Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

I’m not sure if any of the students believed him, though I’m not sure what reason they’d have not to believe him and anyway it wasn’t exactly a contradiction to be both enrolled and an impostor, a fine student and seriously druggish, deluded.

Mono’s father had taught mathematics at the university — he’d made major advances in knotted polynomials, applied them to engineer a tamperproof model for voting by computer — and so was sure his son’s application would be accepted, despite the crappy grades.

But it wasn’t, it was rejected.

When he finally sold the house and moved away to chair the math department of a school in California — this was about six months before Mono and I sat together over beers in Berlin — Mono decided to remain.

Mono’s mother had died — an aneurysm after a routine jog, a clean body in a bloodless bath — three years before these events. Her death was why his father had wanted to move, though Mono thought his failure to have been admitted to school had an influence — his father’s professional humiliation (Mono was a professional at humiliating his father).

And the car his mother left behind precipitated Mono’s fight with his father — when the professor began dating a former student or began publicly dating her. She’d brought the largest veggie stix ’n’ dip platter to the gathering after the funeral.

She was also from Yerevan — super young and super skinny and tall with curly red hair curled around a crucifix that oscillated between the antennal nipples of her breasts — and as long as we’re confusing ourselves with chronology, she was just two years older than Mono.

His mother’s ailing Ford became his because his father already had a convertible.

Then one afternoon his father asked, Could you lend Aline your car for the day? She wishes to consolidate her life before the moving.

Mono said he said nothing.

His father tried again, Could you drive her yourself, to assist with the boxes?

Mono explained:

That was his father’s way of telling him that Aline was coming to Cali.

My mother’s car? Mono finally asked.

But you can forget about Aline. She’s pregnant with Mono’s half brother in Palo Alto and this is her last appearance.

At the time Mono’s name was not yet Mono. That name was as new as Berlin.

Like monolingual, he’d said when we shook hands (his hand was sweaty).

Whereas the surname he’d been given was much more distinctively foreign. Not that he was supposed to divulge that name to his customers — to them, until he ruined himself, he was only Dick.

To get him to loiter outside your dorm or stand around licking fingers to count bills on the rickety porch of an offcampus sorority, you dialed Methyl, who’d say, He be calling a minute before he shows. Name of Dick.

Dick would usually show up within a half hour and though he was supposed to only get paid and leave, he never followed Methyl’s instructions.

Instead he’d play older brother, stacking used plastic cups, making troughs of new ice, holding class presidents steady upsidedown for kegstands, reveling in free drinks and ambient vagina until recalled to work with a vibrating msg: NW6, say (Trenton’s North Ward location six, where he’d make the night’s next pickup — Methyl didn’t trust anyone out with more than three deliveries at a time).

Dick stayed out later the later in the night he was called and so on a 3 AM delivery to a party that had run out that a colleague, Rex, had delivered earlier that evening, a party pumping for six or seven hours already through music playlists both popularly appropriate and someone’s stepdad’s collection of Dylan bootlegs and whose mixer juices and tonics had been exhausted, Dick would not be moved, especially not when a girl — the same girl who’d called Methyl, who’d told his deliverer to expect a female customer — threw arms around him and said:

They sent you this time!

Dick, who prided himself on remembering all his customers, couldn’t be sure whether this girl, Em, was pretending to remember him or just wasted — and this should have been his first warning.

The couch, the absorbent couch, furniture in appearance like a corkscrew coil of shit — brown cushions, black backing worn shiny — soaking in the boozy spill and smoke of years, intaking fumes and fluids through the spongy membrane of its upholstery. They sat there, he and this girl who knew him only as Dick —this townie fake gownie and though he didn’t know it yet the daughter of a Midwestern appliances manufacturer who maintained, this daughter did, upward of thirty anonymous weblogs: Stuff to Cook When You’re Hungover, Movies I Recently Saw About Niggers, My Big Gay Milkshake Diary, The Corey News (which warned of the depredations of child stardom), What I’ve Heard About Bathrooms in North America —all irregularly updated but all updated.

They sat doing lines — is that my line? that’s your line? this line’s mine — and all was weightlessly intimate until Em turned to him and said:

This is from yours right?

Dick didn’t answer immediately so she asked again.

This is on you?

Dick said, Sure.

Sure?

Whatever. We’ll figure it out.

Em said, No not whatever. No figuring. Say it for me!

He felt like he had to stop himself from peeling her lips off her face as if they were price stickers, like they were designer labels as she said again:

Say it for me! This is your supply.

He said, This is your supply.

Em smiled.

OK, this is my shit. This shit is mine.

And she laughed and said, Dick! I’m so glad they sent you!

And he said, Actually only people who work for me call me Dick. My name’s really Rich.

Rich?

Richard.

Rich hard what?

I’d show you my license, if I had it.

He’d been craving this opportunity to brag.

I was jumped last month in Philly, rival dealers, took my narcotics and wallet (a lie: he’d been drugfree on his way to a bartending job interview, the muggers barely pubescent, three kids as stubby as their switchblades).

You don’t carry ID?

He reached into a pocket, found his passport, passed it around.

Em flipped through it, Did you enjoy Mexico?

I went with my parents.

You were an ugly child.

Discussions were: over changing the music and so changing the mood, about what band was good or bad in which years and with which personnel — is playing the bass harder than it looks? does a true leadsinger have any business playing guitar?

Anyway what kind of person would say which— personnel as opposed to lineup? leadsinger as opposed to frontman?

Is this coke cut? is all coke cut? and how is that not the same as lacing?

What innocents they were, Dick thought — the purity was theirs, not the drug’s.

This one guy said, There was this girl I used to go out with who was the transitional girlfriend of a kid who starred in like every fucking movie.

Who was it? the party wanted to know, what every fucking movie was he in?

The guy told them.

Famous right? crazy crazy famous? Girls saved his face into screensavers, produced ringtones out of his voice. She was with him for three months off and on. Then I was with her and after our third or fourth date we had sex and you know what she said to me after?

What?

She said: Peter, before you having sex was just like staring at the ceiling.

Like what?

Again: like staring at the ceiling.

And that night that coital praise became an inside joke, like, whatchacallit, a party trope.