Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

If you meet the Buddha along the way

destroy him

by obtaining his confidences

and then making them available publicly.

Fuck Kali

the headseverer

[Are you feeling OK?]

Whatevs. Or whatever your wife would say.

[Why don’t we break?]

No, no. Here, take your Tetbook back, here. No. Keep the memcard, the stick. No. Eject it and return it.

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[Feel or Jesus tell you yet? Or Myung? Fucking Kori Dienerowitz’s flown into Dubai. He just ambushed me down on the beach.]

Rovery. Ranting. Rambling gamblers gambol in the brambles. With ferry fare fairly free travelers trip with fashionable frequency twixt two temples on the Terekhol.

[OK — but what’s Kor doing, besides fucking this up? What have you not told me?]

About what? Can you name us another multinational corporation tech or rec assetized at north of $90 billion that has not done a favor or two for the governments of every country in which it operates, just hoping not to provoke conflict with the foreign policy of the country in which it is based and the majority of its investors hold citizenship?

[It’s time that you came clean.]

What did we say? We are never without a system. We are telling according to plan. What did we leave off with?

[Moe, the hanging, you still have to finish that, hold on, “… destroy him by obtaining … the self in exchange …”]

We hate our voice. We hate the babiedness in it, the infantile spanked whine, pedolalia. A lacking something sound. An always disagreeing with something sound. To rewind, to replay, the loathing just procreates. As like to be reborn, which is also to redie.

The alternative is to avatar, replicate the self, which

Moe used to say, whatever happens in life always remember that the worst tragedy is already behind us, the end of immortality with the beginning of sex. Once there had been singlecelled organisms capable of eternally replicating by dividing, by splitting, and the replications gradually sought protective symbiosis in colonies that civilized into multicellular organisms. But then an evolutionary drive to succeed emerged among them, and ultimately compelled them to mate with others of their kind in order to eliminate mutation and competition in the propagation of the very best of their kind. Though with each reproduction the essence of the progenitors was becoming less and less evident in their progeny, who grew into separate lifeforms entirely, conscious of their mortality and aware that their only consolation for that and for having their own offspring who would be so different and ungrateful was the fact that reproduction was sex for them, and sex for them was pleasurable.

But then to be able to enjoy the sex without receiving that propagation benefit, that might be the next phase in evolution, homosexuality, which Moe never pursued, or bisexuality, which we

Moe thought future humans would become as like the ardhanari or Hindu intergender gods, but with larger and thicker skulls that would shield their brains from being microwaved by wifi.

Another thought Moe had was that because humans were now able as like a species to digest lactose past childhood, in the future they would be able to breastfeed themselves too and survive through adulthood on that alone.

Telephone poles always made him pensive. With everything going mobile, he worried about what would happen to them.

Maybe they would become effigies. Maybe they would be worshipped.

The cardinal difference between Buddhist and Hindu incarnation doctrines is that Buddhism does not believe in a soul, but in a mind that transfuses our successors, and in a body that decomposes as like biosphere. Hinduism, however, believes in the soul, which determines

Moe related the situation of the individual Buddhist to the situation of a computer that lacked a memory. Which would not be a computer at all, but

Dire, our condition was dire. M-Unit brought in the Stanford shrink, who was cur about investing in a Tetration IPO, the Stanford shrink brought in homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, aromachologists, who were cur about our investing in their research. Pulse electromagnetic field therapy. Enerpathic and liquid mineral stimulation of adrenals. Entheogen solutions for aboulia and immunocompromise. Bhang, ayahuasca, venoms.

We fake slept through Aunt Nance, weak without her sarcasm, consulting a chelationist for advice on how to treat her joint inflammation. Then we were asleep.

We had dreams. We will not discuss them.

Mat Plokta and Trey Kerner chased us through an arcade while calling us “cholesterol.” They threatened to beat us until we turned into “testosterone.” Then we were in this stadium cafeteria that was not at Stanford, but it was, there were tons of students and every time anyone recognized and was recognized by anyone else, both of them grew taller, wider, everyone scrambled for their friends, which was awkward, as like everyone grew, they bumped one another, bumped heads. We had to dodge their shoes, we were friendless, we reached up to their shoelaces. Next we dreamt that Moe would not let us play a game that involved arranging very small cards, facedown, on the squares of a chessboard, we asked him why, he said, “Because it is unfair, you are a computer.” We asked him to at least explain the rules, he said, “You either obey me, or you obey me while pretending to understand me.” Next we had a dream about a taco, D-Unit was the vendor, it was a bull taco with guac and salsa and yellow shredded cheddar wires, and just before we bit into it D-Unit snatched off a papertowel and placed it atop our head as like a yarmulke. He said a blessing, but he said it in BASIC, or LISP.

Then there was this low rumble, and a whiny grating. The sofabed shook, the entire room shook. It was the garagedoor, below us, grinding along its track, opening, closing, remotely. M-Unit and Aunt Nance drove off.

They had their volunteering to do, counseling the families of queer minors, coaching tolerance, coaching love.

We got up, folded the sofabed, folded the robe. This was all robotic, this was the fanaticism of the robotic. We went downstairs and dredged the drawers for the phonebook. Flipped through to Places of Worship. We skimmed the entries, recognized the addy, the number associated. We must have put on clothes, because we had our rollerblades on and were blading to the rabbis.

We rolled out of the BART station at Powell Street and through the Tenderloin, from Market, to Turk, to Laguna, and Bush Street. We did not know what we were doing, but then we did not know what D-Unit had been doing either, praying with the Hasidics, or praying to the Hasidics, driving the 20 minutes, 40 minutes in traffic, each way, just to make a minyan. He did not believe in anything. But he believed in showing up.

It was a grand old slammed to shit synagogue, littered, tagged, bird shit and bird nests around the decalogue windows. We knocked until a Fujian janitor was at the door telling us to come back at no time we comprehended, and so we coasted around until dusk or so, the momentary jolt of passing under lamps and having them flash on.

The far curb was all comppeople peers of peer age with incomplete facial hair, chip earrings, 3D glasses type glasses. They hung apart from the hippie men bald but with gray ponytails, hippie women gray to the knees. We crowded between them into a foyer smogged with incense. The signage was Sinitic. Half the people might have been half Jewish. This had definitely stopped being a synagogue.