Book of Numbers: A Novel (4 page)

9/11/2001, Miriam was bagladying up Church Street to an allergist’s
appointment. She must’ve heard the first plane, or seen the second. The South
Tower 2, the North Tower 1, collapsing their tridentate metal. Their final defiance of
the sky was as twin pillars of fire and smoke.

Sometime, then—in some hungover midst I can’t point to,
because to make room for the coverage every channel banished the clock—a seething
splitscreen showed the Bowery, the street just below me, and it was like a dramatization
of that Liberty sonnet, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”
“the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”: the old homeless alongside
the newly homeless and others dressed that way by ash, none of them white, but not black
either, rather gray, and rabid, being held at bay by a news crew with lashes of camera
and mic. I spilled Cal’s mouthwash and spilled myself downstairs, leaving the TV
on, and thinking a minty, asinine muddle, about this girl from last night who said she
lived on Maiden Lane like she was inviting me there anytime that wasn’t last
night, her date she was carrying who said he was too blitzed to make it to Inwood, and
thinking about my book, and Miriam, and Aar, and how vicious it’d be to get all
voxpop man on the street interviewed, and be both outside and inside at once.

But downstairs the crew was gone, or it never was there—so I went
onto Houston and through the park, beyond. Chinatown beyond. Chinatown was the edge of
triage. A firetruck with Jersey plates, wreathed by squadcars, sped, then crept toward
the cloud. A man, lips bandaged to match his bowtie, offered a prayer to a parkingmeter.
A bleeding woman in a spandex unitard knelt by a hydrant counting out the contents of
her pouch, reminding herself of who she was from her
swipecard ID. A
bullhorn yelled for calm in barrio Cantonese, or Mandarin. The wind of the crossstreets
was the tail of a rat, swatting, slapping. Fights over waterbottles. Fights over
phones.

Survivors were still staggering, north against traffic but then with
traffic too, gridlocked strangers desperate for a bridge, or a river to hiss in, their
heads scorched bald into sirens, the stains on their suits the faces of friends. With no
shoes or one shoe and some still holding their briefcases. Which had always been just
something to hold. A death’s democracy of C-level execs and custodians, blind,
deaf, concussed, uniformly tattered in charred skin cut with glass, slit by flitting
discs, diskettes, and paper, envelopes seared to feet and hands—they struggled as
if to open themselves, to open and read one another before they fell, and the rising
tide of a black airborne ocean towed them in.

“If you can write about the Holocaust,” Miriam once told me,
“you can write about anything”—but then she left this life and left
it to me to interpret her.

A molar was found in the spring, in that grange between Liberty &
Cedar, and was interred beneath her bevel at Union Field.

Aar dealt with insurance, got custody of Achsa—Miriam’s
daughter, Ethiopian, adopted, then eight. He moved her up to the Upper East Side, built
her a junglegym in his office. His neighbors complained, and then Achsa complained she
was too old for it. He fitted the room with geodes, lava eggs, mineral and crystal
concretions, instead.

The bookstore still stood—preserved by its historical foundations
from the damage of scrapers. But Aar couldn’t keep it up. It wasn’t the
customer scarcity or rehab cost, it was Miriam. The only loss he couldn’t take.
He put the Judaica in the gable, garnished the best of the rest and sold it, donated the
remainder to prisons, and sold the bookstore itself, to a bank. For an unstaffed ATM
vestibule lit and heated and airconditioned, simultaneously, perpetually.

He kept the topfloor, though, Miriam’s apartment, tugged off the
coverlets that’d been shrouding its mirrors since shiva, moved his correspondence
cabinet there, moved his contract binders there—fitted his postal scale between
her microwave and spicerack—the entirety of his agency. He kept everything of
hers—the bed, dresser, creaky antiques, coffinwood, the clothes, the face
products. Took her antianxieties and
antidepressants and when he
finished them, got prescriptions of his own. Meal replacement opiates—he’d
chew them.

The only stuff he moved was Achsa’s, in whose old room he set up
his rolltop and ergo swiveler. Computer and phone to accept offers, reject offers,
monitor the air quality tests. He had different women working as
assistants—Erica, and Erica W., and Lisabeth—junior agents in the kitchen,
preparing my royalty statements, my rounding error earnings against advance. But on
their days off and at nights he’d have his other girls over, his
Slavs—helping them through their ESL and TOEFL exams, writing their LaGuardia
Community College applications, fucking them, fucking them only in the stairwell, the
hall, where Miriam’s scent didn’t linger—as insomniac corpses came
and went for cash below, on a floor once filled with rare gallery catalogs and quartet
partitur, just a ceaseless withdrawing, depositing, fluoresced, blown hot and cold.

