Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  But Qui and Cull had never even called the cops, and so our algy was spared.

  Then we called CESS, the electronics show organizers. But they would not relay exhibitor info over the phone and suggested we consult the official commemorative catalog. But we already had. We had an unlisted Indian situation.

  We clenched, we had been waiting to clench. Everything Cull and Qui were telling us was a repetition. Either the Indian was this master who absently mixed up his horses, or grifted, or both. He made interactive creditcards. He made crappy dongles. But he was also working on a vanguard type of total computing in which what went in and what went out were sustainably equilibrated. Reversibility in computing was as like letting a bet ride through every race without ever winning or losing but also without paying a vig. As like a sex act between two bodies that never aged and whose minds were equipped with the Undo/Redo functions.

  Cull and Qui hit the showers. We went back to getting aggro about the inprogress site of the Bureau of Indian Affairs whose only unbroken link on its linkpage was to a url broker trying to sell virtual reservations to every tribe, apache to zuni.com. We decamped for the unmoderated engineer hunting grounds, WbStrZ.org, Netikit.org, @omic@araxy, 73h.wh157l3bl0w3r. We read about nodes and electrodes, capacitive coupling, bistability.

  We posted msgs with handles as like ISOLone and VegaSageV with offers to hire an engineer for a reversible experiment that made a weeny affirmative action claim about especially welcoming applications from Native Americans. Just by reading and msging we were feeling proximal already, if not linguistically or conceptually proximal, then mystically, religiously, as like in searching for him we were feeling that tingle of being searched for ourselves.

  Super Sal woke us up at the terminal by saying, “The Chief is on Line 2.”

  We took the call, assuming we had been preemptively found, but then Line 2 introduced itself as like, “This is only the acting chief of the council of business elders.” He was just returning the voicemail we had left after tetrating “Indian+O’Lune” had brought us to the tribal site of the Ohlone, or to be politically PC the Muwekma Ohlone, descendants of the original inhabitants of the Bay, since dispossessed, halfassedly genocided.

  But none of the members of the Ohlone tribe were called Ohlone, the chief said. Or they all were called Ohlone. They were the Costeños, “coastal people,” to the Spanish. The Ohlone, “people of the west,” to the Miwok. The Muwekma, “people of the Miwok,” to themselves. People of the Miwok, people of the west. Western Miwok. Überwesterners.

  The chief told us we were eligible for a lowprice genetic test that might establish our membership in up to 18 federally recognized tribes. Or our money back. And our money back. Reparations might be attainable.

  Finally, a TendR VC cur about our having applied for and received US Patent 5835905B, “Method for relevance prediction,” rang back with two asks:

  Firstly, would we explain the parallelism formulas governing Fig. 4D? And secondly, would we explain why we were getting so publicly inquisitive about this character Ohlone?

  We answered that our partners had met him in Vegas and got cur about him but never got his contact, and the VC said, “Next time write an algy that can, with all respect, call bullshit. Anyway, Muwekma Ohlone. That is an alias. Legally his name is Vishnu Vaidya.”

  Our terms, then, became clarified.

  “He tried to get us involved in a scheme for invertible computing,” the VC said and we said, “Reversible.”

  The VC then reminisced about a snazzy anorak he used to own, lined on one side in cotton, for the theater, the other in water repellent Tyvek, for hiking home.

  “He is Indian?” we said.

  “With a dot,” the VC said. “Not a feather.”

  “Vaidya?” we said.

  “But he came to us with that bullshit inversible scheme calling himself Vishnu Fernandes.”

  “With a z?”

  “Fernandes with an s,” the VC said. “But then how the fuck would a dot Indian get that name?”

  “From Portugal.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “From Portugal.”

  Then the VC told us all that montage about the remotes and the mafia, backtracking, and how the Vishnu identity had been disclosed during diligence on his reversible papers, backtracking. “The suspicion,” the VC said, “was that he stopped being Vishnu because of all that cablebox fraud and being foreign especially was trying to not get arrested.”

  We thanked him and he said, “No prob, just keep our name out of it.”

