by Joshua Cohen
His days were spent commuting and in Midtown bouts of trying to identify faces that couldn’t exist and cars and guns he was hallucinating: a guy as black as him with his old corroded bolt M60 behind the wheel of a 2888 Chevy Sureño.
His hood: the Blooded and Cripped, having divided the turf, rode the DMZ between the Garveys and Wentworth Arthur Matthew. The Baby A’s had the front of the Hattusa Houses, the EEU crew had the back, and in the middle was a territorial dispute, both sides of which were being governed from Rikers.
The Brimless Boys slung their zips below the scaffold of the Ammon Air Rights Rehab, across from PS 613, and even across from the masjid, between which was the lone bodega equipped to sell him, if he had the cash to buy, his minty Cope dips, and all the three ingredients of Robitussin Wine, the third ingredient being the pineapple Jolly Ranchers. The pills the doctor prescribed for his vein pain were stronger than any opiate he remembered—so strong they got him fired after he nodded on the job.
He was already six months behind on his monthlies, envelopes lay scattered on the porch. Which gave the impression that his house was abandoned, his house was unmanned. Kids would be fixing to burgle. Kids just trying to find a place to get crunked, a place to strip of copper.
He sat in noddy vigil over his mother’s bequest. His mother’s furniture. Armoires, breakfronts, credenzas, stuff that wasn’t made anymore. Legs like of beasts, arms swathed in lace.
If he left, because he had to leave, he just went to the Key Food and the library, not the one by the projects that didn’t have any computers or the one by the autobodies with just a row of so slow they might as well have been unplugged computers, but the J to the Sixth Avenue Line to the Main Manhattan, that library temple of studiers so mindfully wise they didn’t always keep track of their backpacks, serious soap and paper replenishment action in the bathrooms, shelves of probate property records, and a whole entire room of genealogy like a grove of familytrees.
Default: failure to fulfill an obligation—automatic reversion to a predetermined option. Foreclose: to deprive—to shut out, exclude, bar—to prevent—to establish an exclusive claim to—to close, settle, answer beforehand.
A brother from the masjid was a lawyer, but an immigration lawyer from Pakistan, who gave him a number to call and Imamu called and the party rang him back but gave no advice, just made an offer on the property, plug nickels on the dollar.
The Pakistani lawyer followed up but by then he was already buying himself free of pain on the street, because his COBRA insurance had lapsed, and Verizon had terminated his phoneservice.
After he flunked a drugtest his union rep was through with him. No appeal.
He’d told the Baby A’s he wanted more of the same—he’d wanted more oxy. But they’d offered rocks, a zip for free. He repeated himself like a child to a child. Other crews offered h. He repeated himself into mumbling, just wandering the leafblown pedways mumbling, the only child who wasn’t armed.
He left the house once a day, stayed out all day to avoid being served, and returned by night to kick the envelopes from off the porch. He returned, once, to find the door padlocked and papered with petition.
Notice of Eviction—winter was hereby proclaimed.
Imamu felt the inadequacy of having missed something—like how you feel if you’re religious and missed some prayer. The time for its pronouncement just crept up on you and now all you can do is await the retribution.
Christmas. Red and green, the colors of traffic, became the colors of the season. Snow fell in dustings, a blanket. He needed a blanket. His shoes were crap. He went out to shop, to spend what he had left: his senses.
Outside the Key Food was a market of Christmas trees and each day until the sixth business day he dragged trees home with him—dragging them after him like tightly furled umbrellas through a basement window he’d shattered. The culeros paid to guard the artificial forests would be in their foldingchairs asleep.
He’d go for the smaller trees, which dried quicker.
The hearth he’d renovated himself. He’d put in the flue, he’d once scooped a dead possum out of the chimney.
