Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  David went into the meeting proposing to take out a loan on all the lode he still had stowed there, but was ultimately persuaded against it—because the rockets didn’t always lead to war, and if they did, the war was always quick.

  He left the meeting pledging to deposit even more cash, significantly more, into his Israeli account—that is, if he wouldn’t have to transport it himself again, physically.

  He left the meeting with a feeling of victory.

  Tammy earned her sobriety certificate, returned to school, to the dorms, completed her community service spiking trash in Union Square, did her semester abroad in Prague, and on her way to visiting Budapest stopped in Vrbové.

  She aced all her tests and her drug tests, was graduated from NYU, and as a present David bought her that brownstone in Crown Heights.

  She got a smattering of writing assignments and published a report on rape and New York bar culture, others about frisking policy and profiling by cops, but it was her series defending the success rates of Vodou drug therapies among New York’s Haitian population—against legal challenges seeking to criminalize the act of transferring a crack addiction to a goat, which was then butchered—that precipitated an offer from the developmental assistance and humanitarian relief NGO, which meant that she wasn’t going to come work for her father anytime soon.

  And then just before Passover, this spring, 2015, David had a numbness, then a lancination in his chest—while making the turn from the Belt Parkway to the BQE on his way back from a sheriff’s office vs. marshal’s office charity touch football game. It was a heartattack so mild he’d driven himself to the hospital.

  And not the nearest hospital, but Mount Sinai.

  The situation wasn’t remotely lethal, just unnerving. Bedbound, the hardest thing had been managing Ruth, her nurture and advances.

  In the depths of his convalescence, which lasted all of half a month, he’d received an email, from his cousin Dina, the Subject: of which was vaguely ominous:

  Re: Bad New, it read, and given the linguistic barrier he could only guess that the intention had been Bad News, though that Re: was somewhat reassuring, in that it meant that his cousin hadn’t developed any telepathic powers but rather marked the communication as a continuance of something preexisting, of an earlier chain being summarily exhumed, resurrected, and rattled. Under the circumstances, however—with him being hospitalized and then as a ward of his apartment, fevered with mortality and fending off all aid—he didn’t have it in him to ascertain the originating email of that Subject: whether the present missive dilated the old email about the Twin Towers, or the old email about Uncle Shoyl/Sha’ul being deceased.

  Either, in their time, could’ve been the Bad New.

  But now, healing up, that rubric seemed prophetic, despite its present usage at the top of an email that concerned itself instead with all news good and cheery, copypasted in vivid different balloon fonts: Dina wrote that Ilan, her husband, had just turned 50, which attainment the couple had celebrated with a jaunt to the Dalmatians, lately his career had been picking up steam, given the unexpectedly extensive natural gas fields recently uncovered in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, her own career was advancing at the veterinary clinic to the point that she’d had to hire a dental aide and Yoav, their son, was about to get out of the army.

  Dina got to her gravamen only at the close of the email, but made it brief, a studiedly casual request, as if typed offhand: she wrote that Yoav, she’d written your cousin, Yoav, who’d be discharged in the summer, was hoping to visit the States, and would it be in any way feasible—rather she’d phrased it: if it is acceptable to you at all—for him to come and stay in New York, just for a time, and then: in return for stay with you it is so nice if you can get him also a job.

  David, still not restored to former strength, gunmetal laptop atop his stunned chest, had written back immediately—jumping at the opportunity, jumping as if at prey: it would be his pleasure.

  It was inexplicable, his agreeing—how he’d felt about Yoav coming. His avidity among the recuperative hazes, the morphine sleeps, the bland diet, no nicotine, no booze. It was a weakness of the heart. While being treated, he’d been infected with sentiment, nostalgia, a nasty nosocomial case. Out of nowhere, David had found himself yearning, but not for the immediate, for the far. Distance gave a grandeur to the emotions, expanded the dwindling self, expanded its purchase, by imbuing each desire with an ancestry, a mystery, a primitive significance, compared to which his own rehabilitation seemed a drudge: the doctors’ appointments, the nurses applying electrodes, the limpness of his shaft.

