Book of Numbers: A Novel (78 page)

It’s as if, simultaneous with the invention of printing, the last uninhabited planet in the Tau Ceti system was being colonized by cyborgs.

I tried to explain Yasir’s absence, but I didn’t have his schedule. Anyway—the next night, he was there.

He seemed fit, at ease. Disinterested in me. I stood by the Alawwam Obst + Gemüse produce market, holding this notebook like a shoppinglist, and watched, and wrote, and watched. The streaks of blood to the right and left of this sentence, this paragraph, are from the grapes I snuck, and crushed.

Because you were there, Iz. Without warning, you were across the street from me and swaying toward the Trafik. Though I wasn’t certain it was you initially. And my rationale for it not being you was that I saw your face. If it was recognizably your face, then it wasn’t yours, or it wasn’t only yours anymore. Unmasked. Healed. Keen. Breathing. You seemed happy.

Your skirt just touched the knee. It was a black skirt riding up at the rear and crimped twisted at the waist, and you leaned by a bugswarmed lamppost to adjust it. Black wool pointelle sweater, I’d bought that too. Zara, The Gap.

The heels, haute heels for an evening errand, were opentoed. Your raintoes, Iz. Your head covered in a red wetcolored scarf. Because a freezing rain will make anyone pious.

You weren’t wearing a coat, though. You never did like that coat.

You carried a tray of brass, clung around with foil. You set it down in front of your brother on the snackclogged counter you barely reached.

You exchanged a word. And then he leaned over and tied your headscarf. Cinching it tighter, pinching your cheek. Then you brought yourself to the corner and crossed away from me.

Iz, I didn’t chase you—rather I’d already chased you, but now that I was seeing you wet to the skin I realized it wasn’t you that I’d been after. It was a dream. It was another life. It was forgiveness—it was to be forgiven.

I approached your brother, and crowded him under his canopy. He was hunched over a calculator, fluttering receipts.

“I’m Joshua,” I said.

Before this, only his stain had addressed me, but now I had the man. Bewildered.

“So let me have a paper,” I said. “A newspaper.”

Yasir pointed, his mouth exhuming a relict tongue. “But all are German.”

“Not all of them. But that’s not what I mean. Just give me one. It’s not for me.”

“What one?” Yasir said. “Who?”

I went with a
Wiener Zeitung,
thick as a blanket. Put two coins in the dish, or atop the dish you’d brought still wrapped and steaming, Iz, and let any change due back to me be his.

My blessings.

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Dear Cal,

I might not be the best person to caution you against dreaming. Or to give any writing advice. Or even to be reading you. Particularly now. And anyway I’d rather get paid to do this up as a critical essay, review the living shit out of you for—what’s that paper the homeless sell,
Street News
? Or does
Beaver Hunt
still publish? Cal. It’s not like either of us have finished every single book we’ve ever reviewed. All dreams in books are typeset in italics, that handwriting that during the Renaissance (15th to 17th centuries, also M&W 10:35–11:50 612 Philosophy Hall, Dr. Gerds) developed into the earliest fonts for the earliest books from the Latin and Greek, and so Antiquity was a dream, that’s all I’ve got to offer. Truth is, I’ve never actually cared about dreams, and anytime I get to them in a book I feel cheated, even worse than I feel cheated by flashbacks, because at least in flashback the present revisits the past to further nuance itself into future (like we’d slum out to the Bowery today not to meet new friends but to toast the friends we wouldn’t meet who are out in Westchester and sad), while dreams just float or unfloat as timeless spaceless inconsequentials, meaning everything, meaning nothing, not beholden, never beholden, the fuckers (everyone dreams in Westchester). But hey, this oneiric somnic verbigerage can’t be of interest to anyone I’m not sleeping with. And I’m not sleeping.

Cal, this is not an email I’m ever going to send—this isn’t even a letter, Dear—and anyway I can’t send anything.

Aaron’s kids passed on your ms., and I’ve read it—on trains and then in this “youth pension” I’m in—night after night gutting the manila (postseason joke: the Mets moved to the Philippines and changed their name to the Manila Folders), getting that glue smell and unclipping, unrubberbanding, tracing each line with the clipedge, wrapping the bands around my typing injury wrists nervously because I want it to be
brilliant, I want it to be terrible—my competitiveness competing with a weak need to be transported, even entertained.

