Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  Yoav sat tossing the skewers like pygmy spears into this unidentifiable pot that reminded him of the helmet of a vanquished knight and some would land inside with a coining clank and some would miss and go skidding and after he’d tossed them all he’d get up and retrieve them.

  And then come back to the couch.

  The couch was where he ate his cutlets not from the closer Open For 24 Hours Deli, but from the farther Open For 12 Hours Deli, where he bought or tried to buy his Buds and Marlboros too, because the farther Open For 12 Hours Deli was Mexican, and the closer Open For 24 Hours Deli was Syrian, and on his initial visit its cashier had by default addressed him in Arabic, to which he’d responded, likewise by default, in his rudimentary service Arabic, and in the interrogation that ensued had represented himself as Ismail the itinerant carpenter from Al-Quds—he’d usurped the identity of one of his squad’s former informers, just to hear himself do it, to see if he could do it, if he could get away with it, or merely to justify his patronage.

  Each time he’d leave the house, it was only to complete a single errand, which was all he could manage—one roll toiletpaper, one bar soap, that’s all he could take—before he had to return to his cushioning.

  Sunday Trashday Tuesday Wednesday Trashday Friday Saturday, but on the occasions that Cousin David would pick him up, Yoav had to clean, at least the groundfloor, because that’s as far as his cousin would venture, just to pick up the mail, which was bills, and turn down, or off, the AC. One day, Cousin David took him to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and the World Trade Center Memorial, all in one day, and in the evening wanted to take him to a sushi and hibachi restaurant, but wanted him to change his clothes and told him to be quick about it and waited outside in the van and even though his cousin was waiting Yoav sat, just for a moment, before going upstairs and getting dressed, and then he sat again quickly after.

  He’d sit, remote in hand, triggerfingering, until telling night from day from screen was getting as difficult as pointing out Zion on a spinning globe.

  Cousin David would parade him around like a hero, for a weekend straight of cooing Jews, then drop him.

  Though Yoav wasn’t quite able yet to discriminate between weekends and weekdays, American goyim and American Jews—Israel took off Fridays and Saturdays, the States took off Saturdays, Sundays, and apparently the rest of the summer.

  It was still summer. Same smog, stagnancy, clinging.

  David was driving him in the van over a bridge and said, “Sorry again for not getting the porch repaired.”

  “OK,” Yoav said. He understood, at least, that this was an apology.

  “No pressure, but maybe while we’re waiting to put you on shifts, you can try repairing it yourself?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We have the lumber in Jersey, the sealant. Or forget it—I’ll get the guys out.”

  “Say to the guys I work with them. To move.”

  But David said, as God said to the shepherd king, “Be patient.”

  Life had become as confusing to Yoav as the tenses and persons of the auxiliary verb to be, which is to say he was dismayed to find that his English—despite years of mandatory instruction in school, months of private lessons with a Bible studies PhD from Exeter visiting Israel to research Christ, repeated encounters with every episode of every season of Sex and the City (subtitled), sporadic encounters with Fast & Furious 1–6 (undubbed), and an aborted reading of the collected works of Sherlock Holmes (abridged)—sucked:

  “I patient.”

  “What?”

  His Exeter/Devonshire/American media mongrel accent, like that of an effeminate Berber pirate, wasn’t helping matters: Oi PAY-shun.

  “When I was younger,” David said, “I certainly wasn’t. I couldn’t stop myself—I couldn’t get enough.”

  He sheared the van into a tunnel. Yoav shut his eyes.

  “There a girl on your mind? Or you just tired, Yo?”

  Yoav was tunneling into himself, begging in breaths to be back aboveground and in the clement light.

  “Buck up. A boy like you, you’ll meet someone here—she’ll meet you.”

  As they rode into the sun again, Yoav exhaled and said, “This all also Manhattan?”

  David took a hand off the wheel and thumbed. “That was Manhattan, behind us. That nightmare we just drove through.”

  Yoav turned around toward the city.

