Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  “It’s circumcised,” he informs them, pretending to have seen them staring. “You know who’s circumcised? Only two groups in the world. Real Jews and real Americans. The only ones. That’s why the Jews chose America, you know. So we could hide among the circumcised cocks.” He doesn’t know where this comes from. He listens, amazed by this idea. At least as amazed as his audience. “Let’s see yours,” he says with seriousness, with camaraderie. “C’mon, let’s see yours. Let’s see if you’re real Jews or real Americans. Or are you neither one? Is that why you’re ashamed to show them? Because you’re neither one?”

  “I’m gonna tape his fuckin’ mouth,” says the middle one, shifting itchily in the little bathroom, threateningly, explosive. Realizing they have not done this right at all but are now stuck. Fuck—they are his prisoners. The skinhead kicks the wall in frustrated punctuation. “When we tape him up again, I’m tapin’ that mouth.”

  There is silence as Peke shits. A holy pause, a moment of suspension and fascination. He mutters. He strains, for their benefit. They watch. “You see,” he says, breathing, “just like you. No different. The same.” Alternating continually, confusingly, purposefully, between the declarations they can’t believe, and the assertions they don’t doubt. Needle, cajole, annoy. Engage, engage . . .

  A group of strangers watching you shit. Is that the opposite of aloneness? The opposite of lost? Or another variant of lost, of alone . . .

  In a moment, waving his taped hands modestly behind him like a wagging duck tail—something mocking in its very motion—he asks in a manner so cheerful, so succinctly crafted, that it is obvious he has been gleefully waiting for this moment to ask:

  “So, who will wipe me? Who volunteers?”

  They haven’t anticipated this either. Once again, they don’t know what to do. It is as if each succeeding moment has been calibrated to add another layer of incompetence and embarrassment. Should they cut his hands loose? But Nick must have said not to untie him no matter what, and they are already partly in violation of that, not knowing how else to accommodate the predicament. And anyway, which of them would even get near Peke’s hands right now to cut the tape?

  “Or should I come back to you unwiped, and we’ll enjoy the scent together?”

  Crasser than they. Less civil than even they can imagine.

  It is too much for them.

  “Wipe with your hands tied,” the Colonel commands curtly, reddening, trying to maintain control and authority—a ridiculous aim, given the circumstance.

  “Ah, so you’ve imagined me wiping and you think it can be done? You’ve had fun imagining me doing it . . .”

  “Wipe!” the Colonel shrieks, nearly frantic, explosive. “Wipe!”

  Peke looks at him and shrugs.

  Hands behind his back, he bends down awkwardly, shuffles sideways, to reach the toilet paper roll perched on the freestanding plastic shelf next to the toilet.

  He succeeds in unrolling a portion of it, pulling it off the roll.

  He also feels for the nail scissors that he knows are next to the toilet roll. He finds them with his fingers, tucks them quickly beneath the palm of one hand, keeps them tucked in that hand as he manages to wipe.

  The scissors that he saw among the toiletries on the plastic shelf when he used this toilet a week ago.

  When he saw how narrow and uncomfortable the bathroom is. Thinking—while tied to the chair—how its narrowness and L-shape would necessarily limit the number of observers and the effectiveness of their observations.

  The purpose of his trip to the bathroom was not primarily to shit, of course, but he waited until he could, to make that seem the purpose.

  The little plastic shelf next to the toilet: on it the roll of toilet paper. Deodorant. Shampoo. Nail scissors. A spray disinfectant. More of the thief’s organizational zealotry, he had thought, seeing it that first time, wondering for a brief moment about the thief’s sexual preference, given this neat, prim arrangement of items next to the toilet, and the tasteful bedroom where he saw the jeweled watch. Such surprising touches amid the farmhouse’s general male chaos.

  There is, he realizes with gratitude now, nothing wrong with his memory whatsoever.

  His body provides a natural shield from their seeing what he is doing. Amid his sputter of scatological jokes and speculations and barbs, they are not inclined to look too closely either.

