Book of Numbers

8/27? 28? TWO DAYS BEFORE END OF RAMADAN

If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.

Paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth, the thread from threadstuff or — what are bindings made of? hair and plant fibers, glue from boiled horsehooves?

The paperback was compromise enough. And that’s what I’ve become: paper spine, paper limbs, brain of cheapo crumpled paper, the final type that publishers used before surrendering to the touch displays, that bad thin four-times-deinked recycled crap, 100 % acidfree postconsumer waste.

I have very few books with me here—Hitler’s Secretary: A Firsthand Account, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, whatever was on the sales table at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, and in the langues anglais section of the FNAC on the Rue de Rennes — books I’m using as models, paragons of what to avoid.

I’m writing a memoir, of course — half bio, half autobio, it feels — I’m writing the memoir of a man not me.

It begins in a resort, a suite.

I’m holed up here, blackout shades downed, drowned in loud media, all to keep from having to deal with yet another country outside the window.

If I’d kept the eyemask and earplugs from the jet, I wouldn’t even have to describe this, there’s nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is. Suffice it to say that these pillows are each the size of the bed I used to share in NY. Anyway this isn’t quite a hotel. It’s a cemetery for people both deceased and on vacation, who still check in daily with work.

As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up — with my employer’s technology — myself, and Rach.

My wife, my ex, my “x2b.”

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Living by the check, by the log — living remotely, capitalhopping, skipping borders, jumping timezones, yet always with that equatorial chain of blinking beeping messages to maintain, what Principal calls “the conversation”—it gets lonely.

For the both of us.

Making tours of the local offices, or just of overpriced museums to live in. Claridge’s, Hôtel de Crillon. Meeting with British staff to discuss removing the UK Only option from the homepage. Meeting French staff to discuss the.fr launch of Autotet. Granting angel audiences to the CEOs of Yalp and Ilinx. Being pitched, but not catching, a new parkour exergame and a betting app for fantasy rugby.

This was micromanaging, microminimanaging. Nondelegation, demotion (voluntary), absorption of duties (insourcing), dirtytasking. All of them at once. In the lexicon of the prevailing techsperanto.

This was Principal spun like a boson just trying to keep it, keep everything, together.

At least until Europe was behind us and we could stay ensuite, he could stay seated, in interviews with me. Between the naps, interviewing for me.

You call the person you’re writing “the principal” and mine is basically the internet, the web — that’s how he’s positioned, that’s how he’s converged: the man who helped to invent the thing, rather the man who helped it to invent us, in the process shredding the hell out of the paper I’ve dedicated my life to. Though don’t for a moment assume he regards it as, what? ironic or wry? that now, at our mutual attainment of 40 (his birthday just behind him, mine just ahead), he’s feeling the urge to put his life down in writing, into writing on paper.

He has no time for irony or wryness. He has time for only himself.

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cant wait 4 wknd, Rach updates.

margaritas tonite #maryslaw

ever time i type divorce i type deforce (still trying 2 serve papers)

read that my weights the same as hers — feelingood til the reveal: shes 2 inches taller — ewwww!!

“She” who was two inches taller was a model, and though Rach’s in advertising I never expected her to be just as public, to enjoy such projections.

To be sure, she enjoys them anonymously.

My last stretch in NY I’d been searching “Rachava Cohen-Binder,” finding the purest professionalism — her profile at her agency’s site — searching “Rachava Binder,” getting inundated with comments she’d left on a piece of mine (“Journalism Criticizing the Web, Popular on the Web,” The New York Times). It was only in Palo Alto that I searched “Rachav Binder” and “Rach Binder,” got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church’s databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions (“Net Costs,” The Atlantic), and finally it was either in London or Paris, I forget, because I was trashed, that I, on a trashy whim, searched “Teva Café Detroit MI,” but the results suggested I’d meant “Tevazu Café Detroit MI”—cyber chastisement for having incorrectly spelled the place where I’d proposed with ring on bended knee.

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.

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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.

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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 (Henry?), who copyedited and/or proofread them (Henri?), 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.

It was his honor, publishing me.

I dragged up to the front like a greenhorn with a trunk and Finnity went to hug or kiss and I went to shake his hand.

I gave a speech — and the speech was my Acknowledgments (the book itself didn’t have any). I had a lot of people to thank. My mother, for one, who fled Poland, for giving me the money to travel to Poland, only so I could write a book about her life. (I left the inheritance from my father out of it — spent.)

I thanked my Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe, whom I visited and interviewed in Israel, and my cousin Tzila, who drove me directly from a Tel Aviv club to a shabby Breslov minyan in Jerusalem so I could interrogate a former block commander who’d been interrogated before by better, the obscurer relations, honorary inlaws, and strangers who’d responded to my letters from Kraków, Warsaw, Vienna, Graz, Prague, Bratislava, the good people of Los Angeles, and of Texas, Florida, and Maine (survivors), the faculties of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, and the stern lady clerks of the Polish State Archives, who helped me sift cadastral registries, deportation manifests, and Zyklon B inventories, who not only confirmed Moms’s memories — the color of a hat ribbon or shoelace, the flavor of the cream between favorite wafers — but who gave them flesh and future too — the location of Gruntig’s butcher stand (by the mikvah, on what became the corner of Walecznych and Proletariuszy Streets), the fate of schoolfriend Sara (Cuba, aneurysm) — assisting with the granular details: how many grams of bread my uncles were allotted in what camp on what dates, how many liters of soup were allotted per prisoner per week/month in what camp vs. the amount on average delivered. How my grandparents last embraced in Zgody Square, Kraków ghetto, 10/28/42, 10:00.

Appreciated — and when I was finished everyone stormed to congratulate me, shake my hand, and Caleb nodded, from a huddle of girls, and Aaron nodded too, gesturing for a smoke above a scrim of critics, reviewers. Someone congratulated me by hugging and kissing and someone said, “Introduce me to your mother.” But Moms wasn’t in attendance, she hadn’t been invited. “She wouldn’t have enjoyed it — this isn’t exactly her crowd.”

I leaned between brass poles, velvet suspended into satisfied smiles. Aar sparked a joint and we smoked it and the air was gassy and my suit was wool and Cal filed out with the girls.

We stumbled down 10th in celebration, or observance — in memo-riam — afterparties bearing the same relationship to parties as the afterlife to life. Straggling to get cash, to get cigs and a handle of vodka, to decipher the Spanish on a wall shrine to a child shot or stabbed, to do chinups on new condo construction scaffolding.

Gansevoort Street: everything smelled like meat and disinfectant. The bouncer was a big black warty dyke bound in leather and chains, checking IDs, grabbing wrists so as to break them, to stamp the back of the hand and someone said, “This is like the Holocaust,” and someone said, “The Holocaust wasn’t airconditioned neither.”

Behind the bar were crushed photographs of the uniformed: cops, firefighters, Catholic schoolgirls. Businesscards between the slats, as if phone fax email were all that held the walls together, all that fused the landfilled island.

The bartender served Cal and me our sodas and we took them to a banquette in the back to mix in the vodka while Aar ordered a whiskey or scotch and while it was being fixed wound his watch and left a bill atop a napkin and left.

Someone had the hiccups, someone slipped on sawdust.

Kimi! publicized by the banquette:

“The deal is the publisher’s picking up the tab for beers and wines,” and Cal said, “Why didn’t you say so?” and Kimi! said, “How many do you need?” and Cal counted how many girls we were sitting with and said, “We need six of both,” and Kimi! snorted and Cal stood to go with her, but instead they went to the bathroom.

I had to go to the bathroom too. But all of college was crammed into the stall, Columbia University class of 1992, with a guy whose philosophy essays I used to write, now become an iBanker, let’s call him P. Sachs, or Philip S., sitting not on the seat but up on the tank, with the copy of my book I’d autographed for him on his lap—“To P.S., with affect(at)ion” rolling a $100 bill, tapping out the lines to dust the dustjacket, offering Cal and Kimi! bumps off the blurbs, offering me.

“Cocaine’s gotten better since the Citigroup merger.”

A knock, a peremptory bouncer’s fist, and the door’s opened to another bar, yet another — but which bars we, despite half of us being journalists, wouldn’t recollect: that dive across the street, diving into the street and lying splayed between the lanes. Straight shots by twos, picklebacks. Well bourbons chasing pabsts. Beating on the jukebox for swallowing our quarters. “This jukebox swallows more than your mother.” “Swallows more than The Factchecker.”

The Factchecker changed by the party, the season. Any fuckable female publishing professional could be The Factchecker — if it could be proven that she was between the ages of 18 and 26, and that she had fucked precisely zero people since arriving in NY.

Last call was called, and Kimi! went up to tab bourbon doubles for us and for herself a gin and tonic and Cal and I drank ours and even hers and shared a cig between us and my mouth tasted like nickels, like dimes, and my gums needed a haircut.

The lights went up, the jukebox down, I hurled a cueball at the dartboard — Finnity had left with The Factchecker, Cal asked, “Anyone want to come back to my place?”

We still had vodka in the bag, two girls in each cab, two cabs taxiing to the Bowery, to the apartment Cal’s parents, half Jewish and full Connecticut stockbrokers each, had bought for him. I was in the back and he was in the back and Kimi! was between us (The Factchecker’s roommate was up front), and I asked if anyone had talked to Aar but Kimi! was already calling him though she must’ve been calling his office, because he didn’t have a phone on his person, this was before everybody had phones on their persons.

Aar was waiting outside Cal’s building, wrapping his silk scarf around a Russian or Ukrainian or close enough gift — a present to himself shivering in only a frilly cocktail waitress shirt and a drink umbrella skirt and a nametag. Cal poked with the keys, Aar poked his Slav from behind with a handle of rye, and we all crowded into the elevator, stopped on every floor, Kimi! and Missy having plunged into pressing all the buttons.

I’d lit a cig on the street and was still smoking in the elevator and the cig I was smoking was menthol.

Missy, being The Factchecker’s roomie, whining to Kimi! and me about her job as a temp receptionist, and “Why can’t I get a job at an agency?” and “Can you I’m begging you introduce me to Aar?” as Cal scoured around stuffing tightywhities into drawers, as Aar and his Masha? Natasha? he’d picked up from hostessing the restaurant of the Jersey City Ramada, the same place I’m sure he’d picked up the rye, set about mixing Manhattans.

Cal tidying the shelves, rearranging and flipping what he must’ve considered the respectable reads, the larger and wider reads, the complement of Brontës, the Prousts, the Tolstoys, centrally and spine out, exchanging the livingroom’s Flags of the Confederacy poster for the kitchen’s canvas of abstract slashes by a dissentient Union Square Lithuanian, fussing with the stereo, putting on some hiphop, some rap, clearing away the motivational improve your vocab lectures he worked out to. I left Kimi! and Missy to help him move the treadmill to the bedroom, left him trying to fold the treadmill into the closet at the buzzing, went to the door and buzzed them in: a dozen people, a 12-pack, dangling in the hall, dangling like keys passed from the fire escape to the acquainted, from the acquainted to the strangers they’d invited, assisterati and receptionistas arriving, schedulers and reschedulers early and late, marketing and distribution cultureworkers I didn’t know and who didn’t know me but we, this was our business, pretended. More pot and coke, which, as P.S. said again, had gotten better since the Citigroup merger. Tequila in the sink, martinis in the shower. Ash in both and in energy drinkables. Masha or Nastya was asking if we had any games and after Cal realized she didn’t mean Monopoly mentioned that his neighbor was a firstperson fanatic — not the literary gambit, the gaming — and suddenly six fists were knocking at Tim’s door demanding to borrow his system, and Tim, calculus teacher at Stuyvesant, answered the door red and tousled senseless, and hauled into Cal’s his system and even connected it to Cal’s TV with the bigger screen and bigger speakers, the night blooding the morning as P.S. and some random hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy tested each other in mortal combat avatared as lasertusked elephants and wild ligers with rocketlaunching claws, as Aar left with his Slav who had to get back to Staten Island by her cousins’ curfew, as Tim’s girlfriend who had the flu trundled over in a balloonpocked blanket and scowled and sneezed and coughed and left taking Tim but not his system with her, as some random hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy left with his decentbodied girlfriend, as Cal grinded Missy and took her into the bedroom, as I fumbled with Kimi! and got a burp, which sent her to the bathroom to vomit, which sent Missy to the bathroom to help her, and P.S. kept playing with himself, and in the hall Missy was into hooking up with Kimi! but not Kimi! with Missy, P.S. suggested they call The Factchecker to confirm whether and which sex acts she was perpetrating on Finnity, Missy and Kimi! left, P.S. left with them, and after opening the fiercely bulbed fridge to find expired mustard and ketchup sweating, just sweating, I suggested calling for delivery, but the good place was closed and we were just a block outside the bad place’s delivery zone, and the freezer wasn’t just out of ice but out of cold from being left open, and there was a cushion wet on the floor in the hall, and there was sleep without dreaming.

I was woken — lumped in the contents of a dumped jar of vitamins — by Kimi!’s phone, which she’d left behind. Cal picked it up, and Kimi! yelled at him and he yelled at me to find the remote, but all I was finding was a jar and vitamins.

Then Kimi!’s phone went dead and Cal was gone.

My mouth tasted like tobacco and mucus and lipgloss, absinthe (strangely), marijuana, coke bronchitis.

I had an ache in the back of my head, and was deciding whether to vomit. The screen was still showing the game, 1 Player, 2 Players, New, Resume, and on the way to the window I stopped to resume the function for the time, but the screen just filled with smoke, the sky with smoke, and in the weeks to come, the months to come, into 2002 when the paperback release was canceled and beyond, my book received all of two reviews, both positive.

Or one positive with reservations.

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Miriam Szlay. Still to this day, I’m not sure whether she made it to the party. Either I didn’t notice her, or she was too reluctant to have sought me out, because she was kind. Or else, she might have skipped it — that’s how kind she was, or how much she hated my susceptibility to praise, or how much she hated paying for a sitter.

I never asked.

Miriam. Her bookstore was a messy swamp on the groundfloor of a lowrise down on Whitehall Street — literature cornered, condescended to, by the high finance surrounding. Before, it’d been a booklet store, I guess, selling staplebound investment prospectuses and ratings reports contrived by a Hungarian Jew who’d dodged the war, and bought Judaica with every dollar he earned — kabbalistic texts that if they didn’t predict commodity flux at least intrigued in their streetside display. At his passing he left the property and all its effects and debts to his children — Miriam, and her older and only brother — who broadened the inventory to include fiction and nonfiction of general interest to the Financial District’s lunch rush, which as a businessplan was still bleak.

Miriam — who kept her age vague, halfway between my own and my mother’s — was the one who ran the shop and hired me: straight out of Columbia, straight out of Jersey, a bridge & tunnel struggler with a humanities diploma between my legs but not enough arm to reach the Zohar. She was inflexible with what she paid me an hour ($8 or its equivalent in poetry), but was flexible with hours. She respected my time to write, knew that I wasn’t going to be a clerk all my life (just throughout my 20s), knew that a writer’s training only began, didn’t end, with alphabetical order. Another lesson: “subject” and “genre” are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving.

Miriam was my first reader — my second was her brother, who became my agent. Aaron signed me on her word alone — a demand, not a recommendation — and helped me clarify my projects. A memoir (I hadn’t lived enough), a study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I had no credentials), a novel about the Jersey Shore (no story), a collection of linked short stories about the Jersey Shore (no linkages), a long poem conflating the Inquisitions and Crusades (not commercial). Then one fall day in 1996 Aar came back brutalized from Budapest, cabbing from JFK to Whitehall to drop a check with his sister (the shop would never be profitable). His trip had been coital, not cliental, but out of solicitousness he talked only profitability, Mauthausen, Dachau, family history. That was the moment to mention my mother.

My mother was my book, he agreed, and he met me monthly after work, weekly after I left work to finish a draft, to discuss it — how to recreate dialogue, how to limit perspective — still always meeting at the register, where I’d give my regards to Miriam, and him a check to Miriam, then rewarding ourselves at a café up the block. Not a café but a caffè—as the former could be French, and the latter could only be Italian. Aar taught, I learned: how to tie a Windsor and arrange a handkerchief, how a tie and handkerchief must coordinate but never match, which chef who cooked at Florent also subbed at which Greek diner owned by his brother only on alternate Thursdays, who really did the cooking — Mexicans. Actually Guatemalans, Salvadorans. A Manhattan should be made with rye, not bourbon. Doormen should be tipped. Aar — quaffing a caffè corretto and marbling the table with stray embers from his cig, when smoking was still permitted — knew everything: stocks and bonds and realestate, Freud and Reich, the fate of the vowels in Yiddish orthography, and the Russian E and И conjugations. When was the cheapest day to fly (Tuesdays), when was the cheapest day to get gas (Tuesdays), where to get a tallis (Orchard Street), where to get tefillin repaired (Grand Street), who to deal with at the NYPD, the FDNY, the Port Authority, the Office of Emergency Management, how to have a funeral without a body, how to have a burial without a plot.

9/11/2001, Miriam was bagladying up Church Street to an allergist’s appointment. She must’ve heard the first plane, or seen the second. The South Tower 2, the North Tower 1, collapsing their tridentate metal. Their final defiance of the sky was as twin pillars of fire and smoke.

Sometime, then — in some hungover midst I can’t point to, because to make room for the coverage every channel banished the clock — a seething splitscreen showed the Bowery, the street just below me, and it was like a dramatization of that Liberty sonnet, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”: the old homeless alongside the newly homeless and others dressed that way by ash, none of them white, but not black either, rather gray, and rabid, being held at bay by a news crew with lashes of camera and mic. I spilled Cal’s mouthwash and spilled myself downstairs, leaving the TV on, and thinking a minty, asinine muddle, about this girl from last night who said she lived on Maiden Lane like she was inviting me there anytime that wasn’t last night, her date she was carrying who said he was too blitzed to make it to Inwood, and thinking about my book, and Miriam, and Aar, and how vicious it’d be to get all voxpop man on the street interviewed, and be both outside and inside at once.

But downstairs the crew was gone, or it never was there — so I went onto Houston and through the park, beyond. Chinatown beyond. Chinatown was the edge of triage. A firetruck with Jersey plates, wreathed by squadcars, sped, then crept toward the cloud. A man, lips bandaged to match his bowtie, offered a prayer to a parkingmeter. A bleeding woman in a spandex unitard knelt by a hydrant counting out the contents of her pouch, reminding herself of who she was from her swipecard ID. A bullhorn yelled for calm in barrio Cantonese, or Mandarin. The wind of the crossstreets was the tail of a rat, swatting, slapping. Fights over waterbottles. Fights over phones.

Survivors were still staggering, north against traffic but then with traffic too, gridlocked strangers desperate for a bridge, or a river to hiss in, their heads scorched bald into sirens, the stains on their suits the faces of friends. With no shoes or one shoe and some still holding their briefcases. Which had always been just something to hold. A death’s democracy of C-level execs and custodians, blind, deaf, concussed, uniformly tattered in charred skin cut with glass, slit by flitting discs, diskettes, and paper, envelopes seared to feet and hands — they struggled as if to open themselves, to open and read one another before they fell, and the rising tide of a black airborne ocean towed them in.

“If you can write about the Holocaust,” Miriam once told me, “you can write about anything”—but then she left this life and left it to me to interpret her.

A molar was found in the spring, in that grange between Liberty & Cedar, and was interred beneath her bevel at Union Field.

Aar dealt with insurance, got custody of Achsa — Miriam’s daughter, Ethiopian, adopted, then eight. He moved her up to the Upper East Side, built her a junglegym in his office. His neighbors complained, and then Achsa complained she was too old for it. He fitted the room with geodes, lava eggs, mineral and crystal concretions, instead.

The bookstore still stood — preserved by its historical foundations from the damage of scrapers. But Aar couldn’t keep it up. It wasn’t the customer scarcity or rehab cost, it was Miriam. The only loss he couldn’t take. He put the Judaica in the gable, garnished the best of the rest and sold it, donated the remainder to prisons, and sold the bookstore itself, to a bank. For an unstaffed ATM vestibule lit and heated and airconditioned, simultaneously, perpetually.

He kept the topfloor, though, Miriam’s apartment, tugged off the coverlets that’d been shrouding its mirrors since shiva, moved his correspondence cabinet there, moved his contract binders there — fitted his postal scale between her microwave and spicerack — the entirety of his agency. He kept everything of hers — the bed, dresser, creaky antiques, coffinwood, the clothes, the face products. Took her antianxieties and antidepressants and when he finished them, got prescriptions of his own. Meal replacement opiates — he’d chew them.

The only stuff he moved was Achsa’s, in whose old room he set up his rolltop and ergo swiveler. Computer and phone to accept offers, reject offers, monitor the air quality tests. He had different women working as assistants — Erica, and Erica W., and Lisabeth — junior agents in the kitchen, preparing my royalty statements, my rounding error earnings against advance. But on their days off and at nights he’d have his other girls over, his Slavs — helping them through their ESL and TOEFL exams, writing their LaGuardia Community College applications, fucking them, fucking them only in the stairwell, the hall, where Miriam’s scent didn’t linger — as insomniac corpses came and went for cash below, on a floor once filled with rare gallery catalogs and quartet partitur, just a ceaseless withdrawing, depositing, fluoresced, blown hot and cold.

Caleb, however — that September made him. He’d done better at history, I’d done better at English, he’d become a journalist directly out of Columbia, with bylines in the Times, and I’d become a bookstore clerk, but published first — a book.

Then I fell behind.

What destroyed me, created him — Cal — the sirens were his calling. After filing features on Unemployment (because he was happy with his employment), and The Gay Movement (because he was happy being straight), he put himself on the deathbeat, jihad coverage. He left the Bowery and never came back. He was down at the site round the clock, digging as the searchers dug, as the finders sifted, but for facts. Every job has its hackwork, promotions from horror to glamour. Not to my credit, but that’s how it felt at the time.

He tracked a hijacker’s route through the Emirates, Egypt, Germany — to Venice, Florida, where he proved himself going through the records of a flight school, turning up associates the FBI had missed, or the CIA had rendered. At a DC madrassa he got a tip about Al Qaeda funding passing through a Saudi charity and pursued it, cashed out on the frontpage above the fold. His next dateline was Afghanistan. He went to war. Combat clarified his style. He had few contacts, no bodyarmor. But when his letter from Kabul prophesied the Taliban insurgency, The New Yorker put him on staff. It’s difficult for me to admit. Difficult not to ironize. I was jealous of him, envious of risk. The troop embeds, the voluntary abductions, hooded with a hessian sandbag and cuffed, just to tape a goaty madman’s babble. He was advantaging, pressing, doing and being important, careering through mountain passes in humvees with Congress.

Cal returned to the States having changed — in the only way soldiers ever change, besides becoming suicidal. He was clipped, brusque, and disciplined — his cynicism justified, his anger channeled. He brought me back a karakul hat, and for the rest of his fandom a.doc, an ms. A pyre of pages about heritage loss, the Buddha idols the mullahs razed. About treasurehunting, profiteering (Cal’s the expert). About the lithium cartels, the pipelines for oil and poppies (Aar told him to mention poppies).

Cal certainly had other offers for representation, but went with Aar on my advice. The book sold for six figures, and got a six figure option, for TV or film, in development, still. I edited the thing, before it was edited, went through the text twice as a favor. But I’ll type the title only if he pays me. Because he didn’t use my title. Which the publisher loathed. 22 months on the bestseller list: “as coruscating and cacophonous as battle itself” (The New York Times, review by a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), “as if written off the top of his head, and from the bottom of his heart […] anguished, effortless, and already indispensable” (New York, review by Melissa Muccalla — Missy from my bookparty). The Pulitzer, last year — at least he was nominated.

My famous friend Cal, not recognized in any café or caffè famous but recognized in one or two cafés or caffès and the reading room of the 42nd Street library famous — writerly anti-nonfamous. I’ve never liked Cal’s writing, but I’ve always liked him — the both of them like family. He’s been living in Iowa, teaching on fellowship. All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

“And I’ve been working on the next book,” according to his email. This time it’s fiction, a novel. Aar hasn’t read a word yet. Cal won’t let it go until it’s finished. “And I’ve been thinking a lot about you and your situation and how you can’t be pessimistic about it because life can change in a snap, especially given your talent,” according to his email. Don’t I know it, my hero, my flatterer.

\

Caleb was off warring and I was stuck, ground zero. Which for me was never lower smoldering Manhattan, but Ridgewood. Metropolitan Avenue. Out past the trendoid and into the cheap, always in the midst of transition, enridged. Blocksized barbedwired disbanded factories. Plants where the bubbles were blown into seltzer and lunchmeats were sliced. My building was an industrial slabiform, not redeveloped but converted, in gross violation of the informal zoning code of prudence. Used to be a printing facility, the only relic of which was a letterpress, a hulking handpress decaying screwy out in the central courtyard, exposed to the weather, too heavy to move. From time to time I’d stumble on a letter, wedged between the cobbles.

The unit itself was a storage facility 20 × 20, not certified for even a moment of frenetic pacing let alone habitation, and with a rabid radiator the resident antisemite, but without a window, I had to take from the rear dumpsters a bolt of billiard baize for a doorstop, for ventilation. Sawhorses supporting a desk of doublepaned wired glass. International Office Supply wood swiveler, the least comfortable chair of the Depression. Banker’s lamp. Bent shelves of galleys, from when I reviewed, of my own galleys from when I’d be the reviewee. My mother’s potted cups, one for caffeine, the other an ashtray. In a corner my airbed and bicycle, in another the pump for both. Brooklyn by my left leg, Queens by my right, hands between them, an intimate borough. At least there was a door. At least there was a lock.

My apartment, my office — I had nothing to do but practice my autograph. I didn’t. I sat, I lay, pumped, adjusted the angle of recline.

I was the only NYer not allowed to be sad, once it came out what I was sad about, the bathroom was common and down the hall, all my sustenance was from the deli.

I bought a turkey sandwich, cheese curls, frosted donuts, lotto scratchers, Cossack vodka I’d drink without ice, from the spare change trough emptied and unwashed, Camel Lights I’d smoke out in the hall through the bars of the airshaft, smoking so hard as to crack a rib.

That’s what I bought — representatively, each day — but also exactly, precisely, the day I spent the last of my advance. Summer 2002.

No further monies would be earned from my book — from all that labor. My advance was now behind me.

I tried to write something else — tried some stories (Hasidic tales recast), translations (from the Hebrew). But nothing — I was wasted, blocked, cramped blank by my “mogigraphia,” “graphospasms.” Translation: spending all my time online, blotted in a cell glutted with paper. I became a cursor, a caret, a button pressed and pressing — refreshing reactions to Cal’s work.

Then, with the anniversary approaching, the Times got in touch. An editor emailed to ask if I’d write an “article,” a “piece,” about my luck. For the Sunday Styles section. I opened and closed her email for weeks, for months after the close of that summer, until rent was due, utilities too, and then I answered. I didn’t just write back in the affirmative, I wrote the thing itself, which was shocking. After being so incapable, so incapable of wording, to spew out what I spewed — all bodytext, no attachments — I was shocked.

Because I sent it out and received an immediate rejection. I wasn’t timely anymore. But I could still read between the lines. My tone had been too charged, my rhetoric too raging.

The editor, however, either pitying or gracious, passed me along to the Sunday Book Review, which offered me its font (Imperial) — if I could contain myself, be selfless, mature. My initial assignment was a book about the events — not as they affected me, but as they affected everyone (else).

Though I’ve since forgotten everything about the book — its title, its author, but that’s only because they’re online — I do recall the work: being mortified by it, and enjoying it. Enjoying my mortification. The clippings collected. My precocious ghosts, paper creased yellow. “Edifice Rex.” “Rubble Entendre.”

I became a legit critic, one of the clerisy, the tribe that had ignored me — and it was all because I’d been ignored that I was fair, accurate, pretentious. I always went after the feinschmecker stuff. Wolpe at Carnegie Hall (centennial of his birth), Whistler at the Frick (centennial of his death). The Atlantic, The Nation. Though my assignments were usually kept to Jewish books, to be defined as books not just about Jews but by them. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, American Judaism: A History—for The New Republic a novel called The Oracle or The Oracle’s Wife set entirely in Christian New Amsterdam but written by a woman called Krauss — I wrote Edward Saïd’s obituary for Harper’s.

I explained, explicated, expounded — Mr. Pronunciamento, a taste arbiteur and approviste, dispensing consensus, and expensing it too: on new frontiers in race and the genetics of intelligence (Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum and heterozygote fitness), on new challenges to linguistics (connectionist vs. Chomskyan), circumcision and STDs (“Cut Men, Not Budget”), manufacturing jobs shipped overseas and other, related, proxies for torture (“Contracting Abroad: Black Boxes and Black Sites”). All for casual readers who specialized in nothing but despecialization, familiarity. They didn’t want to know it, they just wanted to know about it. Culture justified by cultural calendaring: the times and addresses and price.

But then, a break.

A site was about to launch — a bright blue text/bright white background site that if it wasn’t defunct would be ridiculous now, but it wasn’t then — in NY urls were still being typed and discussed with their wwws. It was amply backed by old media, amply staffed by new media, and was to be given away for free — its publication was its publicity — www.itseemedimportantatthetime.com, believe me.

They emailed with a Q: Would I like to interview Joshua Cohen?

My A: Why not?

But not this type of Q&A — instead, a profile, though they wanted only 2,000 words. They had infinite room, eternal room, margins beyond any binding or mind, and yet: they wanted only 2,000 words (still, @ $1/word).

It was a gimmick — everything is, and if it isn’t, that’s its gimmick — and yet, I accepted, I had to, I had to meet myself.

