by Joshua Cohen
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10/8
Fiction writers mistrust the truth, nonfiction writers swear by it, while ghostwriters—who are typically laidoff journalists with novels in the drawer—are divided down the middle. And even that division is split. By which I mean, the relationships I’ve had with my ghostees have always replicated. What happens is I end up rewriting everybody, and so I become rewritten myself. Haunt the lives of controlfreaks, egomaniacs, career narcissists and solipsists, your lovers, your wife, your mother, and you become them too, inevitably.
Banks again, then either a library or café. All my errands would be cut if this were fiction, but this is truth, so suffer.
It’s like I’m writing for Rach. As if my accuracy in this ensures the accuracy of her blog. In Palo Alto I’d tried to get Principal to revoke her blog. He refused.
I’ve had this fear with everything I’ve written, rather on every computer I’ve owned—last laptop, the Compaqs and Gateways Rach took home from her agency, the Gopal desktopped out in Ridgewood. I go to open up whatever .doc of whatever project I’ve been working on, one day, just any normal rainday, and find everything changed. Someone, though fear never fleshed this someone, had gotten into my computer and overwritten me and I wasn’t able to tell the difference between what was mine and what was his. But it’s only with this book, with Principal’s—though also with this—that I’m finally realizing that’s plausible.
So: if anything’s bad, it isn’t mine.
Out through the courtyard, jangling my Medieval keys, my last four €20s folded and frayed in my walletpocket. They were large bills, large in every sense to me, not just because they wouldn’t fit into an American wallet.
Euros (a term, I might point out, that covers both the fake banknotes and the fake people using them). Euros (but I mean just the currency) don’t advertise prime ministers or presidents or composers or painters but rather architectural treasures like bridges and windows, which might initially strike you as a liberalization of the elitist iconographies of the bygone mark and franc, until you realize they’re completely false, completely conjured, that none of them are to be found on this continent whose every river is traversed by an actual bridge and whose every castle and cathedral and church contains an actual window to hurl monarchy and clergy through. And so a privilege once claimed by politicians and artists, who never appeared corrupt or syphilitic on their own money, has merely been extended to walls and gates, which now must be shown in their quintessence. The paragon of a Baroque or Rococo arch, the consummate Gothic steeple or spire. Not a style, but the ideal of a style, which can’t exist, because style has to live too, style has to eat and sleep and make angsty concessions. Apparently, the EU Parliament reached this decision to feature archetypes as opposed to real edifices so as to avoid offending any nations lacking in culture, rather to avoid privileging any nations abounding in culture and beyond that, the monuments to it—and so preventing Italy and Greece, among the poorest of EU members, from seizing the cash both verso and recto with all their Colosseums and Parthenons.
The same effect might’ve been achieved, I’m proposing, by putting Berlin on the bills—Berlin’s already perfect at being nothing. Ugly plattenbau, flattenbau, immane housingblocks the shape of bills, with the same sense of being backed by relentless brutality, yet just as fragile, frangible, crumbling.
As for the older houses still referred to as Jugendstil, the houses that’d survived the fires—to become cherished only because of that survival, because in their primes they might’ve been among the plainest façades around—next to their squat concrete heirs they seem memorial, like inhabited memorials to themselves.
Insert a line about the weather. Insert a line about how describing Berlin is like describing Berlin’s weather—the moment it’s set, everything changes, the wind changes direction, the rain stops, but only for a block of Mitte, the sun rises over a wan villa in Wannsee (west), and sets over the graves in Weißensee (east), and the only consistency is the mercury falling.
The lindens were being left by their leaves, and I blew through in a swirl of emergency colors. A drunk gastarbeiter in demidenim overalls stopped me to bum a smoke, but pretending to be a tourist, I turned him down—me, who never turns anyone down.
I missed the tramstop, turned corners strange and prefab, a prefabricated strangeness, encountering only signs standing for things I didn’t need, only signs I didn’t know what things they stood for and so didn’t know whether I needed them or not. An ATM, or whatever that was in German—that’s what I was after, though I would’ve settled for locating even just the full meaning of ATM at its source, automatic teller machine, automated teller machine, automatic automated I’ve never felt so removed or dissevered.
