by Joshua Cohen
I used one of the quadrants to ash in. I wouldn’t have minded a beeeeeeeer.
“Go to your Tetbook, the desktop, open the folder Dossier.”
The only new folder, “Dosser?”
“There is no i?”
“Guess not.”
It contained: Tetration site txt, public domain .docs, junk. But then also internal reports. Personnel intel. Official Tetration capsule bios of its prez, its vps of VP (Various Projects), Finance, Futurity/Devo.
Quarterly assessments. Performance reviews with nothing smeared out. How many files? More than scrollable—inscrollable?
Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning’s identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified—located elsewhere. Creation stuff, cosmology, a founding myth, lore of origin: light separated from darkness, the wind inseminating the aether—the earth is balanced on the back of an elephant, or held by angels standing on the shell of a turtle—but what was that turtle standing on? was it just tortoise on tortoise forever?
An apple plunging from a tree and inventing gravity, volume determined by water displaced from Antiquity’s jacuzzi, a dream about the structure of the solar system being the structure of the atom, a dream about a snake consuming its own tail being the ring structure of the molecule benzene, relativity conceived in a tram as it passed a clocktower in Bern, coordinate geometry measured by the relationship of a flitting fly and the floor, ceiling, walls of some sordid dorm in Utrecht? or Leiden? A suburban garage with Dad’s camper parked out in the driveway—make room for the racks, clear the toolbench for the switches. A grant or degree. A mentor, a mother.
I took it as my job to discern something similar—to search in the way www.searching couldn’t, to find in the way www.finding couldn’t—which is to say, to conceive, make it up.
Like say I’m talking to myself—how to substantiate the claim? how can anyone but the author authenticate? I had no way of corroborating whether it was or wasn’t Principal, talking. His feed could’ve been recorded in Myanmar, in Burma, prerecorded in Siam, postproduced in Thailand, he could’ve been coming to me live but two hours behind, eight hours ahead, on whichever side of excruciation’s meridian, 36 TbPS streaming straight from the 36th century.
From then on we met constantly, continuously. I questioned, I didn’t. Answers were dirigent, direct. This was our background, the setting of scene: the hut monitor displayed graphics resembling the Himalayas (spiky unscalable linecharts of number of urls indexed by year, number of tetrations by year, number of new/unique users by year, number of tetrations by average user by year), resembling the planets Venus and Mars (πcharts of ownership structure) and Bay Area bridges (bargraphs of ad revenue)—thermodynamical models of the tech protocol itself or just organigram tutorials in managerial flow, squiggly doodly retiaries that rendered concepts like vertical or horizontal omnidimensional, unhelpful.
I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics. Interfaces: beaming cracks in plaster.
But it was all about others. Nothing about him. None of the material was personal. An interface has no profile.
He spoke to me as a grownup to an infant. A brat pubescent to a rutting pet. Would I be allowed to interview the others? No. In person? No. In writing? No. Can I speak? Talk to the wall.
I had clearance like it was going out of business, but the cost to me was guilt. Families and financials. I knew how many dependents people had, how many savants and seniors, their salaries and dividends, bonuses and dumps. Their incentives for retirement, their splits. Class A, one vote per share. Class B, 10 votes per share. I knew everything but what all this meant to them. How they spoke. Stood and sat. How they groomed.
Were they people? Not to Principal. Not even employees? They were more like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain.
He guarded his privacy but flung open the doors to the lives of others. His underlings. Their underthings. What’s privacy to the employee is security to the boss.
All this factuality grated, was a grate, a veil, a screen—a firewall. There was a firewall between us.
Tetrate “firewall.” Though how to decide which site to hold with? the most popular or most reputable? and if reputation shouldn’t be popularly decided, then how? and couldn’t this question be better asked of politics (management), or religion (ownership)?
Class A knowledge is not as powerful as Class B knowledge, and all the managers be fools and the owners, doctrinaire.
