Book of Numbers: A Novel (2 page)

One site—and one site alone—had made that same spelling
mistake, though, and when I clicked through I found others even graver:

a-bintel-b
was a blog, hosted by a platform developed by my
employer, which is more famous for having developed the search engine—the one
everyone uses to find everyone else, movie times, how to fix my TV tutorials, is this
herpes? how much does Gisele Bündchen weigh?

Though her accounts lack facts—and Majuscules, and
punctuation—
I haven’t been able to stop reading,
can’t stop reminding myself that what I read was written in my, in our,
apartment. Between the walls, which have been redone a univeige, a cosmic latte
shade—the floors have similarly been buffed of my traces.

I wasn’t ready to get reacquainted with the old young flirty Rach.
Not on this blog, which she began in the summer, just after we severed, and especially
not while I was estranged abroad, in London, Paris, Dubai as of this morning—if
it’s Sunday it must be Dubai—with Principal negotiating the dunespace for
a datacenter.

Apparently.

\

Remember that old joke, let’s set it in an airport, at the
security checkpoint, when a guard asks to inspect a bag, opens the bag, and removes from
it a suspicious book.

“What’s it about?” he asks.

And the passenger answers, “About 500 pages!!!!”

Contracted as of two weeks ago, due in four months. Simultaneous hardcover
release in six languages, 100,000 announced first printing (US), my name nowhere on it,
in a sense.

As of now all I have is its title, which is also the name of its author,
which is also the name of his ghost.

Me, my own.

Though my contract with Principal has a confidentiality
clause—beyond that, a clause that forbids my mentioning our confidentiality
clause, another barring me from disclosing that, and yet another barring me from going
online, I assume for life—I can’t help myself (Rach and I might still have
a thing or two in common):

I, Joshua Cohen, am writing the memoir of the Joshua Cohen I’m
always mistaken for—the incorrect JC, the error msg J. The man whose business has
ruined my business, whose pleasure has ruined my pleasure, whose name has obliviated my
own.

Disambiguation:

Did you mean
Joshua Cohen
? The genius, googolionaire, Founder and
CEO of Tetration.com, as of now—datestamped 8/27, timecoded 22:12
Central European Summer Time—hits #1 through #324 for
“Joshua Cohen” on Tetration.com.

Or
Joshua Cohen
? The failed novelist, poet, husband and son, pro
journalist, speechwriter and ghostwriter, as of now—datestamped 8/28, timecoded
00:14 Gulf Standard Time—hit #325 “my” highest ranking on
Tetration.com.

#325 mentions my first book—the book I’m writing this
book, my last, to forget. The book that everyone but me already buried. Also I’m
trying to earn better money, this time, at the expense of identity. Rach, my support,
had been keeping me in both.

But it was only after my session with Principal today—two Joshes
just joshing around in the Emirates—that I decided to write this.

Coming back from Principal’s orchidaceous suite to my own
chandeliered crèmefest of an accommodation, alive with talk and perked on
caffeines, I realized that the only record of my one life would be this record of
another’s. That as the wrong JC it was up to me and only me to tell them to
stop—to tell Rach to stop searching for her husband (I’m here), to tell my
mother to stop searching for her son (I’m here), to send my regrets to you both
and remember you, Dad—I’m hoping to get together, all on the same
page.

://

10 years ago this September, 10 Arab
Muslims hijacked two airplanes and flew them into the Twin Towers of my Life &
Book. My book was destroyed—my life has never recovered.

And so it was, the End before the beginning: two jets fueled with total
strangers, terrorists—two of whom were Emirati—bombing my career, bombing
me personally. And now let me debunk all the conspiracies: George W. Bush didn’t
have the towers taken down with controlled demolitions, the FAA didn’t take its
satellites offline to let the jets fly over NY airspace unimpeded, the Israeli
government didn’t withhold intel about what was going to happen (all just to have
a pretext for another Gulf War), and as for the theory that no Jews died or were even
harmed in the attacks—what am I? what was this?

That day was my final page, my last word,
ellipses … ellipses … period—closing
the covers on all my writing, all my rewriting, all my investments of all the money my
father had left me and my mother had loaned me in travel, computer equipment/support,
translation help, and research materials (Moms never let me repay my loans).

