Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, for consumption to consume us. London’s just around the corner, a floor up or down, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, and so bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

The only thing that grounds me is the beach—the ground before the oil, the oil money, the derricks bowing, rising, bowing, rising, the gusher skyscrapers, the rush on the roads.

I feel the sand, the salinity, the limit, the edge—they’re in me, they’re in everyone.

Mortality is a mesh for sifting water and quartz.

All of humanity washed up on the beach, but I stayed a span later to dry. I wasn’t always bridges and tunnels, huddling under scaffolding in Midtown waiting for the storms to stop or for the stripclubs to be demolished—I wasn’t always NY.

No, no, I’m Jersey, sprung from the Shore. And that basin is contiguous—all tides are my territory.

Fridays, try to leave the city before noon, turnpike to parkway past the loading and lading, our own crude tanks and refinery towers, toward the barrens, the pinescrub ceding to reeds, marshgrass and weedy tails. Take any exit south of 114, and take it to the end, to the dunecrash, the salt scarp, the lick of the sea. Low tide uncovers the loss—snapped surfboards, ripped rafts and tubes, jetties black as if soaked in creosote through winter—high tide covers that loss again only to hazard the driftwood piers, threatening to flood the rentals masted up on their struts as the vacationers flee with summer—this was how I grew up.

Shoregirt.

Let me reel in that life, like a fishing haul, winching back the lines for concessions, cranking the queues to catch battered flounder, hook pizzas and gyros, burgers and franks, fries like bait, and funnelcake like tangled tackle. Or else, like a gull drops a bivalve to smash its shell, then swoops down to beak up the meat—my memories:

Beachfront, we had resorts too. Hotels and motels. A boatel. Then four blocks in, off the touristed strip, lotto bodegas and pawns. A decent taco drivethru. A gas station.

Another four blocks inland and it’s already the other side of the island, the bayside, where Shoregirt—a city in summer, a town in spring and fall, a village in winter—dwindles into wharves. At the top of the island, sandcastle timeshares, at the bottom, tenements teeming like conches on the verge of being outgrown, kept by chainlink fencing trawling fortybottles, sixpack rings, and butts. The ocean goes in, the ocean goes out, east to west. The boards, the promenade’s planks, curl to crash north to south.

Home was in the axis. Between the two waters, the open ocean, the closed clammed bay. My house, two floors of wind between the shingles. Giving directions, my mother would say, “By the gas station.”

Do I trust myself in this garden state? With the heart all rusted like an abandoned Mister Softee?

To Moms, I’d never be “a beach person.” At best I’d be “a shoebee”—which was as far out as she’d swim into slang: a local term for all the poor Polish Jews who hadn’t moved out of NY and married American, who’d come down the shore for the day with all their necessities—cold leftovers, balms—packed into a shoebox.

My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.

I’d be sneaking around, then, until my father quit his chemo, and Moms resolved to spend our final family time together by the wake down the street. I dressed in long sleeves long pants long face and brought along whatever I was reading bound in its municipal cellophane.

I’m recalling a stretch of grain as a single day—Dad yelling at me, “Stop that, enough with the words. I have one word for you—Atlantic, get in!”

Kaufman and Laufer were digging moats. The Tannenbaum sisters buried each other. The Gottlieb twins wore baseball mitts on their heads to guide their mother cutting their hair, then they had a catch with their father—not even, their stepfather—while Dad, sclerotic, was sputtering, “Get out there, bodysurf! Goddamn it, ride a wave!”

After that didn’t work, it was, “Here’s a dollar for the games”—the gambles a kid could take, the gambles not even a kid could take. Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole, or the forceps submerging in plush, always surfacing empty.

“I’m too old for that,” I said.

“Leave us, amuse yourself, enjoy.”

Moms said, “Just this once you’ll do this.”

I was 12.

Money meant that Dad had made mud in his diaper.

It must’ve been mortifying for him to have to use wide waddling Moms as a cane, hobbling him under the boardwalk, to change.

Though I was reading I didn’t comprehend all this until after.

“Enough with the book!” and Dad, churning, gathering his strength into swells, threw himself out of his chair and atop me, ripped the book from my hands—a sentence, in the middle of a sentence—and, limping through the froth, threw it to the Atlantic, far out, not far enough out, its pages splayed like an injured pigeon.

The book splashed, and surged, and a wave brought it in and so Dad, wailing, stooped to his soil, picked the book up and tossed it again, but another wave brought it in and again, until he fell by the tidemark—only for Moms to claw for the book before dragging him in.

