Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  “Go,” Jon yelled, “get out of here.”

  Whatever Yoav said was Hebrew.

  “You’re in the Bronx,” Jon yelled, “you understand me? The Bronx? Take a taxi, a car service. Have them take you home.”

  Yoav again, in crunched Hebrew.

  “Yo, we had an accident, the police are going to come, they’re going to bring us in, and you’re working without papers, you’re illegal, goddamnit, so make yourself scarce—that’s an order.”

  Tinks was behind the truck, trying to open the door, any of the doors, of the yellow SUV whose grille was all up in the truck’s hitch totaled. He was flopped across the seats slapping the driver awake, as Yoav staggered past.

  At the bottom of a pothole crater a child animal howled.

  It was only when Yoav held a wad of bills in his hand and was being waved toward the trees that he understood this wasn’t Gaza.

  It was cold and wet and the grasses were endless. He made his way around the rolls of razorwire around a cemetery. The black stones became black houses, aerialed projects. All the taxis that passed were off for the night, so were now just the cars of drivers heading to their cable packages and their wives, and none were stopping or even slowing.

  He chased after a bus, which lit the way to the subway, which was elevated here. And Yoav, soaked to his purpose, ascended the platform and rode through the sky, until he was swallowed down into the guts.

  —

  His chest was aching for a while after, though that could’ve been from an earlier wound or the suffocating emptiness of time. The days were swelling inside him, the offdays, the Tues, the Wed, the Thurs. Midweek. Midmonth. Days idling. Days chained together and towed into sleeplessness swinging and rattling.

  He tried requesting extra jobs, but with Talc having to finance his landscaping, and Ronriguez having to refinance his third baby, Paul Gall was prioritizing their overtime. He took the issue up with Ruth, who told him to chill like the weather, check out a museum, a park, a girl, all of which were free and not only in Manhattan.

  In Manhattan, he found himself a block from his cousin’s and called and David picked up and said that if Yoav was just downstairs then Yoav must be in Canada, because David was in Ontario pricing a conveyor system.

  Yoav wondered what’d happen if he’d just casually show up to a job another crew was slotted for, but he couldn’t find the address. It was like 315 Broad had been moved so thoroughly, there wasn’t even a vacant lot—like 315 had ceased to be a number.

  He wasn’t used to making decisions like this, he wasn’t able to choose, and not just because of the army. The notion of being free to do whatever you wanted, virtually whenever you wanted, had been so alien to the family Matzav, it was like having a relative you hadn’t been in contact with for such an immensity of time that you were doubting his existence, until out of nowhere you were forced together and thrust into recognizance.

  The only choices Yoav was capable of making, then, were minor, befitting his rank: he, who’d always shaved his head, or let Reuven do it for him, was now growing it out into a patchy coronation. He was realizing that he’d never liked beer, he liked rum. He still wasn’t sure about cigs, though, which meant he was addicted. Flossing didn’t make him a fag. From now on he’d wear boxers, not even boxerbriefs, and briefs never again. His socks wouldn’t be the tall tubes anymore but the shorties. He’d turned to reading, and didn’t care that Gad, who read English but swore Hemingway was better in Hebrew, and Kosta, who only read articles glamorizing the Shabak and Mossad, would’ve heaved him to the latrines for the sites he now perused—sites on Israeli history, the reconstruction of Salah al-Din Road, and FAQs about how to be an actor. He kept the TV tuned to topical series and serious cinema and drew his own conclusions: his tastes could be improved. And even certain thoughts—not overtly political but just the thoughts or intimations or taints of impatience that might come from being stuck in line behind a grubby slow salaaming human of another race who kept changing his mind about his Powerball digits at the deli—he’d have to break with those thoughts. He couldn’t stay in America without breaking those thoughts and dealing with the guilt.

  He stopped answering his phone (his Israeli phone, not the American phone David had given him), and returned its calls (but only his mother called his Israeli phone) only when he was sure his mother was unavailable. But if she ever tried him on the American phone—Yoav had no clue how she’d gotten that (917), whether from him in a slip, or she’d extorted it from David—he’d pick up, he’d have to, because he’d be curious, and she’d greet him by saying, “You got fired?”

