Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Both Judaism and Islam speak of God protecting with, or as, “a wall of fire.” “This relates to the desert practice of keeping oneself safe from predators by surrounding oneself with fire.”

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During breaks my hut’s screen oscillated a koan. It was a clock, but with just a single hand, and the clockface had no divisions into minutes or hours. It had no divisions at all. Was it a timer? and if so what time did it tell?

Mornings, or whatever, I’d be woken by Principal’s voice shrilling over a hearth of incombustible logs that might’ve been another screensaver.

That morning, however, I woke up on my own to a screen that was off, so I fell back into a dream in which I was shopping for the antithrombosis travel compression braces that Moms had recommended, but the stores were gypping me and I went into a frenzy because each pair contained two and a pair for me, I can’t explain it, meant three, and then Rach and I were going to Dr. Idleson the fertilitist who was also Meany the shrink, who told us that what we’d been having wasn’t sex and was about to tell us what to do instead — but then I was jolted up and out of the cot by an error msg honk. Abort retry fail honking.

The screen flickered an external feed — a clubcart was at the door.

Two men were jammed inside — two big men, giants, juvie and cruel, special in the sense of special forces: Jesus and Feel (Jesús and Felipe).

I rode deck as they let the cart drive us, in swampy compound circles.

“So you the visitor genius?” Feel said.

“You think?” I said.

“Never met no genius.”

I said, “Only a genius would know what you’re talking about.”

“What else a genius do?” Jesus said. “You get the mother and father — los árboles?”

“Meaning what?”

But Feel was saying, “Also in my family the primos, the cousins segundos. Not like when my cousin has kids, but like when my two brothers marry two sisters and they both have kids — they would be how related?”

I understood: “Genealogist, you mean.”

Principal had told them, hadn’t told me, my cover was as genealogist.

I said, “And what do you do — seguridad detail?”

“No importa,” Feel said.

“Stunt driver,” said Jesus.

“Are you from here or Mexico?”

“Afghanistan,” said Jesus.

Feel said, “Two tours.”

We went ramping down into the mound of La Domo — a subgarage of charging stations and inductive mats. A mechanics corps was sponging a Tesla X, a car that didn’t exist. No other boytoys though. No racers. All electric. And no motorcycles. Scooters. Bike-bikes.

Adjacent to the garage was the mechanics’ locker room. The next room was a box, like a boxroom, just heaps of packaging, addressed to me, myself, and I. Deliveries oneclicked — one guess — online. Principal’s no different from the rest — he orders and so he is.

The boxroom, the bagroom, the room of guitars, the room of drums, of charcoal and chalk, of splintered easels. Room of wood. Room half carpet half grass just because. Room in which the scissors were left. Room of nothing but the loss of a button.

Rooms: there must be something to call the room in which everything in it is supposed to come off as causal, but, in fact, has been calculated down to the threadcount. The room into which, before someone visits, the householder hauls everything significant or representative, so that even if this is the only room he — I — will visit, everything will be communicated: essential personality, selfhood. Gist, pith. Taste.

There must come a point when a house has so many rooms that it becomes pointless to name them. There must come a room — where the homeowner just wavers at the threshold, and fails it.

Principal had made a shrine, and so enshrined himself. An altar awaiting a sacrifice. Rotund Asian deities in speedos. Incense censer. A sutured set of sutras. The Dharma lode, block and mallet, beads, wheel, ghanta, vajra, mandala.

Principal lotused on the floor. His face, the skin that showed, was haggard. Wrung. He’d aged double what I’d aged since our last.

His chinpatch was now the color of static and the shape of Long Island. A short wiggy bowlcut, as lustrous as laminated bamboo.

But, as he gradually rose, as he ritually twitchingly rose, what got me the most was his size — how fat he was or creepy with muscle. Massive pecs and quads. Pumped bumps for biceps. Bulgeous calves.

Rather what got me was more the disparity, between whatever it was that made him so swollen imposing and the head that hovered above, the floating face shrunken, wan, marasmic, insucked brittle cheeks, bone straining through nose — the presentation was freakish.

But also at least halfwise intentional. Because as he breathed and commenced with a ceremonial stripping, all that bulk turned out to be clothes, just clothes, bunches, rolls, layers, breathable filters. The heat was on and there was no call for the heat to be on. Principal stripped and shivered.

All of it was branded, TT Tetgear: he unshrugged the kasaya robe to expose a unipouched hoodie, tore the tearaway trainers to sweatpants — not in academic gray, but silicon gray. The plastic toggles that capped the drawstrings of both hoodie and sweats had been gnawed to shreds. He tugged them loose, tried not to gnaw. Underneath was a neoprene wetsuit. Thick wool socks overwhelming the sandals.

The wetsuit peeled away to a belly bloated white but of the same substance, that squishy squamous thickness, that reptilian or amphibian give — like if I would’ve poked him, the indent inflicted would’ve remained for life. His limbs were tentacularly downed powerlines, livewire distensions. He was a nonviolent resister, of himself. On a hunger strike, protesting himself. That’s how ill he was, that’s how Gandhi. An ascetic, or ascitic, revealing to me scars, stitched slits all ragged red inflamed like the marks of the great, the markings by which one suffers for greatness, also revealing his penis — testudinal, pinched, sacs sagging like they’d been punctured, hairless — and he was hairless too under the wig.

“What the fuck? What happened?”

“A second opening, all of life is but a second opening, or it can be,” he said. “That, and only that, is the fuck.”

He trembled back to the concrete floor, relotused himself stiffly.

I settled just across.

“Please,” he said, “our sandals are still on us.”

“Off?” I said. “You can’t take them off by yourself?”

Or he wouldn’t, so I undid the velcro and got him discalced, shed socks from feet, rigid toes horned coarse and crustated.

He seemed relieved: a man at rest after a powertrip.

“A man is born royal,” he said. “His father is the king but he is no prince. Or he is on the outside. But it all is just outside, exterior.”

“This is you? Or are you talking the Buddha?”

“We are not talking Buddha. Or we are but he is not Buddha yet. He goes. He seeks to go outside of the outside. From the palace to the walls, through the gates. Out until the gates and the walls and the palace are all behind him.”

“So you’re becoming the Buddha? Considering a career change?”

“We are no one. We are the horse and the chariot both.”

“But in the different accounts I’m trying to recall, isn’t there also like a charioteer — a guy who’s steering or whipping? The Buddha, or whatever he is, whatever his name is, wasn’t alone.”

“We are all alone, always. No matter accounts. Whether a charioteer or no charioteer. Immaterial. Does not matter. There is no horse and the man is just walking.”

“But he’s walking in orienteering socks and nubuck archopedic sandals.”

“As like he goes, he is followed: men seeking money, to be repaid only in hatred, women seeking money, to be repaid only in sex, and he ignores them and goes on. He meets an old man, very old, on the verge of death, and laments because age awaits us all and all the world does not lament every moment. He meets another man, afflicted not just with age but with disease, and laments because infirmity awaits us all and all the world does not lament every suffering. Yet another he meets. Or he does not. Because this man is not a man, not old or infirm anymore, not living, a corpse, and the man who is a man, who is still alive, healthy and young, laments nonetheless, because death awaits us all and all the world does not lament every death.”