Book of Numbers: A Novel (17 page)

That was the straw that broke this camel’s back, to get all local about it.

Roomed again, I opened my Tetbook for the nth time to ensure he hadn’t switcherooed his for mine, and it was automatic—it’s in my hands, or like how my hands breathe—I typed in the address.

Tetra—I didn’t even have to type it fully. The addy autocompleted: tetration.com.

I have, I admit, visited before. It knows me like a good conciergerie, knows me better than my wife.

I checked in on camels (no spitting for them, they “gleet,” and it’s the bactrians that have two backs to break—two humps—while dromedaries have only one), checked up on Rach, who she linked to, who linked to her and left comments and what their comments were and the comments on the comments—We’re always trying to improve our service, Tell us how we’re doing.

The latest post’s latest reaction wasn’t to Rach’s choice of curry joint (a takeout I’d found, which she was claiming she’d found), nor was it an opinion as to whether the best thing about breaking up was that now she was getting a pet (but which? vote below: guinea pig or fuzzy lop bunny, a chinchilla or mink?). Rather, it was just a fuzzy irrelevancy, a spamcurry bot sequitur or whatever, courtesy of username “KORDIE”:

“
if yre not 2 busy genealogizing & if yre down 2 continue our convo im hosting recept 4 prince @ 20:00 bani yas suite
”

Fuck you in your Bani Yas, Kor Dienerowitz.

But then without intending to I was tetrating that. The Bani Yas were “among the founding tribes of the trucial United Arab Emirates”—another window—I clicked, and kept clicking through the autoloading Burj site if only to keep from tetrating for sites that have never existed: what-do-you-know-about-my-sexual-history.com, which would tell me how intimate Kor had gotten with Rach’s raving, do-you-think-theres-a-pattern.biz, which would tell me whether Kor had been tracking me all along or was just taking a chance on this invitation—if-he-had-been-tracking-me.org might explain why, then-why-invite-me-to-realize-this-so-blatantly.org might explain itself (but there’s always the chance that I was totally misaligned and that somehow msging someone through their estranged spouse’s blog had become a newly permissible mode of communication).

It was the heat on me, it had me clicking through the Burj surveillance feeds: out_beachport, and toggling to where Kor and I had sat, where the sand had no traces of our sitting. Saw the waves. Heard the waves. Streamed the data. The number of miles (km) of beach outside, the number of miles (km) of beach inside. I clicked the in_beachport, to remember an experience I never—membered: the sand set firm under the tanning lights, a gunite wadingpool of water piped in and then waved into froth by machine.

Another toggle, to the four chlorinated lap pools beyond its negative edge, each the size of four Olympics, veritably.

Next, soothing myself, I connected to a tour of the golfcourses both outdoor and indoor, linked around the links. I splitscreened between them and the volley with a robot tennis pavilion. Cricketcam. Wicketcam. The sports snowglobe. Keyed in my room number to find out if I was eligible for discounts on any XXXtreme bungee/skydiving/kitesurfing/jetski/abseiling/assorted parasports “adventures” (I was).

I, who’d actually been in the lobby, could understand the lobby only now, immersing, submerging, and so discovering its décor with a diligence that in fleshlife would’ve required a dubious protracted loiter by the guest services station consulting reference texts on textile history and rubbing lasciviously against the drapery. I could explore the provenance of the provincial antiquities displayed in the perimeter
encasements (one I thought was real was a repro, and another I thought was a repro was—guess).

The restaurants I’d never dine at, serving which cuisines at what hours, locations, with directions—with directions from within the resort.

Stats on all the rooms not mine, inclusive of their rates I’d never pay, stats also on their interior design with links to the sites of their interior designers, the furnishings’ brands listed with multicurrency pricing and even the option to “add to my cart” (delivery options, next page).

My experience was beyond the vicarious—I myself was autocompleted (I don’t recall getting dressed and out of the room).

The elevators were each the size of an Emirate, each with its own culture, weather, official tree (ebony paneling), official animal (ebony operator). I took a car from the same bank I’d been taking to Principal’s suite—but passed Principal’s, into the open.

The doors withdrew, as if in the presence of majesty, with every guest a royal, and I found myself in what can only be described as a purple passage: literally a passage of purple mirror etched into damask, tossing petals at my steps across a roofdeck—behind me shafty minarets cupolating with moon for the delectation of the sheikh on the jumbotrons—ahead of me the Gulf and its isles, dredged drifting replicas of all the earth’s landmasses, the Antarctic a sandbar of bulldozers and dumptrucks, Greenland a flurry of speedboat launches.

