Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

10/19– 10/20–

Museum hours remain the same, but prayer hours are subject to change. Gods don’t take a day off, the sun just leaves earlier. The clouds. The clouds weigh gravid.

Out of my hostel the Trafik was a right and a left and between the turns, a bridge like a gangrenous rainbow over the Wienfluss.

A minority cleft, a migrant clave, posteverywar buildings to accommodate any ethnicity. In the yards weeding intervenient to the units of whatever the German term is, Socialistcommunistworkerhousingthebalconiesarefalling, the laundry was being taken in, colorless veils and shawls like photos hung dripping but not yet developed.

All of this neighborhood might as well have been downtown Jewish NY at the turn of last century—here was the same stage of nascent assimilation—just translate the Yiddish, switch around the referents, and update the technologies. Easier times, simpler times, tenements, peddler carts—what’s the Arabic for “egg creams”? the Persian for “spaldeens”? Bundled boys were choosing sides for a game that involved kicking a punctured tire. Then they were kicking each other. Scarves waved. Penalties.

Yasir wasn’t at the Trafik. Only one of us was early or late, for an appointment only one of us had made. The other clerk was working. The clerk from earlier. Describe him later. Describe how all day he was on the headset phone talking bluetoothed Arabic that no foreigner would ever be able to tell whether he was delighted or enraged.

Was he Yasir’s nephew? And so Iz’s cousin? Yasir’s son? How old? Still plenty young to busy with the future. He was too consumed with not becoming his father or uncle or cousin to be troubled by me—he wouldn’t still be moonlighting at our age.

I stroked the glossies, rubbed the ink from the print. The Trafik carried only a few German/Austrian titles: Kronen Zeitung, Kurier, Die Presse, Die Standard, Wiener Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Vogue, Glamour, a few copies each.

The rest of the papers were folded into racks as if in the alphabetical order of my incomprehension, from tabloids in Turkish to broadsheets of abjad, and in that emoticonese I think is Sinhalese, and in that zodiac handicap signage I think is Amharic. Papers in languages left to right and right to left. And verticalized until continued, next page. They must’ve published out of London or Paris or Berlin, because boxed above their prices in both euros and pounds were weathermaps of London and Paris and Berlin and it was raining.

And that was the good news, which readers never trusted or skipped. The bad news was that elections were rigged, bribery scandals were sanctioned, and schools and social services had been suspended in cities that readers would never return to. Something happened to 16 somewhere somewhen, something happened to 30,000. Also, Israel.

I was pleased to find the classifieds healthy, and the backgammon column still thrives.

I wasn’t going to leave this Trafik until the work I’d done with Principal was public—until I recognized the headline of every frontpage as my own writing, and my outdated groomed promo bookphoto made the cover of every periodical in stock.

And then he’d recognize me, and nod, and I’d nod back—not him, Yasir.

The clerk was talking, but some to me, some to his headset: “Heast, Oida—du Penner—wos wüst?”

I said, “Ich spreche kein Arabisch. Nicht Arabisch?”

He chewed at his cheek and gestured my putting down the mag he’d doubted I could afford and now was sure I couldn’t read—another issue with a centerfold on Principal’s birthday.

I reracked it and showed him my empty pack of Camel Lights. Put money in the dish. Change came back in the dish, along with a fresh pack of, I’ll live, Camel Regulars. I reached into the cooler for a beer, an Ottakringer. Put money in the dish. Change came back in the dish. He popped the cap with a countermounted popper like a rusty torture chamber contraption. Worst thing about Europe is that you have to pay for matches.

Around the block again, a two cig walk. I would’ve liked to dump that sour warm beer over the cold, be done with it.

I went and stood outside Yasir’s building in another window’s light as all the desires I’d been feeling constellated into the desire just to stand there, within them, under that haloing light, to prove that I could, that I could be faithful—to anything, to myself.

According to the Muslim press it was 1432. And by the Jews it’d just turned 5772.

It’s as if, simultaneous with the invention of printing, the last uninhabited planet in the Tau Ceti system was being colonized by cyborgs.

I tried to explain Yasir’s absence, but I didn’t have his schedule. Anyway—the next night, he was there.

He seemed fit, at ease. Disinterested in me. I stood by the Alawwam Obst + Gemüse produce market, holding this notebook like a shoppinglist, and watched, and wrote, and watched. The streaks of blood to the right and left of this sentence, this paragraph, are from the grapes I snuck, and crushed.

