Nicotine (12 page)

“You would love the DJD,” Jazz says. “I can see you now, curled up on it like a kitty-cat. It's so Penny. You'd never get up.”

“Plus I'd fuck whoever came along, by accident.”

“That's the sexual spell of the DJD. It has all the purity of minimalism, but it's a sofa—the most bourgeois item of furniture known to man—so it's like a biodynamic dungeon or a radioactive unicorn.
But listen. There's a massive environmental issue with that house. They're deep into conserving water. As in not letting it flow to the ocean. And not just in desert regions.” She sees Penny's blank expression. “You know Belo Monte? A guy at DJD told me the Belo Monte Dam is a small price to pay for sustainable growth with zero emissions.”

“Oh my god,” Penny says, as though hearing that cannibalism is a small price to pay for trichinosis. “What about the other house?”

“Tranquility,” Jazz says. “But I can't see you doing indigenous rights.”

“What do you mean?” Rob protests. “Look at her Kogi amulets!”

“Penny is their worst nightmare. A modern woman. The great leveler. Entropy incarnate.”

“It was my mom who blew out of indigeneity,” Penny says. “Or indigence or whatever. I'd go back and spend my life doing coke and taking naps in a heartbeat! I like fricasseed guinea pig! I'd be an upper-class Kogi, obviously. Not one of the slaves.”

“You can teach them the old ways,” Tony suggests. “Then lead them to freedom.”

“I think you should just interview at Tranquility and get it over with,” Anka says, frowning at Tony and Jazz. “It's a nicer house. The room that's free has two closets and a parquet floor and a nice light fixture. They've been renovating the upstairs bathroom at DJD for like two solid years.”

“Sold,” Penny says.

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY NIGHT, PENNY
sits in the corner of a sofa in the common room at Tranquility. The other residents look at her with interest. She shares the sofa with Rufus, a middle-aged African American man, and a South Asian–looking man in his thirties named Barry wearing a Filipino dress shirt with eyelet lace and
patch pockets. Two white college students, Jacob and Maureen, sit in armchairs, while an African American woman named Stevie occupies the rug.

“We hear you're Kogi from Colombia,” Maureen says. Her right arm is decorated with a fresh, clear, deep black tattoo of a Kwakiutl orca totem. “That is so fascinating.”

“Half-Kogi, I guess,” Penny says. “Where are you guys from?”

“Louisville,” Barry says. “My ancestors immigrated to Maryland in the seventies.”

Maureen says, “Wilkes-Barre.”

Jacob says, “I'm from around here.”

Rufus nods in assent, indicating that he is also a local.

Stevie says nothing.

“Well, basically I'm from the Upper West Side via Morristown,” Penny says. “And Morgantown. I went to WVU. It's my mom who's Kogi. She ran away from home and ended up meeting my dad, who was from New York.”

“Just like me!” Stevie says. She has curly magenta hair and wears a forties-style bathing suit of plum-colored cotton gabardine with fishnet stockings and Chuck Taylors. She looks ageless and possibly about thirty-five. “My parents wanted me to finish high school and I was like fuck
you
. It's indoctrination. So I ran away. That's part of why I'm committed to indigenous peoples' right to self-determination. Nobody should have their way of life dictated to them.”

“I joined the navy when I was seventeen,” Rufus says. “That's when I started learning about oppression.”

“Cool,” Penny says approvingly. “I'm sure you know more about it than I do. I've never really had to follow orders, except in college, and at work, I guess. I mean, my parents weren't strict.”

“It's stressful,” Rufus says. “The navy is very traditional. Always doing things the way they always been done. I had to run away, too.”

“What, are you AWOL? Do you get a lot of MPs coming around here?” Seeing that Rufus looks horrified, she adds, “Just kidding.”

“Are there very many Kogi left?” Barry asks.

“No clue,” Penny says. “But anyway, my dad was Jewish.”

“That's a shame.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, your mom could have married a Kogi.”

“What do you mean? They're not an endangered species! Do you think my dad should have married a Jewish girl?”

