Rabbi Krikruker,
Today I was writing an email to my cousin and his wife in Israel (Kfar Chabad), to wish them a mazel tov on their first child, a boy. But then I was stopped by a sinful thought!! Obviously when I type anything that invokes the Hebrew for “G-d,” I use the traditional euphemism familiar from the way everyone knows to pronounce the Name whenever they’re not distinctly praying: “HaShem,” which means, of course, “the Name.” Like for a good luck on a new business venture email I might type: “May HaShem bless you and keep you,” or for a get well soon email: “Blessed is HaShem, the source of healing,” or for a condolence email: “HaShem, save us — may the King answer on the day we call.”
But now that all of our communications are online, I can’t help but wonder about rabbis like yourself who have to type out the Name of G-d, the true and perfect four letter mystical unpronounceable Name He calls Himself, for religious purposes such as instruction.
According to Jewish law — Torah: Deuteronomy 12:3–4, Talmud: Megillah 26b, Shabbat 115a, Eruvin 98a — the Name of G-d must never be destroyed. Any paper or other writing surface that contains the Name must be buried like a person is buried, not discarded. But what about on the computer? Can we erase or trash? Or do we have to bury our machines too? And what about servers or online like in the cloud?
Please advise, as my cousin and his wife are also interested. May your site go from strength to strength, b’ezrat HaShem.
I. Blitzer
New York, NY
Don’t bury your old PC in the cemetery, Mr. Blitzer! Instead, dispose of it properly! Or better, recycle it! Donate it to charity! It is kosher to do so now that the Israeli chief rabbinate has ruled that it is permissible to delete the Tetragrammaton — the four letter Name of God — from both computer screen and file, AND from a server (meaning from anywhere online).
As the responsum explains, a computer cannot inscribe or be inscribed by anything, and the proscription against destroying the Name pertains exclusively to physical scripture, to writing by hand (though as dot matrix printer ink impregnates the paper, printed copies must still be interred). In a computer file, the Name of God, like any other word, exists only as a binary series of numbers, as 1s and 0s signifying the sequence of the letters — they are NOT the letters themselves! It follows that what is saved to memory, whether on your computer or to a server online—“the cloud”—is merely a representation! Onscreen, the Name of God is not even represented, but just perpetually refreshed. Light is beamed at the screen approximately 60x/second. In its every manifestation, then, the digitized Name is purely symbolic, and so, by the standards of Jewish law, lacks permanence. HaShem’s light, by contrast, is everlasting.
I haven’t written in a while, I’ve been writing.
Factcheck: transcribing, what I’ve been doing is transcribing. Two.docs are open. This and the book, the book’s. I have 80 recfiles open too, recs. PLAY, PAUSE, type. REWIND, PLAY, type. This might be the only time in my life I haven’t cheated. Every word out of Principal’s mouth I’ve put down on the page (down onscreen). All I’ve been told to do I’ve done. I’ve earned this break, this vacation (though only a writer would ever consider writing a vacation). I’m speaking strictly for myself again, in my own words, talking back to Principal. To you — as of today I’ve copied all of you I have.
This might be the only time in my life I haven’t cheated, except accidentally. By which I mean that every few hours: minutes: seconds, my employer’s snakecharming vocoder voice has arisen from out of its 32 bit 44.1 kHz decompression with a statement of material fact so outlandish, that I had this gut or just opposable thumbs compulsion to corroborate, and before I knew it my fingers left the keys and were clicking on my browser, which loaded to remind — I was not online. I have even, without thinking, gone searching for signals, for nothing. I’ve been stranded, utterly abandoned, left wireless — rather, wirelessless.
Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kipper: a happy healthy year to you, Moms.
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Izdihar al-Maribi — the only woman I’ve fucked whom I’ve had to remember, because she’s untetratable.
Go ahead — slap me with a fatwa, make me famous, Insha’Allah.
That day Over two weeks ago
Fuck it—9/11—9/11 dawned with alarm, the robocall to a prayer of a day. There was so much to do, there was nothing else to do, so much of nothing else at 6:00.
Izdi, Iz — she was up already and out of bed, wearing her sunglasses and zipped ripely into my Tetration sweatsuit. As the roomphone rang on she was bawling in French, “Ne decrotch pa!”
I reached for the phone but she swatted my hand, “C’est mon mari!”
But I kept reaching. For how to say “courtesy call” en Français. Reveill? reveille? Coup de courtoisie? appel do wakeywakey?
I lifted the transceiver from its cradle but Iz knocked it away and cowered down to the floor — because, I realized, my sore livid hersmelling hand was empty in midair as if about to beat her, and so I just pressed the speakerphone option. The robovoice was repeating the date, as the Gulf sounds sloshed in the background, tides in and out and in. Iz recognized if not the meaning of the recording then its purpose, and calmed.
I offed the speakerphone as she went grabbing at her sweatpants and twisting the excess calf fabric around into knots — she wasn’t used to wearing sleeves on her legs, I guess. The transceiver just lay there bleating.
And she was talking to me. And I couldn’t understand — I couldn’t understand because then she was on her knees and crawling under the bed and tugging out her abaya and spitting on the chalking still whitening the back of that blackness and rubbing it into a slime, and frowning, and spitting, rubbing, talking all the while.
Apropos of whatever she was saying, I tucked my abating prick under the sheets and recalled that cliché found in antedated Anglo-American translations of European novels, in which cravated Mediterranean lechers are said not to speak but to “have languages.” “I had” no Arabic and only a bit of French, “Iz had” no English and only a bit of French. “We had” no language in common. It’s an insinuative phrase — it’s as if the very act of speech had once been possession, and innocence and naïveté and sincérité and intégrité each had its price.
Iz had turned her abaya insideout and now was patting it unrumpled. She was searching for a pocket, a pouch sewn into its insides, pudendal. She took out a book of her own. And she opened it — and that slayed me with poignancy — how she opened the book as if to reassure herself of her identity before offering it to me.
It was an Omani passport whose red pebbled leatherette was consanguine with the stain spread on her face — that ruddier tenderness pulsing under her skin, seeping out from her glasses, still dangling their pricetag down her nose.
The pass’s thumbnail photo had her face unbattered, in full. Muslim women must get special dispensation to unveil themselves to be photographed for travel.
I held the likeness up to the original and then set it facedown on the pillow and went to touch that cheekstain but Iz fumbled away and slit the blinds to put the sun on me. If I’d meant that touch sexually, I didn’t anymore, I didn’t bother.
I rolled over wallward and read — I read her passport. Which I mean in the idiomatic sense of “getting a read on that person,” “taking a read on the situation,” but also in the sense of “reading” being something even the inanimate can do, “the pass’s ID flap ‘read’ Sultanate of Oman,” “it ‘read’ Izdihar al-Maribi”—examples that should give some notion of how automatic and pointless “reading” has become.
So pointless that even paper can do it. Paper can do it for us.
Here’s how to read: take all the things that are on the page and apply them to all the things that are not on the page, and if that ever stops working, reverse it.
Place of birth/Lieu de naissance: Yemen. Date of birth/Date de naissance: whatever it was she was 20 years old. Sex, yes, please. I’m not sure height was listed, I’m sure, however, that weight was not. Eye color, brown? Hair color, brown? Married name: Albadi, which is how Omanis with Continental business pretensions spell al-Badi. Domicile: She had a Schengen Eurozone visa and French residency permit, titre de sejour temporaire but with an accent, de séjour, 76 Rue des Forges, 13010 Marseille.
Below it all the blank for her signature was blank.
I flipped it through — she’d flown only twice before this, or they’d only stamped her twice. Muscat — Paris. Paris — Abu Dhabi. Her marriage had been a layover. After wedding a wife you sweeten your nights by taking her on what’s called a honeymoon. I wonder what it’s called in Arabic, that trip you take your first wife on just before you marry your second. Because that’s what this was. Because that’s what her husband was doing.
I couldn’t let her go back to him. But then I couldn’t take her with me or even explain why. We weren’t happening as a couple. One of us was going to fail us.
The ultimate page of the passport was unreadable with handwriting. Childish fistwriting, the Arabic script of a tongue thrust in concentration through the knuckles. It must’ve been the transliteration of an address, which only partially explained the slow deliberate heavy strokes. I got the numbers at least, the numerals, though they were Arabic too.
Iz dropped the walleted jeans and my vilest madras shirt atop me, pointed a nail at the page and said, “Unfrerch a Viend. Monfrerch a Viend.”
That, combined with the only words in this alphabet, ÖSTERREICH/AUSTRIA, confirmed it: she was telling me she had a brother (un frère) who lived in Vienna (à Vienne). This was how to contact him.
Stupey of me not to jot anything down.
I got dressed so as not to be fat in her presence, got up out of bed and noticed that my wheeliebag had already been packed — everything folded, suit at the creases, shoes stinking up the nethercompartment. I mussed around for my undies and socks, displacing the twin Korans and even the porn she must’ve riffled from the endtable.
I went into the bathroom to cool shower myself and piss and not take my plane trepidation shit, not with her present.
I came back redressed just as she was raveling my Tetbook in its wire — I jumped at her—“No, non.”
She huddled again until I was whispering, “OK, it’s OK,” and as I packed my tote myself I said, “You go à Vienne? Not me. You. Pas moi. Vous. I pay — comprendre?”
She said, “Oui.”
I said, “L’aéroport we go together — ensemble?”
She said, “Oui. Mon passeport?”
I pinched into my jeans and returned it and then she went for the waistband of her sweatsuit for two other passports — Americans — mine and Principal’s, warmed by her belly. We traded.
She said, “Avanty l’aéroport, lemall?”
“Le what?” I said.
“Boutiques.”
But this wasn’t romantic, or nostalgia for the site of our meeting — this backtracking of ours to the Khaleej mall, Iz in Tetgear and heels and me wheeling both my bag and her aluminum rocket case just as the boutiques were raising their grates.
We were in such a hurry and it was all so unplanned that I’m not going to describe it fairly. If I say (write) that it was Iz who led us into every outlet and down every aisle choosing the wardrobe I’d be buying for her, I’d be making her out to be greedy, acquisitive. If I say (write) that because I was doing the buying I did the leading and choosing too, I’d be deprivileging her, depriving her of agency. Either way, I’d be a monster.
Anyway, in terms of appearances it didn’t matter what I thought — it mattered what everyone else thought, though this early the only other people on the concourse were maintenance Filipinos riding EV tilescrubbers. I told myself Iz was Egyptian, or Jordanian, one of the liberals, and I wasn’t her west but her center. We would convey our Christianity by paying retail. I posed between fittingrooms and tried to look like I wasn’t looking. And tried not to hear as the poised blithe clerks — Caucasians but like from the Caucusus, the Khanates, who’d been addressing Iz in an uppity Arabic — cackled amongst themselves in Q train Russian about my “zhena,” my “wife,” my “doch,” my “daughter,” whom I’d struck raw and now owed for the damages.
A budget is a soiled outfit that has to be squeezed into. I was suggesting drawstrung leisurewear of her own, for her plane comfort, from Aéropostale (Fit & Flare Bottoms, €38, Sequined Fullzip Hoodie Top, €38).
But Iz wasn’t interested, and she wasn’t even trying to communicate why — whether her legs were feeling smothered, or she intuited that a transition as drastic as hers required glamour. Iz pointed to a dress in the window. Regardless of any outfits she found in the interior Iz seemed to prefer what was in the window. The clerks must’ve said there weren’t any left or in her size, though — Chechens still lag in the customer service department — so Iz just teetered up to the display and nudged the dress down herself.
I splurged (Hugo Boss Metallic Two Tone Sheath, €790).
Skirts were next and priced equally though half the length to her dimpled kneelessness. And tighter than her own skin. Her walk runnethed over down the runway of aisle. She was showing off for me, but also not only for me, and I was doing the same just by letting her try the stuff on. And by buying it. We were showing off for the fellow shoppers so mortified they were pretending to be clerks and the clerks so mortified they were pretending to be fellow shoppers. Iz, it appeared, had that tacky rhiney sequiney taste that I’d always assumed, from Aaron’s experience with the girls of NY’s postcommunist boroughs, was Slavic, but was evidently common to new arrivals of every ambition. Blouses in endangered antelope prints that Iz must’ve considered sexy, but that I thought could only be worn ironically and Rach would’ve thought could only be worn cynically. Immigrant fashion. Social mores as brands. It’s about finally having some money to flaunt. Money, which buys them the body they already own, or at least something of the body they’ve sold. Iz held the lovehandles of herself between mirrors. Don’t go dressing for the passport you have, but for the passport you deserve.
Chanel Lambskin Leather Hamptons Bag (purse), €2,188. La Senza Microfiber Low Rise Lace Trim Thong, Medium, three for €20, La Senza Pushup Plunge Bra With All Over Geo Lace, 80D EU/36D USA, three for €28.
To the next man who’ll be with her — you’re welcome.
And though I tried telling her how cold it’d be in Vienna, she wouldn’t even try the jacket, would only let them wrap it. A €340 Belted Puffer Jacket from Armani Exchange, but nonreturnable.
Makeup was by Dermalogica and Missha (€82.66 total), purchased at one emporium and slathered on in the fittingroom of another — and every time I attempted to sneak inside with her, other women, Rachlike, Lanalike, clashing embodiments of the Western femininities, materialized behind me, and they judged, as Iz emerged with turquoise lipstick on her teeth. To accentuate bone drama, or because it’s never been the fashion for even an Arab woman to flaunt her abuse, she’d been zealous with the blush — laying the rouge across her buccal bruising, powder crumbing the corners of her pout.
A cab was taken to the grand mosque sheikh something or other, which perhaps wasn’t necessary as an evasive maneuver — I just wanted to get a sense of the thing before leaving. No trip to Abu Dhabi is complete without a visit to the grand mosque sheikh something or other.
Then the airport, Abu Dhabi International — forgot what I paid the cabbie, forgot to tip the cabbie.
Went straight to the EgyptAir counter, and purchased a single oneway ticket to Vienna via Cairo (2,260 dirhams?). For her.
I kept explaining she’d have to change flights in Cairo, as if nobody in Egypt spoke any Arabic or would help her. Or would out of chaste motives help her.
Bread sandwich at Starbucks, Terminal 1 (22 dihrams?).
I didn’t have enough clock to bring her to her gate and wait for her plane, so I just put her in line with her carryons and her carryon self and let her roll away until she was checked in. She turned around for the last, though not to me, I realized, after my limp wave wasn’t repaid, but to what must’ve been a cantilevered screen scrolling Departures. I was so nervous about my own flight that we never did what even secular friendly uninvolved adults did and kissed or hugged or said adieux. I had to say that to myself, then — I do.
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From: madamimadam@tetmail.com
To: jcomphen@aol.com
Wed, Sept 14, 2011, 10:08 AM
RigdeWood
I’m writing this email at Rach’s request. She does not wish to make this yet a matter for the lawyers.
Rach and I have been intermediately receiving notices that expenses have not been paid on your Metropolitan Ave office for a period now of two months now (July, August). September’s bill is two weeks overdue. October’s bill just arrived. Rach informed you of this in emails of 8/16, 8/22, 9/1, 9/6 (below), to which she received no response. After receiving the second of two late notices (July August) we dully turned them over to Martin & Simon Eisen & Associates PC who according to them had no choice but to turn them over to your agent Aaron Szlai on 8/24 (copied below). We can only guess that Mr. Szlai’s been in contact. What we can’t guess is why you haven’t been or paid? Rach is extremely insensed!!!! September’s bill came 8/16 and was due 9/1 and October’s came today 9/14 and is due 10/1 again. Against Eisen’s recommendation Rach has as of today paid for July and August in full ($680 rent and maintenance × 2 plus $40 × 2 in late fees for a total of $1,440, below), only because the property’s still in her name, plus an outstanding utilities bill of $216.64 cumulative (below). Rach does not wish to deprive you of a workspace that means your support. However she wishes to have the lease taken over and switched to your name ASAP and has informed Vanderende Mngmnt. accordingly (below). Please get in touch or have Aaron or representation of your choice get in touch with Vanderende ASAP, who told us you have not been on the premises. (Onders has been trying to contact with you also and we gave him Mr. Szlai”s phone.) If you do not assume the lease by 9/26, assuming you wish to and we do not wish to threaten, Rach will notify Vanderende of intention to terminate effective 10/31 (Bob Onders the manager stipulates two months’ notice req. but is willing “to forgive September for October conversion”), and forward all damages/fees + moving expenses to you, or whoever. We’re willing to write off our losses but no further.
Sincerely,
Adam Shale
P.S. I’d scrapbooked my entire career especially the stage to which I will be returning this fall and winter, PLaybills, critcial notices (the raves!!), cast photos and scripts, then the film and TV material to 1986, all of which I lost in a fire (Grove St., 1986), and yet I still miss this material touchingly. It was my whole life and the history of many others who miss it. I predict the temptation might be to forget the past but trust me if I say this is a sense you repent. Rach tells me you have many books at the office and papers, p.p.s. also I don’t know if you know but I grew up a bit in that neighbor hood
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From: madamimadam@tetmail.com
To: jcomphen@aol.com
Fri, Sept 23, 2011, 9:52 AM
Re: RigdeWood
I still haven’t received a response from you to my email of a week ago but received a response from Eisen, to which I ccopied or bccopied my email of a week ago. Eisen wrote that he’d not received a response from Aaron Szlay and then did or a secretary called Eliza said no one has been able to reach you since August. I’m not prepared to repeat type what he said. What Eisen said about the stalling that it was disingenius. But I’m sure you have a firmer opinion.
We’re taking the opportunity to communicate to you that Rach and I have decided to revise our position on the office for termination instead effective 9/30. Vanderende has been very acomodating and is willing to cut a deal to forgive the dvanced notice if the office is vacated by the end of the month, and so that is what we’ll shift to. You’ll have to arange vacation yourself and if you don’t we’ll arange it for you at significant cost and not to mention loss to you.
Since I’ve been in rehearsals for “The Pryers”(Lincoln Center, previews Nov, opening Dec) I have not had the time to make an appropriate survey of the contents and for Rach it is understandably difficult. Also I have a lot of voice work on the schedule this fall/winter and another deodorant commercial too and Onders who HAS entered the unit (legally, within his rights as Vanderende management) also reports it is a mess and very daunting. It wi;; be understandably difficult if it’s up to us do the clearance alone and though it might appear that I am in the best of shape even for me it would be expensive. After what you did to Rach! After how you treated her!
(to still leave her shoveling up your slop, even after)
Other issues: we would like to know your best delivery address for mail mail (Rach opened some of the envelopes thinking they might be joint concerns, not me). Some books Rach says are review copies and two cordial invitations she said you always got but at least they entertained me, for Dr. Joshua Cohen to address the astrophysics symposia in South Africa, and Dr. Joshua Cohen to participate in a “plenary” on “deliberative democracy” (I had to search that up), at the University of North Texas — Denton (when you search your name you get so many people no you but when for my name all you get is me for the first dozen more two dozen ro so resultant pages). But if you prefer I can just send them to your mother. If preferred.
Which brings me to a phonecall we received from a friend of Rach’s at R ø t how do you change the font 9(used to be I&B), head of global marketing who told Rach she remembered you from a xmas party two years ago but now recognized you in June at the San Francisco airport in June. Possible? You don’t strike me as “a west coast guy.” I am definitely not, though w’ere going out to LA for a weekend in October to record the voiceover of “The Fireplace” for a Pixar project I can’t tell anyone anything about. But anything is possible. Judith Geller (Judy, her name is in San Francisco, black hair, dyed black, short, hair short and she is too, dresses funky)? Also Aaron Szlaw never returned my call about this either.
So you can mpathize that this fall what with the play and the dubbing and the spot for Refresh (deodorant but not na antipersprint) I UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can let your affairs encompass our life beyond what they’ve already encompassed.
Rachava was so kind and generous to you who were not kind and not generous and selfish. You begrudged her and kept your begrudges all locked up for us to dispose of.
Case close.d
Also today going through a winter clothes container — second closet by bathroom — I noticed you left some nice condition sweaters. Assuming you’re still around the city, it’s only getting colder. Some nice bottom drawer sweaters and a few extra shirts including a very good insulated plaid. So, EMail me your best mail delivery address and I’ll throw in a few pants that don’t fitme anymore (too large), including a beautiful pair of corduroy I’ve never even wear.
Sincerely,
Adam Shale
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— describe apartment/“flat” I’m in? describe Berlin?
— who’s it owned by? Balk?
— after I left “Iz” I hit two different euro ATMs in two different terminals of AD Int’l for €4,000 on my Bank of America Visa credit/debit, with which I purchased two different tickets to two different destinations on two different airlines leaving from two different terminals under two different passports, wheeliebagged in and out, initially as Principal, again as myself, passport controls, security checks
— took a shuttle to Al Bateen Executive Airport
— was flown to a midforest fascist boulevard airstrip that I still maintain was on the wrong side of the Oder, meaning it was Poland
— was met by Balk’s presumptive agent, Anders Maleksen, a mesomorphic Scando Nordo guy with a buzzcut and barcodey scars at his neck who drove me into Berlin in a beatup grayscale Mercedes, AND WHO STILL HASN’T COME BACK, OR BEEN IN TOUCH, AND HASN’T REIMBURSED ME
— so either Bank of America froze my account for suspicious activity
— or Interpol had them do it
— because of my double absence from the flights
— whose tickets I purchased in cash
— have €166 left
— and just coins in my stomach rattling around, THOUGH IN THIS COUNTRY COINS COUNT
— but then whenever I slot my card in a machine to check my balance and try to withdraw, do they know where I am?
— who are they?
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Various things I’d like to tetrate: Whenever I slot my card in a machine to check my balance and try to withdraw, do they know where I am? Who are they? BoA? Kor? CIA/DIA/NSA? Obama? Cheapest closest grocery location? Hours? German phrases to explain I need to borrow a phone? German phrases to explain why I need to borrow it? The correct plural and caloric and fat contents of doners? How to insert umlauts in Tetsuite—Ö döners? The outcome of that football/soccer game the Copt pilots put on in the cockpit from AD and invited me to join them for and I did and there it was opening up in front of me, the sky? Russia vs. either Brazil or Portugal? Anders Maleksen, whether what he said was true about having never been told anything about reimbursing me or if that was all just subterfuge like his refusal to confirm even his relationship with Balk? Whether that treed airstrip he’d picked me up at was across the Oder in Poland like I’d guessed? Who that battered grayscale Merc with D plates BEI2628 was registered to if not to him or Balk? Whether Maleksen was from Australia or New Zealand, or just his accent in English? Why he wouldn’t even stop for a bathroom break but just pissed into a 2L of Fanta Grape while driving? What or who was he afraid of or was it that he was scared I might run off on him? What was indicated by the recordingesque nictitating diode on the keyring he handed me? What if any repercussions will I have to negotiate for succumbing to my impulse to detach the ring from the keys and toss it to the trashcan on my corner?
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QWERTY, n, adj: pertaining to the standard English-language keyboard layout, named after the first six consecutive keys of the weakhanded northern row. The computer keyboard is merely a copy of the typewriter’s, whose keys triggered the arms that struck the letters to the page. But if the keys of the earliest models were depressed too fast, the arms would jam. Later models would integrate a lag, a drag. Letters commonly coupled together, like t and h, and q and u, were relegated to different rows or spaced apart, so that no matter how fast the question, the arms wouldn’t tanglge, the letters wouldn’t jumblbe, the page wouldn’t blot. Users became so inured to the resulting keyboard that even as typewriters gave way to computers, it remained: a fossil, and any attempt to backengineer and develop a new layout, placing Who, What, When, Where, and Why in a greater proximity would be wildly inconvenient.
Point is, so it goes with our own human couplings: After a while, everything starts seeming logical. A failed writer gets used to being blocked. A Yemeni childbride gets used to being beaten. Both qwerty, if in disparate degrees.
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Using Tetsuite, its wordprocessor — one feature I hate is how it senses you’re typing an interrogatory and just automatically inserts the punctuation. Also, the Notes tab is lost in the clutter of the Typefaces menu, the notes themselves get lost if margins change, it reformats every numeral into heading a list, respells “algy” as “algae,” and though I turned Tetration.com into a macro it keeps reproducing as a link, and I keep accidentally tapping it, and raising that unmullioned sill — that disconnected window.
Or I’m writing cliché, and it just autoinserts that accent? That acute or grave? As if cliché were French. As if it weren’t universal. Publishers started out by setting their books one letter at a time. The type was movable (it was movable type), which was necessary given that all the letters had to be rearranged into every conceivable order, to spell out every conceivable word — necessary but also wasteful. And so the printers, always working toward efficiency, soon cast metal slugs of words and then, eventually, whole entire repeated phrases. “Love” was not composited of four separate sorts anymore—“l” “o” “v” “e”—but merely of one, “love.” Phrases such as “as it were” or “for that matter”—their equivalents in the European languages — were confined to one continuous line. The sizzle made when a phrase was cast — when the hot hackneyed metal was dumped from its matrix into water to quench — was said to be, in French, cliché. The hiss of clich, clich, clich, cliché. In time, this onomatopoeia was shed, or rather acquired significance. Like: divorcing balding overweight broke male writer. Like: divorcing balding overweight broke male writer has sex with a younger female. Like: benevolent Jew, bewildered Arab. Like: if I remember it, it’s true.
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Other things I’d like to tetrate: Is the chair I’m in Biedermeier? Who’s Biedermeier? Or is it Empire? Whose? Louis XIV was the furniture king? Louis XVI was the king whose only memorable furniture was the guillotine? This desk, what type of wood is it? Deskwood? How to pick a drawer’s lock? How to determine whether a drawer is stuck or merely a glued cosmetic forgery? “Casement” windows? Or “casedment”? Is this ceiling “coffered”? Can floors or walls be “coffered”? Are the parquet plat inlays swastikas or is it me who’s bent? Swastika is “hakenkreuz” and the plural is “hakenkreuze” but am I pronouncing either correctly? Who’s the saint in that painting holding his own severed head as ink spouts out from the mouth? What are the pedals of this warped discordant piano called? How to determine whether a pendulum clock is broken or just unwound? How to wind it? No fireplace? No electronics so the remote I rummaged under the divan cushion is for what? That chest? Camphor chest? “Shoji” screens? Or “joshi”? Lacquer, how? Is there anything creepier than the Reich’s kitsch penchant for the Orient? Are the three idols made out of crystal all Buddhas, or is only one of them the Buddha and the others Laozi and Confucius? Which one is wearing the hat?
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— I have groceries now NO MORE FASTFOOD! NO MORE MC’D’S! STICK WITH RICE! PLATES @ 12:00/8:00!
— the Visa’s been rejected by Deutsche Bank/Commerzbank/Volksbank/Berliner Sparkasse (multiple locations)
— who are Balk’s contacts in Berlin (besides Maleksen)?
— contact Balk or Maleksen via Myung but how?
— better to go online at café or library or try by disposaphone?
— destroy Principal’s passport or just dispose of it?
— hold onto Principal’s passport
— clean up this shitpit
— pawn the flat’s antiques at pawnshop, or “flohmarkt”
— wait until dark to take out the trash (“restmüll,” the rest of the bins in the courtyard are recycling)
— rejected at ReiseBank/Western Union (multiple locations)
—€118.62 left
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From: a@szlayliteristic.com
To: jcomphen@aol.com
Wed, Sept 28, 2011, 11:37 PM
checking
Dear J, stop reading this and get back to work. Two things are bothering me: should I be opening emails with “Dear,” like a letter, and 2.) should I be worried about teensy mental slips like signs of aging? (like not flipping that formula around — it should read: should I be worried about signs of aging like teensy mental slips …) I hope your concerns are slightly more — slightly more — I hope you’re writing. Give me news if you can but if you can’t Just whatever you do don’t come back to NY, where I haven’t been able to sleep so Just up on the roof heeling the tar, clinking two rocks against the glass. The brownstones from here are green Achsa’s settled into Princeton. But of course with her there’s the car issue and she bitches that I’m trying to revert the insurance. She asks me if I know what the payments are. I don’t know how to answer, besides obviously I do, you spoiled bratty bitch of my own raising. Her major will be Econ, which is now called operations research and financial engineering?! or is it!? Mir’s loss was my gain. Now my loss is some asshole fratboy’s gain, but she’s not dating or wouldn’t tell me. For the Econ major most students take a psychology minor. But she didn’t say that. She said something like more than 60 % take a psychology minor. Over the phone. Even with the car she don’t come home no mo no mo no mo no mo.
Now, Rach. I can’t have this. Fucking Martinize and Simonize (tetrate it) the Eisen lawyers call. Not to mention the actor guy calls twice a week and last time according to Seth this boy who’s been on phones giving Lisabeth a break — a break from what? — he even tried to pitch a children’s book, a fucking series of children’s books, because, the actor guy said, Seth said, he understands “such things are pitched in series.”! Josh, I can’t have it. I’m your agent, not your personal assistant. And I’m certainly not this kid power forward anymore running pick and rolls like Carmelo Anthony last season (they’re going to regret the lockout, the players arguing over salary caps and revenue sharing while their youths tick away). Don’t get me wrong, I understand what we’re doing and why I have to tie myself and all the office up in phone lies, saying we’ve got no idea where you are, no idea when you’re coming back, but now I’m realizing, with you not responding, it’s true, I don’t, I’m worrying.
You need to get a lawyer (because I’m not a lawyer and my dead parents are on line 2 saying “we told you so.”). You’re going to need Irv Feyer, or maybe like a Spence Rich. I’ll think on which, you’ll think on which, GET BACK TO ME and I’ll handle it. Rach is trying to serve you with papers, and because she can’t or for whatever other fucked delusional reason she’s trying to shame you with this illiterate blog of hers and anything you can do to address it on your own will just exacerbate the situation. Do Not Fucking Comment. Keep doing what you’re doing and DON’T CONFRONT. We’ll get a lawyer to handle everything and make the removal of the blog a stipulation. But only a lawyer can tell you if that’s viable.
The other reason I’m getting personal and legalistic is this: the check, first half, just came. I knew it was coming and I knew we had to decide what to do with it and trust me I considered every option. We need, the two of us, to talk, and if you end up retaining either Feyer or Rich as counsel as I strongly advise, we need to talk with him. Because it’s my sense, again, not as a lawyer, that as the contract was executed and the half advance was sent before a divorce or even papers were served (it’s not like I’m in the position to tell Finn how to time his checks, it’s not like Finn after your fiasco with him in California would put himself out with “the bookkeepers”), it’s my amateur sense that this counts as earned income that Rach can claim, because this is NY, babele, up to 50 % of, especially given indiscretions I’ll spare the both of us, and the fact that she’d supported you financially for years, or like a decade. A judge would bankrupt you and a lady judge wouldn’t leave you enough for funeral expenses. I was hoping you’d patch all this up or had been straighter with me.
So, two options to consider (I haven’t taken my commission yet, I haven’t even deposited the check): we can be what Miri used to call “home kosher” on this — meaning we ate whatever on our own but in our parents’ house it was milk separate from meat and never a crustacean — and you get a divorce and only after the divorce the agency cuts you a check and you keep low like the mafia after a heist and don’t flash foxes and Caddys, or we go full on treyf and impatient and you go now and open a new account with a new bank abroad and I’ll have the money routed there and we pray (I have European junketing this autumn) — again, we can discuss this, even with Feyer and maybe Rich.
What else I wouldn’t bother touching on unless I felt you might have a sense of it and would be willing to break the “radio silence” and please enlighten me. I’m also a bit trepidatious like I’m some Hollywood Adam Shale about to be popped by TMZ saying something racist and then I’ll have to go on the Today Show to count up how many nonwhite friends I have. I have 12 nonwhite friends is how many (though Skip Gates has to count for like 10 on his own — my numbers were higher before Octavio Paz died).
But over the last two weeks, or when I went to the Fulton banya I first noticed it, mid-September, wherever I went I was noticing this Asian person. It’s more with Asian women and I’ll never understand this and I bet I’m not unique in this regard but I can always tell from behind if a woman’s Asian. Even with the hair bunned up. It’s not like I’ve spent so much time parsing why, but it’s consistently true, from behind, and I’m only secondarily an ass man, I can always get them. It might be just how they hold themselves. But I won’t get into it. I hate this pc shit. I hate that I’ve been cowered into this tapdance — I swear I’m so concerned for Asian welfare, I dropped Jolly Roger acid and 4F’d the VC, which at the time still meant VietCong.
