Read Online Book of Numbers: A Novel by Joshua Cohen - Free Book Online

methadone girl, “The usual,” and then
     explained again what that was, and then explained the job: “Just your average
     lives of the billionaires vanity project, the usual.”
    I didn’t even have water in me—nothing to spit or sinuose
     through the nose. Just: “This is the guy who haunts me?”
    “Who called me directly and Lisabeth put him through, saying
     it’s you, and straight off he’s proposing a memoir.”
    “He wants me to be his ghost?”
    The caffeines came, and the juices—an OJ agua fresca.
    Aar went for his giftbox trimmed in ribbons. An expertly tied bow
     resembling female genitalia.
    He took his knife and deflowered it all to tinsel,
     tissue—“You’re the only one he wants.” Champagne.
    “We’re popping bottles?”
    “What do you suppose they charge for corkage?” He held the
     magnum under the table, until the radio repeated its forecast, a chance of showers
     onomatopoeia—no fizz, no froth, just a waft at the knees—and he took both
     juice cups down and poured them brimming and then setting the magnum at his side offered
     to clink chevronated plastics:
    “To the JCs! The one and the only!”
    “But which am I?” though I was sipping.
    “We’re dealing either with a dearth of imagination,”
     Aar swallowed. “Or an excess.”
    “I thought he hated me—I thought he’d forgotten me
     before we even met.”
    “May we all be hated for such money—Creator of the World and
     of all the Universe, Creator—may we too be forgotten under such munificent
     terms.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s already sold.”
    “A stranger’s autobiography I haven’t agreed to write
     yet has already been sold how? To whom?”
    “I wasn’t sure you’d agree so I went ahead,”
     and he reached for his pocket, for a napkin, a placemat.
    A contract stained with waiver, disclaimer.
    \
    Sign and date here and here and here and here, initial. I have to fill
     them in—the what else to call them? the blanks?
    By now I’m through saying that my book changed everything for
     everyone around it, around me—I’d recognize the smell of burning ego
     anywhere.
    Not even the events—the
     explosions—changed everything for everyone. But still it’s unavoidable. He
     is, Finnity. After my book, he never went back to editing lit—meaning, he never
     again worked on a book I respected.
    Out of favor with the publisher—a press founded as if a civic trust
     by dutiful WASPs, operated as if a charity by sentimental Jews, whose intermarried heirs
     were bought out by technocrats from Germany—Finnity transferred, Aar said Finnity
     told him, or was transferred, Aar maintained, to another imprint, a glossier less
     responsible imprint where he acquired homeopathic cookbookery, class-actionable
     self-help, and a glossy, Strasbourg-born associate editor who also happened to be the
     only daughter of the chairman of the parent multinational, the top of not just the
     Verlagsgruppe but of the whole entire media conglomerate, getting intimate with the
     business from the bottom (missionary position).
    Two children by now, a house in New Canaan.
    He’s become a revenue dude—a moneymaker.
    Anyway, Aar—vigilantly sensitive to the vengeance of
     others—had gone to him first, and Finnity hadn’t believed him.
    “I’ll be straight with you,” Aar said to me.
     “First he tried to talk me out of you, then we both got on the phone to
     conference JC2, let’s say, and Finnity went naming all my other
     clients.”
    “But you insisted?”
    “He insisted—your double.”
    “He doesn’t assume from that dead assignment I know anything
     about online?”
    “What’s to know? You go, you hunt and peck, what comes
     up?”
    “Twin lesbians? My bank balance?”
    “Words, just words. You know this.”
    “Did you know he read my book?”
    “Joshua Cohen is always interested in books written by Joshua
     Cohen.”
    “Joshua Cohens or Joshuas Cohen?”
    “Or maybe his hobby’s the