Cosmopolis (17 page)

Technicians weaved through the group with light meters, soft-stepping over heads and between spread legs, reciting numbers in the night, and a woman with a slate stood ready to mark the scene and take. Eric went to the corner and squeezed through a pair of warped boards that blocked the sidewalk.

He stood inside the plywood framework breathing mortar and dust and removed his clothes. It took him a while to remember why his midsection smarted so badly. That's where he'd been frizzed by the stun gun, and how sensational she'd looked in the arc and strobe, his bodyguard in her armored vest.

He felt a lingering sting, mid-dick, from the vodka she'd dribbled thereon.

He rolled his trousers tightly around the handgun and left all his clothes on the sidewalk. He felt 74/91

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his way in the dark, turning the corner and putting his shoulder to a board until he could see a fringe of light. He pushed slowly, hearing the board scrape the asphalt, and then sidled around the plywood and stepped into the street. He took ten baby steps, reaching the limits of the intersection and the border of fallen bodies.

He lay down among them. He felt the textural variation of slubs of chewing gum compressed by decades of traffic. He smelled the ground fumes, the oil leaks and rubbery skids, summers of hot tar.

He lay on his back, head twisted, arm bent on chest. His body felt stupid here, a pearly froth of animal fat in some industrial waste. Out of one eye he could see the camera sweep the scene at a height of twenty feet. The master shot was still being prepared, he thought, while a woman with a hand-held camera prowled the area shooting digital video.

A high assistant called to a lesser, "Bobby, lock it up."

The street grew quiet in time. Voices died, the sense of outlying motion faded. He felt the presence of the bodies, all of them, the body breath, the heat and running blood, people unlike each other who were now alike, amassed, heaped in a way, alive and dead together. They were only extras in a crowd scene, told to be immobile, but the experience was a strong one, so total and open he could barely think outside it.

"Hello," someone said.

It was the person nearest him, a woman lying facedown, an arm extended, palm turned up. She had light brown hair, or brownish blond. Maybe it was fawn-colored. What is fawn? A grayish yellow-brown to a moderate reddish brown. Or sorrel. Sorrel sounded better.

"Are we supposed to be dead?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Nobody told us. I'm frustrated by that."

"Be dead then."

The position of her head forced her to speak into the blacktop, muffling her words.

"I assumed an awkward pose intentionally. Whatever has happened to us, I thought, probably happened without warning and I wanted to reflect that by individualizing my character. One entire arm is twisted painfully. But I wouldn't feel right if I changed position. Someone said that the financing has collapsed. Happened in seconds apparently. Money all gone. This is the last scene they're shooting before they suspend indefinitely. So there's no excuse for self-indulgence, is there?"

Didn't Elise have sorrel hair? He could not see the woman's face and she could not see his. But he'd spoken and she'd evidently heard him. If this was Elise, wouldn't she react to the sound of her husband's voice? But then why would she? It was not an interesting thing to do.

The rumble of a truck somewhere drummed on his spine.

"But I suspect we're not actually dead. Unless we're a cult," she said, "involved in a mass suicide, which I truly hope is not the case."

An amplified voice called, "Eyes closed, people. No sound or movement."

The crane shot commenced, camera slowly lowering, and he shut his eyes. Now that he was sightless among them, he saw the clustered bodies as the camera did, coldly. Were they pretending to be naked or were they naked? It was no longer clear to him. They were many shades of skin color but 75/91

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he saw them in black-and-white and he didn't know why. Maybe a scene such as this needed somber monochrome.

"Rolling," called another voice.

It tore his mind apart, trying to see them here and real, independent of the image on a screen in Oslo or Caracas. Or were those places indistinguishable from this one? But why ask these questions?