So I noticed her from behind. At the Fulton banya. Then at Gourmet Garage, and I’m never at Gourmet Garage (I’d given Lisabeth a week off for a family reunion in Maine — because every weekend is a family reunion in Maine if you own Penobscot Bay — and she usually manages the menus). Remember Svetlana? Does this link work, tetset.com/svetlana.muzhikhoyeva or you’re the expert do I have to put a www.? After you left I went online, and regot in touch with “Sveltelana,” put her back on the rotation, but just the moment we’d gotten copacetic again, now that she’d turned 30 and turned her back on all the horrid shit women have to deal with in their 20s, not least of which their appraisals of themselves, their attempts to square their mothers’ and then their own assessments of ability or beauty with their ambitions, and then further with their prospects, anyway, all of that crashed, we burned, and though the time before it was about marriage, or my refusal to ring her, this time it was about a wedding and wasn’t my fault in the least, just bad luck though not nearly as bad as yours, no offense, my luck’s the only thing I’m guilty of because otherwise, I didn’t do shit. I just happened to have a lunch with an editor at Viking, junior editor, very young, very cute, Bard or Amherst grad handjob in the bathroom at a Paris Review party cute, but it was strictly a welcome to the business let’s get acquainted lunch and as we left The Breslin who was it I met? “Svetlelana” was just out from getting fitted at David’s Bridal with a lace gang of bridesmaids for one of their regular Russian nuptial orgies, and yelling at me, smacking me, stalking away with her fellow bridesmaids and the blushing bride, the junior editor fleeing crosstown weeping, and as I was about to head back into The Breslin to wash up and decompress another sazerac who was it in a Red Sox hat loitering on the sidewalk like she was checking the health inspection grade but checking me instead like a homeless harpy, and then she ran for it?
The Asian — stalking me to just about every other lunch and spending more time hanging around Achsa and me during her visits than Sveta my Svetichka ever did, and I’m sure you can put this into better Hebrew for me, but I was davening, God YHVH, Father of my fathers, don’t let her shoot me down with Achsa around or before our tix to Merce Cunningham’s farewell at the Armory. But then she’s like God herself, this Asian, in all places at all times, though managing always to be far enough away from me and inconspicuous to cabbies that I thought she might be two Asians, or four, or more, and even jumping into Bill’s on 54th and blarneying a bartender who’d once temped for me into letting me exit through the broken filing cabinets of the Prohibition sewer tunnel that let me out on 55th to come around Madison to get her face, head on, she’d turned, was gone. But then she’s outside my office. Outside my fucking building. At the fucking cardiologist’s, like she knows what she’s doing to me. Always in that Red Sox hat, and that’s what drives me crazy — also, can you imagine my bloodpressure coming through Koreatown?
I went through all the Asians I’ve ever repped, all the Asian women I’ve ever repped (so counting up my nonwhite friends nontheless), no likelies, so she’s either a sub I rejected, or related to us, our us, which would be worse. Because I can say this with total confidence. I’m sure I never fucked her. It’s difficult in life, to go against the conventional wisdom, to oppose all the entrenched norms and institutions and dogma, like Copernicus and Galileo, Spinoza, Marx, Pancho Villa, Rosa Parks, like Duchamp going readymade and Dylan going electric, and this is mine, my stand, my own two feet on the garbage day street with that scrawny flat just unfuckable ass always in front of me and then behind, face brimmed, averted. Unlike every other male American Jew, I have never had a thing for Asians. I’ve loved women of every race, and if I haven’t loved them equally it wasn’t from any bias, just my diet or circulation, poor sleep habits. But an Asian fetish? No. Have I ever thought of them as unobtrusive and subservient replacements for my mother? No. Have I ever thought of anyone as a replacement for my mother? Maybe my sister, maybe me for my sister’s kid, maybe Elaine Kaufman, until we got into a fight over Norman Mailer, maybe Norman Mailer.
Have to go now. Calls to return to what was once called “the coast.” Back in the days when 12 channels broadcast for only 12 hours a day, the pitcher’s mound was 15 inches and the designated hitter didn’t exist, the bestseller lists were 30 % Jewish. When the pinnacle of technology was mutually assured atomic destruction, and women, who were basically typewriters — wait …
Really really can’t wait for that away msg, aar
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To begin is how to begin, for the writer and reader both. The first sentence sets the rules, the laws, the measures, sentencing the second to its fate.
To begin with how to begin, I couldn’t. I couldn’t decide on whether to try some generalist baseline crap, something about how computers have changed our lives (the history of the mainframe or personal comp?), or how online has (explain the difference between the net and web?), or how search has (explain tetration/Tetration?), or to go instead for a more intimate approach, like with an anecdote, with people in it, a person, Principal, but I was unable to decide between presenting him as a child or as an adult, at a successful moment like the company’s founding or IPO, or at a moment not more failed but sad like the cancer or Balk, though anything like that would mean that the book wouldn’t proceed chronologically, which always requires an earlier germ, the earliest — Principal’s birth and the lives of his parents and grandparents (the partition of Poland by Imperial Russia, the Roman exile, the Greek conquest of Palestine, the Babylonian exile, the sixth day of Creation, the void?).
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The dream of search is the
History derives from historia, meaning “I search” [is this true?], which Antiquity [which Antiquity?]
I was [firstperson singular?] born in Palo Alto, CA, 40 years ago last summer. The neighborhood, Crescent Park, lay cradled in the crescent of San Francisquito Creek.
I am [present tense?] the 14th richest man in America and the 18th richest man in the world and my sole possession is a begging bowl.
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All distractions, diversions — fidgeting, smoking, drinking, jerking to memories eidetic, echoic, Arabic/Semitic but fading like drunkenness, fading like smoke, until as empty as my Glenlivet and Jameson bottles and my last carton of Camel Lights.
I went reading through my old.docs for old inspiration and techniques (which voice to use for this, whether active or passive?), and I moved around (which tense, if not the present?), moving myself, the furniture, alternating nights between rooms, dragging the Tetbook’s charger wire between my legs limp until finally settling — the past, the past was unavoidable, not as deep as the void, but proximal, basically, as like.
I forced myself to stay seated, at screen — no wifi bars to stick my nose through, with any other barrier just selfimposed — and then, after a day or two sleepless, I got into it, I grew into the writing and so found myself growing up too, alongside Principal, taking his life and making it mine or half his and half mine and so going through all that childhood pap and school crap again, maturing, or aging, but also, simultaneously, getting younger. Whatever, don’t pay any attention, just get the words down on the page. Point is, that feeling was returning. That etherealizing feeling I’d assumed I’d lost forever of just losing yourself, myself, in another. Letting everything else just go slack. Hitting wordcounts, hitting Return.
The sky outside was a cloud, a metaphor or simile, a repository of all worldly files but mine. All the windows were on the same channel. Oscillating rain. Let lightning describe itself, and let thunder be its dialogue.
I had this superstition — never sit directly under the chandelier. No walls would ever be white again, next to or behind the whiteness of blank.docs. No silence would ever be as silent as the sibilance between.recs. It’s bizarre that this flat doesn’t have a fireplace, but I might’ve noted that already — pressing Ctrl+F would find that out, I keep pressing my sinuses instead.
If you think this is procrastinating, think again — because I also had the sensation of spyquip, and went about searching its concealments. In the tall thin coiled basketry that reminded me of Rach and the stumpy canopic jarlets that recalled me to Lana. In the sepia clock, the cameras and mics eloigned behind its escapement. In the small little Mongoloid trees, which if they weren’t themselves recording devices were either dead or dying.
Going for a refill of ice, or a light from the burners, trying to block it all out — the kitchen. All that tile and stainless steel was just a rash of prepackaged foodstuffs in and out of prepackaging. The floating task station and chopblock, the handles of the freezer/fridge, the knobs of the range, were flavored with ketchup, mustard, mayo from teethslit packets. The double trough sinks cradled an afterbirth of takeout goulash, backsplashed even to the pot/pan rack. A sponge had been rended, which bothers, because I don’t recall ever doing the dishes. A bite of the sponge was stuck to the wall.
Going to the bathroom was to navigate the McDonald’s takeout sacks I’d intended to take out, börek and wurst wraps, polystyrene bivalves of dumplings, cardboard pails clotted with chiliflecked stirfry. €2 coins have a silver coating, a creamy gold center, €1 coins have a gold coating, a creamy silver center. Both feature maps of borderless Europe. Just desserts. Toiletpaper was wadded with all the laundry I wasn’t doing. Tiny green hemorrhoids of toothpaste were affixed to the mirror and sink. Toothbrush gagging the drain. Thank Christ I’d boosted towels from the Khaleej, the Burj. No extra set of sheets has been provided. I haven’t accounted for the bedroom just yet, that Charlemagne deathbed perfect for rugmunching and with a canopy so high no cumshot would ever reach it.
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I’ve been realizing only lately what I’ve lost. I used to just sit in a chair at a desk and search myself up and suddenly I’d be sitting in a certain type of chair at a certain type of desk, on a certain date, at a certain time, and at certain coordinates, with a certain weather forecast outside. Those days are over, though, those days and their access I’ve been withdrawing from gradually, groggily, like from an addiction, a relationship. I’ve been realizing only lately the exact precise upholstery of my ignorance. Everything creaks. Especially in the dark, the dark trafficless silence — everything creaks, internally.
How perverse is it that thinking of Rach, with her fly’s memory, consoles me? — how perverse that the only thing that calms me down is thinking of her in the same situation, unable to handle it, going insane? Her pda had this app that by the time I’ll be finished with this job, finished with this thought, will already be outdated, outmoded — by the very thought that it might be, it is. She’d hold her pda out in front of her like a cleaver, and click to camera a pic or vid or to record an audio snippet, and by that alone the app would tell her what it is, or was, which intel she’d then use to preempt me, test me, correct me when she suspected I was guessing, when she suspected I was lying in the hopes of appearing better or smarter or sexier: wondering by the reservoir, “What kind of dog is that, sniffing around?” Click, “A Pomeranian.” Wandering on Riverside Drive, “What kind of cat is that, grooming in the window?” Click, “A Siamese.” That woman ironing is La repasseuse by Picasso, and that’s a Morandi, I told her at the Guggenheim, at MoMA, and I was correct, but then later I called a Dix a Grosz or a Grosz a Dix and she checked and was irate — I told her the cab radio was playing September Song, composed by Kurt Weill, lyrics by (but everyone forgets lyricists), and she checked and yelled that it was James Brown, but then I yelled how it was a cover version, and though the app agreed she never apologized: “I wouldn’t have to do this,” she said, “if your confidence wasn’t such bullshit.”
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A memory, unsubstantiated, inherently “unsubstantiatable” (is that a word? what site can prove it’s not?). The first time Rach dragged me to psych, to Dr. Meany’s office, I spent the entire sessh inspecting the office, telling myself that its decoration would tell me everything I needed to know about him or perhaps would tell me nothing I needed to know because he too must have had this thought and decorated accordingly, which, were that the case, would tell me everything. I’d get the same intelligence from his wearables. His wordchoices.
Another memory. Once I arrived early, or late, on a Monday but the appointment was for Friday — rather it wasn’t an appointment with Meany but with one of the fertility doctors, though he was out, his receptionist was out, and I was all alone amid the indirect tracklighting and minimal tulips, and snooped. Or I tried to. The cabinets wouldn’t budge — they were all childproofed, or adultproofed, they were proofed against adults who wanted children, proofed against adults who were acting like the children they didn’t want to have (the greatest breakthrough I’ve ever had).
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I’d forgotten just how much of myself I’d outsourced, offshored, externalized. To Rach and Lana, to Moms. Externalized online. I’ve become so reliant.
It’s as if I’d presumed there would always be some woman or mother around, if not then some dusty storeroom in Ridgewood or even just a Jersey of unlimited storage that would hold everything for me, that would safekeep and recall me, so that no matter how far I’d go or how long I’d be gone, and no matter how many people I’d ghost, my own being or inborn self, who I was supposed to be, not who I was, would always be secure, if only in another’s sense of how they’ve been frustrated, disappointed, or betrayed by me.
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From: madamimadam@tetmail.com
To: jcomphen@aol.com
Fri, Sept 30, 2011, 10:24 AM
RidgeWood
We’ve been indated with rehearsals and gym and to have to deal with this I’m insensed but also pity you. Still we have had no response besides your agency’s assistant, Daniel Maleksen, finally reaching out to me to state (in writing) (email) that because he hasn’t been able to contact you if we were serious on the office front he’d have to hold onto your computer, though it’s Rach’s computer, but being over four years old it might as well be dead to her.
We are working to meet up.
You’re lucky that tomorrow 10/1 is a Saturday — Shabbos Shuvah, or Atonement — and that today I had no time to deal with this or Bob Onders granted us the last — the last — extension.
So if you have any interest whatsoever in salvaging your office on terms that are your own you must get in touch now immediately.
We have also had to take issue with the Amex. This is either between us or between our laywers and you and the fraud department unless you can admit it and be absolutely honest. Rach’s Amex has had a number of interesting charges recently that have only recently come to our attention, which none of the charges we have made. Rach does not remember ever having given you this card (copy of your own) and her own card she has in her wallet. But the fraud department has stupulated that a card for that account HERS WAS ISSUED IN YOUR NAME on 4/29/11 and mailed to you not at the billing address I’m writing from but to you c/o your office. I was activated on 5/4/11 for a charge so negible we must have missed the statement at the time, which would be June, for Amazon.com, who would not conform or deny or eithr turn over an account or shipping destination unless the charge was contested in which case they would but directly to Amex. We are guessing books. And you. And this is unconsciousable that you would commit fraud like this but we are “hoping for the best” even after a period of no activity besides Rach’s own legitimate purchases how it was lately brought to our attention (the account has since been canceled).
Namely (you might have had it stolen, or in loo of robbery had lost it, or the worst of the scenarios: you had it all this time and only now are using it impunitly): because now we received an irregular activity fraud alert for charges in excess of $4,482.62 from Baby Phat, Chanel, Dior, and “ASAQ” outlets, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. I tetrated ASAQ and got that it was “Abdul Samad Al Qurashi.” Then again about a week or so after that attack of 9/12, the card was used at “Kaufhaus des Westens,” Berlin, and throughout the month at Karstadt, Edeka, all Berlin, all tetrating as groceries, and then again repeated attempts at cash withdrawal including one just 9/ Monday that was rejected, according to the shah of the fraud alert team, “Teri” Lakshmi, for multiple wrong PINs, which you must have if it was you forgot. The Monday location was a Deutsche Bank AG, Kurf_rstendamm 182, and then a Sparkasse, Friedrichstra_e 148. We found this out only by luck because the primary number Amex calls to alert to fraud is our landline, which we just reinstalled after a full kitchen renovation (chelseakitchenry.com, maison-de-fantaisie-nyc.com), and the secondary number they are supposed to call with no response to the first is the cell, Rach’s old work cell, which she had paid for you on her plan, and attempted to obtain back verbally by leaving a msg on it that was never returned and neither was the cell relinquenched. This msg would have been left, Rach’s guesstimation, way back around 6/10. The cancellation of that phone from her plan was 6/24, but she is very angry with herself that she didn’t switch in her own cell as backup emergency with Amex, and you are cognizent I would hope of how it traumatizes Rach and gets her ticked to neglect something to neglect something.
Are you in Berlin? And in the Dhabi? If so, why? If not, why was Rach’s Amex? And beyond that how can you justify doing that to her again, that extra insult of taking out another card for the account at the time you did,
in case you went broke alone and decided she’d underwrite you forever My character costarring in “The Pryers” (Lincoln Center) is about an “experienced,” which is how I describe any character described as “old,” “gentleman” who worked all his life in the pits of Virginia or West Virginia so he would be able to give his son the best, education, opportunities, and the son who’s my costar is a major respected congressional leader, a friend of the poor and downtrodden like his father, which everyone is after to run for president, the son, but he won’t run, the son, or won’t decide not to until the accusations emerge of sexual improperties with a missing intern, and the media surrounds, and then fiscal improperties relating to the sexual and the media becomes unbearable. His wife has left him and taken the children just as he resigns at the press conference. Then with everyone trespassing his home in the capitol he has only once place to go, back home to the coal pits and father, and all throughout he has been unflappable but now he is flappable because he has to confront his father, which he intends will refuse to forgive him. He doesn’t care about the constitutionts or about his fellow congress, just his father because his mother is dead. I am working like him on the forgiveness. You have to work on getting in touch about your office tomorrow (Sat) or at the very latest after tomorrow (Sun), because I have already getting varying quotes from different trash removers and DON’T DO NOT INTEND to make two trips. The voice of Pixar’s “The Fireplace” I’ve created is an impersonation of Rach’s impersonation of you. “Coming next spring to a theater near you.” Rach does you like a vary enthic “nutty” “professor” liar who talks to everyone like talking to himself and the fireplace doesn’t need logs, it doesn’t need kindling, it burns on its own. I’m going to do that with the stutter you had, which time we met in the park.
Yours during this holiday season that absolves us from sins,
shanah tovah,
Adam
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From: madamimadam@tetmail.com
To: jcomphen@aol.com
Mon, Oct 3
Re: RidgeWood, 9:36 PM
Besides you know what (you KNOW), the main contention Rach ever counted against you was your lack of a job and now that you’re through living off her sponsorship and have to get one let me recommend to you the trash business. It’s a wracket whose worse aspect is that if the customer has any decency I can’t help but help out, I’m too sensitive having had such jobs before, even though I’m paying through the nose not to. I couldn’t restrain myself and lifted. I wish either of us could feel my spine.
You fouled up and today was the consequence. Fouled! Up! With Rach too emotionally busy to deal with this, because I would do anything to allevate her suffering. Today they and I (Bob Onders from Vanderende, management, and the assistant from your agency, Daniel Maleksen) were scheduled to meet at 10 to let me in, the Refuseniks — which I found online on the recommendaton of theater props and set design friends and for which I should now instead of this should be writing a testimonial to get a rebate — would come at 12, giving me ample time to go through your possessions before the Reuseniks would come, in case there was anything of Rach’s property strictly. YOU CANNOT BE SVADE FROM YOURSELF!1!1 Having never been there before so how could I have known that the time was not ample, in fact, I could not have. Rach printed me a list of what she knew would be hers and have made an exhausting list of your own items also that struck me and will retain them as collaterals (both attached, items to be disposed of pending what the courts will now determine).
(final reciept attached too)
I’m trying to write this in your style …
Or I’ll be honest, truthful’s not your style: besides the airports and an event at the botanical gardens and I think another event on the QM2 at the cruise terminal I don’t think I’dhave been to an outerborough since 1968, the very year I left my parent’s house, which was only according to the tetmap about 2 miles from where you office. Still I’m Brooklyn and you’re Queens I suppose, as if all that out of the way and distitute zoning laws or mileage still matter. I’ll admit to the tepidaton I felt about the neighborhood. My parents moved down to Ocala (Florida) soon after I left and died soon after I hadn’t been back but you recall the 60s through the Koch administration, or you don’t because you’re too young or to quote myself “inexperienced” from Jersey. (“Not from the “neighborhood.”) Anyway it was a good place to live when my parents moved in but became bad when the — I was going to — but I guess it’s a matter of educatin and opportunitie.s
The subway was off for the weekend. “they” always called it the BMT. The 10, the 16, Canarsie Line, Jamaica Line, I remember our phone number began with EV, Evergreen, then ST, which, don’t get me started, and everyone was Jewish not like in books. Most not just small businesspeople like my parents but big strong men like barrels who used to labor in breweries, the women stuffed sausages. Germans toward you but Polish and Yiddish toward us, all Jews. But nowadays I had to get off seven stops out of Manhattan but the subway stopped at five and so I had to take a bus, because of a disruption in service. Everyone on the train was either “inexperienced” and white or “experienced” and not white and you didn’t even have to look at them to tell which you just had to hear who do you supposed was grumbling at the service disruption announcement? the whites!! If it is a matter of education and oppoptunities that make priviledged “the gentrifiers,” then no thank you. Originally “hipster” just meant anyone who was exempt from fighting the Nazis, the psychological and gay. We got out of the station and they handed us free transfers to the bus. Free? But we paid for it already! (when you expect service and when you don’t get the service you expected and so are offer an alternative they can’t call it “free” but whats stopping them).
News to me subway service is always off on weekends. But the bus was a bus bus not a shuttle bus so the stops it made were in between the stations. Though without a display the driver didn’t announce any stops so I went to check but he pretended ignore me. This is the status of public servants nowadays except I’m convinced the MtA is private, like once on a bus from a director’s house in Monticello, NY, which will remain nameless broke down and the driver wouldn’t let us off as we waited for a new bus because of liability issues, and also on the subway every time no one gets up for the PREGNANT! A Mex lady with a full cart between her legs got off at the next stop and the driver drove away before she’d gotten off fully. But this would all have been entertaining if it was research for a role. I’m not sure who to contact about the driver, whether the city or his union.
I had because it was not a shuttle to keep track of the subway and I tried to find and count the stops out the window but lost them and we turned and got found them again and I knew it was my stop. I pressed the strip. I was sure I wouldn’t recognize it but then I did and it was like the experience you know of finding a woman with another man, which I don’t mean to be cheap about it but both of us can be direct that you are happier now. That happened even to me once, Barrow Street, a girlfriend “making out” with Ian Johnson who to me will always be Isaac Jacoby, his parents were on the last Yiddish radio, WARD, WBBC, which despite the broadcasts being over by our age got him “connections,” for showing his paintings and strumming mandolin and doing antiwar pantomime blackbox down in the Village. He went on to host TV gameshows but only after he got his heartattack did they get married, Sonya Tubalsky, the girlfriend, which they inherited her paren’ts SROs and moved out to the Hamptons. I have never been married but would like to change, Josh. You are a bad person but if you too would like “to make a change,” unless the more bad you are makes you the more happier and if that’s the case, go ahead.
No one got off with me and walked to my building. We were middle of the block. I walked into a dream sequence. The groundfloor used to be a grocer’s then a stationary store then if you know what this is a notions shop, used broken clocks that customers paid for the repair and got the watch free, or paid for the watch and got the repair free, but now it’s a locksmith but closed, I don’t know whether closed permanently or if it also did a business in Our Lady of Guadalupe or else it had just a lot of plaster virgins and glass votives in its window behind the shutter and the window was shuttered. “Back when I was growing up” the owner of a business all they ever hoped to do was own the building so that downstairs was where they worked and upstairs was where they lived above it but our unit didn’t appear to beinhabited. My father, not Shale but Shulinsky, was a failed grocer then a failed stationary store and notions shop owner then he rented the floor below to my mother’s brother, who was my uncle to run “his junkyard,” from money he had from an injury settlement from constructing the Goethals Bridge. Uncle Sruly who always played the sportsbook went to Aqueduct one Rosh Hashana and didn’t come back not even for Yom Kipper. For my mother this was tough. He won too much or lost too much but they didn’t find the body until I forget until. After. Washed up and leaking through his wounds the Gowanus.
I was standing outside recollecting my flashback from the sidewalk before realizing that someone was behind me on the sidewalk. I don’t want to accuse and say this someone was Hispanic or Latino if there’s a distinction because I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to turn around to tell, because he, I’m just guessing he was he, I could just feel his weight, he was very close to me. I decided to walk. A block. I walk fast and faster and if I was cold before now I was warm and though it was only 20 blocks but it was forever. The blocks are long are very long because industrial. The Mex was just behind me. It was always just an industrial stretch to avoid between the cemeteries of my parents who emmigrated from Warsaw as babies in the 1920s (emmigrated separately, the Shulinskys and Ratschelds — they were cousins and so Uncle Sruly was also my father’s cousin).
I had the directions from my house in my pocket to your office but couldn’t slow down to reach them but could find my way without them anyway. Linden across the intersection and under the L not running still to busier Gates, straight up, Forest, which I had never been on, Metropolitan, neither I had been on this stretch og it. I have to admit this to me is just a mystery what you do. Not what you do in this neighborhood so cruddy and all the clapboard out of vinyl. The halal laundromats and Polish not Jewish but Polish hair salons and Hindu destints, every dentist named Raj. But what you do with writing or used to do. All the time I was going up Gates north this Mex was following me. He was on my heels but that’s difficult to communicate. It’s very difficult how swift he was run. At leats on the screen there is music and sound effects and editing tricks especially to cover the time of the visuals and motion.
(I could already make out a white guy we would have entitled The Aussie in our youth down the block and waved to him and he waved back to me. I was coming closer. I didn’t think this was Bob Onders from Vanderende because I didn’t know how his appearance. Then I was crossing from Forest and on the corner. He was very white, which I will own up to it encouraged. Metropolitan was slow of traffic. Just the diesel tractortrailers and vans. I waved again to make sure he was “with me,” and he waved again and the Mex must have realized I was “with him,” because he just crossed Metropolitan toward the Carvel and either went inside or didn’t. Your rep Daniel Makelsen couldn’t even notice him.
I hope you are nice to this nice Dan Makelsen. Though isn’t he too slightly old to be an assistant? He is so white but in wonderful shape, very worldly, with that politeness you find only in veterans. But isn’t that a fascinating biography he has coming from Russia and not Sydney at all? He was giving me tips on postwalk postrun limbering out on the curb waited to be let in. He has the charm to be an actor so it’s a pity how his neck’s deformed. I told him that about the charm only and about my concept for a book series for children about the adventures of Dabb the lizard from that Dabb franchise I was did and he urged me to put together a proposal and then delinated how to put together a proposal. And we will work together hopfully.
And then in a flawless Chrysler Imperial Bob Onders arrived.
Bob Onders who shook hands with me and Dan Makelsen is bald with limited sharp blonde stubble and his head is red, and the rest is eminently freckled. It is either a tan from working outdoors or hypertension, his head. He dons thick black plastic glasses and a gray jacket that says Vanderende Management, under which he dons an Islanders tshirt and careworn light blue jeans by Levi. His boots are Timberland. He chews tobacco and spits into the bottom sliced out of a plasticbottle I’m not sure was for water or soda but also smelled of vodka. He does not come off as the kind of guy who’d spend his cash on water. When he let me in with Dan Makelsen he held the bottle bottom in his mouth to hold the door, took the bottle bottom back in his hand and ushered me up the stairs, it’s a lot of flights but we’re in better shape and at the door to your unit he put the bottom back in his huffing mouth and took a keyring from his pocket and found the key marked with black electrical tape and put it in the lock and turned and turned the knob, held the door and stood around and spit (stage direction).
I can’t believe it, Josh. I can’t believe you put up with a place so unheated and where the light won’t turn off, the light’s always on and makes such a rattling and above all 40 watt. And you have so many books, so many that you by default don’t want, by default. Such a goddamn mess. But then we were also shocked. Dan Makelsen packed up the computer. I have no doubt you won’t be shocked. Because as we poked around I caught myself realizing how absurd this was but I was apologizing to Dan Makelsen, for you. The cartons, the fucking cardboard cartons, of pornography. Disgusting! I don’t want to tell Rach but I’m not sure I have a choice for full disclosure. So much porn you have. The sluttiest! Reels, photos, dittos stripclubs hand out for the whore ads. Fistfucking, chestshitting, cornholing, pissdrink. True vintage collectibles. Shit only an officionado would own. The labels were W (black) w/ Stallion (black), W (white) w/ Pony (skewbald), M on M cow (costume), M on M on F Dwarf “speakeasy 1929,” which were disgusting for what they were but also for how antique and unlike your other piles organzied by theme, Bestiality, Gangbang, Minstrel, Red Army Sexual Hygiene Instructional Materials. I confess I was emphafically not going to sift this. I enraged at you. I we’d given you a chance. Rach had given you so many chances that I wanted to toss it out. Then I wanted to just take it all and send it to you COD. Send it to you COD destroyed. Take it and fence it immediately, one lot (though Rach’s correct in that we’d get better prices on the other belongings from auction houses that will have to appraise and by putting the other belongings online).
But no, I became calmed down.
I have followed every law and then be courteous like a cherry on top.
Yes also I would know where to send it now. Or at least Rach has a knowledge as to your whereabouts approximately. Because her therapy blog has a stat counter that’s counted traffic from throughout the United Arabic Emirates but also from Palo Alto, California, which neighbors San Francisco. Dhubai. Abu Dhaubi. Daily for a while. Consistent with Amex conditions.
Makes sense you are retreating us. All will be transmitted to Eisen our laywers.
Besides the porn the autographed editions of Wiesel, Bellow, Roth, Bernard Malamud. I.B. Singer, personalized inscription. Encyclopedia Judaicas, which can’t be carried. Once a reference set is on the shelves the room can never be left, my parents called that “Jewish wallpaper.” Basquiat napkin, laminated. The guitar pick of Slash from the rock band Guns & Roses, that’s what’s signed in sharpie on the ziploc. All will be authenticated. Brownpaper in plastic of magazines hoarded but the explanation as I went through them wasn’t how into celebrity profiles you were but that your writing was in them, always in the back, always reviews of books, and Makelsen who read through them also said you were “a very thorough reviewer.” But he wouldn’t take them with. Makelsen said he had copies of everything at the office his agency office already except for the files that were his intellcetual property in the computer so that’s why he was taking the computer and everything else was your ordeal. I’m don’t know what you did to anger a guy like that. Such a together guy except for the scalded throat thing that would barely be noticeable if he wore a tie, which for what we did together was inappropriate.
Framed frontpage that says First Color Page of the New York Times, 10/16/9? So many copies of your own book I haven’t read (but will). So many books on computers and the computing business new in their Amazon cellophane (I’ll match up the invoices with our billing), just shelves of them called The Exciting Account of How Something Changed Something Forever? The drawers stuffed with crumpled tissue. Semen all on the underside of the desk. Your mugs, shrunken twisted penholders from clay I tried not to break, fountainpen, Mount Blank.
Which if any are valuable and what are they worth because they were in a separate special pile? The Education of Henry Adams by Adams, Henry, Brief Lives by Aubrey, John, The Life of Samuel Johnson by Boswell, James, Sartor Resartus by Carlyle, Thomas, Tischreden by Luther, Martin, Parallel Lives of Plutarch by Plutarch, The Playboy Interviews: Comedians, and then a book I was unable to read but Makelsen who held it said it was in Russian Programirovany economysomethingych y upravlensomethingych zaduck with total pro diction and said that meant Programming Economic and Management Tasks by? He’s a very educated asset to the agency, Makelsen. My chair is much more comfortable than yours.
All this I took and put in designated trashbags with the assitance of Makelsen. I forgot to say I brought a box of trashbags. Then my cell rang. The Refuseniks were downstairs. This was the end of my salvaging time. I just could’n’t do it anymore and Makelsen either who didn’t have to assist me but did out of his own heart. We had ten bags full by that time. My knees and back were spasms, especially because I couldn’t buzz them in so had to go all the way down the stairs again to open the door. But Makelsen who had publisher appointments you were keeping him from offered to go and let the Refuseniks in as he went. He handed me $200 in two $100s and said he wished the agency was able to do more but the agency wasn’t able to do more and so I have to think this was from his own pocket, which would be gnerous. He said gday mate so I said gday mate too. I just love that. Then Makelsen picked up the computer that I never mentioned was Rach’s so that I wasn’t able with him holding it to even shake his hand. (I have profound respect for him and guess he had a car.)
Then the Refuseniks came on up.
The rest of your office is theirs now, which we can get a tax deduction and whatever they can’t donate to charity will be offered to the dump. They will send a list of documentation for what has been donated and though it’s too polite to you I will fwd: that too. All of this was explained to me again by their coordinator who mentioned he was getting a PhD in Urban, I’d rather not get it wrong, maybe just in Urban and so I asked if his two colleagues were also students and he answered they were graduate students in nonprofit while the two stayed silent strapping on their lifting belts. I thought maybe they wouldn’t be phased by the porn but I thought wrong, because showing them around the unit but unable to move because all crowded in by your dreck your chazerai I said to be levity, “feel free to help yourself to this guy’s porn,” but they did not find it funny and acted insulted because their nonprofit thesis was on gender policy.
They were older than I remembered students being, certainly older than I must’ve been at City College, which I was barely shaving and they all had large mutton beards with moustaches, were big, burly, confusign. They certainly looked like movers or sanitation or other people in debt. Then talking it out with me they tried to sound like they were from the city with that accent I never hear anymore except in the crime procedurals I used to do, that Irish cop fireman or PS 475 assistant principal or Social Security office supervisor with the wife sore at him so he never goes home voice. All this but still they were quite transparentyl not from the city, they didn’t have that city antenna, that you can’t impress me sensabilty. I was once in a commercial for loans. But they didn;t recognize.
They began crating everything up indiscrimly, two packing and hauling with their dollys down the hall and one, the urban coordinator one, down the hall trying the elevator. I hadn’t realized the presence of an elevator and the coordinator shouted if I had the key but I didn’t and called Bob Onders but he wasn’t picking up.
I took the two bags I was able to handle and took the stairs to leave them downstairs and search for Bob Onders or get better reception for the cell in the event he wasn’t picking up because of the reception was better downstairs.
Or he was in the basement.
