Nicotine by Nell Zink Page B

you cut it up and smoke it or dip it, or make cigars like Tony does. That’s about all. You can’t sell it.”
    The last flight of stairs is narrow and steep, as if built to replace a ladder, and ends in a wooden lean-to on the roof. As they reach the top he points out bundles of tobacco leaves suspended from the ceiling like sheaves of grain, curing slowly in the still, moist heat.
    The top-floor landing has two flimsy doors facing each other. Behind one of them, Rob inhabits a converted attic space with a small window and a skylight. It’s indifferently finished, with mismatched pressboard paneling stapled to heavy beams and fiberglass insulationpeeking through the gaps. Penny sees a futon, books, a fan, a space heater, and a straight-backed chair piled with clothes. He says this was the half of the house that wasn’t damaged in the fire.
    Opposite his room, a dented aluminum storm door opens onto the roof, which is painted silver and walled in on one side by the fake mansard that faces the street. It slopes slightly toward a vertical drop to the backyard. The roof belongs to Jazz, her plants, and the conservatory-slash-penthouse in which she dwells. In winter her glass-walled room is crowded with seedlings in plastic cups. Now the plants are lined up against walls, wherever their roots can get some shade, growing well in the open—three feet tall, with trumpet-like flowers. “Don’t touch the leaves unless you want a rash,” Rob advises Penny.
    â€œIt’s nice up here,” she says. The grid of rooftops stretching to the horizon echoes the sky’s crisscrossed condensation trails. Intermittent trees poke up as puffy masses, echoing the natural clouds.
    â€œJazz was the first person to move in, when I was still doing gut rehab,” Rob says. “She was sixteen. She saw nicotine as a civil rights issue. Her parents were growers. She’s Kurdish American. You’ll like her. Everybody likes her. She’s getting back from Boston tonight.”
    Penny looks over the edge into the backyard—into the crook of the L—and sees a thicket filled with trash bags, tires, glass and plastic bottles, and the torn remains of a vinyl aboveground swimming pool. “Is that you guys’ yard?” she asks.
    â€œWe haven’t really gotten around to yard work yet,” he says. On the way down, he pauses on the second-floor landing to indicate the door opposite Sorry’s. “That’s a really nice room, but I wouldn’t advise you to request a viewing. That’s where angels fear to tread.”
    â€œDid somebody die in there?”
    â€œYou wish.”
    â€œNow I’m curious.”
    He pushes the door open. The room has two high windows, bothwith the sashes raised and fine-meshed white screens. Obscuring their lower halves is a wall of rubber buckets, the kind stonemasons use for hydrochloric acid, minus their handles, and lined up on smoothly planed birch planks. “Four rows of thirteen buckets,” Rob says. “One for every week of the year.”
    â€œI don’t want to know what’s in them,” Penny says.
    â€œYou definitely don’t,” he assures her.
    â€œWhere’d they come from?”
    â€œWe had this hard-core anarchist living here for a while. This prisoners’ rights guy with the Anarchist Black Cross, doing protests against the control units and diesel therapy and so on. He had done hard time and was—um—not fastidious. So when he heard rumors the police were going to run us out, he started saving ammunition. The police never came, and after about a year and a half he got in some kind of trouble, so one day he just comes home and grabs his stuff and leaves. Gone. And there was nothing we could do. We tried one time, me and Jazz. We shifted one bucket a quarter of an inch, and it was like the whole wall was going to come down on us. And we said, fuck it, forget it, who cares anyway? It