Because you were there, Iz. Without warning, you were across the street from me and swaying toward the Trafik. Though I wasn’t certain it was you initially. And my rationale for it not being you was that I saw your face. If it was recognizably your face, then it wasn’t yours, or it wasn’t only yours anymore. Unmasked. Healed. Keen. Breathing. You seemed happy.

Your skirt just touched the knee. It was a black skirt riding up at the rear and crimped twisted at the waist, and you leaned by a bugswarmed lamppost to adjust it. Black wool pointelle sweater, I’d bought that too. Zara, The Gap.

The heels, haute heels for an evening errand, were opentoed. Your raintoes, Iz. Your head covered in a red wetcolored scarf. Because a freezing rain will make anyone pious.

You weren’t wearing a coat, though. You never did like that coat.

You carried a tray of brass, clung around with foil. You set it down in front of your brother on the snackclogged counter you barely reached.

You exchanged a word. And then he leaned over and tied your headscarf. Cinching it tighter, pinching your cheek. Then you brought yourself to the corner and crossed away from me.

Iz, I didn’t chase you—rather I’d already chased you, but now that I was seeing you wet to the skin I realized it wasn’t you that I’d been after. It was a dream. It was another life. It was forgiveness—it was to be forgiven.

I approached your brother, and crowded him under his canopy. He was hunched over a calculator, fluttering receipts.

“I’m Joshua,” I said.

Before this, only his stain had addressed me, but now I had the man. Bewildered.

“So let me have a paper,” I said. “A newspaper.”

Yasir pointed, his mouth exhuming a relict tongue. “But all are German.”

“Not all of them. But that’s not what I mean. Just give me one. It’s not for me.”

“What one?” Yasir said. “Who?”

I went with a Wiener Zeitung, thick as a blanket. Put two coins in the dish, or atop the dish you’d brought still wrapped and steaming, Iz, and let any change due back to me be his.

My blessings.

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Dear Cal,

I might not be the best person to caution you against dreaming. Or to give any writing advice. Or even to be reading you. Particularly now. And anyway I’d rather get paid to do this up as a critical essay, review the living shit out of you for—what’s that paper the homeless sell, Street News? Or does Beaver Hunt still publish? Cal. It’s not like either of us have finished every single book we’ve ever reviewed. All dreams in books are typeset in italics, that handwriting that during the Renaissance (15th to 17th centuries, also M&W 10:35–11:50 612 Philosophy Hall, Dr. Gerds) developed into the earliest fonts for the earliest books from the Latin and Greek, and so Antiquity was a dream, that’s all I’ve got to offer. Truth is, I’ve never actually cared about dreams, and anytime I get to them in a book I feel cheated, even worse than I feel cheated by flashbacks, because at least in flashback the present revisits the past to further nuance itself into future (like we’d slum out to the Bowery today not to meet new friends but to toast the friends we wouldn’t meet who are out in Westchester and sad), while dreams just float or unfloat as timeless spaceless inconsequentials, meaning everything, meaning nothing, not beholden, never beholden, the fuckers (everyone dreams in Westchester). But hey, this oneiric somnic verbigerage can’t be of interest to anyone I’m not sleeping with. And I’m not sleeping.

Cal, this is not an email I’m ever going to send—this isn’t even a letter, Dear—and anyway I can’t send anything.

Aaron’s kids passed on your ms., and I’ve read it—on trains and then in this “youth pension” I’m in—night after night gutting the manila (postseason joke: the Mets moved to the Philippines and changed their name to the Manila Folders), getting that glue smell and unclipping, unrubberbanding, tracing each line with the clipedge, wrapping the bands around my typing injury wrists nervously because I want it to be brilliant, I want it to be terrible—my competitiveness competing with a weak need to be transported, even entertained.

It’s all I have with me is why, that and a passport that both is and isn’t mine—bookmarking your book by my side, under my head as a pillow—reading it in cafés, museums

The night before, I came back late and the pension was closed—I’d never had the key to the front. I rung the bell labeled HAUSBESORGER, and this ogre Hungarian opened the door a gibbous swing like he’d been standing just behind it polishing the phrase “No One Will Admit Between Hour of Two and Six.” He was stubborn, it must’ve been that hour. So, given that I was already carrying all my possessions in this nifty, recently acquired, green in every sense Amazon.com totebag—because everyone’s a thief—I left,

It’s like my standards are gone with Aar, and I’m not sure what he’s told you, or whether you even wanted me to read your novel—you never asked, and you used to ask, directly—or Aar’s kids just wanted to keep me amused and out of their hair (meaning Lisabeth), or flatter me and so keep me as a client (meaning Seth, who has a nose on him).

