Book of Numbers: A Novel (14 page)

I took it as my job to discern something similar—to search in the
way www.searching couldn’t, to find in the way www.finding
couldn’t—which is to say, to conceive, make it up.

Like say I’m talking to myself—how to substantiate the
claim? how can anyone but the author authenticate? I had no way of corroborating whether
it was or wasn’t Principal, talking. His feed could’ve been recorded in
Myanmar, in Burma, prerecorded in Siam, postproduced in Thailand, he could’ve
been coming to me live but two hours behind, eight hours ahead, on whichever side of
excruciation’s meridian, 36 TbPS streaming straight from the 36th century.

From then on we met constantly, continuously. I questioned, I
didn’t. Answers were dirigent, direct. This was our background, the setting of
scene: the hut monitor displayed graphics resembling the Himalayas (spiky unscalable
linecharts of number of urls indexed by year, number of tetrations by year, number of
new/unique users by year, number of tetrations by average user by year), resembling the
planets Venus and Mars (πcharts of ownership structure) and Bay Area bridges
(bargraphs of ad revenue)—thermodynamical models of the tech protocol itself or
just organigram tutorials in managerial flow, squiggly doodly retiaries that rendered
concepts like vertical or horizontal omnidimensional, unhelpful.

I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then
Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics. Interfaces:
beaming cracks in plaster.

But it was all about others. Nothing about him. None of the material was
personal. An interface has no profile.

He spoke to me as a grownup to an infant. A brat pubescent to a rutting
pet. Would I be allowed to interview the others? No. In person? No. In writing? No. Can
I speak? Talk to the wall.

I had clearance like it was going out of business, but
the cost to me was guilt. Families and financials. I knew how many dependents people
had, how many savants and seniors, their salaries and dividends, bonuses and dumps.
Their incentives for retirement, their splits. Class A, one vote per share. Class B, 10
votes per share. I knew everything but what all this meant to them. How they spoke.
Stood and sat. How they groomed.

Were they people? Not to Principal. Not even employees? They were more
like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain.

He guarded his privacy but flung open the doors to the lives of others.
His underlings. Their underthings. What’s privacy to the employee is security to
the boss.

All this factuality grated, was a grate, a veil, a screen—a
firewall. There was a firewall between us.

Tetrate “firewall.” Though how to decide which site to hold
with? the most popular or most reputable? and if reputation shouldn’t be
popularly decided, then how? and couldn’t this question be better asked of
politics (management), or religion (ownership)?

Class A knowledge is not as powerful as Class B knowledge, and all the
managers be fools and the owners, doctrinaire.

Tetrationary.com, a userdriven site, defines: “Firewalls can either
be software-based, or hardware-based, and are used to help keep a network
secure,” then digresses into types: packets, filters, layers, proxies. Entry last
updated by “Myndmatryxxx.”

Correction—last updated by myself, as I rejoined the verbal phrase:
“Firewalls can be either.”

Whereas a more authoritative site, which I’ll define as one that
employs professionals, at minimumwage, but still—pride counts more than maternity
leave or sickdays—states: “1. A fireproof wall used as a barrier to
prevent the spread of fire. 2. Any of a number of security schemes that prevent
unauthorized users from gaining access to a computer network or that monitor transfers
of information to and from the network.”

Correction—the site, lexility.com, just freeloaded the work of old
print dictionaries and encyclopedias whose compilers are dead and whose compiled kin
don’t receive any residuals.

Another site says “firewall,” in its architectural usage,
dates to ca.
1840, in its computing sense, to ca. 1980. Yet another
site gets strangely specific, 1848, 1982, on the dots.

Austro-Hungary, apparently, designed the firewall. The Austro-Hungarian
theater. Where it was armor dropped from a proscenium to prevent a conflagration onstage
from spreading to the audience. No mention on the site as to what might’ve
started the fire onstage—the effects, like the fake cannon that ignited
Shakespeare’s Globe, likelier than anything textual.

In German, this barrier was called
der Eiserner Vorhang
.
“The Iron Curtain.” Which another site attributes to Churchill. Whose own
source is cited by yet another site as having been the Muslim belief in “the
Gates of Iron,” “erected by Cyrus the Great to keep Gog and Magog out of
Persia.” Still others assert that Cyrus is actually Alexander the Great and Gog
and Magog are really the Scythians. “Not even a wall of iron can separate Israel
from its God,” Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, 200 CE. “
Iron
and
steel
were called the same in
ancient
Hebrew
and
Arabic
,
and both cultures believed the element fell from the heavens.”

