Book of Numbers: A Novel (73 page)

“You sure?”

“I’m saying the shareholders. Can’t read. Do they even issue stock certificates on paper? Don’t they just expect you to download and print nowadays?”

LOL again, and we cheersed and took the shots down.

I spilled and either she was indulging me by refusing to notice or her break was over and it was back to her job. She recounted which panels she’d attended before asking which were my faves—the oldest reporting trick in the—and I told her, inventing who spoke on what and what they said, she asked my opinion of the opening speech, and I gave it to her, and either she was fucking with me or fucking lying too because she agreed with me, then she went on to describe the Messe hall architecture so effectively that I’ve plagiarized her—all the roach/armadillo/
Transformers
comparisons were hers, above—and then a male Magyar bonobo swung over and said in a menthol dialect, “Congratulations, it is very [unintelligble], New Ink,” or “News, Inc.,” “Jew Kink,” “Next Drink,” crawled on.

“Congrats—to you?” she said, the pad open again.

“Can’t imagine on what. He must’ve gotten me confused with someone else.”

“Someone like Caleb Krast?” and she twitched her pen along my ribs.

“So we’ve finally gotten to the point of this flirtation.”

“Don’t you know him?”

“Guy with chronic stink breath from an oral hygiene aversion, the cashmere sweaters that cloy at the midriff, still trying to squeeze into slimfits, preshredded—Cal, I know.”

“Have you two been in touch?”

“Not since he turned war hero. It’s difficult to get an appointment.”

“The new novel’s been picked up in a dozen languages—care to give me a quote?”

“He’s the novelist of our generation. Correction—he’s the novelist our generation deserves.”

She frowned, folded, capped, “You talk about all your friends this way?”

“You’d rather talk about the importation of Arab crime fiction to the American market? Or the enduring popularity of comix?”

She smiled, “Graphic novels.”

“Graphic just used to mean you’d get a titty scene, after which a thug would get his legs blown off.”

“Have you read any of the enhanced ebooks released for multisense ereaders? You hold the tablet and it shakes and you can manually feel the explosions?”

“Have I read them? Is that what you’re supposed to do with them?”

“Tell me another story, then.”

“Like a bedtime story?”

“You don’t have it in you,” and she smirked and then tugged my lanyard, me, close. “Who are you?—I mean, besides Aaron Szlay?”

The DJ spun up again and all around us glitter swirled like metal snowflakes. Laser tracerfire. Flashpot brisance. Strobes.

Our mouths were a tongue apart. But my teeth were too sharp and her lips were still moving.

“You have to help me out,” she said. “My deadline was a drink ago. Lene Termin at Viking hasn’t returned any of my msgs, I’m currently out
of the office, no shit. The booths are all just assistants and so trained nowadays I get nothing but review copies, smiles. No one’s in NY, but it’s like no one’s even in Frankfurt. Finally I called out to Iowa, but the students kept transferring me to extensions that might’ve been Caleb’s but the voicemails weren’t set up.”

I put a fist at her back, “Why can’t we just sleep next to each other, no touching?”

She flinched and dropped the credentials, “Why can’t you do me one fucking favor?”

“Because you’re dead.”

“You’re an asshole.”

Then I was conjugating: “You’re dead, I’m dead, they’re dead, we’re all dead.”

“But you’re still an asshole.”

My reply was slurred toward the exit because—across the room past the median bar and splotched in ambers and clears amid appetizer molder—was Finn. Floridcheeked in grief carousal. He didn’t notice me, he hadn’t. This must’ve been his local lodging.

Finn’s silk shirt was busted open to the butterflycrunches navel, and the suitjacket he held and danced with whipped and spun like a ghost. It was an unbuttoned black with white pinstripes ghost he dipped and twirled around, Sufi matador dancing on the ceiling of hell.

The vestibule was riled with revelers who weren’t waiting for the elevators, or were, but swayingly, gropingly, humping one another up against the bookwall and the ballroom’s sliding partitions, and suddenly it struck me as impossible that they were readers too, or claimed to be, impossible that they’d ever even once just sat still in a chair or lain in bed, alone, silently, one light, and read. Indirect light. Quiet, please. I went hushing the couples stairward. The partition walls were sliding apart, or the lidcovers had been pried off the bookcoffins along the stairs, and even as I had to tipsy around them to avoid tripping, craven Danish creatures were crawling out of the darkness and seizing me, tugging at my totestrap. “We take you to what room you stay,” they said. “We are help you
cannot stand.” I can’t say how or why, I just smelled it on them, through the herb liquor sulfur—they were Danish.

