Book of Numbers: A Novel (75 page)
Read Book of Numbers: A Novel Online
Authors: Joshua Cohen
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Retail, #Technological, #Thrillers
i was out and apparently stayed out through a fight between you and moom who refused to leave until i came to but with all the pessaries and anesthetic and teratogen death agent ivs i was pumped with though wouldnt swallow as tablets and dropped behind the bed instead and later flushed it was all just a dream of you moom and emi and tal the four all the five of us in bed together dreaming. that was a week id say. week and a half. you were doing and even by past behavior overdoing everything and just by realizing that i was recovering. you even managed to impress moom and convice her to go to a show with emi and tal before heading back to wykagyl. jersey boys
that was the show
. then we were alone except for all the shiva trays and platters. so many of them so much ringing at the door you pried off the intercom and cut the wire but then all the ringing was phone. note how all the dormant instincts come out among the buddha jews and suddenly its tunafish and eggsalad and coldcuts and rye. the smell of meat i couldnt deal with. note the pareve cheesecake babkas and diet soda liters like a reflex from fairway. thankfully i couldnt keep anything down. the office called daily. “mia” my yoga instructor showed up with a healing asana a malasana variation to detox she said i had to do the moment i got up i had to squat down toes diagonal heels flat to pelvic width or wider abs or what was left of them to the front hands front elbows to the inner knee breathe shoulders to the inner knee breathe and hold imagining the vagina is a nostril and the anus a mouth or the other way around and drop them to suck the floor and she demonstrated and basically held her class for me on the unmatted floor of our room and you were admiring her ass her tits admit it but like me shes too fit shes not your type. you werent sleeping with me anymore. but that came out wrong because i dont mean sex i mean it would still be forever before id be able to use a goddamned tampon. instead we just stayed awake together and you gave me your story. the tale of the man whod garbled the hilton and the hyatt
and how thatd caused you to miss the registration orientation. all through the calling youd been in different important sessions. also the topic wasnt pyramids but writing and curation. museumology and institutional critique. as you talked all i could think about was rabbi offen the friend of mooms you wouldnt let marry us whod said that even without a body we could have a funeral. but then i thought that a funeral after a shiva was meaningless. then i was out of bed. youd hired an inept cleaningperson or cleaned yourself we never discussed this. ill be straight with you id had enough of you being shut up together. all id wanted was tv but as always i felt judged when i switched on my reality crap even though when you were crapping out yourself with top chef i judged nothing and then you went and got movies but not my movies and be straight with me not even yours because theres no way you like or ever enjoyably or au fond thoroughly sat through godards vivre da vie or fastbinders berlin alexanderplatz. all id wanted was to be left to my workmails and tv. id gotten out of bed not because i was strong enough but because youd gone out for groceries. i had this urgent need for laundry to do laundry. you hadnt done it whether because you were “begging to be caught” or giving “a cry for help” or just suffering from a passive aggressive s&m complex or
guilt resulting in reversal
(
selfsabotage or sad cingulate gyrus selfhandicapping
) according to doc meanley. the suitcase youd taken was in the closet and i emptied it all into the machine that roller suitcase the friedmans got us for our wedding. by the time the load was ready for the dryer id read through the conference convention schedule a map of the smithsonian. from the map fell this limpdick amtrak ticket to dc. faded but also oneway. folded into the schedule were printouts. hertz rental car reservations from dc. your name. receipt for the mainstay inn cape may nj the night that night your name vowels intact. payment type was cash. depraved. you were two hours from ny but only an hour from your mother and didnt visit. i got out my work laptop and put it atop the lap that had just held our child of fingers toes eyes and ears but not yet sexed. or barely. or i resisted asking but asking would never have occurred to you and i took
your lack of curiosity as trauma and then as gender equality because we were mourning ourselves and not just genitals and then i realized what it was and realized that id always known what it was selfishness all along id known and been lied to and so lied to myself to banish from my mind that shadow like the sagittal sign on the ultrasonogram the cranial notch that says penis and the caudal notch that says not vagina but clitoris the penis pointing up to the empty head because in utero its in perpetual erection but the clit pointing down out of shame because with women even our own bodies are against us. i tetrated every name in the schedules list of panelists every name. small versions of photos on paper bigger ones online. the curator of the whore collection at the met gave a presentation about the fate of possessions in the afterlife. whether they were believed to actually incarnate into use or were just purely symbolic. whether a clay slave was believed to have represented a flesh slave or to become one. interesting. it was the middle of the second trimester we miscarried you did. how am i doing check back with me in october. i was all over the computer ignoring my backmail and well wishes and you came through the door. you were carrying groceries. youd actually gone to get groceries.
