Book of Numbers: A Novel (16 page)

The only thing that grounds me is the beach—the ground before the oil, the oil money, the derricks bowing, rising, bowing, rising, the gusher skyscrapers, the rush on the roads.

I feel the sand, the salinity, the limit, the edge—they’re in me, they’re in everyone.

Mortality is a mesh for sifting water and quartz.

All of humanity washed up on the beach, but I stayed a span later to dry. I wasn’t always bridges and tunnels, huddling under scaffolding in Midtown waiting for the storms to stop or for the stripclubs to be demolished—I wasn’t always NY.

No, no, I’m Jersey, sprung from the Shore. And that basin is contiguous—all tides are my territory.

Fridays, try to leave the city before noon, turnpike to parkway past the loading and lading, our own crude tanks and refinery towers, toward the barrens, the pinescrub ceding to reeds, marshgrass and weedy tails. Take any exit south of 114, and take it to the end, to the dunecrash, the salt scarp, the lick of the sea. Low tide uncovers the loss—snapped surfboards, ripped rafts and tubes, jetties black as if soaked in creosote through winter—high tide covers that loss again only to hazard the driftwood piers, threatening to flood the rentals masted up on their struts as the vacationers flee with summer—this was how I grew up.

Shoregirt.

Let me reel in that life, like a fishing haul, winching back the lines for
concessions, cranking the queues to catch battered flounder, hook pizzas and gyros, burgers and franks, fries like bait, and funnelcake like tangled tackle. Or else, like a gull drops a bivalve to smash its shell, then swoops down to beak up the meat—my memories:

Beachfront, we had resorts too. Hotels and motels. A boatel. Then four blocks in, off the touristed strip, lotto bodegas and pawns. A decent taco drivethru. A gas station.

Another four blocks inland and it’s already the other side of the island, the bayside, where Shoregirt—a city in summer, a town in spring and fall, a village in winter—dwindles into wharves. At the top of the island, sandcastle timeshares, at the bottom, tenements teeming like conches on the verge of being outgrown, kept by chainlink fencing trawling fortybottles, sixpack rings, and butts. The ocean goes in, the ocean goes out, east to west. The boards, the promenade’s planks, curl to crash north to south.

Home was in the axis. Between the two waters, the open ocean, the closed clammed bay. My house, two floors of wind between the shingles. Giving directions, my mother would say, “By the gas station.”

Do I trust myself in this garden state? With the heart all rusted like an abandoned Mister Softee?

To Moms, I’d never be “a beach person.” At best I’d be “a shoebee”—which was as far out as she’d swim into slang: a local term for all the poor Polish Jews who hadn’t moved out of NY and married American, who’d come down the shore for the day with all their necessities—cold leftovers, balms—packed into a shoebox.

My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.

I’d be sneaking around, then, until my father quit his chemo, and Moms resolved to spend our final family time together by the wake
down the street. I dressed in long sleeves long pants long face and brought along whatever I was reading bound in its municipal cellophane.

I’m recalling a stretch of grain as a single day—Dad yelling at me, “Stop that, enough with the words. I have one word for you—Atlantic, get in!”

Kaufman and Laufer were digging moats. The Tannenbaum sisters buried each other. The Gottlieb twins wore baseball mitts on their heads to guide their mother cutting their hair, then they had a catch with their father—not even, their stepfather—while Dad, sclerotic, was sputtering, “Get out there, bodysurf! Goddamn it, ride a wave!”

After that didn’t work, it was, “Here’s a dollar for the games”—the gambles a kid could take, the gambles not even a kid could take. Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole, or the forceps submerging in plush, always surfacing empty.

“I’m too old for that,” I said.

“Leave us, amuse yourself, enjoy.”

Moms said, “Just this once you’ll do this.”

I was 12.

Money meant that Dad had made mud in his diaper.

It must’ve been mortifying for him to have to use wide waddling Moms as a cane, hobbling him under the boardwalk, to change.

Though I was reading I didn’t comprehend all this until after.