Both Judaism and Islam speak of God protecting with, or as, “a wall
of fire.” “This relates to the desert practice of keeping oneself safe
from predators by surrounding oneself with fire.”

\

During breaks my hut’s screen oscillated a koan. It was a clock,
but with just a single hand, and the clockface had no divisions into minutes or hours.
It had no divisions at all. Was it a timer? and if so what time did it tell?

Mornings, or whatever, I’d be woken by Principal’s voice
shrilling over a hearth of incombustible logs that might’ve been another
screensaver.

That morning, however, I woke up on my own to a screen that was off, so I
fell back into a dream in which I was shopping for the antithrombosis travel compression
braces that Moms had recommended, but the stores were gypping me and I went into a
frenzy because each pair contained two and a pair for me, I can’t explain it,
meant three, and then Rach and I were going to Dr. Idleson the fertilitist who was also
Meany
the shrink, who told us that what we’d been having
wasn’t sex and was about to tell us what to do instead—but then I was
jolted up and out of the cot by an error msg honk. Abort retry fail honking.

The screen flickered an external feed—a clubcart was at the
door.

Two men were jammed inside—two big men, giants, juvie and cruel,
special in the sense of special forces: Jesus and Feel (Jesús and Felipe).

I rode deck as they let the cart drive us, in swampy compound circles.

“So you the visitor genius?” Feel said.

“You think?” I said.

“Never met no genius.”

I said, “Only a genius would know what you’re talking
about.”

“What else a genius do?” Jesus said. “You get the
mother and father—los árboles?”

“Meaning what?”

But Feel was saying, “Also in my family the primos, the cousins
segundos. Not like when my cousin has kids, but like when my two brothers marry two
sisters and they both have kids—they would be how related?”

I understood: “Genealogist, you mean.”

Principal had told them, hadn’t told me, my cover was as
genealogist.

I said, “And what do you do—seguridad detail?”

“No importa,” Feel said.

“Stunt driver,” said Jesus.

“Are you from here or Mexico?”

“Afghanistan,” said Jesus.

Feel said, “Two tours.”

We went ramping down into the mound of La Domo—a subgarage of
charging stations and inductive mats. A mechanics corps was sponging a Tesla X, a car
that didn’t exist. No other boytoys though. No racers. All electric. And no
motorcycles. Scooters. Bike-bikes.

Adjacent to the garage was the mechanics’ locker room. The next
room was a box, like a boxroom, just heaps of packaging, addressed to me, myself, and I.
Deliveries oneclicked—one guess—online. Principal’s no different
from the rest—he orders and so he is.

The boxroom, the bagroom, the room of guitars, the room of drums, of
charcoal and chalk, of splintered easels. Room of wood. Room half
carpet half grass just because. Room in which the scissors were left. Room of
nothing but the loss of a button.

Rooms: there must be something to call the room in which everything in it
is supposed to come off as causal, but, in fact, has been calculated down to the
threadcount. The room into which, before someone visits, the householder hauls
everything significant or representative, so that even if this is the only room
he—I—will visit, everything will be communicated: essential personality,
selfhood. Gist, pith. Taste.

There must come a point when a house has so many rooms that it becomes
pointless to name them. There must come a room—where the homeowner just wavers at
the threshold, and fails it.

Principal had made a shrine, and so enshrined himself. An altar awaiting a
sacrifice. Rotund Asian deities in speedos. Incense censer. A sutured set of sutras. The
Dharma lode, block and mallet, beads, wheel, ghanta, vajra, mandala.

Principal lotused on the floor. His face, the skin that showed, was
haggard. Wrung. He’d aged double what I’d aged since our last.

His chinpatch was now the color of static and the shape of Long Island. A
short wiggy bowlcut, as lustrous as laminated bamboo.

But, as he gradually rose, as he ritually twitchingly rose, what got me
the most was his size—how fat he was or creepy with muscle. Massive pecs and
quads. Pumped bumps for biceps. Bulgeous calves.

