Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.

Meanwhile, the sweater layers came off and then the women put on shorts and then the men put on shorts and everyone became a child. The applianceries threw up bunting declaring preseason priceslashes on BBQs and ACs, and all the children were out on Atlantic Avenue slurping challenging snowcones in flavors like tripe.

I, no surprise, was camped inside, grilling windowless. Heinekens, pinching the filters out of Camels.

The desk had to be cleared, but then what—go clear out any unmatched gloves I’d left uptown? pack out Ridgewood’s Rach clutter and return it? Spring cleaning—my neighbors, my floor of nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfive units, were into that too.

The unit to one side, the trove of an Albanian who peddled arts recordings mailorder and in person, DVD, VHS, Regions 1 and 2, even rarees on reels, 10mm, 8mm, of concerts and operas, tours of the Hermitage, the Louvre, Gemäldegalerien, both samizdat shaky cameraworks he produced himself from the back rows of Lincoln Center, and classier documentaries duped from public broadcasting, all for homebound infirm or dying oldsters who couldn’t be bothered with or couldn’t afford a system upgrade. The unit to the other side, the vault of a dire Sri Lankan trying to become the exclusive stateside distributor of only the worst products of his island: floppy slabs of irregularly cut rubber reclaimed from sparetires, coir, peat, microwaveable pouches of a prespiced rice—Sprice.

I wasted a lot of that stretch with them, out in the hall in plastiwicker patio chairs from a patio furnisher, and a homeshopping supplier’s rotating fans.

“You can have shot the actor for $10,000,” according to the Albanian, “or for that you can have also two new womens and not the Tirana bitches but the healthy country girls from Kukës.”

The plaintive Sri Lankan, “You will write for the CNN about my rice?”

I didn’t know what I wanted, Rachwise, and I was as angry at her as I was, I’ll admit, turned on—by the thought of her wanting that actor. After my hallmates left for their own domestic disturbances I got onto wifi and clicked past Adam’s ads, trafficked into his filmography, his televisionography, his large and small screen oeuvre or at least his performances not expressly endorsing rugged yet sensitive colognes, refreshing, switching among the networks—Proven Nexports, WinsumGypsum, AY86MNO22, Readyornotherei1111 (in order of reliability), some from businesses whose proprietors had given me their wpas or wpa2s in order to facilitate my redaction of debt consolidation/collection correspondence, others I’d just guessed (either the names of the networks themselves, or abcdefgh, or that CAPPED, or 12345678, or a combo), but none of his films or shows I found had any sex scenes, rather he, or his characters—because a writer has to be careful about confusing a person with his characters—weren’t involved in any of them: always it was his son fucking someone, or his daughter fucking someone, after which he, Adam, might have a benignly erotic talk with her about it, or a stern but supportive discussion with her partner. Revenge of the Nasteroids I liked. Also the complete Season 2 of Fare Friends, except for the episodes “The Bantling Commission” and “Dolly Dispatch.”

In Daaaabbb! and its sequel Daaaaaaaabbbbbb! he was animated again—busy, active, but also a cartoon—some type of anguimorph in length trailing a long scorpion’s tail without a stinger. He was, I realized, some variety of lizard, and then a franchise fansite’s posting clarified, he was a mastigure, of the genus Uromastyx, and another posting debated which species. The head, because I’m not sure whether lizards have faces, had Adam’s dry/wet features, his slitherine expressions and gestures, and, of course, his voice, conventionally rugged, with fugettaboutit dabs. But that must’ve been relatively easy—for the rest, it was just a matter of having him strip and slapping nodes on his tits, letting a computer model his motions.

I clicked through the clips and, in the midst of loading part 3 of 21, I must’ve fallen asleep and the signal must’ve too, because waking up it was frozen, and I was in a sweat.

The phone. Aar was checking in, “How’s it going already?”

I said, “Nothing going,” and I told him no one had been in touch, and then I told him about Rach.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t contact him, he’ll contact you.”

But I’d meant—about Rach?

Calls also came from Finnity, but I ignored them, and the msgs were: “Is this your phone, Josh? It’s Finn,” “So this is the number Aaron gave me, just wondering if you’ve gotten any sense of the project timeline or maybe you’re already working?” “It’s your daily obscene phonecall from your editor, just wondering what you’re wearing and what the plans are if you’ve made them?” “Regrets OK if I’m wrongnumbering you but that’s the price of an automated greeting, or else OK if you’re there Josh I’m just going to have to conclude that your not picking up or ringing me back is like some fantasy tantrum about something from way in the past that neither of us had control over—it’s Finnity?”