“Enough with the book!” and Dad, churning, gathering his strength into swells, threw himself out of his chair and atop me, ripped the book from my hands—a sentence, in the middle of a sentence—and, limping through the froth, threw it to the Atlantic, far out, not far enough out, its pages splayed like an injured pigeon.

The book splashed, and surged, and a wave brought it in and so Dad, wailing, stooped to his soil, picked the book up and tossed it again, but another wave brought it in and again, until he fell by the tidemark—only for Moms to claw for the book before dragging him in.

The book before the husband. I cried the whole way home.

Out amid the spindrift tears, by boardwalk’s midpoint, between Eustasy and Orarian Terraces, there’s a bench: a slatty construction anchored in tar, with a plaque engraved on the back dedicating it to my
father,
1924–1984,
Yevarechecha Adonay, v’yishmerecha
—the inscription translating as badly as a stranger’s dream, or sappy reminisce.

Dubai. If I would’ve drowned off the coast of my childhood, and my body had sunk to the bottom of the ocean as dead as my father’s, this is what that bottom would be like. Truly, the furthest shore. Where there were no poor, and certainly no shoebees. Just children, or the childish. Foreigners whose very foreignness was childish, demanding exorbitant juicy red orange yellow iced quenchers be traipsed to their wombish white caravan cabañas between sucks on their flaring cigars—they’d become adults again only when the bill came.

The Gulf sun does that, it reverts, regresses—unthinkable to be a thinking person amid all this light and heat.

The resort curved up, like a fin or wing, a dhow’s sail giving shadow: Eurotrash littering, their guts and asses and tits heaped rudely, extremities flung out to grip the towel tips, the corners of the plush horizon. The men spilled from their trunks. Hairy but soft, bodies the consistency of flaccid cock, sticky testicles lolling. The women were counterpoised, compensatory, lean, bronzed upgrade wife and mistress trophy, bones propping up the skin tent, shaylas for the bust and crotch, burqinis.

This was a private beach, then, and not cheap. Barbicans segregated it from the public beaches, which segregated themselves by gender—you have to pay for equality.

I stomped to an unclaimed chaiselounge, and ratcheted it back to an obtuse degree, sat, lay—washed up.

I tugged down the visor, repositioned the shades. More Tetration freebies, more items lettered with corporate glyph.

No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced. That basking was making me suspicious—and turning me into my father: Why don’t you diddle a racquet? go fly a kite?

I rummaged through my Tetote—also company complimentary, brimming with brandwater, brandpretzels and chips, “fresh” dates and figs, that commonest variety of nut called “mixed,” yogurt or no, that’s sunscreen—for my Tetbook.

But nothing else was getting written.

Just like it’s impossible to be around words without reading—try not to read the next words as they turn—it’s impossible to be around the naked without gawking.

\

As I closed my Tetbook on a .doc unsaved—it was replaced by another mirage. A bland white guy whiteguying up to me, in flipflops.

He was familiar, but I wasn’t sure how. He had this ambling and amiable coach demeanor, and the agglutinated fatness of the entire Eastern Division of pro football, American football. He was in slumpy trunks and a tanktop from a Beat Leukemia!! 5K race he definitely hadn’t run, and then the tanktop was off, and was over his head like a kaffiyeh. As he settled into the lounger beside mine, his flab extruded between the slats.

He grinned buckteeth and said, “Hiyo,” aggressively genial, content with his content. He produced an identical Tetbook from an identical Tetote, set it in what had to be his lap.

He showed me his, I showed him mine—or just went to remind myself whose was whose: I reopened and, angling my screen away from the glare, and from his glare, went toggling through files.

Kori Dienerowitz, in the copious flesh—Kor Memory—Tetration President, and presidentially sized. What’d prevented me from an immediate ID wasn’t the context, but the dread of him. He was all clicketyclackety, “Crap connection,” dug out the same tube of sunscreen. “Would I be interrupting you to ask a favor?”

“Yes?”

“I have a tough time reaching my back, my shoulders and neck—it’s fine, you can laugh, but would you mind giving me a slather? Strictly hetero, one patriot to another?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Don’t burn me.”