Joshua Cohen — Principal, but not yet mine — would be in NY for only a minimized window. I was instructed to meet him at Tetration’s HQ, at some strange time, some psychoanalyst’s 10 or so intersessionary minutes before or after the hour. In the lobby, in a waterfront fringe of Chelsea being rezoned for lobbies. They’d just gone public, at $80/share, for a market capitalization in excess of $22B.

My first reaction was, this was a railshed of reshunted freight that coincidentally included office furniture — Tetration was still moving in. I entered as the gratis vendingmachines were being installed, empty, gratis but empty. They’d purchased the railshed before Cohen had even toured it, apparently. This would be a first for us both.

The meet & greeter’s badge wasn’t brass but a brasscolored sticker on his vneck, below which were black slacker jeans, holstered taser. He smirked at my license, summoned an elongated attenuated marfanoid flunky to take me up, but instead of elevators or escalators or stairs, we took the ladders, rope ladders, rigging. An obstacle course of rainbowbanded enmeshments. We scuttled past androids fumbling to hook up their workstations, arraying plushtoys, wire/string disentanglement puzzles, tangrams, rubikses, möbiuses, slinkies.

The conference room was massive and vacant and carpet interrupted by tapemarks. The flunky left and rolled back with a chair and positioned its casters over the tapemarks and to keep the chair from rolling away chocked the casters with lunchboxsized laptops, left finally.

The ceiling panels were black and white, a chessboard defying gravity with magnetized pieces in an opening gambit of f3 d5, g3 g4, b3 d7, b2 e6. The wallpaper, a cohelixing of the DNA of Tetration’s founders, a physical model of their alliance — or, just design.

Portals, portholes, had a vista over a plaza whose rubberized T tiles were proof of the four color map theorem, and stacked cargo containers and bollards being retrofit for a children’s playground. The pier of my bookparty was just beyond, but which it was, I wasn’t sure, as all the piers were becoming trussed in steel or repurposed into monocoques of electrochromic smartglass, available for weddings, and bar and bat mitzvot.

Our fleshtime: Principal entered, and the one chair was for him because he sat in it and I was still standing but all was otherwise similar between us.

“How’s it treating you, NY?” I said.

“Banging, slamming,” yawning.

“Not tubular?”

“Whatever the thing to say is, write it.”

“I take it you don’t have a great opinion of the press?”

“The same questions are always asked: Power color? HTML White, #FFFFFF. Favorite food? Antioxidants. Favorite drink? Yuen yeung, kefir, feni lassi, kombucha. Preferred way to relax? Going around NY lying to journalists about ever having time to relax. They have become unavoidable. The questions, the answers, the journalists. But it is not the lying we hate. We hate anything unavoidable.”

“We? Meaning you or Tetration itself?”

“No difference. We are the business and the business is us. Selfsame. Our mission is our mission.”

“Which is?”

“The end of search—”

“—the beginning of find: yes, I got the memo. Change the world. Be the change. Tetrate the world in your image.”

“If the moguls of the old generation talked that way, it was only to the media. But the moguls of the new generation talk that way to themselves. We, though, are from the middle. Unable to deceive or be deceived.”

In the script of this, a pause would have to be indicated.

“I want to get serious for a moment,” I said. “It’s 2004, four years after everything burst, and I want to know what you’re thinking. Is this reinvestment we’re getting back in NY just another bubble rising? Why does Silicon Valley even need a Silicon Alley — isn’t bicoastalism or whatever just the analog economy?”

Principal blinked, openshut mouth, nosebreathed.

“You — what attracted us to NY was you, was access. Also the tax breaks, utility incentives. Multiple offices are the analog economy, but the office itself is a dead economy. Its only function might be social, though whatever benefits result when employees compete in person are doubled in costs when employees fuck, get pregnant, infect everyone with viruses, sending everyone home on leave and fucking with the deliverables.”

“Do the people who work for you know your feelings on this? If not, how do you think they’d react?”

“Do not ask us — ask NY. This office will be tasked with Adverks sales, personnel ops/recruitment, policy/advocacy, media relations. Divisions requiring minimal intelligence. Minimal skill. Not techs but recs. Rectards. Lusers. Loser users. Ad people. All staff will be hired locally.”

“You realize this is for publication — you’re sure you want to go on the record?”

“We want the scalp of the head of the team responsible for this wallpaper.”

I had a scoop, then, as Principal kept scooping himself deeper — and deeper — digging into his users, his backers, anyone who happened to get on the wrong side of his pronoun: that firstperson plural deployed without contraction (not “all that bullshit we got for having Dutch auctioned the offering, we could’ve thrown it in their faces but didn’t,” rather “we could have thrown it in their faces but did not”).

“The investors lacked confidence in Tetration or in the market?”

“Confidence is liability packaged as like asset, and asset packaged as like liability. Only we were sure how it would play, going public.”

“I missed out on it totally — what was your stake, again?”

“Nobody noticed that the 14,142,135 shares we equitized ourselves was a reference to √2.”

“What?”

“The square root of 2: 1.414213562373—stop us when you have had enough.”

“I will.”

“095048801688724209698078569671875376—stop us whenever — where were we?”

“5376?”

“7187537694?”

“If I dial that, I’m calling your aunt in the Bronx?”

“We do not have an aunt in the Bronx.”

“What about the name?”

“The name of what?”

“Joshua Cohen.”

“We invented that too?”

“Not at all, too unoriginal. That’s why they have me writing this, you realize? I’m trying to work in something about the future of identity, something about names linking, or mislinking. Two Joshua Cohens becoming one, or becoming you, how it makes us feel?”

“We have the same name?”

“That wasn’t mentioned?”

“No.”

“No?”

Pause for a blush: “Dumb — it makes us feel dumb.”

“Dumb because you have me beat in the rankings? Or dumb because you hadn’t been privy to what we’ve been sharing?”

But he’d gone dumb like mute. Dumb like no comment.

“I mean, we even resemble each other? The nose?”

Principal pinched his nose. Rigidified.

I leaned against a wall, between magicmarker scribbles labeling imminent workstation emplacement: “A unit,” “B unit.” The dictaphone clicked, time to flip.

Remember that? the dictaphone?

I went back to Ridgewood and typed it all up, doubled my 2000 word limit but figured with this material they’d have to accommodate: how he hadn’t wanted to meet, but had been compelled, how I hadn’t wanted to meet, but had been compelled. I demarcated our respective pressures: his partners and shareholders, my rent and ConEd.

I delineated the effect of Principal’s affect, the texture of his flatness, how he’d left a better impression on the chair, how the chair had left a better impression on the carpet, and concluded like the session had concluded with an account and analysis of the one thing that’d converted his format, from.autism to.rage — his ignorance.

Anything he missed didn’t exist for him, and whoever pointed it out to him was destroyed. The reader was supposed to be that person — standing around, like I’d stood around, gaping at the chutzpah.

I emailed it in — jcomphen@aol.com, back then. The site was pleased. But then Tetration got in touch and requested quote approval. The site, without consultation, agreed. Then Tetration requested nonpublication. They were expecting doublefisted puffycheeked blowjob hagiography. I was expecting to be protected. But no.

The writeup was killed, it was murderized. The only commission of mine ever dead, stopped at.doc.

The site paid me half fee, and then another envelope arrived in the mail containing a copy of my book, with an inscription on the flyleaf, “great read!!” and an impostor’s signature, “Joshua Cohen.” The bookmark was a blank check likewise signed, made payable to me from Tetration, which I filled in and cashed for $1.41—proud of my selflessness, proud of my ignorance — all endeavor is the square root of two.

\

Nothing of mine has appeared since “in print”—rather it has, just anonymously, polyonymously, under every appellation but my own. I spent mid to late 2004 through early to mid 2006 responding to job listings online, falsifying résumés to get a job falsifying résumés, fabricating degrees to get a job fabricating papers for degrees, undergrad and grad, becoming a technical writer, a medical and legal writer, an expatriate American lit term paper writer, a doctoral dissertation on the theological corollaries to the Bakhtinian Dialogue writer: Buber, Levinas, Derrida, references to Nishida tossed in at no additional cost.

I edited the demented terrorism at the Super Bowl screenplay of a former referee living on unspecified disability in Westchester. I turned the halitotic ramblings of a strange shawled cat lady in Glen Cove into a children’s book about a dog detective. I wrote capsule descriptions of hotels and motels in cities I’d never visited, posted fake consumer reviews of New England B&Bs I wasn’t able to afford but still, two thumbs up, four and a half stars more convincing than five, A− more conniving than +, “the deskclerk, Caleb, was just wonderfully polite and accommodating.” Or else I posted as “Cal,” dropping his name to assert that the B&Bs were closer to attractions, or farther from garbage dumps, more amenitized, or less pest infested, than otherwise claimed, while for rating car rental businesses I trended toward black, posting with interpolations of the names of dead presidents, “Washington Roosevelt,” and for spas and pampering ranches I tended dickless as a “Jane”—Dear John, Sincerely, Doe.

I wrote catalog copy: “Don this classic tartan wool driving cap and suddenly you’re transported to the greenest backroad in County Donegal. You stop to let a shepherd get his flock across — is he wearing the same Royal Stewart as you?”

“The time is yours and the weather is balmy. You settle into the Arawak Hammock. You don’t notice the mesh — it’s handwoven, not knotted, using the highest-grade cotton twill — you don’t notice the staves — they’re handcrafted seasoned oak, providing maximum stability, and preventing bunching and coiling. You just notice: the waves. You sway along with the tide. Have you ever been so comfortable? (Mount and chains incl.) (4′ W × 6 ½′ L, 16 lbs).”

I responded to an ad posted by a MetLife jr. manager seeking a speechwriter for a banquet honoring a sr. manager on his retirement, and when the superior told the inferior he’d enjoyed the speech, the inferior told the superior he’d had a professional write it and the superior congratulated the inferior on his honesty, emailed for my email, and commissioned a toast for his granddaughter’s baptism.

Menu tweaks came in cycles, booms and busts, from fancying up to fancying down, from overselling the Continental to underselling the American, both culinarily and linguistically. If it wasn’t mille-feuille, it was a millennial reduction of simple proteins, grains, and greens. The NY Landmarks Conservancy was giving some medal to someone, a donor who lived in a landmark no doubt, and wanted to get a second opinion, wanted a clause or two trimmed to fit the citation. Then there was that spate of unusually tricky translations from the Hebrew, everything from subtitling a documentary about the Jenin refugee camp (“Why was the UN factfinding mission denied entrance? was it because after the Israelis massacred the women and children, they still had to massacre the evidence?”), to a promotional brochure for Ben Anak Defense Systems’ Dual-Mission Counter-Rocket, — Artillery and — Mortar Midrange Defense System (“Shield the skies from foreign threats, now and tomorrow, day and night, all weather”).

I responded to an ad posted by an ad agency, which was ridiculous — how boring, brief, the ad was, yet how clumsily cumbrously phrased, it was, misspellt? mis-punctuated!

It sought a copywriter, with special experience in the tourism sector. I wrote a letter, telling the truth: I’m the author of (I forget what number of) fake reviews for travel sites, which have generated (I forget what sum) in revenue — to be sure, I made up the number, and made up the sum, but only because I’d lost track when I tried to count all my postings, and when I called the coordinator of the compliment firm to ask after the revenue generated she answered that under no circumstances would I be paid by the click and hung up on me and never hired me again and I have to admit, being paid by the click had never occurred to me.

I wrote up Anguilla, an island — a BOT, or British Overseas Territory — I’d never been to, whose tourism board was eager to promote it as a vacation destination. The salient point was that it had survived hurricanes with its tax shelters intact. The board was so generous they flew the agency over, the agency was so generous they gave my ticket to an intern. They returned and described, provided photos. Big money tourism requires big history. The expense of recreation justified by indigenous settlement (native dwellings to visit), colonial presence (churches), frigatebirds, barracudas, whose narratives I plagiarized from nononline sources, for an account that appeared in two periodicals I once wrote for, inside the promotional box.

That job got me recommended for another, and that for another, more — it feels like I’m giving a testimonial for myself. I consulted on brandings, renamings (what to call a convertible child safety seat/pram for the Latino, rather Latina 18–40 demographic? what to call a cunt of a Hispanic boss who claimed my “Buggé” as her own?).

I never accepted offers to stay on, never worked at an agency on more than one account.

Once I showed up to the same building, the same floor, but to a different agency — in the neighborhood’s last tunnelward sewer to have resisted redevelopment, Hell’s Kitchenette. My boss this time, the sr. creative to my jr., was — I’ll sell her:

Imagine taking home this beautiful young paleskinned blackhaired late-model Jewess. Into fitness, healthy living. Raised good in better Yonkers. Mother a Hebrew School teacher, which means for her a traditional education. Father a chief risk officer for an energy provider in the Midwest. They’re not in touch, but still he makes his payments. Imagine getting to know this girl, a recently promoted sr. creative who’ll stay jr. by a decade forever. Think of the investment opportunity. NYU grad, very oral.

Read the smallprint: too tall for me. Fit, healthy: orthorexia, multiple gym memberships. Jewish means “babycrazy.” Maternally bonded. Daddy issues. CV relative to youth indicates a stop at nothing ambition. Potential for growth is immaturity. Oral means “communications major.”

Still, I was 35, 36, and life was tighter than the plaids and jeans I still wore from college.

The time for redress had come — bachelors buy on impulse.

If it’s too bad to be true — it’s worse, it’s Rach. Contrary to her blog we didn’t wait until “[my] stint was finished.” Even when I was still working under her, I was atop her. Contrary too, I hadn’t been pleading to be kept on when she, “putting career before [her] heart,” refused me. “i made the choice 2 fire a colleague but hire a boyfriend”—please. “U&I,” as she refers to the agency, is “Y&B”—clever. The Y I never met, but the B stands for Bernoff, feely in the office. He spanked Rach once, promoted her again. Account management. Rach always omits the spanking. We went to Italy and Greece on her new salary, and for a business thing to amorous Detroit, where I proposed at that shisha and arak joint she’s forgotten. I didn’t have a diamond, that’s true, but her “he gave me his fathers dud pinkie ring” is bullshit. That was Dad’s wedding band. Moms has never worn one (jewelry, confinement, makes her nervous).

Rach encouraged me to write again, but encouragement has always been best expressed in joint accounts. We were married at City Hall, 2008. “he wouldnt even let me have a wedding, or rabbi”—but it was more like her mother wanted Rach’s childhood rabbi and my mother wanted my childhood rabbi and I was more interested in peace than in shattering circles under a chuppah. “he refused to have a party because i wasnt smart enough for his friends and he didnt have any friends left anyway”—but she can’t have it both ways, or can.

“he refused to have a honeymoon,” but we’d just put a payment down, or Rach had just put a payment down, and we were owned by a mortgage, on a two bedroom on 92nd & Broadway. “when my father had business in the city he wouldnt meet him,” but who’s the “he” and who’s the “him”? and wasn’t Rach the one who’d nixed it, ultimately with some mad insane passive-aggressive, codependent gambit, something like how we both have to stay home waiting for when the new dishwasher’s delivered?

“he never wanted a kid.” Didn’t I try not just to want one but to have one? “before we tried 4 a kid we were never unhappy.” Now you’re speaking for me too, like Principal, in plural?

“he hated therapy.” But didn’t I go? “and couldnt be faithful.” To whom?

“he was never writing,” “hell never write again.”

Not like you I wasn’t, not like you I won’t.

“but this is all just too rushed and emotionul,” “im trying to serve him papers but cant track him down and trying to benefit the doubt if i cant im just gonna have to shame with embarasment.”

Please, Rach — humiliate me with your pettiness, your money mania, your body/mind volatilities, your typos.

“2 put down everything,” “all. of. it.”

://

~ ~ ~

I couldn’t complain, or have been more unemployed, insured, or domesticated — even a jaunt to the postoffice could feel like a fulltime job.

Between 9/11 and 2009, Aar and I had drifted, and the drift was my fault and then it was his and I was a failure and he a success and I spent more time mentally recording what I took to be his snubs and negs than I did manually recording any serious writing — I spent so much time imagining blame and resentment that if I’d laid it out all plain on the page, it would’ve been another book, another scuppered friendship.

But now, by having gotten married, it was as if I’d become — acceptable. Not socially — because Aar had never cared for niceties and still did his share of uglybumping with the underprivileged and Green Cardless — but psychologically, maybe, I’d become psychologically tamed.

I wasn’t this demonstrably disgruntled troll anymore, living under an overpass in the ghetto woods and pawing at an aimless compass — I’d become an equal, an adult, equally unhappy but undramatic in adulthood — I was trying to salvage something of myself, and maybe if this more stable, more functional blame and resentment lasted, something literary would be makeable too. This, at least, was one explanation, and though it was harsh, the other explanation was harsher: laziness, on both our parts. I’d drifted out of my boroughed burrow and into Manhattan, settling just across the park, which became our adjoining backyard: west side, east side, Aar and I were neighbors. We could be close now in every sense, we could have our rapprochement — all relationships are cheats of convenience, but NYers are cruel enough to neglect a bond due only to trackwork on the L.

I’d say he got in touch first, he’d say I got in touch first, anyway we were meeting — I was hauling across the park from West 92nd, once a month, every two weeks, whenever he didn’t have to get to the agency, whenever he didn’t have a lunch, to meet him at a diner. Past the mansions and into slummy deli territory — inconvenience must be treated as ritual, ceremony.

The diner was a kitsch joint of a bygone pantophagy, all unwiped formica and unctuous linoleums, leaks rusting into a bucket used for pickling. We always ordered the same from the same smack casualty waitress who never remembered the order, so we always had to order, Aar ordered: the smoked fishes for him, the poached eggs for me, and we’d split, but with the roles reversed — with 15 % going to the writer, 85 % to the agent, who though he talked faster ate faster too.

Aar avoided talking about my writing, even avoided mentioning books by authors still alive and in this language — rather his topics were: sex, Achsa, aging, Miriam, and he’d vary them in the manner of the menu: Miriam, aging, Achsa, sex — aging, Miriam, sex, Achsa — bagel with creamcheese, bagel with egg and cheese, bagel with creamcheese and lox. Not that my own fixations were any more fixable, or more palatable: Rach and I had fought and I’d left, Rach and I had fought and she’d left, we’d fought and she’d thrown a jug (Moms’s), we’d fought and she’d thrown a mug (Moms’s).

Absolutely, a refill. Pulp.

\

Caleb — he was never mentioned either. Not what he was doing, not that Aar and I were both in touch with him and knew we were both in touch and knew what he was doing.

Cal, he’d be able to write it. He’d be able to avoid all these redundancies, these doublings. This summary, synopsis. What in all the matinee movies and noon TV I took in was communicated by montage — time passing, elapsion: lie, sit, stand, sit, lie, drag to individual therapy, to couples therapy, sleep on the loveseat in the hall, wake up on the airmat in Ridgewood — today’s writing, especially Cal’s, is too impatient for.

“What are you doing with yourself?” Aar asked me, just before last Passover.

Any question might be the forbidden question, and any answer might expose present weakness, the latest changeable bandage for the writing wound (the not writing wound).

“Nothing, nothing,” I said. “First seder by Rach’s mother’s, my Ramses-in-law, second in Jersey, chometz and matzah.”

“I meant, what are you doing still married?”

What could I say? I could have told him — that I’d wanted to marry (I had wanted to), or that I’d loved her (I had)?

I, like my father before me, had been a wandering Aramean, seeking refuge in a distant land in the hopes of surviving the coming drought, the coming famine, only to become enslaved in that land, forced to make mud bricks and arrange them into pyramids for my own tomb? Not even — for the tomb of the man I used to be?

All men are Arameans, whoever they are, and we commemorate our enslavement to our female taskmasters and their mothers — our mothers — not just two nights a year, but daily. L’chaim.

Basically, though, the answer to his question was my book. Our book. That was the reason I married. That was the reason I was still married.

Why I got and stayed together with Rach wasn’t the book’s nonexistence unto itself, but rather was within that nonexistence, was covered by it: the generations broken, the family broken, to be repaired like a dropped pot or snarled ark of reeds, that unshakeable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot, in plopping myself in creaky unreclinable chairs around tables of prickly leaves to commiserate through recitation: flight into Egypt, plagues, flight out of Egypt, desert and plagues — a travail so repeated without manumission that it becomes its own travail, and so the tradition is earned.

But instead of explaining all that, I said, “I’m treating life like a book — like I’m the hero of my own life.”

“A book you’re living, not writing?” Aar had never been so direct.

I’m not sure it’s good writing to say what my reaction was — it was bad.

I don’t want to continue with that meeting — but then neither do I want to have to prose just one of our regular meetings: who’d you fuck, who do you want to fuck, Achsa’s college application essay he wanted my read on (How I Dealt With My Grief), remember that guy who tried to sell Miriam his father’s library comprised entirely of a single book the father had published about how to make rocks talk on Wall Street — the father had bought enough copies to make it a bestseller and put him on the lecture circuit, when he died his son found pallets of the stuff, books still wrapped, in a vault registered to the father in Secaucus. Or that other guy who’d tried to sell some other inherited junk: a raft of detectives, Westerns, that tatty crap by two nobodies named Thoreau and Emerson (first editions).

Or the way Miriam would pick her nose and silently fart at the register or if the fart refused to be silent how she’d slam the register drawer.

The scarves she always wore.

Let this meeting be as cryptic — as representative/nonrepresentative — as the Arameans, a people that never had a land of their own but still managed to leave behind their language — the only thing they left behind, their language. Aramaic. Ha lachma anya. This is the bread of affliction. Eli Eli lama shavaktani? Father, Father, why didn’t Christ quote the Psalms in Hebrew — was he that inept, or does excruciation always call for the vernacular?

Aar would pay, and would say as he said every time: “I never gave you anything for your funeral.”

He’d pay in cash—“My condolences on your continued nuptials,” and I’d slap down Rach’s card, and he’d put his hand atop mine and hold it, palm on palm on Visa and say, as if conspiring, as if pledging undying service, “Cash only.”

Always has been. Always will be.

Then I’d walk him to Lexington — leave him by the 4 train, or the M102 bus, and walk quickly, quickly, toward the museums, and don’t turn around, don’t judge him for never waiting or descending, rather striding to the curb to flag down a ride.

\

That was the last we’d intersected before the spring — I’ll have to check the contract: 4/29/2011. I’d been sleeping — how to put this? where? I could say it was a time apart thing suggested by Dr. Meany, I could say I’d been sent back to Ridgewood for a spell due to a Bible-sized, though, given our history, more than passoverable, argument dating from Pesach, which was the most amount of time Rach and I had spent together in a while. After the seder at her mother’s, we drove to mine’s, and stopping at a backroad farmer’s market had bought a tree and given it to my mother who’d wondered aloud, who spends money on a tree? and then criticized the pot and Rach had taken that as a snub and refused to stay over and yelled at me all the drive back and yet all had been forgotten until we received in the mail a thank you note Rach took as begrudging — though that’s just what Rach would’ve done, sent a belated thank you with gritted teeth — enclosing a photo of a fresh pot thrown as criticism.

I could say it was a disagreement over how I’d acted at Dr. Meany’s, refusing to talk about “trust as fatherhood/fatherhood as trust,” instead ranting about Jung, Lacan, hypergamy/hypogamy, gigantonomy/leucippotomy, modern male childhood as berdachism, modern male parenthood as couvade, or over how I’d acted at her mother’s house when the woman, who knew everything/thought she did, told me to wear looser underwear to promote sperm motility and I — exploded.

I could hand to Bible or at least Haggadah swear on all of that, but the truth was — we weren’t having sex anymore. We weren’t trying anymore. Not even trying to try again. Trying to sneak in a jerkoff sessh on the toilet. “Don’t mixup the toothbrushes.” But both of them were green, which, because the brushes sold in twopacks are always different colors, meant Rach had bought two packs—“I’m not provoking you.”

Cig out the window. No bourbon after toothpaste.

Rach and I had been touch and go, no touch and yes go — since fall? check the archives — Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kipper 2010? Conjugally making each other’s lives unlivable but getting off on the correspondence. We’d flirted briefly, on chat, over email, another Meany suggestion, and so it was innocent, or it felt that way. Opening different accounts under different names, getting back in touch with each other and so ourselves by communicating our fantasies, her writing me something salacious or what for her passed as salacious as sexrach1980 or cuntextual (an injoke), as rachilingus or bindme69me (a cybernym I picked for her), but then just a moment later writing something serious again about her thyroid hypochondria or the decision of which dehumidifier to purchase, from her main account, her work addy identity.

We’d even taken to posting personal ads on a personal ads site and then responding to what we guessed were the other’s — not following through unless — I’m sure she never followed through.

It was early or still late when the ring woke me up — it was darkness and the only light was the phone, which displayed either number or time, never both. The ringing stayed in my head. I’d been drunk, I was still drunk, there was a cig burn at the cuticle of my middle finger. I never turned my phone off, when we were together and even apart, because Rach still called with crises and if I didn’t pick up, there would be wetter blood and trauma. She called between home and office, between meetings, at lunch’s beginning and end, from the lockers at the gym, between elliptical slots, before and after freeweights, in the showers at Equinox with her newer improveder phone wrapped in a showercap and kept on a ledge above the sprinkler on speaker, from the supplement aisle at Herbalife, while smoothieing in the kitchen, while abed dreamdialing. This flippity phone Rach purchased and programmed and forced me to keep charged and carry at all times, vibrating my crotch — for potency’s sake I wasn’t supposed to carry it in that pocket — or intoning L’chah Dodi, from the Shabbos eve service, her choice.

Abandonment issues, resolving in engulfment. In stalkiness, if a husband can be stalked by a wife. Rach’s msgs as shrill as the matingcall of whatever locustal species mates as foreplay to the woman smiting, devouring, the man. prsnlty dsrdr is how I’d abbreviate for txt.

This tone, though, wasn’t anything prayerful, just the default, and though I couldn’t program, I could still recognize the digits.

But Aar didn’t want to talk. He said, “Let’s meet?” and I said, “Let’s,” and he said, “Just come across or, better, I’ll come to you,” and I said, because he didn’t have to have all the grindy geary details of my situation, “Best is for me to do the traveling — noon?”

He said, “Now.”

(212) faded to clock, 6AM.

Manhattan was accessible by train — I’d have to change only once — by bus — I’d have to change all of twice — just as I was about to blow up the bike, the phone resumed its default panic.

“Take a cab,” Aar said, “I’ll pay for it.”

Cabs in Ridgewood weren’t for the hailing. There was never anything yellow not lotted. But up the block was a gypsy service and I’d like to be able to say I’m fictionalizing — they took their time serving me because all their drivers were directing another driver reversing a hearse into the garage. If I were fictionalizing I’d say they put me in the hearse, but it was a moving van and I was seated up front — take me past Ambien withdrawal, or on a tour of the afterlife according to Allah.

We hurtled into the city before the rest of the rush with the sun a sidereal horn honking behind us. Manhattan was still in black & white, a sandbagged soundstage, a snorting steamworks, a boilerplate stamping the clouds. This can be felt only in the approach, from exile. How old the city is, the limits of its grid, its fallibility. Fear of a buckling bridge, a rupture deluging the Lincoln or Holland. Fear of a taxi I can’t afford.

Off the FDR, I dialed Aar, who said, “Un momento, por favor — she’s taking forever to get slutty,” though I wasn’t sure which she he meant until 78th and Park, and it was Achsa — I never remembered her like that. But it takes just a moment.

Aar paid the driver, “Gracias, jefe,” and we chaperoned Achsa to school — her last patch of school at an institution so private as to be attendable only alone, which was her argument. “You don’t have to drop me.” But Aar was already holding her dashiki backpack, “Not many more chances to ogle your classmates.” Achsa said, “That’s nasty, Dad, and ageist.” Then she laughed, so I laughed, and Aar was our unfinished homework.

The sky was clear. The breeze stalled, stulted. We talked about graduation. About Columbia, which was closer, but too close, and anyway Princeton was #6 overall and #1 in the Ivies for field hockey.

Achsa’s school was steepled at a privileged latitude, a highschool as elited high on the island as money gets before it invests in Harlem. Girls, all girls, dewperfumed, to blossom, to bloom.

“This is where we ditch her,” Aar said, halting at a roaned hitchingpost retained for atmosphere. “You studied?”

“Argó, argoúsa, árgisa,” Achsa said, “tha argó, tha argíso.”

“He/she/it has definitely studied.” Aar swung the backpack and unzipped it and wriggled out a giftbox.

“What’s that and who’s it for?”

“I’m not the one taking the tests today — you are.”

Achsa shrugged on her straps and said, “Hairy vederci”—to me.

Aar said, “No cutting.”

But she’d already turned away — from a shelfy front to a shelf of rear, enough space there for all the books she had, jiggling.

“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.

Returning from that first chemo visit, Moms went and bought some clay, a wheel, some tools. Impractical platters, flaccid flasks: she’d been inspired to pot, moved to mold, vessels for her depression, while I had been, inadvertently, sexualized.

Moms had intended to inculcate only a fetish for art, not for what art must start as: body, the body defined by waist.

Dad, weakened, shriveled — a mummy’s mummy — had six months left to live.

\

That day, signing day, I took my tour, conducted my ordinary circuit by gallery: first the women, then the men. Rounding the rotundities, before proceeding to those other busts, those heads.

Staved heads — of the known and unknown, kings of anonymity with beards of shredded feta, or ziti with gray sauce — separated for display by the implements that might’ve decapitated them. If it’s venerable enough, weaponry can look like art, just like commonplace inscriptions can sound like poetry — Ozymandias, anyone? “this seal is the seal of King Proteus”?