  It’d saddened him, how Ruth had seemed to take even his loss of sexual function in stride, or as a sign of his welcoming a deepening of their intimacy. She’d hovered, like a mother hovered.

  Tammy, for her part, was unsure how to act. She was as disappointed that he’d survived as she would’ve been had he not.

  Throughout all this, what’d bolstered him was Israel: the ideal of it, the abstraction. To have family in the country was to have the country in the family, the whole entire country. Forget the individuals, forget that Dina was a spay and neuter tyrant and Ilan a perfunctory boor, David’s was a greater relationship, between his delusion and spirituality, between his ignorance and soul and so, at bottom, in that bloody chamber beneath the skin, it was a reckoning with death. If he’d stay in touch with Israel, if he’d maintain with Israel, certain responsibilities would devolve on the living after his demise. He was almost sure of it, he almost said it aloud: who among the living was going to shovel the dirt in his grave or say a kaddish? His daughter?

  So that’s why he’d agreed—or was it? How to judge? David could only yearn, could only crave. Until in his impotence he’d fathered a figment—his cousin arising out of his anesthesia like a son, arriving from across the seas to increase him.

  He received another email from Dina, just about the time he went back to work. Still under the banner of Bad New, now Re: Re:, it consisted of a checklist of questions, detailed, persnickety questions: about what to pack, what the weather would be, about where Yoav would be housed, the nature of the work, and of the payment, if and when he’d have days off, and/or a considerable stretch of at least partially paid leave in which to travel—all of this posed to David with a manic curiosity verging on the militant, as if failing to prepare for a stint of R&R in the incredibly well-equipped, well-outfitted abundance of New York, a city in which anything forgotten from home could be bought, in which everything not for sale or even conceivable at home could be bought, was as perilous a prospect as failing to prepare for a major combat operation.

  Dina was a shrewd negotiator.

  For some reason, David didn’t turn their talks over to Ruth, or try to interest or even inform his daughter. He felt—for some reason, he felt compelled, and responded to each bulletpointed neurosis himself.

  And it was only now that David realized that throughout all this, he’d only ever been in touch with Dina: he’d never spoken with Yoav directly.

  He’d woken, as was his habit, before his alarms—he’d always prided himself on that, anticipating his alarms, cancelling them before their sounding. He was in a room. A plain singlewindowed containment of jaundiced parquet and anemic plaster. A central ceiling light domed down from the fan, light on, fan whirring.

  It was the bed that threw him, its sibling furniture. All that overbearing oak, imposing, obstructing, inassimilable: Queens.

  He checked Yoav’s flight: still ontime.

  He stopped in the hall to pluck a dustbunny and because the only trashcan was in the kitchen, slipped it in a pocket. All the lights and fans were on, ablaze. He switched them off, switched the AC unit from Medium to Low, and retrieved his jacket from a doorknob. He’d never taken off his tie.

  There, at the end of the hall, what’d been his childhood bedroom had been stickered all over with unfamiliar cartoon heroes. Superheroes. Chances are the Bengali Bangladeshis had raised a boy here. He tried
peeling a sticker, but part of it adhered, and he was left with just a body in a cape without a head. On the sill was a cactus, Jon and Leland must’ve missed it. His parents had never had plants, they wouldn’t have been able to cope with even a cactus. David dipped a finger into the soil—was it supposed to be this thirsty? In the bathroom, he splashed water to his mouth, returned to the bedroom and dribbled from his lips into the pot—why do this?

  He turned back and turned the AC from Low to Off.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, the chipped formica was piled with all the quarters, dimes, and nickels he’d swept up just hours ago, which he now swept up in his hands: not quite a dollar for each hour he’d slept.

  Not quite three and dust.

