Cosmopolis (12 page)

"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 51/91

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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.

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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 53/91

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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 spectacle 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 54/91

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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.

He'd walked nearly to the stage door when he realized Danko was not with him. This he understood. The man was back there somewhere dancing, beyond the reach of his wars and corpses, his mind snipers firing at first light.

He went stride for stride with Torval to the car. The rain had stopped. This was good. This was clearly what it should have done. The street carried a shimmer of sodium lamps and a mood of slowly unfolding suspense.

"Where is he?"

"Decided to stay inside," Eric said. "Good. We don't need him."

"Where is she?"

"Sent her home."

"Good."

"Good," Torval said. "It's looking good."

There was someone camped in the limo. She sat tilted on the banquette, nodding off, all plastic and rags, and Torval rousted her out. She did a little dance of twisting free and remained there in aggregate, a standing heap of clothes, bundled possessions and sandwich bags for alms looped over her belt.

"I need a gypsy. Anybody here read palms?"

One of those unused voices that sound outside the world.

"What about feet?" she said. "Read my feet."

He searched his pockets for money, feeling a little foolish, a little chagrined, having made and lost sums that could colonize a planet, but the woman was moving up the street on shoes with flapping soles and there were no bills or coins in any case to find inside his pants, or documents of any kind.

The car crossed Eighth Avenue, out of the theater district, out of the row of supper clubs and lounges, beyond the retail atriums now, beyond the airline offices and auto showrooms and into the 55/91

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local, the mixed, the mostly unnoticed blocks of dry cleaner and schoolyard, just an inkling here of the old brawl, the old seethe and heat of Hell's Kitchen, the rake of fire escapes on old brick buildings.