Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

“Jewish, we are not Africa. Arabs are European — we believe in bargaining — we haggle.”

“Prince, yours is a theocracy criticizing a republic, a monarchy critiquing a democracy. Anyway, arguing the Emirates is different from arguing Jerusalem.”

“But it is not — regardless of our government you would treat us the same, it is politically expedient. If six million Emiris suddenly settled your America, policy would change in a snap.”

“I’m not convinced.”

“You are already convinced — you came from a failing empire to this desert, only to take advantage of us, quite — then it is back home to a second mortgage and the one woman marriage.”

“Not for me.”

“But just like you wank online and never touch, you preach a freedom you never practice. Your libertization is a fiction, which must be maintained so that particular pressures can be exerted upon particular regimes, in order to deprive them of their resources. What Israel does, what Jewishes have always done, is just perpetuate this lie. In the media especially. This falsehood is not just your god but also your idol. You are enslaved to it, and so you enslave us too.”

The prince, still holding Olya, stood, shoved her to the floor, where she huddled, heaved.

The weapon’s sharpness outglinting its jewels.

He wasn’t going to cut her empty head off, he didn’t have that in him, though he might’ve been capable of severing a toe. Instead, abruptly, he sheathed the dagger, and staggered out, his thuggery trudging behind him. †

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† This dagger would be the very last thing I’d tetrate — later, in Berlin, on an overcast noon at the Staatsbibliothek (library). Everything following this note was written entirely from my head, entirely out of what I know and think and saw and heard, without any technological verification, or direction. Any slips are solely my own. Correx and/or corrigenda may be sent but not received. The prince’s dagger was a khanjar, a scythey, severely curved — verging-on-90°-curved — weapon, reminiscent of a penis at rest. Khanjarha (the plural) are carried “in a[n] ivory or leather scabbard and decorated with jewel, gold, silver, etc., etc., worn on a belt similar[ly] decorated.” While the hilts of the most precious specimens are of rhinoceros horn, more common hilts are of sandalwood or marble. Design variations — hilt type, # of rings attaching scabbard to belt — denote different privileges enjoyed by the wearer. Though the steel used to fashion the blade was traditionally Yemeni, its ornamental silver was obtained, at the turn of last century, by melting down thalers, a popular bullion issue of Austro-Hungary. The prince’s model was gold or heavily gilded, its hilt definitely horny.

Insomnia, nausea.

Shit.

— I’ve been having some name grief — I don’t mean with my homonym, or Tetwin, but with the aliases we’ve been registered under. All standard operating procedure, of course, and it was fun though somewhat defamiliarizing initially to be calling down to the reception desks and have them say, “Fine day, Mr. Immermann,” or, “Bonsoir, M. Yaarsky.” Though it’s not obvious that any of this duplicity would be effective for celebrities of the first results page rank, who if they’re staying anywhere, even at the Burj, would certainly be noticed by employees, and then it’s just a matter of when the tip’s called in, to the press crews, or the protestors. It seems, then, that the only guests for whom this handling would make sense wouldn’t be recognizable by face, but only by name: the primeval way of being famous.

— An indication of the failure of our aliases is that neither Jesus nor Feel can keep them straight, checking Principal in under what mine was last, and checking me in under what’d been Principal’s (the ultimate indication is that none of this fooled Kor). Myung’s the one who picks them, the aliases, and so she’s the one to ping as to whether I’d become “Moises Binder,” meaning that Principal was “Chaim Apt.”

Think back to the time my name was still mine, all those aughts ago: 1999. Think of my feelings, as online associated me with people with whom I shared that name, and yet nothing else. Idempotent nomials, mutual onomasticators, whose lives would otherwise never have disappointed or cheered (me), or even been counted (against mine). I’ve spent my whole entire virtual experience subordinate to Principal, reloading my name as it became his, reloading it into becoming his — but it’s only now that I can regret my collaboration: that the more I clicked on him, the more he became me and I became nobody.

It’s no neat psych trick to explain why I’m reliving this now — the anticipations, the anxieties, all the dreamshit especially — with the traveling I’m doing, the traveling for a book, interviewing again, gathering materials.

This was in Poland, fall/winter 1999, and I was driving, for research, not lost, asking in Krasnystaw how to get to Piaski, asking in Piaski how to get to Krasnystaw, asking this goitrous streetsweeper for directions to whichever town I’d just left only to calm her hostile claim that the destination I was originally asking for never existed: the Trawniki concentration camp, which I was sure was midway between them, Krasnystaw, Piaski. But the only thing between them was a sign for the highway to Chełm, and on my last pass through, as the road narrowed to a toppled chimney of darkness, I turned, and found myself trapped by the snuffed timber and thatch of what might’ve been a granary, and I stopped and got out to piss.

I dropped trou in the weeds, above a septic depression rimmed by moon and the headlights of my rental Daewoo. Just as I unleashed my stream I noticed the stones, I was pissing on the stones, a cemetery of nubby slabs askew and overgrown, desecrated by the weather or Poles, and just ahead was my own, it was my gravestone, rather it was a sandstone marker belonging to Yehoshuah ben David Ha-Cohen, whose dates had been abrased yearless though the rest was still legible, Adar 14–Tevet 4. This wasn’t just my Hebrew name, but also the deathday was the same as my birthday by the Hebrew calendar. By the time I’d made the calculations I was trickling. Zipping, buttoning up. Yiddish might have a word for “both strange and expected,” or German, “expectedly strange”: the banality of names, the banality of numbers (I went to make a rubbing but it didn’t take) (and my camera’s flash was broken).

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Archaeology — that’s what I’m doing in the Emirates — what else is there to do in the desert? except excavate through bone and bed, toward a terminal stratum, an inaccessible anticline depth? I won’t fully love a woman unless I’ve done this, unless I’ve dug between her legs. A site. I have to wave my spade around seeking the who and where and when of her. Who was here, or there. First, last, longest, shortest. The Chaldeans? The Sumerians or Akkadians, Assyrians or Babylonians? One of the Canaanite tribes, like the Moabites? Or just a bluechip Jewish Philistine from Central Park West?

This was my field — I’d fuck someone new, some casual bar score from Barnard, or The Factchecker for Bloomberg News, who held that title for an unprecedented 1994–98, and the moment I was finished, with her lying next to me unsatisfied or in the bathroom already flushing and clitting off, I’d be asking about her partners, asking what she liked, what she didn’t, and if she’d answer at all it’d be abashedly — but still I’d press, barter, bribe, shovel atop my own carnalities, overplaying myself until my mid-20s, downplaying intensively by 30, not because I was so experienced, just wiser. But then by that age my women were too, and they understood and manipulated my appetite. Giving me the grittiest on exactly precisely how many men they’d fucked before me, how many times and in what locations for what durations, simultaneously, or separately, ages, races, physiques, with what appendage sizes in which positions in which orifices — was it good? who was better? grand total of orgasms? their intensities? and whatever their pasts, I’d suffer through them, until I’d find the strength to live up to them.