Book of Numbers: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

sonnet, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”
     “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”: the old homeless alongside
     the newly homeless and others dressed that way by ash, none of them white, but not black
     either, rather gray, and rabid, being held at bay by a news crew with lashes of camera
     and mic. I spilled Cal’s mouthwash and spilled myself downstairs, leaving the TV
     on, and thinking a minty, asinine muddle, about this girl from last night who said she
     lived on Maiden Lane like she was inviting me there anytime that wasn’t last
     night, her date she was carrying who said he was too blitzed to make it to Inwood, and
     thinking about my book, and Miriam, and Aar, and how vicious it’d be to get all
     voxpop man on the street interviewed, and be both outside and inside at once.
    But downstairs the crew was gone, or it never was there—so I went
     onto Houston and through the park, beyond. Chinatown beyond. Chinatown was the edge of
     triage. A firetruck with Jersey plates, wreathed by squadcars, sped, then crept toward
     the cloud. A man, lips bandaged to match his bowtie, offered a prayer to a parkingmeter.
     A bleeding woman in a spandex unitard knelt by a hydrant counting out the contents of
     her pouch, reminding herself of who she was from herswipecard ID. A
     bullhorn yelled for calm in barrio Cantonese, or Mandarin. The wind of the crossstreets
     was the tail of a rat, swatting, slapping. Fights over waterbottles. Fights over
     phones.
    Survivors were still staggering, north against traffic but then with
     traffic too, gridlocked strangers desperate for a bridge, or a river to hiss in, their
     heads scorched bald into sirens, the stains on their suits the faces of friends. With no
     shoes or one shoe and some still holding their briefcases. Which had always been just
     something to hold. A death’s democracy of C-level execs and custodians, blind,
     deaf, concussed, uniformly tattered in charred skin cut with glass, slit by flitting
     discs, diskettes, and paper, envelopes seared to feet and hands—they struggled as
     if to open themselves, to open and read one another before they fell, and the rising
     tide of a black airborne ocean towed them in.
    “If you can write about the Holocaust,” Miriam once told me,
     “you can write about anything”—but then she left this life and left
     it to me to interpret her.
    A molar was found in the spring, in that grange between Liberty &
     Cedar, and was interred beneath her bevel at Union Field.
    Aar dealt with insurance, got custody of Achsa—Miriam’s
     daughter, Ethiopian, adopted, then eight. He moved her up to the Upper East Side, built
     her a junglegym in his office. His neighbors complained, and then Achsa complained she
     was too old for it. He fitted the room with geodes, lava eggs, mineral and crystal
     concretions, instead.
    The bookstore still stood—preserved by its historical foundations
     from the damage of scrapers. But Aar couldn’t keep it up. It wasn’t the
     customer scarcity or rehab cost, it was Miriam. The only loss he couldn’t take.
     He put the Judaica in the gable, garnished the best of the rest and sold it, donated the
     remainder to prisons, and sold the bookstore itself, to a bank. For an unstaffed ATM
     vestibule lit and heated and airconditioned, simultaneously, perpetually.
    He kept the topfloor, though, Miriam’s apartment, tugged off the
     coverlets that’d been shrouding its mirrors since shiva, moved his correspondence
     cabinet there, moved his contract binders there—fitted his postal scale between
     her microwave and spicerack—the entirety of his agency. He kept everything of
     hers—the bed, dresser, creaky antiques, coffinwood, the clothes, the face
     products. Took her antianxieties andantidepressants and when he
     finished them, got prescriptions of his own. Meal replacement opiates—he’d
     chew them.
    The only stuff he moved was Achsa’s, in whose old room he set up
     his