by Joshua Cohen
“What can I say, Yoavik? That God fucks up and we call it a miracle?”
“All my life I pleased my mother and did everything she wanted and meanwhile the one single thing my father ever wanted was that I serve in his old unit, but he never asked, not me, and for sure he didn’t ask the army, but still I could sense it, I couldn’t not, like how you sense an ambush that never comes but still you keep preparing for it anyway just so that if it ever does come you can claim your retaliation’s been proportional. So I, like a good boy, I was always good in school, found myself changing, it wasn’t a decision, just a change, and I found myself doing whatever I had to do to qualify, like I was qualifying for placement not just in the infantry but also as his son, and then when I did that, when I accomplished that goal and got my placement and my father didn’t react, my father said nothing, or nothing beyond just gaping at me like he didn’t believe me, or like he suddenly didn’t believe in the integrity of the army, I was crushed. By earning a spot I’d become unfit for that spot. The effort it cost me wrecked me.”
Uri honked out a mucus cusp. “What you mean is that you won, but then you gave up—isn’t that it? It bothers you to win? It makes you have guilt?”
Yoav said, “And I wouldn’t have realized any of this without leaving—the army and the rest of it. But then you show up, or you’re pressed onto me and I can’t resist thinking.”
“What?”
“I can’t help thinking.”
“What, you coward?”
“That you’re what I’m trying to forget.”
Uri hunched toward Yoav, who withdrew, and he gathered Yoav’s bags and then gathered his own. “But you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” he said.
Yoav sighed. “And that’s the worst of it for us both.”
He tramped after Uri through the snowtamped weeds and around the guardrail onto Capitolina—stepping into a buried tire, almost falling from the softness onto the shoveled blacktop. The street’s only light came from the house, leaking out from around the faces of cabinets wrested from walls and nailed across the windows to keep the wind and other trespassers out. The frontdoor had been hinged back on and wouldn’t give. Yoav knocked with a boot. Gyorgi pried the nails from the inside with a crowbar and then exchanged the crowbar for a sledgehammer and renailed the cabinet face across the door to seal it shut. So Gyorgi was here and Grio was too and had brought tupperwared goat stew and leftover rolls and Absolut from some hotel buffet that some familymember of his was responsible for replenishing, which booze was chilling in a bucket of gutter snow set in the hearth. Uri unloaded the Coronas and Negra Modelos onto a tarp spread in the parlor. “Who got ham? Who the cheesesteak?” Yoav was hurling out sandwiches and cheesecurls and pretzels and chips pulvered to salt.
Tom toasted their picnic. “Feliz Navidad.”
Ronriguez said, “Is all you blancos know. Bet you $20 none you know how to say Happy New Year.”
Tom said, “That’s your toast, vato? I’m the only blanco here.”
Gyorgi said, “Feliz New Year.”
Tom said, “A merry jolly Hanukah, Yo?”
Ronriguez said, “$20.”
Talc said, “To the holiday season.”
Tom said, “To euphemism. To secularism.”
Talc said, “I be raising to raises, to extra vacation.”
Yoav said, “L’chaim.”
Uri, as if this were a competition, chugged his beer and flattened it on his forehead and then nabbed Yoav’s beer, chugged it down to the floor and did a pushup atop it, two pushups into it—three was what it took him to flatten it with his forehead, now marked by the rim and sopping with foam.
They smoked Marlboros—Tom’s Camel Lights order had slipped Yoav’s mind. They’d boarded themselves in so well they were clouding up the parlor.
Talc was crowbarring loose any paneling that was graffitied and Tom said, “We’re going to have to sacrifice the mirror.”
“That’s bad fortune to smash it,” Talc said.
“Worse not to smash it—we can’t leave any traces. We tossed a guy out into the cold yesterday.”
Talc said, “Why you sweating some crack bum? That guy ain’t no owner.”
Tom said, “We can’t have our names here on anything.”
All the surfaces that wouldn’t be pried, like the wainscot, Ronriguez slammed out of the walls with the sledgehammer.
Grio had to piss, so Gyorgi removed a board from a window and suddenly everyone had to piss and the window was left unsealed.
