Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  The Senator said, “Your chariot awaits.”

  And so it did, there was no denying: that bruised blue van, its white letters molting, KIN OVING.

  The valet jingled the keys, as David took out his wallet and chose among bills: a single or hundreds. He chose $100.

  There wasn’t any traffic—no one was heading his direction, no one would ever. Because his direction was a circle, or would be, counterclockwise, looping him cross-Island, Queens to Brooklyn, Manhattan then Jersey, only to turn back around again, Brooklyn to Queens.

  Or else he’d drive up from Jersey and hazard Staten Island.

  A punitive, regurgitative route. Thanks Ruthie. He was still slightly drunk and it felt like rain. He put a cig in his mouth just to suck.

  Waiting at a light, before the bridge into Manhattan, he checked his phone: his cousin’s flight had just departed, on time.

  A guy stood out by the turn to Canal Street—neither a vendor nor a squeegeeist, and if he seemed not just jobless but also homeless in abscess and rags he didn’t seem to be panhandling, though he held a cardboard boxflap sign, SAVE THE HUDSON, and then flipped it around, PAVE THE HUDSON, and then flipped it again—and David wondered whether this wasn’t just another candidate campaigning, and whether the opposing sides of the sign weren’t the same: you saved a river by paving it over, letting the water flow beneath untouched.

  He raised his window.

  To emerge from the tunnel was to be born again, soaked in the sullage of the marshes—coming out headfirst past Liberty and Ellis Islands, Where it all began, as David liked to remark to himself, as if that were the wetlands’ brand, even though that’s not Where it all began, because David’s father had arrived in the States only after the war, and while Liberty had loitered on her soggy corner immortally, Ellis had already been mothballed and the boat that’d brought his father had docked in Jersey. Exit 14A, David was always accelerating into turns. He lowered his window again, lowered all the windows, to get the stench, the way the methane rushed in like a fart. Port Jersey to Colony Road: a sparsely lit and sodden strip joining reedy islets, which you’d only drive if you owned or worked for a business located on it or were lost, slowly sinking into the darkness. The desolation stifled, especially in heat. To the right were the yards, their shippingcontainers like bulky ridged cinderblocks stacked into barracks, so many of the blues from Korea, but lately more of the German greens, the Chinese reds and yellows. To the left were the piers, their solemn cranes saluting the tankers slipping by. Below, down in the murk, that’s where you got rid of the murders and of the guns that turned people into murders. That’s where your hotwired Buick was ditched, in an underwater parkinglot of broken boilers, leaky microwaves, and all the AA batteries.

  Toward the end of the strip was King’s HQ, girded by barbedwire.

  David dug out his asswarmed wallet, for his passcard. He should never have given one to Ruth. But if not Ruth, who else should have one? Because who else, if the worst happened, would make sure his daughter was taken care of?

  His daughter. Not Ruth’s.

  He hung himself out the window, swiped the slab across the sensor, the gate slid along its track.

  Harsh bugswarmed LED luminaires, grate stairs to an office of pitted brick, from which the warehouses extended like trust into the dimming.

  Tim Brynks, AKA Tinks, was behind the desk, fixed in the chair, fixated on screens: one was showing porn, the other five the feeds from the CCTV.

  David said, “Sorry to interrupt your jerkoff session.”

  Tinks didn’t break from his screen: “I don’t jerkoff.”

  “Here you don’t?”

  “Ever I don’t.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit,” and Tinks twitched, swiveled. “I like the tension of not, it keeps me awake—I like how they don’t talk.”

  David went to the minifridge, got them both Tecates.

  “You’re in the office why? Your computer down at home?”

  David chugged and grimaced. “To be honest,” he said, “I never understood anything with a dick in it.”

  How it worked was that you signed a contract—a bill of lading. Which asserted that you assumed sole risk, and that you and your heirs, successors, executors, and subrogates did hereby agree to waive and release, indemnify and hold harmless, King’s Moving, Inc., its directors, officers, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, causes of actions, and suits for accidental and/or negligent damage and/or loss.

