Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  “Bathroom, hello? I’m going to the bathroom?”

  Yoav startled, stepped back in apology. There, facing each other at the threshold, for a moment it was like they were dancing.

  Later, when the lights went low, he’d get drunk enough to dance purposefully.

  Tammy introduced him to her boss, a pallid woman who said she wasn’t her boss: “No one works for me, every one of us works for the children.”

  “That’s the issue with nonprofits,” Tammy said, “the more money you’re spending on internals, the less you have to spend on your mission.”

  A dashiki, a kimono, and a bundle of banker guys in banker suits mustered agreement and made an exit. The music was up and drumming.

  Yoav had another shot of rum and then the shot he’d brought for Tammy.

  The boss redraped herself in some burry wool serape that belonged between a saddle and donkey and swung herself into another conversation.

  A girl brisked over. “Been fundraising?”

  Tammy said, “Our asses off.”

  The girl said, “Boss’ll be asking you to call her a car.”

  “Ten minutes she’ll ask me.”

  “There’s grinding going on. Ten seconds.”

  Tammy introduced the girl to Yoav as her friend, who also worked with her and was her roommate.

  The girl smirked and told Yoav she was Tammy’s friend, who also worked for her and was her tenant.

  Tammy said, “Meet Cousin Yoav.”

  The girl said, “Five four three two one.”

  Their boss, from over by the window, yelled, “Tammy.”

  The explosion the girl made in her mouth became a croaky laugh. Tammy handed Yoav her champagne and he put his lips to her lipstick prints and drained.

  “I said—you’re Israeli?”

  Yoav took the girl by the waist and swayed her. “The cousin of Tammy. One second removed.”

  The girl repositioned the chopsticks in her dreads. “So what happened? With Israel? You just couldn’t cut it? Couldn’t live there anymore?”

  “I just try to make travel and do new things. New experience.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever you did in the army.”

  Yoav stepped on his own sneaker. “And you? What you do?”

  “I send emails. I update social media.”

  “About?”

  “Genocides, environmental catastrophes, polio outbreaks at refugee camps in Palestine.”

  “That important.”

  “Vaccinations, reproductive rights, child conscription. I make lists of people who have money and invite them to this.”

  “Money for the children?”

  “We help women too, but people care about children.”

  “Not the men?”

  “If you’re lucky enough not to be one of the 4.9% of all infants who die every year, then I’d say you have a roughly 50/50 chance of growing up to be a man.”

  “Then after they growing up you not help them?”

  “Then they’re on their own.”

  He was behind her, bumping up against her, up a spiral stairway to the roof, emerging onto a terrace sheathed in glass, with an awning he was sure was retractable.

  To the north and south were towers, out in front was Manhattan, and all around were the airplanes for stars. But it wasn’t enough. He wouldn’t be satisfied until there was nothing above him. He boosted himself atop a cherryslat bench but could barely touch the awning or keep balanced.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want to find the,” he couldn’t find how to say it, jumped down. “The thing for the roof,” he said.

  “What thing?”

  “I want the,” and he made a cranking motion with his hand and then blushed from its unmeant obscenity.

  She’d already had the joint rolled and now licked it. “Just chill.” She lit the fussed tip, sucked, and gave it to Yoav—“Tammy wouldn’t approve,” she said.

  “She not like?”

  “She does like, she just wouldn’t approve.”

  Two tugboats hooted out on the water.

  She took the joint back from Yoav and kissed him. Just a brief kiss, a meeting of teeth, and a retreat from his tongue.

  “What’s my name?”

  She pushed him down onto a swiveling rocker and its bamboo crackled under his weight like flames. She steadied the rocker, angled it toward her and stood over him.

  “Tell me one thing about me. One thing.”

  She undid his suitjacket and stroked his chest through the shirt and then she was undoing the shirt. He tried to help her but she swatted his hands, popped a button.

