Moving Kings E-Book

Joshua Cohen

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a propulsive, incendiary novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America's poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East. The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav's distant cousin David King – a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King's Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the Tri-State area's moving and storage industries. What starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job – an "Occupation" – quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge. Driven by Cohen's characteristic intelligence, boundless energy, psychological tension, and humor, Moving Kings is a powerful and provocative novel about faith, race, class, and what it means to have a home.

Leseprobe

‘Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings is a lit fuse, a force let loose, a creeping flame heading for demolition, and Cohen himself is a fierce polyknower in command of the workings of the moving parts of much of the human predicament. A master of argot and wit, he writes the language of men in a staccato yet keening idiom of his own invention. And though it is set in a grungy New York, call this the first Israeli combat novel ever dared by an American writer.’

 — Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies

‘Joshua Cohen is a blacksmith who heats, hammers and molds the language to sharpest, most precise points. Not for the sake of craft, but to tell a troubled story about troubled life in the twenty-first century. This is a dazzling and poignant book.’

— Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

‘If there is a job of the epoch, it might be the Removal Specialist. Since 2008, and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, removal firms have been doing well. David, the star of Joshua Cohen’s new novel, owns such a firm, and he’s currently being asset-stripped by his wife. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv might not be the best place to seek solvency. Funny, smart, and perfectly addictive, Moving Kings is a novel of wonderful scope. It shows Cohen at the top of his powers and is bound to bring him many new readers, hot for a fresh understanding of America.’

— Andrew O’Hagan, author of The Illuminations

‘This is a book of brilliant sentences, brilliant paragraphs, brilliant chapters … There’s not a page without some vital charge – a flash of metaphor, an idiomatic originality, a bastard neologism born of nothing … Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious in American fiction today … his sentences are all-season journeyers, able to do everything everywhere at once.’

— James Wood, New Yorker

MOVING KINGS

JOSHUA COHEN

To BC, DC and MC

[Because I didn’t speak up my bones wore old through roaring all the day.]

— Psalm 32

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPH DAVIDYOAV AND URIAVERY LUTER, IMAMU NABI ABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

DAVID

(In Distraint)

Ye shall know them by their vehicles: those blue trucks that’re always cutting you off on your way to the airport, sides emblazoned with grimy white crowns, dinged bumpers stickered got a problem with my driving? call 1-800-212-king!

Ye shall know them by their ads: on basic cable and drivetime radio, those billboards that’re always blocking the signs and making you miss the airport turn, with their offers of free estimates over the phone and 100% money back guarantees.

Or maybe, like more than 180,000 other satisfied customers served in all five of the boroughs and three neighboring states since 1948, you know them as the Courtly Couriers®, or the Royal Treatment Pros®, or the Removalists with the Regal Touch™—whom you’ve let into your home, to move your most precious possessions to your new home, or else to one of their six 24-hour, security-monitored, climate-controlled storage facilities conveniently located throughout the New York Metropolitan Area.

Or maybe, whatever you know is wrong, because you’ve just been reading their online reviews.

King’s Moving (David King, President, Spokesman, Container of Crises, Stresses, & the Distrained) was a licensed, bonded, limited-liability insured large small business that specialized in—one guess—moving … ’n’ storage … ’n’ parking … ’n’ towing … ’n’ salvage … ’n’ scrap, activities that demanded the bloodsweat of plus/minus 40 fulltime and 60 parttime employees, 50 vehicles, three lots, five garages, six 24-hour, security-monitored, climate-controlled storage facilities conveniently located 12 throughout the New York Metropolitan Area—not to mention a headquarters in Jersey City, hard by the piers.

Above all, King’s Moving was a family business. Family owned, family operated. Family, family, family… Take that into account, Your Honor…

It was summer, toward the weekend of a holiday week—Moving Day (last day of the month, first day of the month), followed by Independence Day—and David King was out in the Hamptons at a birthday party for America, to which he’d been invited as a member of the Empire Club, which had required attendees to donate upwards of $4K for the privilege of drinking diluted booze and eating oversauced BBQ under the auspices of the New York State Republican Committee.

Inviting him to a party and then making him pay: that was class. That was how billionaires stayed billionaires.

