Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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I was woken—lumped in the contents of a dumped jar of vitamins—by Kimi!’s phone, which she’d left behind. Cal picked it up, and Kimi! yelled at him and he yelled at me to find the remote, but all I was finding was a jar and vitamins.

Then Kimi!’s phone went dead and Cal was gone.

My mouth tasted like tobacco and mucus and lipgloss, absinthe (strangely), marijuana, coke bronchitis.

I had an ache in the back of my head, and was deciding whether to vomit. The screen was still showing the game, 1 Player, 2 Players, New, Resume, and on the way to the window I stopped to resume the function for the time, but the screen just filled with smoke, the sky with smoke, and in the weeks to come, the months to come, into 2002 when the paperback release was canceled and beyond, my book received all of two reviews, both positive.

Or one positive with reservations.

Miriam Szlay. Still to this day, I’m not sure whether she made it to the party. Either I didn’t notice her, or she was too reluctant to have sought me out, because she was kind. Or else, she might have skipped it—that’s how kind she was, or how much she hated my susceptibility to praise, or how much she hated paying for a sitter.

I never asked.

Miriam. Her bookstore was a messy swamp on the groundfloor of a lowrise down on Whitehall Street—literature cornered, condescended to, by the high finance surrounding. Before, it’d been a booklet store, I guess, selling staplebound investment prospectuses and ratings reports contrived by a Hungarian Jew who’d dodged the war, and bought Judaica with every dollar he earned—kabbalistic texts that if they didn’t predict commodity flux at least intrigued in their streetside display. At his passing he left the property and all its effects and debts to his children—Miriam, and her older and only brother—who broadened the inventory to include fiction and nonfiction of general interest to the Financial District’s lunch rush, which as a businessplan was still bleak.

Miriam—who kept her age vague, halfway between my own and my mother’s—was the one who ran the shop and hired me: straight out of Columbia, straight out of Jersey, a bridge & tunnel struggler with a humanities diploma between my legs but not enough arm to reach the Zohar. She was inflexible with what she paid me an hour ($8 or its equivalent in poetry), but was flexible with hours. She respected my time to write, knew that I wasn’t going to be a clerk all my life (just throughout my 20s), knew that a writer’s training only began, didn’t end, with alphabetical order. Another lesson: “subject” and “genre” are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving.

Miriam was my first reader—my second was her brother, who became my agent. Aaron signed me on her word alone—a demand, not a recommendation—and helped me clarify my projects. A memoir (I hadn’t lived enough), a study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I had no credentials), a novel about the Jersey Shore (no story), a collection of linked short stories about the Jersey Shore (no linkages), a long poem conflating the Inquisitions and Crusades (not commercial). Then one fall day in 1996 Aar came back brutalized from Budapest, cabbing from JFK to Whitehall to drop a check with his sister (the shop would never be profitable). His trip had been coital, not cliental, but out of solicitousness he talked only profitability, Mauthausen, Dachau, family history. That was the moment to mention my mother.

My mother was my book, he agreed, and he met me monthly after work, weekly after I left work to finish a draft, to discuss it—how to recreate dialogue, how to limit perspective—still always meeting at the register, where I’d give my regards to Miriam, and him a check to Miriam, then rewarding ourselves at a café up the block. Not a café but a caffè—as the former could be French, and the latter could only be Italian. Aar taught, I learned: how to tie a Windsor and arrange a handkerchief, how a tie and handkerchief must coordinate but never match, which chef who cooked at Florent also subbed at which Greek diner owned by his brother only on alternate Thursdays, who really did the cooking—Mexicans. Actually Guatemalans, Salvadorans. A Manhattan should be made with rye, not bourbon. Doormen should be tipped. Aar—quaffing a caffè corretto and marbling the table with stray embers from his cig, when smoking was still permitted—knew everything: stocks and bonds and realestate, Freud and Reich, the fate of the vowels in Yiddish orthography, and the Russian E and И conjugations. When was the cheapest day to fly (Tuesdays), when was the cheapest day to get gas (Tuesdays), where to get a tallis (Orchard Street), where to get tefillin repaired (Grand Street), who to deal with at the NYPD, the FDNY, the Port Authority, the Office of Emergency Management, how to have a funeral without a body, how to have a burial without a plot.

9/11/2001, Miriam was bagladying up Church Street to an allergist’s appointment. She must’ve heard the first plane, or seen the second. The South Tower 2, the North Tower 1, collapsing their tridentate metal. Their final defiance of the sky was as twin pillars of fire and smoke.

