Book of Numbers

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 Fi

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 Fi

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 pere

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 Fi