The phone. Aar was checking in, “How’s it going already?”

I said, “Nothing going,” and I told him no one had been in touch, and then I told him about Rach.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t contact him, he’ll contact you.”

But I’d meant—about Rach?

Calls also came from Finnity, but I ignored them, and the msgs were: “Is this your phone, Josh? It’s Finn,” “So this is the number Aaron gave me, just wondering if you’ve gotten any sense of the project timeline or maybe you’re already working?” “It’s your daily obscene phonecall from your editor, just wondering what you’re wearing and what the plans are if you’ve made them?” “Regrets OK if I’m wrongnumbering you but that’s the price of an automated greeting, or else OK if you’re there Josh I’m just going to have to conclude that your not picking up or ringing me back is like some fantasy tantrum about something from way in the past that neither of us had control over—it’s Finnity?”

Rach didn’t leave any msgs, just called.

\

Important that I explain.

Some, not all but some, of my avoidance of their calls was about as basic as psych ever gets: with Finnity, I was delaying a reconciliation with the editor who’d abandoned me and my book in our time of mutual distress and yet whose meddling I’d now have to stet again due to a perversity of Aar’s—a perversity I’d have to appreciate—and then with Rach, I was procrastinating the final total squaring of even more convoluted, more vulnerable, accounts.

But the rest of my evasion was professional in nature.

I had, contrary to the terms of the no conflicts of interest clause in my contract, another client. I had a single active client. My last, and special. Especially demanding.

She was a curator, and a perennially tenuretracked assistant professor at CUNY, and I’d been ““““working”””” with her off and on for a desultory year or year and a half, and also working on a vague ms. vaguely concerned with archaeological controversies that if it doesn’t make her scholarly career will at least make her scholastically notorious as it’s intended for a general audience. In practical terms that meant helping her edit the indefatigable writing she did for various archaeology and Egyptology journals and exhibition monographs—which became, as I got involved, duographs, I guess—recasting the required academese for mass appeal while retaining the authoritative tone. She had a cubicle at the CUNY Graduate Center, in Midtown, but preferred to rendezvous at home, specifically in her bedroom, Tribeca (bought when the market was down, when the towers went down and only the ruthless were buying beyond Canal Street). Her name, not that it’s important—Alana, or Lana, which is “anal” backwards, which is how anal’s done (I initially noticed this reversal in our cheval glass reflection—her lucubratory loft was otherwise bare).

During the second week of May—after having been out of touch, and then away again on perfunctory fieldwork in South America—she called. It’d been a while. It’d been ugly how we parted. Then she called again, and left another msg, but now about having been invited to deliver a lecture at a summer institute—a seminar series held in a pristine mountain state that presented the work of diverse scholars and famous public policy types to the busy and wealthy who required an educational justification for their leisure.

All that was required, she said, was a breezy summary of her blown uncollated messy ms., though she also said she’d decided to focus her presentation on mummies—nothing pleased a crowd of the retired rich like mummies, apparently. So, she wanted to meet. Then, fourth week of May, she needed to meet. Unfortunately, she knew how to find me, and unlike Rach didn’t have an aversion to multistop, multitransfer, masstransit.

We labored (I did) on something that would air aloud, something oral, but had to finish—prematurely—and told her I’d email her the rest.

She never paid me—not cash. It wasn’t that type of relationship.

There was hardly any work left to do on it—but still I let it drag, the lecture (there were other conclusions I’d always put off).

Until after she’d dialed, and redialed, if-I-get-your-voicemail-I’m-going-to-act-like-my-phone’s-in-my-purse dialed, I-just-happen-to-be-driving-a-Prius-on-the-way-to-a-coworker’s-parent’s-shiva-in-Nassau-County dialed, and I had to pick up to avoid another surprise. I was laying on the curses like I was protecting my tomb: I couldn’t meet, not here, neither in her corkwalled cenacle between two cenacles each shared by a dozen prying prudish anthropology and sociology department adjuncts, I wasn’t feeling well, I had other deadlines—I couldn’t stop by her loft to primp her in the mirrored center of the bed amid all that white Egyptian cotton, reaching over only now and then to the bedstands to languidly spin her globes and point—stop.

It would’ve been disastrous—getting into that again.

Instead, gut spilling over my laptop’s lip, I screened more of Adam, but more of his earlier vehicles, from when he was my age, when he was younger, a child, becoming dissatisfied with clips and even sequentials and so going to torrent the entireties, torrenting illegally, getting dropped, returning and resuming, .ph, .id, malware centrals, poisoning my computer, giving it fullblown whatever’s worse than AIDS, now that AIDS is treatable.

Anything to divert me. Anything to distract.

\

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried. The facts have to be wrapped like mummies, in the purest and softest verbiage, which both preserves them and makes them presentable. Instead of straight explanations, analogies must be pursued—like mummies. Examples, instances—next chapter.

I thought the other JC had forgotten me, or that the job itself had just been a thought—a whim of his, or mine—my “imagination,” which is how a writer phrases a mania or pathology. I’d get to his book in the afterlife, if then.

June. I sat laptopped amid the doldrums, the slowdown, the season when traditional publishing takes fourday weekends at Montauk, when even the sites are updated only sporadically, remotely. I finally returned on Finnity, but in the plasmic midst of night, leaving 2:37, 4:19 msgs on voicemail, and when he’d call back in the morning I wouldn’t pick up. The msgs I left were just, “No news, I’m assuming it’s off,” and he’d voicemail in response, “No news on this end either but still we have to talk,” and my next call would be, “Let’s try to get an extension—also ever catch Daaaabbb!? or Daaaaaaaabbbbbb!? They’re about this lizard and lizards are reptiles, which live on land laying eggs as opposed to amphibians, their ancestors, which are born in the water with gills only to grow up into lungs and die on land, but I’m not sure with them about the egg thing,” and his reply was, “The terms were no contact until contact’s made, but once it is I’ll try for an extension, which means we have to meet—me, you, Aar,” and I’d just capacitate his box, “I can’t, I’m deep into drafting this thing starring this NY Jewish kid who while on a class trip to the White House wanders off by accident and finds in a bathroom a telex using the Soviet GOST block cipher, and he deciphers it, just like that, just like nothing, and tells the president what the telex says, and whatever it says, I haven’t gotten to that yet, it’s enough to convince the president to end Cold War ICBM brinkmanship, and the West is saved and the kid’s father who’s from the USSR and is now in the numbers rackets down on Orchard Street is proud—I’ve been getting into this one specific actor, but also into 1980s and 90s representations of mathematicians and scientists onscreen” (I was cut off, I’m figuring, around the recap of the president).