Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  Their plan had been to drive across the country, he and Rose. Take it slow. See America. Visit friends along the way whom they hadn’t seen in years. Neither had ever driven across America. They were classic coastal dwellers, and they wished to finally erase their myopic coastal arrogance. Their clothes for the trip were packed into two suitcases in the Mercedes trunk.

  They delay their departure while they sort things out. He gets them a room at a pretty little inn in town where they always wanted but never had occasion to stay. He makes appointments with the insurance adjusters, talks to his lawyer, files the first claims, begins to order and gather the few truly necessary replacement documents—the most recent bank and brokerage statements, another copy of the title to their new Santa Barbara home. He thinks about the contents of his desk drawers. Papers. Insurance policies. Monthly bank and brokerage statements. Stock buy and sell slips. Nothing irreplaceable, he thinks. In truth, there aren’t so many truly essential documents. Some phone calls, some explanations, and it will all be reissued. The wake of the disaster is more orderly and less stressful than he would have thought, and he can’t help but think that is something the thief relies on as well.

  Waiting at the house to meet with the two insurance adjusters, to take them step by step through the events, as they politely but insistently requested that he do, Peke is surprised to find the life of the house continuing in his absence. The grounds attended to, per the closing contract. (The new owners are returning from a five-year posting in Asia and will not take occupancy for another month.) He notices that mail keeps coming. Not the first-class mail, which is being forwarded, but everything else. The junk mail. Flyers, solicitations, credit card offers, TO CURRENT RESIDENT. And all the catalogs. Catalogs of physical objects. Of items, of things. A pictorial index of the known domestic universe. Beds and tables and chairs and hassocks and ottomans and lamps, candies and chocolates, tools and toys and boats. As if the Fates know what has just occurred and have dispatched catalogs filled with convenient and immediate replacements. Curtains and clothes and bathroom towels and linens and robes. What convenient temptation, and how perfectly timed. American commerce at its finest and most clever. He can simply reorder his existence. Dial 800, speak to flat-toned, pleasant Midwesterners, and reorder his life.

  Dreams delivered to your doorstep. Consummately American, these catalogs, he’d always felt. The object as imagery, imagery as object, the distinction utterly blurred. Here was all any immigrant ever needed to see. Catalogs of objects, still entering his former wooden fortress of objects, sliding in deftly under the door, Trojan horse–like, glossy and perfect-bound.

  He thumbs idly through an electronics catalog filled with gadgetry, trying to recall what purchase, if any, would have brought a catalog like this into the house. Maybe the security system; he thinks about the house’s protection, its elaborate, multizoned alarm system, which he and Rose installed and then steadfastly kept unarmed. But it would have made no difference on the day of the move, Peke knows, when all the doors were thrown open, as it happened, welcoming the thieves, letting them shop—spend the day shopping, as it were.

  He wanders around. The house is identically empty to their first and last night in it. But of course, that emptiness now has a completely different quality. The same wide-planked maple and cherry floors. The same panoramas of woodland beyond the windows. The same loved evergreens and deciduous trees and prize plantings doted on individually through the seasons like children. But a new memory now lies atop all the others, smothering them. The memory of plunder, of loss. Of the uniformed men’s earnest and smiling faces. Smiling like carnival barkers.

  The uniformed men. The empty house. The images push at him resiliently. He tamps them down, focuses intently on the here and now.

  His desk drawer. His papers. He tries to picture them. Is he forgetting anything? That depends, he realizes, on whether he has truly grown forgetful. Perhaps in his new forgetfulness he’ll even forget about this insult. Or perhaps this event will stir him from his forgetfulness. His lack of material concern, of material attentiveness, could hurt him now, particularly with the insurance companies. He and Rose could have itemized the things in the house, like the insurance companies always suggest. His wife might very well recall more than he, though he has begun to see that she isn’t necessarily much better at remembering. And if he can see that in her, then isn’t that a good sign about his own alertness?

