PRAISE FOR JOSHUA COHEN
“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.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE 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
www.atrandom.com
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Book design by Simon M. Sullivan
v3.1
CONTENT
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
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About the Author
Other Books by This Author
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
8/27? 28? TWO DAYS BEFORE END OF RAMADAN
If 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.”
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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.