I sat spotlit by the homepage, Tetration.com, boring my head into its underdesign, the whole shallowbacked templatitude of it, trying to find out what was going on, and even once tetrating, “where is joshua cohen?” and “when will he get in touch with me?”

I went to the Midtown library, and read—but bury the algorithms, the histories of tubes, transistors, circuits, of processor architecture and the invention of memory—maxed out my understanding and turned to Egyptology, borrowed the techbooks for later along with a Theatrepedia in which “Adam Shale” was mentioned.

I came out of the main branch and past the tarred trunks to Broadway, which anytime I’m on it I’m amused is also “Broadway”—at least to the prairie herds of fannypackers that roam between shows. This is the only sort of mental masturbation that gets me through Times Square.

Because someone was behind me, and someone was, millions. But in among them, the stands of balloontwisters and calligraphers who are paid to write “Peace” and “Love” in Hanzi but instead write “Scum” and “Twat,” the chula churro carts and that truck that does nachos and roofies, the same person, again, on another block, an Asian—in an intemperate sweatsuit and cap, Red Sox and red crocs.

An Asian of indeterminate everything: intention, gender, age, even Asianness. Indeterminate even if he or she were the same entity each time. Rach, at this point, would’ve condemned me for racism, though not only don’t I care and write this for myself, but as a reader I’d surely enjoy a book by an Asian in which he or she suspects they’re being followed by a white person, but can’t be sure of that white person’s intent or gender or age, or whether that white person is the same person every time or even white. I’m perseverating, I know, but thoughts have to be followed to their ends, the end of next block, and then keep going, to avoid being overtaken.

By the highway, the Hudson—the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy. The Paronomasian, let’s say, turned to close the gap to the curb. A whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th & 10th—this was Tetration’s NY HQ.

I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or Tetguest?

Since last I was here all or nothing had changed: there was just a new type of new in evidence—all novelty has this feeling, this rush. A provisionality. Something to marvel at, not something to trust. The bot was trying to palaver with me in a crepitant creole, increasing its volume and titling itself and then treading away.

A monitorbank mounted on the crosstown wall showed activity at every subtetplex, where there was day, like here, and where there was night, like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Moscow, Tel Aviv, which were nonetheless still busying. Everyone was being scrutinized, but denied ultimate access, the access to themselves. Everyone was being made reciprocally vulnerable. All lobbies were onscreen but this one, which existed strictly in my poses. It was my duty, then, to be conspicuous. I flung my limbs bagladen just so that someone in some other life might choose me. But I was chosen from just behind by a guard. (A human.)

“May I help you, sir?”

“I sure hope so,” I said, realizing that to him I was a transient. “I have a reservation for the Circle Line Cruise?”

\

Maintaining that I hoofed it back to Ridgewood would account for the next week, give or take, though I paced that distance inside, ordering in until my cash ran out and running to the ATM at the Comida Fresca Cada Día—leery of any Asian not affiliated with the nearby Tianjin Trading Ltd., or Lucky Monkey Lumber & Millwork. I read a lot of news, which I liked to read because text, unlike newer media, didn’t tell me how to pronounce it: “Jamahiriya,” “Ansar al-Sharia”—the Arab Spring seemed an issue of Vogue, the Times was so into wiretaps and leaks it’d become an electrical or plumbing manual. I studied the techbooks, which had underlinings and highlightings and in one a frayed crocheted bookmark from what had to’ve been a little old lady striving to master her little old PC. I searched Rach’s blog with the thought of identifying our pseudonymized friends, Rach’s friends who might’ve known about her affair, who if they’d ever reach their mentions themselves would have to search for the scarf they wore or the wallet they lost on their last lunchdate with Rach, in the very terms Rach used in her posting (searching online becoming a writerly endeavor: the search for the perfect detail, or error).

6/6, I got an email from Cal, replying to my own email of drunks ago. He wrote me about how “optimal” it was that this Muslim unrest had coincided with his book hiatus, and how “unabatingly obligated” he was to his editors and the reporters who’d taken his beat. As for the unrest itself, it was still undecided “whether the oppositions will do the governing required.” Anyway, it was “awesome and poignant that technology that was so manipulative is now so cheap it might level the playing field for civil disobedience.” However this was merely his transition to fiction—rather to mansplaining wisdom about fiction. Cal wrote that while technology itself might be “naturally ambivalent,” he was certain it was “anathema” to novels, “to the vicissitudes of the novel,” in that for a novel to “function properly”—as if novels were like a tool, not a bluntness—its characters had to be kept apart from each other, “separated into missing each other and never communicating,” and that now in this present of pdas and online, people were rarely ever “plausibly alone,” everyone now knew what everyone else was doing, and what everyone else was thinking, and the result was a life of fewer crosspurposes and mixups, of less portent and mystery too—and I agreed with him, I’d already agreed, because I’d recognized the ideas as having been plagiarized verbatim from an interview with a decrepit South African literary pundit just published at the site of the NYRB.

Anyway, Cal signedoff by asking, as he always asked, whether I was working on anything, and I answered that I’d just completed an email, nonfiction.

The next email to slip from my hands (two fingers, hardbitten nails) was sincerer.

I told myself I had to finish the last lecture page for the professoress by midnight, be done with it, and at midnight I uploaded and clicked send, and she wrote back with such speed it was like she’d responded before I’d sent it, or at least like she’d had her response already prepared and saved under Drafts. Lana wrote to thank me with an invitation to the summer institute—apparently she was allotted one guest and it “has 2 b u.”

I wrote another email declining—don’t waste the keystrokes on how, why—and Lana wrote me back, “lets chat.”

“I don’t have chat.”

“just download it here,” a link to Tetchat.

“You can always just call me. But I’m not sure I’m ready for another trip. Need to sort things w/ Rach. Need time.”

“download prick dont be such a

“a

“a

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My laptop was colorwheeling, so cursed to its cursor that force quit had to be skipped for the nuclear option, Off/On.

Then the phone rang and though it was a regular ring and the number wasn’t listed, I went for it, “No patience.”

But the voice though expectedly female was Asian, like reared in Asia, “Excuse? Hello, Mr. Cohen?”

“Speaking?”

“Please pack a single piece of luggage, including only materials important to your process—everything else will be provided. Waiting outside your studio residence is a Lincoln Continental, black. You will meet it within 10 minutes. Your flight departs JFK at 7:00.”