Book of Numbers: A Novel (68 page)

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Riding trains, in their impassive passing, in, their, speed, that, smoothes the tracks out, that straightens the rails and evens the ties—it feels like how you tour a museum. How you tour a busy museum on a weekend or holiday noon.

You streak by mindlessly, peeking over heads, pardon me, Entschuldigen Sie, until something stills you, something tries to keep you, but you can’t be stilled, you can’t be kept, you’re bound to a schedule and hurried by, and the only impression you retain is one of resentment—not of the murmurous crowd, but of the artifacts in their cases, their stasis.

A city revolving its exhibitions by the neighborhood, the block, with the only explanatory labels the graffiti:
ZIZ
tagged along a quarter kilometer of trackfence in the chemical blue of the toilet in the trainstation’s men’s room,
ZiZiZiZiZ
bubbled in the neon pink of the powdered soap, then
Un train peut en cacher un auteur,
fuck death,
fuck debth,
¡mauerpower!
Drab Altbau progressing along the timeline into the new, the housingblock towers disinterred in tiers, archaeological strata of the future spilling onto balconies, hanging gardens of prams and bicycles, antennae, satellitedishes, and saggy feldgrau panties—all of it being left behind like a diorama display, as if Berlin were a museum of itself behind “glass.”

Cranes guarded the route, imperious in their hover, monitoring progress, approving entry, denying entry, wreckingballs at the ready to prevent a touch, even a linger, enforcing a policy of No Eating, No Drinking, No Flash Photography.

The woman had emerged from behind a grate to ring in the next customer like an automaton skeleton in an astronomical clock of the Northern Renaissance, but with a Deutsche Bahn blazer, and without a scythe. Only after I’d managed to explain that I didn’t want to go directly to Frankfurt but wanted to switch along the local routes instead, changing from train to train, each one smaller than the last, at the smallest and least convenient stations, accidental depots that were just collisions or breakdowns, and only after the woman had quoted me how that’d cost more than double than and take more than four times the time of the ICE, the InterCityExpress, I settled, but requested a ticket only oneway, which might’ve confused or even disappointed the customers behind me, who’d been convinced I was a criminal or escaped convict, but now realized that even if I were one, I was inept and beyond that, cheap.

Only a corpse would lay out for a oneway ticket. Frankfurt and the grave are the only two destinations to which the directest route is also the cheapest.

Have all the pensioned docenty dyejobbed perfume in their pits ladies of this continent shut all the ports and gates, bar all the entrances, barricade—screen—all the emergency exits, and it all becomes a museum, in which all us museumgoers become the exhibits, relics studying one another, studying ourselves.

This has been me just following a track, unable to stop and get off.

I hadn’t slept. Just loitered, vagranced. Benched. No sleep now.

My suit still hadn’t dried from showering in the sink. I felt clung to. The many things in my many pockets weighed on me. My rightleg had my keys, my leftleg had my wallet. Passports pinched my asscheeks. My Tetote, a pocket unto itself, was strapped left to right across my heart. All my possessions were pressuring me, hungrily, pressuring through my pockets, insatiably, until I myself was pocketed as a single speeding point, without volition, beating.

A couple of businesstypes toward the rear of my car had unpacked their tablets. Ereaders, which is a term that can indicate either the person reading or the thing that’s read, but they were ereading. Any news
that was newer would be prophecy, which the train enabled with wifi. To turn the page, to turn the screenpage of their tablet devices, they made a slight slash with the indexfinger, like how tyrants used to select their concubines and condemn their jesters to death. Stroke, off with her clothes. Stroke, off with his head.

And I was doing it too—dismissing my fellow passengers with their own gesture. I esat with my efinger in the iair and islashed it around. Then I went clicking on things, at least on the window between me and the thing, as if whatever I clicked would have to explain itself to me. As if I’d press on a village we passed and it’d surrender its name. Press on a town for population, demographic, economic realia. Press on a field we passed, press on the pane between me and field, and projected back through my whorled prints would be a history of its sowing, its reaping, the annals of who’d screwed between its sheaves.

