Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

[You’re implying that in violation of policy someone on the inside was volunteering suspicious tetraffic to law enforcement?]

Not someone. Rather Ranklin had been using Autotet. His Gopal Pro had synched multiple mobile devices he must have spent his entire Burger King fortune on. He had gone nosing into explosives, basically, and our algys lit the fuse by suggesting the rest.

[You’re implying that Autotet has a monitoring and reporting function?]

All who read us are read.

[But by humans or just machines?]

Myung was at the door again, with Kor and Nicky, the casual encounter partner of Kor. A textbook innocent bystander. Panamanian, drove towtrucks and helped motorists who locked their keys in their cars, you get the type. He got their keys out of their cars.

Kor never brought him with on travel and yet the Smithsonian was an exception. Nicky was a Lincoln buff and keen to tour.

Point being, the banquet.

Kor ordained a stroll. We tripped at curbs, barely kept it together. Kor went praising the monuments as like they were monuments to him. He granted approval to the duraturf, validated the marble horses.

It was lost on no one but Nicky that the server we were donating had last been modified by Moe.

He should have been with us in the greenroom, Moe, should have been onstage. He was. Hardware, the body left behind. And software is God, wandering, doubted, bloodless, able only to describe itself. Everything else from that vantage was niggly rectarded. Hi-res to the point of lo-res, distorted, overundercalculated. The vicepresident of America smiled, but it was not at us, it was at how guano crazy he had to be to assent to existence. Congress was just a gray repository that got its OS replaced with each election.

We were too small for a too big suit and our braided leather belt was extraneous. We had pronged an extra hole but it was too wide and the buckle kept slipping. We hate all belts. They stop us from being seamless.

Kor was the one who spoke. He had our PR rewrite Myung. Just for the record, Tetration employs struggling writers. We, for serious, give back. We would never have worked with any of them otherwise. Lax procrastors, writing their thrillers on the clock.

We got all woozy, after. Sweated over our salad, steadied ourselves by holding the breadplate. Held the airplane filet but we were grounded. Getting too close to the ground. We managed to arrange our napkin nicely before basically asking as like a baby asks to go to the bathroom. We had already made number one but then made number two balled in a corner halfway. The only reason we mentioned Nicky is because he found us on his way out for a cigarette. He had quit but it was difficult to stay quit while drinking. This was between us. Our head was also between us.

We sent him to get Jesus, Feel. Myung would tender Kor an excuse. E coli, salmonella. No hospital. Rest. We had passed out, this was the Smithsonian, in an alcove below a case displaying what we had taken for a basket but was we swear the headdress of Soto, grand chief of the Pomo tribe.

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[Let’s take a break. We can order up a bite, and I can tell you how I got my hand all mauled.]

Ibrahim Albadi.

[Who?]

Your friend from the elevator. From the hall. Franchisee, British Petroleum. Owns every BP station in Marseille. Or many of them. An Omani, flew through Roissy CDG on Etihad Airways Flight 340 with his Yemeni first wife.

[First wife?]

He loves her.

[He was beating the hell out of her.]

Do not let your fantasy jeopardize our book. He loves her very much.

[My fault for bringing it up …]

[… But it’s been a fucking ordeal, OK? This whole thing. This whole fucking desert of a summer. And now I’m supposed to what, assure you I wasn’t the one picking the fight with a polygamist polyabusing Arab? I have on the one hand, which might be broken, Rach, whose emails I haven’t responded to because of how busy we’ve been to where I’m sure she’s convinced I’m avoiding her because I don’t want to get divorced. But I want to get divorced, that’s the truth, I honestly do. And not just to please Lana with the tongue and museum patience who if I’m going to be single again might be the only thing left. The only person left. Which is my fault. All of it’s been my fault, OK. So it’s not like I don’t understand what you’re doing, that you’re treating me like I treated them, controlling the contexts, omitting, withholding — until what? Until I’m finally ready? Or I find out on my own and resent you? You’re seriously going to act like I hadn’t already guessed the cancer you’ve been keeping in reserve like a fucking birthday surprise? Don’t talk to me like I’m a child, but like another suffering fucking adult too flawed to have a child, the same as you. I was 10 years old when the diagnosis angel visited my house — my mother — ]

Noto, not the kakuchi but the reactor, might have been a contributing factor, because though we were screened for radiation and certified normal immediately after, the effects

Diet and lifestyle pressures might also have been responsible, the rolling deadline stress and tension weakening immunity, and though we tried antioxidizing ourselves through veggie and especially fruit juicing, all that did was elevate our fructose too, and promote cell senescence if not

[My father — ]

D-Unit was always clunking around the basement with toxicish components. Though he died before the current state of genetics research and we have not involved M-Unit, we ourselves do not possess any of the BRCA2/PALB2 germline mutations on the q arm of chromosome 13, or any of the ATMs or ataxia telangiectasia mutations either, of any genes on the q arm of chromosome 11.

We hate that science is not fully conclusive. That this might be gibber within a year or even six months. That this might be gibber and we will be dead. It is not fair that we will die before science has concluded.

[My mother said it was unfair of my father to leave her still alive, before he got around to replacing the stormwindows. For him it was his lungs, then liver.]

Or else, and we admit that of all the idiopathies this is the stupiest, but the summer just before DC, Cull and Qui invited us along with their children WynWyn and Varian and a cruft of friends to fly a dronekite in Shoreline Park, and after we managed to smash it our CoFos called a toiletbreak and took half the kids with them and left the other half with us. Immaterial. Or one took the kids to the toilets and the other went to collect all the smithereens of the dronekite. Immaterial. Anyway they were gone and stayed gone and we fell asleep on a bench. We had been falling asleep a lot at the time, and were lucky no one strayed into the lake, but instead WynWyn or Varian picked up a bug and let it crawl around our face. A caterpillar. As like a caterpillar. They must have prodded it or just flicked it into our mouth, a black hairy wriggler struggling to get all its legs aligned down our throat as like we woke choking and spitting and yelling until everyone cried. Our CoFos came back with the others and assumed the crying was our fault.

Point is, we still cannot shake that sensation, of a larva tracking its goo through our system, squeezing toward our darker warmer recesses to spin its cocoon, pupating, bugging up our relays and switches and sticking together our tickertape guts, only to emerge as like a monster moth, fluttering around inside us, wings beating our heart, pincering our stomach and sucking dry our gallbladder. No butterfly. A moth. There are no butterflies at the end of this.