Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

None of the other guest floors or reclevels would admit me. Not even the lobby. The underground parkinglot. The ground under which admits everyone. I pressed open, but the doors wouldn’t open, then went for the help button that in all languages is red and in braille is a rash. Sweating, dizzy, stifled.

I struck out at the walls, the antiscratch padding and weather touchsplays. I jumped but was short of the ceiling, took out my Tetbook — no wifi — had this urge to cringe inside my tote, as the elevator’s lighting dimmed and the thrum of its mechanism quieted.

I was karmically stuck, a floater. It was my breath. I had to ease my breath, and then empty it. Void this car containment.

I tried to fold myself up like a map, to compress myself like in eastward travel. To become the time lost to flights, the time lost across longitudes. The differences between Palo Alto and London and Paris, and between them and the Emirates — I’d go where they went, when they went. Into nonexistence — into neverexistence.

The doors would glide away then and it wouldn’t just be the Khaleej again, it would also be the Burj, de Crillon, Claridge’s, all their ambiance mingling, their couture scents and muzaks merged, the corridors turning one way into London wainscoting below Victorian wallpaper flocked with paisleys, turning the other into Paris parlor boiseries wreathing Empire urns with moldings of laurel, a cracked soaking tub bashed through a rainforest steamshower, hometheater systems dunked in the toilets, gardens growing into beaches to kelp the Gulf, the desert strewn with broken crockery from The Foyer and Les Ambassadeurs — bent knives from every restaurant I’ve stayed above, with Doc Huxtable, the piloting Sims, Gaston, Lavra — and all Myung’s Buddhas staved and dashed, the prayerbeads off their threads, the wheels unspoked, the sutras dismembered and blowing scattered. It was as if by evacuating my mind, I found this was my mind, a room of all my rooms, assailed by all my planes, or just a car in flames, and a voice, which was its capacity, shrieking.

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With Maghrib (ca. 18:30 to 20:00) I was moving again. Descending. I had to be called, being unable to call myself. But then the car stopped, around the Khaleej’s midlevel, the doors fell away, and there’s no other way I can explain this sensation — of identicality but wrongness, of unicity within displacement — this was, but wasn’t, my floor.

Only the numerals distinguished.

A man crouched by the elevatorbanks, his back to me.

He was an Arab, clad in a kandura like a bedsheet filched from housekeeping, straight off the cart. Bright brilliant just from the shrinkwrap white, still creased shoulders to elbows, rustling at toes.

He was close enough to obstruct my exit, and was stooping over as if to pick up something he’d dropped. Some hankie or submissive tissue — a woman.

But not white — she was black. She was a wadded tossed abaya, a smutty black abayayaya — trill it through the nose, like a jihad ululant.

She’d fallen — mucous sniveling through her nostril slit — she’d been hit.

As the doors went to shut, the Arab pivoted and kicked a foot out, a foot clad expensively crocodilian, and wedged them open.

“Stop!” I yelled, “Lay off, asshole!” or its panicked equivalent — it’s not enough to look ridiculous in action? I have to sound strangled on the page?

The Arab just tried to drag her into the elevator with me.

But she struggled, and so the Arab let go, only to hit her again — smacking the sniffling girl backhanded. She thrashed away howling.

Or that was me, urging her on with stupey nonconfrontationalisms: “Get away!” (I’m sure there’s a security recording), “Run!” (I’m willing to negotiate terms for the erasure of any security recording). My sneaker might’ve grazed his wingtip still holding the doors, and the Arab whirled around dervishly.

We faced each other, and I can only imagine what he took me for: a burnt paleface, a paunch in its decline, into financial services, Homo americanus consultantus .

Then again, my impressions of him were just as imaginary. He was some fictional character from transit lit, some thriller villain spun from a revolving rack in an international terminal. I only wished it were a better translation. He was introducing himself as the girl’s husband, or father, or brother, explaining that whatever the nature of their relationship, it entitled him to beat her, explaining that it required him to beat her — and just as the elevator doors were sliding shut again between us, he lashed out with pointy chinbeard and charged.

He choked me by the totestrap and I went for his thumbs, until everything in the tote was falling and we went after it, into the hallway. We fell like dictators. Slowly, messily slowly, crashing into curios and rolling into benches. I punched his jaw and his head hit the wall, bent my knee between his balls on my way to getting upright, lurching amid the wreckage of lamps, braziers, kashkul of sawdusty potpourri.

He was out. Not just unaware, but unconscious, and not in the psychoanalytic definition, but with blood in his goatee.

“You OK?” I said to the girl. But the cowering napkin just wailed.

I stumbled to the elevatorbanks, pressed the up and down buttons. I rocked him loose from deadweight and turned him over and inside the car, pressed every floor.

The elevator closed, opened: a flap of his bedsheet was stuck between doors. I tucked him in and took out my wallet and swiped him down to the pillow of lobby, and thank the gods of maintenance or inspectorship, or of magnetic coercivity, he plummeted.

My sessh effects were sprawled along the hall, Tetbook concussed from tote. “If you’re seriously OK, help me pick all this up?”

The girl stayed just a heap, of grieved cheek and lusty gutturals, so I bent to collect my adapters, converters, pink highlighter, and then went to haul her up too — but her hands wouldn’t have mine — she refused to reach out and meet me. Though this wasn’t because of trauma, rather it was because the touch of an auslander male was prohibited: her daddy or hubby or whatever could touch, he could strike her, but her savior was — haram.

“What room number are you?”

No reply or no number?

“Speak English? The zimmernummer, your numéro de chambre?”

But why would she slink back to the suite of a beater? — beyond that, would a controlfreak batterer let her have her own key?

“Let’s call Security? Do you have any family you can stay with?”

Nothing, and I even tried in Hebrew — gevalt.

She stayed down on all fours just wiping her face with a black cloth, which then again became her veil — and her face was gone, and then she was gone, spurning me crawling around a corner.

Her mouth, at least, was beautiful. All of me that was not my mind was virtuous, blameless.

Rewrite this all. Bottom to top.

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The Khaleej’s stairs were strictly service, in case of emergency, power outage. Their utility proved a moral instruction. An ethics of exertion. The soul antipode of the resort leisured around them.

There was no carpeting so profanely plush that rougher rugs had to be placed upon it for prayer, no marbles so carnally veined as to recall the flesh — they were purging, spiritually purifying. Unventilated, sweltering.

10 flights of 10 steps each, count their discipline down.

The fluorescence hummed penance, absolved the walls of their materials: scuffed, costcut, asbestic. Breathe in, breathe out, relax. But my wind wasn’t up to even an intellectual exercise. My lungs were tight, legs, feet, it’s my hand that I’m sure was broken. Typing with my nose. The last two flights were huffed.