Yoav and Uri were sent upstairs to gut the shelving.
It was too dark to demolish up there—they had to strip the titles and by touch alone puzzle them into boxes. Books of all sizes that if gripped by their spines felt like they’d never open and Yoav wondered, if he hadn’t known they were books, what he’d think they were. Patio paving slabs, BLTs in clingwrap. As they worked, Uri kept bumping up against him. They’d roll each box to Gyorgi on the landing, who’d tape it and roll it to Grio on the bottom step, to stack.
Tom’s phone rang and Tinks was told to go around. Tom helped him up and over the sill. Mind the puddle. The piss window was reboarded.
Tinks was fuming: he had an installation to dig out but instead he was here.
“An installation of what?” Tom said.
“Fuck you of what. My piece.”
“Your piece of what?”
“My multimedia immersion art thing about climate change I’ve been fucking spamming you about since fall. The speaker consoles and stands for the holograms, my partner left them up on the roof and they got buried.”
It was never obvious in his reference to a partner whether he meant that in the sexual or just artistic collaborator sense or both.
Anyway, Tinks had flaked on her or him and as he twitched off his backpack he said, “No fucking cabs out and I don’t appreciate the threats.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Tom said, “I’m grateful you came. We’re trying to stay energized—just tell me what I owe.”
Tinks bounced a doppbag between his hands and said, “Fuck it. As long as I’m blowing off my projects.”
Tom said, “As long as you’re trying to keep your job.”
Tinks said, “Clock me at rate from whenever you started to whenever we’re done.”
Tom said, “Done.”
Tinks reached into the doppbag for a vial and said, “And everyone’s going to have to roll me a bill. Make it $20.”
Talc perked up. “You do how you do, Tommy G, but you’re covering Ronriguez and you’re covering me.”
Ronriguez said, “Próspero Año Nuevo, chupacabra.”
Tinks said, “Zion in the house?”
Tom said, “Upstairs,” and then had the Raelis toss down ransacked books unboxed. Gyorgi tossed to Grio, who handed to Tinks who said, “Not the Koran,” and Tom said, “The Communist Manifesto? A History of Vietnam?”
The back cover wasn’t black & white—it was red, so became dusted in white, granular drifts of cocaine and whatever other substances might get subsumed under that rubric: babypowder, baby formula mix, vitamin B-12.
The Raelis were called downstairs and Uri knocked past Yoav, nearly sending him off the derailed landing.
Talc was rolling one of Tom’s $20s and quizzing Ronriguez, who was rolling up the other, on who’s the ovaled president: “Lincoln, who you fooling?”
They did their lines.
Tom said, “Who say you, Yo?” and Yoav said, “Gyorgi Washington?” and Tom mouthed a wrong answer buzzer.
Tom said, “It’s up to Uri to restore our faith in the brains of his race,” but Yoav had stopped explaining and Uri flexed his brow.
Tom squeezed another wrong answer out of his nose and had a line himself.
Tinks said, “That’ll be $20 from each of you,” and Yoav was certain Uri understood at least that, but neither of them reached for a wallet.
“What’s up, Raelis?” Tom said. “You lovers got squabbles?”
> He reached for his own wallet. “Fuck it, they’re on me. Everyone’s on me. Just trying to keep the fucking peace up in here.”
He floated another two bills toward Tinks, tightened the one he already held like a screw. His phone, recharged to all bars, he untethered from the generator and, setting it atop a book box, he poured out the vial along the thumbsmudged screen. With his King’s Moving Amex he tapped out a trinity of lines and called the Raelis from opposite corners of the parlor. But he didn’t let them have any of the coke—just groomed and regroomed the graywhite gunpowder.
“You’ve got to earn your line,” he said. “Answer my question and get a sniffle—understand?”
Yoav was throatclogged and about to demur, but Tom said, “Not you, I mean Uri. I know your answers, I don’t know his. Jew my questions and don’t fuck them up. Has he ever killed anyone?”
“I won’t say that,” Yoav said. “He won’t answer.”
