Book of Numbers: A Novel Read online

  “Banging, slamming,” yawning.

  “Not tubular?”

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

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

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

  “We? Meaning you or Tetration itself?”

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

  “Which is?”

  “The end of search—”

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

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

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

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

  Principal blinked, openshut mouth, nosebreathed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What?”

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

  “I will.”

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

  “5376?”

  “7187537694?”

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

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

  “What about the name?”

  “The name of what?”

  “Joshua Cohen.”

  “We invented that too?”

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

  “We have the same name?”

  “That wasn’t mentioned?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

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

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

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

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

  Principal pinched his nose. Rigidified.

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

  Remember that? the dictaphone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ://

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

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

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

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

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

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