  His lack of materialism. Not keeping account. It concerns him as he waits for the adjusters. But only a little.

  Is he forgetting anything? He doesn’t think so. He hasn’t had to truly worry about anything in so long.

  The fact is, he’s been good at forgetting. And he knows that while some of his forgetting is certainly biological, an inevitable consequence of aging, he also knows that some of it is another sort of forgetting. A habit, a practice of forgetting. Purposeful and protective and useful. Forgetting as healing, as balm. Forgetting ancient events that this event seems nonetheless determined to call up. He has never needed to distinguish between the two kinds of forgetting—the natural and the adaptive. They have contributed to each other, flowed into each other easily. He senses—fears—that that is about to change.

  In the end, he doesn’t know whether it has crept up into his consciousness or if it has been there all the time, while some part of him has vainly tried to suppress it. Suppress the parallels, which have loomed up, increasingly insistent. He realizes that this might be what Rose’s silence is actually about. Embarrassment. Discomfort. At recognizing the parallels, too, even from the little she knows of them. Seeing them before he did. Remaining silent, not wanting to make it worse. She fears, perhaps, that it is too much for him to handle, to take in. That it is too much for him to accept.

  The uniformed men. The empty house. It has happened to him before. As bizarre, as unpredictable, as unaccountable as what has just occurred is, it has occurred before. On another continent. In another life. He has tried to cut off the association, tried to bury it in the thick dirt and deep distance of the past. But it rises, powerful and insuppressible. An event poised fragilely between memory and actuality. Between the mind’s eye and the witness’s uncomprehending gaze.

  The uniformed men. The empty house. It has happened to him before.

  The adjusters pull up. Get out of their nondescript sedan formally, funereally, though they’re both cherubically young.

  “Stanley Peke?” the closer one asks, squinting at the figure seated on the slate front steps.

  Peke nods curtly.

  The accounting soon begins. Walking through the empty house, room by room, to let each room trigger his remembering. Going through the items again in his mind, individually—just as he had watched the items that day as the movers loaded them into the truck. But this time, the cataloging is only in memory. This time, there is only each object’s ghost form.

  LaFarge doesn’t mind all the lifting. He used to lift equipment in a rock band—keyboards, amplifiers—so it’s second nature. Got him off the streets of the Bronx, after his graffiti stage, that band did. This is like being in a rock band. The four guys. The guys you’re close to, you work with, you argue with, and then make up with. He misses the band and the music, but here the work is steady, the pay is good, and the only rule is you have to shut up about it. The lifting doesn’t bother him. You get to know the secrets of leverage and angles. It’s an art. You can do it even if you aren’t an especially big guy. And you get to see the country. Fancy places you never knew existed. Fancy homes. Rich people. Crisscrossing this great land. It’s an education. He has Nick to thank.

  Nick probably wouldn’t have liked seeing him talking to the rich old man, LaFarge knows. Probably wouldn’t like it at all. Nick probably would be nervous. But LaFarge felt bad for the guy, rich or not. LaFarge knows it isn’t really hurting these people. They’re insured and all. They get over it. But he feels bad anyway.

  They are at a rest stop, having a quick breakfast.
Sitting on and standing around the rear gate of the truck with donut wrappers in their laps, a steady wind blowing off the interstate at them, carrying on it, even this early, that familiar oppressive highway hum.

  The aimless discussion backs innocently, inadvertently into it. “I don’t know,” says LaFarge. “Seems awfully harsh. To even take their pictures . . .”

  He knows as soon as he says it that it’s a mistake. A big one.

  Nick looks at him, instantly annoyed. Instantly transformed. “Oh, that doesn’t work for you?”

  LaFarge turns meek, goes silent. He says nothing more, but it’s already too late. He’s gone too far. He’s touched a nerve. Nick is already stewing, going molten. His anger like bile, once risen, unsettlable.