Sometime, then—in some hungover midst I can’t point to, because to make room for the coverage every channel banished the clock—a seething splitscreen showed the Bowery, the street just below me, and it was like a dramatization of that Liberty sonnet, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”: the old homeless alongside the newly homeless and others dressed that way by ash, none of them white, but not black either, rather gray, and rabid, being held at bay by a news crew with lashes of camera and mic. I spilled Cal’s mouthwash and spilled myself downstairs, leaving the TV on, and thinking a minty, asinine muddle, about this girl from last night who said she lived on Maiden Lane like she was inviting me there anytime that wasn’t last night, her date she was carrying who said he was too blitzed to make it to Inwood, and thinking about my book, and Miriam, and Aar, and how vicious it’d be to get all voxpop man on the street interviewed, and be both outside and inside at once.

But downstairs the crew was gone, or it never was there—so I went onto Houston and through the park, beyond. Chinatown beyond. Chinatown was the edge of triage. A firetruck with Jersey plates, wreathed by squadcars, sped, then crept toward the cloud. A man, lips bandaged to match his bowtie, offered a prayer to a parkingmeter. A bleeding woman in a spandex unitard knelt by a hydrant counting out the contents of her pouch, reminding herself of who she was from her swipecard ID. A bullhorn yelled for calm in barrio Cantonese, or Mandarin. The wind of the crossstreets was the tail of a rat, swatting, slapping. Fights over waterbottles. Fights over phones.

Survivors were still staggering, north against traffic but then with traffic too, gridlocked strangers desperate for a bridge, or a river to hiss in, their heads scorched bald into sirens, the stains on their suits the faces of friends. With no shoes or one shoe and some still holding their briefcases. Which had always been just something to hold. A death’s democracy of C-level execs and custodians, blind, deaf, concussed, uniformly tattered in charred skin cut with glass, slit by flitting discs, diskettes, and paper, envelopes seared to feet and hands—they struggled as if to open themselves, to open and read one another before they fell, and the rising tide of a black airborne ocean towed them in.

“If you can write about the Holocaust,” Miriam once told me, “you can write about anything”—but then she left this life and left it to me to interpret her.

A molar was found in the spring, in that grange between Liberty & Cedar, and was interred beneath her bevel at Union Field.

Aar dealt with insurance, got custody of Achsa—Miriam’s daughter, Ethiopian, adopted, then eight. He moved her up to the Upper East Side, built her a junglegym in his office. His neighbors complained, and then Achsa complained she was too old for it. He fitted the room with geodes, lava eggs, mineral and crystal concretions, instead.

The bookstore still stood—preserved by its historical foundations from the damage of scrapers. But Aar couldn’t keep it up. It wasn’t the customer scarcity or rehab cost, it was Miriam. The only loss he couldn’t take. He put the Judaica in the gable, garnished the best of the rest and sold it, donated the remainder to prisons, and sold the bookstore itself, to a bank. For an unstaffed ATM vestibule lit and heated and airconditioned, simultaneously, perpetually.

He kept the topfloor, though, Miriam’s apartment, tugged off the coverlets that’d been shrouding its mirrors since shiva, moved his correspondence cabinet there, moved his contract binders there—fitted his postal scale between her microwave and spicerack—the entirety of his agency. He kept everything of hers—the bed, dresser, creaky antiques, coffinwood, the clothes, the face products. Took her antianxieties and antidepressants and when he finished them, got prescriptions of his own. Meal replacement opiates—he’d chew them.

The only stuff he moved was Achsa’s, in whose old room he set up his rolltop and ergo swiveler. Computer and phone to accept offers, reject offers, monitor the air quality tests. He had different women working as assistants—Erica, and Erica W., and Lisabeth—junior agents in the kitchen, preparing my royalty statements, my rounding error earnings against advance. But on their days off and at nights he’d have his other girls over, his Slavs—helping them through their ESL and TOEFL exams, writing their LaGuardia Community College applications, fucking them, fucking them only in the stairwell, the hall, where Miriam’s scent didn’t linger—as insomniac corpses came and went for cash below, on a floor once filled with rare gallery catalogs and quartet partitur, just a ceaseless withdrawing, depositing, fluoresced, blown hot and cold.

Caleb, however—that September made him. He’d done better at history, I’d done better at English, he’d become a journalist directly out of Columbia, with bylines in the Times, and I’d become a bookstore clerk, but published first—a book.

