Book of Numbers: A Novel by Joshua Cohen

plagues—a travail so repeated without manumission that it becomes its own
     travail, and so the tradition is earned.
    But instead of explaining all that, I said, “I’m treating
     life like a book—like I’m the hero of my own life.”
    “A book you’re living, not writing?” Aar had never
     been so direct.
    I’m not sure it’s good writing to say what my reaction
     was—it was bad.
    I don’t want to continue with that meeting—but then neither
     do I want to have to prose just one of our regular meetings: who’d you fuck, who
     do you want to fuck, Achsa’s college application essay he wanted my read on (How
     I Dealt With My Grief), remember that guy who tried tosell Miriam
     his father’s library comprised entirely of a single book the father had published
     about how to make rocks talk on Wall Street—the father had bought enough copies
     to make it a bestseller and put him on the lecture circuit, when he died his son found
     pallets of the stuff, books still wrapped, in a vault registered to the father in
     Secaucus. Or that other guy who’d tried to sell some other inherited junk: a raft
     of detectives, Westerns, that tatty crap by two nobodies named Thoreau and Emerson
     (first editions).
    Or the way Miriam would pick her nose and silently fart at the register or
     if the fart refused to be silent how she’d slam the register drawer.
    The scarves she always wore.
    Let this meeting be as cryptic—as
     representative/nonrepresentative—as the Arameans, a people that never had a land
     of their own but still managed to leave behind their language—the only thing they
     left behind, their language. Aramaic.
Ha lachma anya
. This is the bread of
     affliction.
Eli Eli lama shavaktani?
Father, Father, why didn’t Christ
     quote the Psalms in Hebrew—was he that inept, or does excruciation always call
     for the vernacular?
    Aar would pay, and would say as he said every time: “I never gave
     you anything for your funeral.”
    He’d pay in cash—“My condolences on your continued
     nuptials,” and I’d slap down Rach’s card, and he’d put his
     hand atop mine and hold it, palm on palm on Visa and say, as if conspiring, as if
     pledging undying service, “Cash only.”
    Always has been. Always will be.
    Then I’d walk him to Lexington—leave him by the 4 train, or
     the M102 bus, and walk quickly, quickly, toward the museums, and don’t turn
     around, don’t judge him for never waiting or descending, rather striding to the
     curb to flag down a ride.
    \
    That was the last we’d intersected before the
     spring—I’ll have to check the contract: 4/29/2011. I’d been
     sleeping—how to put this? where? I could say it was a time apart thing suggested
     by Dr. Meany, I could say I’d been sent back to Ridgewood for a spell due to a
     Bible-sized, though,given our history, more than passoverable,
     argument dating from Pesach, which was the most amount of time Rach and I had spent
     together in a while. After the seder at her mother’s, we drove to mine’s,
     and stopping at a backroad farmer’s market had bought a tree and given it to my
     mother who’d wondered aloud, who spends money on a tree? and then criticized the
     pot and Rach had taken that as a snub and refused to stay over and yelled at me all the
     drive back and yet all had been forgotten until we received in the mail a thank you note
     Rach took as begrudging—though that’s just what Rach would’ve done,
     sent a belated thank you with gritted teeth—enclosing a photo of a fresh pot
     thrown as criticism.
    I could say it was a disagreement over how I’d acted at Dr.
     Meany’s, refusing to talk about “trust as fatherhood/fatherhood as
     trust,” instead ranting about Jung, Lacan, hypergamy/hypogamy,
     gigantonomy/leucippotomy, modern male childhood as berdachism, modern male parenthood as
     couvade, or over how I’d acted at her mother’s house when the woman, who
     knew everything/thought she did, told me to