  “Work, women and work,” David said. “I’ll be honest, at a certain age it catches up with you and you want something else. You want that profound connection. But you can’t get it, not with a bank letter, not even with cash. Retail or wholesale, a profound connection’s just not on the market. Because the truth is, you have it already, it’s there for you, it’s yours, whenever you’re willing to accept it—if you have a family, you’ve had it all along.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re family, Yo.”

  “I thinking yes.”

  “Keep thinking,” David said. “Next time we’ll get Tammy out.”

  Yoav yawned. They thudded through the suburbs.

  “All my life I worked at this one thing harder than I worked at anything else. You know what that was, Yo? It was being a Jew. It was proving I was. People who thought I was greedy—I took from. People who thought I was pushy—I pushed. But anyone under the impression I was gentle and wise, I came to them in the spirit of lovingkindness. You understand?”

  “Who say to you this?”

  “It’s not important. In this business, everyone talks. My point is, unlike me, Yo, you’re a real Jew. This is who you are naturally, grown up from the land. And now that you’ve paid your dues to that land, now that you’ve suffered for the state, you’re out, you’re here, and you have to understand the significance. Here in America, a real Jew like you is going to have to find his own thing to prove.”

  And off they went to another cookout. Yoav liked corn on the cob, he was ambivalent about pie.

  The only reason Yoav was in the States, the truest deepest only reason he was able to lounge, loathe, and develop opinions about why goyim or just Jews in the States made such disproportionate use of sunblock, was because the summer before, almost one year to the day before he landed in New York, in the midst of what foreign press were calling the Gaza War, or the Second Gaza War, or the Third Gaza War, which Israel was once again insisting was only a conflict—Operation Firm Cliff or Resolute Cliff was the literal Hebrew, which made the violence seem Biblically wrathful, Operation Protective Edge was the official English obligingly supplied by the IDF, which made the violence seem warranted because merely prophylactic—his friend, Uri, had saved his life.

  His friend and squadmate, Corporal Uri Dugri—who, like a score of their other squadmates, both alive and dead, now remained behind in Israel:

  Kosta was tending to his cancerous parents in Netanya,

  Gad was preparing to matriculate at Hebrew University (the Faculty of Humanities),

  Reuven was preparing to reenlist in the army as a cadet in the Officers’ Training Course (Bahad 1),

  Menachem was settling into work at his family’s rubber processing concern and trying to get his girlfriend to be his wife or just pregnant in Herzliya,

  Eitan and Oded were in Tel Aviv trying to scrape together the cash to open up a studio devoted to their new form of martial arts, which had 42 defensive stances, 168 offensive stances, but as of yet no coherent philosophy.

  Uri, meanwhile, was sitting around in his childhood bedroom in Nika just jerking it.

  Rather, he was devoting all of his considerable energies to not jerking it, to keeping his hands off his cock—because at any moment one or two or three of his older sisters might come crashing through the door in storms of wet hair and nails—to check on him, to call him for meals, to ask him about their hair, nails, outfits, and boys as pretexts for checking on him, to nag him about his own romantic prospects now that everything with Batya Neder was in absolute collapse—“That girl was like a wall
,” they liked to say, “with no curves and the chin of a Firm or Resolute Cliff”—giving him advice but no privacy, never any peace…

  Such were…ha’uvdot b’shetach, “the facts on the ground”: that Uri was still grounded in Israel, that he was living again with his family and unable to relocate out of a lack of imagination or shekels or both, that he was in the process of cutting himself off from his only friends, his squadmates, out of the shame of being the only one of them to have left the army with no education arranged, no employment set up, and headaches that the miracle rabbi his mother would send him to—that even the Psycholog his sisters would send him to, unbeknownst to their mother, who wouldn’t have approved—would dismiss as every bit as psychosomatic as his dreams. Which wouldn’t stop the dreams, or make them taper, or deny their legitimacy, their truth.