  The door: the new toplock had been installed backward, locking clockwise, but he didn’t have the tools or time, so he just popped the bottom and sought the van. Though the sun had barely cleared the rooftops, there was already sweat on his hairs like dew on the blades. He revved to outbleat the lawnmowers, downed the windows and yawned through a Yield. Forget stopping for coffee—bodegas don’t do drivethru.

  His businesses lived and died by time. His own lateness cost, but from customer lateness he benefited. For every ten minutes that King’s Moving was late to a job, the customer got $20 off. Storage, that was like parking: one minute over the hour meant customers paid the next hour in full, one day over a month meant they paid the next week at least. This was how David made money, the same way he drove: by chiseling, like his loafered feet on the pedals were hammers and the van itself was a chisel being hammered into granite, picking out the law, picking out an epitaph. He tapped the accelerator and just the moment before his fender tapped the bumper in front, braked.

  He groped for the glovebox, for his pharmorganizer: tablets and capsules, all of them regulatory, all of them moderating, reducers of clotting and coagulation, decreasers of pressure. To be healthy meant being able to swallow them dry.

  He turned onto Northern Boulevard heading south. The cars seeped like spread tar and hardened into traffic. A display flashed Work Zone, then Active Work Zone, then JFK Expect Delays, and then the absurd, nearly antagonizing suggestion, Take Mass Transit. What was the city hoping to achieve? To get everyone to stop, step out of their vehicles, and slink off to a train, or the buses that beeped like geese stuck behind him?

  His phone was ringing and he strapped on his headset—“PG?”

  “Brother David.”

  “PG, you there?”

  “Here and queer, David.”

  “What’s today like?”

  “Today? High 93, low 85, humidity currently holding at 70%.”

  “The PIX11 forecast brought to you by Dunkin—or is it NY1? What’s her name, that weatherwoman you’re in love with?”

  “The meteorologist.”

  “Sure—meteorology is the study of how to wear a dress while pointing at Albany.”

  “They’re doing lane closures on the Grand Central Parkway.”

  “Why don’t you tell me something new for a change?”

  It was the same order daily—Paul Gall calling with the schedule, calling for judgment: Havana Fashions had changed its mind and didn’t want to just have its racks shipped, but also wanted to have them reassembled and was wondering what that would cost. A Platinum Level customer in Secaucus, guy who owned stripclubs and a portapotty business, was insisting on equipping his units with livemonitored humidors for his Cohibas and horizontal cellaring for his Bordeaux. Pair of guys, junkies, had been caught living in a unit at Hunts Point, caught and ejected, unrefunded. This woman from Fairfield, the least pleased county in all of Connecticut, had been phoning for days complaining that her movers broke “like a—some what the fuck thing?”

  “What the fuck, Paul?”

  “Windchime—no. Windvane?”

  “We broke her weathervane?”

  “Tommy says we didn’t.”

  “Tom says. That’s why we have insurance.”

  “What about the house?”

  “What about it? Thanks for taking care of the furniture.”

  “Classy, no?”

  “Sure—you turned my parents’ house into a funeralhome.”

  “Very tasteful.”

  “Anyway, my cousin. The kid. I’m picking him up just now and I want you to start putting him on shifts. Something comfortable, something easy.”

  “You serious, Brother D?”

  “I’m serious—why? You’re going to tell me that even with the summer rush the rotation’s crunched? Or are you worried about him taking slots away from the regulars? Or are they worried about it—the regulars?”

  “That’s some of it.”

  “Just some?”

  “The rest is my advice: you have to rest him, bench him. He’ll start eventually. There’s always fall. We’ll need him in the fall.”

  “OK, coach—what’s got into you? Any reason that you’re talking like we’re going to be short on hitters in the playoffs?”

  “The kid served, no? Just finished soldiering? You’re going to want to give him time to get used to being a civilian again. Like I did with Tommy after Afghanistan.”

  “Paul, Tom was in the Coast Guard. Afghanistan has no coast.”

  “Tommy was in Bagram, he was in Kandahar.”

  “For like a day he was, a day each at most.”

  “Inspecting cargo being shipped home during the drawdown. No one’s more thorough than the Coast Guard.”

