Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Moe did not attend this meeting either, but should have. The drive should have been going into production already.

[You were in touch with him? I mean — what were you doing all this time?]

That was just about the time of the letter, which had been addressed to us and brought by post. A globally synched humanbased delivery system.

Point is, a letter had been delivered but not to The Clingers, where we still had the condo, neither to Sierra Vista, where we had rented this vinylsided cyanobacterially roofed crashpad to be maximally proximal to the Tetplex, nor c/o the Tetplex whose treemail has always been envelopes of anthrax flour and lipsticked postcards from deathrow, but c/o M-Unit and Aunt Nance. M-Unit, who had called Super Sal who had called us to his phone, was apologizing for the snailish delay. The letter had been posted to their previous Palo Alto addy and so had to be fwd: d to their current Berkeley addy. Also, they had been away. M-Unit had never told us she was going, but insisted she had. They had mediated Eritrea, sabbaticalized Ghent.

We told M-Unit, drag to trash, it was just another beardy luddite demanding a ransom on our sanity. Though if she were feeling in her citizen mood, she might dial the FBI or the CDC.

Either way, we said, she would have to get used to our new profile, inure herself to philatelic harassment and Safeway bags of ricin left on the porch.

M-Unit countered with accusations of Chomskyism, or megalomania, and said that any fellow creature who had gone through the trouble of postage was due an audience, respect.

“Open it yourself.”

“We do not open mail that is not for us,” M-Unit said.

Aunt Nance, on the study extension, “But you steamed that Dutch envelope of mine, just for an offer to lecture on Baathist Clientelism at The Hague.”

“We do not get involved in conversations that do not involve us,” M-Unit said.

What Aunt Nance humped downstairs and unsealed was a normcore AAA roadmap to Delaware, DC, Maryland, Virginia. A handwritten line joined Fort Meade to McLean, from the middle of which another line went south to drown in the Potomac and make a T.

M-Unit offered that the postmark was San Jose, CA, 95126.

But the return addy was Pruristac, which does not exist except as like a midden of shellfish shells, a lost original Ohlone settlement on the margin of Pacifica.

[So Moe or someone impersonating Moe sent you some roadmap of the nation’s capital? Why through the post, though — he’d never heard of email?]

He had.

This was toward November. That cold warm clouding toward November. Fog in advection, wet light deresolutioning into darkness by noon. The Bay getting to resemble itself on the billboard.

Everyone was feeling this weather as like confirmative of STrapp fail and so a Keiner renege on the balance of our funding. That at least was the chatter in the corridor and at the end of the corridor the office of Kor was empty. Kor was never around. The claim was the common coryza. Or a stomach flu. Everyone chattered and wheezed.

The office of Kor, we had always avoided going inside.

[Wait, hold up — I’m not seeing the connection. What does all this have to do with a map?]

The office of Kor, we had always avoided going inside. A showercurtain hung over the threshold, indicating a total availability to staff. We approached that clearish nylon sheet, and handled it carefully because the rod was not bolted but wedged between jambs and so would fall if tugged. The shelving units were empty then, as like they were waiting for their contents. Groundbreaking shovels from the African techschools we would finance, Taiwanese Olympic pingpong team jerseys, putters that decided the Masters, the key to the city of Sderot. Nothing Kor had any relationship to, just fealty from admirers, dignitary tribute, rubberplant, spiderplant, fern, ficus.

We picked up his phone and called Moremory in Cupertino, asked for Moe, who was not available.

We asked for Kor, and the lobby bot without any sardonics replied that Kor was available only at the number we were calling from.

November the policy changed.

[Fucking stop — you’re going to have to slow the fuck down and explain this to me. You suspected Kor of hanging around Moremory to crack whip on Moe and make sure the product shipped?]

November the policy changed. The new deal was no meetings. Kor had sent the email, which Cullqui fwd: d approvingly, and Quicull fwd: d disapprovingly, but we had also received the missive directly from Kor. We responded to such redundancies with an email reminding them of their founder status, which, if it had no other perk, at least signed a blank check re: scheduling. Cullqui replied all complaining about our tone, cc: ing Kor, bcc: ing Moe. Quicull replied all complaining back, cc: ing Moe, bcc: ing the Soviets.

We neglected to mention that we had taken to regarding them not as like friends anymore but a conformant unit, which we called Cullqui if they sided with Kor, and Quicull if they sided with us. We called them that mentally, then increasingly aloud.

We found ourselves unable to control our impatience and so went into the shared Tetcal and filled a convenient blankness, which turned out to be Thanksgiving.

The meeting would be a Culloquium, a Quiocullum, calendared for Founders Only, and for everyone else not a founder to worry about. Its only agenda would be to assert that it was still our prerogative to have one. A meeting or agenda. Cull and Qui canceled tofurkey carving with Roland, Toole, Posek, Syskin, and their consociate SOs. We had not been invited to that potluck. M-Unit and Aunt Nance spent their holidays of Puritan hegemony at the Korean spa.

The building 1 meetingroom had just been finished. It was paneled in slabs of gleaming serpentine that approx 140 million years ago had erupted from the mantle of the earth to become the crust of the Pacific that deformed it into greenness and receded, as like California rose. The mineralizations matched across the slabs, their quartz as like polished static. Everything, carpeting to knobs to handles, gave shocks. The table was sequoia, a crosssectioned stump obtained sustainably from a tree timbered dead outside Yosemite, the rings showing evidence of approx 620 years of fires and storms, after which we always lost count. Its glossy varnish was set with saddlethemed leather chairs.

Qui showed, and he stood, until Cull showed, and they sat, opposite each other, and so we sat too, but because the table was round all us CoFos were at opposites. CoFounders.

We opened by announcing Tetrateer of the Quarter, Salvatrice, who had just had a baby. Super Sal had Tetblasted about it, which was next item, a zero tolerance policy for all vanity Tetblasts.

Qui and Cull said nothing, so we declared a moment of silence to reflect on the genocide of the precolumbian peoples.

Kor, who would ordinarily facilitate our meetings, had introduced a practice of docking the pay of any Tetrateer who interrupted him, prorating the sum by time lost to interruption weighted by employee number. So, as like he lumbered through the door leveling our concentration, we figgered he owed us, despite his position. He had on jorts so short they were as like nonexistent below a long pouchy baja emblazoned with the Tetgram. We hated that insignia, TT, and hated its font, Fellahin Serif, designed by, immaterial. We hated “Your Site Never Dies, It Just Loses Rank,” “Never Hesitate 2 Tetrate,” “We Work 4 Free,” and “Tetriffic,” and hated the office contests too, Best Varint Reduction, Best Alt Use of Staplers, both of which we would have won except, immaterial. All were Kor initiatives.