The book before the husband. I cried the whole way home.

Out amid the spindrift tears, by boardwalk’s midpoint, between Eustasy and Orarian Terraces, there’s a bench: a slatty construction anchored in tar, with a plaque engraved on the back dedicating it to my father, 1924–1984, Yevarechecha Adonay, v’yishmerecha—the inscription translating as badly as a stranger’s dream, or sappy reminisce.

Dubai. If I would’ve drowned off the coast of my childhood, and my body had sunk to the bottom of the ocean as dead as my father’s, this is what that bottom would be like. Truly, the furthest shore. Where there were no poor, and certainly no shoebees. Just children, or the childish. Foreigners whose very foreignness was childish, demanding exorbitant juicy red orange yellow iced quenchers be traipsed to their wombish white caravan cabañas between sucks on their flaring cigars—they’d become adults again only when the bill came.

The Gulf sun does that, it reverts, regresses—unthinkable to be a thinking person amid all this light and heat.

The resort curved up, like a fin or wing, a dhow’s sail giving shadow: Eurotrash littering, their guts and asses and tits heaped rudely, extremities flung out to grip the towel tips, the corners of the plush horizon. The men spilled from their trunks. Hairy but soft, bodies the consistency of flaccid cock, sticky testicles lolling. The women were counterpoised, compensatory, lean, bronzed upgrade wife and mistress trophy, bones propping up the skin tent, shaylas for the bust and crotch, burqinis.

This was a private beach, then, and not cheap. Barbicans segregated it from the public beaches, which segregated themselves by gender—you have to pay for equality.

I stomped to an unclaimed chaiselounge, and ratcheted it back to an obtuse degree, sat, lay—washed up.

I tugged down the visor, repositioned the shades. More Tetration freebies, more items lettered with corporate glyph.

No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced. That basking was making me suspicious—and turning me into my father: Why don’t you diddle a racquet? go fly a kite?

I rummaged through my Tetote—also company complimentary, brimming with brandwater, brandpretzels and chips, “fresh” dates and figs, that commonest variety of nut called “mixed,” yogurt or no, that’s sunscreen—for my Tetbook.

But nothing else was getting written.

Just like it’s impossible to be around words without reading—try not to read the next words as they turn—it’s impossible to be around the naked without gawking.

As I closed my Tetbook on a .doc unsaved—it was replaced by another mirage. A bland white guy whiteguying up to me, in flipflops.

He was familiar, but I wasn’t sure how. He had this ambling and amiable coach demeanor, and the agglutinated fatness of the entire Eastern Division of pro football, American football. He was in slumpy trunks and a tanktop from a Beat Leukemia!! 5K race he definitely hadn’t run, and then the tanktop was off, and was over his head like a kaffiyeh. As he settled into the lounger beside mine, his flab extruded between the slats.

He grinned buckteeth and said, “Hiyo,” aggressively genial, content with his content. He produced an identical Tetbook from an identical Tetote, set it in what had to be his lap.

He showed me his, I showed him mine—or just went to remind myself whose was whose: I reopened and, angling my screen away from the glare, and from his glare, went toggling through files.

Kori Dienerowitz, in the copious flesh—Kor Memory—Tetration President, and presidentially sized. What’d prevented me from an immediate ID wasn’t the context, but the dread of him. He was all clicketyclackety, “Crap connection,” dug out the same tube of sunscreen. “Would I be interrupting you to ask a favor?”

“Yes?”

“I have a tough time reaching my back, my shoulders and neck—it’s fine, you can laugh, but would you mind giving me a slather? Strictly hetero, one patriot to another?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Don’t burn me.”

“You’re not going to lie stomach up the whole time?”

“You’re right—a true American would choose a side, but this is a matter of survival.”

“How?”

“Allegiances have changed—tides and times. We live at the pale, the fade of the unmelanized. The white man’s hegemony is over. The future belongs to those who tan, or those so dark they never tan.”

“Doesn’t that leave out the Asians?”

He closed and toted his unit, “If I have to try myself, I won’t be able to work—you have any idea how annoying it is, typing with slick fingers?”

I closed and stowed too, toed my tote closer, as Kor stretched over a shoulder and squirted a lump—a thick chunky load leaking down his back’s already medium rare hairless center and it wasn’t that I wanted to help him, it’s just that I couldn’t bear to witness the trickle. The sheer smooth presence was the goad, that dollop dribbling fusiform, taunting, luridly viscid.

