by Joshua Cohen
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?”
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“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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The shift to Palo Alto was—I’m already regretting this—tectonic.
Not because there was this apparently extremely minor earthquake or tremor just as my flight was being cleared for landing and we were delayed, an hour, hovering, two hours—the last time I fly commercial—nor because all my typical eastern negativity toward the West always threatens to break and chunk and pile up into violent incoherence.
Rather I’m talking a totally personal, emotional rupture. Coming to the other coast, single, oneway, felt like a permanent upheaval.
Also, I was all sorts of pilly.
I have what’s called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.
The livery smartcar had a partition between me and what must’ve been a driver, but the switches just lowered the windows and a platelet of GPS. Our destination was La Trovita Lando, which I took for a city, or for a neighborhood. It was a slough through brackish marshes, a ping at a gate, and we stopped. And I stepped out into the snaring web of a twentynothing woman, covered with spidery henna, her hands just slobbered with cobs—spinning me through the grounds to a lavish stucco cottage, unlocking the door, handing me the key, then sticking around spraddled in the doorway, one hairy armpit aired by the jamb.
I’m proud of myself for not mentioning until now that she was Asian. She was. Now hatless. Braless vest and culottes.
“It was you on the phone?”
Nothing.
“Or at the library—but isn’t there a library closer to home? Like in your lap or whatever?”
Or in her vest. She took from its midzip pouch the house pda, a Tetheld.
“Your guestwork is paltoguest0014,” she said. “For access you will have to create a uname/pword, each a min of eight alphanumerics, the pword to contain a symbol and CAP.”
“I’ll try,” taking the Tetheld from her, klutzing the keying, creating both out of my former accounts.
Her Tetheld informed: that uname is not available, and I said, “That uname is not available,” and she said, “What does it suggest? Can you follow the prompt?”
It suggested Jcohen19712, which was also to become my email.
I chose the dollarsign to close my pword—$ finishing what’d been my pword for all.
In other accommodations the bellhop points for his tip to the thermostat, or offers to lead you up the lilypad slates toward the saunas, but here the orientation was only: how to get online.
She took back her Tetheld, “We have been instructed to apologize. Today will be busy.”
“It will? What’s the schedule?”
“Party prep. Invasion and occupation. Caterers. Florists. Amusements. Petting zoo.”
“I don’t understand—party for what?”
The face she purged was disgusted.
“His birthday?”
“His?”
Principal’s, she informed me as she flicked, finalized my account. His 40th, tomorrow.
Was I supposed to have mindread? or have been previously briefed?
She had an @ bud pierced above her lip. Her Tetheld shook, “You are affirmed.”
“Confirmed?”
“Affirmative.”
“Confirmative?”
She buttoned again, “May we have a moment with your computer?”
My computer—two years old? two generations and an operating system defunct? A present from Rach from my own birthday past, a generous provocation to earn. As I dug through my bag for my laptop, I considered the immediate gift politics—what to give a quadragenarian who has everything? besides donating to a favorite cause? Besides myself, I mean.
“We have been instructed to transfer everything—your .docs, your contacts—all will be the same.”
“Why?”
“There is a requisition order.”
“Requisitioning what?”
“A new laptop.”
She left, I pottered, lasers raved across the windows and mariachis tuned. I’d only just unpacked and was resting on the cot when there was a knock at the door, and without me responding she entered, “We are sorry for keeping you waiting, Mr. Cohen.”
I took the slab from her, “Thank you, Miss?”
“You are welcome, Mr. Cohen.”
“Miss?”
“Myung.”
She turned to go so I went grasping: “It’s smaller.”
“.72″ / 1.8 cm × 12″ / 30.4 cm, × 8.2″ / 20.8 cm the depth.”
“Lighter too.”
“2.4 lbs / 1.08 kg.”
“Brand?” because none was evident.
“Tetbook prototype.”
“You’ve moved into computers?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Prototype.”
Drop it, rather—don’t, “But everything’s still on it?”
“Everything.”
“You sure?”
“Even the apps you will never use are on it.”
“Appreciated—but where’s my old unit?”
“Excuse me?”
“Larger, heavier? My oldie?”
