Book of Numbers: A Novel (24 page)

Blasting me away, blowing us both through the floor, and ticking through
the igniferous floors below it, bombing the lobby at mortal checkout—bringing the
hypostyle to crash, the arches to collapse, atop a cuneiform of limbs and kilim tatters
and fragments of the monogrammed blazon of Allah that’d pendulated over the
interactive pillars.
Imagine, amid the settling dust, a
providentially inviolate vase from which a single peacock feather—drifted.

“Vous étrange,” she said.

“Non.”

She shuddered. “Oui, vous.”

“Non je ne suis pas regardez you strange.”

My last wish before I submitted: let her explosion scramble this diary so
that everything will read like my French.

She shimmied out of the bra, let it fall—without a flash, without
immolation. No martyr.

Then she tugged the panties down, stopping at the calves to shed the heels
before continuing.

She wasn’t shaved. Not in any of her pits.

I was holding in my hands this wild mother of a bone.

Rach would be familiar with the feeling, Principal would be too. This
feeling of unveiling. To unveil the next product. To lift the curtain on the new.

I went slowly with her below me and then I was behind her and not
slow.

Her name was Izdihar, so Izi, so Iz.

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Y
ehoshuah Kohen was born in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug,
halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine. The old century was
dying, and the new century   
lurking just beyond the
fields, lying in wait in the snowy woods
   would be no
consolation. By the
goyim
Christians, it was 1870/71. In an
heirloom Bible, the family Kohen recorded
only                     FUCK
ME BEGIN LATER

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from the Palo Alto sessions:
We
were born in the year of the microprocessor, LGBT Pride Month, the Day of the Death of
Mohammed [June 8, 1971]. M-Unit a retired gender studies professor at UC Berkeley,
D-Unit an engineer, Xerox-PARC. Basically he was one of the inventors of personal
computing. Which meant, he used to say, he took computing personally. We grew up in a
white splancher in Crescent Park [Palo Alto]. A good neighborhood too überaware
of its goodness. Lots of cool subdued kids. Lots of cool hippie parents. Kindergarten
was at Berkeley. A totally egalitarian viro. M-Unit and D-Unit alternated breakfasts,
spelt pancakes, stevia quinoa. We had chore charts, surprise room cleanliness
inspections. We collected dinosaur eggs, coprolite, ambered insects, pyrite. We
memorized the chart of Mendeleev, which hung on our ceiling. We were picked on at school
for our [INCOMPREHENSIBLE—wardrobe?], which was sewn by parental friend
[INCOMPREHENSIBLE—Nancy Apt?], the back fabrics of the chinos and buttondowns
different from the fabrics in front. We were raised to mistrust brands, to be a
proactive consumer, a prosumer. All adults were academics. Primiparousness was the
norm.

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Communication is a
useful [tool [way] to understand Cohen’s family.
Cohen’s was a
family [consumed subsumed] by communication [communications/communications systems]: His
father, Abraham,
was one of the prime innovators
of
     
laid many of
the most important foundations
for
     worked on a team that helped establish
a few vital technical specifications for the internet—before the web, before the
technology had any commercial, industrial, or even military? applications. Not many
companies can afford a pure research arm, but Xerox, the photocopy giant, could, and
endowed PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1970 ? thousands of miles away from Xerox
corporate headquarters (in Rochester, New York). The PARCys, as employees were called,
were free to pursue their projects with minimal supervision, but with minimal support.
The innovations that came out of their labs, particularly from the Computer Science
Division, set the standards for modern computing.
Though Xerox
invested in developing none of them, though development costs would’ve been
prohibitive.

In 1972, the Computer Science Division built the Alto, the world’s
first personal computer [IS THIS TRUE?], which featured a wordprocessing program called
Wupiwug, which its programmer Hal Lahasky always claimed was a monster from a scifi book
by a writer he’d never name, though it was only an acronym for “What U
Press Is What U Get,” an indication that the keystrokes a user made were
reflected directly onscreen, and not on a teletype printout. [INSERT HERE A LINE ABOUT
LANGUAGES: BASIC, LISP.]

