by Don DeLillo
"I'm losing money by the ton today. Many millions. Betting against the yen."
"Isn't the yen asleep?"
"Currency markets never close. And the Nikkei runs all day and night now. All the major exchanges. Seven days a week."
"I missed that. I miss a lot. How many millions?"
"Hundreds of millions."
She thought about that. She began to whisper now. "How old are you? Twenty-eight?"
"Twenty-eight," he said.
"I think you want this Rothko. Pricey. But yes. You totally need to have it."
"Why?"
"It will remind you that you're alive. You have something in you that's receptive to the mysteries."
He laid his middle finger lightly in the rut between her buttocks.
He said, "The mysteries."
"Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew."
He made a fist and wedged it between her thighs, turning it slowly back and forth.
"I want you to go to the chapel and make an offer. Whatever it takes. I want everything that's there. Walls and all.'
She didn't move for a moment. Then she disengaged, the body easing free of the goading hand.
He watched her getting dressed. She dressed in a summary manner, appearing to think ahead to some business that needed completing, whatever he'd interrupted on his arrival. She was in post-sensual time, fitting an arm to a creamy sleeve, and looked drabber and sadder now He wanted a reason to despise her.
"I remember what you told me once."
"What's that?"
"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted."
"What did I mean?" she said.
"You meant I was ruthlessly efficient. Talented, yes. In business, in personal acquisitions. Organizing my life in general."
"Did I mean lovemaking as well?"
"I don't know. Did you?"
"Not quite ruthless. But yes. Talented. And a commanding presence as well. Dressed or undressed. Another talent, I suppose."
"But there was something missing for you. Or nothing missing. That was the point," he said. "All this talent and drive. Utilized. Consistently put to good use." She was looking for a lost shoe.
"But that's not true anymore," she said.
He watched her. He didn't think he wanted to be surprised, even by a woman, this woman, who'd taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color.
She dipped toward the bed. But before she plucked her shoe from under a quilt that had spilled to the floor, she engaged him at eye level.
"Not since an element of doubt began to enter your life."
"Doubt? What is doubt?" He said, "There is no doubt. Nobody doubts anymore."
She stepped into the shoe and adjusted her skirt.
"You're beginning to think it's more interesting to doubt than to act. It takes more courage to doubt."
She was whispering, still, and turned away from him now.
"If this makes me sexier, then where are you going?" She was going to answer the telephone that was ringing in the study.
He had one sock on when it came to him. G. triacanthos. He knew it would come to him and it did. The botanical name of the tree in the courtyard. Gleditsia triacanthos. The honey locust.
He felt better now. He knew who he was and reached for his shirt, dressing in double time.
Torval was standing outside the door. Their eyes did not meet. They went to the elevator and rode to the lobby in silence. He let Torval exit first and check the area. He had to concede that the man did this well, in a soft choreography of tacking moves, disciplined and clean. Then they walked through the courtyard and out to the street.
They stood by the car. Torval indicated the haircut that waited in either direction, only yards away.
Then his eyes went cool and still. He was hearing a voice in his ear bud. There was a pitch to the
moment, a sense of intent expectation.
"Threat condition blue," he said finally. "Man down."
The driver held open the door. Eric did not look at the driver. There were times when he thought he might look at the driver. But he had not done this yet.
The man down was Arthur Rapp, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Arthur Rapp had just been assassinated in Nike North Korea. Happened only a minute ago. Eric watched it happen again, in obsessive replays, as the car crawled toward a choke point on Lexington Avenue. He hated Arthur Rapp. He'd hated him before he met him. It was a hatred with the purest bloodlines, orderly, based on differences of theory and interpretation. Then he met the man and hated him personally and chaotically, with sizable violence of heart.
He was killed live on the Money Channel. It was past midnight in Pyongyang and he was making final comments to an interviewer for the benefit of North American audiences after a historic day and night of ceremonies, receptions, dinners, speeches and toasts.
Eric watched him sign a document on one screen and prepare to die on another.
A man in a short-sleeve shirt came into camera range and began to stab Arthur Rapp in the face and neck. Arthur Rapp clutched the man and seemed to draw him nearer as if to share a confidence. They tumbled together to the floor, tangled in the mike cord of the interviewer. She was dragged down with them, a willowy woman whose slit skirt ran up her thigh and became the pivotal point of observation.
Horns were blowing in the street.
There was a close-up on one of the screens. It was Arthur Rapp's pulpy face blowing outward in spasms of shock and pain. It resembled a mass of pressed vegetable matter. Eric wanted them to show it again. Show it again. They did this, of course, and he knew they would do it repeatedly into the night, our night, until the sensation drained out of it or everyone in the world had seen it, whichever came first, but he could see it again if he wished, any time, through scan retrieval, a technology that seemed already oppressively sluggish, or he could recover a slow-motion shot of the willowy woman and her hand mike being sucked into the terror and he could sit here for hours wanting to fuck her then and there in the bloodwhirl of knife and random limbs and slashed carotids, amid the staccato cries of the flailing assassin, cell phone clipped to his belt, and the gaseous bloated moans of the dying Arthur Rapp.
