Cosmopolis (6 page)

"We've profited, we've flourished even as other funds have stumbled," she said. "Yes, the yen will fall. I don't think the yen can go any higher. But in the meantime you have to draw back. Pull back. I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today."

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He was not looking at her now. She shut the door and began running north on Fifth Avenue, past the shabby man at the ATM. There was something familiar about him. It wasn't his khaki field jacket or paper-shredded hair. Maybe it was his slouch. But Eric didn't care whether this was someone he'd once known. There were many people he'd once known. Some were dead, others in forced retirement, spending quiet time alone in their toilets or walking in the woods with their three-legged dogs.

He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inference of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.

Ingram folded the examining table back into the cabinet. He packed his satchel and went out the door, turning briefly to look at Eric. He was stationary, only a couple of feet away, but already lost in the crowd, forgotten even as he spoke, wide-eyed, with studied detachment in his voice.

"Your prostate is asymmetrical," he said.

2

The Confessions of Benno Levin

NIGHT

He is dead, word for word. I turned him over and looked at him. His eyes were mercifully closed.

But what does mercy have to do with it? There was a brief sound in his throat that I could spend weeks trying to describe. But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

This resembles something he would say. I must be mouthing his words again. Because I'm sure he said it once, walking past my workstation to the person who was with him, in reference to such and such. Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

Allow me to speak for myself. I had a job and a family. I struggled to love and provide. How many of you know the true and bitter force of that simple word provide? They always said I was erratic. He is erratic. He has problems of personality and hygiene. He walks, whatever, funny. I never heard a single one of these statements but knew they were being made the way you sense something in a person's look that does not have to be spoken.

I made a phone threat that I didn't believe. They took the threat to be credible, which I knew they had to do, considering my knowledge of the firm and the personnel. But I didn't know how to track him down. He moved about the city without pattern. He had armed escorts. The building where he lived was unapproachable in my current state of randomized attire. And I accepted this. Even at the firm, it was not easy to find his office. It changed all the time. Or he voided it to work elsewhere, or work wherever he happened to be, or work at home in the annex because he did not really separate live and work, or to travel and think, or to spend time reading in his rumored lake house in the mountains.

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My obsessions are mind things, not geared to action.

Now I'm in a position where I can talk to his corpse. I can speak without interruptions or corrections. He can't tell me this or that is the case or I am shaming myself or fooling myself. Not thinking straight. This is the crime he placed in the hall of fame of horrors.

When I try to suppress my anger, I suffer spells of hwabyung (Korea). This is cultural panic mainly, which I caught on the Internet.

I was assistant professor of computer applications. Maybe I said this already, in a community college. Then I left to make my million.

The pencil I'm writing with is yellow, with the numeral 2. I want to note the tools I'm using, just for the record.

I was always aware of what they said in words or looks. It is what people think they see in another person that makes his reality. If they think he walks at a slant, then he walks at a slant, uncoordinated, because this is his role in the lives around him, and if they say his clothes don't fit, he will learn to be neglectful of his wardrobe as a means of scorning them and inflicting punishment on himself.

I make mind speeches all the time. So do you, only not always. I do it all the time, long speeches to someone I can never identify. But I'm beginning to think it's him.

I have my paper, legal size, white with blue lines. I want to write ten thousand pages. But already I see that I'm repeating myself. I'm repeating myself.

After I turned him over I went through his pockets and found nothing. One of his pockets was torn.

He had a crusty purple wound on his head, not that I am interested in description. I am interested in money. I was looking for money. He had one half a haircut but not the other and wore shoes but no socks. The body smell was foul.

I steal electricity from a lamppost. I doubt if this occurred to him, for my living space.

I've suffered many reversals but I'm not one of those scanted men you see in the street, living and thinking in minutes. I live at the ends of the earth philosophically. I collect things, it is true, from local sidewalks. What people discard could make a nation. Sometimes I hear my voice when I am speaking.

I am speaking to someone and hear the sound of my voice, third person, filling the air around my head.

The windows were sealed by the City when they condemned the building. But I pried one board loose to let in air. I don't live an unreal life. I live a practical life of starting over, with middle-class values intact. I'm knocking down walls because I don't want to live in a set of little quads where other people lived, doors and narrow hallways, whole families with their packed lives and so many steps to the bed and so many steps to the door. I want to live an open life of the mind where my Confessions can thrive.

But there are times when I want to rub myself against a door or wall, for the sympathetic contact.

I wanted his pocket money for its personal qualities, not its value so much. I wanted its intimacy and touch, his touch, the stain of his personal dirt. I wanted to rub the bills over my face to remind me why I shot him.

For a while I could not stop looking at the body. I looked inside his mouth for signs of rot. That's when I heard the sound in his throat. I thought in all expectancy he was going to talk to me. I wouldn't mind talking to him some more. After all we'd said in the long night I realize there's more for me to 25/91

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say. There are great themes running through my mind. The themes of loneliness and human discard.

The theme of who do I hate when there's no one left.

The complex is the intelligence unit of the firm. This is who I called with my mostly empty threat.

