Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  On the way we asked D-Unit who that man had been and D-Unit answered, “Him—he is the Laureate.”

  Solow. [?] Stigler. [?] Anyway. Jewish.

  All we can tell you.

  D-Unit had slept in the Ford. Or garage.

  ://

  [A NOTE RE: STANFORD. HOW IT WAS FOUNDED IN 18?? BY THE RAILROAD MAGNATE? LELAND STANFORD, WHO HAD TAXPAYERS PAY FOR THE RAILROADS HE PROFITED FROM, AND HOW THE WAY TRAINS CONNECTED THE EAST AND WEST COASTS OF THE COUNTRY WAS VERY PROTO ONLINE.]

  [CF. TETRATION NATION, JAMIE GLEICHE (MACMILLAN, 2010), SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TETRATION, MATTHEW KJARR (HACHETTE, 2008).]

  The only thing Cohen liked about Stanford was the architecture. [Though he never appreciated the main campus itself—the Mission revivals of darkening porticoes and lightening arches, the dull pious sandstone cloistered below bright terracotta—]He was in all likelihood the only freshman ever grateful for having been assigned to Stern, a student residence facility constructed just after WWII in a style that, when Cohen moved in, was all over the TV news—sternly, brutally, Soviet. It was as if an Eastern Bloc tower had been cut up and scattered, a floor at a time, across a landscape of encina, bristlecone, gum tree, and asphalt. The Wall in Berlin was being chipped at, and smashed, but Cohen’s dorm had been built already broken, and whereas the prefab slabs of concrete halfway across the world were smeared with peacenik graffiti, the local décor tended toward posters offering $10/hour to participate in sensory deprivation studies and ads for cheap student sublets.

  Cohen’s dormroom was small and blank and the smallness appealed to him, because it meant less to clean, but the blankness, the scuffed emptiness, provoked. He couldn’t understand why the school provided each student with a bed and chair and desk, but didn’t continue that determinism into wall decoration. Beyond that, he couldn’t understand why his was the building’s only single, and suspected it was because he had just enough personality to be left alone, but either too many or too few personalities to have a roommate. Or else, he suspected, the registrar or bursar’s office regarded his unit as vacant—because he wasn’t even enrolled—he hadn’t accepted, hadn’t been accepted, to begin with.

  Cohen’s neighbors were roommates, a double—Cullen de Groeve and Owmar O’Quinn [INTRODUCE LATER]. On one of their walls was a map of the Bay Area, on another was a batik likeness of Einstein, and so after a visit to the Salvation Army on Veterans Boulevard that’s how Cohen furnished his own, with an MTA map of New York City, and an 8×10 glossy photo of “Dick Feynman,” whom he wouldn’t have recognized without the autograph, “To promising physicist [sic], best wishes, Dick Feynman.”

  Cohen’s major was math. Class was Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, while Wednesdays were seminars rotating around a diffuse array? range? of topics—logic, number theory, algebraic and symplectic geometries—followed by research group: he worked in probability before the possibilities of game theory lured him [WITH WHAT/HOW?]. [“We worked on statistics. Decidability, duction. Pattern recognition, precision and recall. Allocations, nomials. If you want to get granular, ergodicity, Gaussian distributions and masked Markovistics, processes and models. If you want to get übergranular, asymptotic properties of the entropy of stationary data sources with applications to data compression.”]

  Cohen applied that education to his own private scheduling but found his interests and commitments difficult to reconcile with classtime and his major’s requirements. He’d be awake for days, “jagging” lists of things to do, then doing the things on the lists, “jagging” lists of the solids he ate and the liquids he drank, lists of his urinations and bowel movements, of his Carson and Family Ties catchup consumption on the TV nextdoor, and his inability to sleep, as publicized by his nextdoor neighbors, who, wall and door aside, effectually became his roommates, caused the other students in Stern to presume he had an addiction to amphetamines, and caused two upperclassmen who presumed he was dealing amphetamines to try and get him to pledge AEPi [until what?]—which resulted, in turn, in the alternate personas Cohen assumed/adopted: speed addict, speed dealer, and eventually, a third persona, speed pharmacologist, which itself became, soon enough, the fourth, the inventor of a new speedy drug whose name he kept changing [to/from what?], and whose substance he refused to sell to anyone.