But just as I was about to leave a man comes jumping up the steps breathing and screaming, “stop! stop!” in Russian, “styop! styop!” and all I can say is where’s Maleksen when you need him (Maleksen wouldn’t need have to talk he’d just petrify him)?? But as he slams into me and we both have to hold each other to keep from flopping and he’s breathing on me I realize the man’s Tartar or mixed, which is all the worst of being Russian mixed with all the worst of being Muslim. You’ve been fortunate or are being covered for. A friend of yours, this Albanian, he said he was.
He said that all the documents were his and that you’d given him a spare key and that he was using it to store this extra inventory in your unit with permission. What documents? “The pornographies.” For your sake is this so?
ALBANIAN (to me): I will remove immediately my documentaries.
I bestowed him the “benefit of the doubt,” which apppplies to you. This is why I have not told Rach about it despite how consistent it is with your behavior.
I told the chief Refusekin to let him keep whatever if it was porn.
CHIEF (fake hard): I’m not here to babysit anyone.
I went for my wallet to bribe him if that’s what he would have come to but
CHIEF: Forget it, you’ll just be overtime your estimate.
They bill by the hour but I didn’t have it in me to negiotate the Albanian to pay. He was patheticly thanking
ALBANIAN: Thank you.
So the Refusekins would taken a break and we went down to let your friend or this con artist scrounge.
They helped me with my bags. All the bags and I was aching all over.
The bus and train would not be suffice. I’d have to get a cab or in that neighborhood a gypsy service because am I savvy in assuming no cabs ever come to that neighboorhod? Which serviced is yours? Gladly I had saved from online a number.
The coordinator with his assistants took the opportunity of my dialing to leave me. They scattered. They wanted a deli if there was a deli there or just not to be bothered. I was left alone and remembered but nixed going upstairs again to your porn con to wonder if he had a copy of the elevator key, because they wanted the key to the elevator.
The car service picked up, put me on hold, and I repeated them the address twice and finally they explained Spanish they’d be veinte minutos, which might have been 20 or 10 I froget. I waited out in front of the door alone except therefusenik truck, doubleparked at the corner. The Chrysler Imperial had taken leave of Metropolitan. The wind was It was cold. Check the weather today, it was freezing suddenly and I was waiting all freaked by the no pedestrians, which is not NY. All the cars with rims too ritzy for this neighborhood were passing me with my bags and scuffling, freaking me out to lug two at a time all my bags to the corner to wait by the truck, I amdit, to wait behind it. In the driver’s seat of the truck the only Refusenikwh o wasn’t a student. He was in distinction to them who were “inexperienced” white a black guy and very “experienced,” dozing through the windshield it was all just a heap of laundry.
Half hour later the car service came and I dumped the bags in the trunk and told the Mex driver the city. But because he drove so hesitent on the LIE I took the wheel and told him to take the Queensborough and had to give him directions uptown and across and was so irked that even though I was doing the heavy lifting the fare was still $44 and I wasn’t feeling genrous. Still when I said keep the $60 he acted like he’d never been tipped before so that when he popped the trunk he got out of the car and got the bags out for me and some ripped with some sharp Tanach corner tearing through and all on the street was clay bits and loose pages from the broke Tanach. He stooped with me to the pavement scooping it all back into the holes and knotting the slack to be juryrigged enough to get them inside, which he also helped with too.
So tack that expense onto what’s attached (below). Besides my time that I won’t charge for.
Because I did this for Rach, which is priceless. But she’ll be coming home in a moment and dinner’s my responsibility, wash all this dust off me. We’ll order. Prawnless vegan prawn rolls, two #2s, Bia Hois.
Yours in the book of life, gmar tov,
Adam (Shulinsky)
P.S. I took a mutliple copy of your book. Your mother’s from Cracow?My people are Warsaw olev hashalom. Specifically Vishkava, the shtetl. If you have any experience with that I would be under other cirumstances fascinated. She was a reader and read until she died.
PPS: No bcc: but cc: to Eisen. If you are familiar with ironies what happens incidently in missing spouse cases after digilent search is undertaken “is divorce by publication.” I refer you to New York Civil Law § 315–316 www.divorcelawxplained.com/ny/3, which states
Contents of order; form of publication; filing. An order for service of a summons by publication shall direct that the summons be published together with the notice to the defendant, a brief statement of the nature of the action and the relief sought, and, except in an action for medical malpractice, the sum of money for which judgment may be taken in case of default and, if the action is brought to recover a judgment affecting the title to, or the possession, use or enjoyment of, real property, a brief description of the property, in two newspapers, at least one in the English language, designated in the order as most likely to give notice to the person to be served, for a specified time, at least once in each of four successive weeks, except that in the matrimonial action publication in one newspaper in the English language, designated in the order as most likely to give notice to the person to be served, at least once in each of three successive weeks shall be sufficient. The summons, complaint, or summons and notice in an action for divorce or separation, order and papers on which the order was based shall be filed on or before the first day of publication.
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Fiction writers mistrust the truth, nonfiction writers swear by it, while ghostwriters — who are typically laidoff journalists with novels in the drawer — are divided down the middle. And even that division is split. By which I mean, the relationships I’ve had with my ghostees have always replicated. What happens is I end up rewriting everybody, and so I become rewritten myself. Haunt the lives of controlfreaks, egomaniacs, career narcissists and solipsists, your lovers, your wife, your mother, and you become them too, inevitably.
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Banks again, then either a library or café. All my errands would be cut if this were fiction, but this is truth, so suffer.
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It’s like I’m writing for Rach. As if my accuracy in this ensures the accuracy of her blog. In Palo Alto I’d tried to get Principal to revoke her blog. He refused.
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I’ve had this fear with everything I’ve written, rather on every computer I’ve owned — last laptop, the Compaqs and Gateways Rach took home from her agency, the Gopal desktopped out in Ridgewood. I go to open up whatever.doc of whatever project I’ve been working on, one day, just any normal rainday, and find everything changed. Someone, though fear never fleshed this someone, had gotten into my computer and overwritten me and I wasn’t able to tell the difference between what was mine and what was his. But it’s only with this book, with Principal’s — though also with this — that I’m finally realizing that’s plausible.
So: if anything’s bad, it isn’t mine.
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Out through the courtyard, jangling my Medieval keys, my last four €20s folded and frayed in my walletpocket. They were large bills, large in every sense to me, not just because they wouldn’t fit into an American wallet.
Euros (a term, I might point out, that covers both the fake banknotes and the fake people using them). Euros (but I mean just the currency) don’t advertise prime ministers or presidents or composers or painters but rather architectural treasures like bridges and windows, which might initially strike you as a liberalization of the elitist iconographies of the bygone mark and franc, until you realize they’re completely false, completely conjured, that none of them are to be found on this continent whose every river is traversed by an actual bridge and whose every castle and cathedral and church contains an actual window to hurl monarchy and clergy through. And so a privilege once claimed by politicians and artists, who never appeared corrupt or syphilitic on their own money, has merely been extended to walls and gates, which now must be shown in their quintessence. The paragon of a Baroque or Rococo arch, the consummate Gothic steeple or spire. Not a style, but the ideal of a style, which can’t exist, because style has to live too, style has to eat and sleep and make angsty concessions. Apparently, the EU Parliament reached this decision to feature archetypes as opposed to real edifices so as to avoid offending any nations lacking in culture, rather to avoid privileging any nations abounding in culture and beyond that, the monuments to it — and so preventing Italy and Greece, among the poorest of EU members, from seizing the cash both verso and recto with all their Colosseums and Parthenons.
The same effect might’ve been achieved, I’m proposing, by putting Berlin on the bills — Berlin’s already perfect at being nothing. Ugly plattenbau, flattenbau, immane housingblocks the shape of bills, with the same sense of being backed by relentless brutality, yet just as fragile, frangible, crumbling.
As for the older houses still referred to as Jugendstil, the houses that’d survived the fires — to become cherished only because of that survival, because in their primes they might’ve been among the plainest façades around — next to their squat concrete heirs they seem memorial, like inhabited memorials to themselves.
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Insert a line about the weather. Insert a line about how describing Berlin is like describing Berlin’s weather — the moment it’s set, everything changes, the wind changes direction, the rain stops, but only for a block of Mitte, the sun rises over a wan villa in Wannsee (west), and sets over the graves in Weißensee (east), and the only consistency is the mercury falling.
The lindens were being left by their leaves, and I blew through in a swirl of emergency colors. A drunk gastarbeiter in demidenim overalls stopped me to bum a smoke, but pretending to be a tourist, I turned him down — me, who never turns anyone down.
I missed the tramstop, turned corners strange and prefab, a prefabricated strangeness, encountering only signs standing for things I didn’t need, only signs I didn’t know what things they stood for and so didn’t know whether I needed them or not. An ATM, or whatever that was in German — that’s what I was after, though I would’ve settled for locating even just the full meaning of ATM at its source, automatic teller machine, automated teller machine, automatic automated I’ve never felt so removed or dissevered.
It wasn’t that I had trouble finding a bank — I had trouble finding an untried bank. Until the FinanzCenter Moabit, a scruffy cashpoint behind decals and defaced perspex. I slotted my card to access the vestibule, which savored of wet German shepherds, unless in Germany they just call them shepherds. I swiped the card strip out. Geldautomat. Selected English. You can’t go wrong with English. My PIN, why not write it? 179121? My birthday. Backward.
“Transaction denied,” greened across the screen. “Contact your financial institution.”
But I just did, sorta kinda.
I centered my face within the CCTV bauble and looked deep into my reflection like I was looking deep into an underground lair under the grounds of the White House, imagining my sleeplessness blown up to its pores on the defcon board for the edification of two presidents, Kori D and that other one, intel personnel and Congresspeople all taking a break from their mahjong to tune in, and though I was fairly sure that this Geldautomat didn’t have the audio capability for them to also hear me, I said, “Library, Staatsbibliothek.”
Read my lips why don’t you.
Coming out and mind the bikelane, resist the urge to shove the passing cyclists into the passing smartcars, though the scrimpy smartcars might get the worst of it. I didn’t know whether to ask directions in this language or try and ask in German, didn’t know whether to trust someone who responded or someone who refused, and follow them like the street was following me, over the Spree and into the Tiergarten.
I avoided the paths to trail along the bisector road toward the roundabout’s column, which bore a statue of a lady holding a wreath and staff all so goldsilver precious that it had me appreciating NY’s Liberty for her copper, the metal that conducts our lives. Scattered crumbs, pigeons walking like Egyptians pecking crumbs, bench, condom in a bush. Keep walking, trying not to recall why I hate parks. Thank Rach and Christ I was out of the trees and back in the traffic again.
I went among embassies and consulates, and considered leaving myself on a doorstep and staying awhile like Balk, but I wasn’t able to sort through all the tricolore.
Potsdamer Platz splashed ahead, and the crossing’s white slashes on black asphalt reminded me that prisoners don’t wear the striped uniform anymore, which must’ve been retired after everyone got lost behind the bars and electrified wires.
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The Staatsbibliothek — a sleek airporty shell. Braze podlighting, hypoallergenic concourses. Switchback mezzanines jutted above the stacks. The ceilinged PA speakers were about to announce that boarding would commence to Belletristik, or last call for Flight 296.1.
That’s the only decimal system thing I know—296.1, “Religion, Other & Comparative Religions, Judaism, Sources of.” That’s how to find Jews in the library.
I thought the hush of the place would take the edge off — it didn’t. The modularity rankled me, the ranks of tables and chairs and the students too, interchangeable recessives, receding into their typing, without a backspace typing. All had laptops of their own, lonely and attentionless I can’t be by myselftops. Whatever they were doing, it was too effortless for work. Every table, though, had its mechanical Turk, at the head or the foot, at odds. A guy or girl furrowing a textbook in either risk analysis or hospitality studies.
Beyond them were the public terminals. Radical queer crustpunk skinheads who weren’t skinheads and just unaffiliated opiated homelesspeople, geriatrics switching between pairs of bakelite glasses and clamping down their headphones — they sat in neat interdigitated rows at new unibody Gopal Go 2.0s, searching.
All that Aryan lucence, the sham race purity of Gopal’s product design — I kept spotting him, I kept hallucinating him. Maleksen.
Not among the users, but among the machines.
It took me a moment to understand why: Maleksen — there’s no other way to say this — was like a Gopal device. He had that whiteness, that untouchably smug whiteness, that gloating, that crisp compact perfection. Everything so concentrated it was like his insides were his outsides and were muscle, and that muscle was always flexed. A processor torso curved into a nonadjustable head, a quadrat Gopal monitor. And that jagged scraping between them, across his laryngeal mass, like a hot knife had scarred him with thick and thin bars, was the barcode of his specs. Scan him and be intimidated by his dysfunction.
If he’d brought me what Balk owed me I wouldn’t have come. Not that I had a clue what I was going to do besides maybe write Aar, maybe Cal. I looped around to the infodesk and signed for the next computer slot available. Cinching my tote closed throughout so that the librarian wouldn’t notice I already owned a computer, and I’d have to explain how its modem had died, how the dying Founder of the world’s most profitable because most complicit tech company had taken off his belt and used the buckle’s prong on it.
The librarian wheeled around with my terminal number and time — I’m presuming it’s acceptable to mention that he was in a wheelchair.
There was an hour’s line to get online alongside unwashed Gypsies and jobless Slavs.
So I went browsing, or I guess it’s not browsing if you know what you want. I wanted Keine Familie ist ganz. That’s what the translator or publisher had titled my book. Retitled it for appeal, I think. They never even sent me a copy or review clippings, or royalties. I don’t remember it surprising me that Germany was the only foreign market to buy the rights, though in the immediate aftermath of American publication I don’t remember anything surprising me. Anyway, Germans buy everything Jewish, it’s compulsory since reunification, it’s in their constitution. It doesn’t even matter whether the topic’s Jewish, provided the author is, if only just half or mischling like Caleb, or if the book has at least one character who visits a rabbi in Brooklyn or a cemetery in Queens, to say oy gevalt chutzpah bupkes, amen.
Anyone of my generation with even the slightest Judaic taint can air their grievances in Germany — not for a fortune, or even a readership, but for a psychic reparation between hideous brown buckram covers — and as I thumbed at the spines of my consonant for the sole copy the Staatsbibliothek had in its catalog, I was imagining the cycle continuing: not just children like me chronicling how their parents survived the deportations, but grandchildren producing multimedia ebooks about how their grandparents were used as slave labor, greatgrandchildren generating interactive immersive lit experiences about how their greatgrandparents had been experimented on with phenol and cyanide — all to be sold at fabulous prices to futuristic Prussians, who’ll still refuse to download anything for free, God bless.
And there it was, where it was supposed to be, where it’d been shelved since they’d ordered it. The original had been thinner than this edition, but then the original of me in the flap photo had been thinner too, my crown still sparsed with gritty city grass.
I checked in again with the infodesk clock and dedicated the 40 minutes or so left before my slot to reading myself in German, and didn’t understand a word — which was good. That meant it was a good translation. Rather, the only words I understood had always been in German. Words like Aktion, Zyklon, and Judenfrei.
Keine Familie ist ganz—not a faithful title. But still it’s accurate. No Family Is Whole? Entire? Intact? Together?
This trip — though it’s absurd to call this a trip — is the first I’ve been back to Europe since researching that book. Not to discount my jag with Principal just prior to the Emirates, or that vacation Rach took me on to Athens, Crete, and Rome — after every meal sauced and cheesy reiterating to me, to the waiters, that she’d be paying, with her account management promotion raise — what I mean is, this is my first substantial solo return.
Because that pilgrimage I made 12 years ago, fall 1999, was weeks, was months, alone. Taking the grand deathtour, budget timetravel through ghettos and camps. I’d flown from having interviewed my Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe in Tel Aviv, to the setting of every interview’s memory, Poland. Racking up expensive kilometerage on the Daewoo from Sixt Rent a Car in Warsaw, visiting the gravelessness of my family between Warsaw and Kraków. Swerving the Daewoo from red tollways to green freeways to yellow locals to the grayest byroads, as the map that was still wrought out of paper back then blew from the dash and around my face, and I skidded onto a dirtlane that muddied into a pagan grove of birch just wide enough for a uturn. Tailgating an ox and cart, unable to pass them, too timid to honk. Utilitypoles leaning heraldically like halberts on the shield of sky. And panicking that I’d already crossed the border into Belarus, even though I’d know when I had, they’d let me know when I had — there’d be a bridge, and a river churning like a wobbly tire.
This was (why am I even writing this? but then can anything about the past still be assumed?) before the zoomable livestream mapping, the captures and grabs and pinches and swipes, the make it bigger make it smaller fingers, tugging the corners of dewy pastures to a saturation verd. The only icons were in chapels, and if I hoped to obtain one’s aid I had to make a donation for the restoration of a window.
I’d paged through my book all the way to the last chapter — the Vienna chapter, by chance. If chance can be invoked.
My mother and father met in Vienna. Dad was with the Army. The US Army. Moms had come down from the mountains of Czechoslovakia, from hiding in haylofts, and a convent in Małopolska that’d hid her from herself. The fields around Bełżec were fertilized with her parents. Her brothers were also ash.
Iz, it hasn’t escaped me that you’re there now, in Vienna — picnicking in the Prater, or promenading the Ring.
If we ever meet there remind me not to tell you this.
\
I sat, Tetbook in the Tetote on my lap, at a Gopal Go 2.0. Clicked the Union Jack/Stars & Stripes, which loaded up the Staatsbibliothek homepage in English. Agreed to abide by the Terms of Service. Only if I didn’t have to read them, Yes.
My IP was what it was. Proxy this, Dienerowitz, bounce it off your ass.
The only precaution I took was, I didn’t use Tetration.
Except, I did — I typed out tetration.com, was redirected to tetration.de, deredirected to.com again and tetrated, or the German verb is tetraten, I guess, “what are other searchengines?” And then I cruised the competition on another competitior’s machine, and found both lacking, and I haven’t been paid to say that, or paid for anything.
I broke my promise to Principal on opensourcers, semantics. With Clickb8, Sengine, Fravia, Phind0, Jerque, and Treap (in the order of increasing fatuity).
Whatever, their names were immaterial to me — I tetrated with all of them. Not every trademarked term can be chosen for genericide. None of us will treap. Or jerque it. What the fuck’s a Gopal? Gopal fuck yourself?
I tetrated “Izdihar Almaribi”: no results.
I tetrated “Izdihar Albadi”: check spelling, increase number of terms, broaden terms, no results.
“Ibrahim Albadi”: (“did you mean Al-Badi?”): site operations engineer at Sohar Industrial Port Services, no, executive VP for Takaful, Doha Insurance, SAQ, no.
So I added +“Marseilles”—which autocorrected to “Marseille”—and was returned two hits, beyond the usual snippety tetspam.
Iz’s husband was listed as a member of L’Association des Stations-Service Franchisées de France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Bouches-du-Rhône division.
He was mentioned again, amid plain Anglais, on the site of the Biannual Eurosummit of BP Franchisees, which would be held, had already been held, 9/9–11 in Abu Dhabi. He would be attending as a representative of L’Association des Stations-Service Franchisées de France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Bouches-du-Rhône division — his honeymoon or whatever it’d been with Iz was a business expense.
“al-Maribi” (“did you mean Al Ma’ribi?”): but all were just Al Qaeda — inciter clerics and deranged bandoliered teens, the victims of other American results in Ma’rib, and of Shia militias in Dhamar — until what I recalled of the address—+“1210 Wien”—got me Iz’s brother.
Yasir was a “Prozesstechniker”—“process technician”—employed by Birefringen AG, located in 1210 Vienna, and online at Birefringen.at.
Click, they were “the world’s leader in glass science,” click, “devoted to the best in architectural, automotive, aeronautic, marine, biomedical, and touchglass.”
The “In Profil” page was dotted with enlargeable but not enlargeable enough official photos of the different “Geschäftsbereiche”—divisions? groups? There were about two dozen black and brown faces in the photo labeled “Prozesstechniker,” and “Maribi, Yasir,” was captioned in the third row five in. I counted and landed, because God is good, because God is great, on a forehead wound. Yasir had a scarlet birthmark at his hairline, but then the expression below it was quizzical, like that hematic crescent wasn’t his, but was a corruption in the wifi transmission, or a blotch of phlegm on the screen.
“Maleksen”: A Maleksen gøta in central Tórshavn, Streymoy, Faroe Islands. Maleksen Island, a glaciated constituent of the Arctic Russian Franz Josef archipelago. Norwegian sites tended to spell the name “Malekson,” Swedish sites, “Maleksson.” Pages in this language usually followed the Danes. Maleksen Spezialtransporte GmbH “specialized in transport” throughout Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Hilde Maleksen offered “online P2P healing” from ~48.13°N 11.56°E elev ~518m (Munich).
Anders Maleksen was a dual Swiss Australian citizen, who, incensed by the carnage inflicted on the Palestinians during the Gaza War of 2008–09, hacked into the computer systems of the Aman, Mossad, Shabak, and Malmab, exfiltrated palimpsests pertaining to Israel’s second strike nuclear arsenal and submitted them to b-Leaks, which earned him the position of “amercement officer,” which he parlayed into a spot as “adjutant”—the organization’s #2.
“Balk,” a verb meaning “to stop abruptly,” “to refuse obstinately,” a noun meaning “a hindrance or check,” “a defeat,” in sports both a verb, “to make an incomplete or misleading motion,” and a noun, “an incomplete or misleading motion.”
Thor Ang Balk, Danish national and the founder of b-Leaks who after allegedly drugging and raping a 16 year old Spanish “alt” or “alternative” model — with whom he’d been in sexually explicit correspondence, and who b-Leaks would later insist, without documentation, was an asset of US intelligence — fled his base in Copenhagen, was detained at Reykjavík-Keflavík airport, and spent a week dodging press while awaiting the verdict of the Icelandic authorities as to whether to return him to Denmark, until Andrey Vasilyevich Tsyganov, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation, dispatched a detachment that managed to surrept him back to the embassy’s chancery at Garðastræti 33, his residence for the past six — the profile was dated—14 months.
Yet another — now that I’d switched to tetration.de, com, to utilize its tetrans — I tetrated, proprietarily tetrated, myselves: Principal hadn’t been reported dead or even missing yet, and no newsfeed mention meant me instead. Just Autotet fluff, and fluffy charticles about Autotet, earnings reports and predictions, stock flux. All the tabloid sites were sedent, their comments sections too. cohencidence.us was, reload, was down.
Then I finally did what I’d been waiting to do, I tetrated what’d been stabbing at my insides since Dubai, cutting away at my synaptic fray since Dhabi, I tetrated “what is that dagger called traditionally used in the united arab emirates”—no questionmark, no question, sharp demand — and was returned weaponsoftheworld.com, khanjar: “The khanjar was the traditional dagger of the Oman and the United Arab Emirates (but in Yemen called ‘the jambiya’). It carried in a ivory or leather scabbard and decorated with jewel, gold, silver, etc., etc., worn on a belt similar decorated. Though today it worn as formal dress or as symbolical ‘fashion statement,’ in the history it was the regular weapon for revenge or assassining.”
I loaded bankofamerica.com but had been brainvacuumed of my portpass. It was different from my PIN, and wasn’t any other Rachy anniversary. I exceeded all my allotted attempts. BoA was sending an email that would let me change my portpass.
I put off checking Rach’s blog, and went loading all my six million emails.
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From: a@szlayliteristic.com
To: jcomphen@aol.com
Mon, Oct 3, 2011, 11:13 AM
call yourmother, myung
Knock knock? Who’s there? Aaron. Aaron who? Why Aaron you replying to email? Though the other punchline is Aaron the side of caution. Dear, dear — this is your personal assistant again. Your Lisabeth. Telling you that your mother’s been ringing nonstop. She’s worried. You haven’t been answering her emails, and she’s been telling Lisabeth that the only reason she got involved with paying Verizon $54/month, and she can’t understand why her first month’s bill should be $88, incidentally, was to be in touch with her son! and then Lisabeth went through explaining her plan, the Quantum, 15/5 Mbps, 10 MB of hosting! I told her you were off on an investigative project, something about unfair wage labor practices in telecom manufacturing because that’s what was in the NY Review under my latte (rhetorical latte), which was how I found out you’d told her you were doing something about scandals between donors and museums relating to deaccession policies and I apologized and agreed, you were overcommitted and overdue on both without an alibi, and she wondered how I held my soap, which was faintly erotic, and already today the answer’s on my desk (your mother made me a soapdish).
Besides your mother traffic’s been standard: Ad Shulinsky’s now claiming you’re charging lingerie and Arab whores to your wife’s Amex (please use a rubber and also, DON’T CHARGE ARAB WHORES TO YOUR WIFE’S AMEX), and that you haven’t renewed the lease on your office (which was relayed to me only on Friday and I’m trying to intercede without involving Lisabeth or Seth but the voicemail Ad left says Rach’s holding your possessions with intent to recoup your rent she paid — there better be nothing in there, in terms of P—“possessions” better just mean “the scattered grains of your neighbor’s nukeable basmati”! and I haven’t even mentioned the Eisenizers yet, or Alana, telling me she’s been leaving msgs but your phone’s off the hook or whatever the new hooks are, I told her get in line!
But Rach — just think — if her blog’s a retaliation for what you’ve already done, think about how she’ll reply to a felony. You’re both behaving like fucking children. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, fuck you. Dibarnu dofi. Forgive me. Or just trust me.
Bullet points, brass tacks, takhles:
— Feyer has been retained, informally. I had him pick me up on East End Ave so we wouldn’t be followed and we weren’t (the Asian) despite that he’d decided it was smart to take his Austin Healey. We drove to Jersey, in homage, or because if anyone followed us to the Brisket King of Linden, they could have us. They could have us with a side of kishka. I explained, not all of it, of course, just the divorce and money angles. Feyer tendered his advice. If you’re indeed out of country, which I suspect you are, which you’d better be to be so incommunicado, and out of country for a protracted time (there are no definites on time), it’s only logical that you’d require a foreign bank. Anyway, it’s imperative we talk, either by phone or my preference is in person.
— My schedule: I leave for the Book Fair, in Frankfurt, Germany, 10/14–16, and I’m bringing along the final version of Cal’s novel, which he just delivered fresh from Iowa after two years of revisions, dicking around with commas like they haven’t already been paid for in the States, and spoken for by publishers in four foreign languages (German, French, Hebrew, and Dutch). I’ll do my Fair business to shore up the rest of the rights and then if you’re in Europe I’ll rebook my flight or extend and meet you in Zurich and we’ll go banking. Feyer advises that we found a company and not a personal account (under your own name). So pack for an incorporation vacation, all names pair well with the Swiss AG, we’ll drink silver tequila tête à tête de cuvee, eat popcorn like gold teeth and write it off. In Europe there’s Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Andorra, before we’re talking Cyprus, Channel Islands. What does P do? Query? Another option if the logistics go south is that I go ahead wherever and open an account myself and deposit the sum and then when you surface we’ll make you a cosigner or even if you’d prefer remove me totally and cash me out. Now Feyer who suggested this mentioned that I wouldn’t require your permission for this, or the bank wouldn’t — because the bank wouldn’t know that you exist, obviously — and if that suggestion doesn’t shake you out of Arabia, even if just for a phonecall, I don’t know what will. The IRS doesn’t have quite the incentive of an embittered wife with forensic accountants. THIS MUST BE ATTENDED TO IMMEDIATELY. 10/28 I have to be back in NY for a routine coronary catheterization indignity but if you can’t get together the week after Frankfurt or until later in the month I’m after any excuse to tramp around France with the NBA expats as they waste their lost season dunking on ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne. Beyond October, let’s not get into. Beyond October, forget it.
— now: the urgency. You remember Tad Geary? Cal’s friend once upon a time at the Times, and now with Wired? Anyway, he called Friday day and talked, because he always does, like an NPR segment, all about the death of print, and whistleblowing, and drones, before getting down to the salacious, genital warts at The New Yorker, herpes at The Journal, and from the venereal it’s always been a natural transition to the topic of literary agency — because just as I was sure he was going to propose an ebook he slipped me a rumor that I’d been working with P. I denied, but must not’ve been as convincing as this rumor from sources unspecified, because Geary was already reassuring me that if certain access was given or blanks were filled in my identity and the “granulars” of my “partnering” would stay privileged. I didn’t counter with what access he was after, but then the questions he asked explained everything (the blanks). Like, where’s P? When’s P back in Palo Alto? Is the health as awful as the gossip? What if anything are the plans for succession? I told him they’d just hire a computer. Then he took me to school on the health gossip. It was stomach cancer, he said. Or colon. That’s not me being unsure. That was him. Then I had to call Cal, to coordinate blurbs with the comma czar and, I’m predicting, permanent writer in residence of Iowa, and while I had him on the phone said that Geary would be calling asking questions of him and that he’d be doing me a favor. If he’d pump Geary for his sources especially. I told Cal I wasn’t involved in any tech projects, that not only didn’t I know Bing from Skype, I thought lit agencies were cheapened by having sites, that’s why we never got one. Geary called, because I’m a prophet, on Saturday, and told Cal everything he’d already told me and Cal feigned curiosity, but didn’t have to feign ignorance, and probed, and promised to investigate for Geary out of interests of his own, because he’d just turned in a new novel, which would require my, Aaron Szlay’s, full attention. The takeaway was that Geary had no indication of P’s medical status, no verification, and the only news he had of P’s potential book property was of my ostensible repping and Finn’s ostensible publishing of it, both of which tips had been passed to him, independently passed, by some Buddhist guru, Master Tetsugen Ken Classman, and a VC named Dustin Something, who’s tight, apparently, like they’re sharing the same bunk on a yacht tight, with Kori Dienerowitz and, Geary told Cal who told me, he was finding it strange that not only had the same tips reached him, Geary, through two different channels, but also that Dienerowitz — whose stakes were higher than everyone’s by degrees of magnitude, or higher than everyone’s but P’s — would have said anything about P to anyone, even intimately. Geary suspects a powerplay. A ploy or coup, but to what conclusion, Geary has no conclusion. I haven’t jawed any of this with Finn (he’ll be in Frankfurt).
— because, now, the Asian: I went out to Staten Island yesterday to explain myself to Svetlana (because she wasn’t taking my calls). I took the ferry. You can’t top for climax the Staten Island Ferry. Sveta wouldn’t let me in and the mother whom I’d met all of once outside Macy’s (Sveta once tricked me into going to Macy’s to get a swimsuit only to meet in the ladies’ swimsuit section a Soviet lady with Chernobyl growths on her chin and the cheeks of a circus cosmetologist who gave her daughter a crate of homemade beef cutlets and shook my hand and said, “You be glad forever”) — anyway, Svetlana’s mother, handling a difficult situation, came out to the stoop with a bottle of Evian for me, or not even that but the fucking bottle with trees on it, Poland Spring, and forced a smile and went back in and locked the door. Whatever. That isn’t the point. Returning to the ferry, the Asian was onboard (she’s Korean). She made sure I noticed her, the sweats, collegiate, crimson, Harvard. So loose on her, windblown at the railings. I decided, fuck it, enough cowardice and slapstick, and as the ferry launched I chased her casually up, down, and across the decks. But then I realized I wasn’t chasing her. She was just trying to get away from the crowds. Away, windy. Starboard’s the side that isn’t port. I violated my policy of never engaging Red Sox fans, especially not from Harvard. But she had this together professional don’t trifle with me thing that just cracked. That was her affect, cracked. A once organized type a ivy executive human now broken. She told me her name was Myung Unsui (she spelled it out), but I’ll admit that ever since a certain site has appeared in my life, I’ve been having trouble with my manure detector. I’m just going to relate what she said, and let you be the judge of whether it’s true or just, as the distinguished typo has it, “voracious,” because I’m too frazzled — I can’t sleep but if I do sleep all I dream about is apnea.
She said she worked for P. Confirm this. She said she was an assistant and very close personally, and either it’s all imagined in her head or they were fucking. By fucking I mean in love, confirm this. They were traveling together. She said they were traveling with a friend of mine, but she didn’t say your name, or your names fungible. She mentioned the UAE. But how it checks is that she also described you, physically, accurately, but in that ruthless quibbling analytic metricsexual way. Don’t shoot the messenger, just diet and shave. You and P were working all the time, she said. She was obviously jealous. She had that envy pout that so transcends all cultures and races and even our species that if the aliens ever contact me but I snub them because I’m writing an email to a client that’s the expression the aliens will have, all their suctorial prehensile mouths petulant. Her job was that every place you went to she went to that place before you and set everything up. But in the Emirates P told her to go back to the States and leave you two alone, just you and P. He told her to take the rest of his entourage back to the office “to await further instruction,” which she said with airquotes and henna on her hands, like Achsa once had. She did, she took. But no instruction followed. P was misaligned, she said. I didn’t understand. She hesitated and then said, cancer. The Battery grew. The statue and the bridges and everything and even with all of that she was crying.