It wasn’t that I had trouble finding a bank—I had trouble finding an untried bank. Until the FinanzCenter Moabit, a scruffy cashpoint behind decals and defaced perspex. I slotted my card to access the vestibule, which savored of wet German shepherds, unless in Germany they just call them shepherds. I swiped the card strip out. Geldautomat. Selected English. You can’t go wrong with English. My PIN, why not write it? 179121? My birthday. Backward.
“Transaction denied,” greened across the screen. “Contact your financial institution.”
But I just did, sorta kinda.
I centered my face within the CCTV bauble and looked deep into my reflection like I was looking deep into an underground lair under the grounds of the White House, imagining my sleeplessness blown up to its pores on the defcon board for the edification of two presidents, Kori D and that other one, intel personnel and Congresspeople all taking a break from their mahjong to tune in, and though I was fairly sure that this Geldautomat didn’t have the audio capability for them to also hear me, I said, “Library, Staatsbibliothek.”
Read my lips why don’t you.
Coming out and mind the bikelane, resist the urge to shove the passing cyclists into the passing smartcars, though the scrimpy smartcars might get the worst of it. I didn’t know whether to ask directions in this language or try and ask in German, didn’t know whether to trust someone who responded or someone who refused, and follow them like the street was following me, over the Spree and into the Tiergarten.
I avoided the paths to trail along the bisector road toward the roundabout’s column, which bore a statue of a lady holding a wreath and staff all so goldsilver precious that it had me appreciating NY’s Liberty for her copper, the metal that conducts our lives. Scattered crumbs, pigeons walking like Egyptians pecking crumbs, bench, condom in a bush. Keep walking, trying not to recall why I hate parks. Thank Rach and Christ I was out of the trees and back in the traffic again.
I went among embassies and consulates, and considered leaving myself on a doorstep and staying awhile like Balk, but I wasn’t able to sort through all the tricolore.
Potsdamer Platz splashed ahead, and the crossing’s white slashes on black asphalt reminded me that prisoners don’t wear the striped uniform anymore, which must’ve been retired after everyone got lost behind the bars and electrified wires.
The Staatsbibliothek—a sleek airporty shell. Braze podlighting, hypoallergenic concourses. Switchback mezzanines jutted above the stacks. The ceilinged PA speakers were about to announce that boarding would commence to Belletristik, or last call for Flight 296.1.
That’s the only decimal system thing I know—296.1, “Religion, Other & Comparative Religions, Judaism, Sources of.” That’s how to find Jews in the library.
I thought the hush of the place would take the edge off—it didn’t. The modularity rankled me, the ranks of tables and chairs and the students too, interchangeable recessives, receding into their typing, without a backspace typing. All had laptops of their own, lonely and attentionless I can’t be by myselftops. Whatever they were doing, it was too effortless for work. Every table, though, had its mechanical Tur
k, at the head or the foot, at odds. A guy or girl furrowing a textbook in either risk analysis or hospitality studies.
Beyond them were the public terminals. Radical queer crustpunk skinheads who weren’t skinheads and just unaffiliated opiated homelesspeople, geriatrics switching between pairs of bakelite glasses and clamping down their headphones—they sat in neat interdigitated rows at new unibody Gopal Go 2.0s, searching.
All that Aryan lucence, the sham race purity of Gopal’s product design—I kept spotting him, I kept hallucinating him. Maleksen.
Not among the users, but among the machines.
It took me a moment to understand why: Maleksen—there’s no other way to say this—was like a Gopal device. He had that whiteness, that untouchably smug whiteness, that gloating, that crisp compact perfection. Everything so concentrated it was like his insides were his outsides and were muscle, and that muscle was always flexed. A processor torso curved into a nonadjustable head, a quadrat Gopal monitor. And that jagged scraping between them, across his laryngeal mass, like a hot knife had scarred him with thick and thin bars, was the barcode of his specs. Scan him and be intimidated by his dysfunction.