“Let’s try that again—I ask you and you ask him, that simple. Uri, have you ever killed anyone?”
Uri said, “You’re too much of a pussy to tell me what he’s saying.”
Tom said, “What the fuck did he say to you?”
Yoav said, “He said I’m too much—afraid.”
“Correct,” Tom said and proffered his phone. Uri took the tuberolled bill, bowed his head and sucked a line. “That’s enough. One at a time. Next question. Did you ever kill anyone in your own unit?”
Yoav refused, just shaking his head.
Tom said, “I mean by accident, of course.”
Talc said, “Lay off him, Tommy G.”
Ronriguez said, “He going to murder you.”
“Or else,” Tom said, “did any decision you made—like any managerial decision—result in the death of one of your own people?”
Uri asked what Tom was asking, but like he already knew.
Tinks said, “You have to be careful, Tom, referring to their own people. Because technically both they and their enemies are Semites.”
Uri took Yoav’s face in his hands and held it and Yoav rendered speech and Uri spoke and Yoav translated—he didn’t interpret: “He said he sleeps now.”
Tom said, “Not on this he won’t,” and Uri pinched a nostril.
Uri had this peculiar way of pinching a nostril: just extending a finger and pressing it in, then hunkering down with the bill.
Coming up for air again, he said in the first English he’d spoken like the first English ever spoken, “I sleep.”
Tom said, “Last question. What about you, Yo—ask him what kind of soldier were you?”
Yoav was frozen but Uri was riled and put a hand to Yoav’s neck and the inquiry passed between them—the inquiry and the reply.
And then the Raelis were rolling on the floor.
It wasn’t even a tussle, just a barely completed roll, a pinning.
Yoav was trying to butt with his head but Uri butted him down gently, obnoxiously gently, grinned and quit him.
Yoav was up a moment later with the sledgehammer in his hands—raised to the chandelier’s stripped sockets, twined to tinkle with its chain—he wasn’t decided on what he was going to do with it. Just hold it. Wave it. Bring it down. Not to make contact, just wind in descent. But Uri, who had his back to Yoav and was heading across the parlor, crouched down for the crowbar and pivoted, catching the hammer midswing, bar against shaft breaking the swing, and then Uri was sliding the bar up the shaft beyond its point of fulcrum and, with a lunge, he forced the hammer high again, forced it high over Yoav’s head, until Yoav was outfulcrumed himself and lost his balance.
Gyorgi stepped toward the foyer out of range, Grio backed toward the window that’d become the bathroom trying not to trip over the charger cord strangle. Talc and Ronriguez were leaned by the hearth just gawking.
Yoav was having to screen Uri out: two-hands-in-two-places (holding something with hands at either end) was better than two-hands-in-one-place (holding something with hands next to each other). Blocks beat swings, but then blocks were swings. The horizontal always beats the vertical. There was no such thing as defense, just another’s offense converted. Even if you weren’t holding a weapon, even if you just had your hands, it still took a grip at two points to disarm an opponent. And just like with a weapon, it helped if you gripped your opponent at the poles: at two points, one on either side of the axis of symmetry—the farther the points, the stronger your grasp.
“Yo?” Tom said. “What’s he telling you in Jew?”
Uri charged, and it was like training again, because training too had just been organized taunt.
Uri was going meanly tender, a strike and a withdrawal, strike and withdraw.
Yoav deflected, but after an errant sledgeswing split a floorboard, Uri got his boot over the hammer’s head and held it weighted down as he thrust the forktailed end of his bar up against Yoav’s scar, just below his throat.
“The adversary is his own adversary,” he said, “because he’s also your tool.”
He ran the bar down Yoav’s chest, his belly, the onesie’s elastic.
Tom said, “Yo, you alright? What’s this fuckhead up to?”
“Imagine a line at the center of your body. Divide your body in half.”
“Fucking Raelis,” Tom said as he blundered his gun out. “Get over yourselves already.”
“To take you down,” Uri said, “I have to apply more pressure to one side, less to the other. I have to apply contradictory pressures, pull you to one side, push you to the other. Whatever I do, I have to break your body at the center, each half going different directions. All attacks must reach to both sides of this line.”