  “Your name is Yoav. Y, O, A, V. And me, I’m a bicycle activist. A feminist who bakes. I’m also your cousin’s intern. She’s my landlord.”

  She took another toke and handed the joint off, sank down to her knees and put her face to his stomach, kissing him again at least there, kissing his muscles there, tonguing their each packaged definition.

  “Here’s what we have in common,” she said. “I like to talk and you don’t.”

  “Also,” he said, “we both from Africa.”

  She laughed and hacked and undid his clasp, unzipped him and then, gripping his ridiculous suitpants by the ridiculous pleats, she pulled them folded around his scant socks and sneakers. She left his boxers on.

  All Yoav was thinking was how Natan had been wrong about the order: it didn’t always go, or didn’t always have to go, kiss kiss, tits, dagdagan.

  He was hard.

  All he was thinking was how Eli and Sami had been wrong about how American women liked to be forced: some liked to be the forcers.

  He was missiles hard.

  For now, though, she was just enjoying teasing him: nosing among his abs and biting, digging her nails along his ribs, burying her bitten nails between his ribs and then scraping up toward his nipples. She scraped just below his throat and poked his scar. That brownness. That raised puffy blackbrownness like a burn.

  The Zelda, the APC, the vehicle was being shot up. They’d driven into a trap, on the way to reinforce the paratroopers, along that hoveled road between Jabalia and Shujaiyeh. This was their 12th day of combat. Grenades were skizzing in, the Zelda was treads on fire. Uri hauled him out through the hatch, because he wasn’t getting out on his own. Shelter was a doorway and then Uri was ramming the door down and hauling him inside, which might’ve detonated an IED, or else they’d been grenaded. The jamb. A piece of the jamb—a piece from where its mezuzah would’ve been, had any dwelling in Gaza been a Jewish dwelling—mixed in with some shrapnel—had passed above his vest and lodged inside him.

  In Yoav.

  She pressed where it’d lodged, twisted the bump left by its removal like it was an ignition, squeezed it like she was piqued and wouldn’t stop until she’d gotten a reaction. But he wasn’t the one to be seeking that from.

  Not Yoav sprawled in a castoff suit, his feet sliding along the tile, knees locked, head hung in smoke.

  She rose up from the hollow of his legs to snatch the joint back. “You must be embarrassed.”

  She took a last toke and then spit in his navel, a dense taunting strand, and, as if with a sigh, put the joint out in the puddle.

  “What happen?” Yoav said.

  “I’m just making it worse.”

  She was standing again, embarrassed herself, because though she was still attracted to him, she’d just realized that what she was attracted to was his monstrousness.

  Yoav, wrists smearing the ashy saliva, crept a hand into his boxers to tug his untouched cock. “Why you go? For condom?”

  But she was already heeling beyond the giant potted ferns. “Sure, army boy, that’s what I’m doing. I’m just going to get us a condom.”

  Yoav sat and dripped. The glass that immured was vast and streakless and admitted the city, some of it shimmering and some with a cauterizing clarity, as if to assert that there was no
such thing as darkness, only distance. Darkness was just distance from light. He tossed the joint to a planter and brought his pants up.

  Standing made him dizzy and he reached for support, but all there was to grasp was flat and slippery. He could only palm the panes, imprint them, he could only lean his head against them and cloud them with his breath.

  Some of the towers were clad in glass and some just had glass for windows. All of them mirrored and were mirrored by their neighbors, just like the river and sky worked on each other by day, insatiably reflecting.

  It was hard to fathom that there could be more, that more could fit—on the ground, in the air, in his eye.

  This tower Yoav was terraced on wasn’t the tallest along the river, but it was the closest to the river, or the closest not still under construction—it was newly completed, which meant it was just a matter of months or even weeks before a newer tower went up between here and the Manhattan skyline, which ascended to the heavens like an emergency stairs to be used in case of fire.

  Not out amid the night but directly down, below him, was the deep dirt pit for the newest, with a ladderlike structure already growing inside it.

