Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  At this point Kor got dressed.

  We told him about the Mohammeds. Sons of their Emirs, promotable sheikhlings on the Economic and Industrial Development committees of the Council, deputy generals of the armed forces, of the UAE. They were willing to match the Dubai price. Pay attention and they might even go lower.

  Sharjah and Fujairah were the Emirates to bet on, we said. In every crash Dubai had evinced a withering. It was all prefab infrastructure afloat on silica, grainy towers slipping through the fingers, whole entire reinvestment zones and innovation districts just salty Gulf bubbles rolled up on the shore, the roads between them paved with oil borrowed from the Emirates that pumped. Sharjah and Fujairah pumped. Dubai had no oil, just reserves. Sharjah and Fujairah would survive no matter what.

  All the billionaires we have ever met stand clasping their hands behind their back. Only Kor holds his hands that way while sitting.

  He was basically disgusted.

  “Stop micromanaging,” he said. “Stop all this cockmonkey nano pico femto attomanaging.” He asked us what reduction came after atto. Then he asked us to have a seat.

  “So you flew all the way the fuck out here just to save dough with a petty Emirate? What the fuck is going on with you?”

  We answered with the further reductions, “Zepto, yocto, nothing.”

  “You sound the way you look,” he said. “Shit.”

  Then he broke out a bag of sourdough white, tipped a jar of mild salsa, pooling the gunk atop each slice, mozzarella, parmesan, prosciutt. Mexican pizzas, mezzas, two, and two minibar colas.

  We should have abstained, should not have abstained, unsure as like which would have maintained the normal. We delivered the mezza to our mouth and chewed.

  Kor asked, “This is Negam territory, no?” Referring to Monica Negam, who directs our DCents in Africa.

  We swallowed and said, “You,” not basically, verbatim.

  Kor asked, “You ping Susan Rim?” Referring to Seo Woo-Rim, who directs our DCents in Asia.

  We said, “This is us delegating. You.”

  “What?”

  “You are going to go to Sharjah and Fujairah on our behalf.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Emiratis expect the works with extra cheese.”

  “You are telling me? With how you screwed us already, just by making this trip alone? It was enough of an effort to massage the fauxgrammers. To keep your autobiographer or whoever minding his manners.”

  We had a sip of cola and laid our trump. We said we were only trying to do something nice for him, “Korele, stop making this something we regret.”

  We told him that one of the Council negotiators had turned out to be a comrade vintage military freak who quartermastered the army depot in Ajman, collected vehicles and crafts, historical armaments. At our suggestion he was sending a helicopter. A mint condition Mil-24, a Soviet combat rattletrap, a cramping buggy Hind. Kor would be traveling to Sharjah and Fujairah in style.

  But not just that, Kor would be permitted to fly the thing, and beyond that he would even be allowed, but this was not our suggestion, to fire a rocket or two along the way. Into the desert. At a dune. Oryx, ibex, gazelle, whatever leaps.

  You will go suss both deals and return same day, we said to Kor, basically.

  We would stay behind, not to spook Dubai. This Sharjah and Fujairah trip would be pleasure, justifiable.

  Just after Kor went coptering off we put all nonessential personnel on our jet and flew them Stateside.

  Then we took his for Abu Dhabi.