  “OK, then, we won’t take the pictures,” Nick says coolly, his sarcasm hardly masking his anger. His anger at being questioned, being challenged.

  He tosses the remains of his raisin bagel into the Dumpster alongside them—you’ve ruined my breakfast—lifts the back gate of the truck, disappears into it.

  Emerges with a carton.

  Standing on the gate of the truck, above them, he heaves it into the huge green Dumpster.

  “There. We’re not taking the pictures.”

  A half hour later, after driving in silence:

  “You take the pictures because you need to take everything,” Nick says patiently, with exaggerated calm, as if explaining to a child. “Because you need it to be total annihilation. Total defeat. You don’t want them getting any ideas about mercy from you. You want to create the impression of professionalism”—the implication clearly with guys like you, LaFarge, it will be only an impression—“so they know what they’re dealing with.”

  The others stay silent. Listening.

  “What’s the point of taking everything if you’re not going to take everything?”

  They roll into the compound at night. 150 acres, dirt cheap—dirt cheap, in this case, having literal meaning. Paid for with cash, a form of payment that out here didn’t seem to raise an eyebrow. It’s about the ugliest 150 acres imaginable—scrub, dirt, pools of rusty standing water. But it’s his. And it works. And this is only storage anyway. This is business. His life is in Vegas and Miami Beach and twice a year in Rio. Trysts with the comically proportioned, cartoon-chested Viola. Her body offers constant reminders and visual assurance that it can never be a relationship. That this can never be anything more than a consumerist arrangement. Which gives him a sense of control that he needs. She’s a package on a shelf—a high, special shelf, out of the reach of others, he pretends—a package to take down, comport with, and replace back on the high shelf when finished. It is well suited to a loner. A loner with cash.

  The crew knows about Viola. They don’t know about Armando, and they don’t have to.

  Another difference that made his foster parents nervous, that made him nervous: a difference that wasn’t merely his intelligence.

  But fine objects have always aroused him. And Viola and Armando, they’re both fine objects themselves. In both cases, it’s an arrangement. He doesn’t question it too much. That’s the meaning of the term arrangement—no questions.

  Viola. Armando. It’s a reflection of his living outside the rules. That’s what he tells himself. That’s all he tells himself.

  It has always concerned Nick a little that they are out here with the nuts. With the white separatists and the millennial fire-and-brimstone crowd and anti-IRS warriors and Aryan militias and ultra-Christians and Armageddonists. But what can you do? This is where his activities are the least suspicious. This is where his privacy will be respected. (Although he’s started to have the feeling all these personal-privacy hermits and land-rights extremists and off-the-grid kooks might in fact be nosier than anybody else, but they won’t act on whatever they might know or figure out.) This is where you can pull a semi in and out, and though people might talk, locals might mutter, they’ll keep it to themselves, if it ever comes to the involvement of any authority.

  The cults—they always have these ramshackle compounds, don’t they? The guys who burn themselves up and go down firing and make suicide pacts and treat their children to poison juices. Is he in a cult, too? A cult of things, of objects? He’s obsessive. He might be just as obsessive as they are. Just as crazy. But his is no cult of death. His is a cult of survival.

  The welcome, sudden silence after the day-and-night drone of the engine. The fresh air after the close, musty stench of the truck’s cab. The immense, star-soaked Montana night sky after the frustrating clots of traffic, the glaring illumination of highways and cities. Nick watches as Chiv, LaFarge, and Al go, wordlessly, familiarly, straight toward the farmhouse. He stands outside a moment, listening, while they crank up the spectacular stereo in the crummy, beat-up living room and splinter the stillness. Chairs and couches you can barely stomach sitting in. They are lighting up and stretching back. Cigarettes. Marijuana. Someone will start a midnight spaghetti dinner.

  In a few minutes, Nick walks in with a carton under his arm. He goes past the mild celebration, the ritual winding-down, into his office. Flips on the office lights, closes the door behind him.

