Book of Numbers: A Novel (49 page)

The billboard that had inspired Adverks.

On our previous and only visit, on our way back from remotely controlling LA, the billboard that had inspired Adverks had advertised some local petting zoo or playland, then we recall Moe mentioning fashion, an ad featuring the model Lena Söderberg or someone resembling the model Lena Söderberg, and though we would just be inventing its next iteration it was comptrastingly bland as like for a mayoral campaign, or just for itself, Imagine Your Ad Here. This iteration had been especially enraging, to Moe, who must have taken the detour past this billboard only to feed that rage, or else to provide fodder for his interstitial work banter, because he would always be delivering us updates about it, verging into diatribes about the lazy wasteful Americanness he had taken it to represent.

But then just earlier that spring, toward the end of the fiscal year and the start of all our trouble, a new ad had finally gone up.

As like it was a sign.

It was a billboard, which now promoted a languageschool.

Kor had sent us out with the Schloger nephew who was interning for us that summer and was president of the mountain climbing club at Cornell, and Ronnie G who had a catering business, but a landscaping truck, and we drove all the lanes of tar that become Calaveras Boulevard as like they cross the 880 in Milpitas.

To recap: Ronnie Giudice, husband of Salvatrice Trapezzi. Randy Schloger, husband of Heather Trapezzi, uncle of the intern.

We drove along the chains of Verizons and AT&Ts and the Wells Fargos and the odd weird indie Thai restaurants that buffered the parkinglots that buffered the stacks of big box stores that would never be properly malled. We passed Best Buy and Walmart and an intersection of Mexican laborers, as like the access road wandered toward the freeway again, in that stunned and desperate way a dying coyote approaches a dumpster.

And then we stopped. At the last stoplight before the coiled ramps and cars. We were pinched between Ronnie G at the wheel and the Schloger intern nephew, and we were feeling their pressure, and feeling their doubt. Just after the light was the rear of a landfill. A planting of
wan sapling evergreens and a fence at the rear of a commercial landfill. Then, attached to the fence and between the evergreens was a blue that was not the sky.

Rather, it was the Bay, billboarded up in the air in dramatic panorama, and though the Golden Gate Bridge was arching across it, the calibration or transfer was off and the result was less golden and more a silver gray as like ash, while the Bay itself was the color of all the weeds outside the frame. Bottomline, though, what was truly distinctive about the image was that in the oozing middle of the Bay, and half on one side of the bridge, half on the other, but also just erected through it, the Statue of Liberty was photoimposed in malfunctioning printer and monitorscalding electric blue screen of death.

The face of Liberty was not her face or even the face of a woman but the face of a genderless and racewise indistinct person neither old nor young and not even just one person but a composite. The blended American in flubbed retouch.

In the raised hand was still the torch but the other cradled what appeared to be a Dynabook. The earliest but unproduced tablet computer from Xerox-PARC.

The English text was “Study English With Us And Live Your Dreams (Both Conversational And Technical),” above text in every other language and a 1-800 number but no online presence just yet.

The Schloger intern nephew whistled as like Ronnie G gunned his truck. “Not going to be a problem,” he said.

The Schloger intern nephew set the ladder in the grass and said, “That German is whack, that Chinese is whack. The thing is falling down anyway.”

As like they had been stealing billboards all their lives.

We suggested it would be easier to razor and roll the thing but Ronnie G and the Schloger intern nephew insisted on detaching the billboard from the aluminum bracket full and complete in its plywood frame.

We trucked off with it propped between flatbed and cab.

It just occurred to us that it would have been easier to buy it.

Moe had a slanted rhombus shanty house at the edge of the Asian diaspora, Centerville, Fremont. Which explains why he spent time
at the mandir. Nothing explains how he spent his money. We reversed into the driveway and honked and Kor came out to the stoop and across the tanned brown lawn. Ask us how he got inside. Ask us how he was sweating.

