Book of Numbers: A Novel (11 page)

We labored (I did) on something that would air aloud, something oral, but
had to finish—prematurely—and told her I’d email her the rest.

She never paid me—not cash. It wasn’t
that type of relationship.

There was hardly any work left to do on it—but still I let it drag,
the lecture (there were other conclusions I’d always put off).

Until after she’d dialed, and redialed,
if-I-get-your-voicemail-I’m-going-to-act-like-my-phone’s-in-my-purse
dialed,
I-just-happen-to-be-driving-a-Prius-on-the-way-to-a-coworker’s-parent’s-shiva-in-Nassau-County
dialed, and I had to pick up to avoid another surprise. I was laying on the curses like
I was protecting my tomb: I couldn’t meet, not here, neither in her corkwalled
cenacle between two cenacles each shared by a dozen prying prudish anthropology and
sociology department adjuncts, I wasn’t feeling well, I had other
deadlines—I couldn’t stop by her loft to primp her in the mirrored center
of the bed amid all that white Egyptian cotton, reaching over only now and then to the
bedstands to languidly spin her globes and point—stop.

It would’ve been disastrous—getting into that again.

Instead, gut spilling over my laptop’s lip, I screened more of
Adam, but more of his earlier vehicles, from when he was my age, when he was younger, a
child, becoming dissatisfied with clips and even sequentials and so going to torrent the
entireties, torrenting illegally, getting dropped, returning and resuming, .ph, .id,
malware centrals, poisoning my computer, giving it fullblown whatever’s worse
than AIDS, now that AIDS is treatable.

Anything to divert me. Anything to distract.

\

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research
buried. The facts have to be wrapped like mummies, in the purest and softest verbiage,
which both preserves them and makes them presentable. Instead of straight explanations,
analogies must be pursued—like mummies. Examples, instances—next
chapter.

I thought the other JC had forgotten me, or that the job itself had just
been a thought—a whim of his, or mine—my “imagination,”
which is how a writer phrases a mania or pathology. I’d get to his book in the
afterlife, if then.

June. I sat laptopped amid the doldrums, the slowdown, the season
when traditional publishing takes fourday weekends at Montauk, when
even the sites are updated only sporadically, remotely. I finally returned on Finnity,
but in the plasmic midst of night, leaving 2:37, 4:19 msgs on voicemail, and when
he’d call back in the morning I wouldn’t pick up. The msgs I left were
just, “No news, I’m assuming it’s off,” and he’d
voicemail in response, “No news on this end either but still we have to
talk,” and my next call would be, “Let’s try to get an
extension—also ever catch
Daaaabbb!
? or
Daaaaaaaabbbbbb!
?
They’re about this lizard and lizards are reptiles, which live on land laying
eggs as opposed to amphibians, their ancestors, which are born in the water with gills
only to grow up into lungs and die on land, but I’m not sure with them about the
egg thing,” and his reply was, “The terms were no contact until
contact’s made, but once it is I’ll try for an extension, which means we
have to meet—me, you, Aar,” and I’d just capacitate his box,
“I can’t, I’m deep into drafting this thing starring this NY Jewish
kid who while on a class trip to the White House wanders off by accident and finds in a
bathroom a telex using the Soviet GOST block cipher, and he deciphers it, just like
that, just like nothing, and tells the president what the telex says, and whatever it
says, I haven’t gotten to that yet, it’s enough to convince the president
to end Cold War ICBM brinkmanship, and the West is saved and the kid’s father
who’s from the USSR and is now in the numbers rackets down on Orchard Street is
proud—I’ve been getting into this one specific actor, but also into 1980s
and 90s representations of mathematicians and scientists onscreen” (I was cut
off, I’m figuring, around the recap of the president).

I sat spotlit by the homepage, Tetration.com, boring my head into its
underdesign, the whole shallowbacked templatitude of it, trying to find out what was
going on, and even once tetrating, “where is joshua cohen?” and
“when will he get in touch with me?”

