Old Meats and No Service
by Itto and Mekiya Outini
Rayan hasn’t slept. Last night, as he scraped wiry hairs from his chin with a straight razor before his chipped and frameless bathroom mirror, two chimes rang through his apartment: the first from his microwave, announcing his dinner of pre-buttered popcorn, and the second from his laptop, waiting open on the standing desk that doubles as his kitchen table. A message from his thesis advisor. Fresh lab results were in. Sixteen documents attached. Datasets in need of crunching.
All night, he’s been obediently crunching. Now the numbers swim before his eyes, uprooted from the substrate of semantics, even the four stately digits in the upper righthand corner of his screen: 12:07. The shock only hits when he pries himself from his chair, staggers to the sliding door, and jerks the curtain open. He wants a cigarette, a breath of fresh air. Bright gray daylight slams his eyes. The realization comes on in increments. Twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes. That’s how long he’s been hunched in the chair.
In the parking lot, a trio of tarpaulins flap over coolers and white folding tables set with steaming aluminum trays. A line of neighbors winds between the parked cars, thirty or forty Americans in sweatpants, raincoats, hoodies, all bigger, wider, better fed than him. Last week, pink notes appeared on each resident’s door: “Save the date! Taco party on Saturday. Be there and bring your Tupperware.”
Thunder gurgles at a noncommittal distance as Rayan pulls his shoes on and his raincoat, hurries down the stairs. Misty apparitions skate across adjacent building’s gray-green roofs. He feels himself advancing, an egg along a snake’s digestive tract, jostled and drawn by American bodies, heads buried deep in slouching shoulders, fists balled up in crumb-lined pockets. He holds himself erect despite the phantom numbers pooling in his eyes.
Sally, the apartment manager, has never set foot at the complex on a Saturday afternoon, but here she is in all her glory, enthroned on a beer cooler. Her upper body’s veiled beneath a baggy tee while down below, from neon-yellow SpongeBob shorts, two pale and fleshy thighs extend. Drawn to the head of the line now, Rayan drops his gaze—revulsion, not modesty—and surveys the trays of steaming pulp and gristle. The rain is picking up now, cutting sideways. Pearly droplets flay his raincoat, trickle down his hands, and wet in his hair.
“What is this?” he wants to know.
Sally gazes implacably up at him. She is the residue that lines the bottom of the melting pot once all of middle America has boiled down to nothing: flesh not so much white as washed-out gray, hair heaped up in once-blonde rollers, face eternally infested with a softly pinched expression. Placid, homespun, bovine on the surface, but one layer deeper, calculations churn. Her closest kin, phylogenetically speaking, are crisp apples pregnant with razor blades.
Last year, she made her voice sweet on the phone: “Don’t worry about the application, Hon. You’re already family. I’ve got a second-floor, one-bedroom.”
The other managers he called all wanted credit scores and credit histories, things he didn’t understand. One guffawed when he began to read the numbers off his credit card—“Fresh off the boat, huh?”—and hung up, leaving him to scream at his motel room wall: “What boat? The only fucking boat I go on is a cruise ship, motherfucker! I fly first class. I came here for my fucking degree.”
Affordability has never been an issue for his family. Back in Tunisia, they own two houses, three apartments. They used to go on extravagant holidays, celebrating Rayan’s high school diploma, associate’s, and B.S. in Britain, France, and Singapore, respectively, and upon his admission to the M.S. in food sciences in Manhattan—Kansas, not New York, but who knows the difference, really?—they popped champagne and booked three weeks on a Hawaiian cruise. Even though she must’ve already decided to scuttle their three-year relationship, his fiancée opted to join them at Rayan’s family’s expense. Her about-face the night before his departure for the States, incongruent as it was, caught Rayan so off guard that shortly after touching down at the Manhattan Regional Airport in Riley County, he went ahead and did precisely what he would’ve done back home to soothe his raw nerves—bought an Audi—without quite grasping that the sales price, and the insurance payments, and even the property taxes were in dollars. His whole life, as a matter of fact, is in dollars, and it will stay that way for two years. Those dollars have changed things.