Rach didn’t leave any msgs, just called.

Important that I explain.

Some, not all but some, of my avoidance of their calls was about as basic as psych ever gets: with Finnity, I was delaying a reconciliation with the editor who’d abandoned me and my book in our time of mutual distress and yet whose meddling I’d now have to stet again due to a perversity of Aar’s—a perversity I’d have to appreciate—and then with Rach, I was procrastinating the final total squaring of even more convoluted, more vulnerable, accounts.

But the rest of my evasion was professional in nature.

I had, contrary to the terms of the no conflicts of interest clause in my contract, another client. I had a single active client. My last, and special. Especially demanding.

She was a curator, and a perennially tenuretracked assistant professor at CUNY, and I’d been ““““working”””” with her off and on for a desultory year or year and a half, and also working on a vague ms. vaguely concerned with archaeological controversies that if it doesn’t make her scholarly career will at least make her scholastically notorious as it’s intended for a general audience. In practical terms that meant helping her edit the indefatigable writing she did for various archaeology and Egyptology journals and exhibition monographs—which became, as I got involved, duographs, I guess—recasting the required academese for mass appeal while retaining the authoritative tone. She had a cubicle at the CUNY Graduate Center, in Midtown, but preferred to rendezvous at home, specifically in her bedroom, Tribeca (bought when the market was down, when the towers went down and only the ruthless were buying beyond Canal Street). Her name, not that it’s important—Alana, or Lana, which is “anal” backwards, which is how anal’s done (I initially noticed this reversal in our cheval glass reflection—her lucubratory loft was otherwise bare).

During the second week of May—after having been out of touch, and then away again on perfunctory fieldwork in South America—she called. It’d been a while. It’d been ugly how we parted. Then she called again, and left another msg, but now about having been invited to deliver a lecture at a summer institute—a seminar series held in a pristine mountain state that presented the work of diverse scholars and famous public policy types to the busy and wealthy who required an educational justification for their leisure.

All that was required, she said, was a breezy summary of her blown uncollated messy ms., though she also said she’d decided to focus her presentation on mummies—nothing pleased a crowd of the retired rich like mummies, apparently. So, she wanted to meet. Then, fourth week of May, she needed to meet. Unfortunately, she knew how to find me, and unlike Rach didn’t have an aversion to multistop, multitransfer, masstransit.

We labored (I did) on something that would air aloud, something oral, but had to finish—prematurely—and told her I’d email her the rest.

She never paid me—not cash. It wasn’t that type of relationship.

There was hardly any work left to do on it—but still I let it drag, the lecture (there were other conclusions I’d always put off).

Until after she’d dialed, and redialed, if-I-get-your-voicemail-I’m-going-to-act-like-my-phone’s-in-my-purse dialed, I-just-happen-to-be-driving-a-Prius-on-the-way-to-a-coworker’s-parent’s-shiva-in-Nassau-County dialed, and I had to pick up to avoid another surprise. I was laying on the curses like I was protecting my tomb: I couldn’t meet, not here, neither in her corkwalled cenacle between two cenacles each shared by a dozen prying prudish anthropology and sociology department adjuncts, I wasn’t feeling well, I had other deadlines—I couldn’t stop by her loft to primp her in the mirrored center of the bed amid all that white Egyptian cotton, reaching over only now and then to the bedstands to languidly spin her globes and point—stop.

It would’ve been disastrous—getting into that again.

Instead, gut spilling over my laptop’s lip, I screened more of Adam, but more of his earlier vehicles, from when he was my age, when he was younger, a child, becoming dissatisfied with clips and even sequentials and so going to torrent the entireties, torrenting illegally, getting dropped, returning and resuming, .ph, .id, malware centrals, poisoning my computer, giving it fullblown whatever’s worse than AIDS, now that AIDS is treatable.

Anything to divert me. Anything to distract.

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried. The facts have to be wrapped like mummies, in the purest and softest verbiage, which both preserves them and makes them presentable. Instead of straight explanations, analogies must be pursued—like mummies. Examples, instances—next chapter.

