Book of Numbers: A Novel (69 page)

After China the book—because only after China would my ms. be a book—would have to be loaded onto boats and shipped back to America, to my publisher’s distributor in Delaware, or Maryland, or Virginia. The distributor would have to send the books out by truck and train, fraught stock freighted to whatever bookstores still existed, which would sell whatever inventory would sell and then return whatever wouldn’t—returning it damaged unremainderable—and so again the trucks with their squalid cabs shrieking libertarian radio, and so again the trains chuggachuggachoochooing through backyards unmown and littered
with stormwater kiddiepools, all the way back to the distributor again, only to be turned around again and redistributed, sent to that minor inferno of upstate NY, Buffalo, where they’d be pulped, where they’d be recycled, in a factory owned by Canadians.

And all this is set in motion once a year, with all of America’s literary agents and editors and publishers flying off, business class, to Germany, “to network” with their international counterparts, to sell the books they agent and edit and publish to other agents and editors and publishers in other countries, to buy the books the other agents and editors and publishers in other countries agent and edit and publish—to stretch their expense accounts out to the desistive notch of the industry’s debauched cardboard belt in lavish drinking and eating bingery and depressing indulgences in inroom krautporn—unsustainable.

It’s all far less efficient than it was half a millennium ago, when that scum capitalist Gutenberg forced his underpaid, uninsured employees to pack a wagon or packhorses or perhaps only a single wormridden horse with communion fare and a few copies of the genesiac printed Bible—headed a full day on a pilgrimage that today can take all of half an hour, from Gutenberg’s native Mainz following the river Main to Frankfurt, to the Messe, the Fair, where reading paraphernalia like tinderbox flints, tallow candles, and commodes were sold, where those first editions—literally the first printed editions of the word of God—were bought like any other commodity, by semiliterate merchants and papal emissaries, who haggled. The merchants went bust or were failed by heirs, the popes were divinely chosen by smokes and died, and likewise Frankfurt’s Römer, or cityhall, the site of its medieval markets, was abandoned for a newer fairgrounds, equipped with the infrastructure required by car tradeshows and appliancemakers’ expos.

The oldest extant building of the modern fairgrounds, though now only a performance venue, is the fin de siècle Festhalle, whose glass and steel were meant to reflect the design of Frankfurt’s main trainstation. The square in front of the Römer hosted a famous Nazi “libricide,” or “biblioclasm,” in which fiction and poetry were burned only for having insufficiently imagined what followed. Kristallnacht. The owners of those libraries, Frankfurt’s Jews, were herded into the Festhalle. From which they were droved to the trainstation, deported. It’s incredible what
can be compressed, confessed to, on paper. The stroll was calm, the hotel was not. It had a very useful library.

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A History of Frankfurt
was an oversized and useful book, which covered the city from its founding by tribal Franks to its destruction in the Allied aerial bombardments of 1944. This hotel was among the casualties. The photograph on its page was dated 1933, however, and showed the structure as grand, intact, staunch in tradition, ennobling in permanence, and indistinguishable from its incarnation today.
A History of Frankfurt
noted only that the hotel was subsequently rebuilt, but never addressed how or why it was rebuilt—though perhaps such questions are only for outsiders, or retrospect.

Because it seems to me that standing amid the rubble you have a choice.

You can rebuild, or you can not rebuild, and if you decide to rebuild then will you rebuild the thing exactly as it was or will you make it new. Either you can go get the exact same masonry and the exact same woods and the semblant rugs and the Aryan atlas figures that uphold the pediment with your name done up in vermeil, to make as faithful a replica as tenable of what you’ve lost, or else you can just hit reset and find an alternate design—other materials—and maybe not even a hotel.

I had this thought at and about the Frankfurter Hof, of course—this outstanding reproduction of a hotel, stolid in its blockbound prewar glory, truly the architectural embodiment of everything the city surrounding it has always aspired to, just acquired and spiffed by a consortium of Sunni hoteliers, apparently—but because I know the future will demand the explicit, let me also state: the questions of whether to make, or not to make, of whether to remake or make new, are just as germane to literature.

“Did Elisabeth Block check in yet?”