But in the event that Bringdom came from you, I’ve been giving it my all. Thorough notes will have to wait, but here:

1. you shouldn’t have a sex scene longer than a page that’s a dream (pp. 99-101),

2. you shouldn’t have a death scene shorter than a page that’s a flashback (p. 250),

3. the war theatricals have all obviously been informed by reporting, but they’re too much in the fact department, the military lingo is too much especially for the abstracted Kafka or like Camus in the Sunni Triangle mood you’re aiming for (let the Weinsteins or The HBO tang up the slang for the next generation of soldiers),

4. because once I was out of Chapter 2—and this is my main point—once Bringdom’s PTSD and debt and failed marriage and failure to engage with his child have been effectively established in “the present,” by which I mean “the topical,” and the novel’s deployed on this death mission account of his past, his enlistment and training, all his ballsdeep macho martyrdom antics (you’ll get a Purple Heart for nonpurple prose under fire), I was doing that guiltily-flip-ahead-to-gauge-how-many-pages-are-left-in-the-chapter thing, the guess-how-many-desert-boring-pages-are-wasted-on-this-already-wasteful-war thing, and was disappointed to find that all of them were (about war), except for the jerking-it-to-the-Kurd-girl-who-turns-into-his-mother-in-the-middle-of-a-soyfield dream, and the maybe-suicide-maybe-not-of-his-father flashback I mentioned above, which though I realize I just warned you not to use flashbacks and dreams, I meant only contextually, because in terms of content this is your truest territory: Home.

(And Rachel-Anne, nice touch—as perduring as the Plains, and as open as the Kmart pharmacy.

I know, I know, she’s not my Rach—she’s your authorial prerogative.)

Anyway, onto your concluding scenes. Rachel-Anne getting that call, and fainting, with all the customers just waiting. That you’ve written it so that readers can only suppose they know what the call’s about, but can never know for sure: it’ll play better with the soundtrack behind it, unison cellos and solo muted horn. That the concerned customer who pats her hand and gives her a plastic poppy is black but is never described that way and it’s only made relevant by her coworker’s racist comment: it’s like I’m reading you sweat. This restraining tendency feels especially unfair with the decision to withhold the baby’s name. Just name the baby, Cal—for me.

There’s more, of course. And more about style. But then you always doubted that, style. Next time, if time and I get squared.

“With compliments and condolences—we have to be in touch” (about how to market what’s basically a male violence novel to females ages 18 to 80 who together are responsible for approx 68% of all new book buying and approx 64% of all public library book borrowing in America today) (my stats are reliable),

j

P.S. Read this postscript first.

The way I was raised, Cal, from the earliest, was that my mother’s was the only war. That what she experienced (her Yiddish would be vos mikh hot getrofn, “what has befallen me”), being stowed away in that Carmelite convent in southern Poland on the Czechoslovak border and beaten and enslaved, essentially, was worse than anything any other human had ever experienced, but what occurs to me now was that Moms had never insisted on this, Dad had. Only Dad would attempt to exploit her trauma in explanations of her insomnia and bedsoilings and health issues, including, of course, her infertility, or in rationalizing her lateness in picking me up from baseball practice, or in leaving the laundry in the hamper and the pantry bare. This is all to establish that from the very start of planning my book (Moms had agreed to let me interview her, but only after I’d threatened to write about her regardless), I had no impression of my father’s pathologizing as anything other than an expression of his devotion to my mother, a duty that required both uxory and coddling. I’d failed to recognize his denial—abnegation, sublimation, displacement mechanism (I’m the first in my family to ever talk to a shrink) (about anything)—how my father had developed this smothering veneration in order to avoid discussing his own war. It was how he avoided anything even remotely to do with himself.

But the time to return to is 12 years ago, Cal, the research, the writing, Tel Aviv. I sat with my Tante Idit, not my aunt but my mother’s first cousin, interrogating her in the parched garden of the white duplex she shared with her seething companion, a retired Maghrebi army general who resembled King Hussein of Jordan and never once said shalom to me. He blamed me for the crying—Idit was crying all the time. And her brother Menashe was crying, and he was calling his crying sister by her birthname, Yetta, and they were calling Moms by her birthname, Yocha. They answered all my questions sincerely, shamelessly, but with rivalry too—after finding out how selective of an account Moms had given me. 12 goddamned years ago.