I went to the Midtown library, and read—but bury the algorithms,
the histories of tubes, transistors, circuits, of processor architecture and the
invention of memory—maxed out my understanding and turned to Egyptology, borrowed
the techbooks for later along with a Theatrepedia in which “Adam Shale”
was mentioned.

I came out of the main branch and past the tarred trunks to Broadway,
which anytime I’m on it I’m amused is also
“Broadway”—at least to
the prairie herds of
fannypackers that roam between shows. This is the only sort of mental masturbation that
gets me through Times Square.

Because someone was behind me, and someone was, millions. But in among
them, the stands of balloontwisters and calligraphers who are paid to write
“Peace” and “Love” in Hanzi but instead write
“Scum” and “Twat,” the chula churro carts and that truck
that does nachos and roofies, the same person, again, on another block, an
Asian—in an intemperate sweatsuit and cap, Red Sox and red crocs.

An Asian of indeterminate everything: intention, gender, age, even
Asianness. Indeterminate even if he or she were the same entity each time. Rach, at this
point, would’ve condemned me for racism, though not only don’t I care and
write this for myself, but as a reader I’d surely enjoy a book by an Asian in
which he or she suspects they’re being followed by a white person, but
can’t be sure of that white person’s intent or gender or age, or whether
that white person is the same person every time or even white. I’m perseverating,
I know, but thoughts have to be followed to their ends, the end of next block, and then
keep going, to avoid being overtaken.

By the highway, the Hudson—the library books straining at their
delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of
literacy. The Paronomasian, let’s say, turned to close the gap to the curb. A
whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th &
10th—this was Tetration’s NY HQ.

I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a
Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed
and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest
hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or
Tetguest?

Since last I was here all or nothing had changed: there was just a new
type of new in evidence—all novelty has this feeling, this rush. A
provisionality. Something to marvel at, not something to trust. The bot was trying to
palaver with me in a crepitant creole, increasing its volume and titling itself and then
treading away.

A monitorbank mounted on the crosstown wall showed activity at every
subtetplex, where there was day, like here, and where there was night, like Amsterdam,
Copenhagen, Moscow, Tel Aviv, which were
nonetheless still busying.
Everyone was being scrutinized, but denied ultimate access, the access to themselves.
Everyone was being made reciprocally vulnerable. All lobbies were onscreen but this one,
which existed strictly in my poses. It was my duty, then, to be conspicuous. I flung my
limbs bagladen just so that someone in some other life might choose me. But I was chosen
from just behind by a guard. (A human.)

“May I help you, sir?”

“I sure hope so,” I said, realizing that to him I was a
transient. “I have a reservation for the Circle Line Cruise?”

\

Maintaining that I hoofed it back to Ridgewood would account for the
next week, give or take, though I paced that distance inside, ordering in until my cash
ran out and running to the ATM at the Comida Fresca Cada Día—leery of any
Asian not affiliated with the nearby Tianjin Trading Ltd., or Lucky Monkey Lumber
& Millwork. I read a lot of news, which I liked to read because text, unlike
newer media, didn’t tell me how to pronounce it: “Jamahiriya,”
“Ansar al-Sharia”—the Arab Spring seemed an issue of
Vogue,
the
Times
was so into wiretaps and leaks it’d become
an electrical or plumbing manual. I studied the techbooks, which had underlinings and
highlightings and in one a frayed crocheted bookmark from what had to’ve been a
little old lady striving to master her little old PC. I searched Rach’s blog with
the thought of identifying our pseudonymized friends, Rach’s friends who
might’ve known about her affair, who if they’d ever reach their mentions
themselves would have to search for the scarf they wore or the wallet they lost on their
last lunchdate with Rach, in the very terms Rach used in her posting (searching online
becoming a writerly endeavor: the search for the perfect detail, or error).