The Reception slab was a barricade protecting taste from the shabbiness of frequent flyers. The Hofmeister, Herr Portier, uniformed like a
general, had a phone on hold over each shoulder like epaulets—“Are you Mr. Aaron?”

But then he raised a hand as if in salute, and, pressing extensions, transferred his calls to the garage, or wellness spa, or Ruritania.

“Again,” he said, “my regrets. What is your name, sir?”

“Aaron Szlay?” It was a decent guess, and I even spelled it.

He nodded as if to indicate that he was going to vary this performance a bit from the way we’d done it in rehearsal, and then he went to charge my keycard.

The guy behind me reached around to tap his pda on the marble ledge—“What’s the goddamned holdup?”

Herr Portier said, “Please, sir, we today are at the maximum.” And then to me, “Ms. Block has taken care of everything.”

I took the keycard, the luck, and repeated my room number just to have a line.

“Unfortunately we are not able to accommodate upgrade to executive.”

“I understand.”

Throughout this, I have to mention, Herr Portier had barely broken from his screen. I left, but the tapper didn’t advance—not until he finished txting.

The room: I’m guessing we’re already well past that posthistorical point at which it’s still interesting to note that hotelrooms are like film sets—now I’m just assuming they’re designed that way, and that thanks to film itself and to Frankfurt School theory classes the unconscious has once again become the deliberate (the tedious). Everything furniture to fabrics was squiggled and jotted as if all aesthetics were just a hedge against spills. Lamps giving off light to the circumferences of chipboard tables. The TV was atop the desk (the escritoire? secrétaire?), so that I won’t be able to write—if I have to write another hotel sentence I’ll die.

I sprayed myself wethot in my underthings and wrung them out hung, got into bed with the snackbasket. Crumbs. Sky News was doing the invasion of Libya and the occupation of Wall Street. Then
Germany’s Next Top Model,
they hadn’t translated the title, and then a show I didn’t know, whose every voice was Ad’s, and drooling into maybe, just maybe, sleep.

Until the phone rang, and it kept ringing, because I let it.

I was woken by a knock at the door—which nobody ever does on TV, they just bound in. Unexpected doorknocking is more a staple of the European novel, more ominous.

“Aaron Szlay?” The accent was abominable, even through oak.

The only thing worse than an Aussie or Kiwi intonation is its intermittent use. When it’s Auckland talking, or Melbourne, fine. But when a snatch of downunder drawl erupts from the mouth of a Euro, it’s like blood in your urine. Maleksen said, “I know you’re in, mate.”

“I’m in the bathroom,” and I was flushing the toilet to stall. To stow my tote, hide my Tetbook.

But it wasn’t fitting—not between tank and tile, not beneath the sink, and then, there on the floor and just as I’d left it, paged open to the spot I was in, it was
A History of Frankfurt,
which had the spatials and heft. I wedged my Tetbook and Principal’s passport too in among the pages, and stashed the volume on the shelf with all the other volumes about life, war, and what to do in town.

Maleksen—he made a fist and put it to my pudge, fistbumped me back to bed until I sat, holding my towel’s knot, pillowed at the headboard.

Then he was in the closet and hatching the roomsafe, at the window taking down the blackout shades. He straddled a clubchair and vented his crotch, dejacked the phone with a boot.

This was my thought, with him just across: this is what my children’s children I’ll never have will look like, will sound like, will be. From nowhere, from everywhere, edged up against crisp cropped skin in desert digifatigues whirring with muscle or device.

Not even his scars were humanizing: the 12 seared bars I counted just told other machines his price.

He unsnapped a pannier, dug out like a black snowglobe, set it on the table between us and dialed around until its northern antipode was palpitating red and on TV the contestants did the fizzle shimmy, dead.

“Gute nacht to you too,” I said.

“You say that only to sleep,” he said. “You must say instead guten abend.”

“What fucking toy is that—an evil baseball?”

“We have here the yammer,” he said. “It is yamming for us all wireless wave frequency and electromagnetic transmission. On multiband level to 1500 MHz for 30m radius. Including all remote neural dragnet spying on human brainwave.”

“Here I was trying to keep my thoughts to myself. It’s a jammer, by the way.”

He tried to wrest a smile, from either of us. “It is very dumb that you left Berlin.”

