Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  the appts he liked the least but if we canceled them even if we werent feeling well like i wasnt that day a year ago wed still have to pay (and if youre new here you can read why im tetranting all this as a therapy assignment here). parentheticly thats my suggestion ladies for a new anniversary not the birth of the baby but forty weeks or nine ten months before that the conception anniversary get your party on and kick me suggestions about how to name this holiday like a baby and the winner gets a surprise ill get it together.

  so i came all nauseous out of the agency and toward time square taking anything but 40th street because i was feeling fat though he said i wasnt but he always said i wasnt avoiding the muffin place even though now they have raw and it was stifle hot and the ac on every bus and train id been on was busted and the sneaks were so comfortable and the striped tracksuit with the noticeably discreet logo placement was so light it was like i was wearing breezes that i decided fuck me with my metrocard im going to fucking schlep it like 50 blocks uptown and that would calm my tummy.

  as i was schlepping i was calling him but he didnt pick up but i didnt leave a msg and instead checked my ical prsnl where i record my diets and gym and gyn routines to remind me he had that presentation at the met that hed finally gotten a job there even if it was freelance writing a handwriting on the wall text it was a job and that made me happy that he was happy enough to get out of the apartment and that goddamned office and bring in money doing something especially something more intelectualy stimulating than more housewives of bravo and matinees at film forum that he went to the pawnbroker four times and reading the covers and page 36s of books at the strand or getting ricepuddings from that ricepudding place on spring st that only nyu girls dressed all in black with that one brightly colored scarf accessory patronize except for him and his agent id find the receipts or the $8.82 amex statement.

  so i had the time to hike until taking a shower or better a bath at 7 before our sex appt at 9 both events dont make funny of me also recorded. i hiked. it was still hot but breezier up by columbus circle after that time square jumbotron meshugas. i stopped in at some stores and did some shopping but not too much because i didnt want to have too much to carry so that id need to take the 123 or 104 up broadway. in the 60s i bought some soaps and bubblestuff no clothes for sure just some loofas and a cute pumice in the shape of a foot from that cute independent sabon place i cant recall its name and i keep confusing their stuff with sephoras and not really having any thoughts really beyond thinking through while applying samples this new responsibility the agency had just given me of deciding which probono to do this year because the agency did only one or two probonos a year like free campaigns for charities for kids with lead insult or like child bone cancers important to the agencys rep and after checking out with my purchases wondering also that even if this new green conditioner id bought was all eco it might still interact wacko with the new shampoo id bought too just to try a different brand that might not even be totes syntheticfree because the bottle label only had no parabens phthalates sulfates or antibacterials. but somehow up toward the 80s on that big bright smoldering stretch between the ansonia and the apthorp thats very european wondering about this other acct the agency had just landed some home security alarm firm. but thats about the limit of my disclosure. i must seek mystique i must seek mystique i must

  my tum i wasnt able to explain its just incredible how ignorant you can be of yourself by missing the cues youve been waiting for by ascribing them to just the strangest conditions such as passing by this very precious adorable new american organic farm to table bistro id read about on my chowblast app and decided the rumbling meant i was hungry it would be nice to sit and deny myself sangrias but treat myself to the ramps on special because i didnt know what ramps were but was ready to know and scroll through some charity prospectuses and some of the alarm system factdoc hoping that would settle it all and keep the vomit from popping up out of my mouth like a chatbox.

  so i went in and though it was 6oclock early the place was crowded or reserved to be crowded and the gwynethesque greeter girl said itd be a halfhour to 20 min to sit at the bar but though i dont like and always feel lonely and pandered to on stools at bars she took my name and number and listed me and i told her i was just going to run an errand and sweating.

  so i walked up to the pharmacy the duane reade on 80something the one duane reade down from ours i like duane reade even though its a chain its a chain only in the city not like rite aid and so i think of it like an indie and heres a tip go down to city hall i got married there and before the park its duane street and reade street off broadway. but this was in the 80somethings and i was wanting a laxative or like the antilaxative whatever its called that calms the gut flora and fauna and i dont recall just what i was thinking dazed because the lights so spectacular from the hudson especially because it properly was nighttime the exact reverse of how early my period was i didnt need my ical to tell me either.

  but then there at the end of the aisles was the test. i had boxes of tests at the apt in the bathroom behind the mirror medicine chest but this was a different brand and if i could understand why i went with this one i could understand much more than marketing but myself. the box wasnt pink or that light red between reassuring the girl on her first menstruation and comforting the emergency bleeder but it wasnt overly serious paternalizing biblical either like it was a drug requiring prescription just an empowerinf strong shiny platinum with raised puffy pink and blue stripes because i the woman might be having a boy too or even a gay boy and its name wasnt too feminine or clinical but just something direct though ill conceal it too just to keep consistent the policy but something the name men might read as demanding and snippy though all women feel as reflex instinct like tell me true or i demand a response to this immediately. or maybe ill invent one though i havent done that before and anyway that was his dept all lies and i suspect the book too but lets try it the test was bstraight with me no thats homophobe so maybe sincerity yes yes sincerit-e.