  But we told him we did not understand why and he said, “If you hire him, you can forget about our support.”

  We hung up.

  The VC. His name was Bretton Cleaver.

  We tetrated again using “Vishnu Vaidya,” and appended “the Bay,” because back then to trim by coordinate consilience or zipcode was a Vedic fantasy.

  The results stack came back paltry.

  One result was a gambling site, one comment below many and most of them gibber, “nice turnout last time. chuck u left yr asthma inhaler will bring,” left by the uname Vishuponafern at the bottom of a thread called “Poker In The Rear.”

  The READ THIS FIRST post advised that getting in on a game was contingent on responding correctly to a riddle: “Four men sit around playing blackjack. The first man gets up, leaves, and lives. The second man gets up, leaves, and lives. The third man gets up, leaves, and lives. The fourth man gets up, leaves, and expires. Explain without accusing anyone of homicide.”

  The last line of the riddle was hyperlinked to a moderator/admin email, and we clicked it and replied: “They were playing on an airplane to determine who got the last three parachutes, or on a boat to determine who got the last three lifejackets, or else the guy with the lowest or busted hand had a brain aneurysm,” and the moderator responded immediately with an invitation.

  At the Wells Fargo we withdrew the sub $6K still in the account without telling Cull or Qui, went out searching the way our ancestors searched, with the only other cards we ever had, with our name on them and the title embossed, Founder, Tetration.

  The game was held outside Portola, on a foreclosed duderanch this Amazon lady from Amazon.com had bought just to flip, an egregious driveway to a villa, cardtable and saddlechairs the only furnishings. Already we were down in the hole thanks the taxi.

  We went with the Fresca, left the other players to their single malt doubles. Let them read us or try to.

  Vishnu Vaidya, Vishnu Fernandes, Muwekma Ohlone—Moe—he came in late, a groundless current bursting from this just heinous flasher trenchcoat. His teeth were all caried crowded funk mesiodental, his tongue as like a pinkslip splotched white.

  He stunk, reeked to tell the truth foul.

  The game was Texas hold em, 2/4 no limit, which dealt from the top suggests the obfuscation at stake because to win most of time is to fold em. We were better than most but worse than him, tight.

  Moe had half the table buying in seconds by the second full deal rotation, and immediately post antemeridian the other half just left.

  By last Fresca it was just us and a scruffy cruft of simoleoned emotionals, who played not too strong not too weak, but unpredictably predictably reckless. The type to wait out, let them cope, come senses or tantrum.

  But Moe did not wait, shuffling a pocket pair as like a toolbar. He did not even take off the trench.

  His play had been tame wild until it suddenly became wild tame, without bluff, which was the bluff, but not. Basically any bid to define strategy yielded tactics, any attempt to refine his decisions into levels or stages, degrees of the mind, was the biggest mistake an opponent could make. Rather the biggest mistake after not cashing out or not being Moe himself. Or boozing between pots. Moe might have been Hindu but for poker he had Buddha face. He bet low on big hands either because they were not big enough or just to keep us or him still cur. He went all in 44 times. He was little blind holding A-J just anteing up until
the J-6-4 flop had him going in as like gangbusters, which left only this dotcomster comedian still in the game miraculously seeing not raising, the turn was 10, which meant a straight or flush could still be in the cards because both the J and 10 were of some manly finance suit, some clubs or spades flushed straight away in an ace cascade and fuck you, Yahoo from Yahoo.com, $8K for an ace high on the river two pair.

  Moe quit approx $10K up at the end of the night that was morning, while we had managed, just, to make exactly $3.379K, though that was nothing because he still had not acknowledged—you will not laugh? Promise?

  He still had not acknowledged us.

  Our self.

  Not until we were both outside amid spring 97.

  Moe popped his collar. “So we are square?”

  We said, “The name is Tetration.”

  “We are money square, that is my meaning. Tell your Tetration bros—I have lent back to you what I have borrowed from them.”

  We stopped our slog through the driveway clay and dung hung in the air. “You think you let us win in there?”

