Book of Numbers: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

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     least intrigued in their streetside display. At his passing he left the property and all
     its effects and debts to his children—Miriam, and her older and only
     brother—who broadened the inventoryto include fiction and
     nonfiction of general interest to the Financial District’s lunch rush, which as a
     businessplan was still bleak.
    Miriam—who kept her age vague, halfway between my own and my
     mother’s—was the one who ran the shop and hired me: straight out of
     Columbia, straight out of Jersey, a bridge & tunnel struggler with a humanities
     diploma between my legs but not enough arm to reach the Zohar. She was inflexible with
     what she paid me an hour ($8 or its equivalent in poetry), but was flexible with
     hours. She respected my time to write, knew that I wasn’t going to be a clerk all
     my life (just throughout my 20s), knew that a writer’s training only began,
     didn’t end, with alphabetical order. Another lesson: “subject” and
     “genre” are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily
     ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving.
    Miriam was my first reader—my second was her brother, who became my
     agent. Aaron signed me on her word alone—a demand, not a
     recommendation—and helped me clarify my projects. A memoir (I hadn’t lived
     enough), a study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I had no credentials), a novel
     about the Jersey Shore (no story), a collection of linked short stories about the Jersey
     Shore (no linkages), a long poem conflating the Inquisitions and Crusades (not
     commercial). Then one fall day in 1996 Aar came back brutalized from Budapest, cabbing
     from JFK to Whitehall to drop a check with his sister (the shop would never be
     profitable). His trip had been coital, not cliental, but out of solicitousness he talked
     only profitability, Mauthausen, Dachau, family history. That was the moment to mention
     my mother.
    My mother was my book, he agreed, and he met me monthly after work, weekly
     after I left work to finish a draft, to discuss it—how to recreate dialogue, how
     to limit perspective—still always meeting at the register, where I’d give
     my regards to Miriam, and him a check to Miriam, then rewarding ourselves at a
     café up the block. Not a café but a caffè—as the former
     could be French, and the latter could only be Italian. Aar taught, I learned: how to tie
     a Windsor and arrange a handkerchief, how a tie and handkerchief must coordinate but
     never match, which chef who cooked at Florent also subbed at which Greek diner owned by
     his brother only on alternate Thursdays, who really did the cooking—Mexicans.
     Actually Guatemalans, Salvadorans. A Manhattanshould be made with
     rye, not bourbon. Doormen should be tipped. Aar—quaffing a caffè corretto
     and marbling the table with stray embers from his cig, when smoking was still
     permitted—knew everything: stocks and bonds and realestate, Freud and Reich, the
     fate of the vowels in Yiddish orthography, and the Russian E and И conjugations.
     When was the cheapest day to fly (Tuesdays), when was the cheapest day to get gas
     (Tuesdays), where to get a tallis (Orchard Street), where to get tefillin repaired
     (Grand Street), who to deal with at the NYPD, the FDNY, the Port Authority, the Office
     of Emergency Management, how to have a funeral without a body, how to have a burial
     without a plot.
    9/11/2001, Miriam was bagladying up Church Street to an allergist’s
     appointment. She must’ve heard the first plane, or seen the second. The South
     Tower 2, the North Tower 1, collapsing their tridentate metal. Their final defiance of
     the sky was as twin pillars of fire and smoke.
    Sometime, then—in some hungover midst I can’t point to,
     because to make room for the coverage every channel banished the clock—a seething
     splitscreen showed the Bowery, the street just below me, and it was like a dramatization
     of that Liberty