“This interview is taking a strange turn,” Rufus remarks.

“It's not a job interview,” Penny says, turning to him. “I don't have to put on a fake personality. I get tired of hearing people say indigenous people should practice their folkways. White people don't have that responsibility, do they? They can innovate all they want, because it's their tradition to be modern, and I'm supposed to reclaim my ancestral mountaintop? Thanks a lot!”

Penny knows she is talking too much, but in the presence of five strangers she can't keep straight, she feels safe falling back on a familiar topic—herself—somewhat as when people dominate conversations in bars simply because they can't hear anybody.

“But it's genocide,” Barry says. “Once indigenous peoples assimilate, they're gone.”

“So if I convert to Islam to keep Boko Haram from killing me, I'm committing genocide.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Sorting people into groups isn't what anybody needs. Not indigenous peoples, or anybody else.”

Barry says, “It's an inevitable irony that you can't condemn genocide without using the perpetrators' racial categories. But that doesn't make it right to kill people because of their ethnic background.”

“I didn't say I'm okay with genocide! I just meant that they call
it a crime against humanity because it's subhuman, and I say fuck that. If somebody kills me, I don't want it to be beneath his dignity. I want it to be murder.”

Maureen says, “I don't get what you're saying, but I think you might be a really interesting addition to the house. I like these kinds of discussions.”

Jacob pipes up at last. “Do you sit down in the bathroom?” he asks. “Because that's my main concern with new indigenous groups in the house. Remember that Hindu guy who squatted on the toilet seat without taking off his shoes? And that girl who would only shit in plastic bags.”

“But she was a runaway, and crazy,” Rufus says. He turns to explain her to Penny. “It was sad. She would throw those bags out in the yard, and the cats would get in them. A kitten gets hungry enough, it will eat human feces—but I don't want to
know
. Don't confront me with that fact. Don't make me go out and clean up the yard and find all those little kittens with the bags ripped open and your shit on their faces!”

“Oh my god,” Penny says, visibly moved. “How long did she live here?”

“Months,” he says. “She was a street kid with nowhere to go. We couldn't throw her out until we found her a replacement abandominium.”

“She had so many friends,” Jacob says.

“She was tribal,” Stevie says. “The tribe of underage sex workers from Garden City.”

“So you guys are basically just suckers,” Penny says. “Way too nice.”

Shrugs all around. “We try to be friendly,” Rufus says.

“Do you mind if I ask a question about the solidarity work you do as a house?” No one minds. They look flattered and expectant. She asks, “Do you support any groups engaged in armed struggle?”

“Do we
what
?” Barry asks.

“You ask if we building
bombs
?” Rufus says.

“I mean like the Karen in Burma or whatever. With your fund-raising. I'm basically against violence. I'm kind of a pacifist. Anything is better than hurting people.”

“We're not in a position to raise money,” Maureen says. Her housemates nod. “I mean, I give all the support I can to my favorite causes on social media. It's so many initiatives, I can't even keep track. I like Amnesty International, but I guess my favorite is UNICEF. They have this great program to make sure indigenous girls get food.”

“I like UNICEF, too,” Penny says. “I've actually done some fund-raising work for them.” (She means while trick-or-treating in Morristown.)

“Maybe you can teach us something about fund-raising,” Stevie chimes in. “I work with a collective that builds puppets for street theater, and it takes so much money. Just storing the puppets between conferences takes money.”

“The puppets are great,” Jacob says. “They're what made me into an activist. I saw them on YouTube.”

“You can get more support with puppets than with anything else,” Stevie says. “People go to a demo or see video and they see the police on one side and us on the other, and they see who's having all the fun. It gets them to join the revolution.”

“The puppets are awesome,” Barry agrees. The others nod.

Maureen says, “Lots of indigenous cultures do street theater with puppets. The Dogon. The Hopi.” Again, they all nod.

“That sounds awesome,” Penny says. “I love puppets.”