The armor of a certain case has always reminded me of cocoons, chrysalides, shed snakeskin — all the breastplates and armguards and sheaths for the leg just rougher shells from an earlier stage of human development. The armor featured in an adjacent case, with its precisely positioned nipples and navels, sculpted pecs and abs, would’ve been even stranger without them. The men without bodies were still better off than the men just lacking penises, or testes. Regardless, statuary completed only by its incompletion, or destruction, resounded with me, while the swords hewed through my noons, severing neuroses.

But then I returned, I always returned, to my women, closing the show, a slow, agonizingly slow circumflexion.

Fertility goddesses, that’s what the archaeologists who’d dug them up had said, that’s what Moms had said, and I’d believed her — these women were the idols of women and women were the idols of men and yet we kept smashing them (I understood only later), smashing with rose bouquets, samplers of marzipan and marrons glacés, getaway tickets, massage vouchers, necklaces, bracelets, and words.

It strikes me that Moms herself might’ve believed that these odd lithic figurines were for fecundity, because everything else had failed her — the inability to conceive (and the inconceivability of) were fates she’d share with Rach, or else the problem was mine.

And Moms might even have been so distraught by Dad’s decline as to have placed genuine faith in the power of that petrified gallery — guiding me through rooms now changed, antiquity redecorated since 1984—because suddenly I wasn’t enough, she wanted another: a boy, though what she needed was a girl in her image.

If so, then that studio she had erected at home — her installation of a kiln in Dad’s neglected garage — must be regarded as a shrine, a temple to opportunity lost.

\

Now, when it comes to art, and I mean every discipline: lit, sculpture, painting, music, and theater (but only Rach liked dance, because she danced) — when it comes to any medium, I’m divided. Not between styles, between perfections. Mark my museum map with only the oldest and newest. Roll me in scrolls, volumina of vellum and parchment, papyri. But then also pile up all the new books appearing, seasonally stack the codex barrage — how else to live, without contemporaries to hate? Forget their books — I mean how to live without their bios, their autobios to peruse and hold against my own?

Beginnings to romanticize and endings to dread — I’ll take anything but the middles, all that received or established practice crap. Because the middle was where I grew up — bounded by house and garage filled with clay — a cramped colorless room filled with clayey boyhood, which my mother was bent on modeling not for greatness, but for portability and durability and versatile use. Moms’s hands that were her English, the puffy wrists behind the pads digging in, poking holes in me so I might perceive life only as she perceived it — threatening, but beautiful if I’d be careful. This was her way because from earliest age she’d been foreign to even herself, as the youngest and the only girl after six brothers, dumbsy, clumsy, inconcinnous, a dreamer, whose family fell in the snow around her, around Kraków, and who’d lived like “an extinct girl dinosaur”—meaning arousing of a hideous pity — until my father married her home.

She’d had difficulties having sex, and so difficulties getting pregnant. Her baby was late, was me. She’d told me about the drugs. Pergonal, Clomid. The barren superstitions. Don’t sit on snow or ice or rock, do bathe in water infused with moss from the walls of the shul on Szeroka Street. Dad had mentioned, only once, as he was dying, that Moms’s war had been “tough,” “hard knocks,” which was how he’d recount each tax quarter. A solo CPA after being laidoff as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he’d never applied his actuarial MS but kept it in a depositbox at the bank. Moms is a public school speech-language pathologist/audiologist, retired. Anyway, Dad’s instructions: “Help your mother out,” “Kaddish if she insists.”

Moms: what she lost in family, she gained in body.

She was dense with her dead — with Dad’s passing becoming ever more solid, ever more embonboobed, rubicund. Zaftig, not obese.

Steatopygous — which doesn’t have to be italicized, it’s already my language — all italics do is make what must be native, not. Anyway, it’s not from the Latin, but Greek. Steatopygous meaning possessed of fat buttocks, and implying fat all around, the thighs, hips, waist, a gluteal gut, even adipose knees, unfortunate but vital. That’s what Moms’s lady statuettes are technically called — steatopygi, or steatopygia. Thrombosed bulges, throbbing clots — my mother’s hindquarter was always a veiny maze, a varicose labyrinth, though not just hers: weighty were the bases of all the women in my family, my mother’s family. My grandmother, my greatgrandmother, every aunt and cousin — Holocaust fodder. Heavy Jewesses, thickly rooted Jewesses, each swinging a single pendulous braid. From Poland, the Russian Pale, that settled and mortaring mixture. Upper Paleolithic, Lower Neolithic, lower and swollen. Marbled in calcite, schist, steatite, striated with stretchmarks of red rivers, the Vistula, the Bug. They were made out of stone and many of them even had hearts of stone — not Moms, though, despite how tough Rach found her. Yes, yes, Rach — she was the hard one, the skinny, the taut, all rib and limb, a spindly wife more like a plinth, like a pediment.

://

~ ~ ~

Coming out of the Met with all those gods on the brain — all those haloed faces seared into my own — it’s an adjustment to sense normally. That’s why the museum abuts the park, so that its patrons can walk in solitude—“walking in the garden in the cool of the day”—to get their glaze back.

Or — in the collecting heat of that Friday, a freak faineant warmth that unnerved me. I wasn’t myself because enriched, beyond the pecuniary. Distracted by the thought of a second self. Distracted by the thought of a second book.

I was so scattered, I’m still not sure what to write: About my back aching from where I’d slept? my head still gauzed, Pharaohnically wrapped, from when I’d been woken up? about the cut on my neck? the slit from chin’s caruncle to neck like an against the grain shaving mishap, just healing? Rach had responded to Moms’s thank you gratuitousness by throwing a bisque dish for our keys, which struck a sill and splintered all over me.

The window had broken. Rach was expecting me to replace it. I was expecting her to replace it. We both were aware of this, but only she might’ve been consciously waiting.

I was — instead — counting my bounty.

Writing mental checks, but not for windows, before I’d written a word.

I still haven’t written a word — just musings about museums, snarks about parks, observations to obelize: two frisbeeists freed from their cubicles — a professorial but perverted uncle emeritus — a Caribbean nanny strollering her employer along the reservoir. I was imposing topiary on trees, and rhymes between their branches and trunks.

I’d rather be procrastinating — I’d rather be doing anything — rather jog, rather run — than record that moment.

When I approached the bench.

When I recognized him.

\

Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don’t — you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess. The fictional, the factually nonexistent, don’t leave msgs or txt. You’ll never have your own story about meeting Raskolnikov shuffling the aisles of Zabar’s, or about bumping into Werther or, more bizarrely, Bouvard and Pécuchet on line at Han’s Fruit & Vegetable — anyway, if you did bump into them, having been exiled from home yourself, like a fairytale knight errant sent out to seek not your fortune but tampons, how would you know? From their “teeth gnashing”? their “furrowed brows”? all those antique gestures? or just those antiquated translations? Forget the fictional characters — how many authors are being stopped on the street?

Another feature, but of the Victorian serial novel: They always doubled up, they repeated, reviewed, just in case the reader skipped an installment. Or was diverted by a major business decision.

I’d just made a major business decision, having contracted for a book for which I had absolutely no qualifications.

Or my only qualification was my name, the JC halfloops I stopped strolling — I stopped.

I’d just quit the presence of immemorial Basileis and marmoreal Caesares — the likenesses of infamous men who’d raped and plundered Europe and Asia as if only for my entertainment. Yet this — he — was what jarred me. This guy who’d always played the shrewn but happy hubby, the patient catchphrasey Pop. A minor B-celeb, a situational tragicomedian.

He was sensitive, but gave the impression of impersonating himself. His handsomeness was stilled, like the lines of his face were just distortion in his reception. In terms of painting: chiaroscuro cheeks, a worried craquelure mouth. In terms of sculpture: the nosetip curiously chipped, puttied cosmetically.

This cameo was atop a bench off the reservoir path, crowded by pigeons pecking at the matzah slivers he tossed. A proper picnic was spread in the grass.

I gathered myself and approached him, setting the flock to flying, a claque clapping its wings and wallaing west — like in film when directors seeking indistinct background chatter have their extras, forbidden by union rules from pronouncing anything scripted, repeat the same word at the same time but at different speeds and in different tones, walla supposedly being the most effective or just traditional choice, which happens to be an Amerindian word for “water,” as well as slang for “really?” in Hebrew and Arabic — really?

Because sitting next to him was Rach.

\

I started fabricating immediately — as if I were Rach — began peddling their presence to myself: this was just a routine appointment enlivened with nature. A meeting negotiated into a harmless park outing. Their commercial was about to be shot, had been shot and was about to air. This was crunchtime, kinks had to be smoothed, geriatric touches retouched.

I remember thinking that their conversation — this situation — was itself a commercial, an infomercial, a public service announcement warning: you’re not as witty as you think.

The actor noticed me before she did, and he recognized too — two stars in rare midday conjunction. His face tanned a shade deeper, and went rumpled as if by a gust, like the dewed pollenstrewn picnic blanket — a bedsheet, one of ours.

Rach collapsed into her lap.

She’d been complaining about him since the fall. He’d been forced on her by a director, by an agency exec. She’d never been more harried on set, she’d never dealt with talent more demanding. So old, hard of hearing, glaucomic, goutish — just getting his travel arranged was an account in itself, a nightmare.

But the way Rach kept her head in her hands told me the truth: that he’d been her true campaign, or she his, all along, and that all her whining to me had just been a prompt or cue — to be something, to change something, perform my regret, make amends.

What’s my line? Did I have any lines?

Otherwise, his presence would’ve been nothing but scenery to me — he’d existed strictly in bitparts, never as a whole. Until then, I’d thought of him only as a supporter, a walking dead rerun, I’d known him only as a man who — a generation after appearing as the first teacher cannibalized by student zombies in the last installment of a horror franchise, as the smilingly wisenheimer outtaboro accent of an animated knishcart in a popular afterschool cartoon series — didn’t even work with my wife, but worked for her.

A face without a voice, a voice without a face, though even if both were retained, I couldn’t remember his name. I hadn’t expected him to feature in my marriage, and, moreover, even if I had, I could never have suspected that the character most natural for me to portray — Jewish Husband #1—would feel guilty about it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m interrupting.”

Rach raised her head, said, “You’re not,” but too formally, as if our next meeting would be with our lawyers.

“Decided to take the day off?”

“What about you — keeping tabs on me?”

“I had a meeting.”

“We’re having one too,” and she bowed to the actor, who was friendly, or who was trying to be, I’ll give him that — when he held my face with his and said, “You’re the husband.”

Rach, helplessly, laughed, “Take two.”

He repeated, but did so reluctantly, “You’re the husband.”

Rach, out of control, shrieked her teethbleach, “Isn’t that fantastic?”

“Isn’t what fantastic?”

She shrilled, clogstomped, applauded, “You never watched our spot?”

“My apologies,” I said to him, and to her, “I’m sure you never told me to watch it.”

“I did,” she said. “A couple’s like asleep in bed — does that ring a bell?”

My sneaks sunk in the soppy turf, grass engrossing, growing over the heels—“Ringing nothing.”

“Like a couple’s asleep in bed,” she said. “At least they’re presented like a couple in bed, in the suburbs — when suddenly an alarm sounds loud from downstairs, it wakes them up and the woman whispers it must be a burglar, like get up, like go downstairs and be a man — you’re positive I never showed you?”

“About the only thing I’m positive about.”

I was honestly ignorant, yet I loathed her describing ads to me, her scolding me for having to describe them.

“So the guy steps out like with a baseball bat on tiptoe, only to meet like a stranger prowling around the den and shouting who are you and the guy’s screaming who are you and like he’s got the bat cocked and is about to take a swing but like hesitates just perfectly because the stranger, the alleged burglar who’s all balled in the corner, he whimpers?”

“I’m the husband,” the actor gave an imitation whimper.

“That’s who you are?” I said. “You’re the husband?”

“The other guy,” Rach said. “It’s our spot for Skilling Security.”

\

I’ve since rectified, viewed it online:

After that line the camera pans disinterest across the cozy den, taking in a row of photos of the wife from upstairs alongside the second man, the supposed burglar, plowing the ski slopes, hippie fab at their wedding, babyboomed flabby on an anniversary cruise.

After a cut to the logo of Skilling Security like a coat of arms with a Yield sign, the ad cuts again to EMTs, fire, two burly cops cuffing the adulterer.

A final tense shot of husband and wife, confronted by infidelity, cozened by den and moon.

The commercial’s wife, the actress, appears to be younger than Adam but older than Rach, who cast her, I’m sure, so as not to attract him or be threatened herself. Or just so the relationship would test appropriate agewise. As for the husband, he’s not my type, but not Rach’s either. She had the egalitarian audacity to cast a Vietnamese, who’s ageless.

But it’s Adam who has the last word, in custody overdub, police cruiser voiceover, though now I can’t recall what it was, rather I can’t differentiate it from the last words of his other commercials I clicked on (for razors, deodorants, cholesterol meds), nor can I recall him, for that matter, in any of the made for TV dramedies, or the direct to video aliens vs. robots action thrillers I torrented (always portraying the reliable neighbor in the former, and a rabbi in the latter), as having been wardrobed or madeup at all differently than he was just then, a gentle goof in suede, an endearing streak of sunblock down the nose stump.

“I’m Adam,” he said, finally rolling the credits.

His sitting height was my standing height. His hand was damp, but the body behind it was muscle.

“No doubt,” I said, “Rach’s told me everything about you.”

“You might as well join us.”

“Already?” Rach said.

I said, “Since the weather’s so nice.”

“It is,” Adam patted a slat.

Rach said, “Already?”

Adam said, “A pleasure.”

“I’d love to,” I said, “but I have writing to do.”

Rach said, “No doubt”—like she was flinging a crust, as I hurried off for Ridgewood.

Cut.

One last repeat, one last syndication:

Another man’s career is revived, only because of his relationship with my wife, and I’m supposed to take that as material. A suggestion for Adam’s next vehicle: an adaptation of Rach’s life, in which I play him and he plays me.

How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader? Not even — a memorizer?

What to say, Rach? Will you tell me what to say?

://

~ ~ ~

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.

Meanwhile, the sweater layers came off and then the women put on shorts and then the men put on shorts and everyone became a child. The applianceries threw up bunting declaring preseason priceslashes on BBQs and ACs, and all the children were out on Atlantic Avenue slurping challenging snowcones in flavors like tripe.

I, no surprise, was camped inside, grilling windowless. Heinekens, pinching the filters out of Camels.

The desk had to be cleared, but then what — go clear out any unmatched gloves I’d left uptown? pack out Ridgewood’s Rach clutter and return it? Spring cleaning — my neighbors, my floor of nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfive units, were into that too.

The unit to one side, the trove of an Albanian who peddled arts recordings mailorder and in person, DVD, VHS, Regions 1 and 2, even rarees on reels, 10mm, 8mm, of concerts and operas, tours of the Hermitage, the Louvre, Gemäldegalerien, both samizdat shaky cameraworks he produced himself from the back rows of Lincoln Center, and classier documentaries duped from public broadcasting, all for homebound infirm or dying oldsters who couldn’t be bothered with or couldn’t afford a system upgrade. The unit to the other side, the vault of a dire Sri Lankan trying to become the exclusive stateside distributor of only the worst products of his island: floppy slabs of irregularly cut rubber reclaimed from sparetires, coir, peat, microwaveable pouches of a prespiced rice — Sprice.

I wasted a lot of that stretch with them, out in the hall in plastiwicker patio chairs from a patio furnisher, and a homeshopping supplier’s rotating fans.

“You can have shot the actor for $10,000,” according to the Albanian, “or for that you can have also two new womens and not the Tirana bitches but the healthy country girls from Kukës.”

The plaintive Sri Lankan, “You will write for the CNN about my rice?”

I didn’t know what I wanted, Rachwise, and I was as angry at her as I was, I’ll admit, turned on — by the thought of her wanting that actor. After my hallmates left for their own domestic disturbances I got onto wifi and clicked past Adam’s ads, trafficked into his filmography, his televisionography, his large and small screen oeuvre or at least his performances not expressly endorsing rugged yet sensitive colognes, refreshing, switching among the networks — Proven Nexports, WinsumGypsum, AY86MNO22, Readyornotherei1111 (in order of reliability), some from businesses whose proprietors had given me their wpas or wpa2s in order to facilitate my redaction of debt consolidation/collection correspondence, others I’d just guessed (either the names of the networks themselves, or abcdefgh, or that CAPPED, or 12345678, or a combo), but none of his films or shows I found had any sex scenes, rather he, or his characters — because a writer has to be careful about confusing a person with his characters — weren’t involved in any of them: always it was his son fucking someone, or his daughter fucking someone, after which he, Adam, might have a benignly erotic talk with her about it, or a stern but supportive discussion with her partner. Revenge of the Nasteroids I liked. Also the complete Season 2 of Fare Friends, except for the episodes “The Bantling Commission” and “Dolly Dispatch.”

In Daaaabbb! and its sequel Daaaaaaaabbbbbb! he was animated again — busy, active, but also a cartoon — some type of anguimorph in length trailing a long scorpion’s tail without a stinger. He was, I realized, some variety of lizard, and then a franchise fansite’s posting clarified, he was a mastigure, of the genus Uromastyx, and another posting debated which species. The head, because I’m not sure whether lizards have faces, had Adam’s dry/wet features, his slitherine expressions and gestures, and, of course, his voice, conventionally rugged, with fugettaboutit dabs. But that must’ve been relatively easy — for the rest, it was just a matter of having him strip and slapping nodes on his tits, letting a computer model his motions.

I clicked through the clips and, in the midst of loading part 3 of 21, I must’ve fallen asleep and the signal must’ve too, because waking up it was frozen, and I was in a sweat.

The phone. Aar was checking in, “How’s it going already?”

I said, “Nothing going,” and I told him no one had been in touch, and then I told him about Rach.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t contact him, he’ll contact you.”

But I’d meant — about Rach?

Calls also came from Finnity, but I ignored them, and the msgs were: “Is this your phone, Josh? It’s Finn,” “So this is the number Aaron gave me, just wondering if you’ve gotten any sense of the project timeline or maybe you’re already working?” “It’s your daily obscene phonecall from your editor, just wondering what you’re wearing and what the plans are if you’ve made them?” “Regrets OK if I’m wrongnumbering you but that’s the price of an automated greeting, or else OK if you’re there Josh I’m just going to have to conclude that your not picking up or ringing me back is like some fantasy tantrum about something from way in the past that neither of us had control over — it’s Finnity?”

Rach didn’t leave any msgs, just called.

\

Important that I explain.

Some, not all but some, of my avoidance of their calls was about as basic as psych ever gets: with Finnity, I was delaying a reconciliation with the editor who’d abandoned me and my book in our time of mutual distress and yet whose meddling I’d now have to stet again due to a perversity of Aar’s — a perversity I’d have to appreciate — and then with Rach, I was procrastinating the final total squaring of even more convoluted, more vulnerable, accounts.

But the rest of my evasion was professional in nature.

I had, contrary to the terms of the no conflicts of interest clause in my contract, another client. I had a single active client. My last, and special. Especially demanding.

She was a curator, and a perennially tenuretracked assistant professor at CUNY, and I’d been ““““working”””” with her off and on for a desultory year or year and a half, and also working on a vague ms. vaguely concerned with archaeological controversies that if it doesn’t make her scholarly career will at least make her scholastically notorious as it’s intended for a general audience. In practical terms that meant helping her edit the indefatigable writing she did for various archaeology and Egyptology journals and exhibition monographs — which became, as I got involved, duographs, I guess — recasting the required academese for mass appeal while retaining the authoritative tone. She had a cubicle at the CUNY Graduate Center, in Midtown, but preferred to rendezvous at home, specifically in her bedroom, Tribeca (bought when the market was down, when the towers went down and only the ruthless were buying beyond Canal Street). Her name, not that it’s important — Alana, or Lana, which is “anal” backwards, which is how anal’s done (I initially noticed this reversal in our cheval glass reflection — her lucubratory loft was otherwise bare).

During the second week of May — after having been out of touch, and then away again on perfunctory fieldwork in South America — she called. It’d been a while. It’d been ugly how we parted. Then she called again, and left another msg, but now about having been invited to deliver a lecture at a summer institute — a seminar series held in a pristine mountain state that presented the work of diverse scholars and famous public policy types to the busy and wealthy who required an educational justification for their leisure.

All that was required, she said, was a breezy summary of her blown uncollated messy ms., though she also said she’d decided to focus her presentation on mummies — nothing pleased a crowd of the retired rich like mummies, apparently. So, she wanted to meet. Then, fourth week of May, she needed to meet. Unfortunately, she knew how to find me, and unlike Rach didn’t have an aversion to multistop, multitransfer, masstransit.

We labored (I did) on something that would air aloud, something oral, but had to finish — prematurely — and told her I’d email her the rest.

She never paid me — not cash. It wasn’t that type of relationship.

There was hardly any work left to do on it — but still I let it drag, the lecture (there were other conclusions I’d always put off).

Until after she’d dialed, and redialed, if-I-get-your-voicemail-I’m-going-to-act-like-my-phone’s-in-my-purse dialed, I-just-happen-to-be-driving-a-Prius-on-the-way-to-a-coworker’s-parent’s-shiva-in-Nassau-County dialed, and I had to pick up to avoid another surprise. I was laying on the curses like I was protecting my tomb: I couldn’t meet, not here, neither in her corkwalled cenacle between two cenacles each shared by a dozen prying prudish anthropology and sociology department adjuncts, I wasn’t feeling well, I had other deadlines — I couldn’t stop by her loft to primp her in the mirrored center of the bed amid all that white Egyptian cotton, reaching over only now and then to the bedstands to languidly spin her globes and point — stop.

It would’ve been disastrous — getting into that again.

Instead, gut spilling over my laptop’s lip, I screened more of Adam, but more of his earlier vehicles, from when he was my age, when he was younger, a child, becoming dissatisfied with clips and even sequentials and so going to torrent the entireties, torrenting illegally, getting dropped, returning and resuming, ph, id, malware centrals, poisoning my computer, giving it fullblown whatever’s worse than AIDS, now that AIDS is treatable.

Anything to divert me. Anything to distract.

\

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried. The facts have to be wrapped like mummies, in the purest and softest verbiage, which both preserves them and makes them presentable. Instead of straight explanations, analogies must be pursued — like mummies. Examples, instances — next chapter.

I thought the other JC had forgotten me, or that the job itself had just been a thought — a whim of his, or mine — my “imagination,” which is how a writer phrases a mania or pathology. I’d get to his book in the afterlife, if then.

June. I sat laptopped amid the doldrums, the slowdown, the season when traditional publishing takes fourday weekends at Montauk, when even the sites are updated only sporadically, remotely. I finally returned on Finnity, but in the plasmic midst of night, leaving 2:37, 4:19 msgs on voicemail, and when he’d call back in the morning I wouldn’t pick up. The msgs I left were just, “No news, I’m assuming it’s off,” and he’d voicemail in response, “No news on this end either but still we have to talk,” and my next call would be, “Let’s try to get an extension — also ever catch Daaaabbb!? or Daaaaaaaabbbbbb!? They’re about this lizard and lizards are reptiles, which live on land laying eggs as opposed to amphibians, their ancestors, which are born in the water with gills only to grow up into lungs and die on land, but I’m not sure with them about the egg thing,” and his reply was, “The terms were no contact until contact’s made, but once it is I’ll try for an extension, which means we have to meet — me, you, Aar,” and I’d just capacitate his box, “I can’t, I’m deep into drafting this thing starring this NY Jewish kid who while on a class trip to the White House wanders off by accident and finds in a bathroom a telex using the Soviet GOST block cipher, and he deciphers it, just like that, just like nothing, and tells the president what the telex says, and whatever it says, I haven’t gotten to that yet, it’s enough to convince the president to end Cold War ICBM brinkmanship, and the West is saved and the kid’s father who’s from the USSR and is now in the numbers rackets down on Orchard Street is proud — I’ve been getting into this one specific actor, but also into 1980s and 90s representations of mathematicians and scientists onscreen” (I was cut off, I’m figuring, around the recap of the president).

I sat spotlit by the homepage, Tetration.com, boring my head into its underdesign, the whole shallowbacked templatitude of it, trying to find out what was going on, and even once tetrating, “where is joshua cohen?” and “when will he get in touch with me?”

I went to the Midtown library, and read — but bury the algorithms, the histories of tubes, transistors, circuits, of processor architecture and the invention of memory — maxed out my understanding and turned to Egyptology, borrowed the techbooks for later along with a Theatrepedia in which “Adam Shale” was mentioned.

I came out of the main branch and past the tarred trunks to Broadway, which anytime I’m on it I’m amused is also “Broadway”—at least to the prairie herds of fannypackers that roam between shows. This is the only sort of mental masturbation that gets me through Times Square.

Because someone was behind me, and someone was, millions. But in among them, the stands of balloontwisters and calligraphers who are paid to write “Peace” and “Love” in Hanzi but instead write “Scum” and “Twat,” the chula churro carts and that truck that does nachos and roofies, the same person, again, on another block, an Asian — in an intemperate sweatsuit and cap, Red Sox and red crocs.

An Asian of indeterminate everything: intention, gender, age, even Asianness. Indeterminate even if he or she were the same entity each time. Rach, at this point, would’ve condemned me for racism, though not only don’t I care and write this for myself, but as a reader I’d surely enjoy a book by an Asian in which he or she suspects they’re being followed by a white person, but can’t be sure of that white person’s intent or gender or age, or whether that white person is the same person every time or even white. I’m perseverating, I know, but thoughts have to be followed to their ends, the end of next block, and then keep going, to avoid being overtaken.

By the highway, the Hudson — the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy. The Paronomasian, let’s say, turned to close the gap to the curb. A whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th & 10th — this was Tetration’s NY HQ.

I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or Tetguest?

Since last I was here all or nothing had changed: there was just a new type of new in evidence — all novelty has this feeling, this rush. A provisionality. Something to marvel at, not something to trust. The bot was trying to palaver with me in a crepitant creole, increasing its volume and titling itself and then treading away.

A monitorbank mounted on the crosstown wall showed activity at every subtetplex, where there was day, like here, and where there was night, like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Moscow, Tel Aviv, which were nonetheless still busying. Everyone was being scrutinized, but denied ultimate access, the access to themselves. Everyone was being made reciprocally vulnerable. All lobbies were onscreen but this one, which existed strictly in my poses. It was my duty, then, to be conspicuous. I flung my limbs bagladen just so that someone in some other life might choose me. But I was chosen from just behind by a guard. (A human.)

“May I help you, sir?”

“I sure hope so,” I said, realizing that to him I was a transient. “I have a reservation for the Circle Line Cruise?”

\

Maintaining that I hoofed it back to Ridgewood would account for the next week, give or take, though I paced that distance inside, ordering in until my cash ran out and running to the ATM at the Comida Fresca Cada Día — leery of any Asian not affiliated with the nearby Tianjin Trading Ltd., or Lucky Monkey Lumber & Millwork. I read a lot of news, which I liked to read because text, unlike newer media, didn’t tell me how to pronounce it: “Jamahiriya,” “Ansar al-Sharia”—the Arab Spring seemed an issue of Vogue, the Times was so into wiretaps and leaks it’d become an electrical or plumbing manual. I studied the techbooks, which had underlinings and highlightings and in one a frayed crocheted bookmark from what had to’ve been a little old lady striving to master her little old PC. I searched Rach’s blog with the thought of identifying our pseudonymized friends, Rach’s friends who might’ve known about her affair, who if they’d ever reach their mentions themselves would have to search for the scarf they wore or the wallet they lost on their last lunchdate with Rach, in the very terms Rach used in her posting (searching online becoming a writerly endeavor: the search for the perfect detail, or error).

6/6, I got an email from Cal, replying to my own email of drunks ago. He wrote me about how “optimal” it was that this Muslim unrest had coincided with his book hiatus, and how “unabatingly obligated” he was to his editors and the reporters who’d taken his beat. As for the unrest itself, it was still undecided “whether the oppositions will do the governing required.” Anyway, it was “awesome and poignant that technology that was so manipulative is now so cheap it might level the playing field for civil disobedience.” However this was merely his transition to fiction — rather to mansplaining wisdom about fiction. Cal wrote that while technology itself might be “naturally ambivalent,” he was certain it was “anathema” to novels, “to the vicissitudes of the novel,” in that for a novel to “function properly”—as if novels were like a tool, not a bluntness — its characters had to be kept apart from each other, “separated into missing each other and never communicating,” and that now in this present of pdas and online, people were rarely ever “plausibly alone,” everyone now knew what everyone else was doing, and what everyone else was thinking, and the result was a life of fewer crosspurposes and mixups, of less portent and mystery too — and I agreed with him, I’d already agreed, because I’d recognized the ideas as having been plagiarized verbatim from an interview with a decrepit South African literary pundit just published at the site of the NYRB.

Anyway, Cal signedoff by asking, as he always asked, whether I was working on anything, and I answered that I’d just completed an email, nonfiction.

The next email to slip from my hands (two fingers, hardbitten nails) was sincerer.

I told myself I had to finish the last lecture page for the professoress by midnight, be done with it, and at midnight I uploaded and clicked send, and she wrote back with such speed it was like she’d responded before I’d sent it, or at least like she’d had her response already prepared and saved under Drafts. Lana wrote to thank me with an invitation to the summer institute — apparently she was allotted one guest and it “has 2 b u.”

I wrote another email declining — don’t waste the keystrokes on how, why — and Lana wrote me back, “lets chat.”

“I don’t have chat.”

“just download it here,” a link to Tetchat.

“You can always just call me. But I’m not sure I’m ready for another trip. Need to sort things w/ Rach. Need time.”