We’d cross the Elbe (which the Soviets never did, though neither did the Americans), cross over its tributary the Saale, or I forget which one of the Saales, and how many Saales, and how many rivers we’d cross that weren’t a Saale, but I’ll never forget what redundancy feels like. Redundancy feels like doing this on my own.

Whatever lay in the path of the straightest standard gauge connection would be crossed and in that crossing, obliterated. We’d span every other river in the Reich and why not even the same river twice—we’d pass but not pass through the Harz, and we wouldn’t cross the Rhine (my father the soldier did once, in the opposite direction).

A man who didn’t strike me as a businesstype—rather he was closer to being into football, American, though his footballsized face was intelligent—settled across the aisle. What bothered me, initially as an affront to that intelligence, subsequently because it marked him as a danger, was that he wasn’t doing anything, he wasn’t reading or ereading anything that would’ve made his language public, he wasn’t even playing a game.

I sat with head averted at my window, deep in a comp lit seminar with my and Principal’s twin passports. As the strokers kept stroking
screenpages, and the fields blocked by like crosswordpuzzle blanks, like spot the differences between the photos teasers.

It wasn’t obvious whether the man was weak fat or strong fat or even which seat he was sitting in besides the whole row, with the median armrest raised. He pivoted toward me, and his neckhair and wristhairs were so alert and bristling as though frequency tuning that I toted up, got away, over the metal tack, the bridles and saddles that coupled the cars, stopping midway between the caboose and the motive, the diningcar.

I needed a drink, to rid myself of my last coin.

The English/French/Spanish menu encouraged me to “Sample the Regional Wine,” which was what I ordered by pointing.

No speech, just cork—no need to retail my own blushing terroir.

The waiter returned having linked his cuffs and buttoned his collar and clipped around it a redherring bowtie. He set down bread, which I refused with a headwag. He would’ve charged me if I’d touched it. Then he brought the grail of plastic goblets, already poured. Even the napkin had its price. It was a check that unfolded like linen, €4, a €1 tip rounding up, and that was all of it.

Prost, prosit—I took a sip. Trust nothing you read. Nothing about this wine was local. Motion has no local.

Just as I was rimming the sip the door autoslid. And behind it was another door, a wall, my aislemate. He was tall and wide as if he were quarried from the surrounding terrain, as if he were being quarried from the car itself, a raw rupestral growth who had to nick himself down just to fit into my fantasies. He boothed two booths away facing me and ordered a mineral water and was served that sparkling clarity in a glass anchored by a big crystal of ice with a big halfsliced citron floating atop like a buoy.

The English language is like a tunnel with endless clearance—an eye or ear too forgiving. Americans especially can usually get where someone’s coming from. This has to do with being mediated, having seen and heard enough screenwise to know how Yugo gangsters inflect, when they plot amongst themselves without subtitles. How Russian assassins dress, when they’re planning to explode a motorcade. We have every variation, not least the counterintuitive. But I can’t say I can do the same offscreen and within another culture. I couldn’t dig deep enough into his
umlauts to judge them native. But I could still suspect some curry in his wurst. His skin was either racially tan or tanned. How he poured. How he drank. How he did absolutely nothing else. How he wouldn’t leave my face. And so I slumped to show him his reflection in my baldspot—and then he finished—to repel him by his reflection—and then he left. Coins on the table, no tip. Just a cock of the head. Tongue out. Like he was aiming.

\

Probably just an overreaction. Probably he’d just never been around a Jew before.

In the next car another passenger sat reading another book. Not ereading an ebook. The passenger just closed the thing. And took a euro billsized card, an indexcard that spanned the indexfinger to the middle of the hand, and marked the page. No cornering, no folds. Cards. Reminders of the census. Cards were how censuses used to be conducted. Once, each city, each town, each village had an official going door to door, collecting information, marking each dwelling’s data with pen or pencil on card. Each municipality collected its cards and summarized their stats in a report, and each bound report was put on a train and relayed to the capital. I’m wondering whether any of their couriering officials ever read them if bored on the journey. I’m just guessing that another book, containing and summarizing the stats of all the municipal books, would have to be compiled in the capital.

