Midnite Moving Co

Returned inside with the bin, he pulled it closer to the worst of the carnage and said to Chris, “I think George scared them off.” Jesse was relieved when George slipped in behind him a moment later and locked the door.

George said, “They’re sitting in Drew’s truck, trying to work each other up into having a shot at me since I’m obviously a circus acrobat and not a combat fighter.”

Jesse said, “Heugh! Like either of them are.” It was irritating to know that George would mop the floor with both of them and yet be unable to bet on the outcome.

George stared at Jesse. “He is most assuredly a karateka of some renown! — but that doesn’t help if you fall over backward when startled.”

“Yes,” Jesse said. “After that, it’s all grappling and ground game.”

Chris said, “I don’t even think I can go through with this. Maybe I can get an extension from the landlord.” It was month end.  Chris veered between low-grade panic, snarky humour and catatonia. Panic was definitely winning.

George was dismissive. “You’ve paid us, we’re here, you’re in shock, sit down, shut up.” Jesse looked at him.

“I will not,” Chris said.

“Please keep talking, but sit down,” Jesse said, and walked noisily through the mess and stood with him.

This being a much more palatable request, Chris sat down and stared up at him. Jesse bore the attenuated but still irritating assessment of his fitness-to-bang with as good grace as he could, and moved away to find something useful to do. There was a lot of broken glass, but the squeeze had only found some of the kitchen boxes, and it looked worse than it was.

“You don’t have a lot of sympathy for people in this situation, do you,” Chris said, addressing George.

Jesse didn’t let the smirk reach his lips, but his eyebrows missed the memo. “That’s enough out of you, Jesse,” George said.

“Me? What? Fuck d’I do?”

George didn’t answer the customer right away, and considered Jesse’s question unanswerable.  He found the broom and the dustpan where Chris had let them drop in the dining area, carefully moved to the far wall of the kitchen, and started to push broken glass into the middle of the floor. The sound of the sweeping, and the crunching, sliding glass, was rhythmically interspersed with George’s response.

“I have sympathy for few people in few situations,” George said. “Victims of domestic violence get what little I have, in the form of a service to help them stay safe, and keep all their belongings safe, during periods when the cops won’t help them because there’s no threat, and their friends won’t help them because their friends absolutely know there is a threat, and hope that by avoiding helping they may also avoid the brutal treatment they know is likely. I make people pay for the service, and if this culture wasn’t a pile of maggots feasting on a dying planet, I’d have no reason to take your money because you’d never have taken up with such a person. You’d have had the sense not to, since you would have been raised properly, and he wouldn’t be an asshole, because ditto.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jesse said, appalled that George would say such a thing to a customer.  In the truck, afterward, on the way home, sure, let ‘er rip, but holy fuck. And is he reefing on Chris so hard because he’s a guy? Or gay? He looked at George, no longer trusting what he thought he knew about him.

Chris sat on a kitchen stool and looked at George, stricken. After a second he dropped his eyes and watched the floor slowly be cleared of its burden of shards with slow, steady strokes.

“You’re saying I asked for this,” Chris said. “You’re blaming the victim.”

George stopped, and remained awkwardly posed.

“No, sir,” George said coldly, sweeping again. “By no means. I’m saying you’re lucky you can buy your way out of the problem. This problem, the one we’re dealing with right now. We can have you out of here by dawn. I have a storage facility I will let you use for sixty days at no charge, but I have three conditions, each one of which you’re going to hate more than the last.”

“I’m the customer,” Chris bleated.

Jesse blew through his lips and quietly said, “Like that means fuck all in end-stage crony capitalism.”

George fixed a quelling gaze on Jesse, and then said to Chris, “You don’t have a place to move your stuff to, unless you have connections or qualities so far unrevealed.”

“You are a fucking prick, you know that?”

No argument here, Jesse thought, once again trying to keep the smirk on the inside.

“I am the very model of a rational social justice warrior, and you need to give me your phone, leave this apartment by cab and report the damage in person to the police, indicating that you’ve left the movers in the apartment so they don’t come in and try to thump us on general principles. Then you need to go to the last place he’d ever look for you. We’ll move your stuff into the locker. I’d come back and clean but by the looks of things it would make no difference to your security deposit. The kindest thing you can do for your landlord is get the hell out so she can fix it.”