“download prick dont be such a

“a

“a

“a

My laptop was colorwheeling, so cursed to its cursor that force quit had to be skipped for the nuclear option, Off/On.

Then the phone rang and though it was a regular ring and the number wasn’t listed, I went for it, “No patience.”

But the voice though expectedly female was Asian, like reared in Asia, “Excuse? Hello, Mr. Cohen?”

“Speaking?”

“Please pack a single piece of luggage, including only materials important to your process — everything else will be provided. Waiting outside your studio residence is a Lincoln Continental, black. You will meet it within 10 minutes. Your flight departs JFK at 7:00.”

“To? I’m guessing Palo Alto?”

“Palo Alto does not have a commercial airport. Delta 269 nonstop to SFO. San Francisco. 10:18 PDT, arrival.”

“Oskar Kilo.”

“Excuse?”

“That just means OK.”

“Please, one precaution we ask: take your phone or pda and remove its battery, leave both the battery and chassis at home. You will not require it.”

She didn’t have to ask twice — she didn’t.

Goodbye (646).

://

~ ~ ~

The shift to Palo Alto was — I’m already regretting this — tectonic.

Not because there was this apparently extremely minor earthquake or tremor just as my flight was being cleared for landing and we were delayed, an hour, hovering, two hours — the last time I fly commercial — nor because all my typical eastern negativity toward the West always threatens to break and chunk and pile up into violent incoherence.

Rather I’m talking a totally personal, emotional rupture. Coming to the other coast, single, oneway, felt like a permanent upheaval.

Also, I was all sorts of pilly.

I have what’s called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.

The livery smartcar had a partition between me and what must’ve been a driver, but the switches just lowered the windows and a platelet of GPS. Our destination was La Trovita Lando, which I took for a city, or for a neighborhood. It was a slough through brackish marshes, a ping at a gate, and we stopped. And I stepped out into the snaring web of a twentynothing woman, covered with spidery henna, her hands just slobbered with cobs — spinning me through the grounds to a lavish stucco cottage, unlocking the door, handing me the key, then sticking around spraddled in the doorway, one hairy armpit aired by the jamb.

I’m proud of myself for not mentioning until now that she was Asian. She was. Now hatless. Braless vest and culottes.

“It was you on the phone?”

Nothing.

“Or at the library — but isn’t there a library closer to home? Like in your lap or whatever?”

Or in her vest. She took from its midzip pouch the house pda, a Tetheld.

“Your guestwork is paltoguest0014,” she said. “For access you will have to create a uname/pword, each a min of eight alphanumerics, the pword to contain a symbol and CAP.”

“I’ll try,” taking the Tetheld from her, klutzing the keying, creating both out of my former accounts.

Her Tetheld informed: that uname is not available, and I said, “That uname is not available,” and she said, “What does it suggest? Can you follow the prompt?”

It suggested Jcohen19712, which was also to become my email.

I chose the dollarsign to close my pword—$ finishing what’d been my pword for all.

In other accommodations the bellhop points for his tip to the thermostat, or offers to lead you up the lilypad slates toward the saunas, but here the orientation was only: how to get online.

She took back her Tetheld, “We have been instructed to apologize. Today will be busy.”

“It will? What’s the schedule?”

“Party prep. Invasion and occupation. Caterers. Florists. Amusements. Petting zoo.”

“I don’t understand — party for what?”

The face she purged was disgusted.

“His birthday?”

“His?”

Principal’s, she informed me as she flicked, finalized my account. His 40th, tomorrow.

Was I supposed to have mindread? or have been previously briefed?

She had an @ bud pierced above her lip. Her Tetheld shook, “You are affirmed.”

“Confirmed?”

“Affirmative.”

“Confirmative?”

She buttoned again, “May we have a moment with your computer?”

My computer — two years old? two generations and an operating system defunct? A present from Rach from my own birthday past, a generous provocation to earn. As I dug through my bag for my laptop, I considered the immediate gift politics — what to give a quadragenarian who has everything? besides donating to a favorite cause? Besides myself, I mean.

“We have been instructed to transfer everything — your.docs, your contacts — all will be the same.”

“Why?”

“There is a requisition order.”

“Requisitioning what?”

“A new laptop.”

She left, I pottered, lasers raved across the windows and mariachis tuned. I’d only just unpacked and was resting on the cot when there was a knock at the door, and without me responding she entered, “We are sorry for keeping you waiting, Mr. Cohen.”

I took the slab from her, “Thank you, Miss?”

“You are welcome, Mr. Cohen.”

“Miss?”

“Myung.”

She turned to go so I went grasping: “It’s smaller.”

“.72″ / 1.8 cm × 12″ / 30.4 cm, × 8.2″ / 20.8 cm the depth.”

“Lighter too.”

“2.4 lbs / 1.08 kg.”

“Brand?” because none was evident.

“Tetbook prototype.”

“You’ve moved into computers?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Prototype.”

Drop it, rather — don’t, “But everything’s still on it?”

“Everything.”

“You sure?”

“Even the apps you will never use are on it.”

“Appreciated — but where’s my old unit?”

“Excuse me?”

“Larger, heavier? My oldie?”

That flustered. “Most guests do not want theirs back.”

“Most everyone hasn’t a clue what they want.”

“Please,” resetting herself, “you are also completely backed up to servers. Clouded. Nubified. Nephed. Your files are now protected online. Accessible to your account only.”

“Jcohen19712 then my password?”

“Precisely. If that is what it is, precisely.”

“So this is mine to keep?”

“All yours.”

“As for the oldster?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve trashed it already, haven’t you?”

“Do not worry. We recycle.”

It was only when my deliverer had departed, when I was alone with this foldable tablet where all my files, or copies, were nestled nicely again, or anew, into folders, that I realized just how much they had the goods on me, how much intel was available on my preferences, vice. I had no secret, I was no secret, to be Principal’s guest was to have nowhere to hide — not just the laptop but, beyond the panes, the surveillance outside, the tall strong stalks of spyquip planted amid the birch and cedar, the sophisticated growths of recognizant CCTV, efflorescing through my bungalow’s peephole, getting tangled in the eaves. I bawled myself out, got cotted, covered my face with the dresser’s doily and scrolled schiztic for what to disclaim, for which self to accuse of what inclination: the offlabel oxycodone and hydrocodone ordered scriptless from British Columbia, the minoxidil reliance legal though mortifying, all that screengrab analingus. Meanwhile, vans and trucks were offloading dusk — a carousel clattered from a trailer, ferris wheel assembly clamor, a log flume hosed, trampolines inflated.

\

Waiting to be collected by dark. Waiting mopey for Myung. As the helicopters chopped my sleeping into naps. As the gusts balmed in chatter between the blinds.

Finally I got up, showered and shaved and toweled over to my wheeliebag to formally decide (wrinkled old City Hall ceremony suit? wrinkled older bookparty suit?), ineluctably jeansed it below a tshirt Rach’d gotten me from the Mark Twain House in Connecticut: black, “Mark This Twain” in graffiti white, an arrow pointing dickward.

My presence aside, I still hadn’t come up with anything as tribute — again, what do you get the Founder of everything? besides flattery? Beautiful. It was just beautiful. The trail to Principal’s back 40 acreage had been redcarpeted, a door policy was in effect.

At trail’s terminus was a cupreous voluptuous Chicana. The thing in her hand must’ve been an unreleased Tetheld, judging by how it disturbed attendees into fussing with their own models, noting equivalencies, compatibilities, breathing screens and wiping them clean.

The Tethelds were scanned — touchless mating of machines — the attendees were admitted, returned their devices to their pockets, patting, reassuring: like it was the last time they’d make love to a spouse they’d have to abandon.

The invites were surveys, apparently — digi.

Waiting for approval, I recognized: the chairman/cofounder of America’s most popular eTailer, a crowd theory academic from UC Berkeley, the COO of a premier iConometry site, a venture capitalist/immediate past California state controller, a Congressperson who’d been advocating for the establishment of a Department of Online (DO) within the next president’s cabinet (the president of the United States), and then — far in the front, past cyberpunkadelic bodimodis, transdermally implanted proboscideans, vulcan jedis with diversified portfolios and freshly filed teeth — was the alternative to the alternatives, was Finnity.

I wanted to sign off, I wanted to sign out — whichever had the most hits, or provided the least traceable exit.

Which flight had he been on? the red eye or brown nose? The rest of him was a ruddy blond — and perfectly unfolded, with not an extraneous crease — tweeded like a lordly hunter.

I might’ve guessed: Finn never missed parties — he would’ve hitched if he’d had to.

He scanned, was admitted, indifferently seamless, but because I didn’t have a pda or even a rotary dragging an oinker’s cord all the way from NY, the Chicana guided me under the privacy of a willow, “I’ll have to take this actinally.”

“Take what?”

“Your dietary requirements,” clicking her screen. “So: vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, lactovo, or macrobiotic?”

“Are you serious?” but as her thumbs huddled I answered myself, “I’m an omnivore.”

“Now do you mind eating out of the Greater Bay? Or do you insist on zipsourcing—94/95000s?”

“Anything goes.”

“Any allergies?”

“Just to being interrogated.”

She put me down for seconds of testiness, “This is only because you didn’t respond online.”

“You asked this on an invite?”

“It’s just protocol.”

I was Table ^πie—which was difficult to remember atechnically. But if the seating arrangements were what I suspected, that would be the one to avoid.

The festivities were centered on a capacious bullfighting ring patio flanked by Moorishish fountains reviving ponds. Hubs of eager earnest convo, politics too optimistic for opinion. Mass delusion. Mass hydration.

The patio: La Korto — every notable architectural element was labeled, was to be referred to, in a slurred Spanish that was just Esperanto. La Trovita Lando, the compound — the main house above us (La Domo), the guest huts beyond (La Domoj), enshrouded in fog.

The xeriscaped rear descended into the vast gape of a wildlife refuge: a semiofficial preserve and so another tax dodge to Principal, a religious life — mission farmland and clergy R&R — to the Spanish, but originally a religion itself — animism, totemism, dendrolatry — to the indigenous Indians, whom the Spanish called the Costeños, or “coastal people,” but who called themselves Ohlone: Ohlo = “western,” ne = “people.”

All information offered by my employer, sin costo.

The info both explained, and became, my surroundings: The darkness was cypress, juniper, madrone. The trailside eruptions were of manzanita and sage. The interfaces scattered around the property obtruded with names, in English, in Spanish, their Native American names and Genus, species. I trackballed one: “Tell me more about chaparral.”

The interfaces served dual functions: to educate, sure, but for the more curious — to mark the perimeter of the wild. No Trespassing. Be content with what vantage you have. Go beyond, get a foot stuck in a conquistador helmet, a tomahawk wedged in the head.

I had the sense, though, that those woods were where the real party was — the real debauchery, I mean. Those woods were made for culty fucking, if not for fucking then for fireside circlejerking, critter sacrifice — who had the coke? what’s a Cali dally without pot (without unrefined hemp utensils, dishes, and stemware)?

I was about to make a break for them when the apéritif/hors d’oeuvres sampling was called by the perky MC, Conan O’Brien (Late Night with Conan O’Brien) — the only chair vacant was mine. I had to either leave or confront — a round table, Finnity counterclockwise from me, lagging always a moment behind.

“Yo,” he said.

“Eloquent,” I said. “Yo back.”

He took it, he grimaced but took it. Perspiration down my crevice, already.

“So,” he said, “a surprise?”

“I think our host knows it’s his birthday.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure, my life’s been nothing but surprises — for what’s it been for us? A decade?”

“10 years Aar’s filled us both in on.”

“What’s left to say then?”

“That ever stopped you before?”

“It wasn’t you I was avoiding in line, it was definitely Gwyneth.”

I didn’t mean to be so rude, just I felt — cornered, even at a circular table. Babysat, boosted.

“You want to know why I’m here?”

“I want to know why you think you’re here, Finn.”

“I thought it would be nice to talk.”

“I was going to say frequentfliers, I was going to say points.”

“I trust you’re keeping your receipts.”

“You came to intimidate me into getting to work — but you’re staying for the favors, the swag?”

Conan (The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien), loosened tie, hair swept up like someone had jizzed it, told a joke about some Silicon Valley Social Media PR summit happening now “at the Best Western in Menlo Park,” but empty, unattended — not because everyone was here, but because it hadn’t been publicized.

“One dork, one geek, one nerd, all male, just hanging around polishing the icecubes.”

He told a Gwyneth joke funnier than mine — when Finn leaned in: “You might’ve made time for me in NY.”

We got sommeliered by a guy with a cowbelling tastevin. Finn went white, I went red, both of new autochthonous vintage.

His cheers: “To your book,” mine: “To your book.”

To ours, to theirs, earthy, hints of bile.

“Josh — this is us doing the mending, OK? Healing up? It’s enough. No more grudges. No more blame.”

“Sure, why not? How to argue that? Edit away — you’re the editor.”

“Keep lying to yourself — you’re the writer.”

“Finn, you can return to your prixfixe friends at Café Loup in peace. Your ambush was successful.”

“Enough, Josh? What did you expect me to do back then — take out a fullpage color ad in The New Yorker saying ignore the tragedy and read this book?”

“I get it.”

“Fuck it, I tried for you — OK? I had the Times chasing you for a feature, didn’t I?”

“The angle was like author victimized.”

“OK?”

“Wasn’t exactly dignified.”

“Nothing was dignified then except to shut the fuck up. Still I leaned on them to let you write it.”

“Promote myself — not exactly tactful either.”

“That was the choice — whore or be whored. But you went lofty.”

“But there could’ve been a rerelease. There could’ve been a goddamned paperback.”

“That was shit luck — it’s not like I landed so smoothly either. The quarterlies came around and we all had to explain our no sales and why we hadn’t been signing up Islam books all through the summer like we had warning. The publishers were acting like they’d all known about the attacks forever — why didn’t we know? Why weren’t we prepared with books on how to cope with jihad or the infrastructure of hawala or a comprehensive history of the House of Saud, or, fuck it, a Guantánamo tellall by the fucking 20th hijacker, OK?”

“Got it.”

Finn iced himself down and sipped, whispered, “You haven’t met our Principal, have you?”

“I was expecting you to introduce me.”

“He doesn’t know I’m here — I begged an invitation off an exgirlfriend from Gopal,” and he nodded a radius through the table at four brunette romcoms.

“Get her to introduce us, all four of them.”

“She doesn’t think he’s here.”

“I don’t think I’m here either.”

Our server approached.

She was wearing a stetson and roper boots, denim overalls underall which I’m not sure.

“Your preferenced meals will be out momentarily,” she said. “For now, does anyone need anything?”

Finn said, “Nada.”

“Just as an update,” she smiled, “for dessert you’ll be having the birthday cake, which is glutenfree, the candles are sustainable beeswax.”

“Muchas gracias.” Finn reached out to tug straight her bandana.

“Also keep in mind,” she was saying as she swatted his hand, “with continued climate change, drought will affect over half of the world in this century alone. That’s half of the whole world, not just the developing. So, we’re doing all we can to moderate our water waste. By not changing your plates, you’re changing lives. Snap the QR on your napkin rings to get involved.”

I excused myself behind her: pretense was the toilet, purpose was the bar.

I trailed, and turned past the wagonwheel tables of every industry’s pioneers, destined for the dimming. Passing fame, passing actual fame. Not the observed in the park, but the celebrated globally. People — what’s more than people? more like businesses, companies, corporations, states unto themselves? — whose reps, even, whose lowliest brand ambassadors, would never return my calls.

It was a reality show — an actuality show — a making of a behind the scenes collision. Two Nobel laureates (Physics, Peace), two models whose models, unlike the laureates’, I understood (thanks, Rach), the actor who got top billing in something Adam was in (won’t drop a name, but rhymes with “Mom Thanks”), another who won an Oscar for directing a host of somethings Adam was never in (rhymes with “Even Spielberg”), an andrologist with an infomercial system, a copyright attorney who commented on extremist cable, and Oprah? Fat Oprah and her skinnier double? Everyone lounging, chatty, bingey purgey — entouraging one another, giving interview, posing, thronging the serapedraped vitamix stations, mingling the dancezones, Tethelding selfies in pic and vid while decrying the paparazzi.

If they were invited, they were a celebrity. Even if this was just a job for them, they were a celeb. They had to be, the fame was contaminating. The wraithy freckled red bandanafied servergirl, all the servers, they were moonlighting microphenoms not only by moonlight but in their true industries too, with even the busboys, the prides of Sonora, maintaining their own stalky followings.

I joined, danced through — no one else had my moves — toward a holographic bonfire lighting up the forest. Finally, a pit of the party’s only stiffer provision, a makeshift cantina camp pitched twinkly out in the night like the last settlement before everything went savage — calling a younger crowd, guzzling heirloom beers and heritage cocktails of one part freerange to two parts forage, muddled into mason jars out of the back bays of circled Conestogas.

A girl bordelloized to impress asked, “When’s Lady Gaga showing?” A ranchhanded guy said, “It’s Dylan & Jagger,” and the girl asked, “Who’s that?”

I waited for my hooch behind a pornstached chillionaire and his two brogrammer friends, by which I mean his coworkers at #Summerize, according to their shirts and shorts and hats.

One said, “You can’t change the scale without scaling the change.”

Another said, “Evoke transcendence.”

The chillionaire said, “Will you stop reading that neurolinguistic reinforcement pickup artist shit? This party’s got mad fucking latency to it.”

His coworkers nodded up from their Tethelds and the transcendence guy said, “All paradigms can be realigned, modulo a pussy deficit. Because if we don’t count the nontech women, who don’t count us, we’re dealing with 6s, the same as always, mid 6s.”

“Get positivized,” the scalar change guy said. “Or just get beyond the systems integration analysts — the ad rep girls are 8s for def.”

The chillionaire said, “For me, this birthday’s all about trying to get an audience with the boss. I mean, he bought us without even meeting us, who does that?”

His coworkers clenched smiles at me. The chillionaire noticed and answered himself, “A fucking genius is who. What are you guys feeling — the no carbs rum horchata punch? Or the Red Bull Añejo Paloma?”

But his coworkers’ faces shone expressionlessly rapt again in the glows of their Tethelds until the chillionaire said, “Before your batteries are cashed, are you guys checking in with your Tetsets?”

They keyed, and the scalar change guy said, “This says there’s a quidditch game for new acqhires happening over by the stables.”

The transcendence guy said, “This says if anyone finds a yellow/black GoreTex GoreBike windstopper cycling shell, please reply, reward negotiable.”

“There’s a capture the flag tourney for vest & resters that’s voting now on team captains.”

“This says P Diddy’s taking all the ad rep pussy to the sweat lodge.”

“Hey, sorry, disruption incoming,” and the chillionaire was talking to me now. “Can you just take a square of us?”

He handed me his Tetheld, the only one I’ve ever held, and it was anodized cool. I tried to get them all onscreen. But I wasn’t sure what to press, or if there was anything to press. Or even whether the recording was still or in motion, with sound. An Asian, an Arab, and an Indian, all speaking together in questionmarks like white girls. Such were my unspoken thoughts, which only I can record, I think.

The Asian thanked me and posted the groupsquare crossplatform from his Tetset and the Arab and Indian reposted to their own Tetsets, and read the replies as they blipped in: “giddyup you cutie cowboys,” “fuck u and fuck the startup u rode in on.”

It was their turn to order from the Conestoga. They ordered waters with electrolytes.

I had the fringey coonskincapped hipster pour me an artisanal vodka with artisanal rocks.

As I went for a cig he said, “No smoking.”

“Where?”

“Nowhere on property.”

They didn’t need a sign. They needed a sign for everything else.

“La Bano?” I pointed, “the toilets?” and while the frontierster was pointing them out, I swiped a bottle, biomash rye.

I headed away, swerved for the trees. Forgive me. Fine me for tossing my lighter. It was empty but I still had matches.

I staggered, rolled like a stone. It was all a ball of feints, disguises. Power masquerading as responsibility, stewardship. Excess but slim, trim. Spiritual emaciation in good citizen costume. Wastefulness spun as ethical consumption. A party in honor of health, which improved health. Nothing could fool me, or could fool me enough.

Still, I couldn’t get no satisfaction — the leaves rasping hey hey hey. Cause I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried — to distinguish between the rustic and the epic style art: a Calder stabile like a girdered ferruginous rhododendron, and what was either a Richard Serra or a Donald Judd or a boulder.

I couldn’t shake a certain bumpkinish feeling, that sense of being a hick, a rube, an unacceptable regression. I spurred myself sloppy, smoked and drank with the roots.

Just ahead was a stand of trees, just tremendous trees, mossy antennas, redwood but pulsing black — their monitors were black, and their bark was livid brown, quakefissured. They too had to acclimate after being transplanted. Weldmesh fence prevented my touch. The path went around them and pebbled away and was panned into sand by the grass.

It was a spit of beach along a salina bayscape. A dimidiate moon, and stars falling darkly pacific.

From out of the nebula and down the beach, a desperado was approaching. I didn’t have a weapon, I was freelance. I dug in, sparked the pack’s penultimate cig, contemplated another message for the bottle besides breaking it. On his skull, on mine.

He swayed, wary, rolledup pants, rolled shirtsleeves, suitjacket looped around neck, a sockstuffed shoe in each hand, whiteness, Finn.

“Can I get a taste?”

“Taste the empty?” I tipped the bottle to grains.

“Then a smoke?”

I passed the butt, “Why not share?”

He dragged, “You’ve been making the rounds?”

“I’ve had people to meet — putting faces to names and names to faces. The next round I’m putting bodies to bodies.”

Finn ashed, returned what was left, for me to snuff.

He said, “I’m not keeping tabs.”

“I am?”

“But Aaron just happened to mention — something about the wife? She got you down?”

“Mine or yours?”

Finn clapped his heels, “You want some advice, Josh?”

“About what — always be a friend to your friends? Never go swimming on a full stomach?”

Finn grinned, “The book: it can’t be a book — it has to be an option. Write it for the screen. The game version. Whatever.”

“That’s it?”

“I need a property,” he mooned. “I need an adaptation.”

\

I felt it the next morning. Noon, after. Nothing but hangover fog, a lukewarm front of quit throat. Giving way by evening to arrogance.

Nobody came.

I checked my new account: one email, my first. Jcohen19712@tetmail.com. An invitation to yesterday, a link to a dietary survey. Made another resolution: quit drinking and smoking, check email more or less often.

Drag. Dump Trash. An empty inbox, an empty outbox. A pure, an impeccable, soul.

I went out to get something to eat, and some head analgesia. Just when I had my hand on the handle, a voice said, “Hungry?”

I turned.

The voice said, “Aspirin or ibuprofen?”

“What?”

Voice circumambient, modulated with viperish reverb, then a panel withdrew, the monition of a monitor face. Just opposite my cot. Principal’s face. But frozen, cryogenized.

I assumed a malfunction, a fritz.

“It is just a still,” the voice said. “Official as like for a book.”

“As like what?”

“Or perhaps this one is better?” and the monitor regressed: a Founder’s shot, him next to a — I’m just going to call it a server. “Or this one?” a yearbook shot — highschool? college? — teeth agleam amid pleiades of acne. “Or maybe this?” a newborn frame, squashed and jaundiced, clawmarks at the cheeks. “Or?”

“Whichever the fuck,” and again, the first familiar image was restored.

“Come back toward the cot — hang out.”

“You can see me?”

“Confirmative.”

“You can hear me?”

“Confirmative, though on the cot is better — hang loose.”

“You’re fucking snooping on me?”

“We are doing no such thing. We are offering naproxen? Acetaminophen? Depends how your stomach is — you should not need an anti-inflammatory.”

“I’m just trying to avoid taking the hard shit.”

“The hard shit?”

I gestured around at all my stuff stowed, “You should know — you think I moved in myself?”

“Pfizer is in the dumps, trading down below 20, indicating low consumer confidence in ibuprofen. Johnson & Johnson is holding steady in the 60s, aspirin is on the up.”

“Were you even around for your own 4–0?”

“Around, yes, in attendance, no.”

“Did I jerk off?”

“Unclear.”

I wanted to wish him happy returns on his birthday, but also I wanted to keep that sentiment pounding in my head, to determine whether it registered.

“We cannot read thoughts.”

“Try.”

“Think of something.”

“Any something?”

“Any.”

“Am doing it — you got it?”

At the door was a knock and a black but white goth buff transgender person entered — an XX or an XY or a chromosomally spliced Ze bearing a metal tray. I had not been thinking about its contents. But I did not have that thought until I’d consumed its contents. The tray was divided into quadrants, and all were of composted mush.

I used one of the quadrants to ash in. I wouldn’t have minded a beeeeeeeer.

“Go to your Tetbook, the desktop, open the folder Dossier.”

The only new folder, “Dosser?”

“There is no i?”

“Guess not.”

It contained: Tetration site txt, public domain.docs, junk. But then also internal reports. Personnel intel. Official Tetration capsule bios of its prez, its vps of VP (Various Projects), Finance, Futurity/Devo.

Quarterly assessments. Performance reviews with nothing smeared out. How many files? More than scrollable — inscrollable?

Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning’s identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified — located elsewhere. Creation stuff, cosmology, a founding myth, lore of origin: light separated from darkness, the wind inseminating the aether — the earth is balanced on the back of an elephant, or held by angels standing on the shell of a turtle — but what was that turtle standing on? was it just tortoise on tortoise forever?

An apple plunging from a tree and inventing gravity, volume determined by water displaced from Antiquity’s jacuzzi, a dream about the structure of the solar system being the structure of the atom, a dream about a snake consuming its own tail being the ring structure of the molecule benzene, relativity conceived in a tram as it passed a clocktower in Bern, coordinate geometry measured by the relationship of a flitting fly and the floor, ceiling, walls of some sordid dorm in Utrecht? or Leiden? A suburban garage with Dad’s camper parked out in the driveway — make room for the racks, clear the toolbench for the switches. A grant or degree. A mentor, a mother.

I took it as my job to discern something similar — to search in the way www.searching couldn’t, to find in the way www.finding couldn’t — which is to say, to conceive, make it up.

Like say I’m talking to myself — how to substantiate the claim? how can anyone but the author authenticate? I had no way of corroborating whether it was or wasn’t Principal, talking. His feed could’ve been recorded in Myanmar, in Burma, prerecorded in Siam, postproduced in Thailand, he could’ve been coming to me live but two hours behind, eight hours ahead, on whichever side of excruciation’s meridian, 36 TbPS streaming straight from the 36th century.

From then on we met constantly, continuously. I questioned, I didn’t. Answers were dirigent, direct. This was our background, the setting of scene: the hut monitor displayed graphics resembling the Himalayas (spiky unscalable linecharts of number of urls indexed by year, number of tetrations by year, number of new/unique users by year, number of tetrations by average user by year), resembling the planets Venus and Mars (πcharts of ownership structure) and Bay Area bridges (bargraphs of ad revenue) — thermodynamical models of the tech protocol itself or just organigram tutorials in managerial flow, squiggly doodly retiaries that rendered concepts like vertical or horizontal omnidimensional, unhelpful.

I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me — cameras, mics. Interfaces: beaming cracks in plaster.

But it was all about others. Nothing about him. None of the material was personal. An interface has no profile.

He spoke to me as a grownup to an infant. A brat pubescent to a rutting pet. Would I be allowed to interview the others? No. In person? No. In writing? No. Can I speak? Talk to the wall.

I had clearance like it was going out of business, but the cost to me was guilt. Families and financials. I knew how many dependents people had, how many savants and seniors, their salaries and dividends, bonuses and dumps. Their incentives for retirement, their splits. Class A, one vote per share. Class B, 10 votes per share. I knew everything but what all this meant to them. How they spoke. Stood and sat. How they groomed.

Were they people? Not to Principal. Not even employees? They were more like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain.

He guarded his privacy but flung open the doors to the lives of others. His underlings. Their underthings. What’s privacy to the employee is security to the boss.

All this factuality grated, was a grate, a veil, a screen — a firewall. There was a firewall between us.

Tetrate “firewall.” Though how to decide which site to hold with? the most popular or most reputable? and if reputation shouldn’t be popularly decided, then how? and couldn’t this question be better asked of politics (management), or religion (ownership)?

Class A knowledge is not as powerful as Class B knowledge, and all the managers be fools and the owners, doctrinaire.

Tetrationary.com, a userdriven site, defines: “Firewalls can either be software-based, or hardware-based, and are used to help keep a network secure,” then digresses into types: packets, filters, layers, proxies. Entry last updated by “Myndmatryxxx.”

Correction — last updated by myself, as I rejoined the verbal phrase: “Firewalls can be either.”

Whereas a more authoritative site, which I’ll define as one that employs professionals, at minimumwage, but still — pride counts more than maternity leave or sickdays — states: “1. A fireproof wall used as a barrier to prevent the spread of fire. 2. Any of a number of security schemes that prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to a computer network or that monitor transfers of information to and from the network.”

Correction — the site, lexility.com, just freeloaded the work of old print dictionaries and encyclopedias whose compilers are dead and whose compiled kin don’t receive any residuals.

Another site says “firewall,” in its architectural usage, dates to ca. 1840, in its computing sense, to ca. 1980. Yet another site gets strangely specific, 1848, 1982, on the dots.

Austro-Hungary, apparently, designed the firewall. The Austro-Hungarian theater. Where it was armor dropped from a proscenium to prevent a conflagration onstage from spreading to the audience. No mention on the site as to what might’ve started the fire onstage — the effects, like the fake cannon that ignited Shakespeare’s Globe, likelier than anything textual.

