by Don DeLillo
Something else was happening. There was a shift, a break in space. Again he wasn't sure what he was seeing, only thirty yards away but unreliable, delusional, where a man sat on the sidewalk with legs crossed, trembling in a length of braided flame.
He was close enough to see that the man wore glasses. There was a man on fire. People turned away crouching or stood with hands to faces, spun and crouched and went to their knees, or walked past unaware, ran past in the shuffle and smoke without noticing, or watched spell-struck, bodies going slack, faces round and dumb.
When the wind blew, gusting suddenly, the flames dipped and flattened but the man remained rigid, his face unobscured, and they saw his glasses melt into his eyes.
The sound of moaning began to spread. A man stood wailing. Two women sat on the curbstone wailing. They draped their arms over their heads and faces. Another woman wanted to snuff the fire but only got close enough to wave her jacket at the man, careful not to hit him. He was rocking slightly and his head was burning independent of the body. There was a break in the flames.
His shirt was assumed, it was received spiritually into the air in the form of shreds of smoky matter, and his skin went dark and bubbly and this is what they began to smell now, burnt flesh mixed with gasoline.
A jerry can stood upright close to his knee and it was also burning, ignited when he'd set himself on fire. There were no chanting monks in ochre robes or nuns in dappled gray. It seemed he'd done this on his own.
He was young or not. He'd made the judgment out of lucid conviction. They wanted him to be young and driven by conviction. Eric believed even the police wanted this. No one wanted a deranged man. It dishonored their action, their risk, all the work they'd done together. He was not a transient in a narrow room who suffers episodes of this or that, hearing voices in his head.
Eric wanted to imagine the man's pain, his choice, the abysmal will he'd had to summon. He tried to imagine him in bed, this morning, staring sideways at a wall, thinking his way toward the moment. Did he have to go to a store and buy a box of matches? He imagined a phone call to someone far away, a mother or lover.
The cameramen moved in now, abandoning the special unit that was retaking the tower across the street. They came running to the corner, broad men in haunchy sprints, cameras bouncing on their shoulders, and they closer in tight on the burning man.
He lowered himself into the car and sat in the jump seat, facing Vija Kinski.
Even with the beatings and gassings, the jolt of explosives, even in the assault on the investment bank, he thought there was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating, even, in the parachutes and skateboards, the styrofoam rat, in the tactical coup of reprogramming the stock tickers with poetry and Karl Marx. He thought Kinski was right when she said this was a market fantasy. There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.
Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric all the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at a pause, the protesters and riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling. What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach.
He could see the coverage in her face. She was downcast. The interior of the car tapered toward the rear, lending authority to the seat she was in, normally his of course, and he knew how much she liked to sit in the glove-leather chair and glide through the city day or night speaking ex cathedra. But she was dejected now and did not look at him.
"It's not original," she said finally.
"Hey. What's original? He did it, didn't he?"
"It's an appropriation."
"He poured the gasoline and lit the match."
"All those Vietnamese monks, one after another, in all their lotus positions."
"Imagine the pain. Sit there and feel it."
"Immolating themselves endlessly"
"To say something. To make people think."
"It's not original," she said.
"Does he have to be a Buddhist to be taken seriously? He did a serious thing. He took his life. Isn't this what you have to do to show them that you're serious?"
Torval wanted to talk to him. The door was dented and bent and it took Torval a moment to work it open. Eric moved in a crouch to exit the car, passing near Kinski as he did, but she would not look at him.
The members of an ambulance crew moved slowly through the crowd, using their gurney to clear the way. Sirens were blowing in the cross streets.
The body had stopped burning by now and was still rigidly set in a seated position, leaking vapors and haze. The stink came and went with the wind. The wind was stronger now, storm-bearing, and there was thunder in the distance.
At the side of the car the two men were in a state of formal avoidance, looking past each other. The car sat stunned. It was slathered in red-and-black spray paint. There were dozens of bruises and punctures, long burrowing scrape marks, swaths of impact and discolor. There were places where splashes of urine were preserved in pentimento stainage beneath the flourish of graffiti.
Torval said, "Just now."
"What?"
"Report from the complex. Concerns your safety."
"Little late, are they?"
"This is specific and categorical."
"There's been a threat then."
"Assessment, credible red. Highest order of urgency. This means an incursion is already in progress."
"Now we know"
"And now we have to act on what we know."
"But we still want what we want," Eric said.
Torval adjusted his point of view. He looked at Eric. It seemed a massive transgression, violating the logic of coded glances, vocal tones and other gestural parameters of their particular terms of reference. It was the first time he'd studied Eric in such an open manner. He looked and nodded, pursuing some somber course of thought.