Tetrationary.com, a userdriven site, defines: “Firewalls can either be software-based, or hardware-based, and are used to help keep a network secure,” then digresses into types: packets, filters, layers, proxies. Entry last updated by “Myndmatryxxx.”
Correction—last updated by myself, as I rejoined the verbal phrase: “Firewalls can be either.”
Whereas a more authoritative site, which I’ll define as one that employs professionals, at minimumwage, but still—pride counts more than maternity leave or sickdays—states: “1. A fireproof wall used as a barrier to prevent the spread of fire. 2. Any of a number of security schemes that prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to a computer network or that monitor transfers of information to and from the network.”
Correction—the site, lexility.com, just freeloaded the work of old print dictionaries and encyclopedias whose compilers are dead and whose compiled kin don’t receive any residuals.
Another site says “firewall,” in its architectural usage, dates to ca. 1840, in its computing sense, to ca. 1980. Yet another site gets strangely specific, 1848, 1982, on the dots.
Austro-Hungary, apparently, designed the firewall. The Austro-Hungarian theater. Where it was armor dropped from a proscenium to prevent a conflagration onstage from spreading to the audience. No mention on the site as to what might’ve started the fire onstage—the effects, like the fake cannon that ignited Shakespeare’s Globe, likelier than anything textual.
In German, this barrier was called der Eiserner Vorhang. “The Iron Curtain.” Which another site attributes to Churchill. Whose own source is cited by yet another site as having been the Muslim belief in “the Gates of Iron,” “erected by Cyrus the Great to keep Gog and Magog out of Persia.” Still others assert that Cyrus is actually Alexander the Great and Gog and Magog are really the Scythians. “Not even a wall of iron can separate Israel from its God,” Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, 200 CE. “Iron and steel were called the same in ancient Hebrew and Arabic, and both cultures believed the element fell from the heavens.”
Both Judaism and Islam speak of God protecting with, or as, “a wall of fire.” “This relates to the desert practice of keeping oneself safe from predators by surrounding oneself with fire.”
During breaks my hut’s screen oscillated a koan. It was a clock, but with just a single hand, and the clockface had no divisions into minutes or hours. It had no divisions at all. Was it a timer? and if so what time did it tell?
Mornings, or whatever, I’d be woken by Principal’s voice shrilling over a hearth of incombustible logs that might’ve been another screensaver.
That morning, however, I woke up on my own to a screen that was off, so I fell back into a dream in which I was shopping for the antithrombosis travel compression braces that Moms had recommended, but the stores were gypping me and I went into a frenzy because each pair contained two and a pair for me, I can’t explain it, meant three, and then Rach and I were going to Dr. Idleson the fertilitist who was also Meany the shrink, who told us that what we’d been having wasn’t sex and was about to tell us what to do instead—but then I was jolted up and out of the cot by an error msg honk. Abort retry fail honking.
The screen flickered an external feed—a clubcart was at the door.
Two men were jammed inside—two big men, giants, juvie and cruel, special in the sense of special forces: Jesus and Feel (Jesús and Felipe).
I
rode deck as they let the cart drive us, in swampy compound circles.
“So you the visitor genius?” Feel said.
“You think?” I said.
“Never met no genius.”
I said, “Only a genius would know what you’re talking about.”
“What else a genius do?” Jesus said. “You get the mother and father—los árboles?”
“Meaning what?”
But Feel was saying, “Also in my family the primos, the cousins segundos. Not like when my cousin has kids, but like when my two brothers marry two sisters and they both have kids—they would be how related?”
I understood: “Genealogist, you mean.”
Principal had told them, hadn’t told me, my cover was as genealogist.
I said, “And what do you do—seguridad detail?”
“No importa,” Feel said.
“Stunt driver,” said Jesus.
“Are you from here or Mexico?”
“Afghanistan,” said Jesus.
Feel said, “Two tours.”