Sally was the only one who seemed to understand. “Don’t worry about that income limit nonsense,” she told him on the phone. “We take care of each other around here. Some folks have rented with me for fifteen, twenty years. No one ever wants to leave!”
She said there was a gym—but by that, he discovered after signing the lease, she meant the Gold’s around the corner, where the receptionist, a chubby black girl with gold on her knuckles, fixed him with a blank and contemptuous stare when he asked about resident discounts. A pool—by which she must’ve meant the inflatable one in the neighbor’s yard. Community events every first Saturday afternoon—but this is the first one she’s hosted in fourteen months, a period that, for Rayan, has been punctuated by a series of jarring discoveries. The sliding glass door to his balcony doesn’t lock. The ethernet jack has been painted over. A moldering crack has opened in the caulking around the tub. Dry rot has eaten through one of the wood posts that holds up the balcony. The monthly water bill reliably lands between $255 and $265, even when he doesn’t wash his clothes and only bathes on campus in the laboratory shower that’s supposed to contain biohazards. Perhaps most disconcerting of all, when he calls the emergency number, an electronic voice admonishes him to leave a voicemail, but no matter how many times he states his name, apartment number, and the nature of his emergency, his calls remain unanswered, unreturned. He’s spotted the maintenance man, a pale and twitchy cryptid with a bald head, only once, hauling a roll of new carpet toward a recently vacated unit a few weeks ago. Rayan didn’t confront him then. He was already too exhausted from hours of processing samples and staring at screens for the sake of insights that will someday appear in print with the imprimatur of his advisor’s name, not his, all to retain any sense of himself as a force in the world. Nor did he mean to confront Sally now, but when she plunges her serving spoon into a tray, fixes him with an expectant gaze, and answers, “Taco meat,” something in him begins to fray.
“Is it pork?” he asks.
It isn’t that he doesn’t drink, or that he fasts, or that he prays—although he does pray, at the church on Sundays, always with stacks of clean Tupperware jammed in his backpack, and also at the mosque during Ramadan, again with the Tupperware. It’s just that the notion of pork turns his stomach, as it turns the stomachs of so many others from his country, even those who hold no deep convictions on the subject. He wants to be sure that whatever he sends to his stomach will stay there.
“It’s just taco meat,” Sally says. “Regular taco meat.” Then, as if to drive her point home,
“Ground up taco meat.”
“But from what kind of animal?” Rayan’s fists have gone hard in his pockets. White sparks dance before his eyes.
“Like . . . you mean . . . like . . . was it grass-fed?”
The fraying concludes with a decisive snap.
“Listen to me, Sally,” Rayan hisses, leaning in. “You listen, okay? You listen, Sally. I have my culture, okay? I have my religion. We don’t eat pork in my country, okay? Are you getting it? So, I need to know if this is pork, okay? I get very sick if I eat pork. You understand that? Very sick. If I get sick, Sally, that’s discrimination. Do you hear me? Discrimination.”
He expects his words to plunk through her serene exterior and leave no ripple, just as they have left no ripple every time before, every time he’s seethed into her answering machine. When his pilot light died, when his garbage disposal was jammed, when his water was shut off for thirty-two hours, no answer, but this time, to his shock, she flinches.
“Hush!” Her vehemence jars him as much as her recoil. For a few seconds, emotions scud across her face. Then she regains control. “Please, Rayan,” she says, her voice transformed now, sweet again, “there’s no discrimination happening here, I swear. It’s just regular old taco meat. Same thing everyone else is getting.”
“What? You said what?”
“Sorry?” She cocks her head.
“Old meats?”
“What?”
“You are serving us old meats?”
“Regular meat,” she repeats, the strain creeping into her voice once more. “Regular taco meat.”
“You hear this?” Rayan turns to face the stragglers behind him in the line. Most have vanished into their apartments, but a few remain, waiting their turn or sheltering beneath the tents with paper plates in hand, fingers too greasy, regrettably, to operate their phones. “You hear this? She is serving us old meats!”