No, not any secretion: the lotion was like a perspiring prophylactic, a condom he wanted me to tug over his pudging—and I tugged, I applied my fingers and thumb, put my wrists behind it. I rolled, twisted, pinched, slapped at his spinelessness, went for the deepest tissue—rubbing whiteness into whiteness as the glabrous pores absorbed, until I couldn’t tell what was zinc and what was just Caucasian.

“Obliged.”

I wiped my hands on the sand, the sand on my shorts, and mentally waded. Pretended to study the lifeguard’s bunker. No lifepreservers, no rowers, but gathered around the bunk the guards chattered into walkietalkies, prodded jellyfish with Kalashnikovs.

“Tell me,” Kor wasn’t asking, “has he mentioned me yet?”

“Who?”

“You’re the genealogist, you figure it out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Good, very good—we can trust you.”

“Who’s we?”

“You know—I’m one of the guys with the creditcard. What’s your beverage—seltzer?”

A beachboy abjected himself, and the order came, “Two big waters with bubbles—975, no, 976 bubbles in each.”

As he scampered I decided, “What brings you to the Emirates?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“We have similar interests,” he said, going through his Tetgear, putting on the shades, the visor.

Just what I needed, another clone. “I guess we have a thing or two in common.”

“Though you’d prefer vodka, and I’m sober. You smoke and I’d never. You’re about to be divorced, or are you trying to reconcile by telecuddle? Making passes at your lady by wifi?”

“Fuck off.”

“Fair enough.”

The resort was a blade that cast darkness to the dial, that clocked. But now there was no time. Now there was no shadow. It was noon, and that great incandescent beachball was directly above. Behind us, far on the elevated concourse, a crowd went about its static, like spray spumed from an unattuned screen. Men in robes, white terry. Women blacked between them. In front of us, the abyss lapped at the corniche, as if gorging out of boredom.

The beachboy brought the seltzers, and Kor tapped the charge away.

“So what’s the point?” to let him sip.

“I’m only trying to stress confidentiality, reminding you how important it is to keep whatever you’re doing to yourself.”

“Genealogy.”

“And just generally making myself available.”

“And you do this by intimidation?”

He burped, let him.

“I’ve been trying to convince the FTC that any protocol we develop that allows our devices to communicate with those of our competitors doesn’t have to allow those of our competitors to also communicate with ours, and so must be regarded as free and clear not just proprietary, but benevolent. I’m hiring an operations guy in Johannesburg, firing an operations girl in Belgrade, mediating a discrimination suit in Ottawa, monitoring coups throughout the Maghreb. China’s about to embargo my ass. Japan has two, count them, two, national intelligence agencies, and they don’t get along, and yet what I’m telling you is, I’ll make time for you.”

“I got it.”

“Tough for the both of us.”

“Yes.”

“Your wife, that actor—stupes.”

Then—I’d like to report an air raid, but no: it was the muezzin. Cutting us off, an ululating breeze.

It was the call to prayer, Dhuhr, and one person, but only one, turned over on his towel to face Mecca. Not east but west.

It’s disgusting, how I’ve been managed: the surveillance hut and passport, then this moment’s notice trip—and now to be lubbered up against an intertidal watercooler for office chitchat with Kori Dienerowitz.

That was the straw that broke this camel’s back, to get all local about it.

Roomed again, I opened my Tetbook for the nth time to ensure he hadn’t switcherooed his for mine, and it was automatic—it’s in my hands, or like how my hands breathe—I typed in the address.

Tetra—I didn’t even have to type it fully. The addy autocompleted: tetration.com.

I have, I admit, visited before. It knows me like a good conciergerie, knows me better than my wife.

I checked in on camels (no spitting for them, they “gleet,” and it’s the bactrians that have two backs to break—two humps—while dromedaries have only one), checked up on Rach, who she linked to, who linked to her and left comments and what their comments were and the comments on the comments—We’re always trying to improve our service, Tell us how we’re doing.

The latest post’s latest reaction wasn’t to Rach’s choice of curry joint (a takeout I’d found, which she was claiming she’d found), nor was it an opinion as to whether the best thing about breaking up was that now she was getting a pet (but which? vote below: guinea pig or fuzzy lop bunny, a chinchilla or mink?). Rather, it was just a fuzzy irrelevancy, a spamcurry bot sequitur or whatever, courtesy of username “KORDIE”:

“if yre not 2 busy genealogizing & if yre down 2 continue our convo im hosting recept 4 prince @ 20:00 bani yas suite”

Fuck you in your Bani Yas, Kor Dienerowitz.

