Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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Or four, with a kiss to Olya’s scalp—he was leaning so close to me it would count as a hug in any culture.

Everyone was standing but me—Olya was standing, preventing me—everyone had bowed.

Kor, minister of whores—man with tricks up his portfolio—sunk so low his gut scraped crumbs off the table.

“Salam alaykum.”

“Wa alaykum salam.”

A director’s sling was produced, hinged out for the sitting—it was the highest chair around, and the fauxgrammers lumped around as he spastically scaled it.

“What do you say, Prince?” Kor asked. “How’s my Arabic?”

“It’s like we grew up together, quite,” the prince said. “Oxbridge? Le Rosey?”

Kor laughed.

“And my IT Emiris,” the prince went on, “how progresses their English pronouncement?”

I chewed a cohiba. “Quite.”

The prince frowned and Kor to the rescue, “If you’re just as generous at hosting servers as you are at hosting us, we might have ourselves a deal.”

“I am chuffed to be considered. To conduct this facility—this cluster.” Then he Arabized and the Emiris blushed into full cups. Zam-Zam colas, Mountain Dews.

What I knew at the time: there was a king, and the king had sons, and so there was a line, but not like of foaming techies camped outside select retailers just to overpay for an undertested Tetheld 4. Rather a line that stretched for eternities, for grudges—throneward.

I took this prince and his presence at this function to communicate the succession: the son at the head of the pipeline would handle the oil, the next son would handle the gas, the son after that the shipping, and only the next after that would get online—and if that’s who he was, he could afford, perhaps, to act princely—depraved.

His protection placed before him a heavy cutcrystal decanter, poured him a tumbler he gulped clear down—either a louchey anisette or a malarial water. I prayed for water.

Emirati royalty, what could I know: his father was the sheikh, or one of the sheikh’s brothers, whether the crown prince or another. He himself might’ve been the son crowned with a PhD, administering the free trade zones in Fujairah and Sharjah, or the son with a MEcon, or MEng, developing a transhub in Ajman. Or he’d been the prodigal abroad, who’d tried to stick it to every busted ugly daughter of the 20th Earl of Diddlesex, before being recalled and betrothed to a Qatari sheikha who’d never had a wax. Or the son accused of a homicide that became a suicide only when the bank transfer went through. Or the cerebrally defective son still favored over his sisters, who were mere baubles like their mothers. Like all their mothers, who, if not sisters to one another, were otherwise related.

He might’ve been any of them, or none. He had some of that sheikhy jumbotron to him—some of that lizard snout, but then lizards are all snout—darting, sensing.

He said, “I trust my Burj you find sufficient in terms of modcons, nothing dodgy.”

I almost expected a tongueflick, a forked tongue flick, when his protection served his dinner.

Goblet refilled and drained again.

I said, “To be honest, Prince, I’ve been having trouble accessing certain sites.”

“Which?”

“American sites, mostly. Politics, mostly.”

“Only such?”

“Only.”

“Cheeky,” the prince said and then Arabized and the fauxgrammers chuckled.

Kor tried to join them but just showed teeth.

The prince asked, “So what politics have you been craving? I will do everything I can to accommodate requests.”

“Nothing in particular—just the sense that I’m not blocked, is all.”

“You are saying you are blocked—at the Burj? Or in all the Emirates?”

“Forget it.”

“I will not. This is unacceptable. What is it you lack? Certainly not cunt?”

“What?”

“Cunt—or do you prefer to pleasure yourself alone?”

“I don’t follow, Prince.”

“Bollocks. You have the real right here—right now—but all you crave is fake?”

“I don’t, Prince.”

“You Americans always think you have such progress—you think that you are libertized and the Emirates are not? That the Emirates censor and you do not? Wankers. What you have to search for online in your country, in my country is already found.”

Kor said, “He’s sorry,” and then he said to me, “Apologize.”

“For what?”

The prince Arabized to Olya, who genuflected and leched away from me, to lift his dinner’s cloche.

What was exposed: two rawly moist strips of bacon as skimpy as the two elastic strips that gripped her, and as she reached French tips out to grab one, the prince smacked her hand, and Olya shivered, flushed baconcolored, and the fauxgrammers gasped.

