Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

— now: the urgency. You remember Tad Geary? Cal’s friend once upon a time at the Times, and now with Wired? Anyway, he called Friday day and talked, because he always does, like an NPR segment, all about the death of print, and whistleblowing, and drones, before getting down to the salacious, genital warts at The New Yorker, herpes at The Journal, and from the venereal it’s always been a natural transition to the topic of literary agency — because just as I was sure he was going to propose an ebook he slipped me a rumor that I’d been working with P. I denied, but must not’ve been as convincing as this rumor from sources unspecified, because Geary was already reassuring me that if certain access was given or blanks were filled in my identity and the “granulars” of my “partnering” would stay privileged. I didn’t counter with what access he was after, but then the questions he asked explained everything (the blanks). Like, where’s P? When’s P back in Palo Alto? Is the health as awful as the gossip? What if anything are the plans for succession? I told him they’d just hire a computer. Then he took me to school on the health gossip. It was stomach cancer, he said. Or colon. That’s not me being unsure. That was him. Then I had to call Cal, to coordinate blurbs with the comma czar and, I’m predicting, permanent writer in residence of Iowa, and while I had him on the phone said that Geary would be calling asking questions of him and that he’d be doing me a favor. If he’d pump Geary for his sources especially. I told Cal I wasn’t involved in any tech projects, that not only didn’t I know Bing from Skype, I thought lit agencies were cheapened by having sites, that’s why we never got one. Geary called, because I’m a prophet, on Saturday, and told Cal everything he’d already told me and Cal feigned curiosity, but didn’t have to feign ignorance, and probed, and promised to investigate for Geary out of interests of his own, because he’d just turned in a new novel, which would require my, Aaron Szlay’s, full attention. The takeaway was that Geary had no indication of P’s medical status, no verification, and the only news he had of P’s potential book property was of my ostensible repping and Finn’s ostensible publishing of it, both of which tips had been passed to him, independently passed, by some Buddhist guru, Master Tetsugen Ken Classman, and a VC named Dustin Something, who’s tight, apparently, like they’re sharing the same bunk on a yacht tight, with Kori Dienerowitz and, Geary told Cal who told me, he was finding it strange that not only had the same tips reached him, Geary, through two different channels, but also that Dienerowitz — whose stakes were higher than everyone’s by degrees of magnitude, or higher than everyone’s but P’s — would have said anything about P to anyone, even intimately. Geary suspects a powerplay. A ploy or coup, but to what conclusion, Geary has no conclusion. I haven’t jawed any of this with Finn (he’ll be in Frankfurt).

— because, now, the Asian: I went out to Staten Island yesterday to explain myself to Svetlana (because she wasn’t taking my calls). I took the ferry. You can’t top for climax the Staten Island Ferry. Sveta wouldn’t let me in and the mother whom I’d met all of once outside Macy’s (Sveta once tricked me into going to Macy’s to get a swimsuit only to meet in the ladies’ swimsuit section a Soviet lady with Chernobyl growths on her chin and the cheeks of a circus cosmetologist who gave her daughter a crate of homemade beef cutlets and shook my hand and said, “You be glad forever”) — anyway, Svetlana’s mother, handling a difficult situation, came out to the stoop with a bottle of Evian for me, or not even that but the fucking bottle with trees on it, Poland Spring, and forced a smile and went back in and locked the door. Whatever. That isn’t the point. Returning to the ferry, the Asian was onboard (she’s Korean). She made sure I noticed her, the sweats, collegiate, crimson, Harvard. So loose on her, windblown at the railings. I decided, fuck it, enough cowardice and slapstick, and as the ferry launched I chased her casually up, down, and across the decks. But then I realized I wasn’t chasing her. She was just trying to get away from the crowds. Away, windy. Starboard’s the side that isn’t port. I violated my policy of never engaging Red Sox fans, especially not from Harvard. But she had this together professional don’t trifle with me thing that just cracked. That was her affect, cracked. A once organized type a ivy executive human now broken. She told me her name was Myung Unsui (she spelled it out), but I’ll admit that ever since a certain site has appeared in my life, I’ve been having trouble with my manure detector. I’m just going to relate what she said, and let you be the judge of whether it’s true or just, as the distinguished typo has it, “voracious,” because I’m too frazzled — I can’t sleep but if I do sleep all I dream about is apnea.