Nascent computing displayed its output on a tick of tape. The monitor
followed, a face to face the user’s, light hurled at a pane of glass. The last
frontier, or what was regarded as the last frontier, was also the first, paper again.
The laserprinter both continued and undermined the Xerox tradition: in that it
reproduced, but from a nonexistent original, putting to
paper the
page of the screen
(parenthetically, the laserprinter was the only
PARC innovation Xerox ever brought to market, in 1977 debuting the 9700, which
averaged TK?? pages per minute, and retailed for $??K)
. (The output of
nascent computing was just text, and not its formatting—to Abraham, the two were
inseparable.) The problems he had set out to solve involved what today is called
“desktop publishing,” or “design”—namely, how to
perfectly reproduce a print artifact onscreen, and then, outrageously, how to render it
manipulatable, perfectly printable again.

[However, building on phototelegraphy, which had been around since the
19th century, and the shift from wire to wireless facsimile, which occurred just after
the turn of the 20th, Xerox’s main interest in documents remained in their
reproduction, and in their reproduction through transmission, not in their manipulation.
All distances had to be bridgeable, as far as Xerox was concerned—the distance
between PARC and
Rochester
Stamford, CT, to which Xerox
moved its HQ in 19??, was not.] While Abraham’s colleagues were focused on
[creating the] transmission protocols between computers[, and computers and printers],
and constructing the Ethernet—a local area network [explain] that allowed
machines, and the people who made them, to communicate with one another
virtually—Abraham was alone in his fixation. He spent 14 years at PARC huddled
with scanners that still functioned with tubes, surrounded by hunched engineers
who’d already been graduated to transistors and circuits.

While the character recognition program was relatively simple to code
[WHAT WAS IT CALLED?], as were the modifications to Wupiwug that allowed user
modification of the recognized characters, it was the image that proved frustrating. The
images scanned well [do scanners work the same way as photocopiers or fax?], but Abraham
was never able to code an interface that pleased him. Every graphics program he invented
was either too rudimentary, or [the opposite of rudimentary?] intricate. He experimented
with raster and vector, with dividing the graphics into 2D “spatches,”
into 3D “layers,” but his lack of progress led to a lack of resource
availability, and in 1984, with PARC reorganized under new management, Abraham’s
unit was mothballed, and he was transferred to another [BUT WHICH?].

He would joke to his son that this was the fate of the
Jews—to be stymied by the image.

[[OPENING VERSION 1 BIOGRAPHY:
One hundred years before PARC’s inception
, Yehoshuah
Kohen was born in 1870, in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between
Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine.

Bershad was a textile town, and antisemitism was a familiar thread. Upon
returning from a spell at the yeshiva of Koretz, Yehoshuah married Chava Friedgant, the
youngest daughter of a family of weavers, and it was weaving that supported
Yehoshuah’s life of study and prayer, and the life of their son, Yosef, born
1895. In 18??, however, a pogrom was sparked [a pogrom sparked how?], and burned the
Jewish textile warehouse [but only one warehouse?]. Theirs was a tragedy so common to
the milieu that it can only become banal by repetition.

Regardless—wagon to Uman, trains to Lvov, Warsaw, Berlin,
Hamburg—the family took a steamship to America, bundling with them a single
trunk, and Yosef. Ellis Island records attest to an arrival of April 4, 1901. The year
of the Edison battery and the transatlantic radio, the death of Queen Victoria and the
assassination of McKinley,
annus Rooseveltus
. The first day of Passover
5661.

They settled on Orchard Street, on the East Side of New York City, where
Yehoshuah—now “Cohen”—found a job as an iceman, initially
cutting that substance from the East River, before being promoted to assistant deliverer
(an innate sense for horses and geography), to chief deliverer (developing English and
manners), cut manager, assistant payroll. But when his payroll chief married the
daughter of the ice concern’s owner, he left. The man was a fellow immigrant, but
from Uzhgorod [, Ungvar in Yiddish], who considered Yehoshuah a peasant[, which he was].
But he was also a natural businessman.