And then it was fall already, and I was off like a thief to Poland—to Warsaw. Renting that Daewoo on Moms’s MasterCard and driving it to Sobibór and Majdanek, or what Communist memorials remained of them, to Bełżec, or what Communist memorials remained of it, past the lot that’d been my mother’s house in Kraków, and the convent at Chyżne that’d abused and saved her thanks to luck and her parents’ money and their influence with the Kraków Judenrat, and finally across the cankered karsts of the Tatras in what’d lately been Czechoslovakia, to Vienna—from which I flew back to the States.

I stayed in NY and wrote, and went down to Jersey only to present Moms with my transcripts to confirm or deny, as the intelligencers say—but she just set down the pot she was glazing and made me promise never to print anything the cousins told me, and I agreed, or she said I agreed, and that she trusted me.

So then I went ahead and printed all of it, Cal, because that’s just what we do—I’m not going to pretend it was ever a choice, but neither am I going to pretend it wasn’t difficult. 9/11 pubdate, Miri pulverized, Aar gnashing out in the wilderness beyond all assuagement and phone reception, you and your fame, Cal—and then in the midst of all that, Finn came through, or Kimi! did (and what the hell ever became of Kimi!?), either one of them or just a distributor’s order fulfillment robot sent Moms a finished copy. I hadn’t let her read any earlier version (I’m not about to lecture you, Cal, on how agonizing it is letting others read your drafts, doubly so if they’re the subject and are bound to be troubled). Moms wasn’t just troubled, she was furious, but she didn’t call me, she called Israel. She’d gotten online at the house around then, and she and her cousins were emailing too. She was never “raped” by the Soviet starshina, she said, because after the first time, he paid her in food, and after the last time, he paid her in a map and outlined a tentative route to where her brothers lived, where they had lived and operated branches of their family’s lumber firm, in Žilina (or Sillein in German) and Brno (or Brünn). Anyway, she said, the soldier wasn’t a starshina, but a podpolkovnik. Moms and Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe feuded back and forth over whether “rape” meant the same thing in Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. Whether the Red Army rank of the soldier corresponded to the Israeli Army rank of seren or segen—lieutenant colonel? full colonel? And it wasn’t like I was trying to stay out of it, Cal—Moms kept me out of it, and the only way I knew anything was that the Israelis would fwd: me the emails. That’s how I knew that Moms otherwise enjoyed the book, or just wouldn’t admit to her cousins that she hadn’t—all her emails began “Dear Yetta and Menashele,” and ended with her signing herself, not Yocha, but “Love, Gloria.”

I also got a letter then—through the mail, through the fanmail, Cal—forwarded from Random House, October or November, 2001. I responded, and it led to a lunch. Which led to another. Retirees transited in from the Five Towns on the Island and from Main Line Philly to have lunch with me and then go gawk at the pit downtown.

They were readers, they were my only readers—if I didn’t snare the women I at least had a corner table with the only consolation demographic, geriatric Jews—but they didn’t want to talk about my book. They wanted to talk about my father.

You know, I’m sure you do, Cal, how you expend all this effort writing something and thinking through the detail of every decision (do I name the restaurants we met at? or just describe them? do I mention what was ordered? who took care of the bill?), but then you finish, or you delude yourself into finishing, and realize—too late, with the book already a classic of the bargain bin—that you’d missed something, a scene or even just a line that would’ve brought everything together, that would’ve resolved all the fogs—a gesture just as crucial to your life, but also as easily forgotten in daily life, as a person you’d loved who’s now dead.

My father. I’d hardly mentioned him in all my pages. Because Moms’s account of their meeting had demoted him into a handsome uniform that acted swiftly. My father was like a new character introduced at the end of a book, as the end of a book—a Daddy ex machina, maybe. And it’s been on my mind ever since, or—I’m trying for honesty—what’d then been a guilty notion I was in no psychological state to pursue is recurring only now, the notion that if there were to be any reissue or updated edition I would write an afterword to it, an afterword about him. And hey, a girl can dream, can’t she? a girl can flashback????