He contemplated what looked like a lot of drywall work for a handyman; enough for a weekend, anyway.  There were holes, some gaping and dramatic, others like a succession of hammer head impressions, made in a row to illustrate some point.

George continued, “I’ve got a spare key and and card for the locker, which I will give to you, so it’s not like we’re trying to run off with your stuff. We witnessed the two of them exiting the building and heard lots of screaming, and you’d already asked us to help you move, as will be evidenced by the phone records, if it comes to that. You have witnesses and a good timeline, and those two morons are still out there in the truck.”

To Jesse he said, “I planted a listening device,” and briefly pulled out and waggled an earbud, replacing it before Jesse could get too close a look.

George said, “Now I have to say something that’s going to be hard to listen to.”

“Oh really,” Chris said. “Because everything’s just been a Roger Whittaker song up ’til now.”

Jesse, who had found another dustpan brush and was removing glass from the cloth furniture, coughed. Or at least, so he hoped it would be interpreted.

“Give me your phone.”

“Not a chance,” Chris said.

Jesse felt sorry for him.  He mentally predicted what would happen.  George will reach out an arm, yup, put it on his shoulder, and there ya go, Chris is off the stool, and for a second they look like they’re gonna dance, and then — called it! — George is standing back blinking with the phone in his left hand.

Chris tried to hit George.

Jesse couldn’t take it anymore, it was like watching a baby get punched out.  He scooted behind Chris, put his hands between Chris’s elbows and back, and said into his neck, “Nuh unh.”

“Get the fuck off me, ya goon, I need my phone!” Chris said, pumping his feet uselessly and squirming.

“And you’ll find it, with its battery, once you unpack,” George said. “In the meantime I don’t want you to have easy access to Drew’s social media, or the texts he never stops sending you, or the texts his new squeeze sends you for fun when Drew hands his phone over.”

“What?”

“Textual analysis indicates two different kinds of illiteracy,” George said, looking at Chris’s phone.

“All this and a grammar Nazi too?” Jesse asked, aghast. Raven was always going on about how class and worth were policed and bounded by a narrow and stultifying interpretation of grammar rules that were dying at the time they were first codified. From this Jesse had slowly and painfully extracted the idea that you shouldn’t assign moral value to another person’s chosen mode of communication. He painfully resisted this conclusion, mentioning people like Derrida and McLuhan (whom he only knew about because Raven was always going off about them) and he kept coming up with exceptions until Raven got mad at him for being so pointillistic. “Quit looking at the dots and look at the whole picture!!” she would say. It had been a relief when she stopped going to university and got into local activism and shelter work instead.

He didn’t hear George say, “If textual analysis helps me figure out that both of them are involved in gas-lighting Chris, yes.”

“Wait a minute,” Chris said slowly. “How did you get access to my texts.”

“I’m looking at them, and I’m listening to them send you one.  You know that them texting you is against the peace bond you swore out, right? Ditching your old phone and getting a new one would really help with that now.”

“I can’t get next to removing Chris’s agency like this,” Jesse said. He knew George would ignore him, but if he didn’t make it clear he was on Chris’s side he’d never get him out of the apartment when the time came. It still was not clear to Jesse where Chris was going to end up or whether he would even come out of his emotional coma and flee like a sensible person, and George was in a mood he’d never previously displayed.  He knew George would be perfectly happy to restrain and remove Chris, but Jesse was already tiring of this approach to miscreants, as much fun as it had been at first; to decide it was the appropriate way to treat clients tonight seemed a bridge too far.

He knew that was one of the reasons George was so adamant about being paid up front, a rule he’d broken twice, once with a happy outcome and once with a night which had been expensive and painful and humiliating even before the police had arrived. But as George said, if he got paid up front, he still had the money if they decided not to like him afterward.

“I don’t want to go to the police,” Chris said plaintively.  He was in his late thirties, but apart from a tiny paunch, he looked a decade younger, and younger still in his misery.

