Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Mary, myself, and the other journalists gawking nonchalance as we sidled to the bar — awkward malcontents mentally annotating who I might’ve been — might’ve been the only writers around.

“The story is two writers discussing the story,” I said, “two writers afraid of missing the story and so inventing the story, inventing whatever it would scare us to have missed, nicht wahr?”

“Off the record?”

“Off, on, background, foreground — we’re doing Jäger shots in Germany.”

“Are we? Why don’t you have another kebab and then we’ll consider?”

“The story’s the same as it always was, what are the sums. The biggest advance is the biggest story, vice versa. It’s how one print industry rewards another for paying out its confidence so recklessly. I’m fine, I’m fine — two Jägermeisters, bitte.”

“You sure?”

“I’m saying the shareholders. Can’t read. Do they even issue stock certificates on paper? Don’t they just expect you to download and print nowadays?”

LOL again, and we cheersed and took the shots down.

I spilled and either she was indulging me by refusing to notice or her break was over and it was back to her job. She recounted which panels she’d attended before asking which were my faves — the oldest reporting trick in the — and I told her, inventing who spoke on what and what they said, she asked my opinion of the opening speech, and I gave it to her, and either she was fucking with me or fucking lying too because she agreed with me, then she went on to describe the Messe hall architecture so effectively that I’ve plagiarized her — all the roach/armadillo/ Transformers comparisons were hers, above — and then a male Magyar bonobo swung over and said in a menthol dialect, “Congratulations, it is very [unintelligble], New Ink,” or “News, Inc.,” “Jew Kink,” “Next Drink,” crawled on.

“Congrats — to you?” she said, the pad open again.

“Can’t imagine on what. He must’ve gotten me confused with someone else.”

“Someone like Caleb Krast?” and she twitched her pen along my ribs.

“So we’ve finally gotten to the point of this flirtation.”

“Don’t you know him?”

“Guy with chronic stink breath from an oral hygiene aversion, the cashmere sweaters that cloy at the midriff, still trying to squeeze into slimfits, preshredded — Cal, I know.”

“Have you two been in touch?”

“Not since he turned war hero. It’s difficult to get an appointment.”

“The new novel’s been picked up in a dozen languages — care to give me a quote?”

“He’s the novelist of our generation. Correction — he’s the novelist our generation deserves.”

She frowned, folded, capped, “You talk about all your friends this way?”

“You’d rather talk about the importation of Arab crime fiction to the American market? Or the enduring popularity of comix?”

She smiled, “Graphic novels.”

“Graphic just used to mean you’d get a titty scene, after which a thug would get his legs blown off.”

“Have you read any of the enhanced ebooks released for multisense ereaders? You hold the tablet and it shakes and you can manually feel the explosions?”

“Have I read them? Is that what you’re supposed to do with them?”

“Tell me another story, then.”

“Like a bedtime story?”

“You don’t have it in you,” and she smirked and then tugged my lanyard, me, close. “Who are you? — I mean, besides Aaron Szlay?”

The DJ spun up again and all around us glitter swirled like metal snowflakes. Laser tracerfire. Flashpot brisance. Strobes.

Our mouths were a tongue apart. But my teeth were too sharp and her lips were still moving.

“You have to help me out,” she said. “My deadline was a drink ago. Lene Termin at Viking hasn’t returned any of my msgs, I’m currently out of the office, no shit. The booths are all just assistants and so trained nowadays I get nothing but review copies, smiles. No one’s in NY, but it’s like no one’s even in Frankfurt. Finally I called out to Iowa, but the students kept transferring me to extensions that might’ve been Caleb’s but the voicemails weren’t set up.”

I put a fist at her back, “Why can’t we just sleep next to each other, no touching?”

She flinched and dropped the credentials, “Why can’t you do me one fucking favor?”

“Because you’re dead.”

“You’re an asshole.”

Then I was conjugating: “You’re dead, I’m dead, they’re dead, we’re all dead.”

“But you’re still an asshole.”

My reply was slurred toward the exit because — across the room past the median bar and splotched in ambers and clears amid appetizer molder — was Finn. Floridcheeked in grief carousal. He didn’t notice me, he hadn’t. This must’ve been his local lodging.

Finn’s silk shirt was busted open to the butterflycrunches navel, and the suitjacket he held and danced with whipped and spun like a ghost. It was an unbuttoned black with white pinstripes ghost he dipped and twirled around, Sufi matador dancing on the ceiling of hell.

The vestibule was riled with revelers who weren’t waiting for the elevators, or were, but swayingly, gropingly, humping one another up against the bookwall and the ballroom’s sliding partitions, and suddenly it struck me as impossible that they were readers too, or claimed to be, impossible that they’d ever even once just sat still in a chair or lain in bed, alone, silently, one light, and read. Indirect light. Quiet, please. I went hushing the couples stairward. The partition walls were sliding apart, or the lidcovers had been pried off the bookcoffins along the stairs, and even as I had to tipsy around them to avoid tripping, craven Danish creatures were crawling out of the darkness and seizing me, tugging at my totestrap. “We take you to what room you stay,” they said. “We are help you cannot stand.” I can’t say how or why, I just smelled it on them, through the herb liquor sulfur — they were Danish.

“I’m not a guest,” I said, or intended to say. “Just get me a cab,” like have it drive into the lobby and up to the landing at least.

Wheeliebags kept clunkaclunking past me downstairs, and all of them were mine, and I said to each, “You’re mine,” not because they were, because it entertained me. The railings were not to be trusted. I reached for them and they swatted me back, so I leaned against the coldsweat porphyry, and sat. And assed myself between the steps.

By the time I got to the lobby it must’ve been midnight, because everyone was straight above me, shooting me: my attempts to rise, my sotted swipes at their devices, my pale hairy bellyflopping, staying on my belly so they wouldn’t snap my face and tag it posthumous. #DrunkAmi. #LitSlob.

The carpet tasted bland. Because it was immaculate, unpatterned.

“Lass ihn,” was said in a foreigner’s German, but in a foreignness I recognized. “Er ist mein Arbeitskollege — mein Freund.”

Such brute fancy watches on the hands that rolled me, on the hands that grasped the strap to drag my flab upright, even as I tried stuffing the tote under my shirt and pants at once, popping buttons. My waist tumbled out into handles. I was being lifted, taken by my handles and lifted and whatever I was yelling had to do with whether anybody was fucking aware of what this fucking suit cost? Anybody?