David Cohen, Private First Class, US First Army, had liberated Buchenwald, where the Yiddish competency he demonstrated so impressed the OSS officers he debriefed that they took him along to interrogations at Dachau, Mauthausen, and after V-E Day, here, to Vienna, where he was attached to command—according to the oldsters I was meeting with, my father’s former colleagues.

To be totally accurate, Cal, the guy who’d read my book and initially contacted me was this decorous epitomist Connecticut WASP, from rep tie to bucks with the blueblood suit between, and it was only after he’d vetted me over lunch at the Union Club that he sent the other guys my way, his octogenarian Jewish subordinates who claimed they recalled me coming up to their knees, their knees since replaced, at my father’s funeral—there was a Prussian yecca type with spoon up his ass posture who as a policy refused to eat and talk or even be talked to at the same time, and then two widowers who resembled Dad biographically, being the sons of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw who grew up south of Delancey speaking Yiddish. That language had bound them together, and brought them to the captain—the WASP had retired from the OSS as a captain—for whom they interpreted interrogations of, and translated testimonies by, survivors of concentration and labor camps, which were cited extensively in the subsequent war crimes tribunals.

Cal, they were filling in a man I had never known. A man my mother, reciting the shameless sanitized version of this story, the Story, had never known either—or had forgotten with her arrival in Jersey, her renaming as Gloria, her infirmities (avitaminosis) (stomatitis), and lack of baby, her spats with my father’s parents, attempts to master cooking and English by reading Ladies’ Home Journal recipes and cooking through the irreconcilable fascinations of The Honeymooners and Bonanza.

Vienna, 1945, the latter winter of a year that’d felt all winter—my father left US Army HQ, the former Hotel Bristol, located on the Ring (after the war it became a hotel again, and now its rooms cost north of €308/night). In one direction was the recently unnamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz, in the other the recently renamed Josef-Stalin-Platz—Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into zones. But my father headed for neither. Nor did he stop at his lodgings off Kärntner Straße. Instead, he went on toward the river—Why? The downtown Jews said, Why? Because word had come in that the Danube had just frozen over, and my father wanted to check. The downtown Jews told me this as if it was unimpeachably logical, and it was, because that’s who Dad was: the type of man who if you told him the river’s frozen was going to want to check. There by the riverbank he met a woman—a woman who’d just walked in gaiters taken off a Wehrmacht soldier, which meant off a Wehrmacht corpse, from Poland to Žilina to Brno to Vienna (I’m in no position to record the numbers just now, Cal, but consult the book or imagine around 600 kilometers or 400 miles), and was starving and feverish and out in the incipient snow begging—Moms would never admit to begging—and who called out to him in Yiddish, Zeit moychel, because Dad had a face like one of her brothers, who’d died in Theresienstadt, or Auschwitz. Dad gave her chewinggum, took her for a sawdusty schnitzel at a basement café. And then maybe to his room, the downtown Jews said. Then again, maybe not. Because she was icicle skinny like a Muselmann, they said. That’s what they called the people in the camps not gas exterminated but exterminated by hunger, Muselmänner. My mother was named Yocha then—did I mention that? Is this what senility is like? It was illegal to marry her. The downtown Jews said the Army might’ve courtmartialed my father under the GI ban on fraternization, which tended to treat brides unable to provide evidence of their identities as enemy nationals until proven innocent. But the captain said they wouldn’t have dared. The yecca, that scooped asshole Prussian, who just before I closed our tab at French Roast ordered fries for takeout, said that he was the one who’d forged her papers—though, he noted, it might not have been forgery because it was done on the captain’s orders—and not a Nansen Displaced Persons document either but a straight Shipley US passport that characterized the bearer as a secretarial assistant in the office of the special advisor on Austrian affairs, and falsified her age. My father was 21 and had an honorable discharge pending, Moms was—she guessed she was—16. They married, 4/16/1946, in the synagogue on Seitenstettengasse, the sole shul to survive in Vienna, in a ceremony officiated by Chaplain Rabbi Daniel S. Daniels of Worcester, MA, who died in a car wreck on I-95 in the late 1980s, on Shabbos. Back in civilian life, Dad studied actuarial science at Newark Technical School. In the gaps between assignments and a Bamberger’s shift he set about tracking down Moms’s relatives. Yetta had become the Hebraicized Idit, after Birkenau, but Menashe, who’d fled to Argentina, was still just Menashe—did I mention that? Am I confusing you, Cal? Moms and Dad visited them regularly in Israel—because, Moms liked to say, the Tel Avivniks were always too poor to visit us—and after I was born they brought me with them, though they went less and less, until we moved from Newark out to Shoregirt and they got up the confidence to fly without me maybe twice, because Shoregirt had a yard and picket fence and Jewish neighbors in the insurance business for me to stay by, the Tannenbaums. The last time my parents made the trip I wasn’t yet 12, and I’d worked out this compromise by which I was able to spend the afterschool day at my own house all alone, but had to report to the Tannenbaums’ house at dinnertime each night, for boiled chicken “cacciatore,” kugel “moussaka,” a dessert review of my bar mitzvah portion, and bed. Then my parents returned, and the back muscle that Dad had strained—from having lifted their suitcases loaded with a copy of Walt Whitman’s Bletlekh groz for Menashe and bras for Idit and cameras and camcorders for all their children and grandchildren—was diagnosed as a lung sarcoma, and all the traveling they did after that was to Sloan Kettering. My father refused to die only because it meant leaving my mother, but what was truly remarkable was that he’d lived that way too, which was why he’d never attended the reunions, and only met his army friends on worktrips to NY, and at his funeral—he had to be there anyway.

