Book of Numbers: A Novel (34 page)

[“It was this 16 bit at 2.8 MHz 1.125 MB 256 KB round white
cow egg. Fugly. We do not mean to fellate our competition by confessing that our
future partners executed their juvenilia on its equipment. As like Gopal does
everything else by itself, from its chips to the antitampering sixpointed screws
that entail an antitampering sixpointed screwer, let it administer its own fellatio.
All the rich kids at Stanford had a Gopal, all the kids at Stanford were rich,
RAMateurs, ROMateurs, who craved the shelter of an impermeable shell OS and whose
only other computing
requirements were to sound and look cool
with 32 oscillators, 640 × 200 resolution. Anyway, we were not in competition
with them then or now, and never will be. Gopal already had over $2 billion
in annual revenue but our dominance was math, we knew bigger numbers, we knew the
biggest. We tasted our dominance even while economizing on a daily diet of one
pineapple nectar and one pita sliced midsagittally into devaginated halves and
spooned with marshmallow fluff.”]

Both de Groeve and O’Quinn were compsci majors and by the end of
first semester had cowritten a program for Concentives that enabled the mystery shopping
company to automatically tabulate upsell results and implement a general rating system,
both by mall and by franchises of chains among malls. However, they were still having a
problem with standardizing, not to mention automating, the evaluations of the written
portion of each assessment and, having related the particulars to Cohen as they packed
for the holidays, left—de Groeve to Hong Kong, O’Quinn to Philadelphia.
Cohen remained in his dorm throughout winter break, and by the time his roommates
returned for second semester he’d engineered a solution. The roommates were
stunned. Cohen had broken through their wall, and not just figuratively, but literally.
Requiring their stash of written assessments and unable to find his copy of their key
amid his mess, he’d borrowed a sledgehammer from maintenance and bashed a crude
passage into the plaster shared between their rooms.

In Cohen’s estimation, deriving and automating [automatizing?]
ratings from written assessments was merely an extension of listing, a matter of
sourcing an urlist of keywords, which could be accomplished either by management
designating approved verbiage for reportorial use (“topdown”),
homogenizing and so narrowing the expression of the reports, or by culling the reports
themselves for the verbiage (“bottomup”), relying on the reporters to
provide a heterogeneous and so wider expression. [Obviously?] this latter option was
preferable, but it could be implemented only if the assessments were made
searchable.

Cohen had written a [descriptor algorithm?], pen on quadrille paper, which
totalized the frequency of term use both across the entire spectrum of
reportage—by all reports, by all reports within mall, by all reports within type
(“apparel,” “appliances”), by all reports within chain
(“McDonald’s,” “Burger King”)—and within the
oeuvre of each
individual reporter. This approach generated ratings
both of the stores and the shoppers or pseudoshoppers themselves, whose written
assessments were rife with [ambiguous proportions?]:
“very”/“extremely” being positive values when applied to
“helpful,” but negative values when applied to “unhelpful,”
not to mention the double negatives (“not unhelpful”), which were only
halfway positive, and the double positives (“too helpful”), which were
only halfway negative.

De Groeve and O’Quinn coded the algorithm in C++
[INSERT JOKE? “THE ONLY GRADE ANY OF US RECEIVED THAT SEMESTER”?]. Cohen
would have nothing to do with the programming besides suggesting that the better
language to use might be Perl, in which each line is prefaced with a dollar
sign—a “$” [CLARIFY USAGE/DIFFERENCES, BETWEEN CODING AND
PROGRAMMING, AS NOUN AND VERB].

Cohen completed his freshman year without visiting home, which was only
[#] miles away, and without even taking his finals, which were only [#] yards away. That
summer he turned down an offer from de Groeve and O’Quinn to live in an apartment
with them in San Francisco’s Mission District and hone the program, now
officially called Repearter, for Concentives, and instead opted to stay in his single,
and accept recruitment [WHY?] into a panoply of university projects [WHY RECRUITED?]:
memory and cognitive studies (on efferent discharge, synaesthesia, subitization), and a
psych manifestation team that trained participating students to embody certain
characteristics of certain psychiatric syndromes and comorbidities to test the ability
of trainee shrinks to identify factitious disorders (as team members included both
“authentics”—those with genuine syndromes/comorbidities—and
“healthies”—those without—and as admission to the team
required screenings by mental health professionals, whose findings were not revealed to
anyone, no team member was aware of which they were, or were supposed to have been,
until the collation of the professional and trainee diagnoses that marked the
study’s conclusion).

