Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  His one consolation was that his tradecraft was consistent—it was consistently excellent. He never missed the chance to miss a session even on days when nobody was home to notice whether he left when he was supposed to.

  It wasn’t that he was concerned about Mrs. Shavit, the widow nextdoor, who could be as nosy at the window as she was regular in naps. Neither was he concerned about his sisters, whose curiosity about their therapeutic investment could be satisfied by his usual mutterings or, lately, by an unusually imperious appeal to the policy of doctor/patient confidentiality he’d gleaned from a book he’d shoplifted from the mall’s Steimatzky.

  Instead, he just worried about himself—about maintaining discipline. About not letting down Mr. Gil and Mr. Yitz, the sherut drivers who split the Netivot route and expected him weekly—roundtrip cost 20 shekels.

  The sherut was a 1996 Mercedes Benz Sprinter City and on any given day there’d be, Uri would make report to himself, about six or seven other passengers: always the earbuds and eyedrops girl and then occasionally this other adolescent Haredi girl who waited for the newest paved sections of road to slather on her unguents and extirpate her pimples.

  Once the sherut had broken down, one Sunday, and Mr. Gil had requested help, because Mr. Yitz had told him Uri was a mechanic. Uri didn’t remember having told Mr. Yitz that, but found himself clamping down on a deltoid and forced to clarify: he was still just an apprentice mechanic.

  Everything in the desert became like the desert—everything dusted a caffeine brown spread by tiretread into blackness until all the signs and radomes and satellite dishes and even the roads and their barriers appeared indigenous. And in Beersheva and Kiryat Gat all the bars had seemed like real bars, but they were shit. And in Netivot the poolhall had seemed like it had a real bar too, but it was shit, and the hash there was too cheap to be hash but still, for him, too expensive and made his head feel as if it were full up with clearcolored gummiworms. But this route’s only other options were Sderot, which wasn’t really a city, and the moshavim and kibbutzim, which weren’t really anything or even trying.

  Everything in this country was trying to pass for what it wasn’t. Everything was camouflaged in this desert of a country.

  The sherut was stifling—the AC was busted and Uri had substances in his blood. Also he’d be coming back too early. And there were boulders. He’d forgotten how happy boulders made him. How happy he’d be if he got off, clambered up them, caressed them, and then thumbed it the rest of the way. On the 25, the highway.

  He leaned toward the driver’s seat and tapped Mr. Yitz and requested a stop and Mr. Yitz nodded into the rearview mirror, “Achi, gever, relax, you paid me to take you to Nika,” so Uri yelled, “I’m asking you to stop,” and Mr. Yitz said, “And I’m asking you to stay seated, you’re freaking out the passengers,” but the only other passenger was this Bedouin who’d been scrolling women on his phone and who now stayed motionless and averted, doing a convincing imitation of an unattended bag.

  Uri kept yelling until Mr. Yitz said, “Nu, b’seder, be crazy,” though still he drove on but slower, slumping the sherut toward the shoulder’s sand, as if he found the prospect of dropping a passenger alone in the flattened wastes distasteful, or not just that, but inevitable and distasteful, and the way he strained his head over the wheel and twitched between the windows communicated his disappointment if not with Uri or himself, then with their nation, which wasn’t providing even the slightest hint of a civilization deserving of his brakes: just a stretch of fencing and the stalks of sprinklerheads sprouted around a single transplant cedar.

  Uri jumped out at some industrial park and the sherut limped away like a fox lamed in a fight and stunned by daylight.

  This was a smidge after the Ha’Nasi junction and the time according to the sun was 16:00 something.

  Which meant that Binyamin would just be rousting a stewardess out of his bed before scootering to Port Metro Vancouver. Avi would be sipping a coffee, or sitting to squeeze out a coffee shit, or just stuck in fucking traffic again because he had to bring this buxom snubnosed HVAC salesrep home on his way to the appliance showroom at the Plaza Carso Polanco. Yaniv, he’d be rolling up his sleepingbag like a Viennese pastry, the kind whorled with chocolate or currant jam. As for Moti and Dani, they’d be on a train to Buchenwald or Dachau, but for a tour—which meant they’d be drunk too or just hungover already.