In German, this barrier was called der Eiserner Vorhang. “The Iron Curtain.” Which another site attributes to Churchill. Whose own source is cited by yet another site as having been the Muslim belief in “the Gates of Iron,” “erected by Cyrus the Great to keep Gog and Magog out of Persia.” Still others assert that Cyrus is actually Alexander the Great and Gog and Magog are really the Scythians. “Not even a wall of iron can separate Israel from its God,” Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, 20 °CE. “Iron and steel were called the same in ancient Hebrew and Arabic, and both cultures believed the element fell from the heavens.”

Both Judaism and Islam speak of God protecting with, or as, “a wall of fire.” “This relates to the desert practice of keeping oneself safe from predators by surrounding oneself with fire.”

\

During breaks my hut’s screen oscillated a koan. It was a clock, but with just a single hand, and the clockface had no divisions into minutes or hours. It had no divisions at all. Was it a timer? and if so what time did it tell?

Mornings, or whatever, I’d be woken by Principal’s voice shrilling over a hearth of incombustible logs that might’ve been another screensaver.

That morning, however, I woke up on my own to a screen that was off, so I fell back into a dream in which I was shopping for the antithrombosis travel compression braces that Moms had recommended, but the stores were gypping me and I went into a frenzy because each pair contained two and a pair for me, I can’t explain it, meant three, and then Rach and I were going to Dr. Idleson the fertilitist who was also Meany the shrink, who told us that what we’d been having wasn’t sex and was about to tell us what to do instead — but then I was jolted up and out of the cot by an error msg honk. Abort retry fail honking.

The screen flickered an external feed — a clubcart was at the door.

Two men were jammed inside — two big men, giants, juvie and cruel, special in the sense of special forces: Jesus and Feel (Jesús and Felipe).

I rode deck as they let the cart drive us, in swampy compound circles.

“So you the visitor genius?” Feel said.

“You think?” I said.

“Never met no genius.”

I said, “Only a genius would know what you’re talking about.”

“What else a genius do?” Jesus said. “You get the mother and father — los árboles?”

“Meaning what?”

But Feel was saying, “Also in my family the primos, the cousins segundos. Not like when my cousin has kids, but like when my two brothers marry two sisters and they both have kids — they would be how related?”

I understood: “Genealogist, you mean.”

Principal had told them, hadn’t told me, my cover was as genealogist.

I said, “And what do you do — seguridad detail?”

“No importa,” Feel said.

“Stunt driver,” said Jesus.

“Are you from here or Mexico?”

“Afghanistan,” said Jesus.

Feel said, “Two tours.”

We went ramping down into the mound of La Domo — a subgarage of charging stations and inductive mats. A mechanics corps was sponging a Tesla X, a car that didn’t exist. No other boytoys though. No racers. All electric. And no motorcycles. Scooters. Bike-bikes.

Adjacent to the garage was the mechanics’ locker room. The next room was a box, like a boxroom, just heaps of packaging, addressed to me, myself, and I. Deliveries oneclicked — one guess — online. Principal’s no different from the rest — he orders and so he is.

The boxroom, the bagroom, the room of guitars, the room of drums, of charcoal and chalk, of splintered easels. Room of wood. Room half carpet half grass just because. Room in which the scissors were left. Room of nothing but the loss of a button.

Rooms: there must be something to call the room in which everything in it is supposed to come off as causal, but, in fact, has been calculated down to the threadcount. The room into which, before someone visits, the householder hauls everything significant or representative, so that even if this is the only room he — I — will visit, everything will be communicated: essential personality, selfhood. Gist, pith. Taste.

There must come a point when a house has so many rooms that it becomes pointless to name them. There must come a room — where the homeowner just wavers at the threshold, and fails it.

Principal had made a shrine, and so enshrined himself. An altar awaiting a sacrifice. Rotund Asian deities in speedos. Incense censer. A sutured set of sutras. The Dharma lode, block and mallet, beads, wheel, ghanta, vajra, mandala.

Principal lotused on the floor. His face, the skin that showed, was haggard. Wrung. He’d aged double what I’d aged since our last.

His chinpatch was now the color of static and the shape of Long Island. A short wiggy bowlcut, as lustrous as laminated bamboo.

But, as he gradually rose, as he ritually twitchingly rose, what got me the most was his size — how fat he was or creepy with muscle. Massive pecs and quads. Pumped bumps for biceps. Bulgeous calves.

Rather what got me was more the disparity, between whatever it was that made him so swollen imposing and the head that hovered above, the floating face shrunken, wan, marasmic, insucked brittle cheeks, bone straining through nose — the presentation was freakish.

But also at least halfwise intentional. Because as he breathed and commenced with a ceremonial stripping, all that bulk turned out to be clothes, just clothes, bunches, rolls, layers, breathable filters. The heat was on and there was no call for the heat to be on. Principal stripped and shivered.

All of it was branded, ^TT Tetgear: he unshrugged the kasaya robe to expose a unipouched hoodie, tore the tearaway trainers to sweatpants — not in academic gray, but silicon gray. The plastic toggles that capped the drawstrings of both hoodie and sweats had been gnawed to shreds. He tugged them loose, tried not to gnaw. Underneath was a neoprene wetsuit. Thick wool socks overwhelming the sandals.

The wetsuit peeled away to a belly bloated white but of the same substance, that squishy squamous thickness, that reptilian or amphibian give — like if I would’ve poked him, the indent inflicted would’ve remained for life. His limbs were tentacularly downed powerlines, livewire distensions. He was a nonviolent resister, of himself. On a hunger strike, protesting himself. That’s how ill he was, that’s how Gandhi. An ascetic, or ascitic, revealing to me scars, stitched slits all ragged red inflamed like the marks of the great, the markings by which one suffers for greatness, also revealing his penis — testudinal, pinched, sacs sagging like they’d been punctured, hairless — and he was hairless too under the wig.

“What the fuck? What happened?”

“A second opening, all of life is but a second opening, or it can be,” he said. “That, and only that, is the fuck.”

He trembled back to the concrete floor, relotused himself stiffly.

I settled just across.

“Please,” he said, “our sandals are still on us.”

“Off?” I said. “You can’t take them off by yourself?”

Or he wouldn’t, so I undid the velcro and got him discalced, shed socks from feet, rigid toes horned coarse and crustated.

He seemed relieved: a man at rest after a powertrip.

“A man is born royal,” he said. “His father is the king but he is no prince. Or he is on the outside. But it all is just outside, exterior.”

“This is you? Or are you talking the Buddha?”

“We are not talking Buddha. Or we are but he is not Buddha yet. He goes. He seeks to go outside of the outside. From the palace to the walls, through the gates. Out until the gates and the walls and the palace are all behind him.”

“So you’re becoming the Buddha? Considering a career change?”

“We are no one. We are the horse and the chariot both.”

“But in the different accounts I’m trying to recall, isn’t there also like a charioteer — a guy who’s steering or whipping? The Buddha, or whatever he is, whatever his name is, wasn’t alone.”

“We are all alone, always. No matter accounts. Whether a charioteer or no charioteer. Immaterial. Does not matter. There is no horse and the man is just walking.”

“But he’s walking in orienteering socks and nubuck archopedic sandals.”

“As like he goes, he is followed: men seeking money, to be repaid only in hatred, women seeking money, to be repaid only in sex, and he ignores them and goes on. He meets an old man, very old, on the verge of death, and laments because age awaits us all and all the world does not lament every moment. He meets another man, afflicted not just with age but with disease, and laments because infirmity awaits us all and all the world does not lament every suffering. Yet another he meets. Or he does not. Because this man is not a man, not old or infirm anymore, not living, a corpse, and the man who is a man, who is still alive, healthy and young, laments nonetheless, because death awaits us all and all the world does not lament every death.”

“I’m with you,” I said, and I was.

“So the old, the infirm, the deceased,” he said. “They get into his head. And the head is shaped as like the bowl for alms and all its faces are the same in vacuity. The man is incapable of love, incapable of emoting anything. He is depressed and seeks the trees. He sits under a tree and waits and attempts to cure himself of waiting as like it were a disease and attempts to destroy his waiting as like it were a life. Then through the trees, enter the fourth man, the beggar. And the beggar would have passed, this is the point, he would have passed the man at the tree, and would have respected that peace and asked for nothing. Because true beggars never ask. They are beggars because they are given. There is something in them that compels the alms, something saintly. They might even refuse. In reward or punishment. The man asked the beggar who he was and the answer was not a beggar but a wanderer — we wander, he says, we search.”

“And then the man attains enlightenment and becomes the Buddha and the beggar goes to heaven,” I said. “All beggars go to heaven — they never refuse.”

“But maybe we can say it is better if the man never asked and the beggar never answered,” Principal said. “The man becoming Buddha just knew. Basically. Maybe from the presence of the beggar. No. Or from the existence of the beggar. Yes. Because begging is giving too is the point that communicates all the knowledge that is ours.”

“I don’t follow.” I didn’t.

“We are becoming bhikshus,” he said. “Itinerant, mendicant. Sadhu to the Hindu. Monastic.”

“Do you have an itinerary in mind or is that against principle?”

“Europe, that is all for now. 25something° N, 55something° W.”

“You can’t get specific, or won’t?”

“Immaterial. Not divulged.”

“That’s supposed to be reassuring?”

“We know.”

“What do you know?” I asked.

“Without asking,” and he reached for his kasaya, that white woundbind slopping the floor. He took from a slit in it a blueblack scab.

He gave, I took. It was a passport.

“We have our charioteers after all. Payrolls of them. Part men, part chariot, part horse, all inclusive. Expediters.”

“This is possible?” I turned the passport around in my hands.

“What is not possible is to go wandering the earth as like a Class D motorist licensed by the state of NY.”

I opened it up. My date and place of birth were accurate. And unfortunate. The proceeding pages were as blank as an alms plate.

The pass I already had, I tried to remember when it expired, and where it was stashed — in Ridgewood’s hoarder forests? with Rach?

The photo on this pass was even worse, though, from spyquip: me stumbling back to my hut from the party, out of my mind and unretouched.

I couldn’t tell — I couldn’t.

Which of us was not himself.

://

9/7–8, BURJ AL-JUMEIRAH HOTEL, DUBAI

total time of Principal recordings: 146:07:09

total number of Principal.Tetrec files: 58

their size: 2.9 GB

their content: In consideration of the disclosure of confidential/proprietary information [“Information”] by the Disclosing Party [“Joshua Cohen 1”], the Receiving Party [“Joshua Cohen 2”] hereby agrees:

i) to hold the Information in strict confidence and to take all precautions to protect such Information (including, without limitation, all precautionary practices/technologies employed by Joshua Cohen 1), (ii) not to disclose any such Information or any information derived therefrom to any third person/party, (iii) not to make any use whatsoever at any time of such Information or any information derived therefrom except to evaluate internally its relationship with Joshua Cohen 1 for purposes covered under Section 2 of the contract [“Contract”], and (iv) not to copy or

Emails received:

UNIT #610 OVERDUE NOTICE, from VanderEnde officespace mgmt.

OVERDUE NOTICE, from the New York Public Library.

No Subject, from Moms.

why arent u returning my calls? from Lana.

Autoresponses sent: “traveling for work through september at the latest, replies might be slow.”

How else to reply? I can’t write about what I’m doing with Principal even here in this.doc, so what can I communicate in an email?

If you’re ever unable to discuss the main events of your life, you have to rely on all the bits you’ve somehow always missed.

Managed some fruit. Shit an hour.

Insomnia, nausea, sinuses aching, still can’t shake this plane cough (avian pertussis? or is that for the birds?).

Vocabulary: orthogony, heuristics, traverse vertices, exocortex, autonomia, transclusion, “the embedding of one document or part of a document within another by reference.”

tetrationary.com/transclusion

But tech’s not my only vocab problem in the Emirates. There’s ménage, which isn’t quite how it’s said in French, then when I don’t understand, there’s zimmermann, which isn’t quite how it’s said in German, and then when I don’t understand that (my sinuses having imparted to my replies an enigmatically European accent), they say room keening.

Language itself is a burqa, an abaya—so many new words! so much chancy chancery cursive! The garments that blacken even the tarmac, that blacken the lobby (irreligiously lavish). Words are garb. They’re cloaks. They conceal the body beneath. Lift up the hems of verbiage, peek below its frillies — what’s exposed? the hairy truth?

Alternately, click here: dubai.ae

Click until this page wears out, until you’ve wiped the ink away and accessed nothing.

\

A remote control should indicate the existence of another device to be controlled remotely — to be uncovered, certainly, within range.

The remote is typically the filthiest object in the room, according to Principal. 100 billion bacteria per button, on average. Each bacterium’s DNA containing the equivalent of approx 1 million bytes of information. Meaning the average remote control button has the data capacity of approx 100,000 terabytes.

According to Principal: streptococcus, staphylococcus, meningococcus, coliform.

Aerobic, anaerobic. Microbes.

Roomservice — because I can’t bring myself to go down to the restaurants alone. Jump. But window won’t open. Shouldn’t be smoking anyway.

I ordered the “Four Been Soup”—bean soup with regrets. Cramps 2.0.

Tetrating transgulfane: pancreatitis, the difference between communal and equitable distribution of assets earned by one party before divorce but after separation if separation was never legally sanctioned (New York Consolidated Statutes, Article XIII, Domestic Relations, § 236B).

Other sites: nytimes.com (to check whether Cal had written, he hadn’t), nybooks.com (to check whether Cal had written, he had), haaretz.co.il (ERROR), haaretz.com (ERROR), guardian.co.uk, lemonde.fr, a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/01/09/doc-n-law-1.html (Rach), escortzrevue.com/dubai, escortzrevue.com/abu_dhabi, whitedicksblackchicks.biz (ERROR), whitedicksblackchicks.biz/whitezilla-slaughters-her-ass (ERROR), thenational.ae, gulfnews.com, a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/02/09/doc-n-law-2.html (Rach), hoodratlatina.biz/ass-to-mouth-teacher-on-student (ERROR), hoodratlatina.biz/cumpilation-blonde (ERROR), poetryfoundation.org, poetryfoundation.org/article/16129, jewsy.com (ERROR), jewsy.com (ERROR), a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/03/09/doc-n-law-3.html (Rach), a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/04/09/doc-n-law-4.html (Rach), bangableblackteens.com (ERROR), bangableblackteens.com/mixrace/fave/orderby+mf&timeby=today (ERROR), tetration.com/search?q=Thor+Balk, tetpedia.com/tet/Thor_Balk, maid4jizz.biz (ERROR), maid4jizz.biz (ERROR), maid4jizz.biz (ERROR), maid4jizz.biz (ERROR).

Each instance of HTTP 404ishness occasioned a buzz, a buzzing.

My gut knocking too (getting fatter off roomservice).

A deft young dark boy in a resort staffed exclusively by same, wheeling in more lentils. Occipital headache, sneezy.

I hadn’t gotten around to getting any of the currency (either dirham or dihram — tetrate it?), so gave him €4 (too much?).

\

On every flight I’ve been on since the invention of wifi the attendants are always saying, don’t go online until we tell you. Then they tell you, at what they call cruising altitude, which some sites have as 30,000 ft/9,100 m, and some sites have as 35,000 ft/10,600 m. Whichever, no online, and no phone either, during takeoff and landing especially. Passenger signals interfere with the cockpit’s communications with the ground. I’d always accepted this, until aboard the Tetjet, which has no attendants, no announcements were made, and electronics were being used all the time. By Jesus and Feel. Not Principal. But still. This had me skeptical. I’d rather be brought down by glorious jihadi or a flock of sphinxes screeching into the engines than by some amped mercenaries playing some app game matching lozenges.

Principal’s coding (“Principal” is itself a code, for me to avoid having to type “my name”). When Principal says, “The Sims are ready to fly,” he means he’s ready to fly (both of his pilots are Sims: Simon Prentice, Thomas Simons).

“The Gulfstream 650 is the largest elite jet in the Gulfstream fleet. Its maximum operating speed of.925 Mach makes it the fastest civil aircraft flying, and its maximum altitude of 50,000 ft allows it to avoid congestion and adverse weather,” but then I gave up reading All About the Tetjet, and switched, dismissive flick of screen, to Media, streaming everything conceivable but also featuring a selection “curated this quarter by Kori Dienerowitz, President”: 80s sitcoms, Jeopardy! Scorsese, Westerns all’italiana, Korean Wave, Mecha anime, 20 episodes of a show called Xun Qin Ji.

When Principal says, “Gaston wants to cook,” he knows that all meals are docketed, but isn’t hungry.

In London, Welsh radix box with a side of sprouts (both raw), in Paris mixed kales below purée de betterave crapaudine (both semisteamed), muria puama, saw palmetto, reservatrol. For dessert, his nutritive of twos: vitamins A₂ (retinaldehyde), B₂ (riboflavin), C₂ (choline), D₂ (ergocalciferol), supplemented with hazelnut oil, cedar berry, turmeric, borage, selenium, γ-linolenic acid.

When Principal says, “Lavra wants to exercise,” he knows that all workouts are docketed, but isn’t motivated.

40 elliptical minutes listening to a podcast on diamond synthesis using hydrocarbons, another on Malthus (London), watching a clipathon on the extraction of precious metals from waste electronics using plasma, another on the physiocrats and François Quesnay (Paris), Lavra alongside him on the twin machine, then leading him in 80 light squats, correcting technique. Midplantar/lower palmar reflexology, cranial electrotherapy (Lavra insists, no acupressure or brain stimulation without the cardio).

I’ve been with Principal through every meal and workout, but have never participated in any.

When Myung says to Principal, “Doc Huxtable has got you booked,” she means — forget it.

This is exactly where a code’s required, extra shorthand, an abbrev: like how red ink indicated lies in memoranda sent to and from the gulag, like “an inlaw” meant “an SS officer” in the partisan encryption of the Warsaw Ghetto, while the Nazis themselves used “solution” to mean “mass extermination.”

\

Code.

There are two great innovations to recall: (1) all relationships between two or more quantities can be expressed as equations (the algorithm, which enciphers the name of al-Gorithmi, the Persian mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and Judeophile, eighth century CE), and (2) all numbers, no matter how large, can be expressed by the sequential combination of the smallest numbers: zeroes and ones (though the original binaries weren’t numerals but short and long syllables, combinable into every conceivable meter of Sanskrit prosody — Pingala, fourth century BCE).

Binary code — an encryption that’s simultaneously a translation, in how it renders two different systems compatible, equitable. “Bits”—the term itself is a contraction (“binary digits”) — are the fundamentals of any expression: not just of integers but also of language, and so of instructions, commands.

In international unicode standard, by which every conceivable character in the universe can be represented by an octet, or a sequence of eight bits, Principal’s net worth would be signified by 00110001 00111000 00110010 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $18.2B, as of 2010 taxes), and the value of my advance for this book by 00110100 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $440K) — though I’ll get only half that up front, or Aar will and then he’ll take his commission (00110011 00110011 00110000 00110000 00110000), and then the IRS will take its too (00110001 00110101 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000).

Principal has directed our publisher to pay his own fee to an undisclosed organization, or so he says.

The only records of prior largesse are of $2 million to endow a computing exhibition devoutly aggrandizing Tetration at the Smithsonian Institution, and $252 to the Santa Clara Council of Dharmic and Abrahamic Religions, which has become a for profit yoga studio.

He never says our name if it refers to me, not even the nickname, the lame abridgement, “Josh.” Bash it to bits, you’d get 01001010 01101111 01110011 01101000, though if the “j” were minuscule, were lowercase, you’d get 01101010 (01101111 01110011 01101000).

Thanks, biconversion.com.

Point is, we’re all made differently of the same ones and zeroes — the ones our fortunes, the zeroes our voids, our blacker lacking places.

Ultimately, then, Principal and I do not compute, and all the imbalance between us can’t be attributed to just the swollenness of his bankroll, or my fatter tits and ass — or to the facts that only one of us was given a middle name, and only one of us was given a future. How to express the extent of Principal’s nullity? how else but code to write around his holes?

://

~ ~ ~

The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, for consumption to consume us. London’s just around the corner, a floor up or down, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, and so bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

The only thing that grounds me is the beach — the ground before the oil, the oil money, the derricks bowing, rising, bowing, rising, the gusher skyscrapers, the rush on the roads.

I feel the sand, the salinity, the limit, the edge — they’re in me, they’re in everyone.

Mortality is a mesh for sifting water and quartz.

All of humanity washed up on the beach, but I stayed a span later to dry. I wasn’t always bridges and tunnels, huddling under scaffolding in Midtown waiting for the storms to stop or for the stripclubs to be demolished — I wasn’t always NY.

No, no, I’m Jersey, sprung from the Shore. And that basin is contiguous — all tides are my territory.

Fridays, try to leave the city before noon, turnpike to parkway past the loading and lading, our own crude tanks and refinery towers, toward the barrens, the pinescrub ceding to reeds, marshgrass and weedy tails. Take any exit south of 114, and take it to the end, to the dunecrash, the salt scarp, the lick of the sea. Low tide uncovers the loss — snapped surfboards, ripped rafts and tubes, jetties black as if soaked in creosote through winter — high tide covers that loss again only to hazard the driftwood piers, threatening to flood the rentals masted up on their struts as the vacationers flee with summer — this was how I grew up.

Shoregirt.

Let me reel in that life, like a fishing haul, winching back the lines for concessions, cranking the queues to catch battered flounder, hook pizzas and gyros, burgers and franks, fries like bait, and funnelcake like tangled tackle. Or else, like a gull drops a bivalve to smash its shell, then swoops down to beak up the meat — my memories:

Beachfront, we had resorts too. Hotels and motels. A boatel. Then four blocks in, off the touristed strip, lotto bodegas and pawns. A decent taco drivethru. A gas station.

Another four blocks inland and it’s already the other side of the island, the bayside, where Shoregirt — a city in summer, a town in spring and fall, a village in winter — dwindles into wharves. At the top of the island, sandcastle timeshares, at the bottom, tenements teeming like conches on the verge of being outgrown, kept by chainlink fencing trawling fortybottles, sixpack rings, and butts. The ocean goes in, the ocean goes out, east to west. The boards, the promenade’s planks, curl to crash north to south.

Home was in the axis. Between the two waters, the open ocean, the closed clammed bay. My house, two floors of wind between the shingles. Giving directions, my mother would say, “By the gas station.”

Do I trust myself in this garden state? With the heart all rusted like an abandoned Mister Softee?

To Moms, I’d never be “a beach person.” At best I’d be “a shoebee”—which was as far out as she’d swim into slang: a local term for all the poor Polish Jews who hadn’t moved out of NY and married American, who’d come down the shore for the day with all their necessities — cold leftovers, balms — packed into a shoebox.

My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger — so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.

I’d be sneaking around, then, until my father quit his chemo, and Moms resolved to spend our final family time together by the wake down the street. I dressed in long sleeves long pants long face and brought along whatever I was reading bound in its municipal cellophane.

I’m recalling a stretch of grain as a single day — Dad yelling at me, “Stop that, enough with the words. I have one word for you — Atlantic, get in!”

Kaufman and Laufer were digging moats. The Tannenbaum sisters buried each other. The Gottlieb twins wore baseball mitts on their heads to guide their mother cutting their hair, then they had a catch with their father — not even, their stepfather — while Dad, sclerotic, was sputtering, “Get out there, bodysurf! Goddamn it, ride a wave!”

After that didn’t work, it was, “Here’s a dollar for the games”—the gambles a kid could take, the gambles not even a kid could take. Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole, or the forceps submerging in plush, always surfacing empty.

“I’m too old for that,” I said.

“Leave us, amuse yourself, enjoy.”

Moms said, “Just this once you’ll do this.”

I was 12.

Money meant that Dad had made mud in his diaper.

It must’ve been mortifying for him to have to use wide waddling Moms as a cane, hobbling him under the boardwalk, to change.

Though I was reading I didn’t comprehend all this until after.

“Enough with the book!” and Dad, churning, gathering his strength into swells, threw himself out of his chair and atop me, ripped the book from my hands — a sentence, in the middle of a sentence — and, limping through the froth, threw it to the Atlantic, far out, not far enough out, its pages splayed like an injured pigeon.

The book splashed, and surged, and a wave brought it in and so Dad, wailing, stooped to his soil, picked the book up and tossed it again, but another wave brought it in and again, until he fell by the tidemark — only for Moms to claw for the book before dragging him in.

The book before the husband. I cried the whole way home.

Out amid the spindrift tears, by boardwalk’s midpoint, between Eustasy and Orarian Terraces, there’s a bench: a slatty construction anchored in tar, with a plaque engraved on the back dedicating it to my father, 1924–1984, Yevarechecha Adonay, v’yishmerecha—the inscription translating as badly as a stranger’s dream, or sappy reminisce.

Dubai. If I would’ve drowned off the coast of my childhood, and my body had sunk to the bottom of the ocean as dead as my father’s, this is what that bottom would be like. Truly, the furthest shore. Where there were no poor, and certainly no shoebees. Just children, or the childish. Foreigners whose very foreignness was childish, demanding exorbitant juicy red orange yellow iced quenchers be traipsed to their wombish white caravan cabañas between sucks on their flaring cigars — they’d become adults again only when the bill came.

The Gulf sun does that, it reverts, regresses — unthinkable to be a thinking person amid all this light and heat.

The resort curved up, like a fin or wing, a dhow’s sail giving shadow: Eurotrash littering, their guts and asses and tits heaped rudely, extremities flung out to grip the towel tips, the corners of the plush horizon. The men spilled from their trunks. Hairy but soft, bodies the consistency of flaccid cock, sticky testicles lolling. The women were counterpoised, compensatory, lean, bronzed upgrade wife and mistress trophy, bones propping up the skin tent, shaylas for the bust and crotch, burqinis.

This was a private beach, then, and not cheap. Barbicans segregated it from the public beaches, which segregated themselves by gender — you have to pay for equality.

I stomped to an unclaimed chaiselounge, and ratcheted it back to an obtuse degree, sat, lay — washed up.

I tugged down the visor, repositioned the shades. More Tetration freebies, more items lettered with corporate glyph.

No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced. That basking was making me suspicious — and turning me into my father: Why don’t you diddle a racquet? go fly a kite?

I rummaged through my Tetote — also company complimentary, brimming with brandwater, brandpretzels and chips, “fresh” dates and figs, that commonest variety of nut called “mixed,” yogurt or no, that’s sunscreen — for my Tetbook.

But nothing else was getting written.

Just like it’s impossible to be around words without reading — try not to read the next words as they turn — it’s impossible to be around the naked without gawking.

\

As I closed my Tetbook on a.doc unsaved — it was replaced by another mirage. A bland white guy whiteguying up to me, in flipflops.

He was familiar, but I wasn’t sure how. He had this ambling and amiable coach demeanor, and the agglutinated fatness of the entire Eastern Division of pro football, American football. He was in slumpy trunks and a tanktop from a Beat Leukemia!! 5K race he definitely hadn’t run, and then the tanktop was off, and was over his head like a kaffiyeh. As he settled into the lounger beside mine, his flab extruded between the slats.

He grinned buckteeth and said, “Hiyo,” aggressively genial, content with his content. He produced an identical Tetbook from an identical Tetote, set it in what had to be his lap.

He showed me his, I showed him mine — or just went to remind myself whose was whose: I reopened and, angling my screen away from the glare, and from his glare, went toggling through files.

Kori Dienerowitz, in the copious flesh — Kor Memory — Tetration President, and presidentially sized. What’d prevented me from an immediate ID wasn’t the context, but the dread of him. He was all clicketyclackety, “Crap connection,” dug out the same tube of sunscreen. “Would I be interrupting you to ask a favor?”

“Yes?”

“I have a tough time reaching my back, my shoulders and neck — it’s fine, you can laugh, but would you mind giving me a slather? Strictly hetero, one patriot to another?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Don’t burn me.”

“You’re not going to lie stomach up the whole time?”

“You’re right — a true American would choose a side, but this is a matter of survival.”

“How?”

“Allegiances have changed — tides and times. We live at the pale, the fade of the unmelanized. The white man’s hegemony is over. The future belongs to those who tan, or those so dark they never tan.”

“Doesn’t that leave out the Asians?”

He closed and toted his unit, “If I have to try myself, I won’t be able to work — you have any idea how annoying it is, typing with slick fingers?”

I closed and stowed too, toed my tote closer, as Kor stretched over a shoulder and squirted a lump — a thick chunky load leaking down his back’s already medium rare hairless center and it wasn’t that I wanted to help him, it’s just that I couldn’t bear to witness the trickle. The sheer smooth presence was the goad, that dollop dribbling fusiform, taunting, luridly viscid.

No, not any secretion: the lotion was like a perspiring prophylactic, a condom he wanted me to tug over his pudging — and I tugged, I applied my fingers and thumb, put my wrists behind it. I rolled, twisted, pinched, slapped at his spinelessness, went for the deepest tissue — rubbing whiteness into whiteness as the glabrous pores absorbed, until I couldn’t tell what was zinc and what was just Caucasian.

“Obliged.”

I wiped my hands on the sand, the sand on my shorts, and mentally waded. Pretended to study the lifeguard’s bunker. No lifepreservers, no rowers, but gathered around the bunk the guards chattered into walkietalkies, prodded jellyfish with Kalashnikovs.

“Tell me,” Kor wasn’t asking, “has he mentioned me yet?”

“Who?”

“You’re the genealogist, you figure it out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Good, very good — we can trust you.”

“Who’s we?”

“You know — I’m one of the guys with the creditcard. What’s your beverage — seltzer?”

A beachboy abjected himself, and the order came, “Two big waters with bubbles—975, no, 976 bubbles in each.”

As he scampered I decided, “What brings you to the Emirates?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“We have similar interests,” he said, going through his Tetgear, putting on the shades, the visor.

Just what I needed, another clone. “I guess we have a thing or two in common.”