She said she worked for P. Confirm this. She said she was an assistant and very close personally, and either it’s all imagined in her head or they were fucking. By fucking I mean in love, confirm this. They were traveling together. She said they were traveling with a friend of mine, but she didn’t say your name, or your names fungible. She mentioned the UAE. But how it checks is that she also described you, physically, accurately, but in that ruthless quibbling analytic metricsexual way. Don’t shoot the messenger, just diet and shave. You and P were working all the time, she said. She was obviously jealous. She had that envy pout that so transcends all cultures and races and even our species that if the aliens ever contact me but I snub them because I’m writing an email to a client that’s the expression the aliens will have, all their suctorial prehensile mouths petulant. Her job was that every place you went to she went to that place before you and set everything up. But in the Emirates P told her to go back to the States and leave you two alone, just you and P. He told her to take the rest of his entourage back to the office “to await further instruction,” which she said with airquotes and henna on her hands, like Achsa once had. She did, she took. But no instruction followed. P was misaligned, she said. I didn’t understand. She hesitated and then said, cancer. The Battery grew. The statue and the bridges and everything and even with all of that she was crying.

She stood around the office doing absolutely nothing. She didn’t sit because she’d never had an office in the office. She’d just shared whatever office P was in and now he wasn’t in any and no one knew where he was or when he was returning and if she had a job anymore she decided it was to comport herself like she knew but would never divulge and above all wasn’t anxious about anything. But then she didn’t have a job anymore. She was fired. She was called in by Kori Dienerowitz himself and pretended to miss the voicemail but couldn’t pretend again, she couldn’t do anything but go in and get fired. She’d never been fired before. She said she still wasn’t sure that he had the authority to fire her, but regardless her email was denied, her logs were closed, whatever the lingo is, they confiscated her computer and parkingpass, which I gather in California is rather severe. She wouldn’t answer any of my questions about P’s relationship with Dienerowitz. She just kept talking about “termination,” about how being “terminated” was like being called “a witch,” which her grandmother who’d been a shaman or shamaness I guess had been “branded,” she said, in Korea. She was embarrassed, and talked fast, and then was embarrassed because her accent intensified. She had no friends in California, she had no friends except family in NY, and so she flew to NY and disguised the disgrace she felt by using her savings to pay off their apartment in the Bronx, Grand Concourse, so uptown in the city’s math that the numbers collapse, with a 208th Street jumping to a 210th Street intersecting with a 208th Ave and a 210th Blvd. Having been sapped unconfident, and sapped by TV, and she had to share the TV with her grandmother, she now found herself the last two or so weeks commuting alongside her parents to the tip of Hunts Point to help out with their deli. Balance the books. Make change to slide around atop the carousel behind the bulletproof partition. Acrylite. Like in a taxi. Like she’d done throughout Bronx Science, like she was a teenager again, humiliated. “The bills are filthy.” “No one ever takes the one moment to unwrinkle.” We docked. We went up toward Whitehall and approached my office and paused in front of it as if acknowledging that yes, this was a building, yes, this was a building acknowledged by both of us as my office, then resumed, went further, Bowling Green, the Bull getting its balls fondled by tourists. She talked about a job interview she had coming up. “Shit IT.” But she couldn’t even get her references together. If people knew her, she said, they knew her as P’s, and worried about her loyalties. She couldn’t stop chewing gum or cutting her hair, and she took off the Sox hat and showed me. Sometimes, putting the scissors down, she’d just suck on the hair, sometimes she’d swallow it. “There is nothing to do at a deli.” It was a bad business model. No systems, so inventory’s all by sense or by hand. Her father insisted on giving credit, microfinance for the parish, her mother on keeping a bunny despite the health department. The licensing, the taxes. Operating costs and insurance. Unreliable labor. Callingcards returns. The powerball machine always breaking. The hassle of cashing checks and regularly explaining to regular customers that prepared foods can’t be paid for with stamps. The franchises and chain pharmacies that undercut pricing by stocking in bulk or their own productlines. 24 hours, two shifts of 12, seven days a week, and she insisted on the nightshifts so as to better follow me and then, letting her parents take off for some church and peace and a touch of the flu, she was by herself and went out to rearrange the produce and some bath salts maniac jerks around the corner and grabs the scissors out of her apron and holds them to her face. “He does not want money.” “But he does not want to be alive either.” I’m just typing what she said. I wondered if she’d ever considered a career in publishing. But we were on Wall Street. Bankers were out in the mild. She was about to go down for a 4 train. To Woodlawn, I said. Yes. Get out at Yankee Stadium, take the Bx4. Yes, she said, but Bx6. I’ll be able to find her. A family clunked up from the station arguing already, carrying protest signs and a megaphone. I asked her and I was yelling as she descended why she’d been following me and she paused and turned sniffling and clung to herself as she met me on the landing, and she answered that Kori Dienerowitz was trying to sabotage my friend, you, and that he had government resources behind him, because P had gotten involved with Thor Balk of b-Leaks, or his involvement was forced at the threat of disclosing his disease. But that at core P wasn’t compelled by any of that and instead he was working on something beyond death, something spiritual. And that my friend, you, would never understand that, and that for all the chip and wisdom you cultivated you were just a nice guy out of your depth. Not nice but sad, she said. “Like Principal, he treats you like he’s inventing you and knows that it’s bad but still better than anything else,” “you don’t think he has a soul until you realize he just shares yours.”