  And Yoav—he was running the family business. He’d inherited it. He was halfway to being a millionaire by now. But only halfway—and he needed Uri, according to Uri, to carry him like a pack up to the peak of the cliff and show him how to spend what was below them.

  That same blue Kia that’d passed him once already was approaching again in the opposite direction. Must’ve been turned around. Didn’t want to go to the Bedouin town. What a sad notion, a Bedouin town. Uri felt it in his spine, that sensation of being an obstruction. He searched the landscape for weapons, that’s how he was trained, to search around whatever surroundings for anything to weaponize. In the poolhall, he might’ve gone for a poolcue and swung it. In the bars there’d been steins to smash and the cash register would’ve been hard enough to crack any jaws he bashed against it. But here, nothing like that was available here. There was just a stunted tamarisk to uproot and wield. A grass clod to fling in the face. Sand to kick in desperation. The desert was its own defense. It would just let the car keep driving and driving for dunams, offering up nothing of its own to hit—just him.

  The Kia, in that kabbalist blue, the blue that wards off evil, veered onto the shoulder, straight at him. Uri stepped toward the guardrail and the Kia swerved sidelong, skidded long, throwing up a nimbus of dust that concealed both leftside doors opening and the guys who leapt out.

  Uri came to in the trunk.

  Though later he’d maintain that he’d never tapped out or if he had then it hadn’t been from being tackled but from the trunk lid banging his scalp.

  He’d known immediately what’d happened and he’d even claim that he’d known by the traffic alone—by the ambient honking and neon in through the seams—that he was being driven through Tel Aviv.

  He was already laughing about it by evening but had too much dignity to ask how many times Eitan and Oded had tailed him.

  As for calling his family, he’d call his family himself.

  He slept with his squadmates on mats on the floor of some studio that was otherwise furnitureless because it was a krav maga studio and though they weren’t supposed to be living there the owner was benevolent or just a moron.

  The owner of Adam Greenberg Judo, Aikido, & Krav Maga was Adam Greenberg—Kivsa Brigade, Akavish Battalion, Tziraah Company, but class of 2008: too old for First Gaza, too young for Second Lebanon.

  Eitan taught at the studio four sessions a day and unloaded boxes at night, produce for the shuk Ha’Carmel and the market on Levinsky, dairy for a dozen or so AM:PMs. Oded taught two night sessions and spent the day doing data entry for Keter Plastic. Between jobs they made plans to launch their own studio. Which entailed a physical studio with equipment and a website. But before that, before they could even reckon a budget, they had to hone their method. They’d been developing their own martial art but had no guiding ideology, though by the time they explained this to Uri they’d become so stymied by the struggle to define one that they were ready to accept that a martial art shouldn’t have a guiding ideology—because all an ideology did was limit options—violence was what happened after ideology failed.

  Uri, meanwhile, found the address of the offices of Appikoros, Inc. He asked for Batya Neder and was told she’d moved to Brussels. Which he was told was in Belgium, which he resented. He asked for her manager or the man who’d managed to lay her and the receptionist summoned a man who Uri knew wasn’t him, he knew was a guard, who was old and fat and had the posture of someone who’d sat protractedly in tanks. Uri punched him in the face and walked back to the studio. The walk took all night because of the bars and in the
morning he was vomiting green gin all over the grating. Greenberg tossed everyone out. Eitan threatened to quit. Oded talked to Greenberg, who in a crisis of sniveling admitted that the decision wasn’t his, the studio wasn’t even his, it was his mother’s, at least it was her name on the lease. Eitan and Oded went to talk to the mother, who let them stay but charged them rent, though she refused to take in Uri too and gave him just a week to make alternate arrangements. As a Slav, she had no tolerance for darker skin and for anyone who had no tolerance for alcohol. Uri still had about 1,200 shekels of sisterly Psycholog money. Eitan contacted their squadmates, Oded set up a crowdfunding account. Another 3,634 shekels would turn their problem into Yoav’s problem. What hadn’t quite been a kidnapping demanded what wasn’t quite a ransom: if the squad didn’t pay up, Uri would have to go home.

