by Don DeLillo
They were talking, they were pressed together nestling. He told himself this was his wife.
"The vehicle is armored of course. This complicated the cork-lining. But they managed in the end. It's a gesture. It's a thing a man does."
"Did it work?"
"How could it work? No. The city eats and sleeps noise. It makes noise out of every century It makes the same noises it made in the seventeenth century along with all the noises that have evolved since then. No. But I don't mind the noise. The noise energizes me. The important thing is that it's there."
"The cork."
"That's right. The cork. This is what finally matters."
Torval was not in sight. He spotted the male bodyguard standing near the cash register, appearing to study a menu. He wanted to understand why cash registers were not confined to display cases in a museum of cash registers in Philadelphia or Zurich.
Elise looked into her bowl of soup, bobbing with life forms.
"Is this what I wanted?"
"Tell me what you wanted."
"Duck consomme with an herb twist."
She said this self-mockingly, affecting an accent that was extraterritorial and only slightly more elevated than her normal system of inflection. He looked at her closely, expecting to admire the arched nostrils and the fine slight veer along the ridge of the nose. But he found himself thinking that maybe she wasn't beautiful after all. Maybe she missed. It was a stab of awareness. Maybe she was middling, desperately unexceptional. She was better-looking back in the bookstore when he'd thought she was someone else. He began to understand that they'd invented her beauty together, conspiring to assemble a fiction that worked to their mutual maneuverability and delight. They'd married in the shroud of this unspoken accord. They needed the final term in the series. She was rich, he was rich; she was heir-apparent, he was self-made; she was cultured, he was ruthless; she was brittle, he was strong; she was gifted, he was brilliant; she was beautiful. This was the core of their understanding, the thing they needed to believe before they could be a couple.
She held the soup spoon above the bowl, motionless, while she formulated a thought.
"It's true, you know. You do actually reek of sexual discharge," she said, making a point of looking into the soup.
"It's not the sex you think I've had. It's the sex I want. That's what you smell on me. Because the more I look at you, the more I know about us both."
"Tell me what that means. Or don't. No, don't."
"And the more I want to have sex with you. Because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. It's the antidote to disillusion. The counterpoison."
"You need to be inflamed, don't you? This is your element."
He wanted to bite her lower lip, seize it between his teeth and bite down just hard enough to draw an erotic drop of blood.
"Where were you going," he said, "after the bookstore? Because there's a hotel."
"I was going to the bookstore. Period. I was in the bookstore. I was happy there. Where were you going?"
"To get a haircut."
She put a hand to his face and looked somber and complicated.
"Do you need a haircut?"
"I need anything you can give me."
"Be nice," she said.
"I need all the meanings of inflamed. There's a hotel just across the avenue. We can start over. Or finish with intense feeling. That's one of the meanings. To arouse to passionate feeling. We can finish what we barely started. Two hotels in fact. We have a choice."
"I don't think I want to pursue this."
"No, you don't. You wouldn't."
"Be nice to me," she said.
He waved his chopped liver sandwich, then took a loud bite, chewing and talking, and helped himself to her soup.
"Someday you'll be a grown-up," he said, "and then your mother will have no one to talk to."
Something was happening behind them. The nearest counterman spoke a line in Spanish that included the word rat. Eric swung around on his stool and saw two men in gray spandex standing in the narrow aisle between the counter and the tables. They stood motionless back to back, right arms raised, each man holding a rat by the tail. They began to shout something he could not make out. The rats were alive, forelegs pedaling, and he was fascinated, losing all sense of Elise. He wanted to understand what the men were saying and doing. They were young, in full body suits, rat suits, he realized, blocking the way to the door. He faced the long mirror on the far wall and could see most of the room, either reflected or direct, and behind him the countermen in baseball caps were arrayed in a state of thoughtful pause.
The two men separated, taking several long strides in opposite directions, and began to swing the rats over their heads, voices out of sync, shouting something about a specter. The face of the man who sliced pastrami hovered above his machine, eyes undecided, and the patrons didn't know how to react. Then they did, half frantic, ducking the arc of the circulating rats. A couple of people pushed through the kitchen door, disappearing, and general movement ensued, with toppled chairs and bodies spinning off the stools.
Eric was rapt. He was held nearly spellbound. He admired this thing, whatever it was. The bodyguard was at the counter, speaking into his lapel. Eric extended an arm, indicating there was no need for the man to take action. Let it express itself. People called out threats and curses that overwhelmed the voices of the two young men. He watched the nearest guy get jumpy, eyes beginning to drift. The threats sounded ancient and formulaic, one phrase eliciting the next, and even the remarks in English had an epic tenor, deathly and stretchable. He wanted to talk to the guy, ask him what the occasion was, the mission, the cause.