“Then don’t,” Jesse said. “But you have to get out of here tonight, and go someplace safe, and let us deal with them if they come back. The last time you were lucky you didn’t get hit in the head with flying glass.”

“They’re still out there. I think they’re snorting something, they sound a little confused,” George said, putting his finger to his ear.

“Couldn’t you have lifted that off them while you were planting the bug?” Jesse said, referring to the drugs they were ingesting.

“It was in the car,” George said, shrugging.

“I can’t not have a phone,” Chris said.

George pulled out a burner and held it and Chris’s Samsung up. Gesturing with them, he said, “You can have this one. You’ll get this one back when things have died down. If they did turn on tracking, the battery’s out now, and that’ll prevent you from giving away your location. Since he knows where you work, you should either quit, go on vacation or ask for a leave of absence.”

“I can’t do that,” Chris said numbly.

What a fucking gumptionless numpty this guy is, Jesse thought. His feelings did not show on his face. And he’s a victim of the worst domestic violence I’ve seen so far. My history of abuse and my understanding of the mechanics of DV mean nothing.  I see a man in this situation, and rather than pity I have contempt.  What a long fucking way I have to go, Jesse thought.

“Well, you should,” George said in a much more reasonable and pleasant voice than he’d previously used. “They’re actually plotting to kill you.”

George pulled the earbud out, and once again, before Jesse could get a good look at it, he swiftly put it in Chris’s left ear. Chris jerked his head away, and said, “That’s freezing.”

Then, as he heard their voices, hotly contesting how they should kill him, and where and when, laughing with harsh ragged hoots, pounding the dashboard, his eyebrows rose higher and higher and higher. He listened for perhaps two minutes, an eternity to Jesse as he watched the hurt and confusion rush in successive waves across Chris’s face. Then George, reading his body language, plucked the earbud out before Chris could touch it. Chris sagged. His eyes were wet, but he didn’t weep. He made a hiccupping noise which might have been a sob.

“Will you leave now?” George asked Chris, exasperated.

His mouth opened and closed. He took a breath and said, very quietly, “I guess I have to. How could he? I knew he was a diamond in the rough —“

Holy shit, thought Jesse.

“ — but I never thought he could do something like this.  It’s that fucking drug addict new boyfriend of his. If he was gone Drew and I could go back to how it was —“

And again, thought Jesse.

George broke up the sweet alternate reality reunion which was happening in Chris’s head. “Uh, Drew is talking about sawing your head off and the two of them taking turns having sex with your neck. Chris, I truly think the barque of reconciliation has shoved off — and now he’s snorting something again,” George said in disgust.  “I don’t think he should be driving,” he concluded uneasily.

“You could always zap strap them to the steering column until this is over.” Jesse said.

“I’d love to, but a) you hate it when I do that — “ at which Jesse made a mild sound of disbelief  “— and b) I’d prefer it if whatever they’re tied to is a long way from here. We still have a lot of work to do.”

“It isn’t Drew, it’s the drugs,” Chris said anxiously.  “He’s really a very cool guy.”

George said, “He’s put you in hospital twice.”

“He’s got a temper,” Chris said.

George pulled at his face with one hand like a cartoon character, and then said, “You’ve been abused by Drew for a long time, and you’re in a very precarious mental state. Can you trust us to look after your long term interests tonight? It’s hard to believe now, but your situation will look and feel different to you when you’ve got some distance.  You have more friends than you know; they’ve all been scared off by Drew.”

“If they were my real friends, they would love Drew as much as I do,” Chris said.

“No they wouldn’t!” Jesse said, more energetically than he intended.

“You can love someone body and mind without sacrificing your one wild precious life to him,” George said, and the anger had now vanished, leaving only a melting sadness.

There was a bang on the door.

Chris jumped.

“Showtime,” said Jesse.

“Oh God,” Chris said, and folded himself up into a tight ball on the sofa, arms wrapped around his knees.

George, who didn’t look concerned, answered the door to a stout black woman in her mid-forties, who started when she saw George and then looked past him to Chris.  “You know Drew’s in the parking lot, right?”

