"Cosmopolis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delillo Don)

3

She had coral brown skin and well-defined cheekbones. There was a beeswax sheen to her lips. She liked to be looked at and made the act of undressing seem proudly public, an unveiling across national borders with an element of slightly showy defiance.

She wore her ZyloFlex body armor while they had sex. This was his idea. She told him the ballistic fiber was the lightest and softest available, and the strongest as well, and also stab-resistant.

Her name was Kendra Hays and she was easy in his presence. They mock-boxed for about a second and a half. He licked her body here and there, leaving fizzes of spittle behind.

"You work out," she said.

"Six percent body fat."

"Used to be my number. Then I got lazy."

"What are you doing about it?"

"Hit the machines in the morning. Run in the park at night."

She had cinnamon skin, or russet, or a blend of copper and bronze. He wondered if she felt ordinary to herself, riding an elevator alone, thinking about lunch.

She shed the vest and took her room service scotch to the window. Her clothing was folded on a chair nearby. He wanted to spend a day in silence, in his meditation cell, just looking at her face and body, as an exercise in Tao, or fasting with the mind. He didn't ask her what she knew about the credible threat. He wasn't interested in details, not yet, and Torval wouldn't have said much, anyway, to the bodyguards.

"Where is he now?"

"Who?"

"You know."

"He's in the lobby. Torval? Watching them come and go. Danko's in the hall outside."

"Who's that?"

"Danko. My partner."

"He's new."

"I'm new. He's been watching your back for some time now, ever since those wars in the Balkans. He's a veteran."

Eric sat cross-legged on the bed popping peanuts in his mouth and watching her.

"What's he going to say to you about this?"

"Torval? Is that who you're talking about?" She was amused. "Say his name."

"What's he going to say to you?"

"Just so you're safe. That's his job," she said. "Men get possessive. What. You don't know this?"

"I heard the rumor. But the fact is I technically speaking went off duty an hour ago. So it's basically my time we're dealing with here."

He liked her. The more he knew Torval would hate her, the more he liked her. Torval would hate her hotbloodedly for this. He'd spend weeks glaring out at her from under his stormy brows.

"Do you find this interesting?"

She said, "What?"

"Protecting someone in danger."

He wanted her to move slightly left so that her hip would catch the glow of the table lamp nearby.

"What makes you willing to do this? Take this risk."

"Maybe you're worth it," she said.

She dipped a finger in her drink, then forgot to lick it. "Maybe it's just the pay. The pay's pretty good. The risk? I don't think about the risk. I figure the risk is yours.

You're the man in the crosshairs."

She thought this was funny.

"But is it interesting?"

"It's interesting to be near a man somebody wants to kill."

"You know what they say, don't you?"

"What?"

"The logical extension of business is murder." This was funny too.

He said, "Move a little left."

"Move a little left."

"There. Nice. Perfect."

Her skin was foxy brown, hair braided close to the scalp.

"What kind of weapon did he give you?"

"Stun gun. Doesn't trust me yet with deadly force." She approached the bed and took the glass of vodka out of his hand. He could not stop tossing peanuts in his mouth.

"You ought to eat more healthy."

He said, "Today is different. How many volts at your disposal?"

"One hundred thousand. Jam your nervous system. Drop you to your knees. Like this," she said.

She poured a few drops of vodka on his genitals. It stung, it burned. She laughed when she did it and he wanted her to do it again. She poured a trickle more and bent over to lap it off, to tongue-scrub him in vodka, and then knelt astride him. She had a glass in each hand and tried to keep her balance while they bounced and laughed.

He finished off her scotch and ate peanuts by the fistful while she showered. He watched her shower and thought she was a woman of straps and belts. At some level she would never be naked.

Then he stood by the bed to watch her dress. She took her time, the body armor fastened across her torso, the pants about to be fastened, shoes next, and was fitting the waistband holster onto her hip when she saw him standing in his shorts.

He said, "Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot.

I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I'm looking for more. Show me something I don't know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now"

The car was parked outside the hotel and across the street from the Barrymore, where a group of smokers gathered at intermission, tucked under the marquee.

He sat in the car borrowing yen and watching his fund's numbers sink into the mist on several screens. Torval stood in the rain with arms folded. He was a lone figure in the street, facing a series of empty loading docks.

The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual, attuned to the registers of his lower brain and gaining distance from the need to take inspired action, make original judgments, maintain independent principles and convictions, all the reasons why people are fucked up and birds and rats are not.

The stun gun probably helped. The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes and he'd rolled about on the hotel rug, electroconvulsive and strangely elated, deprived of his faculties of reason.