  i forgot all about the cramp medication and like floated to the counter bought the box asked the old oprah who was selling it to me if i could use the bathroom but her reply was we dont have a bathroom only for the pharmacists even i have to go nextdoor.

  which was how i ended up nextdoor at the lingerie store pretending to rub the silk to examine a silk nightie for a moment so that the young oprah clerk approached to ask if she could help so that i answered by asking for the bathroom.

  to which she said its for employees only but i told her i was preggers im not sure how to feel about any of this but she frowned and said ok and led me back past the fittingrooms into the last fittingroom with a fullsized locking door where I turned on the light sat on the toilet peed and peed all of works vitaminwaters waited and waited and then the two stripes came up not one but two and i really was preggers for real and screeching in the stall so that young oprah came back yelling you better come on out and not wreck anything but i was already pulling up panties and tracksuit pants while calling him but still he wasnt available leaving the stall pushing through the store and door and out to the street where we left a msg for him me and the yelling of young oprah so excited that only after I got home totes sweating the 10 blocks did i realize i still had a strand of toiletpaper hanging between my legs like mummy wrapping like the mummy was unraveling the spool inside me was unraveling out.

  now i might be getting this wrong or just that its from j so dont trust it or do with grains of salt but after he came home and i told him we were pregs and we talked it out late into morning he excited but about which i couldnt tell insisted on telling me about his presentation. he said the curator liked his text actually liked it. fact: that in the egyptian embalming process not only are all the organs and glands removed through the nose and jarred and their cavities lined with resin and replaced with linens but by now the ancient mummies have been replaced in full in that all that human flesh and bone has turned to like bitumen or like grains of natron
salt. fact: whether it was a religious thing to satisfy the gods or the peoples expectations of their rulers or else just a practical consideration because a pyramid ramping up to the realm of the gods could take such effort and money and so many people and so much time regardless the first thing that all the pharaohs did upon ascending to power was to commission and break ground on their tombs.

  ://

  I left Booth 8.S42 before doing anything dicey like A a Q, give or take advice, explain. I had to get away from that mortuary, Lisabeth when she returned, myself even. Szlay Literistic will have its pick of eulogists, obituarists, and apt quotation epitaphs—though for sheer eloquence none will surpass the silent punctuation of “Reykjavík, Iceland,” that pause reassuring me that I had the same city/country combo in mind while also, condescending. “Reykjavík, Iceland”—that comma spoke—I heard that comma, I saw it on Seth’s tongue before he spoke it, or didn’t: Aar’s bemused rectitude had become just a tic.

  Seth, I’d been around that type before—back when I was new to a life I was better than, I’d been that type—too resentful to deal with anyone not me.

  I’m imagining an airplane, planing through the air—a jet swooping through every cloud and so through everything swirling within the Cloud—all the Canadian maps, Greenland facts, and Frequently Asked Questions about water, average temperature of the Arctic (water, land, air temps), average surge of glaciers (time of year dependent), airline routes, ticket pricing, protocol for dealing with passengers deceased en route, which plane models have onboard morgues, or whether the attendants automatically upgrade corpses to first class. Aar’s flight soaring through the omnibus nimbus, through all charts and graphs, all blogs and castings and torrential feeds, until the compressed uncompressed, the zipped unzipped, and stormed with every word, every letter, I’ve ever written, the .docs, the emails, every bit I’ve deigned to store—Aar passing through them all and though he wouldn’t have had the time or life to read them, I’d like to imagine that he noticed them, and that he noticed what was missing from them—this.

  LH403 (Lufthansa), Newark—Frankfurt, 18:05—Never, passenger Szlay, Aaron, losing life with altitude, losing life with speed, breasting the meridian untimely, to be descended with as a deceased body for burial under Iceland.

  A corpse borne away winged to the lowerland, the iceland, that had the ring of saga to it—not a book to be written now, but a myth if written deep hesternal.

  Break a hunk of ice off the land, crack off a chunk the same proportions as Manhattan Island, then slab Aar’s emberous body on out, the winds floating a hyemal pyre melting toward the Pole. Now that’s a way to pass.

  Before simile rose like a star, before the star of metaphor rose, death was north, beyond Ultima Thule. This explains why the preeminent mourners are northerners, because they’re already dead. In an unheated zone of the hall Slavs huddled together, in furs clipped with leaky pens like amulets, talismanic charms. All you can ever hope for is to expire peacefully among a people who deny Self-Help, and who refuse to countenance any genre distinctions between Religion and Spirituality. Their stalls repped books both origs and trans, appropriate for all ages, mortality being a market unto itself. On angels and demons, on thaumaturgy (thaumaturgia), eschatology (eschatologia), and Ragnarök (Рагнáрёк)—books that in this world have to toil in Polish or Ukrainian or Russian, but that in the next world will repose in print forever in that one language after this we’ll all share—yes, ja, da. A drink? Why not?

