Cosmopolis

by Don DeLillo

  He said, "Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot.

  I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I'm looking for more. Show me something I don't know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now"

  The car was parked outside the hotel and across the street from the Barrymore, where a group of smokers gathered at intermission, tucked under the marquee.

  He sat in the car borrowing yen and watching his fund's numbers sink into the mist on several screens. Torval stood in the rain with arms folded. He was a lone figure in the street, facing a series of empty loading docks.

  The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual, attuned to the registers of his lower brain and gaining distance from the need to take inspired action, make original judgments, maintain independent principles and convictions, all the reasons why people are fucked up and birds and rats are not.

  The stun gun probably helped. The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes and he'd rolled about on the hotel rug, electroconvulsive and strangely elated, deprived of his faculties of reason.

  But he could think now, well enough to understand what was happening. There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading. He found the humidor and lit a cigar. Strategists could not explain the speed and depth of the fall. They opened their mouths and words came out. He knew it was the yen. His actions regarding the yen were causing storms of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm's portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger.

  He smoked and watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior. He was also bored and a little dismissive. They were making too much of it. He thought it would end in a day or two and he was about to code a word to the driver when he noticed that people under the marquee were staring at the car, battered and paint-sprayed.

  He lowered the window and looked more closely at one of the women standing there. At first he thought it was Elise Shifrin. This is how he sometimes thought of his wife, by full name, due to her relative celebrity in the social columns and the fashion books. Then he wasn't sure who it was, either because his view was partly obstructed or because the woman in question had a cigarette in her hand.

  He forced open the door and walked across the street and Torval was at his side, ably containing his rage. "I need to know where you're going."

  "Wait and learn," he said.

  The woman looked away when he approached. It was Elise, noncommittally, in profile. "You smoke since when."

  She answered without turning to face him, speaking from a seeming distance.

  "I took it up when I was fifteen. It's one of those things a girl takes up. It tells her she's more than a skinny body no one looks at. There's a certain drama in her life."

  "She notices herself. Then other people notice her. Then she marries one of them. Then they go to dinner," he said.

  Torval and Danko flanked the limo and it moved deliberately down the street in light taxi traffic, husband and wife assessing the prospects of immediate eating places. One of the screens displayed a guide to the street's restaurants and Elise chose the old small reliable subterranean bistro. Eric looked out the window and saw a crack in the wall called Little Tokyo.

  The place was empty.

  "You're wearing a cashmere sweater."

  "Yes I am."

  "It's beige."

  "Yes."

  "And that's your hand-beaded skirt."

  "Yes it is."

  "I'm noticing. How was the play?"

  "I left at intermission, didn't l?"

  "What was it about and who was in it? I'm making conversation."

  "I went on impulse. The audience was sparse. Five minutes after the curtain went up, I understood why."

  The waiter stood by the table. Elise ordered a mixed green salad, if manageable, and a small bottle of mineral water. Not sparkling, please, but still.

  Eric said, "Give me the raw fish with mercury poisoning." He sat facing the street. Danko stood just outside the door, unaccompanied by the female. "Where is your jacket?"

  "Where is my jacket."

  "You were wearing a suit jacket earlier. Where is your jacket?"

  "Lost in the scuffle, I guess. You saw the car. We were under attack by anarchists. Just two hours ago they were a major global protest. Now, what, forgotten."

  "There's something else I wish I could forget."

  "That's my peanuts you smell."

  "Didn't I see you come out of the hotel just up the street while I was standing outside the theater?"

  He was enjoying this. It put her at a disadvantage, playing petty interrogator, and made him feel boyishly inventive and rebellious.

  "I could tell you there was an emergency meeting of my staff to deal with the crisis. The nearest conference room was at the hotel. Or I could tell you I had to use the men's room in the lobby. There's a toilet in the car but you don't know this. Or I went to the health club at the hotel to work off the tension of the day. I could tell you I spent an hour on a treadmill. Then I went for a swim if there's a swimming pool. Or I went up to the roof to watch the lightning flash. I love it when the rain has that wavering quality it rarely has these days. It's that whiplash sort of quality, where the rain undulates above the rooftops. Or the car's liquor cabinet was unaccountably empty and I went in to have a drink. I could tell you I went in to have a drink, in the bar off the lobby, where the peanuts are always fresh."

  The waiter said, "Enjoy."

  She looked at her salad. Then she began to eat it. She dug right in, treating it as food and not some extrusion of matter that science could not explain.

  "Is that the hotel you wanted to take me to?"

  "We don't need a hotel. We'll do it in the ladies' room. We'll go to the alley out back and rattle the garbage cans. Look. I'm trying to make contact in the most ordinary ways. To see and hear. To notice your mood, your clothes. This is important. Are your stockings on straight? I understand this at some level. How people look. What people wear.

  "How they smell," she said. "Do you mind my saying that? Am I being too wifely? I'll tell you what the problem is. I don't know how to be indifferent. I can't master this. And it makes me susceptible to pain. In other words it hurts."

