Book of Numbers: A Novel (15 page)

“And then the man attains enlightenment and becomes the Buddha and
the beggar goes to heaven,” I said. “All beggars go to heaven—they
never refuse.”

“But maybe we can say it is better if the man never asked and the
beggar never answered,” Principal said. “The man becoming Buddha just
knew. Basically. Maybe from the presence of the beggar. No. Or from the
existence of the beggar. Yes. Because begging is giving too is the point that
communicates all the knowledge that is ours.”

“I don’t follow.” I didn’t.

“We are becoming bhikshus,” he said. “Itinerant,
mendicant. Sadhu to the Hindu. Monastic.”

“Do you have an itinerary in mind or is that against
principle?”

“Europe, that is all for now. 25something° N,
55something° W.”

“You can’t get specific, or won’t?”

“Immaterial. Not divulged.”

“That’s supposed to be reassuring?”

“We know.”

“What do you know?” I asked.

“Without asking,” and he reached for his kasaya, that white
woundbind slopping the floor. He took from a slit in it a blueblack scab.

He gave, I took. It was a passport.

“We have our charioteers after all. Payrolls of them. Part men,
part chariot, part horse, all inclusive. Expediters.”

“This is possible?” I turned the passport around in my
hands.

“What is not possible is to go wandering the earth as like a Class
D motorist licensed by the state of NY.”

I opened it up. My date and place of birth were accurate. And unfortunate.
The proceeding pages were as blank as an alms plate.

The pass I already had, I tried to remember when it expired, and where it
was stashed—in Ridgewood’s hoarder forests? with Rach?

The photo on this pass was even worse, though, from spyquip: me stumbling
back to my hut from the party, out of my mind and unretouched.

I couldn’t tell—I couldn’t.

Which of us was not himself.

://

Emails received:

UNIT #610 OVERDUE NOTICE,
from VanderEnde officespace mgmt.

OVERDUE NOTICE,
from the New York Public Library.

No Subject,
from Moms.

why arent u returning my calls?
from Lana.

Autoresponses sent: “traveling for work through september at the latest, replies might be slow.”

How else to reply? I can’t write about what I’m doing with Principal even here in this .doc, so what can I communicate in an email?

If you’re ever unable to discuss the main events of your life, you have to rely on all the bits you’ve somehow always missed.

Managed some fruit. Shit an hour.

Insomnia, nausea, sinuses aching, still can’t shake this plane cough (avian pertussis? or is that for the birds?).

Vocabulary:
orthogony,
heuristics,
traverse vertices,
exocortex,
autonomia, transclusion,
“the embedding of one document or part of a document within another by reference.”

tetrationary.com/transclusion

But tech’s not my only vocab problem in the Emirates. There’s
ménage,
which isn’t quite how it’s said in French, then when I don’t understand, there’s
zimmermann,
which isn’t quite how it’s said in German, and then when I don’t understand that (my sinuses having imparted to my replies an enigmatically European accent), they say
room keening
.

Language itself is a
burqa,
an
abaya
—so many new words! so much chancy chancery cursive! The garments that blacken even the tarmac, that blacken the lobby (irreligiously lavish). Words are garb. They’re cloaks. They conceal the body beneath. Lift up the hems of verbiage, peek below its frillies—what’s exposed? the hairy truth?

Alternately, click here:
dubai.ae

Click until this page wears out, until you’ve wiped the ink away and accessed nothing.

\

A remote control should indicate the existence of another device to be controlled remotely—to be uncovered, certainly, within range.

The remote is typically the filthiest object in the room, according to Principal. 100 billion bacteria per button, on average. Each bacterium’s DNA containing the equivalent of approx 1 million bytes of information. Meaning the average remote control button has the data capacity of approx 100,000 terabytes.

According to Principal: streptococcus, staphylococcus, meningococcus, coliform.

Aerobic, anaerobic. Microbes.

Roomservice—because I can’t bring myself to go down to the
restaurants alone. Jump. But window won’t open. Shouldn’t be smoking anyway.

I ordered the “Four Been Soup”—bean soup with regrets. Cramps 2.0.

Tetrating transgulfane: pancreatitis, the difference between communal and equitable distribution of assets earned by one party before divorce but after separation if separation was never legally sanctioned (New York Consolidated Statutes, Article XIII, Domestic Relations, §236B).

Other sites:
nytimes.com
(to check whether Cal had written, he hadn’t),
nybooks.com
(to check whether Cal had written, he had),
haaretz.co.il
(ERROR),
haaretz.com
(ERROR),
guardian.co.uk, lemonde.fr, a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/01/09/doc-n-law-1.html
(Rach),
escortzrevue.com/dubai, escortzrevue.com/abu_dhabi, whitedicksblackchicks.biz
(ERROR),
whitedicksblackchicks.biz/whitezilla-slaughters-her-ass
(ERROR),
thenational.ae, gulfnews.com, a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/02/09/doc-n-law-2.html
(Rach),
hoodratlatina.biz/ass-to-mouth-teacher-on-student
(ERROR),
hoodratlatina.biz/cumpilation-blonde
(ERROR),
poetryfoundation.org, poetryfoundation.org/article/16129, jewsy.com
(ERROR),
jewsy.com
(ERROR),
a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/03/09/doc-n-law-3.html
(Rach),
a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/04/09/doc-n-law-4.html
(Rach),
bangableblackteens.com
(ERROR),
bangableblackteens.com/mixrace/fave/orderby+mf&timeby=today
(ERROR),
tetration.com/search?q=Thor+Balk, tetpedia.com/tet/Thor_Balk, maid4jizz.biz
(ERROR),
maid4jizz.biz
(ERROR),
maid4jizz.biz
(ERROR),
maid4jizz.biz
(ERROR).