“You’re not going to lie stomach up the whole time?”

“You’re right—a true American would choose a side, but this is a matter of survival.”

“How?”

“Allegiances have changed—tides and times. We live at the pale, the
fade of the unmelanized. The white man’s hegemony is over. The future belongs to those who tan, or those so dark they never tan.”

“Doesn’t that leave out the Asians?”

He closed and toted his unit, “If I have to try myself, I won’t be able to work—you have any idea how annoying it is, typing with slick fingers?”

I closed and stowed too, toed my tote closer, as Kor stretched over a shoulder and squirted a lump—a thick chunky load leaking down his back’s already medium rare hairless center and it wasn’t that I wanted to help him, it’s just that I couldn’t bear to witness the trickle. The sheer smooth presence was the goad, that dollop dribbling fusiform, taunting, luridly viscid.

No, not any secretion: the lotion was like a perspiring prophylactic, a condom he wanted me to tug over his pudging—and I tugged, I applied my fingers and thumb, put my wrists behind it. I rolled, twisted, pinched, slapped at his spinelessness, went for the deepest tissue—rubbing whiteness into whiteness as the glabrous pores absorbed, until I couldn’t tell what was zinc and what was just Caucasian.

“Obliged.”

I wiped my hands on the sand, the sand on my shorts, and mentally waded. Pretended to study the lifeguard’s bunker. No lifepreservers, no rowers, but gathered around the bunk the guards chattered into walkietalkies, prodded jellyfish with Kalashnikovs.

“Tell me,” Kor wasn’t asking, “has he mentioned me yet?”

“Who?”

“You’re the genealogist, you figure it out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Good, very good—we can trust you.”

“Who’s we?”

“You know—I’m one of the guys with the creditcard. What’s your beverage—seltzer?”

A beachboy abjected himself, and the order came, “Two big waters with bubbles—975, no, 976 bubbles in each.”

As he scampered I decided, “What brings you to the Emirates?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“We have similar interests,” he said, going through his Tetgear, putting on the shades, the visor.

Just what I needed, another clone. “I guess we have a thing or two in common.”

“Though you’d prefer vodka, and I’m sober. You smoke and I’d never. You’re about to be divorced, or are you trying to reconcile by telecuddle? Making passes at your lady by wifi?”

“Fuck off.”

“Fair enough.”

The resort was a blade that cast darkness to the dial, that clocked. But now there was no time. Now there was no shadow. It was noon, and that great incandescent beachball was directly above. Behind us, far on the elevated concourse, a crowd went about its static, like spray spumed from an unattuned screen. Men in robes, white terry. Women blacked between them. In front of us, the abyss lapped at the corniche, as if gorging out of boredom.

The beachboy brought the seltzers, and Kor tapped the charge away.

“So what’s the point?” to let him sip.

“I’m only trying to stress confidentiality, reminding you how important it is to keep whatever you’re doing to yourself.”

“Genealogy.”

“And just generally making myself available.”

“And you do this by intimidation?”

He burped, let him.

“I’ve been trying to convince the FTC that any protocol we develop that allows our devices to communicate with those of our competitors doesn’t have to allow those of our competitors to also communicate with ours, and so must be regarded as free and clear not just proprietary, but benevolent. I’m hiring an operations guy in Johannesburg, firing an operations girl in Belgrade, mediating a discrimination suit in Ottawa, monitoring coups throughout the Maghreb. China’s about to embargo my ass. Japan has two, count them, two, national intelligence agencies, and they don’t get along, and yet what I’m telling you is, I’ll make time for you.”

“I got it.”

“Tough for the both of us.”

“Yes.”

“Your wife, that actor—stupes.”

Then—I’d like to report an air raid, but no: it was the muezzin. Cutting us off, an ululating breeze.

It was the call to prayer, Dhuhr, and one person, but only one, turned over on his towel to face Mecca. Not east but west.

\

It’s disgusting, how I’ve been managed: the surveillance hut and passport, then this moment’s notice trip—and now to be lubbered up against an intertidal watercooler for office chitchat with Kori Dienerowitz.