Then I fell behind.

What destroyed me, created him—Cal—the sirens were his calling. After filing features on Unemployment (because he was happy with his employment), and The Gay Movement (because he was happy being straight), he put himself on the deathbeat, jihad coverage. He left the Bowery and never came back. He was down at the site round the clock, digging as the searchers dug, as the finders sifted, but for facts. Every job has its hackwork, promotions from horror to glamour. Not to my credit, but that’s how it felt at the time.

He tracked a hijacker’s route through the Emirates, Egypt, Germany—to Venice, Florida, where he proved himself going through the records of a flight school, turning up associates the FBI had missed, or the CIA had rendered. At a DC madrassa he got a tip about Al Qaeda funding passing through a Saudi charity and pursued it, cashed out on the frontpage above the fold. His next dateline was Afghanistan. He went to war. Combat clarified his style. He had few contacts, no bodyarmor. But when his letter from Kabul prophesied the Taliban insurgency, The New Yorker put him on staff. It’s difficult for me to admit. Difficult not to ironize. I was jealous of him, envious of risk. The troop embeds, the voluntary abductions, hooded with a hessian sandbag and cuffed, just to tape a goaty madman’s babble. He was advantaging, pressing, doing and being important, careering through mountain passes in humvees with Congress.

Cal returned to the States having changed—in the only way soldiers ever change, besides becoming suicidal. He was clipped, brusque, and disciplined—his cynicism justified, his anger channeled. He brought me back a karakul hat, and for the rest of his fandom a .doc, an ms. A pyre of pages about heritage loss, the Buddha idols the mullahs razed. About treasurehunting, profiteering (Cal’s the expert). About the lithium cartels, the pipelines for oil and poppies (Aar told him to mention poppies).

Cal certainly had other offers for representation, but went with Aar on my advice. The book sold for six figures, and got a six figure option, for TV or film, in development, still. I edited the thing, before it was edited, went through the text twice as a favor. But I’ll type the title only if he pays me. Because he didn’t use my title. Which the publisher loathed. 22 months on the bestseller list: “as coruscating and cacophonous as battle itself” (The New York Times, review by a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), “as if written off the top of his head, and from the bottom of his heart […] anguished, effortless, and already indispensable” (New York, review by Melissa Muccalla—Missy from my bookparty). The Pulitzer, last year—at least he was nominated.

My famous friend Cal, not recognized in any café or caffè famous but recognized in one or two cafés or caffès and the reading room of the 42nd Street library famous—writerly anti-nonfamous. I’ve never liked Cal’s writing, but I’ve always liked him—the both of them like family. He’s been living in Iowa, teaching on fellowship. All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

“And I’ve been working on the next book,” according to his email. This time it’s fiction, a novel. Aar hasn’t read a word yet. Cal won’t let it go until it’s finished. “And I’ve been thinking a lot about you and your situation and how you can’t be pessimistic about it because life can change in a snap, especially given your talent,” according to his email. Don’t I know it, my hero, my flatterer.

Caleb was off warring and I was stuck, ground zero. Which for me was never lower smoldering Manhattan, but Ridgewood. Metropolitan Avenue. Out past the trendoid and into the cheap, always in the midst of transition, enridged. Blocksized barbedwired disbanded factories. Plants where the bubbles were blown into seltzer and lunchmeats were sliced. My building was an industrial slabiform, not redeveloped but converted, in gross violation of the informal zoning code of prudence. Used to be a printing facility, the only relic of which was a letterpress, a hulking handpress decaying screwy out in the central courtyard, exposed to the weather, too heavy to move. From time to time I’d stumble on a letter, wedged between the cobbles.

The unit itself was a storage facility 20 × 20, not certified for even a moment of frenetic pacing let alone habitation, and with a rabid radiator the resident antisemite, but without a window, I had to take from the rear dumpsters a bolt of billiard baize for a doorstop, for ventilation. Sawhorses supporting a desk of doublepaned wired glass. International Office Supply wood swiveler, the least comfortable chair of the Depression. Banker’s lamp. Bent shelves of galleys, from when I reviewed, of my own galleys from when I’d be the reviewee. My mother’s potted cups, one for caffeine, the other an ashtray. In a corner my airbed and bicycle, in another the pump for both. Brooklyn by my left leg, Queens by my right, hands between them, an intimate borough. At least there was a door. At least there was a lock.