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There’s something different about writing by hand again (something
rebooting, refreshing, restoring
, restorative), using pen and notebook, for the first time since I’m not sure, school. Writing with the whole hand, writing with the entirety of my handedness, not just with the fingers. Get a grip, a hold, let the punctuation loosen, let the ligatures slack, shed the remanence, degauss the ghost, release, breathe. Do whatever.
Writing by hand, it’s not just the foreign words that get italics, every word gets italics. Capitalization becomes a negligence. Letters in the middle of words are capitAlized. Or at the end, like seX. Bold is pressure exerted. Underline, a bump.
The pen—not a dippable nib but a disposable ballpoint. Ink through a tube like marrow in the bones, which lubricates a ball as it’s rolled over a page—I can’t help but be reminded of heads, of decapitation. Cut off my own, dripping its fresh indigo, and roll me over all that blankness outside. Me, rolling over the fields, punctuating with my nose.
The paper—like the traintracks laid straight out below me, ruling Europe, lining mind—I’m wondering, what year did lined or ruled paper first appear? And which is it—lined or ruled? German goes for Liniert. In school the marble swirl notebooks were Wide-Ruled, like a Homeric epithet. My gut’s telling me that this longitude first emerged before the war—but which war? But then the gut gets all unsettled again and says—maybe the 1840s? That feels more like it. 1642, in London or Paris. Venice. Amsterdam. Make it up. Feel more. At the time, the writers must’ve been thinking, just another pointless novelty! The grid’s too cramping!
Too controlling! Once again, technology’s depriving our thoughts of freedom! (I haven’t used an exclamation in a while! Feels great!)
Bear with me hairs, plant fibers, horse hooves! Bear me nut galls and berries, resins, tannins!
Computers keep total records, but not of effort, and the pages inked out by their printers leave none. Screens preserve no blemishes or failures. Screens preserve nothing human. Save in the fossiliferous prints left behind by a touch.
But a page—only a page can register the sorrows of the crossings, bad word choice, good word choice gone bad, the gradual dulling of pencil lead, which is graphite. A draft by hand resembles the mechanism of computational processing. A semiconductor, an integrated circuit or in plaintxt, a chip. Think of the paper as the silicon substrate, and think of the multicolored scribble piled atop as having been fabricated in layers, in strata dug from the earth—it’s like an archaeology in which the artifact you’re seeking is the earth itself, which is mining, I guess, like drilling for mineral deposits, metals, copper, aluminum, gold, silver, nickel, tin, zinc.
On second thought, on 40th thought, forget the analogy. Rub it out, don’t rub it. Semiconductor levels (“the wafers”) are smaller than particles of dust, semiparticulate small, and if even one of them from the solder on down to the boarded substrate becomes compromised in any way, at any point in the fabrication, the entire circuit’s fucked, and the computer might be too, fucked integrally. That’s why they’re manufactured in spotlessly white compartments kept airlocked and ionized, seismically stabilized, fascistically regulated for temperature and humidity, and free of contact with contaminants like sweat and dust (“the human”). That’s why they’re increasingly being manufactured by robots. Just like prose is.
A notebook is the only place you can write about shit like this and not give a shit, like this. Cheap and tattered, a forgiving space, dizzyingly spiralbound, coiled helical.
\
Enough tetricity—I left Frankfurt, but never went back to Berlin.
You could line a triangle, you could triangulate, among Berlin, Frankfurt, and where I am, or was, moving. 10:18 with no timechange.
At least the windows always change. The tracks are always on time.