In 1909, with money he’d saved and income from Chava’s
lacemaking, Yehoshuah purchased a building in Coney Island, Brooklyn—freezing
cellar down below, living quarters up top—from which he’d deliver his ice
to every borough, and even unto the wilds of New Jersey, where he buried Chava in 1918
(influenza).

A year later, their only son, the Americanized
“Joseph”—who’d spent his late teens working nights for his
father while attending Stuyvesant High School during the day, and his early 20s working
days while attending City College at night—was married to Eve Leopold, a German
American Jewess and fellow student at [City College? whose family, all of whom were
involved with industrial refrigerator/freezer manufacturing, disapproved of the match,
and attempted to snub Joseph by not taking him into the business, instead granting him a
nonexclusive license to retail their products, which he did, to outstanding success, by
exploiting the newly emerging home market, introducing puffs of the Russian Pale into
American households by van and truck as far afield as Connecticut].

[Yehoshuah died in 1967, Joseph in 1977. Colon cancer—both?]

In 1930, Joseph and Eve had a daughter, Lily (accountant, d. 1998? how?),
and, in 1933, a son, Abraham (named for Eve Leopold’s grandfather? great-uncle?,
Abraham Leopold, a pioneer of gas absorption technology? or aqua ammonia?).

“Abs” was a loving, and beloved, son—in true
immigrant fashion, Joseph and Eve would have done anything for him, but in true
first-generation American fashion, “Abs” had required nothing, and had
accomplished all he had on scholarship: Harvard (bachelor’s in electrical
engineering), MIT (SM, electrical engineering), Stanford (PhD, electrical engineering).
12 years of education had cost his parents nothing.

If Abs ever disappointed his parents it wasn’t
with any computer coupling, rather with a coupling more personal [more
what?].
Joseph and Eve still held out hope that their son would return home
after he finished his PhD, and Abs seemed to placate them throughout 1969 by
interviewing for positions at IBM, Honeywell, Multics, and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman
[was he offered any?]. But he had no intention of taking a job with any East Coast firm.
Either because of the women out west, or the war in Vietnam.

Joseph’s pedes plani (flatfeet) had earned his deferral from WWI,
and Abs had been too young for conscription into WWII, too II-S (enrolled in essential
studies) for Korea
, and old enough that by Vietnam he wasn’t
fit for anything besides servicing mainframes[, which were
the size of jungle temples, and brought napalm from the sky].

On Christmas Day 1969, Abs had accepted the only offer he’d
been waiting for[, from the celebrated Computer Science Laboratory of
Xerox-PARC]

On New Year’s Eve, 1970, two men wandered San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury in a celebratory mood. Abs and Hal Lahasky had been rivals at Stanford,
but now that both were newly minted PARCys, the time had come to be friends.
Firecrackers were going off in the streets [WERE THEY?]. Love-beaded flower-children
danced in the gutters with sparklers [DID THEY?]. The house [DESCRIPTION OF WOOD
BOHEMIAN GINGERBREAD TRIM SF HOUSE] belonged to a cousin/friend of Lahasky’s, but
the party going on inside it, spilling out onto the porch and the street, was so packed
that Abs never met her/him, and lost Lahasky within a moment of arriving [REWRITE/CUT:
NO LAHASKY].

Marijuana was being passed around, which Abs was used to, but then,
judging by the [crazy bucknakedish people], there was also LSD. He avoided the punch and
went for beer. People stood [at a distance from the hifi?] “drinking
draft.” That’s what they told him the game was called. You drank the
number of drinks of your draft number. Until you hit it, or died. Luckily, also
unluckily, the numbers were low. Still, a guy [in a Mao suit?] had to be held standing
by, or was trying for a piggyback ride from, a [pretty young] woman.