Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Basically at that point it ends.

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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.

\

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.