  Cohen, who hadn’t yet resigned himself to not having an identity, would assimilate the identities of others: He was also a horticulturist Buddhist (he kept bonsai junipers), a retired skateboarder forced out of the competition circuit by knee injury (he affected a limp), a manically verbigerant mediaphile—in which he spoke only in the dialogue of female characters from John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies—and a brand ambassador, in which he would monthly choose a new product, an edible or drinkable, a wearable or widget, and would buy it and use it publicly and remark on how great it was to everyone around him in inordinate terms such as, “Powerade is deliciously refreshing, dude,” or, “Powerade is refreshingly delicious, dude,” enough so that people began assuming—he never disabused them—that he was a paid spokesperson, an influential marketing covertly to students.

  [“]The roommates[”] were in on this, and would help with the ruse: Cullen de Groeve’s parents were [astoundingly?] wealthy executives for Timex, living in Hong Kong, and so always had new gadgets they’d give Cullen, who’d give them to Cohen to show around [de Groeve’s father had been an engineer with Casio and Seiko who’d sequelized the calculator watch before being hired as senior vicepresident, manufacturing/supply chain, with a mandate to bring Timex into the digital future, while his second stepmother, who’d been Playboy’s Miss December 1976, handled the company’s Asian press relations]. Owmar O’Quinn was a scholarship case from [which?] Philadelphia projects[—his father worked Sanitation, his mother for Corrections—]who out in California had to support himself working for a market research business, Concentives, as a mystery shopper, browsing through regional shoppingcenters, falsely p/matronizing their stores as a fake consumer in order to collect information and make report on the behavior of retail staff: whether they offered assistance, or attempted to upsell him, whether they offered free wrapping or shipping or respected feigned allergies and lactose intolerances. To maintain his cover, In each store O’Quinn was supposed to buy a small product, an item under $5, and though the $5 and under items he bought were usually just sneaker shoelaces or sweatbands, energy bars or weightlifting shakepowders, he also managed to shoplift, advantaging the eccentric costumes he’d designed for himself to conceal goods more expensive and so more likely to garner bids on the secondary market, though the fragrances he stockpiled, in the unlikely event of a girlfriend. He’d dress as a woman, or affect a traditionally black African American manner of speaking—O’Quinn being half black African American, and half Irish—in a bid to remain unrecognizable to the staff on repeat visits.

  The merchandise O’Quinn lifted, like de Groeve’s gizmos, served as props in Cohen’s campaigns.

  [A SENTENCE OR TWO RE: THE EVOLUTION OF “STARTUP CULTURE”? BECAUSE WITHOUT IT THIS’LL SEEM WEIRD?] “Startup” culture hadn’t even begun yet—it was online that enabled that, and launched a billion geosocial sex apps and digital currencies [developed in rented frathouses fetid with ass and backyarded with lenticular pools]. Before then, students and even faculty were content to collaborate on products the university would own and market: CAD modelers for the automotive industry, analysis and trading platforms, system emulators, military simulators. With the university’s computers prioritized for class projects, personal projects had to be pursued on personal computers—inadequate, DOS incompatible, RAM/ROM inexpansible, intramural. In 1989 [or 90?], the year online debuted, Cohen, O’Quinn, and de Groeve had only one unit among them—de Groeve’s: a Gopal Ovum 1000, which retailed for $4800[, which today would be over $9300?].

  [“It was this 16 bit at 2.8 MHz 1.125 MB 256 KB round white cow egg. Fugly. We do not mean to fellate our competition by confessing that ou
r future partners executed their juvenilia on its equipment. As like Gopal does everything else by itself, from its chips to the antitampering sixpointed screws that entail an antitampering sixpointed screwer, let it administer its own fellatio. All the rich kids at Stanford had a Gopal, all the kids at Stanford were rich, RAMateurs, ROMateurs, who craved the shelter of an impermeable shell OS and whose only other computing requirements were to sound and look cool with 32 oscillators, 640 × 200 resolution. Anyway, we were not in competition with them then or now, and never will be. Gopal already had over $2 billion in annual revenue but our dominance was math, we knew bigger numbers, we knew the biggest. We tasted our dominance even while economizing on a daily diet of one pineapple nectar and one pita sliced midsagittally into devaginated halves and spooned with marshmallow fluff.”]

