Book of Numbers: A Novel (35 page)

We turned on a computer and went through its files. We turned them all on
and investigated. They were networked, so we stayed on one and went through them all.
There was a genealogy he was investigating. There were recipes in a .doc called
EZ_Meals_for_the_Single_Cook,
there were inspirational anecdotes collected
in another .doc called
therabbinicapproachtodivorce
. Another we remember was a
scientific study on midlife, or secondlife, lesbianism.

On the floor by the CPU chassis was a flaking mass that, we had always
thought, was just another faulty tridimensional printjob, and in a sense it was, because
it was a cardboard box and we were always kicking it. But then we kicked it once and it
spilled over and we, leaving off reading about the process of gittin, or Jewish divorce
documents, but you know that, or the pseudoscientific relationship between lesbianism
and premature menopause and the resultant excess of stress hormone and dearth of
estrogen that affects the amygdala, got up out of the swiveler to examine the damage and
what it was, it was the future.

It is inconceivable now. Not just that we had not experimented before,
but that this was the way access was packaged. That access was packaged at all. Now
everything just loads, streams, flows, automatically, but back then software was
indistinguishable from hardware. A program came on a disc. A round rainbowized flatness
that came in a box. Remember. There was a handbook, there was a manual. Containing
instructions to heed, for installation. The program had to be registered, there was a
warranty, there was a terms of service that had to be agreed to and signed, and both had
to be sent through the mail. The old mail. Remember. But D-Unit had taken care of this.
We cannot conceive of having missed this but have no rationale. The icons were there all
along, there in plain day on the desktop. Press us, press us.

The net, the web. One a way of talking, the other what was said. We would
have hacked if D-Unit had not stored all his IDs and pwords in memory. We dialed and the
hiss came through and we came through the
ascending levels of hiss
as like progressively being swallowed by a cobra. We were connected, had msgs, mail, the
new mail.

D-Unit had CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, America Online, and though we
forget which one we used, it was a service. Mortifying. Commercial. D-Unit was an early
adopter for a rec, having opened his accounts in 89, though also a late adopter for a
tech given that we are describing 91 and serious presdigitals had been dinking around
with modems and phone exchanges not even in their offices but at their homes from the
80s, the 70s.

The D-Unit we knew had always been a hardware guy, meaning that he
regarded software as like unserious, or pretentious, as like the gynolinguistic pedagogy
of his wife. He had spent his life around machines and if he at least tolerated the code
that programmed them it was because it came on discs that came packaged in envelopes, in
boxes. The D-Unit we knew never had any patience for the service economy, but was
fundamentally a maker, a producer, consumed by stuff and things. To him, legit computing
could only be accomplished in a workplace with other professionals, in the flesh and on
a schedule, time and space were physically shared. The engineers replaced the tubes,
replaced the transistors and circuits, by hand, the boss had a desk with only a
paperweight on it and could not even type. The home was the home, the office was the
office, and to bring a hugenormous mainframe back into the house, even in a better color
than mental ward offwhite, was as like committable an offense as like bringing back into
the house another lover to introduce to your child and spouse.

We are not implying that D-Unit was a company suit, we are just trying to
convey that for him the home office dichotomy was a quasireligion, just as like his
parents had kept glatt kosher and his grandparents had kept the Sabbath. He would never
have read the Rationalists in the lab, he would never have soldered on the toilet.

He would have been appalled by all this realization of the virtual,
communication becoming transactional, customers exchanging money for air. He would have
considered it a scam, as like having to pay an admission fee at libraries, or having to
pay a multinational corporation for admission to his brain. A multinational corporation
that made its money licensing his knowledge to others, and, in turn, by commodifying,
commodizating, their thoughts. He would never have listened to the
movements of the fourth Bartók quartet out of the order of their intention, he
would never have looked at the Rubens Calvary except in person.

We should also say that he always insisted on matinees at the Aquarius
Theater.

