Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  So while Feel and Jesus tried to hash out a compromise in a way that kept the concierge from alerting his supervisor, and I turned my head for just a moment to rustle for my drugs—Principal got impatient and wandered unattended.

  The dudes in turbans and S&M leather and chains slouching across the lobby must’ve been affiliated with that visiting ruler as like valet dungeonmasters, or executioners. Because they weren’t doormen: the doors were automatic, sliding glass.

  Principal was heaving himself over the gul rug and Burj medallion until, just as he was about to crash into the glass, he stopped—the panes wouldn’t part for him, his presence wasn’t sensed, and he was shocked. He barely even had a reflection, just the ghost of a ghost, of an insatiable paling, and an amniotic and alien baldness.

  Then the sadomaso dudes mobbed him, and bowed to him, and their bows were detected, and the doors stood aside. Jesus and Feel, just sprinting up, dropped their hands from their holsters.

  Outside, and into the heatblast. Convoys of Range Rovers and Escalades were idling, and whether Feel or Jesus or the dispatch itself was to blame, ours was the black tacky stretch prom limo.

  The chauffeur—Afric, vitiliginous—tried to wheel my wheelie but Jesus refused him. He tried to take the suitcase from Feel and Feel handed it over with a palmful of dollars that if they didn’t buy the limo itself bought the right to drive it.

  Jesus rode shotgun reading directions off his Tetheld.

  We had no sirened escort or motorbike gang—just speed, lanechanges without a signal, tires bucking us unpaved.

  Principal, throughout, was just this loosely seatbelted breathing, which intensified with and then surpassed the AC, by a mindful circulation, simultaneous in and exhalation like he was resuscitating himself nose to mouth. I sat alongside him and bumped knees with the chauffeur sitting abstracted and sad on the opposite banquette.

  A sign put Dubai airport one way, 20 km, Abu Dhabi airport the other, 100 km—as one airport ended, another began, with nothing between.

  Construction sites, stalled. Construction completed in the style of stalled. The cranes indistinguishable from the towers they built. For sale or lease or rent, both the towers and the cranes. The sky was blue. The lights were green. Until, at Port Saeed, traffic honked stopped. A yacht had floated off a flatbed. A sideloader’s shipping containers barged by the guardrails. Gulf Navigation, Hanjin, Maersk, P&O Nedlloyd.

  Helicopters hopped and buzzed like locusts over Al Quds Street. Baggagetrains wormed through the snail drips of refueling tankers. The tarmac was uneven, as if asphalt had been poured directly over the dunes, the airplane hangar an oasis, roof planted with radar fronds. We slowed, and stopped, and just left the limo running, the doors ajar and the chauffeur sitting amid all that calfskin and burnished trim, and as I walked under the hangar’s ribs, I turned—he was still in the limo, just sitting, hands brooding gloved by his flanks.

  This wasn’t our plane, but was—it was the same but Kor’s, Tetjet Two. Another shrewdly nibbed Gulfstream 650.

  An Arab in a spotless salafi jumpsuit that marked him as foreman sprung at us with a folder of paperwork, and went up between Jesus with our bags and Feel escorting Principal shaky on the airstairs.

  I lit a cig, procrastinating. Bibbed mechanics flipped wrenches. The rest of the groundcrew sat around on a conveyor. That the scars of their faces were different might’ve meant their tribes were different, or their troubles.

  The foreman returned and I assumed he was going to have me put out my cig, but he bummed one, and as I was lighting him he said, “Next time you give advance notice? Avoid rush charges?”

  As I boarded I popped the last of my pharmacopoeia. My beverage choice wasn’t a choice, kombucha or lukewarm Corona.

  I sat across from Principal—I wondered which seat was Kor’s. Between Feel and Jesus we had at least one pilot, apparently.

  Principal lotused his legs, and wedged them under the armrests, the arms at rest, he was breathing into becoming breath, he was ridding himself of ballast.

  The Burj bowl was overturned in his lap.

  Samadhi—I don’t know if that’s how to spell it—iddhi—I don’t even know what that means, what it can mean to the spiritual.

