Book of Numbers: A Novel (23 page)

Her featurelessness was of a supernumerary tit atop tits, though in her
strain to speed ahead a waist was shaped atop that ass. Swishy hips, thighs that rubbed.
Becoming again all ass. Even her feet were ass. She was an ass in heels. One cheek to
each, wobbling for balance.

In the foodcourt there was a pub called Hybernopub, theme of Dublin. Its
façade was fêted with shamrocks, bows rising crassly from cauldrons.
Outside the premises an animatronic leprechaun jigged on a plaster keg and listed, in
robotic Arabic and this language, robotically
but with an Arabic
growl, not beers but nearbeers, missed beers, close but no dice beers, pints of
simulhops, the demalted and wortless unfoaming, and runed on the keg itself were their
bankrupting prices in chalk. Dollars, euros, AED/dhs—that currency whose slick
prismatic bills, denominated in every pigment of the oleaginous spectrum, depict
skycrapers, sports stadia, falcons? sturgeons? antelopes? rams?—malls, definitely
malls.

The chalk.

It was a short thin length like a finger bone, a pointer. I emancipated it
from its string, approached her—the other ladies noticed, or didn’t, but
parted, humped on.

I quickened, she quickened, tensed from my tension. My shadow crossed hers
and was lost.

I was hurrying alongside her—swinging arm and leg caressing her
cloth, as if stroking her hair, as if her garment had grown from her
scalp—reaching out to her, once more.

It wasn’t a pinch I gave—I’m no pervert—but a
mark, a chit, between the shoulders, chalking her for the ease of my stalk.

Just as I did, the ladies—the handful or so remnant, after most had
peeled off for meals with their men—exited the foodcourt, and entered the tech
sector. They went left, toward the A/V side, featuring televisions (how antique), and
stereos (how antiquated)—to the right, the side for computers.

I dropped the chalk stub into a trashcan atop a waxpapered basket of
chickpeas.

We passed through a pair of weighted black curtains—like I was
passing through the ladies themselves. Suddenly it was night again.

There hadn’t been enough prayers—there would never be. All
was frozen dark.

A vacuumsealed interior—it took time to adjust, it took the ladies
dispersing. I stood behind woofers, tweeters, subpurrers, gluglugers, supraribbiters,
hissers.

My abaya was caught, contained. Glassed plasmatic. She stood in front of a
camera, which captured her image, and then sent it to the screen she stood in front of,
scrutinizing herself. She moved left, her image moved right. She turned her back, turned
her back on herself. It
took her—it took all of her sisters
doing the same at their own sistered stations—a moment to realize that the
cameras were built into the screens.

As they groomed their monitor selves, I monitored them—as they
realigned, adjusted. Fascinating how their abayat resembled screens—black screens
struck from the walls and curtained around their curvatures.

Still the chalk on my girl’s back shone through, from deep amid the
mediaroom mockups. She’d strip before bed to wash that body beneath, the skin the
permanent abaya, and find this sign singed into her skin, and take it as intended and
find me? though if a symbol was all I could afford, how could I be sure it’d be
interpreted correctly?

I considered returning, retrieving the chalk, to outline my body in a very
public atrium.

The girls trembled before their trembling, while I wavered undecided
between signal and noise, feigning interest in a gadget.

It was a Tetheld 4, a successionary replacement device as new in relation
to preceding Tethelds as Allah is to Yahweh: with every capability of spoken life (it
had a phone and SUI, or semantic user interface), and of textual life (via Tetsuite),
and was equipped for music/pics/vids (multiformat/polyshareable, via mOEs, or mobile
operating ecesis), and for any other experience purchasable online (4G). It had a health
monitor that took blood pressure, pulse and body temp, body mass index, tested
reflexes—I’m sure it even legally notarized.

An Emiri tween—torqued by gym and sleazily
pimpsuited—approached sniffing commission, “Any assistance?” And
while I was declining his attentions, she vanished—my abaya, disappeared.

I glanced from the flash in my hand, and she was gone, they all were.

Only their images remained for a breath, then faded.

Strike this.

Strike this like an Arab bride.

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I was back in my room switching channels,
too wasted to pack. BBCs 1–4, CNN Int’l, Eurosport (volleyball), Al
Jazeera (unrest). I sat through a documentary about the Khaleej but clicked away during
a segment on its dining facilities. The weather was a rerun too.