Kor said, “What?”

The prince said, “This is not for her—she must keep her figure.”

Kor said, “Forgive us, Prince.”

Then the prince pointed at me, “Here, you have the honor of tasting. Tell me it is good, tell me it is salty.”

“If you please, Prince, I’d rather not.”

“Do not worry, you cannot botch this. Tell me how scrummy it is—I can smell it.”

“Taste it yourself,” just a suggestion.

“But this honor is yours—it might be poisoned.”

“So feed it to your thugs.”

“They eat what I tell them to. Animals must not eat other animals.”

“Go ahead, enjoy.”

“You.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are a Jewish—you must be.”

“And you’re Muslim—pork isn’t for you.”

“So I am accurate—you are a Jewish—but not religious? Is it for religion that you refuse?”

“No, not that, I just don’t like being coerced. I don’t like having my face rubbed in another man’s dinner.”

“But this is soy, this is curd, imitation.”

“So we shouldn’t have a problem.”

“We should not,” and he unsheathed a dagger—hilt all bedizened with precious twinklings—cut the fake meats in half, stabbed each slice into his mouth, then set the glistering blade pseudogristled on the table.

“A bad habit from abroad,” he said. “All my education it was bacon, hams, and sausages, but here it is back to the soy. Do you not think, Jewish, that religions are quite like soy, like tofu? You let the good natural essence curdle, until what is left is without taste, a substitute?”

“Prince, how can I argue?”

“You are a Jewish, yes, but also of Israel?”

Kor said, “He’s not, Prince.”

I interrupted, “Fuck—you’re Kori fucking Dienerowitz. And his boss just below us is also a Jew.”

The prince thumbed at his neck.

Kor said, “But only my father’s a Jew—so technically I’m not.”

The prince turned and groped Olya, who’d been leaning on his chairback.

“Israel,” he said. “Jewish, indulge me.”

“I won’t,” I crossed my arms, my personal cutlery.

“Indulge me and say this woman is Israel—can we agree? Foot to head, this woman, Israel, yes?”

“Isn’t that demeaning?”

“According to who demeaning? Later you will fuck her and that will be demeaning but now she serves a purpose.”

“Demeaning to fucking Israel too, I meant.”

“Negev to Golan—how would you distribute?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You want me to cut?” again he brandished the dagger.

“Enough.”

“Do you want me to cut her? Be serious.”

“I don’t know—I’d probably give her away, all of her, you can always find a new one.”

“No, you cannot, this is the rub. This is the only one we both want, we both want her whole. What do we do? What say the Israelis?”

“We share?”

Olya, who understood I’d say about half—cut, divided in her comprehensions—trembled.

“I am the host and you are the guest, it is my hospitality so it is you tonight and me tomorrow? Or we try to coexist, bugger her at the same time the two of us?”

“We could. But I think we should let her off. A woman isn’t land. Affections aren’t an issue of territory.”

“They are the only territory. The Israelis think this. They say here, the Jewishes take the knocker tits and holes, the cunt and bum, the oases. And here, the elbow, the shoulder, the knee—my arse—the Arabs take the desert, quite.”

“You said Jews—and it’s not Arabs, it’s Palestinians.”

“The same—or not even the knees, but the more rubbish parts, the pinkie or thumb, the mingy hair, the cropless arid cellulite portion—that is what you do.”

“Not what I do.”

“But what say the Arabs?”

“The Palestinians.”

“We accept, we compromise—we say have the holes, the reproductives, have it all foot to head, even the face, just leave us with the navel.”

“The face you hide under veils because you’re too weak to resist?”

“The face we conceal out of respect.”

“And you fuck instead the Russians?”

“And we fuck instead the Russians—and we take our electronics from Asia, our online from America. We agree, assent, assure bloody right we will be your ally against terror, bloody right we will cooperate with your trade agreements, your military drones—bloody right all your energy needs will be met, even though bloody right all your foreign debt obligations will never be met—bloody right a stable industry because bloody right a stable government.”

