Book of Numbers: A Novel (22 page)

That voice. It wasn’t recorded, but live. Both bodiless and hoarse.
Arabesque. The voice that turns lattices to speakers. That speaks the very fretwork. While rising and falling like an arch. The sound of calligraphy, of cacography.

I listened, I lay and listened while watching the default channel, as the face of the sheikh wiped onscreen—a screensaver, a sheikhsaver.

Then a dissolve, to a stock image of Medina. Minarets around a vert dome. The sheikh returned, superimposed. A dissolve again, to a stock image of Mecca: caravanserai encircling the Kaaba, that brute granite tabernacle that holds paradise inside it and grants wisdom to all—in its big black squareness it even looked like a datacenter.

Again with “the sheikh”—or “king”—the lexicon kept changing, or else the man himself refused to be defined. Ruler of the petrols we’re passing for flight. Ruler of the electrified high celestials. Guardian of freon, and of the urinals that flush in the sky.

I wondered how he’d receive Principal: desert hospitality mandates feetwashing, the watering of camels, a meal (the guests served first and best), the best bed and first choice of concubine (supplies limited). A prudent host would also provide the translation.

The sheikh would speak, would describe an immense palace of utterance, and only when finished, only when utterly finished, would he let the interpreter render. A dictatorial practice, Koranic in a sense. Unless the totality has been communicated, nothing has been communicated. A single misunderstanding flaws it all.

Or else maybe the sheikh would break his speech into units, bits and bytes and girih tiles, pausing between each to demonstrate his authority, in the guise of generosity—pausing between each to allow his interpreter, scrounging on hands and knees, tongue thrust in concentration, to clean it up. To lick the words up from the limen, and spit out again a perfect reproduction mosaic.

But then perhaps the sheikh would say nothing at all, and just sit enthroned, while his interpreter stood and spoke for him: either words the sheikh supplied the interpreter with prior to this audience, or words the sheikh never supplied—the interpreter recast as a prophet and the sheikh becoming an oracle or dream.

Then again, the ultimate would be if there were no sheikh whatsoever: the sheikh could pose as his own interpreter, or the interpreter
could pose as the sheikh, who was absent from this audience because too important, or too senile, or even deceased, and so the interpreter who claimed to represent him was just representing himself.

I wrapped my hand in a washcloth, prepped for my next sessh with Principal. Stretched for the ascent.

There were a lot of steps ahead of me. And each vital to mastering the next.

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To fall for this Arabess is forbidden, but nowadays to fall for any
woman you can’t search up online is forbidden. How else to snoop her? how else to
send her around?

Her life had been set to Private.

Her mouth, a pool of jewel set in bodied blackness. The modesty mullahs
sure know what they’re doing, insisting that the less I know of a woman, the more
I want to know, I need to know.

She’d reserved a full floor in my memory, without giving a number,
without giving a name. I had no wasta, and only this chance. Though even if I’d
manage to baksheesh the compjockeys at resort IT, it’d be too suspicious to ask
after her, I’d have to ask after him, the rolypoly ayatollah, the offensive
effendi. Claim him a prospective investment partner. Invest him in my claim. Either that
or I’d appeal to Principal to hack the Khaleej dbase and ransack the records. No
other sources to cultivate. Just desert.

Instead of excavating around the site, exposing its ramparts, I decided to
go down, foundationally. I dug myself into the lobby, and sifted through the drifters,
the dunes motioned around me—humpy dumps in full hijab.

The women who passed compelled attention by tighter fits, which were
pregnancies, and heelless shoes, so as not to slight their escorts. Kitchen slippers, or
wrung through the laundry slippers and then, open toes.

Hints of tint from the fingers. Ten drips of an esoteric ultramarine.

The purdah population must’ve boomed overnight (or else I’ve
just grown the appropriate antenna).