You can’t fly anywhere, anywhen, from Vienna.

Or you can, but it’s never cheap. To JFK, Washington-Dulles, Chicago-O’Hare. Connections in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Frankfurt knock a schilling off the price. There was also a layover option via Budapest. Layovernight. Tuesdays were the most affordable days to fly. Still, I was barely able to afford London on a Tuesday, noon. Vienna–London–Toronto–LaGuardia, more than 20 hours, eight procedurals, six sitcoms, four films with their plane fatalities edited out, four meals (or “snackboxes”).

I wasn’t checking luggage but if the clerk found that suspicious she didn’t say.

Let her just try and check this prose, let everyone.

Vienna—I slotted Principal’s passport into an aperture fit for transacting with an ulcerous deli clerk out on a drug corner. The guard took it and swiped it and flipped his interest through, in a way that convinced me of his scrutiny, so I said, “I get that all the time,” and either he didn’t find that hilarious or it wasn’t hilarious or he was just keeping busy for the surveillance scrutinizing him, then waved me through.

On the other side, in the immigration zigzag in NY—CNNing all around with Afghan dronestrikes, and then as a teaser before commercial break, which realityshow celeb really and showily got tossed out of a Manhattan Gopal store for cutting in line?

But then it was my turn to passport the officer, so I said, “I get that all the time,” which got a grin. “You must be the 10th guy who’s said that today.”

Just then I recalled how I always used to like having my passport stamped. It fixed my persona. Nailed my being down. So I asked the officer for a stamp.

And he answered by saying, “I’d love to, friend, but they’re phasing out that ink stuff.”

Customs was/were: spit thrice over your shoulder when anyone praises you, knock wood twice when praising yourself. Another line, another form handed over, smudged with Moms’s addy, permanent addy.

I went out into the chill, cab exhaust.

I joined the queue, waited, though I guess I could’ve called the agency, collect, could’ve had Lisabeth or Seth spring for a livery out of pity, shave and a haircut, suite at the Plaza, a sandwich. But I wanted to continue on my own—wanted Jersey, mother, buffer.

The expediter was a deadringer for La Guardia, the mayor, but with cornrows—“Where you going?”

“Jersey,” I said.

She sneered borough cred, directed me with her middlefinger down the idlers.

Aar, leaving a client’s afterafterparty, a launch, or reading—he’d get into a cab and say to the driver, “Take me to work with you,” or “Take me somewhere we can be alone,” and I miss that something wretched.

I, with my no balls, just told the driver how to drive but he demanded the addy and knucked it into his GPS, which calculated the same distance and time and directions that I had, and then he said how much, off meter, and that was as much as he said.

Nasty habit. It used to be that every time I’d take a cab there would come this moment, this intersection, and Rach hated it—when I couldn’t help but talk, couldn’t help but engage the driver, and some of that is a Jew thing, but some certainly was all that white baggage, which won’t fit in any trunk—wanting to show the driver that I held by what that Berber slave playwright once wrote, nothing human was alien to me, nothing was strange, or rattling, wanting to show respect by talking politics domestic and foreign, I’d be honored by his opinions, because they came from a land in which opinions were criminal, a land I’d never get any closer to than now—a mangled divider between us.

But for whatever reason, this trip—for two hours in gutimpacting traffic—I didn’t.