“Stable because oppressive, Prince—stable because allowed to be.”

“Jewish, we are not Africa. Arabs are European—we believe in bargaining—we haggle.”

“Prince, yours is a theocracy criticizing a republic, a monarchy critiquing a democracy. Anyway, arguing the Emirates is different from arguing Jerusalem.”

“But it is not—regardless of our government you would treat us the same, it is politically expedient. If six million Emiris suddenly settled your America, policy would change in a snap.”

“I’m not convinced.”

“You are already convinced—you came from a failing empire to this desert, only to take advantage of us, quite—then it is back home to a second mortgage and the one woman marriage.”

“Not for me.”

“But just like you wank online and never touch, you preach a freedom you never practice. Your libertization is a fiction, which must be maintained so that particular pressures can be exerted upon particular regimes, in order to deprive them of their resources. What Israel does, what Jewishes have always done, is just perpetuate this lie. In the media especially. This falsehood is not just your god but also your idol. You are enslaved to it, and so you enslave us too.”

The prince, still holding Olya, stood, shoved her to the floor, where she huddled, heaved.

The weapon’s sharpness outglinting its jewels.

He wasn’t going to cut her empty head off, he didn’t have that in him, though he might’ve been capable of severing a toe. Instead, abruptly, he sheathed the dagger, and staggered out, his thuggery trudging behind him.^†

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† This dagger would be the very last thing I’d tetrate—later, in Berlin, on an overcast noon at the Staatsbibliothek (library). Everything following this note was written entirely from my head, entirely out of what I know and think and saw and heard, without any technological verification, or direction. Any slips are solely my own. Correx and/or corrigenda may be sent but not received. The prince’s dagger was a khanjar, a scythey, severely curved—verging-on-90°-curved—weapon, reminiscent of a penis at rest. Khanjarha (the plural) are carried “in a[n] ivory or leather scabbard and decorated with jewel, gold, silver, etc., etc., worn on a belt similar[ly] decorated.” While the hilts of the most precious specimens are of rhinoceros horn, more common hilts are of sandalwood or marble. Design variations—hilt type, # of rings attaching scabbard to belt—denote different privileges enjoyed by the wearer. Though the steel used to fashion the blade was traditionally Yemeni, its ornamental silver was obtained, at the turn of last century, by melting down thalers, a popular bullion issue of Austro-Hungary. The prince’s model was gold or heavily gilded, its hilt definitely horny.

Insomnia, nausea.

Shit.

–I’ve been having some name grief—I don’t mean with my homonym, or Tetwin, but with the aliases we’ve been registered under. All standard operating procedure, of course, and it was fun though somewhat defamiliarizing initially to be calling down to the reception desks and have them say, “Fine day, Mr. Immermann,” or, “Bonsoir, M. Yaarsky.” Though it’s not obvious that any of this duplicity would be effective for celebrities of the first results page rank, who if they’re staying anywhere, even at the Burj, would certainly be noticed by employees, and then it’s just a matter of when the tip’s called in, to the press crews, or the protestors. It seems, then, that the only guests for whom this handling would make sense wouldn’t be recognizable by face, but only by name: the primeval way of being famous.

–An indication of the failure of our aliases is that neither Jesus nor Feel can keep them straight, checking Principal in under what mine was last, and checking me in under what’d been Principal’s (the ultimate indication is that none of this fooled Kor). Myung’s the one who picks them, the aliases, and so she’s the one to ping as to whether I’d become “Moises Binder,” meaning that Principal was “Chaim Apt.”

Think back to the time my name was still mine, all those aughts ago: 1999. Think of my feelings, as online associated me with people with whom I shared that name, and yet nothing else. Idempotent nomials, mutual onomasticators, whose lives would otherwise never have disappointed or cheered (me), or even been counted (against mine). I’ve spent my whole entire virtual experience subordinate to Principal, reloading my name as it became his, reloading it into becoming his—but it’s only now that I can regret my collaboration: that the more I clicked on him, the more he became me and I became nobody.

It’s no neat psych trick to explain why I’m reliving this now—the anticipations, the anxieties, all the dreamshit especially—with the traveling I’m doing, the traveling for a book, interviewing again, gathering materials.