  “Tell it to the Marines. Or the Navy. Or the capos of the Gigante family.”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “What?”

  “Your cousin deserves a break after what he’s been through.”

  After David ended the call, he realized: he wasn’t quite sure what that was. What exactly Yoav had been in the army. What exactly he’d done. In last summer’s war. Whether he’d been a mechanic or sapper or a kevlared PR stooge, whether he was traumatized. By having been too in the action or too out of it.

  The Van Wyck was a slog. He should’ve taken Woodhaven.

  At the Linden exit, he compared the time on the dash with the time on his phone and hoped to be accommodated by the discrepancy.

  Anyway, it always took at least a halfhour after landing for the passengers of an international flight to deplane and crawl through immigration, baggageclaim, customs—at least an hour, he told himself, changing lanes without a signal, for the coddled passengers to toddle off as people again, stepping decompressed from neutral transit soil to American soil—concrete to concrete, asphalt to asphalt.

  At the Rockaway exit, he couldn’t find his billboard—what do you expect if you don’t check? And why were all the mattress jingles better than his?

  His phone rang again and he turned the radio off.

  “I’m disturbing you,” Ruth said.

  “Then why are you calling?”

  “To ask how the house went, to ask how you’re doing.”

  “Good, great.”

  “And to tell you I’m feeling better and your plane’s just at the gate.”

  “Thanks. Such a help. I’m glad.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m driving is where.”

  “You should’ve taken Woodhaven.”

  He took the turn to the airport—the road curving and bumping as underpass became overpass became underpass again—toward the Terminals.

  He idled at Terminal 4 between a khaki jeep and a sunburnt sedan that was peeling. People clothed for other climates streamed out onto the asphalt and stripped.

  He leaned across the gearshift and tried to guess who among them was family.

  “So that’s a yes?” Ruth said. “We’ll get together?”

  “Who now?”

  “Me and you and Yoav.”

  “You’ll be working together. Yes.”

  “I mean outside of work. Like for the holidays.”

  “He’s my family. Not yours.”

  “Yoav’s such a nice name.” />
  “Ruth.”

  “I’m going to make a quilt for him.”

  The sedan pulled out from behind, the jeep pulled out up front. The hotel shuttles consummated their circuits.

  A black suit and tie and cap chauffeur revolved out the revolvingdoors towing the luggage of his passenger, who had the same black suit and tie but lacked the cap. The passenger followed and with both hands held the placard that held his name, the placard the chauffeur must’ve been holding that’d told him this chauffeur was his and no one else’s. And that’s how it goes, David was about to say, that’s the deal. Some people make a name for themselves in this world, while others stay anonymous on the other side of the tinted divider.

  There was a knock at the driverside window.

  “Hold on, Ruth.”

  The cop wasn’t a cop but Security, seething in polyester livery and an oversize retroreflect vest like a jersey borrowed off the Knicks.

  He said, “Why you acting like I ain’t even here? Disrespecting like I ain’t been telling you move on?”

  David said, “But I have someone just coming out,” and then he said, “Officer.”

  “Why you get to stay and all them can’t? What’s it say on the sign?”

  David took off his headset, pressed for speakerphone and raised his voice: “It’s my mother, Officer, she’s senile. I have her on the line and she’s already outside and I’m just trying to find her before she strays—say hi, Mom.”

  Ruth, distorted by speaker, said, “Hi, Mom.”

  Security said, “Keep circling.”

  David, and the planes above, circled. A holdingpattern of tarmacs and hangars. Chainlinked lots of cars for rent. Barbed yards beyond all mileage.

  “They don’t let you wait,” he said.

  Ruth said, “That’s the city for you. It’s because of the terrorism.”

  “You have to go around.”

  “Why not park?”

  “Where they’d let me, that’s like parking in the Hamptons.”

  “I think it’s so kind of you to go meet him yourself. As a mother I say this. It’s generous. Not to send someone—not to send me like some taxi.”