Cosmopolis (8 page)

On the other side of Sixth Avenue, the car moved slowly past the brokerage house on the corner.

There were cubicles exposed at street level, men and women watching screens, and he felt the safety of 32/91

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their circumstance, the fastness, the involution of it, their curling embryonic ingrowth, secret and creaturely. He thought of the people who used to visit his website back in the days when he was forecasting stocks, when forecasting was pure power, when he'd tout a technology stock or bless an entire sector and automatically cause doublings in share price and the shifting of worldviews, when he was effectively making history, before history became monotonous and slobbering, yielding to his search for something purer, for techniques of charting that predicted the movements of money itself.

He traded in currencies from every sort of territorial entity, modern democratic nations and dusty sultanates, paranoid people's republics, hellhole rebel states run by stoned boys.

He found beauty and precision here, hidden rhythms in the fluctuations of a given currency.

He'd left the luncheonette with half a sandwich still in hand. He was eating it now and listening to ecstatic rap on the sound system, the voice of Brutha Fez, with a Bedouin fiddle as sole accompaniment. But an image on one of the onboard screens distracted him. It was the president in his limousine, visible from the waist up. This was a feature of the Midwood administration, the chief executive on live videostream, accessible worldwide. Eric studied the man. He watched for ten motionless minutes. He didn't move and neither did the president, except reflexively, and neither did the traffic in either location. The president was in shirtsleeves, sitting in a quotidian stupor. He twitched once, blinked a few times. His gaze was empty, without direction or content. There was an air of eternal flybuzz boredom. He did not scratch or yawn and began to resemble a person sitting in an offstage lounge waiting to do a guest spot on TV Only it was eerier and deeper than that because his eyes carried no sign of immanence, of vital occupancy, and because he seemed to exist in some little hollow of nontime, and because he was the president. Eric hated him for that. He'd talked to him several times. He'd waited in the yellow reception room in the west wing. He'd advised him on matters of some importance and had to stand where someone asked him to stand while someone else took pictures. He hated Midwood for being omnipresent, as he himself used to be. He hated him for being the object of a credible threat to his safety. And he hated and mocked him for his gynecoid upper body with its swag of dangling mammaries under the sheer white shirt. He looked vengefully at the screen, thinking the image did the president every justice. He was the undead. He lived in a state of occult repose, waiting to be reanimated.

"We want to think about the art of money-making," she said.

She was sitting in the rear seat, his seat, the club chair, and he looked at her and waited.

"The Greeks have a word for it." He waited.

"Chrimatistikos," she said. "But we have to give the word a little leeway. Adapt it to the current situation. Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself."

She usually wore a beret but was bareheaded today, Vija Kinski, a small woman in a button-down business shirt, an old embroidered vest and a long pleated skirt of a thousand launderings, his chief of theory, late for their weekly meeting.

"And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and planes. This has nothing to 33/91

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do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape.

The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself."

The car sat in stationary traffic halfway between the avenues, where Kinski had boarded, emerging from the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. This was curious but maybe it wasn't. He faced her from the jump seat, wondering why he didn't know how old she was. Her hair was smoky gray and looked lightning-struck, withered and singed, but her face was barely marked except for a large mole high on her cheek.

"Oh and this car, which I love. The glow of the screens. I love the screens. The glow of cyber-capital. So radiant and seductive. I understand none of it."

She spoke in near whispers and wore a persistent smile, with cryptic variations.

"But you know how shameless I am in the presence of anything that calls itself an idea. The idea is time. Living in the future. Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity.

They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently."

He said, "There's something I want to show you."

"Wait. I'm thinking."

He waited. Her smile was slightly twisted.

"It's cyber-capital that creates the future. What is the measurement called a nanosecond?"

"Ten to the minus ninth power."

"This is what."

"One billionth of a second," he said.

"I understand none of this. But it tells me how rigorous we need to be in order to take adequate measure of the world around us."

"There are zeptoseconds."

"Good. I'm glad."

"Yoctoseconds. One septillionth of a second."

"Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today," she said, looking slyly into her hands. "To correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less."

The south side of the street was nearly empty of pedestrians. He led her out of the car and onto the sidewalk, where they were able to get a partial view of the electronic display of market information, the moving message units that streaked across the face of an office tower on the other side of 34/91

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Broadway. Kinski was transfixed. This was very different from the relaxed news reports that wrapped around the old Times Tower a few blocks south of here. These were three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street. Financial news, stock prices, currency markets. The action was unflagging. The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed. But he knew that Kinski was absorbing it.

He stood behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Beneath the data strips, or tickers, there were fixed digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what she was thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the way data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment.

She said, "Does it ever stop? Does it slow down? Of course not. Why should it? Fantastic." He saw a familiar name flash across the news ticker.