6/6, I got an email from Cal, replying to my own email of drunks ago. He
wrote me about how “optimal” it was that this Muslim unrest had coincided
with his book hiatus, and how “unabatingly obligated” he was to his
editors and the reporters who’d taken his beat. As for the unrest itself, it was
still undecided “whether the oppositions will do the governing required.”
Anyway, it was “awesome and poignant that technology
that was
so manipulative is now so cheap it might level the playing field for civil
disobedience.” However this was merely his transition to fiction—rather to
mansplaining wisdom about fiction. Cal wrote that while technology itself might be
“naturally ambivalent,” he was certain it was “anathema” to
novels, “to the vicissitudes of the novel,” in that for a novel to
“function properly”—as if novels were like a tool, not a
bluntness—its characters had to be kept apart from each other, “separated
into missing each other and never communicating,” and that now in this present of
pdas and online, people were rarely ever “plausibly alone,” everyone now
knew what everyone else was doing, and what everyone else was thinking, and the result
was a life of fewer crosspurposes and mixups, of less portent and mystery too—and
I agreed with him, I’d already agreed, because I’d recognized the ideas as
having been plagiarized verbatim from an interview with a decrepit South African
literary pundit just published at the site of the
NYRB
.

Anyway, Cal signedoff by asking, as he always asked, whether I was working
on anything, and I answered that I’d just completed an email, nonfiction.

The next email to slip from my hands (two fingers, hardbitten nails) was
sincerer.

I told myself I had to finish the last lecture page for the professoress
by midnight, be done with it, and at midnight I uploaded and clicked send, and she wrote
back with such speed it was like she’d responded before I’d sent it, or at
least like she’d had her response already prepared and saved under Drafts. Lana
wrote to thank me with an invitation to the summer institute—apparently she was
allotted one guest and it “has 2 b u.”

I wrote another email declining—don’t waste the keystrokes
on how, why—and Lana wrote me back, “lets chat.”

“I don’t have chat.”

“just download
it here
,” a
link to Tetchat.

“You can always just call me. But I’m not sure I’m
ready for another trip. Need to sort things w/ Rach. Need time.”

“
download
prick dont be such a

“a

“a

“a

My laptop was colorwheeling, so cursed to its cursor that force quit had
to be skipped for the nuclear option, Off/On.

Then the phone rang and though it was a regular ring and the number
wasn’t listed, I went for it, “No patience.”

But the voice though expectedly female was Asian, like reared in Asia,
“Excuse? Hello, Mr. Cohen?”

“Speaking?”

“Please pack a single piece of luggage, including only materials
important to your process—everything else will be provided. Waiting outside your
studio residence is a Lincoln Continental, black. You will meet it within 10 minutes.
Your flight departs JFK at 7:00.”

“To? I’m guessing Palo Alto?”

“Palo Alto does not have a commercial airport. Delta 269 nonstop to
SFO. San Francisco. 10:18 PDT, arrival.”

“Oskar Kilo.”

“Excuse?”

“That just means OK.”

“Please, one precaution we ask: take your phone or pda and remove
its battery, leave both the battery and chassis at home. You will not require
it.”

She didn’t have to ask twice—she didn’t.

Goodbye (646).

://

The shift to Palo Alto
was—I’m already regretting this—tectonic.

Not because there was this apparently extremely minor earthquake or tremor
just as my flight was being cleared for landing and we were delayed, an hour, hovering,
two hours—the last time I fly commercial—nor because all my typical
eastern negativity toward the West always threatens to break and chunk and pile up into
violent incoherence.

Rather I’m talking a totally personal, emotional rupture. Coming to
the other coast, single, oneway, felt like a permanent upheaval.

Also, I was all sorts of pilly.

I have what’s called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is
preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.

The livery smartcar had a partition between me and what must’ve
been a driver, but the switches just lowered the windows and a platelet of GPS. Our
destination was La Trovita Lando, which I took for a city, or for a neighborhood. It was
a slough through brackish marshes, a ping at a gate, and we stopped. And I stepped out
into the snaring web of a twentynothing woman, covered with spidery henna, her hands
just slobbered with cobs—spinning me through the grounds to a lavish stucco
cottage, unlocking the door, handing me the key, then sticking around spraddled in the
doorway, one hairy armpit aired by the jamb.