Book of Numbers: A Novel
Read Book of Numbers: A Novel Online
Authors: Joshua Cohen
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Retail, #Technological, #Thrillers
“To sum this up in Web terms, he’ll make you want to be an angel investor in his stuff. What’s a book but a public offering? You’ll want to be in on the ground floor.”
—
The New York Times
“Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious … [Cohen’s] best prose does everything at once.”
—
The New Yorker
“Cohen, a key member of the United States’ under-40 writers’ club (along with Nell Freudenberger and Jonathan Safran Foer), is a rare talent who makes highbrow writing fun and accessible.”
—
Marie Claire
“In Mr. Cohen’s hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all know—the link, the click—to the one we tend to forget: the human.… Mr. Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita.”
—
The New York Observer
“[Cohen has] manifold talents at digging under and around absurdity.… The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique.”
—Rachel Kushner, author of
The Flamethrowers
“Like [David Foster] Wallace, Cohen is clearly concerned with the depersonalizing effects of technology, broken people doing depraved things, and how the two intersect in tragic (and, sometimes, hilarious) ways.”
—
The Boston Globe
“What dazzles here is a Pynchonesque verbal dexterity, the sonic effect of exotic vocabulary, terraced sentences, robust puns and metaphors, and edgy, Tarantino-like dialogue.”
—
Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Cohen packs whole histories and destructions, maps and traditions, into single sentences. He employs lists, codes, and invented syntax with the sure hand of a visionary, his prowess and passion further emboldened by a boundless sense of scope.”
—
The Believer
“There is ample evidence that Joshua Cohen is one of the greatest literary minds of his generation.”
—
Flavorpill
Book of Numbers
is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known real-life figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Joshua Cohen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9691-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9692-0
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
123456789
Book design by Simon M. Sullivan
v3.1
But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your
children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms,
until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness. After the number of days in
which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear
your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise.
—
NUMBERS
14:32–34, KING JAMES VERSION
And your corpses you will fall in this desert. And your children will be of
shepherds in the desert 40 years and will support your prostitution/adultery
until the perfection/destruction of your corpses in the desert. In the number of
days you searched the land 40 days the day to the year the day to the year you
will support your poverty/violation 40 years and you will know my
opposition/pretext.
—
NUMBERS
14:32–34, TRANSLATION BY
TETRANS.TETRATION.COM/#HEBREW/ENGLISH
END OF RAMADAN
I
f you’re reading this on a
screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.
Paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth, the thread from threadstuff
or—what are bindings made of? hair and plant fibers, glue from boiled
horsehooves?
The paperback was compromise enough. And that’s what I’ve
become: paper spine, paper limbs, brain of cheapo crumpled paper, the final type that
publishers used before surrendering to the touch displays, that bad thin
four-times-deinked recycled crap, 100% acidfree postconsumer waste.
I have very few books with me here—
Hitler’s Secretary: A
Firsthand Account,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,
whatever was on the sales table at Foyles
on Charing Cross Road, and in the langues anglais section of the FNAC on the Rue de
Rennes—books I’m using as models, paragons of what to avoid.
I’m writing a memoir, of course—half bio, half autobio, it
feels—I’m writing the memoir of a man not me.
It begins in a resort, a suite.
I’m holed up here, blackout shades downed, drowned in loud media,
all to keep from having to deal with yet another country outside the window.
If I’d kept the eyemask and earplugs from the jet, I
wouldn’t even have to describe this, there’s nothing worse than
description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is. Suffice
it to say that these pillows are each the size of the bed I used to share in NY. Anyway
this isn’t quite a hotel. It’s a cemetery for people
both deceased and on vacation, who still check in daily with work.
As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow
on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and
frying my sperm, searching up—with my employer’s technology—myself,
and Rach.
My wife, my ex, my “x2b.”
\
Living by the check, by the log—living remotely, capitalhopping,
skipping borders, jumping timezones, yet always with that equatorial chain of blinking
beeping messages to maintain, what Principal calls “the
conversation”—it gets lonely.
For the both of us.
Making tours of the local offices, or just of overpriced museums to live
in. Claridge’s, Hôtel de Crillon. Meeting with British staff to discuss
removing the UK Only option from the homepage. Meeting French staff to discuss the .fr
launch of Autotet. Granting angel audiences to the CEOs of Yalp and Ilinx. Being
pitched, but not catching, a new parkour exergame and a betting app for fantasy
rugby.
This was micromanaging, microminimanaging. Nondelegation, demotion
(voluntary), absorption of duties (insourcing), dirtytasking. All of them at once. In
the lexicon of the prevailing techsperanto.
This was Principal spun like a boson just trying to keep it, keep
everything, together.
At least until Europe was behind us and we could stay ensuite, he could
stay seated, in interviews with me. Between the naps, interviewing for me.
You call the person you’re writing “the principal”
and mine is basically the internet, the web—that’s how he’s
positioned, that’s how he’s converged: the man who helped to invent the
thing, rather the man who helped it to invent us, in the process shredding the hell out
of the paper I’ve dedicated my life to. Though don’t for a moment assume
he regards it as, what? ironic or wry? that now, at our mutual attainment of 40 (his
birthday just behind him, mine just ahead), he’s feeling the
urge to put his life down in writing, into writing on paper.
He has no time for irony or wryness. He has time for only himself.
\
cant wait 4 wknd,
Rach updates.
margaritas tonite #maryslaw
ever time i type divorce i type deforce (still trying 2 serve papers)
read that my weights
the same as
hers
—feelingood til the reveal: shes 2 inches
taller—ewwww!!
“She” who was two inches taller was a model, and though
Rach’s in advertising I never expected her to be just as public, to enjoy such
projections.
To be sure, she enjoys them anonymously.
My last stretch in NY I’d been searching “Rachava
Cohen-Binder,” finding the purest professionalism—her profile at her
agency’s site—searching “Rachava Binder,” getting inundated
with comments she’d left on a piece of mine (“Journalism Criticizing the
Web, Popular on the Web,”
The New York Times
). It was only in Palo Alto
that I searched “Rachav Binder” and “Rach Binder,” got an
undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon
Church’s databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous
conversions (“Net Costs,”
The Atlantic
), and finally it was
either in London or Paris, I forget, because I was trashed, that I, on a trashy whim,
searched “Teva Café Detroit MI,” but the results suggested
I’d meant “
Tevazu
Café Detroit MI”—cyber
chastisement for having incorrectly spelled the place where I’d proposed with
ring on bended knee.