It’s all I have with me is why, that and a passport that both is and isn’t mine—bookmarking your book by my side, under my head as a pillow—reading it in cafés, museums

The night before, I came back late and the pension was closed—I’d never had the key to the front. I rung the bell labeled HAUSBESORGER, and this ogre Hungarian opened the door a gibbous swing like he’d been standing just behind it polishing the phrase “No One Will Admit Between Hour of Two and Six.” He was stubborn, it must’ve been that hour. So, given that I was already carrying all my possessions in this nifty, recently acquired, green in every sense Amazon.com totebag—because everyone’s a thief—I left,

It’s like my standards are gone with Aar, and I’m not sure what he’s told you, or whether you even wanted me to read your novel—you never asked, and you used to ask, directly—or Aar’s kids just wanted to keep me amused and out of their hair (meaning Lisabeth), or flatter me and so keep me as a client (meaning Seth, who has a nose on him).

But in the event that
Bringdom
came from you, I’ve been giving it my all. Thorough notes will have to wait, but here:

1. you shouldn’t have a sex scene longer than a page that’s a dream (pp. 99-101),

2. you shouldn’t have a death scene shorter than a page that’s a flashback (p. 250),

3. the war theatricals have all obviously been informed by reporting, but they’re too much in the fact department, the military lingo is too much especially for the abstracted Kafka or like Camus in the Sunni Triangle mood you’re aiming for (let the Weinsteins or The HBO tang up the slang for the next generation of soldiers),

4. because once I was out of Chapter 2—and this is my main point—once Bringdom’s PTSD and debt and failed marriage and failure to engage with his child have been effectively established in “the present,” by which I mean “the topical,” and the novel’s deployed on this death mission account of his past, his enlistment and training, all his ballsdeep macho martyrdom antics (you’ll get a Purple Heart for nonpurple prose under fire), I was doing that
guiltily-flip-ahead-to-gauge-how-many-pages-are-left-in-the-chapter thing, the guess-how-many-desert-boring-pages-are-wasted-on-this-already-wasteful-war thing, and was disappointed to find that all of them were (about war), except for the jerking-it-to-the-Kurd-girl-who-turns-into-his-mother-in-the-middle-of-a-soyfield dream, and the maybe-suicide-maybe-not-of-his-father flashback I mentioned above, which though I realize I just warned you not to use flashbacks and dreams, I meant only contextually, because in terms of content this is your truest territory: Home.

(And Rachel-Anne, nice touch—as perduring as the Plains, and as open as the Kmart pharmacy.

I know, I know, she’s not my Rach—she’s your authorial prerogative.)

Anyway, onto your concluding scenes. Rachel-Anne getting that call, and fainting, with all the customers just waiting. That you’ve written it so that readers can only suppose they know what the call’s about, but can never know for sure: it’ll play better with the soundtrack behind it, unison cellos and solo muted horn. That the concerned customer who pats her hand and gives her a plastic poppy is black but is never described that way and it’s only made relevant by her coworker’s racist comment: it’s like I’m reading you sweat. This restraining tendency feels especially unfair with the decision to withhold the baby’s name. Just name the baby, Cal—for me.

There’s more, of course. And more about style. But then you always doubted that, style. Next time, if time and I get squared.

“With compliments and condolences—we have to be in touch” (about how to market what’s basically a male violence novel to females ages 18 to 80 who together are responsible for approx 68% of all new book buying and approx 64% of all public library book borrowing in America today) (my stats are reliable),

j

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P.S. Read this postscript first.

The way I was raised, Cal, from the earliest, was that my mother’s was the only war. That what she experienced (her Yiddish would be
vos mikh hot getrofn,
“what has befallen me”), being stowed away in that Carmelite convent in southern Poland on the Czechoslovak border and beaten and enslaved, essentially, was worse than anything any other human had ever experienced, but what occurs to me now was that Moms had never insisted on this, Dad had. Only Dad would attempt to exploit her trauma in explanations of her insomnia and bedsoilings and health issues, including, of course, her infertility, or in rationalizing her lateness in picking me up from baseball practice, or in leaving the laundry in the hamper and the pantry bare. This is all to establish that from the very start of planning my book (Moms had agreed to let me interview her, but only after I’d threatened to write about her regardless), I had no impression of my father’s pathologizing as anything other than an expression of his devotion to my mother, a duty that required both uxory and coddling. I’d failed to recognize his denial—abnegation, sublimation, displacement mechanism (I’m the first in my family to ever talk to a shrink) (about anything)—how my father had developed this smothering veneration in order to avoid discussing his own war. It was how he avoided anything even remotely to do with himself.

