Joshua Cohen: Book of Numbers

The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want.


As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up—with my employer’s technology—myself, and Rach.


My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.


No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced.


Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning’s identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified—located elsewhere.


What’s privacy to the employee is security to the boss.


A people’s legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn’t a relationship unless it’s left behind its trash.