“Has Drew ever bothered you?” George asked.

“Bothered?” the woman asked. Her tone was gentle, but she frowned.

“You okay, Chris?” she called into the apartment.

“No. Drew wants to kill me,” he called back.  He had started to shake, very slightly.

“You gotta get out of here! It isn’t safe.”

“We’re trying,” George said. “We haven’t figured out where the furniture is going or where he’s going to stay.”

“May I come in?”

She picked her way across the floor, along a pathway cleared of debris, and sat, bolt upright, next to Chris.

Seeing his distress, she sagged a trifle. She put a hand on his knee and looked into his face. “Chris you’ve got to leave. He’s on fire, and you’re gasoline,” she said tenderly.

“Okay,” he said, and his voice broke. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” George said suddenly, “My name’s George. It’s my guilty duty to inform you that I’m spying on Drew right now.”

“You are!?” she said.

“It seemed prudent,” Jesse said, mostly because he was tired of being the silent sidekick.

George shot him a look, then turning his attention back to the neighbour and briefly smiled that smooth, almost greasy, professional smile. Then the smile vanished. He looked almost apologetic. “They’re coming.  I planted a bug on Drew. You need to get back to your apartment, this instant.”

She stood and squeezed Chris’s hand, nodding. Then, with creditable speed and grace, Chris’s neighbour heeded George’s advice.  They heard her door quietly close and then the hisses and squelched giggling as the two men shushed themselves. George left the apartment door ajar and peered out as they dopily took the stairs.  He motioned Jesse and Chris into the kitchen, where they couldn’t be seen when the door opened wide. Jesse stood between Chris and the door and waited.

“Where’s Chris?” Drew asked. His boyfriend stood next to him, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Elsewhere,” George said.  “Leave or I’m calling the cops.”

Figuring it was two to one, they tried to crowd through the door.

George, with no apparent effort, pushed them both back and closed it.

Thunderous pounding and provocative cursing followed.

“Beat it,” said George through the door. “You’re holding Schedule I, II and IV drugs, you’ve been drinking and driving, and you’ve already committed mischief and uttered threats.  Unless you want to spend the night in the central lockup, get the fuck away from this door and shut up.”

There was shuffling, and then giggling again.

“They’re going to beat the door in with the fire extinguisher in the hall,” George said in disgust.  He jerked open the door as Drew tried to smash the door handle, and once again Drew fell over, this time onto his face, simultaneously discharging the fire extinguisher. In the chaos, the boyfriend started to scream and took off down the stairs like a scalded cat. The door to the parking lot banged and reverberated through the stairwell and corridor.

George hauled Drew to his feet and said, “I was going to call the cops, but honestly I don’t think that would help.”

Jesse bodily restrained Chris when he heard Drew’s voice.

“Fuck you,” Drew said. “Who the fuck do you think you are. If I want to talk to Chris you can’t stop me.”

“Wishin’ won’t make it so,” George said.  He shoved Drew, who was resisting vigorously, back out the door, and put a hand over his mouth since, once again, the volume had maxed out.

Then he pushed him down the stairs and called 911.

George slowly descended the stairs, and pausing on the last step, called 911 while looking straight out the window.  The pounding continued, but it was a solid door, well-fitted to its frame, and it showed no sign of giving way.

He finished with,“There’s a very intoxicated and belligerent man at the most easterly door, where the patient is, so advise responders to go to the other entrance, where the buzzer is.”

He slowly put the phone away. “I have not tasted that knowledge yet,” George said, looking down at Drew, “that allows me to hope they’ll take my advice. And, really, since I caused this injury I should at least try to prevent the first responders from getting a tire iron in the face when they arrive.”

Hearing no sentient creature disagree, George performed minimal first aid (simultaneously moving Drew away from the sweep of the door), and with a deeply theatrical sigh, flung the door outward.

The young man he almost knocked over sprang up, drug-fuelled and hot-tempered, but found himself pinned before his rage could accomplish anything. George was as benignly gentle as an indulgent auntie collecting a toddler.

