Book of Numbers: A Novel (65 page)
Read Book of Numbers: A Novel Online
Authors: Joshua Cohen
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Retail, #Technological, #Thrillers
Framed frontpage that says First Color Page of the New York Times, 10/16/9? So many copies of your own book I haven’t read (but will). So many books on computers and the computing business new in their Amazon cellophane (I’ll match up the invoices with our billing), just shelves of them called The Exciting Account of How Something Changed Something Forever? The drawers stuffed with crumpled tissue. Semen all on the underside of the desk. Your mugs, shrunken twisted penholders from clay I tried not to break, fountainpen, Mount Blank.
Which if any are valuable and what are they worth because they were in a separate special pile? The Education of Henry Adams by Adams, Henry, Brief Lives by Aubrey, John, The Life of Samuel Johnson by Boswell, James, Sartor Resartus by Carlyle, Thomas, Tischreden by Luther, Martin, Parallel Lives of Plutarch by Plutarch, The Playboy Interviews: Comedians, and then a book I was unable to read but Makelsen who held it said it was in Russian Programirovany economysomethingych y upravlensomethingych zaduck with total pro diction and said that meant Programming Economic and Management Tasks by? He’s a very educated asset to the agency, Makelsen. My chair is much more comfortable than yours.
All this I took and put in designated trashbags with the assitance of Makelsen. I forgot to say I brought a box of trashbags. Then my cell rang. The Refuseniks were downstairs. This was the end of my salvaging time. I just could’n’t do it anymore and Makelsen either who didn’t have to assist me but did out of his own heart. We had ten bags full by that time. My knees and back were spasms,
especially because I couldn’t buzz them in so had to go all the way down the stairs again to open the door. But Makelsen who had publisher appointments you were keeping him from offered to go and let the Refuseniks in as he went. He handed me $200 in two $100s and said he wished the agency was able to do more but the agency wasn’t able to do more and so I have to think this was from his own pocket, which would be gnerous. He said gday mate so I said gday mate too. I just love that. Then Makelsen picked up the computer that I never mentioned was Rach’s so that I wasn’t able with him holding it to even shake his hand. (I have profound respect for him and guess he had a car.)
Then the Refuseniks came on up.
The rest of your office is theirs now, which we can get a tax deduction and whatever they can’t donate to charity will be offered to the dump. They will send a list of documentation for what has been donated and though it’s too polite to you I will fwd: that too. All of this was explained to me again by their coordinator who mentioned he was getting a PhD in Urban, I’d rather not get it wrong, maybe just in Urban and so I asked if his two colleagues were also students and he answered they were graduate students in nonprofit while the two stayed silent strapping on their lifting belts. I thought maybe they wouldn’t be phased by the porn but I thought wrong, because showing them around the unit but unable to move because all crowded in by your dreck your chazerai I said to be levity, “feel free to help yourself to this guy’s porn,” but they did not find it funny and acted insulted because their nonprofit thesis was on gender policy.
They were older than I remembered students being, certainly older than I must’ve been at City College, which I was barely shaving and they all had large mutton beards with moustaches, were big, burly, confusign. They certainly looked like movers or sanitation or other people in debt. Then talking it out with me they tried to sound like they were from the city with that accent I never hear anymore except in the crime procedurals I used to do, that Irish cop fireman or PS 475 assistant principal or Social Security office supervisor with the wife sore at him so he never goes
home voice. All this but still they were quite transparentyl not from the city, they didn’t have that city antenna, that you can’t impress me sensabilty. I was once in a commercial for loans. But they didn;t recognize.
They began crating everything up indiscrimly, two packing and hauling with their dollys down the hall and one, the urban coordinator one, down the hall trying the elevator. I hadn’t realized the presence of an elevator and the coordinator shouted if I had the key but I didn’t and called Bob Onders but he wasn’t picking up.
I took the two bags I was able to handle and took the stairs to leave them downstairs and search for Bob Onders or get better reception for the cell in the event he wasn’t picking up because of the reception was better downstairs.
Or he was in the basement.
