by Joshua Cohen
Computers keep total records, but not of effort, and the pages inked out by their printers leave none. Screens preserve no blemishes or failures. Screens preserve nothing human. Save in the fossiliferous prints left behind by a touch.
But a page—only a page can register the sorrows of the crossings, bad word choice, good word choice gone bad, the gradual dulling of pencil lead, which is graphite. A draft by hand resembles the mechanism of computational processing. A semiconductor, an integrated circuit or in plaintxt, a chip. Think of the paper as the silicon substrate, and think of the multicolored scribble piled atop as having been fabricated in layers, in strata dug from the earth—it’s like an archaeology in which the artifact you’re seeking is the earth itself, which is mining, I guess, like drilling for mineral deposits, metals, copper, aluminum, gold, silver, nickel, tin, zinc.
On second thought, on 40th thought, forget the analogy. Rub it out, don’t rub it. Semiconductor levels (“the wafers”) are smaller than particles of dust, semiparticulate small, and if even one of them from the solder on down to the boarded substrate becomes compromised in any way, at any point in the fabrication, the entire circuit’s fucked, and the computer might be too, fucked integrally. That’s why they’re manufactured in spotlessly white compartments kept airlocked and ionized, seismically stabilized, fascistically regulated for temperature and humidity, and free of contact with contaminants like sweat and dust (“the human”). That’s why they’re increasingly being manufactured by robots. Just like prose is.
A notebook is the only place you can write about shit like this and not give a shit, like this. Cheap and tattered, a forgiving space, dizzyingly spiralbound, coiled helical.
Enough tetricity—I left Frankfurt, but never went back to Berlin.
You could line a triangle, you could triangulate, among Berlin, Frankfurt, and where I am, or was, moving. 10:18 with no timechange.
At least the windows always change. The tracks are always on time.
Switch trains at Nürnberg, 12:30. Just across the platform.
Field, house, church, house, field—and they’ve stopped checking passports when you cross the Inn (the river) (tributary of the Danube). In a pleather banquette, passing cows—cudding huddled stupey cows grazing at grass fenced just off the trackbed—meatcows the color of rancid butter, fenced separately from milkcows whose piebald inkblots remind me of roundbordered countries I’d rather be in.
Memory, that roundbordered country.
Vienna, terminus was the Westbahnhof, which I’d never been through before—on my last visit to Vienna, to research my book, 12 years ago now, I’d driven in from the east, taking the route of my mother’s war through what’d only recently been called Czechoslovakia, from Poland. I admit, I was momentarily perplexed: I’d expected an Austro-Hungarian railroad shed of clichéd fin de siècle grandeur, not this stagnant dingy penal colony advertising telecoms, art exhibitions, operas, and compgenerated architectural renderings of the unfinished Hauptbahnhof—slated to replace this facility in a ludicrously futuristic 2014—gummed with dotmatrix printouts of the take a tab variety.
I took a tab—no decent hostel was ever very far from trains. The city was turning its back on the sun and getting slapped with darkness.
At the hostel I was assigned a drywall cell fitted with foldout bunks that every time I counted them I got a different sum, but at least they were empty.
And to think—on my last visit I’d stayed at the goddamned Bristol. On my mother’s dime, but still. The Bristol. Only to sink to this.
Don’t think.
Read.
I fell asleep but at some point was woken by the nightmares—Dutch and some Gabonaise, and the former were saffronrobed backpacker Christian hippie maybe gay but maybe not gyrovagues, while the latter might’ve been involved in the logging industry and crashed around our cell like drunken trees, and the drywall was wet from the stalled bathrooms above and the bathrooms were showers too or rather just total wetrooms each with a sprinkler system showerhead above a rank Turkish squat toilet that slanted toward a drain.
But I didn’t mind—I’m not letting myself mind even the blanketlessness, the starchy sheet that required a deposit or the towel that had to be renewed daily, no exceptions and no discounts for extended stays, because privacy had become loneliness again (nothing to do but submit to conditions if the cost of privacy becomes loneliness)—except, the no smoking policy bothered (always going up and down).