A tour bus blocked the route across the avenue. It was a double decker with smoke rolling from its underbelly and rows of woeful heads poking from the top tier, unstirring Swedes and Chinese, their fanny packs stuffed with currency.
Michael Chin was still in the jump seat, facing rearward. He'd listened to the audio account of the assassination but had not turned to look at the screens.
Eric watched him now, wondering whether the young man's restraint was a form of moral rigor or an apathy so deep it was not pierced by the muses, even, of sex and death.
"While you were away," Chin said. "Yes. Tell me."
"There was a report that consumer spending is weakening in Japan." He spoke in a newscaster's voice. "Raising doubts about the country's economic strength."
"See. What. I said as much."
"The yen is expected to fade. The yen will sink a bit."
"There we are. See. Has to happen. The situation has to change. The yen can't go any higher."
Torval came walking back to this end of the car. Eric lowered the window. Windows still had to be lowered.
Torval said, "A word."
"Yes."
"The complex recommends extra security."
"You're not happy about this."
"First a threat to the president."
"You're confident you can handle whatever comes up."
"Now this attack on the managing director."
"Acce
pt their recommendation."
He raised the window. How did he feel about additional security? He felt refreshed. The death of Arthur Rapp was refreshing. The prospective dip in the yen was invigorating.
He scanned the visual display units. They were deployed at graded distances from the rear seat, flat plasma screens of assorted sizes, some in a cluster framework, a few others projected singly from side cabinets. The grouping was a work of video sculpture, handsome and airy, with protean potential, each unit designed to swing out, fold up or operate independent of the others.
He liked the volume low or the sound turned off.
They were climbing down out of the tour bus now. It seemed to be sinking into the dark smoke that foamed up around it. A derelict tried to board, dressed in bubble wrap. There were sirens in the distance, fire trucks caught in traffic, the sound hanging in the air, undopplered, and car horns blowing locally, another hardness upon the day.
He felt his elation deepen. He slid open the sunroof and thrust his head into the reeling scene. The bank towers loomed just beyond the avenue. They were covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them.
They looked empty from here. He liked that idea. They were made to be the last tall things, made empty, designed to hasten the future. They were the end of the outside world. They weren't here, exactly. They were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it.
He sat down and looked at Chin, who was biting the dead skin at the side of his thumbnail. He watched him gnaw. This was not another of Michael's tender reveries. He was gnawing, grinding his teeth on the hangnail, then the nail itself, the base of the nail, the pale arc of quarter moon, the lunula, and there was something awful and atavistic in the scene, Chin unborn, curled in a membranous sac, a scary little geek-headed humanoid, sucking his scalloped hands.
Why is a hangnail called a hangnail? It's an alteration of agnail, which is Middle English, Eric happened to know, from Old English, with roots in torment and pain.
Chin loosed one of his vegetarian farts. Mode control ate it at once. Then there was an opening and the car bucked and lurched, veering in a screech around the tour bus and across the avenue. The man at the taco cart solemnly watched. The car wobbled over the curbstone and sphinctered free and Chin's eyes came out of lunar seclusion when it raced all the way to Park along a surreal length of empty street.
"Time for you to do what."
"Yes. All right," Chin said.
"You don't know this? We both know this."
"There's work to do at the office. Yes. I need to retrace events over time and see what I can find that applies."
"Nothing applies. But it's there. It charts. You'll see it." "I need to back-test currencies, I don't know, like into the misty dawn."
"We can't wait for the misty dawn."
"Then I'll do it here. To save time. That should make you happy. I do time cycles in my sleep. Years, months, weeks. All the subtle patterns I've found. All the mathematics I've brought to time cycles and price histories. Then you start finding hourly cycles. Then stinking minutes. Then down to seconds."
"You see this in fruit flies and heart attacks. Common forces at work."
"I'm so obsolete I don't have to chew my food."
"You can't stay here."
"I like it here."
"No, you don't."
"I like riding backwards." Chin spoke in his newscaster voice. "He died as he lived. Backwards. Details after the game.
He felt good. He felt stronger than he had in days, or weeks maybe, or longer. The light was red. He saw Jane Melman on the other side of the avenue, his chief of finance, dressed in jogging shorts and a tank top, moving in a wolverine lope. She stopped at the prearranged pickup spot, next to the bronze statue of a man hailing a cab. Then she looked in Eric's direction, squinting, trying to determine whether the limousine was his or someone else's. He knew what she would say to him, first line, word for word, and he looked forward to hearing it. He could hear it already in the nasal airstream of her vernacular. He liked knowing what was coming. It confirmed the presence of some hereditary script available to those who could decode it.