He’d also stolen a hatchet out from under the noses of the sleeping culeros and wore it in his waistband like an Indian. He was sure he had that heritage in him or recalled his mother saying he did or else just thought he recalled her saying that and that’s what saddened him the most about not being able to talk to his mother anymore and never having known his father, that he wasn’t able to do anything more than just wish himself a Comanche, Caddo, or Shango. Talk about garnishment, talk about repossession. Any tree just growing out on the curb unclaimed, its ownership reverted to whoever had the hatchet and the largest shiniest set of ornamental balls. The house was drowned in pine. He sat by the hearth and chopped the stolen pine and warmed himself by chopping and then spread out beside the grated flames atop a floor of needles.
Kwanzaa, which began the day after Christmas, ended on New Year’s Day. The first night’s theme was Umoja, meaning Unity: to strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, country, and race.
The last night was Imani, meaning faith.
He was being told how to pick stuff up and move it. Not with the back, with the knees. He was being told how to move stuff and put it down. How to hold it. How to position it. Uri, put it down. In the direction of use, open side up. Detailed instructions on how to deal with a cup. A cup was not a mug was not a glass, which, however, might be made out of glass. A plate was a dish not as deep as a bowl. Escalera, carretilla, vámonos coño. It was like being a grunt again, taking orders from shechorim, kushim.
Your-ee, they said. Only the Mexicanim said it his way, Or-ee.
He wasn’t very good at it, Uri: neither the moving, nor the language. He was too impatient to be good. Anything that was said to him had to be said through Yoav. Anything he said in response would have to be transmitted the same in reverse. But something would happen to the words en route. They’d depart someone’s mouth in English or his own mouth in Hebrew only to arrive way off in the target language like a casualty, hemorrhaging significance and finally expiring amid the interference and crosstalk.
Yoav refused to put into Hebrew the crew’s cursing at Uri and to put into English Uri’s cursing at him—Yoav was the only one to take the blame in the original.
Yoav was the only one to understand what Uri was up to: he was trying to justify, he was trying to earn, the demotion he perceived.
Uri had always had seniority. He’d been the active one, the valiant one, fluent at everything physical, while Yoav had always been the fretting junior, inattentive, blanching. But here in the States all that had changed and Uri wasn’t quite able to concede. All his commands were going unobeyed because untranslated, and all his efforts to correct Yoav, like he’d always corrected Yoav, felt like desperate vestiges of days with higher stakes.
Which just made him work harder, which just made things break.
Moving was requiring all his strength along with a strangely sparing delicacy and so it contained a contradiction. In that way, Uri thought, it was like handling a woman—it was like handling Batya, the only other task at which he’d failed.
They were moving an office: nondescript, gray. It was a high floor all of windows and Uri sat in a revolving chair he was supposed to be packing at a desk he was supposed to be packing too and together they were turning into a Lockheed C130 soaring in splendor through the grayness and he was a paratrooper about to be airdropped atop the enemy theater of Jersey City just below, and then Paul Gall was calling his name—and Uri leapt, but leapt up, and stood in humiliation at having had his fantasy observed, and then he took hold of the chair and rolled it into the hall, toward Yoav at the elevators.
He rolled it at Yoav, but the carpeting was so thick that the chair made it only part of the way, then tipped.
Uri went up to a Midtown middlefloor office divvied up by collapsible cubicles and he pushed them over, he pushed them one by one, unt
il the floor was a pile of walls.
He assembled pyramids out of modular filingunits scuffed and dinged and had Yoav propel him atop a dolly into them, and his body rebounded off them, ricocheted between them, until they knocked him down.
Boxes—they’d come flat and Uri would fold them together, flap over flap, but then he’d forget to seal them, so the flaps wouldn’t hold, the flaps would give way, and Tom Gall would reprimand Yoav and then Yoav would reprimand Uri, who’d revenge himself by binding the next box with nearly a complete roll of tape as if he were unrolling around it a cloying length of his own innards and then he’d sever the length with his teeth.
When he’d throw a box to Tinks, say, or to anyone else on the crew, he’d have to say something in English, something like “Head up” or “Heads,” but when he’d throw to Yoav, it was Hebrew: squared off, heavy, packed.
“What’re we eating tonight?” “Where can I get a jacket for winter?” “Where’s that bar your girl cousin works at?” “Think she’ll ever let me tap that pussy?”
“I’m making hamin.” “Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s.” “Not Manhattan.” “No.”
