Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

One site — and one site alone — had made that same spelling mistake, though, and when I clicked through I found others even graver:

a-bintel-b was a blog, hosted by a platform developed by my employer, which is more famous for having developed the search engine — the one everyone uses to find everyone else, movie times, how to fix my TV tutorials, is this herpes? how much does Gisele Bündchen weigh?

Though her accounts lack facts — and Majuscules, and punctuation — I haven’t been able to stop reading, can’t stop reminding myself that what I read was written in my, in our, apartment. Between the walls, which have been redone a univeige, a cosmic latte shade — the floors have similarly been buffed of my traces.

I wasn’t ready to get reacquainted with the old young flirty Rach. Not on this blog, which she began in the summer, just after we severed, and especially not while I was estranged abroad, in London, Paris, Dubai as of this morning — if it’s Sunday it must be Dubai — with Principal negotiating the dunespace for a datacenter.

Apparently.

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Remember that old joke, let’s set it in an airport, at the security checkpoint, when a guard asks to inspect a bag, opens the bag, and removes from it a suspicious book.

“What’s it about?” he asks.

And the passenger answers, “About 500 pages!!!!”

Contracted as of two weeks ago, due in four months. Simultaneous hardcover release in six languages, 100,000 announced first printing (US), my name nowhere on it, in a sense.

As of now all I have is its title, which is also the name of its author, which is also the name of his ghost.

Me, my own.

Though my contract with Principal has a confidentiality clause — beyond that, a clause that forbids my mentioning our confidentiality clause, another barring me from disclosing that, and yet another barring me from going online, I assume for life — I can’t help myself (Rach and I might still have a thing or two in common):

I, Joshua Cohen, am writing the memoir of the Joshua Cohen I’m always mistaken for — the incorrect JC, the error msg J. The man whose business has ruined my business, whose pleasure has ruined my pleasure, whose name has obliviated my own.

Disambiguation:

Did you mean Joshua Cohen ? The genius, googolionaire, Founder and CEO of Tetration.com, as of now — datestamped 8/27, timecoded 22:12 Central European Summer Time — hits #1 through #324 for “Joshua Cohen” on Tetration.com.

Or Joshua Cohen ? The failed novelist, poet, husband and son, pro journalist, speechwriter and ghostwriter, as of now — datestamped 8/28, timecoded 00:14 Gulf Standard Time — hit #325 “my” highest ranking on Tetration.com.

#325 mentions my first book — the book I’m writing this book, my last, to forget. The book that everyone but me already buried. Also I’m trying to earn better money, this time, at the expense of identity. Rach, my support, had been keeping me in both.

But it was only after my session with Principal today — two Joshes just joshing around in the Emirates — that I decided to write this.

Coming back from Principal’s orchidaceous suite to my own chandeliered crèmefest of an accommodation, alive with talk and perked on caffeines, I realized that the only record of my one life would be this record of another’s. That as the wrong JC it was up to me and only me to tell them to stop — to tell Rach to stop searching for her husband (I’m here), to tell my mother to stop searching for her son (I’m here), to send my regrets to you both and remember you, Dad — I’m hoping to get together, all on the same page.

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10 years ago this September, 10 Arab Muslims hijacked two airplanes and flew them into the Twin Towers of my Life & Book. My book was destroyed — my life has never recovered.

And so it was, the End before the beginning: two jets fueled with total strangers, terrorists — two of whom were Emirati — bombing my career, bombing me personally. And now let me debunk all the conspiracies: George W. Bush didn’t have the towers taken down with controlled demolitions, the FAA didn’t take its satellites offline to let the jets fly over NY airspace unimpeded, the Israeli government didn’t withhold intel about what was going to happen (all just to have a pretext for another Gulf War), and as for the theory that no Jews died or were even harmed in the attacks — what am I? what was this?

That day was my final page, my last word, ellipses … ellipses … period — closing the covers on all my writing, all my rewriting, all my investments of all the money my father had left me and my mother had loaned me in travel, computer equipment/support, translation help, and research materials (Moms never let me repay my loans).

I’d worried for months, fretted for years, checked thesauri and dictionaries for other verbs I could do, I’d paced. I couldn’t sleep or wake, fantasized best, worst, and average case scenarios. Working on a book had been like being pregnant, or like planning an invasion of Poland. To write it I’d taken a parttime job in a bookstore, I’d taken off from my parttime job in the bookstore, I’d lived cheaply in Ridgewood and avoided my friends, I’d been avoided by friends, procrastinated by spending noons at the Battery squatting alone on a boulder across from a beautiful young paleskinned blackhaired mother rocking a stroller back and forth with a fetish boot while she read a book I pretended was mine, hoping that her baby stayed sleeping forever or at least until I’d finished the thing its mother was reading — I’d been finishing it forever — I’d just finished it, I’d just finished and handed it in.

I handed it to my agent, Aaron, who read it and loved it and handed it to my editor, Finnity, who read it and if he didn’t love it at least accepted it and cut a check the size of a page — which he posted to Aar who took his percentage before he posted the remainder to me — before he, Finnity, scheduled the publication for “the holidays” (Christmas), which in the publishing industry means scheduled for a season before “the holidays” (Christmas), to be set out front in the fall at whatever nonchain bookstores were at the time being replaced by chain bookstores about to be replaced by your preferred online retailer. The book, my book, to be stuffed into a stocking hanging so close to the fire that it would burn before anyone had the chance to read it, which was, essentially, what happened.

Finnity, then, edited — it wasn’t the book yet, just a manuscript — handed, manhandled it, back to me. The edits had to be argued about, debated. I was incensed, I recensed, reedited in a manner that reoriginated my intentions, then when it was all recompleted and done again and my prose and so my sanity intact I passed the ms. back to Finnity who sent it to production (Rod?), who turned it into proofs he sent to Finnity who printed and sent them to me, who recorrected them again, subtracting a word here, adding a chapter there, before returning them to Finnity who sent them to a copyeditor (Henr y ?), who copyedited and/or proofread them (Henr i ?), then sent them to production (Rod?), who after inputting the changes had galleys printed and bound with the cover art (photograph of a synagogue outside Chełm converted into a granary, 1941, Anonymous, © United States Holocaust Museum), the jacket/frontflap copy I wrote myself, not to mention the bio, which I wrote myself too, and the publicity photo for the backflap (© I. Raúl Lindsay), which I posed for, hands in frontpockets moody, within a tenebrous archway of the Manhattan Bridge. All that, including the blurbs obtained from Elie Wiesel and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, being sent out to the critics four months before date of publication (by Kimi! my publicist!), four months commonly considered enough time for critics to read it or not and prose their own hatreds, meaning that galleys, softcover, were posted in spring, mine delivered around the middle of May — tripping over that package left in my vestibule by a courier either lazy or trusting — though I held a finished copy only in mid-August — after I insisted on nitpicking through the text once again in the hopes of hyphen-removal — when Aar sent to Ridgewood two paramedics who stripped off their uniforms to practice CPR on each other, then gave me a defibrillatory lapdance and a deckled hardcover.