But then without intending to I was tetrating that. The Bani Yas were “among the founding tribes of the trucial United Arab Emirates”—another window—I clicked, and kept clicking through the autoloading Burj site if only to keep from tetrating for sites that have never existed: what-do-you-know-about-my-sexual-history.com, which would tell me how intimate Kor had gotten with Rach’s raving, do-you-think-theres-a-pattern.biz, which would tell me whether Kor had been tracking me all along or was just taking a chance on this invitation—if-he-had-been-tracking-me.org might explain why, then-why-invite-me-to-realize-this-so-blatantly.org might explain itself (but there’s always the chance that I was totally misaligned and that somehow msging someone through their estranged spouse’s blog had become a newly permissible mode of communication).

It was the heat on me, it had me clicking through the Burj surveillance feeds: out_beachport, and toggling to where Kor and I had sat, where the sand had no traces of our sitting. Saw the waves. Heard the waves. Streamed the data. The number of miles (km) of beach outside, the number of miles (km) of beach inside. I clicked the in_beachport, to remember an experience I never—membered: the sand set firm under the tanning lights, a gunite wadingpool of water piped in and then waved into froth by machine.

Another toggle, to the four chlorinated lap pools beyond its negative edge, each the size of four Olympics, veritably.

Next, soothing myself, I connected to a tour of the golfcourses both outdoor and indoor, linked around the links. I splitscreened between them and the volley with a robot tennis pavilion. Cricketcam. Wicketcam. The sports snowglobe. Keyed in my room number to find out if I was eligible for discounts on any XXXtreme bungee/skydiving/kitesurfing/jetski/abseiling/assorted parasports “adventures” (I was).

I, who’d actually been in the lobby, could understand the lobby only now, immersing, submerging, and so discovering its décor with a diligence that in fleshlife would’ve required a dubious protracted loiter by the guest services station consulting reference texts on textile history and rubbing lasciviously against the drapery. I could explore the provenance of the provincial antiquities displayed in the perimeter encasements (one I thought was real was a repro, and another I thought was a repro was—guess).

The restaurants I’d never dine at, serving which cuisines at what hours, locations, with directions—with directions from within the resort.

Stats on all the rooms not mine, inclusive of their rates I’d never pay, stats also on their interior design with links to the sites of their interior designers, the furnishings’ brands listed with multicurrency pricing and even the option to “add to my cart” (delivery options, next page).

My experience was beyond the vicarious—I myself was autocompleted (I don’t recall getting dressed and out of the room).

The elevators were each the size of an Emirate, each with its own culture, weather, official tree (ebony paneling), official animal (ebony operator). I took a car from the same bank I’d been taking to Principal’s suite—but passed Principal’s, into the open.

The doors withdrew, as if in the presence of majesty, with every guest a royal, and I found myself in what can only be described as a purple passage: literally a passage of purple mirror etched into damask, tossing petals at my steps across a roofdeck—behind me shafty minarets cupolating with moon for the delectation of the sheikh on the jumbotrons—ahead of me the Gulf and its isles, dredged drifting replicas of all the earth’s landmasses, the Antarctic a sandbar of bulldozers and dumptrucks, Greenland a flurry of speedboat launches.

I took a stairwell of chrome and glass up to a helipad, beyond the roundel of which a tent was pitched and inside the tent was a room. A suite double the size of Principal’s, the standard layout zoomed to enlarge, deep into the fabric of night. Hircine, rough, and nothing to knock. The furnishment was all divans draped in antimacassary, pillow pyres obscuring the brocades beneath. A mixed bag showcase, then, as cluttered as Orientalism, as patchwork pastiched as the choice of whether to relish or critique it. Shelves held alcohol distilled by types, within types, by vsop, xo, cigs American and British.

The mess was hubbed by a vast mannered table, marquetried in fractals of pearl but inlaid with an unmohammadian felt swath for games with cards and dice. It was staffed, but also patronized, by cleancut young achievers.

They were natives, though, and so only nepotistically ambitious, twit sycophants attitudinized by privilege: twentyeightsomething, twentyeightandahalfsomething at the far end where the tentflaps were staked to expose the starlessness.