And David, who’d resented even the toll to the Long Island Expressway, couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d met $4K worth of people yet—he couldn’t help valuating everything: the people, the property, the Victorianized manse shadowing the pool. His phone was vibrating again in his pocket.

He canceled the call—he was working.

He was working by attending a party at which he didn’t know anyone, or knew only that he recognized: names, faces, profiles.

It was work having to restrain himself from mentioning mergers he’d only read about, acquisitions that weren’t his, a celebrity stranger’s divorce/custody negotiations still ongoing—having to endure discussions of clean ocean and beach replenishment initiatives, when all he wanted to know was: daughter or wife? when all he wanted to know was: does anyone know where our host 13 is? It was work pretending he blended, he mixed, pretending he wasn’t sweating and had a second residence of his own and was a Hamptons vet and agreeing yes hasn’t the Meadow Lane heliport gotten so crowded lately? and yes isn’t Ray from Elite Landscapers just the best?

Because the fact remained that David had never been this far out on the Island before and not only couldn’t he tell you which of the Hamptons he was in, he couldn’t even tell you the number of Hamptons, or the differences between the Hamptons, or what made a Hampton a Hampton, singular, to begin with.

“Hope we’re not keeping you?” a lady said.

David said, “Come again?”

“You keep checking your phone.”

“I’ve got foreign business, never stops. It’s already July 5th somewhere.”

And he excused himself from that bezant of lawn and its assembly of skinny flagpole women flying dresses in red, white, and blue.

Ruth, his office manager, had been calling without leaving messages. Now she was gibberish txting: sorry sorry bill sick have take bill jr bball practice.

And then: anyway not finding passcard.

David made his way among tents, buffet tables of chafing and carving and bars—the trick was to keep on the move.

Kids—put David around kids and he’d fantasize about having them and only then would he recall that he had a daughter, who was an adult now—the kids were having their faces smeared native with warpaint. They bounced around on a giant inflatable galleon, parried and thrust with balloon swords.

A breeze blew in with the dung of elephant rides.

He moved among servers who made $8.75 an hour 14 and so who made about 14 cents, 14.5833 cents, he did the figures in his head, for each minute it took them to carve him primerib or fix him a scotch or direct him and his menthols to a smoking area.

Conversations collected, as they were conducted, in circles. About stocks, about realestate, stocks. About renovations and how draining it was to open a house for the season. Apparently, to have two houses meant always neglecting one of them, at least. About alarm systems, sprinkler systems, sump pumps, white vs. black mold. About politics.

David’s politics were aspirational, inferior: he was in favor of contacts, contracts, the right to not diet, and the right to jump lines at dessert stations.

David King was a man who if a longtime employee flaked on a commitment on short notice because her exhusband was too ill to take their son to a baseball practice that wasn’t even hardball but actually softball, or if his primerib came closer to medium than to the already spineless concession that was medium rare, or if his Dewar’s 18 turned out to be Dewar’s 15 or 12 or God forbid came with an icecube or even just an extra splash of water, or if the line for the dessert station was moving so indecisively slowly that his icecream would melt before he got to the toppings he liked—it wasn’t his fault that he was so decisive about his toppings—he’d scream, he’d have a conniption, and yet once he’d fudged his sundae with a cherry atop he had all the attention, all the guilty sated childlike attention, for being lectured by an Ivy League B student on the new model Gulfstreams (though David didn’t have his own plane), the best sailing routes (though David didn’t have his own boat), the best steeplechase courses (David didn’t even have a pony), how New York State was the most regulated state 15 in the union, the state with the highest taxes, the state with the highest energy costs, the highest fuel costs, the highest insurance premiums, and a convoluted body of tort law that made even the Nazi justice system seem unbiased and lenient, and how so and so was really the only candidate to bet on, so and so the only candidate who had real plans both for the Middle East and for midsized American businesses (our composited Ivy League B student apparently knew his audience)—the only candidate who was legitimately “Pro-Growth,” and that was the line, or the jargon, that struck him, and brought to mind the image of a small modest neat building, like some fourfloor prewar walkup in the Village, which with every vote for a Republican grew taller by the floor, until it became this big shiny tower that clockhanded all of Manhattan, and then, by association, his mind flashed below his belt, which was on its last notch, and below his gut, which hung like a panting tongue over it, to his bloodless dick, which—as if his heart had betrayed the party platform, “Pro-Growth”—dangled limp and useless.