“I’m not a guest,” I said, or intended to say. “Just get me a cab,” like have it drive into the lobby and up to the landing at least.

Wheeliebags kept clunkaclunking past me downstairs, and all of them were mine, and I said to each, “You’re mine,” not because they were, because it entertained me. The railings were not to be trusted. I reached for them and they swatted me back, so I leaned against the coldsweat porphyry, and sat. And assed myself between the steps.

By the time I got to the lobby it must’ve been midnight, because everyone was straight above me, shooting me: my attempts to rise, my sotted swipes at their devices, my pale hairy bellyflopping, staying on my belly so they wouldn’t snap my face and tag it posthumous. #DrunkAmi. #LitSlob.

The carpet tasted bland. Because it was immaculate, unpatterned.

“Lass ihn,” was said in a foreigner’s German, but in a foreignness I recognized. “Er ist mein Arbeitskollege—mein Freund.”

Such brute fancy watches on the hands that rolled me, on the hands that grasped the strap to drag my flab upright, even as I tried stuffing the tote under my shirt and pants at once, popping buttons. My waist tumbled out into handles. I was being lifted, taken by my handles and lifted and whatever I was yelling had to do with whether anybody was fucking aware of what this fucking suit cost? Anybody?

Maleksen—bulked albinic Maleksen—he was speaking with the stubblepated guards who had my arms pinned back and were twisting my wrists: “Er kotzt.”

Sure enough if I kept protesting I’d puke.

Maleksen wagged a finger at me, before switching to the only sprache guards respect besides violence: “Bloke went bottle up on an empty stomach. But a good bloke. Good Arbeitskollege and Freund. We bunk at the Frankfurter Hof. I take him myself, no worries. Danke, mate.”

I was basically shoved into him—“Macht Platz.”

Maleksen staggered me into the doors like they were revolvingdoors, which they weren’t, headfirst.

Outside. And shivering. But Maleksen still wouldn’t let go, and no
curbstumble I took or rut I forced myself into had him loosening his totehold. Whatever I was babbling went into the wind, beyond the kliegs of the hofzone and into the dimming. Au revoir, you logos. Adieu, you chains. It was too late in the day for late capitalism. Everything was closed. Maleksen jerked me back. “Wait.” Then a boot to the calf. “Move, mate.”

Because there were businessmen blundering inebriate. Because there was a crowd at the tramstop, though by the schedule of the night route a solitary kerchiefed pensioner huddling sackladen at the shelter was a crowd. Even just a cig would’ve been. Just a goddamned cig. We came to this intersection of shuttered bar, shuttered schnitzeleria/bar, vacant plaster atelier still affiched as a cybercafé, and as I hobbled along with the tracks Maleksen heaved me sharp by the strap into a turn, and now I was behind him, led, towed, like I was leashed. River gusts blew in through the gape in my fly. We crossed again, against the signal. Maleksen was scared of being followed, but also scared of not being—rather he was afraid of not having the correct followers.

He stopped again at the meridian, checked traffic—“What is the pass, mate?”

“The password?”

“It will be cracked,” he said, “but it will be more gentle if you tell me—it is not fingerprint, no?”

“To my computer? None of my passwords have computers.”

This was parkland now, grass swards scrawled over by the umbrage of bare branches. And my only witnesses, writers and the like more famous and for now more dead than I was, enpedestaled statues.

“Give it up, mate,” Maleksen said.

“So we’re going to visit Balk? He lives in a park?”

He was dragging me toward the willows. Behind that a road. Above us the stars. Plane weather.

“Give it to me.”

“Stop talking porn to me.”

He whirled around and as he spoke the scarred bars bent at his throat: “The computer. The laptop.”

“Let’s get clear on this—you’re mugging me? For fucking recordings you’d be getting anyway? All because why? I violated terms? Because I
left Berlin or went online like once at a welfare state library? Or is b-Leaks getting impatient with me and reneging?”

“Shut up. You will type and access for me.”

“It’s just suckmypenis, alloneword. The name of that twat teacher from Sydney who taught your accent, all CAPS. I should be mugging you, for all that cash you owe me. I should be tapping Balk’s defense fund.”

“Is it touch ID?”

