Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

I scrolled down below the dross:

uy387456: “ perfect post!! 2 increase yr traffic click here.”

therightfootfwd: “ i subscribed to this feed and will check new posts. for bargain footwear and related content click here. ”

StrongL80s: “ happiness happens. be yourself today tenaciously. ”

I’d always presumed StrongL80s — and Nokiddushing, and Challahatyourgirl, and others — were all just Rach, cheerleading herself tenaciously.

The next and last was it: the only comment I hadn’t already read, the only comment I hadn’t already reread, was another from “KORDIE”:

“ wtf? taking my plane leaving me behind in ras alkhaimah ummmm alquwain wtf? im just concerned 4 the both of u. the truth must not be evaded. trust me yre in waaaay over yr head. download this 2 contact me now. ”

\

I got up out of the chair, tried to find the remote — where was it? if I were a remote where would I be? Wriggling myself across pins and needles to the entertainment system, to switch it on manually, then reembedding myself, constantly switching my alignment to face the east that was west, the west that was — comfort.

Insomniac, I defaced every direction — every qibla, or mihrab. All prayers point to the Saudis.

Each time the muezzin came through the curtains — sounding throughout the city, resounding and vibrating — each time he pronounced, I heard Rach. Her old ringtone.

That voice. It wasn’t recorded, but live. Both bodiless and hoarse. Arabesque. The voice that turns lattices to speakers. That speaks the very fretwork. While rising and falling like an arch. The sound of calligraphy, of cacography.

I listened, I lay and listened while watching the default channel, as the face of the sheikh wiped onscreen — a screensaver, a sheikhsaver.

Then a dissolve, to a stock image of Medina. Minarets around a vert dome. The sheikh returned, superimposed. A dissolve again, to a stock image of Mecca: caravanserai encircling the Kaaba, that brute granite tabernacle that holds paradise inside it and grants wisdom to all — in its big black squareness it even looked like a datacenter.

Again with “the sheikh”—or “king”—the lexicon kept changing, or else the man himself refused to be defined. Ruler of the petrols we’re passing for flight. Ruler of the electrified high celestials. Guardian of freon, and of the urinals that flush in the sky.

I wondered how he’d receive Principal: desert hospitality mandates feetwashing, the watering of camels, a meal (the guests served first and best), the best bed and first choice of concubine (supplies limited). A prudent host would also provide the translation.

The sheikh would speak, would describe an immense palace of utterance, and only when finished, only when utterly finished, would he let the interpreter render. A dictatorial practice, Koranic in a sense. Unless the totality has been communicated, nothing has been communicated. A single misunderstanding flaws it all.

Or else maybe the sheikh would break his speech into units, bits and bytes and girih tiles, pausing between each to demonstrate his authority, in the guise of generosity — pausing between each to allow his interpreter, scrounging on hands and knees, tongue thrust in concentration, to clean it up. To lick the words up from the limen, and spit out again a perfect reproduction mosaic.

But then perhaps the sheikh would say nothing at all, and just sit enthroned, while his interpreter stood and spoke for him: either words the sheikh supplied the interpreter with prior to this audience, or words the sheikh never supplied — the interpreter recast as a prophet and the sheikh becoming an oracle or dream.

Then again, the ultimate would be if there were no sheikh whatsoever: the sheikh could pose as his own interpreter, or the interpreter could pose as the sheikh, who was absent from this audience because too important, or too senile, or even deceased, and so the interpreter who claimed to represent him was just representing himself.

I wrapped my hand in a washcloth, prepped for my next sessh with Principal. Stretched for the ascent.

There were a lot of steps ahead of me. And each vital to mastering the next.

://

To fall for this Arabess is forbidden, but nowadays to fall for any woman you can’t search up online is forbidden. How else to snoop her? how else to send her around?

Her life had been set to Private.

Her mouth, a pool of jewel set in bodied blackness. The modesty mullahs sure know what they’re doing, insisting that the less I know of a woman, the more I want to know, I need to know.

She’d reserved a full floor in my memory, without giving a number, without giving a name. I had no wasta, and only this chance. Though even if I’d manage to baksheesh the compjockeys at resort IT, it’d be too suspicious to ask after her, I’d have to ask after him, the rolypoly ayatollah, the offensive effendi. Claim him a prospective investment partner. Invest him in my claim. Either that or I’d appeal to Principal to hack the Khaleej dbase and ransack the records. No other sources to cultivate. Just desert.

Instead of excavating around the site, exposing its ramparts, I decided to go down, foundationally. I dug myself into the lobby, and sifted through the drifters, the dunes motioned around me — humpy dumps in full hijab.

The women who passed compelled attention by tighter fits, which were pregnancies, and heelless shoes, so as not to slight their escorts. Kitchen slippers, or wrung through the laundry slippers and then, open toes.

Hints of tint from the fingers. Ten drips of an esoteric ultramarine.

The purdah population must’ve boomed overnight (or else I’ve just grown the appropriate antenna).

I was muftied again in my predistressed jeans, flannel over I heart NY tee, sitting on a tulipary divan between the elevatorbanks and pretending to compute. I clicked for a speech I’d consulted on for the mayor’s office: New Urbanism & the Future of Energy. But energy has an unlimited future, and it’s humanity that doesn’t have even a horizon on the horizon: “The city seeks Albany’s pledge to develop solar, wind, and hydroelectric capabilities in both the Hudson and East Rivers within the next decade”—this was laughable, rather, depressing, reading this in a Gulfside palace powered not by sun, wind, or water but by fossils, whose government ownership would go sustainable only if that meant going nuclear. Scrolled through a few old journo squibs: reviews of books about homosexuality and Cubism, about German dodecaphonists in America, and then a profile of an Israeli novelist dedicated to answering “The Palestinian Question,” a kaddish eulogy overpraising an overpriced deli upon its shuttering.

Went through my résumé, exaggerating credentials for the main search — the job search — to come. I rattled the filechains, unfettered the inbox. Wrote: draft emails to two lawyers Lana had recommended, ridiculous (one Levin, the other Levine), to decline a Rosh Hashanah dinner and/or Yom Kipper break fast invite from the managing ed of jewe.com, to thank Cal and Finn for the porn. Loaded the porn. Cal — gratitude retracted — had sent a pic of a grossly obese man having his foreskin licked by a dog having its foreskin licked by a cat. Finn — apologies in order — had sent a vid. Long. Loading. Taking so long to load the old me could’ve buffered twice already (the new me couldn’t fathom ever buffering again).

Black. She emerged from the car. I knew it was her, because she knew it was me. She startled — facelessly — turned away, turned back but clung to her guide.

She was being minded not by her husband but by a more voluminous rotundity — a floating dome, like of a mosque, but undergoing reconstruction. An old woman scaffolded with a cervical collar, and an ungainly plastic and titanium orthotic — a bootcast.