This was in Poland, fall/winter 1999, and I was driving, for research, not lost, asking in Krasnystaw how to get to Piaski, asking in Piaski how to get to Krasnystaw, asking this goitrous streetsweeper for directions to whichever town I’d just left only to calm her hostile claim that the destination I was originally asking for never existed: the Trawniki concentration camp, which I was sure was midway between them, Krasnystaw, Piaski. But the only thing between them was a sign for the highway to Chełm, and on my last pass through, as the road narrowed to a toppled chimney of darkness, I turned, and found myself trapped by the snuffed timber and thatch of what might’ve been a granary, and I stopped and got out to piss.

I dropped trou in the weeds, above a septic depression rimmed by moon and the headlights of my rental Daewoo. Just as I unleashed my stream I noticed the stones, I was pissing on the stones, a cemetery of nubby slabs askew and overgrown, desecrated by the weather or Poles, and just ahead was my own, it was my gravestone, rather it was a sandstone marker belonging to Yehoshuah ben David Ha-Cohen, whose dates had been abrased yearless though the rest was still legible, Adar 14–Tevet 4. This wasn’t just my Hebrew name, but also the deathday was the same as my birthday by the Hebrew calendar. By the time I’d made the calculations I was trickling. Zipping, buttoning up. Yiddish might have a word for “both strange and expected,” or German, “expectedly strange”: the banality of names, the banality of numbers (I went to make a rubbing but it didn’t take) (and my camera’s flash was broken).

Archaeology—that’s what I’m doing in the Emirates—what else is there to do in the desert? except excavate through bone and bed, toward a terminal stratum, an inaccessible anticline depth? I won’t fully love a woman unless I’ve done this, unless I’ve dug between her legs. A site. I have to wave my spade around seeking the who and where and when of her. Who was here, or there. First, last, longest, shortest. The Chaldeans? The Sumerians or Akkadians, Assyrians or Babylonians? One of the Canaanite tribes, like the Moabites? Or just a bluechip Jewish Philistine from Central Park West?

This was my field—I’d fuck someone new, some casual bar score from Barnard, or The Factchecker for Bloomberg News, who held that title for an unprecedented 1994–98, and the moment I was finished, with her lying next to me unsatisfied or in the bathroom already flushing and clitting off, I’d be asking about her partners, asking what she liked, what she didn’t, and if she’d answer at all it’d be abashedly—but still I’d press, barter, bribe, shovel atop my own carnalities, overplaying myself until my mid-20s, downplaying intensively by 30, not because I was so experienced, just wiser. But then by that age my women were too, and they understood and manipulated my appetite. Giving me the grittiest on exactly precisely how many men they’d fucked before me, how many times and in what locations for what durations, simultaneously, or separately, ages, races, physiques, with what appendage sizes in which positions in which orifices—was it good? who was better? grand total of orgasms? their intensities? and whatever their pasts, I’d suffer through them, until I’d find the strength to live up to them.

Which was the thing with Rach—with her I dug harder than ever, and turned up all of what? Comedy club stubs from dates she’d had with retirement age tax lawyers and radiologists, a taxi receipt in return from a tryst with her graymaned counterpart at a competing agency, the baggy condom of a dentist and family friend.

They treated her like an equal, that’s what she swore—that’s the truth of it. Just like everything she writes for her campaigns is true—it has to be. The best electronics won’t obsolesce with their production. The top refrigerator/freezers won’t expire before the eggs inside them. The acclaimed bouncy bath toy will never suffocate a child. Rach, of the monochrome suits, the locavore dairies and cauline greens, the classes in bhangra, hatha yoga, and the Audi whose space rented for twice my office—her talent was for enthusiasm, with a specialty in revisionism, in her men as in her ads, and if she didn’t find the explanations she was after, up at a client’s HQ, or down in its labs, in the market testings, or at the brandjob rounds of her fellow creatives, she didn’t hesitate to invent.

History has always privileged the civilization—shunning nomadism, tribalism, all the existential bachelorhoods.

A people’s legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn’t a relationship unless it’s left behind its trash.

