“To the JCs! The one and the only!”

“But which am I?” though I was sipping.

“We’re dealing either with a dearth of imagination,” Aar swallowed. “Or an excess.”

“I thought he hated me—I thought he’d forgotten me before we even met.”

“May we all be hated for such money—Creator of the World and of all the Universe, Creator—may we too be forgotten under such munificent terms.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s already sold.”

“A stranger’s autobiography I haven’t agreed to write yet has already been sold how? To whom?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d agree so I went ahead,” and he reached for his pocket, for a napkin, a placemat.

A contract stained with waiver, disclaimer.

\

Sign and date here and here and here and here, initial. I have to fill them in—the what else to call them? the blanks?

By now I’m through saying that my book changed everything for everyone around it, around me—I’d recognize the smell of burning ego anywhere.

Not even the events—the explosions—changed everything for everyone. But still it’s unavoidable. He is, Finnity. After my book, he never went back to editing lit—meaning, he never again worked on a book I respected.

Out of favor with the publisher—a press founded as if a civic trust by dutiful WASPs, operated as if a charity by sentimental Jews, whose intermarried heirs were bought out by technocrats from Germany—Finnity transferred, Aar said Finnity told him, or was transferred, Aar maintained, to another imprint, a glossier less responsible imprint where he acquired homeopathic cookbookery, class-actionable self-help, and a glossy, Strasbourg-born associate editor who also happened to be the only daughter of the chairman of the parent multinational, the top of not just the Verlagsgruppe but of the whole entire media conglomerate, getting intimate with the business from the bottom (missionary position).

Two children by now, a house in New Canaan.

He’s become a revenue dude—a moneymaker.

Anyway, Aar—vigilantly sensitive to the vengeance of others—had gone to him first, and Finnity hadn’t believed him.

“I’ll be straight with you,” Aar said to me. “First he tried to talk me out of you, then we both got on the phone to conference JC2, let’s say, and Finnity went naming all my other clients.”

“But you insisted?”

“He insisted—your double.”

“He doesn’t assume from that dead assignment I know anything about online?”

“What’s to know? You go, you hunt and peck, what comes up?”

“Twin lesbians? My bank balance?”

“Words, just words. You know this.”

“Did you know he read my book?”

“Joshua Cohen is always interested in books written by Joshua Cohen.”

“Joshua Cohens or Joshuas Cohen?”

“Or maybe his hobby’s the Holocaust—why not? Whose isn’t?”

“Or maybe it’s another gimmick, like to keep it out of the press that he’s not writing it himself—or like for marketing.”

“Actually the contract provides for that: strictly confidential. He worked it out himself, no agent on his behalf. You’re nondisclosured like a spook. Like a spy. You can forget about any duple credit on the covers, or the two of you breaking names up the spine. No ‘As told to,’ no ‘In collaboration with’—we’re talking no acknowledgment, not even on copyright.”

“Actually that makes the offer compelling.”

Aar went for my bagel, caved it. Laid on the creamcheese, waxy mackerel, frozen sewerlids of tomato and onion. To eat one bagel he had to have two, because he only ate the tops. The tops had all the everything seasonings.

Poppy, sesame, garlic, gravel salt: his breath as he said, “What compels, my friend, is the money.”

“It’s a lot of fucking money.”

“What we’d be getting paid is a lot, what the publisher would be paying is a fucking lot—for him it’s just snot in a bucket.”

“How much would he get?”

“How much I can’t say,” but Aar took up his knife again, pierced one of my yolks, and scribbled in the yellow.

A dozen times my fee.

The waitress came by not to clear us—we weren’t through yet—rather to plunk down two styro cups, and so the magnum was brought up and poured, settled on the table.

She smiled to demonstrate her braces—all there was between the trackmarks at her jugulars and her bangs held back with bandaids—and took the full cups and gave one to our cash register guy and they ¡saluded! each other and us from the takeout window and drank and sparked a swisher cigarillo and passed it. Enjoy.

Aar was in the middle of saying, “Even them—¿comprende? ¿me entiendes? you can’t tell anyone—anything.”

“I get it.”

“Not a word, he was adamant about that,” and Aar was too. “He wanted to contact you directly, wanted to do this without me, represent you himself—he’s even insisting that the publisher not announce the deal.”

“Finnity’s complying.”

“Doesn’t have a choice, and neither do you.”

“Book of the century. Of the millennium. I get it—what’s next? An age is a million years? An epoch 10 million years? Or what’s beyond that—an era or eon?”

“Be serious—there are penalties if anyone blabs.”

“Penalties?”

“Inwired: if word gets out, the contract’s canceled.”

“Abort, abort.”

“Autodestructo.”

“So not a word.”

“Rach.”

“No Rach.”

“Shut your mouth.”

I shut my mouth.

The diner just had pencils—I picked my teeth with a pencil, until a pen was found.

A caper was stuck in my teeth.

://

I left Aaron in a stupor—Aar taxiing to his office to process, me to wander stumbling tripping over myself and, I guess, cram everything there was to cram about the internet? or web? One was how computers communicated (the net?), the other was what they communicated (the web?)—I was better off catching butterflies.

I wandered west until, inevitably, I was in front of the Metropolitan.

I used to spend so much time there, so many weekend and even weekday hours, that I’d imagine I’d become an exhibit, that I’d been there so long that I, the subject, had turned object, and that the other museumgoers who’d paid, they’d paid to see me, to watch how and where I walked, where I paused, stood, and sat, how long I paused at whatever I was standing or sitting in front of, when I went to the bathroom (groundfloor, past the temporary galleries of porcelain and crystal, all the tapestries reeking of bathroom), or for cafeteria wine and then out to the steps to smoke, whether I seemed attentive or inattentive, whether I seemed disturbed or calmed—as if I were carrying around this placard, as if I myself were just this placard, selfcataloging by materials, date, place of finding, provenance: carbonbased hominid, 2011, Manhattan (via Jersey)—a plaque and relic both, of paunchy dad jeans, logoless tshirt untucked, sportsjacket missing a button, athletic socks, unathletic sneaks.

I visited the Met for the women, not for meeting them new, but for the reassurance of the old. For their forms that seduced by soothing—for their form, that vessel shape, joining them in sisterhood as bust is joined to bottom.

I visited to be mothered, essentially, and it was altogether more convenient for me to get that swaddling from the deceased strangers buried uptown than from my own mother down in Shoregirt.

The physique I’m feeling my way around here is that of the exemplary vase: a murky womb for water, tapering. I’m remembering a certain vase from home, from the house I was raised in: marl clay carved in a feather/scale motif, the gashes incised by brush or comb, then dipped transparently and fired, and set stout atop the cart in the hall. That was the pride of my mother’s apprenticeship: a crudely contoured holder for any flowers I’d bring, which she’d let wilt and crumble dry, as if measures of my absence. Yes, coming to the museum like this, confining myself behind its reinforced doors and metal detectors, and within its most ancient deepwide hushed insensible receptacles, will always be my safest shortcut to Jersey, and the displays of the Master of Shoregirt—Moms the potter—who’s put together like this, like all the women I’ve ever been with, except Rach.