Kor motioned me to a propinquous tassled tuft. A Slav built like a pole flying a blackstriped bandeau swimsuit like a flag laid out the snifters and cohibas.

The natives were Arabizing and I didn’t understand—anything beyond, they were freaked by the Slav.

“This is Josh,” Kor said. “He’s a biographer, a writer—can any of you name any writers?”

Each member of the fraternity auditioned his own laugh.

“He didn’t mean just American,” I said. “Any Emiratis or Emiris or whatever? Anyone in Arabic?”

Nothing, so I named a few—a few poets, ghazal guys. That gal Scheherazade.

“And these,” Kor intervening, “these are the programmers we were hoping for.”

“Programmers?”

“Apparently we’re negotiating a server facility, and this is the local talent.”

“Is that why we’re here?”

“You tell me.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“Just us and the fauxgrammers—their English gets a D, and I’d bet even that’s better than their C++.”

“And now I’m apparently a biographer?”

Kor patted their cheeks like valets pet the sleek sides of cars, soothing assurance for a smooth ride: “You tell me.”

“Do they at least know how to update a résumé?”

Menus, rivetbound, were passed around, listing not the fare but the etiquette: everything would be sampled. Shareware soup, cybersalad of packetsniffed florettes dusted with a terabyte of truffles. Herbes de POP Palmiers. Tarte à l’Terminal et aux apps.

The fauxgrammers studied, breaking off their fastidiousness only with Kor’s foray: “Any of you familiar with orthogony? Orthonormality?”

They weren’t—they were brainless. They grinned.

“What about mengineering?” Kor pressed on. “Are any of you mengineers? Smellecom experience? B.O.-tech?”

I raised a glass and toasted Kor and the fauxgrammers gladhanded at their glasses to toast him too, or else to keep him from pouring them Krug Brut—only the best for them to abstain from. With his blubbering jollity and tonsure Kor now seemed like a wily friar brewer, like the mascot off a label for cider or ale.

“Did you know our programmers back in the States do all their consumption from a vendingmachine?” he said.

I said, “Did you know they’re also forcibly neutered?”

“Guess who else is staying at the Burj?”

The fauxgrammers kept murmuring, “Burj?”

Kor said that current guests included a girlgroup called Broadband, a catalogue raisonné of Biennial curators. The fauxgrammers were blanking.

“Jerry?” I said. “George? Elaine? Kramer? Omar Sharif? Batman?”

Half the fauxgrammers chinned excitably, “Spidey?”

Kor said, “Stupes.”

A whole roasted lamb—stuffed with lamb sausages, organ and glandbreads, dried fruits and currants, tomato/garlic/onion mush, the entirety cardamomated, corianderized, cumined, cloved—was brought out on a spit, danced around. The carcassbearers were women, further gorgeous bursting Slavs, just as anorexstretched tall as Rach but otherwise her bulimically inverted opposite—modified, with satellite dish breasts of an antennary perkiness. Globoid, global. When a woman’s loveliness was through and the Burj would cast her out to sea to drown into bait or chum anew, only her tits would survive her, nonbiodegradable pouches of saline floating loose to bob in saline, silicone buoys choking dolphins and sharks.

Some Ukes, some Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, Yugos, but the lingua prostituta was Russian. There were only a handful, at first—one for each of the fauxgrammers? leaving two for me given that Kor would go for the drove of slaveboy fauxgrammers themselves?—eventually over a dozen, as women I’d never been around offscreen and without masturbating unfolded their limbs in scopic sections like the stands that steadied amateur A/V equipment.

Their English was better than the fauxgrammers’, was better than any of our Russian—if anyone can ever speak universally, it’s whores: Sveta, Svetka, Svetichka, names getting diminutively girlish by the toast, the dregs upended. Throughout, their protuberances were immovable, their faces paused impassive. A despondent lover might jump from their cheekbones, noosing ropes of waistlength straight hair peroxidized or crude black dyed or both. Sharp stilettos under the vexillological twosies, in the national colors: Abbasid black, Umayyad white, Fatimid green, red spilled of al-Andalus—each piece of each twopiece no bigger than a napkin, stained and tenting in my lap.

Eastern females: there’s something to be said of them definitively and I’ll try for it, allowing the fauxgrammers to get done with dessert, allowing Kor and myself our postprandial brandies—Cognac, Armagnac, liqueurs of French cantons extant only in the cartographies of marketing—to refuse coffee for tea, in homage to our waitstaff.

