Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

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.