  He had to account for his time, and tell her where he’d visited and with whom, and such was her appetite—or his solitude and the greed of her pauses—that he lied: “I’ve been going to shows.”

  “What shows?”

  “Good shows, at the Broadway theater, the one about the lion, and then the other one”—he tried to recall the ads—“about the Arab kid with the genie.”

  “You made friends with David’s daughter?”

  “Tammy—she’s very smart, a nonprofit.”

  “What?”

  “A nonprofit.”

  Which he said in English, though he was sure his mother didn’t know what that was, though he wasn’t sure he knew either.

  When he asked to speak to his father, her answer was: “You’re not the only one who works.”

  He stopped replying to email, because all his former squadmates’ lives suddenly seemed so frivolous, irresponsible: Iddo was surfing? Let him surf. Nachum adopted a kangaroo? May he elope with a koala. Pinchas had been fined for camping in the forest, or making a bonfire in the forest, fined and then arrested. Gershon had been with a whore in Nepal and now had a wart on his scrotum.

  “And guess whose face the wart resembles?”

  He was being chatted—by Eli, by Sami.

  “Yoavik—you there? You online?”

  As for the concerns about Uri—there were counselors for that. There were huckster wonderworkers in white hazmat suits and yarmulkes.

  Yoav had come to regard, he’d come to resent, all this contact as control. All these transmissions sent through the air, these neuroses beamed, dread streamed in on the rays—from his family’s phone greased up with oliveoil in the kitchen in Bat Yam, from his squadmates’ dented laptops filching wifi out on the patios of tropical cafés, and even from the mouths of the Chabad Hasidim who’d accost him in the flesh on Eastern Parkway.

  There were two of them, this one dayoff, both as young as he was in the face, but their bellies made them seem older. Well fed and defanged, they seemed friendlier than Hasidim in Israel. But they couldn’t have been, there shouldn’t have been any differences between them. The point of being a Hasid was to be the same in every country, in every age. Still, this was a pair of Americans, soft and throbbing with jollity. They’d thrived on the luxury of their exoticism, the luxury of their otherness.

  They proffered tallis and tefillin while exhorting in their stilted archaic tongue: “Bist du a yid? Du davenst?”

  Yoav ignored them, but they shimmied up to either side of him, pleading in corrupt Jurassic Hebrew: “Thou art Jewish—Israeli—thou must be.”

  “Get a job,” Yoav said.

  “Pray at our shul.”

  “Blow me,” he said, but in a slang that wouldn’t be understood.

  He’d miscalculated, apparently: by thinking that to leave Israel he could avoid Israel, could evade the Jews, the news—by thinking, like nearly all the customers he’d moved, that just by changing the walls around him he’d be changed within, as if all that junk that’d been pumped into his head would come tumbling out in the transit. He’d underestimated the methods, the retention initiatives, the stoploss techniques. He hadn’t been counting on his squadmates to already be sending up their flares, summoning him back if not to the homefront then to his duty. Telling him what his debt was, telling him what he owed.

  Whatever the army pai
d out to the disabled or bereaved. If only they’d accept his dollars in lieu of his presence, in lieu of his blood.

  It was the holidays.

  Paul Gall knew not to put Yoav on the schedule and Yoav knew not to balk. He was ashamed, though, because all throughout the three days he was missing—a stretch that might’ve meant six shifts, of 12, 13, even 14 jobs—he should’ve been begging the forgiveness of his God, but all he was occupied with was the income he was losing.

  He couldn’t not accept David’s invitation to synagogue, to temple—showing up for Rosh Hashanah in a Champion sweatshirt and the only Levi’s he had unstained.

  For Yom Kippur, David insisted on putting him into a vintage polyblend suit pullulating with pleats and lapels like the wings of angels, so stiff with starch it felt like he’d crack it every time he sat and stood and genuflected in that stale churchy spanse, as the congregation wheezed hosannas in cumbrous English.