Caleb, however—that September made him. He’d done better at
history, I’d done better at English, he’d become a journalist directly out
of Columbia, with bylines in the
Times,
and I’d become a bookstore
clerk, but published first—a book.

Then I fell behind.

What destroyed me, created him—Cal—the sirens were his
calling. After filing features on Unemployment (because he was happy with his
employment), and The Gay Movement (because he was happy being straight), he put himself
on the deathbeat, jihad coverage. He left the Bowery and never came back. He was down at
the site round the clock, digging as the searchers dug, as the finders sifted, but for
facts. Every job has its hackwork, promotions from horror to glamour. Not to my credit,
but that’s how it felt at the time.

He tracked a hijacker’s route through the Emirates, Egypt,
Germany—to Venice, Florida, where he proved himself going through the records of
a flight school, turning up associates the FBI had missed, or the CIA had rendered. At a
DC madrassa he got a tip about Al Qaeda funding passing through a Saudi charity and
pursued it, cashed out on the frontpage above the fold. His next dateline was
Afghanistan. He went to war. Combat clarified his style. He had few contacts, no
bodyarmor. But when his letter from Kabul prophesied the Taliban insurgency,
The New
Yorker
put him on staff. It’s difficult for me to admit. Difficult not
to
ironize. I was jealous of him, envious of risk. The troop embeds,
the voluntary abductions, hooded with a hessian sandbag and cuffed, just to tape a goaty
madman’s babble. He was advantaging, pressing, doing and being important,
careering through mountain passes in humvees with Congress.

Cal returned to the States having changed—in the only way soldiers
ever change, besides becoming suicidal. He was clipped, brusque, and
disciplined—his cynicism justified, his anger channeled. He brought me back a
karakul hat, and for the rest of his fandom a .doc, an ms. A pyre of pages about
heritage loss, the Buddha idols the mullahs razed. About treasurehunting, profiteering
(Cal’s the expert). About the lithium cartels, the pipelines for oil and poppies
(Aar told him to mention poppies).

Cal certainly had other offers for representation, but went with Aar on my
advice. The book sold for six figures, and got a six figure option, for TV or film, in
development, still. I edited the thing, before it was edited, went through the text
twice as a favor. But I’ll type the title only if he pays me. Because he
didn’t use my title. Which the publisher loathed. 22 months on the bestseller
list: “as coruscating and cacophonous as battle itself” (
The New York
Times,
review by a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), “as if
written off the top of his head, and from the bottom of his heart […] anguished,
effortless, and already indispensable” (
New York,
review by Melissa
Muccalla—Missy from my bookparty). The Pulitzer, last year—at least he was
nominated.

My famous friend Cal, not recognized in any café or caffè
famous but recognized in one or two cafés or caffès and the reading room
of the 42nd Street library famous—writerly anti-nonfamous. I’ve never
liked Cal’s writing, but I’ve always liked him—the both of them
like family. He’s been living in Iowa, teaching on fellowship. All of Iowa must
be campuses and crops.

“And I’ve been working on the next book,” according
to his email. This time it’s fiction, a novel. Aar hasn’t read a word yet.
Cal won’t let it go until it’s finished. “And I’ve been
thinking a lot about you and your situation and how you can’t be pessimistic
about it because life can change in a snap, especially given your talent,”
according to his email. Don’t I know it, my hero, my flatterer.

\

Caleb was off warring and I was stuck, ground zero.
Which for me was never lower smoldering Manhattan, but Ridgewood. Metropolitan Avenue.
Out past the trendoid and into the cheap, always in the midst of transition, enridged.
Blocksized barbedwired disbanded factories. Plants where the bubbles were blown into
seltzer and lunchmeats were sliced. My building was an industrial slabiform, not
redeveloped but converted, in gross violation of the informal zoning code of prudence.
Used to be a printing facility, the only relic of which was a letterpress, a hulking
handpress decaying screwy out in the central courtyard, exposed to the weather, too
heavy to move. From time to time I’d stumble on a letter, wedged between the
cobbles.

