Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

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?