by Joshua Cohen
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9/7–8, BURJ AL-JUMEIRAH HOTEL, DUBAI
total time of Principal recordings: 146:07:09
total number of Principal.Tetrec files: 58
their size: 2.9 GB
their content: In consideration of the disclosure of confidential/proprietary information [“Information”] by the Disclosing Party [“Joshua Cohen 1”], the Receiving Party [“Joshua Cohen 2”] hereby agrees:
i) to hold the Information in strict confidence and to take all precautions to protect such Information (including, without limitation, all precautionary practices/technologies employed by Joshua Cohen 1), (ii) not to disclose any such Information or any information derived therefrom to any third person/party, (iii) not to make any use whatsoever at any time of such Information or any information derived therefrom except to evaluate internally its relationship with Joshua Cohen 1 for purposes covered under Section 2 of the contract [“Contract”], and (iv) not to copy or
Emails received:
UNIT #610 OVERDUE NOTICE, from VanderEnde officespace mgmt.
OVERDUE NOTICE, from the New York Public Library.
No Subject, from Moms.
why arent u returning my calls? from Lana.
Autoresponses sent: “traveling for work through september at the latest, replies might be slow.”
How else to reply? I can’t write about what I’m doing with Principal even here in this .doc, so what can I communicate in an email?
If you’re ever unable to discuss the main events of your life, you have to rely on all the bits you’ve somehow always missed.
Managed some fruit. Shit an hour.
Insomnia, nausea, sinuses aching, still can’t shake this plane cough (avian pertussis? or is that for the birds?).
Vocabulary: orthogony, heuristics, traverse vertices, exocortex, autonomia, transclusion, “the embedding of one document or part of a document within another by reference.”
tetrationary.com/transclusion
But tech’s not my only vocab problem in the Emirates. There’s ménage, which isn’t quite how it’s said in French, then when I don’t understand, there’s zimmermann, which isn’t quite how it’s said in German, and then when I don’t understand that (my sinuses having imparted to my replies an enigmatically European accent), they say room keening.
Language itself is a burqa, an abaya—so many new words! so much chancy chancery cursive! The garments that blacken even the tarmac, that blacken the lobby (irreligiously lavish). Words are garb. They’re cloaks. They conceal the body beneath. Lift up the hems of verbiage, peek below its frillies—what’s exposed? the hairy truth?
Alternately, click here: dubai.ae
Click until this page wears out, until you’ve wiped the ink away and accessed nothing.
A remote control should indicate the existence of another device to be controlled remotely—to be uncovered, certainly, within range.
The remote is typically the filthiest object in the room, according to Principal. 100 billion bacteria per button, on average. Each bacterium’s DNA containing the equivalent of approx 1 million bytes of information. Meaning the average remote control button has the data capacity of approx 100,000 terabytes.
According to Principal: streptococcus, staphylococcus, meningococcus, coliform.
Aerobic, anaerobic. Microbes.
Roomservice—because I can’t bring myself to go down to the restaurants alone. Jump. But window won’t open. Shouldn’t be smoking anyway.
I ordered the “Four Been Soup”—bean soup with regrets. Cramps 2.0.
Tetrating transgulfane: pancreatitis, the difference between communal and equitable distribution of assets earned by one party before divorce but after separation if separation was never legally sanctioned (New York Consolidated Statutes, Article XIII, Domestic Relations, §236B).
Other sites: nytimes.com (to check whether Cal had written, he hadn’t), nybooks.com (to check whether Cal had written, he had), haaretz.co.il (ERROR), haaretz.com (ERROR), guardian.co.uk, lemonde.fr, a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/01/09/doc-n-law-1.html (Rach), escortzrevue.com/dubai, escortzrevue.com/abu_dhabi, whitedicksblackchicks.biz (ERROR), whitedicksblackchicks.biz/whitezilla-slaughters-her-ass (ERROR), thenational.ae, gulfnews.com, a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/02/09/doc-n-law-2.html (Rach), hoodratlatina.biz/ass-to-mouth-teacher-on-student (ERROR), hoodratlatina.biz/cumpilation-blonde (ERROR), poetryfoundation.org, poetryfoundation.org/article/16129, jewsy.com (ERROR), jewsy.com (ERROR), a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/03/09/doc-n-law-3.html (Rach), a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/04/09/doc-n-law-4.html (Rach), bangableblackteens.com (ERROR), bangableblackteens.com/mixrace/fave/orderby+mf&timeby=today (ERROR), tetration.com/search?q=Thor+Balk, tetpedia.com/tet/Thor_Balk, maid4jizz.biz (ERROR), maid4jizz.biz (ERROR), maid4jizz.biz (ERROR), maid4jizz.biz (ERROR).
Each instance of HTTP 404ishness occasioned a buzz, a buzzing.
My gut knocking too (getting fatter off roomservice).
A deft young dark boy in a resort staffed exclusively by same, wheeling in more lentils. Occipital headache, sneezy.
I hadn’t gotten around to getting any of the currency (either dirham or dihram—tetrate it?), so gave him €4 (too much?).