She stood around the office doing absolutely nothing. She didn’t sit because she’d never had an office in the office. She’d just shared whatever office P was in and now he wasn’t in any and no one knew where he was or when he was returning and if she had a job anymore she decided it was to comport herself like she knew but would never divulge and above all wasn’t anxious about anything. But then she didn’t have a job anymore. She was fired. She was called in by Kori Dienerowitz himself and pretended to miss the voicemail but couldn’t pretend again, she couldn’t do anything but go in and get fired. She’d never been fired before. She said she still wasn’t sure that he had the authority to fire her, but regardless her email was denied, her logs were closed, whatever the lingo is, they confiscated her computer and parkingpass, which I gather in California is rather severe. She wouldn’t answer any of my questions about P’s relationship with Dienerowitz. She just kept talking about “termination,” about how being “terminated” was like being called “a witch,” which her grandmother who’d been a shaman or shamaness I guess had been “branded,” she said, in Korea. She was embarrassed, and talked fast, and then was embarrassed because her accent intensified. She had no friends in California, she had no friends except family in NY, and so she flew to NY and disguised the disgrace she felt by using her savings to pay off their apartment in the Bronx, Grand Concourse, so uptown in the city’s math that the numbers collapse, with a 208th Street jumping to a 210th Street intersecting with a 208th Ave and a 210th Blvd. Having been sapped unconfident, and sapped by TV, and she had to share the TV with her grandmother, she now found herself the last two or so weeks commuting alongside her parents to the tip of Hunts Point to help out with their deli. Balance the books. Make change to slide around atop the carousel behind the bulletproof partition. Acrylite. Like in a taxi. Like she’d done throughout Bronx Science, like she was a teenager again, humiliated. “The bills are filthy.” “No one ever takes the one moment to unwrinkle.” We docked. We went up toward Whitehall and approached my office and paused in front of it as if acknowledging that yes, this was a building, yes, this was a building acknowledged by both of us as my office, then resumed, went further, Bowling Green, the Bull getting its balls fondled by tourists. She talked about a job interview she had coming up. “Shit IT.” But she couldn’t even get her references together. If people knew her, she said, they knew her as P’s, and worried about her loyalties. She couldn’t stop chewing gum or cutting her hair, and she took off the Sox hat and showed me. Sometimes, putting the scissors down, she’d just suck on the hair, sometimes she’d swallow it. “There is nothing to do at a deli.” It was a bad business model. No systems, so inventory’s all by sense or by hand. Her father insisted on giving credit, microfinance for the parish, her mother on keeping a bunny despite the health department. The licensing, the taxes. Operating costs and insurance. Unreliable labor. Callingcards returns. The powerball machine always breaking. The hassle of cashing checks and regularly explaining to regular customers that prepared foods can’t be paid for with stamps. The franchises and chain pharmacies that undercut pricing by stocking in bulk or their own productlines. 24 hours, two shifts of 12, seven days a week, and she insisted on the nightshifts so as to better follow me and then, letting her parents take off for some church and peace and a touch of the flu, she was by herself and went out to rearrange the produce and some bath salts maniac jerks around the corner and grabs the scissors out of her apron and holds them to her face. “He does not want money.” “But he does not want to be alive either.” I’m just typing what she said. I wondered if she’d ever considered a career in publishing. But we were on Wall Street. Bankers were out in the mild. She was about to go down for a 4 train. To Woodlawn, I said. Yes. Get out at Yankee Stadium, take the Bx4. Yes, she said, but Bx6. I’ll be able to find her. A family clunked up from the station arguing already, carrying protest signs and a megaphone. I asked her and I was yelling as she descended why she’d been following me and she paused and turned sniffling and clung to herself as she met me on the landing, and she answered that Kori Dienerowitz was trying to sabotage my friend, you, and that he had government resources behind him, because P had gotten involved with Thor Balk of b-Leaks, or his involvement was forced at the threat of disclosing his disease. But that at core P wasn’t compelled by any of that and instead he was working on something beyond death, something spiritual. And that my friend, you, would never understand that, and that for all the chip and wisdom you cultivated you were just a nice guy out of your depth. Not nice but sad, she said. “Like Principal, he treats you like he’s inventing you and knows that it’s bad but still better than anything else,” “you don’t think he has a soul until you realize he just shares yours.”
aar
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Riding trains, in their impassive passing, in, their, speed, that, smoothes the tracks out, that straightens the rails and evens the ties — it feels like how you tour a museum. How you tour a busy museum on a weekend or holiday noon.
You streak by mindlessly, peeking over heads, pardon me, Entschuldigen Sie, until something stills you, something tries to keep you, but you can’t be stilled, you can’t be kept, you’re bound to a schedule and hurried by, and the only impression you retain is one of resentment — not of the murmurous crowd, but of the artifacts in their cases, their stasis.
A city revolving its exhibitions by the neighborhood, the block, with the only explanatory labels the graffiti: ZIZ tagged along a quarter kilometer of trackfence in the chemical blue of the toilet in the trainstation’s men’s room, ZiZiZiZiZ bubbled in the neon pink of the powdered soap, then Un train peut en cacher un auteur, fuck death, fuck debth, ¡mauerpower! Drab Altbau progressing along the timeline into the new, the housingblock towers disinterred in tiers, archaeological strata of the future spilling onto balconies, hanging gardens of prams and bicycles, antennae, satellitedishes, and saggy feldgrau panties — all of it being left behind like a diorama display, as if Berlin were a museum of itself behind “glass.”
Cranes guarded the route, imperious in their hover, monitoring progress, approving entry, denying entry, wreckingballs at the ready to prevent a touch, even a linger, enforcing a policy of No Eating, No Drinking, No Flash Photography.
The woman had emerged from behind a grate to ring in the next customer like an automaton skeleton in an astronomical clock of the Northern Renaissance, but with a Deutsche Bahn blazer, and without a scythe. Only after I’d managed to explain that I didn’t want to go directly to Frankfurt but wanted to switch along the local routes instead, changing from train to train, each one smaller than the last, at the smallest and least convenient stations, accidental depots that were just collisions or breakdowns, and only after the woman had quoted me how that’d cost more than double than and take more than four times the time of the ICE, the InterCityExpress, I settled, but requested a ticket only oneway, which might’ve confused or even disappointed the customers behind me, who’d been convinced I was a criminal or escaped convict, but now realized that even if I were one, I was inept and beyond that, cheap.
Only a corpse would lay out for a oneway ticket. Frankfurt and the grave are the only two destinations to which the directest route is also the cheapest.
Have all the pensioned docenty dyejobbed perfume in their pits ladies of this continent shut all the ports and gates, bar all the entrances, barricade — screen — all the emergency exits, and it all becomes a museum, in which all us museumgoers become the exhibits, relics studying one another, studying ourselves.
This has been me just following a track, unable to stop and get off.
I hadn’t slept. Just loitered, vagranced. Benched. No sleep now.
My suit still hadn’t dried from showering in the sink. I felt clung to. The many things in my many pockets weighed on me. My rightleg had my keys, my leftleg had my wallet. Passports pinched my asscheeks. My Tetote, a pocket unto itself, was strapped left to right across my heart. All my possessions were pressuring me, hungrily, pressuring through my pockets, insatiably, until I myself was pocketed as a single speeding point, without volition, beating.
A couple of businesstypes toward the rear of my car had unpacked their tablets. Ereaders, which is a term that can indicate either the person reading or the thing that’s read, but they were ereading. Any news that was newer would be prophecy, which the train enabled with wifi. To turn the page, to turn the screenpage of their tablet devices, they made a slight slash with the indexfinger, like how tyrants used to select their concubines and condemn their jesters to death. Stroke, off with her clothes. Stroke, off with his head.
And I was doing it too — dismissing my fellow passengers with their own gesture. I esat with my efinger in the iair and islashed it around. Then I went clicking on things, at least on the window between me and the thing, as if whatever I clicked would have to explain itself to me. As if I’d press on a village we passed and it’d surrender its name. Press on a town for population, demographic, economic realia. Press on a field we passed, press on the pane between me and field, and projected back through my whorled prints would be a history of its sowing, its reaping, the annals of who’d screwed between its sheaves.
We’d cross the Elbe (which the Soviets never did, though neither did the Americans), cross over its tributary the Saale, or I forget which one of the Saales, and how many Saales, and how many rivers we’d cross that weren’t a Saale, but I’ll never forget what redundancy feels like. Redundancy feels like doing this on my own.
Whatever lay in the path of the straightest standard gauge connection would be crossed and in that crossing, obliterated. We’d span every other river in the Reich and why not even the same river twice — we’d pass but not pass through the Harz, and we wouldn’t cross the Rhine (my father the soldier did once, in the opposite direction).
A man who didn’t strike me as a businesstype — rather he was closer to being into football, American, though his footballsized face was intelligent — settled across the aisle. What bothered me, initially as an affront to that intelligence, subsequently because it marked him as a danger, was that he wasn’t doing anything, he wasn’t reading or ereading anything that would’ve made his language public, he wasn’t even playing a game.
I sat with head averted at my window, deep in a comp lit seminar with my and Principal’s twin passports. As the strokers kept stroking screenpages, and the fields blocked by like crosswordpuzzle blanks, like spot the differences between the photos teasers.
It wasn’t obvious whether the man was weak fat or strong fat or even which seat he was sitting in besides the whole row, with the median armrest raised. He pivoted toward me, and his neckhair and wristhairs were so alert and bristling as though frequency tuning that I toted up, got away, over the metal tack, the bridles and saddles that coupled the cars, stopping midway between the caboose and the motive, the diningcar.
I needed a drink, to rid myself of my last coin.
The English/French/Spanish menu encouraged me to “Sample the Regional Wine,” which was what I ordered by pointing.
No speech, just cork — no need to retail my own blushing terroir.
The waiter returned having linked his cuffs and buttoned his collar and clipped around it a redherring bowtie. He set down bread, which I refused with a headwag. He would’ve charged me if I’d touched it. Then he brought the grail of plastic goblets, already poured. Even the napkin had its price. It was a check that unfolded like linen, €4, a €1 tip rounding up, and that was all of it.
Prost, prosit — I took a sip. Trust nothing you read. Nothing about this wine was local. Motion has no local.
Just as I was rimming the sip the door autoslid. And behind it was another door, a wall, my aislemate. He was tall and wide as if he were quarried from the surrounding terrain, as if he were being quarried from the car itself, a raw rupestral growth who had to nick himself down just to fit into my fantasies. He boothed two booths away facing me and ordered a mineral water and was served that sparkling clarity in a glass anchored by a big crystal of ice with a big halfsliced citron floating atop like a buoy.
The English language is like a tunnel with endless clearance — an eye or ear too forgiving. Americans especially can usually get where someone’s coming from. This has to do with being mediated, having seen and heard enough screenwise to know how Yugo gangsters inflect, when they plot amongst themselves without subtitles. How Russian assassins dress, when they’re planning to explode a motorcade. We have every variation, not least the counterintuitive. But I can’t say I can do the same offscreen and within another culture. I couldn’t dig deep enough into his umlauts to judge them native. But I could still suspect some curry in his wurst. His skin was either racially tan or tanned. How he poured. How he drank. How he did absolutely nothing else. How he wouldn’t leave my face. And so I slumped to show him his reflection in my baldspot — and then he finished — to repel him by his reflection — and then he left. Coins on the table, no tip. Just a cock of the head. Tongue out. Like he was aiming.
\
Probably just an overreaction. Probably he’d just never been around a Jew before.
In the next car another passenger sat reading another book. Not ereading an ebook. The passenger just closed the thing. And took a euro billsized card, an indexcard that spanned the indexfinger to the middle of the hand, and marked the page. No cornering, no folds. Cards. Reminders of the census. Cards were how censuses used to be conducted. Once, each city, each town, each village had an official going door to door, collecting information, marking each dwelling’s data with pen or pencil on card. Each municipality collected its cards and summarized their stats in a report, and each bound report was put on a train and relayed to the capital. I’m wondering whether any of their couriering officials ever read them if bored on the journey. I’m just guessing that another book, containing and summarizing the stats of all the municipal books, would have to be compiled in the capital.
But then at the turn of the century—1890? 1880? I forget, my exactitudes are later — the census was automated, at least partially automated, first in America and only later in Europe. In 1933 the Nazis counted only in Germany, but in 1939 they counted in all the annexations too, counting Austria, Sudetenland, Memelland, counting Poland, the Generalgouvernement, at least in part. The censustakers distributed to each household a strip of paper, a survey whose filling was mandatory and whose findings the takers themselves coded onto a card by a system of punched holes, a punchcard. This citizen had blond hair, punch, this noncitizen had black hair, punch, cranial and facial type, nose type (straight or curved, weakly or strongly bent in which cardinality), tabulating religion (column 22 hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, hole 3 annihilated). Did he or she have one Jewish parent or two? even one Jewish grandparent? Any disabilities? and/or disfigurements? Glasses and/or hearing aid would help to complete the form — condemn. An accounting tallying poetically, still — all identities are voids.
The punchcard and its calculating machine — the storage/memory and processor of the earliest computing — were invented in 1890 by a German American from Buffalo, NY, named Hollerith, whose company became the company that became IBM, which, in turn, licensed the technology to the Nazis (but don’t get all nitpicky angry if online contradicts me and says the year was 1889 and the city was Albany and the inventor’s name was Höllerith and the licensing was done by an IBM subsidiary).
The technical execution of the punchcard’s primitive programming was modeled on textiles, specifically on how looms used cards to separate threads into patterns for weaving, for embroidering things like swastika bands and yellow stars, though the inventor himself always maintained he’d initially been inspired to adapt the process by a train journey he’d taken through the American West — by the tickets required, their validation, their punching.
The conductor, a sturdy peasant in matching prussic pants and vest over boiled nasty sputumnal shirt, strapped his monkeycap and cowbelled into the car — weaved down the aisle and took your ticket and like a censustaker, with a small metal squeezer apparatus, punched it, put a hole in it, marking your fare and so marking your fate, your final destination. A flurry of chad, white discs of paper floating floorward like the Polish snow that greeted the steerage.
Genocide, like publishing, is 66.6 % a problem of distribution — how to get the people/things you need to be killed where they need to be killed when they need to be killed, and at a minimum. How to get Halbwachs to Buchenwald to meet his dysentery. How to get the best Yiddish poets of Kiev all to Moscow, to the Lubyanka’s basement, on the same summer night for mass execution. How to get Mandelstam to the Second River transit camp by Vladivostok in time for his official cause of death, which was frozen “unspecified.”
Nowadays publishers just invest in writers, they have the writer’s work edited, copyedited, proofed, but then they have to print it and make it public (murder). Nowadays writers are murdered mainly by their publishers, by being sent off to press and then to market.
American printers used to be the best in the world (the linotype, 1870–80? by Mergenthaler?), until for margin considerations too caustic to countenance, they merged with or were acquired by foreign companies, and so migrated abroad. Or else the companies uprooted themselves, keeping their corporate registries but moving their plants to Mexico, or China, the country that invented the book but bans books, and imprisons its authors — and in which, about two centuries before Christ, the Emperor I’d butcher his name erected a great firewall all around his Empire, buried its scholars alive, and then burned all their books, either to stifle their critique or standardize the writing system (the same Emperor whatever his name standardized his Empire’s currency, busy man) — and in which, about two millennia after Christ, this book I’m not writing is scheduled to be printed, though it would still have to be approved by the censors before being translated, and before any of the workforce enslaved to its production, any of the billion other Chinese, would be able to read it.
If only they had time to read it — hordes of the desexualized toothless working alongside one another like stripped gears, loading and impressing by roll, gathering the signatures, by octavo, by quarto, for binding—12 hours/day, 6 days/week, roughly ¥12 or $2/day, approx $52/month, approx $624/year. I’ve read the same journalism as everyone else, and I’m still not sure what to fall for — either any job is a good job, any pay is good pay, or China has only one factory, is only one factory, and its only product is suicide.
After China the book — because only after China would my ms. be a book — would have to be loaded onto boats and shipped back to America, to my publisher’s distributor in Delaware, or Maryland, or Virginia. The distributor would have to send the books out by truck and train, fraught stock freighted to whatever bookstores still existed, which would sell whatever inventory would sell and then return whatever wouldn’t — returning it damaged unremainderable — and so again the trucks with their squalid cabs shrieking libertarian radio, and so again the trains chuggachuggachoochooing through backyards unmown and littered with stormwater kiddiepools, all the way back to the distributor again, only to be turned around again and redistributed, sent to that minor inferno of upstate NY, Buffalo, where they’d be pulped, where they’d be recycled, in a factory owned by Canadians.
And all this is set in motion once a year, with all of America’s literary agents and editors and publishers flying off, business class, to Germany, “to network” with their international counterparts, to sell the books they agent and edit and publish to other agents and editors and publishers in other countries, to buy the books the other agents and editors and publishers in other countries agent and edit and publish — to stretch their expense accounts out to the desistive notch of the industry’s debauched cardboard belt in lavish drinking and eating bingery and depressing indulgences in inroom krautporn — unsustainable.
It’s all far less efficient than it was half a millennium ago, when that scum capitalist Gutenberg forced his underpaid, uninsured employees to pack a wagon or packhorses or perhaps only a single wormridden horse with communion fare and a few copies of the genesiac printed Bible — headed a full day on a pilgrimage that today can take all of half an hour, from Gutenberg’s native Mainz following the river Main to Frankfurt, to the Messe, the Fair, where reading paraphernalia like tinderbox flints, tallow candles, and commodes were sold, where those first editions — literally the first printed editions of the word of God — were bought like any other commodity, by semiliterate merchants and papal emissaries, who haggled. The merchants went bust or were failed by heirs, the popes were divinely chosen by smokes and died, and likewise Frankfurt’s Römer, or cityhall, the site of its medieval markets, was abandoned for a newer fairgrounds, equipped with the infrastructure required by car tradeshows and appliancemakers’ expos.
The oldest extant building of the modern fairgrounds, though now only a performance venue, is the fin de siècle Festhalle, whose glass and steel were meant to reflect the design of Frankfurt’s main trainstation. The square in front of the Römer hosted a famous Nazi “libricide,” or “biblioclasm,” in which fiction and poetry were burned only for having insufficiently imagined what followed. Kristallnacht. The owners of those libraries, Frankfurt’s Jews, were herded into the Festhalle. From which they were droved to the trainstation, deported. It’s incredible what can be compressed, confessed to, on paper. The stroll was calm, the hotel was not. It had a very useful library.
\
A History of Frankfurt was an oversized and useful book, which covered the city from its founding by tribal Franks to its destruction in the Allied aerial bombardments of 1944. This hotel was among the casualties. The photograph on its page was dated 1933, however, and showed the structure as grand, intact, staunch in tradition, ennobling in permanence, and indistinguishable from its incarnation today. A History of Frankfurt noted only that the hotel was subsequently rebuilt, but never addressed how or why it was rebuilt — though perhaps such questions are only for outsiders, or retrospect.
Because it seems to me that standing amid the rubble you have a choice.
You can rebuild, or you can not rebuild, and if you decide to rebuild then will you rebuild the thing exactly as it was or will you make it new. Either you can go get the exact same masonry and the exact same woods and the semblant rugs and the Aryan atlas figures that uphold the pediment with your name done up in vermeil, to make as faithful a replica as tenable of what you’ve lost, or else you can just hit reset and find an alternate design — other materials — and maybe not even a hotel.
I had this thought at and about the Frankfurter Hof, of course — this outstanding reproduction of a hotel, stolid in its blockbound prewar glory, truly the architectural embodiment of everything the city surrounding it has always aspired to, just acquired and spiffed by a consortium of Sunni hoteliers, apparently — but because I know the future will demand the explicit, let me also state: the questions of whether to make, or not to make, of whether to remake or make new, are just as germane to literature.
“Did Elisabeth Block check in yet?”
The Reception slab was a barricade protecting taste from the shabbiness of frequent flyers. The Hofmeister, Herr Portier, uniformed like a general, had a phone on hold over each shoulder like epaulets—“Are you Mr. Aaron?”
But then he raised a hand as if in salute, and, pressing extensions, transferred his calls to the garage, or wellness spa, or Ruritania.
“Again,” he said, “my regrets. What is your name, sir?”
“Aaron Szlay?” It was a decent guess, and I even spelled it.
He nodded as if to indicate that he was going to vary this performance a bit from the way we’d done it in rehearsal, and then he went to charge my keycard.
The guy behind me reached around to tap his pda on the marble ledge—“What’s the goddamned holdup?”
Herr Portier said, “Please, sir, we today are at the maximum.” And then to me, “Ms. Block has taken care of everything.”
I took the keycard, the luck, and repeated my room number just to have a line.
“Unfortunately we are not able to accommodate upgrade to executive.”
“I understand.”
Throughout this, I have to mention, Herr Portier had barely broken from his screen. I left, but the tapper didn’t advance — not until he finished txting.
The room: I’m guessing we’re already well past that posthistorical point at which it’s still interesting to note that hotelrooms are like film sets — now I’m just assuming they’re designed that way, and that thanks to film itself and to Frankfurt School theory classes the unconscious has once again become the deliberate (the tedious). Everything furniture to fabrics was squiggled and jotted as if all aesthetics were just a hedge against spills. Lamps giving off light to the circumferences of chipboard tables. The TV was atop the desk (the escritoire? secrétaire?), so that I won’t be able to write — if I have to write another hotel sentence I’ll die.
I sprayed myself wethot in my underthings and wrung them out hung, got into bed with the snackbasket. Crumbs. Sky News was doing the invasion of Libya and the occupation of Wall Street. Then Germany’s Next Top Model, they hadn’t translated the title, and then a show I didn’t know, whose every voice was Ad’s, and drooling into maybe, just maybe, sleep.
Until the phone rang, and it kept ringing, because I let it.
I was woken by a knock at the door — which nobody ever does on TV, they just bound in. Unexpected doorknocking is more a staple of the European novel, more ominous.
“Aaron Szlay?” The accent was abominable, even through oak.
The only thing worse than an Aussie or Kiwi intonation is its intermittent use. When it’s Auckland talking, or Melbourne, fine. But when a snatch of downunder drawl erupts from the mouth of a Euro, it’s like blood in your urine. Maleksen said, “I know you’re in, mate.”
“I’m in the bathroom,” and I was flushing the toilet to stall. To stow my tote, hide my Tetbook.
But it wasn’t fitting — not between tank and tile, not beneath the sink, and then, there on the floor and just as I’d left it, paged open to the spot I was in, it was A History of Frankfurt, which had the spatials and heft. I wedged my Tetbook and Principal’s passport too in among the pages, and stashed the volume on the shelf with all the other volumes about life, war, and what to do in town.
Maleksen — he made a fist and put it to my pudge, fistbumped me back to bed until I sat, holding my towel’s knot, pillowed at the headboard.
Then he was in the closet and hatching the roomsafe, at the window taking down the blackout shades. He straddled a clubchair and vented his crotch, dejacked the phone with a boot.
This was my thought, with him just across: this is what my children’s children I’ll never have will look like, will sound like, will be. From nowhere, from everywhere, edged up against crisp cropped skin in desert digifatigues whirring with muscle or device.
Not even his scars were humanizing: the 12 seared bars I counted just told other machines his price.
He unsnapped a pannier, dug out like a black snowglobe, set it on the table between us and dialed around until its northern antipode was palpitating red and on TV the contestants did the fizzle shimmy, dead.
“Gute nacht to you too,” I said.
“You say that only to sleep,” he said. “You must say instead guten abend.”
“What fucking toy is that — an evil baseball?”
“We have here the yammer,” he said. “It is yamming for us all wireless wave frequency and electromagnetic transmission. On multiband level to 1500 MHz for 30m radius. Including all remote neural dragnet spying on human brainwave.”
“Here I was trying to keep my thoughts to myself. It’s a jammer, by the way.”
He tried to wrest a smile, from either of us. “It is very dumb that you left Berlin.”
“Blame yourself,” I said, “I left because I was broke. All you had to do was bring me my cash and still you fucked that up.”
“How is that happening? Do you not get money?”
“Not from you. Not from Balk.”
“I mean from Aaron Szlay, mate. That is why you come here. He gives you money you give to him files? But are they a copy on drive or your computer?”
“What’s it to you? Haven’t you fucked with enough of my technology?”
Maleksen juggled the dark globe, then repanniered it.
“Your trip to NY — breaking into my office? I was waiting for you to bring it up.”
“They let me in, mate — you have no security. b-Leaks is only ensuring there is no copying of files.”
“Why not just ask?”
“Because if we ask we have to trust. You know about this visit to your dumb office as you call it only because you go online, and you are ordered not to do that.”
“I’m not in the Swiss Army, you fuck. I don’t do orders.”
“You must explain this to Thor. To me you must explain your addiction to Zionism. I like only the writings about your wife and the film script, because it is about space travel. The rest of the documents on that computer, no — I think your experiences are maybe not as important as you think they are.”
“Maybe you weren’t supposed to read them?”
“The videos,” he said. “You must turn them over.”
“What?”
“The videos of the interviews, mate.”
“The interviews I did were audio.”
“Any format is acceptable. Just turn them over.”
“The recordings are only on my computer, and my computer’s only in Berlin. Anyway, I don’t do anything without authorization.”
“Thor authoritates.”
“I don’t mean Balk — I mean the man whose life I’d be duping away. We have the same name, they’re on the same contract.”
“He is gridless. We have no coordinates.”
“Writing himself barefoot in the dust of an interior Pradesh. That’s convenient.”
Maleksen stood—“But they are not secure, mate. The recordings. They can be wiped. Or corrupt.”
“The plan was that I hold the recordings until deadline. If I fuck up the deadline and don’t hand a book in, b-Leaks gets the recordings and goes live. Only then, though. And I have time.”
Maleksen went over to the dresser. Pulled a drawer. The next drawer he pulled off its tracks. He capsized the table there’s no name for.
“What the fuck? This isn’t even my room.”
He went for that shelf that ran opposite the bathroom. His hands under it, frisking. Pushing up on the bolts, shaking the snackbasket, mantelclock. A History of Frankfurt.
“Fuck, stop — will you? I didn’t bring anything with me — the computer’s in Berlin.”
“No,” and he turned, a hand lingering on the shelf. “In Berlin is a flat b-Leaks assigns you. In the flat are insects from the trash of shit hydrogenated cornsyrup America suppers, all over the antiques of senior b-Leaks allies. But in the flat there are no computers.”
“You were there?”
“I am there at times you are not.”
Neighbors, if people in adjacent hotelrooms can be neighbors, were smacking at the walls to quiet down.
I got up from the bed, it took me standing to realize how halfnaked I was. I had one hand to gesture with if I wanted to keep my modesty, or appendages.
I said, “I’ll be back in Berlin — I don’t need to tell you when — I’m sure you’ll find out when before I do. Then we can arrange to talk this out with Balk.”
Maleksen went for the door, but then aboutfaced, took my towel in hand and yanked it clear off. Then he left.
And there it was, my prick.
://
There was no way I was going back to dreamlessness after that — there was no Aar. It was 8:00 on the restored TV and the tickers scrummed the rugby scores. I went fisting my socks prolapsed, and my skidmarked tightywhities. By the time they’d dry frühstück would be over. Petit déjeuner, desayuno, breakfast. The Frankfurter Hof’s laundry service takes 24 hours. I habilimented myself all stiff, retrieved my Tetbook. I left Sky News on for a ruse, left everything in the halogenic heated bathroom on, left the mirror on, left.
I elevatored down to the lobby, lined up behind my nose and became the garnish to a salad of Spanish, Italian, Greek, all propping menus I didn’t have. Printer paper spiralized between clear covers, mss. I made the buffet, filled a plate with what was left of the healthies, fruitsnvegs, before staking out the carbohydrate troughs. Then it was all a matter of doing the school or employee cafeteria dance, whom to sit with, but none of the tables were empty enough, rather any that were just as I approached them were being whisked and stripped.
Some situations were meetings of four people reading and some situations weren’t meetings but also four people reading. Still other business transpired, like the two bedheads blanking their faces above a twotop whose snidely gliding linens suggested footsie, legwork, crotching. Man with a hirsute Mediterranean goat vibe slumped low to gain traction, woman this pale Dutch scullery maid all gyral and shifting her sheath, neither of them speaking too good the English, the only language besides the shoelessness between them. They’d been adulterating everything. Their pdas mated vibrationally amid cutleries, their respective spouses calling — I had to resist picking up. I had to resist removing their footgear from the surrounding chairs and sitting to offer advice — it’s always better to pick up, feign static.
Then toward the pastryside of the buffet in the middle of the room was this big burl of a guy by himself, tunic of a tshirt held together by electrical tape, baggy jeans from the nuclear winter collection, sneaks blatantly inspired by better sneaks, fingerless gloves he pounded into the pockets of a skanky nylon windbreaker. Wiccan roadkill hair parted sparsely in the middle hanging limp like two wimpy black anarchist flags. As I passed I noticed the catalog he was reading, the selfie, his, he was studying below his name, and I stopped without even proceeding into the accompanying bionote. There are no words, there is no word, for having translated my own translator.
“No family is intact,” I said, and settled my plate. “No family is intact but the family of the dead.”
“I am sorry,” clipped, gruff, “but your meaning?”
“So you’ve forgotten the beginning of our book?”
He frowned, “That is the beginning?”
“Sure is.”
Then he said, “Indefinitely,” by which he must’ve meant “undoubtedly” or “indubitably.”
“A pleasure, Dietmar Klug,” I said.
He gripped me weakly, then throttled his neard, his neckbeard.
All the significance was already plated: just behind us were Anglo steamtrays of eggs, lipidinous wursts and rashers of bacon, puddings, hashbrowns, beans, mushrooms, tomato hemispheres, and behind that a jointly controlled French and German zone of what would’ve been a continental frühstück if consumed on another continent, the crepes and quark streusels preserved by marmalades and juice and milk selections from venturing into the Asian stations of noried rice, and yet all he’d hoarded was a, I’ll traduce it for him, canapé.
As I chairbacked my tote and sat against it he picked up that plug of kornbrot and shook its mayosmeared hamfleck into his napkin, then took a dainty bite of the stale rusky round to chew over the coffee or tea question, before finally spitting crust in English, “I would have please a Heifeweizen,” which compelled the server to ask not him but me, “Room number, sir?” Trust Aar to cover the cost.
Dietmar, Diet, had to wiggle his seat out and hunch just to face me. “OK, so first it is complete unjust,” he said.
“What is?”
“OK, so first the amount, with schedule. To do the book by one month is two chapters every day, also Saturday, also Sunday, and that is 10 or 12 hours each and I have children. Second, the way it is that we must receive chapters from you each at a time is maybe how other translators work but not myself. To translate I require the complete text at all times to ensure the consistency and also the style. Consistent mood and style. I know you will say you have the editor to take care of that but you do not edit the same way because I do not have the agent to do this for me. I also have things to say about the contract. But wait.”
“I’m waiting, but you’re getting me mixed up.”
“Ja, ja, you mix me up the worse. The title must not be in German the same. Duskovites means in German just nothing. Dämmerung-Kinder as Schmöker suggested is bad, however, very bad. I will think of the better title for you. I have thought potentials already but we will put in the contract extra if I do that and you use.”
“Again, calm down, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”
“No, I requested to talk with the American publisher because Schmöker would not pass my worries and finally was vengeful of my influence. He said I was to go talk to you directly if I was sure I had a sense. I do, I have a sense. For pertinence this second volume must extend the plot of the twisted horn and to resolve also whether the unicorn can pass between the dimension zippers because in volume 3 it was no but in volumes 2 and 1 it was otherwise and between them nothing was explained about it.”
“I understand.”
“Also for the 10–16 year olds like for my children the erotic pretext of the frozen marquise is not appropriate.”
“Finished?”
“Ja, ja.”
“So you write yourself?” hoping to humor or just waylay his concerns halfway among the condiments, but his beer came.
He muzzled a toast and drank and dripped liberally from his neard, staining the lapels of his windie.
“So what are you translating now?”
He waried, “Truth?”
“Nothing but.”
“Scheiße, other series. You test me that I do not tell but I have read the contracts.”
“This isn’t a test. Trust me to trust your discretion — just moneywork, then?”
“Ja, ja,” he laughed, “translation is for money. Dress and feed two girls with only English.”
“What would you choose to translate, if the money weren’t an issue?”
“Truth again?”
“Try me.”
“I like translating what I do, the Americans, romane, sachbücher, fiction like not fiction. It is not much, the work, you can even put it all into a computer the syntactics are so basic.”
“American books are written by computer.”
“The series we do is written for children but it is the same as the books for adult, the same identical differentiality, no?”
“Difficulty?”
“Quatsch, quatsch. It’s not very much at all.”
“So the dream is being lived?”
“Or once again if I retire and do not die I will write poesie,” and then he was assessing all around us again, and the ceiling too, as if he were inspecting the sprinkler system.
I said to change it up, “What room are you in?”
“Gallus neighborhood.”
“Do you come every year to the Messe?”
