Book of Numbers: A Novel (27 page)

Joseph’s father had been named Yehoshuah, Joseph said, which was
just Joshua in Hebrew
, though his family had spoken Yiddish and
called him Heschel, and his wife, Chava, called him Shy.
In America he cut
ice, this was before refrigerators, before freezers, he would have to wait for the
freeze—“it froze more often back then, it froze more
thick”—and then when the ice was sturdy enough he’d venture out
onto it, the ice over the river, ice over the bay, and cut it out in blocks, cutting the
ground out from under himself, like how the Israelite slaves built the pyramids.

[REPETITION: In Egypt, Joseph said, the Egypt of Europe, his father,
Yehoshuah, had been a rabbi—in Bershad. Cohen asked what Bershad meant and his
grandfather answered it meant Bershad. It was a city the size of a city block. All of it
might fit inside Grand Central, or Port Authority. Yehoshuah didn’t have a
congregation, but instead navigated the territory around Bershad delivering rulings on
kashrut and fair labor practices, performing weddings and funerals. He’d be gone
for days, even a week, at a time
, like a traveling salesman,
offering women brushes, combs, fertility incantations, fiduciary spells.
]

“He had many brothers and sisters,”
Joseph said. “In America, people don’t have that many brothers and
sisters, even though they have the money to have them. I could never understand. My
mother, and Evele, never could.”

Joseph told Cohen that Yehoshuah was the eldest of eight or nine children
and Cohen asked how it was that his grandfather didn’t know whether the number
was eight or nine and Joseph answered, “Old people have trouble remembering,
young people have trouble knowing.”

Cohen was confused and Joseph said, “We left so young I barely knew
how many hands I had, let alone how many fingers. Such a rush we didn’t
count.”

But Yehoshuah knew the numbers, Joseph said, he was the type who
always knew. “If you don’t keep the numbers in your head, they keep
them for you on your forearm.”

Joseph said his parents, Yehoshuah and Chava, took him out of Bershad but
left their family behind. “Uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters on both sides,
cousins—the family was now what is called nuclear.”

[FUCKING REPETITITITIOUS.]

But it was difficult to stay in touch with the rest of the family, Joseph
said, especially given all the turmoil. It wasn’t like he could just pick up a
telephone, or send a telegram so easily. Rather he could, Joseph said, but it
wasn’t like the family was always available to pick up the other end, or reply.
The post was unreliable too, especially for packages. Instead, Joseph said, we could
only think certain thoughts, and they could only think certain thoughts and, but this
was important, “Each half of the family had to know that’s what the other
half of the family was doing.” Joseph said, “At least, that’s how
my father explained it.”

“He told me he’d picked his own star,” Joseph said,
“like Polaris—lots of people pick Polaris, especially if they’re
young, especially if they live in the north, in the cold. And he told me that if he was
in the mood to communicate with his family he faced this star, not at a certain time or
from a certain place, but whenever, wherever, and he talked to that star, or he
didn’t even talk, he told me, he just poured himself into it, all his life and
frustrations, all his feelings, his dreams, he just poured all of himself into that
fire.

“Then he told me,” Joseph said, “that I could do the
same thing, that I
could just find a star, any star—I could
find my own or I could use his star, because any star has the capacity of all of
them—and I could invest this star with my emotions, I could make this star the
outside pocket for everything inside me, and that the family still over in Europe would
have their own stars and would do this same thing too, all of them, all of us, sending
and receiving.”

[REMOVE FROM DIRECT QUOTATION]

Joseph told Cohen that these communications would become stored in these
stars,
turning them into mutual archives, common caches,
omnipresent and yet evanescent
. From which they could be accessed, not at a
certain time or from a certain place
—“people have to
work, after all”—
but at any time, and from any place, and
ultimately not just by the relations and friends they were intended for but also by
anyone sensitive enough to go seeking. Anything ever communicated to a star, Joseph told
Cohen, could be accessed even after the death of its transmitter, and, unlike with the
spinning satellites and their transmissions, could be accessed and even altered by the
dead themselves, and then he mentioned Oma Eve and encouraged Cohen to speak with her in
this way, freely, and then he mentioned himself and encouraged Cohen to speak with him
in this way too, freely, once he himself passed, to that light on the other side of the
darkness.