But that D-Unit who was totally capable of achieving his own access
instead chose to subscribe to a cruft of rectarded netservices whose chief goal was to
keep their users within the walled garden by providing a sense of community, along with
local news and weather, only so as like not to lose them to the wilds of the
web—that this was his choice meant he was depressed. We read his emails first,
the first emails we ever read, and confirmed, depression. Online was not a hobby for
him, but an attempt to spend himself unsad. Companionship at 14400 bits/second, 2400
baud, $6/hour on evenings and weekends, $3/hour on weekday days.

Venturing into the online activities of abco, abco33, batchelor, and
cuddlemaven did not bring him or them to life, but brought us to become them or him,
which prevented any mischief. Initially. While the rest of userdom was liberated by
alias to chatrape girls or cybercheat on husbands, to meddle in any way as like D-Unit
or his selves was to transgress a commandment. Respect the name. Respect thy parents
even unto their proxy reputations. Initially.

D-Unit had posted to boards about the Dodgers, about seismology. To a room
called Bay Singles, a place for people to flirt while discussing the dangers of meeting
people online. To a room called Bay Singles: Jewish, a place for Jews to flirt while
discussing the dangers of meeting goyim online. He also gave advice at Querytek, and at
1-900-Trouble. The desperation was overwhelming. He had helped a woman fix her modem by
telling her to restart it. He had also accessed pornography. We would prefer not to
discuss it.

It was ultimately the census that broke us, a room in which amateurs made
recommendations for a digitization of the census and in a thread titled “1990
Last Paper Census??” D-Unit had posted a warning about the ease of data
manipulation and uploaded a paper about accusations of electronic voting fraud in the
1972 presidential elections. The thread
then split into two, one a
discussion of Nixon, the other a discussion of the history of data manipulation,
beginning with the punchcard and its tabulator and ending, as like all discussions end,
with the Holocaust.

D-Unit had been attacked for defending the deathcamp totals. The thread
had been dormant for eight or nine months. We posted nonetheless. We posted as like
abco33, then created our own avatar and agreed with ourselves. Posted as like abco33
again, with thanks for our support. Then we argued about the Dodgers, a team we knew
nothing about, a sport we knew nothing about, and were informed that, in baseball, there
was always next season.

In Bay Singles, batchelor had explained his situation to troglodyke_Y, a
selfidentified lesbian who had collapsed midway through and written, “what else
2,” number 2, “expect from women?” then admitted he was a man. In
Bay Singles: Jewish, cuddlemaven had explained the same or a very similar situation,
which had garnered a single response, “abs?” and so still as like
cuddlemaven we took the thread offboard and emailed the responder directly, wondering
why s/he had thought it was “us,” and the party who turned out to be a
retired PARCy responded, “abraham cohen is deceased. whoever you are you are
being reported for violation of your ToS,” and so that account, the CompuServe,
died too.

We flamed the PARCy with emails, as like other avatars, as like the same
avatars but registered with other services. batchelor but now @Prodigy, cuddlemaven but
now @GEnie. We even went trolling for him among the dossy BBSes and subscribed to
leetish listservs and wrote posts or comments or whatever they were called then to
autogenerate and hex all the sysops down. It was an addiction, because the self is an
addiction. We placed orders just through chatting, with paraphiliac feeders who lived in
the Bay and were willing to drop takeout Asian fusion at the foot of our stairs with no
strings attached, or else we explained and this we regret that we had cancer and so
normcores took pity on us too and delivered pallets of cane sodas for nothing, never
taking the bill or coins we left wedged under the mat. Our deliverers did not even want
to meet us, certainly not after we insisted that we did not want to be met in our
condition, and this let us assert was ultimately more important than the start of
ecommerce, this was more as like the start of freecommerce, though not even that claim
can justify our behavior.