  "This is good. We're like people talking. Isn't this how they talk?"

  "How would I know?"

  He swallowed his sake. There was a long pause.

  He said, "My prostate is asymmetrical."

  She sat back and thought, looking at him with some concern.

  "What does that mean?"

  He said, "I don't know."

  There was a palpable adjustment, a shared disquiet and sensitivity.

  "You have to see a doctor."

  "I just saw a doctor. I see a doctor every day."

  The room, the street were completely still and they were whispering now. He didn't think they'd ever felt so close.

  "You just saw a doctor."

  "That's how I know."

  They thought about this. With the moment growing solemn, something faintly humorous passed between them. Maybe there is humor in certain parts of the body even as their dysfunction slowly kills you, loved ones gathered at the bed, above the soiled sheets, others in the foyer smoking.

  "Look. I married you for your beauty but you don't have to be beautiful. I married you for your money in a way, the history of it, piling up over generations, through world wars. This is not something I need but a little history is nice. The family retainers. The vintage cellars. Little intimate wine tastings. Spitting merlot together. This is stupid but nice. The estate-bottled wines. The statuary in the Renaissance garden, beneath the hilltop villa, among the lemon groves. But you don't have to be rich."

  "I just have to be indifferent."

  She began to cry
. He'd never seen her cry and felt a little helpless. He put out a hand. It remained there, extended, between them.

  "You wore a turban at our wedding."

  "Yes."

  "My mother loved that," she said.

  "Yes. But I'm feeling a change. I'm making a change. Did you look at the menu? They have green tea ice cream. This is something you might like. People change. I know what's important now."

  "That's such a boring thing to say. Please."

  "I know what's important now."

  "All right. But note the skeptical tone," she said. "What's important now?"

  "To be aware of what's around me. To understand another person's situation, another person's feelings. To know, in short, what's important. I thought you had to be beautiful. But this isn't true anymore. It was true earlier in the day. But nothing that was true then is true now."

  "Which means, I take it, that you don't think I'm beautiful."

  "Why do you have to be beautiful?"

  "Why do you have to be rich, famous, brainy, powerful and feared?"

  His hand was still suspended in the air between them. He took her water bottle and drank what remained. Then he told her that Packer Capital's portfolio had been reduced to near nothingness in the course of the day and that his personal fortune in the tens of billions was in ruinous convergence with this fact. He also told her that someone out there in the rainswept night had made a credible threat on his life. Then he watched her absorb the news.

  He said, "You're eating. That's good."

  But she wasn't eating. She was absorbing the news, sitting in a white silence, fork poised. He wanted to take her out in the alley and have sex with her. Beyond that, what? He did not know. He could not imagine. But then he never could. It made sense to him that his immediate and extended futures would be compressed into whatever events might constitute the next few hours, or minutes, or less. These were the only terms of life expectancy he'd ever recognized as real.

  "It's okay. It's fine," he said. "It makes me feel free in a way I've never known."

  "That's so awful. Don't say things like that. Free to do what? Go broke and die? Listen to me. I'll help you financially. I'll truly do what I can do to help. You can reestablish yourself, at your pace, in your way. Tell me what you need. I promise I'll help. But as a couple, as a marriage, I think we're done, aren't we? You speak of being free. This is your lucky day."

  He'd left his wallet in the jacket in the hotel room. She took the check and began to cry again. She cried through tea with lemon and then they walked to the door together, in close embrace, her head resting on his shoulder.

  He found his cigar smoldering in an ashtray on the liquor cabinet and he fired it up again. The aroma gave him a sense of robust health. He smelled well-being, long life, even placid fatherhood, somewhere, in the burning leaf.

  There was another theater across the street, near the desolate end of the block, the Biltmore, and he saw scaffolding out front and construction rubble in a dumpster nearby. A restoration project was underway and the front doors were bolted but there were people slipping into the stage entrance, young men and women in slinky pairs and clusters, and he heard random noise, or industrial sounds, or music in massive throbs and blots coming from deep inside the building.

  He knew he was going in. But first he had to lose more money.

  The crystal on his wristwatch was also a screen. When he activated the online function, the other features receded. It took him a moment to decode a series of encrypted signatures. This is how he used to hack into corporate systems, testing their security for a fee. He did it this time to examine the bank, brokerage and offshore accounts of Elise Shifrin and then to impersonate her algorithmically and transfer the money in these accounts to Packer Capital, where he opened a new account for her, more or less instantaneously, by thumbnailing some numbers on the tiny keypad that was set around the bezel of the watch. Then he went about losing the money, spreading it systematically in the smoke of rumbling markets. He did this to make certain he could not accept her offer of financial help. The gesture had touched him but it was necessary to resist, of course, or die in his soul. But this wasn't the only reason to piss away her birthright. He was making a gesture of his own, a sign of ironic final binding. Let it all come down. Let them see each other pure and lorn. This was the individual's revenge on the mythical couple.