A quarter moon after the looting, [PFC. CHRISTOPHER] Bringdom’s unit was assigned to secure the Museum and monitor its cleanup. They had to make sure its fabled collection sustained no further losses. Bringdom found it funny to be soldiering among all these Arab men doing what was supposed to be women’s work, all these misogynistic Arab men who seemed not to mind doing it. Sure, men were good for hauling gear, or those priceless hunks of busted Mesopotamian vases, but the Army had convinced him that men were pretty damn bad at sweeping and mopping.
Bringdom’s patrol brought him up to a large gallery with a small dune of glass on the floor. He broke away to kick at the sharp jagged shards, scattering them into reds and whites and blues, depending on the light. He was awestruck, but also confused. No windows had blown here. All the glass above was intact. Bringdom bent over his rifle and scooped a handful of the fragments into his flakvest pocket.
It was desert glass, created by a lone renegade comet. As the comet entered our atmosphere, it exploded like a celestial bomb. The heat of the blast fused the sand directly below it into a pane, which, just a moment later, was shattered by the impact of the nucleus. What resulted was this glistening mess.
Bringdom didn’t know this, though, he never would know any of this. The glass just reminded him of a girl.
—CALEB KRAST, Bringdom’s War
10/17
Iz, I’ve walked—coiling myself into circles, into rings. Bunions, corns, and a bathfungus developing. All the natives or the Viennese I’m taking for natives are old and women, their men must die before them, and they all have tiny little plasticbags under their chins that fill and empty with air. The women, even as I resisted the suggestion, I saw as Moms. I heard my name, but only in reference to coal. Kohle.
The morning was paved with pigeons. You can never wake up earlier than pigeons—you can never wake up earlier than streets.
I’m not sure how or even if you’re going to respond to whatever crisis comes out of this, Rach, what sort of pathos is still in you or whether
Vienna—of course this is where you ended up, Iz. This is where I sent you packing. Away from your husband, into your brother’s house. Bankrupting myself in the process, bankrupting my soul’s accounts too. Is the fact that you have family in this city a sign or just a coincidence? Which would you rather it be?
or whether, Rach, you’d regard whatever transpires—yes, transpires—as just another example of my fucking up—my fucking everything up—but
I’m trying to figure out how to find you, Iz. I’m trying to engineer a coincidence, but maybe you didn’t go out today, maybe you don’t go out ever, or just not in the citycenter. I’m assuming that you’re allowed to, that you’ve received or don’t require your brother’s permission. Being a glass scientist, or at least a laboratory rat, must make him strict but liberal. He wouldn’t have slaughtered you to preserve the family honor, so I’m fairly confident he won’t stab me. He might even speak my language, if only a specialized technical dialect. I’m judging all this based on having tetrated him once. Yasir.
Is he married? To a Muslim? Have they reproduced? Do you cook or babysit to defray what you cost in room & board?
I have my fantasies. Like you’re not getting along with the wife, she resents your beauty, your youth, her husband’s affection for you, the way you have with the baby.
Like on the Karlsplatz, this woman passed me by in an abaya or whatever her culture calls it—the first abaya I’ve been around sinc
e yours—a cape unfurling out behind her as if to umbrella her girls, two of them, clinging. It’s been raining off and on.
A caricaturist blandished pastels at a canvas. An accordionist busked out a wheedly waltz. A Gypsy laid down a swatch of velvet and laid a coin at its center to assure me that others had found him deserving. But I was a beggar too, crouched on the floor of the ÖBV Buchhandlung, copying out my appeal into German with the help of a phrasebook.
Is this the office Ist dies das Büro of the glassworks/glass manufacturer der Glaswerke/Glasfabrik Birefringen AG?
May I with an employee Darf/Kann ich mit einem Mitarbeiter/Arbeitnehmer named namens Yasir Almaribi speak sprechen?
I would like a message to leave. Ich möchte eine Nachricht ver/hinterlassen.
It concerns his sister. Es betrifft/konzern this phrasebook doesn’t differentiate between the verb senses of “is about” and “worrying to” and the noun senses of “personal problems” and “business interests” seine Schwester. I will for him outside wait. Ich werde für ihn draußen warten. Ich bin aus Amerika. Danke.