Why see these things? They isolated him. They set him apart and this is not what he wanted. He wanted to be here among them, all-body, the tattoed, the hairy-assed, those who stank. He wanted to set himself in the middle of the intersection, among the old with their raised veins and body blotches and next to the dwarf with a bump on his head. He thought there were probably people here with wasting diseases, a few, undissuadable, skin flaking away. There were the young and strong. He was one of them. He was one of the morbidly obese, the tanned and fit and middle-aged. He thought of the children in the scrupulous beauty of their pretending, so formal and fine-boned. He was one. There were those with heads nested in the bodies of others, in breasts or armpits, for whatever sour allowance of shelter. He thought of those who lay faceup and wide-winged, open to the sky, genitals world-centered. There was a dark woman with a small red mark in the middle of her forehead, for auspiciousness. Was there a man with a missing limb, brave stump knotted below the knee? How many bodies bearing surgical scars? And who is the girl in dreadlocks, folded into herself, nearly all of her lost in her hair, pink toes showing?

He wanted to look around but did not open his eyes until a long moment passed and a man's soft voice called, "Cut."

He took one step and extended an arm behind him. He felt her hand in his. She followed him into the boardedoff section of sidewalk, where he turned in the dark and kissed her, saying her name. She climbed his body and wrapped her legs around him and they made love there, man standing, woman astraddle, in the stone odor of demolition.

"I lost all your money," he told her.

He heard her laugh. He felt the spontaneous breath of it, the lap of humid air on his face. He'd forgotten the pleasure of her laugh, a smoky half cough, a cigarette laugh out of an old black-and-white movie.

"I lose things all the time," she said. "I lost my car this morning. Did we talk about this? I don't remember."

That's what this resembled, the next scene in the black-and-white film that was being screened in theaters worldwide, outside the script and beyond the need for refinancing. After the naked crowd, the two lovers in isolation, free of memory and time.

"First I stole the money, then I lost it." She said laughingly, "Where?"

"In the market."

"But where?" she said. "Where does it go when you lose it?"

She licked his face and shinnied up his body and he could not remember where the money went.

She ran her tongue over his eye and brow He lifted her rhapsodically higher and mashed his face in her breasts. He felt them jump and hum.

"What do poets know about money? Love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Nothing but 76/91

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this," she said. "And this."

Here she put a hand to his head and took him, seized him by the hair, a thrilling fistful, drawing his head back and bending to kiss him, so prolonged and abandoned a kiss, with such heat of being, that he thought he knew her finally, his Elise, sighing, tonguing, biting his mouth, breathing muggy words and dying murmurs, whisperkissing, babytalking, her body fused to his, legs girdling, buttocks hot in his hands.

The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. Then she wedged herself through the narrow opening in the boards and he watched her cross the street. Nothing moved out there. She was the lone stroke of motion, crew and extras gone, equipment gone, and she was cool and silvery slim and walking headhigh, with technical precision, toward the last trailer in the service station, where she would find her clothes, dress quickly and disappear.

He dressed in the dark. He felt the street grit, minutely coarse, studding his back and legs. He poked around for his socks but couldn't find them and went barefoot out to the street, carrying his shoes.

The last trailer was gone, intersection empty. He didn't sit with the driver this time. He wanted to be in the rear cabin of his cork-lined limousine, in bronzy light, alone in the flow of space, noting the lines and grains, the sweet transitions, this shape or texture modulated to that. The long interior had a thrust, a fluid motion rearward, and he smelled the leather around him and the red cedar paneling up front, used in the partition. He felt the marble underfoot, bone cold. He looked at the ceiling mural, a dark ink wash, semi-abstract, that showed the arrangement of the planets at the time of his birth, calculated to the hour, minute and second.

They crossed Eleventh Avenue into the car barrens. Old junked-up garages and ratty storefronts.

Car repair, car wash, used cars. A sign reading Collision Inc. Stripped cars ranked on the sidewalk, tail ends to the street. It was the last block before the river, nonresidential, nonpedestrian, car lots fenced with razor wire, an area suited to his limo in its current condition. He put on his shoes. The car stopped near the entrance to an underground garage, where it would sit overnight and probably forever, or until it was evicted, scavenged and scrapped.

