Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

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You can’t fly anywhere, anywhen, from Vienna.

Or you can, but it’s never cheap. To JFK, Washington-Dulles, Chicago-O’Hare. Connections in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Frankfurt knock a schilling off the price. There was also a layover option via Budapest. Layovernight. Tuesdays were the most affordable days to fly. Still, I was barely able to afford London on a Tuesday, noon. Vienna — London — Toronto — LaGuardia, more than 20 hours, eight procedurals, six sitcoms, four films with their plane fatalities edited out, four meals (or “snackboxes”).

I wasn’t checking luggage but if the clerk found that suspicious she didn’t say.

Let her just try and check this prose, let everyone.

Vienna — I slotted Principal’s passport into an aperture fit for transacting with an ulcerous deli clerk out on a drug corner. The guard took it and swiped it and flipped his interest through, in a way that convinced me of his scrutiny, so I said, “I get that all the time,” and either he didn’t find that hilarious or it wasn’t hilarious or he was just keeping busy for the surveillance scrutinizing him, then waved me through.

On the other side, in the immigration zigzag in NY — CNNing all around with Afghan dronestrikes, and then as a teaser before commercial break, which realityshow celeb really and showily got tossed out of a Manhattan Gopal store for cutting in line?

But then it was my turn to passport the officer, so I said, “I get that all the time,” which got a grin. “You must be the 10th guy who’s said that today.”

Just then I recalled how I always used to like having my passport stamped. It fixed my persona. Nailed my being down. So I asked the officer for a stamp.

And he answered by saying, “I’d love to, friend, but they’re phasing out that ink stuff.”

Customs was/were: spit thrice over your shoulder when anyone praises you, knock wood twice when praising yourself. Another line, another form handed over, smudged with Moms’s addy, permanent addy.

I went out into the chill, cab exhaust.

I joined the queue, waited, though I guess I could’ve called the agency, collect, could’ve had Lisabeth or Seth spring for a livery out of pity, shave and a haircut, suite at the Plaza, a sandwich. But I wanted to continue on my own — wanted Jersey, mother, buffer.

The expediter was a deadringer for La Guardia, the mayor, but with cornrows—“Where you going?”

“Jersey,” I said.

She sneered borough cred, directed me with her middlefinger down the idlers.

Aar, leaving a client’s afterafterparty, a launch, or reading — he’d get into a cab and say to the driver, “Take me to work with you,” or “Take me somewhere we can be alone,” and I miss that something wretched.

I, with my no balls, just told the driver how to drive but he demanded the addy and knucked it into his GPS, which calculated the same distance and time and directions that I had, and then he said how much, off meter, and that was as much as he said.

Nasty habit. It used to be that every time I’d take a cab there would come this moment, this intersection, and Rach hated it — when I couldn’t help but talk, couldn’t help but engage the driver, and some of that is a Jew thing, but some certainly was all that white baggage, which won’t fit in any trunk — wanting to show the driver that I held by what that Berber slave playwright once wrote, nothing human was alien to me, nothing was strange, or rattling, wanting to show respect by talking politics domestic and foreign, I’d be honored by his opinions, because they came from a land in which opinions were criminal, a land I’d never get any closer to than now — a mangled divider between us.

But for whatever reason, this trip — for two hours in gutimpacting traffic — I didn’t.

After the negotiation only the GPS talked, voicing my welcome homescape in Arabic. Every lanechange or so a familiarity would surface, Semitic fricatives, faucal honkings of phlegm, and then “I-95, NJ Turnpike.” The rusting midtide marsh, dead fish methane waft, an egret balanced onefooted out in that muck like it’d have to be crazy to step full in. A Canaanite hairball, then “Garden State Parkway.”

Through the Pinebarrens saying nothing and with nothing said unmechanical — maybe that, just that, was dignity.

Or I did say something, once we got to the house.

Some things like “I got your money inside,” OK, “Come in and use the bathroom, if you have to,” no thanks.

Which spared him having to witness me begging my mother for money (the hug, the kiss, the beg). I was embarrassed, sure, but only because she was embarrassed for me, and disapproved, and disapproved of what I was being charged, went for her clutch, and that earthenware bowl for tzedakah I’d forgotten, and finally outside to beat down the price. I collapsed. Never even got the driver’s face.

11/15 or 16, everything broke. The Post headline was punny enough, “Balk-Mail!” The Daily News went with “Tetraitors!” You know the rest — everyone knows.

Moms paid for my two Heinekens and Camels. The only thought I had I thought daily, twice — what a beautiful name for a convenience store, Wawa.

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Basically at that point it ends.

And then the phone rang.

Moms said it hadn’t rung like that since September. I had mail from back then too and I signed the enclosed papers and got an envelope and stamp from Moms and included a note to Rach asking what I owed her, and promising her that whatever else had to be done, she’d be able to find me. I walked over to the postoffice. And by the time I’d walked back they were outside, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NY1, and our porch was on the TV in the livingroom and Moms was having a fit about how the stoop was chipped and leaves were clogging the gutters. Leaksmen — the organization that claimed responsibility for releasing the recording files, my transcriptions of them, my attempts at shaping them into Principal’s life, and the diary I kept of my own life in the Emirates — was headed by a dual Australian Swiss citizen by the name of Anders Maleksen. Descramble Maleksen — get Leaksmen.

An anonymous source of the senior American intelligence official type stated that the organization was a Russian front, and that Maleksen was the field alias of FSB agent Daniil Kalemov, who’d been assigned to infiltrate b-Leaks by providing documents regarding Israeli nuclear capability that now appear to be Kremlin forgeries. Whether he entrapped Balk in the rape charges or not, he certainly arranged for the flight from Copenhagen and asylum in the Russian embassy in Reykjavík. No comment from b-Leaks. Which is to say, no comment from Balk.

People kept knocking at the door asking to help or be helped, to share their findings about how the C band electromagnetic range used for wifi transmissions stimulated the growth of or even implanted parasitic worms called “cestodians,” which track our movements, diets, cyberchondria. Moms said that a person in a Jersey Central Power & Light uniform who’d resembled Kalemov or Maleksen but was maybe shorter and with a bit of a stomach and very polite and so maybe it wasn’t him, had stopped by about two weeks or even a month ago now “to read the meter.”

She wouldn’t trust any news that would trust me as a source.

A body was hauled out of the river Ganges, Varanasi, India, 11/19 or 20, apparently. This was just downstream from the Manikarnika Ghat, the main crematorium ghat, a perpetual stream of burning bodies plunging down the stairs but not plashing at bottom because by the bottom all was ash, a cloud of flies scattering across the waters.