If he’d brought me what Balk owed me I wouldn’t have come. Not that I had a clue what I was going to do besides maybe write Aar, maybe Cal. I looped around to the infodesk and signed for the next computer slot available. Cinching my tote closed throughout so that the librarian wouldn’t notice I already owned a computer, and I’d have to explain how its modem had died, how the dying Founder of the world’s most profitable because most complicit tech company had taken off his belt and used the buckle’s prong on it.
The librarian wheeled around with my terminal number and time—I’m presuming it’s acceptable to mention that he was in a wheelchair.
There was an hour’s line to get online alongside unwashed Gypsies and jobless Slavs.
So I went browsing, or I guess it’s not browsing if you know what you want. I wanted Keine Familie ist ganz. That’s what the translator or publisher had titled my book. Retitled it for appeal, I think. They never even sent me a copy or review clippings, or royalties. I don’t remember it surprising me that Germany was the only foreign market to buy the rights, though in the immediate aftermath of American publication I don’t remember anything surprising me. Anyway, Germans buy everything Jewish, it’s compulsory since reunification, it’s in their constitution. It doesn’t even matter whether the topic’s Jewish, provided the author is, if only just half or mischling like Caleb, or if the book has at least one character who visits a rabbi in Brooklyn or a cemetery in Queens, to say oy gevalt chutzpah bupkes, amen.
Anyone of my generation with even the slightest Judaic taint can air their grievances in Germany—not for a fortune, or even a readership, but for a psychic reparation between hideous brown buckram covers—and as I thumbed at the spines of my consonant for the sole copy the Staatsbibliothek had in its catalog, I was imagining the cycle continuing: not just children like me chronicling how their parents survived the deportations, but grandchildren producing multimedia ebooks about how their grandparents were used as slave labor, greatgrandchildren generating interactive immersive lit experiences about how their greatgrandparents had been experimented on with phenol and cyanide—all to be sold at fabulous prices to futuristic Prussians, who’ll still refuse to download anything for free, God bless.
And there it was, where it was supposed to be, where it’d been shelved since they’d ordered it. The original had been thinner than this edition, but then the original of me in the flap photo had been thinner too, my crown still sparsed with gritty city grass.
I checked in again with the infodesk clock and dedicated the 40 minutes or so left before my slot to reading myself in German, and didn’t understand a word—which was good. That meant it was a good translation. Rather, the only words I understood had always been in German. Words like Aktion, Zyklon, and Judenfrei.
Keine Familie ist ganz—not a faithful title. But still it’s accurate. No Family Is Whole? Entire? Intact? Together?
This trip—though it’s absurd to call this a trip—is the first I’ve been back to Europe since researching that book. Not to discount my jag with Principal just prior to the Emirates, or that vacation Rach took me on to Athens, Crete, and Rome—after every meal sauced and cheesy reiterating to me, to the waiters, that she’d be paying, with her account management promotion raise—what I mean is, this is my first substantial solo return.
Because that pilgrimage I made 12 years ago, fall 1999, was weeks, was months, alone. Taking the grand deathtour, budget timetravel through ghettos and camps. I’d flown from having interviewed my Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe in Tel Aviv, to the setting of every interview’s memory, Poland. Racking up expensive kilometerage on the Daewoo from Sixt Rent a Car in Warsaw, visiting the gravelessness of my family between Warsaw and Kraków. Swerving the Daewoo from red tollways to green freeways to yellow locals to the grayest byroads, as the map that was still wrought out of paper back then blew from the dash and around my face, and I skidded onto a dirtlane that muddied into a pagan grove of birch just wide enough for a uturn. Tailgating an ox and cart, unable to pass them, too timid to honk. Utilitypoles leaning heraldically like halberts on the shield of sky. And panicking that I’d already crossed the border into Belarus, even though I’d know when I had, they’d let me know when I had—there’d be a bridge, and a river churning like a wobbly tire.
This was (why am I even writing this? but then can anything about the past still be assumed?) before the zoomable livestream mapping, the captures and grabs and pinches and swipes, the make it bigger make it smaller fingers, tugging the corners of dewy pastures to a saturation verd. The only icons were in chapels, and if I hoped to obtain one’s aid I had to make a donation for the restoration of a window.