  “I think I let you win a profit.”

  “What about the DAS Capital associate or that Gaymer GM who folded on queens over eights?”

  “It was queens over nines.”

  “Eights or nines.”

  He poked his ignition key between our ribs and said, “What about we settle this in Los Angeles, Joshua Cohen?”

  ://

  The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want. As like Los Angeles, as like a drive to Los Angeles. But we were helpless. We were in a dustbrown dump of a soccer parent van with a fluorescent red bindi decal on the hood and a back bay lending library of leaflets and pamphlets as like “Cellphone Brain Tumors Exposed!” and “Beware the Monoculture: the PC virus and the viruses that can bring down the system!” A lot stub from Vegas was wedged between spring coils in a gash in the upholstery. The talkradio was tuned to Republican. Moe drove not toward I5 but stayed on the 101. He chainsmoked a figment cigarette, just bringing fingers to lips and pinching the lips and breathing in, breathing out, windows fogging. It was dewy and cold and he could not figger the defroster. We will repeat that. He was a trained genius engineer who could not figger the defroster, so he rolled down his window to the breezes, route scenics.

  He knew everything about us, knew everything about Tetration. He referred to Cull and Qui as like our “bros,” and to us as like his “rakhi bro.” Everyone at the game had called him Moe, and that was the only name he ever mentioned having. Moe picked among his toothcrowd with our businesscard.

  His driving was not erratic if we followed his thoughts, because his driving followed his thoughts and veered and passed. Cut off. He was telling us about India, which had invented online. The Vedas, the Upanishads. He rehashed the Ramayana, stalled, the Mahabharata, stalled. Rather, he said, Hinduism had invented the cosmology that had been plagiarized online. The net, the web, just a void and in the void a wilderness, a jungle of hardware sustaining a diversity of software, of sites, of all out of order pages, a pantheon to be selectively engaged, an experience special to each user. Each click was a dedicated worship, an act of mad propitiation that hazarded destruction.

  Altogether, never altogether, online comprised a religion of bespoke blue plural gods that could also be goddesses that could also be customized in any alternative to gender and blueness, not a religion but a flux of cults, temporary sects, routing allegiances, provider alliances. The user as like the Hindu can ping whatever divinity is best convenient for whatever purpose, can ping the deity of the specific moment or location, or the one pertinized to a particular task, without any core theology, without any central control, anything goes.

  What guaranteed this access was search. No one understood search as like an Indian.

  We stopped at a tarpit outside Paso Robles and Moe got out and pumped gas and went into the conmart and returned with a carton of menthol cigarettes, buckled up, then unbuckled and conmarted again and returned with a tank of gin in plastic. He put his incisors to the carton, a pack, bit a menthol and struck a strike anywhere match anywhere, breathed in and out and swore he had quit. He uncapped the gin to wash down two whitepink pills whose pharmcalls we noted, M575, do the detectivework, go sleuth it. When he swallowed it was with the Gayatri, that mantra that clears the astral nerve tubes. We have no clue how to drive. We have never had a license.

  We got into LA around 18:00 and went to get some dinner. After our steaks he gave us a pill. We took another after our sundae. The steaks were gushing in that rare to raw style that homophobe kitchens hash out to men on dates who request medium. The icecream was brownbutter lardon nut brittle berry. We had never eaten as like that in our lives, but had no guilt.

  Though we had two, but only one each, martinis. Because Moe was taking us along to his regular game, and we had to stay upright to knock it over.

  “You go in and just ask the reception for Rosebud,” Moe said, “who will tell you the room. Come in calm and be yourself. Sit how you are told to sit and get your cash out. Pretend you might have met them all before but you cannot remember. Pretend with me just the same.”

  The waiter offered cappuccino, espresso, and Moe said, “You are awake enough?”

  We said, “Are you asking us or just the waiter?”

  Moe said, “You are awake enough. Check, please.”

  Modafinil retails as like Provigil in the States, but the whitepinks we had taken were some Canadian version, Alertec. A eugeroic, a nootropic, which IT twerks and the Green Berets prefer to amphetamine and methylphenidate because it is nonaddictive.