I’d worried for months, fretted for years, checked thesauri and
dictionaries for other verbs I could do, I’d paced. I couldn’t sleep or
wake, fantasized best, worst, and average case scenarios. Working on a book had been
like being pregnant, or like planning an invasion of Poland. To write it I’d
taken a parttime job in a bookstore, I’d taken off from my parttime job in the
bookstore, I’d lived cheaply in Ridgewood and avoided my friends, I’d been
avoided by friends, procrastinated by spending noons at the Battery squatting alone on a
boulder across from a beautiful young paleskinned blackhaired mother rocking a stroller
back and forth with a fetish boot while she read a book I pretended was mine, hoping
that her baby stayed sleeping forever or at least until I’d
finished the thing its mother was reading—I’d been finishing it
forever—I’d just finished it, I’d just finished and handed it
in.

I handed it to my agent, Aaron, who read it and loved it and handed it to
my editor, Finnity, who read it and if he didn’t love it at least accepted it and
cut a check the size of a page—which he posted to Aar who took his percentage
before he posted the remainder to me—before he, Finnity, scheduled the
publication for “the holidays” (Christmas), which in the publishing
industry means scheduled for a season before “the holidays” (Christmas),
to be set out front in the fall at whatever nonchain bookstores were at the time being
replaced by chain bookstores about to be replaced by your preferred online retailer. The
book, my book, to be stuffed into a stocking hanging so close to the fire that it would
burn before anyone had the chance to read it, which was, essentially, what happened.

Finnity, then, edited—it wasn’t the book yet, just a
manuscript—handed, manhandled it, back to me. The edits had to be argued about,
debated. I was incensed, I recensed, reedited in a manner that reoriginated my
intentions, then when it was all recompleted and done again and my prose and so my
sanity intact I passed the ms. back to Finnity who sent it to production (Rod?), who
turned it into proofs he sent to Finnity who printed and sent them to me, who
recorrected them again, subtracting a word here, adding a chapter there, before
returning them to Finnity who sent them to a copyeditor (Henr
y
?), who
copyedited and/or proofread them (Henr
i
?), then sent them to production (Rod?),
who after inputting the changes had galleys printed and bound with the cover art
(photograph of a synagogue outside Chełm converted into a granary, 1941,
Anonymous, © United States Holocaust Museum), the jacket/frontflap copy I wrote
myself, not to mention the bio, which I wrote myself too, and the publicity photo for
the backflap (© I. Raúl Lindsay), which I posed for, hands in frontpockets
moody, within a tenebrous archway of the Manhattan Bridge. All that, including the
blurbs obtained from Elie Wiesel and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, being sent out to the critics
four months before date of publication (by Kimi! my publicist!), four months commonly
considered enough time for critics to read it or not and prose their own hatreds,
meaning that galleys, softcover, were posted
in spring, mine
delivered around the middle of May—tripping over that package left in my
vestibule by a courier either lazy or trusting—though I held a finished copy only
in mid-August—after I insisted on nitpicking through the text once again in the
hopes of hyphen-removal—when Aar sent to Ridgewood two paramedics who stripped
off their uniforms to practice CPR on each other, then gave me a defibrillatory lapdance
and a deckled hardcover.

Every September the city has that nervy crisp air, that new season
briskness: new films in the theaters where after a season of explosions serious black
and white actors have sex against the odds and subplot of a crumbling apartheid regime,
the new concert season led by exciting new conductors with wild floppy hair and big
capped teeth premiering new repertoire featuring the debuts of exciting new soloists of
obscure nationalities (an Ashkenazi/Bangladeshi pianist accompanying a fiery redheaded
Indonesian violinist in
Fiddler on the Hurūf
), new galleries with new
exhibitions of unwieldy mixedmedia installations (
Climate Change Up:
a cloud
seeded with ballot chad), new choreography on new themes (
La danse des tranches, ou
pas de derivatives
), new plays on and off Broadway featuring TV actresses
seeking stage cred to relaunch careers playing characters dying of AIDS or dyslexia.

