Book of Numbers: A Novel (20 page)

A bustling recreatrix—who’d left in each one of my rooms a fresh pack of appropriate adapters/converters.

The UK plugs are bulky, rigid, threepronged with two up top, that absurdly big grounding knob at bottom—indicative of a bulky, rigidly grounded country? or a country ridiculously overcompensating, seeking to overpenetrate, for lost power? The French plugs are expectedly more attractive, softer, rounder, twopronged but with a hole at bottom because the grounder, in France, is not incorporated into the plug itself but into
the socket—indicative of a more attractive, softer, rounder country? or a country that surrenders its hole and enjoys it?

The Emirates are equipped for both.

The time was a beseechment between Isha, the prayer to be said after the sun’s red recording light has faded from the sky, and Fajr, the prayer to be said at the pulsing return of its luminance.

I kept getting roused out of sleep by a dream or a line memory, which had me backtracking all the way to Palo Alto—through tracks I never imagined having to Play, I can’t imagine transcribing, rewriting, being read. Rewinding and Playing again: “[…] the time/distance required for luxuries to become staples, wants to become needs. London is just around the corner, Paris can be ordered,” “[…] wants to become needs. London is just around the corner, Paris can be ordered. Bewildering. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.”

A knock at the door interrupted, and Jesus let himself in like in an extraordinary rendition, which it was. Except there wasn’t any chloroform towel, the pillowcases stayed on the pillow, under my head and smothering it “in quotes.”

He wouldn’t let me pack myself, but it wasn’t a security measure, it was a haste thing. He rolled my bag for me.

Feel was in the lobby with a single suitcase.

Principal had either ditched, or forgotten, his toupee. In his hand was a begging bowl from the buffets.

\

I’m not sure I understood what, but something got screwed up with our transport: something about how we were supposed to leave from an auxiliary garage, but how as an extra precaution Jesus and Feel had waited until now to inform the Burj concierge, who was apologizing that our transfer had already been routed out front and the auxiliaries all reserved for the impending visit of the ruler of whichever nation had a white flag with a crown and a serrated edge, waving.

So while Feel and Jesus tried to hash out a compromise in a way that kept the concierge from alerting his supervisor, and I turned my head
for just a moment to rustle for my drugs—Principal got impatient and wandered unattended.

The dudes in turbans and S&M leather and chains slouching across the lobby must’ve been affiliated with that visiting ruler as like valet dungeonmasters, or executioners. Because they weren’t doormen: the doors were automatic, sliding glass.

Principal was heaving himself over the gul rug and Burj medallion until, just as he was about to crash into the glass, he stopped—the panes wouldn’t part for him, his presence wasn’t sensed, and he was shocked. He barely even had a reflection, just the ghost of a ghost, of an insatiable paling, and an amniotic and alien baldness.

Then the sadomaso dudes mobbed him, and bowed to him, and their bows were detected, and the doors stood aside. Jesus and Feel, just sprinting up, dropped their hands from their holsters.

Outside, and into the heatblast. Convoys of Range Rovers and Escalades were idling, and whether Feel or Jesus or the dispatch itself was to blame, ours was the black tacky stretch prom limo.

The chauffeur—Afric, vitiliginous—tried to wheel my wheelie but Jesus refused him. He tried to take the suitcase from Feel and Feel handed it over with a palmful of dollars that if they didn’t buy the limo itself bought the right to drive it.

Jesus rode shotgun reading directions off his Tetheld.

We had no sirened escort or motorbike gang—just speed, lanechanges without a signal, tires bucking us unpaved.

Principal, throughout, was just this loosely seatbelted breathing, which intensified with and then surpassed the AC, by a mindful circulation, simultaneous in and exhalation like he was resuscitating himself nose to mouth. I sat alongside him and bumped knees with the chauffeur sitting abstracted and sad on the opposite banquette.

A sign put Dubai airport one way, 20 km, Abu Dhabi airport the other, 100 km—as one airport ended, another began, with nothing between.

Construction sites, stalled. Construction completed in the style of stalled. The cranes indistinguishable from the towers they built. For sale or lease or rent, both the towers and the cranes. The sky was blue. The lights were green. Until, at Port Saeed, traffic honked stopped. A yacht
had floated off a flatbed. A sideloader’s shipping containers barged by the guardrails. Gulf Navigation, Hanjin, Maersk, P&O Nedlloyd.