  Even Rotem, who’d lost his legs and was in a wheelchair, would wheel himself to their monthly squad reunions…Even Dror would show, despite his oxygen tank, for which he’d quit smoking, for which he’d quit drinking…

  Uri was the only one missing, the only one who’d skip. He was too busy not returning their emails. Having anger issues, putting fists through walls. Mortaring closet doors, bareknuckled. His parents had been whispering together so he wouldn’t understand. Arabic, but a sophisticated dated Arabic, was becoming—as it’d been under the reign of his Moroccan grandparents—the higher language of the house.

  His mother had gotten Uncle Peretz, a senior warder in the Israel Prison Service, to get him an interview for the guard program, but he’d missed the deadline to register, and then he’d missed the extended deadline, and since then, his mother’s crying. His father had brought him along on a roofing job, but by week’s end his dizziness was such that he’d had to step down the ladder and leave, and since then, his father’s howling.

  Crying and howling were Arabics too, which were still happier than the chastening he got from Batya Neder.

  Uri had grown up with Batya and loved her and made the motions of love to her in a field. But because the army requires all men to serve for three years and women for two, she’d already been out for one, and in just that one had managed to leave pitiful Nika for Tel Aviv, enroll on scholarship in a computer academy, get recruited by a man to join his firm, which developed or just adapted apps, and—don’t think about it—to share the man’s apartment, his duplex.

  The Batya Uri had known had been a pretty athletic Teimaniyah (Yemenite), not a sedentary coder. She must’ve picked up that computing interest in the army (in Intelligence), and yet she’d never mentioned it in all the txts she’d sent, the fewer and fewer txts, or on any of the brief occasions their leaves coincided. He’d also never known her to hang up on him. Their last conversation he’d tried to stay on nonerotic terms, which she’d initiated. She’d been filling him in on her life, but that single word, or the fact that he hadn’t recognized that word and had asked her to repeat it, and then had asked her to explain it, and she’d laughed, had set him off into a rage. It wasn’t even Hebrew, or it hadn’t been until Batya and others like her had made it Hebrew: duplex.

  “What do you mean—others like me?” she’d said.

  Others like people who go to coed computer academies. Or people who cohabitate with their instructors and speak fancy languages and make fancy salaries and have copious oral sex at artistic parties in Tel Aviv.

  “You’d better get out of Nika,” she’d said.

  Nika was a dusty moshav halfway between Kiryat Gat and Beersheva and so halfway between nowhere and not quite somewhere. The place barely existed and yet was impossible to leave. This was because it was laid out in a concentric circling, like a target’s roundel or the crosshaired reticle of a telescopic sight, with roads that compassed around and around and around and never intersected. To get to the bullseye, which was just a runty stucco administrative office that also held pesticides, you had to walk through people’s orchards, through people’s gardens. Past the outer rim road were the communal fields: the fields that were in every way identical because all-encompassing, or in every way identical because always changing, with crops and clearings appearing and disappearing seasonally, so that to get Batya alone Uri had always had to do some reconnaissance, some fieldwork, and remember the location of a certain cleared space, and hope that it would remain clear for however long it would take him to check the school, or the silos, or the aquifers, for her—for however long it would take him to coax her. He recalled that spring patch where he’d laid Batya down for the first and she’d run away, leaving him to grind into the soil and spew himself, panting. He recalled that autumn patch to which he’d dragged her, a harvest and two acne regimens later, and to which he’d dragged along a blanket and spread it out and spread her out atop it. The blanket was from his bed—he’d rolled her in it, rolled her wrapped in her clothes and then just in her hair. She had tiny hairs on her ass like browned grass. Tiny brown anthill tits but gangling nipples like carob pods. An ant had crawled up from an ear and across a closed eyelid and she’d felt the crawl and wouldn’t open up. That blanket they’d used, the same child’s blanket that still covered his bed, had remained blue even when the sky itself hadn’t and the only indications of all the sweat and time that’d elapsed since then was that the white of its cloud pattern was pilling and her bloodspot had yellowed.