I took a stairwell of chrome and glass up to a helipad, beyond the roundel of which a tent was pitched and inside the tent was a room. A suite double the size of Principal’s, the standard layout zoomed to enlarge, deep into the fabric of night. Hircine, rough, and nothing to knock. The furnishment was all divans draped in antimacassary, pillow pyres obscuring the brocades beneath. A mixed bag showcase, then, as cluttered as Orientalism, as patchwork pastiched as the choice of whether to relish or critique it. Shelves held alcohol distilled by types, within types, by vsop, xo, cigs American and British.

The mess was hubbed by a vast mannered table, marquetried in fractals of pearl but inlaid with an unmohammadian felt swath for games with cards and dice. It was staffed, but also patronized, by cleancut young achievers.

They were natives, though, and so only nepotistically ambitious, twit sycophants attitudinized by privilege: twentyeightsomething, twentyeightandahalfsomething at the far end where the tentflaps were staked to expose the starlessness.

Kor motioned me to a propinquous tassled tuft. A Slav built like a pole flying a blackstriped bandeau swimsuit like a flag laid out the snifters and cohibas.

The natives were Arabizing and I didn’t understand—anything beyond, they were freaked by the Slav.

“This is Josh,” Kor said. “He’s a biographer, a writer—can any of you name any writers?”

Each member of the fraternity auditioned his own laugh.

“He didn’t mean just American,” I said. “Any Emiratis or Emiris or whatever? Anyone in Arabic?”

Nothing, so I named a few—a few poets, ghazal guys. That gal Scheherazade.

“And these,” Kor intervening, “these are the programmers we were hoping for.”

“Programmers?”

“Apparently we’re negotiating a server facility, and this is the local talent.”

“Is that why we’re here?”

“You tell me.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“Just us and the fauxgrammers—their English gets a D, and I’d bet even that’s better than their C++.”

“And now I’m apparently a biographer?”

Kor patted their cheeks like valets pet the sleek sides of cars, soothing assurance for a smooth ride: “You tell me.”

“Do they at least know how to update a résumé?”

Menus, rivetbound, were passed around, listing not the fare but the etiquette: everything would be sampled. Shareware soup, cybersalad of packetsniffed florettes dusted with a terabyte of truffles. Herbes de POP Palmiers. Tarte à l’Terminal et aux apps.

The fauxgrammers studied, breaking off their fastidiousness only
with Kor’s foray: “Any of you familiar with orthogony? Orthonormality?”

They weren’t—they were brainless. They grinned.

“What about mengineering?” Kor pressed on. “Are any of you mengineers? Smellecom experience? B.O.-tech?”

I raised a glass and toasted Kor and the fauxgrammers gladhanded at their glasses to toast him too, or else to keep him from pouring them Krug Brut—only the best for them to abstain from. With his blubbering jollity and tonsure Kor now seemed like a wily friar brewer, like the mascot off a label for cider or ale.

“Did you know our programmers back in the States do all their consumption from a vendingmachine?” he said.

I said, “Did you know they’re also forcibly neutered?”

“Guess who else is staying at the Burj?”

The fauxgrammers kept murmuring, “Burj?”

Kor said that current guests included a girlgroup called Broadband, a catalogue raisonné of Biennial curators. The fauxgrammers were blanking.

“Jerry?” I said. “George? Elaine? Kramer? Omar Sharif? Batman?”

Half the fauxgrammers chinned excitably, “Spidey?”

Kor said, “Stupes.”

A whole roasted lamb—stuffed with lamb sausages, organ and glandbreads, dried fruits and currants, tomato/garlic/onion mush, the entirety cardamomated, corianderized, cumined, cloved—was brought out on a spit, danced around. The carcassbearers were women, further gorgeous bursting Slavs, just as anorexstretched tall as Rach but otherwise her bulimically inverted opposite—modified, with satellite dish breasts of an antennary perkiness. Globoid, global. When a woman’s loveliness was through and the Burj would cast her out to sea to drown into bait or chum anew, only her tits would survive her, nonbiodegradable pouches of saline floating loose to bob in saline, silicone buoys choking dolphins and sharks.