  Any day now its foundations would breach streetlevel and then, engirdered, climb higher, into a massive steel frame sustained by walls of glass.

  He’d stand here until the drums went slack or the tower had risen to block his view.

  Uri’s eldest and youngest sisters had been making some inquiries and one day between the holidays on the pretext of going to the GlobusMax and letting him decide between whichever was the current iteration of Transformers or X-Men, they borrowed the middle sister’s boyfriend’s car and the middle sister’s boyfriend himself, Ben Sassoon, a 30 year old man boyfriend who was so consummately an accountant that he’d been an accountant in the army, and had him drive them all cramped out to a brittle stucco block, the groundfloor a shabby clothingstore selling shapeless floralprinted clothes for old women hung on mannequins with the bodies of young women that lacked heads and arms and legs, which were scattered to the floor of the display amid fallen flypaper and gluetraps.

  This was the bargain they’d struck: if Uri just cooperated, just this once cooperated, his sisters would get him some hash. And then they’d come back in an hour, or in 45 minutes that were billed like an hour and get high with him, higher than the sun and then they’d all go to the GlobusMax, where it was dank and snacky.

  Trembling—whether with anger or trepidation, it didn’t matter, the trembling’s the thing—Uri resisted, until his sisters said they’d be charged if he canceled, they’d be charged if he skipped and so, stuffing their scrimped cash into a pocket, he got out of the car and dawdled like an inmate in the courtyard, where the building kept its trash. And then the decision was which staircase. The hallways were all dingy white and the doors they led to were all the same and labeled something Ashkenaz: something like Mirsky and Hoffmann, the type of names that made him claustrophobic, Yudkevitz. Dentists, osteopaths. Accountants, of course.

  And then the Psycholog, a professional with hips.

  She wanted to know about his family—what they’d told him about this visit and how they’d told him and how that made him feel.

  He said nothing, or not much. Which, she said, was a hallmark of adjustment troubles—transitions to civilian life were rarely smooth.

  But Uri returned the next Sunday and gradually, he opened: he mentioned Batya, his father and the roofing job, his mother and the Prison Service job, the Baba Batra.

  The Psycholog wanted to know what that renowned rabbi, so beloved of orphans and recovering addicts, had told him, so Uri told her.

  “And you agree with him,” the Psycholog said, “that the fight never ends?”

  “It does end,” Uri said, “but only with death.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “I did.”

  “Do you think about death?”

  “Whatever I say, you’ll think I’m threatening suicide.”

  “Are you?”

  “And anyway who knows what happens after we die? Not me or you. Not even the religious have a concept. We Jews—do you know this, that we Jews have the only major world religion that tells its people what to eat and when and where to pray and even how to fuck, but nothing at all about what it’ll be like after God rolls the credits?”

  “Didn’t your rabbi tell you that Judaism believes in the coming of the messiah?”

  “And we’ll all be resurrected—that’s what you believe? But what happens between, in all that time between death and resurrection? Do we get to keep our phones? Will there be service—a signal?”

  “And what about Jews who don’t have phones—what will they do?”

  “What Jews don’t have phones? Anyway, I’m not here to debate religion with you.”

  The Psycholog smiled gnarly incisors. “You’re not here to debate religion, OK—so tell me what you’re here for.”

  He was about to say: for your thighs. Instead he said, “For my sisters and because the rabbi didn’t cure me.”

  The Psycholog adjusted her skirt. “That’s it?”

  “And the dreaming.”

  The Psycholog’s face took on that late in the session distance like she was scouting over his head to the land beyond the clock. “You can never choose your dreams or your family, but you can choose how you react to them.”

  “Fine, sure.”

  “And yet you don’t react, at least you don’t so that anyone notices, having been conditioned to internalize all the frustration and aggression. You punish yourself for letting yourself be punished by others.”

  “OK.”