  Both de Groeve and O’Quinn were compsci majors and by the end of first semester had cowritten a program for Concentives that enabled the mystery shopping company to automatically tabulate upsell results and implement a general rating system, both by mall and by franchises of chains among malls. However, they were still having a problem with standardizing, not to mention automating, the evaluations of the written portion of each assessment and, having related the particulars to Cohen as they packed for the holidays, left—de Groeve to Hong Kong, O’Quinn to Philadelphia. Cohen remained in his dorm throughout winter break, and by the time his roommates returned for second semester he’d engineered a solution. The roommates were stunned. Cohen had broken through their wall, and not just figuratively, but literally. Requiring their stash of written assessments and unable to find his copy of their key amid his mess, he’d borrowed a sledgehammer from maintenance and bashed a crude passage into the plaster shared between their rooms.

  In Cohen’s estimation, deriving and automating [automatizing?] ratings from written assessments was merely an extension of listing, a matter of sourcing an urlist of keywords, which could be accomplished either by management designating approved verbiage for reportorial use (“topdown”), homogenizing and so narrowing the expression of the reports, or by culling the reports themselves for the verbiage (“bottomup”), relying on the reporters to provide a heterogeneous and so wider expression. [Obviously?] this latter option was preferable, but it could be implemented only if the assessments were made searchable.

  Cohen had written a [descriptor algorithm?], pen on quadrille paper, which totalized the frequency of term use both across the entire spectrum of reportage—by all reports, by all reports within mall, by all reports within type (“apparel,” “appliances”), by all reports within chain (“McDonald’s,” “Burger King”)—and within the oeuvre of each individual reporter. This approach generated ratings both of the stores and the shoppers or pseudoshoppers themselves, whose written assessments were rife with [ambiguous proportions?]: “very”/“extremely” being positive values when applied to “helpful,” but negative values when applied to “unhelpful,” not to mention the double negatives (“not unhelpful”), which were only halfway positive, and the double positives (“too helpful”), which were only halfway negative.

  De Groeve and O’Quinn coded the algorithm in C++ [INSERT JOKE? “THE ONLY GRADE ANY OF US RECEIVED THAT SEMESTER”?]. Cohen would have nothing to do with the programming besides suggesting that the better language to use might be Perl, in which each line is prefaced with a dollar sign—a “$” [CLARIFY USAGE/DIFFERENCES, BETWEEN CODING AND PROGRAMMING, AS NOUN AND VERB].

  Cohen completed his freshman year without visiting home, which was only [#] miles away, and without even taking his finals, which were only [#] yards away. That summer he turned down an offer from de Groeve and O’Quinn to live in an apartment with them in San Francisco’s Mission District and hone the program, now officially called Repearter, for Concentives, and instead opted to stay in his single, and accept recruitment [WHY?] into a panoply of university projects [WHY RECRUITED?]: memory and cognitive studies (on efferent discharge, synaesthesia, subitization), and a psych manifestation team that trained participating students to embody certain characteristics of certain psychiatric syndromes and comorbidities to test the ability of trainee shrinks to identify factitious disorders (as team members included both “authentics”—those with genuine syndromes/comorbidities—and “healthies”—those without—and as admission to the team required screenings by mental health professionals, whose findings were not revealed to anyone, no team member was aware of which they were, or were supposed to have been, until the collation of the professional and trainee diagnoses that marked the study’s conclusion).

  Cohen’s sophomore year was, if possible, even more disastrous. He was generally regarded as the most promising [undergraduate?] mathematician at Stanford, and yet he was failing all of his classes except for a course in information theory. He wandered the campus perpetually, somnambulistically, and his attempts to count the numbers of windows and doors in each of the buildings, and his unwillingness to move from Stern into another dorm [WHICH?] he was assigned, were all taken as indicative of drug dependence.

  The hole hammered into his wall[—over which he hung an ersatz family shrine featuring a Chinese New Year’s card wishing a lucky Year of the Horse 4688, which depicted the de Groeve parents dressaged from jodhpurs to helmets on horseback atop Victoria Peak above Pok Fu Lam and bay, and an unframed group portrait of Philadelphia’s own Local 3, which union did not identify but unequivocally represented O’Quinn’s brothers—]was rumored to have been the result of a methamphetamine lab explosion. With de Groeve and O’Quinn informing him that even the faculty had been gossiping about his hallucinogen abuse, Cohen went into Math 234/Stat 374, Major Deviations, obstructing and so invalidating a toss of either fair or loaded dice [“TO DETERMINE WHETHER STOCHASTIC PROCESSES WITH DIFFERENT TRANSITION MATRICES PRODUCE THE SAME STATE DISTRIBUTION”], and introduced himself to the professor as Inigo Zweifel, which was the professor’s own name.