We went ramping down into the mound of La Domo—a subgarage of charging stations and inductive mats. A mechanics corps was sponging a Tesla X, a car that didn’t exist. No other boytoys though. No racers. All electric. And no motorcycles. Scooters. Bike-bikes.
Adjacent to the garage was the mechanics’ locker room. The next room was a box, like a boxroom, just heaps of packaging, addressed to me, myself, and I. Deliveries oneclicked—one guess—online. Principal’s no different from the rest—he orders and so he is.
The boxroom, the bagroom, the room of guitars, the room of drums, of charcoal and chalk, of splintered easels. Room of wood. Room half carpet half grass just because. Room in which the scissors were left. Room of nothing but the loss of a button.
Rooms: there must be something to call the room in which everything in it is supposed to come off as causal, but, in fact, has been calculated down to the threadcount. The room into which, before someone visits, the householder hauls everything significant or representative, so that even if this is the only room he—I—will visit, everything will be communicated: essential personality, selfhood. Gist, pith. Taste.
There must come a point when a house has so many rooms that it becomes pointless to name them. There must come a room—where the homeowner just wavers at the threshold, and fails it.
Principal had made a shrine, and so enshrined himself. An altar awaiting a sacrifice. Rotund Asian deities in speedos. Incense censer. A sutured set of sutras. The Dharma lode, block and mallet, beads, wheel, ghanta, vajra, mandala.
Principal lotused on the floor. His face, the skin that showed, was haggard. Wrung. He’d aged double what I’d aged since our last.
His chinpatch was now the color of static and the shape of Long Island. A short wiggy bowlcut, as lustrous as laminated bamboo.
But, as he gradually rose, as he ritually twitchingly rose, what got me the most was his size—how fat he was or creepy with muscle. Massive pecs and quads. Pumped bumps for biceps. Bulgeous calves.
Rather what got me was more the disparity, between whatever it was that made him so swollen imposing and the head that hovered above, the floating face shrunken, wan, marasmic, insucked brittle cheeks, bone straining through nose—the presentation was freakish.
But also at least halfwise intentional. Because as he breathed and commenced with a ceremonial stripping, all that bulk turned out to be clothes, just clothes, bunches, rolls, layers, breathable filters. The heat was on and there was no call for the heat to be on. Principal stripped and shivered.
All of it was branded, TT Tetgear: he unshrugged the kasaya robe to expose a unipouched hoodie, tore the tearaway trainers to sweatpants—not in academic gray, but silicon gray. The plastic toggles that capped the drawstrings of both hoodie and sweats had been gnawed to shreds. He tugged them loose, tried not to gnaw. Underneath was a neoprene wetsuit. Thick wool socks overwhelming the sandals.
The wetsuit peeled away to a belly bloated white but of the same substance, that squishy squamous thickness, that reptilian or amphibian give—like if I would’ve poked him, the indent inflicted would’ve remained for life. His limbs were tentacularly downed powerlines, livewire distensions. He was a nonviolent resister, of himself. On a hunger strike, protesting himself. That’s how ill he was, that’s how Gandhi. An ascetic, or ascitic, revealing to me scars, stitched slits all ragged red inflamed like the marks of the great, the markings by which one suffers for greatness, also revealing his penis—testudinal, pinched, sacs sagging like they’d been punctured, hairless—and he was hairless too under the wig.
“What the fuck? What happened?”
“A second opening, all of life is but a second opening, or it can be,” he said. “That, and only that, is the fuck.”
He trembled back to the concrete floor, relotused himself stiffly.
I settled just across.
“Please,” he said, “our sandals are still on us.”
“Off?” I said. “You can’t take them off by yourself?”
Or he wouldn’t, so I undid the velcro and got him discalced, shed socks from feet, rigid toes horned coarse and crustated.
He seemed relieved: a man at rest after a powertrip.