  If he smudges some of his own feces on the nail scissors, so be it. If he accidentally cuts himself in the unfamiliar simultaneous actions of holding the scissors and wiping his anus, so be it. They won’t see any blood. It would only run into his pants. And he can work somewhat slowly. They will assume it is simply his wiping. They will assume it takes an old man some time to wipe. Especially an old man with his hands taped together behind him.

  He stands up, leans partly forward, squats awkwardly, to accomplish the wiping.

  Perhaps they think this is how any old man wipes.

  Perhaps they think this is how you have to wipe with your hands taped behind your back.

  Perhaps they think this is how a Jew wipes. Standing like this. Different from them.

  As he finishes, he is able to drop the used panels of toilet paper directly into the toilet, grapple for and press the flush lever, even to pull his pants partway up, to his knees, before looking up at them, exasperated, that he can’t pull his pants up all the way.

  As the muscled one steps forward, Peke presses the scissors deeper into his own hand. The muscled one hitches Peke’s belt loosely, and then—given the events and frustrations of the last few minutes, and the sense of belittlement where there should have been domination, and such proximity and opportunity—he kicks Stanley Peke in the gray, dangling, too-tempting balls.

  Peke gasps. Falls back awkwardly onto the open toilet. The pain goes hot, searing, instantaneous through his body like an electric jolt.

  In a moment, he realizes he has opened his hands. He’s no longer gripping the nail scissors.

  A new pain sears him inside his forehead, deep inside his chest. The interior pain of a crucial mistake—equally unbearable in its own way.

  They must have dropped—to the floor, or into the bowl. He must not have heard them—it must be that nobody had—in the commotion and crash of his body against the toilet.

  But when he desperately clenches his hand again, the scissors are still there.

  A sticky edge of the duct tape around his wrists and hands must have held them stuck for that brief instant.

  He grips them again. Holds them tight.

  In another minute, Peke is back in the living-room chair, the nail scissors hidden beneath his taped palms.

  On a sunny California morning, at a beautiful oceanside home in Santa Barbara, the front doorbell rings.

  The lady of the house rises to answer it.

  She opens the door.

  It’s four men in crisp green uniforms, an immense white truck gleaming in the California sunshine behind them.

  Rose and Nick stare silently at each other for a moment.

  “We’re the movers,” he says. With only the trace of a smirking smile.

  Their possessions in exchange for her husband’s life. Reduced to those stark terms—things versus a life—it’s ridiculous to even contemplate any other decision, no matter what her husband has instructed.

  Of course this is what the thief is relying on, Rose knows. He knows there is no choice, really. Though he values the worldly things—values them so highly he has come for them again—he knows they will have no value to civilized people in comparison with a life. To anyone’s life. It’s easy for the thief. It’s an equation he knows the answer to before the test is administered. A nondecision. For all her pacing, her sleeplessness, her replaying of that brief moment of insistent instruction from her husband, there really was never a decision.

  The only question is, will the thief honor his side of the agreement? But why wouldn’t he? What is in it not to? She could not see his face at th
at moment he proposed it—your things for your husband’s life—but presumes that his coarse posturing over the phone was primarily for threat. His implying that it would be nothing—easy, unthinking, only momentary—for him to kill her husband. That is bound to be posturing. Necessary for him to do. What would it profit him to actually do it?

  Now he is no longer a voice on the phone but standing in the California sun in front of her. Yet the question remains. Who is this man, really? This broad, squat, quick-grinned cipher?

  She hopes his coming here, doing this, is pure vindictiveness on the thief’s part. Because if it is vindictiveness, then the thief will want Peke alive to prove the point to him. He will want Peke alive to wander his own empty house. To live with the knowledge of who has won. She hopes, prays, for that vindictiveness, that meanness, that precise purpose in the thief.

  “My men will be very careful with your things,” says the broad, squat man now, holding his clipboard. “We wouldn’t want to compromise their value in any way.”