“Every month and every week and day it is like I go to this stumpfes Messe, because I live here.”
Translation, by repetition, “You live here as in Frankfurt?”
“Ich bin ein Frankfurter. Sie sind ein Hamburger.”
The beans and mushrooms were already ladled away, and the tomatoes followed. My mug was cold but the servers were disinclined to refill it, the frühstück hall was sparse with late and sluggard headaches, all the guests who’d make a differentiality today had gone, frühstück hours would be over in 10 or so minutes by the cheapo digiwatch my companion kept switching between his wrists and already even the occupied tables were being bussed.
Last chance, “Keine Familie ist ganz—you remember?”
“A book?”
“A book you did. About Jews, the Shoah. American. 2002, this would’ve been around.”
“I did at that time but also before many books on Juden.”
“Which was your favorite?”
But he was lost to me, “And now if not the books for children it is many books on Islam.”
“This one was special. To me at least.”
“The Juden books I don’t know.”
“Don’t hold back.”
“They are wrote to not be read I think.”
“Just bought, you mean? Guilt purchases?”
“I mean — no, no,” and he rubberbanded his hair back, “that they are wrote by writers who do not live today for readers who read who are not the people today with the problems,” and picked his scalp, “totally not like life, or like nothing has happened between the war and date of publishing,” and peeled a scab, “my English is not so good to conversate — identität ist nur rassismus, ein buch für juden ist kein buch für den menschen,” and he reeled in his chair — definitively, undoubtedly, indubitably, perturbed.
“A shame you feel that way.”
But he jumped up and backhanded smacked himself, his watch imprinting buttons.
He yelled, “My life is fuck — it fuck — scheiße, I am sorry fully, apologize fully, I never meant to do not,” and he covered his mouth with his hands.
“Please.”
“I hope I did not insult because this is a job I require and the series is wunderbar and Crown to me and Mrs. Janet Dofts at Crown Books has been wunderbar.”
“Of course, of course.”
“This is living money for me.”
“Obviously, no offense.”
But his jaw convulsed, “Two girls, one translator, Dietmar Klug.”
He turned, I sat, as the waitstaff bared the table and plied its cloth.
\
As I slung my tote through the lobby and out, litzened doormen doffed their laureled caps.
Danke, guten tag.
It was a dank gutted tag, no sun toward noon. I wended around polygonous planters, barrier hollies unberried. Men adjusted wool blends, their tieknots the size of the Kaiser’s scrotum. Women long and thin lightered long thin flavored cigs and exhaled into their phonecalls. Deathmasked Hungarians. Serbs or Croats, unplaceables or just Danes. Their scents were cloved smoke, buffet borborygmi, and olent Hofbrand unguents, and the languages they conferred in were all, or none — Euroenglish, Euronglish spraying like water not from the fountain, drained beyond the colonnade. And I was the only American among them — the only American to still be dawdling the day away with a fair on.
I followed the delegates from the smaller lesser nations of smaller lesser languages through the Platz der Republik, a dull hub of officespace like deserted barracks, bunkers exhumed. Every Mercedes M-Class 4×4 ever made rolled by, windows up. The access to the Messe was meshfenced and coned between signs indicating the airport, Lufthansa billboards vandalizing the orisont tethering inflatable jets. The forecast called for a 100 % chance of flurried schedule sheets and complimentary bookmarks.
The newest structures formed a quad, or tetrad — four halls numbered consecutively, 1 and 2 projecting from a concession terminant in screeningroom, a massive A/V ark whose presence and purpose demonstrated the lack of confidence bookpeople have in their product — why read? why not just grab a seat in the theater and conk out?
Halls 3 and 4 were of architectural interest, roofed in gently sloping metal dunes. Impressions: each mirroring metal wave resembled an abdominal segment of a robotic roach, a cuttlefish’s iridescent cuttlebone, or a toucan’s beak cast in dental amalgam, an armoring scute of an armadillo, while the total effect was that of a multizeppelin crash, or a mashup of the Decepticon mothership Nemesis and the Autobot derelict planet Cybertron, from the animated TV series and liveaction movies, respectively, of Transformers.
Not just four halls — on the back of the backpage of the schedule was a map — everything was a mirroring. My fellow Americans were all in Hall 8, apparently.
Halls 5 through 8 inclusive reminded me of malls, best measured not in square meters but in parsecs. I walked through them and sidestepped their conveyors. I walked between them, and there was Frankfurt’s skyline, like apocalypse does Dallas. Your friendly neighborhood global banking headquarters — Deutsche Bank’s logo of a blue square slit diagonally has always read to me like the desolate vagina of a war widow.
She was being positioned, canted, bolted, this survivor of the gender wars, arm up, arm down, legs spread wide as if to imply a corresponding wideness of taste — a mannequin of Charlotte, whether her first name or last they’d only posted that, the first female printer in history. Paris, reign of Francis I. Alongside her pose was pasteboarded a polyglot factsheet about homosexuality and publishing. Friedrich Koenig, no umlaut for him, invented the first nonmanpowered, but steampowered, press, an unwieldy replica of which anchored the display. The Asians, despite all their advances, their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe, were underrepresented, inevitably. Theirs was just another but scanty polyglot boardtext noting all their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe. Clay and wood and bronze. Lead and tin and antimony. Samples. Gutenberg and his moneylenders were dummied prominently, don’t doubt.
The translation’s typography was blackletter Textura, Fraktur, the spelling unstable, incunabular: “Johanes.” Mainz was referred to as “the once rival of Frankfurt.” Once upon a time. Snobs. The installation featured animatronics, rather inside the cases were Poles and the murmurs reverberant from behind the plastic sheeting were in Polish responding to yelled German. They were running late. They were running with screwdrivers to tighten the screw on a press. It was the same as the oil principle, the crushing of seed, nut, olive. Smithing. Gemcutting. Platen. Windlass. Gutenberg’s father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, was employed by the ecclesiastical mint. My speculation, exactly. Chirography, typography, money mania. A coin is minted by mold, the metals are poured into it, and an image is stamped on the surface. Given that a nickel now is just a quarter nickel, it’s strictly the image that coins the worth, glyphs of tetrarchs and portraits of feudal royalty, with time becoming kitschy graphics of livestock and wheat. Given that paper’s still paper it’s the scripting that authenticates the bill, the signatures of presidents or primeministers, treasurers, reserve chiefs. Pecuniary inscription being a residuum of the regent’s seal or signet ring, the guarantor of authorship and so, of authority. Sphragides, sigilia, specie and fiat currencies, movable type, all systems of writing to date, in each instance an arbitrary materiality is forcibly impressed with transitory value. Proof of identity. Colophons of self. I told the registration guards my name was Aaron Szlay, and though I’d left my pass back in the room I could show them my swipecard in its sleeve with that name on it. They consulted their list, credentialed me, couldn’t have been nicer.
I entered under scaffolding. Let history record that in my lifetime most major public spaces were being renovated and not many ever utilized their main entrances.
Stamping through literatures familiar and not. Books everyone in America who reads has already read, now finally new again in translation. Books that nanocosm of literate America will pretend to be familiar with, if given the opportunity. The same book in multiple editions, the memoirs of a writer, his wife, her lover, of some kidnapped juvenile who grew up to become the first democratically elected female CEO of Muslim Africa, each language’s copy cut into the shape, the mapshape, of the land in which that language obtained, the books arranged to puzzle Europe. They were cutting the final books, the jigs and jags of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, with saws. Still on the schedule was when they’d gather the 10 thickest volumes published since last fair and toss knives at them or shoot them. As if to determine the densest. A banner tugged taut, into an expressionless mouth: this year, the fair’s theme was either the Future of Books, or the Books of the Future — sometimes with German all I get are the nouns.
America, at last.
Stomping past my publisher, expecting Finn, his bosses. Other publishers had pavilions, mine had a breakaway republic. Hostile sovereign Midtown territory. I wouldn’t have been surprised by a functional military. An intense assisterhood whose mufti concealed all variety of weaponry. The jaded. The coy. The derisive. I kept my head down to flatter myself. The intern of my enemy is not my friend, the extern of my enemy is, forget it.
Finn must’ve been elsewhere.
The agencies all had the same style of booth crowded clustered at center hall, foldingchairs but upholstered in oxblood, foldingtables but teak. Placards bearing agency name and Messe directory number propped atop. To be a truly venerable publisher you have to be European or owned by Europeans with a vast backcatalog of pogrom tracts or Nazi agitprop to rely on. To be a decent agent all you have to be is American and social. Convince, be competent. Smile.
“Seth,” which wasn’t my memory but his lanyarded tag, was skinnysuited with a skinny tie, a quiff. Hipbony, hipstery, novelty Masonic tieclip and links.
“I’m interested in making a bid for rights,” I said. “I’m an editor at a discerning house in Sri Lanka.”
But Seth’s face was off wandering behind me, as if Sri Lanka were there.
“The new book by Caleb Krast, specifically. I’m told it’s a novel. We’ll bind it in coral. Dustjacket of leather, porpoise or whale. Targeted advertising and outreach to blogs. We’re the best and only operation on the island — I’ll translate it myself.”
Even Seth’s wince was forced, as he came around the table and said: “First off, Sri Lankans are a linguistically diverse people who tend to read Anglo-American writers of quality in the original. Second, Sri Lanka, as a former colony of Britain, is a member of the Commonwealth, and so its territory is typically covered under the terms of a UK agreement, which we’ve already concluded, prefair, in the case of Mr. Krast.”
“Concluded lucratively?”
“With all respect, Mr. Cohen,” but then she ran between us and cut him off.
She: Seth held her and shook her, and only then did I have her — it was Lisabeth Block. She was shaking crying and holding her nose, emulging. Seth let her go. He was diligent with a tissue.
Lisabeth was a bucktoothed and fawnish blonde braided by the better schools. Aar had hired high, and highstrung. She’d never needed this job, she’d only needed something to blame, to have some purpose to the days between breakdowns, ballets, Montauk, and Maine. She’d had a relative on the Mayflower but only Aar ever remembered his name. She was 22 years old, rather she’d been that age in my mind for over a decade. Not much more than a voicemail, the voice that put me through. I’d try to banter, I’d flirt with myself. She’d kept her distances, played close to the varsity vest, pencil skirt snug at the thighs.
But now she clung to me, and because I wasn’t sure why, it was my fault — I read all of Rach’s grievances graven across her cheeks, inconsolable.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “Why don’t you pick that up?”
Lisabeth stepped away and dabbed her lipfuzz, “What?”
I said, “A very small person’s having a conniption inside your very small purse,” and then Seth said, “That might be her.”
By the time Lisabeth’d broken a nail to her Tetheld the ringtone had stopped. “I can’t,” she said, but went to ID what she’d missed and as she did the ringtone started again and with her crying the effect was of sirens.
“Achsa,” she said to Seth, to me, and with a jagged thumb accepted the call.
“Achsa,” she said, and heeled toward the exits, “Hello? — Frankfurt, in Frankfurt — hold on, I’m taking you with me.”
“What’s with the hysterics?”
Seth unfolded a chair, “Sit down.”
“Where’s Aar?”
“Joshua, please.” He went back around the table and I sat tote in lap creaky across like I was begging for a temp job. “We’ve been setting up here since yesterday morning,” he said. “Mr. Szlay was to have flown in last night.”
“But?”
Seth fluffed his tietips, and his beltbuckle was a square and compass—“Why are you here?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Does Lisabeth?”
“We haven’t had the chance to discuss it.”
“So, what? Aar’s missing and I’m the mystery?”
“What I’m telling you isn’t public. But you’re his friend?”
“Guilty, yes. But you know this.”
“I know that when an agent takes such an interest in a client who isn’t writing, he has to be a friend.”
“So?”
“Mr. Szlay.”
“Go on.”
“Had a heartattack.”
“Fuck? Where?”
“Up in the plane. Midflight.”
“Is there a number where I can reach him?”
“He went, Josh, before they even landed.”
“What — he went?”
“All agency travel lists Lisabeth as emergency contact — the airline notified her, and she’s been trying ever since to contact Achsa.”
“But where is he?”
“They diverted to Reykjavík, Iceland.”
“Aar’s where in Reykjavík, Iceland?”
“Understand me — he went, left, died. Before they even landed.”
“Where?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where fucking exactly did he die?”
“Up in the air. He died in midair.”
“But above what where? Motherfucker, why won’t you tell me?”
I both can and can’t explain my focus. I needed something fixed, some fixed grounding at the time.
Aar died smack in the middle of the ocean. Aaron Szlay, in the middle of a cloud.
“I’m sorry,” Seth said, “but why are you here again? I don’t have his schedule — were you two supposed to meet?”
Now. I can’t write this.
Can’t. Cut.
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a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/30/06/thedumpydump1
if you go online you can find out a lot about mummies. fact: the oldest mummy ever recorded is actually of a south american child. two millennia older than anything egyptian. double fact: when the mummy of ramses ii was so deteriorated that the egyptians had to fly it from cairo to paris where it got modern preservation the mummy was issued an egyptian passport listing its occupation as king (deceased).
even if youre going to get more specific and tetrate “mummies in the department of egyptian art of the metropolitan museum of art on the upper east side of nyc” youll get too much to handle. fact: that actually the mummies arent the most important artifacts of the metropolitans egyptian collection but instead the small little wooden models of the thebian servants who were supposed to come to life to serve their pharaoh in the afterlife are. double fact: the big big temple building reconstructed at the tip of the wing wasnt looted from egypt as my x2b told me the many times we visited but instead was given by the egypt government to the met as a token of appreciation because it was going to be drowned by the construction of the aswani dam (the nile).
but despite any terms you tetrate one thing youll never get is that the associate curator of the department of egyptian art of the metropolitan museum of art on the upper east side of nyc is a whore. shes a mummy coordinator how perfect is that responsible for the linens or like the wrappings of the mummies that have like hieroglyphic or hieratic demotic writing on them that help if not identify them by name then at least by date region because of the materials and let me say also I got all this not from my x2b but online. because j always lied. its like sites were invented just to call him on his bullshit.
at the met he was always into the fatties and this one wasnt any different she was chubbs chubbseroo like a sacrophagus. also dark enough that i prejudged from tetrating her that she was egyptian herself but the last names persian though im not sure jewish. on her cuny faculty homepage her titles listed along with a list of her publications on femininity and exhibitions curated like the one in washington dc last fall but im getting ahead of myself. i got her home addy too in excellent school district but trainless tribeca her parents def had paid for and her workphone and workemail at least but im getting ahead of myself no links.
id been prepping a new campaign for a sportswear client unmentionable in this context except it has all the cool hip eurosport feel of an adidas but also the vintage made in america brand identity of a converse despite it being neither so use your imagination and also unlike converse it doesnt just specialize in shoes. i was going around in their clothes for a while just to get a feel and remember thinking even a size or two bigger the clothes would be so comfortable i thought they would be kickass maternitywear. they were!! i wore them to work and that was acceptable because everyone else was wearing them like they wanted to be anywhere but at work like playing golf or tennis or taking couple strolls through the wetlands preserves or playing lacrosse with the 2.5s against the garage before refinishing. advertising is all about that aspiration and planning for the move you want to be when you grow up even though only grownups really have the real money to spend on the products and services especially advertised. like when you sit next on the bus where you can parse the ads and the cheaper the campaigns the cheaper this is evident. that chica doesnt actually want to go to that shitty profiteering technical college for an associates degree in underpaid midwifing as a second language what her pose communicates from the zoomy cleavage and the way her tush juts directly toward the older whiter professor photomanaged next to her is that she actually wants to marry up just like in the jewelry ads the men are always much older but more tanned and rested and successfully physically heavier and thicker than the women because the ads are intended to communicate to men that if you take care of your woman and take the relationship honest into metals and gems this is what youll live to. But this is all kindergarten stuff and I worked on the larger accounts that had to be more subtle while being less subtle too and in every way larger but anyway the basics are the basics.
wed been having our appt sex with such regularity like they were fertility doc i or shrink doc m appts and maybe we got too regimented maybe we got too strict im an invertebrate scheduler. but ive covered this extensively before. to recap. it was gyms and no gyms diets and no diets mucus boosters ph levelers organic boli from the corsican homeo who said she worked at equinox but she worked behind the desk at equinox i guess also i got a bit freaky tossing out all the cleaning products convinced they were the problem and then stopped cleaning and hired a cleaninglady w referral but fired her before she came out of guilt then felt guilty about it and called around to get another referral but d picked up the phone while she was chasing her daughter trikeing down the hall i hung up i couldnt i couldnt take it. we made checklists and went to appointments and the problem was tubes or azoospermia zoospermia or motility tensions and stress and their effect on hormones and phobic overexpectancy in which failure to fertilize is attributed to failed desire like only feelings can fertilize like sperm and egg can only lambada when theres love and then he flipped when he researched that the potency boosters i had him on damiana and conium were versions of hemlock but everythings a version ok. the manuals with their clipart diagrams and advice motto slogans that were bad but also good routinize romance lust or bust porn is worn jerking for it isnt working for it getaway to get your way have only one reservation and thats at 8 practice worshipfulness cultivate a rapport with your mother or a member of the clergy. courtship. civalry. ovulation apps eggtimer apps basal thermometers next the precoital stretching the positions with the pillow under my tuchus and legs elevated wondering what color to do my nails in the air while he fantasizes about the anchors on ny1 on in the background liz viv or lew or lou the news guy with the moustache and john david the chief meteorologist with all the tides before the sports. or after the sports.
the appts he liked the least but if we canceled them even if we werent feeling well like i wasnt that day a year ago wed still have to pay (and if youre new here you can read why im tetranting all this as a therapy assignment here). parentheticly thats my suggestion ladies for a new anniversary not the birth of the baby but forty weeks or nine ten months before that the conception anniversary get your party on and kick me suggestions about how to name this holiday like a baby and the winner gets a surprise ill get it together.
so i came all nauseous out of the agency and toward time square taking anything but 40th street because i was feeling fat though he said i wasnt but he always said i wasnt avoiding the muffin place even though now they have raw and it was stifle hot and the ac on every bus and train id been on was busted and the sneaks were so comfortable and the striped tracksuit with the noticeably discreet logo placement was so light it was like i was wearing breezes that i decided fuck me with my metrocard im going to fucking schlep it like 50 blocks uptown and that would calm my tummy.
as i was schlepping i was calling him but he didnt pick up but i didnt leave a msg and instead checked my ical prsnl where i record my diets and gym and gyn routines to remind me he had that presentation at the met that hed finally gotten a job there even if it was freelance writing a handwriting on the wall text it was a job and that made me happy that he was happy enough to get out of the apartment and that goddamned office and bring in money doing something especially something more intelectualy stimulating than more housewives of bravo and matinees at film forum that he went to the pawnbroker four times and reading the covers and page 36s of books at the strand or getting ricepuddings from that ricepudding place on spring st that only nyu girls dressed all in black with that one brightly colored scarf accessory patronize except for him and his agent id find the receipts or the $8.82 amex statement.
so i had the time to hike until taking a shower or better a bath at 7 before our sex appt at 9 both events dont make funny of me also recorded. i hiked. it was still hot but breezier up by columbus circle after that time square jumbotron meshugas. i stopped in at some stores and did some shopping but not too much because i didnt want to have too much to carry so that id need to take the 123 or 104 up broadway. in the 60s i bought some soaps and bubblestuff no clothes for sure just some loofas and a cute pumice in the shape of a foot from that cute independent sabon place i cant recall its name and i keep confusing their stuff with sephoras and not really having any thoughts really beyond thinking through while applying samples this new responsibility the agency had just given me of deciding which probono to do this year because the agency did only one or two probonos a year like free campaigns for charities for kids with lead insult or like child bone cancers important to the agencys rep and after checking out with my purchases wondering also that even if this new green conditioner id bought was all eco it might still interact wacko with the new shampoo id bought too just to try a different brand that might not even be totes syntheticfree because the bottle label only had no parabens phthalates sulfates or antibacterials. but somehow up toward the 80s on that big bright smoldering stretch between the ansonia and the apthorp thats very european wondering about this other acct the agency had just landed some home security alarm firm. but thats about the limit of my disclosure. i must seek mystique i must seek mystique i must
my tum i wasnt able to explain its just incredible how ignorant you can be of yourself by missing the cues youve been waiting for by ascribing them to just the strangest conditions such as passing by this very precious adorable new american organic farm to table bistro id read about on my chowblast app and decided the rumbling meant i was hungry it would be nice to sit and deny myself sangrias but treat myself to the ramps on special because i didnt know what ramps were but was ready to know and scroll through some charity prospectuses and some of the alarm system factdoc hoping that would settle it all and keep the vomit from popping up out of my mouth like a chatbox.
so i went in and though it was 6oclock early the place was crowded or reserved to be crowded and the gwynethesque greeter girl said itd be a halfhour to 20 min to sit at the bar but though i dont like and always feel lonely and pandered to on stools at bars she took my name and number and listed me and i told her i was just going to run an errand and sweating.
so i walked up to the pharmacy the duane reade on 80something the one duane reade down from ours i like duane reade even though its a chain its a chain only in the city not like rite aid and so i think of it like an indie and heres a tip go down to city hall i got married there and before the park its duane street and reade street off broadway. but this was in the 80somethings and i was wanting a laxative or like the antilaxative whatever its called that calms the gut flora and fauna and i dont recall just what i was thinking dazed because the lights so spectacular from the hudson especially because it properly was nighttime the exact reverse of how early my period was i didnt need my ical to tell me either.
but then there at the end of the aisles was the test. i had boxes of tests at the apt in the bathroom behind the mirror medicine chest but this was a different brand and if i could understand why i went with this one i could understand much more than marketing but myself. the box wasnt pink or that light red between reassuring the girl on her first menstruation and comforting the emergency bleeder but it wasnt overly serious paternalizing biblical either like it was a drug requiring prescription just an empowerinf strong shiny platinum with raised puffy pink and blue stripes because i the woman might be having a boy too or even a gay boy and its name wasnt too feminine or clinical but just something direct though ill conceal it too just to keep consistent the policy but something the name men might read as demanding and snippy though all women feel as reflex instinct like tell me true or i demand a response to this immediately. or maybe ill invent one though i havent done that before and anyway that was his dept all lies and i suspect the book too but lets try it the test was bstraight with me no thats homophobe so maybe sincerity yes yes sincerit-e.
i forgot all about the cramp medication and like floated to the counter bought the box asked the old oprah who was selling it to me if i could use the bathroom but her reply was we dont have a bathroom only for the pharmacists even i have to go nextdoor.
which was how i ended up nextdoor at the lingerie store pretending to rub the silk to examine a silk nightie for a moment so that the young oprah clerk approached to ask if she could help so that i answered by asking for the bathroom.
to which she said its for employees only but i told her i was preggers im not sure how to feel about any of this but she frowned and said ok and led me back past the fittingrooms into the last fittingroom with a fullsized locking door where I turned on the light sat on the toilet peed and peed all of works vitaminwaters waited and waited and then the two stripes came up not one but two and i really was preggers for real and screeching in the stall so that young oprah came back yelling you better come on out and not wreck anything but i was already pulling up panties and tracksuit pants while calling him but still he wasnt available leaving the stall pushing through the store and door and out to the street where we left a msg for him me and the yelling of young oprah so excited that only after I got home totes sweating the 10 blocks did i realize i still had a strand of toiletpaper hanging between my legs like mummy wrapping like the mummy was unraveling the spool inside me was unraveling out.
now i might be getting this wrong or just that its from j so dont trust it or do with grains of salt but after he came home and i told him we were pregs and we talked it out late into morning he excited but about which i couldnt tell insisted on telling me about his presentation. he said the curator liked his text actually liked it. fact: that in the egyptian embalming process not only are all the organs and glands removed through the nose and jarred and their cavities lined with resin and replaced with linens but by now the ancient mummies have been replaced in full in that all that human flesh and bone has turned to like bitumen or like grains of natron salt. fact: whether it was a religious thing to satisfy the gods or the peoples expectations of their rulers or else just a practical consideration because a pyramid ramping up to the realm of the gods could take such effort and money and so many people and so much time regardless the first thing that all the pharaohs did upon ascending to power was to commission and break ground on their tombs.
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I left Booth 8.S42 before doing anything dicey like A a Q, give or take advice, explain. I had to get away from that mortuary, Lisabeth when she returned, myself even. Szlay Literistic will have its pick of eulogists, obituarists, and apt quotation epitaphs — though for sheer eloquence none will surpass the silent punctuation of “Reykjavík, Iceland,” that pause reassuring me that I had the same city/country combo in mind while also, condescending. “Reykjavík, Iceland”—that comma spoke — I heard that comma, I saw it on Seth’s tongue before he spoke it, or didn’t: Aar’s bemused rectitude had become just a tic.
Seth, I’d been around that type before — back when I was new to a life I was better than, I’d been that type — too resentful to deal with anyone not me.
I’m imagining an airplane, planing through the air — a jet swooping through every cloud and so through everything swirling within the Cloud — all the Canadian maps, Greenland facts, and Frequently Asked Questions about water, average temperature of the Arctic (water, land, air temps), average surge of glaciers (time of year dependent), airline routes, ticket pricing, protocol for dealing with passengers deceased en route, which plane models have onboard morgues, or whether the attendants automatically upgrade corpses to first class. Aar’s flight soaring through the omnibus nimbus, through all charts and graphs, all blogs and castings and torrential feeds, until the compressed uncompressed, the zipped unzipped, and stormed with every word, every letter, I’ve ever written, the.docs, the emails, every bit I’ve deigned to store — Aar passing through them all and though he wouldn’t have had the time or life to read them, I’d like to imagine that he noticed them, and that he noticed what was missing from them — this.
LH403 (Lufthansa), Newark — Frankfurt, 18:05—Never, passenger Szlay, Aaron, losing life with altitude, losing life with speed, breasting the meridian untimely, to be descended with as a deceased body for burial under Iceland.
A corpse borne away winged to the lowerland, the iceland, that had the ring of saga to it — not a book to be written now, but a myth if written deep hesternal.
Break a hunk of ice off the land, crack off a chunk the same proportions as Manhattan Island, then slab Aar’s emberous body on out, the winds floating a hyemal pyre melting toward the Pole. Now that’s a way to pass.
Before simile rose like a star, before the star of metaphor rose, death was north, beyond Ultima Thule. This explains why the preeminent mourners are northerners, because they’re already dead. In an unheated zone of the hall Slavs huddled together, in furs clipped with leaky pens like amulets, talismanic charms. All you can ever hope for is to expire peacefully among a people who deny Self-Help, and who refuse to countenance any genre distinctions between Religion and Spirituality. Their stalls repped books both origs and trans, appropriate for all ages, mortality being a market unto itself. On angels and demons, on thaumaturgy (thaumaturgia), eschatology (eschatologia), and Ragnarök (Рагнáрёк) — books that in this world have to toil in Polish or Ukrainian or Russian, but that in the next world will repose in print forever in that one language after this we’ll all share — yes, ja, da. A drink? Why not?
To you, Aar. Prost, prosit, l’chaim.
I was drinking all the whites and reds on offer — free — and what appeared to be the Messe staple, prosecco, uncorked to toast Cal in German, Romanian, Bulgarian, Svorsk, fits of fizzy ebullience for whichever laureate just fell off a list and won the Booker, the sensation de rigueur of the rentrée littéraire, the finalists of the Prix Goncourt and Renaudot. But then I was sampling the clear harder stuff too, accepting shots like prizes, gripping bottles like they were the 108th Annual Stockholm Oslo Helsinki Awards. Members of the Royal Academy, thank you for the vodka. My ration aquavit, appreciated. I wouldn’t be standing here with you today if it weren’t for Aaron Szlay. Wouldn’t, weren’t, barely standing. A man who loved his sister, Miriam, his niece, Achsa, and the NY Knickerbockers, even through the post-Ewing/Isaiah Thomas Era. A man who also loved women he wasn’t related to, and never engaged in oragenital stimulation without trying to make it mutual and simultaneous. He died above Iceland, which has nothing to do with Thor Balk, because I am sane. He is survived by a diner out on York Avenue, which, like him, would always refill an empty glass.
The Lapps clapped bookends stylized like sepulchral menhirs, condolence applause. I was about to lead everyone in a rousing kaddish. But the only editor who was also the only writer who was also the only reader in Greenland lit the cig in my mouth. A guard preempted with “Rauchen Verboten,” but then used his body English.
“Alright, alright, I’ll go immolate outside.”
Wettish slate the sky. The satellites were wheeling.
Faces surrounded — from Midtown, the Flatiron, faces with whom I might’ve shared rides leaving parties in Park Slope or Astoria. Or with whom I might’ve had lifechanging convos about slipped my mind subjects stumbling south down the Bowery from a launch for a handsewn letterpressed poetry chapbook of two pages in a limited edition of 12.
They said they were going back to the hotel, so I went along, but it wasn’t my hotel. It was too modern, too minimal as maximal luxe — it was this immense mercury raindrop, shaped like a tear.
Into, and through, the lobby — to throng the elevators, but I took the suspension stairs, which were mocked up into a bookcase holding coffinsized volumes.
I tried lifting the cover or lid of, I won’t record which, but it was nailed.
Up on the mezzanine was this beton empyrean of ballroom, with a party on. And who wasn’t there? I mean that literally. Who wasn’t?
We clocked each other out in the vestibule — this lady and I — sciamachy by the cloakroom hung between the doorways. We clocked each other but let it go.
I studied the wall until she went inside. They were raffling off the wall. I took a ticket. I had one chance to win the wall. At the end of the night the DJ would draw the numbers. The wall was a series of screenbanks stacked like shelves that showed new books and if I liked any title flashing past all I had to do was doubleclick it open and stand amidst the clamor and read.
This lady, she was my successor — putative, emphasis on the first two syllables, because she was Spanish, barrio Spanish, Afro-Cuban NY.
I’m not trying to say she was my replacement, I’m not trying to say I was replaceable, only that I once worked for, and that she still worked for, the Times—our careers might’ve overlapped for a weekend edition. But while I’d written criticism and then quit, she’d been hired to cover the publishing beat, rather the media beat, whose “news” about how much culture was being bought or sold for, how much it grossed, and the business behind its production, was now unequivocally established as the apotheosis of culture and criticism both: the dramas and appraisals of boardroom and backstage, in one convenient package.
The Times’s local rovers, native floaters, chatted circles around her — they were Germans whose English was so competent that the paper had been able to discard its regular permanent foreign correspondents like second swizzlesticks. Laidoff, forgotten on a tray, as the budgets melted to water everything down. With ad revenue shrinking and so pagecounts shrinking it was better to downsize a single staff job with benefits into two dozen freelance gigs, relying on Germans to cover Germany, musicians to cover Music, artists to cover Art, dancers to terpsichore on the generalist’s mass grave. Media being the last limit of our culture, this woman was one of the last culture staffers left, for the last major paper published in America’s last major publishing city — or, to put it directly, like a journalist would, the Times put her on a plane from NY to write about NY people at the bookfair — they would’ve sent her to Abbottabad had wahhabi warlords bought fullpage ads for Allah.
Finn especially, I’m sure he’s had to do with her — fill in a byline, whichever might be remembered from such filings as “Slicing, Dicing, Ebook Pricing,” or else “Remote Revision: Amazon Alters Ebook Content Without Consent.” Say Finn’s ergosedentarily decumbent with feet propped atop the slushpile of a lazy day, pondering out the window whether that pigeon below him is crippled or just resting, and the phone rings, she has his directline, and he picks up, and she goes all Torquemada inquisitive.
I can’t speak to anything about any layoff/reshuffling, he says. Regrettably. A Joshua Cohen memoir? Who? Hang up. Out amid that sixth floor catchment pool subroofed over Broadway, a pigeon either crippled or resting.
She extracted herself from the klatsch of Germans, taking appetizing nips out of every other server. Dipping crudités. Making cocktail napkin waves. Leaving her pda with a kebab skewer on a tray, turning, retrieving it.
She was big in her little black dress, lashed to it with lathered beads. Pageboyed, her complexion the result of mixed and matched 10 sites’ cosmetic tips, glimmer, shimmer, comedogenic, an It girl who then had to earn It.
“Hey, Cohen, is that you?”
“This is me,” I said, “and this is a vodka soda.”
“Fuck, Cohen — are you alright?”
“Just fine.”
“Seriously?”
“Allergies, it’s an allergic reaction.”
“To the vodka? Or small quiches?”
“Smalltalk.”
LOL, “It’s been since, what? The New Yorker holiday party, 2000s ago?”
“The Copper Age. Early Church.”
“So?”
“What?”
“So who are you here for?”
I popped the quiche and chewed, which kept the expression straight and the tears in check and with a green mouth said, “On spec.”
“Nope, no way.”
“I’m a visiting scholar at the Institut für Sozialforschung,” swallowing, frigid crusts and core.
“Legit?”