I read my own name at a news kiosk and went to open to an article, which the kioskist said I’d have to purchase, but I didn’t because it was just a belated photospread of Principal’s birthday party. Happy 40th. Exklusiv! Tetraten sie sich selbst?
Bankside flat plasmas updated the stocks and scores, and the name Balk was whipping around a ticker in red LED, though what followed was too densely rapid and German and I tried to keep still until the relevancy scrolled my way again, but it never did.
and if there’s any fallout for you let me apologize in advance, Rach, please, you have to understand that my intention was merely to
Which street is yours, Iz? Which building? Which floor? Which window? Nothing in this neighborhood, I’m guessing. The district of guided package tours. Schoolgroups younger than online. Retirees snapping selfies in Napoleon poses backed by fake French Habsburg landscaping. Queues of airport shuttles. Taxis debating lanes with hansom cabs, whose horses hoofed so serenely haughty it’s as if they were proud of having been tamed, and disdained the wildness of their Balkan drivers.
though I’d appreciate that in the event of any fallout you’d refrain from making any comment whether on or off the record to journalists about anything, Rach, but particularly about our life together, which is or was after all
Iz, have you returned to your parents? Or been returned to your husband? To Oman or Yemen? To France? Didn’t make your connection in Cairo? Stayed in Cairo why? If you’re in Vienna, just bump into me. Just there, under the porte cochère. I’ll take you to a café, and pay. And in return you’ll take me back with you and shelter me and read my drafts, you’ll learn this language and read my drafts, slake me with urchins de la mer Rouge and schnapps.
I walked around the Ring, that broad treed boulevard that’s just the raised footprint of the ancient walls that’d protected the city against the Turks and Slavs but that, as the city grew, became dangerous, entrapping, and so were razed to make room for tourists to take their leisure in a setting both pleasant and surveillable.
Today the fallen walls of Vienna—but also of Frankfurt and Berlin—are held by Turks and Slavs peddling souvenirs, bringing history a crooked full circle.
Are you Sind sie Yasir al-Maribi? Speak you English Sprechen sie Englisch?
I am a Ich bin (ein) friend of your sister Freund (von) deine/ihrer Schwester.
I am not sure Ich bin nicht sicher what Izdihar has war Izdihar hat about our RELATIONSHIP said über unsere RELATIONSHIP gesagt.
This might be die letzte Chance the last chance ich habe zu sprechen I have to speak mit Iz wegen durch because of future events das sein was sein wird in den Nachrichten which will be in the news (which is the same as “message” just plural?) (shookrun?).
A soldier has that last night of sex before deployment that’s never quite as great as later claimed. And then after a tour spent getting mortared by rounds of Iranian 60s and Soviet 82s and emails from Texas, from the pregnancy announcement to photo and video attachments of the birth, he rotates home and meets the kid. Immediately, the doubts set in. This was just what the sergeant had warned him about in Fallujah.
Bringdom would be holding the kid, and her nose would remind him of Dexter’s, or Malcolm’s, or her expressions would recall Groin Plate Dave’s, or Tibb’s, or Narvaez’s, or even What Did You Sayyid’s, and they were dead. It was as if all of Bringdom’s unit had fathered his child, sneaking out of their outposts silent, invisible, like Paiute Indians in a ghostdance, going all the way with Rachel-Anne and back before rollcall. He imagined his girl at 8, or 12, 16, or at his age of 22. Suddenly, after beating him in H-O-R-S-E, or correcting him after he called it The HBO, she’d get that smirk, and it’d be like the sergeant’s latrine smirk.
Once, after Rachel-Anne had put their daughter down for a nap, Bringdom confessed all this, but Rachel-Anne just laughed it off. ‘Stupid ain’t sexy, hero.’
He brought it up again a day later after Rachel-Anne had returned from working a double at the Kmart pharm to find their daughter still awake and bawling. And Rachel-Anne bawled too, this time. ‘Don’t matter what you think, Daddy. What matters is what she thinks of you.’