“I am not!” Sally rises from the cooler, brandishing her spoon. “That is not what is happening here!”
“What is it you are trying to do here, Sally?” Rayan demands. “Kill us with your old meats? You think you can get away with this discrimination?”
“That is a very hurtful word!” Halfway between sitting and standing, she reddens, like an enormous, bloody blister on the bottom of a fleshy sole. Blown up. In need of lancing. “Just look around you, please,” she beseeches. “Just look around and see, just look, just see who all I rent to. Look around and tell me to my face, tell me honestly, am I someone who discriminates?”
“These are just black people,” Rayan declares, deaf to the sucked-in breaths, the murmurs rippling out across the parking lot, overt and undisguised. The hush that falls. “Not immigrants. I see no immigrants here.”
“But Bayani’s an immigrant.”
At the sound of his name, the skinny Filipino man who squats every night on the patio beneath Rayan’s balcony, frying fish on a portable cookstove, jerks to attention.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“And a human being,” Sally adds hastily. “That’s how I see you, Bayani, as a human being. And that’s how I see you, Rayan. As a human being. A beautiful human being. But Rayan, I can’t have you talking to me this way in front of my residents. I’ve never done anything—”
“That’s right!” Rayan bursts out. “That’s right, Sally! You’ve never done anything! I pay you good money, and what do you do? You give me old meats and no service! My fridge is broken! When I put the milk, the shelf falls! And my dryer—when I put the clothes, it takes two cycles, three cycles, sometimes four cycles! My apartment is broken! You are running a death trap here, Sally. A death trap!”
“I have a black daughter-in-law,” Sally cries. “My grandson is half black! He’s dating a Cherokee girl who’s blind from one eye! I do not discriminate! That is not true! That’s a very hurtful thing to say!”
“Those people you are telling me are not immigrants,” Rayan snarls. “They don’t have to live in your broken apartments and eat your old meats!”
“But Bayani is loving his taco.”
Bayani’s eyes bulge from his skull as he stands even straighter. “Yes, ma’am!”
How many times has acrid, fishy smoke crept through the cracks around the window, into Rayan’s room? Has he got any clothes left that don’t smell of rancid tilapia and scalded vegetable oil? He switched off his fire alarm lest it go off without warning and get him billed, as he’s heard victims are in the US, for the use of emergency vehicles. Speaking of vehicles, how many times has the roar of Bayani’s motorcycle awakened him at 3:00 a.m.? How many times?
“Bayani,” he answers, his voice all gelatinous tremor, “is not from my country. You think we are all from the same country? Listen to me, Sally. You think just because I live here, I’m not rich? Let me tell you something. I go every year on six cruises! I take my white girlfriend to Paris. We stay at the Sheraton! Every porter knows me. You call them, you ask them about me, they’ll tell you I give them the best tips, sometimes five hundred US dollars. I pay for everything! I’m from a good family. I am studying science. You know what science is? I live here in your broken apartments only because you are a liar, Sally. You lie about everything!”
“Do you want your taco or not?”
No one’s filming yet—a quick glance around confirms this—and Rayan’s frustration at this failure of the crowd transforms, abruptly, into relief.
“Yes,” he mumbles, popping open his Tupperware. “I want it. No meat. The other part. Put it here.”
These people mean nothing, he tells himself as he bears soggy taco shells and tasteless tomatoes back through the rain. These people are nothing. To lose face in their presence doesn’t count. To stand on principle before them would amount to nothing but a waste of time. He will not go without his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not because of Sally.
Cross-legged on the floor of his apartment, a ratty towel spread before him to catch the crumbs, he chews—on the tacos, yes, but also on the information that he’s gained. The high, strained note in Sally’s voice. The urgency. The fear. He never thought she would be frightened of him—certainly not in his present state, diminished by these dollars. He was raised on American movies, attended the American University of North Africa, came to understand that money is the godhead worshipped by these people, but now, for the first time, he’s beginning to perceive the second member of their pantheon, the shadow skulking half out of sight behind the altar, the one that licks its slavering lips, that snorts hot steam, whose name conjures fear and horror: Discrimination.