"We want a haircut," Eric told him.
He saw a police lieutenant carrying a walkie-talkie. What entered his mind when he saw this? He wanted to ask the man why he was still using such a contraption, still calling it what he called it, carrying the nitwit rhyme out of the age of industrial glut into smart spaces built on beams of light.
He got back in the car to wait for the long untangling of traffic. People began to move off, some with bandannas still secured against the afterburn of tear gas and the probes of police cameras. There were skirmishes taking place, a few and scattered, men and women running on broken glass that covered the sidewalks and others catcalling at the stoic cops posted on the traffic island.
He told Kinski what he'd heard.
"Do they think the threat is credible?"
"Status urgent."
She was delighted. She began to be herself again, smiling inwardly. Then she looked at him and spilled into laughter. He wasn't sure what was funny about this but found himself laughing as well. He felt defined, etched sharply. He felt a burst of self-realization that heightened and clarified.
"It's interesting, isn't it?" she said. He waited.
"About men and immortality."
They covered the burnt body and wheeled it away, semi-upright, with rats in the streets and the first drops of rain coming down and the light changing radically in the preternatural way that's completely natural, of course, all the electric premonition that rides the sky being a drama of human devising.
"You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God."
She found this amusing.
"And you bought an airplane. I'd nearly forgotten this. Soviet or ex-Soviet. A strategic bomber. Capable of knocking out a small city. Is this right?"
"It's an old Tu-160. NATO call
s it Blackjack A. It was deployed around 1988. Carries nuclear bombs and cruise missiles," he said. "These were not included in the deal." She clapped her hands, happy and charmed. "But they wouldn't let you fly it. Could you fly it?"
"Could and did. They wouldn't let me fly it armed."
"Who wouldn't?"
"The State Department. The Pentagon. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."
"The Russians?"
"What Russians? I bought it black-market and dirt cheap from a Belgian arms dealer in Kazakhstan. That's where I took the controls, for half an hour, over the desert. U.S. dollars, thirty-one million."
"Where is it now?"
"Parked in a storage facility in Arizona. Waiting for replacement parts that nobody can find. Sitting in the wind. I go out there now and then."
"To do what?"
"To look at it. It's mine," he said.
She closed her eyes and thought. The screens showed charts and graphs, market updates. She clutched one hand in the other, tightly, veins going flat and blood draining from her knuckles.
"People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They're melting into the texture of everyday life. This is true or not?"
"Even the word computer."
"Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb."
She opened her eyes and seemed to look right through him, speaking quietly, and he began to imagine her asquat his chest in the middle of the night, in candlelight, not sexually or demonically driven but there to speak into his fitful sleep, to trouble his dreams with her theories.
She talked. This was her job. She was born to it and got paid for it. But what did she believe? Her eyes were unrevealing. At least to him they were, faint, gray, remote to him, unalive to him, bright at times but only in the flush of an insight or conjecture. Where was her life? What did she do when she went home? Who was there besides the cat? He thought there had to be a cat. How could they talk about such things, these two? They were not qualified.
It would be a breach of trust, he thought, to ask if she had a cat, much less a husband, a lover, life insurance. What are your plans for the weekend? The question would be a form of assault. She would turn away, angry and humiliated. She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.
"I understand none of this," she said. "Microchips so small and powerful. Humans and computers merge. This is well beyond my range. And never-ending life begins." She took a moment to look at him. "Shouldn't the glory of a great man's death argue against his dream of immortality?"
Kinski naked on his chest.
"Men think about immortality. Never mind what women think. We're too small and real to matter here," she said. "Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down."
Kinski vivid in his nightmares, commenting on events therein.
"There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired. It's a mystery to me, how such a thing might happen. Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think. Later today perhaps. Maybe today is the day when everything happens, for better or worse, ka-boom, like that."
It was twilight, only dimmer, with a silvery twinge in the air, and he stood outside his car watching taxis extract themselves from the ruck. He didn't know how long it was since he'd felt so good.
How long? He didn't know.
With the currency ticker restored to normal function, the yen showed renewed strength, advancing against the dollar in microdecimal increments every sextillionth of a second. This was good. This was fine and right. It thrilled him to think in zeptoseconds and to watch the numbers in their unrelenting run. The stock ticker was also good. He watched the major issues breeze by and felt purified in nameless ways to see prices spiral into lubricious plunge. Yes, the effect on him was sexual, cunnilingual in particular, and he let his head fall back and opened his mouth to the sky and rain.