I was muftied again in my predistressed jeans, flannel
over I heart NY tee, sitting on a tulipary divan between the elevatorbanks and
pretending to compute. I clicked for a speech I’d consulted on for the
mayor’s office: New Urbanism & the Future of Energy. But energy has an
unlimited future, and it’s humanity that doesn’t have even a horizon on
the horizon: “The city seeks Albany’s pledge to develop solar, wind, and
hydroelectric capabilities in both the Hudson and East Rivers within the next
decade”—this was laughable, rather, depressing, reading this in a Gulfside
palace powered not by sun, wind, or water but by fossils, whose government ownership
would go sustainable only if that meant going nuclear. Scrolled through a few old journo
squibs: reviews of books about homosexuality and Cubism, about German dodecaphonists in
America, and then a profile of an Israeli novelist dedicated to answering “The
Palestinian Question,” a kaddish eulogy overpraising an overpriced deli upon its
shuttering.

Went through my résumé, exaggerating credentials for the
main search—the job search—to come. I rattled the filechains, unfettered
the inbox. Wrote: draft emails to two lawyers Lana had recommended, ridiculous (one
Levin, the other Levine), to decline a Rosh Hashanah dinner and/or Yom Kipper break fast
invite from the managing ed of jewe.com, to thank Cal and Finn for the porn. Loaded the
porn. Cal—gratitude retracted—had sent a pic of a grossly obese man having
his foreskin licked by a dog having its foreskin licked by a cat. Finn—apologies
in order—had sent a vid. Long. Loading. Taking so long to load the old me
could’ve buffered twice already (the new me couldn’t fathom ever buffering
again).

Black. She emerged from the car. I knew it was her, because she knew it
was me. She startled—facelessly—turned away, turned back but clung to her
guide.

She was being minded not by her husband but by a more voluminous
rotundity—a floating dome, like of a mosque, but undergoing reconstruction. An
old woman scaffolded with a cervical collar, and an ungainly plastic and titanium
orthotic—a bootcast.

I shirked my Tetbook into the tote, approached. Sidled up alongside.

“Hello.”

Closer than would be considered normal even if she weren’t a she,
or Arab.

They made a show of ignoring me, her most of all.

“Speak German? Speak French?”

She said nothing and her escort was just a gentle dumb hemisphere orbiting
gravely.

I said, “Pretend no one else is in this lobby—you with
me?” I tried to hold her pace, her general area of face. “It’s just
the two of us, remember?” I gestured at my chest, sashed by the totestrap in the
getup of a eunuch.

She whispered what I took to be “English.”

I said, “What are you up to today?”

The equatorial plumpness next to her shushed, Arabized a spate
comprehensible internationally as disapproval.

I said, “Today?”

“No English,” she said, mine.

“Mari?”

“No.”

“Frau oder Mädchen?”

“Jaloux jaloux mon mari.”

This was like a Russian novel already, this French, this
German—excessive, dumm, imbécile.

The chaperoning mother—or mother inlaw? or an eldest prima wife
who’d been hurt in an unpreventable domestic accident of her own?—scolded
in gutturals, tsks, and sped them ahead, her boot’s clunkery punctuating my
failure.

\

No matter how much they’ve traveled, most whites have had this
experience abroad—especially in the darker countries. These people—these
dimnesses, darknesses—are interchangeable, the white tourist thinks,
they’re cognate, coincident, synonymical. The inner life as impenetrable as its
outer pigmentation. Black is bad, the color of evil, a stain or taint. A cancer. Red is
bestial. Brown is shit. Yellow is piss timid.

But then inevitably our traveler comes to know someone—maybe only
his waiter, maybe only his maid. He might even, let’s hope, come to have sex with
someone, for love or money, for both, and—when the
fascination ends, when the package tour ends—is either confirmed or
disabused, ashamed of his initial bias or not.

I followed—what should I dub her? should I set up an online
presence for her, have Aar and Cal vote on a name?

Like her, dislike her, track her as favorite—through the
Khaleej’s lobby, through a garish consecution of kufic script scannables and
projected ads that connected practically and thematically the resort complex with the
mall.

Gaudy antiseptic fountains, cacti to deter loitering, boulders whose size
trafficked toward sales. Palms marked the passageways fronding radially from the central
bourse. The mall had planted only species native to the Americas, as if to boast, to
brag, to demonstrate what was feasible—not just the acquisition but the thriving.
The trees grew, amid the frigidity, they prospered and grew, and the abayas were their
fruit, ripely contused—the proper plural of abaya? abayat?