  Now he’d just sit with legs wedged under the bed, window shut, curtains drawn, lights off, naked so as to deter any entering sorority, naked except for his stubble (buzzcut growing out, unibrow grown out), aviator sunglasses tangling with his unibrow—and there in that stifling darkness he’d do situps (crunches, bicycle and butterfly and regular). He’d lie, with his feet wedged under the dresser, his feet lifting the dresser to just before the point at which it’d tip and fall atop and crush him. Candidates for guard in the Israel Prison Service had to be able to complete at least 50 regular crunches in a minute or less. Candidates for guard in the Israel Military Prison Service had to complete 70. Uri was averaging 100, and 30 pullups (hands in), 30 chinups (hands out), 65 each of pushups and crossedleg pushups and knuckle pushups. He lifted the weights he’d made for himself on that construction site, the weights being his only accomplishment on that construction site besides quitting—on his first day taking two withered Alliance tires from their roadside desertion and a metal showercurtain rod from the trashbin of the neighboring property and inserting the rod through the holes in the tires and mixing the cement and pouring the cement into the holes and waiting for it all to harden like his heart, and so it did, by close of day, and he went home, his father had driven him home, with a perfectly decent barbell clunking around in the trunk, which he now lifted and pressed and curled and rowed in many reps of many sets, until his compact apeface was drenched to the neckbeard and he’d banished from his brain that kid from Gaza City from whom he’d annexed the idea: that kid who’d lost his lower jaw who’d kept his barbells like this in the livestock pit that’d passed for his backyard—that’d passed for his backyard even before the war.

  Uri would workout until his sisters burst in or he was defeated by sleep. He dreamt of cities and burnwards, of his middle sister Orly sneaking into his room and spraying this rancid green aerosol in his eyes to give him nightvision and in his ears to give him nighthearing and all over his body to armor it and give him nighttouch. The way he exercised, it was like he was planning something. He squatted like he dreamt, like a man pursued.

  What he was proudest of was that his arm muscles and leg muscles were equally developed and that, when it came to his arms, his biceps and triceps were equally impressive. He hadn’t made that common amateur’s mistake of neglecting one set of fibers in favor of another and, when adrift in refractory moments, had the tendency to keep a hand on one or the other, left arm or right, biceps or tri, gripping it, pumping it like a flotation device, packing it like a parachute, kneading it like bread.

  This was the same process, it turned out, required to stuff and button all his newish bulk
into his shirts and pants from before the army. To cram himself into shoes, the type of shoes where you have to wear socks—you have to polish.

  Uri had been granted an audience with the Baba Batra, that most famous of diminutive rabbis, or that most diminutive of famous rabbis, depending on whom you asked. It was a privilege you had to dress up for, you had to make a donation. Uri was dreading it, but his mother gave him no choice: she swore by this wonderworking sage who’d brought babies to barren friends, quelled a cousin’s Armenian fever, and eradicated Tay-Sachs from the family genes. Uri’s sisters wished him luck, but tartly, and darted off to class, which meant something different to each of them: cosmetology class, merchandising class, the mall.

  Uri’s father—a tolerant skeptic who always drove Uri’s mother to work, dropping her off first even if his current construction site was closer to home than her tailoring job at a bridal emporium—dropped Uri off at a modernist, but ancient modernist, faith complex in Netivot of six stone tents resembling a vivisected star.

  Bustling men in white—asylum orderly but also piously white—passed his cash, his name, and his person down halls, left him sitting, to wait.

  There was no one ahead of him, there was no one behind, but still: there was waiting. A condition so chronic, so messianically anticipant, that its trappings didn’t matter. Sometimes you waited at home in your room so demobilized into quiet that you could just about feel the maskingtape losing its stick and your mortifying teenaged posters of American moviestars who were 50% Jewish and Argentinian-German models who were 100% hot, Uri Malmilian (the football striker), Uri Geller (the mentalist), and Ha’Tzanchanim (the Paratroopers), peeling slowly from the walls, and sometimes you waited away from home in a room cluttered up with pews and vociferous copies of Yom Le’Yom, Maariv, and National Geographic, which mocked with all the exotic destinations in which your friends were becoming themselves, or themselves as other people, as bicycle messengers, yoga instructors, contractors in Sudan, pure—and sometimes you waited in no rooms at all, just out in the cold sun, blanking.