Once, in the atrium of a skyscraper, Uri took a great glass globe off a pillar and threw it to Yoav, and the instant it was out of his hands, he just forgot—it was like he’d thrown away all memory of what he was throwing and whom he was throwing it to and which language to speak and what words.
Yoav was looking away—he was expecting Uri to carry it to him, not expecting him to throw it. But the globe arced across the atrium like a dazzling transparent bomb, and the motion caught the corner of his eye, so Yoav turned and grasped for it, and the glass slipped through his outstretched hands and burst atop the marble floor like an alien word into noise and millions of baffling glyphic filaments.
Tom was yelling hoarse. Yoav, holding his head, said it was his fault. This time, Uri didn’t correct him. Everything was his fault, because Uri hadn’t changed.
Yoav took the broom and swept. Uri went to wrap the empty pillar.
He was acting like a homo now, Yoav, with all his cleaning and cooking and dressing in khakis and plaids that though they fit too tight he wore them when they went out and even when they stayed home to ice their arms and he’d put on movies in English that were so old they weren’t set in color and if Uri clicked the TV to a better channel he’d escape upstairs with his computer. Yoav was reading a lot and had stopped, Uri was taken aback by this the most, eating meat. At least he wouldn’t eat it more than once or twice or three times a week. He’d gotten new shell glasses and new round earring studs and the ears around them festered red because in the piercing they’d been infected and the infection was only now going down.
Lately, Uri had noticed that Yoav was going to bed or just into his bedroom unsociably early, claiming spasms and pangs and pretending to sleep, switching off the overhead bulb but switching on a flashlight—like they used to do in the army after curfew. The nights when all the squad would masturbate. Or when they’d pretend to masturbate, so as to be left alone with their phone solitaire and farts. Each barrack bunk creaking to its own affinity, soldiers just shadows within lambent wombs of blanket.
Uri would creep upstairs and crouch by the door and watch Yoav’s flashlight beam glide past the draft and listen to the gargling he wasn’t able to put into meaning, though he was sure the same lines were being repeated but hushed—it was either a script or a psalm.
Once, after the flashlight went off and the dark was unspoken, he’d prowled over from his child’s bedroom nextdoor and popped the knob and stood hovering over his friend’s slumbering face, smeared with fleecy creams. He took his friend’s glasses off the nightstand and tried them on and found the lenses clear and without prescription. In his friend’s money drawer, there wasn’t much money, just hairgels and a deodorant but not antiperspirant stick that Uri sniffed and rubbed into his pits and replaced among the clipped receipts and MTA maps and Playbills and a black & white stack of promotional photographs of some guy—some spiked stubbled guy cupping his chin and smiling and then again not cupping his chin and not smiling and weirdly it was only in the photos that had glasses and earrings that Uri recognized Yoav and he tacked the glossies up all around the house, even in the fridge and freezer.
That was how they filled their days off. They went to a bar that Yoav said Tammy was working at, but she wasn’t there and when it came time for them to pay the drinks weren’t free or even cheaper. Anyway, Uri did most of the drinking. Then they went to another bar, where a girl greeted them by saying, “You’ll get what you were promised, Ahmed, but first I want my uranium.”
Yoav, who had to be Ahmed again, had to strain for his lines: “One thing you Americans,” and then again, “One thing you Americans,” and she said, “Will never understand,” and he said, “One thing you Americans will never understand is that we live here.”
“You call this living?” she said.
He said, “For you, Madam Secretary, Baghdad is just a parttime job.”
She singed an orange peel and floated it to finish the tumbler she handed to Uri, “Sec. Re. Tar. Y. And it’s parttime job, not parrhtimeyob. You need to articulate.”
He said, “Parrhtimeyob.”
She said to Uri, “Dumbest script I ever read in my life.”
She took them to the party of another friend from their acting class who didn’t appreciate Uri draining most of the handle of Overholt she’d been saving for the eggnog.
