Book of Numbers: A Novel (8 page)

“Blessed art Thou, Lord our God,” I said, “Who Hath
Prevented me from Reproducing.”

“Amen.”

“But also she resembles her mother.”

“My sister,” Aar said, “the African.”

East, we went east again—away from fancy au pairland, the emporia
that required reservations. Toward the numbered streets, to the street before the
numbers, not a 0 but a York—Ave.

Pointless bungled York, a bulwark. Manipedi and hair salons. Drycleaning.
Laundry.

Outside, the doublesided sandwichboard spread obscenely with the recurring
daily specials still daily, still special, the boardbreaded sandwiches and soups
scrawled out of scraps, the goulash and souvlaki and scampi, leftover omelets and
spoiled rotten quiches, the menus inside unfolding identically—greasy. The vinyls
were grimy and the walls were chewed wet. A Mediterranean grove mural was trellised by
vines of flashing plastic grape. A boombox was blatting la mega se pega, radio
Mexicano.

The methadone girl was working, and so the methadone was working on the
girl. Our counter guy wiped the counter.

In this diner as in life, nothing came with anything, there were no
substitutions—it was that reminder we craved. A salad wasn’t just extra,
but imponderable. A side of potatoes was fries. We always went for a #13 and a
15—which was cheaper than getting the #s 2, 3, 4, and 5—a booth in
the back like we were waiting for the bathroom.

Aar ordered from the methadone girl, “The usual,” and then
explained again what that was, and then explained the job: “Just your average
lives of the billionaires vanity project, the usual.”

I didn’t even have water in me—nothing to spit or sinuose
through the nose. Just: “This is the guy who haunts me?”

“Who called me directly and Lisabeth put him through, saying
it’s you, and straight off he’s proposing a memoir.”

“He wants me to be his ghost?”

The caffeines came, and the juices—an OJ agua fresca.

Aar went for his giftbox trimmed in ribbons. An expertly tied bow
resembling female genitalia.

He took his knife and deflowered it all to tinsel,
tissue—“You’re the only one he wants.” Champagne.

“We’re popping bottles?”

“What do you suppose they charge for corkage?” He held the
magnum under the table, until the radio repeated its forecast, a chance of showers
onomatopoeia—no fizz, no froth, just a waft at the knees—and he took both
juice cups down and poured them brimming and then setting the magnum at his side offered
to clink chevronated plastics:

“To the JCs! The one and the only!”

“But which am I?” though I was sipping.

“We’re dealing either with a dearth of imagination,”
Aar swallowed. “Or an excess.”

“I thought he hated me—I thought he’d forgotten me
before we even met.”

“May we all be hated for such money—Creator of the World and
of all the Universe, Creator—may we too be forgotten under such munificent
terms.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s already sold.”

“A stranger’s autobiography I haven’t agreed to write
yet has already been sold how? To whom?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d agree so I went ahead,”
and he reached for his pocket, for a napkin, a placemat.

A contract stained with waiver, disclaimer.

\

Sign and date here and here and here and here, initial. I have to fill
them in—the what else to call them? the blanks?

By now I’m through saying that my book changed everything for
everyone around it, around me—I’d recognize the smell of burning ego
anywhere.

Not even the events—the
explosions—changed everything for everyone. But still it’s unavoidable. He
is, Finnity. After my book, he never went back to editing lit—meaning, he never
again worked on a book I respected.

Out of favor with the publisher—a press founded as if a civic trust
by dutiful WASPs, operated as if a charity by sentimental Jews, whose intermarried heirs
were bought out by technocrats from Germany—Finnity transferred, Aar said Finnity
told him, or was transferred, Aar maintained, to another imprint, a glossier less
responsible imprint where he acquired homeopathic cookbookery, class-actionable
self-help, and a glossy, Strasbourg-born associate editor who also happened to be the
only daughter of the chairman of the parent multinational, the top of not just the
Verlagsgruppe but of the whole entire media conglomerate, getting intimate with the
business from the bottom (missionary position).

Two children by now, a house in New Canaan.

He’s become a revenue dude—a moneymaker.

Anyway, Aar—vigilantly sensitive to the vengeance of
others—had gone to him first, and Finnity hadn’t believed him.

“I’ll be straight with you,” Aar said to me.
“First he tried to talk me out of you, then we both got on the phone to
conference JC2, let’s say, and Finnity went naming all my other
clients.”

“But you insisted?”

“He insisted—your double.”

“He doesn’t assume from that dead assignment I know anything
about online?”

“What’s to know? You go, you hunt and peck, what comes
up?”

“Twin lesbians? My bank balance?”

“Words, just words. You know this.”

“Did you know he read my book?”

“Joshua Cohen is always interested in books written by Joshua
Cohen.”

“Joshua Cohens or Joshuas Cohen?”

“Or maybe his hobby’s the Holocaust—why not? Whose
isn’t?”

“Or maybe it’s another gimmick, like to keep it out of the
press that he’s not writing it himself—or like for marketing.”

“Actually the contract provides for that: strictly confidential. He
worked it out himself, no agent on his behalf. You’re nondisclosured like
a spook. Like a spy. You can forget about any duple credit on the
covers, or the two of you breaking names up the spine. No ‘As told to,’ no
‘In collaboration with’—we’re talking no acknowledgment, not
even on copyright.”

“Actually that makes the offer compelling.”