But the time to return to is 12 years ago, Cal, the research, the writing, Tel Aviv. I sat with my Tante Idit, not my aunt but my mother’s first cousin, interrogating her in the parched garden of the white duplex she shared with her seething companion, a retired Maghrebi army general who resembled King Hussein of Jordan and never once said shalom to me. He blamed me for the crying—Idit was crying all the time. And her brother Menashe was crying, and he was calling his crying sister by her birthname, Yetta, and they were calling Moms by her birthname, Yocha. They answered all my questions sincerely, shamelessly, but with rivalry too—after finding out how selective of an account Moms had given me. 12 goddamned years ago.

And then it was fall already, and I was off like a thief to Poland—to Warsaw. Renting that Daewoo on Moms’s MasterCard and driving it to Sobibór and Majdanek, or what Communist memorials remained of them, to Bełżec, or what Communist memorials remained of it, past the lot that’d been my mother’s house in Kraków, and the convent at Chyżne that’d abused and saved her thanks to luck and her parents’ money and
their influence with the Kraków Judenrat, and finally across the cankered karsts of the Tatras in what’d lately been Czechoslovakia, to Vienna—from which I flew back to the States.

I stayed in NY and wrote, and went down to Jersey only to present Moms with my transcripts to confirm or deny, as the intelligencers say—but she just set down the pot she was glazing and made me promise never to print anything the cousins told me, and I agreed, or she said I agreed, and that she trusted me.

So then I went ahead and printed all of it, Cal, because that’s just what we do—I’m not going to pretend it was ever a choice, but neither am I going to pretend it wasn’t difficult. 9/11 pubdate, Miri pulverized, Aar gnashing out in the wilderness beyond all assuagement and phone reception, you and your fame, Cal—and then in the midst of all that, Finn came through, or Kimi! did (and what the hell ever became of Kimi!?), either one of them or just a distributor’s order fulfillment robot sent Moms a finished copy. I hadn’t let her read any earlier version (I’m not about to lecture you, Cal, on how agonizing it is letting others read your drafts, doubly so if they’re the subject and are bound to be troubled). Moms wasn’t just troubled, she was furious, but she didn’t call me, she called Israel. She’d gotten online at the house around then, and she and her cousins were emailing too. She was never “raped” by the Soviet starshina, she said, because after the first time, he paid her in food, and after the last time, he paid her in a map and outlined a tentative route to where her brothers lived, where they had lived and operated branches of their family’s lumber firm, in Žilina (or Sillein in German) and Brno (or Brünn). Anyway, she said, the soldier wasn’t a starshina, but a podpolkovnik. Moms and Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe feuded back and forth over whether “rape” meant the same thing in Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. Whether the Red Army rank of the soldier corresponded to the Israeli Army rank of seren or segen—lieutenant colonel? full colonel? And it wasn’t like I was trying to stay out of it, Cal—Moms kept me out of it, and the only way I knew anything was that the Israelis would fwd: me the emails. That’s how I knew that Moms otherwise enjoyed the book, or just wouldn’t admit to her cousins that she hadn’t—all her emails began “Dear Yetta and Menashele,”
and ended with her signing herself, not Yocha, but “Love, Gloria.”

I also got a letter then—through the mail, through the fanmail, Cal—forwarded from Random House, October or November, 2001. I responded, and it led to a lunch. Which led to another. Retirees transited in from the Five Towns on the Island and from Main Line Philly to have lunch with me and then go gawk at the pit downtown.

They were readers, they were my only readers—if I didn’t snare the women I at least had a corner table with the only consolation demographic, geriatric Jews—but they didn’t want to talk about my book. They wanted to talk about my father.

You know, I’m sure you do, Cal, how you expend all this effort writing something and thinking through the detail of every decision (do I name the restaurants we met at? or just describe them? do I mention what was ordered? who took care of the bill?), but then you finish, or you delude yourself into finishing, and realize—too late, with the book already a classic of the bargain bin—that you’d missed something, a scene or even just a line that would’ve brought everything together, that would’ve resolved all the fogs—a gesture just as crucial to your life, but also as easily forgotten in daily life, as a person you’d loved who’s now dead.