by Joshua Cohen
The second section explained the Selective Service regulations for the draft lottery[, the third was tragic, the fourth, a farce]
The third section opened by asserting that in a year with 366 days the average lottery number for each month should be situated in the middle—at 183. But in this lottery the average draft number for the first six months of the year was higher (for people born in January, the average draft number was 201.2), while the ADN for the last six months was lower (for people born in December, the ADN was 121.5). The correlation between one’s date of birth and draft number indicated a regression curve of −.226. An unflawed lottery would’ve maintained a level correlation at zero, a straight flatline throughout the year.
[In sum, the closer you were born to the start of things, the better.]
The paper then pointed out that people are not born with uniform distribution throughout the year[ and especially not with uniform distribution in the leap years]. It proved this by parsing datasets from the US Public Health Service to determine that the birthrates in the first quarters of each year between 1900 and 1940 [EARLIEST RECORDS? TO THE WWII DRAFT?] were a mean 12.2% above average[, confirming that summers between the equinoctes have normally been the busiest periods of conception]. Further[—through a sinister twist that might only be explained through a syncrasy of biochemistry, sex trends, and God—]an average of 64.2% of all babies born during the first quarters of 1900–1940 were male. This meant that early year male babies were doubly insured against conscription—firstly by their birthdates, and then secondly by their disproportionate sample size.
All [samples of] men who shared the same birthday were inducted by order of their names, last, middle, and first weighted accordingly, and ranked in the lotteried sequence: an alphabet that began with J and ended with V[ for Victory]. This policy spelled discrimination for men who lacked middle names, and made no provision for the grading of men with identical birthdates and names.
It was this nameranking that comprised the lottery’s purest bias, apparently. Equations weren’t required to understand that the scores of Johnsons and McNamaras and Nixons and Mitchells and Hoovers and Helmses in America tended to have middle names while the singularly ethnic Witold Negróns tended not to.
The paper’s fourth section, its conclusion: In preparation for the lottery drawing, Abs wrote, the days and so the months had been encapsulated consecutively. Meaning that the capsules containing the papers with the January dates were assembled first, the February capsules were assembled second, and so on through the calendar, with each month’s encapsulations poured into a handcranked drum, a mechanical bingo spinner [like a wheel for a gerbil or hamster], upon completion. This meant that the January capsules were mixed with the others 11x, the February capsules mixed 10x, and so on, through the November capsules, which were mixed with the others 2x, and the December capsules, mixed only 1x. A final condemnation cited the Selective Service’s own report that the capsules had been poured into the fishbowl from the side of the drum that’d held the earlier days of the year, so that the latter less thoroughly spun days remained atop[ floating like a scum].
On the day “Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy in with the Lots” was published in a special War Math issue of Science in July 1970, six months after Sari inspired it Abs proposed to Sari. Theirs being an engagement very preoccupied with numbers—figures, equations—it bears notice that though they were married at Congregation Beyt Am, in Palo Alto, on January 1, 1971, their son and only child was born on June 8.
Witold Negrón, 8th Battalion, 4th Artillery, was mortally wounded in Operation Lam Son 719 between Khe Sanh forward supply base and Tchepone, Laos, March 1971.
[[[[OPENING VERSION 2 BIOGRAPHY: Sari’s parents, Imre and Ilona Le Vay, were Hungarians to the Americans, but Jews to the Hungarians. Above all, though, they were Budapesters, geographically and culturally marooned between Joseph’s [Abs’s father’s] ghetto origins and Eve’s [Abs’s mother’s] haughty ancestry in Cologne.
To them, Joseph was just a [coarse] peddler of frozen water who’d tried to socially elevate himself through his union with a [wealthy snobbish] yecca wife, Eve, who invariably played the same EZ piano arrangement of Mozart’s Variations KV.265 (“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”/“Baa Baa Black Sheep”/the ABCs), dabbled in depopulated watercolors (kitchen still-lives, insipid landscapes of the wildlife preserves around JFK), and in lieu of financially solving whatever problems their daughter was having with her monkeywrench son, preferred to waste her fortune on transcontinental flights, to offer her opinions in person.
