Book of Numbers: A Novel (61 page)

Basically at that point it ends.

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I
haven’t written in a while, I’ve been writing.

Factcheck: transcribing, what I’ve been doing is transcribing. Two .docs are open. This and the book, the book’s. I have 80 recfiles open too, .recs. P
LAY
, P
AUSE
, type. R
EWIND
, P
LAY
, type. This might be the only time in my life I haven’t cheated. Every word out of Principal’s mouth I’ve put down on the page (down onscreen). All I’ve been told to do I’ve done. I’ve earned this break, this vacation (though only a writer would ever consider writing a vacation). I’m speaking strictly for myself again, in my own words, talking back to Principal. To you—as of today I’ve copied all of you I have.

This might be the only time in my life I haven’t cheated, except accidentally. By which I mean that every few hours:minutes:seconds, my employer’s snakecharming vocoder voice has arisen from out of its 32 bit 44.1 kHz decompression with a statement of material fact so outlandish, that I had this gut or just opposable thumbs compulsion to corroborate, and before I knew it my fingers left the keys and were clicking on my browser, which loaded to remind—I was not online. I have even, without thinking, gone searching for signals, for nothing. I’ve been stranded, utterly abandoned, left wireless—rather, wirelessless.

Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kipper: a happy healthy year to you, Moms.

\

Izdihar al-Maribi—the only woman I’ve fucked whom I’ve had to remember, because she’s untetratable.

Go ahead—slap me with a fatwa, make me famous, Insha’Allah.

That day           Over two weeks ago

Fuck it—9/11—9/11 dawned with alarm, the robocall to a prayer of a day. There was so much to do, there was nothing else to do, so much of nothing else at 6:00.

Izdi, Iz—she was up already and out of bed, wearing her sunglasses and zipped ripely into my Tetration sweatsuit. As the roomphone rang on she was bawling in French, “Ne decrotch pa!”

I reached for the phone but she swatted my hand, “C’est mon mari!”

But I kept reaching. For how to say “courtesy call” en Français. Reveill? reveille? Coup de courtoisie? appel do wakeywakey?

I lifted the transceiver from its cradle but Iz knocked it away and cowered down to the floor—because, I realized, my sore livid hersmelling hand was empty in midair as if about to beat her, and so I just pressed the speakerphone option. The robovoice was repeating the date, as the Gulf sounds sloshed in the background, tides in and out and in. Iz recognized if not the meaning of the recording then its purpose, and calmed.

I offed the speakerphone as she went grabbing at her sweatpants and twisting the excess calf fabric around into knots—she wasn’t used to wearing sleeves on her legs, I guess. The transceiver just lay there bleating.

And she was talking to me. And I couldn’t understand—I couldn’t understand because then she was on her knees and crawling under the bed and tugging out her abaya and spitting on the chalking still whitening the back of that blackness and rubbing it into a slime, and frowning, and spitting, rubbing, talking all the while.

Apropos of whatever she was saying, I tucked my abating prick under the sheets and recalled that cliché found in antedated Anglo-American translations of European novels, in which cravated Mediterranean lechers are said not to speak but to “have languages.” “I had” no Arabic and only a bit of French, “Iz had” no English and only a bit of French. “We had” no language in common. It’s an insinuative phrase—it’s as if the very act of speech had once been possession, and innocence and naïveté and sincérité and intégrité each had its price.

Iz had turned her abaya insideout and now was patting it unrumpled. She was searching for a pocket, a pouch sewn into its insides, pudendal.
She took out a book of her own. And she opened it—and that slayed me with poignancy—how she opened the book as if to reassure herself of her identity before offering it to me.

It was an Omani passport whose red pebbled leatherette was consanguine with the stain spread on her face—that ruddier tenderness pulsing under her skin, seeping out from her glasses, still dangling their pricetag down her nose.

The pass’s thumbnail photo had her face unbattered, in full. Muslim women must get special dispensation to unveil themselves to be photographed for travel.

I held the likeness up to the original and then set it facedown on the pillow and went to touch that cheekstain but Iz fumbled away and slit the blinds to put the sun on me. If I’d meant that touch sexually, I didn’t anymore, I didn’t bother.

I rolled over wallward and read—I read her passport. Which I mean in the idiomatic sense of “getting a read on that person,” “taking a read on the situation,” but also in the sense of “reading” being something even the inanimate can do, “the pass’s ID flap ‘read’
Sultanate of Oman,
” “it ‘read’
Izdihar al-Maribi
”—examples that should give some notion of how automatic and pointless “reading” has become.

So pointless that even paper can do it. Paper can do it for us.

Here’s how to read: take all the things that are on the page and apply them to all the things that are not on the page, and if that ever stops working, reverse it.

Place of birth/Lieu de naissance: Yemen. Date of birth/Date de naissance: whatever it was she was 20 years old. Sex, yes, please. I’m not sure height was listed, I’m sure, however, that weight was not. Eye color, brown? Hair color, brown? Married name: Albadi, which is how Omanis with Continental business pretensions spell al-Badi. Domicile: She had a Schengen Eurozone visa and French residency permit, titre de sejour temporaire but with an accent, de séjour, 76 Rue des Forges, 13010 Marseille.

Below it all the blank for her signature was blank.