  Then, you packed up your belongings and moved, or had your belongings packed up and moved for you, to the nearest King’s Moving facility, to one of the blue and white precast blights in Manhattan (Downtown), Manhattan (Uptown), Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and there they remained, there they reposed: all your outgrown babyclothes, strollers, and cribs, all your iceskates, woks, and blenders. But then say you changed your address and forgot to give notice and so fell behind on payments. Because of alimony expenses. Because of health expenses. Say you went bankrupt or to prison or just died. After six months of notifications of delinquency with interest calculated, followed by a two month grace period during which the accounting department, Ruth, would attempt to trace and bill your next of kin—who’d never be found, or if found would typically refuse or be unable to pay arrears—all your junk would be transferred here, and ownership reverted, as King’s Moving moved to recoup its losses.

  This facility, Jersey City, kept the spoils: your possessions repossessed, stored inside concrete pillboxes wallowing in septic and brine.

  The first warehouse’s units still hadn’t been processed and so were tagged to lot, which was freaky: they were like miniature theaters, shrinkydink stage sets. Behind their metal curtains were rooms, which were filled with other rooms: there was a 1950s livingroom (eggchair, boomerang table), neighboring a 1970s den (heavy on the teak), across the hall from a summer 1984 recroom in mintcondition replete with astroturf, a naugahyde La-Z-Boy, and a pennant from the LA Olympics—all of them containing all of the furnishings and effects of their originating locations, but just crowded now, cluttered up, because the units were small: 20' × 20', 15' × 15', 10' × 10'. You almost expected to find the people inside. Instead you just found hints, intimations, material vestiges of mind: hubcaps, a welding rig, a treadmill, a sybian saddle. Each unit had its drama. Each was an inventory of an absent person’s life, all the stuff they hadn’t been able to live with, but weren’t prepared to lose: a unit of eviscerated photoalbums with snapshots skittering the floor, another totally vacant except for a roofless dollhouse.

  The second warehouse’s units had already been processed and so were tagged to item, which was easier to deal with: they weren’t as human. The units just of shelving arranged haphazardly wall to wall, the units packed to the ceiling’s sprinklers with chests, the unit of stray drawers. Things, deprived of their relationships with their owners, and even of their relationships with their owners’ other things, were now just related to one another. To others of their kind. They’d been restored to their kind, and so sterilized, laundered, mended. Lamps among lamps. Stereo components among stereo components. This made them simpler to price and post online, in the hopes of bypassing the resalers and selling the hutchdesks and loveseats and teddybears direct to the hutchdesk and loveseat and teddybear collectors.

  Down the way was the unit of clocks, from whose shutter came a raspy crippled ticking.

  David swiped through to the third warehouse—letting the fluorescents sense his motion and flick on, letting them flicker and thrum along with the echoes of his pacing. Towels, linens. Bowls and plates. That’s what the house still lacked: the little domiciliary niceties.

  He was trying to think what they were—what his parents’d had. What he’d had. The appliances of childhood. If he found even half that stuff, that would be enough for his cousin.

  He found a wheeled pallet, piled it with flatware and stemware. He had no qualms about breaking up t
he sets. The sets were incomplete already. Anyway, how many knives did one guy need? How many pots and pans? He took six placesettings, figuring his cousin wouldn’t be too keen on doing dishes. He took three waterglasses, three wineglasses, and then this gleaming soup tureen whorled like a shell and capacious enough to bathe a baby in. He swaddled it in tablecloth, settled it on the pallet. It was stupid to have asked Ruth to do this. Ruth who’d been trying to get him to commit to her forever. Ruth who’d been trying to get him to settle. To have asked her to pick out everything, but the correct everything, to basically shop for a home, which would never be their home, was cruel. Still, she would’ve known what to get, she would’ve known what was appropriate. Like, what to do if his cousin kept kosher? Wouldn’t he need all this same stuff again, but separate? David backtracked, out of prudence and—automatically considering the plain porcelain and aluminum utensils more appropriate for dairy—took more lidded pots and a fryingpan for meat, meat knives with faux wood handles, and meat bowls and plates wreathed in ivy.

  All that stooping to lift the shutters, to lift the loads, he ached. His goddamned lumbars.

