Binary code—an encryption that’s simultaneously a translation, in how it renders two different systems compatible, equitable. “Bits”—the term itself is a contraction (“binary digits”)—are the fundamentals of any expression: not just of integers but also of language, and so of instructions, commands.

In international unicode standard, by which every conceivable character in the universe can be represented by an octet, or a sequence of eight bits, Principal’s net worth would be signified by 00110001 00111000 00110010 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $18.2B, as of 2010 taxes), and the value of my advance for this book by 00110100 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $440K)—though I’ll get only half that up front, or Aar will and then he’ll take his commission (00110011 00110011 00110000 00110000 00110000), and then the IRS will take its too (00110001 00110101 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000).

Principal has directed our publisher to pay his own fee to an undisclosed organization, or so he says.

The only records of prior largesse are of $2 million to endow a computing exhibition devoutly aggrandizing Tetration at the Smithsonian Institution, and $252 to the Santa Clara Council of Dharmic and Abrahamic Religions, which has become a for profit yoga studio.

He never says our name if it refers to me, not even the nickname, the lame abridgement, “Josh.” Bash it to bits, you’d get 01001010 01101111 01110011 01101000, though if the “j” were minuscule, were lowercase, you’d get 01101010 (01101111 01110011 01101000).

Thanks, biconversion.com.

Point is, we’re all made differently of the same ones and zeroes—the ones our fortunes, the zeroes our voids, our blacker lacking places.

Ultimately, then, Principal and I do not compute, and all the imbalance between us can’t be attributed to just the swollenness of his bankroll, or my fatter tits and ass—or to the facts that only one of us was given a middle name, and only one of us was given a future. How to express the extent of Principal’s nullity? how else but code to write around his holes?

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The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, for consumption to consume us. London’s just around the corner, a floor up or down, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, and so bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.

The only thing that grounds me is the beach—the ground before the oil, the oil money, the derricks bowing, rising, bowing, rising, the gusher skyscrapers, the rush on the roads.

I feel the sand, the salinity, the limit, the edge—they’re in me, they’re in everyone.

Mortality is a mesh for sifting water and quartz.

All of humanity washed up on the beach, but I stayed a span later to dry. I wasn’t always bridges and tunnels, huddling under scaffolding in Midtown waiting for the storms to stop or for the stripclubs to be demolished—I wasn’t always NY.

No, no, I’m Jersey, sprung from the Shore. And that basin is contiguous—all tides are my territory.

Fridays, try to leave the city before noon, turnpike to parkway past the loading and lading, our own crude tanks and refinery towers, toward the barrens, the pinescrub ceding to reeds, marshgrass and weedy tails. Take any exit south of 114, and take it to the end, to the dunecrash, the salt scarp, the lick of the sea. Low tide uncovers the loss—snapped surfboards, ripped rafts and tubes, jetties black as if soaked in creosote through winter—high tide covers that loss again only to hazard the driftwood piers, threatening to flood the rentals masted up on their struts as the vacationers flee with summer—this was how I grew up.

Shoregirt.

Let me reel in that life, like a fishing haul, winching back the lines for concessions, cranking the queues to catch battered flounder, hook pizzas and gyros, burgers and franks, fries like bait, and funnelcake like tangled tackle. Or else, like a gull drops a bivalve to smash its shell, then swoops down to beak up the meat—my memories:

Beachfront, we had resorts too. Hotels and motels. A boatel. Then four blocks in, off the touristed strip, lotto bodegas and pawns. A decent taco drivethru. A gas station.

Another four blocks inland and it’s already the other side of the island, the bayside, where Shoregirt—a city in summer, a town in spring and fall, a village in winter—dwindles into wharves. At the top of the island, sandcastle timeshares, at the bottom, tenements teeming like conches on the verge of being outgrown, kept by chainlink fencing trawling fortybottles, sixpack rings, and butts. The ocean goes in, the ocean goes out, east to west. The boards, the promenade’s planks, curl to crash north to south.

Home was in the axis. Between the two waters, the open ocean, the closed clammed bay. My house, two floors of wind between the shingles. Giving directions, my mother would say, “By the gas station.”

Do I trust myself in this garden state? With the heart all rusted like an abandoned Mister Softee?

To Moms, I’d never be “a beach person.” At best I’d be “a shoebee”—which was as far out as she’d swim into slang: a local term for all the poor Polish Jews who hadn’t moved out of NY and married American, who’d come down the shore for the day with all their necessities—cold leftovers, balms—packed into a shoebox.

My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.

I’d be sneaking around, then, until my father quit his chemo, and Moms resolved to spend our final family time together by the wake down the street. I dressed in long sleeves long pants long face and brought along whatever I was reading bound in its municipal cellophane.

I’m recalling a stretch of grain as a single day—Dad yelling at me, “Stop that, enough with the words. I have one word for you—Atlantic, get in!”

Kaufman and Laufer were digging moats. The Tannenbaum sisters buried each other. The Gottlieb twins wore baseball mitts on their heads to guide their mother cutting their hair, then they had a catch with their father—not even, their stepfather—while Dad, sclerotic, was sputtering, “Get out there, bodysurf! Goddamn it, ride a wave!”

After that didn’t work, it was, “Here’s a dollar for the games”—the gambles a kid could take, the gambles not even a kid could take. Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole, or the forceps submerging in plush, always surfacing empty.

“I’m too old for that,” I said.

“Leave us, amuse yourself, enjoy.”

Moms said, “Just this once you’ll do this.”

I was 12.

Money meant that Dad had made mud in his diaper.

It must’ve been mortifying for him to have to use wide waddling Moms as a cane, hobbling him under the boardwalk, to change.

Though I was reading I didn’t comprehend all this until after.

“Enough with the book!” and Dad, churning, gathering his strength into swells, threw himself out of his chair and atop me, ripped the book from my hands—a sentence, in the middle of a sentence—and, limping through the froth, threw it to the Atlantic, far out, not far enough out, its pages splayed like an injured pigeon.