Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

“Shookrun,” I said, which extended the full courtesy of my fluency, transliterating “thank you.” I tipped him one euro and one quid, the last linty currency I had, and he sneered, withdrew shook running.

The offering, uncovered, was all garnish, preservatived herb celebrating a premature gestation. Not yet brought to term and so borne with dill and parsley.

Rate the Catering? One star charred. Cleanliness? 10 out of 10, but only because turndown’s been forbidden me, by Principal.

Please remit any suggestions in the space below provided:/S’il vous plaît donnez des suggestions dans le champ ci-dessous:/Bitte geben Anregungen in das dafür vorgesehene Feld unten:

Merci, danke, thanks — sheikh’s rume? chic room? Standardized transliteration of pleasantries might empower guests, and encourage their engagement with local culture. Elevator 2 of the north bank should be fixed. All mall escalators should be steep enough to get a wisp of female crotch in purdah. Countries that practice online censorship evince a higher incidence of sexual assault, and a lower level of political literacy, or else it’s vice versa. Ratib was quite simply the best Ratib I’ve ever encountered.

That survey card was my bookmark. I covered the inedible creature as if extinguishing an altar, returned to the Korans.

But the Don’t Disturb had fallen from the knob, was sticking its laminate edge through the draft.

\

Just as I was about to replace it, another knock. Once, timorous.

It was Ratib returned, I guessed, working up the nerve to blackmail a better gratuity out of me. Good for you, Ratib! go get him (go get me)!

The doorcom monitor showed only a fuscously cloaked dessert cart.

I opened, and made way for her. The chalk was still at her back.

She was a darkling abaya bag, with a cheap overbuckled overzippered velcronated aluminum missile of a case she dropped by the closet.

I leaned into the hall and the rooms numbering upways and the rooms numbering downways were peaceful, and outside their doors platters of blistered doughy pistachio sweets slumbered through their rots alongside the drycleaning and laundry and men’s shoes awaiting polish.

Inside again, lock chain slotted deadbolt, I said, “Your husband?”

She was standing between the chairs, speaking Arabic to them — to me. There are some people who pick up languages fast, there are some people who pick up love fast. But I can be only one of them. Too late.

I said, “Mari?”

She held out her hands, held her fingers apart like her nails were still wet from their dip in the sea — and she went for the stitching, and revealed her face.

Or what of it there was around the sunglasses she was wearing: giant outlandish mosquito moonspecs, their pricetag hanging by a thread. Her injuries seeped a shade matching their lensing.

I’m going to try transcribing what she said, I’m going to try doing every other thing to her, decently: “je veux divorcer,” and then she said something “rien à foutre”—and then something in Arabic again? “khanith”?

I said, “Did you decide to get divorced before he hit you or is this just today’s development? Peut-être he’s been hitting you forever?”

She cried, and my arms led my steps to her, but she recoiled and took off her glasses, and her eyes — haven’t I read that certain Semitic languages never distinguish blue from green? Hebrew does — but what about Arabic? Her ears had no earrings, no holes.

“You sure you weren’t — vous a-t-il followed here by anyone?”

“Je serai toujours seule.”

She stood by the east of the bed and I stood by the west and what was between us was all that sharia blanket she was tangled in.

But even switching directions, changing the poles — stand me by the east, stand her by the west — what was between us was blacker: our ages. Also the sense that my interest in her was erotic because she was also, or merely, exotic — though Rach would knock that down and call racism, if she’d burst into this room just now to find this woman, this girl, Muslim, pretty young and gorgeously wed, facing me across the bed and quivering.

She’d been gathering up her hem, and I circled around and helped her lift it over her head. All she had on underneath was her underwear, which was torture: iron maiden panties, spiked bra.

She took my hands, and laughed, the laughter swollen, “Lentement.”

Don’t worry—“Je ne vais pas hurt you! je ne pourrai jamais hurt you! No pain, no pain.”

Her cheekwound blushed, and yet that blushing was also its bandage. Below the unmentionables she was still in her heels.

She was warm to my touch but how to say shy? just traduce to timide?

Still, let the opposite room eavesdrop, let anyone peep into our window from a wraparound suite. I didn’t care — I didn’t drop blinds or slip drapes.

Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop — Psalms were about to pour out of me.

“Vous?”

“Josh,” I said.

“Vous habillé.”

“Je vais me undressed, clothes off, unhabillé, déshab.”

She fussed with her hair, braided it into a fuse. “Lentement.”

Slow, but slowly, I declothed. Though I was shit unfit, though I was every bit as fucking fit as her husband.

She had to her an overbite of hesitation.

\

Meekness, humility — terror. She sat on the bed terrified in puffed diaper and padded bra. And seizing the elastic, and faltering. Squeezing at the clasps. Like she’d never worn undies before. Like someone else had put them on her, some enemy. Packed her nylon cups to an underwire straining, rigged posterior casings with C-4 plastique. And I wanted her to do it now, I wanted her to just detonate herself and get it over with — launch all the lethal payload that was fertilizing her: shrapnel nail and screw and poisoned syringe.

Blasting me away, blowing us both through the floor, and ticking through the igniferous floors below it, bombing the lobby at mortal checkout — bringing the hypostyle to crash, the arches to collapse, atop a cuneiform of limbs and kilim tatters and fragments of the monogrammed blazon of Allah that’d pendulated over the interactive pillars. Imagine, amid the settling dust, a providentially inviolate vase from which a single peacock feather — drifted.

“Vous étrange,” she said.

“Non.”

She shuddered. “Oui, vous.”

“Non je ne suis pas regardez you strange.”

My last wish before I submitted: let her explosion scramble this diary so that everything will read like my French.

She shimmied out of the bra, let it fall — without a flash, without immolation. No martyr.

Then she tugged the panties down, stopping at the calves to shed the heels before continuing.

She wasn’t shaved. Not in any of her pits.

I was holding in my hands this wild mother of a bone.

Rach would be familiar with the feeling, Principal would be too. This feeling of unveiling. To unveil the next product. To lift the curtain on the new.

I went slowly with her below me and then I was behind her and not slow.

Her name was Izdihar, so Izi, so Iz.

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