Some Ukes, some Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, Yugos, but the lingua prostituta was Russian. There were only a handful, at first—one for each of the fauxgrammers? leaving two for me given that Kor would go for the
drove of slaveboy fauxgrammers themselves?—eventually over a dozen, as women I’d never been around offscreen and without masturbating unfolded their limbs in scopic sections like the stands that steadied amateur A/V equipment.

Their English was better than the fauxgrammers’, was better than any of our Russian—if anyone can ever speak universally, it’s whores: Sveta, Svetka, Svetichka, names getting diminutively girlish by the toast, the dregs upended. Throughout, their protuberances were immovable, their faces paused impassive. A despondent lover might jump from their cheekbones, noosing ropes of waistlength straight hair peroxidized or crude black dyed or both. Sharp stilettos under the vexillological twosies, in the national colors: Abbasid black, Umayyad white, Fatimid green, red spilled of al-Andalus—each piece of each twopiece no bigger than a napkin, stained and tenting in my lap.

Eastern females: there’s something to be said of them definitively and I’ll try for it, allowing the fauxgrammers to get done with dessert, allowing Kor and myself our postprandial brandies—Cognac, Armagnac, liqueurs of French cantons extant only in the cartographies of marketing—to refuse coffee for tea, in homage to our waitstaff.

Chai, chaichick—what among the Arabs has to be cultivated, among the female Slavs grows wild: when young they steep the testicular bag in their tight sugared mouths, when old they turn bitter, sour, take on the silhouettes of rusty samovars, and wrinkle from smoking—as if they stubbed out their cigs on their foreheads—as if, whenever they weren’t drinking their tea, they set their glasses atop their chins to leave behind tepid impressions.

I knew some women like this, knew how to resist them especially, women who with the fall of communism, went west—they were Aaron’s obsession. He had a girl from Brighton, a girl from Forest Hills—give him one each from Staten Island and the Bronx, if just to preserve a sense of socialist equity among the boroughs. Long drives to Long Island, detours into metro NJ, compulsive, he was always ferrying them to Whitehall, ferrying them back to their parents’ apartments slummed so far out in the city that their transit stops were the train muster yards and the bus maintenance lots, returning them nervous, flustered because just fucked, in the Saab convertible fucked, to do mealtime with the folks.
Immigrant families, emigrant families, codependent, claustral—Jewish girls unable to make it through dates without their mothers calling, or without expecting Aar to father their children.

They’d invite him up: for bruisey melon and disemboweling kvass, to sit on the sectional en familie and peruse the photoalbums scattered (this is Odessa, this is Kiev, the future mother inlaw, the future father inlaw, as kids), to give a word in Yiddish to the grandparents farting the stripes off their tracksuits in the corner, farschimmelt—Aar always halfway between the parents and grandparents in age—he’d oblige but never return.

The Slav slaves strutting around this aerie harem, this high houri lounge, were different. At the least the one on my lap was. Olya. It’s not just that she wasn’t Semitic, it’s that she wasn’t even Slav, or not fully. She had that Asiatic horde hybridity, that Tatar sauce Mongolic mix. Kazakh, Uzbek. Or from one of the randomer stans where feminine training included not just cooking and cleaning but how to put on a condom with the mouth. Olya, though that was just a conjecture: taut, tensile, cold in her bones, tempered ice, her back blades so severe they sliced against my face, shaving off what stubble I’d grown since—last I’d shaved? today or yesterday?—her ass like a heel crushing my crotch, as two men entered the tent, like they owned the place, or were about to burn it down.

\

Spend enough time with the überrich and spotting the bodyguard species becomes a cinch—they’re almost physically inhuman: the legs of a police thoroughbred, the torso of a firetruck, the arms of a steroidal ape, steeringwheel heads set on no appreciable necks—noctivagant, and foul of mood.

There are two ways these specimens dress for the wild: one is to differentiate themselves from the party they’re supposed to protect, while the other’s to blend with him or her, choosing camouflage similar or same. Designer pelts. Couture pelage. Pistols by Glock.

The latter’s the classier adaptation—Jesus and Feel, a floor below, dressed down because Principal dressed down, presenting a uniform exterior of exclusive brandwear.

But these two had opted for the former. They were gangstafied as turf enemies, one cripped in blue doorag, blue puffy over blue beater and blue jeans slung to show the blue briefs between, the other blooded in red flatbrim, red puffy over red soccer jersey and matching shorts as long as pants, all for a counterfeit team—the San Francisco 94ers.