by Joshua Cohen
Aar, leaving a client’s afterafterparty, a launch, or reading—he’d get into a cab and say to the driver, “Take me to work with you,” or “Take me somewhere we can be alone,” and I miss that something wretched.
I, with my no balls, just told the driver how to drive but he demanded the addy and knucked it into his GPS, which calculated the same distance and time and directions that I had, and then he said how much, off meter, and that was as much as he said.
Nasty habit. It used to be that every time I’d take a cab there would come this moment, this intersection, and Rach hated it—when I couldn’t help but talk, couldn’t help but engage the driver, and some of that is a Jew thing, but some certainly was all that white baggage, which won’t fit in any trunk—wanting to show the driver that I held by what that Berber slave playwright once wrote, nothing human was alien to me, nothing was strange, or rattling, wanting to show respect by talking politics domestic and foreign, I’d be honored by his opinions, because they came from a land in which opinions were criminal, a land I’d never get any closer to than now—a mangled divider between us.
But for whatever reason, this trip—for two hours in gutimpacting traffic—I didn’t.
After the negotiation only the GPS talked, voicing my welcome homescape in Arabic. Every lanechange or so a familiarity would surface, Semitic fricatives, faucal honkings of phlegm, and then “I-95, NJ Turnpike.” The rusting midtide marsh, dead fish methane waft, an egret balanced onefooted out in that muck like it’d have to be crazy to step full in. A Canaanite hairball, then “Garden State Parkway.”
Through the Pinebarrens saying nothing and with nothing said unmechanical—maybe that, just that, was dignity.
Or I did say something, once we got to the house.
Some things like “I got your money inside,” OK, “Come in and use the bathroom, if you have to,” no thanks.
Which spared him having to witness me begging my mother for money (the hug, the kiss, the beg). I was embarrassed, sure, but only because she was embarrassed for me, and disapproved, and disapproved of what I was being charged, went for her clutch, and that earthenware bowl for tzedakah I’d forgotten, and finally outside to beat down the price. I collapsed. Never even got the driver’s face.
11/15 or 16, everything broke. The Post headline was punny enough, “Balk-Mail!” The Daily News went with “Tetraitors!” You know the rest—everyone knows.
Moms paid for my two Heinekens and Camels. The only thought I had I thought daily, twice—what a beautiful name for a convenience store, Wawa.
Basically at that point it ends.
And then the phone rang.
Moms said it hadn’t rung like that since September. I had mail from back then too and I signed the enclosed papers and got an envelope and stamp from Moms and included a note to Rach asking what I owed her, and promising her that whatever else had to be done, she’d be able to find me. I walked over to the postoffice. And by the time I’d walked back they were outside, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NY1, and our porch was on the TV in the livingroom and Moms was having a fit about how the stoop was chipped and leaves were clogging the gutters. Leaksmen—the organization that claimed responsibility for releasing the recording files, my transcriptions of them, my attempts at shaping them into Principal’s life, and the diary I kept of my own life in the Emirates—was headed by a dual Australian Swiss citizen by the name of Anders Maleksen. Descramble Maleksen—get Leaksmen.
An anonymous source of the senior American intelligence official type stated that the organization was a Russian front, and that Maleksen was the field alias of FSB agent Daniil Kalemov, who’d been assigned to infiltrate b-Leaks by providing documents regarding Israeli nuclear capability that now appear to be Kremlin forgeries. Whether he entrapped Balk in the rape charges or not, he certainly arranged for the flight from Copenhagen and asylum in the Russian embassy in Reykjavík. No comment from b-Leaks. Which is to say, no comment from Balk.
People kept knocking at the door asking to help or be helped, to share their findings about how the C band electromagnetic range used for wifi transmissions stimulated the growth of or even implanted parasitic worms called “cestodians,” which track our movements, diets, cyberchondria. Moms said that a person in a Jersey Central Power & Light uniform who’d resembled Kalemov or Maleksen but was maybe shorter and with a bit of a stomach and very polite and so maybe it wasn’t him, had stopped by about two weeks or even a month ago now “to read the meter.”
She wouldn’t trust any news that would trust me as a source.
A body was hauled out of the river Ganges, Varanasi, India, 11/19 or 20, apparently. This was just downstream from the Manikarnika Ghat, the main crematorium ghat, a perpetual stream of burning bodies plunging down the stairs but not plashing at bottom because by the bottom all was ash, a cloud of flies scattering across the waters.
I can only assume that the Indian authorities wouldn’t ordinarily bother with a floater, but he was white, or what was left of him was white, apparently. Other or the same Indian authorities, evincing impressive operational prerogative, ordered an autopsy that determined the COD as accidental/suicide, ordered a DNA test and copied both the results and report to the US State Department, which matched the genetic markers as being Principal’s. Sari Apt Le Vay petitioned for the body’s return, but it was in such a bitten crocodilian or ultimately imaginary condition that it was cremated, not at the Manikarnika but in a facility. No pics or vids of the body exist or have—like a missing pancreas—leaked yet.
It was Moe all over again—but because I switched off the TV after PBS had on Seth without Lisabeth, I can only piece this together from scrap bits of the Asbury Park Press, the NJ Jewish News, and whatever general interest nonpotting rags Moms still subscribes to, though delivery’s been iffy. And the house modem, which has been broken since I got here—Moms doesn’t even remember it breaking.
I couldn’t go to Wawa and couldn’t have Moms go for me, so I quit drinking, quit smoking, I guess. I made myself useful in the attic department, heirloom rearrangements. Suddenly everything heavy in the house had to be moved. The coverage didn’t leave the lawn until purdah season’s winter storm advisory.
Cal called and left a msg, and I still haven’t gotten back to him. Finn called and left a msg saying he’d consider a reprint of my book, be sure to be in touch.
I haven’t been. I never made a statement—I wrote.
Consider this: A dozen Moes crashed Principal’s “medimorial” (meditation memorial) held at the Tetplex, four of them legally named Vishnu, and one even named Vishnu Fernandes. Cullen de Groeve and Owmar O’Quinn read a selection from the Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Void cannot injure void, the qualityless cannot injure the qualityless.”
Kori Dienerowitz did not attend due to a prior commitment in Bermuda, a premature retirement with prosecutorial immunity.
A Pew Research poll, of around this date, queried a responsible sampling of Americans as to whether their government’s online surveillance initiatives were justified (62%)? or unjustified (28%)? with only 10% undecided.
Into December, another whitish body washed up in a drainage culvert at the Verna Industrial Estate, Goa, and the boy who found it, shockingly recognizing his find, posted the pics and vids online, which were reasonably convincing, according to the convinced: Principal, already decaying. Anyway, something happened next like the boy’s father without contacting anyone, perhaps without even being privy to his son’s exploits, tried selling the body. But he was caught. Or the guy who’d bought it from him and contacted Sari Apt Le Vay was caught, the body taken into custody or whatever, but lost before tests, according to the tabloids. Subsequent corpses turned up in Cairo, Lisbon, Kifl Haris outside Nablus (Palestinian Territories). The great wheel turned and memed. Live in the flesh spottings in Brazil were a thing. Principal was a wayfarer in a Finnish disco. The wheel was turning me 40. A child was born in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, whose soul was recognized as his.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSHUA COHEN was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Witz), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, London Review of Books, Bookforum, The Forward, and others. He is a critic for Harper’s Magazine and lives in New York City.
BY JOSHUA COHEN
Book of Numbers
Four New Messages
Witz
A Heaven of Others
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto
