Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 35 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

The technical execution of the punchcard’s primitive programming was modeled on textiles, specifically on how looms used cards to separate threads into patterns for weaving, for embroidering things like swastika bands and yellow stars, though the inventor himself always maintained he’d initially been inspired to adapt the process by a train journey he’d taken through the American West—by the tickets required, their validation, their punching.

The conductor, a sturdy peasant in matching prussic pants and vest over boiled nasty sputumnal shirt, strapped his monkeycap and cowbelled into the car—weaved down the aisle and took your ticket and like a censustaker, with a small metal squeezer apparatus, punched it, put a hole in it, marking your fare and so marking your fate, your final destination. A flurry of chad, white discs of paper floating floorward like the Polish snow that greeted the steerage.

Genocide, like publishing, is 66.6% a problem of distribution—how to get the people/things you need to be killed where they need to be killed when they need to be killed, and at a minimum. How to get Halbwachs to Buchenwald to meet his dysentery. How to get the best Yiddish poets of Kiev all to Moscow, to the Lubyanka’s basement, on the same summer night for mass execution. How to get Mandelstam to the Second River transit camp by Vladivostok in time for his official cause of death, which was frozen “unspecified.”

Nowadays publishers just invest in writers, they have the writer’s work edited, copyedited, proofed, but then they have to print it and make it public (murder). Nowadays writers are murdered mainly by their publishers, by being sent off to press and then to market.

American printers used to be the best in the world (the linotype, 1870–80? by Mergenthaler?), until for margin considerations too caustic to countenance, they merged with or were acquired by foreign companies, and so migrated abroad. Or else the companies uprooted themselves, keeping their corporate registries but moving their plants to Mexico, or China, the country that invented the book but bans books, and imprisons its authors—and in which, about two centuries before Christ, the Emperor I’d butcher his name erected a great firewall all around his Empire, buried its scholars alive, and then burned all their books, either to stifle their critique or standardize the writing system (the same Emperor whatever his name standardized his Empire’s currency, busy man)—and in which, about two millennia after Christ, this book I’m not writing is scheduled to be printed, though it would still have to be approved by the censors before being translated, and before any of the workforce enslaved to its production, any of the billion other Chinese, would be able to read it.

If only they had time to read it—hordes of the desexualized toothless working alongside one another like stripped gears, loading and impressing by roll, gathering the signatures, by octavo, by quarto, for binding—12 hours/day, 6 days/week, roughly ¥12 or $2/day, approx $52/month, approx $624/year. I’ve read the same journalism as everyone else, and I’m still not sure what to fall for—either any job is a good job, any pay is good pay, or China has only one factory, is only one factory, and its only product is suicide.

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.

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.

://

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.

Some situations were meetings of four people reading and some situations weren’t meetings but also four people reading. Still other business transpired, like the two bedheads blanking their faces above a twotop whose snidely gliding linens suggested footsie, legwork, crotching. Man with a hirsute Mediterranean goat vibe slumped low to gain traction, woman this pale Dutch scullery maid all gyral and shifting her sheath, neither of them speaking too good the English, the only language besides the shoelessness between them. They’d been adulterating everything. Their pdas mated vibrationally amid cutleries, their respective spouses calling—I had to resist picking up. I had to resist removing their footgear from the surrounding chairs and sitting to offer advice—it’s always better to pick up, feign static.

Then toward the pastryside of the buffet in the middle of the room was this big burl of a guy by himself, tunic of a tshirt held together by electrical tape, baggy jeans from the nuclear winter collection, sneaks blatantly inspired by better sneaks, fingerless gloves he pounded into the pockets of a skanky nylon windbreaker. Wiccan roadkill hair parted sparsely in the middle hanging limp like two wimpy black anarchist flags. As I passed I noticed the catalog he was reading, the selfie, his, he was studying below his name, and I stopped without even proceeding into the accompanying bionote. There are no words, there is no word, for having translated my own translator.

“No family is intact,” I said, and settled my plate. “No family is intact but the family of the dead.”

“I am sorry,” clipped, gruff, “but your meaning?”

“So you’ve forgotten the beginning of our book?”

He frowned, “That is the beginning?”

“Sure is.”

Then he said, “Indefinitely,” by which he must’ve meant “undoubtedly” or “indubitably.”

“A pleasure, Dietmar Klug,” I said.

He gripped me weakly, then throttled his neard, his neckbeard.

All the significance was already plated: just behind us were Anglo steamtrays of eggs, lipidinous wursts and rashers of bacon, puddings, hashbrowns, beans, mushrooms, tomato hemispheres, and behind that a jointly controlled French and German zone of what would’ve been a continental frühstück if consumed on another continent, the crepes and quark streusels preserved by marmalades and juice and milk selections from venturing into the Asian stations of noried rice, and yet all he’d hoarded was a, I’ll traduce it for him, canapé.

As I chairbacked my tote and sat against it he picked up that plug of kornbrot and shook its mayosmeared hamfleck into his napkin, then took a dainty bite of the stale rusky round to chew over the coffee or tea question, before finally spitting crust in English, “I would have please a Heifeweizen,” which compelled the server to ask not him but me, “Room number, sir?” Trust Aar to cover the cost.

Dietmar, Diet, had to wiggle his seat out and hunch just to face me. “OK, so first it is complete unjust,” he said.

“What is?”

“OK, so first the amount, with schedule. To do the book by one month is two chapters every day, also Saturday, also Sunday, and that is 10 or 12 hours each and I have children. Second, the way it is that we must receive chapters from you each at a time is maybe how other translators work but not myself. To translate I require the complete text at all times to ensure the consistency and also the style. Consistent mood and style. I know you will say you have the editor to take care of that but you do not edit the same way because I do not have the agent to do this for me. I also have things to say about the contract. But wait.”

“I’m waiting, but you’re getting me mixed up.”

“Ja, ja, you mix me up the worse. The title must not be in German the same. Duskovites means in German just nothing. Dämmerung-Kinder as Schmöker suggested is bad, however, very bad. I will think of the better title for you. I have thought potentials already but we will put in the contract extra if I do that and you use.”

“Again, calm down, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”

“No, I requested to talk with the American publisher because Schmöker would not pass my worries and finally was vengeful of my influence. He said I was to go talk to you directly if I was sure I had a sense. I do, I have a sense. For pertinence this second volume must extend the plot of the twisted horn and to resolve also whether the unicorn can pass between the dimension zippers because in volume 3 it was no but in volumes 2 and 1 it was otherwise and between them nothing was explained about it.”

“I understand.”

“Also for the 10–16 year olds like for my children the erotic pretext of the frozen marquise is not appropriate.”

“Finished?”

“Ja, ja.”

“So you write yourself?” hoping to humor or just waylay his concerns halfway among the condiments, but his beer came.

He muzzled a toast and drank and dripped liberally from his neard, staining the lapels of his windie.

“So what are you translating now?”

He waried, “Truth?”

“Nothing but.”

“Scheiße, other series. You test me that I do not tell but I have read the contracts.”

“This isn’t a test. Trust me to trust your discretion—just moneywork, then?”

“Ja, ja,” he laughed, “translation is for money. Dress and feed two girls with only English.”

“What would you choose to translate, if the money weren’t an issue?”

“Truth again?”

“Try me.”

“I like translating what I do, the Americans, romane, sachbücher, fiction like not fiction. It is not much, the work, you can even put it all into a computer the syntactics are so basic.”

“American books are written by computer.”

“The series we do is written for children but it is the same as the books for adult, the same identical differentiality, no?”

“Difficulty?”

“Quatsch, quatsch. It’s not very much at all.”

“So the dream is being lived?”

“Or once again if I retire and do not die I will write poesie,” and then he was assessing all around us again, and the ceiling too, as if he were inspecting the sprinkler system.

I said to change it up, “What room are you in?”

“Gallus neighborhood.”

“Do you come every year to the Messe?”

“Every month and every week and day it is like I go to this stumpfes Messe, because I live here.”

Translation, by repetition, “You live here as in Frankfurt?”

“Ich bin ein Frankfurter. Sie sind ein Hamburger.”

The beans and mushrooms were already ladled away, and the tomatoes followed. My mug was cold but the servers were disinclined to refill it, the frühstück hall was sparse with late and sluggard headaches, all the guests who’d make a differentiality today had gone, frühstück hours would be over in 10 or so minutes by the cheapo digiwatch my companion kept switching between his wrists and already even the occupied tables were being bussed.

Last chance, “Keine Familie ist ganz—you remember?”

“A book?”

“A book you did. About Jews, the Shoah. American. 2002, this would’ve been around.”

“I did at that time but also before many books on Juden.”

“Which was your favorite?”

But he was lost to me, “And now if not the books for children it is many books on Islam.”

“This one was special. To me at least.”

“The Juden books I don’t know.”

“Don’t hold back.”

“They are wrote to not be read I think.”

“Just bought, you mean? Guilt purchases?”

“I mean—no, no,” and he rubberbanded his hair back, “that they are wrote by writers who do not live today for readers who read who are not the people today with the problems,” and picked his scalp, “totally not like life, or like nothing has happened between the war and date of publishing,” and peeled a scab, “my English is not so good to conversate—identität ist nur rassismus, ein buch für juden ist kein buch für den menschen,” and he reeled in his chair—definitively, undoubtedly, indubitably, perturbed.

“A shame you feel that way.”

But he jumped up and backhanded smacked himself, his watch imprinting buttons.

He yelled, “My life is fuck—it fuck—scheiße, I am sorry fully, apologize fully, I never meant to do not,” and he covered his mouth with his hands.

“Please.”

“I hope I did not insult because this is a job I require and the series is wunderbar and Crown to me and Mrs. Janet Dofts at Crown Books has been wunderbar.”

“Of course, of course.”