It was distressing—to others, but not to himself, who didn’t notice—how he’d change. How he’d let himself be lectured, talked down to. How he’d become, in certain situations, not servile exactly, but docile, tamed. A Jew. And so he’d always wind up thanking his interlocutor for the condescension, for the aeronautical, nautical, equestrian, or civic education. Just like after he’d shout at Ruth, he’d apologize and give her a raise, just like he’d always overtip his servers—even tipping them at an event like this, where accepting gratuities would get them in trouble.

David’s normal social calendar had him visiting precincts, firehouses, and school auditoria, cultivating such 16 notable personalities as: Port Authority commissioner, State Assembly member, City Council member, Borough president, Borough Board member, Community Board member, the executive of the Teamsters Locals 560 and 831, and of the DOB, DCP, DOT, and DSNY. This occasion, however, was mayoral and beyond—it was congressional and beyond—the developers, the financiers, the waspiest machers, robust with exemptions, strong in abatements. The people who ran the energy companies, not the people who ran the fuel distribution depots and waste disposal services. The bankers who drove the interest rates and generals who earned medals, not the retired cops who drove the armored cars and former hacks who owned medallions. Mingling with this class had gotten him awkward, apprehensive. With his side of the mouth talking, his talking hands, checking his fly with sticky fingers.

All his struggles were in his face. All his personas in combat: king, commoner, selfmade, incomplete. The booze and red meat and dairy. The pills ostensibly for bloodpressure and the pills ostensibly for cholesterol and the pills he wasn’t sure what they did: for anxiety. He didn’t swear by anything, just swallowed it. He never knew what to say, or knew but got his audiences crossed, got lost in the game, playing against type when he should’ve been playing to type, playing to when he should’ve been playing against. Golf with racquet sports enthusiasts and racquet sports with golfers. With a Belgian diplomat he’d discussed the chance of rain. With the CEO of a cosmetics firm he’d discussed how most people think the Iranians are Arabs. It didn’t help that most people here considered it obnoxious to mention, or to be pressured into mentioning, what they did for a living, which was who they were for a living, so that 17 actors and actresses and uniformed military personnel aside, the only presences here whose identities were in any way legible to him were the servers, so he bantered with them, about why he was refusing to support an increase in the minimum wage, and whether or not they’d seen the host of the party, and then he’d tuck singles into their pockets and tell them to tell him if they heard anything. What he was, then, was local color, just out of his locale. They probably thought he was physically tough. They probably thought he was in with the mob.

David edged his way around the crowd, which pressed in around the dancefloor, at the center of which a professional couple of professional dancers swung and hopped and twirled. Keys, guitar, bass, and drums were locked into a jazz that turned the whole world into an elevator, the horn section rose and riffed. Makeshift baffles to either side of the bandstand held massive eagle art for raffle. The band became a drumroll, which became clapping, as the emcee made a quip about being black and then introduced the candidate.

David was already out—by the beach, an open balmy vista. Bright water, bright sand. Given the winds, it took many changes of stance, many deli matches, to light his kingsized Newport. Then he hefted his phone and dialed Ruth.

“Hello?”

“Ruthie.”

“David—hello? Are you driving?”

“Just talk. What’s the issue?”

“I can barely—if you’re driving, put up the window.”

“I’m outside—there’s no window outside.” He cupped the phone, “What’s up?”

“I told you. I can’t go.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

18 “I’m not feeling so hot.”

“I thought it was Bill, I thought Bill Jr. Now you’re ditzing up your excuses.”

“No excuses.”

“You seriously don’t have it in you to just stock a fridge, bring over the kitchenware and like a blanket or whatever?”

“I’ve got a son with a playoff game and an exhusband stubborn and vomiting.”

“It’s just the basics, Ruthie.”

“Better you let Paul take care of it.”

“Paul’s not domestic, he’s not even housebroken. And anyway he already did me enough of a favor with the furniture, when he moved out the Bengalis.”

“Bangladeshis.”

“They leave it decent? You were supposed to clean.”

“I’m standing in my exhusband’s house, standing in my exhusband’s vomit, and feeling woozy myself.”

