Book of Numbers: A Novel (50 page)

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,
^T
T, 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.

Our President sat straining against the pommel of his saddle. We tried to decide whether his ruminant gumchewing meant that he was, or was not, expecting a meal.

We ceded the floor, and the single dryerase wall, to our CoFos, who had reconsidered their recommendation of DCentering Celilo, apparently, and were now unanimously in support of DC. Rather Maryland/Virginia. Celilo would never be feasible, they explained. Even if the Columbia River would scale, hydroelectrically, if the Columbia Gorge would be scaled, anemoelectrically, and regardless of all subsidies and tax credits.

They were revising their projection of average DCent power consumption to exceed 20–22 megawatts/quarter, an amount unsustainable on renewables alone. An amount unsustainable even if American forces would annex and refine all the fossils in Iraq.

The goal for now, they said, had to be to serve our Beltway customers, whether from a base among the Amish farms of Mechanicsville, MD, equidistant to two Mirant coal plants, or Newport News, VA, by a Dominion Resources coal plant that supplied NASA Langley, which had granted them a tour.

Throughout this report of our CoFos, something was nagging at us, something was off. It was Heather who had just had the baby, not Salvatrice. Anyway they both had off. They were stuffed together with the rest of the Trapezzis making gravy.

All our other employees, even our employees who had only just pilgrimed to our coast on probationary visas, were away and giving their thanks.

Kor chewed as like he was mouthing grace. Outside our meetingroom the Tetplex was all barren open plan bullpen and deserted pods, halogen for no one, and the hum of things unused but still plugged in.

Which explains why he was not spotted, this courier, why he was not stopped, this rider from across the Bay.

Someone, Moe or someone, must have let him into the lobby.

He must have wheeled straight through. Taken the stairs. Stepped them with his bike. The elevators, biometric now, at the time would have required a swipecard.

Our door was ajar and he was dizzy skidding through. Hispanic, Latino. Indo. Chaingrease on his denim and the wrong cuff was rolled. The smell of his sweat was of frying. He tried to slot his bike between the hinges, then leaned against the handlebars and huffed.

Rather, he was struggling with his backpack. A cinch string backpack. He shrugged to get loose of it and twisted in his windbreaker, writhing the pack around to his front until its toggle was in his teeth and he was biting to slacken the strings, to extricate a clipboard. He shoved it at us with both hands but without a pen.

As like we had a pen, or would steady him.

But Kor snatched the clipboard away, read our name from its sheet and asked, “You order food delivery?” and asked the courier, “What do we owe?”

The courier though was bent over sucking air, delivering us a seizure, or tugging out what appeared to be the lining of his cincher, but was a
trashbag. He tried to unziptie its ziptie and then just slashed through the black shiny plastic with his nails.

Kor waved the clipboard and yelled, “Oye ese, what are you doing? Quién te ha enviado?”

But the courier was oblivious, he was on his knees, wriggling partially out of the bag and dripping this slimy rank squircle, a device shaped as like a square circle. This panicked Kor, who wound up with the clipboard and smacked him on the back and everything just spewed. The device flew across the room amid an acidulous piñata confetti of huevos rancheros and arros con upchuck, semidigested plaintain rounds and frijole flak and cola. For serious unmelted chunks of cola ice soaking the carpet a darker fawn than we had paid for.

Kor tossed the clipboard at the courier, lifted him by the pits as like he yelled, “Lo siento, lo siento, no se lo digas a mi jefe, no hacer que me despidan,” but we do not speak Spanish. Kor crashed him into his bike, which he crashed into the door, frontwheel bucking, rearing through, pedals scraping processors already slated for service toward the stairs.

Barf treadmarks down two flights to the lobby.

Qui had tipped his chair into a fort and huddled behind it. Cull was atop the table on his mobilephone with 911, which kept asking the Tetplex addy, and he kept shrieking the answer, Tetration.com. The only addys he ever retained were online. In frustration he threw the unit, clunky and weighty and totally state of the art then with its extra sharp retractable antenna fully out, not at anyone specifically, but at the ceiling, which scattered it down the hall as like components.

Even now that nick is there. Up on the ceiling between mediate track fixtures since replaced, and though all the furnishings are different too. We told Super Sal to tell his migrants not to touch it, and Kor just let it pass. We can praise him for that at least.

Now, the delivery. The bloodcolored package in the corner.

This was the STrapp, the y2Kreeper, the only model that existed or that we had ever encountered and yet we recognized it, which in other circumstances would have been the certification of smart design. But this was just a sloppy handpacked brick, contouring at its extremities into hooded vents influenced by snakes. Its middle was split, though the split was ragged as like it had been done manually and not
manufacturally standard. This midunit gash exposed a motor, rotor, stator windings, readwrite headstack and magnet, spinless disk. Two stray sopping coils were centered. A slick conjoined pair of wiry wrinkly spheroids.