  He smiles that narrow smile again.

  The same men, she sees. The same uniforms. The same white truck. An eerie duplication of the original moving day, as if to mock them. A perfect reenactment. Making her watch in the bright reality of the California morning what she has already watched repeatedly in shadowy memory.

  There was complete shock and surprise, of course, at the unpredictable conclusion of that moving day.

  While this time—with every piece they pack and carry—she already knows that it is gone.

  The loading begins.

  Who is this man, really? The question becomes immediately more pointed, because this man with his clipboard, she realizes soon enough, is going to stand beside her the whole time. It begins as hardly noticeable, but he is soon a pressing presence.

  In case she tries to say anything, she’s sure. In case there’s been an arrangement with the police. So that he can monitor her. So that should anything happen, he can grab her, possess a fragile, useful hostage. He is not foolish, this man. He is a tactician. So would a true tactician really see murder as a tactic? What tactical purpose could it serve?

  Estelle Simon, neighbor and casual friend, wanders up the bluestone walk, her exaggeratedly puzzled look clearly the excuse she is wearing to approach. Rose breathes deep to calm herself, to prepare for this first test that she knew would come from somewhere.

  “My God, Rose. You can’t be moving!”

  Rose smiles. “No, no, just putting a few things in storage.”

  Estelle stands and watches for a moment. “Such a big truck. It confused me.”

  Rose shrugs, smiles. “I don’t know why they sent such a big truck. Maybe they make a few stops.”

  Estelle watches the loading, looks in the rear gate of the truck. “That’s a lot for storage.”

  “Well, we’re really redoing it. The whole place. You’ll see. You’ll love it.”

  “And where’s Stanley during all this?” Slightly disapproving—as if she knows the answer can’t justify his absence.

  “Golf with friends. He’ll be back.”

  “You let him?”

  Rose shrugs again.

  The thief is sitting in the kitchen nearby, looking at his sheaf of papers, pretending not to listen, listening intently.

  “Well, I was just checking. We didn’t want to lose you and Stanley so soon,” says Estelle. And smiles at Rose. And smiles, too, at the broad, squat, nice moving foreman sitting there studiously over his paperwork, who smiles pleasantly back at her.

  Peke is back in the chair. Worn down from the stealth of the event, the tensions of the effort, the lack of food, the lack of rest. But if he falls asleep, his hands will relax and the scissors will drop. He can’t count again on a lucky edge of tape.

  They have not said it specifically, but he knows. That the truck is on its way to his home in Santa Barbara—or is by now even making its return. That Rose is doing everything they ask, in the hope of getting him back. That she is not listening to him. That she is denying his explicit wishes, for perhaps the first time in their lives. For perhaps the last time in their lives.

  He still assumes that the skinheads and the Colonel have been instructed to keep him alive, so the fact can be proved to Rose if need be, with a phone call where she hears his voice. You see, Mrs. Peke? Everything is as promised, everything is as planned, a simple exchange of goods—no reason to involve the police.

  At least until the truck is loaded and closed, its big diesel engine started up, and it pulls away from the Santa Barbara curb. Then he is instantly expendable. Then he can be left utterly to the narrow imaginations and devices of the skinheads and their Gothic commandant.

  His captors might in fact be waiting for that phone call. Letting them know they can do whatever they want with him. And what would that be, exactly?

  The offhand slaps and punches, occasional, unpredictable, are becoming more adept—and more enthusiastic. To him it is clearer than ever that they signify waiting. An aggressive, brutal ticking of the clock. A violent, impatient marking of time. He finds he can bear the individual blows. Each like a wave of pain, thick and liquid, rising up, washing over him but washing past. It’s their cumulative effect that is wearing him down, exhausting him. Can he pretend to sleep? Can he pretend to without actually falling asleep?

  His captors have not slept either. They are amped up, stimulated by events. Their normally sluggish, inalert patterns are temporarily suspended. But they will have to revert at some point. Sometime soon, they will want—need—to sleep. Come down. He has to make it until then.