  ://

  Josh, Balk not. We will give you our passport. Tomorrow you will go to Abu Dhabi International and buy a ticket on one airline with our passport for anywhere, Aeroflot has significant discounts to Moscow, then buy another ticket on another airline with your passport for anywhere, Korean Air to Seoul always gets tetpraisals of four stars. But remember, two different tickets to two different destinations on two different airlines leaving from two different terminals under two different passports. Pay everything in cash. You will have to backtrack and take out cash. Next. Check into one with one passport, go through security, go through immigration, go for the veggie kabob, no booze, then go back out and take the shuttle to the other terminal, check into the other with the other passport, security, immigration, another veggie kabob, no booze, then back out and take a taxi to Al Bateen Executive Airport, executive terminal 2, arranging to arrive by 10:00. We have hired a plane. Not a Gulfstream as like none were available but be assured it will be serviceable and staffed with a competent twoperson crew. They will fly you to Berlin. Upon landing, customs or whatever might assume you are us but in the event they request a passport, they will certainly not scan it. Jets make an impression, even if they are not Gulfstreams. Backtracking. Destroy our passport between the airports. Correction. Shred inflight and flush. Keep your own for a souvenir or an escape plan. Immaterial. In Berlin you will be met. And though you will not know this someone, they will know you. Someone with a car we presume. They will reimburse your tickets and expenses and drive you to a house apportioned to your use by an anonymous donor to Balk whose identity even we do not have. Neither do we have the addy. Not city or state. Do not interrupt us. Or country. You will stay until you finish our book.

  Backtracking. You will have to transcribe our recordings yourself. Use no online or offline computational transcription service or product, and never employ assistants, secretaries, humans. Backtracking. Avoid your Tetmail account, never check it again from this or any other computer. Backtracking. Same goes for all other accounts, including Tetset. Backtracking. Do not transfer the recording or manuscript files to any other computer or take any other computer online. Backtracking. Give us your Tetbook. Help us off with our belt. It has the prong. To strap the strap. Shaking, there. Steady, there. We have just disabled your modem. You cannot take this Tetbook online. Upon completion, destroy it. Backtracking. Upon completion, print one copy and only one copy of the manuscript on a new and/or old printer that has never been and/or cannot be taken online. Load the printer driver by hard software and couple to the printer by wire. Transfer one copy of the recordings to either our agent or publisher not by stick but with a crossover wire with two male ends. Deliver a paper manuscript.

  You will note that if you have not delivered a manuscript by 24:00 EDT, 04/01/2012, our contract autonullifies and you are forbidden from publishing in any media or way any work you might have completed. In that event Balk himself will contact you to take receipt of the recordings, an unedited transcript of which b-Leaks will post online. Regardless, the recordings must be retained, either by our agent and/or publisher or b-Leaks, and made available to press or court as like testimony, in a manner that mitigates their dissemination/reproduction. Once authenticity has been established we request they be destroyed. We are ashamed of our voice and would not wish its immortality on anyone. Upon what we are confident will be the print publication of a finished book, $14 million assetized to our shell Firstborn Equity, B.M., held in escrow by Bank Hapoalim, Tel Aviv, will be disbursed to b-Leaks accounts. This understanding will prevent b-Leaks from pursuing the matter independently, and will further incentivize its support of your work. Upon publication, the remainder of our estate will be entrusted jointly to M-Unit and Aunt Nance, all instructions pertaining to which along with suggestions for almsgiving have been arranged with Mendel Gutshteyn, Esq., 5290 Geary Boulevard, the Richmond.

  We are going to find Ohlone. We will be taking Tetjet Two with Jesus and Feel, who will return to the States without us. We will be alone. We will be lost. Kor will have not even uncovered our routes by the time you are settled and we, all crossed. The crossing we seek does not countenance the passport. Moe never hanged himself with a belt from Montreal. But if he did it was only to return as like another.

  We make this declaration while in full possession of our mental faculties for in . We have had visions, bells.

  Online has expanded since fi
rst we spanned it. There is a Vishnu Fernandes who sets up pennyante eTailer sites for as like tool and die and silk wholesalers in Goa, just some bad oneclick carting better subcontracted to robots. There is another just an entry on the rolls maintained by the Department of Social Welfare, Goa. A Vishnu Fernandes who appears to be a teacher at one institution, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a student at another, Kohinoor College of Tourism Management. Yet another in some orphanage in Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi, adoptable. We go. Moe claimed life open and we claimed life closed but neither is feasible because there are cows in the road. You can go and then smack. There is a cow. In the river of the road. You have to wait. You wait to cross.

  Basically at that point it ends.

