Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Their English was better than the fauxgrammers’, was better than any of our Russian — if anyone can ever speak universally, it’s whores: Sveta, Svetka, Svetichka, names getting diminutively girlish by the toast, the dregs upended. Throughout, their protuberances were immovable, their faces paused impassive. A despondent lover might jump from their cheekbones, noosing ropes of waistlength straight hair peroxidized or crude black dyed or both. Sharp stilettos under the vexillological twosies, in the national colors: Abbasid black, Umayyad white, Fatimid green, red spilled of al-Andalus — each piece of each twopiece no bigger than a napkin, stained and tenting in my lap.

Eastern females: there’s something to be said of them definitively and I’ll try for it, allowing the fauxgrammers to get done with dessert, allowing Kor and myself our postprandial brandies — Cognac, Armagnac, liqueurs of French cantons extant only in the cartographies of marketing — to refuse coffee for tea, in homage to our waitstaff.

Chai, chaichick — what among the Arabs has to be cultivated, among the female Slavs grows wild: when young they steep the testicular bag in their tight sugared mouths, when old they turn bitter, sour, take on the silhouettes of rusty samovars, and wrinkle from smoking — as if they stubbed out their cigs on their foreheads — as if, whenever they weren’t drinking their tea, they set their glasses atop their chins to leave behind tepid impressions.

I knew some women like this, knew how to resist them especially, women who with the fall of communism, went west — they were Aaron’s obsession. He had a girl from Brighton, a girl from Forest Hills — give him one each from Staten Island and the Bronx, if just to preserve a sense of socialist equity among the boroughs. Long drives to Long Island, detours into metro NJ, compulsive, he was always ferrying them to Whitehall, ferrying them back to their parents’ apartments slummed so far out in the city that their transit stops were the train muster yards and the bus maintenance lots, returning them nervous, flustered because just fucked, in the Saab convertible fucked, to do mealtime with the folks. Immigrant families, emigrant families, codependent, claustral — Jewish girls unable to make it through dates without their mothers calling, or without expecting Aar to father their children.

They’d invite him up: for bruisey melon and disemboweling kvass, to sit on the sectional en familie and peruse the photoalbums scattered (this is Odessa, this is Kiev, the future mother inlaw, the future father inlaw, as kids), to give a word in Yiddish to the grandparents farting the stripes off their tracksuits in the corner, farschimmelt — Aar always halfway between the parents and grandparents in age — he’d oblige but never return.

The Slav slaves strutting around this aerie harem, this high houri lounge, were different. At the least the one on my lap was. Olya. It’s not just that she wasn’t Semitic, it’s that she wasn’t even Slav, or not fully. She had that Asiatic horde hybridity, that Tatar sauce Mongolic mix. Kazakh, Uzbek. Or from one of the randomer stans where feminine training included not just cooking and cleaning but how to put on a condom with the mouth. Olya, though that was just a conjecture: taut, tensile, cold in her bones, tempered ice, her back blades so severe they sliced against my face, shaving off what stubble I’d grown since — last I’d shaved? today or yesterday? — her ass like a heel crushing my crotch, as two men entered the tent, like they owned the place, or were about to burn it down.

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Spend enough time with the überrich and spotting the bodyguard species becomes a cinch — they’re almost physically inhuman: the legs of a police thoroughbred, the torso of a firetruck, the arms of a steroidal ape, steeringwheel heads set on no appreciable necks — noctivagant, and foul of mood.

There are two ways these specimens dress for the wild: one is to differentiate themselves from the party they’re supposed to protect, while the other’s to blend with him or her, choosing camouflage similar or same. Designer pelts. Couture pelage. Pistols by Glock.

The latter’s the classier adaptation — Jesus and Feel, a floor below, dressed down because Principal dressed down, presenting a uniform exterior of exclusive brandwear.

But these two had opted for the former. They were gangstafied as turf enemies, one cripped in blue doorag, blue puffy over blue beater and blue jeans slung to show the blue briefs between, the other blooded in red flatbrim, red puffy over red soccer jersey and matching shorts as long as pants, all for a counterfeit team — the San Francisco 94ers.

Nothing made less sense than the duffelsized puffies — nothing made more, when the crip punched a console and the blood kicked a vent, activating the AC.

The tent whirred, Olya’s areolas poked.

The gangbangers had bags from the dutyfree, tokens to distribute. They hulked around the table, handing each fauxgrammer a filigreed manacle of a watch in the souk dreck style, oudh in a glass spritzer blown into the borders of the UAE, both labeled “un souvenir pour votre femme/ein Souvenir für Ihre Frau.” Also a trackpad. In the style of a Bedouin rug replete with nonslip rubber backing.

As they went dexter, another man made the rounds sinister — the bodyguards’ body, their charge.

I hadn’t noticed his entrance, and not because I was so taken with my — what was it? an electrophoretic shatterproof Sinai tablet?

The olive beret, plumped as if to give him height, just made him even slighter, twee. A bad narco’s crinkled white linen suit became, in the climatized bluster, inappropriately lightweight. Sockless. In little tiny loafers.

He had a temperature problem, obviously. There was a seethe in his greetings he didn’t intend. He sweated, dousing each obeisance. One kiss to one cheek in America, one to each cheek in Europe, whereas in the Emirates, or just to him, it was a threepeat, with a return to the cheek of origin.

Or four, with a kiss to Olya’s scalp — he was leaning so close to me it would count as a hug in any culture.

Everyone was standing but me — Olya was standing, preventing me — everyone had bowed.

Kor, minister of whores — man with tricks up his portfolio — sunk so low his gut scraped crumbs off the table.

“Salam alaykum.”

“Wa alaykum salam.”

A director’s sling was produced, hinged out for the sitting — it was the highest chair around, and the fauxgrammers lumped around as he spastically scaled it.

“What do you say, Prince?” Kor asked. “How’s my Arabic?”

“It’s like we grew up together, quite,” the prince said. “Oxbridge? Le Rosey?”

Kor laughed.

“And my IT Emiris,” the prince went on, “how progresses their English pronouncement?”

I chewed a cohiba. “Quite.”

The prince frowned and Kor to the rescue, “If you’re just as generous at hosting servers as you are at hosting us, we might have ourselves a deal.”

“I am chuffed to be considered. To conduct this facility — this cluster.” Then he Arabized and the Emiris blushed into full cups. Zam-Zam colas, Mountain Dews.

What I knew at the time: there was a king, and the king had sons, and so there was a line, but not like of foaming techies camped outside select retailers just to overpay for an undertested Tetheld 4. Rather a line that stretched for eternities, for grudges — throneward.

I took this prince and his presence at this function to communicate the succession: the son at the head of the pipeline would handle the oil, the next son would handle the gas, the son after that the shipping, and only the next after that would get online — and if that’s who he was, he could afford, perhaps, to act princely — depraved.