We joined all the religious fora because back then the
only pages that existed, smut aside, were about two things, basically: one being the
absolute miracle of the very existence of the pages, as like some business celebrating
the launch of some placeholder spacewaster site containing only contact information,
their address in the real, their phone and fax in the real, and two being the sites of
people, predominantly, at this stage, computer scientists or the compscientifically
inclined openly indulging their most intimate curs, their most spiritual disclosures, as
like experimental diabetes treatment logs and conversion diaries patiently explaining
ontological discrepancies between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhisms, interspersed with
kitten and puppy photos, a Christmas tree growing at syrupspeed from starred tip to
rootless trunk until filling the window.

We tracked what we could, as like much as like we could. We trafficked,
unable to stop. We had to know everything, to not just know everything but to have it,
to keep it all under wraps, under banner. We correlated pages with profiles,
crossreferenced profiles based on similarity of subject, of style or time of expression,
but each time a connection was made, another connection appeared, and the number of
sites grew too large, and so the number of their links grew too big, and so the database
we were producing went onerous.

This is how history begins: with a log of every address online in 1992.
130 was the sum we had by 1993, by which time the countingrooms we were monitoring had
projected the sum as like quarterly doubling. 623, approx 4.6% of which were dotcom.
2738, approx 13.5%. There were too many urls to keep track of, so we kept track of
sites. There were too many sites to keep track of, so we kept track of host domains that
only monitored or made public their numbers of registered sites, not their numbers of
sites actually setup and actually functional, and certainly not their names or the urls,
the universal resource locators of their individual pages, but what frustrated more than
the fact that we could not dbase all the web by ourselves was the fact that none of the
models we engineered could ever predict its expansion.

Computers had grown smaller by the release, shrinking to lapsize, and were
shrinkable further until the limit, the entropy point, at which it became feasible to
make a computer handsize, fingersize, too small to
be humanly
usable. The web had reached something of the same limitpoint but from the opposite
direction, it had become too big for any one user to feasibly navigate. We identified
only two ways to bring about realignment. Either to limit its size, which was
censorship, or to map it and make that map searchable. The future was and will always be
ahead of us, but also behind us, and to the sides. The future is the client, the past is
just something to find.

The wallpaper of the condo was testpattern CMYK, cyan magenta yellow key
black stripes curving shoddy toward their tangency at a monoxide detector whining the
sinewave of its battery drained. We covered it all with lists printed on printers and
legal pads, lists of sites and sitemaps described, but it was only with the phoneline
conked and the electricity just after that we were finally able to get to work. Before
we were too close to the screen. Too near to the potentials to equate them.

It was harrowing just going outside. The other condo units shone dusk to
dawn and phones rang in the sky. We had octalfortied that sound and the look of gravel
and hedges. At the foot of the stairs our mailbox had lacked the bandwidth for all the
bills from PG&E and PacBell, four figures of bankruptcy. The condo was accessed
by a staircase as like a fire escape, and the storage enclosure under the stairs
contained a cage, and the cage contained a putrefied pet skeleton. It might have been a
hedgehog. We went back inside. Just swiveled. It had taken a year and a half, 1993, for
us to realize that the chair we sat in was adjustable. Which was helpful because either
the desk was too low or we were taller than D-Unit.

Or else it was AOL that finally cut us off. Because that too was billed
separately. We cannot recall precisely. And we had no clue that D-Unit owned a
hedgehog.

Point is, we were returned from practice to theory and paper. It is
unfortunate that you will have to transcribe this.

[SARI CONTACT?]

[CONDO MGMT?]

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Tetration’s
genesis
The Clinger’s, Abs’s condo complex at 100 Muralla Way,
Pacifica, CA, consisted of 26 identical units, all of them two bedroom condos below
second floor one bedroom condos, with the exception of Cohen’s, which was a
second floor one bedroom condo above the maintenance shed.

Visitors had to navigate ruptured mulchbags, rusting rakes, shovels, and a
wheelbarrow to access the outdoors staircase, which [suspiciously] resembled a fire
escape. But if visitors were infrequent with Abs alive, with his son in residence
they