The wind came up. He stood in the street, near a derelict tenement, windows boarded, a padlocked iron door where the entrance used to be. He thought he'd like to get a can of gasoline and set fire to the car. Create a riverside pyre of wood, leather, rubber and electronic devices. It would be a great thing to do and see. This is Hell's Kitchen. Burn the car to a blackened scrap of dead metal, right here in the street. But he could not subject Ibrahim to such a spectacle.

The wind blew hard off the river. He and his driver met at the side of the car.

"Early morning you can see, right here, teams of men in white coveralls, they are washing the limousines. A marketplace of limos. Rags flying."

The two men embraced. Then Ibrahim got in the car and eased it down the ramp and into the garage. The steel grille came down. He would drive his own car out the exit on the next street and head on home.

The moon was mostly shadow, a waning crescent twenty-two days into its orbit, he estimated.

He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn't realized this could happen to him. The 77/91

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moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn't planned on this. Where was the life he'd always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all directions were the same?

Then there was a shot. The sound flew in the wind. It was something, yes, an occurrence, but also nearly negligible, a hollow popping noise come and gone in a breath and carrying only the faintest intimation of danger. He didn't want to blow it out of proportion. Then another shot followed by a man's voice howling his name in a series of trochaic beats and at a cracked pitch that was more chilling than gunfire.

ERIC MICHAEL PACKER

So it was personal then. He remembered the gun in his belt. He took it in hand and prepared to sprint toward a couple of small dumpsters on the sidewalk behind him. There was shelter there, a blind from which to return fire. Instead he stood where he was, in the middle of the street, facing the padlocked building. Another shot sounded, barely, nearly lost in the ripping wind. It seemed to come from the third floor.

He looked at his gun. It was a snub-nosed revolver, small and blunt, with a wide trigger. He checked the cylinder, which held only five rounds. But he knew he would not be counting rounds.

He prepared to fire, eyes closed, visualizing his finger on the trigger, in tight detail, and also seeing the man in the street, himself, long-lensed, facing the dead tenement.

But there was something moving toward him, off his left shoulder. He opened his eyes. It was a man on a bike, a bike messenger, bare-chested, and he went swarming past, arms spread wide, and made a sweeping turn onto the West Side Highway, heading north along the terminals and piers.

Eric watched for a moment, semi-marveling at the sight. Then he turned and fired. He fired at the building itself, as a building. This was the target. It made every sense to him. It solved so many problems of who or whom. The man fired back.

Why do people interpret gunshots as firecrackers going off or as cars backfiring? Because they aren't being hunted by a killer.

He approached the building. The padlocked door looked formidable, an iron-plated bulkhead. He thought of firing a shot into the lock for the sheer cinematic stupidity of the gesture. He knew there was another way in and out because the padlock could not be opened by someone inside the building.

There was a gate to his left, some steps, an alley that was narrow and dog-shat, leading to a junked-up yard behind the building.

He pushed against an old misshapen door. His strength coach was a woman, Latvian. It gave way and he entered the building. The back hallway was swampish. A man lay dead or sleeping in the vestibule, if this is still a word, and he walked around the body and climbed two flights of stairs in the dim swinging light of a couple of strung bulbs.

The wind was blowing through the upper floors. There was fallen plaster on the landings and every sort of drift and silt and street debris. On the third floor he stepped over a number of unfinished meals in styrofoam trays, with neatly snuffed cigarettes worked to the nub. All the doors but one were gone 78/91

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and the wind came blowing through an unboarded window space. He liked that, the sound of wind knocking through the rooms and halls. He liked the two rats he saw moving toward the food nearby.

The rats were good. The rats were fine and right, thematically sound.

He stood outside the one apartment that had a door. He stood with his back to the wall, shoulder nudging the jamb. He held the gun alongside his face, muzzle up, and looked straight ahead, into the windy hallway, not seeing things at maximum clarity but thinking into the moment.