But he could think now, well enough to understand what was happening. There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading. He found the humidor and lit a cigar. Strategists could not explain the speed and depth of the fall. They opened their mouths and words came out. He knew it was the yen. His actions regarding the yen were causing storms of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm's portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger.

He smoked and watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior. He was also bored and a little dismissive. They were making too much of it. He thought it would end in a day or two and he was about to code a word to the driver when he noticed that people under the marquee were staring at the car, battered and paint-sprayed.

He lowered the window and looked more closely at one of the women standing there. At first he thought it was Elise Shifrin. This is how he sometimes thought of his wife, by full name, due to her relative celebrity in the social columns and the fashion books. Then he wasn't sure who it was, either because his view was partly obstructed or because the woman in question had a cigarette in her hand.

He forced open the door and walked across the street and Torval was at his side, ably containing his rage. "I need to know where you're going."

"Wait and learn," he said.

The woman looked away when he approached. It was Elise, noncommittally, in profile. "You smoke since when."

She answered without turning to face him, speaking from a seeming distance.

"I took it up when I was fifteen. It's one of those things a girl takes up. It tells her she's more than a skinny body no one looks at. There's a certain drama in her life."

"She notices herself. Then other people notice her. Then she marries one of them. Then they go to dinner," he said.

Torval and Danko flanked the limo and it moved deliberately down the street in light taxi traffic, husband and wife assessing the prospects of immediate eating places. One of the screens displayed a guide to the street's restaurants and Elise chose the old small reliable subterranean bistro. Eric looked out the window and saw a crack in the wall called Little Tokyo.

The place was empty.

"You're wearing a cashmere sweater."

"Yes I am."

"It's beige."

"Yes."

"And that's your hand-beaded skirt."

"Yes it is."

"I'm noticing. How was the play?"

"I left at intermission, didn't l?"

"What was it about and who was in it? I'm making conversation."

"I went on impulse. The audience was sparse. Five minutes after the curtain went up, I understood why."

The waiter stood by the table. Elise ordered a mixed green salad, if manageable, and a small bottle of mineral water. Not sparkling, please, but still.

Eric said, "Give me the raw fish with mercury poisoning." He sat facing the street. Danko stood just outside the door, unaccompanied by the female. "Where is your jacket?"

"Where is my jacket."

"You were wearing a suit jacket earlier. Where is your jacket?"

"Lost in the scuffle, I guess. You saw the car. We were under attack by anarchists. Just two hours ago they were a major global protest. Now, what, forgotten."

"There's something else I wish I could forget."

"That's my peanuts you smell."

"Didn't I see you come out of the hotel just up the street while I was standing outside the theater?"

He was enjoying this. It put her at a disadvantage, playing petty interrogator, and made him feel boyishly inventive and rebellious.

"I could tell you there was an emergency meeting of my staff to deal with the crisis. The nearest conference room was at the hotel. Or I could tell you I had to use the men's room in the lobby. There's a toilet in the car but you don't know this. Or I went to the health club at the hotel to work off the tension of the day. I could tell you I spent an hour on a treadmill. Then I went for a swim if there's a swimming pool. Or I went up to the roof to watch the lightning flash. I love it when the rain has that wavering quality it rarely has these days. It's that whiplash sort of quality, where the rain undulates above the rooftops. Or the car's liquor cabinet was unaccountably empty and I went in to have a drink. I could tell you I went in to have a drink, in the bar off the lobby, where the peanuts are always fresh."

The waiter said, "Enjoy."

She looked at her salad. Then she began to eat it. She dug right in, treating it as food and not some extrusion of matter that science could not explain.

"Is that the hotel you wanted to take me to?"

"We don't need a hotel. We'll do it in the ladies' room. We'll go to the alley out back and rattle the garbage cans. Look. I'm trying to make contact in the most ordinary ways. To see and hear. To notice your mood, your clothes. This is important. Are your stockings on straight? I understand this at some level. How people look. What people wear.

"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 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.

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 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 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 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.

Traffic was scant but the car kept to the daylong draggy pace. This is because Eric was in his seat talking through the open window to Torval, who walked alongside the automobile.

"What do we know?"

"We know it's not a group. It's not an organized terror cell or international kidnappers with ransom demands."

"It's an individual. Do we care?"

"We don't have a name. But we have a phone call. The complex is analyzing voice data. They've made certain assessments. And they're projecting a course of action on the part of the individual."

"Why can't I work up any curiosity on the subject?"

"Because it doesn't matter," Torval said. "Whoever it is, that's who it is."

Eric agreed with this, whatever it meant. They moved down the street between rows of garbage cans set out for collection and past the gaunt hotel and the synagogue for actors. There was muddy water in the street, deepening as they proceeded, three, four inches now, the residue of the water-main break earlier in the day. Workers in dayglo vests and high boots were still in the area, under floodlights, and Torval high-stepped through generations of muck, making a splash with each bitter stride until the river diminished to an inch of standing water.