I thought the other JC had forgotten me, or that the job itself had just been a thought—a whim of his, or mine—my “imagination,” which is how a writer phrases a mania or pathology. I’d get to his book in the afterlife, if then.

June. I sat laptopped amid the doldrums, the slowdown, the season when traditional publishing takes fourday weekends at Montauk, when even the sites are updated only sporadically, remotely. I finally returned on Finnity, but in the plasmic midst of night, leaving 2:37, 4:19 msgs on voicemail, and when he’d call back in the morning I wouldn’t pick up. The msgs I left were just, “No news, I’m assuming it’s off,” and he’d voicemail in response, “No news on this end either but still we have to talk,” and my next call would be, “Let’s try to get an extension—also ever catch Daaaabbb!? or Daaaaaaaabbbbbb!? They’re about this lizard and lizards are reptiles, which live on land laying eggs as opposed to amphibians, their ancestors, which are born in the water with gills only to grow up into lungs and die on land, but I’m not sure with them about the egg thing,” and his reply was, “The terms were no contact until contact’s made, but once it is I’ll try for an extension, which means we have to meet—me, you, Aar,” and I’d just capacitate his box, “I can’t, I’m deep into drafting this thing starring this NY Jewish kid who while on a class trip to the White House wanders off by accident and finds in a bathroom a telex using the Soviet GOST block cipher, and he deciphers it, just like that, just like nothing, and tells the president what the telex says, and whatever it says, I haven’t gotten to that yet, it’s enough to convince the president to end Cold War ICBM brinkmanship, and the West is saved and the kid’s father who’s from the USSR and is now in the numbers rackets down on Orchard Street is proud—I’ve been getting into this one specific actor, but also into 1980s and 90s representations of mathematicians and scientists onscreen” (I was cut off, I’m figuring, around the recap of the president).

I sat spotlit by the homepage, Tetration.com, boring my head into its underdesign, the whole shallowbacked templatitude of it, trying to find out what was going on, and even once tetrating, “where is joshua cohen?” and “when will he get in touch with me?”

I went to the Midtown library, and read—but bury the algorithms, the histories of tubes, transistors, circuits, of processor architecture and the invention of memory—maxed out my understanding and turned to Egyptology, borrowed the techbooks for later along with a Theatrepedia in which “Adam Shale” was mentioned.

I came out of the main branch and past the tarred trunks to Broadway, which anytime I’m on it I’m amused is also “Broadway”—at least to the prairie herds of fannypackers that roam between shows. This is the only sort of mental masturbation that gets me through Times Square.

Because someone was behind me, and someone was, millions. But in among them, the stands of balloontwisters and calligraphers who are paid to write “Peace” and “Love” in Hanzi but instead write “Scum” and “Twat,” the chula churro carts and that truck that does nachos and roofies, the same person, again, on another block, an Asian—in an intemperate sweatsuit and cap, Red Sox and red crocs.

An Asian of indeterminate everything: intention, gender, age, even Asianness. Indeterminate even if he or she were the same entity each time. Rach, at this point, would’ve condemned me for racism, though not only don’t I care and write this for myself, but as a reader I’d surely enjoy a book by an Asian in which he or she suspects they’re being followed by a white person, but can’t be sure of that white person’s intent or gender or age, or whether that white person is the same person every time or even white. I’m perseverating, I know, but thoughts have to be followed to their ends, the end of next block, and then keep going, to avoid being overtaken.

By the highway, the Hudson—the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy. The Paronomasian, let’s say, turned to close the gap to the curb. A whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th & 10th—this was Tetration’s NY HQ.

I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or Tetguest?

Since last I was here all or nothing had changed: there was just a new type of new in evidence—all novelty has this feeling, this rush. A provisionality. Something to marvel at, not something to trust. The bot was trying to palaver with me in a crepitant creole, increasing its volume and titling itself and then treading away.

A monitorbank mounted on the crosstown wall showed activity at every subtetplex, where there was day, like here, and where there was night, like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Moscow, Tel Aviv, which were nonetheless still busying. Everyone was being scrutinized, but denied ultimate access, the access to themselves. Everyone was being made reciprocally vulnerable. All lobbies were onscreen but this one, which existed strictly in my poses. It was my duty, then, to be conspicuous. I flung my limbs bagladen just so that someone in some other life might choose me. But I was chosen from just behind by a guard. (A human.)