My apartment, my office—I had nothing to do but practice my autograph. I didn’t. I sat, I lay, pumped, adjusted the angle of recline.

I was the only NYer not allowed to be sad, once it came out what I was sad about, the bathroom was common and down the hall, all my sustenance was from the deli.

I bought a turkey sandwich, cheese curls, frosted donuts, lotto scratchers, Cossack vodka I’d drink without ice, from the spare change trough emptied and unwashed, Camel Lights I’d smoke out in the hall through the bars of the airshaft, smoking so hard as to crack a rib.

That’s what I bought—representatively, each day—but also exactly, precisely, the day I spent the last of my advance. Summer 2002.

No further monies would be earned from my book—from all that labor. My advance was now behind me.

I tried to write something else—tried some stories (Hasidic tales recast), translations (from the Hebrew). But nothing—I was wasted, blocked, cramped blank by my “mogigraphia,” “graphospasms.” Translation: spending all my time online, blotted in a cell glutted with paper. I became a cursor, a caret, a button pressed and pressing—refreshing reactions to Cal’s work.

Then, with the anniversary approaching, the Times got in touch. An editor emailed to ask if I’d write an “article,” a “piece,” about my luck. For the Sunday Styles section. I opened and closed her email for weeks, for months after the close of that summer, until rent was due, utilities too, and then I answered. I didn’t just write back in the affirmative, I wrote the thing itself, which was shocking. After being so incapable, so incapable of wording, to spew out what I spewed—all bodytext, no attachments—I was shocked.

Because I sent it out and received an immediate rejection. I wasn’t timely anymore. But I could still read between the lines. My tone had been too charged, my rhetoric too raging.

The editor, however, either pitying or gracious, passed me along to the Sunday Book Review, which offered me its font (Imperial)—if I could contain myself, be selfless, mature. My initial assignment was a book about the events—not as they affected me, but as they affected everyone (else).

Though I’ve since forgotten everything about the book—its title, its author, but that’s only because they’re online—I do recall the work: being mortified by it, and enjoying it. Enjoying my mortification. The clippings collected. My precocious ghosts, paper creased yellow. “Edifice Rex.” “Rubble Entendre.”

I became a legit critic, one of the clerisy, the tribe that had ignored me—and it was all because I’d been ignored that I was fair, accurate, pretentious. I always went after the feinschmecker stuff. Wolpe at Carnegie Hall (centennial of his birth), Whistler at the Frick (centennial of his death). The Atlantic, The Nation. Though my assignments were usually kept to Jewish books, to be defined as books not just about Jews but by them. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, American Judaism: A History—for The New Republic a novel called The Oracle or The Oracle’s Wife set entirely in Christian New Amsterdam but written by a woman called Krauss—I wrote Edward Saïd’s obituary for Harper’s.

I explained, explicated, expounded—Mr. Pronunciamento, a taste arbiteur and approviste, dispensing consensus, and expensing it too: on new frontiers in race and the genetics of intelligence (Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum and heterozygote fitness), on new challenges to linguistics (connectionist vs. Chomskyan), circumcision and STDs (“Cut Men, Not Budget”), manufacturing jobs shipped overseas and other, related, proxies for torture (“Contracting Abroad: Black Boxes and Black Sites”). All for casual readers who specialized in nothing but despecialization, familiarity. They didn’t want to know it, they just wanted to know about it. Culture justified by cultural calendaring: the times and addresses and price.

But then, a break.

A site was about to launch—a bright blue text/bright white background site that if it wasn’t defunct would be ridiculous now, but it wasn’t then—in NY urls were still being typed and discussed with their wwws. It was amply backed by old media, amply staffed by new media, and was to be given away for free—its publication was its publicity—www.itseemedimportantatthetime.com, believe me.

They emailed with a Q: Would I like to interview Joshua Cohen?

My A: Why not?

But not this type of Q&A—instead, a profile, though they wanted only 2,000 words. They had infinite room, eternal room, margins beyond any binding or mind, and yet: they wanted only 2,000 words (still, @ $1/word).

It was a gimmick—everything is, and if it isn’t, that’s its gimmick—and yet, I accepted, I had to, I had to meet myself.

Joshua Cohen—Principal, but not yet mine—would be in NY for only a minimized window. I was instructed to meet him at Tetration’s HQ, at some strange time, some psychoanalyst’s 10 or so intersessionary minutes before or after the hour. In the lobby, in a waterfront fringe of Chelsea being rezoned for lobbies. They’d just gone public, at $80/share, for a market capitalization in excess of $22B.