  In the midst of the service, David leaned over and murmured worshipfully, “Don’t forget it—I used to wear a 32 waist.”

  The tongue was sour from fasting, the walk uptown was slow.

  David lived in a massive, stolid, brutalist block, his bachelorized co-op a strip of three units that’d been joined, or that were supposed to have been joined, in a renovation he’d left incomplete—it’d left him jaded. Two of the units—inaccessible, inhospitable, littered with the cardboard cartons from David’s online impulse purchases that he never was able to bring himself to recycle—surrounded what amounted to a dismal sunken den of other people’s furniture atop musty Persian rugs and loosetacked scuffed parquet infringing on a kitchen island set with sharp stools and vapid cabinetry and pristine unused appliances.

  There was a slidingdoor that gave out onto a balcony of flaking masonry over hansoms and monuments to dead generals, but it was jammed.

  Three women, subcontracted from an employee of the office, comprised the evening’s help. They stood prim and prepared to greet in white smocks crested with the emblem of the Trump International and David, unsure as to which was Grio’s mother, which was Grio’s sister, and which was Grio’s sister in law, just said, “You’re all so youthful, I can’t tell which is which.”

  The down the hall neighbors, the co-op secretary, the temple treasurer—David, famished for affection, hugged each between swallowing cherry blintzes.

  Ruth, who couldn’t be a guest without becoming a host, couldn’t relax—she supervised. There weren’t enough trays or just too many of veg, too few of fruit. They weren’t being refreshed or unwrapped of their cling quite fast enough. The dips were being spread around and what’d been tidy scoops of overmayoed tuna and eggsalad fell into each other, became slurried.

  Yoav was in a corner and deep into his bagels, beyond the initial satiation phase and immersed now in an intricate assembly: laying slabs of tomato, onion, lox. He’d commandeered his own personal twoliter of whatever Coke was left. Coke Zero. At least he wasn’t drinking straight from it.

  And then she was next to him, waving a cup. A woman whose pursed posed face plumped chubbier and younger with each photo of her down the hall. Yoav poured her out some foam and as the fizzing subsided she stepped closer and he trickled in some soda. David, from across the room, gave a stupid thumbs up.

  “That for me or you?” she said.

  “Soda for you.”

  “I meant the—forget it. I’m Tammy. Your cousin? Second cousin once removed?”

  Yoav furrowed like he was figuring it out, hoping to confirm her.

  She picked up a napkin. “Not trying to be awkward, but—creamcheese?”

  Yoav muffled whatever he was saying by wiping knuckles across his lips.

  “That’s it, all gone. You’ve got it.”

  She’d made a fist around the napkin. “How’s that for an icebreaker?” And now chucked it to a shelf. “Don’t you just hate these?”

  “What you hate?”

  “What do I? A ton of shelf with no books. Or nothing you’d ever read. And all this weird decor crap that doesn’t have any function, just sits there. These large wooden apples, like if I wanted an apple, I’d definitely want one way too large to bite into and anyway made out of maple. Or, like, here’s an innovation, let’s not have any plants, because plants require effort, let’s just have a chintzy dish in the shape of a leaf. What’s it filled with? Rainbow gravel. I wonder what poor fuck’s house he took that out of? Did he just take the dish or did it come with the gravel?”

  “What poor fuck?”

  Tammy took a sip and stifled a belch. “Because I can’t imagine him buying gravel.”

  “What you have in your house?”

  “Driving to the store, finding parking—does he even bother to feed the meter? Going inside and buying gravel.”

  “In what neighborhood you live?”

  Tammy gulped down her cup. “I like the suit.”

  She reached between the wooden apples for the scotch, turned the labels to get the best or just the aged of the bottles, poured and cheersed him, “To the Jews.”

  The sad nonclink of plastics.

  “It’s sad,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Everything—it’s desperate. Me coming like this. Coming late and leaving early. I give him once a year.”

  “Always a holiday?”

  Tammy poured refills. “Or sometimes I go to the dinner thing with the Pharaoh and the matzah.”

  “Pesach.”