  He chocked the heaped pallet against an interior door, tapped dates into the keypad: the year his Tammy was born, followed by the year he left, or was left by, his wife. The lights here he had to toggle himself, without tripping. Black boxes hindered the way, black safes hoarded into corners. Racks of purses and leather jackets, cold storage lockers roaring with furs, the skins he’d claimed shivering on hangers. He’d gather here, annually or so, with his experts from the city. Deviants into coins and stamps and sports memorabilia, who’d pick through the bins of autographed jerseys, bats, and balls. Also, this cranky provenancer from Amish country Pennsylvania who was the leading authority on Civil War tchotchkes.

  Once there’d been an urn that wound up being Egypt, New Kingdom, ca. 14th–13th century BCE, appraised at $400K, and it went for $620K, at auction.

  The jewelry was in the wall.

  He turned to the camera bracketed midwall and considered draping a sheet, but why should he be embarrassed? Why shouldn’t Tinks be?

  He waved at Tinks. Give my regards to the lesbians.

  He swiped at the vault and then keyed in the same years but reversed: his splitdate and then the birthdate, Tammy’s. Inside were trays, dark and softly cushioned.

  He took a pendant necklace, let it unspool loose in his pocket.

  From there, it was a hustle down the ramp to the yard, to the maintenance shed to snag a bucket and mop, then it was pushing the pallet, kicking its casters realigned and through the mire—he realized only halfway there it would’ve been better to’ve left the pallet at the top of the ramp and just backed the van on up to it.

  The pumps without prices. A coil of rope asleep in a flatbed. The slumbering trucks. Tinks was gassing the van up—“So what did you say this was, so late?”

  David said, “My cousin,” and took Tinks’ cig away and puffed and heeled it out. “Not while you fuel.”

  Tinks clicked his tongue along with the clicking gallons.

  “My cousin from Israel, he’s coming to work for us. Tomorrow. Today. I’m setting up his house.”

  “Because there isn’t any work in Israel?”

  “Because there aren’t any houses.”

  “He can’t find anything for cheap in Palestine?”

  “He just got out of the army.”

  Tinks rehung the nozzle. “Sounds gay.”

  “That’s what they do: everyone in Israel goes into the army, and then when they get out, they go traveling.”

  “Everyone? Then who’s left in Israel? Is Israel empty? Do the Muslim nations know this?”

  “It’s like to calm down, whatever.”

  “From what? From killing Arabs?”

  “That’s it, from killing Arabs.”

  “OK, I get it—even moving sounds calmer than that.”

  Tinks helped David load and when they finished David said, “You think you can help me stay awake out there?”

  “Already?”

  “I haven’t asked you in a while.”

  “You haven’t asked me since your coronary.”

  “You don’t do that anymore?”

  “I never did,” but Tinks was already glooming over to his Dodge. He foraged in a compartment by the clutch and returned with a vial.

  “I’ll owe you,” David said. “Put it on my tab.”

  Tinks said, “A parting tip from a pro?”

  David snuffed from off the van key, “What?”

  “You’re going to want to cram your foam bumpers down into the wheelwells and mat the load so nothing frags.”

  The route was 440 through Bayonne—the emissions turbid in wind, the pollutants bracking the meadows. Past the natural gas plant’s twinkling, the pressure vessels rose like foreign moons roiling with oil. This was what David relied on. This was what the city relied on: the terminals, the channels and trestles, the transmission substations, the transformers and pylons. The grid behind the grid, the truth that sustained the corruption. That’s what David was always telling his daughter: without all this industry, the bistros would have to stop serving, the $6 latte stands would shut. No phones, no screens. No sweatshop thongs.

  Staten Island was just a road between bridges and a drip that bittered his throat. The span heading in was so minor and hunched, the span heading out felt like a pompous suspension, multiple levels, multiple lanes. He always took the upper level, the waterward lane. He was in the midst of the bay, blowing his nose, when the sky exploded.