I knew they would interpret my comments as the specialized knowledge of a former employee and would gather rapid data on such. It was satisfying to me, telling them their own names, even somebody's mother's maiden name in a brilliant and telling thrust, and detailing the procedures and routines. I was in their heads, now, making contact. I didn't have to carry the burden alone.

I have my writing desk, which I dragged along the sidewalk, through the alley and up the stairs.

This was an undertaking of days, with a system of wedges and ropes. This was two days I needed to do this.

I never felt a distinction over time between child and man, boy and man. I was never consciously a child as the term is usually applied. I feel like the same thing I always was.

I used to write him letters after they let me go but stopped because I knew it was pathetic. I also knew there was something in my life that needed to be pathetic but I forced myself to break off contact. The fact that he would never see the letters was not an issue. I would see them. The issue was writing them and seeing them myself. So think how surprised I was that I did not have to track him and stalk him, which I was unfitted to do and anyway haunted by opposing forces concerning does he die or not.

And whatever I said to them on the phone and however rapidly they gathered data, how could they trace me to where and how I live?

I don't own a watch or clock. I think of time in other totalities now. I think of my personal time-span set against the vast numerations, the time of the earth, the stars, the incoherent light-years, the age of the universe, etc.

World is supposed to mean something that's selfcontained. But nothing is self-contained.

Everything enters something else. My small days spill into lightyears. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.

I still have my bank that I visit systematically to look at the last literal dollars remaining in my account. I do this for the ongoing psychology of it, to know I have money in an institution. And because cash machines have a charisma that still speaks to me.

I am working on this journal while a man lies dead ten feet away. I wonder about this. Twelve feet away They said I had problems of normalcy and they demoted me to lesser currencies. I became a minor technical element in the firm, a technical fact. I was generic labor to them. And I accepted this.

Then they let me go without notice or severance package. And I accepted this.

One of my syndromes is agitated behavior and extreme confusion. This is known in Haiti and East Africa as delirious gusts in translation. In the world today everything is shared. What kind of misery is it that can't be shared?

I did not read for pleasure, even as a child. I never read for pleasure. Take this any way you will. I think about myself too much. I study myself. It sickens me. But this is all there is to me. I'm nothing else. My so-called ego is a little twisted thing that's probably not so different from yours but at the 26/91

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same time I can say confidently that it's active and bursting with importance and has major defeats and triumphs all the time. I have a stationary bike with a missing pedal that someone left on the street one night.

I also have my cigarettes close at hand. I want to feel like a writer and his cigarette. Except I'm out, they're gone, the pack has those little specks at the bottom that I already licked out of existence, and I'm tempted to smell the dead man's breath for a taste of whatever's there, the cigar he smoked a week ago in London.

All through the day I became more convinced I could not do it. Then I did it. Now I have to remember why.

I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left that's worth the telling?

The car crossed the avenue into the West Side and had to slow down at once, moving through the crosswalk against the light, shedding waves of pedestrians.

Torval's voice reported a water-main break somewhere up ahead.

Eric saw his security aides, one to each side of the limo, walking at a calculated pace and wearing similar outfits of dark blazer, gray trousers and turtleneck shirt.

One of the screens showed a column of rusty sludge geysering high from a hole in the ground. He felt good about this. The other screens showed money moving. There were numbers gliding horizontally and bar charts pumping up and down. He knew there was something no one had detected, a pattern latent in nature itself, a leap of pictorial language that went beyond the standard models of technical analysis and out-predicted even the arcane charting of his own followers in the field. There had to be a way to explain the yen.

He was hungry, he was half starved. There were days when he wanted to eat all the time, talk to people's faces, live in meat space. He stopped looking at computer screens and turned to the street.

This was the diamond district and he lowered the window to a scene that was rocking with commerce.

Nearly every store had jewelry on display and shoppers worked both sides of the street, slipping between armored bank trucks and private security vans to look at fine Swiss watches and eat in the kosher luncheonette.

The car moved at an inchworm creep.

Hasidim in frock coats and tall felt hats stood in doorways talking, men with rimless spectacles and coarse white beards, exempt from the tremor of the street. Hundreds of millions of dollars a day moved back and forth behind the walls, a form of money so obsolete Eric didn't know how to think about it. It was hard, shiny, faceted. It was everything he'd left behind or never encountered, cut and polished, intensely three-dimensional. People wore it and flashed it. They took it off to go to bed or have sex and they put it on to have sex or die in. They wore it dead and buried.

Hasidim walked along the street, younger men in dark suits and important fedoras, faces pale and 27/91

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blank, men who only saw each other, he thought, as they disappeared into storefronts or down the subway steps. He knew the traders and gem cutters were in the back rooms and wondered whether deals were still made in doorways with a handshake and a Yiddish blessing. In the grain of the street he sensed the Lower East Side of the 1920s and the diamond centers of Europe before the second war, Amsterdam and Antwerp. He knew some history. He saw a woman seated on the sidewalk begging, a baby in her arms. She spoke a language he didn't recognize. He knew some languages but not this one.