The countermen were armed by now with cutlery.
Then the men flung the rats, stilling the room again. The animals tail-whipped through the air, hitting and rebounding off assorted surfaces and skimming tabletops on their backs, momentum-driven, two lurid furballs running up the walls, emitting a mewl and squeak, and the men ran too, taking their shout out to the street with them, their slogan or warning or incantation.
On the other side of Sixth Avenue, the car moved slowly past the brokerage house on the corner. There were cubicles exposed at street level, men and women watching screens, and he felt the safety of their circumstance, the fastness, the involution of it, their curling embryonic ingrowth, secret and creaturely. He thought of the people who used to visit his website back in the days when he was forecasting stocks, when forecasting was pure power, when he'd tout a technology stock or bless an entire sector and automatically cause doublings in share price and the shifting of worldviews, when he was effectively making history, before history became monotonous and slobbering, yielding to his search for something purer, for techniques of charting that predicted the movements of money itself. He traded in currencies from every sort of territorial entity, modern democratic nations and dusty sultanates, paranoid people's republics, hellhole rebel states run by stoned boys.
He found beauty and precision here, hidden rhythms in the fluctuations of a given currency.
He'd left the luncheonette with half a sandwich still in hand. He was eating it now and listening to ecstatic rap on the sound system, the voice of Brutha Fez, with a Bedouin fiddle as sole accompaniment. But an image on one of the onboard screens distracted him. It was the president in his limousine, visible from the waist up. This was a feature of the Midwood administration, the chief executive on live videostream, accessible worldwide. Eric studied the man. He watched for ten motionless minutes. He didn't move and neither did the president, except reflexively, and neither did the traffic in either location. The president was in shirtsleeves, sitting in a quotidian stupor. He twitched once, blinked a few times. His gaze was empty, without direction or content. There was an air of eternal flybuzz boredom. He did not scratch or yawn and began to resemble a person sitting in an offstage lounge waiting to do a guest spot on TV Only it was eerier and deeper than that because his eyes carried no sign of imm
anence, of vital occupancy, and because he seemed to exist in some little hollow of nontime, and because he was the president. Eric hated him for that. He'd talked to him several times. He'd waited in the yellow reception room in the west wing. He'd advised him on matters of some importance and had to stand where someone asked him to stand while someone else took pictures. He hated Midwood for being omnipresent, as he himself used to be. He hated him for being the object of a credible threat to his safety. And he hated and mocked him for his gynecoid upper body with its swag of dangling mammaries under the sheer white shirt. He looked vengefully at the screen, thinking the image did the president every justice. He was the undead. He lived in a state of occult repose, waiting to be reanimated.
"We want to think about the art of money-making," she said.
She was sitting in the rear seat, his seat, the club chair, and he looked at her and waited.
"The Greeks have a word for it." He waited.
"Chrimatistikos," she said. "But we have to give the word a little leeway. Adapt it to the current situation. Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself."
She usually wore a beret but was bareheaded today, Vija Kinski, a small woman in a button-down business shirt, an old embroidered vest and a long pleated skirt of a thousand launderings, his chief of theory, late for their weekly meeting.
"And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and planes. This has nothing to do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself."
The car sat in stationary traffic halfway between the avenues, where Kinski had boarded, emerging from the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. This was curious but maybe it wasn't. He faced her from the jump seat, wondering why he didn't know how old she was. Her hair was smoky gray and looked lightning-struck, withered and singed, but her face was barely marked except for a large mole high on her cheek.
"Oh and this car, which I love. The glow of the screens. I love the screens. The glow of cybercapital. So radiant and seductive. I understand none of it."
She spoke in near whispers and wore a persistent smile, with cryptic variations.
"But you know how shameless I am in the presence of anything that calls itself an idea. The idea is time. Living in the future. Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently."
He said, "There's something I want to show you."
"Wait. I'm thinking."
He waited. Her smile was slightly twisted.
"It's cyber-capital that creates the future. What is the measurement called a nanosecond?"
"Ten to the minus ninth power."
"This is what."
"One billionth of a second," he said.
"I understand none of this. But it tells me how rigorous we need to be in order to take adequate measure of the world around us."
"There are zeptoseconds."
"Good. I'm glad."
"Yoctoseconds. One septillionth of a second."
"Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today," she said, looking slyly into her hands. "To correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less."