But just as I was about to leave a man comes jumping up the steps breathing and screaming, “stop! stop!” in Russian, “styop! styop!” and all I can say is where’s Maleksen when you need him (Maleksen wouldn’t need have to talk he’d just petrify him)?? But as he slams into me and we both have to hold each other to keep from flopping and he’s breathing on me I realize the man’s Tartar or mixed, which is all the worst of being Russian mixed with all the worst of being Muslim. You’ve been fortunate or are being covered for. A friend of yours, this Albanian, he said he was.
He said that all the documents were his and that you’d given him a spare key and that he was using it to store this extra inventory in your unit with permission. What documents? “The pornographies.” For your sake is this so?
ALBANIAN (to me): I will remove immediately my documentaries.
I bestowed him the “benefit of the doubt,” which apppplies to you. This is why I have not told Rach about it despite how consistent it is with your behavior.
I told the chief Refusekin to let him keep whatever if it was porn.
CHIEF (fake hard): I’m not here to babysit anyone.
I went for my wallet to bribe him if that’s what he would have come to but
CHIEF: Forget it, you’ll just be overtime your estimate.
They bill by the hour but I didn’t have it in me to negiotate the Albanian to pay. He was patheticly thanking
ALBANIAN: Thank you.
So the Refusekins would taken a break and we went down to let your friend or this con artist scrounge.
They helped me with my bags. All the bags and I was aching all over.
The bus and train would not be suffice. I’d have to get a cab or in that neighborhood a gypsy service because am I savvy in assuming no cabs ever come to that neighboorhod? Which serviced is yours? Gladly I had saved from online a number.
The coordinator with his assistants took the opportunity of my dialing to leave me. They scattered. They wanted a deli if there was a deli there or just not to be bothered. I was left alone and remembered but nixed going upstairs again to your porn con to wonder if he had a copy of the elevator key, because they wanted the key to the elevator.
The car service picked up, put me on hold, and I repeated them the address twice and finally they explained Spanish they’d be veinte minutos, which might have been 20 or 10 I froget. I waited out in front of the door alone except therefusenik truck, doubleparked at the corner. The Chrysler Imperial had taken leave of Metropolitan. The wind was It was cold. Check the weather today, it was freezing suddenly and I was waiting all freaked by the no pedestrians, which is not NY. All the cars with rims too ritzy for this neighborhood were passing me with my bags and scuffling, freaking me out to lug two at a time all my bags to the corner to wait by the truck, I amdit, to wait behind it. In the driver’s seat of the truck the only Refusenikwh o wasn’t a student. He was in distinction to them who were “inexperienced” white a black guy and very “experienced,” dozing through the windshield it was all just a heap of laundry.
Half hour later the car service came and I dumped the bags in the trunk and told the Mex driver the city. But because he drove so hesitent on the LIE I took the wheel and told him to take the Queensborough and had to give him directions uptown and
across and was so irked that even though I was doing the heavy lifting the fare was still $44 and I wasn’t feeling genrous. Still when I said keep the $60 he acted like he’d never been tipped before so that when he popped the trunk he got out of the car and got the bags out for me and some ripped with some sharp Tanach corner tearing through and all on the street was clay bits and loose pages from the broke Tanach. He stooped with me to the pavement scooping it all back into the holes and knotting the slack to be juryrigged enough to get them inside, which he also helped with too.
So tack that expense onto what’s attached (below). Besides my time that I won’t charge for.
Because I did this for Rach, which is priceless. But she’ll be coming home in a moment and dinner’s my responsibility, wash all this dust off me. We’ll order. Prawnless vegan prawn rolls, two #2s, Bia Hois.
Yours in the book of life, gmar tov,
Adam (Shulinsky)
P.S. I took a mutliple copy of your book. Your mother’s from Cracow?My people are Warsaw olev hashalom. Specifically Vishkava, the shtetl. If you have any experience with that I would be under other cirumstances fascinated. She was a reader and read until she died.
