back at a booth, he untied his desert boots and changed his socks, rubbing his peeling feet one at a time. The music had been turned off. You heard them cleaning in the kitchen. He put his head down on his arms. Someone rapped the table with a billyclub, a man in a navy sweater with nylon elbow patches and sergeant’s stripes, handcuffs attached to his belt and what could have been a Smith and Wesson.
Skinner pushed himself up. Sighed.
Don’t tell me you don’t know about the rules, the guard said. You oughta know all about the rules. These other ones don’t, but you should.
Skinner looked at him and looked away.
There were derelicts everywhere. A guy in a Mets cap with a triangular unshaven face strutted over to a feminine boy in bellbottoms, and said, Yo, homegirl, give me a quarter.
The time on the wall was three-something in the morning. The lights were half-on, as if in energy-saving mode, and the black and amber field of the street was visible through the glass. A vehicle went by, just one, and litter got sucked up and flew after it, spinning.
He took the magazine out again but couldn’t read.
At four, the guards told everyone they had to leave. The whole McDonald’s was getting to their feet and shuffling to the door in a moving column of piss- and b.o.-stink. He picked up his bags and shuffled outside with them. The cold was vicious. He had to take a piss so badly it was stimulating. The wind lifted a sheet of newspaper from the gutter and blew it against his calf. He had heard someone, possibly the guard, saying that there is another location down the street that stays open. The sky was black and, at the corner, there was a surreal in-the-mountains feeling from the giant silent buildings in the silver-dust light.
No one else came with him. Maybe they went down into the subway station or waited on the street. But he found the other McDonald’s and the door opened when he pulled it, and when it shut behind him, he was warm. He dropped his weight. The Men’s was being cleaned, he used the Ladies and drained his bladder, one of those endless rich-smelling pisses. He bought another coffee, blowing over the plastic lip of the cup, tongue scalded. A Spanish guy with a broken nose, tattooed forearms, and a bop walk was mopping the floor in sections. The stairs leading up to the second floor were chained off and no one else was present.
You think you could let me crash up there?
Come on, the guy said. He unhooked the chain, took him up. Lay your shit on down there. You don’t gotta go nowheres till nine. You got all the way until then.
Fuckin A. Thanks, bro. The ex-con slid off and Skinner piled his gear on the floor and stretched out on a bench.
4
WHEN SHE FIRST ARRIVED, she had tried to stay awake all night in the Port Authority, trying to avoid being seen by the police. She sat on the floor with her forehead on her arms across her knees next to the humming vending machine. They patrolled through, she heard their radios, and she got up and moved. In the restroom, there was toilet paper unspooled across the floor and a black woman was bouncing off the walls, rubbing liquid soap on her arms and legs like lotion. Zou Lei went down through the tunnel and waited in the empty station for the subway. It came and she got on and sat at the end of the car holding her plastic bag with her clothes in it.
At two in the morning, everyone was black or Mexican and they were men, sitting with their knees spread out, sleeping with their mouths open. The door between the cars opened, letting in the roaring at full volume and a column of men came easing in, swinging along the bars, their jeans low and bunched around their ankles, rags on their heads, towels hanging from their pockets.
She crossed her arms and stared straight ahead, seeing the lights flick by.
Her back kept slumping forward and she would prop her chin up with her hand. When she woke up, her bag had fallen off her lap and her clothes were showing. She picked it up and stuffed her clothes back in, the train blasting through the tunnel.
She saw the dawn begin on the elevated tracks, water towers wheeling by against a dark blue sky. Her face was creased from trying to use her clothes as a pillow. Construction workers started getting on, their boots and jeans covered in dust. She sat up straight and crossed her legs and then her head sank forward again as they rocked along. People got on talking. She stood up and read the map, keeping her balance, leaning over someone else. She traced her finger along the colored line beneath the plastic.
This one the Chinatown?
A Salvadoran woman in a white ball cap and gold earrings, whose sneakers barely reached the floor, took her headphones out and said, Qué? Sí.
Zou Lei sat back down. She took a comb out of her bag and combed her hair, tying it back in a ponytail. A man in overalls watched her from across the car, then closed his eyes again.
She took the subway to a station with overflowing trash cans. You could hear the splattering, when the train had gone, of a soda getting poured out on the concrete. She saw someone in multiple coats but no shoes digging through the garbage, taking out the bottles.
The street was lined with dumpsters. She passed a city building for pain abatement that had benches splintering out front. A block later, she saw the Manhattan Bridge arched up over the tenements into a boiling dry-ice cloud ceiling. Framed under the arch, there were fire escapes and clotheslines, brush calligraphy coiling down the ironwork, graffiti booming off the rooftops.