“Your father does this kind of thing now with machines, which I
don’t have to understand. Because what they do isn’t new to
me.”

But returning back to the bungalow, Cohen turned to his grandfather and
asked about daylight, pointing out that this system worked only at night, or in
darkness, and furthermore he’d studied at school how the sky was always changing
around in circles and if in some seasons the stars decided upon were present, in other
seasons they were absent, and so access was not as universal as his grandfather had said
it was.

Joseph turned to Cohen and said, “Tell it to Polaris.”

://

from the Palo Alto sessions:
We
went to Montessori, both D-Unit and M-Unit were active in the PTA. Basically we won
everything at maths and sciences. But math really. Math was really our thing. Age eight
was algebra, geometry. Age nine was trig and calc. M-Unit and D-Unit packed us brownbag
lunches. Lots of veggies and fruits, pita crisps, bean dips, major beanloads. 1x/weekly
an egg, 2x/weekly a yogurt, only if we insisted. Though there were vendingmachines at
PARC and the Berkeley Linguistics Department and we would p/matronize them depending on
whether D-Unit or M-Unit would pick us up from school. Basically just Fritos at
Berkeley. But Twix and Mars bars at PARC. We did not consume them but bought them to
sell to fellow students. Our best customers were Ricardo Boyer-Moore, now of Aquarius
Initiatives, Bjorn Knuthmorrpratt, founder/CEO thebestof.us. A line taped to the carpet
in the den marked how far we had to sit from the TV in order not to be irradiated. We
were raised on a halfhour of TV per day we were allowed to choose ourselves though we
had to justify our choices daily either in oral argument or writing [ANY OF THOSE
WRITINGS STILL AROUND?]. The same policy obtained for the body, if we wanted to be
exempt from the vegan dinner diet of our parents [THOSE WRITINGS?]. Rule #1 was
do not waste water, only turn the faucet on to rinse, do not keep it on while
teethbrushing or facewashing. Rule #2 was the same applied to energy, turn off
the lights upon leaving a room, always keep the fridge and freezer doors shut, and
memorize not just their insides but the insides of every room so as like to minimize
ajarage and not waste electricity. M-Unit and D-Unit told us we could not have a pet
until our 10th birthday when they brought home a lemming we named Chomsky. M-Unit
lovehated Chomsky [EXPAND?]. But the lemming died and was replaced by a vole because it
had an even shorter life expectancy and was largely monogamous, though we could only
have one at a
time, and the first we named Zuse [EXPAND?] but then
it also died and was replaced by a second vole whose name we cannot recall and when that
died too D-Unit brought home two computers. M-Unit chose the Tandy 2 so that left for us
the IBM 5150. We also had an Alto in parts in the basement. Or we had so many parts of
so many Altos D-Unit called the heap of them “Tenor and Bass.” FORTRAN,
1983. PASCAL, 1983. M-Unit was disappointed we were never too proficient at
language-languages. Except. Give us a piece of paper, a writing thing.

://

1984 was a dystopia. Life had become
confusing, especially in the suburbs. There were simultaneously too many options, and
too few. Everything was the same and different, at once. The supermarkets had every food
and drink conceivable, but Cohen’s home had only certain foods and certain
drinks, and his parents shopped at only specialty health stores. The candy Cohen was not
permitted to consume came in more varieties than the fresh produce from his
parents’ garden, but then the fresh produce had more vitamins than the candy did,
which despite its branded array all contained the same ingredients, refined. To further
confuse things, if the ingredients of an apple were just apple, it didn’t make
any sense that his parents differentiated between organic and nonorganic varieties, or
that apples were retailed with labels stuck on them alerting to pesticides and waxy
preservatives. Water, the substance within, became particularly perplexing, because it
came from the tap until it was delivered in jugs, which were initially plastic, then
metal. Television and movies proved bewildering too, in that the same things
didn’t just happen in different movies and shows but also in different episodes
of the same shows, the same plots were always recycled, and during every commercial
break the same sports drinks madness recurred. All the shows and movies began wildly
enough—teenagers played with matches, snorted drugs, and appeared to enjoy doing
both—but then they’d all end tamely, caged, contained in the frame, and
even if the teens died tragically they’d return for a lesson, out of character
and after the credits, telling their peers don’t pay attention to pressure, stay
away from firearms, pederasts, drunk drivers, just say no, and notify an adult.