“Blame yourself,” I said, “I left because I was broke. All you had to do was bring me my cash and still you fucked that up.”

“How is that happening? Do you not get money?”

“Not from you. Not from Balk.”

“I mean from Aaron Szlay, mate. That is why you come here. He gives you money you give to him files? But are they a copy on drive or your computer?”

“What’s it to you? Haven’t you fucked with enough of my technology?”

Maleksen juggled the dark globe, then repanniered it.

“Your trip to NY—breaking into my office? I was waiting for you to bring it up.”

“They let me in, mate—you have no security. b-Leaks is only ensuring there is no copying of files.”

“Why not just ask?”

“Because if we ask we have to trust. You know about this visit to your dumb office as you call it only because you go online, and you are ordered not to do that.”

“I’m not in the Swiss Army, you fuck. I don’t do orders.”

“You must explain this to Thor. To me you must explain your addiction to Zionism. I like only the writings about your wife and the film script, because it is about space travel. The rest of the documents on that computer, no—I think your experiences are maybe not as important as you think they are.”

“Maybe you weren’t supposed to read them?”

“The videos,” he said. “You must turn them over.”

“What?”

“The videos of the interviews, mate.”

“The interviews I did were audio.”

“Any format is acceptable. Just turn them over.”

“The recordings are only on my computer, and my computer’s only in Berlin. Anyway, I don’t do anything without authorization.”

“Thor authoritates.”

“I don’t mean Balk—I mean the man whose life I’d be duping away. We have the same name, they’re on the same contract.”

“He is gridless. We have no coordinates.”

“Writing himself barefoot in the dust of an interior Pradesh. That’s convenient.”

Maleksen stood—“But they are not secure, mate. The recordings. They can be wiped. Or corrupt.”

“The plan was that I hold the recordings until deadline. If I fuck up the deadline and don’t hand a book in, b-Leaks gets the recordings and goes live. Only then, though. And I have time.”

Maleksen went over to the dresser. Pulled a drawer. The next drawer he pulled off its tracks. He capsized the table there’s no name for.

“What the fuck? This isn’t even my room.”

He went for that shelf that ran opposite the bathroom. His hands under it, frisking. Pushing up on the bolts, shaking the snackbasket, mantelclock.
A History of Frankfurt
.

“Fuck, stop—will you? I didn’t bring anything with me—the computer’s in Berlin.”

“No,” and he turned, a hand lingering on the shelf. “In Berlin is a flat b-Leaks assigns you. In the flat are insects from the trash of shit hydrogenated cornsyrup America suppers, all over the antiques of senior b-Leaks allies. But in the flat there are no computers.”

“You were there?”

“I am there at times you are not.”

Neighbors, if people in adjacent hotelrooms can be neighbors, were smacking at the walls to quiet down.

I got up from the bed, it took me standing to realize how halfnaked I was. I had one hand to gesture with if I wanted to keep my modesty, or appendages.

I said, “I’ll be back in Berlin—I don’t need to tell you when—I’m sure
you’ll find out when before I do. Then we can arrange to talk this out with Balk.”

Maleksen went for the door, but then aboutfaced, took my towel in hand and yanked it clear off. Then he left.

And there it was, my prick.

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There was no way I was going back to dreamlessness after that—there was no Aar. It was 8:00 on the restored TV and the tickers scrummed the rugby scores. I went fisting my socks prolapsed, and my skidmarked tightywhities. By the time they’d dry frühstück would be over. Petit déjeuner, desayuno, breakfast. The Frankfurter Hof’s laundry service takes 24 hours. I habilimented myself all stiff, retrieved my Tetbook. I left Sky News on for a ruse, left everything in the halogenic heated bathroom on, left the mirror on, left.

I elevatored down to the lobby, lined up behind my nose and became the garnish to a salad of Spanish, Italian, Greek, all propping menus I didn’t have. Printer paper spiralized between clear covers, mss. I made the buffet, filled a plate with what was left of the healthies, fruitsnvegs, before staking out the carbohydrate troughs. Then it was all a matter of doing the school or employee cafeteria dance, whom to sit with, but none of the tables were empty enough, rather any that were just as I approached them were being whisked and stripped.