The doorway dimensions would not accommodate the billboard, and the garage was sealed at every threshold by a keypad whose combos were, Kor had found them to be, uncrackable. We were considering giving it a go just to show him up, but the Schloger intern nephew was already up on the stoop holding the billboard aslant and Ronnie G was revving his chainsaw. He sawed clean through the frame and bridge and even through Liberty, the paper chunking into papers and the paste that bound them brittling away to exfoliate ragged sooty rainbows. Every one of the ads was still there, apparently, providing backing, providing weight, as like each next ad had just been stuck atop the prior, as like for the benefit of the prior, to stick, bubble, lump, and make whole by the concealment, because now in their surfacing all that remained of whoever had or had not been elected, of Lena Söderberg or her double, and of that foundational inspiration of happy healthy parentless California children playing around a sandbox and monkeybars, was just a mass of acidburnt skin peeling twisted.

Kor directed the halves inside and had the Schloger intern nephew lean them between the walls as like to obstruct the window. They took up so utter much of the room that we and Ronnie G had to keep to the hall, and then he went outside to wipe down his truck.

We felt around for a lightswitch. A burro blanket was tacked to the wall and the plaster around it scummed with swatches of the deserty hues, evidence of a previous occupant deciding on, then abandoning, an upgrade. The linoleum was stripped. In the kitchen was a spork/knife, soysauce. The fridge was not plugged in. The efficiency tag was still on the range. The bathroom had just gone paperless. The bedroom was so unfurnished it did not even have a computer.

Circling back, Kor and the Schloger intern nephew had angled the billboard halves to fit in a diptych as like an altar. They had lined the baseboards along the hall with banded stacks of sacrificial cash, a $10K advance on the STrapp.

Not much, and not even generous as like an insult.

Anyway, Moe concluded his holiday fast as like he always did, with a japa prayer to Vishnu, Krishna, Devki, Devkikrishna, and froyo. Frozey yozey. Frozen yogurt. Moe was a freak for froyo. Every cup was a different system error blend. Kiddie cereals, gummis, dodol. He never used a scooper but his hand, two fingers. Not just for toppings, for gorging.

Before he even finished, though, he called the Tetplex. However by the time the Trapezzi Sisters had determined which office extension we were currently using, which was the office extension of the Soviets, Gushkov and Lebdev, Qui and Cull had patched in too. We listened to the licking. All that was hearable was inveigling and slurps, ambient clank of van.

We were trying not to announce ourselves just yet but must have been respiring because Moe without a swallow said, “Do you know what is rectarded?”

We said we did not know what was rectarded specifically.

He said, “STrapps.”

We agreed.

He wanted to know why not task, insert engineer here. He wanted to know why not task, here insert another.

But all we had to give him was what the VCs had given us, a flatterjob. No one else had his artistry, we said, no one else had his tenacity, that was what we told him, and it was while blowing that down the phone that we might have had the sense, we might have but did not, that this insistence on Moe was if not stupey then stupey suspicious.

Finally, Moe said he would do this suckalicious STrapp. But under four conditions.

One. He would never again be forced into a project. Two. He would not be listed in the patent filings for or be associated in any way with any STrapp product. Three. He did not want to report to Kor directly and if he had to report at all it would be to Carbon or Keiner and strictly via email. Four. He wanted Kor to personally restore the billboard to its original location, and replace the locks on his house and the bedroom alarmclock that was broken.

Kor unmuted his speaker just then and joined the call, assented to the
first, assented to the second, and got Moe to compromise on the third by agreeing to his emailing the VCs but insisting he work out of the Moremory facility, though with total independence. Four Kor had to reject or rather accept as like a provocation.

We did not recall an alarmclock. Kor did not recall breaking one.

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[Kor’s always been manipulative?]

Psychology is for trophy spouses and corpses. Even now you are wasting our time.

[But he always gets his way?]

Kor had gotten Moe, the one human responsible for making us profitable, relegated to the Moremory incubator just to hatch this hunk of STrapp, while without telling anyone he had Cull and Qui out on a nationwide fieldtrip searching for a location for a tentative DCent. We ourselves would not be tapped into this until the next genexec in September. The general executive meeting. September.