On every flight I’ve been on since the invention of wifi the attendants are always saying, don’t go online until we tell you. Then they tell you, at what they call cruising altitude, which some sites have as 30,000 ft/9,100 m, and some sites have as 35,000 ft/10,600 m. Whichever, no online, and no phone either, during takeoff and landing especially. Passenger signals interfere with the cockpit’s communications with the ground. I’d always accepted this, until aboard the Tetjet, which has no attendants, no announcements were made, and electronics were being used all the time. By Jesus and Feel. Not Principal. But still. This had me skeptical. I’d rather be brought down by glorious jihadi or a flock of sphinxes screeching into the engines than by some amped mercenaries playing some app game matching lozenges.
Principal’s coding (“Principal” is itself a code, for me to avoid having to type “my name”). When Principal says, “The Sims are ready to fly,” he means he’s ready to fly (both of his pilots are Sims: Simon Prentice, Thomas Simons).
“The Gulfstream 650 is the largest elite jet in the Gulfstream fleet. Its maximum operating speed of .925 Mach makes it the fastest civil aircraft flying, and its maximum altitude of 50,000 ft allows it to avoid congestion and adverse weather,” but then I gave up reading All About the Tetjet, and switched, dismissive flick of screen, to Media, streaming everything conceivable but also featuring a selection “curated this quarter by Kori Dienerowitz, President”: 80s sitcoms, Jeopardy!, Scorsese, Westerns all’italiana, Korean Wave, Mecha anime, 20 episodes of a show called Xun Qin Ji.
When Principal says, “Gaston wants to cook,” he knows that all meals are docketed, but isn’t hungry.
In London, Welsh radix box with a side of sprouts (both raw), in Paris mixed kales below purée de betterave crapaudine (both semisteamed), muria puama, saw palmetto, reservatrol. For dessert, his nutritive of twos: vitamins A2 (retinaldehyde), B2 (riboflavin), C2 (choline), D2 (ergocalciferol), supplemented with hazelnut oil, cedar berry, turmeric, borage, selenium, γ-linolenic acid.
When Principal says, “Lavra wants to exercise,” he knows that all workouts are docketed, but isn’t motivated.
40 elliptical minutes listening to a podcast on diamond synthesis using hydrocarbons, another on Malthus (London), watching a clipathon on the extraction of precious metals from waste electronics using plasma, another on the physiocrats and François Quesnay (Paris), Lavra alongside him on the twin machine, then leading him in 80 light squats, correcting technique. Midplantar/lower palmar reflexology, cranial electrotherapy (Lavra insists, no acupressure or brain stimulation without the cardio).
I’ve been with Principal through every meal and workout, but have never participated in any.
When Myung says to Principal, “Doc H
uxtable has got you booked,” she means—forget it.
This is exactly where a code’s required, extra shorthand, an abbrev: like how red ink indicated lies in memoranda sent to and from the gulag, like “an inlaw” meant “an SS officer” in the partisan encryption of the Warsaw Ghetto, while the Nazis themselves used “solution” to mean “mass extermination.”
Code.
There are two great innovations to recall: (1) all relationships between two or more quantities can be expressed as equations (the algorithm, which enciphers the name of al-Gorithmi, the Persian mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and Judeophile, eighth century CE), and (2) all numbers, no matter how large, can be expressed by the sequential combination of the smallest numbers: zeroes and ones (though the original binaries weren’t numerals but short and long syllables, combinable into every conceivable meter of Sanskrit prosody—Pingala, fourth century BCE).
Binary code—an encryption that’s simultaneously a translation, in how it renders two different systems compatible, equitable. “Bits”—the term itself is a contraction (“binary digits”)—are the fundamentals of any expression: not just of integers but also of language, and so of instructions, commands.
In international unicode standard, by which every conceivable character in the universe can be represented by an octet, or a sequence of eight bits, Principal’s net worth would be signified by 00110001 00111000 00110010 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $18.2B, as of 2010 taxes), and the value of my advance for this book by 00110100 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $440K)—though I’ll get only half that up front, or Aar will and then he’ll take his commission (00110011 00110011 00110000 00110000 00110000), and then the IRS will take its too (00110001 00110101 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000).
Principal has directed our publisher to pay his own fee to an undisclosed organization, or so he says.
The only records of prior largesse are of $2 million to endow a computing exhibition devoutly aggrandizing Tetration at the Smithsonian Institution, and $252 to the Santa Clara Council of Dharmic and Abrahamic Religions, which has become a for profit yoga studio.
He never says our name if it refers to me, not even the nickname, the lame abridgement, “Josh.” Bash it to bits, you’d get 01001010 01101111 01110011 01101000, though if the “j” were minuscule, were lowercase, you’d get 01101010 (01101111 01110011 01101000).
Thanks, biconversion.com.
Point is, we’re all made differently of the same ones and zeroes—the ones our fortunes, the zeroes our voids, our blacker lacking places.
Ultimately, then, Principal and I do not compute, and all the imbalance between us can’t be attributed to just the swollenness of his bankroll, or my fatter tits and ass—or to the facts that only one of us was given a middle name, and only one of us was given a future. How to express the extent of Principal’s nullity? how else but code to write around his holes?
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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 1
2.
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.