The Le Vays would have sudden fevers and lymphatic surgeries whose recuperation periods would last the durations of Eve’s visits. They called her “the princess gourmand [Princesse de Guermantes] of the synagogue women’s league.” Or else “the doyenne of the mooing bourgeois [la doyenne de la moyenne bourgeoisie].” They mocked her Shalimar perfumes, her Scherrer suits worn always with the gloves, her inaccurate recitations of Heine that never aspired to more than the first two couplets of Die Lorelei, and were just the malapropic asyntactic expressions of the trait that most provoked them: Eve’s Deutschtum, or the conceit of her Germanness. Though it wasn’t just that she persisted in a vain attachment to that identity, it was that she hadn’t suffered for it—she hadn’t suffered like they had. The Le Vays had cultivated the full European education and with such unflagging intensity the continent had no choice but to plan their genocide so that they embodied its quintessence.
The Le Vays were the conjugation of generations of linguists, etymologists, philologists, and lexicostatisticians who’d been querulously crossreferencing one another ever since their forebears—who on both sides included Lévais and Lévajs—Magyarized their surnames in solidarity with the Kingdom of Hungary following its fraught unification with the Austrian Empire in 1867. [Their grandparents?] had learned how to speak, read, and write all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, and how to speak, read, and at least write about all the Baltic languages too. [Their parents?] were capable of griping about the dissolution of the dual monarchy in its every single tongue, and in the Ural-Altaic, the Finno-Ugric-and-Permic, Samoyedic, and Oghuric—in everything but the Semitic. The stiff leatherskinned and authoritative edition that was their family would go to its death incomplete—the Le Vays the missing volumes.
Imre and Ilona had been doctoral candidates at the University of Budapest, where they’d maligned each other’s talents so publicly that when their professor paid a university janitor [how much?] to shelter them both in the janitor’s dacha [Hungarian equivalent?] outside Sárospatak, the beneficiaries, even with the Nazis at the door, interpreted the gesture as only partly altruistic. If the other part was a joke, though, the professor never laughed. Dr. Péter Simonyi died fighting with the Resistance. He never got to meet the couple’s daughter, born in spring—or witness its nuptials, civil in fall—both 1945.
But then neither did their parents and siblings [how many?]: Imre’s family had perished in Auschwitz/Auschwitz-Birkenau, while Ilona’s had been executed and left to the Danube [by the Arrow Cross?].
Following the war, the couple was unable to find employment—despite Imre’s formidable achievement as an Esperantist (his dissertation sought to officialize the artificial language’s first natural phonological evolution, the replacement of the phonemic ĥ with the k), and despite Ilona being one of the great hopes of Hungarian bibliography (her dissertation had proposed conversion mechanisms between the author/title taxonomies then prevalent in Hungary? and the various faceted? international standards). They labored, instead, in the dissident underground, as translators, interpreters: in Russian, vragi naroda—“enemies of the people.”
In 1956, with a popular revolt roiling the boulevards of Budapest, and columns of Soviet tanks about to roll in[, stretching like the lists for arrest they were on], Imre and Ilona took Sari on a train to Szombathely, and telling her they were just visiting her new Gymnasium, slipped across the border[—parted the Iron
Curtain—]for Vienna.
In Vienna they renewed contacts with prewar colleagues, now adjunct émigrés abroad suffering from visa problems and pleionosis. Jobs were arranged, nonetheless [how?], and in 1958 they moved to Saint ?, Minnesota, initially to teach a discipline called Sovietistics at the Lutheran Bible Institute?, and then to Berkeley, to teach Magyar language under the auspices of the Center for Slavic Studies at the University of California [but Hungarian’s not a Slavonic language?].
Sari attended Berkeley for what she then called her bachelorette’s, mistress’s, and PhD degrees, initially studying applied linguistics, though under the guidance of Professor Debora Laklov she chose to do doctoral work in the specialized field of sociolinguistics, focusing particularly on the confluence of language and gender [on the genderlects of disclosure? second-language intimate differencing/contextual integrities?]. “Iceman,” to her, was more than an occupation, but not in the sense that it might’ve been to her future father inlaw, while “Icewoman,” which term Eve might’ve used to describe her daughter inlaw, would become similarly reprehensible. “Iceperson” was less deterministic, preferred. Sari’s dissertation, “Male without Prefix, Male without Suffix: Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and the epicene misnomer in international(ist) language(s),” became a chapter in her seminal [no, no] book, Toward a New “Neuter”: what is ideal about the sexist, and what is sexist about the ideal, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979.
