by Joshua Cohen
He settled the jug down below the van’s tank and reached for the nozzle.
The attendant burst from the booth waving an orangemawed shovel. “You trying to siphon me, mister fucker?”
Imamu said, “Me?”
“You come by again mister fucker I call the cops.”
He backed away and at the closed BP station down the block, he hacked off a section of pressurized airhose.
He’d have to do this on the street, north-south streets numbered through the Conduits, narrower and with just the crescents of their corners lit by moon. He put the tomahawk to a vehicle’s tank and busted its hatch. He loosened the cap and plumbed the hose on inside and stuffed a bootrag around it. The other end of the hose went between his chapped lips and he sucked. The vehicle was an old model Voyager. His lungs were old model lungs. He sucked until he tasted that sizzle, that tingle of gums contracting, teeth left to tumble from out of the skull. With a minimum of spillage he transferred the hose to the jug and stood above the trickle of bilious green.
Back on his block, Imamu doused the dumpster and poured a strip to the sidewalk and up the walkway onto the stairs. He wasn’t worried about the porch planks creaking, he wasn’t worried about being detected. With all the noise, the shaking. The house was being shaken apart from inside.
Then Imamu went down the lane again, doused the tractortrailer and tomahawked its tires. He poured a last viscid portion to the blade, struck a match, and set the sharpness blazing. He touched the blade to the truck, which flared, and touched the porch and incited the stairs and then tossed the tomahawk atop the dumpster. And ran. That had always been his plan, the running, but now it was also his instinct. He skidded at midstreet, heaved himself up with blood warm in his mouth and hobbled away into the white bare bushery and through a gap between slats in the construction site hoarding and turned and lay facing the street.
A crane’s boom crossed shadelessly over him. Behind him was a cementmixer. Behind him were girders. A pit.
A smoldering rat slithered up from the roiled guts of the dumpster and leapt from its ledge, landed on the street as if stunned and tailchasingly flipped over and over—like it was rolling around trying to snuff its fur—until it righted itself and stayed righted and scurried, vanished under the guardrail’s metal horizon.
Within moments, the porch had caught and was becoming impassable: the wind was blowing all the balustrade’s posts into votives, lit sticks dripping like wax. The door was veiled in fire and then the porch’s planks collapsed and took the burning stairs down. The trashbags heaped between the walkway and sidewalk were sparked and their plastic blistered and peeled and flayed away from around batts of insulation glowing incendiary. As acrid flashes surged over the hacked stacked tables and a tangle of chairs, whose limbs were extended in a last flagrant plea, the hulking brazier of the dumpster roared.
It was like that account he’d read in—but Imamu was getting his books confused, their wisdoms twisting in his mind and becoming as difficult to sift and reassemble as ash—that account in the Koran or maybe some hadith or maybe some sermon that called hell the Abode of Fire, where sinners are chastised by the flames they called lies, where the blood of the sinful serves as fuel inexhaustible.
And from that dwelling, there came a knock—a knock from the wrong side of this house without a door—from the death side.
After having tried so hard to seize his house, the eviction djinns now were clamoring—they were chopping, slashing, banging, squealing, in what had to be an eviction djinn dialect they were squealing—to leave it.
They’d do anything to get out, even demolish it.
Suddenly, a cabinet or handled drawer board burst from a windowframe to the east and a murky bandanafaced figure boosted over the sill.
A black guy followed and then another guy who might’ve been Mexican but was as black as anyone in all that sooting, limping off into the darkness beyond the dumpster’s candent rim.
Then two others followed—or three others—or four—rushing around yelling or coughing into phones.
A guy whose backpack had gotten snared on a nail dangled from the sill like a flopped parachutist. He writhed loose from his straps and strained his sneakers toward a drainpipe for footing and with his mohawk frizzling, he jumped.
Just then the columns that propped the porch’s roof melted away and brought down an avalanche of shingling.
The bandanaface who according to his hat was also FBI stood panting by the deadend among the tires. He reached into his jacket and took out a dark snub of gun and wiped it down with snow and placed it, didn’t drop it, but placed it, in a trashcan that he relieved from the freeze and tugged around to the back of the factory, leaving it with the dented mufflers and pallets and weeds.
