Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Which was the thing with Rach — with her I dug harder than ever, and turned up all of what? Comedy club stubs from dates she’d had with retirement age tax lawyers and radiologists, a taxi receipt in return from a tryst with her graymaned counterpart at a competing agency, the baggy condom of a dentist and family friend.

They treated her like an equal, that’s what she swore — that’s the truth of it. Just like everything she writes for her campaigns is true — it has to be. The best electronics won’t obsolesce with their production. The top refrigerator/freezers won’t expire before the eggs inside them. The acclaimed bouncy bath toy will never suffocate a child. Rach, of the monochrome suits, the locavore dairies and cauline greens, the classes in bhangra, hatha yoga, and the Audi whose space rented for twice my office — her talent was for enthusiasm, with a specialty in revisionism, in her men as in her ads, and if she didn’t find the explanations she was after, up at a client’s HQ, or down in its labs, in the market testings, or at the brandjob rounds of her fellow creatives, she didn’t hesitate to invent.

\

History has always privileged the civilization — shunning nomadism, tribalism, all the existential bachelorhoods.

A people’s legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn’t a relationship unless it’s left behind its trash.

Knives, forks of diverse tines, spoons, a ladle. Shards, sherds — from the same or different pots? did this dish catch the spray of human sacrifice or was it used to prepare a corny gruel (I had similar quandaries at the fancier spots in London and Paris)?

Impossible to grasp the development of the handle: that improvement that made handheld blades of basalt, which before had cut only the closest things, now cut violently at a distance, as axes, spears, and arrows — the handle, the innovation that made vessels move. Impossible to come to grips with how its perfectability endures: the wheel becoming the halfwheel of the handle? metaphorized into the handle that posts and chats, gropes virtually?

In that sense, women, vessile women, posed a threat.

The wife I was supposed to fuck, but had no desire to fuck, had no handles (ancient, modern), whereas the nonwife I wasn’t supposed to fuck, but had this uncontrollable desire to fuck immediately in one of the Met’s least frequented galleries—#547 for the bergère, the #400s of Mesopotamia, rattling the ewers in American Wing parlor interiors — had an abundance of handles: she had a waist and clefts, posterior juts, a jug’s taper beneath the jugs, and it was death to decide which to hold, and how (very ancient, very modern).

Once Lana wrote an essay for an exhibition catalog, which means I helped, inhibited. The show concerned an archaeological controversy, and presented a pair of prehistoric remains from Chile’s Atacama found intact, but evincing no sign, or no “evident sign,” as we phrased it, “of having been purposefully mummified or otherwise preserved.”

The remains were of a man and wife, a couple, presumably, and, if so, their serene condition was doubly inexplicable. Some scholars pointed to the geochemical composition of the quebrada cavern they’d been found in/buried in, something to do with salts. Others pointed to the holes bored into their skulls, as being too alike to have been the cause of their deaths, and to the fragments of hair found in the brain cavity of the male, which defied all tests until one finally identified them as a llama’s. Our walltext, at least, had no agenda — it just stated the case, the state of the research, the arguments for and against intentionality, cagey.

\

My own Pharaonic entombment, a Caliph Suite at the Burj:

— clothing, the basics concierged in Paris from American Apparel, from London an outrageous suit in barcode gingham, an albion basketweave shirt, and a tie frauding me in the regimental colors of the First Royal Dragoons, Savile Row.

— a cache of Europorn, bilingual and lesbically bisexual, purchased in London and Paris (Great Windmill & Brewer, Soho, Rue des Archives, Fourth Arrond.), after Aar had emailed a reminder that the Emirates curtailed access to certain niche haunts online, which didn’t stop me from tempting that access: trying workarounds, proxy IPs, any way to evade (any way not to consult Principal).

— purchased from the dutyfree, four cartons of cigs (Camel Lights), and a bottle each of scotch, whiskey, and vodka (I’ll identify the vodka, which was Gorbachev, which was horrid), after Cal had emailed that the Arabs who’d invented it — al-Cohol — now sell it only to foreigners, not in bottles but by the bankrupting glass.

— one pill left in the bottle of Ativan, a half going to gauze in the bottle of Xanax (the tradenames for lorazepam and alprazolam, which remind me of genie or djinni incantations, abracadabra, alakazam).

— a candybar, put on a creditcard, a receipt for a $6 candybar (Toblerone the size of an alpenhorn).

— two pairs of shoes, dressy and less, an unmatched aquasock crept in, Dad’s watch.

— a wallet I haven’t much used, keys to an apartment I’ll never use: W. 92nd 2 br/ba, prewar/newly renovated, move-in condition, spare room prefurnished with a crib and daubed in a pink that insists on not just a baby but a girl, even as Broadway dawn and Hudson dusk ensanguines.

— travelbag with matching toiletrykit, which were wedding presents? from whom?

— Tetbook, have to mention the Tetbook.

— two books besides the Koran.

I’d noticed when heading beachward — copies are given away in the lobby for gratis. I want to hoard heaps of these, cairns and dolmens of these — I want to die in this facility wrapped in a rabbinic beard as quilly soft as this duvet so that when Security (dial 0) slams down the door I’ll be buried under this monument: 1,001 Korans.

://

total time of Principal recordings:168:53:51 (the amount of time a Jewish male is alive before he’s circumcised)

total number of Principal.Tetrec files:72 (the number of names of the Jewish God)

their size: 3.5 GB(the Jews fled Dubai for Abu Dhabi in the year 3.5 GB)

their content: This Agreement imposes the same obligations upon Joshua Cohen 2 with respect to Information or any information derived therefrom that (a) was available to Joshua Cohen 2 prior to the time of its receipt from Joshua Cohen 1, (b) is or becomes publicly available through no express fault of Joshua Cohen 2, (c) is received by Joshua Cohen 2 from a third person/party with/out a duty of confidentiality, (d) is disclosed by Joshua Cohen 1 to a third person/party with/out a duty of confidentiality, (e) is disclosed by Joshua Cohen 2 to any agents and publishers and their employees with Joshua Cohen 1’s approval as covered under the agent and publisher NDA [“NDA 2”] and Section 2 of the Contract.

Failure to comply with the above will result

The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, for consumption to consume us. London’s just around the corner, a floor up or down, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, and so bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, consumption to consume. London’s just around the corner, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.