Each instance of HTTP 404ishness occasioned a buzz, a buzzing.

My gut knocking too (getting fatter off roomservice).

A deft young dark boy in a resort staffed exclusively by same, wheeling in more lentils. Occipital headache, sneezy.

I hadn’t gotten around to getting any of the currency (either
dirh
am or
dihr
am—tetrate it?), so gave him €4 (too much?).

\

On every flight I’ve been on since the invention of wifi the attendants are always saying, don’t go online until we tell you. Then they tell you, at
what they call cruising altitude, which some sites have as 30,000 ft/9,100 m, and some sites have as 35,000 ft/10,600 m. Whichever, no online, and no phone either, during takeoff and landing especially. Passenger signals interfere with the cockpit’s communications with the ground. I’d always accepted this, until aboard the Tetjet, which has no attendants, no announcements were made, and electronics were being used all the time. By Jesus and Feel. Not Principal. But still. This had me skeptical. I’d rather be brought down by glorious jihadi or a flock of sphinxes screeching into the engines than by some amped mercenaries playing some app game matching lozenges.

Principal’s coding (“Principal” is itself a code, for me to avoid having to type “my name”). When Principal says, “The Sims are ready to fly,” he means he’s ready to fly (both of his pilots are Sims: Simon Prentice, Thomas Simons).

“The Gulfstream 650 is the largest elite jet in the Gulfstream fleet. Its maximum operating speed of .925 Mach makes it the fastest civil aircraft flying, and its maximum altitude of 50,000 ft allows it to avoid congestion and adverse weather,” but then I gave up reading
All About the Tetjet,
and switched, dismissive flick of screen, to Media, streaming everything conceivable but also featuring a selection “curated this quarter by Kori Dienerowitz, President”: 80s sitcoms,
Jeopardy!,
Scorsese, Westerns all’italiana, Korean Wave, Mecha anime, 20 episodes of a show called
Xun Qin Ji
.

When Principal says, “Gaston wants to cook,” he knows that all meals are docketed, but isn’t hungry.

In London, Welsh radix box with a side of sprouts (both raw), in Paris mixed kales below purée de betterave crapaudine (both semisteamed), muria puama, saw palmetto, reservatrol. For dessert, his nutritive of twos: vitamins A
₂
(retinaldehyde), B
₂
(riboflavin), C
₂
(choline), D
₂
(ergocalciferol), supplemented with hazelnut oil, cedar berry, turmeric, borage, selenium, γ-linolenic acid.

When Principal says, “Lavra wants to exercise,” he knows that all workouts are docketed, but isn’t motivated.

40 elliptical minutes listening to a podcast on diamond synthesis using hydrocarbons, another on Malthus (London), watching a clipathon on the extraction of precious metals from waste electronics using
plasma, another on the physiocrats and François Quesnay (Paris), Lavra alongside him on the twin machine, then leading him in 80 light squats, correcting technique. Midplantar/lower palmar reflexology, cranial electrotherapy (Lavra insists, no acupressure or brain stimulation without the cardio).

I’ve been with Principal through every meal and workout, but have never participated in any.

When Myung says to Principal, “Doc Huxtable has got you booked,” she means—forget it.

This is exactly where a code’s required, extra shorthand, an abbrev: like how red ink indicated lies in memoranda sent to and from the gulag, like “an inlaw” meant “an SS officer” in the partisan encryption of the Warsaw Ghetto, while the Nazis themselves used “solution” to mean “mass extermination.”

\

Code.

There are two great innovations to recall: (1) all relationships between two or more quantities can be expressed as equations (the algorithm, which enciphers the name of al-Gorithmi, the Persian mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and Judeophile, eighth century CE), and (2) all numbers, no matter how large, can be expressed by the sequential combination of the smallest numbers: zeroes and ones (though the original binaries weren’t numerals but short and long syllables, combinable into every conceivable meter of Sanskrit prosody—Pingala, fourth century BCE).

Binary code—an encryption that’s simultaneously a translation, in how it renders two different systems compatible, equitable. “Bits”—the term itself is a contraction (“binary digits”)—are the fundamentals of any expression: not just of integers but also of language, and so of instructions, commands.

In international unicode standard, by which every conceivable character in the universe can be represented by an octet, or a sequence of eight bits, Principal’s net worth would be signified by 00110001 00111000 00110010
00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $18.2B, as of 2010 taxes), and the value of my advance for this book by 00110100 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $440K)—though I’ll get only half that up front, or Aar will and then he’ll take his commission (00110011 00110011 00110000 00110000 00110000), and then the IRS will take its too (00110001 00110101 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000).

Principal has directed our publisher to pay his own fee to an undisclosed organization, or so he says.

The only records of prior largesse are of $2 million to endow a computing exhibition devoutly aggrandizing Tetration at the Smithsonian Institution, and $252 to the Santa Clara Council of Dharmic and Abrahamic Religions, which has become a for profit yoga studio.

He never says our name if it refers to me, not even the nickname, the lame abridgement, “Josh.” Bash it to bits, you’d get 01001010 01101111 01110011 01101000, though if the “j” were minuscule, were lowercase, you’d get 01101010 (01101111 01110011 01101000).

Thanks, biconversion.com.

Point is, we’re all made differently of the same ones and zeroes—the ones our fortunes, the zeroes our voids, our blacker lacking places.

Ultimately, then, Principal and I do not compute, and all the imbalance between us can’t be attributed to just the swollenness of his bankroll, or my fatter tits and ass—or to the facts that only one of us was given a middle name, and only one of us was given a future. How to express the extent of Principal’s nullity? how else but code to write around his holes?

://

The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, for consumption to consume us. London’s just around the corner, a floor up or down, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, and so bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.