  I’ve never subscribed to the miraculous: a Samaritan turns water to wine with artificial colorants, tugs extra fishes and loaves out of bottomless hats, a leper dances across water in shoes with stilts attached. Still, of all the miracles of all the religions, Buddhism’s are the only ones that make sense to me, because they’re the only ones I’ve at least technologically experienced—seeing over long distances, hearing over long distances, passing unimpeded through walls, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the self—and especially, levitation: going up, and staying up for a bit, coming down.

  Principal did this every time we flew but this meditation must’ve been especially focused. Or it’s just that I had nothing else to notice. The portals were shaded. Principal rumbled in a fluent enginese—either Sanskrit or Pali.

  The self must be escaped, or ejected. The fuselage must be cleared for takeoff, and the wings must become mere excrescences. Heavy metal on the ground becomes airborne, hollowboned birdflight, featherlight. A vessel for impurity becomes a vessel for purity, without claim to creed or even the corporeal.

  Principal chanted, but this time did a version translated for me: “Dwell so that the above is below—shed skin, go, pass organs, go, shit, piss, bile, phlegm, blood, sweat, and fat, go, go.”

  We went—Principal disburdening for lift, and lifting us weightless.

  Until—I felt this genitally—the landing gear deployed. We were back on the ground in about 18 to 20 minutes.

  “Dwell so that the below is above,” Principal still aloft even as the wheels skidded, skipped, and the semaphores yielded.

  He left his bowl, bottom up, in his seat.

 

  I’m not sure how to write about this, not sure whether to still be writing at all—I’ve been trying to screen and block so much out, so many confidences throughout, classified stuff, government stuff, might even get me imprisoned stuff, that it’s become systemic with me, to the point that I find myself trying to withhold on this confession even. Principal’s mouth wired to my ears, his eyes becoming mine, a monitor, a common prompt between us blinking, unblinking, at this sense of having become so irrecordably joined that the only way not to write about him is not to write about myself. I’ll have to spread and type around. Furl and reach between Del and Esc.

  I’d been hoping that this diarizing here would be for me what our sesshs have been for Principal—a reckoning—and that the role he’d play in this would resemble my own in his: a standard, a measure, irrelevant where ignorant, relevant when desired, and if intrusive then only as a punctuating mantra, Am, Em, Im, Om. I guess, um, the difference, um, is that I’m the one who’s getting paid, and already in breach of contract by this acknowledgment.

  We were alone, but if I can’t get into why, I’ll have to turn that omission into a virtue, like the way handicaps are treated, or like scriptural restraints. At least what I’m omitting is professional, nothing personal.

  Am, Em, Im, Om.

  We were in Abu Dhabi, having been checked into the Hotel Palace Khaleej under our names assumed, and ensconced for a sessh in Principal’s preposterous enfilade, which even with its crazy brecciations and carats and enough room in each closet to sepulture the shame of it, was empty. Rather it was disarranged, like the qtips weren’t in their dedicated holder, and the glasses on Principal’s face weren’t the unhinged rimless squares that he preferred and anyway were grubby, and there were no protein potion or granulocyte macrophage booster shot reminders, and there were no potions or shots without reminders. He’d left Myung behind in Dubai, along with the rest of the away staff, our normalcy. I’m fantasizing they’re all helping dismantle that topfloor temple at the Burj, and demolishing its idols.

  Now it was just Feel’s toothaches, Jesus and his restlessnes
s about not being able to contact his wife, who was pregnant.

  At the courtesy call for Asr (that prayer recitable in this season at this latitude between ca. 15:45 and 18:15), Principal told me I was sleepy, which meant he was. I asked the time of our next meeting, I asked what time he had to meet the sheikh, but he was asleep in his chair—I didn’t take off his sandals.

  I retoted and let myself out, relieved Feel from sentry. Jesus was out making a phonecall, or as Feel said with kulfi popsicle lips and a mordant stick between them, “encrypted phonecall,” which, as a status update, I interpreted as twitchy.

  I went out to the elevators, pressed the only button, the down, until it turned into a fiery bindi—if only salvation were as summonable as an elevator, if only redemption were just a mechanical designation, an assignment. The doors closed behind me, and I swiped my keycard, which was coded for floor access, for room access—rubbed, and blew on the black stripe, rubbed, swiped again—demagnetized, which is what happens to everyone who works with laptops, I guess, they lose their hair and muscle tone and magnetism.

