Cosmopolis (20 page)

"Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God."

He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole shapeless narrative of his unraveling.

Benno came around the table and slumped on the sofa. He set the old revolver down and regarded his advanced weapon. Maybe it was advanced, maybe the military had scrapped it a day or two before.

He pulled the towel lower on his face and aimed the pistol at Eric.

"Anyway you're already dead. You're like someone already dead. Like someone dead a hundred years. Many centuries dead. Kings dead. Royals in their pajamas eating mutton. Have I ever used the word mutton in my life? Came into my head, out of nowhere, mutton."

Eric regretted that he hadn't shot his dogs, his borzois, before leaving the apartment in the morning.

Had it occurred to him to do this, in chill premonition? There was the shark in the thirty-foot tank lined with coral and sea moss, built into a wall of sandblasted glass blocks. He could have left orders for his aides to transport the shark to the Jersey shore and release it in the sea.

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Don DeLillo

Cosmopolis

"I wanted you to heal me, to save me," Benno said.

His eyes shone beneath the hem of the towel. They were fixed on Eric, devastatingly. But it wasn't accusation he encountered. There was a plea in the eyes, retroactive, a hope and need in ruins.

"I wanted you to save me."

The voice had a terrible intimacy, a nearness of feeling and experience that Eric could not reciprocate. He felt sad for the man. What lonely devotedness and hatred and disappointment. The man knew him in ways no one ever had. He sat in collapse, gun pointed, but even the death he felt so necessary to his deliverance would do nothing, change nothing. Eric had failed this docile and friendless man, raging man, this lunatic, and would fail him again, and had to look away.

He looked at his watch. He happened to glance at his watch. There it was on his wrist, with a crocodile band, between the napkins stuck to his wound and the yellow pencil tourniquet. But the watch wasn't showing the time. There was an image, a face on the crystal, and it was his. This meant he'd activated the electron camera unintentionally, maybe when he shot himself. The camera was a device so microscopically refined it was almost pure information. It was almost metaphysics. It operated inside the watch body, collecting images in the immediate vicinity and displaying them on the crystal.

He rolled his arm and the face disappeared, replaced by a wire dangling overhead. A zoom shot followed, showing a beetle on the wire, in slow transit. He studied the thing, mouthparts and forewings, absorbed by its beauty, so detailed and gleaming. Then something changed around him. He didn't know what this could mean. What could this mean? He realized he'd known this feeling before, tenuously, not nearly so dense and textured, and the image on the screen was a body now, facedown on the floor.

He felt a blood hush, a pause in midbeing.

There were no bodies in plain sight. He thought of the body he'd seen earlier in the vestibule but how could the screen show the image of a thing that was outside camera range?

He looked at Benno, broody and distant.

Whose body and when? Have all the worlds conflated, all possible states become present at once?

He moved his arm, straightening and flexing, pointing the watch six different ways, but the body of a man, in long shot, remained on-screen. He looked up at the beetle moving in its specialized slowness down along the warps and seams of the wire, its old dumb leaf-eating arcadian pace, thinking it is in a tree, and he redirected the camera at the insect. But the prone body stayed on-screen.

He looked at Benno. He covered the watch with his good hand. He thought about his wife. He missed Elise and wanted to talk to her, tell her she was beautiful, lie, cheat on her, live with her in middling matrimony, having dinner parties and asking what the doctor said.

When he looked at the watch he saw the inside of an ambulance, with drip-feed devices and bouncing heads. The image lasted less than a second but the scene, the circumstance was familiar in some unearthly way. He covered the watch and looked at Benno, who rocked back and forth, a little mystically, muttering. He looked at the face of the watch. He saw a series of vaults, a wall of vaults or compartments, all sealed. Then he saw a vault slide open. He covered the watch. He looked up at the insect on the wire. When he looked at the watch again he saw an identification tag. It was a tag in long 89/91

Don DeLillo

Cosmopolis

shot, fixed to a plastic wristband. He knew, he sensed that a zoom shot would follow. He thought of covering the watch but then did not. He saw the tag in tight close-up now and read the legend printed there. Male Z. He knew what this meant. He didn't know how he knew this. How do we know anything? How do we know the wall we're looking at is white? What is white? He covered the watch with his good hand. He knew that Male Z was the designation for the bodies of unidentified men in hospital morgues.

O shit I'm dead.

He'd always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.

The technology was imminent or not. It was semimythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment.

But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that's not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.

He looked at the far wall, which was white. The insect was still on the wire. He looked at the insect coming down the dangling wire. Then he took his good hand off the watchface. He looked at the watch. The legend remained on-screen, reading Male Z.

There was a trace of enzyme left, the old biochemistry of the ego, his saturated self. He imagined Kendra Hays, his bodyguard and lover, washing his viscera in palm wine in a ceremony of embalming.

She had the face for it, the bone structure and skin color, the tapered planes. It was a face from a wall painting in some mortuary temple buried in sand for four thousand years, with dog-headed gods in attendance.

He thought of his chief of finance and touchless lover, Jane Melman, masturbating quietly in the last row of the funeral chapel, in a dark blue dress with a cinched waist, during the whispery dimness of the vigil.

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Don DeLillo

Cosmopolis

There was something else to consider, that he'd married when he'd married in order to have a widow to leave behind. He imagined his wife, his widow, shaving her head, perhaps, in response to his death, and choosing to wear black for a year, and watching the burial in isolated desert terrain, from a distance, with her mother and the media.

He wanted to be buried in his nuclear bomber, his Blackjack A. Not buried but cremated, conflagrated, but buried as well. He wanted to be solarized. He wanted the plane flown by remote control with his embalmed body aboard, suit, tie and turban, and the bodies of his dead dogs, his tall silky Russian wolfhounds, reaching maximum altitude and leveling at supersonic dash speed and then sent plunging into the sand, fireballed one and all, leaving a work of land art, scorched earth art that would interact with the desert and be held in perpetual trust under the auspices of his dealer and executor, Didi Fancher, and longtime lover, for the respectful contemplation of preapproved groups and enlightened individuals under exempt-status section 501(c) (3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.

What did the doctor say?

It's fine, it's nothing, it's normal.

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.

His murderer, Richard Sheets, sits facing him. He has lost interest in the man. His hand contains the pain of his life, all of it, emotional and other, and he closes his eyes one more time. This is not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound.

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