Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  David was nearly yelling, “I’m Yudy’s son, David. From America. From New York. Visiting you in Israel. Today we went to Jerusalem. You ever go up on top of the Wall—the Temple Mount?”

  Dina grunted, as David retold again what’d happened until Sha’ul’s face wandered to a leak in the ceiling.

  “The last time,” he said and David stopped and Sha’ul assembled his breath, “the last time I go up to Jerusalem was 1948 when I liberate it.”

  And that was it, that was everything. David wasn’t in contact with the family again, not until recently: they didn’t come to the States, he didn’t go there. No rendezvous, no nothing. That visit of his had been so brief and the intervening drift so tolltaking and straining that in retrospect it all seemed to him like an airplane dream—a dream so narcotized and fitful that he could barely remember it, or could give only the broadest synopsis. If since his return David had paid any mind to his cousins at all, it was only when he was reminded of their state—when he had his quarterly conclaves with his bankers, when he found himself stopping in Fair Lawn, Tenafly, or Paramus, to dine at some overlit abattoirish joint with an out of date map from the Bible tacked between the falafel fryer and the spit of incognizable frozen shawarma, or when some Palestinian incursion or Israeli reprisal had fared so spectacularly as to flare up on primetime or the talkradio news. And though he worried, of course, because he always worried, he was also lazy, selfish, and busy, so that his thoughts regarding Israel tended to be similar to his thoughts regarding crises among his vendors and suppliers: namely, that his own core business was strong, moving and storage would always be strong, and that if any of the suffering ventures he dealt with—which supplied him, say, boxes, crates, and fuel—hadn’t implemented sufficient systems and management protocols, then that was their problem, not his, and should he ever get involved and try to solve anything—should he do anything beyond just holding an opinion, or having a wish, or expressing a desire—he’d only succeed at making a fool of himself, making trouble.

  In other words: there wasn’t nothing he could do.

  Of course, just because David wasn’t in contact didn’t mean the Israelis didn’t try.

  They’d tried twice—or Dina had—by email.

  The first email had arrived in the fall, just after David’s return, when the Twin Towers went down—Dina was checking up on him, with a barrage of grief tinged only slightly with the gloating suggestion that now New Yorkers were experiencing what Israelis were already, immemorially, accustomed to.

  The second email had arrived the fall after that, when Shoyl, or Sha’ul, died of pneumonia, and David had at least read that one, and intended to reply.

  But it’d been a difficult time. He’d been busy.

  He’d had his own, his immediate, family to tend to—their immediate splinterings. His divorce.

  His wife—who was holding out for a sum she refused to specify before she agreed to become his exwife—Bonnie, was a disaster. She was accusing him of tight fists, closed fists, and sexually assaulting her while under the influence of cocaine, Ambien, and Lunesta. She had a group of cleanshaven hunky trainee priests representing the Albanian Diocese of the Autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church show up at the Jersey office to deliver a massive, impressively calligraphed scroll annulling her conversion, and then not content with that, she took out a fullpage announcement to that same effect in The Jersey Journal and Star-Ledger.

  Ruth left her Chrysler outside Bill Jr’s school and returned from a conference with the viceprincipal to find its doors all keyed up and a hotpink swastika spraypainted, but spraypainted backward, across its hood, an act of vandalism that David insisted—though he wasn’t convinced and Ruth wasn’t either—was a coincidence.

  After the settlement, after Bonnie’s lawyer got frustrated and forced her to settle, it’s not like life improved.

  Because Bonnie was poisoning their daughter against him and indulging her, completely. She’d given her the run of the Summit house, letting her have parties, poolparties, letting boys stay over, jacuzzi boys, and so Tammy floated through highschool high and drunk and popular and if she hadn’t tested so well, or excited such enthusiastic recommendations out of her male instructors, she’d never have gotten into college. The only college she applied to: NYU.