  None of the other guest floors or reclevels would admit me. Not even the lobby. The underground parkinglot. The ground under which admits everyone. I pressed open, but the doors wouldn’t open, then went for the help button that in all languages is red and in braille is a rash. Sweating, dizzy, stifled.

  I struck out at the walls, the antiscratch padding and weather touchsplays. I jumped but was short of the ceiling, took out my Tetbook—no wifi—had this urge to cringe inside my tote, as the elevator’s lighting dimmed and the thrum of its mechanism quieted.

  I was karmically stuck, a floater. It was my breath. I had to ease my breath, and then empty it. Void this car containment.

  I tried to fold myself up like a map, to compress myself like in eastward travel. To become the time lost to flights, the time lost across longitudes. The differences between Palo Alto and London and Paris, and between them and the Emirates—I’d go where they went, when they went. Into nonexistence—into neverexistence.

  The doors would glide away then and it wouldn’t just be the Khaleej again, it would also be the Burj, de Crillon, Claridge’s, all their ambiance mingling, their couture scents and muzaks merged, the corridors turning one way into London wainscoting below Victorian wallpaper flocked with paisleys, turning the other into Paris parlor boiseries wreathing Empire urns with moldings of laurel, a cracked soaking tub bashed through a rainforest steamshower, hometheater systems dunked in the toilets, gardens growing into beaches to kelp the Gulf, the desert strewn with broken crockery from The Foyer and Les Ambassadeurs—bent knives from every restaurant I’ve stayed above, with Doc Huxtable, the piloting Sims, Gaston, Lavra—and all Myung’s Buddhas staved and dashed, the prayerbeads off their threads, the wheels unspoked, the sutras dismembered and blowing scattered. It was as if by evacuating my mind, I found this was my mind, a room of all my rooms, assailed by all my planes, or just a car in flames, and a voice, which was its capacity, shrieking.

 

  With Maghrib (ca. 18:30 to 20:00) I was moving again. Descending. I had to be called, being unable to call myself. But then the car stopped, around the Khaleej’s midlevel, the doors fell away, and there’s no other way I can explain this sensation—of identicality but wrongness, of unicity within displacement—this was, but wasn’t, my floor.

  Only the numerals distinguished.

  A man crouched by the elevatorbanks, his back to me.

  He was an Arab, clad in a kandura like a bedsheet filched from housekeeping, straight off the cart. Bright brilliant just from the shrinkwrap white, still creased shoulders to elbows, rustling at toes.

  He was close enough to obstruct my exit, and was stooping over as if to pick up something he’d dropped. Some hankie or submissive tissue—a woman.

  But not white—she was black. She was a wadded tossed abaya, a smutty black abayayaya—trill it through the nose, like a jihad ululant.

  She’d fallen—mucous sniveling through her nostril slit—she’d been hit.

  As the doors went to shut, the Arab pivoted and kicked a foot out, a foot clad expensively crocodilian, and wedged them open.

  “Stop!” I yelled, “Lay off, asshole!” or its panicked equivalent—it’s not enough to look ridiculous in action? I have to sound strangled on the page?

  The Arab just tried to drag her into the elevator with me.

  But she struggled, and so the Arab let go, only to hit her again—smacking the sniffling girl backhanded. She thrashed away howling.

  Or that was me, urging her on with stupey nonconfrontationalisms: “Get away!” (I’m sure there’s a security recording), “Run!” (I’m willing to negotiate terms for the erasure of any security recording). My sneaker might’ve grazed his wingtip still holding the doors, and the Arab whirled around dervishly.

  We faced each other, and I can only imagine what he took me for: a burnt paleface, a paunch in its decline, into financial services, Homo americanus consultantus.

  Then again, my impressions of him were just as imaginary. He was some fictional character from transit lit, some thriller villain spun from a revolving rack in an international terminal. I only wished it were a better translation. He was introducing himself as the girl’s husband, or father, or brother, explaining that whatever the nature of their relationship, it entitled him to beat her, explaining that it required him to beat her—and just as the elevator doors were sliding shut again between us, he lashed out with pointy chinbeard and charged.