Cohen’s sophomore year was, if possible, even more disastrous. He
was generally regarded as the most promising [undergraduate?] mathematician at Stanford,
and yet he was failing all of his classes except for a course in information theory. He
wandered the campus perpetually,
somnambulistically, and his
attempts to count the numbers of windows and doors in each of the buildings, and his
unwillingness to move from Stern into another dorm [WHICH?] he was assigned, were all
taken as indicative of drug dependence.

The hole hammered into his wall[—over which he hung an ersatz
family shrine featuring a Chinese New Year’s card wishing a lucky Year of the
Horse 4688, which depicted the de Groeve parents dressaged from jodhpurs to helmets on
horseback atop Victoria Peak above Pok Fu Lam and bay, and an unframed group portrait of
Philadelphia’s own Local 3, which union did not identify but unequivocally
represented O’Quinn’s brothers—]was rumored to have been the result
of a methamphetamine lab explosion. With de Groeve and O’Quinn informing him that
even the faculty had been gossiping about his hallucinogen abuse, Cohen went into Math
234/Stat 374, Major Deviations, obstructing and so invalidating a toss of either fair or
loaded dice [“TO DETERMINE WHETHER STOCHASTIC PROCESSES WITH DIFFERENT TRANSITION
MATRICES PRODUCE THE SAME STATE DISTRIBUTION”], and introduced himself to the
professor as Inigo Zweifel, which was the professor’s own name.

Cohen’s second sophomore semester was spent
further investigating indeterminacy [EXPAND]
, in an office repurposed from
the dormroom in Toyon Hall assigned to de Groeve and O’Quinn, who at the time
were finalizing Repearter for Concentives in their Mission District apartment, commuting
to campus only for classes. Cohen had refused his share of the $20000 the
roommates were paid to deliver the program, but counterproposed nothing except this
office. It was filled with decks of creased playingcards, Thoth tarots, lotto tickets
and scratchers labeled by purchase date and location, snapped pasternbones and
yarrowstalks, all of which kept him from his cryptography problemsets for aleatory
variables. Library books on Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, and Muism [KOREAN SHAMANISM
AND NOT A TYPO], overdue and never due because stolen. [Breaking into 208 Sequoia? to
protest the student incident report Professor Zweifel lodged with the ombuds?,] He
acquired a black magicmarker and a white dryerase board, which he [back in his quarters]
installed incorrectly—with the board’s scrubbable
surface facing the wall, so the corkwood backing facing out—meaning that
anything he’d write on it would be permanent, so he waited, and was patient.

There was a knock at the door and Cohen ignored it but the knocks kept
coming. He went to the door and asked who it was and the voice on the other side
answered, “Acting Dean of Student Affairs Kyle.”

Cohen was sure he was being expelled but then Acting Dean of Student
Affairs Kyle asked, “Are we speaking with Mr. de Groeve or Mr.
O’Quinn?”

Cohen answered, yelling, that he was speaking with both of them.

“Will you open up, please?”

Cohen yelled they were both undressed.

“We have been trying to get in touch with Mr. Joshua Cohen. We
understand he is a friend of yours.”

Cohen confirmed.

“Mr. Cohen is not in his dorm and famously not in class—will
you at least pass along a msg?”

Cohen pressed his mouth up against the door, said nothing.

“Please tell him to be in touch with his mother. An emergency
family situation.”

[DIALOGUE VERBATIM FROM PRINCIPAL—REWRITE ALL W/ SINGULAR PRONOUN
AND W/ CONTRACTIONS.]

[ID TIME AND LOCATION AT TOP? OR BOTTOM?]

Cohen unlocked and turned the knob. His father had had another
heartattack, in the sauna at the Belmont Hills JCC, 04/01/91.

Two ceremonies were held—a funeral, which Sari planned at Alta Mesa
cemetery without a rabbi and without having notified any extended family or friends and,
a month later, a memorial service at Abs’s favorite restaurant, Prime Asian Tacos
II, held by his former colleagues, who were furious with Sari.