I wheezed, “I just happened to be in Frankfurt on assignment for a blog about Euro men’s fashion.”
“Fuck you.”
“Negotiating the reorganization of IG Farben? Or attempting to overthrow the landtag of Hesse?”
“Fuck you limp,” and she went to flip around my lanyard, but I put my hand over hers and prevented her, held her.
Then she withdrew and smoothed the stripe in her hair, puce until the roots, “Why don’t you just promise you’re not filing tonight?”
“Lots of plans tonight but none include filing. Swear on my totebag.”
“Then you can be a source.”
“I’ve been called worse, even nonanonymously.”
“Mind if I ask you a question?”
She, Mary, Mariana (her own lanyard listing free from her breasts), was after the story — I’d better capitalize that, the Story — a tale that functioned like a sixth sense organ alive and proprioceptive, without which it didn’t matter what’d happened in Frankfurt, it might as well have been that nothing had happened.
The Story wasn’t everything, of course, but its telling had to convince editors that it was, or at least had to convince readers that it was — had to story its way into obliterating any intimations of alternative or individual experience. This was the worst of journalism — the realization that no matter how diligently you worked to be impartial, your presence alone was the slant, the tilt, and that even transcendence would have to become narrated, narratized, plotted.
The true story of the fair — she’d clutched for clickerpen, flippad — was that the world rights in every format to every fair’s true story were determined beforehand. All the year’s significant bookdeals were already arranged prior to Frankfurt, in emails, priority whispers. Frankfurt, then, was just where they were announced — when you brought a media property to market, you brought it presold to show it off, or show its price — though details such as the ebook royalty percentage on “copies” exceeding 100,000 might still have to be parsed by the carving stations, untangled on the dancefloor. What other industry has been so neuroticized that it needs a party as an excuse to do business? and needs a business as an excuse to party?
Everyone in this industry was a frustrated writer, which is like all Chairpeople of the Board being frustrated assemblyline workers or machinists, everyone had been a humanities grad with a dream — and that and that alone was the Story, perennially, a tale of people who’d bargained their ways into the business side of books and then once annually were given the opportunity to live their delusion of being crucial to a culture with a trip to a barbarian land conspicuously lacking in the one presence that depressed them at home: writers.
Mary, myself, and the other journalists gawking nonchalance as we sidled to the bar — awkward malcontents mentally annotating who I might’ve been — might’ve been the only writers around.
“The story is two writers discussing the story,” I said, “two writers afraid of missing the story and so inventing the story, inventing whatever it would scare us to have missed, nicht wahr?”
“Off the record?”
“Off, on, background, foreground — we’re doing Jäger shots in Germany.”
“Are we? Why don’t you have another kebab and then we’ll consider?”
“The story’s the same as it always was, what are the sums. The biggest advance is the biggest story, vice versa. It’s how one print industry rewards another for paying out its confidence so recklessly. I’m fine, I’m fine — two Jägermeisters, bitte.”
“You sure?”
“I’m saying the shareholders. Can’t read. Do they even issue stock certificates on paper? Don’t they just expect you to download and print nowadays?”
LOL again, and we cheersed and took the shots down.
I spilled and either she was indulging me by refusing to notice or her break was over and it was back to her job. She recounted which panels she’d attended before asking which were my faves — the oldest reporting trick in the — and I told her, inventing who spoke on what and what they said, she asked my opinion of the opening speech, and I gave it to her, and either she was fucking with me or fucking lying too because she agreed with me, then she went on to describe the Messe hall architecture so effectively that I’ve plagiarized her — all the roach/armadillo/Transformers comparisons were hers, above — and then a male Magyar bonobo swung over and said in a menthol dialect, “Congratulations, it is very [unintelligble], New Ink,” or “News, Inc.,” “Jew Kink,” “Next Drink,” crawled on.
“Congrats — to you?” she said, the pad open again.
“Can’t imagine on what. He must’ve gotten me confused with someone else.”
“Someone like Caleb Krast?” and she twitched her pen along my ribs.
“So we’ve finally gotten to the point of this flirtation.”
“Don’t you know him?”
“Guy with chronic stink breath from an oral hygiene aversion, the cashmere sweaters that cloy at the midriff, still trying to squeeze into slimfits, preshredded — Cal, I know.”
“Have you two been in touch?”
“Not since he turned war hero. It’s difficult to get an appointment.”
“The new novel’s been picked up in a dozen languages — care to give me a quote?”
“He’s the novelist of our generation. Correction — he’s the novelist our generation deserves.”
She frowned, folded, capped, “You talk about all your friends this way?”
“You’d rather talk about the importation of Arab crime fiction to the American market? Or the enduring popularity of comix?”
She smiled, “Graphic novels.”
“Graphic just used to mean you’d get a titty scene, after which a thug would get his legs blown off.”
“Have you read any of the enhanced ebooks released for multisense ereaders? You hold the tablet and it shakes and you can manually feel the explosions?”
“Have I read them? Is that what you’re supposed to do with them?”
“Tell me another story, then.”
“Like a bedtime story?”
“You don’t have it in you,” and she smirked and then tugged my lanyard, me, close. “Who are you? — I mean, besides Aaron Szlay?”
The DJ spun up again and all around us glitter swirled like metal snowflakes. Laser tracerfire. Flashpot brisance. Strobes.
Our mouths were a tongue apart. But my teeth were too sharp and her lips were still moving.
“You have to help me out,” she said. “My deadline was a drink ago. Lene Termin at Viking hasn’t returned any of my msgs, I’m currently out of the office, no shit. The booths are all just assistants and so trained nowadays I get nothing but review copies, smiles. No one’s in NY, but it’s like no one’s even in Frankfurt. Finally I called out to Iowa, but the students kept transferring me to extensions that might’ve been Caleb’s but the voicemails weren’t set up.”
I put a fist at her back, “Why can’t we just sleep next to each other, no touching?”
She flinched and dropped the credentials, “Why can’t you do me one fucking favor?”
“Because you’re dead.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Then I was conjugating: “You’re dead, I’m dead, they’re dead, we’re all dead.”
“But you’re still an asshole.”
My reply was slurred toward the exit because — across the room past the median bar and splotched in ambers and clears amid appetizer molder — was Finn. Floridcheeked in grief carousal. He didn’t notice me, he hadn’t. This must’ve been his local lodging.
Finn’s silk shirt was busted open to the butterflycrunches navel, and the suitjacket he held and danced with whipped and spun like a ghost. It was an unbuttoned black with white pinstripes ghost he dipped and twirled around, Sufi matador dancing on the ceiling of hell.
The vestibule was riled with revelers who weren’t waiting for the elevators, or were, but swayingly, gropingly, humping one another up against the bookwall and the ballroom’s sliding partitions, and suddenly it struck me as impossible that they were readers too, or claimed to be, impossible that they’d ever even once just sat still in a chair or lain in bed, alone, silently, one light, and read. Indirect light. Quiet, please. I went hushing the couples stairward. The partition walls were sliding apart, or the lidcovers had been pried off the bookcoffins along the stairs, and even as I had to tipsy around them to avoid tripping, craven Danish creatures were crawling out of the darkness and seizing me, tugging at my totestrap. “We take you to what room you stay,” they said. “We are help you cannot stand.” I can’t say how or why, I just smelled it on them, through the herb liquor sulfur — they were Danish.
“I’m not a guest,” I said, or intended to say. “Just get me a cab,” like have it drive into the lobby and up to the landing at least.
Wheeliebags kept clunkaclunking past me downstairs, and all of them were mine, and I said to each, “You’re mine,” not because they were, because it entertained me. The railings were not to be trusted. I reached for them and they swatted me back, so I leaned against the coldsweat porphyry, and sat. And assed myself between the steps.
By the time I got to the lobby it must’ve been midnight, because everyone was straight above me, shooting me: my attempts to rise, my sotted swipes at their devices, my pale hairy bellyflopping, staying on my belly so they wouldn’t snap my face and tag it posthumous. #DrunkAmi. #LitSlob.
The carpet tasted bland. Because it was immaculate, unpatterned.
“Lass ihn,” was said in a foreigner’s German, but in a foreignness I recognized. “Er ist mein Arbeitskollege — mein Freund.”
Such brute fancy watches on the hands that rolled me, on the hands that grasped the strap to drag my flab upright, even as I tried stuffing the tote under my shirt and pants at once, popping buttons. My waist tumbled out into handles. I was being lifted, taken by my handles and lifted and whatever I was yelling had to do with whether anybody was fucking aware of what this fucking suit cost? Anybody?
Maleksen — bulked albinic Maleksen — he was speaking with the stubblepated guards who had my arms pinned back and were twisting my wrists: “Er kotzt.”
Sure enough if I kept protesting I’d puke.
Maleksen wagged a finger at me, before switching to the only sprache guards respect besides violence: “Bloke went bottle up on an empty stomach. But a good bloke. Good Arbeitskollege and Freund. We bunk at the Frankfurter Hof. I take him myself, no worries. Danke, mate.”
I was basically shoved into him—“Macht Platz.”
Maleksen staggered me into the doors like they were revolvingdoors, which they weren’t, headfirst.
Outside. And shivering. But Maleksen still wouldn’t let go, and no curbstumble I took or rut I forced myself into had him loosening his totehold. Whatever I was babbling went into the wind, beyond the kliegs of the hofzone and into the dimming. Au revoir, you logos. Adieu, you chains. It was too late in the day for late capitalism. Everything was closed. Maleksen jerked me back. “Wait.” Then a boot to the calf. “Move, mate.”
Because there were businessmen blundering inebriate. Because there was a crowd at the tramstop, though by the schedule of the night route a solitary kerchiefed pensioner huddling sackladen at the shelter was a crowd. Even just a cig would’ve been. Just a goddamned cig. We came to this intersection of shuttered bar, shuttered schnitzeleria/bar, vacant plaster atelier still affiched as a cybercafé, and as I hobbled along with the tracks Maleksen heaved me sharp by the strap into a turn, and now I was behind him, led, towed, like I was leashed. River gusts blew in through the gape in my fly. We crossed again, against the signal. Maleksen was scared of being followed, but also scared of not being — rather he was afraid of not having the correct followers.
He stopped again at the meridian, checked traffic—“What is the pass, mate?”
“The password?”
“It will be cracked,” he said, “but it will be more gentle if you tell me — it is not fingerprint, no?”
“To my computer? None of my passwords have computers.”
This was parkland now, grass swards scrawled over by the umbrage of bare branches. And my only witnesses, writers and the like more famous and for now more dead than I was, enpedestaled statues.
“Give it up, mate,” Maleksen said.
“So we’re going to visit Balk? He lives in a park?”
He was dragging me toward the willows. Behind that a road. Above us the stars. Plane weather.
“Give it to me.”
“Stop talking porn to me.”
He whirled around and as he spoke the scarred bars bent at his throat: “The computer. The laptop.”
“Let’s get clear on this — you’re mugging me? For fucking recordings you’d be getting anyway? All because why? I violated terms? Because I left Berlin or went online like once at a welfare state library? Or is b-Leaks getting impatient with me and reneging?”
“Shut up. You will type and access for me.”
“It’s just suckmypenis, alloneword. The name of that twat teacher from Sydney who taught your accent, all CAPS. I should be mugging you, for all that cash you owe me. I should be tapping Balk’s defense fund.”
“Is it touch ID?”
“It’s retinal. Or iris. I forget. It’s lobal. Ears. You’re going to have to cut off a nipple.”
“I will hurt you if I must.”
“With the blessings of Balk the utopian pacifist, I’m guessing?”
“Tetbook. Now, mate.”
“I’m only trying to make sense of this, sort out your position.”
“Toss it, mate.”
“Wait, I’ve got it — you’re striking out on your own. You’re leaking the leaker, sticking it to Balk.”
Maleksen scowled. “I count.”
I said, “You’re going rogue, like with a ransom thing. Going to publish the interviews yourself. Or sell them off for publication? Or sell them back to every last user they incriminate?”
Maleksen slashed out with his bootheel and knocked me to my knees and the tote swung around my neck and hung down in front of me.
“Fuck,” I said, “just fucking hold up.”
But he was whispering, “b-Leaks is become soft. In politics. Balk is also soft, sitting in Russian Iceland, cannot ever go outside. His intellect tells him he is persecuted because of advocacy and not because he is pederastic. I am only telling this now to you because you like him lie to yourself about your importance. I count.”
“Four” went to “three,” but then Maleksen’s two was “dva” and one was “odin,” and as I was fetching my glasses from the dirt I had to say, “You’re Russian?”
There was a strangulated swan honk from beyond the willows.
Maleksen held a gun, and though all of it was camouflaged in flecktarn browns and greens, it gleamed, as if it were a plastic laser toy, with a black wire straggling through the tangle of roots back to a busted sniper game at a condemned arcade on the Jersey Shore. Then again, the way he was aiming it was real, like all my flesh wasn’t real but pixel, to be shot to death infinitely, to be resurrected eternally — I had the hiccups.
“Why do this?” I said. “Who cares?”
But what I wanted to say was this: I’m only protecting myself. What I wanted to say was: You already know what’s in it. Everybody knows. Within themselves.
There were contrails of light through the boughs. A gray Merc idled out in the raster.
I turned back from it and smack into the gun. Its butt to my jaw, my jaw to the grass.
I wasn’t just wet but made of wetness, flowing along to the lowest ground, and then thrusting up from the matted blades. But when I put a hand to where it stung I fell again, flat, and breathed a puddle that felt like breathing a plasticbag. I wrenched off the plasticbag that had wrapped around me. It was from Kaufland, the hypermarket.
And that was morning.
I straightened my knees, slowly, achingly slowly straightened my grovel joints, patted myself down. No wallet, but Principal’s passport was still there damp under a sock, gravel. The tag wound around my neck identified my corpse as Aaron Szlay’s. What I didn’t have was a tote, with all my lives inside. Each step sparked fire but I was cold, that back of the throat cold. Every swallow was mucous. Each step twinged up the spine, and shook me into coughing fits, croupy coughing, fuck. Sneezing stuff the consistency of gauze, as if to stanch the jawblood. I rubbed my shoulder, at the totemark, the strappage. The 2.4 lbs of my Tetbook, the 2.4 tons of the book it contained, gone. I’d backed nothing up. If posture be my judge I was fucked. I had no other younger version to reload. I had no other younger version of myself.
There was a construction site in my head and then farther along the street was a construction site, jackhammering, pointed pneumatics of kurwa, pizda, overalled gastarbeiters cursing in Polish while breaking asphalt, drilling at sewage with sexual fury.
I felt a car creep up, but it was just a cab, which once it’d crept alongside my condition veered away and soaked me. My suit had been made to order, not to get stretched — it had pleats now.
Here’s the name of the street: Mainzer Landstraße. And here’s another streetname: Taunusanlage. The air was a sodden drear like a frozen screen. A constant pane between me and the skyscraping curtainwalls of mirrored glass just ahead.
Observe, perceive, glean everything — it was as if I were compensating for the material I’d lost by collecting the trash around me. Piking it, staving it, to fill this pit in me. To heal the welts pulsing like stoplights at my temples. Gravel in my shoes like babyteeth.
Into the Messe again. A guard halted me, examined my blood against my tag—“What happens to you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m here for the panel on zombies.”
He said, “There is that today?” As if everyone was in peril.
“It’s on just now — zombie fiction, the undead.”
He was giddy now, silly, “That is the book I please to read.”
I went to the bathrooms and wet papertowels and pressed my face, spiffed up. Then slogged past the tropicalized Pacific Islander stalls, went unrecognized by the Czechs and Slovaks who just a diurnity ago had been my brothers.
Pod caffeine, strudel in a sleeve. And while I was at it, why not, grabbing the giveaway notebooks and ballpoints.
Lisabeth helmed the booth in mourningdress chic, channeling both the orphan and widow (typesetting jargon: an orphan the opening line of a paragraph stranded alone at the bottom of a page, a widow the closing line stranded alone at the top). It was as if she’d traveled prepared for a loss, a charcoal dress quivering to the knees. Her face was swollen from the crying or bouquets. Aaron would’ve appreciated that — he’d always been attracted to women allergic to flowers, and latex.
The foldingtable was shrouded in blueblack linens, furled roses and closelipped tulips, bonbons, sekt. Bereavement cards in soft and hardback, boxed sets. I lined behind the wild sprigs of a deliverer who turned around and cringed. My jaw must’ve been trickling again. Lisabeth signed for him, took another babysbreathed bouquet, set it among the aster strewings, doing her duty stalwart. Such rectitude, she wouldn’t even avail herself of a chair, but stayed standing as if all the books the agency had ever represented were balanced on her head.
I was about to pay a visit emptyhanded.
But then a woman cut in front of me — Cal’s editor, Lene Termin, Earth Mother. A batik peasant smock, a chunky butchness latebloomed with antidepressants.
Lene didn’t even meet my sneer, only said, “Pardon, Entschuldigung.”
She said to Lisabeth, “Pat Sagenhaft, my partner, just picked Seth up at Newark.”
“So helpful,” was all Lisabeth had.
“Pat’s going to sit in with him and the lawyer — Rich?”
“Spence Rich.”
“But just in an advisory capacity — make sure no one’s getting shafted.”
“Thanks.”
“That meeting’s for noon, NY noon. Meantime and with your OK I’ll go personally make the followup calls, to reassure the clients, offer like second opinion, outsider perspective. The immediate goal is fending off the poachers.”
“I understand. And thanks.”
“Again I can’t stress this enough, I’m here for you — Aaron meant a lot to me. If it makes sense to merge, you’ll merge — I’ve already got a few names in mind and even just casually a couple of feelers.”
“Already?”
“Too soon, but — interesting feelers.”
“Your partner Pat’s still with Riba Group, yes? Or Schwartzlist?”
“Then again it’s never too soon — especially with our girl to take care of, the princess of Princeton.”
“Achsa.”
“Exactly — we’ll be sure to involve her in all aspects of the process.”
“Achsa,” Lisabeth snuffed.
“I’m so proud of how you’re holding up, Lisabeth — that won’t go unnoticed. Now is there anything else I can do?”
There was nothing, and Lene lunged across the table to roll Lisabeth in her breast, then left, oblivious of me. Aar had loathed her—“Hel” he’d called her, “Helene, Queen of the Norse,” senior editor at Viking.
Lisabeth, poor wealthy Lisabeth who’d never understood how to take advantage, forsaken by her lanky associate with the quiff and clip, her underling, but in terms of power dynamics, overling, Seth — I could write it out already, it could write itself out clearly even black on black: Seth would coordinate publicity, the funeral, any lunches he’d take with other agents from other agencies he’d explain away as merely convivial, or acculturating, but then by the time Lisabeth’d get back to NY Seth would’ve installed himself either in Aar’s old corner niche, after having removed Miri’s sexless bed and finally fumigated the closets of her mothballs, or in newer officing toward the top of a Flatiron vivarium repping the bottom half of the list, which, the bottom half quarter, would mean repping me. Clever boy. With any brains he’d eventually move into media, but still keep a bit of lit to keep the cred up. If he or his next partners had any class they’d offer Lisabeth a job, or wouldn’t, that’s the only point on which I’m undecided — I’m sure Lene’ll be in touch.
To me, Lisabeth said, “The news just broke online.”
“Seth?”
“He wrote the statement, but I — why do you deserve an explanation? And what happened to your cheek?”
“I don’t. And Iceland happened.”
“Another tragedy another excuse to drink? You’re bleeding.”
“Take it from me: Bleeding means I have a heart.”
“Anyway,” Lisabeth shrilled, “before he flew back he left this envelope for you,” and she handed me a manila.
“Who? Seth did?” I gutted it for what, I’m not sure — a book already lost? already finished?
“It’s Cal’s, his manuscript. Seth said Cal was giving you a copy. For your thoughts. If you have any thoughts.”
“Appreciated.”
“You’re not acting appreciative. What did you expect?”
“Forget it.” The titlepage was inscribed: “With compliments and condolences — we have to be in touch — sethustings@szlayliteristic.com.”
“Care to tell me what you’re doing here, Josh?”
“What?”
“Here, in Frankfurt, why?”
“Aar never told you?”
“Told me what?”
“He never said anything about Switzerland? Our deal?”
“You have a deal or just a proposal, and didn’t you just say Iceland?”
“He mentioned nothing whatsoever?”
“All I have is what I get from your wife.”
“Exwife.”
“Not yet. Don’t worry, though — don’t tell me where you’re living and I can’t tell her where to have you served.”
“It’s complicated, Lis.”
“That’s what her companion’s always saying, the actor. Phoning twice a day about an Amex bill. He canceled the card. But he’s wondering for next time whether it pays to get the extra identity theft protection. I’m like customer care with him. Member services.”
“So you’re just the person to talk to.”
“What?”
“My money — can I have it?”
She stiffened, “Your money for what?”
“That’s why I was meeting Aar.”
“He was giving you a loan?”
“It was sort of like he owed me.”
“So send a record or invoice, I’ll have a check sent when I’m back.”
“Not happening.”
“If it’s an address thing I can wire you online.”
“Not that. Cash.”
Lisabeth — let her be stunned by the gall of it all and not the truth of it. She tonguewriggled her toothgap, “Cash?”
“I need it bad.”
“You need it badly.”
“That’s correct.”
“But Seth has the agency Visa.”
“You can’t just stake me yourself?”
One inflamed white bud at tonguetip, “I make $40K a year.”
“You make $60K.”
“OK, $60.”
“Just help me out, Lis. I promise I’m good for it.”
She held her purse, both hands. That’s it. Nothing else and no deeper meaning. Lisabeth held onto her purse with both hands. She pallbore toward the rear of the hall — heels icepicking past the newest electroflex displays and penputing and fingerink platforms, then wading sullen through crumpled snowballs of epaper — to a temporary slidewall set with fussy ATMs. As we waited our turn she went on a pillage for the appropriate card — tampon, aloe handsanitizer, lipstick, gums, cherry suckers — verlag businesscards origamized or anxiously twisted, laundryoom passkey, Tetheld, lists, personal debit, platinum Visa, its frosty hologram unmistakable.
“Just use that one,” I said. “That has to be your parents’. ”
To be desperate is to live off what others let you have — I wonder if Aar ever met, and if so what his impressions were of, her parents.
She snorted and did the hairtuck behind the ears, what loyalty. Pathic girl, ticridden girl, who typed with nibbled nails and left voicemails with bruxism. She’d tolerated so much, so many clients reliant, and Aar, who’d insisted on salutations on email, phone honorifics, smoking indoors, rye in the drawer, regular drycleaning. He’d preferred the place 10 blocks south unless he’d needed the suit same day, in which case there was a place two blocks north, though he’d always leave it up to her to intuit which he’d needed. This was what I wanted to tell her, how grateful Aar’d been, how appreciative. How freeing but how guiltily freeing it was now that he wasn’t around to stop me from deceit.
With our turn I hung back, pointlessly because Lisabeth faced fully machineward, screening me from the screen and the keypad, her mouthbreathing fogging the prompts but not her compliance. To both sides other patrons swiped, tapped, scifi luminance and blare, sci-nonfi. The units were teleporters, timemachines. This wasn’t Frankfurt anymore, but Whitehall Street 2002. This was Miri’s bookstore, but in its afterlife as bank, and not even a fullservice bank, just machined, a Chase, which anytime I visited Aar’s office above it I took as command, chase the past forever. This was Achsa’s first time back since the space’s conversion. Aar, who had to work, and had no babysitter, and had to get cash anyway, had turned it into a lesson. Achsa knew what she stood in, tile, plateglass, she knew what’d happened to her mother’s books, the same thing that’d happened to her mother. They’d gone away and been turned into money. She’d asked how the cash got into the machine and Aar’d asked her back, just guess. Achsa’d said maybe it was printed, like a printer was housed inside each unit. Try again. Maybe it was like a sewer, she’d said, or like with trees, the roots of trees, the money was always just flowing through tubes, which routed it to blossom at locations of customer request. Aar’d loved that explanation. On the way home they’d passed a produce stand, he’d said, and Achsa hadn’t known what to make of an apple whose stem still had its leaf. It was news to her and shared delicious.
Choose English. I snagged the first two digits of Lisabeth’s PIN. 8, 0. Choose the cash advance.
“How much?”
“How much’s the max?”
Her $500/withdrawal limit rounded to €360, apparently, which we went for four times, and I even went in for scolding her, made her wait around for the last receipt to spit, while her Tetheld quaked with calls, msgs, txts, Momcell, Daddygreenwichwork, and fraud alert premonitions, and she ignored them.
What mystified, though, and heartened, was her holding out the bills and saying, “How are you going to convince me to expense this?”
“I’m a client, aren’t I? Haven’t we been discussing me?”
She shelled shut her wallet and pursed it. “Just don’t lose it.”
“All spending is losing, but sure.”
She yelled, “I don’t mean the money. Get drunk again, get a prostitute. You dick. I mean Cal’s novel — we can’t have it floating around.”
The envelope, which I’d been carrying. “Confirmative.”
A sigh. “Josh, tell me — why aren’t writers invited to Frankfurt?”
“Why?”
“Because they can’t deal with the fact that this is a business.”
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a-bintel-b.tlog.tetrant.com/2011/01/07/thedumpydump2
expectancy. life comes first in semesters for school second in quarters for career and third in trimesters after which life ends and no one hangs with friends. but when i got pregs all my friends had become mothers already and they hadnt had time for me in semesters quarters my first trimester where they finally surfaced because i was finally becoming their peer. babyclothes and cribs and strollers and just about every other type of castoff handmedown bottle bootie were arriving by mail or being dropped off and explained over wheatgrass juice and muffintop brownies.
moom wanted to know how long i intended to nurse before she told me how long was recommended but her recommendation was shorter than anything in books or on weaner.org. its def a girl or boy i can tell moom was always telling me and “emi” said wed want to know before and that was the best decision and “tal” said we absolutely wouldnt want to know before and that was the best decision. hospital drugs and the nosocomical infections had to be weighed against the risk of homebirth and if homebirth a decision had to be made whether to purchase a tub or borrow a friends and disinfect it. like if you go to do what your parents did if you cursed as a kid you washed the kids mouth out but now that was considered abuse and if you did that you had to be concerned with whether what you washed with contained toxins.
but $@#! it was $@#!ing exhilarating. i was glowing healthy and even smelled nice like a bakery of pearls j said i wasnt showing just yet. the fertility docs each recommended their own gynobstetrician so we went browsing and still to doc meanley who was encouraging. he said we were doing better than ever until he pressed j to share and j who never liked being pressed said that he considered a child like a book like hed get to write a child but doc meanley dispproved and asked what happens if you get blocked dont books end up writing you and though j was peeved doc meanley pressured more by claiming that j was being “aversive.” He asked why did you try for a baby if you dont actually want a baby to which j asked “why did i get married if i didnt actually want a marriage” and the doc said it was enough with the “aversives” but then j said “i got married and am having a baby with her so that no one else would [have to????] because i love her so much” what a schmuck if youre reading this having you in my life was already like having a child.
work was so great to me too that already just the moment i told my boss “ben itkowitz” (reread my pseudo/anonymity policy) he was jumping up and down with me saying bubele take all the leave you need. which in ben language meant you best square everything away before you pop one. which meant training my templacement just personable enough that s/he would get on as comfy as sportswear with the clients but also just shoddy and incompatent enough for dealing with coworkers officeside that s/hed get fired if they didnt consult me on every single detail throughout my maternity. that was the only move to make according to “emi” and “tal” for u&i to beg me back to acct mgmt and beyond that promote me. also i needed to prepare clientside transitions for all the open accts though i have to be careful what im typing “net bank of new england ii” “manic webisode” “hellacopter: da game” “pomegranate” “beverage” all while brainstorming a campaign for the alarm system thing and planning the probono.
the msgings always the difficultest but dealing with the city its doubled. the conceptual idea of it was about links between the local and nonlocal or between personal health and the environment. it was an initiative directed at minority communities that are come on in the majority if you ever get out of the cabs. now just lump general women and children in with the minorities and you already have three quarters of the city and the rest are jewish males (the bulk of who are HANDICAPPED).
wed been working on the proposal copy/design for the promo material different versions for different schools and religious groups for community leaders and parents. it never made any sense that though the work was probono we still had to pitch but we did and so went downtown to the school like ps 188 that was interim headquarters until the office at the health dept got its hvac cleaned of mold.
a guard ushered us down the hall amid all the students leaving and told us to wait by the lockers and we obeyed like we ourselves were still in school and the guard became a teacher. i felt like that difficult to describe to anyone who hasnt felt it feeling of being elated but crap and feeling id rather be going with the students heading out from last class or extracurriculars to snuggle into carrot celery hummus and a nap. the students were so big in their bodies but their faces were small and they carried what i had high in front of me low on their backs huge enormous sagging backpacks. they were asian hispanic and every other race to justify my decision about bringing along “khan” who was pakistani and “rod” who was half brazilian half korean i think though this wasnt their acct. they were just relatively between accts at the agency and ive always known how to present. the rest of my team was “jim” and “jon” two guys (black) (and gay and jacked and impeccably tailored my bangers my banging creatives was our jk though they werent romantically involved with each other and me a preggers white girl rounding out her 20 lbs heavier filenes basement going out of business suit.
i wasnt sure what we were waiting for and then i was sure and getting queasy. i hadnt been told this was a cattle call the type in which prospective clients interview a number of agencies or i had been told and id forgotten but whichever i was flustered nauseated or nauseous j always corrected me. [501c3s and public agencies are worse than private corporations theyre the absolute worst to work with please forgive the digression. the money given to them out of the goodness of hearts or from taxes doesnt go to the hungry children without healthcare but to midlevel professionals on disability and though i understand why a for profit has to try to get the best work for the best price the city likes to swing dick the same way and had already smacked u&i $20k in the hole on a campaign that ultimately lost its winner 4x that. well beyond any monies saved in the deductibles. still profile was enhanced.] i got that it was a cattle call and that i was the cow with the door letting out a team from an agency ill just call “the white agency.” they all were hauling out their mockups i didnt have a chance to eval because of a pet the bulge reunion with this totes bitch wasp girl who shrieked that she hadnt known i was preggers as if we were friends and id neglected to tell her and she wrapped herself around me to exaggerate how burst i was but i only said i thought shed been laidoff and had gone into media admin or alumni affairs for like marymount or williams.
we went in after into not anything administrative but just this classroom all set up like a classroom just chilling. it made me think no way im going to send my kid to this or any other publicschool im just going to follow “tali” and move back to wykagyl or the north shore of the island or do like “emi” and straight from the hospital fill out an application for the 92nd st y anything but abuse my own kid like this. It was just this spare ugly dropceiling sheet tile flooring streaked like the dryerase board dented globe dump. At a table the color and greasy texture of fries and a seeded bun stool the size of a burger i eased down onto slow like i was at maximum capacity already.
now im already on thin ice writing about a client so im just going to composite with the assurance that unlike with j everything is true but the job must be protected. its really difficult to do that because i just have this urge to go ahead and type because there arent any consequences here in front of me besides my smoothie. in the future there will have to be this immunity. this immunization booster or whatevs that lets me both vent and erase lets me both tetrant and delete because i can say from experience from having been on the other end the receiving end that a spouse cant be just a recipient or sender. there really have to be better ways than this or crumbling cookies and sneaking a scoop of yellow cakebatter icecream into my smoothie to cope with the pressure. “verna smith” sat atop the teachers station across from us. she was the project mgr. an old but young mix of black mama poet laureate with dreadbraids twisted through cowry shells dangling peacock feathers and white dyke flannel over chinos. then maybe two maybe three other people inhouse. communications personnel at the health and education depts.