  He choked me by the totestrap and I went for his thumbs, until everything in the tote was falling and we went after it, into the hallway. We fell like dictators. Slowly, messily slowly, crashing into curios and rolling into benches. I punched his jaw and his head hit the wall, bent my knee between his balls on my way to getting upright, lurching amid the wreckage of lamps, braziers, kashkul of sawdusty potpourri.

  He was out. Not just unaware, but unconscious, and not in the psychoanalytic definition, but with blood in his goatee.

  “You OK?” I said to the girl. But the cowering napkin just wailed.

  I stumbled to the elevatorbanks, pressed the up and down buttons. I rocked him loose from deadweight and turned him over and inside the car, pressed every floor.

  The elevator closed, opened: a flap of his bedsheet was stuck between doors. I tucked him in and took out my wallet and swiped him down to the pillow of lobby, and thank the gods of maintenance or inspectorship, or of magnetic coercivity, he plummeted.

  My sessh effects were sprawled along the hall, Tetbook concussed from tote. “If you’re seriously OK, help me pick all this up?”

  The girl stayed just a heap, of grieved cheek and lusty gutturals, so I bent to collect my adapters, converters, pink highlighter, and then went to haul her up too—but her hands wouldn’t have mine—she refused to reach out and meet me. Though this wasn’t because of trauma, rather it was because the touch of an auslander male was prohibited: her daddy or hubby or whatever could touch, he could strike her, but her savior was—haram.

  “What room number are you?”

  No reply or no number?

  “Speak English? The zimmernummer, your numéro de chambre?”

  But why would she slink back to the suite of a beater?—beyond that, would a controlfreak batterer let her have her own key?

  “Let’s call Security? Do you have any family you can stay with?”

  Nothing, and I even tried in Hebrew—gevalt.

  She stayed down on all fours just wiping her face with a black cloth, which then again became her veil—and her face was gone, and then she was gone, spurning me crawling around a corner.

  Her mouth, at least, was beautiful. All of me that was not my mind was virtuous, blameless.

  Rewrite this all. Bottom to top.

  ://

  The Khaleej’s stairs were strictly service, in case of emergency, power outage. Their utility proved a moral instruction. An ethics of exertion. The soul antipode of the resort le
isured around them.

  There was no carpeting so profanely plush that rougher rugs had to be placed upon it for prayer, no marbles so carnally veined as to recall the flesh—they were purging, spiritually purifying. Unventilated, sweltering.

  10 flights of 10 steps each, count their discipline down.

  The fluorescence hummed penance, absolved the walls of their materials: scuffed, costcut, asbestic. Breathe in, breathe out, relax. But my wind wasn’t up to even an intellectual exercise. My lungs were tight, legs, feet, it’s my hand that I’m sure was broken. Typing with my nose. The last two flights were huffed.

  Back in NY straggling home from the office, I’d do the burp fart shuffle four blocks south from my stop, trying to forget which building was mine, trying to forget which apartment. I could live anywhere, I thought, I could put my key to any door, not a card to swipe but a dagger to stab and turn—wounding any door, wounding any lock, and the insides that would weep for me, the roomy rumen and innards viscera, all that bark and sap and heartwood ringing, would be similar or same. They’d heal, but even when they wouldn’t, I could always exchange them, I could always upgrade—with no regard for brand if new. The new—once the time of the unprecedented, now the time of the compatible.

  It’s mortifying, but this also went for women—the thought that any woman could accommodate, could give me what I expected from a life. The fault, then, would be with the expectations—downsized, reduced—the fault, then, would be mine.

  My landing was temporary, hard on the heels. Junior Caliph Floor #2, North.

  I leaned against the jamb. Against the bar. Open Sesame. If no one’s around, no alarm will sound.

 

  I hadn’t realized I’d left the sink on. I washed my hands with my hands, cracked my knucks from numbness to stinging—if only minibars carried Vicodin or Percocet.

  Admit it, I was smitten. Me, the stricken party.