My first reaction was, this was a railshed of reshunted freight that coincidentally included office furniture—Tetration was still moving in. I entered as the gratis vendingmachines were being installed, empty, gratis but empty. They’d purchased the railshed before Cohen had even toured it, apparently. This would be a first for us both.

The meet & greeter’s badge wasn’t brass but a brasscolored sticker on his vneck, below which were black slacker jeans, holstered taser. He smirked at my license, summoned an elongated attenuated marfanoid flunky to take me up, but instead of elevators or escalators or stairs, we took the ladders, rope ladders, rigging. An obstacle course of rainbowbanded enmeshments. We scuttled past androids fumbling to hook up their workstations, arraying plushtoys, wire/string disentanglement puzzles, tangrams, rubikses, möbiuses, slinkies.

The conference room was massive and vacant and carpet interrupted by tapemarks. The flunky left and rolled back with a chair and positioned its casters over the tapemarks and to keep the chair from rolling away chocked the casters with lunchboxsized laptops, left finally.

The ceiling panels were black and white, a chessboard defying gravity with magnetized pieces in an opening gambit of f3 d5, g3 g4, b3 d7, b2 e6. The wallpaper, a cohelixing of the DNA of Tetration’s founders, a physical model of their alliance—or, just design.

Portals, portholes, had a vista over a plaza whose rubberized T tiles were proof of the four color map theorem, and stacked cargo containers and bollards being retrofit for a children’s playground. The pier of my bookparty was just beyond, but which it was, I wasn’t sure, as all the piers were becoming trussed in steel or repurposed into monocoques of electrochromic smartglass, available for weddings, and bar and bat mitzvot.

Our fleshtime: Principal entered, and the one chair was for him because he sat in it and I was still standing but all was otherwise similar between us.

“How’s it treating you, NY?” I said.

“Banging, slamming,” yawning.

“Not tubular?”

“Whatever the thing to say is, write it.”

“I take it you don’t have a great opinion of the press?”

“The same questions are always asked: Power color? HTML White, #FFFFFF. Favorite food? Antioxidants. Favorite drink? Yuen yeung, kefir, feni lassi, kombucha. Preferred way to relax? Going around NY lying to journalists about ever having time to relax. They have become unavoidable. The questions, the answers, the journalists. But it is not the lying we hate. We hate anything unavoidable.”

“We? Meaning you or Tetration itself?”

“No difference. We are the business and the business is us. Selfsame. Our mission is our mission.”

“Which is?”

“The end of search—”

“—the beginning of find: yes, I got the memo. Change the world. Be the change. Tetrate the world in your image.”

“If the moguls of the old generation talked that way, it was only to the media. But the moguls of the new generation talk that way to themselves. We, though, are from the middle. Unable to deceive or be deceived.”

In the script of this, a pause would have to be indicated.

“I want to get serious for a moment,” I said. “It’s 2004, four years after everything burst, and I want to know what you’re thinking. Is this reinvestment we’re getting back in NY just another bubble rising? Why does Silicon Valley even need a Silicon Alley—isn’t bicoastalism or whatever just the analog economy?”

Principal blinked, openshut mouth, nosebreathed.

“You—what attracted us to NY was you, was access. Also the tax breaks, utility incentives. Multiple offices are the analog economy, but the office itself is a dead economy. Its only function might be social, though whatever benefits result when employees compete in person are doubled in costs when employees fuck, get pregnant, infect everyone with viruses, sending everyone home on leave and fucking with the deliverables.”

“Do the people who work for you know your feelings on this? If not, how do you think they’d react?”

“Do not ask us—ask NY. This office will be tasked with Adverks sales, personnel ops/recruitment, policy/advocacy, media relations. Divisions requiring minimal intelligence. Minimal skill. Not techs but recs. Rectards. Lusers. Loser users. Ad people. All staff will be hired locally.”

“You realize this is for publication—you’re sure you want to go on the record?”

“We want the scalp of the head of the team responsible for this wallpaper.”

I had a scoop, then, as Principal kept scooping himself deeper—and deeper—digging into his users, his backers, anyone who happened to get on the wrong side of his pronoun: that firstperson plural deployed without contraction (not “all that bullshit we got for having Dutch auctioned the offering, we could’ve thrown it in their faces but didn’t,” rather “we could have thrown it in their faces but did not”).

