Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

It was desert glass, created by a lone renegade comet. As the comet entered our atmosphere, it exploded like a celestial bomb. The heat of the blast fused the sand directly below it into a pane, which, just a moment later, was shattered by the impact of the nucleus. What resulted was this glistening mess.

Bringdom didn’t know this, though, he never would know any of this. The glass just reminded him of a girl.

— CALEB KRAST, Bringdom’s War

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Iz, I’ve walked — coiling myself into circles, into rings. Bunions, corns, and a bathfungus developing. All the natives or the Viennese I’m taking for natives are old and women, their men must die before them, and they all have tiny little plasticbags under their chins that fill and empty with air. The women, even as I resisted the suggestion, I saw as Moms. I heard my name, but only in reference to coal. Kohle.

The morning was paved with pigeons. You can never wake up earlier than pigeons — you can never wake up earlier than streets.

I’m not sure how or even if you’re going to respond to whatever crisis comes out of this, Rach, what sort of pathos is still in you or whether

Vienna — of course this is where you ended up, Iz. This is where I sent you packing. Away from your husband, into your brother’s house. Bankrupting myself in the process, bankrupting my soul’s accounts too. Is the fact that you have family in this city a sign or just a coincidence? Which would you rather it be?

or whether, Rach, you’d regard whatever transpires — yes, transpires — as just another example of my fucking up — my fucking everything up — but

I’m trying to figure out how to find you, Iz. I’m trying to engineer a coincidence, but maybe you didn’t go out today, maybe you don’t go out ever, or just not in the citycenter. I’m assuming that you’re allowed to, that you’ve received or don’t require your brother’s permission. Being a glass scientist, or at least a laboratory rat, must make him strict but liberal. He wouldn’t have slaughtered you to preserve the family honor, so I’m fairly confident he won’t stab me. He might even speak my language, if only a specialized technical dialect. I’m judging all this based on having tetrated him once. Yasir.

Is he married? To a Muslim? Have they reproduced? Do you cook or babysit to defray what you cost in room & board?

I have my fantasies. Like you’re not getting along with the wife, she resents your beauty, your youth, her husband’s affection for you, the way you have with the baby.

Like on the Karlsplatz, this woman passed me by in an abaya or whatever her culture calls it — the first abaya I’ve been around since yours — a cape unfurling out behind her as if to umbrella her girls, two of them, clinging. It’s been raining off and on.

A caricaturist blandished pastels at a canvas. An accordionist busked out a wheedly waltz. A Gypsy laid down a swatch of velvet and laid a coin at its center to assure me that others had found him deserving. But I was a beggar too, crouched on the floor of the ÖBV Buchhandlung, copying out my appeal into German with the help of a phrasebook.

Is this the office Ist dies das Büro of the glassworks/glass manufacturer der Glaswerke/Glasfabrik Birefringen AG?

May I with an employee Darf/Kann ich mit einem Mitarbeiter/Arbeitnehmer named namens Yasir Almaribi speak sprechen?

I would like a message to leave. Ich möchte eine Nachricht ver/hinterlassen.

It concerns his sister. Es betrifft/konzern this phrasebook doesn’t differentiate between the verb senses of “is about” and “worrying to” and the noun senses of “personal problems” and “business interests” seine Schwester. I will for him outside wait. Ich werde für ihn draußen warten. Ich bin aus Amerika. Danke.

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I read my own name at a news kiosk and went to open to an article, which the kioskist said I’d have to purchase, but I didn’t because it was just a belated photospread of Principal’s birthday party. Happy 40th. Exklusiv! Tetraten sie sich selbst?

Bankside flat plasmas updated the stocks and scores, and the name Balk was whipping around a ticker in red LED, though what followed was too densely rapid and German and I tried to keep still until the relevancy scrolled my way again, but it never did.

and if there’s any fallout for you let me apologize in advance, Rach, please, you have to understand that my intention was merely to

Which street is yours, Iz? Which building? Which floor? Which window? Nothing in this neighborhood, I’m guessing. The district of guided package tours. Schoolgroups younger than online. Retirees snapping selfies in Napoleon poses backed by fake French Habsburg landscaping. Queues of airport shuttles. Taxis debating lanes with hansom cabs, whose horses hoofed so serenely haughty it’s as if they were proud of having been tamed, and disdained the wildness of their Balkan drivers.

though I’d appreciate that in the event of any fallout you’d refrain from making any comment whether on or off the record to journalists about anything, Rach, but particularly about our life together, which is or was after all

Iz, have you returned to your parents? Or been returned to your husband? To Oman or Yemen? To France? Didn’t make your connection in Cairo? Stayed in Cairo why? If you’re in Vienna, just bump into me. Just there, under the porte cochère. I’ll take you to a café, and pay. And in return you’ll take me back with you and shelter me and read my drafts, you’ll learn this language and read my drafts, slake me with urchins de la mer Rouge and schnapps.

I walked around the Ring, that broad treed boulevard that’s just the raised footprint of the ancient walls that’d protected the city against the Turks and Slavs but that, as the city grew, became dangerous, entrapping, and so were razed to make room for tourists to take their leisure in a setting both pleasant and surveillable.

Today the fallen walls of Vienna — but also of Frankfurt and Berlin — are held by Turks and Slavs peddling souvenirs, bringing history a crooked full circle.

Are you Sind sie Yasir al-Maribi? Speak you English Sprechen sie Englisch?

I am a Ich bin (ein) friend of your sister Freund (von) deine/ihrer Schwester.

I am not sure Ich bin nicht sicher what Izdihar has war Izdihar hat about our RELATIONSHIP said über unsere RELATIONSHIP gesagt.

This might be die letzte Chance the last chance ich habe zu sprechen I have to speak mit Iz wegen durch because of future events das sein was sein wird in den Nachrichten which will be in the news (which is the same as “message” just plural?) (shookrun?).

\

A soldier has that last night of sex before deployment that’s never quite as great as later claimed. And then after a tour spent getting mortared by rounds of Iranian 60s and Soviet 82s and emails from Texas, from the pregnancy announcement to photo and video attachments of the birth, he rotates home and meets the kid. Immediately, the doubts set in. This was just what the sergeant had warned him about in Fallujah.

Bringdom would be holding the kid, and her nose would remind him of Dexter’s, or Malcolm’s, or her expressions would recall Groin Plate Dave’s, or Tibb’s, or Narvaez’s, or even What Did You Sayyid’s, and they were dead. It was as if all of Bringdom’s unit had fathered his child, sneaking out of their outposts silent, invisible, like Paiute Indians in a ghostdance, going all the way with Rachel-Anne and back before rollcall. He imagined his girl at 8, or 12, 16, or at his age of 22. Suddenly, after beating him in H-O-R-S-E, or correcting him after he called it The HBO, she’d get that smirk, and it’d be like the sergeant’s latrine smirk.