Kaganovich. But he missed the context. Traffic began to move, barely, and they went back to the car with the two bodyguards providing discreet escort. He sat on the banquette this time, facing the visual displays, and learned that the context was the death of Nikolai Kaganovich, a man of swaggering wealth and shady reputation, owner of Russia's largest media conglomerate, with interests that ranged from sex magazines to satellite operations.

He respected Kaganovich. The man was shrewd and tough, cruel in the best sense. He and Nikolai had been friends, he told Kinski. He took a bottle of blood orange vodka out of the cooler and poured two short glasses, neat, and they watched coverage of the event on several screens.

She flushed a little, sipping her drink.

The man lay facedown in the mud in front of his dacha outside Moscow, shot numerous times just after returning from a trip to Albania Online, where he'd set up a cable TV network and signed agreements for a theme park in Tirana, the capital.

Eric and Nikolai had tracked wild boar in Siberia. He told Kinski about this. They'd seen a tiger in the distance, a glimpse, a sting of pure transcendence, outside all previous experience. He described the moment to her, the precious sense of last life, a species in peril, and the vastness of the silence around them. They remained motionless, the two men, long after the animal had vanished. The sight of the tiger aflame in high snow made them feel bound to an unspoken code, a brotherhood of beauty and loss.

But he was glad to see the man dead in the mud. The reporter kept using the word dacha. He stood at an angle to the camera, allowing a clear look at the villa, the dacha, through an alley of pines. On another screen a commentator made vague references to unsavory business associates, to anti-globalist elements and local wars. Then she talked about the dacha. Found dead facedown outside his dacha.

They searched for security in the word, self-confidence. It was all they knew about the man and the crime, something Russian, that he was dead outside his dacha outside Moscow.

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Eric felt good about it, seeing him there, unnumbered bullet wounds to the body and head. It was a quiet contentment, an easing of some unspecifiable pressure in the shoulders and chest. It relaxed him, the death of Nikolai Kaganovich. He didn't say this to Kinski. Then he did. Why not? She was his chief of theory. Let her theorize.

"Your genius and your animus have always been fully linked," she said. "Your mind thrives on ill will toward others. So does your body, I think. Bad blood makes for long life. He was a rival in some sense, yes? He was physically strong perhaps. He had a large personality. Filthy rich, this chap.

Women in his soup. Reasons enough to feel a sneaky sort of euphoria when the man dies horribly.

There are always, always reasons. Don't examine the matter," she said. "He died so you can live."

The car reached the corner and stopped. There were tourists pressing through the theater district in all the words that make a multitude. They moved in swirls and drifts, shuffling in and out of megastores and circling vendors' carts. They stood in a convoluted line, folded back against itself, for cut-rate tickets to Broadway shows. Eric watched them cross the street, stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. These were figures beyond gender and procreation, enchanted women in men's shorts, beyond commerce, even, men immortal in their muscle tone, in the clustered bulge at the crotchline.

Heavy trucks went downtown bouncing, headed to the garment district or the meatpacking docks, and nobody saw them. They saw the cockney selling children's books from a cardboard box, making his pitch from his knees. Eric thought they were the same thing, these two, and the old Chinese was the same, doing acupoint massage, and the repair crew passing fiber-optic cable down a manhole from an enormous yellow spool. He thought about the amassments, the material crush, days and nights of bumper to bumper, red light, green light, the fixedness of things, the obsolescences, going mostly unseen. They saw the old man do his therapeutic massage, working a woman's back and temples as she sat on a bench, her face pressed to a raised cushion attached to a makeshift frame. They read the handwritten sign, relief from fatigue and panic. How things persist, the habits of gravity and time, in this new and fluid reality. The cockney from his knees said, I don't ask you where you get your money, don't ask me where I get my books. They stopped and looked, browsing his cardboard box. The old Chinese stood erect, kneading the woman's acupuncture points, thumbing the furrows behind her ears.

Eric saw people stop at the foreign exchange booth on the southeast corner. This prompted him to open the sunroof and stick his head outside, able to get an unobstructed look at the currency prices skimming across the building just ahead. The yen was climbing, still, trading up against the dollar.

He sat in the jump seat facing Kinski and told her what the situation was, broadly, that he was borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates and using this money to speculate heavily in stocks that would yield potentially high returns.

"Please. Means nothing to me."

But the stronger the yen became, the more money he needed to pay back the loan.

"Stop. I'm lost."

He kept doing this because he knew the yen could not go any higher. He explained that there were levels it could not reach. The market knew this. There were oscillations and shocks that the market tolerated to a certain point but not beyond. The yen itself knew it could not go higher. But it did go 36/91

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higher, time and again.