I’d paged through my book all the way to the last chapter—the Vienna chapter, by chance. If chance can be invoked.
My mother and father met in Vienna. Dad was with the Army. The US Army. Moms had come down from the mountains of Czechoslovakia, from hiding in haylofts, and a convent in Małopolska that’d hid her from herself. The fields around Bełżec were fertilized with her parents. Her brothers were also ash.
Iz, it hasn’t escaped me that you’re there now, in Vienna—picnicking in the Prater, or promenading the Ring.
If we ever meet there remind me not to tell you this.
I sat, Tetbook in the Tetote on my lap, at a Gopal Go 2.0. Clicked the Union Jack/Stars & Stripes, which loaded up the Staatsbibliothek homepage in English. Agreed to abide by the Terms of Service. Only if I didn’t have to read them, Yes.
My IP was what it was. Proxy this, Dienerowitz, bounce it off your ass.
The only precaution I took was, I didn’t use Tetration.
Except, I did—I typed out tetration.com, was redirected to tetration.de, deredirected to .com again and tetrated, or the German verb is tetraten, I guess, “what are other searchengines?” And then I cruised the competition on another competitior’s machine, and found both lacking, and I haven’t been paid to say that, or paid for anything.
I broke my promise to Principal on opensourcers, semantics. With Clickb8, Sengine, Fravia, Phind0, Jerque, and Treap (in the order of increasing fatuity).
Whatever, their names were immaterial to me—I tetrated with all of them. Not every trademarked term can be chosen for genericide. None of us will treap. Or jerque it. What the fuck’s a Gopal? Gopal fuck yourself?
I tetrated “Izdihar Almaribi”: no results.
I tetrated “Izdihar Albadi”: check spelling, increase number of terms, broaden terms, no results.
“Ibrahim Albadi”: (“did you mean Al-Badi?”): site operations engineer at Sohar Industrial Port Services, no, executive VP for Takaful, Doha Insurance, SAQ, no.
So I added +“Marseilles”—which autocorrected to “Marseille”—and was returned two hits, beyond the usual snippety tetspam.
Iz’s husb
and was listed as a member of L’Association des Stations-Service Franchisées de France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Bouches-du-Rhône division.
He was mentioned again, amid plain Anglais, on the site of the Biannual Eurosummit of BP Franchisees, which would be held, had already been held, 9/9–11 in Abu Dhabi. He would be attending as a representative of L’Association des Stations-Service Franchisées de France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Bouches-du-Rhône division—his honeymoon or whatever it’d been with Iz was a business expense.
“al-Maribi” (“did you mean Al Ma’ribi?”): but all were just Al Qaeda—inciter clerics and deranged bandoliered teens, the victims of other American results in Ma’rib, and of Shia militias in Dhamar—until what I recalled of the address—+“1210 Wien”—got me Iz’s brother.
Yasir was a “Prozesstechniker”—“process technician”—employed by Birefringen AG, located in 1210 Vienna, and online at Birefringen.at.
Click, they were “the world’s leader in glass science,” click, “devoted to the best in architectural, automotive, aeronautic, marine, biomedical, and touchglass.”
The “In Profil” page was dotted with enlargeable but not enlargeable enough official photos of the different “Geschäftsbereiche”—divisions? groups? There were about two dozen black and brown faces in the photo labeled “Prozesstechniker,” and “Maribi, Yasir,” was captioned in the third row five in. I counted and landed, because God is good, because God is great, on a forehead wound. Yasir had a scarlet birthmark at his hairline, but then the expression below it was quizzical, like that hematic crescent wasn’t his, but was a corruption in the wifi transmission, or a blotch of phlegm on the screen.
“Maleksen”: A Maleksen gøta in central Tórshavn, Streymoy, Faroe Islands. Maleksen Island, a glaciated constituent of the Arctic Russian Franz Josef archipelago. Norwegian sites tended to spell the name “Malekson,” Swedish sites, “Maleksson.” Pages in this language usually followed the Danes. Maleksen Spezialtransporte GmbH “specialized in transport” throughout Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Hilde Maleksen offered “online P2P healing” from ~48.13°N 11.56°E elev ~518m (Munich).