Free Book of Numbers: A Novel by Joshua Cohen

featured in an adjacent case, with its precisely positioned nipples and navels, sculpted
     pecs and abs, would’ve been even stranger without them. The men without bodies
     were still better off than the men just lacking penises, or testes. Regardless, statuarycompleted only by its incompletion, or destruction, resounded
     with me, while the swords hewed through my noons, severing neuroses.
    But then I returned, I always returned, to my women, closing the show, a
     slow, agonizingly slow circumflexion.
    Fertility goddesses, that’s what the archaeologists who’d
     dug them up had said, that’s what Moms had said, and I’d believed
     her—these women were the idols of women and women were the idols of men and yet
     we kept smashing them (I understood only later), smashing with rose bouquets, samplers
     of marzipan and marrons glacés, getaway tickets, massage vouchers, necklaces,
     bracelets, and words.
    It strikes me that Moms herself might’ve believed that these odd
     lithic figurines were for fecundity, because everything else had failed her—the
     inability to conceive (and the inconceivability of) were fates she’d share with
     Rach, or else the problem was mine.
    And Moms might even have been so distraught by Dad’s decline as to
     have placed genuine faith in the power of that petrified gallery—guiding me
     through rooms now changed, antiquity redecorated since 1984—because suddenly I
     wasn’t enough, she wanted another: a boy, though what she needed was a girl in
     her image.
    If so, then that studio she had erected at home—her installation of
     a kiln in Dad’s neglected garage—must be regarded as a shrine, a temple to
     opportunity lost.
    \

    Now, when it comes to art, and I mean every
     discipline: lit, sculpture, painting, music, and theater (but only Rach liked dance,
     because she danced)—when it comes to any medium, I’m divided. Not between
     styles, between perfections. Mark my museum map with only the oldest and newest. Roll me
     in scrolls, volumina of vellum and parchment, papyri. But then also pile up all the new
     books appearing, seasonally stack the codex barrage—how else to live, without
     contemporaries to hate? Forget their books—I mean how to live without their bios,
     their autobios to peruse and hold against my own?
    Beginnings to romanticize and endings to dread—I’ll take
     anything but the middles, all that received or established practice crap. Because the
     middle was where I grew up—bounded by house and garage filled with clay—a
     cramped colorless room filled with clayey boyhood, which my mother was bent on modeling
     not for greatness, but for portability and durability and versatile use. Moms’s
     hands that were her English, the puffy wrists behind the pads digging in, poking holes
     in me so I might perceive life only as she perceived it—threatening, but
     beautiful if I’d be careful. This was her way because from earliest age
     she’d been foreign to even herself, as the youngest and the only girl after six
     brothers, dumbsy, clumsy, inconcinnous, a dreamer, whose family fell in the snow around
     her, around Kraków, and who’d lived like “an extinct girl
     dinosaur”—meaning arousing of a hideous pity—until my father
     married her home.
    She’d had difficulties having sex, and so difficulties getting
     pregnant. Her baby was late, was me. She’d told me about the drugs. Pergonal,
     Clomid. The barren superstitions. Don’t sit on snow or ice or rock, do bathe in
     water infused with moss from the walls of the shul on Szeroka Street. Dad had mentioned,
     only once, as he was dying, that Moms’s war had been “tough,”
     “hard knocks,” which was how he’d recount each tax quarter. A solo
     CPA after being laidoff as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he’d never applied
     his actuarial MS but kept it in a depositbox at the bank. Moms is a public school
     speech-language pathologist/audiologist, retired. Anyway, Dad’s