Helicopters hopped and buzzed like locusts over Al Quds Street. Baggagetrains wormed through the snail drips of refueling tankers. The tarmac was uneven, as if asphalt had been poured directly over the dunes, the airplane hangar an oasis, roof planted with radar fronds. We slowed, and stopped, and just left the limo running, the doors ajar and the chauffeur sitting amid all that calfskin and burnished trim, and as I walked under the hangar’s ribs, I turned—he was still in the limo, just sitting, hands brooding gloved by his flanks.

This wasn’t our plane, but was—it was the same but Kor’s, Tetjet Two. Another shrewdly nibbed Gulfstream 650.

An Arab in a spotless salafi jumpsuit that marked him as foreman sprung at us with a folder of paperwork, and went up between Jesus with our bags and Feel escorting Principal shaky on the airstairs.

I lit a cig, procrastinating. Bibbed mechanics flipped wrenches. The rest of the groundcrew sat around on a conveyor. That the scars of their faces were different might’ve meant their tribes were different, or their troubles.

The foreman returned and I assumed he was going to have me put out my cig, but he bummed one, and as I was lighting him he said, “Next time you give advance notice? Avoid rush charges?”

As I boarded I popped the last of my pharmacopoeia. My beverage choice wasn’t a choice, kombucha or lukewarm Corona.

I sat across from Principal—I wondered which seat was Kor’s. Between Feel and Jesus we had at least one pilot, apparently.

Principal lotused his legs, and wedged them under the armrests, the arms at rest, he was breathing into becoming breath, he was ridding himself of ballast.

The Burj bowl was overturned in his lap.

Samadhi—I don’t know if that’s how to spell it—iddhi—I don’t even know what that means, what it can mean to the spiritual.

I’ve never subscribed to the miraculous: a Samaritan turns water to wine with artificial colorants, tugs extra fishes and loaves out of bottomless hats, a leper dances across water in shoes with stilts attached. Still, of all the miracles of all the religions, Buddhism’s are the only ones that
make sense to me, because they’re the only ones I’ve at least technologically experienced—seeing over long distances, hearing over long distances, passing unimpeded through walls, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the self—and especially, levitation: going up, and staying up for a bit, coming down.

Principal did this every time we flew but this meditation must’ve been especially focused. Or it’s just that I had nothing else to notice. The portals were shaded. Principal rumbled in a fluent enginese—either Sanskrit or Pali.

The self must be escaped, or ejected. The fuselage must be cleared for takeoff, and the wings must become mere excrescences. Heavy metal on the ground becomes airborne, hollowboned birdflight, featherlight. A vessel for impurity becomes a vessel for purity, without claim to creed or even the corporeal.

Principal chanted, but this time did a version translated for me: “Dwell so that the above is below—shed skin, go, pass organs, go, shit, piss, bile, phlegm, blood, sweat, and fat, go, go.”

We went—Principal disburdening for lift, and lifting us weightless.

Until—I felt this genitally—the landing gear deployed. We were back on the ground in about 18 to 20 minutes.

“Dwell so that the below is above,” Principal still aloft even as the wheels skidded, skipped, and the semaphores yielded.

He left his bowl, bottom up, in his seat.

\

I’m not sure how to write about this, not sure whether to still be writing at all—I’ve been trying to screen and block so much out, so many confidences throughout, classified stuff, government stuff, might even get me imprisoned stuff, that it’s become systemic with me, to the point that I find myself trying to withhold on this confession even. Principal’s mouth wired to my ears, his eyes becoming mine, a monitor, a common prompt between us blinking, unblinking, at this sense of having become so irrecordably joined that the only way not to write about him is not to write about myself. I’ll have to spread and type around. Furl and reach between Del and Esc.

I’d been hoping that this diarizing here would be for me what our sesshs have been for Principal—a reckoning—and that the role he’d play in this would resemble my own in his: a standard, a measure, irrelevant where ignorant, relevant when desired, and if intrusive then only as a punctuating mantra, Am, Em, Im, Om. I guess, um, the difference, um, is that I’m the one who’s getting paid, and already in breach of contract by this acknowledgment.

We were alone, but if I can’t get into why, I’ll have to turn that omission into a virtue, like the way handicaps are treated, or like scriptural restraints. At least what I’m omitting is professional, nothing personal.