“Though you’d prefer vodka, and I’m sober. You smoke and I’d never. You’re about to be divorced, or are you trying to reconcile by telecuddle? Making passes at your lady by wifi?”

“Fuck off.”

“Fair enough.”

The resort was a blade that cast darkness to the dial, that clocked. But now there was no time. Now there was no shadow. It was noon, and that great incandescent beachball was directly above. Behind us, far on the elevated concourse, a crowd went about its static, like spray spumed from an unattuned screen. Men in robes, white terry. Women blacked between them. In front of us, the abyss lapped at the corniche, as if gorging out of boredom.

The beachboy brought the seltzers, and Kor tapped the charge away.

“So what’s the point?” to let him sip.

“I’m only trying to stress confidentiality, reminding you how important it is to keep whatever you’re doing to yourself.”

“Genealogy.”

“And just generally making myself available.”

“And you do this by intimidation?”

He burped, let him.

“I’ve been trying to convince the FTC that any protocol we develop that allows our devices to communicate with those of our competitors doesn’t have to allow those of our competitors to also communicate with ours, and so must be regarded as free and clear not just proprietary, but benevolent. I’m hiring an operations guy in Johannesburg, firing an operations girl in Belgrade, mediating a discrimination suit in Ottawa, monitoring coups throughout the Maghreb. China’s about to embargo my ass. Japan has two, count them, two, national intelligence agencies, and they don’t get along, and yet what I’m telling you is, I’ll make time for you.”

“I got it.”

“Tough for the both of us.”

“Yes.”

“Your wife, that actor — stupes.”

Then — I’d like to report an air raid, but no: it was the muezzin. Cutting us off, an ululating breeze.

It was the call to prayer, Dhuhr, and one person, but only one, turned over on his towel to face Mecca. Not east but west.

\

It’s disgusting, how I’ve been managed: the surveillance hut and passport, then this moment’s notice trip — and now to be lubbered up against an intertidal watercooler for office chitchat with Kori Dienerowitz.

That was the straw that broke this camel’s back, to get all local about it.

Roomed again, I opened my Tetbook for the nth time to ensure he hadn’t switcherooed his for mine, and it was automatic — it’s in my hands, or like how my hands breathe — I typed in the address.

Tetra — I didn’t even have to type it fully. The addy autocompleted: tetration.com.

I have, I admit, visited before. It knows me like a good conciergerie, knows me better than my wife.

I checked in on camels (no spitting for them, they “gleet,” and it’s the bactrians that have two backs to break — two humps — while dromedaries have only one), checked up on Rach, who she linked to, who linked to her and left comments and what their comments were and the comments on the comments — We’re always trying to improve our service, Tell us how we’re doing.

The latest post’s latest reaction wasn’t to Rach’s choice of curry joint (a takeout I’d found, which she was claiming she’d found), nor was it an opinion as to whether the best thing about breaking up was that now she was getting a pet (but which? vote below: guinea pig or fuzzy lop bunny, a chinchilla or mink?). Rather, it was just a fuzzy irrelevancy, a spamcurry bot sequitur or whatever, courtesy of username “KORDIE”:

“if yre not 2 busy genealogizing & if yre down 2 continue our convo im hosting recept 4 prince @ 20:00 bani yas suite”

Fuck you in your Bani Yas, Kor Dienerowitz.

But then without intending to I was tetrating that. The Bani Yas were “among the founding tribes of the trucial United Arab Emirates”—another window — I clicked, and kept clicking through the autoloading Burj site if only to keep from tetrating for sites that have never existed: what-do-you-know-about-my-sexual-history.com, which would tell me how intimate Kor had gotten with Rach’s raving, do-you-think-theres-a-pattern.biz, which would tell me whether Kor had been tracking me all along or was just taking a chance on this invitation — if-he-had-been-tracking-me.org might explain why, then-why-invite-me-to-realize-this-so-blatantly.org might explain itself (but there’s always the chance that I was totally misaligned and that somehow msging someone through their estranged spouse’s blog had become a newly permissible mode of communication).

It was the heat on me, it had me clicking through the Burj surveillance feeds: out_beachport, and toggling to where Kor and I had sat, where the sand had no traces of our sitting. Saw the waves. Heard the waves. Streamed the data. The number of miles (km) of beach outside, the number of miles (km) of beach inside. I clicked the in_beachport, to remember an experience I never — membered: the sand set firm under the tanning lights, a gunite wadingpool of water piped in and then waved into froth by machine.

Another toggle, to the four chlorinated lap pools beyond its negative edge, each the size of four Olympics, veritably.

Next, soothing myself, I connected to a tour of the golfcourses both outdoor and indoor, linked around the links. I splitscreened between them and the volley with a robot tennis pavilion. Cricketcam. Wicketcam. The sports snowglobe. Keyed in my room number to find out if I was eligible for discounts on any XXXtreme bungee/skydiving/kitesurfing/jetski/abseiling/assorted parasports “adventures” (I was).

I, who’d actually been in the lobby, could understand the lobby only now, immersing, submerging, and so discovering its décor with a diligence that in fleshlife would’ve required a dubious protracted loiter by the guest services station consulting reference texts on textile history and rubbing lasciviously against the drapery. I could explore the provenance of the provincial antiquities displayed in the perimeter encasements (one I thought was real was a repro, and another I thought was a repro was — guess).

The restaurants I’d never dine at, serving which cuisines at what hours, locations, with directions — with directions from within the resort.

Stats on all the rooms not mine, inclusive of their rates I’d never pay, stats also on their interior design with links to the sites of their interior designers, the furnishings’ brands listed with multicurrency pricing and even the option to “add to my cart” (delivery options, next page).

My experience was beyond the vicarious — I myself was autocompleted (I don’t recall getting dressed and out of the room).

The elevators were each the size of an Emirate, each with its own culture, weather, official tree (ebony paneling), official animal (ebony operator). I took a car from the same bank I’d been taking to Principal’s suite — but passed Principal’s, into the open.

The doors withdrew, as if in the presence of majesty, with every guest a royal, and I found myself in what can only be described as a purple passage: literally a passage of purple mirror etched into damask, tossing petals at my steps across a roofdeck — behind me shafty minarets cupolating with moon for the delectation of the sheikh on the jumbotrons — ahead of me the Gulf and its isles, dredged drifting replicas of all the earth’s landmasses, the Antarctic a sandbar of bulldozers and dumptrucks, Greenland a flurry of speedboat launches.

I took a stairwell of chrome and glass up to a helipad, beyond the roundel of which a tent was pitched and inside the tent was a room. A suite double the size of Principal’s, the standard layout zoomed to enlarge, deep into the fabric of night. Hircine, rough, and nothing to knock. The furnishment was all divans draped in antimacassary, pillow pyres obscuring the brocades beneath. A mixed bag showcase, then, as cluttered as Orientalism, as patchwork pastiched as the choice of whether to relish or critique it. Shelves held alcohol distilled by types, within types, by vsop, xo, cigs American and British.

The mess was hubbed by a vast mannered table, marquetried in fractals of pearl but inlaid with an unmohammadian felt swath for games with cards and dice. It was staffed, but also patronized, by cleancut young achievers.

They were natives, though, and so only nepotistically ambitious, twit sycophants attitudinized by privilege: twentyeightsomething, twentyeightandahalfsomething at the far end where the tentflaps were staked to expose the starlessness.

Kor motioned me to a propinquous tassled tuft. A Slav built like a pole flying a blackstriped bandeau swimsuit like a flag laid out the snifters and cohibas.

The natives were Arabizing and I didn’t understand — anything beyond, they were freaked by the Slav.

“This is Josh,” Kor said. “He’s a biographer, a writer — can any of you name any writers?”

Each member of the fraternity auditioned his own laugh.

“He didn’t mean just American,” I said. “Any Emiratis or Emiris or whatever? Anyone in Arabic?”

Nothing, so I named a few — a few poets, ghazal guys. That gal Scheherazade.

“And these,” Kor intervening, “these are the programmers we were hoping for.”

“Programmers?”

“Apparently we’re negotiating a server facility, and this is the local talent.”

“Is that why we’re here?”

“You tell me.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“Just us and the fauxgrammers — their English gets a D, and I’d bet even that’s better than their C++.”

“And now I’m apparently a biographer?”

Kor patted their cheeks like valets pet the sleek sides of cars, soothing assurance for a smooth ride: “You tell me.”

“Do they at least know how to update a résumé?”

Menus, rivetbound, were passed around, listing not the fare but the etiquette: everything would be sampled. Shareware soup, cybersalad of packetsniffed florettes dusted with a terabyte of truffles. Herbes de POP Palmiers. Tarte à l’Terminal et aux apps.

The fauxgrammers studied, breaking off their fastidiousness only with Kor’s foray: “Any of you familiar with orthogony? Orthonormality?”

They weren’t — they were brainless. They grinned.

“What about mengineering?” Kor pressed on. “Are any of you mengineers? Smellecom experience? B.O.-tech?”

I raised a glass and toasted Kor and the fauxgrammers gladhanded at their glasses to toast him too, or else to keep him from pouring them Krug Brut — only the best for them to abstain from. With his blubbering jollity and tonsure Kor now seemed like a wily friar brewer, like the mascot off a label for cider or ale.

“Did you know our programmers back in the States do all their consumption from a vendingmachine?” he said.

I said, “Did you know they’re also forcibly neutered?”

“Guess who else is staying at the Burj?”

The fauxgrammers kept murmuring, “Burj?”

Kor said that current guests included a girlgroup called Broadband, a catalogue raisonné of Biennial curators. The fauxgrammers were blanking.

“Jerry?” I said. “George? Elaine? Kramer? Omar Sharif? Batman?”

Half the fauxgrammers chinned excitably, “Spidey?”

Kor said, “Stupes.”

A whole roasted lamb — stuffed with lamb sausages, organ and glandbreads, dried fruits and currants, tomato/garlic/onion mush, the entirety cardamomated, corianderized, cumined, cloved — was brought out on a spit, danced around. The carcassbearers were women, further gorgeous bursting Slavs, just as anorexstretched tall as Rach but otherwise her bulimically inverted opposite — modified, with satellite dish breasts of an antennary perkiness. Globoid, global. When a woman’s loveliness was through and the Burj would cast her out to sea to drown into bait or chum anew, only her tits would survive her, nonbiodegradable pouches of saline floating loose to bob in saline, silicone buoys choking dolphins and sharks.

Some Ukes, some Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, Yugos, but the lingua prostituta was Russian. There were only a handful, at first — one for each of the fauxgrammers? leaving two for me given that Kor would go for the drove of slaveboy fauxgrammers themselves? — eventually over a dozen, as women I’d never been around offscreen and without masturbating unfolded their limbs in scopic sections like the stands that steadied amateur A/V equipment.

Their English was better than the fauxgrammers’, was better than any of our Russian — if anyone can ever speak universally, it’s whores: Sveta, Svetka, Svetichka, names getting diminutively girlish by the toast, the dregs upended. Throughout, their protuberances were immovable, their faces paused impassive. A despondent lover might jump from their cheekbones, noosing ropes of waistlength straight hair peroxidized or crude black dyed or both. Sharp stilettos under the vexillological twosies, in the national colors: Abbasid black, Umayyad white, Fatimid green, red spilled of al-Andalus — each piece of each twopiece no bigger than a napkin, stained and tenting in my lap.

Eastern females: there’s something to be said of them definitively and I’ll try for it, allowing the fauxgrammers to get done with dessert, allowing Kor and myself our postprandial brandies — Cognac, Armagnac, liqueurs of French cantons extant only in the cartographies of marketing — to refuse coffee for tea, in homage to our waitstaff.

Chai, chaichick — what among the Arabs has to be cultivated, among the female Slavs grows wild: when young they steep the testicular bag in their tight sugared mouths, when old they turn bitter, sour, take on the silhouettes of rusty samovars, and wrinkle from smoking — as if they stubbed out their cigs on their foreheads — as if, whenever they weren’t drinking their tea, they set their glasses atop their chins to leave behind tepid impressions.

I knew some women like this, knew how to resist them especially, women who with the fall of communism, went west — they were Aaron’s obsession. He had a girl from Brighton, a girl from Forest Hills — give him one each from Staten Island and the Bronx, if just to preserve a sense of socialist equity among the boroughs. Long drives to Long Island, detours into metro NJ, compulsive, he was always ferrying them to Whitehall, ferrying them back to their parents’ apartments slummed so far out in the city that their transit stops were the train muster yards and the bus maintenance lots, returning them nervous, flustered because just fucked, in the Saab convertible fucked, to do mealtime with the folks. Immigrant families, emigrant families, codependent, claustral — Jewish girls unable to make it through dates without their mothers calling, or without expecting Aar to father their children.

They’d invite him up: for bruisey melon and disemboweling kvass, to sit on the sectional en familie and peruse the photoalbums scattered (this is Odessa, this is Kiev, the future mother inlaw, the future father inlaw, as kids), to give a word in Yiddish to the grandparents farting the stripes off their tracksuits in the corner, farschimmelt — Aar always halfway between the parents and grandparents in age — he’d oblige but never return.

The Slav slaves strutting around this aerie harem, this high houri lounge, were different. At the least the one on my lap was. Olya. It’s not just that she wasn’t Semitic, it’s that she wasn’t even Slav, or not fully. She had that Asiatic horde hybridity, that Tatar sauce Mongolic mix. Kazakh, Uzbek. Or from one of the randomer stans where feminine training included not just cooking and cleaning but how to put on a condom with the mouth. Olya, though that was just a conjecture: taut, tensile, cold in her bones, tempered ice, her back blades so severe they sliced against my face, shaving off what stubble I’d grown since — last I’d shaved? today or yesterday? — her ass like a heel crushing my crotch, as two men entered the tent, like they owned the place, or were about to burn it down.

\

Spend enough time with the überrich and spotting the bodyguard species becomes a cinch — they’re almost physically inhuman: the legs of a police thoroughbred, the torso of a firetruck, the arms of a steroidal ape, steeringwheel heads set on no appreciable necks — noctivagant, and foul of mood.

There are two ways these specimens dress for the wild: one is to differentiate themselves from the party they’re supposed to protect, while the other’s to blend with him or her, choosing camouflage similar or same. Designer pelts. Couture pelage. Pistols by Glock.

The latter’s the classier adaptation — Jesus and Feel, a floor below, dressed down because Principal dressed down, presenting a uniform exterior of exclusive brandwear.

But these two had opted for the former. They were gangstafied as turf enemies, one cripped in blue doorag, blue puffy over blue beater and blue jeans slung to show the blue briefs between, the other blooded in red flatbrim, red puffy over red soccer jersey and matching shorts as long as pants, all for a counterfeit team — the San Francisco 94ers.

Nothing made less sense than the duffelsized puffies — nothing made more, when the crip punched a console and the blood kicked a vent, activating the AC.

The tent whirred, Olya’s areolas poked.

The gangbangers had bags from the dutyfree, tokens to distribute. They hulked around the table, handing each fauxgrammer a filigreed manacle of a watch in the souk dreck style, oudh in a glass spritzer blown into the borders of the UAE, both labeled “un souvenir pour votre femme/ein Souvenir für Ihre Frau.” Also a trackpad. In the style of a Bedouin rug replete with nonslip rubber backing.

As they went dexter, another man made the rounds sinister — the bodyguards’ body, their charge.

I hadn’t noticed his entrance, and not because I was so taken with my — what was it? an electrophoretic shatterproof Sinai tablet?

The olive beret, plumped as if to give him height, just made him even slighter, twee. A bad narco’s crinkled white linen suit became, in the climatized bluster, inappropriately lightweight. Sockless. In little tiny loafers.

He had a temperature problem, obviously. There was a seethe in his greetings he didn’t intend. He sweated, dousing each obeisance. One kiss to one cheek in America, one to each cheek in Europe, whereas in the Emirates, or just to him, it was a threepeat, with a return to the cheek of origin.

Or four, with a kiss to Olya’s scalp — he was leaning so close to me it would count as a hug in any culture.

Everyone was standing but me — Olya was standing, preventing me — everyone had bowed.

Kor, minister of whores — man with tricks up his portfolio — sunk so low his gut scraped crumbs off the table.

“Salam alaykum.”

“Wa alaykum salam.”

A director’s sling was produced, hinged out for the sitting — it was the highest chair around, and the fauxgrammers lumped around as he spastically scaled it.

“What do you say, Prince?” Kor asked. “How’s my Arabic?”

“It’s like we grew up together, quite,” the prince said. “Oxbridge? Le Rosey?”

Kor laughed.

“And my IT Emiris,” the prince went on, “how progresses their English pronouncement?”

I chewed a cohiba. “Quite.”

The prince frowned and Kor to the rescue, “If you’re just as generous at hosting servers as you are at hosting us, we might have ourselves a deal.”

“I am chuffed to be considered. To conduct this facility — this cluster.” Then he Arabized and the Emiris blushed into full cups. Zam-Zam colas, Mountain Dews.

What I knew at the time: there was a king, and the king had sons, and so there was a line, but not like of foaming techies camped outside select retailers just to overpay for an undertested Tetheld 4. Rather a line that stretched for eternities, for grudges — throneward.

I took this prince and his presence at this function to communicate the succession: the son at the head of the pipeline would handle the oil, the next son would handle the gas, the son after that the shipping, and only the next after that would get online — and if that’s who he was, he could afford, perhaps, to act princely — depraved.

His protection placed before him a heavy cutcrystal decanter, poured him a tumbler he gulped clear down — either a louchey anisette or a malarial water. I prayed for water.

Emirati royalty, what could I know: his father was the sheikh, or one of the sheikh’s brothers, whether the crown prince or another. He himself might’ve been the son crowned with a PhD, administering the free trade zones in Fujairah and Sharjah, or the son with a MEcon, or MEng, developing a transhub in Ajman. Or he’d been the prodigal abroad, who’d tried to stick it to every busted ugly daughter of the 20th Earl of Diddlesex, before being recalled and betrothed to a Qatari sheikha who’d never had a wax. Or the son accused of a homicide that became a suicide only when the bank transfer went through. Or the cerebrally defective son still favored over his sisters, who were mere baubles like their mothers. Like all their mothers, who, if not sisters to one another, were otherwise related.

He might’ve been any of them, or none. He had some of that sheikhy jumbotron to him — some of that lizard snout, but then lizards are all snout — darting, sensing.

He said, “I trust my Burj you find sufficient in terms of modcons, nothing dodgy.”

I almost expected a tongueflick, a forked tongue flick, when his protection served his dinner.

Goblet refilled and drained again.

I said, “To be honest, Prince, I’ve been having trouble accessing certain sites.”

“Which?”

“American sites, mostly. Politics, mostly.”

“Only such?”

“Only.”

“Cheeky,” the prince said and then Arabized and the fauxgrammers chuckled.

Kor tried to join them but just showed teeth.

The prince asked, “So what politics have you been craving? I will do everything I can to accommodate requests.”

“Nothing in particular — just the sense that I’m not blocked, is all.”

“You are saying you are blocked — at the Burj? Or in all the Emirates?”

“Forget it.”

“I will not. This is unacceptable. What is it you lack? Certainly not cunt?”

“What?”

“Cunt — or do you prefer to pleasure yourself alone?”

“I don’t follow, Prince.”

“Bollocks. You have the real right here — right now — but all you crave is fake?”

“I don’t, Prince.”

“You Americans always think you have such progress — you think that you are libertized and the Emirates are not? That the Emirates censor and you do not? Wankers. What you have to search for online in your country, in my country is already found.”

Kor said, “He’s sorry,” and then he said to me, “Apologize.”

“For what?”

The prince Arabized to Olya, who genuflected and leched away from me, to lift his dinner’s cloche.

What was exposed: two rawly moist strips of bacon as skimpy as the two elastic strips that gripped her, and as she reached French tips out to grab one, the prince smacked her hand, and Olya shivered, flushed baconcolored, and the fauxgrammers gasped.

Kor said, “What?”

The prince said, “This is not for her — she must keep her figure.”

Kor said, “Forgive us, Prince.”

Then the prince pointed at me, “Here, you have the honor of tasting. Tell me it is good, tell me it is salty.”

“If you please, Prince, I’d rather not.”

“Do not worry, you cannot botch this. Tell me how scrummy it is — I can smell it.”

“Taste it yourself,” just a suggestion.

“But this honor is yours — it might be poisoned.”

“So feed it to your thugs.”

“They eat what I tell them to. Animals must not eat other animals.”

“Go ahead, enjoy.”

“You.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are a Jewish — you must be.”

“And you’re Muslim — pork isn’t for you.”

“So I am accurate — you are a Jewish — but not religious? Is it for religion that you refuse?”

“No, not that, I just don’t like being coerced. I don’t like having my face rubbed in another man’s dinner.”

“But this is soy, this is curd, imitation.”

“So we shouldn’t have a problem.”

“We should not,” and he unsheathed a dagger — hilt all bedizened with precious twinklings — cut the fake meats in half, stabbed each slice into his mouth, then set the glistering blade pseudogristled on the table.

“A bad habit from abroad,” he said. “All my education it was bacon, hams, and sausages, but here it is back to the soy. Do you not think, Jewish, that religions are quite like soy, like tofu? You let the good natural essence curdle, until what is left is without taste, a substitute?”

“Prince, how can I argue?”

“You are a Jewish, yes, but also of Israel?”

Kor said, “He’s not, Prince.”

I interrupted, “Fuck — you’re Kori fucking Dienerowitz. And his boss just below us is also a Jew.”

The prince thumbed at his neck.

Kor said, “But only my father’s a Jew — so technically I’m not.”

The prince turned and groped Olya, who’d been leaning on his chairback.

“Israel,” he said. “Jewish, indulge me.”

“I won’t,” I crossed my arms, my personal cutlery.

“Indulge me and say this woman is Israel — can we agree? Foot to head, this woman, Israel, yes?”

“Isn’t that demeaning?”

“According to who demeaning? Later you will fuck her and that will be demeaning but now she serves a purpose.”

“Demeaning to fucking Israel too, I meant.”

“Negev to Golan — how would you distribute?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You want me to cut?” again he brandished the dagger.

“Enough.”

“Do you want me to cut her? Be serious.”

“I don’t know — I’d probably give her away, all of her, you can always find a new one.”

“No, you cannot, this is the rub. This is the only one we both want, we both want her whole. What do we do? What say the Israelis?”

“We share?”

Olya, who understood I’d say about half — cut, divided in her comprehensions — trembled.

“I am the host and you are the guest, it is my hospitality so it is you tonight and me tomorrow? Or we try to coexist, bugger her at the same time the two of us?”

“We could. But I think we should let her off. A woman isn’t land. Affections aren’t an issue of territory.”

“They are the only territory. The Israelis think this. They say here, the Jewishes take the knocker tits and holes, the cunt and bum, the oases. And here, the elbow, the shoulder, the knee — my arse — the Arabs take the desert, quite.”

“You said Jews — and it’s not Arabs, it’s Palestinians.”

“The same — or not even the knees, but the more rubbish parts, the pinkie or thumb, the mingy hair, the cropless arid cellulite portion — that is what you do.”

“Not what I do.”

“But what say the Arabs?”

“The Palestinians.”

“We accept, we compromise — we say have the holes, the reproductives, have it all foot to head, even the face, just leave us with the navel.”

“The face you hide under veils because you’re too weak to resist?”

“The face we conceal out of respect.”

“And you fuck instead the Russians?”

“And we fuck instead the Russians — and we take our electronics from Asia, our online from America. We agree, assent, assure bloody right we will be your ally against terror, bloody right we will cooperate with your trade agreements, your military drones — bloody right all your energy needs will be met, even though bloody right all your foreign debt obligations will never be met — bloody right a stable industry because bloody right a stable government.”

“Stable because oppressive, Prince — stable because allowed to be.”

“Jewish, we are not Africa. Arabs are European — we believe in bargaining — we haggle.”

“Prince, yours is a theocracy criticizing a republic, a monarchy critiquing a democracy. Anyway, arguing the Emirates is different from arguing Jerusalem.”

“But it is not — regardless of our government you would treat us the same, it is politically expedient. If six million Emiris suddenly settled your America, policy would change in a snap.”

“I’m not convinced.”

“You are already convinced — you came from a failing empire to this desert, only to take advantage of us, quite — then it is back home to a second mortgage and the one woman marriage.”

“Not for me.”

“But just like you wank online and never touch, you preach a freedom you never practice. Your libertization is a fiction, which must be maintained so that particular pressures can be exerted upon particular regimes, in order to deprive them of their resources. What Israel does, what Jewishes have always done, is just perpetuate this lie. In the media especially. This falsehood is not just your god but also your idol. You are enslaved to it, and so you enslave us too.”

The prince, still holding Olya, stood, shoved her to the floor, where she huddled, heaved.

The weapon’s sharpness outglinting its jewels.

He wasn’t going to cut her empty head off, he didn’t have that in him, though he might’ve been capable of severing a toe. Instead, abruptly, he sheathed the dagger, and staggered out, his thuggery trudging behind him.^†

://

† This dagger would be the very last thing I’d tetrate — later, in Berlin, on an overcast noon at the Staatsbibliothek (library). Everything following this note was written entirely from my head, entirely out of what I know and think and saw and heard, without any technological verification, or direction. Any slips are solely my own. Correx and/or corrigenda may be sent but not received. The prince’s dagger was a khanjar, a scythey, severely curved — verging-on-90°-curved — weapon, reminiscent of a penis at rest. Khanjarha (the plural) are carried “in a[n] ivory or leather scabbard and decorated with jewel, gold, silver, etc., etc., worn on a belt similar[ly] decorated.” While the hilts of the most precious specimens are of rhinoceros horn, more common hilts are of sandalwood or marble. Design variations — hilt type, # of rings attaching scabbard to belt — denote different privileges enjoyed by the wearer. Though the steel used to fashion the blade was traditionally Yemeni, its ornamental silver was obtained, at the turn of last century, by melting down thalers, a popular bullion issue of Austro-Hungary. The prince’s model was gold or heavily gilded, its hilt definitely horny.

~ ~ ~

Insomnia, nausea.

Shit.

— I’ve been having some name grief — I don’t mean with my homonym, or Tetwin, but with the aliases we’ve been registered under. All standard operating procedure, of course, and it was fun though somewhat defamiliarizing initially to be calling down to the reception desks and have them say, “Fine day, Mr. Immermann,” or, “Bonsoir, M. Yaarsky.” Though it’s not obvious that any of this duplicity would be effective for celebrities of the first results page rank, who if they’re staying anywhere, even at the Burj, would certainly be noticed by employees, and then it’s just a matter of when the tip’s called in, to the press crews, or the protestors. It seems, then, that the only guests for whom this handling would make sense wouldn’t be recognizable by face, but only by name: the primeval way of being famous.

— An indication of the failure of our aliases is that neither Jesus nor Feel can keep them straight, checking Principal in under what mine was last, and checking me in under what’d been Principal’s (the ultimate indication is that none of this fooled Kor). Myung’s the one who picks them, the aliases, and so she’s the one to ping as to whether I’d become “Moises Binder,” meaning that Principal was “Chaim Apt.”

Think back to the time my name was still mine, all those aughts ago: 1999. Think of my feelings, as online associated me with people with whom I shared that name, and yet nothing else. Idempotent nomials, mutual onomasticators, whose lives would otherwise never have disappointed or cheered (me), or even been counted (against mine). I’ve spent my whole entire virtual experience subordinate to Principal, reloading my name as it became his, reloading it into becoming his — but it’s only now that I can regret my collaboration: that the more I clicked on him, the more he became me and I became nobody.

It’s no neat psych trick to explain why I’m reliving this now — the anticipations, the anxieties, all the dreamshit especially — with the traveling I’m doing, the traveling for a book, interviewing again, gathering materials.

This was in Poland, fall/winter 1999, and I was driving, for research, not lost, asking in Krasnystaw how to get to Piaski, asking in Piaski how to get to Krasnystaw, asking this goitrous streetsweeper for directions to whichever town I’d just left only to calm her hostile claim that the destination I was originally asking for never existed: the Trawniki concentration camp, which I was sure was midway between them, Krasnystaw, Piaski. But the only thing between them was a sign for the highway to Chełm, and on my last pass through, as the road narrowed to a toppled chimney of darkness, I turned, and found myself trapped by the snuffed timber and thatch of what might’ve been a granary, and I stopped and got out to piss.

I dropped trou in the weeds, above a septic depression rimmed by moon and the headlights of my rental Daewoo. Just as I unleashed my stream I noticed the stones, I was pissing on the stones, a cemetery of nubby slabs askew and overgrown, desecrated by the weather or Poles, and just ahead was my own, it was my gravestone, rather it was a sandstone marker belonging to Yehoshuah ben David Ha-Cohen, whose dates had been abrased yearless though the rest was still legible, Adar 14–Tevet 4. This wasn’t just my Hebrew name, but also the deathday was the same as my birthday by the Hebrew calendar. By the time I’d made the calculations I was trickling. Zipping, buttoning up. Yiddish might have a word for “both strange and expected,” or German, “expectedly strange”: the banality of names, the banality of numbers (I went to make a rubbing but it didn’t take) (and my camera’s flash was broken).

\

Archaeology — that’s what I’m doing in the Emirates — what else is there to do in the desert? except excavate through bone and bed, toward a terminal stratum, an inaccessible anticline depth? I won’t fully love a woman unless I’ve done this, unless I’ve dug between her legs. A site. I have to wave my spade around seeking the who and where and when of her. Who was here, or there. First, last, longest, shortest. The Chaldeans? The Sumerians or Akkadians, Assyrians or Babylonians? One of the Canaanite tribes, like the Moabites? Or just a bluechip Jewish Philistine from Central Park West?