Nobody at the party had hash or even a clue how to get hash but that was compensated for by the pot, whose nugs resembled unripened cocoons and weren’t to be smoked but vaped until Uri’s brain flew out of his mouth all wet and winged and gooey and purpurogenous. He streaked around the deck trying to catch it. But it squeezed through his fists and inside and down the hall into a bedroom under the bed, squeaking. A blond elf followed and crawled down beside him under the bed and tried to catch it too but the roommate friend whose room this was came strutting in dramatizing her drowsiness and the blond elf wriggled away and pulled herself up, pulled Uri up and said, “Where did your brain fly to next?”
Uri burped.
So she tried again, “Where do you live?”
“New York.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Queens?”
“Too bad, too far, your brain might be lost.”
New Year’s Eve, which is just another night for Israelis, they went to meet the blond elf at a Manhattan club and lined between roped poles in the cold only to be turned away by a neckless black doorguy who didn’t have their names, which he didn’t even have them try spelling for him, listed on his tablet. Uri wouldn’t accept that and was getting offended by Yoav’s inability or just unwillingness to explain his nonacceptance. He was drunk a little and high a little too. He had to get inside, he had to dance in the warmth, not just outside to get warm. He had to go to the bathroom. The doorguy was ignoring Uri to talk into his wrist. Uri picked the wireless bud from out of his ear, like he wanted to hear the plan for himself. He wanted to hear the voice of God. Instead, he just got a bouncer striding toward him, “Sir, excuse me, sir?” while tugging a baton out from under his trench. “Can you please just step to the side?” Uri aped the accent and stepped, but sprung and took the bouncer out at the knees. Down on the sidewalk, he snatched the baton away and swung it for a perimeter while inflicting a litany of Hebrew insult: “I put my dick on your list, I put my dick on your line, I put my dick on your club, I put my dick on you”—“to put your dick on something” meaning “to not give a fuck about something.”
The doorguy was going for help but Yoav cut in behind and gripped his camelhair coat and flipped it over his head, leaving him hooded and lurching witless and dropping his tablet to crack and glow, alongside the bouncer flat on the sidewalk who’d stopped returning the Hebrew profanities and was now just laughing in gasps.
His name was Arik, he was from Rishon L’Tzion and it turned out that he’d served in the tank
corps with Shlomo’s—their squad’s Shlomo’s—brother. “The older brother?” “The younger.” “Which unit?” “Saar, Seventh Division.”
And that was that, with apologies to the doorguy.
The club was good because the pills Tinks had provided were good. Uri took a whole while Yoav, pretending to wholeness, bit his halved, which Uri noticed and he reached into Yoav’s mouth and plucked the half out and swallowed that too. They paced the simulated combat conditions on a hunt for elfin blondes. Uri went to the bathroom. It was so hard in this city to know who was homo. Another hard thing was knowing how to dress. When he was done, Yoav wasn’t where he’d left him. Uri’s best dance moves were Running Robot, STrance, Na Nach, and Manic Absorption. Then Yoav was behind him doing spastic calisthenics and then Arik was too and then this other Israeli named Zeev, an artillerist from Arad who’d flown drones in the army and now worked the club’s lighting and sound. They brought Uri and Yoav out to the fireescape for the fireworks and stood in rapture as the sky burned. After the club closed they went to a bar that stayed open for bartenders and DJs. Uri was wearing a shearling he’d thieved from off a banquette. They went to a diner and Yoav got a waitress to charge his phone. The way Uri was ordering they could never go home. Zeev had a Crown Vic the color of skim milk filled with cereal marshmallow clovers and rainbows and plastic dinosaur toys and Yoav and Uri sat on either side of the child’s carseat and were driven out over the river as far as Zeev could go before being inconvenienced, Broadway Junction.
The sun was already peaking as they descended underground. To the blue circle A train, bearing down with its evil eye headlight. Yoav sat but Uri liked standing, touching nothing but himself. No stripperpoles, no monkeybars, no seats. He liked, when the train stopped, when it screeched and stopped abruptly, trying to maintain his balance. It was like trying to surf on the back of a vomiting blue dolphin. The walls of the tunnel felt like the walls of the train felt like his skin—everything, all together, was in motion.