The burning tractortrailer erupted into the accelerant wail of its alarm system.
In the lot to the west, two shadows were casting circles around each other, until the wind switched direction and sent up flares from the house to individuate their flesh.
The taller one was dredging a sledgehammer through the snow around the shorter one who wielded a crowbar to check under shrubs and disperse the trash, as if someone was crouching between the treestumps, as if someone was concealed under the berryplant cages and bent doorscreens—he was trying to smoke them out, whoever was responsible for this fire.
The taller one was closing in on the shorter one, but slowly, staying always at a smiting’s length, brandishing the sledgehammer like a shepherd’s crook and talking all the while—he was trying to talk the shorter one down. That was Imamu’s guess, and Imamu had to guess, given the dim and his angle and lowness and that whatever was being said was in that Arabic that wasn’t, that Arabic that hated itself, that mocked itself, that seethed, and took the air in whitehot puffs like sheared wool.
To himself, Imamu had been calling the taller one Big Djinn, though he wasn’t bigger, just taller. He’d been calling the shorter one Little Djinn, though he wasn’t littler, just shorter, and seemed the stronger, or seemed aggrieved enough to be.
He, Little Djinn, swung around and clashed his bar into Big Djinn’s hammer and beat him back across the lot littered with winter until he had him trapped up against a solitary section of chainlink fence blown slanted from a snowdune. Big Djinn was stuck, so Little Djinn struck, and barred the hammer from his grip. Big Djinn fell into the chainlink and cowered, covered himself with his disarmed hands and then fumbled in his pockets. But instead of finishing him off with the bar, Little Djinn picked up the hammer and lifted it too, as if to finish him off with both. He was holding both high and crossing them and whetting them against each other to prime, as Big Djinn raised his hands with what he’d taken from his pocket. It was a flashlight, and its stray spot of flame caught the face that raged above and froze it in its agony.
This was what Imamu witnessed, what he understood. The rage that lacked an enemy. The voice that lacked for heed. Little Djinn brought the bar and hammer down, hitting the edges of the fence, which shook beneath Big Djinn like a rusty web.
As Little Djinn stalked away the flashlight’s target flickered at his back and the shrieking built to the keening pitch of sirens.
Fire was on the scene before the cops, but could hardly fit their engines onto Capitolina, could hardly even make the turn to roll up on the lots.
Fire had bigger axes than Imamu ever had. But Imamu wasn’t sensing their danger.
It was the shorter guy who was the danger—the stark swart compacted guy he’d been calling Little Djinn who was rushing back and forth along the length of the hoarding, clearing the bushes with the bar and hammering at hedges, but haphazardly, madly, like he’d gotten muddled as to whether he was still trying to find someone to punish or just becoming that someone himself. Others were putting their hands up, putting them down on the hoods, legs spread, or they were running, or being run after, Imamu couldn’t keep track, he couldn’t tell who was who, given how the cop uniforms and the uniforms of the evictor djinn
s matched in their blues and how the plownosed cruisers paralleled up on the curb stirred the smoke with their rotating red beacons. Red the color of the coldest flame, blue the color of the hottest flame, white the color of surrender. The cops were yelling as Little Djinn kept hitting against the hoarding and cracking its slats and Imamu felt the cracking in his bones. Big Djinn was out in the middle of the street flailing uncontrollably like a scrawny hose and spewing that gritty particulate language, like he was spitting out the teeth that had to be crushed to speak it, but whatever he was saying wasn’t defusing. The cops had their guns leveled and were yelling over the spray, “Down, put it down.” Little Djinn swung the bar and hammer in circles to fend them until he was spinning like the chief dervish of a springtime cult beseeching heaven. “Freeze, you fucking raghead.” But Big Djinn dashed between the cops and their aim and said in English, “He don’t speak English.” The cops whipped around, “Show us your hands.” They weren’t sure what it was in his hand. “Weapon, weapon.” “What’re you holding?” “A light.” “What?” Someone yelled, “It’s just a fucking flashlight,” and Big Djinn raised and shone it and roved around its beam. “Goddamnit put it down.” Someone yelled from by the cruiser, “Best be cool, they army.” Little Djinn was now just beating the street itself, striking as if tilling the iced hard intransigent blacktop of laneless Capitolina. “The both of you down or you’re dead,” this voice said, and Big Djinn clicked the flashlight and dropped it and was swarmed from behind and just as the backup cops were slicking him down with their knees in his back, Little Djinn lunged out swinging—so a cop shot him, so the other cops shot, each firing to empty for a share of the blame.
