Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

In 1909, with money he’d saved and income from Chava’s lacemaking, Yehoshuah purchased a building in Coney Island, Brooklyn — freezing cellar down below, living quarters up top — from which he’d deliver his ice to every borough, and even unto the wilds of New Jersey, where he buried Chava in 1918 (influenza).

A year later, their only son, the Americanized “Joseph”—who’d spent his late teens working nights for his father while attending Stuyvesant High School during the day, and his early 20s working days while attending City College at night — was married to Eve Leopold, a German American Jewess and fellow student at [City College? whose family, all of whom were involved with industrial refrigerator/freezer manufacturing, disapproved of the match, and attempted to snub Joseph by not taking him into the business, instead granting him a nonexclusive license to retail their products, which he did, to outstanding success, by exploiting the newly emerging home market, introducing puffs of the Russian Pale into American households by van and truck as far afield as Connecticut].

[Yehoshuah died in 1967, Joseph in 1977. Colon cancer — both?]

In 1930, Joseph and Eve had a daughter, Lily (accountant, d. 1998? how?), and, in 1933, a son, Abraham (named for Eve Leopold’s grandfather? great-uncle? Abraham Leopold, a pioneer of gas absorption technology? or aqua ammonia?).

“Abs” was a loving, and beloved, son — in true immigrant fashion, Joseph and Eve would have done anything for him, but in true first-generation American fashion, “Abs” had required nothing, and had accomplished all he had on scholarship: Harvard (bachelor’s in electrical engineering), MIT (SM, electrical engineering), Stanford (PhD, electrical engineering). 12 years of education had cost his parents nothing.

If Abs ever disappointed his parents it wasn’t with any computer coupling, rather with a coupling more personal [more what?].Joseph and Eve still held out hope that their son would return home after he finished his PhD, and Abs seemed to placate them throughout 1969 by interviewing for positions at IBM, Honeywell, Multics, and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman [was he offered any?]. But he had no intention of taking a job with any East Coast firm. Either because of the women out west, or the war in Vietnam.

Joseph’s pedes plani (flatfeet) had earned his deferral from WWI, and Abs had been too young for conscription into WWII, too II-S (enrolled in essential studies) for Korea , and old enough that by Vietnam he wasn’t fit for anything besides servicing mainframes[, which were the size of jungle temples, and brought napalm from the sky].

On Christmas Day 1969, Abs had accepted the only offer he’d been waiting for[, from the celebrated Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox-PARC]

On New Year’s Eve, 1970, two men wandered San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in a celebratory mood. Abs and Hal Lahasky had been rivals at Stanford, but now that both were newly minted PARCys, the time had come to be friends. Firecrackers were going off in the streets [WERE THEY?]. Love-beaded flower-children danced in the gutters with sparklers [DID THEY?]. The house [DESCRIPTION OF WOOD BOHEMIAN GINGERBREAD TRIM SF HOUSE] belonged to a cousin/friend of Lahasky’s, but the party going on inside it, spilling out onto the porch and the street, was so packed that Abs never met her/him, and lost Lahasky within a moment of arriving [REWRITE/CUT: NO LAHASKY].

Marijuana was being passed around, which Abs was used to, but then, judging by the [crazy bucknakedish people], there was also LSD. He avoided the punch and went for beer. People stood [at a distance from the hifi?] “drinking draft.” That’s what they told him the game was called. You drank the number of drinks of your draft number. Until you hit it, or died. Luckily, also unluckily, the numbers were low. Still, a guy [in a Mao suit?] had to be held standing by, or was trying for a piggyback ride from, a [pretty young] woman.

“Let me help,” Abs said.

“I got it,” she said, and slumped the guy up against a banister. “Chivalry is misogyny.”

Then she turned away just as he said, “And chauvinist on a double word score is 36 points in Scrabble.”

She paused, “Heavy.”

“And a pair of Yahtzee dice can be rolled in 36 combinations.”

“So you’re a [spaz/square]?”

“I’m 36.”

“That’s your draft number?”

“I mean I’m 36 years old.”

“Bummer.” [“far out”?]

A month before, on the first day of December, the Selective Service System — an agency of the US government responsible for staffing the armed forces — [had reached its omnipotent eagle’s talons into a dimestore fishbowl] and chosen 366 blue plastic capsules, each of which had been [impregnated] with a paper slip marked with a number corresponding to a day of 1944, which was a leap year. The first number drawn was 258, and the 258th day of that year was September 14. The last was 160, and the 160th day was June 8. Anyone born on June 8 got the highest draft number, 366, and would be among the last to be inducted, while anyone born on September 14 got the lowest, 1, and would be among the first —the other 364 days of 1944 all drew draft numbers between them.

A subsequent drawing was held with the 26 letters of the alphabet, to determine the order in which the men born on the same day would be called. The guy [in bellbottoms/pirate shirt] groveling at the woman’s [quilt skirt] had a birthday of October 26, which was the seventh number picked. His last name was Negrón, and N was the fifth letter picked, and his first was Witold, and W was the ninth. Witold Negrón had done seven shots [of rum?], then five, then nine. Then pounded a beer[?]. He was going to smuggle himself to Vancouver, and the woman told Abs she was considering tagging along.

Her name was Sari Le Vay, and she was a PhD student of comparative linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley[, at which she’d later teach linguistics and gender studies]. She was just finishing up her classwork but was finding it difficult to begin her dissertation [WHAT WAS ABS’S DISSERTATION? DID HE HAVE TO DO ONE?], she said. Her academic field was not respected, women the world over weren’t respected, the current party Central Committee in Hanoi had the lowest number of women of any socialist or communist governing body worldwide, zero, and beyond all that, it was like America had already slaughtered her boyfriend, whose body was laid out on the stairs. She rolled her own Bali Shag, drank Mohawk ginger brandy, popped bennies. She had opinions on how Bundists treated their wives and Trotsky treated the blacks. Self-determination was not a transitional demand. She’d registered Chicanos to vote in Oakland and dated them. Men and women both.

Out on the porch they pondered space. She had theories beyond MLK and the Kennedys. NASA landed on the moon, but it also controlled monsoon season. Kissinger sabotaged the peacetalks to tilt the election from Humphrey.

“Like this lottery shitcrock,” she said. “Like we’re all equal and even and fair in America and who gets picked to go die is just one big serendipity — I don’t think so. It can’t be an accident that everyone I know numbered low is either a minority or an immigrant. You’re a numbers guy — you check the numbers.”

That’s what Abs did the very next morning [BUT WHAT DID HE DO THE REST OF THE NIGHT?] — he found the numbers in The Stanford Daily [IN HIS APARTMENT OR?]. But they had nothing to do with minorities or immigrants. Though there was something about them still perturbing. Or something about Sari had left him smitten. He got her number out of the phonebook and wrote it down at the top of [a page]. Under it he listed all the draft numbers, in 29 rows for the shortest month, 31 rows for the longest, across 12 monthly columns, making a crippled square of days with 18 extras dangling at bottom [like orphans trying to hang onto a Huey whomping out of Saigon].