Book of Numbers: A Novel (33 page)

Hardware, software. Both used to come packaged, not
readily unpacked. Now everything installs itself, feeds and grooms itself, selfexplains.
But we were not that 1D propellerhead tech d00d you want us to be who needs to hack the
drives of Gorbachev before he can POP3 his cherry. Before this all was math. After just
math. When we applied we were pure. When we were pure we applied.

We refrained from accessing records of past GPAs and class ranks and
comptrasting them w/r/t college admissions. Our personal statements, which M-Unit helped
write, mentioned only our facility with numbers. The recommendations D-Unit got for us
did too. We were going to restart and core dump ourselves of computers.

Let Trey Kerner [?] who still played the arcades bust open the Pac machs
to change our high scores manually, let Mat Plokta [?] brag at school about
reprogramming the barcoder at the GalaMart to read the Marlboro Reds and Olde English
40s as like $1 discounted each, only $1 to keep it plausible, we had
higher scores and sums in mind.

Acceptance envelopes came daily from Cal Tech and the Ivies and even
phonecalls as like the one that asked for Mr. Cohen and we answered that we were
speaking and the voice told us that we had won the Reverse Turing Award. Cowon. [FOR
WHAT? W/ WHOM?] This was spring 1989 and we accepted the prize on behalf of D-Unit and
even made the travelplans for him to attend the banquet ceremony in Washington DC. We
wanted a direct flight from SFO, we wanted a corner room at the K Street Sheraton.

That day we were admitted on full tuition to MIT, and D-Unit went to get
the prize on his own and while on a visit to the Mall, the National Mall, had a mild
myocardial infarction. A heartattack. 04/20. M-Unit visited him in the hospital in DC.
“The unshittiest,” Aunt Nance said. “Of the shit hospitals.”
GW. She had come over to take care of us. Dr. Nancy Apt. Berkeley, Econopsychology. We
had always known her as like our aunt, though we also knew her only sisters were the MFs
of the Bay Marxist Feminist Coalition. She moved in and never left. She was on the
foldout in the den between D-Unit on the memoryfoam in the kitchen and M-Unit in the
parental bedroom. Then she was in the bed too and sharing it with M-Unit and D-Unit
might have joined them, he had always been invited to join them before. But now he was
too weak.
He was weak as like the memoryfoam he dragged all
grumptious into the hall.

Aunt Nance was basically applying all her knowledgebase in
conflict/resolution, to mediate. Between D-Unit and his physical health. M-Unit and her
mentals. Aunt Nance was invigilating bloodpressure, the betablockers and nitrates, the
inhibitors and statins. Transitioning herself from babysitter supportive friend and
lover, to babysitter lifepartner wife. Nurse practitioner UN peacekeeper dean. She
negotiated both halves of the parental chores, and our third half. Cooked noncholesterol
taro callaloo and tzimmes, and took us to the Army/Navy surplus in Campbell to get
outfitted for Stanford.

For graduation she gave us a Nintendo with Zelda and Zelda II and Metroid,
and though we had outgrown all that we were gracious. But then one night it along with
the 16″ Zenith had been relocated to their bedroom and M-Unit who had cried about
Nintendo being a brain pollutant was now giggling playing a Donkey Kong, with Aunt Nance
Player 2ing her. Parent child role reversal. Precipitated by Kreem Kush, a midgrade
cannabis hybrid. The next morning when they went with D-Unit to a cardiologist checkup
we retaliated by wiring their clockradio into the console flap where the cartridges go
until the Zenith picked up KQED and the LED 12:00, and though the system was unusable
they were back before we had figgered how to set the alarm. After that M-Unit acted busy
with her scholarship, ignoring us except for that once she remarked on how our leaving
would mean D-Unit would have his own room.

Do not interrupt. Let us tell how it was. Two plus one does not always
equal a threesome. Recall the isosceles fallacy, how the midpoint P is outside the
triangle. Some nights D-Unit who was not enjoyed by the Is, the parents of M-Unit, would
drop us at their house, and in the mornings collect us, and M-Unit would be doing yoga
out on the lawn and Aunt Nance would be recycling winebottles and composting joints.
Just to get away we went to second
Ghostbusters,
second
Back to the
Future,
third
Karate Kid,
and went on fieldtrips to the Artificial
Intelligence Center in Menlo Park because no one else ever did and Calonis, the robot
that led us around, seemed lonely.

