Book of Numbers: A Novel Read Online Free

arriving, schedulers and reschedulers early and late, marketing and distribution
     cultureworkers I didn’t know and who didn’t know me but we, this was our
     business, pretended. More pot and coke, which, as P.S. said again, had gotten better
     since the Citigroup merger. Tequila in the sink, martinis in the shower. Ash in both and
     in energy drinkables. Masha or Nastya was asking if we had any games and after Cal
     realized she didn’t mean Monopoly mentioned that his neighbor was a firstperson
     fanatic—not the literary gambit, the gaming—and suddenly six fists were
     knocking at Tim’s door demanding to borrow his system, and Tim, calculus teacher
     at Stuyvesant, answered the door red and tousled senseless, and hauled into Cal’s
     his system and even connected it to Cal’s TV with the bigger screen and bigger
     speakers, the night blooding the morning as P.S. and some random
     hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy tested each other in mortal combat avatared as
     lasertusked elephants and wild ligers with rocketlaunching claws, as Aar left with his
     Slav who had to get back to Staten Island by her cousins’ curfew, as Tim’s
     girlfriend who had the flu trundled over in a balloonpocked blanket and scowled and
     sneezed and coughed and left taking Tim but not his system with her, as some random
     hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy left with his decentbodied girlfriend, as Cal grinded
     Missy and took her into the bedroom, as I fumbled with Kimi! and got a burp, which sent
     her to the bathroom to vomit, which sent Missy to the bathroom to help her, and P.S.
     kept playing with himself, and in the hall Missy was into hooking up with Kimi! but not
     Kimi! with Missy, P.S. suggested they call The Factchecker to confirm whether and which
     sex acts she was perpetrating on Finnity, Missy and Kimi! left, P.S. left with them, and
     after opening the fiercely bulbed fridge to find expired mustard and ketchup sweating,
     just sweating, I suggested calling for delivery, but the good place was closed and we
     were just a block outside the bad place’s delivery zone, and the freezer
     wasn’t just out of ice but out of cold frombeing left open,
     and there was a cushion wet on the floor in the hall, and there was sleep without
     dreaming.
    I was woken—lumped in the contents of a dumped jar of
     vitamins—by Kimi!’s phone, which she’d left behind. Cal picked it
     up, and Kimi! yelled at him and he yelled at me to find the remote, but all I was
     finding was a jar and vitamins.
    Then Kimi!’s phone went dead and Cal was gone.
    My mouth tasted like tobacco and mucus and lipgloss, absinthe (strangely),
     marijuana, coke bronchitis.
    I had an ache in the back of my head, and was deciding whether to vomit.
     The screen was still showing the game, 1 Player, 2 Players, New, Resume, and on the way
     to the window I stopped to resume the function for the time, but the screen just filled
     with smoke, the sky with smoke, and in the weeks to come, the months to come, into 2002
     when the paperback release was canceled and beyond, my book received all of two reviews,
     both positive.
    Or one positive with reservations.
    \
    Miriam Szlay. Still to this day, I’m not sure whether she made
     it to the party. Either I didn’t notice her, or she was too reluctant to have
     sought me out, because she was kind. Or else, she might have skipped
     it—that’s how kind she was, or how much she hated my susceptibility to
     praise, or how much she hated paying for a sitter.
    I never asked.
    Miriam. Her bookstore was a messy swamp on the groundfloor of a lowrise
     down on Whitehall Street—literature cornered, condescended to, by the high
     finance surrounding. Before, it’d been a booklet store, I guess, selling
     staplebound investment prospectuses and ratings reports contrived by a Hungarian Jew
     who’d dodged the war, and bought Judaica with every dollar he
     earned—kabbalistic texts that if they didn’t predict commodity flux