“This is a you and your Bills’ problem, but you’ve made it a you and me problem. And you’re fucking over my cousin.”

“Fuck you, David. I’m going.”

“You mean you’re going out there now?”

“I mean I’m pressing the red and hanging up on you.”

This was what happened when you relied on an office manager still entangled with her ex, or when you used to screw your office manager still entangled with her ex—the sands kept shifting, the loyalties got kinked like kelp and baited tackle. A barge floated by, laden with fireworks, and David flicked his cig in its direction as if hoping for a gust that would carry the butt ass over ember out over the water and ignite a fuse.

He stomped back through the party (grabbing a bourboned punch), crunched the clamshell drive to the front 19 of the property (leaving his glass in the grass). A valet took his ticket and smirked, “What kind car? Bentley or Rolls?”

David said, “You know what kind. A van, cabron. A Plymouth Estupido.”

Two men were approaching, but just as they were about to take the slate steps for the manse, one paused: “Holy shit—holy shit—David King, is that you? David King The Moving King Will Move Your Mothertrucking Everything?”

The man, swimfit in a slimcut suit, loosened necktie toweled around his neck, pumped David’s hand: “That was classic. Just a total classic.”

He said to his companion, “I was clerking down in DC, but I was always coming back to New York to visit Peg,” and then he said to David, “My wife.”

The man broke the shake to rub his forehead, go wistful: “Anyway, she’d be going to sleep early, Peg would, she was still doing the morning show then, WFAN, so I’d be up late at night alone, just me and my briefs and Channel J—you know Channel J? Was it only in the city? Public access. Madness. 1-900 partylines, psychic chatshows, neighborhood forums you called into with bulletins that advised about blizzards or where your polls were. None of it exists anymore. You had this one commercial where a family’s sitting around a table, mother and daughter talking about their day with the father sitting up at the head on a throne, and the movers come in and just pick him up and take him away and they do it so slick, nobody notices—that was great. That was your own family, David? I always had the feeling. How are they?”

David smiled tight—he was vain. Since that commercial, since he’d dumped that wife, he’d gotten hair 20 implants and replaced his teeth.

He said, “Family’s fine, thanks. But I’ve done a lot since. What about you? Staying awake with any of my new spots?”

The man laughed and his companion said, “So you enjoyed the speech, I gather? The Senator can count on your vote?”

David tried to feign that he’d been joking, telling the Senator, “Sorry, Senator, I was joking.”

The Senator said, “Of course,” and nodded to his companion, who hadn’t laughed. “Let me introduce you to our host.”

The hand that now shook David’s belonged, like so much else in New York, to Fraunces Bower—of the Corn Exchange, Dodgemoor Estates, 1 Bryant, and 388 Greenwich Bowers, the redeveloper of Roosevelt and Governors Islands and the coowner of Rockefeller Center Bowers—the same Bowers who’d strewn shoppingcenters and subsidized housingprojects across every borough of the city and held all that paper on so many acres of distressed property out in the bleak reaches that if that superfluity of land were ever strung together, contiguous, and dropped on Manhattan, it’d cover Central Park.

Fraunces Bower, who was properly Fraunces Bower III—now installed as principal of Bower Asset Management—was tall and thinlimbed, thinframed, in seersucker. A ray of sun put a shine on his head that prevented David from gauging the degree of his baldness.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bower.”

“Fraunces, please,” he said and kept wringing David’s hand like he was going to make a glove out of it.

The Senator said, “Your chariot awaits.”

And so it did, there was no denying: that bruised blue 21 van, its white letters molting, KIN OVING.

The valet jingled the keys, as David took out his wallet and chose among bills: a single or hundreds. He chose $100.

There wasn’t any traffic—no one was heading his direction, no one would ever. Because his direction was a circle, or would be, counterclockwise, looping him cross-Island, Queens to Brooklyn, Manhattan then Jersey, only to turn back around again, Brooklyn to Queens.

Or else he’d drive up from Jersey and hazard Staten Island.

A punitive, regurgitative route. Thanks Ruthie. He was still slightly drunk and it felt like rain. He put a cig in his mouth just to suck.

Waiting at a light, before the bridge into Manhattan, he checked his phone: his cousin’s flight had just departed, on time.