“verna” was talking forever about the project the expectations whatevs but always bringing it back around to her resume or core principles. it was difficult to pay attention especially by “in my socialwork days up in the Bronx” but also because of the cramping just severe excruciating cramping. though i dont mean to be so mean. its difficult because im making up “verna” from the combo of two people honestly the project comanagers and the one from health was tolerable enough because about to retire and haitian french but the other from education was middleaged an irish catholic phd cunt who said things like “advertising in schools can be justified only as a teachable moment for media literacy.”
i was so out of it i could only could barely poke my bangers to represent. “jim” and “jon.” big mistake. biiiig miiiistake. “jim” opened up with the tag “eat junk feel city” because he wrote it and was sure of its humor but the depts either didnt get it or did and just sat as he did the dumbest thing and tried to sell the sell or just neutralize by explaining that the agency didnt think the city was shitty or might be in any way associated with junkfood however we did think the msg would register with youth and i was feeling junky shitty myself. “jon” picked up with “get nutritionated” which was greeted similarly. neither of these were the tags to start with and i thought they knew that i mustve told them that with the city they had to start conservative and work up to the risquey or what the braindead would find risquey they had elected officials to please it was wet the stool. i got shaky up and ignoring the sense of having pissed myself had rod and khan hold the boards “eat and run — or walk — or bike” “eat the world (in moderation)” my hand was trembling. but those only launched education “verna” into this on the rag rant about such “old played out dichotomies.” though health “verna” had no issue with “edgy” the hope was to “get the best msg to the worst affected” education said “this has to be a quality of life initiative with a secondary benefit educational component delivered about or even through the very medium of ad culture inculcating critical reading techniques and consumer scepsis? skepsis? vital to differencing between exploitative msging and healthy mealplanning public service announcements.” as comparables were being cited from like the american heart association and the presidents council on physical fitness i was dying literally physically dying. but just then “jon” and “jim” interrupted what was becoming another miracle of “verna” converting crackheads in tremont by recounting the modalities of the multiple intelligences. “the healthiest dinners have the shortest commutes” campaign featured an extension of the subway map extending the lines out of the boroughs into farm country to encourage consumers to relate to dutchess county and the mexicans who picked in jersey. “next bus: 2-10 minutes next local apple season: 1 year.” and the “vernas” said “wed be very pleased to further this discussion” i was doubling over. and the “vernas” said “well be in touch” i was bent over my hands on the table slipping ketchup mustard picklewater blood slurping down my stockings and through the mesh a gob on the tip of a heel.
now you and i mean you (but not you ladies. you. were supposed to be in dc. some archaeology conference. my memorys perfect. like a computers memory perfect. like a wrinkling going gray elephant computer. but let me check they dont have elephants in mesoamerica. it was supposed to have been some convention about mesoamerican archaeology four days three nights and this was just in the middle. youd been excited about it couldnt stop talking about it. i couldnt help but be excited for you. but then i was being squeezed toward the school lobby. “jim.” “jon.” hero friends. everything was a hero the hallways were heroes just for being halls and the lockers that stayed shut for me were heroes and the doors that were being opened for me were heroes and everyone was a hero except the education people and even the health people who did nothing but wait around houston street for the 911 “verna” called while even the guard was out yelling and hailing cabs though no cab would take us and 911 took forever. “verna” cradled me with womens room papertowels and told me about her two children who were grown architects in new orleans and how her daughter used to work much before my time and more in acct services at an agency ive forgotten. “verna” hung over me asking questions not to keep me with it but to accuse what did i eat did i drink enough was i on any drugs who remembered. my memorys as perfect as something i cant think about just now like how you j youd be writing your hackwork online and wouldnt know what analogy to use youd take a break and read some poetry and then return to work and write that whatever it was the experience of being in a hotel or motel or b&b inn was like poetry that was your default analogy. in the ambulance up 1st ave i had my bangers scrolling my contacts for you and calling but your phone was off and they were leaving msgs delirious. yo um j man your wifes going to where we going where. bellevue er. it was strange when they said your full name. which i never did because you dont deserve the vowels. through admissions before turning the corner i had enough mind presence to tell them how my mother was listed as moom and the bangers got her on the line and before they hung up she was already driving the triboro. then they kept calling you through the day through the night staying all that time until “ben” came too and kept moom company until d&c became dilation and curettage and she was let into my room and coming to all i said was that the day before the night before everytime id called youd picked up. i had moom call “tal” and “emi” and i talked to them while moom on her own initiative called your mother but i wouldve told her that was pointless you tell your mother nothing you hide and keep secrets from everyone and this is the repulsivity j how you keep them from yourself so who knows if she even knew i was preggers the bitch didnt even offer to drive up. then because i told moom you were in dc because you were writing walltxt for the met she called the met but they were closed and she got lost in the menus and transfers. she went to the apt and got the paper where you wrote down where you were staying but the numby and addy you gave were for two different dc hiltons and neither had a record of you as a guest and beyond that no record of archaeology either and moom came back to my room and immediately told me because j you have to respect and be open with the ones you love even if it slays them. because though what you dont know cant hurt you used to be legit now theres nothing that cant be known and so the greatest pain has become not the act itself but the thought of you trying to conceal it from me and how stupid that is and how pitiful the failure how petty. but at the time and it mightve been the anesthetic all my reaction was defending you to moom saying that you were always garbling logistics and that was accurate saying that you probably hadnt booked your own room and that was probably accurate too and reception clerks understand nothing about cuttingedge archaeology. also i was flipping because they gave me doxycycline a tetracycline or teratogen that causes birth defects as an antibiotic and not clindamycin with a shorter halflife so we wouldnt have to wait as long to try again. i wanted nothing i just wanted it out of my system now but though the nurses kept saying discharge and i kept saying discharge moom was just trying to get everyone talking about the same thing. also in the middle of that conversation j you called. you knew what was going on but pretended you didnt because you knew that if i found out youd checked your msgs before just calling me back the moment you turned your phone back on id be whacked youd be. i knew that you knew i was wasted because i didnt interrogate you on why youd turned your phone off or were pretending. we had levels between us deep with meaning to excavate. fuck you and fuck your mummy. you checked the amtrak schedule and said youd be back in four hours but that was a typical exaggeration because it took you all of six and moom who wouldnt leave the room to let me take the call alone had already gotten me back to the apt by then and wouldnt leave until you got there or here and even after discharge the discharge continued and like with this its still sour fresh.
i was out and apparently stayed out through a fight between you and moom who refused to leave until i came to but with all the pessaries and anesthetic and teratogen death agent ivs i was pumped with though wouldnt swallow as tablets and dropped behind the bed instead and later flushed it was all just a dream of you moom and emi and tal the four all the five of us in bed together dreaming. that was a week id say. week and a half. you were doing and even by past behavior overdoing everything and just by realizing that i was recovering. you even managed to impress moom and convice her to go to a show with emi and tal before heading back to wykagyl. jersey boys that was the show. then we were alone except for all the shiva trays and platters. so many of them so much ringing at the door you pried off the intercom and cut the wire but then all the ringing was phone. note how all the dormant instincts come out among the buddha jews and suddenly its tunafish and eggsalad and coldcuts and rye. the smell of meat i couldnt deal with. note the pareve cheesecake babkas and diet soda liters like a reflex from fairway. thankfully i couldnt keep anything down. the office called daily. “mia” my yoga instructor showed up with a healing asana a malasana variation to detox she said i had to do the moment i got up i had to squat down toes diagonal heels flat to pelvic width or wider abs or what was left of them to the front hands front elbows to the inner knee breathe shoulders to the inner knee breathe and hold imagining the vagina is a nostril and the anus a mouth or the other way around and drop them to suck the floor and she demonstrated and basically held her class for me on the unmatted floor of our room and you were admiring her ass her tits admit it but like me shes too fit shes not your type. you werent sleeping with me anymore. but that came out wrong because i dont mean sex i mean it would still be forever before id be able to use a goddamned tampon. instead we just stayed awake together and you gave me your story. the tale of the man whod garbled the hilton and the hyatt and how thatd caused you to miss the registration orientation. all through the calling youd been in different important sessions. also the topic wasnt pyramids but writing and curation. museumology and institutional critique. as you talked all i could think about was rabbi offen the friend of mooms you wouldnt let marry us whod said that even without a body we could have a funeral. but then i thought that a funeral after a shiva was meaningless. then i was out of bed. youd hired an inept cleaningperson or cleaned yourself we never discussed this. ill be straight with you id had enough of you being shut up together. all id wanted was tv but as always i felt judged when i switched on my reality crap even though when you were crapping out yourself with top chef i judged nothing and then you went and got movies but not my movies and be straight with me not even yours because theres no way you like or ever enjoyably or au fond thoroughly sat through godards vivre da vie or fastbinders berlin alexanderplatz. all id wanted was to be left to my workmails and tv. id gotten out of bed not because i was strong enough but because youd gone out for groceries. i had this urgent need for laundry to do laundry. you hadnt done it whether because you were “begging to be caught” or giving “a cry for help” or just suffering from a passive aggressive s&m complex or guilt resulting in reversal (selfsabotage or sad cingulate gyrus selfhandicapping) according to doc meanley. the suitcase youd taken was in the closet and i emptied it all into the machine that roller suitcase the friedmans got us for our wedding. by the time the load was ready for the dryer id read through the conference convention schedule a map of the smithsonian. from the map fell this limpdick amtrak ticket to dc. faded but also oneway. folded into the schedule were printouts. hertz rental car reservations from dc. your name. receipt for the mainstay inn cape may nj the night that night your name vowels intact. payment type was cash. depraved. you were two hours from ny but only an hour from your mother and didnt visit. i got out my work laptop and put it atop the lap that had just held our child of fingers toes eyes and ears but not yet sexed. or barely. or i resisted asking but asking would never have occurred to you and i took your lack of curiosity as trauma and then as gender equality because we were mourning ourselves and not just genitals and then i realized what it was and realized that id always known what it was selfishness all along id known and been lied to and so lied to myself to banish from my mind that shadow like the sagittal sign on the ultrasonogram the cranial notch that says penis and the caudal notch that says not vagina but clitoris the penis pointing up to the empty head because in utero its in perpetual erection but the clit pointing down out of shame because with women even our own bodies are against us. i tetrated every name in the schedules list of panelists every name. small versions of photos on paper bigger ones online. the curator of the whore collection at the met gave a presentation about the fate of possessions in the afterlife. whether they were believed to actually incarnate into use or were just purely symbolic. whether a clay slave was believed to have represented a flesh slave or to become one. interesting. it was the middle of the second trimester we miscarried you did. how am i doing check back with me in october. i was all over the computer ignoring my backmail and well wishes and you came through the door. you were carrying groceries. youd actually gone to get groceries.
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There’s something different about writing by hand again (something rebooting, refreshing, restoring, restorative), using pen and notebook, for the first time since I’m not sure, school. Writing with the whole hand, writing with the entirety of my handedness, not just with the fingers. Get a grip, a hold, let the punctuation loosen, let the ligatures slack, shed the remanence, degauss the ghost, release, breathe. Do whatever.
Writing by hand, it’s not just the foreign words that get italics, every word gets italics. Capitalization becomes a negligence. Letters in the middle of words are capitAlized. Or at the end, like seX. Bold is pressure exerted. Underline, a bump.
The pen — not a dippable nib but a disposable ballpoint. Ink through a tube like marrow in the bones, which lubricates a ball as it’s rolled over a page — I can’t help but be reminded of heads, of decapitation. Cut off my own, dripping its fresh indigo, and roll me over all that blankness outside. Me, rolling over the fields, punctuating with my nose.
The paper — like the traintracks laid straight out below me, ruling Europe, lining mind — I’m wondering, what year did lined or ruled paper first appear? And which is it — lined or ruled? German goes for Liniert. In school the marble swirl notebooks were Wide-Ruled, like a Homeric epithet. My gut’s telling me that this longitude first emerged before the war — but which war? But then the gut gets all unsettled again and says — maybe the 1840s? That feels more like it. 1642, in London or Paris. Venice. Amsterdam. Make it up. Feel more. At the time, the writers must’ve been thinking, just another pointless novelty! The grid’s too cramping! Too controlling! Once again, technology’s depriving our thoughts of freedom! (I haven’t used an exclamation in a while! Feels great!) Bear with me hairs, plant fibers, horse hooves! Bear me nut galls and berries, resins, tannins!
Computers keep total records, but not of effort, and the pages inked out by their printers leave none. Screens preserve no blemishes or failures. Screens preserve nothing human. Save in the fossiliferous prints left behind by a touch.
But a page — only a page can register the sorrows of the crossings, bad word choice, good word choice gone bad, the gradual dulling of pencil lead, which is graphite. A draft by hand resembles the mechanism of computational processing. A semiconductor, an integrated circuit or in plaintxt, a chip. Think of the paper as the silicon substrate, and think of the multicolored scribble piled atop as having been fabricated in layers, in strata dug from the earth — it’s like an archaeology in which the artifact you’re seeking is the earth itself, which is mining, I guess, like drilling for mineral deposits, metals, copper, aluminum, gold, silver, nickel, tin, zinc.
On second thought, on 40th thought, forget the analogy. Rub it out, don’t rub it. Semiconductor levels (“the wafers”) are smaller than particles of dust, semiparticulate small, and if even one of them from the solder on down to the boarded substrate becomes compromised in any way, at any point in the fabrication, the entire circuit’s fucked, and the computer might be too, fucked integrally. That’s why they’re manufactured in spotlessly white compartments kept airlocked and ionized, seismically stabilized, fascistically regulated for temperature and humidity, and free of contact with contaminants like sweat and dust (“the human”). That’s why they’re increasingly being manufactured by robots. Just like prose is.
A notebook is the only place you can write about shit like this and not give a shit, like this. Cheap and tattered, a forgiving space, dizzyingly spiralbound, coiled helical.
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Enough tetricity — I left Frankfurt, but never went back to Berlin.
You could line a triangle, you could triangulate, among Berlin, Frankfurt, and where I am, or was, moving. 10:18 with no timechange.
At least the windows always change. The tracks are always on time.
Switch trains at Nürnberg, 12:30. Just across the platform.
Field, house, church, house, field — and they’ve stopped checking passports when you cross the Inn (the river) (tributary of the Danube). In a pleather banquette, passing cows — cudding huddled stupey cows grazing at grass fenced just off the trackbed — meatcows the color of rancid butter, fenced separately from milkcows whose piebald inkblots remind me of roundbordered countries I’d rather be in.
Memory, that roundbordered country.
Vienna, terminus was the Westbahnhof, which I’d never been through before — on my last visit to Vienna, to research my book, 12 years ago now, I’d driven in from the east, taking the route of my mother’s war through what’d only recently been called Czechoslovakia, from Poland. I admit, I was momentarily perplexed: I’d expected an Austro-Hungarian railroad shed of clichéd fin de siècle grandeur, not this stagnant dingy penal colony advertising telecoms, art exhibitions, operas, and compgenerated architectural renderings of the unfinished Hauptbahnhof — slated to replace this facility in a ludicrously futuristic 2014—gummed with dotmatrix printouts of the take a tab variety.
I took a tab — no decent hostel was ever very far from trains. The city was turning its back on the sun and getting slapped with darkness.
At the hostel I was assigned a drywall cell fitted with foldout bunks that every time I counted them I got a different sum, but at least they were empty.
And to think — on my last visit I’d stayed at the goddamned Bristol. On my mother’s dime, but still. The Bristol. Only to sink to this.
Don’t think.
Read.
I fell asleep but at some point was woken by the nightmares — Dutch and some Gabonaise, and the former were saffronrobed backpacker Christian hippie maybe gay but maybe not gyrovagues, while the latter might’ve been involved in the logging industry and crashed around our cell like drunken trees, and the drywall was wet from the stalled bathrooms above and the bathrooms were showers too or rather just total wetrooms each with a sprinkler system showerhead above a rank Turkish squat toilet that slanted toward a drain.
But I didn’t mind — I’m not letting myself mind even the blanketlessness, the starchy sheet that required a deposit or the towel that had to be renewed daily, no exceptions and no discounts for extended stays, because privacy had become loneliness again (nothing to do but submit to conditions if the cost of privacy becomes loneliness) — except, the no smoking policy bothered (always going up and down).
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A quarter moon after the looting, [PFC. CHRISTOPHER] Bringdom’s unit was assigned to secure the Museum and monitor its cleanup. They had to make sure its fabled collection sustained no further losses. Bringdom found it funny to be soldiering among all these Arab men doing what was supposed to be women’s work, all these misogynistic Arab men who seemed not to mind doing it. Sure, men were good for hauling gear, or those priceless hunks of busted Mesopotamian vases, but the Army had convinced him that men were pretty damn bad at sweeping and mopping.
Bringdom’s patrol brought him up to a large gallery with a small dune of glass on the floor. He broke away to kick at the sharp jagged shards, scattering them into reds and whites and blues, depending on the light. He was awestruck, but also confused. No windows had blown here. All the glass above was intact. Bringdom bent over his rifle and scooped a handful of the fragments into his flakvest pocket.
It was desert glass, created by a lone renegade comet. As the comet entered our atmosphere, it exploded like a celestial bomb. The heat of the blast fused the sand directly below it into a pane, which, just a moment later, was shattered by the impact of the nucleus. What resulted was this glistening mess.
Bringdom didn’t know this, though, he never would know any of this. The glass just reminded him of a girl.
— CALEB KRAST, Bringdom’s War
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Iz, I’ve walked — coiling myself into circles, into rings. Bunions, corns, and a bathfungus developing. All the natives or the Viennese I’m taking for natives are old and women, their men must die before them, and they all have tiny little plasticbags under their chins that fill and empty with air. The women, even as I resisted the suggestion, I saw as Moms. I heard my name, but only in reference to coal. Kohle.
The morning was paved with pigeons. You can never wake up earlier than pigeons — you can never wake up earlier than streets.
I’m not sure how or even if you’re going to respond to whatever crisis comes out of this, Rach, what sort of pathos is still in you or whether
Vienna — of course this is where you ended up, Iz. This is where I sent you packing. Away from your husband, into your brother’s house. Bankrupting myself in the process, bankrupting my soul’s accounts too. Is the fact that you have family in this city a sign or just a coincidence? Which would you rather it be?
or whether, Rach, you’d regard whatever transpires — yes, transpires — as just another example of my fucking up — my fucking everything up — but
I’m trying to figure out how to find you, Iz. I’m trying to engineer a coincidence, but maybe you didn’t go out today, maybe you don’t go out ever, or just not in the citycenter. I’m assuming that you’re allowed to, that you’ve received or don’t require your brother’s permission. Being a glass scientist, or at least a laboratory rat, must make him strict but liberal. He wouldn’t have slaughtered you to preserve the family honor, so I’m fairly confident he won’t stab me. He might even speak my language, if only a specialized technical dialect. I’m judging all this based on having tetrated him once. Yasir.
Is he married? To a Muslim? Have they reproduced? Do you cook or babysit to defray what you cost in room & board?
I have my fantasies. Like you’re not getting along with the wife, she resents your beauty, your youth, her husband’s affection for you, the way you have with the baby.
Like on the Karlsplatz, this woman passed me by in an abaya or whatever her culture calls it — the first abaya I’ve been around since yours — a cape unfurling out behind her as if to umbrella her girls, two of them, clinging. It’s been raining off and on.
A caricaturist blandished pastels at a canvas. An accordionist busked out a wheedly waltz. A Gypsy laid down a swatch of velvet and laid a coin at its center to assure me that others had found him deserving. But I was a beggar too, crouched on the floor of the ÖBV Buchhandlung, copying out my appeal into German with the help of a phrasebook.
Is this the office Ist dies das Büro of the glassworks/glass manufacturer der Glaswerke/Glasfabrik Birefringen AG?
May I with an employee Darf/Kann ich mit einem Mitarbeiter/Arbeitnehmer named namens Yasir Almaribi speak sprechen?
I would like a message to leave. Ich möchte eine Nachricht ver/hinterlassen.
It concerns his sister. Es betrifft/konzern this phrasebook doesn’t differentiate between the verb senses of “is about” and “worrying to” and the noun senses of “personal problems” and “business interests” seine Schwester. I will for him outside wait. Ich werde für ihn draußen warten. Ich bin aus Amerika. Danke.
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I read my own name at a news kiosk and went to open to an article, which the kioskist said I’d have to purchase, but I didn’t because it was just a belated photospread of Principal’s birthday party. Happy 40th. Exklusiv! Tetraten sie sich selbst?
Bankside flat plasmas updated the stocks and scores, and the name Balk was whipping around a ticker in red LED, though what followed was too densely rapid and German and I tried to keep still until the relevancy scrolled my way again, but it never did.
and if there’s any fallout for you let me apologize in advance, Rach, please, you have to understand that my intention was merely to
Which street is yours, Iz? Which building? Which floor? Which window? Nothing in this neighborhood, I’m guessing. The district of guided package tours. Schoolgroups younger than online. Retirees snapping selfies in Napoleon poses backed by fake French Habsburg landscaping. Queues of airport shuttles. Taxis debating lanes with hansom cabs, whose horses hoofed so serenely haughty it’s as if they were proud of having been tamed, and disdained the wildness of their Balkan drivers.
though I’d appreciate that in the event of any fallout you’d refrain from making any comment whether on or off the record to journalists about anything, Rach, but particularly about our life together, which is or was after all
Iz, have you returned to your parents? Or been returned to your husband? To Oman or Yemen? To France? Didn’t make your connection in Cairo? Stayed in Cairo why? If you’re in Vienna, just bump into me. Just there, under the porte cochère. I’ll take you to a café, and pay. And in return you’ll take me back with you and shelter me and read my drafts, you’ll learn this language and read my drafts, slake me with urchins de la mer Rouge and schnapps.
I walked around the Ring, that broad treed boulevard that’s just the raised footprint of the ancient walls that’d protected the city against the Turks and Slavs but that, as the city grew, became dangerous, entrapping, and so were razed to make room for tourists to take their leisure in a setting both pleasant and surveillable.
Today the fallen walls of Vienna — but also of Frankfurt and Berlin — are held by Turks and Slavs peddling souvenirs, bringing history a crooked full circle.
Are you Sind sie Yasir al-Maribi? Speak you English Sprechen sie Englisch?
I am a Ich bin (ein) friend of your sister Freund (von) deine/ihrer Schwester.
I am not sure Ich bin nicht sicher what Izdihar has war Izdihar hat about our RELATIONSHIP said über unsere RELATIONSHIP gesagt.
This might be die letzte Chance the last chance ich habe zu sprechen I have to speak mit Iz wegen durch because of future events das sein was sein wird in den Nachrichten which will be in the news (which is the same as “message” just plural?) (shookrun?).
\
A soldier has that last night of sex before deployment that’s never quite as great as later claimed. And then after a tour spent getting mortared by rounds of Iranian 60s and Soviet 82s and emails from Texas, from the pregnancy announcement to photo and video attachments of the birth, he rotates home and meets the kid. Immediately, the doubts set in. This was just what the sergeant had warned him about in Fallujah.
Bringdom would be holding the kid, and her nose would remind him of Dexter’s, or Malcolm’s, or her expressions would recall Groin Plate Dave’s, or Tibb’s, or Narvaez’s, or even What Did You Sayyid’s, and they were dead. It was as if all of Bringdom’s unit had fathered his child, sneaking out of their outposts silent, invisible, like Paiute Indians in a ghostdance, going all the way with Rachel-Anne and back before rollcall. He imagined his girl at 8, or 12, 16, or at his age of 22. Suddenly, after beating him in H-O-R-S-E, or correcting him after he called it The HBO, she’d get that smirk, and it’d be like the sergeant’s latrine smirk.
Once, after Rachel-Anne had put their daughter down for a nap, Bringdom confessed all this, but Rachel-Anne just laughed it off. ‘Stupid ain’t sexy, hero.’
He brought it up again a day later after Rachel-Anne had returned from working a double at the Kmart pharm to find their daughter still awake and bawling. And Rachel-Anne bawled too, this time. ‘Don’t matter what you think, Daddy. What matters is what she thinks of you.’
— CALEB KRAST, Bringdom’s War
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Vienna’s Mater, its uberous mothering Venus — among the world’s oldest and most perfectly preserved fertility figures — is not to be found among all the Rubens and Bruegel and Roman and Greek and Egyptian antiquities at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but rather just across the park, with the mammoth taxidermy and Diplodocus and tektites and diamonds and ores, at the Naturhistorisches Museum — as if the Venus hadn’t merely been dug from the Danubian loess, but had been created by it. As if She were Nature Herself. Too divine to have been made by mortals. Too fundamental to be grappled with as art. Her limestone is oolitic, meaning its sediment is compounded of ovular grains that tend to crack and crumble and leave behind dimples, one of which serves ingeniously as Her navel. Loads of that stone are found throughout Europe, but never in the Alps of Lower Austria. Also, not only is the Venus’s tint not native to lime, but that Martian red ochre can’t even be derived from local materials. Note that while the figure’s steats and teats and utter facelessness are on display, the head is concealed under a crowning spiral. Some interpret this as plaited hair, concentric braiding. Others, as some sort of pious covering. Regardless, any creator expert enough to have carved a fully sprouted scalp or raveled scarf would certainly have been capable of carving eyes and ears and mouth features too, it’s just that he — most scholars, being male, have assumed a male — for whatever reasons chose not to. And so it would seem that everything about the Venus’s appearance is equally intentional and inexplicable. She, being faceless, was never an individual, and any tribe that might’ve idealized Her is gone now. She’s outlived herself both as a goddess possessing and an idol possessed, as a deity to be appeased and an apotropaic symbol. The only identity of Hers that still survives is that of immigrant. Of foreigner.
(SOURCES: a docent who conducted a tour in English. The Birth of Fertility: Artifacts, Geofacts, and the Male Imagination, Alana Hampur, PhD.)
Glass. What do I know about glass?
The problem with the most effective glass treatments, the coatings and such that protect the best from abrasions and deflect the most harmful waves and rays, is that with age they muddle the glass, and if reapplied will only muddle it further. Here’s how I know that problem, Iz — from being a husband and son and writer and liar.
Facts are of a similar solution. Facts protect and deflect until they cloud over and dirty our wonder.
What else, Iz? Pane sizes are measured in “generations.” The larger the pane, the higher its “gen,” as the abbrev goes. But the scale has never been globally standardized.
I was on the wrong side of the Danube — in the Floridsdorf district, which had no flowers. Just stunted trees screening the properties of hypermarkets and malls.
I sped through the cold along either Birefringenstraße or Birefringengasse or Birefringenstrasse or Birefringengaße — I’m forgetting whether it’s the “ß” or “ss” after a long or short vowel. Anyway, all the intersecting roads were numbered, as unimaginative as their paving bricks.
I paused at the pylons marking the Zulieferung/Livraisons/Deliveries entrance for the glassworks, taking in the grounds — evened hedges, an azimuth of lawn mowed level, and a monumental vitreous gridshell that enclosed a mirrored cube. The Personal/Personnel/Staff entrance was up a grated ramp suspended through a tube. It all reeked of resiliency tests, ductility and tensility trials, research and tech development. A facility as transparent as this would only be into pane design — the manufacturing itself would be confined to that mythically silicic slave island called Offsite, floating through a minor sea of the Indies.
I paced the parkinglot, and counted the cars. No one bothered me. No one had to. The spyquip swiveled noiselessly. It would’ve been insane to charge inside all American slovenly, demanding an audience with an employee, the brother of an ersatz lover. I might as well have thrown a brick, a cobblestone, a rock.
I counted the clouds in the car windows, but none had the reflection I was after. I stood at the curb shivering that face to mind — Yasir’s.
But my only memory was of that blemish, a red nevus like a crescent curving left in the middle of his dark bulb head — or, because the site thumbnail I’d tetrated at the Staatsbibliothek would’ve reversed it, curving right. He’d been scarred in the lab, an experiment with acids gone awry, or else back in an Arab Nationalist phase, which I’m also inventing, Allah was still God but Marx and Lenin had become His prophets, and Yasir had been in an accident while smuggling dynamite to Aden from Sana’a.
If I found him, offline flesh found him, I wouldn’t introduce myself. I’d just follow him until he led me to Iz, who’d know how to introduce me. Because she knew me. I was a savior, a suitor, a bum — the fallen sharer of her airmattress, his floor.
I kept a vigil for his crescent as employees ramped down to the grass, shrugging lodens over labcoats, slinging IDs.
I stepped to the pave and wavered there between a Fiat and what wasn’t a Fiat.
The sun fell to a beheading, dusk was bleeding out.
A dozen middleaged Arabs were lugging rugs rolled like blueprints. They headed toward what had to be the hedge closest to Mecca and spread them on the green.
They reached under their paunches for beltclipped pdas — not even, half of them still had flipphones — and flipping them agape held them up to the sky, as if seeking reception, a signal from a tower or heaven itself, approving of the time. Then they fussed up their belts and assumed the knees, the fourth prayer of the day.
White men, inured to the fervor, hurried to their VWs and Opels and Škodas. A lot of them drove Škoda hatchbacks in Alpine white, and I couldn’t tell them apart, the cars, I mean — it was amazing they could all tell their cars apart.
The Arabs finished with their worship, rugged up, and lined for the mustering buses. Drivers were reversing the placards in their windshields, from indicating Birefringen and Schott and Siemens and Strabag AGs, to indicating the districts. About half the worshippers, about six or so, were lining up for the bus to Josefstadt-Neubau-Mariahilf, and I hustled over to get behind them, as a man up front turned to chat — Yasir. It was brother Yasir — I’d lay my hand on an ereader loading the Koran and swear to Mohammed about all of this.
Yasir was friendly with the Arabs, and even religious in his way — not enough to have prostrated with them, but enough to have waited for the concluding rakat. All his lapsed coworkers and even the driver had stood without complaint, as if it were a sin to depart before the As-Salaamu Alaykum. Toward the right and left. Toward Mecca again. The busdoors sighed out, for boarding. I was hoping the seats outnumbered the crowd.
I drudged the aisle past drowsing, txting, calling — my presence was the least of their cares. I was lost, or had lost my license to booze or drugs, or my Audi or Saab to a divorce, or else I was reconnoitering the commute as a consultant, for ways to reduce its costs. Whichever it was, they rebuffed me. Yasir and his seatmate were engaged, not in whispers, but also not in German, and though he didn’t even raise his mad scientist dome as I went by, I felt his forehead measure me, that stain like a voracious sensor.
I settled into the nosebleed row of empties, alone on the aisle. I had only the backs of their heads, carpet bunches of skin, treadless tires. Bridge congestion. Stops.
Yasir got off with a few coworkers who’d kept the faith and a few who hadn’t, and an unemployed Jew in a straightjacket suit — I crossed the street and down the block. They peeled off in all directions. Petting unripe melons at the markets, laying dominoes for khat, or just sitting by the TV in the movie of their lives, for me, their only standingroom audience. Yasir slipped into a joint booming ghetto lute music and tacked with kebab posters in lieu of menus, its Biohalal Geöffnet sign drooping its plug onto the polyvinyl, dim.
I dawdled catercorner in front of a clothingmart, until its proprietor leaned out to spit a husk of sunflower seed. I moved nextdoor, the other nextdoor. Bazaars of adhan chronometers, qibla compasses, digi misbahas, that collapsible thing you rest your book on, a rehal. Another prop wielded a pikstik to beat the rainwater off his awning.
Yasir stepped out through the flap of the plastic tarp tent for sidewalk dining, holding a brownbag flat because its bottom was spotting greasy.
We went on until we came to what Vienna calls a Trafik, apparently, a boxy phoneboothesque kiosk, a newsagent. The sign atop it, Maribi.
The clerk, who must’ve been late or just impatient for a bathroom, bowed under the counter, removed his apron and embraced it around Yasir, and Yasir, who wouldn’t bow, but lifted the counter, became the clerk — next shift.
What Yasir did was: took a razorblade and slit the brownbag into a placemat, chewed at a tangle of red drumsticks shaped like Austria. Then he folded the placemat over the bones, wedged the parcel behind the racks. He cracked the beverage cooler for a bucket and squeegee. Then it was lifting the counter and out again to swipe at the plexiplastered ads on the side (the lotto), the rear (budget airfare), the side (the lotto), and the sliding partition (between the automat pennants).
What else: he sold some papers and magazines, some stamps, candies and tickets for the bahn or tram, Almdudlers, Red Bulls, and diapers. Individual diapers. A customer brought in a blender and he repaired it. Atop the coingrimed counter. Yasir fixed a watch, toolless. But it might’ve been his watch.
He batched the papers and mags now a day deceased and bound them in twine and stacked them tidy for curbside burial.
But only after he’d hopped up on them, for the height to lower the Trafik’s shutter — he strained. And I would’ve helped. If I hadn’t been his size, or strange to him. The lock he used was like the U-type, for bicycles.
Yasir zipped his jacket, and turned the corner, so I did too, turned it for blocks. His apron flared out behind him. I kept up, kept studying him, and tried to adopt his shambles of a stride so as not to alarm the night. The engine misfiring was inside me, my heart.
He stopped at a middle house. A flypaper façade of swatted windows. This was a man who didn’t bring his glass home with him. I stomped for warmth, and for a light that wasn’t the moon’s, which wasn’t at crescent, or full, but half.
I went up to the door and read the slapdash stickered buzzers. Their names were twinned, written in this script and then repeated below in a script resembling my testing this pen, licking its tip then testing again. Maribi. All pens at the very end of their ink begin to write in Arabic.
At a middle floor a light went on. No shadow child. No revenant wife. And then curtains were drawn like how Moms lets down her hair.