Chin hopped out the door before the car crossed Park Avenue. There was a woman in gray spandex on the median strip holding a dead rat aloft. A performance piece, it seemed. The light went green and horns began to blow. On buildings everywhere in the area the names of financial institutions were engraved on bronze markers, carved in marble, etched in gold leaf on beveled glass.
Melman was running in place. When the car stopped at the corner, she left the shadow of the glass tower behind her and came bumping through the rear door, all elbows and gleaming knees, a web phone pouched on her belly. She was breathless and sweaty from her run and fell into the jump seat with the kind of grim deliverance that marks a deadweight drop to the toilet.
"All these limos, my god, that you can't tell one from another."
He narrowed his eyes and nodded.
"We could be kids on prom night," she said, "or some dumb wedding wherever. What's the charm of identical?"
He glanced out the window, speaking softly, so cool to the subject that he had to deliver his remark to the steel and glass out there, the indifferent street.
"That I'm a powerful person who chooses not to demarcate his territory with singular driblets of piss is what? Is something I need to apologize for?"
"I want to go home and tongue-kiss my Maxima."
The car was not moving, There was a noise beating down that made people cover up when they walked past, rumbling gutturals from the granite tower being raised on the south side of the street, named for a huge investment firm.
"You know what today is, incidentally."
"I know"
"It's my day off, damn it."
"I know this."
"I need this extra day desperately."
"I know this."
"You don't know this. You can't know what it's like. I am a single struggling mother."
"We have a situation here."
"I am a mother running in the park when my phone explodes in my navel. I think it's the kids' nanny, who never calls until the fever reaches a hundred and five. But it's the situation. We have a situation all right. We have a yen carry that could crush us in hours."
"Take some water. Sit on the banquette."
"I like face-to-face. And I don't need to look at all those screens," she said. "I know what's happening."
"The yen will fall."
"That's right."
"Consumer spending's down," he said.
"That's right. Besides which the Bank of Japan left interest rates unchanged."
"This happened today?"
"This happened tonight. In Tokyo. I called a source at the Nikkei."
"While running."
"While flinging my body down Madison Avenue to get here on time."
"The yen can't go any higher."
"That's true. That's right," she said. "Except it just did."
He looked at her, pink and dripping. The car moved faintly forward now and he felt the stir of a melancholy that seemed to cross deep vales of space to reach him here in the midtown grid. He looked out the window, seeing them in odd composite, people on the street, and they waved at taxis and crossed against the light, all and one together, and stood in line at cash machines in the Chase Bank.
She told him he looked mopish.
Buses rumbled up the avenue in pairs, hacking and panting, buses abreast or single file, sending people to the sidewalk in sprints, live prey, nothing new, and that's where construction workers were eating lunch, seated against bank walls, legs stretched, rusty boots, appraising eyes, all trained on the streaming people, the march-past, checking looks and pace and style, women in brisk skirts, half running, sandaled women wearing headsets, women in floppy shorts, tour
ists, others high and slick with fingernails from vampire movies, long, fanged and frescoed, and the workers were alert for freakishness of any kind, people whose hair or clothing or manner of stride mock what the workers do, forty stories up, or schmucks with cell phones, who rankled them in general.
These were scenes that normally roused him, the great rapacious flow, where the physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds shape every anecdotal moment.
He heard himself speak from some middle distance. "I didn't sleep last night," he said.
The car crossed Madison and stopped in front of the Mercantile Library as planned. There were eating places up and down the street. He thought of people eating, lives running out over lunch. What was behind such a thought? He thought of bussers combing crumbs off the tables. The waiters and bussers did not die. It was only the patrons who failed to show up, one by one, over time, for soup with packaged crackers on the side.
A man in a suit and tie approached the car, carrying a small satchel. Eric looked away. His mind went blank except for some business concerning the pathos of the word satchel. It is possible for the mind to go blank in a tactic of evasion or suppression, the reaction to a menace so impending, a tailored man with a suitcase bomb, that there is no blessing to be found in the most resourceful thought, no time for an eddy of sensation, the natural rush that might accompany danger.
When the man tapped on the window, Eric did not look at him.
Then Torval was there, tight-eyed, a hand in his jacket, with two of his aides angling in, male and female, becomingly strikingly lifelike as they emerged from the visual static of the lunch swarm in the street.
Torval leaned into the man.
He said, "Who the fuck are you?"
"Excuse me."
"There's a time limit."
"Dr. Ingram."
Torval had the man's arm yanked up behind him now. He pressed the man into the side of the automobile. Eric leaned toward the window and lowered it. Food odors mingled in the air, coriander and onion soup, the funk of beef patties frying. The aides formed a loose cordon, both facing outward from the action.