A guy stood out by the turn to Canal Street—neither a vendor nor a squeegeeist, and if he seemed not just jobless but also homeless in abscess and rags he didn’t seem to be panhandling, though he held a cardboard boxflap sign, SAVE THE HUDSON, and then flipped it around, PAVE THE HUDSON, and then flipped it again—and David wondered whether this wasn’t just another candidate campaigning, and whether the opposing sides of the sign weren’t the same: you saved a river by paving it over, letting the water flow beneath untouched.

He raised his window.

To emerge from the tunnel was to be born again, soaked in the sullage of the marshes—coming out headfirst past Liberty and Ellis Islands, Where it all began, as David liked to remark to himself, as if that were the wetlands’ brand, even though that’s not Where it all22began, because David’s father had arrived in the States only after the war, and while Liberty had loitered on her soggy corner immortally, Ellis had already been mothballed and the boat that’d brought his father had docked in Jersey. Exit 14A, David was always accelerating into turns. He lowered his window again, lowered all the windows, to get the stench, the way the methane rushed in like a fart. Port Jersey to Colony Road: a sparsely lit and sodden strip joining reedy islets, which you’d only drive if you owned or worked for a business located on it or were lost, slowly sinking into the darkness. The desolation stifled, especially in heat. To the right were the yards, their shippingcontainers like bulky ridged cinderblocks stacked into barracks, so many of the blues from Korea, but lately more of the German greens, the Chinese reds and yellows. To the left were the piers, their solemn cranes saluting the tankers slipping by. Below, down in the murk, that’s where you got rid of the murders and of the guns that turned people into murders. That’s where your hotwired Buick was ditched, in an underwater parkinglot of broken boilers, leaky microwaves, and all the AA batteries.

Toward the end of the strip was King’s HQ, girded by barbedwire.

David dug out his asswarmed wallet, for his passcard. He should never have given one to Ruth. But if not Ruth, who else should have one? Because who else, if the worst happened, would make sure his daughter was taken care of?

His daughter. Not Ruth’s.

He hung himself out the window, swiped the slab across the sensor, the gate slid along its track.

Harsh bugswarmed LED luminaires, grate stairs to an office of pitted brick, from which the warehouses 23 extended like trust into the dimming.

Tim Brynks, AKA Tinks, was behind the desk, fixed in the chair, fixated on screens: one was showing porn, the other five the feeds from the CCTV.

David said, “Sorry to interrupt your jerkoff session.”

Tinks didn’t break from his screen: “I don’t jerkoff.”

“Here you don’t?”

“Ever I don’t.”

“Bullshit.”

“No bullshit,” and Tinks twitched, swiveled. “I like the tension of not, it keeps me awake—I like how they don’t talk.”

David went to the minifridge, got them both Tecates.

“You’re in the office why? Your computer down at home?”

David chugged and grimaced. “To be honest,” he said, “I never understood anything with a dick in it.”

How it worked was that you signed a contract—a bill of lading. Which asserted that you assumed sole risk, and that you and your heirs, successors, executors, and subrogates did hereby agree to waive and release, indemnify and hold harmless, King’s Moving, Inc., its directors, officers, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, causes of actions, and suits for accidental and/or negligent damage and/or loss.

Then, you packed up your belongings and moved, or had your belongings packed up and moved for you, to the nearest King’s Moving facility, to one of the blue and white precast blights in Manhattan (Downtown), Manhattan (Uptown), Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and there they remained, there they reposed: all your outgrown babyclothes, strollers, and cribs, all your iceskates, woks, and blenders. But then say you 24 changed your address and forgot to give notice and so fell behind on payments. Because of alimony expenses. Because of health expenses. Say you went bankrupt or to prison or just died. After six months of notifications of delinquency with interest calculated, followed by a two month grace period during which the accounting department, Ruth, would attempt to trace and bill your next of kin—who’d never be found, or if found would typically refuse or be unable to pay arrears—all your junk would be transferred here, and ownership reverted, as King’s Moving moved to recoup its losses.

This facility, Jersey City, kept the spoils: your possessions repossessed, stored inside concrete pillboxes wallowing in septic and brine.