  Or else take a chance when there’s no one else in the room. When they’re eating something in the kitchen, for instance. Ignoring him for a few minutes. It’s happened before. He can reasonably expect it to happen again. That will be much riskier, but it may be the only chance he has.

  He tries to calculate when the truck will be back. How long it has been away. It’s difficult. A couple of the blows have actually knocked him out, and he doesn’t know whether for a moment or for longer. They’ve taken his watch. He has only night and day to rely on—morning and afternoon shadows in the yard outside the dust-caked living-room windows—and the patterns of his captors, who are largely patternless. By his estimate of when the truck left (he heard it pulling loudly out of the yard) and how long it would take to drive to Santa Barbara, pack, load, and drive back, they will return here by morning. By his rough and unreliable calculation, he is coming into his last few hours of opportunity. Maybe his last few hours of life.

  The skinheads clearly have not heard yet from the thief. It seems they will wait for any greater action, any higher violence, until they do, and if the thief doesn’t call, that could mean waiting until he is back. Peke feels sure the thief will want to see him, show Peke that the mission has been accomplished, wave an item or two under his nose, before he nods to the crazy Colonel and the skinheads to do what they wish, as the thief turns away from Peke for the last time. Peke feels sure that the thief will want Peke to suffer such a moment.

  Peke pitches his head forward.

  His breathing evens out.

  Sleep. Not sleep.

  So that he is merely half-aware of the Colonel’s, the skinheads’, eventual wandering away.

  He must wait.

  He mustn’t wait.

  The impossible discipline of half-awareness returns him to the drift of visions, turns his mind loose to play. He finds himself, in this susceptible state, left dangerously exposed to the old ambivalences, to the ceaseless, restless confusions—to all the old questions that an active lifetime could somewhat hide, could tamp down if not fully extinguish. But a chair in the dark, an atmosphere of finality, calls it up for assessment, wraps him in it like layers of tape across the chest.

  Those indistinct figures in the long-ago kitchen, remembered only in a detail here or there, are by now merely stand-ins for something else, mythic, visionary, unreal. They abandoned me to save me. Saved me by abandonin
g me. The ancient, banished thought turns in him like a child’s rhyme. Saved by being abandoned. Abandoned to be saved. Once again, he tries to imagine the commotion of the village, to imagine the approaching terror, preceded by the credulity and affirmation of horrifying tales—and what portion of those tales was mere rumor, paranoia, inaccurate hysteria? Would he have been better to stay with them? To be with them forever, whatever form forever ultimately took?

  Yet what choice was there? None. None but survival. And that survival’s necessary and subsequent rending of his previous universe: a wolf child, creating his own authority, his own morality, his own existence . . .

  Night falls flat over the 150 acres of scrub.

  Peke finds himself alert again. Time must have passed. Peke in his suspended state, thoughtless, imageless, a trick of his childhood existence, a reexperience of time that he learned when lying in cold fields, staring at faraway stars.

  The old Colonel is lying on the sofa, asleep. One of the skinheads, the small, skinny one, is somewhere out of sight, crashed on a bed, he presumes.

  The other two, though, the muscled middle one and the big, beefy one with the swastika on his forehead—the two most aggressive ones—are eating something in the kitchen.

  They haven’t offered Peke anything. He’s starting to go weaker from his hunger, he can sense. They’ve given him water grudgingly when he’s asked for it—small half cups—not wanting him to urinate, not wanting to again deal with his bodily needs, not wanting to see his cock again.

  The novelty of the prisoner is wearing off. It is obvious they are waiting now only for permission. Only for the go-ahead.

  The two are in the kitchen, laughing, guffawing meanly. The kitchen is close, but there is a wall. He can hear jars opening and closing, the refrigerator opening and closing, the clatter of plates and cutlery. It sounds more elaborate than a snack. That’s good. That’s a little more time. Rock and roll blares on the radio in the kitchen—a hostile, high-speed noise. Noise—that’s good, too.