  ://

  1

  Rabbi Krikruker,

  Today I was writing an email to my cousin and his wife in Israel (Kfar Chabad), to wish them a mazel tov on their first child, a boy. But then I was stopped by a sinful thought!! Obviously when I type anything that invokes the Hebrew for “G-d,” I use the traditional euphemism familiar from the way everyone knows to pronounce the Name whenever they’re not distinctly praying: “HaShem,” which means, of course, “the Name.” Like for a good luck on a new business venture email I might type: “May HaShem bless you and keep you,” or for a get well soon email: “Blessed is HaShem, the source of healing,” or for a condolence email: “HaShem, save us—may the King answer on the day we call.”

  But now that all of our communications are online, I can’t help but wonder about rabbis like yourself who have to type out the Name of G-d, the true and perfect four letter mystical unpronounceable Name He calls Himself, for religious purposes such as instruction.

  According to Jewish law—Torah: Deuteronomy 12:3–4, Talmud: Megillah 26b, Shabbat 115a, Eruvin 98a—the Name of G-d must never be destroyed. Any paper or other writing surface that contains the Name must be buried like a person is buried, not discarded. But what about on the computer? Can we erase or trash? Or do we have to bury our machines too? And what about servers or online like in the cloud?

  Please advise, as my cousin and his wife are also interested. May your site go from strength to strength, b’ezrat HaShem.

  I. Blitzer

  New York, NY

  Don’t bury your old PC in the cemetery, Mr. Blitzer! Instead, dispose of it properly! Or better, recycle it! Donate it to charity! It is kosher to do so now that the Israeli chief rabbinate has ruled that it is permissible to delete the Tetragrammaton—the four letter Name of God—from both computer screen and file, AND from a server (meaning from anywhere online).

  As the responsum explains, a computer cannot inscribe or be inscribed by anything, and the proscription against destroying the Name pertains exclusively to physical scripture, to writing by hand (though as dot matrix printer ink impregnates the paper, printed copies must still be interred). In a computer file, the Name of God, like any other word, exists only as a binary series of numbers, as 1s and 0s signifying the sequence of the letters—they are NOT the letters themselves! It follows that what is saved to memory, whether on your computer or to a server online—“the cloud”—is merely a representation! Onscreen, the Name of God is not even represented, but just perpetually refreshed. Light is beamed at the screen approximately 60x/second. In its every manifestation, then, the digitized Name is purely symbolic, and so, by the standards of Jewish law, lacks permanence. HaShem’s light, by contrast, is everlasting.

  —askandtherabbianswers.com

  10/1, BERLIN

  I haven’t written in a while, I’ve been writing.

  Factcheck: transcribing, what I’ve been doing is transcribing. Two .docs are open. This and the book, the book’s. I have 80 recfiles open too, .recs. PLAY, PAUSE, type. REWIND, PLAY, type. This might be the only time in my life I haven’t cheated. Every word out of Principal’s mouth I’ve put down on the page (down onscreen). All I’ve been told to do I’ve done. I’ve earned this break, this vacation (though only a writer would ever consider writing a vacation). I’m speaking strictly for myself again, in my own words, talking back to Principal. To you—as of today I’ve copied all of you I have.

  This might be the only time in my life I haven’t cheated, except accidentally. By which I mean that every few hours:minutes:seconds, my employer’s snakecharming vocoder voice has arisen from out of its 32 bit 44.1 kHz decompression with a statement of material fact so outlandish, that I had this gut or just opposable thumbs compulsion to corroborate, and before I knew it my fingers left the keys and were clicking on my browser, which loaded to remind—I was not online. I have even, without thinking, gone searching for signals, for nothing. I’ve been stranded, utterly abandoned, left wireless—rather, wirelessless.

  Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kipper: a happy healthy year to you, Moms.

 

  Izdihar al-Maribi—the only woman I’ve fucked whom I’ve had to remember, because she’s untetratable.

  Go ahead—slap me with a fatwa, make me famous, Insha’Allah.

  That day Over two weeks ago

  Fuck it—9/11—9/11 dawned with alarm, the robocall to a prayer of a day. There was so much to do, there was nothing else to do, so much of nothing else at 6:00.

