Book of Numbers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

rolltop and ergo swiveler. Computer and phone to accept offers, reject offers,
     monitor the air quality tests. He had different women working as
     assistants—Erica, and Erica W., and Lisabeth—junior agents in the kitchen,
     preparing my royalty statements, my rounding error earnings against advance. But on
     their days off and at nights he’d have his other girls over, his
     Slavs—helping them through their ESL and TOEFL exams, writing their LaGuardia
     Community College applications, fucking them, fucking them only in the stairwell, the
     hall, where Miriam’s scent didn’t linger—as insomniac corpses came
     and went for cash below, on a floor once filled with rare gallery catalogs and quartet
     partitur, just a ceaseless withdrawing, depositing, fluoresced, blown hot and cold.
    Caleb, however—that September made him. He’d done better at
     history, I’d done better at English, he’d become a journalist directly out
     of Columbia, with bylines in the
Times,
and I’d become a bookstore
     clerk, but published first—a book.
    Then I fell behind.
    What destroyed me, created him—Cal—the sirens were his
     calling. After filing features on Unemployment (because he was happy with his
     employment), and The Gay Movement (because he was happy being straight), he put himself
     on the deathbeat, jihad coverage. He left the Bowery and never came back. He was down at
     the site round the clock, digging as the searchers dug, as the finders sifted, but for
     facts. Every job has its hackwork, promotions from horror to glamour. Not to my credit,
     but that’s how it felt at the time.
    He tracked a hijacker’s route through the Emirates, Egypt,
     Germany—to Venice, Florida, where he proved himself going through the records of
     a flight school, turning up associates the FBI had missed, or the CIA had rendered. At a
     DC madrassa he got a tip about Al Qaeda funding passing through a Saudi charity and
     pursued it, cashed out on the frontpage above the fold. His next dateline was
     Afghanistan. He went to war. Combat clarified his style. He had few contacts, no
     bodyarmor. But when his letter from Kabul prophesied the Taliban insurgency,
The New
     Yorker
put him on staff. It’s difficult for me to admit. Difficult not
     toironize. I was jealous of him, envious of risk. The troop embeds,
     the voluntary abductions, hooded with a hessian sandbag and cuffed, just to tape a goaty
     madman’s babble. He was advantaging, pressing, doing and being important,
     careering through mountain passes in humvees with Congress.
    Cal returned to the States having changed—in the only way soldiers
     ever change, besides becoming suicidal. He was clipped, brusque, and
     disciplined—his cynicism justified, his anger channeled. He brought me back a
     karakul hat, and for the rest of his fandom a .doc, an ms. A pyre of pages about
     heritage loss, the Buddha idols the mullahs razed. About treasurehunting, profiteering
     (Cal’s the expert). About the lithium cartels, the pipelines for oil and poppies
     (Aar told him to mention poppies).
    Cal certainly had other offers for representation, but went with Aar on my
     advice. The book sold for six figures, and got a six figure option, for TV or film, in
     development, still. I edited the thing, before it was edited, went through the text
     twice as a favor. But I’ll type the title only if he pays me. Because he
     didn’t use my title. Which the publisher loathed. 22 months on the bestseller
     list: “as coruscating and cacophonous as battle itself” (
The New York
     Times,
review by a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), “as if
     written off the top of his head, and from the bottom of his heart […] anguished,
     effortless, and already indispensable” (
New York,
review by Melissa
     Muccalla—Missy from my bookparty). The Pulitzer, last year—at least he was
     nominated.
    My famous friend Cal, not recognized in any café or caffè
     famous but recognized in one or two