  Moe insisted on paying for dinner, as like he had paid for the gas, and we got back into the van and drove and stopped and he lit up a menthol for us from the dash.

  “That mansion,” he said, and through the smirched windshield was a mansion. “You will get out here at the Liquor Locker and walk slow down Sunset, so I will have time to park and go in before you. We do not know each other. Remember.”

  “But that is not a lie,” we said and got out on the street.

  Then Moe leaned over and unrolled the window. “Trust me,” he said. “I always know a rakhi bro. I can sense our wheels turning back through the samsara, Joshua Cohen.”

  He waved all the honking cars around him and said to us, “But if they ask, only if they ask, tell them you are the guy who runs the game out in Venice Beach.”

  Moe crept into the lane and we went on slow for blocks, doing the base vs. adjusted probabilities for holding an 8/8. Preflop against one player was 2%, 2.9%, and by increasing by one player per block we had mentally calculated for up to six, a situation in which there was a 16%, 16.3% chance that one of them had a larger pair.

  Then we spit our autograph onto the sidewalk and crossed the street and up the drive. We had been prepared for everything except the Chateau Marmont.

  We dropped Rosebud and were shown down speedbump carpet halls and opened a door to the celebrity 1990s. We are not sure we should be more specific.

  But suffice to say someone as like Keanu was in the room, someone as like Johnny Depp, a Damon and an Affleck, the wrong Wahlberg, who could have been wasted from a protracted wager sessh or just from more of better drugs than we had.

  The one who was Affleck or Damon was yelling at the one he was not for leaving the door unlocked, while the other was yelling that the last to leave the room had been the butler. The Wahlberg was approaching as like to bounce us out, but we were recognized.

  Moe recognized—“You are that guy,” he said. “We met him out in Brentwood, Johnny?”

  Then Depp claimed we were familiar.

  “Not Brentwood,” we said. “You came to our Venice game.”

  With that Damon and Affleck relaxed and put their arms around us but also they were frisking us and the Wahlberg said, “This guy is famous?”

  Keanu said, “For losing.”

 
Seats were rearranged to give us next hand first position, or not rearranged because the only seat available was the bed and so the table was nudged in our direction. Action heroes nudged it, and put us in the chips. We were dealt and folded and lost to establish credibility at first. But then we were betting middlingly, after tipping our hands to Moe using chipstacks to signal our facecards. Ten of $10 whites a jack, ten of $20 reds a queen, ten of $100 blacks a king, nine of the white or black an ace just to miff it, cutting a red stack for a warning sign if his raising verged on patterny. A crude system but comptrasted with manual collusion as like finger taps, effective.

  Pathogenic duvet, walls venereal with mold, polluted cash, but we never washed, we never even had the urge to wash. No bend or crease or soil would spoil our royalty. The bartender was knocking and Keanu was trying to undo the chain with his mind alone until he folded and the Wahlberg helped carry in the bar trolley. Moe kept ordering gin and tonics but we held with martinis despite the bowtied guy repeatedly belaboring our options up or down and dry or wet, dirty with a twist, and smirking because we ordered them with vodka.

  We had to get drunk enough so that our loss was convincing, but not too drunk so that we betrayed our cheat, just running out the clock until a watch was on the line. Moe won but did not have the wrist to wear a Bulgari Ellipsocurvex Tourbillon. Two pairs of courtside tickets to the Lakers next season. If Jerry Buss had been there Moe might have won the Lakers.

  Keanu was busted. The Wahlberg was broke. There was no air, only smoke. There were no glasses that had not been used as like ashtrays. Everyone was yawning that they were due at a party. We were not invited to the party.

  Moe had left his van in Marmont Parking but was in no shape to drive it and would not let the bellhop call us a cab. He did not trust anyone that any venue would call to pick up two men who had just won their karma at duplicitous cards.

  He led us down the strip to hang outside a bar until two guys, all gelspiked hair and cacti muscles and torus piercings through Celtic tatts, got dropped off by a cab.