In September 1973, Sari traveled to a Reassessing Animacy summit at the University of Texas, Austin, leaving Abs with their two year old son, and prompting a visit from Eve. Abs insisted he was managing on his own, but Eve refused to accept this, and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to spend time with her grandson who at the time was two years old.
Eve had strict ideas about the proper way to raise a child, but none approached the method by which Abs and Sari split their parenting duties: divvying up the caregiving by tallying, individually, at the end of each day, and together, at the end of each week, and then again monthly, their changings and feedings, playtimes, and sessions of counting and reading, to ensure an utterly equal distribution of responsibilities. Eve was not aware of this Had Eve been aware that her coming to take charge of her grandson would not redound toward Abs’s total time spent with the child, and that, quite to the contrary, he’d have to make up whatever time he’d been relieved of upon Sari’s return, she might never have made the trip.
Eve would usually spend her visits sitting in the den of the splancher on Fulton Street[, bobbining mundillo, or reading only the best new American fiction][—Leon Uris, Herman Wouk—]while Cohen slept in his playpen, or toddled on the floor. But on this visit she decided that her grandson’s rompers were no better than rags, and that there was no one better than her, there was no one else but her, to dress him appropriately.
As the Le Vay-Cohens had only one car—a Ford Pinto, which Abs had taken to work—and as Eve wasn’t able to ride a bicycle, especially not with a grandson atop, she called for a cab, raided the pantry for supplies, and the note on its door for the address of Sari’s parents, whose atopic dermatitis that’d prevented them from stopping by was surely noncontagious. Eve wasn’t familiar with the greater Bay Area, so might not have expected the hour drive, the traffic, the toll bridge, or the $48 that got her to Hillcrest Road, in Claremont. After the Le Vays assured her she hadn’t been swindled but didn’t offer to contribute to the fare, Eve gave them stringent instructions regarding Cohen’s regimen[—the Le Vays had never been left alone with their grandson before?—], had them repeat to her his feeding times, on what foods in what portions, which she’d provided in a diaper bag along with diapers, wipes, powders, creams, told them she’d be back in two hours, apologized to the driver for keeping him waiting, and asked to be taken “downtown.” [Why didn’t she ask the Le Vays to recommend a children’s clothingstore?]
She was let off in San Francisco[, paid the driver another extortionate fee], went shopping. It was while exiting a Family Wearables on Page Street and turning onto Market, having purchased a pair of overalls and onesie pajamas, that she walked directly into a VW Combi, described only as “tiedyed,” its drivers never described and so never identified—a hit and run [she was left to bleed to death on the sidewalk].
The body lay at the UCSF Medical Center and, since Eve’s driver’s license listed her residence as New York, and the Le Vays’ address was the only local contact contained in her purse, it was Ilona who got the call, and it was Imre who called Abs[—imagine the amount of energy being used in enthusiasm control]. At UCSF Medical, Abs could identify the body only by pantsuit and purse. After, he went to pick up his son from his inlaws’, and call his wife, who convinced him that an earlier flight could change nothing. Finally, Abs called his father, who broke. Joseph was unable to decide whether to have the body sent back to New York or buried out in California, and Abs was unable to tell his father that there wasn’t much of a body left to bury, and so Eve was cremated, on Sari’s recommendation. [COMPRESS.]
Joseph never recovered from this trauma. Cancer, the family’s remontant curse, developed. Colorectal. Adenocarcinoma of the bowel.
Joseph arranged to sell Cohen Cooling Solutions, Inc., to his employees, liquidate and sell the locations of his two Chilliastic outlets—one in New Jersey, one in Staten Island—to Lowe’s? Walgreens? and to the Staten Island Mall (Sears was built on its ashes), retiring to oncologists’ offices and New York Presbyterian for a colectomy and two rounds of chemotherapy that left him uncured, without options, and so weakened that he stayed most of the time not at his too oppressively large splitlevel in Valley Stream, Long Island, but in that small bungalow he also owned on the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens.
The decline of the iceman was tragic [REWRITE]. Joseph Cohen, with his cold [business sense?] and warm [heart?], had exerted an indelible influence over his son, and over his grandson too, who regarded him as a wizard, with the power to change the elements[, to turn the states]: liquids to solids, to liquids again, to gas.
