Cohen - Four New Messages

Four New Messages

Also by Joshua Cohen

Witz

A Heaven of Others

Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto

Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed

The Quorum

Joshua Cohen

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2012 by Joshua Cohen

Emission appeared in the Paris Review; McDonalds appeared in Triple Canopy; The College Borough appeared in Harpers Magazine; and excerpts from Sent appeared in Denver Quarterly and BOMB.

This publication is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota general fund and its arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals.

To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-618-7
ISBN 978-1-55597-058-1 (e-book)

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2012

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012936219

Cover design: Alvaro Villanueva

Four New Messages

This isnt that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and its really just a story about yourself.

My story is pretty simple:

About two years after being graduated from college with a degree in unemploymentmy thesis was on MetaphorId moved from New York to Berlin to work as a writer, though perhaps thats not right because nobody in Berlin works. Im not going to get into why that is here. This isnt history, isnt an episode on the History Channel.

Take a pen, write this on a paper scrap, then when youre near a computer, search:

www.visitberlin.de

Alternately, you could just keep clicking your finger on that address until this very page wears outuntil youve wiped the ink away and accessed nothing.

However, my being a writer of fiction was itself just a fiction and because I couldnt finish a novel and because nobody was paying me to live the blank boring novel that was my life, I was giving up.

After a year in Berlin, with my German language skills nonexistent, I was going back home. Not home but back to New York, I was going to business school. An M.B.A. It was time to grow up because life is short and even brevity costs. My uncle told me that, and it was his being diagnosed with a boutique sarcoma thatforget it.

Yesterday by close of business was the first time my portfolio ever reached seven figures, so if every author needs an occasion, let this be mine. Sitting in an office when I should be out celebrating my first millioninstead remembering these events of five years ago to my keyboard, my screen.

But as Ive said this is not about meno one wants to hear how Im currently leveraged or about my investments in the privatization of hospitals in China.

I met MonoIll always think of him as Monoonly once, a week before I left Neuklln forever. Left the leafy lindens and sluggish Spree, the breakfasts of sausages and cheeses and breads that stretched like communist boulevards into late afternoon, the stretch denim legs of the artist girls pedaling home from their studios on paintspattered single speeds, the syrupy strong coffees the Kurdish diaspora made by midnight at my corner caf and its resident narcoleptic whod roll tomorrows cigarettes for me, ten smokes for two euros.

I was at a Biergarten, outside on its patio overlooking the water. The patio was abundant with greens: softly flowing ferns, flowers in pails, miniature trees packed into buckets to cut down on the breeze from the brackish canal. It was summer, still the evenings sometimes blew cool. Not this one. This evening was stifling. A few punks, scuzzy but happy, sat mohawked, barechested, feeding decomposing mice to their domesticated ermine. I was about to follow suit, had my shirt halfway up my beergut when he sat downjust when the sun was coming down.

Prose descriptions are safer than photographs (pics) and movies (vids). No one would ever identify the hero of a novel, if hed come to life, solely by his authors description. Lets face it: Raskolnikovhis face was pale and distorted, and a bitter, wrathful, and malignant smile was on his lipsis not being stopped on the street.

Across from me Mono sat reading that novel, in English of course. And English led to Englishhe asked what beer was I drinking, an Erdinger Dunkel, and ordered the same.

To make conversation I said, Too bad were being served by the Russian. The Turkturning my eye to the eye of her hairy navelis way hotter.

This is not to my credit. To his he just smiled.

It was a tight smile, lips chewing teeth, as if he wasnt sure how fresh his breath was.

I dont know why Mono made such an impression on my premillionaire selfmaybe because when youre young and lifes a mess, the world is too: young and messy. It could also have been the beer, hopped on malt, its own head turning my head to foam.

I was in my mid 20s, actually in that latter portion of my 20s, spiraling, like how a jetliner crashes, toward 30.

But Mono was young.

He had his decade in front of him.

We covered 30: scary, scary.

Also we discovered we were both from Jerseyme from south, he from central, but still.

Why here?

It was important to deliver this offhand. All expats worry about coming off spoiled or ludicrous, insane.

Why I came here was to write a book, I offered, which isnt working out.

He brought his mouth to his beer, not the other way around. The beard was still growing in.

He swallowed, said, Achtung, and as the sun disappeared told me this story.

Back in Jerseythis was only two months before the time of his telling but anything Jersey felt like years ago, amenitized among diners and turnpikesMono was a deliverer.

Like a priest, delivering from sin?

Or a recent arrival from Fujian with the fried rice, the scooter?

No, what Mono brought were drugs.

Drugs paid well but only for those actually supplying. Mono merely supplied the supply. This was not the ideas economy whatever was supposed to save our country once wed stopped physically making anything of value.

This was effort, was pick up, drop off, keep all names out of it and deal exclusively in cash. ( FYI, Benjamin Franklin is one of only two people featured on bills never to have been US President.)

Mono worked for a manand he was a man with multiple children and women and not a lost lanky kid like Monowho called himself Methyl ONine (as in cocaine, benzoylmethylecgonine, also zero and nine were the last two digits of his retired pager).

He was a short, slim but muscled, comparatively black man with a ritually dyed henna fleck of a goatee discreet beneath voluminous dreads like plumbing gone awry.

Mono spent weekends moving his product.

Methyl was a hushed seclusive typenot just careful but temperamentally dervish in his sandals and gangsta hoodiesand never wanted his deliverers to know where he lived or with whom he supplied and so hed meet Mono as hed meet all the others who did Monos job, on discrepant dim corners in Trenton.