Free Book of Numbers: A Novel by Joshua Cohen Page A

instructions:
     “Help your mother out,” “Kaddish if she insists.”
    Moms: what she lost in family, she gained in body.
    She was dense with her dead—with Dad’s passing becoming ever
     more solid, ever more embonboobed, rubicund. Zaftig, not obese.
    Steatopygous—which doesn’t have to be
     italicized, it’s already my language—all italics do is make what must be
     native, not. Anyway, it’s not from the Latin, but Greek. Steatopygous meaning
     possessed of fat buttocks, and implying fat all around, the thighs, hips, waist, a
     gluteal gut, even adipose knees, unfortunate but vital. That’s what Moms’s
     lady statuettes are technically called—steatopygi, or steatopygia. Thrombosed
     bulges, throbbing clots—my mother’s hindquarter was always a veiny maze, a
     varicose labyrinth, though not just hers: weighty were the bases of all the women in my
     family, my mother’s family. My grandmother, my greatgrandmother, every aunt and
     cousin—Holocaust fodder. Heavy Jewesses, thickly rooted Jewesses, each swinging a
     single pendulous braid. From Poland, the Russian Pale, that settled and mortaring
     mixture. Upper Paleolithic, Lower Neolithic, lower and swollen. Marbled in calcite,
     schist, steatite, striated with stretchmarks of red rivers, the Vistula, the Bug. They
     were made out of stone and many of them even had hearts of stone—not Moms,
     though, despite how tough Rach found her. Yes, yes, Rach—she was the hard one,
     the skinny, the taut, all rib and limb, a spindly wife more like a plinth, like a
     pediment.
    ://

Coming out of the Met with all those gods
     on the brain—all those haloed faces seared into my own—it’s an
     adjustment to sense normally. That’s why the museum abuts the park, so that its
     patrons can walk in solitude—“walking in the garden in the cool of the
     day”—to get their glaze back.
    Or—in the collecting heat of that Friday, a freak faineant warmth
     that unnerved me. I wasn’t myself because enriched, beyond the pecuniary.
     Distracted by the thought of a second self. Distracted by the thought of a second
     book.
    I was so scattered, I’m still not sure what to write: About my back
     aching from where I’d slept? my head still gauzed, Pharaohnically wrapped, from
     when I’d been woken up? about the cut on my neck? the slit from chin’s
     caruncle to neck like an against the grain shaving mishap, just healing? Rach had
     responded to Moms’s thank you gratuitousness by throwing a bisque dish for our
     keys, which struck a sill and splintered all over me.
    The window had broken. Rach was expecting me to replace it. I was
     expecting her to replace it. We both were aware of this, but only she might’ve
     been consciously waiting.
    I was—instead—counting my bounty.
    Writing mental checks, but not for windows, before I’d written a
     word.
    I still haven’t written a word—just musings about museums,
     snarks about parks, observations to obelize: two frisbeeists freed from their
     cubicles—a professorial but perverted uncle emeritus—a Caribbean nanny
     strollering her employer along the reservoir. I was imposing topiary on trees, and
     rhymes between their branches and trunks.
    I’d rather be procrastinating—I’d rather be doing
     anything—rather jog, rather run—than record that moment.
    When I approached the bench.
    When I recognized him.
    \
    Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the
     characters involved, you don’t—you get all the benefits of having a
     relationship, with none of the mess. The fictional, the factually nonexistent,
     don’t leave msgs or txt. You’ll never have your own story about meeting
     Raskolnikov shuffling the aisles of Zabar’s, or about bumping into Werther or,
     more bizarrely, Bouvard and Pécuchet on line at Han’s Fruit &
     Vegetable—anyway, if you did bump into them, having been exiled from home
     yourself, like a fairytale knight errant sent out to seek not your fortune