  LET MY PEOPLE STAY

  —sign on a house facing foreclosure, Wakefield, Bronx, NY, Christmas 2012

  WINTER knocks once, and then knocks the door down, unrolls its white prayer rug over everything. Winter, that once a year prayer. You’ve got to be ready for it—start weeks early, start months early—unless you try to escape by getting yourself bussed down to Florida, in which case, best of luck. But if you intend to stay, to dig in and fight it, you’re going to have to be prepared, with sufficient guts and wood to burn: the branches before the fenceposts, the fenceposts before the furniture. Come the solstice, which is life’s shortest day, you’re going to want to make your fire: your first fire, it won’t be your last. Get a bucket of snow, warm it up into water, wash and dry yourself thoroughly, get your clothes together into layers from tightest to loosest, pronouncing the Shahada throughout to set your mind—to show all that whiteness outside the true meaning of purity: there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger…

  If ever you needed evidence, if ever you needed definitive proof that white is evil and black is natural and good, just remember outerspace, and how outerspace is black, the universe is black, and black is peace because it’s the absence of color. And then recall that winter is white and hopelessly cold and so many brothers are dying…

  His name was Imamu Nabi, and this was what he believed.

  Imamu Nabi wasn’t his legal name but fuck legal.

  He was a man of many beliefs and of frustrations that’d hardened into hatreds. He hated the US Department of Veterans Affairs for its incompetence at delivering his essential services and the US Postal Service for its competence at delivering his inessential mail. His bills and postdues. His collection agency and debt consolidation correspondence. He hated the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and how the midget culero from the Malopolskie Bakery sometimes tied up live rats into the bags of stale bread he tossed to the curb. He hated the Lincoln Savings Bank, later acquired by Anchor Bancorp, which in a merger became Dime Bancorp, later acquired by Washington Mutual, which in its failure amid the general failure that was the Great Recession of Anno Hegirae 1428–1430 was seized, placed in receivership, and reassetized to JPMorgan Chase, which was the entity that now held the note on his home. And so it wasn’t his anymore, it wasn’t a home anymore. It was theirs, just a house.

  And he especially hated how when the snow got sooty, when it got all tinted with the car pollutions, the whitefolks said and even the blackfolks said, that snow be dirty, yo. Because the snow wasn’t dirty. The folks be wrong, yo, and that might’ve been the only thing all the folks have ever had in common, their wrongness. Because that midday exhaust coloration, the CO2 emissions melanization of the snow, was just the city trying to melt the day away for the children to get to school.

  He was born Avery Luter in spring in Texarkana, the Arkansas side. His father, who’d served as a janitor in the fight against Hitler, had returned, fathered him and, wrongplaced, wrongtimed, was arrested for riding in the same car as the gate attendant and the stolen gate strongbox of a traveling circus rodeo. He was convicted of one count of armed robbery, two counts of assault, and sent to pick cotton on a prison farm in Texas. Avery’s mother took her son, aged two months, to Harlem to live with her uncle and aunt, who’d procured her a position as typist in the office of a haircare products manufacturer (relaxants, straighteners, wave tonics), which gave bonuses to employees whose children made high grades. Avery made high grades and avoided trouble. His subjects were Citizenship, Geometry, Biology, and Choo Choo Coleman of the New York Metropolitans. He once had his hand shook by Mayor Wagner.

  He was an indoor child of three strict Christian parents (none of whom mentioned the parent jailed), the family was an indoor family.

  A year after he turned 18, he rolled a 4 in the Vietnam draft, and you did what your country told you, even if your country told you Chu Lai. Americal Division, Alpha Company, 1st of the 96th. He was a machinegunner, shot foliage, lizards, gooks. For trying to shoot him, for making the rain, making the heat, taking his zzz’s away. Everything the fault of the gook. Gun fails to chamber or cock, fucking gooks. Too rainy, so the chopper can’t land, not enough heat tabs so you’re just chowing on raw rabbit, blame the gooks. His CO was a gook, all America was. America that sent him from the back of the bus to the front lines, to die. America its own enemy, which needed the brothers to beat the gooks, but also wanted the gooks to get rid of the brothers so America didn’t have to.