That flustered. “Most guests do not want theirs back.”
“Most everyone hasn’t a clue what they want.”
“Please,” resetting herself, “you are also completely backed up to servers. Clouded. Nubified. Nephed. Your files are now protected online. Accessible to your account only.”
“Jcohen19712 then my password?”
“Precisely. If that is what it is, precisely.”
“So this is mine to keep?”
“All yours.”
“As for the oldster?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve trashed it already, haven’t you?”
“Do not worry. We recycle.”
It was only when my deliverer had departed, when I was alone with this foldable tablet where all my files, or copies, were nestled nicely again, or anew, into folders, that I realized just how much they had the goods on me, how much intel was available on my preferences, vice. I had no secret, I was no secret, to be Principal’s guest was to have nowhere to hide—not just the laptop but, beyond the panes, the surveillance outside, the tall strong stalks of spyquip planted amid the birch and cedar, the sophisticated growths of recognizant CCTV, efflorescing through my bungalow’s peephole, getting tangled in the eaves. I bawled myself out, got cotted, covered my face with the dresser’s doily and scrolled schiztic for what to disclaim, for which self to accuse of what inclination: the offlabel oxycodone and hydrocodone ordered scriptless from British Columbia, the minoxidil reliance legal though mortifying, all that screengrab analingus. Meanwhile, vans and trucks were offloading dusk—a carousel clattered from a trailer, ferris wheel assembly clamor, a log flume hosed, trampolines inflated.
Waiting to be collected by dark. Waiting mopey for Myung. As the helicopters chopped my sleeping into naps. As the gusts balmed in chatter between the blinds.
Finally I got up, showered and shaved and toweled over to my wheeliebag to formally decide (wrinkled old City Hall ceremony suit? wrinkled older bookparty suit?), ineluctably jeansed it below a tshirt Rach’d gotten me from the Mark Twain House in Connecticut: black, “Mark This Twain” in graffiti white, an arrow pointing dickward.
My presence aside, I still hadn’t come up with anything as tribute—again, what do you get the Founder of everything? besides flattery? Beautiful. It was just beautiful. The trail to Principal’s back 40 acreage had been redcarpeted, a door policy was in effect.
At trail’s terminus was a cupreous voluptuous Chicana. The thing in her hand must’ve been an unreleased Tetheld, judging by how it disturbed attendees into fus
sing with their own models, noting equivalencies, compatibilities, breathing screens and wiping them clean.
The Tethelds were scanned—touchless mating of machines—the attendees were admitted, returned their devices to their pockets, patting, reassuring: like it was the last time they’d make love to a spouse they’d have to abandon.
The invites were surveys, apparently—digi.
Waiting for approval, I recognized: the chairman/cofounder of America’s most popular eTailer, a crowd theory academic from UC Berkeley, the COO of a premier iConometry site, a venture capitalist/immediate past California state controller, a Congressperson who’d been advocating for the establishment of a Department of Online (DO) within the next president’s cabinet (the president of the United States), and then—far in the front, past cyberpunkadelic bodimodis, transdermally implanted proboscideans, vulcan jedis with diversified portfolios and freshly filed teeth—was the alternative to the alternatives, was Finnity.
I wanted to sign off, I wanted to sign out—whichever had the most hits, or provided the least traceable exit.
Which flight had he been on? the red eye or brown nose? The rest of him was a ruddy blond—and perfectly unfolded, with not an extraneous crease—tweeded like a lordly hunter.
I might’ve guessed: Finn never missed parties—he would’ve hitched if he’d had to.
He scanned, was admitted, indifferently seamless, but because I didn’t have a pda or even a rotary dragging an oinker’s cord all the way from NY, the Chicana guided me under the privacy of a willow, “I’ll have to take this actinally.”
“Take what?”
“Your dietary requirements,” clicking her screen. “So: vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, lactovo, or macrobiotic?”
“Are you serious?” but as her thumbs huddled I answered myself, “I’m an omnivore.”
“Now do you mind eating out of the Greater Bay? Or do you insist on zipsourcing—94/95000s?”
“Anything goes.”
“Any allergies?”
“Just to being interrogated.”