Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Always has been. Always will be.

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

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

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

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

Cig out the window. No bourbon after toothpaste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said, “Now.”

(212) faded to clock, 6AM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that and who’s it for?”

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