In a conversational tone (he had a hand over the young man’s mouth) he said, “Your liver and kidneys will be shot within a matter of years if you keep this up,” he said as he directed him back to the truck. “If unsafe sex for drug money is your idea of a career path you’re gonna die young and high. Along the way you’ll be a danger to others and a sad reflection on your kin, some of whom would welcome you back if you made the effort to get in right relation with them. Drew is a user, and not just of drugs; he thinks nothing of a nice middle class boy like Chris and you’ll be less than nothing to him when he’s done with you because he knows he can treat you worse.”

George took off the hand, and braced himself.

“He’s mine,” the young man said.

George made a sound. It could have been a bark, or a cough, or perhaps a suppressed laugh. “No friend of yours would ever say ‘you’re welcome to him’.  He’s whipping you up to kill Chris! You’ll be tried in adult court this time, you’re over eighteen aren’t you?”

The planes of his face shifted from defiant to surly. “I turned eighteen last week.”

“I bet the two of you celebrated by spending the evening threatening Chris.”

“Fuck you, he’s mine.”

George stopped arguing with himself. “Since we appear to have come to the end of what generously may be termed our civil intercourse, I must with sadness inform you that our recent cooperation in the unfolding of this evening’s events is now at an end.”

He had lifted the truck keys from Drew. Now he felt uneasy about busting him up so bad, but it had seemed like the best outcome, to have Drew at least sedated for the next little while, to be out of the hair of both of these poor men.

“I’m sorry.  These are cop-grade zip ties, so good luck getting free on your own. Maybe you’ll get lucky, maybe the cops will free you, but if you’re still sitting here in the morning I’ll bring you two McDonalds breakfasts and two cups of coffee.”

George tied him to the steering column. He had stopped resisting, which George really appreciated.

“Good thing I took a shit first,” the young man said. Then, with more emotion, “Is Drew dead? He didn’t look very alive.”

“He was alive with a steady pulse and only a very small bump on his head when I left him,” George said truthfully.  “I have to go and meet the firetruck. Please don’t scream.”

“I won’t, man, I fucking hate being gagged.”

“Good to know.”

Now, how to reduce the size and scale of the mess. If he was coaching a human, he’d say, “Deep breaths,” but there wasn’t really an equivalent for him. Nor did a pulse have much pull as a metaphor, since he had nothing like it. Humans can be seen pulsing and breathing at quite a distance. His own people often remarked on it, making much of their capacity for stillness.

Tingling, by comparison, he could identify with.  The sensation of being awestruck and speechless before something beautiful, or deadly, that some call transcendent wonder. To feel a cuff as a friendly blow exchanged between equals, or close to it. To be so attracted to a lover that your ability to move through the world as a seamless whole is fractured; there is only the world she is in, and everything else, which is a ludicrous, lonely journey through desperate spaces constructed of aching absence.

He didn’t want to compare Drew and his poor dupe here to himself and Kima. Perhaps that had been the point of the evening. He halted as he crossed the parking lot, even as the ambulance’s faint wail grew louder. He walked back to the truck, freed the man, gave him twenty dollars for breakfast and said, “If I was really compassionate I’d try to find you a hostel.”

“Was I in the apartment earlier?”

“Upstairs? There? Yes,” George said, pointing. George had perfect autobiographical memory, or allowed himself that illusion as it was close to being true, and could not understand how this man could just plain forget something that had happened literally minutes earlier. He had seen many, many examples of such lapses, and it always left him feeling shaky and incredulous, everybody off in their own reality, and terrible things happening when those realities touched.

“We did a line in the truck, I remember that,” he said. He slid out of the truck and said, “Peace, out.”

George went upstairs and was thrilled to see a note on the door from Jesse :

Boss, taking the truck back and Chris far far away to an inn. Door’s locked, key’s with me, we’ll come back tomorrow night.

And so it transpired. Drew was four weeks in hospital longer than he was supposed to be because he re-broke his leg. Chris moved to Mission and threw his obsessive temperament into helping his best friend from high school start a restaurant. The street kid they never saw again, although George always looked for him and eventually, as he built up his network of contacts, learned his name.