Rather what got me was more the disparity, between whatever it was that
made him so swollen imposing and the head that hovered above, the floating face
shrunken, wan, marasmic, insucked brittle cheeks, bone straining through nose—the
presentation was freakish.

But also at least halfwise intentional. Because as he breathed and
commenced with a ceremonial stripping, all that bulk turned out to be clothes, just
clothes, bunches, rolls, layers, breathable filters. The heat was on and there was no
call for the heat to be on. Principal stripped and shivered.

All of it was branded,
^T
T Tetgear: he unshrugged
the kasaya robe to expose a unipouched hoodie, tore the tearaway trainers to
sweatpants—not in academic gray, but silicon gray. The plastic toggles that
capped the drawstrings of both hoodie and sweats had been gnawed to shreds. He
tugged them loose, tried not to gnaw. Underneath was a neoprene
wetsuit. Thick wool socks overwhelming the sandals.

The wetsuit peeled away to a belly bloated white but of the same
substance, that squishy squamous thickness, that reptilian or amphibian give—like
if I would’ve poked him, the indent inflicted would’ve remained for life.
His limbs were tentacularly downed powerlines, livewire distensions. He was a nonviolent
resister, of himself. On a hunger strike, protesting himself. That’s how ill he
was, that’s how Gandhi. An ascetic, or ascitic, revealing to me scars, stitched
slits all ragged red inflamed like the marks of the great, the markings by which one
suffers for greatness, also revealing his penis—testudinal, pinched, sacs sagging
like they’d been punctured, hairless—and he was hairless too under the
wig.

“What the fuck? What happened?”

“A second opening, all of life is but a second opening, or it can
be,” he said. “That, and only that, is the fuck.”

He trembled back to the concrete floor, relotused himself stiffly.

I settled just across.

“Please,” he said, “our sandals are still on
us.”

“Off?” I said. “You can’t take them off by
yourself?”

Or he wouldn’t, so I undid the velcro and got him discalced, shed
socks from feet, rigid toes horned coarse and crustated.

He seemed relieved: a man at rest after a powertrip.

“A man is born royal,” he said. “His father is the
king but he is no prince. Or he is on the outside. But it all is just outside,
exterior.”

“This is you? Or are you talking the Buddha?”

“We are not talking Buddha. Or we are but he is not Buddha yet. He
goes. He seeks to go outside of the outside. From the palace to the walls, through the
gates. Out until the gates and the walls and the palace are all behind him.”

“So you’re becoming the Buddha? Considering a career
change?”

“We are no one. We are the horse and the chariot both.”

“But in the different accounts I’m trying to recall,
isn’t there also like a charioteer—a guy who’s steering or
whipping? The Buddha, or whatever he is, whatever his name is, wasn’t
alone.”

“We are all alone, always. No matter accounts. Whether a charioteer
or no charioteer. Immaterial. Does not matter. There is no horse
and the man is just walking.”

“But he’s walking in orienteering socks and nubuck
archopedic sandals.”

“As like he goes, he is followed: men seeking money, to be repaid
only in hatred, women seeking money, to be repaid only in sex, and he ignores them and
goes on. He meets an old man, very old, on the verge of death, and laments because age
awaits us all and all the world does not lament every moment. He meets another man,
afflicted not just with age but with disease, and laments because infirmity awaits us
all and all the world does not lament every suffering. Yet another he meets. Or he does
not. Because this man is not a man, not old or infirm anymore, not living, a corpse, and
the man who is a man, who is still alive, healthy and young, laments nonetheless,
because death awaits us all and all the world does not lament every death.”

“I’m with you,” I said, and I was.

“So the old, the infirm, the deceased,” he said.
“They get into his head. And the head is shaped as like the bowl for alms and all
its faces are the same in vacuity. The man is incapable of love, incapable of emoting
anything. He is depressed and seeks the trees. He sits under a tree and waits and
attempts to cure himself of waiting as like it were a disease and attempts to destroy
his waiting as like it were a life. Then through the trees, enter the fourth man, the
beggar. And the beggar would have passed, this is the point, he would have passed the
man at the tree, and would have respected that peace and asked for nothing. Because true
beggars never ask. They are beggars because they are given. There is something in them
that compels the alms, something saintly. They might even refuse. In reward or
punishment. The man asked the beggar who he was and the answer was not a beggar but a
wanderer—we wander, he says, we search.”