PPS: No bcc: but cc: to Eisen. If you are familiar with ironies what happens incidently in missing spouse cases after digilent search is undertaken “is divorce by publication.” I refer you to New York Civil Law
§315-316 www.divorcelawxplained.com/ny/3, which states
Contents of order; form of publication; filing. An order for service of a summons by publication shall direct that the summons be published together with the notice to the defendant, a brief statement of the nature of the action and the relief sought, and, except in an action for medical malpractice, the sum of money for which judgment may be taken in case of default and, if the action is brought to recover a judgment affecting the title to, or the possession, use or enjoyment of, real property, a brief description of the property, in two newspapers, at least one in the English language,
designated in the order as most likely to give notice to the person to be served, for a specified time, at least once in each of four successive weeks, except that in the matrimonial action publication in one newspaper in the English language, designated in the order as most likely to give notice to the person to be served, at least once in each of three successive weeks shall be sufficient. The summons, complaint, or summons and notice in an action for divorce or separation, order and papers on which the order was based shall be filed on or before the first day of publication.
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Fiction writers mistrust the truth, nonfiction writers swear by it, while ghostwriters—who are typically laidoff journalists with novels in the drawer—are divided down the middle. And even that division is split. By which I mean, the relationships I’ve had with my ghostees have always replicated. What happens is I end up rewriting everybody, and so I become rewritten myself. Haunt the lives of controlfreaks, egomaniacs, career narcissists and solipsists, your lovers, your wife, your mother, and you become them too, inevitably.
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Banks again, then either a library or café. All my errands would be cut if this were fiction, but this is truth, so suffer.
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It’s like I’m writing for Rach. As if my accuracy in this ensures the accuracy of her blog. In Palo Alto I’d tried to get Principal to revoke her blog. He refused.
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I’ve had this fear with everything I’ve written, rather on every computer I’ve owned—last laptop, the Compaqs and Gateways Rach took home from her agency, the Gopal desktopped out in Ridgewood. I go to open
up whatever .doc of whatever project I’ve been working on, one day, just any normal rainday, and find everything changed. Someone, though fear never fleshed this someone, had gotten into my computer and overwritten me and I wasn’t able to tell the difference between what was mine and what was his. But it’s only with this book, with Principal’s—though also with this—that I’m finally realizing that’s plausible.
So: if anything’s bad, it isn’t mine.
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Out through the courtyard, jangling my Medieval keys, my last four €20s folded and frayed in my walletpocket. They were large bills, large in every sense to me, not just because they wouldn’t fit into an American wallet.
Euros (a term, I might point out, that covers both the fake banknotes and the fake people using them). Euros (but I mean just the currency) don’t advertise prime ministers or presidents or composers or painters but rather architectural treasures like bridges and windows, which might initially strike you as a liberalization of the elitist iconographies of the bygone mark and franc, until you realize they’re completely false, completely conjured, that none of them are to be found on this continent whose every river is traversed by an actual bridge and whose every castle and cathedral and church contains an actual window to hurl monarchy and clergy through. And so a privilege once claimed by politicians and artists, who never appeared corrupt or syphilitic on their own money, has merely been extended to walls and gates, which now must be shown in their quintessence. The paragon of a Baroque or Rococo arch, the consummate Gothic steeple or spire. Not a style, but the ideal of a style, which can’t exist, because style has to live too, style has to eat and sleep and make angsty concessions. Apparently, the EU Parliament reached this decision to feature archetypes as opposed to real edifices so as to avoid offending any nations lacking in culture, rather to avoid privileging any nations abounding in culture and beyond that, the monuments to it—and so preventing Italy and Greece, among the poorest of EU members, from seizing the cash both verso and recto with all their Colosseums and Parthenons.
The same effect might’ve been achieved, I’m proposing, by putting Berlin on the bills—Berlin’s already perfect at being nothing. Ugly plattenbau, flattenbau, immane housingblocks the shape of bills, with the same sense of being backed by relentless brutality, yet just as fragile, frangible, crumbling.
As for the older houses still referred to as Jugendstil, the houses that’d survived the fires—to become cherished only because of that survival, because in their primes they might’ve been among the plainest façades around—next to their squat concrete heirs they seem memorial, like inhabited memorials to themselves.