September’s also the time of new books coming out, of publication
parties held at new lounges, new venues. Which was why on that freefloating Monday after
Labor Day, with the city returned to itself rested and tanned, my publisher gathered my
friends, frenemies, writers, in the type of emerging neighborhood that magazines and
newspapers were always underpaying them to christen.

Understand, on my first visits to NY the Village had just been split
between East and West. SoHo went, so there had to be NoHo. When I first moved to the
city the realestate pricks were scamming the editors into helping reconfigure the
outerboroughs too, turning Brooklyn, flipping Queens, for zilch in return, only the
displacement of minorities despite their majority. At the time of my party, Silicon
Alley had just been projected along Broadway, in glassed steel atop the
Flatiron—each new shadow of each new tower being foreshadowed initially in
language (sarcastic language).

Call this, then, as I called it, TriPackFast: the four block triangle
north
of the Meatpacking District but south of the barred lots for
Edison ParkFast. Or Teneldea: the grim gray area beginning where 10th Avenue switches
from southbound to northbound traffic and ending where the elevated rail viaduct crosses
that avenue just past the NY offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

A pier, jutting midway between where the Lusitania departed and the
Titanic never arrived, where steamers and schooners had anchored to unload the old
riches of the Old World like gold and silver and copper slaves, before wealth turned
from tangible goods and favorable tradewinds to a matter of clicking
buttons—where the newest warehouses were filled with “cultural
capital”—where “money,” which was still silver in French
(
argent
) and gold in German (
Geld
), had become a gentrified
abstraction.

A purposefully unreconstructed but rebranded wreckage harbored on the
Hudson—the interior resembled a ruin, a rusted halfgutted rectilinear spanse.
Hangaresque, manufacturingesque. Previously a drydock, formerly a ropery. Had it just
been built, it would’ve been a marvel—the type of modern design that
architects and engineers torment themselves over, the natural course of things achieved
by falling apart: foundation issues, an irresolvable roof, problems with the electric
and plumbing.

A table was set, laid with midpriced wine to be poured not into plastic
cups but glass glasses, that’s how intensely my publisher was investing in me,
offering red and white and, blushing, trays of stinky chèvres and goudas,
muensters, gruyères, a dozen varieties of crackers, veggie stix ’n’
dip, sexual clusters of muscats, sultanas, ruby grapes without seed, selections of meze
with pita.

A trio performed klezmer, or rehearsed it, a screechy avantklez that
didn’t distinguish between rehearsal and performance: a trumpeter, bass, drums,
soloing always in that order.

Copies of the book were piled into pyramids? ziggurats? but ziggs are
goyish, the pyramids are for the Jews.

The press began arriving, all my future peers, my colleagues. The
newspaper people, the dailies, a half hour fashionable. The magazine people, the
weeklies, the monthlies, an hour. Aaron’s joke: the longer the leadtime, the
later they showed. A cymbal tsked. The bass followed a note and stayed with it, not a
note so much as a low throb, as if it were
the guest of honor
everybody felt they had to notice but nobody much liked to be stuck with, just the
excuse for all the busyness swirling—that guest was me, terrified.

I was uncomfortably complimented in my suit, the suit that’d needed
shoes, the shoes that’d needed socks, belt, shirt, tie—the only thing
I’d already owned was the underwear.

The mic was taken from the trumpeter, tapped. Wine courtesy of Pequot
Vintners, beer from Masholu, please join me in thanking our generous
sponsors—that was Kimi!

Everyone applauded, drowning her introduction of Finnity.

My book was called “a migrant story,” “a
quintessential American tale”—inheritance of loss, bequest of suffering
transmitted genetically, the people of the book, after millennia of literacy,
interpretation, commentary, the book of the people of the book, at the end of the shelf
of the century.

Finnity, all prepped, Harvard vowels and Yale degree, tweedly,
leatherpatched not just at elbow but also at shoulder—he would’ve worn
patches on his knees, on his khakis. He mispronounced
tzedakah,
“said
ache a,” misused
tshuvah,
“a concern for Israel in the guise of a
tissueba,” mentioned the Intifadas, all zealotry being inherently suicidal,
democratic pluralisms, Zionisms plural, concluded by saying in conclusion twice,
“It’s the testimony of two generations,” everyone nodded, “a
witness to one America under or over God, with or without God,” and everyone
nodded again and clapped.