“This is living money for me.”

“Obviously, no offense.”

But his jaw convulsed, “Two girls, one translator, Dietmar Klug.”

He turned, I sat, as the waitstaff bared the table and plied its cloth.

As I slung my tote through the lobby and out, litzened doormen doffed their laureled caps.

Danke, guten tag.

It was a dank gutted tag, no sun toward noon. I wended around polygonous planters, barrier hollies unberried. Men adjusted wool blends, their tieknots the size of the Kaiser’s scrotum. Women long and thin lightered long thin flavored cigs and exhaled into their phonecalls. Deathmasked Hungarians. Serbs or Croats, unplaceables or just Danes. Their scents were cloved smoke, buffet borborygmi, and olent Hofbrand unguents, and the languages they conferred in were all, or none—Euroenglish, Euronglish spraying like water not from the fountain, drained beyond the colonnade. And I was the only American among them—the only American to still be dawdling the day away with a fair on.

I followed the delegates from the smaller lesser nations of smaller lesser languages through the Platz der Republik, a dull hub of officespace like deserted barracks, bunkers exhumed. Every Mercedes M-Class 4×4 ever made rolled by, windows up. The access to the Messe was meshfenced and coned between signs indicating the airport, Lufthansa billboards vandalizing the orisont tethering inflatable jets. The forecast called for a 100% chance of flurried schedule sheets and complimentary bookmarks.

The newest structures formed a quad, or tetrad—four halls numbered consecutively, 1 and 2 projecting from a concession terminant in screeningroom, a massive A/V ark whose presence and purpose demonstrated the lack of confidence bookpeople have in their product—why read? why not just grab a seat in the theater and conk out?

Halls 3 and 4 were of architectural interest, roofed in gently sloping metal dunes. Impressions: each mirroring metal wave resembled an abdominal segment of a robotic roach, a cuttlefish’s iridescent cuttlebone, or a toucan’s beak cast in dental amalgam, an armoring scute of an armadillo, while the total effect was that of a multizeppelin crash, or a mashup of the Decepticon mothership Nemesis and the Autobot derelict planet Cybertron, from the animated TV series and liveaction movies, respectively, of Transformers.

Not just four halls—on the back of the backpage of the schedule was a map—everything was a mirroring. My fellow Americans were all in Hall 8, apparently.

Halls 5 through 8 inclusive reminded me of malls, best measured not in square meters but in parsecs. I walked through them and sidestepped their conveyors. I walked between them, and there was Frankfurt’s skyline, like apocalypse does Dallas. Your friendly neighborhood global banking headquarters—Deutsche Bank’s logo of a blue square slit diagonally has always read to me like the desolate vagina of a war widow.

She was being positioned, canted, bolted, this survivor of the gender wars, arm up, arm down, legs spread wide as if to imply a corresponding wideness of taste—a mannequin of Charlotte, whether her first name or last they’d only posted that, the first female printer in history. Paris, reign of Francis I. Alongside her pose was pasteboarded a polyglot factsheet about homosexuality and publishing. Friedrich Koenig, no umlaut for him, invented the first nonmanpowered, but steampowered, press, an unwieldy replica of which anchored the display. The Asians, despite all their advances, their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe, were underrepresented, inevitably. Theirs was just another but scanty polyglot boardtext noting all their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe. Clay and wood and bronze. Lead and tin and antimony. Samples. Gutenberg and his moneylenders were dummied prominently, don’t doubt.

The translation’s typography was blackletter Textura, Fraktur, the spelling unstable, incunabular: “Johanes.” Mainz was referred to as “the once rival of Frankfurt.” Once upon a time. Snobs. The installation featured animatronics, rather inside the cases were Poles and the murmurs reverberant from behind the plastic sheeting were in Polish responding to yelled German. They were running late. They were running with screwdrivers to tighten the screw on a press. It was the same as the oil principle, the crushing of seed, nut, olive. Smithing. Gemcutting. Platen. Windlass. Gutenberg’s father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, was employed by the ecclesiastical mint. My speculation, exactly. Chirography, typography, money mania. A coin is minted by mold, the metals are poured into it, and an image is stamped on the surface. Given that a nickel now is just a quarter nickel, it’s strictly the image that coins the worth, glyphs of tetrarchs and portraits of feudal royalty, with time becoming kitschy graphics of livestock and wheat. Given that paper’s still paper it’s the scripting that authenticates the bill, the signatures of presidents or primeministers, treasurers, reserve chiefs. Pecuniary inscription being a residuum of the regent’s seal or signet ring, the guarantor of authorship and so, of authority. Sphragides, sigilia, specie and fiat currencies, movable type, all systems of writing to date, in each instance an arbitrary materiality is forcibly impressed with transitory value. Proof of identity. Colophons of self. I told the registration guards my name was Aaron Szlay, and though I’d left my pass back in the room I could show them my swipecard in its sleeve with that name on it. They consulted their list, credentialed me, couldn’t have been nicer.