  Though it’s not like New York brought Tammy closer to her father—the fact that he was paying full tuition, and full incidentals, was responsible for that, not to mention that the moment she was out of Summit, Bonnie listed the house, sold it fast and cheap and left for Las Vegas, where a guy who’d customized the Porsches she used to model on had opened a strictly American rodder shop and did a decent trade.

  David remembered the guy from around the Port—he was, himself, like a domestic vehicle: amiable, reliable, lunkish.

  2007: Tammy was in touch with David only if she’d depleted her monthly allowance and needed cash and so she was in touch with him every month. David would invite her up to Central Park South, but she wouldn’t go, though neither did she want him Downtown, where they might bump into one of her student friends who all majored in communications but minored in avoiding interactions with parents, or into one of the men roughly David’s age she’d been hanging around with—the men single, separated, cheating—who, if they weren’t themselves lining up to give Tammy the extra money, then were at least buying her the substances she was otherwise trying to get the money for, or buying her drinks and dinners. The result of this geographic impasse was the declaration of a swath of no man’s land for their father/daughter meetings: that territory north of 14th Street along Broadway, which careered through its intersections in an abrupt greenlined curve like an addict tweaked and reeling—a strip, as opposed to a proper neighborhood, notable only for having the world’s highest per capita concentration of ATMs.

  The amounts Tammy asked for kept increasing and she asked with an increasing shrilling frequency and David—hearing out her justifications on a pedestrian refuge—told her to stop going clubbing so much and to take more advantage of her mealplan and dorm: she looked thin and underslept.

  She, so unlike her father, was into going slow. Heroin. But snorted not shot. That was what she’d tell the hallmates she’d initiated: “I snort it, never shoot it.” That was what she’d tell herself, when she left the hall for her dealer’s apartment on Delancey: “Nostrils, not needles.” She also dabbled in anorexia and bulimia, her head like a brunette plunger in the toilet. Her grades went south. Downtown as south as Wall Street, where the better dealers operated out of cubicles and dressed with all the natty neatness of hedgefunders but behaved with all the volatility of the market. She’d nod off at the Battery. Or on the ferry. Or else in a cab on the way to some rave boroughed past all consciousness and when she came to again she’d have to talk herself, or do something more degrading than talk herself, out of the fare. One upside of having a drug habit is that you pick up a bit of Spanish. Which, as a sophomore, was the only class she wasn’t failing, Spanish II. That summer, she told her father she needed cash to go to California to do some organizing of Mexican farmworkers. She needed some volunteership to put on her resume, though she’d already had ample experience with illegal and/or temporary labor, in which she’d developed her skills at bargaining, dissembling, arbitrage, and fraud. David refused, because he was stingy, but also because he was dubious, so Tammy got a Dominican friend from Summit, who was lately a frat brother at Rutgers, to set up a bilingual website for the farmworker seminar and the money appeared—it had to appear—David had Ruth cut a check and mail it c/o Rutgers. The cashed sum, or most of it, made it to Tammy, who turned it over to a Fujianese who didn’t own, but who purported to own, a raw but still expensive floorthrough loft on Kenmare, where Tammy settled in with two NYU philosophers and the dregs of Delta Kappa Epsilon of New Brunswick. That summer was mostly a drought, though: the Wall Street connections left to supply out of town, which just might’ve been an idiom for jail, and it got to the point that some hapless frat
ters had regressed to skulking through Washington Square and mugging for the cameras, while others had finally succumbed to the sharps, shooting product that threatened coma.

  After not getting through to Tammy in almost two months, David called Bonnie. He’d figured, given California, Tammy might’ve visited her mother in Nevada.

  But Bonnie hadn’t talked to their daughter either and had no information about interning at farms.

  David called the bank, which just told him his check had been cashed. The seminar’s website was down. He told Tinks to keep reloading. He pressed redial like a tremor. He was haunting the NYU library, trying to find her friends. He’d importune anyone likely. Because of shortness of shorts, because of waif insouciance of tanktop. Smokers.

  He didn’t know how else to seek her out—the school registrar wouldn’t tell him who her dormmates were.