The word tastes oily on his tongue: metallic, bitter, sibilant, and beautiful. Discrimination.
Who knew the power of this word? Why was it never taught to him? And what else might it do?
Sure enough, when Rayan googles Sally’s name and that of the apartment complex, there it is. Posted just over a week ago, the day before the taco party was announced, a monolithic block of text: a bad review. Phrases leap out at him:
Lazy racist.
Good-for-nothing tweaker maintenance fucker never fixes nothing.
The exorbitant water bills, the beaters that materialize on the street at odd hours, the rats that haunt the buildings, and the cockroaches, and the raccoons—
Here, Rayan suspends his search and googles what a “raccoon” is. This leads him down a rabbit hole and concludes with his watching several videos of raccoons behaving badly, but also cutely. When he comes to his senses, half an hour has passed, and the tacos have begun to settle in his stomach, and this, along with his all-nighter and the gentle patter of rain, make him drowsy.
On his laptop, datasets await him, but the urgency that drove him through the night has ebbed. He needs a clearer mind, he knows. Better faculties with which to plan.
Perhaps discrimination will unsettle his advisor, too.
* * *
It’s the heat that wakes him, sulfurous and suffocating. His eyes scroll across the popcorn ceiling’s alien geography, the upper edges of the walls, the ceiling fan, then find purchase on the too-familiar laptop, still open on the table, whirring louder than it should when not in use. He hauls himself into a sitting position, heartbeat firing away arrhythmically, and wipes a hand across his brow. The thermostat informs him that he doesn’t have a fever, that the temperature indeed has climbed to eighty-nine degrees—but the thermostat also insists that the AC is running.
At the sink, he splashes water on his face and fills a glass. It’s dark out, half past two, and through the glass door, heat lightning crackles sullenly beyond the neighbors’ roofs. Rayan dials the emergency number, attempts to rally as it rings, and has already begun to rattle off a series of aspersions—discrimination, broken apartment, AC, hellhole, Title VI—when he realizes that he hasn’t gone to voicemail. That someone has answered.
“Hallo?” he says into the phone. Its silence throbs against his ear, an absence signaling a presence, just this side of terrifying.
“Hallo?” he repeats. “Who is this? Coward?”
The call ends.
Rayan gazes at his phone, whose screen throws back the kitchen’s harsh, fluorescent glare. Fog wreathes his mind. Sweat slicks his hands. Oil glistens on the screen. He shakes his head as if to clear his ears, scrubs the phone on his shirt, and stuffs it back into his pocket. If he were less exhausted, he might not find this so unsettling, but as it is, he knows that life will catch him in a moment of imbalance. The urge to right himself, to find his footing before the curveball reaches him, spurs him to motion. He stuffs his shirttails down into his khakis, pulls his shoes on, and shuffles down the stairs.
In the parking lot, flickering, damp, and tropical, he runs his eyes over his Audi, the only car without a dented fender or a bumper missing. Its AC beckons, but he can’t stand the thought of sitting anymore. He does not think to peer into the shadows clinging to the wheel wells, does not catch the way the tires slump. If the Audi rides a little low tonight, then it can only be because he’s riding high, higher than he has since setting foot here in the States, more like he felt on the deck of that cruise ship, a pleasant, salt-flecked buzz about him, watching his fiancée arch and curve beneath the sun. The hunched, fearful figure who slavishly runs numbers through a machine is already beginning to fade. He’s a man coming home to himself after too many months away, too many years, striding out of the parking lot onto the darkened road, his back erect, his head held high. Discrimination. The magic word. But why should he need a magic word? He pays three times what Americans pay for tuition. He’s practically keeping the lights on, doling out the faculty’s salaries. Why should he fear the professors he’s paying? His advisor should be doing his work for him, processing his samples, running his numbers, putting his name on all the papers—not the other way around.
