Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Cohen’s dormroom was small and blank and the smallness appealed to him, because it meant less to clean, but the blankness, the scuffed emptiness, provoked. He couldn’t understand why the school provided each student with a bed and chair and desk, but didn’t continue that determinism into wall decoration. Beyond that, he couldn’t understand why his was the building’s only single, and suspected it was because he had just enough personality to be left alone, but either too many or too few personalities to have a roommate. Or else, he suspected, the registrar or bursar’s office regarded his unit as vacant — because he wasn’t even enrolled — he hadn’t accepted, hadn’t been accepted, to begin with.

Cohen’s neighbors were roommates, a double—Cullen de Groeve and Owmar O’Quinn [INTRODUCE LATER]. On one of their walls was a map of the Bay Area, on another was a batik likeness of Einstein, and so after a visit to the Salvation Army on Veterans Boulevard that’s how Cohen furnished his own, with an MTA map of New York City, and an 8×10 glossy photo of “Dick Feynman,” whom he wouldn’t have recognized without the autograph, “To promising physicist [sic], best wishes, Dick Feynman.”

Cohen’s major was math. Class was Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, while Wednesdays were seminars rotating around a diffuse array? range? of topics — logic, number theory, algebraic and symplectic geometries — followed by research group: he worked in probability before the possibilities of game theory lured him [WITH WHAT/HOW?]. [“We worked on statistics. Decidability, duction. Pattern recognition, precision and recall. Allocations, nomials. If you want to get granular, ergodicity, Gaussian distributions and masked Markovistics, processes and models. If you want to get übergranular, asymptotic properties of the entropy of stationary data sources with applications to data compression.”]

Cohen applied that education to his own private scheduling but found his interests and commitments difficult to reconcile with classtime and his major’s requirements. He’d be awake for days, “jagging” lists of things to do, then doing the things on the lists, “jagging” lists of the solids he ate and the liquids he drank, lists of his urinations and bowel movements, of his Carson and Family Ties catchup consumption on the TV nextdoor, and his inability to sleep, as publicized by his nextdoor neighbors, who, wall and door aside, effectually became his roommates, caused the other students in Stern to presume he had an addiction to amphetamines, and caused two upperclassmen who presumed he was dealing amphetamines to try and get him to pledge AEPi [until what?] — which resulted, in turn, in the alternate personas Cohen assumed/adopted: speed addict, speed dealer, and eventually, a third persona, speed pharmacologist, which itself became, soon enough, the fourth, the inventor of a new speedy drug whose name he kept changing [to/from what?], and whose substance he refused to sell to anyone.

Cohen, who hadn’t yet resigned himself to not having an identity, would assimilate the identities of others:He was also a horticulturist Buddhist (he kept bonsai junipers), a retired skateboarder forced out of the competition circuit by knee injury (he affected a limp), a manically verbigerant mediaphile — in which he spoke only in the dialogue of female characters from John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies — and a brand ambassador, in which he would monthly choose a new product, an edible or drinkable, a wearable or widget, and would buy it and use it publicly and remark on how great it was to everyone around him in inordinate terms such as, “Powerade is deliciously refreshing, dude,” or, “Powerade is refreshingly delicious, dude,” enough so that people began assuming —he never disabused them—that he was a paid spokesperson, an influential marketing covertly to students.

[“]The roommates[”] were in on this, and would help with the ruse: Cullen de Groeve’s parents were [astoundingly?] wealthy executives for Timex, living in Hong Kong, and so always had new gadgets they’d give Cullen, who’d give them to Cohen to show around [de Groeve’s father had been an engineer with Casio and Seiko who’d sequelized the calculator watch before being hired as senior vicepresident, manufacturing/supply chain, with a mandate to bring Timex into the digital future, while his second stepmother, who’d been Playboy ’s Miss December 1976, handled the company’s Asian press relations]. Owmar O’Quinn was a scholarship case from [which?] Philadelphia projects[— his father worked Sanitation, his mother for Corrections — ]who out in California had to support himself working for a market research business, Concentives, as a mystery shopper, browsing through regional shoppingcenters, falsely p/matronizing their stores as a fake consumer in order to collect information and make report on the behavior of retail staff: whether they offered assistance, or attempted to upsell him, whether they offered free wrapping or shipping or respected feigned allergies and lactose intolerances. To maintain his cover,In each store O’Quinn was supposed to buy a small product, an item under $5, and though the $5 and under items he bought were usually just sneaker shoelaces or sweatbands, energy bars or weightlifting shakepowders, he also managed to shoplift, advantaging the eccentric costumes he’d designed for himself to conceal goods more expensive and so more likely to garner bids on the secondary market , though the fragrances he stockpiled, in the unlikely event of a girlfriend. He’d dress as a woman, or affect a traditionally blackAfrican American manner of speaking — O’Quinn being half blackAfrican American, and half Irish — in a bid to remain unrecognizable to the staff on repeat visits.

The merchandise O’Quinn lifted, like de Groeve’s gizmos, served as props in Cohen’s campaigns.

[A SENTENCE OR TWO RE: THE EVOLUTION OF “STARTUP CULTURE”? BECAUSE WITHOUT IT THIS’LL SEEM WEIRD?] “Startup” culture hadn’t even begun yet — it was online that enabled that, and launched a billion geosocial sex apps and digital currencies [developed in rented frathouses fetid with ass and backyarded with lenticular pools]. Before then, students and even faculty were content to collaborate on products the university would own and market: CAD modelers for the automotive industry, analysis and trading platforms, system emulators, military simulators. With the university’s computers prioritized for class projects, personal projects had to be pursued on personal computers — inadequate, DOS incompatible, RAM/ROM inexpansible, intramural. In 1989 [or 90?], the year online debuted, Cohen, O’Quinn, and de Groeve had only one unit among them — de Groeve’s: a Gopal Ovum 1000, which retailed for $4800[, which today would be over $9300?].

[“It was this 16 bit at 2.8 MHz 1.125 MB 256 KB round white cow egg. Fugly. We do not mean to fellate our competition by confessing that our future partners executed their juvenilia on its equipment. As like Gopal does everything else by itself, from its chips to the antitampering sixpointed screws that entail an antitampering sixpointed screwer, let it administer its own fellatio. All the rich kids at Stanford had a Gopal, all the kids at Stanford were rich, RAMateurs, ROMateurs, who craved the shelter of an impermeable shell OS and whose only other computing requirements were to sound and look cool with 32 oscillators, 640 × 200 resolution. Anyway, we were not in competition with them then or now, and never will be. Gopal already had over $2 billion in annual revenue but our dominance was math, we knew bigger numbers, we knew the biggest. We tasted our dominance even while economizing on a daily diet of one pineapple nectar and one pita sliced midsagittally into devaginated halves and spooned with marshmallow fluff.”]