  To you, Aar. Prost, prosit, l’chaim.

  I was drinking all the whites and reds on offer—free—and what appeared to be the Messe staple, prosecco, uncorked to toast Cal in German, Romanian, Bulgarian, Svorsk, fits of fizzy ebullience for whichever laureate just fell off a list and won the Booker, the sensation de rigueur of the rentrée littéraire, the finalists of the Prix Goncourt and Renaudot. But then I was sampling the clear harder stuff too, accepting shots like prizes, gripping bottles like they were the 108th Annual Stockholm Oslo Helsinki Awards. Members of the Royal Academy, thank you for the vodka. My ration aquavit, appreciated. I wouldn’t be standing here with you today if it weren’t for Aaron Szlay. Wouldn’t, weren’t, barely standing. A man who loved his sister, Miriam, his niece, Achsa, and the NY Knickerbockers, even through the post-Ewing/Isaiah Thomas Era. A man who also loved women he wasn’t related to, and never engaged in oragenital stimulation without trying to make it mutual and simultaneous. He died above Iceland, which has nothing to do with Thor Balk, because I am sane. He is survived by a diner out on York Avenue, which, like him, would always refill an empty glass.

  The Lapps clapped bookends stylized like sepulchral menhirs, condolence applause. I was about to lead everyone in a rousing kaddish. But the only editor who was also the only writer who was also the only reader in Greenland lit the cig in my mouth. A guard preempted with “Rauchen Verboten,” but then used his body English.

  “Alright, alright, I’ll go immolate outside.”

  Wettish slate the sky. The satellites were wheeling.

  Faces surrounded—from Midtown, the Flatiron, faces with whom I might’ve shared rides leaving parties in Park Slope or Astoria. Or with whom I might’ve had lifechanging convos about slipped my mind subjects stumbling south down the Bowery from a launch for a handsewn letterpressed poetry chapbook of two pages in a limited edition of 12.

  They said they were going back to the hotel, so I went along, but it wasn’t my hotel. It was too modern, too minimal as maximal luxe—it was this immense mercury raindrop, shaped like a tear.

  Into, and through, the lobby—to throng the elevators, but I took the suspension stairs, which were mocked up into a bookcase holding coffinsized volumes.

  I tried lifting the cover or lid of, I won’t record which, but it was nailed.

  Up on the mezzanine was this beton empyrean of ballroom, with a party on. And who wasn’t there? I mean that literally. Who wasn’t?

  We clocked each other out in the vestibule—this lady and I—sciamachy by the cloakroom hung between the doorways. We clocked each other but let it go.

  I studied the wall until she went inside. They were raffling off the wall. I took a ticket. I had one chance to win the wall. At the end of the night the DJ would draw the numbers. The wall was a series of screenbanks stacked like shelves that showed new books and if I liked any title flashing past all I had to do was doubleclick it open and stand amidst the clamor and read.

  This lady, she was my successor—putative, emphasis on the first two syllables, because she was Spanish, barrio Spanish, Afro-Cuban NY.

  I’m not trying to say she was my replacement, I’m not trying to say I was replaceable, only that I once worked for, and that she still worked for, the Times—our careers might’ve overlapped for a weekend edition. But while I’d written criticism and then quit, she’d been hired to cover the publishing beat, rather the media beat, whose “news” about how much culture was being bought or sold for, how much it grossed, and the business behind its production, was now unequivocally established as the apotheosis of culture and criticism both: the dramas and appraisals of boardroom and backstage, in one convenient package.

  The Times’s local rovers, native floaters, chatted circles around her—they were Germans whose English was so competent that the paper had been able to discard its regular permanent foreign correspondents like second swizzlesticks. Laidoff, forgotten on a tray, as the budgets melted to water everything down. With ad revenue shrinking and so pagecounts shrinking it was better to downsize a single staff job with benefits into two dozen freelance gigs, relying on Germans to cover Germany, musicians to cover Music, artists to cover Art, dancers to terpsichore on the generalist’s mass grave. Media being the last limit of our culture, this woman was one of the last culture staffers left, for the last major paper published in America’s last major publishing city—or, to put it directly, like a journalist would, the Times put her on a plane from NY to write about NY people at the bookfair—they would’ve
sent her to Abbottabad had wahhabi warlords bought fullpage ads for Allah.

  Finn especially, I’m sure he’s had to do with her—fill in a byline, whichever might be remembered from such filings as “Slicing, Dicing, Ebook Pricing,” or else “Remote Revision: Amazon Alters Ebook Content Without Consent.” Say Finn’s ergosedentarily decumbent with feet propped atop the slushpile of a lazy day, pondering out the window whether that pigeon below him is crippled or just resting, and the phone rings, she has his directline, and he picks up, and she goes all Torquemada inquisitive.