  A guy leaving the library bummed a cig. He didn’t know Tammy, but guessed which classes she’d taken. David called the professors at home, but none remembered her. Bonnie phoned to say she’d seen their daughter in Vegas. She’d been driving down the Strip and seen her. Tammy had been riding an escalator, up—she’d had a baby.

  But then Bonnie’s new husband was on the line—“Carl here, Bonnie-lass has been drinking.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Margaritas,” the new husband said as, behind him, Bonnie squawked. “You’ll keep us in the loop, please, David?”

  “I will, Carl.”

  “It’s tough.”

  “It has to be,” David said. “Any other way, it wouldn’t feel like living.”

  A week later, Tammy met a pearly Ford Taurus at that square where Centre becomes Lafayette and as she climbed out of the back clutching her powder, not in glassine as usual, but folded jankily in unscratched lottery scratchers, the car was swarmed by cops.

  David bailed her out and had Pete Simonyi find her a lawyer, who got her released into rehab to be followed by 100 hours of community service and so she’d get her volunteer experience after all.

  David had Ruth drive him in her Chrysler to and from the rehab facility in the Catskills. He needed her chattering, he needed her turnsignaling, that steady click.

  She kept him patient. She suggested they walk and so they walked, around the facility’s grounds, on trips during which Tammy had turned them away: needle trees dulled with snow and an iced stream trickling into an offproperty cataract. This was the closest Ruth had ever come to snaring David in a couple: winter weekends strolling between surveilled stands of pine, trying not to lose the trail, until the trail hit a perimeter wall and they’d aboutface.

  Then it was spring, 2008: the worst year not to own your whole home in America, the best year to own an American moving business.

  And Tammy was thawing—one week she traipsed out to the gate and stood in the rain talking to David while Ruth sat in the car.

  “You’re looking good,” he said. “Putting on pounds.”

  “Mom’s been sending packages.”

  “Good.”

  “She sent me a scarf and candy eggs this time. She’s getting weirder.”

  “She’s your mother.”

  “I take after her, she says.”

  “She thinks it’s all my fault.”

  “What about her?” Tammy gestured toward Ruth in the car. “What does she think—or is she not allowed to?”

  Ruth gave a cautious wave back.

  “Hear me out, Tam—I’m your father,” and he held his umbrella out between them, so that neither was sheltered. “My father, you know I don’t talk about him much, but the camps fucked him up. He had so many expectations, so many ambitions, all this anger. And this is where we are now.”

  “Standing in the fucking rain talking about the Holocaust?”

  “This is where we are,” David said. “So when I became a father, because things were better for me, all I had to be was better than he was. And I tried to be. I tried to give you everything.”

  “And now you feel bad about it.”

  “It was the only way I knew how,” he said, and brushed his sopping coat.

  “We all have our excuses.”

  The next week, Tammy communicated through the rehab facility’s counseling office: David, and Ruth if she must, was to be admitted up to the bungalow.

  She’d made grilledcheese, Tammy had, skillet on a hotplate. She poured out a single seltzer among them, lit up and went outside.

  Tammy was smoking constantly and David joined her but only for every second cigarette, father and daughter bundled in the doorway under the overhang, butts collecting in the hollows of the drainage mat below. The cigarettes that David skipped he stayed inside with Ruth, who was cold to him, because she was being left alone and he was oversmoking and he reacted to that treatment by being obnoxious himself, by ignoring her—because she’d made him leave his thermos of rye in the trunk.

  The moment they were finished and headed for the city, David planned to unscrew the lid and drink—he had just enough left to drink himself out of the woods, but not enough to get through the Bronx.