  Izdi, Iz—she was up already and out of bed, wearing her sunglasses and zipped ripely into my Tetration sweatsuit. As the roomphone rang on she was bawling in French, “Ne decrotch pa!”

  I reached for the phone but she swatted my hand, “C’est mon mari!”

  But I kept reaching. For how to say “courtesy call” en Français. Reveill? reveille? Coup de courtoisie? appel do wakeywakey?

  I lifted the transceiver from its cradle but Iz knocked it away and cowered down to the floor—because, I realized, my sore livid hersmelling hand was empty in midair as if about to beat her, and so I just pressed the speakerphone option. The robovoice was repeating the date, as the Gulf sounds sloshed in the background, tides in and out and in. Iz recognized if not the meaning of the recording then its purpose, and calmed.

  I offed the speakerphone as she went grabbing at her sweatpants and twisting the excess calf fabric around into knots—she wasn’t used to wearing sleeves on her legs, I guess. The transceiver just lay there bleating.

  And she was talking to me. And I couldn’t understand—I couldn’t understand because then she was on her knees and crawling under the bed and tugging out her abaya and spitting on the chalking still whitening the back of that blackness and rubbing it into a slime, and frowning, and spitting, rubbing, talking all the while.

  Apropos of whatever she was saying, I tucked my abating prick under the sheets and recalled that cliché found in antedated Anglo-American translations of European novels, in which cravated Mediterranean lechers are said not to speak but to “have languages.” “I had” no Arabic and only a bit of French, “Iz had” no English and only a bit of French. “We had” no language in common. It’s an insinuative phrase—it’s as if the very act of speech had once been possession, and innocence and naïveté and sincérité and intégrité each had its price.

  Iz had turned her abaya insideout and now was patting it unrumpled. She was searching for a pocket, a pouch sewn into its insides, pudendal. She took out a book of her own. And she opened it—and that slayed me with poignancy—how she opened the book as if to reassure herself of her identity before offering it to me.

  It was an Omani passport whose red pebbled leatherette was consanguine with the stain spread on her face—that ruddier tenderness pulsing under her skin, seeping out from her glasses, still dangling their pricetag down her nose.

  The pass’s thumbnail photo had her face unbattered, in full. Muslim women must get special dispensation to unveil themselves to be photographed for travel.

  I held the likeness up to the original and then set it facedown on the pillow and went to touch that cheekstain but Iz fumbled away and slit the blinds to put the sun on me. If I’d meant that touch sexually, I didn’t anymore, I didn’t bother.

  I rol
led over wallward and read—I read her passport. Which I mean in the idiomatic sense of “getting a read on that person,” “taking a read on the situation,” but also in the sense of “reading” being something even the inanimate can do, “the pass’s ID flap ‘read’ Sultanate of Oman,” “it ‘read’ Izdihar al-Maribi”—examples that should give some notion of how automatic and pointless “reading” has become.

  So pointless that even paper can do it. Paper can do it for us.

  Here’s how to read: take all the things that are on the page and apply them to all the things that are not on the page, and if that ever stops working, reverse it.

  Place of birth/Lieu de naissance: Yemen. Date of birth/Date de naissance: whatever it was she was 20 years old. Sex, yes, please. I’m not sure height was listed, I’m sure, however, that weight was not. Eye color, brown? Hair color, brown? Married name: Albadi, which is how Omanis with Continental business pretensions spell al-Badi. Domicile: She had a Schengen Eurozone visa and French residency permit, titre de sejour temporaire but with an accent, de séjour, 76 Rue des Forges, 13010 Marseille.

  Below it all the blank for her signature was blank.

  I flipped it through—she’d flown only twice before this, or they’d only stamped her twice. Muscat–Paris. Paris–Abu Dhabi. Her marriage had been a layover. After wedding a wife you sweeten your nights by taking her on what’s called a honeymoon. I wonder what it’s called in Arabic, that trip you take your first wife on just before you marry your second. Because that’s what this was. Because that’s what her husband was doing.