Computer scientists make good husbands for polyamorous
increasingly lesbian feminists because of how functional they are, how booley,
steady and quiet as like fans.

No, do not say that. Rewind, record over. Take two. Compscientists make
good first husbands. It is true how silent they are. Cooling fans.

08/22, what we considered that early in our life to be early in the
morning. We had finished packing ourselves doublebagged into trashbags we cinched
altogether and rolled down the hall. D-Unit was already waiting outside in the Ford. But
we had octalfortied our dorm assignment and had to get the address from the letter
magneted to the fridge. Off the kitchen the door was open to the bathroom and in the tub
a man was sleeping and on the tile were wrappers and in the toilet a condom. We
neglected to mention that M-Unit and Aunt Nance had thrown us a goingaway party the
night before.

On the way we asked D-Unit who that man had been and D-Unit answered,
“Him—he is the Laureate.”

Solow. [?] Stigler. [?] Anyway. Jewish.

All we can tell you.

D-Unit had slept in the Ford. Or garage.

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[A NOTE RE: STANFORD. HOW IT WAS FOUNDED
IN 18?? BY THE RAILROAD MAGNATE? LELAND STANFORD, WHO HAD TAXPAYERS PAY FOR THE
RAILROADS HE PROFITED FROM, AND HOW THE WAY TRAINS CONNECTED THE EAST AND WEST COASTS OF
THE COUNTRY WAS VERY PROTO ONLINE.]

[CF.
TETRATION NATION,
JAMIE GLEICHE (MACMILLAN, 2010),
SEEK
AND YE SHALL FIND: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TETRATION,
MATTHEW KJARR (HACHETTE,
2008).]

The only thing Cohen liked about Stanford was the architecture. [Though he
never appreciated the main campus itself—the Mission revivals of darkening
porticoes and lightening arches, the dull pious sandstone cloistered below bright
terracotta—]He was in all likelihood the only freshman ever grateful for having
been assigned to Stern, a student residence facility constructed just after WWII in a
style that, when Cohen moved in, was all over the TV news—sternly, brutally,
Soviet.
It was as if an Eastern Bloc tower had been cut up and
scattered, a floor at a time, across a landscape of encina, bristlecone, gum tree,
and asphalt. The Wall in Berlin was being chipped at, and smashed, but
Cohen’s dorm had been built already broken, and whereas the prefab slabs of
concrete halfway across the world were smeared with peacenik graffiti, the local
décor tended toward posters offering $10/hour to participate in
sensory deprivation studies and ads for cheap student sublets.

Cohen’s dormroom was small and blank and the smallness appealed to
him, because it meant less to clean, but the blankness, the scuffed emptiness, provoked.
He couldn’t understand why the school provided each student with a bed and chair
and desk, but didn’t continue that determinism into wall decoration. Beyond that,
he couldn’t understand why his was the building’s only single, and
suspected it was because he
had just enough personality to be left
alone, but either too many or too few personalities to have a roommate. Or else, he
suspected, the registrar or bursar’s office regarded his unit as
vacant—because he wasn’t even enrolled—he hadn’t accepted,
hadn’t been accepted, to begin with.

Cohen’s neighbors were roommates,
a
double
—Cullen de Groeve and Owmar O’Quinn [INTRODUCE LATER]. On
one of their walls was a map of the Bay Area, on another was a batik likeness of
Einstein, and so after a visit to the Salvation Army on Veterans Boulevard that’s
how Cohen furnished his own, with an MTA map of New York City, and an 8×10 glossy
photo of “Dick Feynman,” whom he wouldn’t have recognized without
the autograph, “To promising physicist [sic], best wishes, Dick
Feynman.”

Cohen’s major was math. Class was Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and
Fridays, while Wednesdays were seminars rotating around a diffuse array? range? of
topics—logic, number theory, algebraic and symplectic geometries—followed
by research group: he worked in probability before the possibilities of game theory
lured him [WITH WHAT/HOW?].
[“We worked on statistics.
Decidability, duction. Pattern recognition, precision and recall. Allocations,
nomials. If you want to get granular, ergodicity, Gaussian distributions and masked
Markovistics, processes and models. If you want to get übergranular,
asymptotic properties of the entropy of stationary data sources with applications to
data compression.”]