They were visiting visnes with an appetence for data. Our founding partners were in LA, meaning outside LA. New York, meaning New Jersey. They were in Illinois. Maryland/Virginia. Assessing the expediencies of the Texas/Iowa border. Data occupy no space but place matters in proximal terms. The closer the users to servers the closer the users to being served. Come for the speed, stay for the algy. If we supplied speed, preference would be won.

They were back for the October genexec. On the agenda was a discussion of two new cartopositioning sites and which one we would either have to dev against and compete with or compete with others to acquire. Penultimate item was the formation of planteams to improve our foreign semantics, which devolved into a wonky procon debate of Cyrillic rootzones, .рф. Then Qui and Cull stood bashfully offering their surveys of the renewable energy compatibility, but just gray drab dull inclemency, of Celilo, Washington/Oregon.

Moe did not attend this meeting either, but should have. The drive should have been going into production already.

[You were in touch with him? I mean—what were you doing all this time?]

That was just about the time of the letter, which had been addressed to us and brought by post. A globally synched humanbased delivery system.

Point is, a letter had been delivered but not to The Clingers, where we still had the condo, neither to Sierra Vista, where we had rented this vinylsided cyanobacterially roofed crashpad to be maximally proximal to the Tetplex, nor c/o the Tetplex whose treemail has always been envelopes of anthrax flour and lipsticked postcards from deathrow, but c/o M-Unit and Aunt Nance. M-Unit, who had called Super Sal who had called us to his phone, was apologizing for the snailish delay. The letter had been posted to their previous Palo Alto addy and so had to be fwd:d to their current Berkeley addy. Also, they had been away. M-Unit had never told us she was going, but insisted she had. They had mediated Eritrea, sabbaticalized Ghent.

We told M-Unit, drag to trash, it was just another beardy luddite demanding a ransom on our sanity. Though if she were feeling in her citizen mood, she might dial the FBI or the CDC.

Either way, we said, she would have to get used to our new profile, inure herself to philatelic harassment and Safeway bags of ricin left on the porch.

M-Unit countered with accusations of Chomskyism, or megalomania, and said that any fellow creature who had gone through the trouble of postage was due an audience, respect.

“Open it yourself.”

“We do not open mail that is not for us,” M-Unit said.

Aunt Nance, on the study extension, “But you steamed that Dutch envelope of mine, just for an offer to lecture on Baathist Clientelism at The Hague.”

“We do not get involved in conversations that do not involve us,” M-Unit said.

What Aunt Nance humped downstairs and unsealed was a normcore AAA roadmap to Delaware, DC, Maryland, Virginia. A handwritten line joined Fort Meade to McLean, from the middle of which another line went south to drown in the Potomac and make a T.

M-Unit offered that the postmark was San Jose, CA, 95126.

But the return addy was Pruristac, which does not exist except as like a midden of shellfish shells, a lost original Ohlone settlement on the margin of Pacifica.

[So Moe or someone impersonating Moe sent you some roadmap of the nation’s capital? Why through the post, though—he’d never heard of email?]

He had.

This was toward November. That cold warm clouding toward November. Fog in advection, wet light deresolutioning into darkness by noon. The Bay getting to resemble itself on the billboard.

Everyone was feeling this weather as like confirmative of STrapp fail and so a Keiner renege on the balance of our funding. That at least was the chatter in the corridor and at the end of the corridor the office of Kor was empty. Kor was never around. The claim was the common coryza. Or a stomach flu. Everyone chattered and wheezed.

The office of Kor, we had always avoided going inside.

[Wait, hold up—I’m not seeing the connection. What does all this have to do with a map?]

The office of Kor, we had always avoided going inside. A showercurtain hung over the threshold, indicating a total availability to staff. We approached that clearish nylon sheet, and handled it carefully because the rod was not bolted but wedged between jambs and so would fall if tugged. The shelving units were empty then, as like they were waiting for their contents. Groundbreaking shovels from the African techschools we would finance, Taiwanese Olympic pingpong team jerseys, putters that decided the Masters, the key to the city of Sderot. Nothing Kor had any relationship to, just fealty from admirers, dignitary tribute, rubberplant, spiderplant, fern, ficus.