Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

I shirked my Tetbook into the tote, approached. Sidled up alongside.

“Hello.”

Closer than would be considered normal even if she weren’t a she, or Arab.

They made a show of ignoring me, her most of all.

“Speak German? Speak French?”

She said nothing and her escort was just a gentle dumb hemisphere orbiting gravely.

I said, “Pretend no one else is in this lobby — you with me?” I tried to hold her pace, her general area of face. “It’s just the two of us, remember?” I gestured at my chest, sashed by the totestrap in the getup of a eunuch.

She whispered what I took to be “English.”

I said, “What are you up to today?”

The equatorial plumpness next to her shushed, Arabized a spate comprehensible internationally as disapproval.

I said, “Today?”

“No English,” she said, mine.

“Mari?”

“No.”

“Frau oder Mädchen?”

“Jaloux jaloux mon mari.”

This was like a Russian novel already, this French, this German — excessive, dumm, imbécile.

The chaperoning mother — or mother inlaw? or an eldest prima wife who’d been hurt in an unpreventable domestic accident of her own? — scolded in gutturals, tsks, and sped them ahead, her boot’s clunkery punctuating my failure.

\

No matter how much they’ve traveled, most whites have had this experience abroad — especially in the darker countries. These people — these dimnesses, darknesses — are interchangeable, the white tourist thinks, they’re cognate, coincident, synonymical. The inner life as impenetrable as its outer pigmentation. Black is bad, the color of evil, a stain or taint. A cancer. Red is bestial. Brown is shit. Yellow is piss timid.

But then inevitably our traveler comes to know someone — maybe only his waiter, maybe only his maid. He might even, let’s hope, come to have sex with someone, for love or money, for both, and — when the fascination ends, when the package tour ends — is either confirmed or disabused, ashamed of his initial bias or not.

I followed — what should I dub her? should I set up an online presence for her, have Aar and Cal vote on a name?

Like her, dislike her, track her as favorite — through the Khaleej’s lobby, through a garish consecution of kufic script scannables and projected ads that connected practically and thematically the resort complex with the mall.

Gaudy antiseptic fountains, cacti to deter loitering, boulders whose size trafficked toward sales. Palms marked the passageways fronding radially from the central bourse. The mall had planted only species native to the Americas, as if to boast, to brag, to demonstrate what was feasible — not just the acquisition but the thriving. The trees grew, amid the frigidity, they prospered and grew, and the abayas were their fruit, ripely contused — the proper plural of abaya? abayat?

Their color scheme was basic black. The fall collection, also the winter, spring, and summer collections in this desert without season. They were bolts of black cloth unrolling. Items strayed off the rack. Some silk, some chenille. All blended.

The women made a hajj to a windowdressed concourse, whose mannequins matched them in chador before lightening up and becoming hysterical, gruesomely festooned in chiffon plastron and crape carapace, billowing with metalline polyester, lycra strapped to masks — garments that called attention to the fact that their wearers weren’t supposed to be calling attention to themselves. Fashion was taking chances so these ladies wouldn’t have to — these ladies swathed in pockets to be worthy by comparison, still devaluing themselves by comparison.

If a girl was just in an abaya and shayla, she judged the girls who were in veils too, who judged others of their retinue for having veils with more or less stylish coverage.

My girl’s covering was just some bag. Some upsidedown insideout unadorned bag. She was wearing its reflection in every display. She was wearing the windows that reflected her and the vain commerce behind them and then instead of a face, my own.

Her old woman companion finished unbunching her beardy niqab from her collar, and swiveled her head around its scant range — but I stepped behind a kiosk.

\

Decency protocols flashed me — from the HD panels battenmounted above, whose programming looped Islam’s conduct and sumptuary guidelines and a fanatic advisory about creditcard addiction and the abominations of debt. A You Are Here dot danced on an interjacent panel, damning me to the haram department — an annex beyond ahkam, a demilitarized or greenzone accepting dollars, its boutiques stocked with wares that on the homefront would be considered tame if transgressing only of taste, but that here transgressed nature itself and were risky even when folded, when hangered. Dresses cut to skirts, lingerie barely exceeding the size of the average customer’s vagina, what it’d take to muffle a mean set of nipples. Negligees, bustiers, girdles, diaphanous whisperweight giggling. The ladies stopped to admire, never to touch. At least I’m assuming it was admiration, though I wasn’t sure of what — the merch itself? or the confidence to be its consumer?

The outfits outfreaked only by the foreigners who purchased them: a eurobimbo bureau of diplobrat jetettes, drafty castle heiresses, and serial divorcée alimony phonies. Still, it takes volition to decide which products to buy. As my ladies passed, the parties exchanged glances, nods, sophisticated gynics. My ladies had no volition, and by contrast seemed like products themselves.

My abaya’s consort embraced her, then left — clumping that boot toward the domestic appliances arcade, accompanied by two other mosquerading matrons.

We were alone now, though still among a dozen. I had to focus. On her hefty swell, the way she shuffled at turns. Otherwise her abaya was so flowing that it trailed along the tile and obscured her stride, giving her the appearance of hovering.

She boarded a conveyor. I scurried alongside, tarrying at every passage break as she disembarked toward free sample demos of jewelry detarnishing solutions, displays of boudoir organizers, pyramid placements of woks and pans, rotating installations of cognoscente cutlery, magic flying bakingtrays and bathmats.

The ultimate stretch of pathway rose, became a ramp — I boarded — an ascending escalator of an escalating steepness leading to the mall’s upper tier, the uppermost skylit.

If stairs are the model life — prepared for any fate, whether up or down — the escalator is a step in the wrong direction. In one direction only. Like each day, like every day, its steps begin by staggering, only to end by flattening. They stagger, fall flat, then repeat.

I sought the highest sharpness.

As we rose, her shoes were exposed. Aqua heels. They were low heels, the lowest, which she stood in as if splashing around. They got a rise out of me nonetheless.

I clambered up the climbing — staying always four abayat, three abayat, two, behind.

\

Language is acquired only for the purposes of further acquisition — my abaya, my burqa, my burq. How much does this item cost? how much larger can it get than xxtra-large?

The ancient mystery faiths all held by this, that whosoever knows the name of a thing, owns that thing, and I’m convinced that’s true only by the truth of its reversal: that if you don’t know something’s name, that something owns you.

Because I was hers, and my tongue was the receipt. I kept pace to better appreciate belonging.

Her featurelessness was of a supernumerary tit atop tits, though in her strain to speed ahead a waist was shaped atop that ass. Swishy hips, thighs that rubbed. Becoming again all ass. Even her feet were ass. She was an ass in heels. One cheek to each, wobbling for balance.