“The investors lacked confidence in Tetration or in the market?”

“Confidence is liability packaged as like asset, and asset packaged as like liability. Only we were sure how it would play, going public.”

“I missed out on it totally—what was your stake, again?”

“Nobody noticed that the 14,142,135 shares we equitized ourselves was a reference to √2.”

“What?”

“The square root of 2: 1.414213562373—stop us when you have had enough.”

“I will.”

“095048801688724209698078569671875376—stop us whenever—where were we?”

“5376?”

“7187537694?”

“If I dial that, I’m calling your aunt in the Bronx?”

“We do not have an aunt in the Bronx.”

“What about the name?”

“The name of what?”

“Joshua Cohen.”

“We invented that too?”

“Not at all, too unoriginal. That’s why they have me writing this, you realize? I’m trying to work in something about the future of identity, something about names linking, or mislinking. Two Joshua Cohens becoming one, or becoming you, how it makes us feel?”

“We have the same name?”

“That wasn’t mentioned?”

“No.”

“No?”

Pause for a blush: “Dumb—it makes us feel dumb.”

“Dumb because you have me beat in the rankings? Or dumb because you hadn’t been privy to what we’ve been sharing?”

But he’d gone dumb like mute. Dumb like no comment.

“I mean, we even resemble each other? The nose?”

Principal pinched his nose. Rigidified.

I leaned against a wall, between magicmarker scribbles labeling imminent workstation emplacement: “A unit,” “B unit.” The dictaphone clicked, time to flip.

Remember that? the dictaphone?

I went back to Ridgewood and typed it all up, doubled my 2000 word limit but figured with this material they’d have to accommodate: how he hadn’t wanted to meet, but had been compelled, how I hadn’t wanted to meet, but had been compelled. I demarcated our respective pressures: his partners and shareholders, my rent and ConEd.

I delineated the effect of Principal’s affect, the texture of his flatness, how he’d left a better impression on the chair, how the chair had left a better impression on the carpet, and concluded like the session had concluded with an account and analysis of the one thing that’d converted his format, from .autism to .rage—his ignorance.

Anything he missed didn’t exist for him, and whoever pointed it out to him was destroyed. The reader was supposed to be that person—standing around, like I’d stood around, gaping at the chutzpah.

I emailed it in—[email protected], back then. The site was pleased. But then Tetration got in touch and requested quote approval. The site, without consultation, agreed. Then Tetration requested nonpublication. They were expecting doublefisted puffycheeked blowjob hagiography. I was expecting to be protected. But no.

The writeup was killed, it was murderized. The only commission of mine ever dead, stopped at .doc.

The site paid me half fee, and then another envelope arrived in the mail containing a copy of my book, with an inscription on the flyleaf, “great read!!” and an impostor’s signature, “Joshua Cohen.” The bookmark was a blank check likewise signed, made payable to me from Tetration, which I filled in and cashed for $1.41—proud of my selflessness, proud of my ignorance—all endeavor is the square root of two.

Nothing of mine has appeared since “in print”—rather it has, just anonymously, polyonymously, under every appellation but my own. I spent mid to late 2004 through early to mid 2006 responding to job listings online, falsifying résumés to get a job falsifying résumés, fabricating degrees to get a job fabricating papers for degrees, undergrad and grad, becoming a technical writer, a medical and legal writer, an expatriate American lit term paper writer, a doctoral dissertation on the theological corollaries to the Bakhtinian Dialogue writer: Buber, Levinas, Derrida, references to Nishida tossed in at no additional cost.

I edited the demented terrorism at the Super Bowl screenplay of a former referee living on unspecified disability in Westchester. I turned the halitotic ramblings of a strange shawled cat lady in Glen Cove into a children’s book about a dog detective. I wrote capsule descriptions of hotels and motels in cities I’d never visited, posted fake consumer reviews of New England B&Bs I wasn’t able to afford but still, two thumbs up, four and a half stars more convincing than five, A− more conniving than +, “the deskclerk, Caleb, was just wonderfully polite and accommodating.” Or else I posted as “Cal,” dropping his name to assert that the B&Bs were closer to attractions, or farther from garbage dumps, more amenitized, or less pest infested, than otherwise claimed, while for rating car rental businesses I trended toward black, posting with interpolations of the names of dead presidents, “Washington Roosevelt,” and for spas and pampering ranches I tended dickless as a “Jane”—Dear John, Sincerely, Doe.