The south side of the street was nearly empty of pedestrians. He led her out of the car and onto the sidewalk, where they were able to get a partial view of the electronic display of market information, the moving message units that streaked across the face of an office tower on the other side of Broadway. Kinski was transfixed. This was very different from the relaxed news reports that wrapped around the old Times Tower a few blocks south of here. These were three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street. Financial news, stock prices, currency markets. The action was unflagging. The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed. But he knew that Kinski was absorbing it.
He stood behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Beneath the data strips, or tickers, there were fixed digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what she was thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the way data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment.
She said, "Does it ever stop? Does it slow down? Of course not. Why should it? Fantastic." He saw a familiar name flash across the news ticker.
Kaganovich. But he missed the context. Traffic began to move, barely, and they went back to the car with the two bodyguards providing discreet escort. He sat on the banquette this time, facing the visual displays, and learned that the context was the death of Nikolai Kaganovich, a man of swaggering wealth and shady reputation, owner of Russia 's largest media conglomerate, with interests that ranged from sex magazines to satellite operations.
He respected Kaganovich. The man was shrewd and tough, cruel in the best sense. He and Nikolai had been friends, he told Kinski. He took a bottle of blood orange vodka out of the cooler and poured two short glasses, neat, and they watched coverage of the event on several screens.
She flushed a little, sipping her drink.
The man lay facedown in the mud in front of his dacha outside Moscow, shot numerous times just after returning from a trip to Albania Online, where he'd set up a cable TV network and signed agreements for a theme park in Tirana, the capital.
Eric and Nikolai had tracked wild boar in Siberia. He told Kinski about this. They'd seen a tiger in the distance, a glimpse, a sting of pure transcendence, outside all previous experience. He described the moment to her, the precious sense of last life, a species in peril, and the vastness of the silence around them. They remained motionless, the two men, long after the animal had vanished. The sight of the tiger aflame in high snow made them feel bound to an unspoken code, a brotherhood of beauty and loss.
But he was glad to see the man dead in the mud. The reporter kept using the word dacha. He stood at an angle to the camera, allowing a clear look at the villa, the dacha, through an alley of pines. On another screen a commentator made vague references to unsavory business associates, to anti-globalist elements and local wars. Then she talked about the dacha. Found dead facedown outside his dacha. They searched for security in the word, self-confidence. It was all they knew about the man and the crime, something Russian, that he was dead outside his dacha outside Moscow.
Eric felt good about it, seeing him there, unnumbered bullet w
ounds to the body and head. It was a quiet contentment, an easing of some unspecifiable pressure in the shoulders and chest. It relaxed him, the death of Nikolai Kaganovich. He didn't say this to Kinski. Then he did. Why not? She was his chief of theory. Let her theorize.
"Your genius and your animus have always been fully linked," she said. "Your mind thrives on ill will toward others. So does your body, I think. Bad blood makes for long life. He was a rival in some sense, yes? He was physically strong perhaps. He had a large personality. Filthy rich, this chap. Women in his soup. Reasons enough to feel a sneaky sort of euphoria when the man dies horribly. There are always, always reasons. Don't examine the matter," she said. "He died so you can live."
The car reached the corner and stopped. There were tourists pressing through the theater district in all the words that make a multitude. They moved in swirls and drifts, shuffling in and out of megastores and circling vendors' carts. They stood in a convoluted line, folded back against itself, for cut-rate tickets to Broadway shows. Eric watched them cross the street, stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. These were figures beyond gender and procreation, enchanted women in men's shorts, beyond commerce, even, men immortal in their muscle tone, in the clustered bulge at the crotchline.
Heavy trucks went downtown bouncing, headed to the garment district or the meatpacking docks, and nobody saw them. They saw the cockney selling children's books from a cardboard box, making his pitch from his knees. Eric thought they were the same thing, these two, and the old Chinese was the same, doing acupoint massage, and the repair crew passing fiber-optic cable down a manhole from an enormous yellow spool. He thought about the amassments, the material crush, days and nights of bumper to bumper, red light, green light, the fixedness of things, the obsolescences, going mostly unseen. They saw the old man do his therapeutic massage, working a woman's back and temples as she sat on a bench, her face pressed to a raised cushion attached to a makeshift frame. They read the handwritten sign, relief from fatigue and panic. How things persist, the habits of gravity and time, in this new and fluid reality. The cockney from his knees said, I don't ask you where you get your money, don't ask me where I get my books. They stopped and looked, browsing his cardboard box. The old Chinese stood erect, kneading the woman's acupuncture points, thumbing the furrows behind her ears.
