Book of Numbers: A Novel (76 page)

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 since 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.

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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.

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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.

(S
OURCES
: a docent who conducted a tour in English.
The Birth of Fertility: Artifacts, Geofacts, and the Male Imagination,
Alana Hampur, PhD.)

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. Just 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.

If I found him, offline flesh found him, I wouldn’t introduce myself. I’d just follow him until he led me to Iz, who’d know how to introduce me. Because she knew me. I was a savior, a suitor, a bum—the fallen sharer of her airmattress, his floor.

I kept a vigil for his crescent as employees ramped down to the grass, shrugging lodens over labcoats, slinging IDs.

I stepped to the pave and wavered there between a Fiat and what wasn’t a Fiat.

The sun fell to a beheading, dusk was bleeding out.

A dozen middleaged Arabs were lugging rugs rolled like blueprints. They headed toward what had to be the hedge closest to Mecca and spread them on the green.