Cosmopolis (10 page)

"Yes."

"Then the blast."

"Yes."

"Has this happened, I wonder, before?"

"Yes. I had our computer security tested."

"Nothing amiss."

"No. Not that anyone, anyway, could produce such an effect. Could anticipate such a thing."

"You recoiled in shock."

"On-screen."

"Then the blast. And then."

"Recoiled for real," he said.

"Whatever that might possibly mean."

She worked her mole. She fingered the mole on her cheek, twisting it as she thought. He sat and waited. "This is the thing about genius," she said. "Genius alters the terms of its habitat."

He liked that but wanted more.

"Think of it this way. There are rare minds operating, a few, here and there, the polymath, the true futurist. A consciousness such as yours, hypermaniacal, may have contact points beyond the general 41/91

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perception."

He waited.

"Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumblebee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way."

The tickers went dark on the face of the tower under assault.

"You've been talking about the future being impatient. Pressing upon us."

"That was theory. I deal in theory," she said sharply.

He turned away from her and watched the screens. The top tier of the electronic display across the avenue showed this message now:

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD

THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM

He recognized the variation on the famous first sentence of The Communist Manifesto in which Europe is haunted by the specter of communism, circa 1850.

They were confused and wrongheaded. But his respect for the protesters' ingenuity grew more certain. He slid open the sunroof and poked his head into the smoke and gas, with burning rubber thick in the air, and he thought he was an astronaut come upon a planet of pure flatus. It was bracing. A figure in a motorcycle helmet mounted the hood and began crawling across the roof of the car. Torval reached up and scraped him off. He tossed him to the ground, where the bodyguards took over. They had to use a stun gun to subdue him and the voltage delivered the man to another dimension. Eric barely noticed the crackling sound and the arced charge of current that jumped the gap between electrodes. He was watching the second ticker begin to operate, words racing north to south.

A RAT BECAME THE UNIT OF CURRENCY

It took him a moment to absorb the words and identify the line. He knew the line of course. It was out of a poem he'd been reading lately, one of the few longer poems he'd chosen to investigate, a line, half a line from the chronicle of a city under siege.

It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around him, the gassed men and women in their defiance, waving looted Nasdaq T-shirts, and to realize they'd been reading the same poetry he'd been reading.

He sat down long enough to take a web phone out of a slot and execute an order for more yen. He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. He wanted all the yen there was.

Then he put his head outside again to watch the words leap repeatedly across the shiny gray facade. The police launched a counter-assault on the tower, led by a special unit. He liked special units. They wore bullet helmets and dark slickers, men with automatic weapons that were skeleton guns, all framework and no body.

Something else was happening. There was a shift, a break in space. Again he wasn't sure what he 42/91

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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 43/91

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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 44/91

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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 calls 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."

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"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.