Chai, chaichick—what among the Arabs has to be cultivated, among the female Slavs grows wild: when young they steep the testicular bag in their tight sugared mouths, when old they turn bitter, sour, take on the silhouettes of rusty samovars, and wrinkle from smoking—as if they stubbed out their cigs on their foreheads—as if, whenever they weren’t drinking their tea, they set their glasses atop their chins to leave behind tepid impressions.

I knew some women like this, knew how to resist them especially, women who with the fall of communism, went west—they were Aaron’s obsession. He had a girl from Brighton, a girl from Forest Hills—give him one each from Staten Island and the Bronx, if just to preserve a sense of socialist equity among the boroughs. Long drives to Long Island, detours into metro NJ, compulsive, he was always ferrying them to Whitehall, ferrying them back to their parents’ apartments slummed so far out in the city that their transit stops were the train muster yards and the bus maintenance lots, returning them nervous, flustered because just fucked, in the Saab convertible fucked, to do mealtime with the folks. Immigrant families, emigrant families, codependent, claustral—Jewish girls unable to make it through dates without their mothers calling, or without expecting Aar to father their children.

They’d invite him up: for bruisey melon and disemboweling kvass, to sit on the sectional en familie and peruse the photoalbums scattered (this is Odessa, this is Kiev, the future mother inlaw, the future father inlaw, as kids), to give a word in Yiddish to the grandparents farting the stripes off their tracksuits in the corner, farschimmelt—Aar always halfway between the parents and grandparents in age—he’d oblige but never return.

The Slav slaves strutting around this aerie harem, this high houri lounge, were different. At the least the one on my lap was. Olya. It’s not just that she wasn’t Semitic, it’s that she wasn’t even Slav, or not fully. She had that Asiatic horde hybridity, that Tatar sauce Mongolic mix. Kazakh, Uzbek. Or from one of the randomer stans where feminine training included not just cooking and cleaning but how to put on a condom with the mouth. Olya, though that was just a conjecture: taut, tensile, cold in her bones, tempered ice, her back blades so severe they sliced against my face, shaving off what stubble I’d grown since—last I’d shaved? today or yesterday?—her ass like a heel crushing my crotch, as two men entered the tent, like they owned the place, or were about to burn it down.

Spend enough time with the überrich and spotting the bodyguard species becomes a cinch—they’re almost physically inhuman: the legs of a police thoroughbred, the torso of a firetruck, the arms of a steroidal ape, steeringwheel heads set on no appreciable necks—noctivagant, and foul of mood.

There are two ways these specimens dress for the wild: one is to differentiate themselves from the party they’re supposed to protect, while the other’s to blend with him or her, choosing camouflage similar or same. Designer pelts. Couture pelage. Pistols by Glock.

The latter’s the classier adaptation—Jesus and Feel, a floor below, dressed down because Principal dressed down, presenting a uniform exterior of exclusive brandwear.

But these two had opted for the former. They were gangstafied as turf enemies, one cripped in blue doorag, blue puffy over blue beater and blue jeans slung to show the blue briefs between, the other blooded in red flatbrim, red puffy over red soccer jersey and matching shorts as long as pants, all for a counterfeit team—the San Francisco 94ers.

Nothing made less sense than the duffelsized puffies—nothing made more, when the crip punched a console and the blood kicked a vent, activating the AC.

The tent whirred, Olya’s areolas poked.

The gangbangers had bags from the dutyfree, tokens to distribute. They hulked around the table, handing each fauxgrammer a filigreed manacle of a watch in the souk dreck style, oudh in a glass spritzer blown into the borders of the UAE, both labeled “un souvenir pour votre femme/ein Souvenir für Ihre Frau.” Also a trackpad. In the style of a Bedouin rug replete with nonslip rubber backing.

As they went dexter, another man made the rounds sinister—the bodyguards’ body, their charge.

I hadn’t noticed his entrance, and not because I was so taken with my—what was it? an electrophoretic shatterproof Sinai tablet?

The olive beret, plumped as if to give him height, just made him even slighter, twee. A bad narco’s crinkled white linen suit became, in the climatized bluster, inappropriately lightweight. Sockless. In little tiny loafers.

He had a temperature problem, obviously. There was a seethe in his greetings he didn’t intend. He sweated, dousing each obeisance. One kiss to one cheek in America, one to each cheek in Europe, whereas in the Emirates, or just to him, it was a threepeat, with a return to the cheek of origin.