“It’s retinal. Or iris. I forget. It’s lobal. Ears. You’re going to have to cut off a nipple.”

“I will hurt you if I must.”

“With the blessings of Balk the utopian pacifist, I’m guessing?”

“Tetbook. Now, mate.”

“I’m only trying to make sense of this, sort out your position.”

“Toss it, mate.”

“Wait, I’ve got it—you’re striking out on your own. You’re leaking the leaker, sticking it to Balk.”

Maleksen scowled. “I count.”

I said, “You’re going rogue, like with a ransom thing. Going to publish the interviews yourself. Or sell them off for publication? Or sell them back to every last user they incriminate?”

Maleksen slashed out with his bootheel and knocked me to my knees and the tote swung around my neck and hung down in front of me.

“Fuck,” I said, “just fucking hold up.”

But he was whispering, “b-Leaks is become soft. In politics. Balk is also soft, sitting in Russian Iceland, cannot ever go outside. His intellect tells him he is persecuted because of advocacy and not because he is pederastic. I am only telling this now to you because you like him lie to yourself about your importance. I count.”

“Four” went to “three,” but then Maleksen’s two was “dva” and one was “odin,” and as I was fetching my glasses from the dirt I had to say, “You’re Russian?”

There was a strangulated swan honk from beyond the willows.

Maleksen held a gun, and though all of it was camouflaged in flecktarn browns and greens, it gleamed, as if it were a plastic laser toy, with a black wire straggling through the tangle of roots back to a busted sniper
game at a condemned arcade on the Jersey Shore. Then again, the way he was aiming it was real, like all my flesh wasn’t real but pixel, to be shot to death infinitely, to be resurrected eternally—I had the hiccups.

“Why do this?” I said. “Who cares?”

But what I wanted to say was this: I’m only protecting myself. What I wanted to say was: You already know what’s in it. Everybody knows. Within themselves.

There were contrails of light through the boughs. A gray Merc idled out in the raster.

I turned back from it and smack into the gun. Its butt to my jaw, my jaw to the grass.

I wasn’t just wet but made of wetness, flowing along to the lowest ground, and then thrusting up from the matted blades. But when I put a hand to where it stung I fell again, flat, and breathed a puddle that felt like breathing a plasticbag. I wrenched off the plasticbag that had wrapped around me. It was from Kaufland, the hypermarket.

And that was morning.

I straightened my knees, slowly, achingly slowly straightened my grovel joints, patted myself down. No wallet, but Principal’s passport was still there damp under a sock, gravel. The tag wound around my neck identified my corpse as Aaron Szlay’s. What I didn’t have was a tote, with all my lives inside. Each step sparked fire but I was cold, that back of the throat cold. Every swallow was mucous. Each step twinged up the spine, and shook me into coughing fits, croupy coughing, fuck. Sneezing stuff the consistency of gauze, as if to stanch the jawblood. I rubbed my shoulder, at the totemark, the strappage. The 2.4 lbs of my Tetbook, the 2.4 tons of the book it contained, gone. I’d backed nothing up. If posture be my judge I was fucked. I had no other younger version to reload. I had no other younger version of myself.

There was a construction site in my head and then farther along the street was a construction site, jackhammering, pointed pneumatics of kurwa, pizda, overalled gastarbeiters cursing in Polish while breaking asphalt, drilling at sewage with sexual fury.

I felt a car creep up, but it was just a cab, which once it’d crept alongside my condition veered away and soaked me. My suit had been made to order, not to get stretched—it had pleats now.

Here’s the name of the street: Mainzer Landstraße. And here’s another streetname: Taunusanlage. The air was a sodden drear like a frozen screen. A constant pane between me and the skyscraping curtainwalls of mirrored glass just ahead.

Observe, perceive, glean everything—it was as if I were compensating for the material I’d lost by collecting the trash around me. Piking it, staving it, to fill this pit in me. To heal the welts pulsing like stoplights at my temples. Gravel in my shoes like babyteeth.

Into the Messe again. A guard halted me, examined my blood against my tag—“What happens to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m here for the panel on zombies.”

He said, “There is that today?” As if everyone was in peril.

“It’s on just now—zombie fiction, the undead.”

He was giddy now, silly, “That is the book I please to read.”

I went to the bathrooms and wet papertowels and pressed my face, spiffed up. Then slogged past the tropicalized Pacific Islander stalls, went unrecognized by the Czechs and Slovaks who just a diurnity ago had been my brothers.