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The oldest representations of the human: that their physiques remain consistent throughout the Upper Paleolithic augurs for a religious explanation, while the fact that their materials, sizes, postures, and adornments vary considerably within that period augurs for an artistic inspiration as well. Still, yet another theory is more practical. They’re maps, itineraries, schedules, lessons in that most primitive school, the body. A culture might’ve chipped the softness of the human form from out of hardness as a lesson for its children or even for posterity, to show what it too will inevitably suffer, the swell of pregnancy, starvation, dehydration, disease, all burst at once in the selfsame corpus. If this were true, however, there would’ve been a tale that interpreted all the massed tragic layers, the strata. There would’ve been an encryption key, to enable the deciphering of the intricate systems of nicks and knaps since lost to hydraulics, aeolian processes, and time. Which brings us to the issue of value. Given that all pebbles are primordial, age can’t determine worth, rather it’s the hand, the presence of the human hand, which cuts from red tuff the stuff that merits enshrining. It’s this intentionality or, better, mindful guidance, which distinguishes nature from both religion and art. A sedimentary hunk cleaved by wind or water tells nothing, while a hunk cleaved by a human who’d lived with the imperative to make tells all. But then there are still a handful of rocks that might go either way — rocks that some “read” as anthropomorphic, undoubtedly purposefully shaped (“artifacts”), and that others “read” as the result of tectonic accidents, of convergences of erosion, spall, and aberrant psychologies (“geofacts”). What some regard as an intentional slice or whittle — a woman’s waist or limb — others regard as the wishful incidents of weather, tidal salinities, volcanic spews, ground mineral grinding mineral. See what you want to see, hear what you want to hear, whatever you search for, you find. And the more controversial specimens have been found in Israel, mostly by Arab children.
(SOURCES: The Birth of Fertility: Artifacts, Geofacts, and the Male Imagination, Alana Hampur, PhD. My mother, my loneliness, winter.)
Museum hours remain the same, but prayer hours are subject to change. Gods don’t take a day off, the sun just leaves earlier. The clouds. The clouds weigh gravid.
Out of my hostel the Trafik was a right and a left and between the turns, a bridge like a gangrenous rainbow over the Wienfluss.
A minority cleft, a migrant clave, posteverywar buildings to accommodate any ethnicity. In the yards weeding intervenient to the units of whatever the German term is, Socialistcommunistworkerhousingthebalconiesarefalling, the laundry was being taken in, colorless veils and shawls like photos hung dripping but not yet developed.
All of this neighborhood might as well have been downtown Jewish NY at the turn of last century — here was the same stage of nascent assimilation — just translate the Yiddish, switch around the referents, and update the technologies. Easier times, simpler times, tenements, peddler carts — what’s the Arabic for “egg creams”? the Persian for “spaldeens”? Bundled boys were choosing sides for a game that involved kicking a punctured tire. Then they were kicking each other. Scarves waved. Penalties.
Yasir wasn’t at the Trafik. Only one of us was early or late, for an appointment only one of us had made. The other clerk was working. The clerk from earlier. Describe him later. Describe how all day he was on the headset phone talking bluetoothed Arabic that no foreigner would ever be able to tell whether he was delighted or enraged.
Was he Yasir’s nephew? And so Iz’s cousin? Yasir’s son? How old? Still plenty young to busy with the future. He was too consumed with not becoming his father or uncle or cousin to be troubled by me — he wouldn’t still be moonlighting at our age.
I stroked the glossies, rubbed the ink from the print. The Trafik carried only a few German/Austrian titles: Kronen Zeitung, Kurier, Die Presse, Die Standard, Wiener Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Vogue, Glamour, a few copies each.
The rest of the papers were folded into racks as if in the alphabetical order of my incomprehension, from tabloids in Turkish to broadsheets of abjad, and in that emoticonese I think is Sinhalese, and in that zodiac handicap signage I think is Amharic. Papers in languages left to right and right to left. And verticalized until continued, next page. They must’ve published out of London or Paris or Berlin, because boxed above their prices in both euros and pounds were weathermaps of London and Paris and Berlin and it was raining.
And that was the good news, which readers never trusted or skipped. The bad news was that elections were rigged, bribery scandals were sanctioned, and schools and social services had been suspended in cities that readers would never return to. Something happened to 16 somewhere somewhen, something happened to 30,000. Also, Israel.
I was pleased to find the classifieds healthy, and the backgammon column still thrives.
I wasn’t going to leave this Trafik until the work I’d done with Principal was public — until I recognized the headline of every frontpage as my own writing, and my outdated groomed promo bookphoto made the cover of every periodical in stock.
And then he’d recognize me, and nod, and I’d nod back — not him, Yasir.
The clerk was talking, but some to me, some to his headset: “Heast, Oida — du Penner — wos wüst?”
I said, “Ich spreche kein Arabisch. Nicht Arabisch?”
He chewed at his cheek and gestured my putting down the mag he’d doubted I could afford and now was sure I couldn’t read — another issue with a centerfold on Principal’s birthday.
I reracked it and showed him my empty pack of Camel Lights. Put money in the dish. Change came back in the dish, along with a fresh pack of, I’ll live, Camel Regulars. I reached into the cooler for a beer, an Ottakringer. Put money in the dish. Change came back in the dish. He popped the cap with a countermounted popper like a rusty torture chamber contraption. Worst thing about Europe is that you have to pay for matches.
Around the block again, a two cig walk. I would’ve liked to dump that sour warm beer over the cold, be done with it.
I went and stood outside Yasir’s building in another window’s light as all the desires I’d been feeling constellated into the desire just to stand there, within them, under that haloing light, to prove that I could, that I could be faithful — to anything, to myself.
According to the Muslim press it was 1432. And by the Jews it’d just turned 5772.
It’s as if, simultaneous with the invention of printing, the last uninhabited planet in the Tau Ceti system was being colonized by cyborgs.
I tried to explain Yasir’s absence, but I didn’t have his schedule. Anyway — the next night, he was there.
He seemed fit, at ease. Disinterested in me. I stood by the Alawwam Obst + Gemüse produce market, holding this notebook like a shoppinglist, and watched, and wrote, and watched. The streaks of blood to the right and left of this sentence, this paragraph, are from the grapes I snuck, and crushed.
Because you were there, Iz. Without warning, you were across the street from me and swaying toward the Trafik. Though I wasn’t certain it was you initially. And my rationale for it not being you was that I saw your face. If it was recognizably your face, then it wasn’t yours, or it wasn’t only yours anymore. Unmasked. Healed. Keen. Breathing. You seemed happy.
Your skirt just touched the knee. It was a black skirt riding up at the rear and crimped twisted at the waist, and you leaned by a bugswarmed lamppost to adjust it. Black wool pointelle sweater, I’d bought that too. Zara, The Gap.
The heels, haute heels for an evening errand, were opentoed. Your raintoes, Iz. Your head covered in a red wetcolored scarf. Because a freezing rain will make anyone pious.
You weren’t wearing a coat, though. You never did like that coat.
You carried a tray of brass, clung around with foil. You set it down in front of your brother on the snackclogged counter you barely reached.
You exchanged a word. And then he leaned over and tied your headscarf. Cinching it tighter, pinching your cheek. Then you brought yourself to the corner and crossed away from me.
Iz, I didn’t chase you — rather I’d already chased you, but now that I was seeing you wet to the skin I realized it wasn’t you that I’d been after. It was a dream. It was another life. It was forgiveness — it was to be forgiven.
I approached your brother, and crowded him under his canopy. He was hunched over a calculator, fluttering receipts.
“I’m Joshua,” I said.
Before this, only his stain had addressed me, but now I had the man. Bewildered.
“So let me have a paper,” I said. “A newspaper.”
Yasir pointed, his mouth exhuming a relict tongue. “But all are German.”
“Not all of them. But that’s not what I mean. Just give me one. It’s not for me.”
“What one?” Yasir said. “Who?”
I went with a Wiener Zeitung, thick as a blanket. Put two coins in the dish, or atop the dish you’d brought still wrapped and steaming, Iz, and let any change due back to me be his.
My blessings.
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Dear Cal,
I might not be the best person to caution you against dreaming. Or to give any writing advice. Or even to be reading you. Particularly now. And anyway I’d rather get paid to do this up as a critical essay, review the living shit out of you for — what’s that paper the homeless sell, Street News? Or does Beaver Hunt still publish? Cal. It’s not like either of us have finished every single book we’ve ever reviewed. All dreams in books are typeset in italics, that handwriting that during the Renaissance (15th to 17th centuries, also M&W 10:35–11:50 612 Philosophy Hall, Dr. Gerds) developed into the earliest fonts for the earliest books from the Latin and Greek, and so Antiquity was a dream, that’s all I’ve got to offer. Truth is, I’ve never actually cared about dreams, and anytime I get to them in a book I feel cheated, even worse than I feel cheated by flashbacks, because at least in flashback the present revisits the past to further nuance itself into future (like we’d slum out to the Bowery today not to meet new friends but to toast the friends we wouldn’t meet who are out in Westchester and sad), while dreams just float or unfloat as timeless spaceless inconsequentials, meaning everything, meaning nothing, not beholden, never beholden, the fuckers (everyone dreams in Westchester). But hey, this oneiric somnic verbigerage can’t be of interest to anyone I’m not sleeping with. And I’m not sleeping.
Cal, this is not an email I’m ever going to send — this isn’t even a letter, Dear — and anyway I can’t send anything.
Aaron’s kids passed on your ms., and I’ve read it — on trains and then in this “youth pension” I’m in — night after night gutting the manila (postseason joke: the Mets moved to the Philippines and changed their name to the Manila Folders), getting that glue smell and unclipping, unrubberbanding, tracing each line with the clipedge, wrapping the bands around my typing injury wrists nervously because I want it to be brilliant, I want it to be terrible — my competitiveness competing with a weak need to be transported, even entertained.
It’s all I have with me is why, that and a passport that both is and isn’t mine — bookmarking your book by my side, under my head as a pillow — reading it in cafés, museums
The night before, I came back late and the pension was closed — I’d never had the key to the front. I rung the bell labeled HAUSBESORGER, and this ogre Hungarian opened the door a gibbous swing like he’d been standing just behind it polishing the phrase “No One Will Admit Between Hour of Two and Six.” He was stubborn, it must’ve been that hour. So, given that I was already carrying all my possessions in this nifty, recently acquired, green in every sense Amazon.com totebag — because everyone’s a thief — I left,
It’s like my standards are gone with Aar, and I’m not sure what he’s told you, or whether you even wanted me to read your novel — you never asked, and you used to ask, directly — or Aar’s kids just wanted to keep me amused and out of their hair (meaning Lisabeth), or flatter me and so keep me as a client (meaning Seth, who has a nose on him).
But in the event that Bringdom came from you, I’ve been giving it my all. Thorough notes will have to wait, but here:
1. you shouldn’t have a sex scene longer than a page that’s a dream (pp. 99-101),
2. you shouldn’t have a death scene shorter than a page that’s a flashback (p. 250),
3. the war theatricals have all obviously been informed by reporting, but they’re too much in the fact department, the military lingo is too much especially for the abstracted Kafka or like Camus in the Sunni Triangle mood you’re aiming for (let the Weinsteins or The HBO tang up the slang for the next generation of soldiers),
4. because once I was out of Chapter 2—and this is my main point — once Bringdom’s PTSD and debt and failed marriage and failure to engage with his child have been effectively established in “the present,” by which I mean “the topical,” and the novel’s deployed on this death mission account of his past, his enlistment and training, all his ballsdeep macho martyrdom antics (you’ll get a Purple Heart for nonpurple prose under fire), I was doing that guiltily-flip-ahead-to-gauge-how-many-pages-are-left-in-the-chapter thing, the guess-how-many-desert-boring-pages-are-wasted-on-this-already-wasteful-war thing, and was disappointed to find that all of them were (about war), except for the jerking-it-to-the-Kurd-girl-who-turns-into-his-mother-in-the-middle-of-a-soyfield dream, and the maybe-suicide-maybe-not-of-his-father flashback I mentioned above, which though I realize I just warned you not to use flashbacks and dreams, I meant only contextually, because in terms of content this is your truest territory: Home.
(And Rachel-Anne, nice touch — as perduring as the Plains, and as open as the Kmart pharmacy.
I know, I know, she’s not my Rach — she’s your authorial prerogative.)
Anyway, onto your concluding scenes. Rachel-Anne getting that call, and fainting, with all the customers just waiting. That you’ve written it so that readers can only suppose they know what the call’s about, but can never know for sure: it’ll play better with the soundtrack behind it, unison cellos and solo muted horn. That the concerned customer who pats her hand and gives her a plastic poppy is black but is never described that way and it’s only made relevant by her coworker’s racist comment: it’s like I’m reading you sweat. This restraining tendency feels especially unfair with the decision to withhold the baby’s name. Just name the baby, Cal — for me.
There’s more, of course. And more about style. But then you always doubted that, style. Next time, if time and I get squared.
“With compliments and condolences — we have to be in touch” (about how to market what’s basically a male violence novel to females ages 18 to 80 who together are responsible for approx 68 % of all new book buying and approx 64 % of all public library book borrowing in America today) (my stats are reliable),
j
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P.S. Read this postscript first.
The way I was raised, Cal, from the earliest, was that my mother’s was the only war. That what she experienced (her Yiddish would be vos mikh hot getrofn, “what has befallen me”), being stowed away in that Carmelite convent in southern Poland on the Czechoslovak border and beaten and enslaved, essentially, was worse than anything any other human had ever experienced, but what occurs to me now was that Moms had never insisted on this, Dad had. Only Dad would attempt to exploit her trauma in explanations of her insomnia and bedsoilings and health issues, including, of course, her infertility, or in rationalizing her lateness in picking me up from baseball practice, or in leaving the laundry in the hamper and the pantry bare. This is all to establish that from the very start of planning my book (Moms had agreed to let me interview her, but only after I’d threatened to write about her regardless), I had no impression of my father’s pathologizing as anything other than an expression of his devotion to my mother, a duty that required both uxory and coddling. I’d failed to recognize his denial — abnegation, sublimation, displacement mechanism (I’m the first in my family to ever talk to a shrink) (about anything) — how my father had developed this smothering veneration in order to avoid discussing his own war. It was how he avoided anything even remotely to do with himself.
But the time to return to is 12 years ago, Cal, the research, the writing, Tel Aviv. I sat with my Tante Idit, not my aunt but my mother’s first cousin, interrogating her in the parched garden of the white duplex she shared with her seething companion, a retired Maghrebi army general who resembled King Hussein of Jordan and never once said shalom to me. He blamed me for the crying — Idit was crying all the time. And her brother Menashe was crying, and he was calling his crying sister by her birthname, Yetta, and they were calling Moms by her birthname, Yocha. They answered all my questions sincerely, shamelessly, but with rivalry too — after finding out how selective of an account Moms had given me. 12 goddamned years ago.
And then it was fall already, and I was off like a thief to Poland — to Warsaw. Renting that Daewoo on Moms’s MasterCard and driving it to Sobibór and Majdanek, or what Communist memorials remained of them, to Bełżec, or what Communist memorials remained of it, past the lot that’d been my mother’s house in Kraków, and the convent at Chyżne that’d abused and saved her thanks to luck and her parents’ money and their influence with the Kraków Judenrat, and finally across the cankered karsts of the Tatras in what’d lately been Czechoslovakia, to Vienna — from which I flew back to the States.
I stayed in NY and wrote, and went down to Jersey only to present Moms with my transcripts to confirm or deny, as the intelligencers say — but she just set down the pot she was glazing and made me promise never to print anything the cousins told me, and I agreed, or she said I agreed, and that she trusted me.
So then I went ahead and printed all of it, Cal, because that’s just what we do — I’m not going to pretend it was ever a choice, but neither am I going to pretend it wasn’t difficult. 9/11 pubdate, Miri pulverized, Aar gnashing out in the wilderness beyond all assuagement and phone reception, you and your fame, Cal — and then in the midst of all that, Finn came through, or Kimi! did (and what the hell ever became of Kimi!?), either one of them or just a distributor’s order fulfillment robot sent Moms a finished copy. I hadn’t let her read any earlier version (I’m not about to lecture you, Cal, on how agonizing it is letting others read your drafts, doubly so if they’re the subject and are bound to be troubled). Moms wasn’t just troubled, she was furious, but she didn’t call me, she called Israel. She’d gotten online at the house around then, and she and her cousins were emailing too. She was never “raped” by the Soviet starshina, she said, because after the first time, he paid her in food, and after the last time, he paid her in a map and outlined a tentative route to where her brothers lived, where they had lived and operated branches of their family’s lumber firm, in Žilina (or Sillein in German) and Brno (or Brünn). Anyway, she said, the soldier wasn’t a starshina, but a podpolkovnik. Moms and Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe feuded back and forth over whether “rape” meant the same thing in Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. Whether the Red Army rank of the soldier corresponded to the Israeli Army rank of seren or segen — lieutenant colonel? full colonel? And it wasn’t like I was trying to stay out of it, Cal — Moms kept me out of it, and the only way I knew anything was that the Israelis would fwd: me the emails. That’s how I knew that Moms otherwise enjoyed the book, or just wouldn’t admit to her cousins that she hadn’t — all her emails began “Dear Yetta and Menashele,” and ended with her signing herself, not Yocha, but “Love, Gloria.”
I also got a letter then — through the mail, through the fanmail, Cal — forwarded from Random House, October or November, 2001. I responded, and it led to a lunch. Which led to another. Retirees transited in from the Five Towns on the Island and from Main Line Philly to have lunch with me and then go gawk at the pit downtown.
They were readers, they were my only readers — if I didn’t snare the women I at least had a corner table with the only consolation demographic, geriatric Jews — but they didn’t want to talk about my book. They wanted to talk about my father.
You know, I’m sure you do, Cal, how you expend all this effort writing something and thinking through the detail of every decision (do I name the restaurants we met at? or just describe them? do I mention what was ordered? who took care of the bill?), but then you finish, or you delude yourself into finishing, and realize — too late, with the book already a classic of the bargain bin — that you’d missed something, a scene or even just a line that would’ve brought everything together, that would’ve resolved all the fogs — a gesture just as crucial to your life, but also as easily forgotten in daily life, as a person you’d loved who’s now dead.
My father. I’d hardly mentioned him in all my pages. Because Moms’s account of their meeting had demoted him into a handsome uniform that acted swiftly. My father was like a new character introduced at the end of a book, as the end of a book — a Daddy ex machina, maybe. And it’s been on my mind ever since, or — I’m trying for honesty — what’d then been a guilty notion I was in no psychological state to pursue is recurring only now, the notion that if there were to be any reissue or updated edition I would write an afterword to it, an afterword about him. And hey, a girl can dream, can’t she? a girl can flashback????
David Cohen, Private First Class, US First Army, had liberated Buchenwald, where the Yiddish competency he demonstrated so impressed the OSS officers he debriefed that they took him along to interrogations at Dachau, Mauthausen, and after V-E Day, here, to Vienna, where he was attached to command — according to the oldsters I was meeting with, my father’s former colleagues.
To be totally accurate, Cal, the guy who’d read my book and initially contacted me was this decorous epitomist Connecticut WASP, from rep tie to bucks with the blueblood suit between, and it was only after he’d vetted me over lunch at the Union Club that he sent the other guys my way, his octogenarian Jewish subordinates who claimed they recalled me coming up to their knees, their knees since replaced, at my father’s funeral — there was a Prussian yecca type with spoon up his ass posture who as a policy refused to eat and talk or even be talked to at the same time, and then two widowers who resembled Dad biographically, being the sons of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw who grew up south of Delancey speaking Yiddish. That language had bound them together, and brought them to the captain — the WASP had retired from the OSS as a captain — for whom they interpreted interrogations of, and translated testimonies by, survivors of concentration and labor camps, which were cited extensively in the subsequent war crimes tribunals.
Cal, they were filling in a man I had never known. A man my mother, reciting the shameless sanitized version of this story, the Story, had never known either — or had forgotten with her arrival in Jersey, her renaming as Gloria, her infirmities (avitaminosis) (stomatitis), and lack of baby, her spats with my father’s parents, attempts to master cooking and English by reading Ladies’ Home Journal recipes and cooking through the irreconcilable fascinations of The Honeymooners and Bonanza.
Vienna, 1945, the latter winter of a year that’d felt all winter — my father left US Army HQ, the former Hotel Bristol, located on the Ring (after the war it became a hotel again, and now its rooms cost north of €308/night). In one direction was the recently unnamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz, in the other the recently renamed Josef-Stalin-Platz — Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into zones. But my father headed for neither. Nor did he stop at his lodgings off Kärntner Straße. Instead, he went on toward the river — Why? The downtown Jews said, Why? Because word had come in that the Danube had just frozen over, and my father wanted to check. The downtown Jews told me this as if it was unimpeachably logical, and it was, because that’s who Dad was: the type of man who if you told him the river’s frozen was going to want to check. There by the riverbank he met a woman — a woman who’d just walked in gaiters taken off a Wehrmacht soldier, which meant off a Wehrmacht corpse, from Poland to Žilina to Brno to Vienna (I’m in no position to record the numbers just now, Cal, but consult the book or imagine around 600 kilometers or 400 miles), and was starving and feverish and out in the incipient snow begging — Moms would never admit to begging — and who called out to him in Yiddish, Zeit moychel, because Dad had a face like one of her brothers, who’d died in Theresienstadt, or Auschwitz. Dad gave her chewinggum, took her for a sawdusty schnitzel at a basement café. And then maybe to his room, the downtown Jews said. Then again, maybe not. Because she was icicle skinny like a Muselmann, they said. That’s what they called the people in the camps not gas exterminated but exterminated by hunger, Muselmänner. My mother was named Yocha then — did I mention that? Is this what senility is like? It was illegal to marry her. The downtown Jews said the Army might’ve courtmartialed my father under the GI ban on fraternization, which tended to treat brides unable to provide evidence of their identities as enemy nationals until proven innocent. But the captain said they wouldn’t have dared. The yecca, that scooped asshole Prussian, who just before I closed our tab at French Roast ordered fries for takeout, said that he was the one who’d forged her papers — though, he noted, it might not have been forgery because it was done on the captain’s orders — and not a Nansen Displaced Persons document either but a straight Shipley US passport that characterized the bearer as a secretarial assistant in the office of the special advisor on Austrian affairs, and falsified her age. My father was 21 and had an honorable discharge pending, Moms was — she guessed she was—16. They married, 4/16/1946, in the synagogue on Seitenstettengasse, the sole shul to survive in Vienna, in a ceremony officiated by Chaplain Rabbi Daniel S. Daniels of Worcester, MA, who died in a car wreck on I-95 in the late 1980s, on Shabbos. Back in civilian life, Dad studied actuarial science at Newark Technical School. In the gaps between assignments and a Bamberger’s shift he set about tracking down Moms’s relatives. Yetta had become the Hebraicized Idit, after Birkenau, but Menashe, who’d fled to Argentina, was still just Menashe — did I mention that? Am I confusing you, Cal? Moms and Dad visited them regularly in Israel — because, Moms liked to say, the Tel Avivniks were always too poor to visit us — and after I was born they brought me with them, though they went less and less, until we moved from Newark out to Shoregirt and they got up the confidence to fly without me maybe twice, because Shoregirt had a yard and picket fence and Jewish neighbors in the insurance business for me to stay by, the Tannenbaums. The last time my parents made the trip I wasn’t yet 12, and I’d worked out this compromise by which I was able to spend the afterschool day at my own house all alone, but had to report to the Tannenbaums’ house at dinnertime each night, for boiled chicken “cacciatore,” kugel “moussaka,” a dessert review of my bar mitzvah portion, and bed. Then my parents returned, and the back muscle that Dad had strained — from having lifted their suitcases loaded with a copy of Walt Whitman’s Bletlekh groz for Menashe and bras for Idit and cameras and camcorders for all their children and grandchildren — was diagnosed as a lung sarcoma, and all the traveling they did after that was to Sloan Kettering. My father refused to die only because it meant leaving my mother, but what was truly remarkable was that he’d lived that way too, which was why he’d never attended the reunions, and only met his army friends on worktrips to NY, and at his funeral — he had to be there anyway.
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You can’t fly anywhere, anywhen, from Vienna.
Or you can, but it’s never cheap. To JFK, Washington-Dulles, Chicago-O’Hare. Connections in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Frankfurt knock a schilling off the price. There was also a layover option via Budapest. Layovernight. Tuesdays were the most affordable days to fly. Still, I was barely able to afford London on a Tuesday, noon. Vienna — London — Toronto — LaGuardia, more than 20 hours, eight procedurals, six sitcoms, four films with their plane fatalities edited out, four meals (or “snackboxes”).
I wasn’t checking luggage but if the clerk found that suspicious she didn’t say.
Let her just try and check this prose, let everyone.
Vienna — I slotted Principal’s passport into an aperture fit for transacting with an ulcerous deli clerk out on a drug corner. The guard took it and swiped it and flipped his interest through, in a way that convinced me of his scrutiny, so I said, “I get that all the time,” and either he didn’t find that hilarious or it wasn’t hilarious or he was just keeping busy for the surveillance scrutinizing him, then waved me through.
On the other side, in the immigration zigzag in NY — CNNing all around with Afghan dronestrikes, and then as a teaser before commercial break, which realityshow celeb really and showily got tossed out of a Manhattan Gopal store for cutting in line?
But then it was my turn to passport the officer, so I said, “I get that all the time,” which got a grin. “You must be the 10th guy who’s said that today.”
Just then I recalled how I always used to like having my passport stamped. It fixed my persona. Nailed my being down. So I asked the officer for a stamp.
And he answered by saying, “I’d love to, friend, but they’re phasing out that ink stuff.”
Customs was/were: spit thrice over your shoulder when anyone praises you, knock wood twice when praising yourself. Another line, another form handed over, smudged with Moms’s addy, permanent addy.
I went out into the chill, cab exhaust.
I joined the queue, waited, though I guess I could’ve called the agency, collect, could’ve had Lisabeth or Seth spring for a livery out of pity, shave and a haircut, suite at the Plaza, a sandwich. But I wanted to continue on my own — wanted Jersey, mother, buffer.
The expediter was a deadringer for La Guardia, the mayor, but with cornrows—“Where you going?”
“Jersey,” I said.
She sneered borough cred, directed me with her middlefinger down the idlers.
Aar, leaving a client’s afterafterparty, a launch, or reading — he’d get into a cab and say to the driver, “Take me to work with you,” or “Take me somewhere we can be alone,” and I miss that something wretched.
I, with my no balls, just told the driver how to drive but he demanded the addy and knucked it into his GPS, which calculated the same distance and time and directions that I had, and then he said how much, off meter, and that was as much as he said.
Nasty habit. It used to be that every time I’d take a cab there would come this moment, this intersection, and Rach hated it — when I couldn’t help but talk, couldn’t help but engage the driver, and some of that is a Jew thing, but some certainly was all that white baggage, which won’t fit in any trunk — wanting to show the driver that I held by what that Berber slave playwright once wrote, nothing human was alien to me, nothing was strange, or rattling, wanting to show respect by talking politics domestic and foreign, I’d be honored by his opinions, because they came from a land in which opinions were criminal, a land I’d never get any closer to than now — a mangled divider between us.
But for whatever reason, this trip — for two hours in gutimpacting traffic — I didn’t.
After the negotiation only the GPS talked, voicing my welcome homescape in Arabic. Every lanechange or so a familiarity would surface, Semitic fricatives, faucal honkings of phlegm, and then “I-95, NJ Turnpike.” The rusting midtide marsh, dead fish methane waft, an egret balanced onefooted out in that muck like it’d have to be crazy to step full in. A Canaanite hairball, then “Garden State Parkway.”
Through the Pinebarrens saying nothing and with nothing said unmechanical — maybe that, just that, was dignity.
Or I did say something, once we got to the house.
Some things like “I got your money inside,” OK, “Come in and use the bathroom, if you have to,” no thanks.
Which spared him having to witness me begging my mother for money (the hug, the kiss, the beg). I was embarrassed, sure, but only because she was embarrassed for me, and disapproved, and disapproved of what I was being charged, went for her clutch, and that earthenware bowl for tzedakah I’d forgotten, and finally outside to beat down the price. I collapsed. Never even got the driver’s face.
11/15 or 16, everything broke. The Post headline was punny enough, “Balk-Mail!” The Daily News went with “Tetraitors!” You know the rest — everyone knows.
Moms paid for my two Heinekens and Camels. The only thought I had I thought daily, twice — what a beautiful name for a convenience store, Wawa.
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Basically at that point it ends.
And then the phone rang.
Moms said it hadn’t rung like that since September. I had mail from back then too and I signed the enclosed papers and got an envelope and stamp from Moms and included a note to Rach asking what I owed her, and promising her that whatever else had to be done, she’d be able to find me. I walked over to the postoffice. And by the time I’d walked back they were outside, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NY1, and our porch was on the TV in the livingroom and Moms was having a fit about how the stoop was chipped and leaves were clogging the gutters. Leaksmen — the organization that claimed responsibility for releasing the recording files, my transcriptions of them, my attempts at shaping them into Principal’s life, and the diary I kept of my own life in the Emirates — was headed by a dual Australian Swiss citizen by the name of Anders Maleksen. Descramble Maleksen — get Leaksmen.
An anonymous source of the senior American intelligence official type stated that the organization was a Russian front, and that Maleksen was the field alias of FSB agent Daniil Kalemov, who’d been assigned to infiltrate b-Leaks by providing documents regarding Israeli nuclear capability that now appear to be Kremlin forgeries. Whether he entrapped Balk in the rape charges or not, he certainly arranged for the flight from Copenhagen and asylum in the Russian embassy in Reykjavík. No comment from b-Leaks. Which is to say, no comment from Balk.
People kept knocking at the door asking to help or be helped, to share their findings about how the C band electromagnetic range used for wifi transmissions stimulated the growth of or even implanted parasitic worms called “cestodians,” which track our movements, diets, cyberchondria. Moms said that a person in a Jersey Central Power & Light uniform who’d resembled Kalemov or Maleksen but was maybe shorter and with a bit of a stomach and very polite and so maybe it wasn’t him, had stopped by about two weeks or even a month ago now “to read the meter.”
She wouldn’t trust any news that would trust me as a source.
A body was hauled out of the river Ganges, Varanasi, India, 11/19 or 20, apparently. This was just downstream from the Manikarnika Ghat, the main crematorium ghat, a perpetual stream of burning bodies plunging down the stairs but not plashing at bottom because by the bottom all was ash, a cloud of flies scattering across the waters.
I can only assume that the Indian authorities wouldn’t ordinarily bother with a floater, but he was white, or what was left of him was white, apparently. Other or the same Indian authorities, evincing impressive operational prerogative, ordered an autopsy that determined the COD as accidental/suicide, ordered a DNA test and copied both the results and report to the US State Department, which matched the genetic markers as being Principal’s. Sari Apt Le Vay petitioned for the body’s return, but it was in such a bitten crocodilian or ultimately imaginary condition that it was cremated, not at the Manikarnika but in a facility. No pics or vids of the body exist or have — like a missing pancreas — leaked yet.
It was Moe all over again — but because I switched off the TV after PBS had on Seth without Lisabeth, I can only piece this together from scrap bits of the Asbury Park Press, the NJ Jewish News, and whatever general interest nonpotting rags Moms still subscribes to, though delivery’s been iffy. And the house modem, which has been broken since I got here — Moms doesn’t even remember it breaking.
I couldn’t go to Wawa and couldn’t have Moms go for me, so I quit drinking, quit smoking, I guess. I made myself useful in the attic department, heirloom rearrangements. Suddenly everything heavy in the house had to be moved. The coverage didn’t leave the lawn until purdah season’s winter storm advisory.
Cal called and left a msg, and I still haven’t gotten back to him. Finn called and left a msg saying he’d consider a reprint of my book, be sure to be in touch.
I haven’t been. I never made a statement — I wrote.
Consider this: A dozen Moes crashed Principal’s “medimorial” (meditation memorial) held at the Tetplex, four of them legally named Vishnu, and one even named Vishnu Fernandes. Cullen de Groeve and Owmar O’Quinn read a selection from the Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Void cannot injure void, the qualityless cannot injure the qualityless.”
Kori Dienerowitz did not attend due to a prior commitment in Bermuda, a premature retirement with prosecutorial immunity.
A Pew Research poll, of around this date, queried a responsible sampling of Americans as to whether their government’s online surveillance initiatives were justified (62 %)? or unjustified (28 %)? with only 10 % undecided.
Into December, another whitish body washed up in a drainage culvert at the Verna Industrial Estate, Goa, and the boy who found it, shockingly recognizing his find, posted the pics and vids online, which were reasonably convincing, according to the convinced: Principal, already decaying. Anyway, something happened next like the boy’s father without contacting anyone, perhaps without even being privy to his son’s exploits, tried selling the body. But he was caught. Or the guy who’d bought it from him and contacted Sari Apt Le Vay was caught, the body taken into custody or whatever, but lost before tests, according to the tabloids. Subsequent corpses turned up in Cairo, Lisbon, Kifl Haris outside Nablus (Palestinian Territories). The great wheel turned and memed. Live in the flesh spottings in Brazil were a thing. Principal was a wayfarer in a Finnish disco. The wheel was turning me 40. A child was born in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, whose soul was recognized as his.
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