  The Dell computer sitting on the Biedermeier table. The elegant Knoll office chair.

  Rows of antiques catalogs. Rows of reference books. American eighteenth-century furniture. Ming dynasty porcelain. Postimpressionist paintings. All the Sotheby’s and Christie’s collection announcements, delivered biweekly to a post office box. He’s fairly expert at this point. He laughs sometimes that it’s the office of a fag. That he’s a street tough in a fag business. Or maybe a fag in a street tough’s business. He stands outside easy categories. In their blurry margins. That’s partly why he remains a loner. But remaining a loner is part of his success, he knows.

  The guys will unload in the morning. No rush. He’ll begin to contact buyers. And only eventually—slowly—to fence. First store everything for a while, in case some police department does initially check with known fences, which is all they can practically do.

  He will wait until the little bits of his trail go fairly cool, if not icy cold.

  He’s brought in with him from the truck the carton containing the old man’s desk drawer contents. At the house, Nick personally packed the contents of Peke’s desk while taking mental notes.

  He begins now to go through it more carefully, systematically. You never know what you’ll find. Old stock certificates. Savings bonds. Safe-deposit box keys. He always starts with the desk contents. You never know.

  Within minutes, he’s come across a decorative little cardboard box—about two inches square, must have held cuff links or something. He opens the box, and there it is: a safe-deposit box key. Labeled with the box number, for Christ’s sake. What a world these people live in. They know their own forgetfulness. They think they’re invulnerable.

  Little town like that. Maybe two, three local banks at most. So this presents an opportunity, of course. To go back for the contents. Unless the old man has already emptied it out. If he’s alert enough. Sometimes the shock of an event like this stirs them to alertness. Stirs them at least momentarily out of the lethargy and complacency they’ve been living in. But an event like this can also confuse them, paralyze them. If the old man realizes and changes the lock? There’s a chance of that. But there’s also a chance—a good chance—he won’t even think of it. These rich old people. He’s learned a lot about them, doing this. And one thing he’s learned, a lesson initially hard for him to take in, hard for him to accept, given the material meagerness, the tatters and scraps, of his own grim upbringing: a lot of them, they can’t even keep track of what they own.

  Nick’s got Peke’s signature in triplicate on the stack of bogus transportation documents. In the desk drawer, he’s got plenty of Peke’s IDs—Social Security card, passport, etc. If it were a big institution, a big city bank, he would have someone practice forging the signature, to match the signature card on file, which would get them
into the safe-deposit box vault room. But this is a small town. Probably a small, old-fashioned, personal bank. They might know Peke personally. They might even be watching for Peke’s name. In which case Nick’s got another idea. A deft, beautiful idea.

  It’s safer, of course, not to go back. Not to risk it. But there’s something in this old man. Something in the man’s proud posture, his swollen chest. Some arrogance, some strength, something unshakable, that rubs at Nick. That rubbed at him a little all that moving day. That’s rubbed at him a little the whole trip here. The mild, unplaceable European accent. As if the old man doesn’t belong in America and has come here and taken Nick’s things. As if, if he hadn’t come here, these would be Nick’s things. As if this is a little Manichaean universe of just the two of them, and he has taken up Nick’s rightful possession of it and right place in it.

  He holds up the old key. Brass, faded, and dull. Cut with the old-style round fob. Check the oldest bank. The first bank. They’d lived in that town forty years, didn’t he hear the old man say, and undoubtedly people like that don’t change banks a lot. He may have forgotten entirely about the safe-deposit box. After all, here’s the key in the corner of a drawer. Likely it’s worth the risk, worth the effort. The old man’s memory is shaky. And if he changes the lock, so be it.

  This one, Nick is going to hit again. Wipe out completely. Pluck the last feathers of the proud peacock.

  He continues carefully through the carton of desk drawer contents, but it’s like staying down in the mine when you’ve already had a strike. In his head, Nick is already heading back East.