Uri stepped off the hammerhead and resumed the stance. “Kus emek—ready?”
Yoav shook.
Tom came between them and trained the gun on Uri. “Enough.”
Uri said, “You enough.”
Tom closed in and cocked the gun within bar range. “Drop it.”
“Shot,” Uri said. “Shoot.”
“I will.”
“Shoot me.”
“Don’t beg.”
“Tom,” Yoav said from across the parlor, “you don’t think he knows it’s not loaded?”
The thing about following a star is where do you stop. Hard to tell where it’s telling you to lay down your burden. Because a star can always seem to be above everything, it can always seem a block beyond. All you can do is follow until you’ve fooled yourself. They’d kept him overnight at Jamaica hospital and now it was the next night already and the translucent shackle on his wrist didn’t have his name on it, just the date of the day he’d missed. Or else that was today’s date.
From outside the Liberty Tax Service off Atlantic, he’d taken a jug, a refillable watercooler specimen.
The Shell station wasn’t busy. He set the jug over by the garage and covered it with snow and with his wet hands washed his face and chimed inside, past the jamb’s heightstrip that took his measure at 5' 9". CCTV cameras mounted in domes hung like teardrops cried by the ceiling. A sandwichboard advertised how slippery the floor was. The aisles were slushy and bootgrotted, clumped with Ford floormats and lined with aluminum racks stocked with antifreeze and jerkies and nuts. The lighterfluid and all other flammables were back by the beverage cases, whose coolingfans buzzed in opposition to the buzzing of the heatingvents and fluorescence to produce that same deranged Da Nang helicopter sound as can be obtained by driving fast with all the windows rolled down just a crack.
Directly behind the sandwichboard was a nativity display: a little fiberglass manger hut with a little plastic burro and a little plastic cow and a little plastic mother and a little plastic baby Christ cozened as if crystal, a fragile shipment atop a thatch of packing straw. Where was the little father, though—the husband whose wife Yahweh porked? Where were the little kings?
The magi: one of them was black, the others were white or Arab. The guy behind the counter was just a Shell uniform—“My boss, hello, what you wan
t?”
All the containers Imamu was browsing were too large. He didn’t need the fluid for BBQ grilling, he needed the fluid for lighters—whatever would fit in his pocket.
“Hello my buddy?” The guy banged the counter.
Imamu reshelved the container whose label he was rereading, whose instructions he’d reread until they’d been memorized.
The guy said, “You want lighter or cigarette? I sell you loose.”
Imamu groaned and approached. “I don’t know.”
“Then what you here for?”
Butane, naphtha, kerosene, sterno. “I’s just checking out your Christmas scene,” he said, “and it’s a beauty.”
“No loiter.”
“Remind me again where all this goes down—Bethlehem or Nazareth?”
“If you loiter, you out.”
“I think Bethlehem, but then why they go calling him Jesus of Nazareth, not Jesus of Bethlehem? What happen in Nazareth that it gets to name him? He don’t die there, so he don’t get resurrected there and anyway what’s more important than where you first born? Or is it just that Nazareth’s for the fancy folks and Bethlehem be ghetto?”
“If you don’t buy, you go.”
“Matches.”
The guy slid out a pack and Imamu said, “More?”
“Go away from here.”
He scuffled on, lugging the jug along the snowy humps between the curb and the galvanized mesh. No way he turned was the wind at his back.
The Gulf station’s logo was a strange impotent sun split in half. Strange that the sun was also a star and that what the stars were made of was fire.
Carols blatted from speakers nested high in the shine of the canopy, salt sacks lined the apron by the pumps. Imamu waited by the employees only bathroom. All the parked vehicles were diesel. Then a paralytic transit van turned in to fuel and an attendant fitted the nozzle and returned to the booth, leaving the gallons and prices to cycle hypnotically until the driver’s head was reclined and his turban had become like a pillow.
Imamu shuffled ahead holding the jug behind him, pressing it against the tomahawk tucked at his waist, the blade pressing cold against his ass.