  Streamers, fizzlers, snaps and pops. Enormous arteries of light rupturing the night, huge burst capillaries and veins. What was striking about fireworks was the expectancy involved. You were never sure if they were over. A rally would come, and the brilliance would spike, and then flatline away into vapors, and you’d tell yourself, that was it, that was the finale. But then there’d be a hiss, and you’d tell yourself, have patience, the ending is still coming.

  In that way it was like getting old, or like waiting for dying.

  The radio was airing some patriotic drumming and fife and bagpipe music but with a midtro rap, and David liked the beat, or he liked that he was familiar with the lyrics. He did another bump, vial to fingernail to the BQE. Then he took the necklace from his pocket and hung it from the rearview mirror, a sparkler never fading, just dangling, tinkling against the E-ZPass. He resisted the inclination to call his daughter.

  He was sped up down Atlantic and making lights—past the bar where he’d last met her, which wasn’t a cool bar, she’d said, but where sometimes she subbed, then past the bars where she usually worked, which got cooler, she’d said, the farther out they were, as the neighborhoods got worse—this last, of course, was his own opinion.

  Some boys clattered by on bikes and threw firecrackers.

  Tammy didn’t like her father visiting her, especially not at her usuals. Where she served craft ales brewed with nutraceuticals and nanobatch liqueurs nextdoor to delis that had to post reminders about how foodstamps can’t be used to buy diapers, tampons, sanitarypads, postagestamps, or any foods precooked.

  In the mornings, she wrote. Because Tammy the bartender was also employed, underemployed, as a fundraiser, a grantwriter, by a nonprofit.

  According to her, David’s initial prejudice against her neighborhood was an insult, but an insult to her, because he tried to pass it off as concern. That was how he’d been raised. To be both racist and conceal it. To him, crime would always be going up and only statistics lived in Brooklyn. Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant. Their streets were just names on the news, associated with the city’s youngest corpses. The boys crossing him at reds, provoking him by crossing his greens, staring him down. As if his color was the wrong color. But then every color was wrong if it was his. His color was Jewish, and yet even his daughter called herself a gentrifier, and the first time he’d heard that word, he’d heard it from her, it’d sounded British, fancy and goyish, like some
thing she couldn’t be, like something he couldn’t be accused of having fathered. Strange that the word was masculine, though the predilections it indicated were feminine, or seemed feminine to him. Ladylike, dainty. She should say ladying instead. She should call herself a ladyfier. Back after she’d gotten sober, David had offered her the house he’d now be lending out to his cousin, to her cousin, but she’d refused. She’d only live in this neighborhood. All her friends lived here, so he’d bought here, from a Hasid related to a Hasid who’d owned the land under one of David’s garages. A slumlord now hoping to offload his own brownstone and tow his bald wife and bawling kids upstate, to a secluded preserve of Talmud Torah. Tammy had the top two floors and rented out the garden apartment, which was a ladying or ladyfying euphemism for basement. The rent was hers to keep. David wasn’t sure who was living there now. What charity case was getting a discount.

  Still, it was turning out to be a solid investment—he had to admit, his daughter had pathologies, but she also had sechel. The neighborhood was improving. Each time he drove by, the dividingline had retreated by the block—with more cops out in cruisers, on hoof and foot, up cherrypicking in guardtowers—with more cafés, kindergartens, pet kindergartens, gyms. Her street had been sprucing by the house: with bricks repointed, stucco retouched, brownstone steamed.

  He pulled around the corner, pulled up to the curb. The slits between the curtains were black. He grabbed the jewelry and, leaving the van running out of stimulant profligacy, ran up the stoop, lifted the mailbox top, pendulated the necklace over the slot and dropped it in. It made a whiny clink.

  Queens—through the impassive park, David’s heart beat fast and his breath fanned fast and sour. All around him was his youth. Where he’d taught Beth Shalom girls to tongue. Where he’d learned to roll joints and pound vodka stirred with Tang.

  This was Flushing—or what still remained of it between Chinatown and Koreatown. Rezoned and redistributed, between one of the Chinatowns and one of the Koreatowns. On one of the dozens of wanton inordinate streets horning in between 37th and 46th Avenues. He checked his cousin’s flight again, stopped just short of a rearending.