I flipped it through—she’d flown only twice before this, or they’d only stamped her twice. Muscat–Paris. Paris–Abu Dhabi. Her marriage had been a layover. After wedding a wife you sweeten your nights by taking her on
what’s called a honeymoon. I wonder what it’s called in Arabic, that trip you take your first wife on just before you marry your second. Because that’s what this was. Because that’s what her husband was doing.

I couldn’t let her go back to him. But then I couldn’t take her with me or even explain why. We weren’t happening as a couple. One of us was going to fail us.

The ultimate page of the passport was unreadable with handwriting. Childish fistwriting, the Arabic script of a tongue thrust in concentration through the knuckles. It must’ve been the transliteration of an address, which only partially explained the slow deliberate heavy strokes. I got the numbers at least, the numerals, though they were Arabic too.

Iz dropped the walleted jeans and my vilest madras shirt atop me, pointed a nail at the page and said, “Unfrerch a Viend. Monfrerch a Viend.”

That, combined with the only words in this alphabet, ÖSTERREICH/AUSTRIA, confirmed it: she was telling me she had a brother (un frère) who lived in Vienna (à Vienne). This was how to contact him.

Stupey of me not to jot anything down.

I got dressed so as not to be fat in her presence, got up out of bed and noticed that my wheeliebag had already been packed—everything folded, suit at the creases, shoes stinking up the nethercompartment. I mussed around for my undies and socks, displacing the twin Korans and even the porn she must’ve riffled from the endtable.

I went into the bathroom to cool shower myself and piss and not take my plane trepidation shit, not with her present.

I came back redressed just as she was raveling my Tetbook in its wire—I jumped at her—“No, non.”

She huddled again until I was whispering, “OK, it’s OK,” and as I packed my tote myself I said, “You go à Vienne? Not me. You. Pas moi. Vous. I pay—comprendre?”

She said, “Oui.”

I said, “L’aéroport we go together—ensemble?”

She said, “Oui. Mon passeport?”

I pinched into my jeans and returned it and then she went for the waistband of her sweatsuit for two other passports—Americans—mine and Principal’s, warmed by her belly. We traded.

She said, “Avanty l’aéroport, lemall?”

“Le what?” I said.

“Boutiques.”

But this wasn’t romantic, or nostalgia for the site of our meeting—this backtracking of ours to the Khaleej mall, Iz in Tetgear and heels and me wheeling both my bag and her aluminum rocket case just as the boutiques were raising their grates.

We were in such a hurry and it was all so unplanned that I’m not going to describe it fairly. If I say (write) that it was Iz who led us into every outlet and down every aisle choosing the wardrobe I’d be buying for her, I’d be making her out to be greedy, acquisitive. If I say (write) that because I was doing the buying I did the leading and choosing too, I’d be deprivileging her, depriving her of agency. Either way, I’d be a monster.

Anyway, in terms of appearances it didn’t matter what I thought—it mattered what everyone else thought, though this early the only other people on the concourse were maintenance Filipinos riding EV tilescrubbers. I told myself Iz was Egyptian, or Jordanian, one of the liberals, and I wasn’t her west but her center. We would convey our Christianity by paying retail. I posed between fittingrooms and tried to look like I wasn’t looking. And tried not to hear as the poised blithe clerks—Caucasians but like from the Caucusus, the Khanates, who’d been addressing Iz in an uppity Arabic—cackled amongst themselves in Q train Russian about my “zhena,” my “wife,” my “doch,” my “daughter,” whom I’d struck raw and now owed for the damages.

A budget is a soiled outfit that has to be squeezed into. I was suggesting drawstrung leisurewear of her own, for her plane comfort, from Aéropostale (Fit & Flare Bottoms, €38, Sequined Fullzip Hoodie Top, €38).

But Iz wasn’t interested, and she wasn’t even trying to communicate why—whether her legs were feeling smothered, or she intuited that a transition as drastic as hers required glamour. Iz pointed to a dress in the window. Regardless of any outfits she found in the interior Iz seemed to prefer what was in the window. The clerks must’ve said there weren’t any left or in her size, though—Chechens still lag in the customer service department—so Iz just teetered up to the display and nudged the dress down herself.

I splurged (Hugo Boss Metallic Two Tone Sheath, €790).

Skirts were next and priced equally though half the length to her dimpled kneelessness. And tighter than her own skin. Her walk runnethed over down the runway of aisle. She was showing off for me, but also not only for me, and I was doing the same just by letting her try the stuff on. And by buying it. We were showing off for the fellow shoppers so mortified they were pretending to be clerks and the clerks so mortified they were pretending to be fellow shoppers. Iz, it appeared, had that tacky rhiney sequiney taste that I’d always assumed, from Aaron’s experience with the girls of NY’s postcommunist boroughs, was Slavic, but was evidently common to new arrivals of every ambition. Blouses in endangered antelope prints that Iz must’ve considered sexy, but that I thought could only be worn ironically and Rach would’ve thought could only be worn cynically. Immigrant fashion. Social mores as brands. It’s about finally having some money to flaunt. Money, which buys them the body they already own, or at least something of the body they’ve sold. Iz held the lovehandles of herself between mirrors. Don’t go dressing for the passport you have, but for the passport you deserve.