  How much was she worth?

  The number surprised him. The total in U.S. dollars was seven hundred and thirty-five million. The number seemed puny, a lottery jackpot shared by seventeen postal workers. The words sounded puny and tinny and he tried to be ashamed on her behalf. But it was all air anyway. It was air that flows from the mouth when words are spoken. It was lines of code that interact in simulated space.

  Let them see each other clean, in killing light.

  Danko preceded him to the stage door. A bouncer was stationed there, immense, steroidal, wearing thumb rings set with jewelled skulls. Danko spoke to him, opening his jacket to reveal the weapon holstered there, an evidence of credentials, and the man gave directions. Eric followed his bodyguard down a plastery damp passageway, up a steep flight of narrow metal stairs and onto a catwalk above the fly space.

  He looked down on a gutted theater pounding with electronic sound. Bodies were packed tight through the orchestra and loges and there were dancers in the debris of the second balcony, not torn down yet, and they spread down the stairs and into the lobby, bodies in cyclonic dance, and on the stage and in the pit more tossing bodies in a wash of achromatic light.

  A bedsheet banner, hand-lettered, dangled from the balcony.

  THE LAST TECHNO-RAVE

  The music was cold and repetitive, computer-looped into long percussive passages with distant tunneling sounds under the pulsebeat.

  "This is very crazy. Take over whole theater. What do you think?" Danko said.

  "I don't know."

  "I don't know either. But I think it is crazy. Looks like drug scene. What do you think?"

  "Yes."

  "I think it is latest drug. Called novo. Makes pain go away. Look how good they feel."

  "Kids."

  "They are kids. Exactly. What pain do they feel that they need to take pill? Music, okay, too loud, so what. It is beautiful how they dance. But what pain do they feel too young to buy beer?"

  "There's pain enough for everybody now," Eric told him.

  It was hard work to talk and listen. Finally they had to look at each other, read lips through the stunning noise. Now that he knew Danko's name, he could see him, partially. This was a man about forty, average size, scarred across the forehead and cheek, with a bent nose and bristled hair cut close. He did not live in his clothes, his turtleneck and blazer, but in a body hammered out of raw experience, things suffered and done to extreme limits.

  Music devoured the air around them, issuing from enormous speakers set among the ruined murals on facing walls. He began to feel an otherworldliness, a strange arrhythmia in the scene. The dancers seemed to be working against the music, moving ever more slowly as the tempo compressed and accelerated. They opened their mouths and rolled their heads. All the boys had ovoid heads, the girls were a cult of starvelings. The light source was in the tech level above the balcony, radiating long cool waves of banded gray. To someone watching from above, light fell upon the ravers with a certain clemency of effect, a visual counterstroke to the ominous sound. There was a remote track under the music that resembled a female voice but wasn't. It spoke and moaned. It said things that seemed to make sense but didn't. He listened to it speak outside the range of any language ever humanly employed and he began to miss it when it stopped.

  "I don't believe I am here," Danko said.

  He looked at Eric and smiled at the idea of being here, among American teenagers in stylized riot, with music that took you over, replacing your skin and brain with digital tissue. There was something infectious in the air. It wasn't the music and lights alone that drew you in, the spec
tacle of massed dance in a theater stripped of seats and paint and history. Eric thought it might be the drug as well, the novo, spreading its effect from those who took it to those who did not. You caught what they had. First you were apart and watching and then you were in, and with, and of the crowd, and then you were the crowd, densely assembled and dancing as one.

  They were weightless down there. He thought the drug was probably dissociative, separating mind from body. They were a blank crowd, outside worry and pain, drawn to the glassy repetition. All the menace of electronica was in repetition itself. This was their music, loud, bland, bloodless and controlled, and he was beginning to like it.

  But he felt old, watching them dance. An era had come and gone without him. They melted into each other so they wouldn't shrivel up as individuals. The noise was nearly unbearable, taking root in his hair and teeth. He was seeing and hearing too much. But this was his only defense against the spreading mental state. Never having touched or tasted the drug, not even having seen it, he felt a little less himself, a little more the others, down there, raving.

  "You tell me when we leave. I take you out."

  "Where is he?"

  "At the entrance. Torval? He watches at the entrance."

  "Have you killed people?"

  "What do you think? Like lunch," he said.

  They were in a trance state now, dancing in slowest motion. The music took a turn toward dirge, with lyrical keyboard flourishes bridging every segment of regret. It was the last techno-rave, the end of whatever it was the end of.

  Danko led him down the long stairway and through the passage. There were dressing rooms with ravers inside, sitting and lying everywhere, slumped against each other. He stood in a doorway and watched. They could not speak or walk. One of them licked another's face, the only movement in the room. Even as his self-awareness grew weaker, he could see who they were in their chemical delirium and it was tender and moving, to know them in their frailty, their wistfulness of being, because kids is all they were, trying not to scatter in the air.