But then at the turn of the century—1890? 1880? I forget, my exactitudes are later—the census was automated, at least partially automated, first in America and only later in Europe. In 1933 the Nazis counted only in Germany, but in 1939 they counted in all the annexations too, counting Austria, Sudetenland, Memelland, counting Poland, the Generalgouvernement, at least in part. The censustakers distributed to each household a strip of paper, a survey whose filling was mandatory and whose findings the takers themselves coded onto a card by a system of punched holes, a punchcard. This citizen had blond hair, punch, this noncitizen had black hair, punch, cranial and facial type, nose type (straight or curved, weakly or strongly bent in which cardinality),
tabulating religion (column 22 hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, hole 3 annihilated). Did he or she have one Jewish parent or two? even one Jewish grandparent? Any disabilities? and/or disfigurements? Glasses and/or hearing aid would help to complete the form—condemn. An accounting tallying poetically, still—all identities are voids.

The punchcard and its calculating machine—the storage/memory and processor of the earliest computing—were invented in 1890 by a German American from Buffalo, NY, named Hollerith, whose company became the company that became IBM, which, in turn, licensed the technology to the Nazis (but don’t get all nitpicky angry if online contradicts me and says the year was 1889 and the city was Albany and the inventor’s name was Höllerith and the licensing was done by an IBM subsidiary).

The technical execution of the punchcard’s primitive programming was modeled on textiles, specifically on how looms used cards to separate threads into patterns for weaving, for embroidering things like swastika bands and yellow stars, though the inventor himself always maintained he’d initially been inspired to adapt the process by a train journey he’d taken through the American West—by the tickets required, their validation, their punching.

The conductor, a sturdy peasant in matching prussic pants and vest over boiled nasty sputumnal shirt, strapped his monkeycap and cowbelled into the car—weaved down the aisle and took your ticket and like a censustaker, with a small metal squeezer apparatus, punched it, put a hole in it, marking your fare and so marking your fate, your final destination. A flurry of chad, white discs of paper floating floorward like the Polish snow that greeted the steerage.

Genocide, like publishing, is 66.6% a problem of distribution—how to get the people/things you need to be killed where they need to be killed when they need to be killed, and at a minimum. How to get Halbwachs to Buchenwald to meet his dysentery. How to get the best Yiddish poets of Kiev all to Moscow, to the Lubyanka’s basement, on the same summer night for mass execution. How to get Mandelstam to the Second River transit camp by Vladivostok in time for his official cause of death, which was frozen “unspecified.”

Nowadays publishers just invest in writers, they have the writer’s
work edited, copyedited, proofed, but then they have to print it and make it public (murder). Nowadays writers are murdered mainly by their publishers, by being sent off to press and then to market.

American printers used to be the best in the world (the linotype, 1870–80? by Mergenthaler?), until for margin considerations too caustic to countenance, they merged with or were acquired by foreign companies, and so migrated abroad. Or else the companies uprooted themselves, keeping their corporate registries but moving their plants to Mexico, or China, the country that invented the book but bans books, and imprisons its authors—and in which, about two centuries before Christ, the Emperor I’d butcher his name erected a great firewall all around his Empire, buried its scholars alive, and then burned all their books, either to stifle their critique or standardize the writing system (the same Emperor whatever his name standardized his Empire’s currency, busy man)—and in which, about two millennia after Christ, this book I’m not writing is scheduled to be printed, though it would still have to be approved by the censors before being translated, and before any of the workforce enslaved to its production, any of the billion other Chinese, would be able to read it.

If only they had time to read it—hordes of the desexualized toothless working alongside one another like stripped gears, loading and impressing by roll, gathering the signatures, by octavo, by quarto, for binding—12 hours/day, 6 days/week, roughly ¥12 or $2/day, approx $52/month, approx $624/year. I’ve read the same journalism as everyone else, and I’m still not sure what to fall for—either any job is a good job, any pay is good pay, or China has only one factory, is only one factory, and its only product is suicide.