Nicotine by Nell Zink

Author:Nell Zink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

AT NOON SHE GOES TO visit him where he is working that day, at a soup kitchen. She accepts and eats a plate of cauliflower au gratin, but she doesn’t see him anywhere.

The parish hall is square. Every surface is white flecked with artificial stains. The shiny linoleum is white with subtle brown streaks. The walls are rough plastic wallpaper with a shadowy moiré pattern. The drop ceiling is thousands of crinkly white panels decorated with an irregular pattern of small holes. The clientele is poor—badly dressed and silent, nervous and loud, fat and thin, but in every case without valuable possessions. Purses are plastic with bursting seams. Shoes are extruded foam clogs, leggings unevenly knit. Men wear incongruous T-shirts and sweat-stained hats. There are easily operable deformities in the room, and open wounds. She looks for Rob and doesn’t see him.

Taking her plate to the bus tray, she asks a short-haired woman wearing a gold cross on a chain over her purple turtleneck where Rob might be.

“Showering some guy in the gym.” She points.

Penny follows her gesture to a door that opens on a hallway that is part of the attached Catholic school. She opens the double doors to the undersize gym full of foam mattresses and cheap inflatable balls printed with cartoon characters. To her left is the door to the boys’ locker room. She opens it a crack and calls out, “Rob?”

“Go away,” Rob says.

She walks in, expecting to see something sexual that might bring her peace of mind. She sees him crouched at the feet of an older homeless man whose toenails remind her of Norm’s. Down near the floor, Rob is cutting them.

“Scram,” he says.

“Let her stay,” the man says. “She can clean my foreskin.”

“She’s been a bad girl,” Rob says, without glancing up, “but not that bad.”

“She could comb my hair,” the man suggests.

“Get out of here,” Rob says.

Penny remains transfixed. She has never seen a healthy, mobile human being in such lousy condition—bumps and puckers and discolorations, blood blisters, red patches, blobby joints, bewildering hair patterns, leprous-looking scars, fungi like navigational charts of shallow oceans. She turns to go and leaves slowly.

Back in the gym, she finds and opens the door of the girls’ locker room. The air is dense with yeast, a haze of unwashed female. Behind a partition, a shower drizzles. Flip-flops slap the tiles. “Maggots in your armpits,” a woman says. She sounds brisk and unfazed, yet surprised, as though expecting maggots elsewhere.

“You’re a saint,” an aged voice replies weakly.

Penny steps back, not wanting to be heard or seen. She eases the door shut and exits the gym through the crash-bar doors, not returning to the parish hall.

She thinks Rob is amazing. Not merely cute. Truly awesome as a human being. Also that this kind of awesomeness—the capacity to care about a filthy stranger—is something she never consciously wanted from anyone and hopes she will never need.

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