  Cohen’s second sophomore semester was spent further investigating indeterminacy [EXPAND], in an office repurposed from the dormroom in Toyon Hall assigned to de Groeve and O’Quinn, who at the time were finalizing Repearter for Concentives in their Mission District apartment, commuting to campus only for classes. Cohen had refused his share of the $20000 the roommates were paid to deliver the program, but counterproposed nothing except this office. It was filled with decks of creased playingcards, Thoth tarots, lotto tickets and scratchers labeled by purchase date and location, snapped pasternbones and yarrowstalks, all of which kept him from his cryptography problemsets for aleatory variables. Library books on Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, and Muism [KOREAN SHAMANISM AND NOT A TYPO], overdue and never due because stolen. [Breaking into 208 Sequoia? to protest the student incident report Professor Zweifel lodged with the ombuds?,] He acquired a black magicmarker and a white dryerase board, which he [back in his quarters] installed incorrectly—with the board’s scrubbable surface facing the wall, so the corkwood backing facing out—meaning that anything he’d write on it would be permanent, so he waited, and was patient.

  There was a knock at the door and Cohen ignored it but the knocks kept coming. He went to the door and asked who it was and the voice on the other side answered, “Acting Dean of Student Affairs Kyle.”

  Cohen was sure he was being expelled but then Acting Dean of Student Affairs Kyle asked, “Are we speaking with Mr. de Groeve or Mr. O’Quinn?”

  Cohen answered, yelling, that he was speaking with both of them.

  “Will you open up, please?”

  Cohen yelled they were both undressed.

  “We have been trying to get in touch with Mr. Joshua Cohen. We understand he is a friend of yours.”

  Cohen confirmed.

  “Mr. Cohen is not in his dorm and famously not in class—will you at least pass along a msg?”

  Cohen pressed his mouth up against the door, said nothing.

  “Please tell him to be in touch with his mother. An emergency family situation.”

  [DIALOGUE V
ERBATIM FROM PRINCIPAL—REWRITE ALL W/ SINGULAR PRONOUN AND W/ CONTRACTIONS.]

  [ID TIME AND LOCATION AT TOP? OR BOTTOM?]

  Cohen unlocked and turned the knob. His father had had another heartattack, in the sauna at the Belmont Hills JCC, 04/01/91.

  Two ceremonies were held—a funeral, which Sari planned at Alta Mesa cemetery without a rabbi and without having notified any extended family or friends and, a month later, a memorial service at Abs’s favorite restaurant, Prime Asian Tacos II, held by his former colleagues, who were furious with Sari.

  Cohen was barely sentient throughout the funeral, having taken [only now] the first drugs of his life—two Valium, the prescription courtesy of Nancy [Apt].

  For the memorial, Cohen took four Valium and, approaching the restaurant’s sombreroed dragon that served as a makeshift lectern to read a selection from the Tibetan Book of the Dead [WHAT SELECTION?], passed out, and hallucinated his father being mauled to death by a dragon in a sombrero. He came to in a cramped untidy condo [WHERE HIS FATHER HAD BEEN LIVING?], in the midst of Abs’s shiva, and when the mourners had finished their prayers[, they left]—they left Cohen alone[, and there he stayed].

  ://

  from the Palo Alto sessions: Toward the end D-Unit had been working on the touchscreen. Do not interrupt, we do not digress. Tactiles. Haptics. It must have been that he was forced into this, or the PARC touchscreen group had been short an engineer and asked him and he could not refuse, D-Unit could never refuse. But his true cur, toward the end, was printing, still printing, but not in 2D anymore, in 3D, and he would have printed in 4D if he could, but no one could, least of all a Xerox employee. His condo was filled with attempts, cracked half shapes and crumbling forms, in plastic, metal, glass, ceramic, foam, powders, pellets, waxes. It was a lot to go sorting through, a lot to determine which was a model and which a modeler, which was a machined part and which a part of a machine that machined the part, from a photofabricator, laser sinterer, deposit fuser, and we spent our time totally consumed with this sorting and did not return to Stanford.