“May I help you, sir?”

“I sure hope so,” I said, realizing that to him I was a transient. “I have a reservation for the Circle Line Cruise?”

Maintaining that I hoofed it back to Ridgewood would account for the next week, give or take, though I paced that distance inside, ordering in until my cash ran out and running to the ATM at the Comida Fresca Cada Día—leery of any Asian not affiliated with the nearby Tianjin Trading Ltd., or Lucky Monkey Lumber & Millwork. I read a lot of news, which I liked to read because text, unlike newer media, didn’t tell me how to pronounce it: “Jamahiriya,” “Ansar al-Sharia”—the Arab Spring seemed an issue of Vogue, the Times was so into wiretaps and leaks it’d become an electrical or plumbing manual. I studied the techbooks, which had underlinings and highlightings and in one a frayed crocheted bookmark from what had to’ve been a little old lady striving to master her little old PC. I searched Rach’s blog with the thought of identifying our pseudonymized friends, Rach’s friends who might’ve known about her affair, who if they’d ever reach their mentions themselves would have to search for the scarf they wore or the wallet they lost on their last lunchdate with Rach, in the very terms Rach used in her posting (searching online becoming a writerly endeavor: the search for the perfect detail, or error).

6/6, I got an email from Cal, replying to my own email of drunks ago. He wrote me about how “optimal” it was that this Muslim unrest had coincided with his book hiatus, and how “unabatingly obligated” he was to his editors and the reporters who’d taken his beat. As for the unrest itself, it was still undecided “whether the oppositions will do the governing required.” Anyway, it was “awesome and poignant that technology that was so manipulative is now so cheap it might level the playing field for civil disobedience.” However this was merely his transition to fiction—rather to mansplaining wisdom about fiction. Cal wrote that while technology itself might be “naturally ambivalent,” he was certain it was “anathema” to novels, “to the vicissitudes of the novel,” in that for a novel to “function properly”—as if novels were like a tool, not a bluntness—its characters had to be kept apart from each other, “separated into missing each other and never communicating,” and that now in this present of pdas and online, people were rarely ever “plausibly alone,” everyone now knew what everyone else was doing, and what everyone else was thinking, and the result was a life of fewer crosspurposes and mixups, of less portent and mystery too—and I agreed with him, I’d already agreed, because I’d recognized the ideas as having been plagiarized verbatim from an interview with a decrepit South African literary pundit just published at the site of the NYRB.

Anyway, Cal signedoff by asking, as he always asked, whether I was working on anything, and I answered that I’d just completed an email, nonfiction.

The next email to slip from my hands (two fingers, hardbitten nails) was sincerer.

I told myself I had to finish the last lecture page for the professoress by midnight, be done with it, and at midnight I uploaded and clicked send, and she wrote back with such speed it was like she’d responded before I’d sent it, or at least like she’d had her response already prepared and saved under Drafts. Lana wrote to thank me with an invitation to the summer institute—apparently she was allotted one guest and it “has 2 b u.”

I wrote another email declining—don’t waste the keystrokes on how, why—and Lana wrote me back, “lets chat.”

“I don’t have chat.”

“just download it here,” a link to Tetchat.

“You can always just call me. But I’m not sure I’m ready for another trip. Need to sort things w/ Rach. Need time.”

“download prick dont be such a

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My laptop was colorwheeling, so cursed to its cursor that force quit had to be skipped for the nuclear option, Off/On.

Then the phone rang and though it was a regular ring and the number wasn’t listed, I went for it, “No patience.”

But the voice though expectedly female was Asian, like reared in Asia, “Excuse? Hello, Mr. Cohen?”

“Speaking?”

“Please pack a single piece of luggage, including only materials important to your process—everything else will be provided. Waiting outside your studio residence is a Lincoln Continental, black. You will meet it within 10 minutes. Your flight departs JFK at 7:00.”

“To? I’m guessing Palo Alto?”

“Palo Alto does not have a commercial airport. Delta 269 nonstop to SFO. San Francisco. 10:18 PDT, arrival.”

“Oskar Kilo.”

“Excuse?”

“That just means OK.”

“Please, one precaution we ask: take your phone or pda and remove its battery, leave both the battery and chassis at home. You will not require it.”

She didn’t have to ask twice—she didn’t.

Goodbye (646).

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