Pete Simonyi was David’s lawyer and so he was Yoav’s lawyer too and he sought to reassure his client by speaking a grammarless Yiddish, which Yoav didn’t know and the lawyer thought was Hebrew. He’d called Yoav’s parents—at David’s request, or Yoav’s own, Yoav wouldn’t swear to which—and reported that though they were hoping to speak to their son directly they were pleased for now that he was being represented by a Jew.
As for Uri’s parents, Pete Simonyi said that the NYPD should’ve called them, or the ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, or else officials of the Israeli embassy or consulate, and Yoav said that he, Yoav, should’ve called them himself. He’d been imagining Uri’s parents being woken up by the news in an English that never was theirs.
Tammy had been with her mother, Bonnie, and Bonnie’s husband, Carl, for Christmas. Las Vegas.
Their house was a splitlevel pseudo pueblo that commanded a culdesac in a half empty pseudo pueblo development. Inflatable candycanes were staked into the lawn level with the Barbary pricklypear, but it was just getting tougher, it annually was, to ladder up to the vigas and string the lights.
Bonnie the aspirant cowgirl was still into lipo and botox and suede, but by this visit had also adopted a hat and this disturbing tic of chewing on its chinstrap, which made all her pronouncements drooly and incomprehensible.
Carl, tactful, escorted Tammy into the garage to show her a Trans Am he’d redone for a customer in Denver and ask her the same question he always: what kind of car was she driving now, the answer to which was still none.
She flew to Los Angeles for New Year’s and met up with her boyfriend. They stayed in the Hollywood condo of a director friend from NYU off shooting on location. LA had its own local news, it didn’t need New York’s. She’d been in Malibu when her father had called. She’d been clenching her boyfriend from behind on a motorcycle ride down Laurel Canyon when Ruth had called. Her father hadn’t left a voicemail. Ruth had, but just of weeping.
Tammy hopped a flight alone and now sat indignant across from her cousin asking whether he’d been brutalized by the cops or informed of his rights as an undocumented laborer. But what she wanted to ask was, “Do you know where my father’s run off to?”
Yoav’s jaw was sore, his head was gauzed, so that the only thought he had was: you have a boyfriend?
She took out her phone and showed him vacation photos.
Pete Simonyi got his client transferred from Varick Federal Detention to Hudson County Jail, a facility in Jersey. There they put him into yet another uniform, the color of Uri’s face, which he’d identified.
Yoav sat on his bunk reading his cell’s only book, the Bible, which would bring him no solace because this was its language and the version was modern.
—
They were in Mexico—Ruth had been after David to take her since summer. In the interests of his health. She’d extracted a vow while he’d been hospitalized, recovering from his heart. Nurses, doctors, insurers—all will pick your pocket while you’re low, but only lovers go scavenging for promises.
“We’re gone two full weeks,” Ruth had told her exhusband Bill. “Only 12 days,” David had told the office, which was what Ruth had told her son, Bill Jr.
The band that manacled David’s wrist was jetblack and flecked with glitter. It entitled him to three meals a day, bottomless drinks, access to pools, stretches of beach, and unlimited free towels.
But he preferred hanging by the front of the resort, among the queuing shuttles. The driveway was a roundabout with an island of poinsettia and yucca and a golfcart decked like a Christmas sleigh hitched up to a team of piñata llamas. If the signal was good he sat in the golfcart like an offduty Santa, if it wasn’t good he stood out at the extremities. He’d also tried the upper tenniscourts (but they had to be booked in advance), or over by the AC units (but their whirring interfered).
