Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

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Maintaining that I hoofed it back to Ridgewood would account for the next week, give or take, though I paced that distance inside, ordering in until my cash ran out and running to the ATM at the Comida Fresca Cada Día — leery of any Asian not affiliated with the nearby Tianjin Trading Ltd., or Lucky Monkey Lumber & Millwork. I read a lot of news, which I liked to read because text, unlike newer media, didn’t tell me how to pronounce it: “Jamahiriya,” “Ansar al-Sharia”—the Arab Spring seemed an issue of Vogue, the Times was so into wiretaps and leaks it’d become an electrical or plumbing manual. I studied the techbooks, which had underlinings and highlightings and in one a frayed crocheted bookmark from what had to’ve been a little old lady striving to master her little old PC. I searched Rach’s blog with the thought of identifying our pseudonymized friends, Rach’s friends who might’ve known about her affair, who if they’d ever reach their mentions themselves would have to search for the scarf they wore or the wallet they lost on their last lunchdate with Rach, in the very terms Rach used in her posting (searching online becoming a writerly endeavor: the search for the perfect detail, or error).

6/6, I got an email from Cal, replying to my own email of drunks ago. He wrote me about how “optimal” it was that this Muslim unrest had coincided with his book hiatus, and how “unabatingly obligated” he was to his editors and the reporters who’d taken his beat. As for the unrest itself, it was still undecided “whether the oppositions will do the governing required.” Anyway, it was “awesome and poignant that technology that was so manipulative is now so cheap it might level the playing field for civil disobedience.” However this was merely his transition to fiction — rather to mansplaining wisdom about fiction. Cal wrote that while technology itself might be “naturally ambivalent,” he was certain it was “anathema” to novels, “to the vicissitudes of the novel,” in that for a novel to “function properly”—as if novels were like a tool, not a bluntness — its characters had to be kept apart from each other, “separated into missing each other and never communicating,” and that now in this present of pdas and online, people were rarely ever “plausibly alone,” everyone now knew what everyone else was doing, and what everyone else was thinking, and the result was a life of fewer crosspurposes and mixups, of less portent and mystery too — and I agreed with him, I’d already agreed, because I’d recognized the ideas as having been plagiarized verbatim from an interview with a decrepit South African literary pundit just published at the site of the NYRB .

Anyway, Cal signedoff by asking, as he always asked, whether I was working on anything, and I answered that I’d just completed an email, nonfiction.

The next email to slip from my hands (two fingers, hardbitten nails) was sincerer.

I told myself I had to finish the last lecture page for the professoress by midnight, be done with it, and at midnight I uploaded and clicked send, and she wrote back with such speed it was like she’d responded before I’d sent it, or at least like she’d had her response already prepared and saved under Drafts. Lana wrote to thank me with an invitation to the summer institute — apparently she was allotted one guest and it “has 2 b u.”

I wrote another email declining — don’t waste the keystrokes on how, why — and Lana wrote me back, “lets chat.”

“I don’t have chat.”

“just download it here,” a link to Tetchat.

“You can always just call me. But I’m not sure I’m ready for another trip. Need to sort things w/ Rach. Need time.”

“download prick dont be such a

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My laptop was colorwheeling, so cursed to its cursor that force quit had to be skipped for the nuclear option, Off/On.

Then the phone rang and though it was a regular ring and the number wasn’t listed, I went for it, “No patience.”

But the voice though expectedly female was Asian, like reared in Asia, “Excuse? Hello, Mr. Cohen?”

“Speaking?”

“Please pack a single piece of luggage, including only materials important to your process — everything else will be provided. Waiting outside your studio residence is a Lincoln Continental, black. You will meet it within 10 minutes. Your flight departs JFK at 7:00.”

“To? I’m guessing Palo Alto?”

“Palo Alto does not have a commercial airport. Delta 269 nonstop to SFO. San Francisco. 10:18 PDT, arrival.”

“Oskar Kilo.”

“Excuse?”

“That just means OK.”

“Please, one precaution we ask: take your phone or pda and remove its battery, leave both the battery and chassis at home. You will not require it.”

She didn’t have to ask twice — she didn’t.

Goodbye (646).

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The shift to Palo Alto was — I’m already regretting this — tectonic.

Not because there was this apparently extremely minor earthquake or tremor just as my flight was being cleared for landing and we were delayed, an hour, hovering, two hours — the last time I fly commercial — nor because all my typical eastern negativity toward the West always threatens to break and chunk and pile up into violent incoherence.

Rather I’m talking a totally personal, emotional rupture. Coming to the other coast, single, oneway, felt like a permanent upheaval.

Also, I was all sorts of pilly.

I have what’s called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.

The livery smartcar had a partition between me and what must’ve been a driver, but the switches just lowered the windows and a platelet of GPS. Our destination was La Trovita Lando, which I took for a city, or for a neighborhood. It was a slough through brackish marshes, a ping at a gate, and we stopped. And I stepped out into the snaring web of a twentynothing woman, covered with spidery henna, her hands just slobbered with cobs — spinning me through the grounds to a lavish stucco cottage, unlocking the door, handing me the key, then sticking around spraddled in the doorway, one hairy armpit aired by the jamb.

I’m proud of myself for not mentioning until now that she was Asian. She was. Now hatless. Braless vest and culottes.

“It was you on the phone?”

Nothing.

“Or at the library — but isn’t there a library closer to home? Like in your lap or whatever?”

Or in her vest. She took from its midzip pouch the house pda, a Tetheld.

“Your guestwork is paltoguest0014,” she said. “For access you will have to create a uname/pword, each a min of eight alphanumerics, the pword to contain a symbol and CAP.”

“I’ll try,” taking the Tetheld from her, klutzing the keying, creating both out of my former accounts.

Her Tetheld informed: that uname is not available, and I said, “That uname is not available,” and she said, “What does it suggest? Can you follow the prompt?”

It suggested Jcohen19712, which was also to become my email.

I chose the dollarsign to close my pword—$ finishing what’d been my pword for all.

In other accommodations the bellhop points for his tip to the thermostat, or offers to lead you up the lilypad slates toward the saunas, but here the orientation was only: how to get online.

She took back her Tetheld, “We have been instructed to apologize. Today will be busy.”

“It will? What’s the schedule?”

“Party prep. Invasion and occupation. Caterers. Florists. Amusements. Petting zoo.”

“I don’t understand — party for what?”

The face she purged was disgusted.