Then Kor was just next to us flicking the dense retch from his hands, wiping his face with his baja. He leaned over and bared a patch of his ass, white, round, reddening. But the sodden orbs were redder, rounder, and hairy. He picked them up and let them dangle.

By December the Tetplex had contracts with every able vet of Gulf War I as like security guards, and we had gone on leave. Discussing this meeting was never discussed. Except, through the US Postal Service again, c/o M-Unit and Aunt Nance again, Kor sent us the results of the analysis. Courtesy of the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. It was bull scrotum, they concluded. Gouged into the circuitry were two balls in a sack.

://

[You get yourself all crazed about office politics, Moe’s been hijacked to put this drive together and then what he turns in has a penis inside? Am I with you? Because if I am, then I don’t understand.]

Not penis, the testes.

Please, we did not understand it either. Rather we did, but wrongly, on the novitiate plane. In the way we can understand that all humanity is inviolably one but still not realize who our friends are. Or that the guy carting his recyclables down La Cienaga is God.

The suddenness with which life can scale expectation. How the most essential secret is how to live among lesser secrets never disclosed. How what we hide best from ourselves is not our own ignorance but how that ignorance sustains us. How trust can become another method of control, how even the future of openness is closed.

We were swiveling around in a postlaunch tizzy pretending we had transcended Beta and attained nirvana. But then Moe went and changed the OS on us, he changed the platform. As like to say, you think you have passed through all the realms already, Buddha boy, think again. You think you have broken the cycle of rebirth and redeath and are now exempt from its traumas, think again.

Moe was showing us that no one was pure, because he was showing us the sign of Kali. Of Kali Yuga. Meaning the final phase. The very last. Extinction, the postscript. Which makes all that karma and feedback loop of the soul stuff fairly moot.

For Hindus, the world goes through four stages. In the first stage, the world was ruled by gods, and in the second, the gods fought, in the third, the world was ruled by humans, and in the fourth, ours, the humans are fighting, terminally. In the beginning, purity is signified by a fourlegged
bull. With each subsequent stage, the bull loses a leg. The time of demon Kali is the time of the onelegged bull, which will never again chase its own tail. At the end, the bull with only one leg to stand on will be slaughtered, and along with it, the world.

[You got all that from Moe shoving bull testicles into a searchequipped storage device?]

Confirmative. We wish we had kept it. The STrapp, not the scrotum. But by the time that had occurred to us it was gone.

[Kor?]

But we certainly kept the post. Though Kor must have a copy of it too.

Here. This memcard. Here. Just a STrapp on a chain.

[What post? What’s the deal with this memcard? I’m just trying to make sure you don’t lose me.]

To take content down from online is almost impossible now and anyway even if taken down in terms of accessibility the content itself almost always remains, it just stays clouded. Nubified. Nephed. But back then it was possible to destroy it.

By comptrast, to take a person down has always been easy. People take down themselves.

For example, the itching. For instance, the scratching. We basically spent all our time disambiguating whether we were scratching at itches or itching at scratches, our migraines extended to seize even our abdominals, our skin tasted as like salt. We had come down with a bad case of psychosomia. Though after tetrating for our symptoms of rashes, fevers, chills, and fatigue, we found that we had ringworm, shingles, scabies, and mule lymphangitis. Comorbid cutaneous infections fungal, bacterial, viral, mule. Chronic circadian rhythm disorder. Tendonitis. Carpal tunnel. Our fingers would go numb and then our hands would go numb and then our entire arms would flail as like rashy dying parasites.

The prime salience was, we were home again, though not at Muralla Way or even Sierra Vista. Rather this had been the home of Ma and Pa Le Vay, the elders I, whose generation had been able to afford two floors with a baud of yard, Claremont Hills, Berkeley. M-Unit and Aunt Nance
had moved in after moving them to that assisted living facility close by and even resembling the university. To be clear, neither Ilona nor Imre Le Vay were dead yet, but now one is, though we have never determined which.

It did not help that the relationship between M-Unit and Aunt Nance was healthy. We were unhealthy while they thrived. They cuddled in the lounger covered with shawls reading conlang morphologies and the Asian syllabaries used only by women as like hiragana and nüshu. They had friends, academic friends, gardening group friends, LGBTQ youth counseling center friends. We just had them, and their shared study the Jamaican eldercare aides had used for changing into and out of their scrubs, second floor. Propped along the bookcases were photos of two Hungarians we barely felt any relation to being amicably restrained by middleaged husky Jamaicans. Aunt Nance had hung her diplomas on the wall along with a gonfalon that explained all the different types of dispute resolution. One type was legally binding settlement, another type was also settlement but not legally binding, the third was about getting each party to understand the other emotionally, while the fourth was just about getting each party to recognize the existence of the other.