This was my field — I’d fuck someone new, some casual bar score from Barnard, or The Factchecker for Bloomberg News, who held that title for an unprecedented 1994–98, and the moment I was finished, with her lying next to me unsatisfied or in the bathroom already flushing and clitting off, I’d be asking about her partners, asking what she liked, what she didn’t, and if she’d answer at all it’d be abashedly — but still I’d press, barter, bribe, shovel atop my own carnalities, overplaying myself until my mid-20s, downplaying intensively by 30, not because I was so experienced, just wiser. But then by that age my women were too, and they understood and manipulated my appetite. Giving me the grittiest on exactly precisely how many men they’d fucked before me, how many times and in what locations for what durations, simultaneously, or separately, ages, races, physiques, with what appendage sizes in which positions in which orifices — was it good? who was better? grand total of orgasms? their intensities? and whatever their pasts, I’d suffer through them, until I’d find the strength to live up to them.

Which was the thing with Rach — with her I dug harder than ever, and turned up all of what? Comedy club stubs from dates she’d had with retirement age tax lawyers and radiologists, a taxi receipt in return from a tryst with her graymaned counterpart at a competing agency, the baggy condom of a dentist and family friend.

They treated her like an equal, that’s what she swore — that’s the truth of it. Just like everything she writes for her campaigns is true — it has to be. The best electronics won’t obsolesce with their production. The top refrigerator/freezers won’t expire before the eggs inside them. The acclaimed bouncy bath toy will never suffocate a child. Rach, of the monochrome suits, the locavore dairies and cauline greens, the classes in bhangra, hatha yoga, and the Audi whose space rented for twice my office — her talent was for enthusiasm, with a specialty in revisionism, in her men as in her ads, and if she didn’t find the explanations she was after, up at a client’s HQ, or down in its labs, in the market testings, or at the brandjob rounds of her fellow creatives, she didn’t hesitate to invent.

\

History has always privileged the civilization — shunning nomadism, tribalism, all the existential bachelorhoods.

A people’s legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn’t a relationship unless it’s left behind its trash.

Knives, forks of diverse tines, spoons, a ladle. Shards, sherds — from the same or different pots? did this dish catch the spray of human sacrifice or was it used to prepare a corny gruel (I had similar quandaries at the fancier spots in London and Paris)?

Impossible to grasp the development of the handle: that improvement that made handheld blades of basalt, which before had cut only the closest things, now cut violently at a distance, as axes, spears, and arrows — the handle, the innovation that made vessels move. Impossible to come to grips with how its perfectability endures: the wheel becoming the halfwheel of the handle? metaphorized into the handle that posts and chats, gropes virtually?

In that sense, women, vessile women, posed a threat.

The wife I was supposed to fuck, but had no desire to fuck, had no handles (ancient, modern), whereas the nonwife I wasn’t supposed to fuck, but had this uncontrollable desire to fuck immediately in one of the Met’s least frequented galleries—#547 for the bergère, the #400s of Mesopotamia, rattling the ewers in American Wing parlor interiors — had an abundance of handles: she had a waist and clefts, posterior juts, a jug’s taper beneath the jugs, and it was death to decide which to hold, and how (very ancient, very modern).

Once Lana wrote an essay for an exhibition catalog, which means I helped, inhibited. The show concerned an archaeological controversy, and presented a pair of prehistoric remains from Chile’s Atacama found intact, but evincing no sign, or no “evident sign,” as we phrased it, “of having been purposefully mummified or otherwise preserved.”

The remains were of a man and wife, a couple, presumably, and, if so, their serene condition was doubly inexplicable. Some scholars pointed to the geochemical composition of the quebrada cavern they’d been found in/buried in, something to do with salts. Others pointed to the holes bored into their skulls, as being too alike to have been the cause of their deaths, and to the fragments of hair found in the brain cavity of the male, which defied all tests until one finally identified them as a llama’s. Our walltext, at least, had no agenda — it just stated the case, the state of the research, the arguments for and against intentionality, cagey.

\

My own Pharaonic entombment, a Caliph Suite at the Burj:

— clothing, the basics concierged in Paris from American Apparel, from London an outrageous suit in barcode gingham, an albion basketweave shirt, and a tie frauding me in the regimental colors of the First Royal Dragoons, Savile Row.

— a cache of Europorn, bilingual and lesbically bisexual, purchased in London and Paris (Great Windmill & Brewer, Soho, Rue des Archives, Fourth Arrond.), after Aar had emailed a reminder that the Emirates curtailed access to certain niche haunts online, which didn’t stop me from tempting that access: trying workarounds, proxy IPs, any way to evade (any way not to consult Principal).

— purchased from the dutyfree, four cartons of cigs (Camel Lights), and a bottle each of scotch, whiskey, and vodka (I’ll identify the vodka, which was Gorbachev, which was horrid), after Cal had emailed that the Arabs who’d invented it — al-Cohol — now sell it only to foreigners, not in bottles but by the bankrupting glass.

— one pill left in the bottle of Ativan, a half going to gauze in the bottle of Xanax (the tradenames for lorazepam and alprazolam, which remind me of genie or djinni incantations, abracadabra, alakazam).

— a candybar, put on a creditcard, a receipt for a $6 candybar (Toblerone the size of an alpenhorn).

— two pairs of shoes, dressy and less, an unmatched aquasock crept in, Dad’s watch.

— a wallet I haven’t much used, keys to an apartment I’ll never use: W. 92nd 2 br/ba, prewar/newly renovated, move-in condition, spare room prefurnished with a crib and daubed in a pink that insists on not just a baby but a girl, even as Broadway dawn and Hudson dusk ensanguines.

— travelbag with matching toiletrykit, which were wedding presents? from whom?

— Tetbook, have to mention the Tetbook.

— two books besides the Koran.

I’d noticed when heading beachward — copies are given away in the lobby for gratis. I want to hoard heaps of these, cairns and dolmens of these — I want to die in this facility wrapped in a rabbinic beard as quilly soft as this duvet so that when Security (dial 0) slams down the door I’ll be buried under this monument: 1,001 Korans.

://

9/9, HOTEL PALACE KHALEEJ, ABU DHABI

total time of Principal recordings: 168:53:51 (the amount of time a Jewish male is alive before he’s circumcised)

total number of Principal.Tetrec files: 72 (the number of names of the Jewish God)

their size: 3.5 GB (the Jews fled Dubai for Abu Dhabi in the year 3.5 GB)

their content: This Agreement imposes the same obligations upon Joshua Cohen 2 with respect to Information or any information derived therefrom that (a) was available to Joshua Cohen 2 prior to the time of its receipt from Joshua Cohen 1, (b) is or becomes publicly available through no express fault of Joshua Cohen 2, (c) is received by Joshua Cohen 2 from a third person/party with/out a duty of confidentiality, (d) is disclosed by Joshua Cohen 1 to a third person/party with/out a duty of confidentiality, (e) is disclosed by Joshua Cohen 2 to any agents and publishers and their employees with Joshua Cohen 1’s approval as covered under the agent and publisher NDA [“NDA 2”] and Section 2 of the Contract.

Failure to comply with the above will result

The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, for consumption to consume us. London’s just around the corner, a floor up or down, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, and so bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, consumption to consume. London’s just around the corner, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

The time/distance required for luxuries to become staples, wants to become needs. London’s just around the corner, Paris can be ordered, ensuite. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

The time/distance required for luxuries to become staples, wants to become needs. London’s just around the corner, Paris can be ordered. Our access is bewildering. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

Principal thrives on consistency.

Every accommodation, each site of a sessh, has quartered his Buddhas, and patchouli wafters, the tantra appurtenances: vajra and ghanta, mandala.

Vajra: a small bolt capped with pins like an antique mainframe’s vacuum tube. Ghanta: a small bell that dinged histrionically. Both objects of contemplation. Brass.

Mandala: a large papyruslike scroll psychedelically emblazoned with a square pierced by four gateways shaped like Ts that grant access to a circle of four subsidiary squares whose plenitude of applications and meanings — including directing meditation and symbolizing the universe — I can only slight by explanation.

Anyway, responsibility for this domestic Dharma fell to Myung.

She was our prepper, and her mysterious tesseractical talent was for already being at every destination before us, despite leaving after us — having all of Principal’s surroundings broken down in one country, only after he’d departed, and set up in another country, before he’d even arrived — as if she’d transcended aircraft for teleportation.

She was in Dubai before us, she was in Paris and London before they were founded — it was like she had multiple Buddhas, it was like she was multiple Myungs. Each with her own white bodystocking, ballet flats, the lobes dangling unattached, which is rare for an Asian, the epicanthic folds enclosed in aviators with barely a nose to hang them on, @ stud in a nare, arachnidan henna across the hands, hair granted extensions hanging coaxial to the waist, clipped at the sides with barrettes of memorysticks.

An advancewoman, front female, avant of the entourage, a vanguard of one, furnishing Principal’s life just a leg ahead of its living, ensuring that anything he would have to adjust to, instead adjusted to him.

Never once since I’ve been with Principal has he commented on his immediate surroundings — nothing about transit facilities, or life beyond windows, climates and biota of disparate timezones. But then it was Myung’s job to ensure he wouldn’t have to. She enabled his detachments. Whether they were from religious principle, or developmental disability, or just the preference of his richness. She was the caretaker of his temples, his travel agent along the autism spectrums, specifying to the relevant guestologists his linen requirements (Mitetite® sheets, 1200 sateen, 2.6 micron pore size, no pillows, no comforters), conforming lighting fixtures to house style (Ecoxenon® bulbs, which would outlast the combined lifespans of all subsequent occupants). Consult attached specs on installing alkalizing purifiers on the taps, bath/shower inclusive, Alqua®, on installing the airfilter of choice, Hepass®. Arrange Gaston’s salt block, spiralizer, dehydrator, soak/sprout set. Arrange Lavra’s resistance bands, plyo harness, quigong bolster, tabata stool. Even unpacking, herself, Doc Huxtable’s protein machine, the vial valise of cytokine boosters. Move all media outroom (no draping). Remove telephones/computers (remove jacks, no draping). Just so that with Principal’s appearance he’d be able to function as if he had no preferences, no demands, whatsoever.

A bustling recreatrix — who’d left in each one of my rooms a fresh pack of appropriate adapters/converters.

The UK plugs are bulky, rigid, threepronged with two up top, that absurdly big grounding knob at bottom — indicative of a bulky, rigidly grounded country? or a country ridiculously overcompensating, seeking to overpenetrate, for lost power? The French plugs are expectedly more attractive, softer, rounder, twopronged but with a hole at bottom because the grounder, in France, is not incorporated into the plug itself but into the socket — indicative of a more attractive, softer, rounder country? or a country that surrenders its hole and enjoys it?

The Emirates are equipped for both.

The time was a beseechment between Isha, the prayer to be said after the sun’s red recording light has faded from the sky, and Fajr, the prayer to be said at the pulsing return of its luminance.

I kept getting roused out of sleep by a dream or a line memory, which had me backtracking all the way to Palo Alto — through tracks I never imagined having to Play, I can’t imagine transcribing, rewriting, being read. Rewinding and Playing again: “[…] the time/distance required for luxuries to become staples, wants to become needs. London is just around the corner, Paris can be ordered,” “[…] wants to become needs. London is just around the corner, Paris can be ordered. Bewildering. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.”

A knock at the door interrupted, and Jesus let himself in like in an extraordinary rendition, which it was. Except there wasn’t any chloroform towel, the pillowcases stayed on the pillow, under my head and smothering it “in quotes.”

He wouldn’t let me pack myself, but it wasn’t a security measure, it was a haste thing. He rolled my bag for me.

Feel was in the lobby with a single suitcase.

Principal had either ditched, or forgotten, his toupee. In his hand was a begging bowl from the buffets.

\

I’m not sure I understood what, but something got screwed up with our transport: something about how we were supposed to leave from an auxiliary garage, but how as an extra precaution Jesus and Feel had waited until now to inform the Burj concierge, who was apologizing that our transfer had already been routed out front and the auxiliaries all reserved for the impending visit of the ruler of whichever nation had a white flag with a crown and a serrated edge, waving.

So while Feel and Jesus tried to hash out a compromise in a way that kept the concierge from alerting his supervisor, and I turned my head for just a moment to rustle for my drugs — Principal got impatient and wandered unattended.

The dudes in turbans and S&M leather and chains slouching across the lobby must’ve been affiliated with that visiting ruler as like valet dungeonmasters, or executioners. Because they weren’t doormen: the doors were automatic, sliding glass.

Principal was heaving himself over the gul rug and Burj medallion until, just as he was about to crash into the glass, he stopped — the panes wouldn’t part for him, his presence wasn’t sensed, and he was shocked. He barely even had a reflection, just the ghost of a ghost, of an insatiable paling, and an amniotic and alien baldness.

Then the sadomaso dudes mobbed him, and bowed to him, and their bows were detected, and the doors stood aside. Jesus and Feel, just sprinting up, dropped their hands from their holsters.

Outside, and into the heatblast. Convoys of Range Rovers and Escalades were idling, and whether Feel or Jesus or the dispatch itself was to blame, ours was the black tacky stretch prom limo.

The chauffeur — Afric, vitiliginous — tried to wheel my wheelie but Jesus refused him. He tried to take the suitcase from Feel and Feel handed it over with a palmful of dollars that if they didn’t buy the limo itself bought the right to drive it.

Jesus rode shotgun reading directions off his Tetheld.

We had no sirened escort or motorbike gang — just speed, lanechanges without a signal, tires bucking us unpaved.

Principal, throughout, was just this loosely seatbelted breathing, which intensified with and then surpassed the AC, by a mindful circulation, simultaneous in and exhalation like he was resuscitating himself nose to mouth. I sat alongside him and bumped knees with the chauffeur sitting abstracted and sad on the opposite banquette.

A sign put Dubai airport one way, 20 km, Abu Dhabi airport the other, 100 km — as one airport ended, another began, with nothing between.

Construction sites, stalled. Construction completed in the style of stalled. The cranes indistinguishable from the towers they built. For sale or lease or rent, both the towers and the cranes. The sky was blue. The lights were green. Until, at Port Saeed, traffic honked stopped. A yacht had floated off a flatbed. A sideloader’s shipping containers barged by the guardrails. Gulf Navigation, Hanjin, Maersk, P&O Nedlloyd.

Helicopters hopped and buzzed like locusts over Al Quds Street. Baggagetrains wormed through the snail drips of refueling tankers. The tarmac was uneven, as if asphalt had been poured directly over the dunes, the airplane hangar an oasis, roof planted with radar fronds. We slowed, and stopped, and just left the limo running, the doors ajar and the chauffeur sitting amid all that calfskin and burnished trim, and as I walked under the hangar’s ribs, I turned — he was still in the limo, just sitting, hands brooding gloved by his flanks.

This wasn’t our plane, but was — it was the same but Kor’s, Tetjet Two. Another shrewdly nibbed Gulfstream 650.

An Arab in a spotless salafi jumpsuit that marked him as foreman sprung at us with a folder of paperwork, and went up between Jesus with our bags and Feel escorting Principal shaky on the airstairs.

I lit a cig, procrastinating. Bibbed mechanics flipped wrenches. The rest of the groundcrew sat around on a conveyor. That the scars of their faces were different might’ve meant their tribes were different, or their troubles.

The foreman returned and I assumed he was going to have me put out my cig, but he bummed one, and as I was lighting him he said, “Next time you give advance notice? Avoid rush charges?”

As I boarded I popped the last of my pharmacopoeia. My beverage choice wasn’t a choice, kombucha or lukewarm Corona.

I sat across from Principal — I wondered which seat was Kor’s. Between Feel and Jesus we had at least one pilot, apparently.

Principal lotused his legs, and wedged them under the armrests, the arms at rest, he was breathing into becoming breath, he was ridding himself of ballast.

The Burj bowl was overturned in his lap.

Samadhi — I don’t know if that’s how to spell it — iddhi — I don’t even know what that means, what it can mean to the spiritual.

I’ve never subscribed to the miraculous: a Samaritan turns water to wine with artificial colorants, tugs extra fishes and loaves out of bottomless hats, a leper dances across water in shoes with stilts attached. Still, of all the miracles of all the religions, Buddhism’s are the only ones that make sense to me, because they’re the only ones I’ve at least technologically experienced — seeing over long distances, hearing over long distances, passing unimpeded through walls, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the self — and especially, levitation: going up, and staying up for a bit, coming down.

Principal did this every time we flew but this meditation must’ve been especially focused. Or it’s just that I had nothing else to notice. The portals were shaded. Principal rumbled in a fluent enginese — either Sanskrit or Pali.

The self must be escaped, or ejected. The fuselage must be cleared for takeoff, and the wings must become mere excrescences. Heavy metal on the ground becomes airborne, hollowboned birdflight, featherlight. A vessel for impurity becomes a vessel for purity, without claim to creed or even the corporeal.

Principal chanted, but this time did a version translated for me: “Dwell so that the above is below — shed skin, go, pass organs, go, shit, piss, bile, phlegm, blood, sweat, and fat, go, go.”

We went — Principal disburdening for lift, and lifting us weightless.

Until — I felt this genitally — the landing gear deployed. We were back on the ground in about 18 to 20 minutes.

“Dwell so that the below is above,” Principal still aloft even as the wheels skidded, skipped, and the semaphores yielded.

He left his bowl, bottom up, in his seat.

\

I’m not sure how to write about this, not sure whether to still be writing at all — I’ve been trying to screen and block so much out, so many confidences throughout, classified stuff, government stuff, might even get me imprisoned stuff, that it’s become systemic with me, to the point that I find myself trying to withhold on this confession even. Principal’s mouth wired to my ears, his eyes becoming mine, a monitor, a common prompt between us blinking, unblinking, at this sense of having become so irrecordably joined that the only way not to write about him is not to write about myself. I’ll have to spread and type around. Furl and reach between Del and Esc.

I’d been hoping that this diarizing here would be for me what our sesshs have been for Principal — a reckoning — and that the role he’d play in this would resemble my own in his: a standard, a measure, irrelevant where ignorant, relevant when desired, and if intrusive then only as a punctuating mantra, Am, Em, Im, Om. I guess, um, the difference, um, is that I’m the one who’s getting paid, and already in breach of contract by this acknowledgment.

We were alone, but if I can’t get into why, I’ll have to turn that omission into a virtue, like the way handicaps are treated, or like scriptural restraints. At least what I’m omitting is professional, nothing personal.

Am, Em, Im, Om.

We were in Abu Dhabi, having been checked into the Hotel Palace Khaleej under our names assumed, and ensconced for a sessh in Principal’s preposterous enfilade, which even with its crazy brecciations and carats and enough room in each closet to sepulture the shame of it, was empty. Rather it was disarranged, like the qtips weren’t in their dedicated holder, and the glasses on Principal’s face weren’t the unhinged rimless squares that he preferred and anyway were grubby, and there were no protein potion or granulocyte macrophage booster shot reminders, and there were no potions or shots without reminders. He’d left Myung behind in Dubai, along with the rest of the away staff, our normalcy. I’m fantasizing they’re all helping dismantle that topfloor temple at the Burj, and demolishing its idols.

Now it was just Feel’s toothaches, Jesus and his restlessness about not being able to contact his wife, who was pregnant.

At the courtesy call for Asr (that prayer recitable in this season at this latitude between ca. 15:45 and 18:15), Principal told me I was sleepy, which meant he was. I asked the time of our next meeting, I asked what time he had to meet the sheikh, but he was asleep in his chair — I didn’t take off his sandals.

I retoted and let myself out, relieved Feel from sentry. Jesus was out making a phonecall, or as Feel said with kulfi popsicle lips and a mordant stick between them, “encrypted phonecall,” which, as a status update, I interpreted as twitchy.

I went out to the elevators, pressed the only button, the down, until it turned into a fiery bindi — if only salvation were as summonable as an elevator, if only redemption were just a mechanical designation, an assignment. The doors closed behind me, and I swiped my keycard, which was coded for floor access, for room access — rubbed, and blew on the black stripe, rubbed, swiped again — demagnetized, which is what happens to everyone who works with laptops, I guess, they lose their hair and muscle tone and magnetism.

None of the other guest floors or reclevels would admit me. Not even the lobby. The underground parkinglot. The ground under which admits everyone. I pressed open, but the doors wouldn’t open, then went for the help button that in all languages is red and in braille is a rash. Sweating, dizzy, stifled.

I struck out at the walls, the antiscratch padding and weather touchsplays. I jumped but was short of the ceiling, took out my Tetbook — no wifi — had this urge to cringe inside my tote, as the elevator’s lighting dimmed and the thrum of its mechanism quieted.

I was karmically stuck, a floater. It was my breath. I had to ease my breath, and then empty it. Void this car containment.

I tried to fold myself up like a map, to compress myself like in eastward travel. To become the time lost to flights, the time lost across longitudes. The differences between Palo Alto and London and Paris, and between them and the Emirates — I’d go where they went, when they went. Into nonexistence — into neverexistence.

The doors would glide away then and it wouldn’t just be the Khaleej again, it would also be the Burj, de Crillon, Claridge’s, all their ambiance mingling, their couture scents and muzaks merged, the corridors turning one way into London wainscoting below Victorian wallpaper flocked with paisleys, turning the other into Paris parlor boiseries wreathing Empire urns with moldings of laurel, a cracked soaking tub bashed through a rainforest steamshower, hometheater systems dunked in the toilets, gardens growing into beaches to kelp the Gulf, the desert strewn with broken crockery from The Foyer and Les Ambassadeurs — bent knives from every restaurant I’ve stayed above, with Doc Huxtable, the piloting Sims, Gaston, Lavra — and all Myung’s Buddhas staved and dashed, the prayerbeads off their threads, the wheels unspoked, the sutras dismembered and blowing scattered. It was as if by evacuating my mind, I found this was my mind, a room of all my rooms, assailed by all my planes, or just a car in flames, and a voice, which was its capacity, shrieking.

\

With Maghrib (ca. 18:30 to 20:00) I was moving again. Descending. I had to be called, being unable to call myself. But then the car stopped, around the Khaleej’s midlevel, the doors fell away, and there’s no other way I can explain this sensation — of identicality but wrongness, of unicity within displacement — this was, but wasn’t, my floor.

Only the numerals distinguished.

A man crouched by the elevatorbanks, his back to me.

He was an Arab, clad in a kandura like a bedsheet filched from housekeeping, straight off the cart. Bright brilliant just from the shrinkwrap white, still creased shoulders to elbows, rustling at toes.

He was close enough to obstruct my exit, and was stooping over as if to pick up something he’d dropped. Some hankie or submissive tissue — a woman.

But not white — she was black. She was a wadded tossed abaya, a smutty black abayayaya — trill it through the nose, like a jihad ululant.

She’d fallen — mucous sniveling through her nostril slit — she’d been hit.

As the doors went to shut, the Arab pivoted and kicked a foot out, a foot clad expensively crocodilian, and wedged them open.

“Stop!” I yelled, “Lay off, asshole!” or its panicked equivalent — it’s not enough to look ridiculous in action? I have to sound strangled on the page?

The Arab just tried to drag her into the elevator with me.

But she struggled, and so the Arab let go, only to hit her again — smacking the sniffling girl backhanded. She thrashed away howling.

Or that was me, urging her on with stupey nonconfrontationalisms: “Get away!” (I’m sure there’s a security recording), “Run!” (I’m willing to negotiate terms for the erasure of any security recording). My sneaker might’ve grazed his wingtip still holding the doors, and the Arab whirled around dervishly.

We faced each other, and I can only imagine what he took me for: a burnt paleface, a paunch in its decline, into financial services, Homo americanus consultantus.

Then again, my impressions of him were just as imaginary. He was some fictional character from transit lit, some thriller villain spun from a revolving rack in an international terminal. I only wished it were a better translation. He was introducing himself as the girl’s husband, or father, or brother, explaining that whatever the nature of their relationship, it entitled him to beat her, explaining that it required him to beat her — and just as the elevator doors were sliding shut again between us, he lashed out with pointy chinbeard and charged.

He choked me by the totestrap and I went for his thumbs, until everything in the tote was falling and we went after it, into the hallway. We fell like dictators. Slowly, messily slowly, crashing into curios and rolling into benches. I punched his jaw and his head hit the wall, bent my knee between his balls on my way to getting upright, lurching amid the wreckage of lamps, braziers, kashkul of sawdusty potpourri.

He was out. Not just unaware, but unconscious, and not in the psychoanalytic definition, but with blood in his goatee.

“You OK?” I said to the girl. But the cowering napkin just wailed.

I stumbled to the elevatorbanks, pressed the up and down buttons. I rocked him loose from deadweight and turned him over and inside the car, pressed every floor.

The elevator closed, opened: a flap of his bedsheet was stuck between doors. I tucked him in and took out my wallet and swiped him down to the pillow of lobby, and thank the gods of maintenance or inspectorship, or of magnetic coercivity, he plummeted.

My sessh effects were sprawled along the hall, Tetbook concussed from tote. “If you’re seriously OK, help me pick all this up?”

The girl stayed just a heap, of grieved cheek and lusty gutturals, so I bent to collect my adapters, converters, pink highlighter, and then went to haul her up too — but her hands wouldn’t have mine — she refused to reach out and meet me. Though this wasn’t because of trauma, rather it was because the touch of an auslander male was prohibited: her daddy or hubby or whatever could touch, he could strike her, but her savior was — haram.

“What room number are you?”

No reply or no number?

“Speak English? The zimmernummer, your numéro de chambre?”

But why would she slink back to the suite of a beater? — beyond that, would a controlfreak batterer let her have her own key?

“Let’s call Security? Do you have any family you can stay with?”

Nothing, and I even tried in Hebrew — gevalt.

She stayed down on all fours just wiping her face with a black cloth, which then again became her veil — and her face was gone, and then she was gone, spurning me crawling around a corner.

Her mouth, at least, was beautiful. All of me that was not my mind was virtuous, blameless.

Rewrite this all. Bottom to top.

://

~ ~ ~

The Khaleej’s stairs were strictly service, in case of emergency, power outage. Their utility proved a moral instruction. An ethics of exertion. The soul antipode of the resort leisured around them.

There was no carpeting so profanely plush that rougher rugs had to be placed upon it for prayer, no marbles so carnally veined as to recall the flesh — they were purging, spiritually purifying. Unventilated, sweltering.

10 flights of 10 steps each, count their discipline down.

The fluorescence hummed penance, absolved the walls of their materials: scuffed, costcut, asbestic. Breathe in, breathe out, relax. But my wind wasn’t up to even an intellectual exercise. My lungs were tight, legs, feet, it’s my hand that I’m sure was broken. Typing with my nose. The last two flights were huffed.

Back in NY straggling home from the office, I’d do the burp fart shuffle four blocks south from my stop, trying to forget which building was mine, trying to forget which apartment. I could live anywhere, I thought, I could put my key to any door, not a card to swipe but a dagger to stab and turn — wounding any door, wounding any lock, and the insides that would weep for me, the roomy rumen and innards viscera, all that bark and sap and heartwood ringing, would be similar or same. They’d heal, but even when they wouldn’t, I could always exchange them, I could always upgrade — with no regard for brand if new. The new — once the time of the unprecedented, now the time of the compatible.

It’s mortifying, but this also went for women — the thought that any woman could accommodate, could give me what I expected from a life. The fault, then, would be with the expectations — downsized, reduced — the fault, then, would be mine.

My landing was temporary, hard on the heels. Junior Caliph Floor #2, North.

I leaned against the jamb. Against the bar. Open Sesame. If no one’s around, no alarm will sound.

\

I hadn’t realized I’d left the sink on. I washed my hands with my hands, cracked my knucks from numbness to stinging — if only minibars carried Vicodin or Percocet.

Admit it, I was smitten. Me, the stricken party.

I’d been aroused by a woman wearing a sweaty tent, a woman I don’t know, can’t ever touch to know Biblically let alone get proximal to for a chat in a neutral language — it’s absurd. With a husband too. To whose swart cheek I’d delivered democracy. Four fingers of unrequited democracy, not even the thumb opposable.

Her husband? who else? Next corridor please let it be a widow I encounter. A cripple. May the next corridor be so empty I can only save myself.

I was desked again, chaired again — the primal scene.

It’s difficult to concentrate — difficult to pay attention, though it accepts any currency current.

I downed trou, tried to get a honker. Tried to beat my cock like it was leukemia. Twisted my scrotum like the wallsafe knob. Then I switched to stroke my shaft with the hand that bled and throbbed. I managed a half honk, a sputter. A corpse’s lean on the wheel.

If only I could shrink like my hair into a single follicle. If only I could zip into my wheelie and mail myself flatrate, at email rates, on home.

I rooted around the nethercompartment of my wheelie, surfaced with my smut — these pages too glossy to gloss. I surrounded myself with the porn, flicked, flipped, unstuck the pages to loosen me up.

I knew as much about these women as I did about that girl. I knew more about “Agnès,” pp. 20–22 her spread, in French. At least I know “her name.” Better to know her name than her herpes.

Masturbation feels different with different hands and without a ring, which I’d left behind in Ridgewood, jarred in clay with the clamps and clips, Moms’s cloying amber glaze. To compensate, then, I rolled the pages around me, positioning their binding staple just at the seam the ring once touched, and stroked, as if I were scraping away a model’s hipbone mole or removing jiggle from her thighs.

With this I managed a bit of length, of longness. A width that wouldn’t flatter girth. Trying for an elevator shaft, straight up and down, getting the incline of a stairwell. Trying for Rach’s shape, narrow and hard, but getting that girl’s — a swerving curviness.