Aar went for my bagel, caved it. Laid on the creamcheese, waxy mackerel,
frozen sewerlids of tomato and onion. To eat one bagel he had to have two, because he
only ate the tops. The tops had all the everything seasonings.

Poppy, sesame, garlic, gravel salt: his breath as he said, “What
compels, my friend, is the money.”

“It’s a lot of fucking money.”

“What we’d be getting paid is a lot, what the publisher
would be paying is a fucking lot—for him it’s just snot in a
bucket.”

“How much would he get?”

“How much I can’t say,” but Aar took up his knife
again, pierced one of my yolks, and scribbled in the yellow.

A dozen times my fee.

The waitress came by not to clear us—we weren’t through
yet—rather to plunk down two styro cups, and so the magnum was brought up and
poured, settled on the table.

She smiled to demonstrate her braces—all there was between the
trackmarks at her jugulars and her bangs held back with bandaids—and took the
full cups and gave one to our cash register guy and they ¡saluded! each other and
us from the takeout window and drank and sparked a swisher cigarillo and passed it.
Enjoy.

Aar was in the middle of saying, “Even
them—¿comprende? ¿me entiendes? you can’t tell
anyone—anything.”

“I get it.”

“Not a word, he was adamant about that,” and Aar was too.
“He wanted to contact you directly, wanted to do this without me, represent you
himself—he’s even insisting that the publisher not announce the
deal.”

“Finnity’s complying.”

“Doesn’t have a choice, and neither do you.”

“Book of the century. Of the millennium. I get
it—what’s next?
An age is a million years? An epoch 10
million years? Or what’s beyond that—an era or eon?”

“Be serious—there are penalties if anyone blabs.”

“Penalties?”

“Inwired: if word gets out, the contract’s
canceled.”

“Abort, abort.”

“Autodestructo.”

“So not a word.”

“Rach.”

“No Rach.”

“Shut your mouth.”

I shut my mouth.

The diner just had pencils—I picked my teeth with a pencil, until a
pen was found.

A caper was stuck in my teeth.

://

I left Aaron in a stupor—Aar
taxiing to his office to process, me to wander stumbling tripping over myself and, I
guess, cram everything there was to cram about the internet? or web? One was how
computers communicated (the net?), the other was what they communicated (the
web?)—I was better off catching butterflies.

I wandered west until, inevitably, I was in front of the Metropolitan.

I used to spend so much time there, so many weekend and even weekday
hours, that I’d imagine I’d become an exhibit, that I’d been there
so long that I, the subject, had turned object, and that the other museumgoers
who’d paid, they’d paid to see me, to watch how and where I walked, where
I paused, stood, and sat, how long I paused at whatever I was standing or sitting in
front of, when I went to the bathroom (groundfloor, past the temporary galleries of
porcelain and crystal, all the tapestries reeking of bathroom), or for cafeteria wine
and then out to the steps to smoke, whether I seemed attentive or inattentive, whether I
seemed disturbed or calmed—as if I were carrying around this placard, as if I
myself were just this placard, selfcataloging by materials, date, place of finding,
provenance: carbonbased hominid, 2011, Manhattan (via Jersey)—a plaque and relic
both, of paunchy dad jeans, logoless tshirt untucked, sportsjacket missing a button,
athletic socks, unathletic sneaks.

I visited the Met for the women, not for meeting them new, but for the
reassurance of the old. For their forms that seduced by soothing—for their form,
that vessel shape, joining them in sisterhood as bust is joined to bottom.

I visited to be mothered, essentially, and it was altogether more
convenient for me to get that swaddling from the deceased strangers buried uptown than
from my own mother down in Shoregirt.

The physique I’m feeling my way around here is
that of the exemplary vase: a murky womb for water, tapering. I’m remembering a
certain vase from home, from the house I was raised in: marl clay carved in a
feather/scale motif, the gashes incised by brush or comb, then dipped transparently and
fired, and set stout atop the cart in the hall. That was the pride of my mother’s
apprenticeship: a crudely contoured holder for any flowers I’d bring, which
she’d let wilt and crumble dry, as if measures of my absence. Yes, coming to the
museum like this, confining myself behind its reinforced doors and metal detectors, and
within its most ancient deepwide hushed insensible receptacles, will always be my safest
shortcut to Jersey, and the displays of the Master of Shoregirt—Moms the
potter—who’s put together like this, like all the women I’ve ever
been with, except Rach.

\

Just to the left of the entrance of the Met, where civilization begins,
where the Greek and Roman Wing begins—there it was: the dwellingplace of the
jugs, the buxom jugs, just begging to surrender their shapes to a substance.

Curvant. Carinated. Bulging. The jar girls, containments themselves
contained, immured squatting behind fake glass.

I used to stop, stoop at the vitrines, and pay my
respects—breathing to fog their clarity, then wiping with a cuff.

I should say that my virgin encounter with these figures was in the
company of Moms, who’d drive the family up 440 N across all
of Staten Island for culture, for chemo (the former for me, the latter for Dad, whom
we’d drop at Sloan Kettering).

But that Friday this past spring, I didn’t see any maternal
proxies. Coming close to these figures, all I could see was myself. At each
thermoplastic bubble, each lucite breach, I hovered near and preened. I was shocked,
shattered, doubly. My chin quadrupled in reflection. My mouth was a squeezed citron.
Stubble bristled at every suggestion. What had been highbrow was now balding.