  “Tell me, then, how can you expect to benefit from this consultation, or even from a session of blessings from a criminal rabbi, if you’ve been pressured to go—or not just pressured but nearly physically compelled? No one before has ever given you the choice of what to do, but now it’s time to give yourself that choice and you’re flailing and I wonder why—I wonder how that feels to you?”

  “Cool.”

  “Whose father—yours? What about him?”

  “I said cool.”

  “No—no—don’t censor yourself. You were about to say something about your father.”

  “Whatever.”

  But then analysis can only be described in the language in which it’s conducted, because psychology is language, and sababa is “cool” and aba is “father.”

  Uri unfolded his arms from his chest and picked at the laminate curled loose from the tissuebox table.

  The Psycholog sighed and said, “Let’s propose for a moment that I’m mistaken and you said cool—then what? Aren’t you just capitulating? Being obedient? Compliant? Because the bonds of family were never severed but merely transferred to the army, postponing maturation so that even now you don’t know your own emotions? You don’t know if you’re capable of living autonomously? So let’s propose instead, just as an experiment, that regardless of what you meant or intended to mean you unequivocally said father—how to treat that? Wouldn’t it be logical that in a house like yours, so full with women—your manipulative sisters who sent you to me and your mother who sent you to that fraud kabbalist who extends refuge to child molesters and condones domestic abuse—wouldn’t it be logical that in a house like that, your father would be your most natural ally, your most natural model? But then maybe he’s weak too? Maybe he never showed you how to stand up and take back what’s yours?”

  Aba, sababa, the Baba Batra: Uri stood, but everything he might’ve said curdled in his mouth unpronounceable.

  He put a tissue to his face and spit.

  Their time was up, and that was their final time: this second session. Uri never went to the office again, he just called once and left a voicemail to say that he’d found someone closer, though he also said that this someone was cheaper too and then, irked by his own remark, closed by thanking the Psycholog gratuitously as if politeness would preclude her from phoning his sisters to
check up.

  He felt low—this was the worst of him. To be hiding out like this, to be slinking out of the house keeping secrets from his secrets. Sitting in a field. Like a wanking mystic. Lying on a blanket in a field like he used to do with Batya. Except now without Batya, who he was betting would follow the example of Michal Tash and Liat Stalbet, one who just got engaged to her middleaged boss at Bezeq, the other who went out to the Bay Area of California and got herself knocked up, not just by a goy but by a Turk. All according to Uri’s sisters. A bitch, a cunt, pretentious. Batya and her clique, not Uri’s sisters—who were generous and kind, willing to sacrifice anything for control of him.

  They kept slipping him their money and because Uri couldn’t stop them, he could only justify himself, he kept up the ruse: having never mentioned that he’d quit the Psycholog, he still honored his appointments.

  He left the house with Yarden, the youngest, and waited for her to take her sherut and only then took his and rode it until his returning would seem plausible or later—he’d stay out at the movies or just outside in the weather, when it wasn’t too hot, when the duplicity overpowered. It appalled him, to be pocketing his sisters’ money—maybe not Yarden’s contribution, because it came from his parents anyway, from the tuition allotment they still gave her, and maybe not Orly’s, the middle sister’s, either, because it’d been carnally embezzled from Ben Sassoon, the accountant, whom her parents were nagging her to marry—rather it was Amit’s, the eldest’s, whose dull coins clinked against the heart, as they’d been made straightening frizzy curls for weddings, depilating, buffing, dyeing brides.

  Uri had become a man who lived off women, off familywomen, and was petrified of his father.

  Why did he stop attending these Psycholog sessions? Why didn’t he tell his sisters he’d stopped? Why couldn’t he? And why was it that he felt the need to mention to his father—who hadn’t asked anything about how Uri had been spending his time—that he, Uri, had gone to work for a Kurdish mechanic at a Paz station near Beit Kama?

  These are all questions he might want to ask should his consultations ever resume.