Cohen applied that education to his own private scheduling but found his
interests and commitments difficult to reconcile with classtime and his major’s
requirements. He’d be awake for days, “jagging” lists of things to
do, then doing the things on the lists, “jagging” lists of the solids he
ate and the liquids he drank, lists of his urinations and bowel movements, of his Carson
and
Family Ties
catchup consumption on the TV nextdoor, and his inability to
sleep, as publicized by his nextdoor neighbors, who, wall and door aside, effectually
became his roommates, caused the other students in Stern to presume he had an addiction
to amphetamines, and caused two upperclassmen who presumed he was dealing amphetamines
to try and get him to pledge AEPi [until what?]—which resulted, in turn, in the
alternate personas Cohen assumed/adopted: speed addict, speed
dealer, and eventually, a third persona, speed pharmacologist, which itself became,
soon enough, the fourth, the inventor of a new speedy drug whose name he kept changing
[to/from what?], and whose substance he refused to sell to anyone.

Cohen, who hadn’t yet resigned himself to not
having an identity, would assimilate the identities of others:
He was also a
horticulturist Buddhist (he kept bonsai junipers), a retired skateboarder forced out of
the competition circuit by knee injury (he affected a limp), a manically verbigerant
mediaphile—in which he spoke only in the dialogue of female characters from John
Carpenter and Wes Craven movies—and a brand ambassador, in which he would monthly
choose a new product, an edible or drinkable, a wearable or widget, and would buy it and
use it publicly and remark on how great it was to everyone around him in inordinate
terms such as, “Powerade is deliciously refreshing, dude,” or,
“Powerade is refreshingly delicious, dude,” enough so that people began
assuming
—he never disabused them—
that he
was a paid spokesperson, an influential marketing covertly to students.

[“]The roommates[”] were in on this, and would help with the
ruse: Cullen de Groeve’s parents were [astoundingly?] wealthy executives for
Timex, living in Hong Kong, and so always had new gadgets they’d give Cullen,
who’d give them to Cohen to show around [de Groeve’s father had been an
engineer with Casio and Seiko who’d sequelized the calculator watch before being
hired as senior vicepresident, manufacturing/supply chain, with a mandate to bring Timex
into the digital future, while his second stepmother, who’d been
Playboy
’s Miss December 1976, handled the company’s Asian press
relations]. Owmar O’Quinn was a scholarship case from [which?] Philadelphia
projects[—his father worked Sanitation, his mother for Corrections—]who
out in California had to support himself working for a market research business,
Concentives, as a mystery shopper, browsing through regional shoppingcenters, falsely
p/matronizing their stores as a fake consumer in order to collect information and make
report on the behavior of retail staff: whether they offered assistance, or attempted to
upsell him, whether they offered free wrapping or shipping or respected feigned
allergies and lactose intolerances.
To maintain his cover,
In each store O’Quinn was supposed
to buy a small
product, an item under $5, and though the $5 and under items he bought
were usually just sneaker shoelaces or sweatbands, energy bars or weightlifting
shakepowders, he also managed to shoplift, advantaging the eccentric costumes
he’d designed for himself to conceal goods more expensive and so more likely to
garner bids on the secondary market
, though the fragrances he
stockpiled, in the unlikely event of a girlfriend
. He’d dress as a
woman, or affect a traditionally
black
African American
manner of speaking—O’Quinn being half
black
African American, and half Irish—in a bid to remain unrecognizable to the staff
on repeat visits.

The merchandise O’Quinn lifted, like de Groeve’s gizmos,
served as props in Cohen’s campaigns.

[A SENTENCE OR TWO RE: THE EVOLUTION OF “STARTUP
CULTURE”? BECAUSE WITHOUT IT THIS’LL SEEM WEIRD?]
“Startup” culture hadn’t even begun yet—it was online
that enabled that, and launched a billion geosocial sex apps and digital currencies
[developed in rented frathouses fetid with ass and backyarded with lenticular
pools]. Before then, students and even faculty were content to collaborate on
products the university would own and market: CAD modelers for the automotive
industry, analysis and trading platforms, system emulators, military simulators.
With the university’s computers prioritized for class projects, personal
projects had to be pursued on personal computers—inadequate, DOS
incompatible, RAM/ROM inexpansible, intramural. In 1989 [or 90?], the year online
debuted, Cohen, O’Quinn, and de Groeve had only one unit among them—de
Groeve’s: a Gopal Ovum 1000, which retailed for $4800[, which today
would be over $9300?].