“A man is born royal,” he said. “His father is the king but he is no prince. Or he is on the outside. But it all is just outside, exterior.”
“This is you? Or are you talking the Buddha?”
“We are not talking Buddha. Or we are but he is not Buddha yet. He goes. He seeks to go outside of the outside. From the palace to the walls, through the gates. Out until the gates and the walls and the palace are all behind him.”
“So you’re becoming the Buddha? Considering a career change?”
“We are no one. We are the horse and the chariot both.”
“But in the different accounts I’m trying to recall, isn’t there also like a charioteer—a guy who’s steering or whipping? The Buddha, or whatever he is, whatever his name is, wasn’t alone.”
“We are all alone, always. No matter accounts. Whether a charioteer or no charioteer. Immaterial. Does not matter. There is no horse and the man is just walking.”
“But he’s walking in orienteering socks and nubuck archopedic sandals.”
“As like he goes, he is followed: men seeking money, to be repaid only in hatred, women seeking money, to be repaid only in sex, and he ignores them and goes on. He meets an old man, very old, on the verge of death, and laments because age awaits us all and all the world does not lament every moment. He meets another man, afflicted not just with age but with disease, and laments because infirmity awaits us all and all the world does not lament every suffering. Yet another he meets. Or he does not. Because this man is not a man, not old or infirm anymore, not living, a corpse, and the man who is a man, who is still alive, healthy and young, laments nonetheless, because death awaits us all and all the world does not lament every death.”
“I’m with you,” I said, and I was.
“So the old, the infirm, the deceased,” he said. “They get into his head. And the head is shaped as like the bowl for alms and all its faces are the same in vacuity. The man is incapable of love, incapable of emoting anything. He is depressed and seeks the trees. He sits under a tree and waits and attempts to cure himself of waiting as like it were a disease and attempts to destroy his waiting as like it were a life. Then through the trees, enter the fourth man, the beggar. And the beggar would have passed, this is the point, he would have passed the man at the tree, and would have respected that peace and asked for nothing. Because true beggars never ask. They are beggars because they are given. There is something in them that compels the alms, something saintly. They might even refuse. In reward or punishment. The man asked the beggar who he was and the answer was not a beggar but a wanderer—we wander, he says, we search.”
“And then the man attains enlightenment and becomes the Buddha and the beggar goes to heaven,” I said. “All beggars go to heaven—th
ey never refuse.”
“But maybe we can say it is better if the man never asked and the beggar never answered,” Principal said. “The man becoming Buddha just knew. Basically. Maybe from the presence of the beggar. No. Or from the existence of the beggar. Yes. Because begging is giving too is the point that communicates all the knowledge that is ours.”
“I don’t follow.” I didn’t.
“We are becoming bhikshus,” he said. “Itinerant, mendicant. Sadhu to the Hindu. Monastic.”
“Do you have an itinerary in mind or is that against principle?”
“Europe, that is all for now. 25something° N, 55something° W.”
“You can’t get specific, or won’t?”
“Immaterial. Not divulged.”
“That’s supposed to be reassuring?”
“We know.”
“What do you know?” I asked.
“Without asking,” and he reached for his kasaya, that white woundbind slopping the floor. He took from a slit in it a blueblack scab.
He gave, I took. It was a passport.
“We have our charioteers after all. Payrolls of them. Part men, part chariot, part horse, all inclusive. Expediters.”
“This is possible?” I turned the passport around in my hands.
“What is not possible is to go wandering the earth as like a Class D motorist licensed by the state of NY.”
I opened it up. My date and place of birth were accurate. And unfortunate. The proceeding pages were as blank as an alms plate.
The pass I already had, I tried to remember when it expired, and where it was stashed—in Ridgewood’s hoarder forests? with Rach?
The photo on this pass was even worse, though, from spyquip: me stumbling back to my hut from the party, out of my mind and unretouched.
I couldn’t tell—I couldn’t.
Which of us was not himself.