Sari wanted her son to attend private school, Abs wanted his son to attend
public school. But not just that, Abs wanted his son to become a bar mitzvah, Sari
wanted her son to avoid that[, calling the practice “a
spiritual circumcision”][CAN’T RECALL: DID PRINCIPAL EVER HAVE AN
INITIAL—PHYSICAL—CIRCUMCISION?]. Deliberations ensued. The costs were
high, in drama and financials. Palo Alto High School[, staffed by PhD washouts from
Berkeley,] would be forsaken for the coeducational, awardwinning [WHAT AWARDS?],
$10K/year Harker School, whose infirmary was run by a Yale/Harvard MD DrPh, and
whose track & field squad was coached by a medallist in the men’s 400m
dash at the Munich Olympics. Which meant that instead of a weekend in middle June
hosting the usual round of gaming—the forbidden Karate Champ, Kung-Fu Master,
Montezuma’s Revenge, Drugwars, Dunjonquest, Wizardry, but also 1K Chess, and
Tetris—it hosted instead the ungameable Sabbath.

The Torah, like a computer’s memory, is divided into compartments,
parts, one to be read for each weekend of the year. Cohen read from the portion called
Shelach Lecha, though he didn’t read from the scroll itself, but from a book.
Rather, he didn’t read at all, but had memorized the verses phonetically from a
cassette recording prepared by Lay Cantor Tawny Fienberg of Congregation Beyt Am.
Though the Torah is divided into portions, one to be read for each
weekend of the year, the divisions aren’t marked in the scroll itself, and
neither do the verses feature any punctuation. It was the rabbis who compiled the
Talmud who established, yet refused to physically separate, the sections, and so
consubstantially commanded the reader, who reads aloud, with mentally tracking all
classes and clivities of that separation, from section breaks and sentence breaks
to, within the sentence, the pauses of phrases. The units the rabbis defined became
referred to by their incipit, or opening clauses, and even today Cohen can remember
the opening clause of his and chant it with the traditional cantillation:
veyidaber adonay el Moshe leymor, shelach lecha anashim, veyaturu et eretz
Canaan
.

Cohen didn’t study for his admission exam to the Harker
School[—on which he attained a score more perfect than anything achievable in
Tetris—], but he couldn’t help but study for the bar mitzvah: Hebrew was
the first subject that gave him trouble, and he could never decide whether it was that
trouble or the language itself that fascinated[, and kept him from coding modifications
to Tetris that allowed two elements to fall at once, that allowed two elements to fall
at different speeds, that previewed
the next two or more to fall and
allowed the player to exchange them, and that expanded and contracted the playing
surface both vertically and horizontally, and flipped it 360°, both by player
whim and parametrically]. To be sure, Cohen wasn’t frustrated by the Hebrew
language, but by its alphabet. Cohen never learned to read, speak, or write Hebrew
fluently, and certainly never learned any grammar. His interest and experience were cut
from semantic context, purely characterological.
While bar mitzvah
preparation required an emphasis on the letter as phoneme, to be reproduced orally,
subsequent to that event the graphic or glyphic aspects prevailed, an approach that
denied the letters their aggregation into syllables, the syllables into words, and
favored instead their pictogrammatical or ideogrammatical identities, as if Hebrew
were an Asian language in which each sign was a pantomime of arms and legs,
ascenders and descenders, bars and stems and ties, in kabbalistic permutation. This
pursuit of a symbolic or representative Hebrew was what inspired Cohen to develop
his own written language, an unpronounceable language that would never be named, but
that would serve as his sole mode of expression for an entire year after his bar
mitzvah, until the summer of 1985.

[GET PRINCIPAL TO ELABORATE ON HIS MOTHER’S BOYCOTTING OF HIS BAR
MITZVAH.]

[GET PRINCIPAL’S FATHER’S REACTION.]

Cohen’s initial impulse in creating his own language was to avoid
what he considered the central paradox of all languages, both human and
computational.