Their color scheme was basic black. The fall collection, also the winter,
spring, and summer collections in this desert without season. They were bolts of black
cloth unrolling. Items strayed off the rack. Some silk, some chenille. All blended.

The women made a hajj to a windowdressed concourse, whose mannequins
matched them in chador before lightening up and becoming hysterical, gruesomely
festooned in chiffon plastron and crape carapace, billowing with metalline polyester,
lycra strapped to masks—garments that called attention to the fact that their
wearers weren’t supposed to be calling attention to themselves. Fashion was
taking chances so these ladies wouldn’t have to—these ladies swathed in
pockets to be worthy by comparison, still devaluing themselves by comparison.

If a girl was just in an abaya and shayla, she judged the girls who were
in veils too, who judged others of their retinue for having veils with more or less
stylish coverage.

My girl’s covering was just some bag. Some upsidedown insideout
unadorned bag. She was wearing its reflection in every display. She was wearing the
windows that reflected her and the vain commerce behind them and then instead of a face,
my own.

Her old woman companion finished unbunching her beardy niqab
from her collar, and swiveled her head around its scant
range—but I stepped behind a kiosk.

\

Decency protocols flashed me—from the HD panels battenmounted
above, whose programming looped Islam’s conduct and sumptuary guidelines and a
fanatic advisory about creditcard addiction and the abominations of debt. A You Are Here
dot danced on an interjacent panel, damning me to the haram department—an annex
beyond ahkam, a demilitarized or greenzone accepting dollars, its boutiques stocked with
wares that on the homefront would be considered tame if transgressing only of taste, but
that here transgressed nature itself and were risky even when folded, when hangered.
Dresses cut to skirts, lingerie barely exceeding the size of the average
customer’s vagina, what it’d take to muffle a mean set of nipples.
Negligees, bustiers, girdles, diaphanous whisperweight giggling. The ladies stopped to
admire, never to touch. At least I’m assuming it was admiration, though I
wasn’t sure of what—the merch itself? or the confidence to be its
consumer?

The outfits outfreaked only by the foreigners who purchased them: a
eurobimbo bureau of diplobrat jetettes, drafty castle heiresses, and serial
divorcée alimony phonies. Still, it takes volition to decide which products to
buy. As my ladies passed, the parties exchanged glances, nods, sophisticated gynics. My
ladies had no volition, and by contrast seemed like products themselves.

My abaya’s consort embraced her, then left—clumping that
boot toward the domestic appliances arcade, accompanied by two other mosquerading
matrons.

We were alone now, though still among a dozen. I had to focus. On her
hefty swell, the way she shuffled at turns. Otherwise her abaya was so flowing that it
trailed along the tile and obscured her stride, giving her the appearance of
hovering.

She boarded a conveyor. I scurried alongside, tarrying at every passage
break as she disembarked toward free sample demos of jewelry detarnishing solutions,
displays of boudoir organizers, pyramid placements
of woks and pans,
rotating installations of cognoscente cutlery, magic flying bakingtrays and
bathmats.

The ultimate stretch of pathway rose, became a ramp—I
boarded—an ascending escalator of an escalating steepness leading to the
mall’s upper tier, the uppermost skylit.

If stairs are the model life—prepared for any fate, whether up or
down—the escalator is a step in the wrong direction. In one direction only. Like
each day, like every day, its steps begin by staggering, only to end by flattening. They
stagger, fall flat, then repeat.

I sought the highest sharpness.

As we rose, her shoes were exposed. Aqua heels. They were low heels, the
lowest, which she stood in as if splashing around. They got a rise out of me
nonetheless.

I clambered up the climbing—staying always four abayat, three
abayat, two, behind.

\

Language is acquired only for the purposes of further
acquisition—my abaya, my burqa, my burq. How much does this item cost? how much
larger can it get than xxtra-large?

The ancient mystery faiths all held by this, that whosoever knows the name
of a thing, owns that thing, and I’m convinced that’s true only by the
truth of its reversal: that if you don’t know something’s name, that
something owns you.

Because I was hers, and my tongue was the receipt. I kept pace to better
appreciate belonging.