Cohen was barely sentient throughout the funeral, having taken [only now]
the first drugs of his life—two Valium, the prescription courtesy of Nancy
[Apt].

For the memorial, Cohen took four Valium and, approaching the
restaurant’s sombreroed dragon that served as a makeshift lectern to read a
selection from the Tibetan Book of the Dead [WHAT SELECTION?],
passed out, and hallucinated his father being mauled to death by a dragon in a sombrero.
He came to in a cramped untidy condo [WHERE HIS FATHER HAD BEEN LIVING?], in the midst
of Abs’s shiva, and when the mourners had finished their prayers[, they
left]—they left Cohen alone[, and there he stayed].

://

from the Palo Alto sessions:
Toward the end D-Unit had been working on the touchscreen. Do not interrupt, we do not
digress. Tactiles. Haptics. It must have been that he was forced into this, or the PARC
touchscreen group had been short an engineer and asked him and he could not refuse,
D-Unit could never refuse. But his true cur, toward the end, was printing, still
printing, but not in 2D anymore, in 3D, and he would have printed in 4D if he could, but
no one could, least of all a Xerox employee. His condo was filled with attempts, cracked
half shapes and crumbling forms, in plastic, metal, glass, ceramic, foam, powders,
pellets, waxes. It was a lot to go sorting through, a lot to determine which was a model
and which a modeler, which was a machined part and which a part of a machine that
machined the part, from a photofabricator, laser sinterer, deposit fuser, and we spent
our time totally consumed with this sorting and did not return to Stanford.

We did not drop out, we just stopped going in, never answered the letters
that came from the profs and deans who knew where we were living [HOW?] and then the
letters stopped coming or just the box got too congested because we stopped going
outside, never answered the phonecalls that came in either from the profs and deans who
knew where we were living [HOW?] and then the calls stopped coming or we stopped getting
them because the line was too busy and even now, we read once online, Stanford still
lists us as like being on leave.

We just hung around the condo and avoided the computers, mutant x86ish PCs
D-Unit had clunked himself, monitors surrounded by boxes of Kleenex and spritzers of
Windex, keyboards surrounded by pressurized air containers, for blowing out the dust
from between the keys, and the other periphs he clunked himself too as like joysticks
and steeringwheels and the double mice he called rats surmounted with babywipes and
kleengel antiseptics.

D-Unit must have abhorred the touchscreen. All that
work to splenda an image only to let the user foul it up with sweaty fingers. Printing
their grimy genes. Sacrificing clarity for convenience.

Basically this is the problem.

No matter how much we wipe our hands, no matter how much we
disinfect—any way we can remember D-Unit just ruins the resolution.

We had not known that D-Unit had been condoliving at The Clingers ever
since we left the house. D-Unit had never told us and we are not even sure whether
M-Unit or Aunt Nance had known. Of the mail we took in, what surprised us the most were
the catalogs for exotic gamemeats and kits for homebrewing. Of the msgs on the voicemail
we checked, what surprised us the most were the appointment confirmations from gun
ranges and attendance requests from Hasidics seeking a minyan.

Either this was the true D-Unit, free from having to split everything with
M-Unit and so free to psychically compensate by evincing a split within himself, or this
was a newly single engineer in the midst of übercrisis. We will never have
confirmation. Unit 26 at The Clingers. Apostrophe, possessive.

We were alone with the computers and we tried to avoid them. We tried to
convince ourselves we were above them, beyond them, we were pure and they were applied,
we could work with just our head and they could work only with processors and
electricity though still they required our head to give them tasks. But the truth, we
realized, was that we were afraid of them, we were scared of getting into trouble again
and to be honest being left alone with that many computers in one condo was as like
being abandoned as like a pedophile in a sandbox during recess. Bad analogy, but
appropriate.

But again this is the problem without resolution. We could say we were not
able to help ourselves and were bored and so broke. Or we could say we were just cur
about D-Unit. This career vegan who after his wife left him for a woman stuffed his
freezer with enough cuts of venison to make
deer, this atheistic azionistic Jew who after his separation scrawled on
the wall by the Xerox photocopier/fax the tollfree number
for
transmitting a prayer to be printed in Jerusalem and stuffed into a crevice of the
Kotel. The Western Wall. Überwestern.