The lamp stood straight in the corner, its metal stanchion staunch, incorruptible. The table with the ice bucket rose immovably, stiff. Two glasses erectly stemmed, unbreakable bottles of booze. Cigarettes, matches, undisturbed smooth. Her bawdy chaudey lips léchouille, bouchey coochie coo. Her khaki hands cupping my sac.

But then the imam interrupted and the call for Isha was all that arose: Allah hu akhbar, chafing, Allah hu akhbar, chapping, Allah hu — my cock bowed over my thumb.

\

I went for my Tetbook, dented and loosed of a Return key, which went chattering around the tote like a tooth. Everything was running slower. Walking, crawling, load. Its cord, its powercable, raveling, unraveling. I weaved it between my fingers to make four insulated rings for the friction, for the frictive pleasure, and wrapped the rest snug around my base — what to call the connection of cock to scrotum along that seam like a perforation on old printer paper with the holes? Don’t tetrate, resist the urge to tetrate (“what to call the connection of cock to scrotum along that seam like a perforation on old printer paper with the holes”) — and, while I’m at it, what’s the difference between raveling and unraveling?

No, memory will not be, cannot be, refreshed — is it the Chinese or the Japanese socket that has the slitty slanted eyes and slashes for ears? or is the proper term not socket but outlet?

The computer’s coolant fan was squealing at pitch with the room fan, with an equal frequency of rotation.

I thought I had to have some porn in storage, some neglected impulse stuff I hadn’t called upon in forever, and, according to tech, according to psychoanalysis, everything transferred. Metaphor, its literal meaning is transference, but tech doesn’t think in metaphors. In similes, maybe, which are like or as math. Regardless, the originals, if ever originated, would’ve remained from my former setup. Time to rouse the past. Raise the clotheless ghosts.

I opened a window — not a real actual window, rather an otherness or alterity — a sill for my filth. I browsed internally by all the cumskein verbiage that occurred to me — blowjob pov, reverse cowgirl, reverse cowgirl Arabian Indian Pakistani teen, curry pussy, spicy biryani pussy, French maid proctolgia purring barky British boardingschool accent — no results. Then browsed by types of files—.avi, flv, mpeg, mpe, mpg, mov, even went for the.jpegs, jpgs, tiffs and.gifs, pngs and.raws — zero (0) results. I’d modernized too precipitously, adopted too early, never saved my vulgarity to memory, relied too much on streaming — how much I had to stream.

I emailed Aaron: email me some porn. I emailed Caleb: email me some porn. I emailed Finnity: email me some porn. I emailed them all again, not cc: but bcc:, my preferences. Tried some social profiles, the Tetsets: Lana’s square, which featured just professional headshot pics and shaky footage of her lecturing, was socialized with the square of a Patagonian preservationist at the Met, who though she was too old to get me up was coupled virtually with the square of her darkfeatured daughter, who though she was too young to keep me up was coupled virtually with the squares of maybe cousins or friends of intermediate ages whose unprotected images extended from last springbreak to last weekend’s MDMA excursion culminating in a mass makeout in the middle of the Pulaski Bridge.

I tugged my wire, charged myself.

But then another window opened, to shut my own — the prayer of Fajr. There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His slayer of boners.

I clicked away, to Rach’s blog.

What was new wasn’t the vid of a client picnic — Governors Island, all leis and tikis, account execs wattlenecked sweating the BBQ, multistrawed canisters of daiquiri and piña colada sweating pixels — I sat through all of it but Rach never made an appearance. Neither was it the pic of the rental condo we’d had in the Hamptons, “Steatite counters!” “Miele appliances!” shelves of salty cookbook, the landlord’s romance and detective novels, the only thing human a suede docksider shoe disembodied on the maple — Adam’s, it had to be.

Rather what was new was a comment. If I can call a thing a comment that has nothing to do with an original. Rach’s blog is offered for free, which must be taken to mean: only at the price of reaction. But I wouldn’t react — not yet.

I scrolled down below the dross:

uy387456: “perfect post!! 2 increase yr traffic click here.”

therightfootfwd: “i subscribed to this feed and will check new posts. for bargain footwear and related content click here.”

StrongL80s: “happiness happens. be yourself today tenaciously.”

I’d always presumed StrongL80s — and Nokiddushing, and Challahatyourgirl, and others — were all just Rach, cheerleading herself tenaciously.

The next and last was it: the only comment I hadn’t already read, the only comment I hadn’t already reread, was another from “KORDIE”:

“wtf? taking my plane leaving me behind in ras alkhaimah ummmm alquwain wtf? im just concerned 4 the both of u. the truth must not be evaded. trust me yre in waaaay over yr head. download this 2 contact me now.”

\

I got up out of the chair, tried to find the remote — where was it? if I were a remote where would I be? Wriggling myself across pins and needles to the entertainment system, to switch it on manually, then reembedding myself, constantly switching my alignment to face the east that was west, the west that was — comfort.

Insomniac, I defaced every direction — every qibla, or mihrab. All prayers point to the Saudis.

Each time the muezzin came through the curtains — sounding throughout the city, resounding and vibrating — each time he pronounced, I heard Rach. Her old ringtone.

That voice. It wasn’t recorded, but live. Both bodiless and hoarse. Arabesque. The voice that turns lattices to speakers. That speaks the very fretwork. While rising and falling like an arch. The sound of calligraphy, of cacography.

I listened, I lay and listened while watching the default channel, as the face of the sheikh wiped onscreen — a screensaver, a sheikhsaver.

Then a dissolve, to a stock image of Medina. Minarets around a vert dome. The sheikh returned, superimposed. A dissolve again, to a stock image of Mecca: caravanserai encircling the Kaaba, that brute granite tabernacle that holds paradise inside it and grants wisdom to all — in its big black squareness it even looked like a datacenter.

Again with “the sheikh”—or “king”—the lexicon kept changing, or else the man himself refused to be defined. Ruler of the petrols we’re passing for flight. Ruler of the electrified high celestials. Guardian of freon, and of the urinals that flush in the sky.

I wondered how he’d receive Principal: desert hospitality mandates feetwashing, the watering of camels, a meal (the guests served first and best), the best bed and first choice of concubine (supplies limited). A prudent host would also provide the translation.

The sheikh would speak, would describe an immense palace of utterance, and only when finished, only when utterly finished, would he let the interpreter render. A dictatorial practice, Koranic in a sense. Unless the totality has been communicated, nothing has been communicated. A single misunderstanding flaws it all.

Or else maybe the sheikh would break his speech into units, bits and bytes and girih tiles, pausing between each to demonstrate his authority, in the guise of generosity — pausing between each to allow his interpreter, scrounging on hands and knees, tongue thrust in concentration, to clean it up. To lick the words up from the limen, and spit out again a perfect reproduction mosaic.

But then perhaps the sheikh would say nothing at all, and just sit enthroned, while his interpreter stood and spoke for him: either words the sheikh supplied the interpreter with prior to this audience, or words the sheikh never supplied — the interpreter recast as a prophet and the sheikh becoming an oracle or dream.

Then again, the ultimate would be if there were no sheikh whatsoever: the sheikh could pose as his own interpreter, or the interpreter could pose as the sheikh, who was absent from this audience because too important, or too senile, or even deceased, and so the interpreter who claimed to represent him was just representing himself.

I wrapped my hand in a washcloth, prepped for my next sessh with Principal. Stretched for the ascent.

There were a lot of steps ahead of me. And each vital to mastering the next.

://

9/10

To fall for this Arabess is forbidden, but nowadays to fall for any woman you can’t search up online is forbidden. How else to snoop her? how else to send her around?

Her life had been set to Private.

Her mouth, a pool of jewel set in bodied blackness. The modesty mullahs sure know what they’re doing, insisting that the less I know of a woman, the more I want to know, I need to know.

She’d reserved a full floor in my memory, without giving a number, without giving a name. I had no wasta, and only this chance. Though even if I’d manage to baksheesh the compjockeys at resort IT, it’d be too suspicious to ask after her, I’d have to ask after him, the rolypoly ayatollah, the offensive effendi. Claim him a prospective investment partner. Invest him in my claim. Either that or I’d appeal to Principal to hack the Khaleej dbase and ransack the records. No other sources to cultivate. Just desert.

Instead of excavating around the site, exposing its ramparts, I decided to go down, foundationally. I dug myself into the lobby, and sifted through the drifters, the dunes motioned around me — humpy dumps in full hijab.

The women who passed compelled attention by tighter fits, which were pregnancies, and heelless shoes, so as not to slight their escorts. Kitchen slippers, or wrung through the laundry slippers and then, open toes.

Hints of tint from the fingers. Ten drips of an esoteric ultramarine.

The purdah population must’ve boomed overnight (or else I’ve just grown the appropriate antenna).

I was muftied again in my predistressed jeans, flannel over I heart NY tee, sitting on a tulipary divan between the elevatorbanks and pretending to compute. I clicked for a speech I’d consulted on for the mayor’s office: New Urbanism & the Future of Energy. But energy has an unlimited future, and it’s humanity that doesn’t have even a horizon on the horizon: “The city seeks Albany’s pledge to develop solar, wind, and hydroelectric capabilities in both the Hudson and East Rivers within the next decade”—this was laughable, rather, depressing, reading this in a Gulfside palace powered not by sun, wind, or water but by fossils, whose government ownership would go sustainable only if that meant going nuclear. Scrolled through a few old journo squibs: reviews of books about homosexuality and Cubism, about German dodecaphonists in America, and then a profile of an Israeli novelist dedicated to answering “The Palestinian Question,” a kaddish eulogy overpraising an overpriced deli upon its shuttering.

Went through my résumé, exaggerating credentials for the main search — the job search — to come. I rattled the filechains, unfettered the inbox. Wrote: draft emails to two lawyers Lana had recommended, ridiculous (one Levin, the other Levine), to decline a Rosh Hashanah dinner and/or Yom Kipper break fast invite from the managing ed of jewe.com, to thank Cal and Finn for the porn. Loaded the porn. Cal — gratitude retracted — had sent a pic of a grossly obese man having his foreskin licked by a dog having its foreskin licked by a cat. Finn — apologies in order — had sent a vid. Long. Loading. Taking so long to load the old me could’ve buffered twice already (the new me couldn’t fathom ever buffering again).

Black. She emerged from the car. I knew it was her, because she knew it was me. She startled — facelessly — turned away, turned back but clung to her guide.

She was being minded not by her husband but by a more voluminous rotundity — a floating dome, like of a mosque, but undergoing reconstruction. An old woman scaffolded with a cervical collar, and an ungainly plastic and titanium orthotic — a bootcast.

I shirked my Tetbook into the tote, approached. Sidled up alongside.

“Hello.”

Closer than would be considered normal even if she weren’t a she, or Arab.

They made a show of ignoring me, her most of all.

“Speak German? Speak French?”

She said nothing and her escort was just a gentle dumb hemisphere orbiting gravely.

I said, “Pretend no one else is in this lobby — you with me?” I tried to hold her pace, her general area of face. “It’s just the two of us, remember?” I gestured at my chest, sashed by the totestrap in the getup of a eunuch.

She whispered what I took to be “English.”

I said, “What are you up to today?”

The equatorial plumpness next to her shushed, Arabized a spate comprehensible internationally as disapproval.

I said, “Today?”

“No English,” she said, mine.

“Mari?”

“No.”

“Frau oder Mädchen?”

“Jaloux jaloux mon mari.”

This was like a Russian novel already, this French, this German — excessive, dumm, imbécile.

The chaperoning mother — or mother inlaw? or an eldest prima wife who’d been hurt in an unpreventable domestic accident of her own? — scolded in gutturals, tsks, and sped them ahead, her boot’s clunkery punctuating my failure.

\

No matter how much they’ve traveled, most whites have had this experience abroad — especially in the darker countries. These people — these dimnesses, darknesses — are interchangeable, the white tourist thinks, they’re cognate, coincident, synonymical. The inner life as impenetrable as its outer pigmentation. Black is bad, the color of evil, a stain or taint. A cancer. Red is bestial. Brown is shit. Yellow is piss timid.

But then inevitably our traveler comes to know someone — maybe only his waiter, maybe only his maid. He might even, let’s hope, come to have sex with someone, for love or money, for both, and — when the fascination ends, when the package tour ends — is either confirmed or disabused, ashamed of his initial bias or not.

I followed — what should I dub her? should I set up an online presence for her, have Aar and Cal vote on a name?

Like her, dislike her, track her as favorite — through the Khaleej’s lobby, through a garish consecution of kufic script scannables and projected ads that connected practically and thematically the resort complex with the mall.

Gaudy antiseptic fountains, cacti to deter loitering, boulders whose size trafficked toward sales. Palms marked the passageways fronding radially from the central bourse. The mall had planted only species native to the Americas, as if to boast, to brag, to demonstrate what was feasible — not just the acquisition but the thriving. The trees grew, amid the frigidity, they prospered and grew, and the abayas were their fruit, ripely contused — the proper plural of abaya? abayat?

Their color scheme was basic black. The fall collection, also the winter, spring, and summer collections in this desert without season. They were bolts of black cloth unrolling. Items strayed off the rack. Some silk, some chenille. All blended.

The women made a hajj to a windowdressed concourse, whose mannequins matched them in chador before lightening up and becoming hysterical, gruesomely festooned in chiffon plastron and crape carapace, billowing with metalline polyester, lycra strapped to masks — garments that called attention to the fact that their wearers weren’t supposed to be calling attention to themselves. Fashion was taking chances so these ladies wouldn’t have to — these ladies swathed in pockets to be worthy by comparison, still devaluing themselves by comparison.

If a girl was just in an abaya and shayla, she judged the girls who were in veils too, who judged others of their retinue for having veils with more or less stylish coverage.

My girl’s covering was just some bag. Some upsidedown insideout unadorned bag. She was wearing its reflection in every display. She was wearing the windows that reflected her and the vain commerce behind them and then instead of a face, my own.

Her old woman companion finished unbunching her beardy niqab from her collar, and swiveled her head around its scant range — but I stepped behind a kiosk.

\

Decency protocols flashed me — from the HD panels battenmounted above, whose programming looped Islam’s conduct and sumptuary guidelines and a fanatic advisory about creditcard addiction and the abominations of debt. A You Are Here dot danced on an interjacent panel, damning me to the haram department — an annex beyond ahkam, a demilitarized or greenzone accepting dollars, its boutiques stocked with wares that on the homefront would be considered tame if transgressing only of taste, but that here transgressed nature itself and were risky even when folded, when hangered. Dresses cut to skirts, lingerie barely exceeding the size of the average customer’s vagina, what it’d take to muffle a mean set of nipples. Negligees, bustiers, girdles, diaphanous whisperweight giggling. The ladies stopped to admire, never to touch. At least I’m assuming it was admiration, though I wasn’t sure of what — the merch itself? or the confidence to be its consumer?

The outfits outfreaked only by the foreigners who purchased them: a eurobimbo bureau of diplobrat jetettes, drafty castle heiresses, and serial divorcée alimony phonies. Still, it takes volition to decide which products to buy. As my ladies passed, the parties exchanged glances, nods, sophisticated gynics. My ladies had no volition, and by contrast seemed like products themselves.

My abaya’s consort embraced her, then left — clumping that boot toward the domestic appliances arcade, accompanied by two other mosquerading matrons.

We were alone now, though still among a dozen. I had to focus. On her hefty swell, the way she shuffled at turns. Otherwise her abaya was so flowing that it trailed along the tile and obscured her stride, giving her the appearance of hovering.

She boarded a conveyor. I scurried alongside, tarrying at every passage break as she disembarked toward free sample demos of jewelry detarnishing solutions, displays of boudoir organizers, pyramid placements of woks and pans, rotating installations of cognoscente cutlery, magic flying bakingtrays and bathmats.

The ultimate stretch of pathway rose, became a ramp — I boarded — an ascending escalator of an escalating steepness leading to the mall’s upper tier, the uppermost skylit.

If stairs are the model life — prepared for any fate, whether up or down — the escalator is a step in the wrong direction. In one direction only. Like each day, like every day, its steps begin by staggering, only to end by flattening. They stagger, fall flat, then repeat.

I sought the highest sharpness.

As we rose, her shoes were exposed. Aqua heels. They were low heels, the lowest, which she stood in as if splashing around. They got a rise out of me nonetheless.

I clambered up the climbing — staying always four abayat, three abayat, two, behind.

\

Language is acquired only for the purposes of further acquisition — my abaya, my burqa, my burq. How much does this item cost? how much larger can it get than xxtra-large?

The ancient mystery faiths all held by this, that whosoever knows the name of a thing, owns that thing, and I’m convinced that’s true only by the truth of its reversal: that if you don’t know something’s name, that something owns you.

Because I was hers, and my tongue was the receipt. I kept pace to better appreciate belonging.

Her featurelessness was of a supernumerary tit atop tits, though in her strain to speed ahead a waist was shaped atop that ass. Swishy hips, thighs that rubbed. Becoming again all ass. Even her feet were ass. She was an ass in heels. One cheek to each, wobbling for balance.

In the foodcourt there was a pub called Hybernopub, theme of Dublin. Its façade was fêted with shamrocks, bows rising crassly from cauldrons. Outside the premises an animatronic leprechaun jigged on a plaster keg and listed, in robotic Arabic and this language, robotically but with an Arabic growl, not beers but nearbeers, missed beers, close but no dice beers, pints of simulhops, the demalted and wortless unfoaming, and runed on the keg itself were their bankrupting prices in chalk. Dollars, euros, AED/dhs — that currency whose slick prismatic bills, denominated in every pigment of the oleaginous spectrum, depict skycrapers, sports stadia, falcons? sturgeons? antelopes? rams? — malls, definitely malls.

The chalk.

It was a short thin length like a finger bone, a pointer. I emancipated it from its string, approached her — the other ladies noticed, or didn’t, but parted, humped on.

I quickened, she quickened, tensed from my tension. My shadow crossed hers and was lost.

I was hurrying alongside her — swinging arm and leg caressing her cloth, as if stroking her hair, as if her garment had grown from her scalp — reaching out to her, once more.

It wasn’t a pinch I gave — I’m no pervert — but a mark, a chit, between the shoulders, chalking her for the ease of my stalk.

Just as I did, the ladies — the handful or so remnant, after most had peeled off for meals with their men — exited the foodcourt, and entered the tech sector. They went left, toward the A/V side, featuring televisions (how antique), and stereos (how antiquated) — to the right, the side for computers.

I dropped the chalk stub into a trashcan atop a waxpapered basket of chickpeas.

We passed through a pair of weighted black curtains — like I was passing through the ladies themselves. Suddenly it was night again.

There hadn’t been enough prayers — there would never be. All was frozen dark.

A vacuumsealed interior — it took time to adjust, it took the ladies dispersing. I stood behind woofers, tweeters, subpurrers, gluglugers, supraribbiters, hissers.

My abaya was caught, contained. Glassed plasmatic. She stood in front of a camera, which captured her image, and then sent it to the screen she stood in front of, scrutinizing herself. She moved left, her image moved right. She turned her back, turned her back on herself. It took her — it took all of her sisters doing the same at their own sistered stations — a moment to realize that the cameras were built into the screens.

As they groomed their monitor selves, I monitored them — as they realigned, adjusted. Fascinating how their abayat resembled screens — black screens struck from the walls and curtained around their curvatures.

Still the chalk on my girl’s back shone through, from deep amid the mediaroom mockups. She’d strip before bed to wash that body beneath, the skin the permanent abaya, and find this sign singed into her skin, and take it as intended and find me? though if a symbol was all I could afford, how could I be sure it’d be interpreted correctly?

I considered returning, retrieving the chalk, to outline my body in a very public atrium.

The girls trembled before their trembling, while I wavered undecided between signal and noise, feigning interest in a gadget.

It was a Tetheld 4, a successionary replacement device as new in relation to preceding Tethelds as Allah is to Yahweh: with every capability of spoken life (it had a phone and SUI, or semantic user interface), and of textual life (via Tetsuite), and was equipped for music/pics/vids (multiformat/polyshareable, via mOEs, or mobile operating ecesis), and for any other experience purchasable online (4G). It had a health monitor that took blood pressure, pulse and body temp, body mass index, tested reflexes — I’m sure it even legally notarized.

An Emiri tween — torqued by gym and sleazily pimpsuited — approached sniffing commission, “Any assistance?” And while I was declining his attentions, she vanished — my abaya, disappeared.

I glanced from the flash in my hand, and she was gone, they all were.

Only their images remained for a breath, then faded.

Strike this.

Strike this like an Arab bride.

://

~ ~ ~

I was back in my room switching channels, too wasted to pack. BBCs 1–4, CNN Int’l, Eurosport (volleyball), Al Jazeera (unrest). I sat through a documentary about the Khaleej but clicked away during a segment on its dining facilities. The weather was a rerun too.

Black and white manna crackled across the entertainment system glass.

It’s like with the Korans I’ve been reading, it’s like with any other paradisiacally dictated book. There’s enough of everything for everyone, there’s never any call to hoard or grub. When you’re wandering the desert, you get to decide what your manna will taste like. Then you eat it, and whatever it tastes like it is. Pick any verse, interpret it into any texture, any flavor, sweet or savory. Corny honey. Matzah brei. Milk schmilk. Bdellium and coriander dew fondue. Any verse can be historicized, analogized — made palatable.

I paged through my Korans to the sura that one edition calls The Banquet and the other calls The Feast, which concerns — dilating on the dilemma of how to sojourn among strangers while preserving a sense of unblemishedness — Islam’s dietary laws. Abu Dhabi’s free copies were preferential to Dubai’s, more archaic, more Thous and Arts — neither copy credited its translators.

Following the prohibitions against consuming prey, raw blood of any type, any porcine product, and the meat of any oblation dedicated to any god not Allah, The Banquet/Feast serves up a delight — by decreeing that Israel had been deeded to the Israelites, the Jews: “the Followers of Scripture” (Dubai version), “the People of the Book” (Dhabi version).

“Enter the advantageous land [Dubai]/the blessed land [Dhabi] that Allah has assigned [Dubai]/hath ordained [Dhabi] for you.” It’s incredible: the text says just what I want it to say, just what the Muslims, I’m sure, don’t need it meaning.

Revisiting the gastronomical proscriptions had whetted my appetite. But I had no patience for the restaurants. The linen flap. The fork and spoon routine. Oppressive. By the second course even the disdain, the derisive scorn, has spoiled to stale formality.

I was having inexplicable tastes, slavering for a porkwing, like a wing from a pig that flies, the blood of beef roadkill consecrated to Baal, the paschal ewe for two, a chicken flipper — the special?

What on the side? Survival’s just a matter of taking every side.

Pastures of greens, eggplant swords beaten into ploughshares. Starches.

I hung up the phone, went for another dram of brown, then stood on the bed and disabled the nimbus of smoke detector, lit a cig — where’s my drink? atop the minbar or bottledwater minibar? There it is. Water down the brown. The same sura bans this booze.

Towel under the draft to block the smoke.

\

The chime at the door had me cowering. What happens if you choose your manna falsely? does the divine chef intuit the heart’s hunger and modify the menu?

I bundled all my Hustler UKs and Club Derrieres into a drawer, doubletapped the doorcom monitor, nudged away the towel, unlocked, unbolted, unchained. On the other side was the boy. The bringer and bearer. He was polite and neat in a stealth tuxedo, his moustache pubescent fascist. Ratib, in English at least, his nametag printed in two alphabets, Ratib. He fluttered a napkin, set a chafing dish atop the table, formerly the desk.

He was older than I’d remembered, or younger — point is, how can I be expected to distinguish between the Ratibs? given that they, the Ratibs, aren’t incentivized enough to distinguish themselves? All the Khaleej’s servants, and the Burj’s too: their faces contort in my mind, like wet sand trampled to dry and harden into brick, and I mean that as praise, if management will pass it along.

“Shookrun,” I said, which extended the full courtesy of my fluency, transliterating “thank you.” I tipped him one euro and one quid, the last linty currency I had, and he sneered, withdrew shook running.

The offering, uncovered, was all garnish, preservatived herb celebrating a premature gestation. Not yet brought to term and so borne with dill and parsley.

Rate the Catering? One star charred. Cleanliness? 10 out of 10, but only because turndown’s been forbidden me, by Principal.

Please remit any suggestions in the space below provided:/S’il vous plaît donnez des suggestions dans le champ ci-dessous:/Bitte geben Anregungen in das dafür vorgesehene Feld unten:

Merci, danke, thanks — sheikh’s rume? chic room? Standardized transliteration of pleasantries might empower guests, and encourage their engagement with local culture. Elevator 2 of the north bank should be fixed. All mall escalators should be steep enough to get a wisp of female crotch in purdah. Countries that practice online censorship evince a higher incidence of sexual assault, and a lower level of political literacy, or else it’s vice versa. Ratib was quite simply the best Ratib I’ve ever encountered.

That survey card was my bookmark. I covered the inedible creature as if extinguishing an altar, returned to the Korans.

But the Don’t Disturb had fallen from the knob, was sticking its laminate edge through the draft.

\

Just as I was about to replace it, another knock. Once, timorous.

It was Ratib returned, I guessed, working up the nerve to blackmail a better gratuity out of me. Good for you, Ratib! go get him (go get me)!

The doorcom monitor showed only a fuscously cloaked dessert cart.

I opened, and made way for her. The chalk was still at her back.

She was a darkling abaya bag, with a cheap overbuckled overzippered velcronated aluminum missile of a case she dropped by the closet.

I leaned into the hall and the rooms numbering upways and the rooms numbering downways were peaceful, and outside their doors platters of blistered doughy pistachio sweets slumbered through their rots alongside the drycleaning and laundry and men’s shoes awaiting polish.

Inside again, lock chain slotted deadbolt, I said, “Your husband?”

She was standing between the chairs, speaking Arabic to them — to me. There are some people who pick up languages fast, there are some people who pick up love fast. But I can be only one of them. Too late.

I said, “Mari?”

She held out her hands, held her fingers apart like her nails were still wet from their dip in the sea — and she went for the stitching, and revealed her face.

Or what of it there was around the sunglasses she was wearing: giant outlandish mosquito moonspecs, their pricetag hanging by a thread. Her injuries seeped a shade matching their lensing.

I’m going to try transcribing what she said, I’m going to try doing every other thing to her, decently: “je veux divorcer,” and then she said something “rien à foutre”—and then something in Arabic again? “khanith”?

I said, “Did you decide to get divorced before he hit you or is this just today’s development? Peut-être he’s been hitting you forever?”

She cried, and my arms led my steps to her, but she recoiled and took off her glasses, and her eyes — haven’t I read that certain Semitic languages never distinguish blue from green? Hebrew does — but what about Arabic? Her ears had no earrings, no holes.

“You sure you weren’t — vous a-t-il followed here by anyone?”

“Je serai toujours seule.”

She stood by the east of the bed and I stood by the west and what was between us was all that sharia blanket she was tangled in.

But even switching directions, changing the poles — stand me by the east, stand her by the west — what was between us was blacker: our ages. Also the sense that my interest in her was erotic because she was also, or merely, exotic — though Rach would knock that down and call racism, if she’d burst into this room just now to find this woman, this girl, Muslim, pretty young and gorgeously wed, facing me across the bed and quivering.

She’d been gathering up her hem, and I circled around and helped her lift it over her head. All she had on underneath was her underwear, which was torture: iron maiden panties, spiked bra.

She took my hands, and laughed, the laughter swollen, “Lentement.”

Don’t worry—“Je ne vais pas hurt you! je ne pourrai jamais hurt you! No pain, no pain.”

Her cheekwound blushed, and yet that blushing was also its bandage. Below the unmentionables she was still in her heels.

She was warm to my touch but how to say shy? just traduce to timide?

Still, let the opposite room eavesdrop, let anyone peep into our window from a wraparound suite. I didn’t care — I didn’t drop blinds or slip drapes.

Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop — Psalms were about to pour out of me.

“Vous?”

“Josh,” I said.

“Vous habillé.”

“Je vais me undressed, clothes off, unhabillé, déshab.”

She fussed with her hair, braided it into a fuse. “Lentement.”

Slow, but slowly, I declothed. Though I was shit unfit, though I was every bit as fucking fit as her husband.

She had to her an overbite of hesitation.

\

Meekness, humility — terror. She sat on the bed terrified in puffed diaper and padded bra. And seizing the elastic, and faltering. Squeezing at the clasps. Like she’d never worn undies before. Like someone else had put them on her, some enemy. Packed her nylon cups to an underwire straining, rigged posterior casings with C-4 plastique. And I wanted her to do it now, I wanted her to just detonate herself and get it over with — launch all the lethal payload that was fertilizing her: shrapnel nail and screw and poisoned syringe.

Blasting me away, blowing us both through the floor, and ticking through the igniferous floors below it, bombing the lobby at mortal checkout — bringing the hypostyle to crash, the arches to collapse, atop a cuneiform of limbs and kilim tatters and fragments of the monogrammed blazon of Allah that’d pendulated over the interactive pillars. Imagine, amid the settling dust, a providentially inviolate vase from which a single peacock feather — drifted.

“Vous étrange,” she said.

“Non.”

She shuddered. “Oui, vous.”

“Non je ne suis pas regardez you strange.”

My last wish before I submitted: let her explosion scramble this diary so that everything will read like my French.

She shimmied out of the bra, let it fall — without a flash, without immolation. No martyr.

Then she tugged the panties down, stopping at the calves to shed the heels before continuing.

She wasn’t shaved. Not in any of her pits.

I was holding in my hands this wild mother of a bone.

Rach would be familiar with the feeling, Principal would be too. This feeling of unveiling. To unveil the next product. To lift the curtain on the new.

I went slowly with her below me and then I was behind her and not slow.

Her name was Izdihar, so Izi, so Iz.

://