  The bungalow was a warren of rooms around a common room—four other recoverers lodged there and because it was never not raining, they were in the same common room too, or in and out of it. The TV was always on, because it gave everyone—stranger residents, stranger adults—something to talk about or not. Everything the screen showed, it greened, as if underwater, or behind a static cloud. Coming back from a cig, David found one of the residents sitting in his place on the sofa next to Ruth and so now sitting between him and Ruth—she was a retard, which term Ruth would disapprove of in the car, but which David would insist on, because Tammy insisted, the girl had been normal before the drugs, she’d had every advantage including the drugs and her brain had come to this: tomato methadone soup. She was clamoring for some sitcom and Tammy didn’t respond and was telling David not to, but the retard kept yowling, until Ruth got up—there was no remote—and switched the channel. A gameshow turned to news, but before Ruth had realized and dialed higher, David said, “Don’t,” and he smiled at the retard, who mouthed, “Thank you,” and settled against a cushion contented.

  Onscreen was the sky, blue like a foreign sea, bottomed with scrolling sports scores. Rockets were skimming through the distance. Skimming so evenly, so peacefully, and the sky was peaceful too. They came in graceful arcs. In elegant convexities. The effect was oddly lulling. It was only when the shot swooped in, when it zoomed in, that there was any sense of spiral, of a slight tight spiraling anxiousness, like how sperm wriggle up toward the solar egg, and then the anchor broke in with commentary about the unprecedented profusion of new Grad missiles—made in Russia, obtained from Iran—being shot into Israel from Gaza.

  David, as if he didn’t have to explain himself, said, “I wonder how they’re doing.”

  Tammy said, “Who?”

  “Your cousins.”

  “Who cares?”

  Ruth still stood alongside the set, awkwardly canted toward it like she was demonstrating its features on the shopping network.

  After a moment, David said, “I care. Tell me you’re not subscribing to that bullshit.”

  Tammy said, “It’s a criminal regime.”

  David said, “Who’s a criminal regime? The Palestinians? The Saudis? The NYPD, or the dopedealers they got off your block?”

  “Israel, Dad. Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah—they’re all just fighting for their freedom, for Palestinian freedom, and Israel’s the rogue state at this point.”

  “This is what you learned at NYU?”

  “What I learned at NYU was just how psycho Jews are. Every protest against Israel, half the people protesting are Jews.”

  “Self-hating, self-antisemites. Or else they’re just being slaves to the trends.”

  “No: they just realize how fucked up it is, to have this country across the ocean that claims to be their home and defend them, that murders in their name.”

  “You’re seriou
s, Tam?”

  “Or else the rallies are just for political bros to meet women. To try and fuck women. Divest, boycott. Enough with the torture, let’s bone.”

  “Defending Jews—that’s not a valid stance for a Jewish country, given history?”

  “I don’t think so, Dad. Sincerely.”

  “You’re not worried that you have family impacted?”

  “Whose family? Does this family I’ve never met worry about me?”

  “Worry about what, Tam?”

  “Anything. How we treat our own minorities. What you do for a living, dispossessing. What I’m going through here, my recovery.”

  “At least in America, you lose your house, you can get it back from the bank. In Israel, you lose it to the rockets.”

  “People my age, they’re just tired of everything, or of having to care about everything. Lobbyists. The money they make. The killing.”

  “You’re not making sense—you’re conflating. Ruthie, will you back me up?”

  Ruth, cripped over, said, “About Israel? I’ve never been. I’d prefer Cancun, if anyone would ever take me. But frankly, I’m happy in Hoboken.”

  Tammy said, “Or else it’s like an addiction. Politics is, or how you feel about what you are is, or how you feel about identity and what it makes you do. Same appetite. It all depends on what you like: uppers or downers.”

  But David was still tuned to Ruth. He said, “Cancun and Hoboken, the promised lands.”

  Tammy said, “It’s all just a matter of being exhausted with whatever’s your normal. Over there, the Palestinians launch rockets and become suicide bombers—over here we just OD.”

  David said, “You’re talking at me, over me. Conflating.”

  “You don’t listen, you don’t see what’s in front of you, you’re living in another world,” Tammy said. “Turn it off.”

  The next day, David set a meeting with his local Bank Leumi banker—not his regular guy, who’d been called back to Israel for reserve duty, but a new guy—over secondfloor Bukharan in the Diamond District: plov and kettled tea.