The unit itself was a storage facility 20 × 20, not certified for
even a moment of frenetic pacing let alone habitation, and with a rabid radiator the
resident antisemite, but without a window, I had to take from the rear dumpsters a bolt
of billiard baize for a doorstop, for ventilation. Sawhorses supporting a desk of
doublepaned wired glass. International Office Supply wood swiveler, the least
comfortable chair of the Depression. Banker’s lamp. Bent shelves of galleys, from
when I reviewed, of my own galleys from when I’d be the reviewee. My
mother’s potted cups, one for caffeine, the other an ashtray. In a corner my
airbed and bicycle, in another the pump for both. Brooklyn by my left leg, Queens by my
right, hands between them, an intimate borough. At least there was a door. At least
there was a lock.

My apartment, my office—I had nothing to do but practice my
autograph. I didn’t. I sat, I lay, pumped, adjusted the angle of recline.

I was the only NYer not allowed to be sad, once it came out what I was sad
about, the bathroom was common and down the hall, all my sustenance was from the
deli.

I bought a turkey sandwich, cheese curls, frosted donuts, lotto
scratchers, Cossack vodka I’d drink without ice, from the spare change trough
emptied and unwashed, Camel Lights I’d smoke out in the hall through the bars of
the airshaft, smoking so hard as to crack a rib.

That’s what I bought—representatively, each day—but
also exactly, precisely, the day I spent the last of my advance. Summer 2002.

No further monies would be earned from my
book—from all that labor. My advance was now behind me.

I tried to write something else—tried some stories (Hasidic tales
recast), translations (from the Hebrew). But nothing—I was wasted, blocked,
cramped blank by my “mogigraphia,” “graphospasms.”
Translation: spending all my time online, blotted in a cell glutted with paper. I became
a cursor, a caret, a button pressed and pressing—refreshing reactions to
Cal’s work.

Then, with the anniversary approaching, the
Times
got in touch.
An editor emailed to ask if I’d write an “article,” a
“piece,” about my luck. For the Sunday Styles section. I opened and closed
her email for weeks, for months after the close of that summer, until rent was due,
utilities too, and then I answered. I didn’t just write back in the affirmative,
I wrote the thing itself, which was shocking. After being so incapable, so incapable of
wording, to spew out what I spewed—all bodytext, no attachments—I was
shocked.

Because I sent it out and received an immediate rejection. I wasn’t
timely anymore. But I could still read between the lines. My tone had been too charged,
my rhetoric too raging.

The editor, however, either pitying or gracious, passed me along to the
Sunday Book Review, which offered me its font (Imperial)—if I could contain
myself, be selfless, mature. My initial assignment was a book about the
events—not as they affected me, but as they affected everyone (else).

Though I’ve since forgotten everything about the book—its
title, its author, but that’s only because they’re online—I do
recall the work: being mortified by it, and enjoying it. Enjoying my mortification. The
clippings collected. My precocious ghosts, paper creased yellow. “Edifice
Rex.” “Rubble Entendre.”

I became a legit critic, one of the clerisy, the tribe that had ignored
me—and it was all because I’d been ignored that I was fair, accurate,
pretentious. I always went after the feinschmecker stuff. Wolpe at Carnegie Hall
(centennial of his birth), Whistler at the Frick (centennial of his death).
The
Atlantic,
The Nation
. Though my assignments were usually kept to Jewish books, to be
defined as books not just about Jews but by them.
The Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish
Suffering, American
Judaism: A History
—for
The New Republic
a novel called
The
Oracle
or
The Oracle’s Wife
set entirely in Christian New
Amsterdam but written by a woman called Krauss—I wrote Edward
Saïd’s obituary for
Harper’s
.

I explained, explicated, expounded—Mr. Pronunciamento, a taste
arbiteur and approviste, dispensing consensus, and expensing it too: on new frontiers in
race and the genetics of intelligence (Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum and heterozygote fitness),
on new challenges to linguistics (connectionist vs. Chomskyan), circumcision and STDs
(“Cut Men, Not Budget”), manufacturing jobs shipped overseas and other,
related, proxies for torture (“Contracting Abroad: Black Boxes and Black
Sites”). All for casual readers who specialized in nothing but despecialization,
familiarity. They didn’t want to know it, they just wanted to know about it.
Culture justified by cultural calendaring: the times and addresses and price.