Knives, forks of diverse tines, spoons, a ladle. Shards, sherds—from the same or different pots? did this dish catch the spray of human sacrifice or was it used to prepare a corny gruel (I had similar quandaries at the fancier spots in London and Paris)?

Impossible to grasp the development of the handle: that improvement that made handheld blades of basalt, which before had cut only the closest things, now cut violently at a distance, as axes, spears, and arrows—the handle, the innovation that made vessels move. Impossible to come to grips with how its perfectability endures: the wheel becoming the halfwheel of the handle? metaphorized into the handle that posts and chats, gropes virtually?

In that sense, women, vessile women, posed a threat.

The wife I was supposed to fuck, but had no desire to fuck, had no handles (ancient, modern), whereas the nonwife I wasn’t supposed to fuck, but had this uncontrollable desire to fuck immediately in one of the Met’s least frequented galleries—#547 for the bergère, the #400s of Mesopotamia, rattling the ewers in American Wing parlor interiors—had an abundance of handles: she had a waist and clefts, posterior juts, a jug’s taper beneath the jugs, and it was death to decide which to hold, and how (very ancient, very modern).

Once Lana wrote an essay for an exhibition catalog, which means I helped, inhibited. The show concerned an archaeological controversy, and presented a pair of prehistoric remains from Chile’s Atacama found intact, but evincing no sign, or no “evident sign,” as we phrased it, “of having been purposefully mummified or otherwise preserved.”

The remains were of a man and wife, a couple, presumably, and, if so, their serene condition was doubly inexplicable. Some scholars pointed to the geochemical composition of the quebrada cavern they’d been found in/buried in, something to do with salts. Others pointed to the holes bored into their skulls, as being too alike to have been the cause of their deaths, and to the fragments of hair found in the brain cavity of the male, which defied all tests until one finally identified them as a llama’s. Our walltext, at least, had no agenda—it just stated the case, the state of the research, the arguments for and against intentionality, cagey.

My own Pharaonic entombment, a Caliph Suite at the Burj:

–clothing, the basics concierged in Paris from American Apparel, from London an outrageous suit in barcode gingham, an albion basketweave shirt, and a tie frauding me in the regimental colors of the First Royal Dragoons, Savile Row.

–a cache of Europorn, bilingual and lesbically bisexual, purchased in London and Paris (Great Windmill & Brewer, Soho, Rue des Archives, Fourth Arrond.), after Aar had emailed a reminder that the Emirates curtailed access to certain niche haunts online, which didn’t stop me from tempting that access: trying workarounds, proxy IPs, any way to evade (any way not to consult Principal).

–purchased from the dutyfree, four cartons of cigs (Camel Lights), and a bottle each of scotch, whiskey, and vodka (I’ll identify the vodka, which was Gorbachev, which was horrid), after Cal had emailed that the Arabs who’d invented it—al-Cohol—now sell it only to foreigners, not in bottles but by the bankrupting glass.

–one pill left in the bottle of Ativan, a half going to gauze in the bottle of Xanax (the tradenames for lorazepam and alprazolam, which remind me of genie or djinni incantations, abracadabra, alakazam).

–a candybar, put on a creditcard, a receipt for a $6 candybar (Toblerone the size of an alpenhorn).

–two pairs of shoes, dressy and less, an unmatched aquasock crept in, Dad’s watch.

–a wallet I haven’t much used, keys to an apartment I’ll never use: W. 92nd 2 br/ba, prewar/newly renovated, move-in condition, spare room prefurnished with a crib and daubed in a pink that insists on not just a baby but a girl, even as Broadway dawn and Hudson dusk ensanguines.

–travelbag with matching toiletrykit, which were wedding presents? from whom?

–Tetbook, have to mention the Tetbook.

–two books besides the Koran.

I’d noticed when heading beachward—copies are given away in the lobby for gratis. I want to hoard heaps of these, cairns and dolmens of these—I want to die in this facility wrapped in a rabbinic beard as quilly soft as this duvet so that when Security (dial 0) slams down the door I’ll be buried under this monument: 1,001 Korans.

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