The first warehouse’s units still hadn’t been processed and so were tagged to lot, which was freaky: they were like miniature theaters, shrinkydink stage sets. Behind their metal curtains were rooms, which were filled with other rooms: there was a 1950s livingroom (eggchair, boomerang table), neighboring a 1970s den (heavy on the teak), across the hall from a summer 1984 recroom in mintcondition replete with astroturf, a naugahyde La-Z-Boy, and a pennant from the LA Olympics—all of them containing all of the furnishings and effects of their originating locations, but just crowded now, cluttered up, because the units were small: 20’ x 20’, 15’ x 15’, 10’ x 10’. You almost expected to find the people inside. Instead you just found hints, intimations, material vestiges of mind: hubcaps, a welding rig, a treadmill, a sybian saddle. Each unit had its drama. Each was an inventory of an absent person’s life, all the stuff they hadn’t been able to live with, but weren’t prepared to lose: a unit of eviscerated photoalbums with snapshots skittering the floor, another totally vacant except for a 25 roofless dollhouse.

The second warehouse’s units had already been processed and so were tagged to item, which was easier to deal with: they weren’t as human. The units just of shelving arranged haphazardly wall to wall, the units packed to the ceiling’s sprinklers with chests, the unit of stray drawers. Things, deprived of their relationships with their owners, and even of their relationships with their owners’ other things, were now just related to one another. To others of their kind. They’d been restored to their kind, and so sterilized, laundered, mended. Lamps among lamps. Stereo components among stereo components. This made them simpler to price and post online, in the hopes of bypassing the resalers and selling the hutchdesks and loveseats and teddybears direct to the hutchdesk and loveseat and teddybear collectors.

Down the way was the unit of clocks, from whose shutter came a raspy crippled ticking.

David swiped through to the third warehouse—letting the fluorescents sense his motion and flick on, letting them flicker and thrum along with the echoes of his pacing. Towels, linens. Bowls and plates. That’s what the house still lacked: the little domiciliary niceties.

He was trying to think what they were—what his parents’d had. What he’d had. The appliances of childhood. If he found even half that stuff, that would be enough for his cousin.

He found a wheeled pallet, piled it with flatware and stemware. He had no qualms about breaking up the sets. The sets were incomplete already. Anyway, how many knives did one guy need? How many pots and pans? He took six placesettings, figuring his cousin wouldn’t be too keen on doing dishes. He took three waterglasses, three wineglasses, and then this gleaming soup tureen 26 whorled like a shell and capacious enough to bathe a baby in. He swaddled it in tablecloth, settled it on the pallet. It was stupid to have asked Ruth to do this. Ruth who’d been trying to get him to commit to her forever. Ruth who’d been trying to get him to settle. To have asked her to pick out everything, but the correct everything, to basically shop for a home, which would never be their home, was cruel. Still, she would’ve known what to get, she would’ve known what was appropriate. Like, what to do if his cousin kept kosher? Wouldn’t he need all this same stuff again, but separate? David backtracked, out of prudence and—automatically considering the plain porcelain and aluminum utensils more appropriate for dairy—took more lidded pots and a fryingpan for meat, meat knives with faux wood handles, and meat bowls and plates wreathed in ivy.

All that stooping to lift the shutters, to lift the loads, he ached. His goddamned lumbars.

He chocked the heaped pallet against an interior door, tapped dates into the keypad: the year his Tammy was born, followed by the year he left, or was left by, his wife. The lights here he had to toggle himself, without tripping. Black boxes hindered the way, black safes hoarded into corners. Racks of purses and leather jackets, cold storage lockers roaring with furs, the skins he’d claimed shivering on hangers. He’d gather here, annually or so, with his experts from the city. Deviants into coins and stamps and sports memorabilia, who’d pick through the bins of autographed jerseys, bats, and balls. Also, this cranky provenancer from Amish country Pennsylvania who was the leading authority on Civil War tchotchkes.

Once there’d been an urn that wound up being Egypt, New Kingdom, ca. 14th–13th century BCE, appraised at $400K, and it went for $620K, at auction. 27

The jewelry was in the wall.

He turned to the camera bracketed midwall and considered draping a sheet, but why should he be embarrassed? Why shouldn’t Tinks be?

He waved at Tinks. Give my regards to the lesbians.

He swiped at the vault and then keyed in the same years but reversed: his splitdate and then the birthdate, Tammy’s. Inside were trays, dark and softly cushioned.