On Monday, he will visit his advisor’s office, have a little heart-to-heart with him, and then there will be no more lab assignments, no more marching orders, no more late nights of indentured servitude—
Headlights lance Rayan’s reverie, a car swinging onto the street, and his body takes over, ducking off the road and taking shelter in the shadow of a pickup parked against the curb. He’s in front of Building 2, with a clear view of the apartment where, two weeks before, he spotted the maintenance man replacing the carpet. What he sees there hits his nervous system first: a punch to the amygdala, the impact traveling down his spine and out along his limbs, then doubling back to his prefrontal cortex and into his consciousness. The ghost of a moth seems to land on the nape of his neck, insubstantial when he swats it. At first he doesn’t know why that warm glow behind the window should fire up his spidey senses.
Then he does.
The apartment is not occupied.
If he were still lost in thought, still walking, he would not have seen the figure come around the corner, wheeling something on a dolly, but his senses are awake now. Someone emerges from the lit apartment, climbs the steps to ground-level, and stops abruptly in the dolly’s path: a near-collision. In the light from the window, which falls across the dolly now, he makes out the shape of a broad-bottomed planter, which teeters forward at its sudden halt, barely saved from tumbling down the steps when both figures lunge and seize it.
Muffled cursing.
From the car, idling on the curb, a third figure appears, lankier than the other two, and lopes across the parking lot to meet them. The one who was in the apartment breaks away, and although Rayan still can’t see her face, he knows her profile, pear-shaped and roller-adorned. Sally. She and the newcomer meet at the corner. The shadow of a Japanese lilac obscures what’s going on, but squinting, Rayan makes out that something is passed from hand to hand, and something else is handed back.
Around the corner, the man with the dolly tries to back it down the steps. Rayan’s teeth grit in sympathy at each jolt of the planter, sharp reports reaching him despite the attempted stealth. At the bottom of the steps, the man rotates the dolly, maneuvers it over the threshold. Good-for-nothing tweaker never fixes nothing—the words scroll through Rayan’s brain as the man passes through the light. Apparently, he does have duties. And performs them.
The third figure lopes back to his car. Sally and the maintenance man reconvene at the top of the steps. They appear to trade words. He gives a jerky, deferential nod and wheels the dolly off into the dark. The entire exchange has lasted less than five minutes.
Sally stands for a moment, half-silhouetted against the open door, examining something in her hands. Checking her phone—except that there’s no lighted screen.
She’s counting money.
Satisfied, she turns and slips back into the apartment. Shadows scud erratically behind the blinds, as if she’s wrestling with the planter: attempting to heave it across the room, perhaps, or lift it up onto a table. Rayan already knows, though he’s too far to make out the shape of the leaves, what sort of plant it is. Yet his mind still hasn’t shaken off its sluggishness. His glands have not yet started pumping fight-or-flight into his bloodstream. He still hasn’t joined up the data points: the inexplicable charges on his water bill; the strange cars that frequent the street after nightfall, Sally’s indifference toward her tenants and, of course, his phone call, uncannily answered just minutes before. He still hasn’t had a chance to reevaluate, once again, his standing in the world, or rather in the shadowy underworld into whose crevices he’s somehow plunged, whose denizens, though motivated to maintain facades, are not the sort to shudder at mere words, especially not if words are all one brings to bear against them on their home turf.
Soon enough, Rayan will feel the full force of these revelations. For the moment, though, for a few uncomprehending seconds more, he stares out from the shadows, unafraid, relishing with confidence loaned from another country and another time the thought of all that he will do to these people, these foolish, incompetent, ignorant people, who mean nothing to him, who are nothing to him, these people who’ve made his life hell for a year for no reason, now that he knows what he knows.
END
Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, North Africa, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Fourth Genre, Fine Lines, Modern Literature, The Good River Review, Southland Alibi, Chautauqua, and elsewhere around the globe, and their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, a full-service author support platform. The Outinis hold an MA and an MFA, respectively, from the University of Arkansas.
Photo by Chelaxy Designs on Unsplash