Am, Em, Im, Om.

We were in Abu Dhabi, having been checked into the Hotel Palace Khaleej under our names assumed, and ensconced for a sessh in Principal’s preposterous enfilade, which even with its crazy brecciations and carats and enough room in each closet to sepulture the shame of it, was empty. Rather it was disarranged, like the qtips weren’t in their dedicated holder, and the glasses on Principal’s face weren’t the unhinged rimless squares that he preferred and anyway were grubby, and there were no protein potion or granulocyte macrophage booster shot reminders, and there were no potions or shots without reminders. He’d left Myung behind in Dubai, along with the rest of the away staff, our normalcy. I’m fantasizing they’re all helping dismantle that topfloor temple at the Burj, and demolishing its idols.

Now it was just Feel’s toothaches, Jesus and his restlessness about not being able to contact his wife, who was pregnant.

At the courtesy call for Asr (that prayer recitable in this season at this latitude between ca. 15:45 and 18:15), Principal told me I was sleepy, which meant he was. I asked the time of our next meeting, I asked what time he had to meet the sheikh, but he was asleep in his chair—I didn’t take off his sandals.

I retoted and let myself out, relieved Feel from sentry. Jesus was out making a phonecall, or as Feel said with kulfi popsicle lips and a mordant stick between them, “encrypted phonecall,” which, as a status update, I interpreted as twitchy.

I went out to the elevators, pressed the only button, the down, until it turned into a fiery bindi—if only salvation were as summonable as an
elevator, if only redemption were just a mechanical designation, an assignment. The doors closed behind me, and I swiped my keycard, which was coded for floor access, for room access—rubbed, and blew on the black stripe, rubbed, swiped again—demagnetized, which is what happens to everyone who works with laptops, I guess, they lose their hair and muscle tone and magnetism.

None of the other guest floors or reclevels would admit me. Not even the lobby. The underground parkinglot. The ground under which admits everyone. I pressed open, but the doors wouldn’t open, then went for the help button that in all languages is red and in braille is a rash. Sweating, dizzy, stifled.

I struck out at the walls, the antiscratch padding and weather touchsplays. I jumped but was short of the ceiling, took out my Tetbook—no wifi—had this urge to cringe inside my tote, as the elevator’s lighting dimmed and the thrum of its mechanism quieted.

I was karmically stuck, a floater. It was my breath. I had to ease my breath, and then empty it. Void this car containment.

I tried to fold myself up like a map, to compress myself like in eastward travel. To become the time lost to flights, the time lost across longitudes. The differences between Palo Alto and London and Paris, and between them and the Emirates—I’d go where they went, when they went. Into nonexistence—into neverexistence.

The doors would glide away then and it wouldn’t just be the Khaleej again, it would also be the Burj, de Crillon, Claridge’s, all their ambiance mingling, their couture scents and muzaks merged, the corridors turning one way into London wainscoting below Victorian wallpaper flocked with paisleys, turning the other into Paris parlor boiseries wreathing Empire urns with moldings of laurel, a cracked soaking tub bashed through a rainforest steamshower, hometheater systems dunked in the toilets, gardens growing into beaches to kelp the Gulf, the desert strewn with broken crockery from The Foyer and Les Ambassadeurs—bent knives from every restaurant I’ve stayed above, with Doc Huxtable, the piloting Sims, Gaston, Lavra—and all Myung’s Buddhas staved and dashed, the prayerbeads off their threads, the wheels unspoked, the sutras dismembered and blowing scattered. It was as if by evacuating my mind, I found this was my mind, a room of all my rooms, assailed by all
my planes, or just a car in flames, and a voice, which was its capacity, shrieking.

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With Maghrib (ca. 18:30 to 20:00) I was moving again. Descending. I had to be called, being unable to call myself. But then the car stopped, around the Khaleej’s midlevel, the doors fell away, and there’s no other way I can explain this sensation—of identicality but wrongness, of unicity within displacement—this was, but wasn’t, my floor.

Only the numerals distinguished.

A man crouched by the elevatorbanks, his back to me.

He was an Arab, clad in a kandura like a bedsheet filched from housekeeping, straight off the cart. Bright brilliant just from the shrinkwrap white, still creased shoulders to elbows, rustling at toes.