Black and white manna crackled across the entertainment system glass.

It’s like with the Korans I’ve been reading, it’s
like with any other paradisiacally dictated book. There’s enough of everything
for everyone, there’s never any call to hoard or grub. When you’re
wandering the desert, you get to decide what your manna will taste like. Then you eat
it, and whatever it tastes like it is. Pick any verse, interpret it into any texture,
any flavor, sweet or savory. Corny honey. Matzah brei. Milk schmilk. Bdellium and
coriander dew fondue. Any verse can be historicized, analogized—made
palatable.

I paged through my Korans to the sura that one edition calls The Banquet
and the other calls The Feast, which concerns—dilating on the dilemma of how to
sojourn among strangers while preserving a sense of
unblemishedness—Islam’s dietary laws. Abu Dhabi’s free copies were
preferential to Dubai’s, more archaic, more Thous and Arts—neither copy
credited its translators.

Following the prohibitions against consuming prey, raw blood of any type,
any porcine product, and the meat of any oblation dedicated to any god not Allah, The
Banquet/Feast serves up a delight—by decreeing that Israel had been deeded to the
Israelites, the Jews: “the Followers of Scripture” (Dubai version),
“the People of the Book” (Dhabi version).

“Enter the advantageous land [Dubai]/the blessed land [Dhabi] that
Allah has assigned [Dubai]/hath ordained [Dhabi] for you.” It’s
incredible: the text says just what I want it to say, just what the Muslims, I’m
sure, don’t need it meaning.

Revisiting the gastronomical proscriptions had whetted
my appetite. But I had no patience for the restaurants. The linen flap. The fork and
spoon routine. Oppressive. By the second course even the disdain, the derisive scorn,
has spoiled to stale formality.

I was having inexplicable tastes, slavering for a porkwing, like a wing
from a pig that flies, the blood of beef roadkill consecrated to Baal, the paschal ewe
for two, a chicken flipper—the special?

What on the side? Survival’s just a matter of taking every
side.

Pastures of greens, eggplant swords beaten into ploughshares.
Starches.

I hung up the phone, went for another dram of brown, then stood on the bed
and disabled the nimbus of smoke detector, lit a cig—where’s my drink?
atop the minbar or bottledwater minibar? There it is. Water down the brown. The same
sura bans this booze.

Towel under the draft to block the smoke.

\

The chime at the door had me cowering. What happens if you choose your
manna falsely? does the divine chef intuit the heart’s hunger and modify the
menu?

I bundled all my
Hustler UK
s and
Club Derriere
s into a
drawer, doubletapped the doorcom monitor, nudged away the towel, unlocked, unbolted,
unchained. On the other side was the boy. The bringer and bearer. He was polite and neat
in a stealth tuxedo, his moustache pubescent fascist. Ratib, in English at least, his
nametag printed in two alphabets, Ratib. He fluttered a napkin, set a chafing dish atop
the table, formerly the desk.

He was older than I’d remembered, or younger—point is, how
can I be expected to distinguish between the Ratibs? given that they, the Ratibs,
aren’t incentivized enough to distinguish themselves? All the Khaleej’s
servants, and the Burj’s too: their faces contort in my mind, like wet sand
trampled to dry and harden into brick, and I mean that as praise, if management will
pass it along.

“Shookrun,” I said, which extended the full courtesy of my
fluency, transliterating “thank you.” I tipped him one euro and one quid,
the last linty currency I had, and he sneered, withdrew shook running.

The offering, uncovered, was all garnish,
preservatived herb celebrating a premature gestation. Not yet brought to term and so
borne with dill and parsley.

Rate the Catering? One star charred. Cleanliness? 10 out of 10, but only
because turndown’s been forbidden me, by Principal.

Please remit any suggestions in the space below provided:/S’il vous
plaît donnez des suggestions dans le champ ci-dessous:/Bitte geben Anregungen in
das dafür vorgesehene Feld unten:

Merci, danke, thanks—sheikh’s rume? chic room? Standardized
transliteration of pleasantries might empower guests, and encourage their engagement
with local culture. Elevator 2 of the north bank should be fixed. All mall escalators
should be steep enough to get a wisp of female crotch in purdah. Countries that practice
online censorship evince a higher incidence of sexual assault, and a lower level of
political literacy, or else it’s vice versa. Ratib was quite simply the best
Ratib I’ve ever encountered.