Anyway, they were the refuges he had—locations he’d found by trial and error to have the best phone reception at the resort.
Ruth complained about the frequency of his check-ins, so to assuage her David agreed to hold their New Year’s meal out by the surf, with the staff having to move their table, chairs, and torches in with the tide.
They spent the remainder of the Eve in the jacuzzi, or he spent the remainder, to spite Ruth after she nagged him to get out, because jacuzzis exacerbated cardiac insufficiencies.
This was, she said, because of the temperature, but he could handle that—he could adapt. If anything was stressing him out it was the bubbles.
The day he was told, he told Ruth nothing. He wanted to fly yesterday, he wanted to rebook his ticket while still talking on the phone.
But Pete Simonyi said, “Better not.”
“Explain that to me?”
“Better wait it out until we’ve assessed your liability.”
He got sick or convinced himself he was getting sick from the bilge they washed the tomatoes in. From brushing his teeth.
He got burnt from staying out at the extremes of the driveway all day. Just waiting on a call or for bars of service. Drinking bottledwater or the vodka he’d bribed the bartenders to fill his waterbottles with. Checking two timezone times on his phone, checking his wristband like a watch.
For the next four days, his conversations with Pete Simonyi were like teenaged contests over which of them was endowed with the bigger longer stubbornness—if David came now, the lawyer was saying, he might be arrested and charged.
“With what?”
“Schmucking.”
“That a crime?”
“Aggravated schmucking.”
“So you’re saying no crime?”
“I’m saying the cops have a certain courtesy way of investigating cops, of covering for them. Investigating you comes next.”
“How much it’s going to cost me to make that not happen?”
“Bower was just asking the same question, how much it’s going to cost you.”
“Fraunces Bower called?”
“No, David. His lawyer called.”
“So they’re putting distance?”
“With an illegal handgun found on the scene?”
“Anyone knows whose it is?”
“Uri Dugri knows. Now put on your sunblock and go inside.”
He went inside, bypassing his own room to find the mediaroom and move its banquettes around to find an outlet to charge from.
But he’d lost his charger. Or Ruth had taken it. He went to their room and mussed around, Ruth hadn’t. The charger had been coiled around his wallet all along, its cord weighted with its twopronged converter curling from his unzipped fannypack like the prehensile electric tentacle of something bad he ate.
He tried folding Ruth’s clothes again and returning them to her suitcase but hadn’t quite gotten every seam of negligee aligned before she came back from her manipedi and was accusing him of snooping, so he was accusing the maids of snooping, his phone tolled with expiring sighs, and Ruth thudded her bare flat gull feet and pink toenails into the bathroom and try as he might he couldn’t convince her that he liked the negligee, and that he’d like her in it, or even just to unlock the door.
He’d failed as a lover and husband and father and cousin and now this—he couldn’t even keep a phone alive.
He kept thinking Ruth knew, but he hadn’t told her, even by Monday, 1/4/16. He kept thinking even the staffmembers knew—the waitress in the poncho who’d curtsied, the groundskeeper in the armsling who’d winked, and that one lifeguard enthroned high up in the tower who kept singling him out for a pensive nod or smile from among that unctuous bloated gringo armada that daily sailed its whiteness past his vigilant mirrored sunglasses.
At the dining pavilion, La Hacienda, the manager must’ve searched David up in the reservations database and on what should’ve been David’s last day made sure to stop by David’s table and kept using David’s name, asking if David needed more sopa, if David wanted more corn as opposed to flour tortillas, and offering to get David another flan just as David was swallowing the initial scoop of his initial flan and Ruth said, “David’s had enough already but mucho mucho gracias, Ángel,” because David was perspiring and kept popping his bathingsuit’s snaps.
As they left through the lobby, the concierge whose nametag’s flag gave the excuse that he was Swiss stopped David to tell him it wouldn’t be an issue—they could extend their stay, they didn’t even have to change suites.