The rain came washing down on the emptying breadth of Times Square with the billboards ghost-lighted now and the tire barricades nearly cleared dead ahead, leaving 47th Street open to the west. The rain was fine. The rain was dramatically right. But the threat was even better. He saw a few tourists creep along Broadway under bunched umbrellas to stare at the charred spot on the pavement where an unknown man had set fire to himself. This was grave and haunting. It was right for the moment and the day. But the credible threat was the thing that moved and quickened him. The rain on his face was good and the sour reek was fine and right, the fug of urine maturing on the body of his car, and there was trembling pleasure to be found, and joy at all misfortune, in the swift pitch of markets down. But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he'd always known would come clear in time.
Now he could begin the business of living.
PART TWO
3
She had coral brown skin and well-defined cheekbones. There was a beeswax sheen to her lips. She liked to be looked at and made the act of undressing seem proudly public, an unveiling across national borders with an element of slightly showy defiance.
She wore her ZyloFlex body armor while they had sex. This was his idea. She told him the ballistic fiber was the lightest and softest available, and the strongest as well, and also stab-resistant.
Her name was Kendra Hays and she was easy in his presence. They mock-boxed for about a second and a half. He licked her body here and there, leaving fizzes of spittle behind.
"You work out," she said.
"Six percent body fat."
"Used to be my number. Then I got lazy."
"What are you doing about it?"
"Hit the machines in the morning. Run in the park at night."
She had cinnamon skin, or russet, or a blend of copper and bronze. He wondered if she felt ordinary to herself, riding an elevator alone, thinking about lunch.
She shed the vest and took her room service scotch to the window. Her clothing was folded on a chair nearby. He wanted to spend a day in silence, in his meditation cell, just looking at her face and body, as an exercise in Tao, or fasting with the mind. He didn't ask her what she knew about the credible threat. He wasn't interested in details, not yet, and Torval wouldn't have said much, anyway, to the bodyguards.
"Where is he now?"
"Who?"
"You know."
"He's in the lobby. Torval? Watching them come and go. Danko's in the hall outside."
"Who's that?"
"Danko. My partner."
"He's new."
"I'm new. He's been watching your back for some time now, ever since those wars in the Balkans. He's a veteran."
Eric sat cross-legged on the bed popping peanuts in his mouth and watching her.
"What's he going to say to you about this?"
"Torval? Is that who you're talking about?" She was amused. "Say his name."
"What's he going to say to you?"
"Just so you're safe. That's his job," she said. "Men get possessive. What. You don't know this?"
"I heard the rumor. But the fact is I technically speaking went off duty an hour ago. So it's basically my time we're dealing with here."
He liked her. The more he knew Torval would hate her, the more he liked her. Torval would hate her hotbloodedly for this. He'd spend weeks glaring out at her from under his stormy brows.
"Do you find this interesting?"
She said, "What?"
"Protecting someone in danger."
He
wanted her to move slightly left so that her hip would catch the glow of the table lamp nearby.
"What makes you willing to do this? Take this risk."
"Maybe you're worth it," she said.
She dipped a finger in her drink, then forgot to lick it. "Maybe it's just the pay. The pay's pretty good. The risk? I don't think about the risk. I figure the risk is yours.
You're the man in the crosshairs."
She thought this was funny.
"But is it interesting?"
"It's interesting to be near a man somebody wants to kill."
"You know what they say, don't you?"
"What?"
"The logical extension of business is murder." This was funny too.
He said, "Move a little left."
"Move a little left."
"There. Nice. Perfect."
Her skin was foxy brown, hair braided close to the scalp.
"What kind of weapon did he give you?"
"Stun gun. Doesn't trust me yet with deadly force." She approached the bed and took the glass of vodka out of his hand. He could not stop tossing peanuts in his mouth.
"You ought to eat more healthy."
He said, "Today is different. How many volts at your disposal?"
"One hundred thousand. Jam your nervous system. Drop you to your knees. Like this," she said.
She poured a few drops of vodka on his genitals. It stung, it burned. She laughed when she did it and he wanted her to do it again. She poured a trickle more and bent over to lap it off, to tongue-scrub him in vodka, and then knelt astride him. She had a glass in each hand and tried to keep her balance while they bounced and laughed.
He finished off her scotch and ate peanuts by the fistful while she showered. He watched her shower and thought she was a woman of straps and belts. At some level she would never be naked.
Then he stood by the bed to watch her dress. She took her time, the body armor fastened across her torso, the pants about to be fastened, shoes next, and was fitting the waistband holster onto her hip when she saw him standing in his shorts.