  “I give him once a year. But for her it’s a fulltime job, like literally.”

  “Who?”

  “Her,” and Tammy dipped her cup toward Ruth and said, “Ruth. You know what she told me? That she comes to this stuff because she knows I won’t. All she can think about, she says, is how depressed he gets if I don’t show. How fucked is that? She’s not the office manager, she’s the life manager. Pretends that she’s my mom. Pretends that she’s his wife. Sits around all week waiting for my prick father to make plans for the weekend and then, because he never does, she knits, she phones for Thai.”

  Yoav nodded toward David, “Maybe he now just a friend?”

  “Maybe he now can go fuck himself—what kind of friend is that? She helps him through his heart thing, he barely calls her through her breast cancer. She remembers his birthday, she remembers my birthday, meanwhile he forgets hers and misses her graduation after she went out and got that master’s in admin for him. He never even went to a single one of her tapdance recitals. That’s what she said. But then he just stops by Hoboken without any warning and tries to fuck her, and the worst of it is, she was telling me, that since his heart he can’t even get it up, and she tells me this not like she’s slagging on him but like she’s assuming I know this already or want to know, and she wants to assure me it’s OK by her, she’s coping with it.”

  “This happens?”

  “Typical employer/employee relationship. And according to her, my mother’s the meddler.”

  “And what you are?

  “About to bounce.”

  Ruth was standing between them and said, “I’m not interrupting but Yoav, dear, would you mind folding up the chairs?”

  Tammy went to get her coat and huddled in it against her father on the sofa.

  Yoav folded the tables and chairs. Ruth convened the help around the kitchen island and was counting out their cash.

  David yelled over to Yoav, “Just leave it all by the foyer closet.” Tammy rose and David said, “Hold up, Tam.”

  He opened his wallet, which had one bill left inside. “Where you off to?”

  Tammy went to take the bill but David lured it back until she said, “A thing.”

  “Another party?”

  “I said a thing.”

  David yelled, “Yoav, just leave them, come here. Your cousin’s taking you out to a party.”

  “Dad.”

  “Wherever it is, whatever it is, take him. Cab it.”

  “You’re talking about him like he’s not even here, Dad.�
��

  “So are you, Tam.”

  She hailed them a cab on the corner of Fifth and told the driver an address, unzipped her backpack and took out the bottle she’d swiped, swigged and passed. The driver rancored away in Arabic, to himself or just a specter.

  There, alongside her, Yoav put together her face. It’d been too strong straight on. Now he could sit back and amass a profile. Tammy had a strong crooked nose, a broken arrow nose. And a rampant mane of unwashed brown with glimmers of what could’ve been blond or gray. She had dry skin on her chin and, when she leaned in, she whispered in garlic, salt, and scotch:

  “Do you understand what he’s saying?”

  “Who?”

  “The driver.”

  “He tells—he told his wife he must go to piss.”

  After crossing a bridge, they looped around for a complex of new sleek condos wavering over the water. The elevator was undersize and overly bright. They were going to the highest floor, PH. “Who is Penthouse?” Yoav said, but Tammy, who had her compact out and was blotting herself, was unimpressed and said, “Some donor.”

  The elevator snapped open to a vestibule jumbled with masks and shields and shields like masks, spears and umbrellas and bags. Turning the corner was like turning a volume knob, the ardent chanting becoming urgent and louder. Everything was white, every surface from the countertops and choppingblocks to the oven. It was the people who provided the colors, their skintones and clothes did, their cloaks and robes, which Yoav wasn’t able to parse whether they were the pinnacle of fashion or just suggestions for the curtains. The cityward wall was a window. There were pointy hats. There was a person in a checkered kafiya.

  Tammy weaved around basketry that might’ve been for sitting on, around a bioethanol fireplace below a contiguity of monitors cycling a slideshow of children. They were writing with chalk on slats at a school. They were eating some type of flatbread next to a well. Doing gymnastics. Trampolining. Weaving something on looms. Tammy was checking rooms, slipped into a room, dropped her backpack and coat and rushed behind another door she spun to shut just as Yoav was coming in.