Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Once, after Rachel-Anne had put their daughter down for a nap, Bringdom confessed all this, but Rachel-Anne just laughed it off. ‘Stupid ain’t sexy, hero.’

He brought it up again a day later after Rachel-Anne had returned from working a double at the Kmart pharm to find their daughter still awake and bawling. And Rachel-Anne bawled too, this time. ‘Don’t matter what you think, Daddy. What matters is what she thinks of you.’

— CALEB KRAST, Bringdom’s War

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Vienna’s Mater, its uberous mothering Venus — among the world’s oldest and most perfectly preserved fertility figures — is not to be found among all the Rubens and Bruegel and Roman and Greek and Egyptian antiquities at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but rather just across the park, with the mammoth taxidermy and Diplodocus and tektites and diamonds and ores, at the Naturhistorisches Museum — as if the Venus hadn’t merely been dug from the Danubian loess, but had been created by it. As if She were Nature Herself. Too divine to have been made by mortals. Too fundamental to be grappled with as art. Her limestone is oolitic, meaning its sediment is compounded of ovular grains that tend to crack and crumble and leave behind dimples, one of which serves ingeniously as Her navel. Loads of that stone are found throughout Europe, but never in the Alps of Lower Austria. Also, not only is the Venus’s tint not native to lime, but that Martian red ochre can’t even be derived from local materials. Note that while the figure’s steats and teats and utter facelessness are on display, the head is concealed under a crowning spiral. Some interpret this as plaited hair, concentric braiding. Others, as some sort of pious covering. Regardless, any creator expert enough to have carved a fully sprouted scalp or raveled scarf would certainly have been capable of carving eyes and ears and mouth features too, it’s just that he — most scholars, being male, have assumed a male — for whatever reasons chose not to. And so it would seem that everything about the Venus’s appearance is equally intentional and inexplicable. She, being faceless, was never an individual, and any tribe that might’ve idealized Her is gone now. She’s outlived herself both as a goddess possessing and an idol possessed, as a deity to be appeased and an apotropaic symbol. The only identity of Hers that still survives is that of immigrant. Of foreigner.

(SOURCES: a docent who conducted a tour in English. The Birth of Fertility: Artifacts, Geofacts, and the Male Imagination, Alana Hampur, PhD.)

Glass. What do I know about glass?

The problem with the most effective glass treatments, the coatings and such that protect the best from abrasions and deflect the most harmful waves and rays, is that with age they muddle the glass, and if reapplied will only muddle it further. Here’s how I know that problem, Iz — from being a husband and son and writer and liar.

Facts are of a similar solution. Facts protect and deflect until they cloud over and dirty our wonder.

What else, Iz? Pane sizes are measured in “generations.” The larger the pane, the higher its “gen,” as the abbrev goes. But the scale has never been globally standardized.

I was on the wrong side of the Danube — in the Floridsdorf district, which had no flowers. Just stunted trees screening the properties of hypermarkets and malls.

I sped through the cold along either Birefringenstraße or Birefringengasse or Birefringenstrasse or Birefringengaße — I’m forgetting whether it’s the “ß” or “ss” after a long or short vowel. Anyway, all the intersecting roads were numbered, as unimaginative as their paving bricks.

I paused at the pylons marking the Zulieferung/Livraisons/Deliveries entrance for the glassworks, taking in the grounds — evened hedges, an azimuth of lawn mowed level, and a monumental vitreous gridshell that enclosed a mirrored cube. The Personal/Personnel/Staff entrance was up a grated ramp suspended through a tube. It all reeked of resiliency tests, ductility and tensility trials, research and tech development. A facility as transparent as this would only be into pane design — the manufacturing itself would be confined to that mythically silicic slave island called Offsite, floating through a minor sea of the Indies.

I paced the parkinglot, and counted the cars. No one bothered me. No one had to. The spyquip swiveled noiselessly. It would’ve been insane to charge inside all American slovenly, demanding an audience with an employee, the brother of an ersatz lover. I might as well have thrown a brick, a cobblestone, a rock.

I counted the clouds in the car windows, but none had the reflection I was after. I stood at the curb shivering that face to mind — Yasir’s.

But my only memory was of that blemish, a red nevus like a crescent curving left in the middle of his dark bulb head — or, because the site thumbnail I’d tetrated at the Staatsbibliothek would’ve reversed it, curving right. He’d been scarred in the lab, an experiment with acids gone awry, or else back in an Arab Nationalist phase, which I’m also inventing, Allah was still God but Marx and Lenin had become His prophets, and Yasir had been in an accident while smuggling dynamite to Aden from Sana’a.

If I found him, offline flesh found him, I wouldn’t introduce myself. I’d just follow him until he led me to Iz, who’d know how to introduce me. Because she knew me. I was a savior, a suitor, a bum — the fallen sharer of her airmattress, his floor.

I kept a vigil for his crescent as employees ramped down to the grass, shrugging lodens over labcoats, slinging IDs.

I stepped to the pave and wavered there between a Fiat and what wasn’t a Fiat.

The sun fell to a beheading, dusk was bleeding out.

A dozen middleaged Arabs were lugging rugs rolled like blueprints. They headed toward what had to be the hedge closest to Mecca and spread them on the green.

They reached under their paunches for beltclipped pdas — not even, half of them still had flipphones — and flipping them agape held them up to the sky, as if seeking reception, a signal from a tower or heaven itself, approving of the time. Then they fussed up their belts and assumed the knees, the fourth prayer of the day.

White men, inured to the fervor, hurried to their VWs and Opels and Škodas. A lot of them drove Škoda hatchbacks in Alpine white, and I couldn’t tell them apart, the cars, I mean — it was amazing they could all tell their cars apart.

The Arabs finished with their worship, rugged up, and lined for the mustering buses. Drivers were reversing the placards in their windshields, from indicating Birefringen and Schott and Siemens and Strabag AGs, to indicating the districts. About half the worshippers, about six or so, were lining up for the bus to Josefstadt-Neubau-Mariahilf, and I hustled over to get behind them, as a man up front turned to chat — Yasir. It was brother Yasir — I’d lay my hand on an ereader loading the Koran and swear to Mohammed about all of this.

Yasir was friendly with the Arabs, and even religious in his way — not enough to have prostrated with them, but enough to have waited for the concluding rakat. All his lapsed coworkers and even the driver had stood without complaint, as if it were a sin to depart before the As-Salaamu Alaykum. Toward the right and left. Toward Mecca again. The busdoors sighed out, for boarding. I was hoping the seats outnumbered the crowd.