—CALEB KRAST, Bringdom’s War
Vienna’s Mater, its uberous mothering Venus—among the world’s oldest and most perfectly preserved fertility figures—is not to be found among all the Rubens and Bruegel and Roman and Greek and Egyptian antiquities at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but rather just across the park, with the mammoth taxidermy and Diplodocus and tektites and diamonds and ores, at the Naturhistorisches Museum—as if the Venus hadn’t merely been dug from the Danubian loess, but had been created by it. As if She were Nature Herself. Too divine to have been made by mortals. Too fundamental to be grappled with as art. Her limestone is oolitic, meaning its sediment is compounded of ovular grains that tend to crack and crumble and leave behind dimples, one of which serves ingeniously as Her navel. Loads of that stone are found throughout Europe, but never in the Alps of Lower Austria. Also, not only is the Venus’s tint not native to lime, but that Martian red ochre can’t even be derived from local materials. Note that while the figure’s steats and teats and utter facelessness are on display, the head is concealed under a crowning spiral. Some interpret this as plaited hair, concentric braiding. Others, as some sort of pious covering. Regardless, any creator expert enough to have carved a fully sprouted scalp or raveled scarf would certainly have been capable of carving eyes and ears and mouth features too, it’s just that he—most scholars, being male, have assumed a male—for whatever reasons chose not to. And so it would seem that everything about the Venus’s appearance is equally intentional and inexplicable. She, being faceless, was never an individual, and any tribe that might’ve idealized Her is gone now. She’s outlived herself both as a goddess possessing and an idol possessed, as a deity to be appeased and an apotropaic symbol. The only identity of Hers that still survives is that of immigrant. Of foreigner.
(SOURCES: a docent who conducted a tour in English. The Birth of Fertility: Artifacts, Geofacts, and the Male Imagination, Alana Hampur, PhD.)
10/18
Glass. What do I know about glass?
The problem with the most effective glass treatments, the coatings and such that protect the best from abrasions and deflect the most harmful waves and rays, is that with age they muddle the glass, and if reapplied will only muddle it further. Here’s how I know that problem, Iz—from being a husband and son and writer and liar.
Facts are of a similar solution. Facts protect and deflect until they cloud over and dirty our wonder.
What else, Iz? Pane sizes are measured in “generations.” The larger the pane, the higher its “gen,” as the abbrev goes. But the scale has never been globally standardized.
I was on the wrong side of the Danube—in the Floridsdorf district, which had no flowers. Ju
st stunted trees screening the properties of hypermarkets and malls.
I sped through the cold along either Birefringenstraße or Birefringengasse or Birefringenstrasse or Birefringengaße—I’m forgetting whether it’s the “ß” or “ss” after a long or short vowel. Anyway, all the intersecting roads were numbered, as unimaginative as their paving bricks.
I paused at the pylons marking the Zulieferung/Livraisons/Deliveries entrance for the glassworks, taking in the grounds—evened hedges, an azimuth of lawn mowed level, and a monumental vitreous gridshell that enclosed a mirrored cube. The Personal/Personnel/Staff entrance was up a grated ramp suspended through a tube. It all reeked of resiliency tests, ductility and tensility trials, research and tech development. A facility as transparent as this would only be into pane design—the manufacturing itself would be confined to that mythically silicic slave island called Offsite, floating through a minor sea of the Indies.
I paced the parkinglot, and counted the cars. No one bothered me. No one had to. The spyquip swiveled noiselessly. It would’ve been insane to charge inside all American slovenly, demanding an audience with an employee, the brother of an ersatz lover. I might as well have thrown a brick, a cobblestone, a rock.
I counted the clouds in the car windows, but none had the reflection I was after. I stood at the curb shivering that face to mind—Yasir’s.
But my only memory was of that blemish, a red nevus like a crescent curving left in the middle of his dark bulb head—or, because the site thumbnail I’d tetrated at the Staatsbibliothek would’ve reversed it, curving right. He’d been scarred in the lab, an experiment with acids gone awry, or else back in an Arab Nationalist phase, which I’m also inventing, Allah was still God but Marx and Lenin had become His prophets, and Yasir had been in an accident while smuggling dynamite to Aden from Sana’a.