Joseph Cohen [might’ve been a greenhorn but he had a green thumb, a man] who grew apples from asphalt, berries from tar. An inveterate tinkerer who [FILL ALL THIS IN].
Cohen, who founded his career on memory, on the notion that memory is the future’s greatest commodity,
The time Cohen spent with his grandfather in the last summer of his grandfather’s life comprises Cohen’s only memory of
Summer 1977, Joseph was ailing, and Abs took a leave of absence from PARC, and took his only son, then six years old, to New York. Cohen’s memories of that trip are myriad. The trains submerging and surfacing, the pneumatics of the bus. How whenever he entered and exited a deli it rained [the dripping air conditioning?]. How wherever he was, even at night, it was daytime—neon, the commonest of the noblest gases. His grandfather’s plot: the raspberry and blueberry bushes. The feel of the house—a cottage, remote, damp, decaying, in no way accessible to masstransit [the A train back then too?]. Two bedrooms, a livingroom—a tiny garage in which Joseph kept a white Plymouth Duster and a workbench. Tools were kept in pristine condition, orderly. Mason jars had been saved from neighboring trash, meticulously labeled: “screws,” “nails,” “nuts ’n’ bolts,” “good nuts.”
One morning Cohen only remembers as having been about a week before his birthday a last issue arose? regarding the pending sale of Cohen Cooling Solutions, and Abs insisted on going into Manhattan to handle it himself. Joseph, surprisingly, agreed. He’d never felt healthier. He’d spare his son the job of minding a child so that Abs would have the tougher task of minding the lawyer, ? Dubin, a Park Avenue Litvak.
Abs went, and then called from the law office to check in, and since his father’s positive report was convincing he took the opportunity to have dinner with ? Ramirez—formerly the cooling business’s supervisor, now the president of its ownership cooperative—and a few friends from Stanford who’d just been hired at Columbia?
That e
vening Joseph took his grandson for a walk on the beach. The setting both was, and was not, unusual [THIS SENTENCE BOTH IS, LAZY AND RIDICULOUS]. Abs and Joseph had taken Cohen out for a walk along the beach each day of their stay. Cohen liked the air. He liked being under the sky. What impressed Cohen the most was how his grandfather knew the names of all the trees on the way to the beach, and even knew the names of the rocks and stones, and the game was that Cohen would point at one or pick one up and his grandfather would tell him what it was and in doing so would bring it into being, into a better or clearer being [UNLIKE THIS WORSENING AND UNCLARIFYING SENTENCE]. Joseph was also familiar with the shells and related to Cohen how they were the homes of animals, huts of protein and mineral, keratin and calcium carbonate, though they weren’t homes in the human sense in that the ocean creatures didn’t hire architects and contractors but made them themselves, they made them with sweat, he explained, or by sweating, and when they outgrew them, they left to sweat out a larger one, and when they died, they left their shells behind but no other ocean creatures would touch them because, he said, “It is indecent to dwell in a shell you haven’t sweated for.” Cohen remembers his grandfather always trying to take his hand whenever he went to touch something, to take it. “This is the story of the Jews,” Joseph had said. “The story of the Jews in America.” He remembers his grandfather always removing from his hand that something he’d taken and placing it back on the beach, placing it, not letting it fall, exactly where it’d been taken from. “Seagulls are goyim—they pick up and drop, pick up and drop.”
Joseph shocked his grandson by telling him that sand was made out of rocks and stones—“ground down into dust,” he told him, “grinding is their working”—and Cohen was skeptical. Joseph also shocked Cohen by telling him that the clouds were made out of the same stuff the ocean was, water, the same stuff that he and his grandson were made out of, and that water was two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen brought together by covalent bonds, and then he told Cohen to take off his flipflops and wade, and that the water was as old as the earth, billions of years old, and that the water they drank was billions of years old too, all water was, even the water inside him and his grandson. When they purchased a knish from a boardwalk vendor and Joseph requested water and the vendor charged him a nickel, he said to Cohen, “Remember when you drink it this water is billions of years old, that you have stuff billions of years old in you, and that the chances are that the molecules, the atoms you’re drinking, have been in you before and so are now just coming home.” And then Joseph said, “You should never pay for water—you should maybe have to pay for the cup but never for the water.”