She feels as though she were admitting a weakness for baby bunnies or chocolate sprinkles—not much of a confession, much less a commitment—but the resonance on the faces around her is so approving that her mind bends willingly. Why shouldn't loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare? Bunnies and chocolate sprinkles don't work as
street theater—much too small—while values such as peace, love, and understanding are notoriously invisible. Puppets it is! Big ones! Why not. There are more inane things you could love.

Mustering these thoughts, she smiles in a way that comes close to the Mona Lisa. She feels that Tranquility is inhabited by hapless lunatics, but she'll be spending most of her time at Nicotine anyway, so who cares.

They ask her to leave the room for a moment. There is a swift consensus to take her in. They feel they have never met anyone quite so indigenous. They imagine both the Kogi and Jewish cultures as the sorts of patriarchies that produce women so strong they're actually matriarchies, if you take time to scratch the surface.

Her new room at Tranquility is on the third floor, with slanted ceilings and gabled windows. The oaken flooring displays an attractive herringbone pattern. She has nearly two hundred square feet of it.

Residents do not pay rent per se; they pay a co-op fee to cover food and utilities. Since much of the food comes from Dumpsters and the heat is off for the summer, the fee is currently very low—fifty-eight dollars and eighty cents per month.

BEFORE SHE HAS A CHANCE
to hire movers at her mother's expense, Rob volunteers to move her things with his minivan. She can't say no, since arriving at Tranquility with professional movers would blow her cover big-time.

On the first Saturday in July, Rob drives into the city. Anka and Tony ride along to help out. With Penny's spare key to open the garage gate, he finds the loading area by the freight elevator in the basement of her building and lodges his vehicle between two pillars. The three ride up to meet her in Norm's old place.

Tony expresses his approval that there is so little furniture. He is somewhat less delighted after he tries budging it. “We could leave
that big wardrobe,” he remarks. “There's nothing saying we have to steal everything that isn't nailed down.”

“What do you mean?” Penny asks.

“Is this not a sublet? This can't possibly be
your
furniture.”

“They said I could have whatever I want,” she says, more or less accurately.

Rob admires her bicycle—a light, fast ten-speed with a short wheelbase—and declares that it will be loaded last, being fragile. His admiration for the bike makes Penny proud. At the same time she is embarrassed by his uneasiness with the upscale nature of the building. Its very height and solidity seem to worry him. She feels glad he never sees the lobby or the doorman.

First Norm's massive bureau and desk descend and are loaded into the rear of the minivan, the desk tipped up on its side. Dismantling the bed takes time, but the headboard and mattress soon find space, surmounted by the kitchen table and chairs with their legs unscrewed. Rob fits in small things on the periphery—bags of clothes and little boxes of books Penny packed small enough to lift them herself. On top goes the bike, pedals removed, handlebars loosened and turned, as if it were going on a plane.

Anka and Tony spend a lot of time standing around, and Penny realizes they were expecting a walk-up. In reality there isn't much to do: load the elevator on floor nine, unload it on floor minus-one.

There is talk of returning for a second load until Rob measures Norm's wardrobe and pronounces it larger than his cargo space. “You'd have to rent a truck,” he tells Penny.

She goes to see the doorman to ask about temporary storage. He remembers Norm with fondness. He opens the boiler room for her. The new heating system is much smaller than the old one, freeing up a great deal of space.

The air is suboptimal for wooden furniture—dank and hot. Penny assures herself and the doorman that the storage solution is only temporary. She knows it is not. She knows she will never rent
a truck and drive into the city to pick up an immense wardrobe she doesn't need. Her room at Tranquility has a large closet, not a real walk-in, but with enough space inside to turn around and a shoe rack. By the time she moves again, the wardrobe will be warped. Still, they carry it—a massive piece of solid wood furniture—down and store it in the boiler room.

The thought of losing it bothers her, but she sees no alternative. She puts it out of her mind.

ANKA, ROB, AND TONY UNLOAD
her things from the minivan to the sidewalk. She thanks them and asks them to stay for sandwiches. They say they should be getting home, but Rob agrees to accept five dollars toward gas and maintenance.