Switch trains at Nürnberg, 12:30. Just across the platform.
Field, house, church, house, field—and they’ve stopped checking passports when you cross the Inn (the river) (tributary of the Danube). In a pleather banquette, passing cows—cudding huddled stupey cows grazing at grass fenced just off the trackbed—meatcows the color of rancid butter, fenced separately from milkcows whose piebald inkblots remind me of roundbordered countries I’d rather be in.
Memory, that roundbordered country.
Vienna, terminus was the Westbahnhof, which I’d never been through before—on my last visit to Vienna, to research my book, 12 years ago now, I’d driven in from the east, taking the route of my mother’s war through what’d only recently been called Czechoslovakia, from Poland. I admit, I was momentarily perplexed: I’d expected an Austro-Hungarian railroad shed of clichéd fin de siècle grandeur, not this stagnant dingy penal colony advertising telecoms, art exhibitions, operas, and compgenerated architectural renderings of the unfinished Hauptbahnhof—slated to replace this facility in a ludicrously futuristic 2014—gummed with dotmatrix printouts of the take a tab variety.
I took a tab—no decent hostel was ever very far from trains. The city was turning its back on the sun and getting slapped with darkness.
At the hostel I was assigned a drywall cell fitted with foldout bunks that every time I counted them I got a different sum, but at least they were empty.
And to think—on my last visit I’d stayed at the goddamned Bristol. On my mother’s dime, but still. The Bristol. Only to sink to this.
Don’t think.
Read.
I fell asleep but at some point was woken by the nightmares—Dutch and some Gabonaise, and the former were saffronrobed backpacker Christian hippie maybe gay but maybe not gyrovagues, while the latter might’ve been involved in the logging industry and crashed around our cell like drunken trees, and the drywall was wet from the stalled bathrooms above and the bathrooms were showers too or rather just total wetrooms each with a sprinkler system showerhead above a rank Turkish squat toilet that slanted toward a drain.
But I didn’t mind—I’m not letting myself mind even the blanketlessness, the starchy sheet that required a deposit or the towel that had to be renewed daily, no exceptions and no discounts for extended stays, because privacy had become loneliness again (nothing to do but submit to conditions if the cost of privacy becomes loneliness)—except, the no smoking policy bothered (always going up and down).
\
A quarter moon after the looting, [PFC. CHRISTOPHER] Bringdom’s unit was assigned to secure the Museum and monitor its cleanup. They had to make sure its fabled collection sustained no further losses. Bringdom found it funny to be soldiering among all these Arab men doing what was supposed to be women’s work, all these misogynistic Arab men who seemed not to mind doing it. Sure, men were good for hauling gear, or those priceless hunks of busted Mesopotamian vases, but the Army had convinced him that men were pretty damn bad at sweeping and mopping.
Bringdom’s patrol brought him up to a large gallery with a small dune of glass on the floor. He broke away to kick at the sharp jagged shards, scattering them into reds and whites and blues, depending on the light. He was awestruck, but also confused. No windows had blown here. All the glass above was intact. Bringdom bent over his rifle and scooped a handful of the fragments into his flakvest pocket.
It was desert glass, created by a lone renegade comet. As the comet entered our atmosphere, it exploded like a celestial bomb. The heat of the blast fused the sand directly below it into a pane, which, just a moment later, was shattered by the impact of the nucleus. What resulted was this glistening mess.
Bringdom didn’t know this, though, he never would know any of this. The glass just reminded him of a girl.
—C
ALEB
K
RAST
,
Bringdom’s War
\
Iz, I’ve walked—coiling myself into circles, into rings. Bunions, corns, and a bathfungus developing. All the natives or the Viennese I’m taking for natives are old and women, their men must die before them, and they all have tiny little plasticbags under their chins that fill and empty with air. The women, even as I resisted the suggestion, I saw as Moms. I heard my name, but only in reference to coal. Kohle.
The morning was paved with pigeons. You can never wake up earlier than pigeons—you can never wake up earlier than streets.
I’m not sure how or even if you’re going to respond to whatever crisis comes out of this, Rach, what sort of pathos is still in you or whether