That survey card was my bookmark. I covered the inedible creature as if
extinguishing an altar, returned to the Korans.

But the Don’t Disturb had fallen from the knob, was sticking its
laminate edge through the draft.

\

Just as I was about to replace it, another knock. Once, timorous.

It was Ratib returned, I guessed, working up the nerve to blackmail a
better gratuity out of me. Good for you, Ratib! go get him (go get me)!

The doorcom monitor showed only a fuscously cloaked dessert cart.

I opened, and made way for her. The chalk was still at her back.

She was a darkling abaya bag, with a cheap overbuckled overzippered
velcronated aluminum missile of a case she dropped by the closet.

I leaned into the hall and the rooms numbering upways and the rooms
numbering downways were peaceful, and outside their doors platters of blistered doughy
pistachio sweets slumbered through their rots alongside the drycleaning and laundry and
men’s shoes awaiting polish.

Inside again, lock chain slotted deadbolt, I said,
“Your husband?”

She was standing between the chairs, speaking Arabic to them—to me.
There are some people who pick up languages fast, there are some people who pick up love
fast. But I can be only one of them. Too late.

I said, “Mari?”

She held out her hands, held her fingers apart like her nails were still
wet from their dip in the sea—and she went for the stitching, and revealed her
face.

Or what of it there was around the sunglasses she was wearing: giant
outlandish mosquito moonspecs, their pricetag hanging by a thread. Her injuries seeped a
shade matching their lensing.

I’m going to try transcribing what she said, I’m going to
try doing every other thing to her, decently: “je veux divorcer,” and then
she said something “rien à foutre”—and then something in
Arabic again? “khanith”?

I said, “Did you decide to get divorced before he hit you or is
this just today’s development? Peut-être he’s been hitting you
forever?”

She cried, and my arms led my steps to her, but she recoiled and took off
her glasses, and her eyes—haven’t I read that certain Semitic languages
never distinguish blue from green? Hebrew does—but what about Arabic? Her ears
had no earrings, no holes.

“You sure you weren’t—vous a-t-il followed here by
anyone?”

“Je serai toujours seule.”

She stood by the east of the bed and I stood by the west and what was
between us was all that sharia blanket she was tangled in.

But even switching directions, changing the poles—stand me by the
east, stand her by the west—what was between us was blacker: our ages. Also the
sense that my interest in her was erotic because she was also, or merely,
exotic—though Rach would knock that down and call racism, if she’d burst
into this room just now to find this woman, this girl, Muslim, pretty young and
gorgeously wed, facing me across the bed and quivering.

She’d been gathering up her hem, and I circled around and helped
her lift it over her head. All she had on underneath was her underwear, which was
torture: iron maiden panties, spiked bra.

She took my hands, and laughed, the laughter swollen,
“Lentement.”

Don’t worry—“Je ne vais pas hurt you! je ne pourrai
jamais hurt you! No pain, no pain.”

Her cheekwound blushed, and yet that blushing was also its bandage. Below
the unmentionables she was still in her heels.

She was warm to my touch but how to say shy? just traduce to timide?

Still, let the opposite room eavesdrop, let anyone peep into our window
from a wraparound suite. I didn’t care—I didn’t drop blinds or slip
drapes.

Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And
under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in
hyssop—Psalms were about to pour out of me.

“Vous?”

“Josh,” I said.

“Vous habillé.”

“Je vais me undressed, clothes off, unhabillé,
déshab.”

She fussed with her hair, braided it into a fuse.
“Lentement.”

Slow, but slowly, I declothed. Though I was shit unfit, though I was every
bit as fucking fit as her husband.

She had to her an overbite of hesitation.

\

Meekness, humility—terror. She sat on the bed terrified in
puffed diaper and padded bra. And seizing the elastic, and faltering. Squeezing at the
clasps. Like she’d never worn undies before. Like someone else had put them on
her, some enemy. Packed her nylon cups to an underwire straining, rigged posterior
casings with C-4 plastique. And I wanted her to do it now, I wanted her to just detonate
herself and get it over with—launch all the lethal payload that was fertilizing
her: shrapnel nail and screw and poisoned syringe.