  Boots and feet the same leather, scragged up, skin peeling back to gook yellow, gook white. Punji wounds, scorching dragonchasing dragonlady fevers. For which he sought the succor of Christ, Who madeth his enemies fall in green paddies and shepherded him atop Hill 411—where his platoon was pinned, where the howitzers devoured half his platoon, leaving the other half for the poppy and poon. His nicknames were Bible, Brillo Head, Iggernay, and Tarbaby, his rank upon discharge was Specialist 4.

  Back Stateside he alternated stints as a busboy and later a waiter with periods of unemployment and boozing. Then he’d go broke, his mother wouldn’t let him borrow, and he’d get that conscience again, get clean. He enrolled in but never completed the Borough of Manhattan Community College. He got a Japanese classmate pregnant, paid for the girl’s abortion, read books.

  Two friends died, one definitely a suicide: from a deuce or trey of adulterated Schmeck, Manthrax speedballed. Another got hit by an ambulance and even that had to do with Vietnam. Some friends who survived became Panthers, others were cats always changing their spots. Getting into Rasta, into Black Hebraism, Nation of Islam. Blacks were created before the sun and stars, their dark forms dug out from the void. The moon used to be part of the earth until the imams invented dynamite and blew it skyward. Avery didn’t embrace or even judge the tenets, he just liked their refusals, their rage. He himself would frequently slag on the Hymies—the Jewdog usurers, the Zionist pawnbrokers, the overcharging underpaying predatory loaning don’t patch no leaky ceiling kikes—but then he got along and once even got a reuben sandwich with his BMCC American History instructor, Professor Jacob C. Friedman, and liked his boss, Yossi, at Loco Joe BBQ, just fine.

  He never told them, never even told his mother, he converted—took the Shahada, and another name too: Imamu Nabi.

  Officially, though, he was still Avery Luter. He never bothered with the paperwork, never had the patience or trust for it.

  In 1978 he landed a job with the Port Authority as a toll collector.

  It was a decent job or was thought to be because it was difficult to get, you had to be connected. Imamu’s connection was his mother’s man, who was a PA payroll supervisor.

  The expectation of gratitude embittered Imamu, as did his assignment to the tunnels, never the bridges: he thought he was being denied fresh air because of his race. Hours and hours standing hurt in his stockingfeet making change, the Holland nastier than the Lincoln. Still, he had to admit the job improved things: he now owned a waterbed, a Marantz stereo, and an Adire tiedye that partitioned the kitchen from the rest of his pad, corner of 185th & How Do You Like Them Apples Boulevard.

  He also, a line at a time, was able to read in
the booth, books from the library that complicated his certainties and realigned his faith. White and black was just a battle, he realized, even Vietnam had been just a battle, in the Armageddon war between chattel capitalism and the precariat. Money was the god of the mosques, where the honorable ministers tapdanced for tithes like Carolina Baptists who’d just moved north and clipped on bowties. None of them had done the hajj or even marched on Washington. He tried other mosques in abutting hoods but they all just skewed too beardy. With real Arabs from real Arabia. Clannish, zealous, katam and henna. He was brought back to the church tragically and so only temporarily in 1996, when his mother stroked out and died and, given her minimal savings and that her man, who was never her husband, was now living with dementia with his own children in Maryland, the funeral expenses were his. He buried her and, having inherited her house, took out a second mortgage.

  The house was massive and stately but in Ornan Fields—way out in the outerboroughs, threshed and harrowed. Imamu was going to sell and then he wasn’t. No one was buying. Because of the mortgages and projects. The stabbings, shootings, arsons. He taught himself plumbing and electric, he learned how to install a stove.

  In 2001 he was finally reassigned to the George Washington Bridge and immediately robbed—not injured, just robbed. He found himself under suspicion to the point that he suspected himself: he’d been begging for the transfer and then, the moment the transfer was granted, this white Camaro comes cruising in low and erratic and this high sureño punk put a gun to his head, he didn’t know what type of gun but he knew sureño and white Camaro. The faces the PA detectives kept showing him were black. He was having headaches and vein issues. He kept switching between the compression socks and the diabetic socks until he wore them both and had become allergic to the gloves that kept the filth of money from his hands. The PA detectives were curious about his myriad names and his being a Muslim. His booth’s prayer calendar got defaced and his radio taken. He filed a complaint against the swingshift and found himself reassigned again to the Outerbridge Crossing—the furthest assignment he could get.