There were police barricades just ahead, blocking access to Ninth Avenue. At first Torval believed this was related to the flooded streets. But there were no clean-up crews on the other side of the avenue. Then he thought the president's motorcade was on the way downtown to some official function after finally shaking free of midtown traffic. But there was music in the distance and people beginning to gather, too many, too young, with headsets attached, to account for a presidential drive-by. Finally he talked to one of the cops at the barricades.

There was a funeral on the way.

Eric got out of the car and stood near the bicycle shop on the corner, with Torval planted nearby. An enormous man approached through the gathering crowd, broad, meaty, solemn, wearing pale linen slacks and a black leather shirt, sleeveless, with platinum accessories here and there. It was Kozmo Thomas, who managed a dozen rappers and had once owned a stable of racehorses in partnership with Eric.

They did the handclasp and half hug. "Why are we here?"

"You ain't heard?"

Eric said, "What?"

Kozmo batted himself in the chest, reverently. "Brutha Fez."

"What?"

"Dead."

"No. What. Can't be."

"Dead. Died. Early today."

"I don't know this?"

"Funeral's been in progress all day. The family wants to give the city a chance to pay respect. The record label wants an exploitation event. Big and loud. Street to street. Right through the night."

"I don't know this? How can this be? I love his music. I have his music in my elevator. I know the man."

He knew the man. The sadness, the plangency of this remark was echoed in the music itself, the gawwali model of devotional rhythms and improvisations, over a thousand years old, growing louder now as the funeral cortege came down the avenue, which had been cleared of extraneous traffic and parked cars.

"What, they shot him?"

First the squad of motorcycles, city police in wedge formation. Two private security vans followed, flanking a police cruiser. It was so completely clear, another dead rapper, the protocol of the rap star who goes down humming in a spatter of gunshots after he fails to pay feudal tribute in the form of respect or money or women to some skittish individual. This was the day, was it not, for influential men to come to sudden messy ends.

Kozmo was looking askance.

" Fez been having cardiac problems for years. Since high school. Been seeing specialists, been seeing faith healers. Heart just wore out. This ain't a thug down some alley. The man never been breathalyzed, barely, since he was seventeen."

Then came the flower cars, ten of them, banked with white roses rippling in the breeze. The hearse came next, an open car with Fez lying in state at the rear in a coffin angled upward to make the body visible, asphodels everywhere, fleshy pink, the flowers of Hades, where souls of the dead come to find meadowy rest.

The dead man's amplified voice sounded from farther back in the procession, singing in slow hypnotic syncopation, accompanied by harmonium and hand drums.

"Hope you're not disappointed."

"Disappointed."

"That our man here wasn't shot. Hope he didn't let you down. Natural causes. That's a letdown."

Kozmo jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder.

"What happened to your stretch? Letting a fine machine degrade in public. That's a scandal, man."

"Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it."

"I'm hearing voices in the night. Because I know it can't be you that's saying this."

Scores of women walked alongside the limousines, in headscarves and djellabas, hands stained with henna, and barefoot, and wailing. Kozmo struck his chest again and so did Eric. He thought his friend was impressive in repose, wearing a full beard and a white silk caftan with hood folded back and the iconic red fez on his head, stylishly tilted, and how affecting it was for the man to be lying in the spiral of his own vocal adaptations of ancient Sufi music, rapping in Punjabi and Urdu and in the blackswagger English of the street.

Gettin' shot is easy Tried it seven times Now I'm just a solo poet Workin' on my rhymes

The crowd was large and hushed, deepening along the sidewalks, and people in nightclothes watched from tenement windows. Four of Fez 's personal bodyguards accompanied the hearse, slow-marching, one off each point of the car. They were in Western dress, dark suits and ties, polished oxfords, with combat shotguns held at port arms.

Eric liked that. Bodyguards even in death. Eric thought yes.

Then came the breakdancers, in pressed jeans and sneakers, here to affirm the history of the deceased, born Raymond Gathers in the Bronx, once a breaker of some fame. These were his contemporaries, six men ranged across the six lanes of the avenue, in their mid-thirties now, back in the streets after all these years to do their windmills and reels, their impossible axial headspins.

"Ask me do I love this shit," said Kozmo.

But the energy and dazzle brought something melancholy to the crowd, more regret than excitation. Even the younger people seemed subdued, over-respectful, as the breakers wheeled on their elbows and flared their bodies parallel to the ground, running in horizontal frenzy.

Grief should be powerful, Eric thought. But the crowd was still learning how to mourn a singular rapper such as Fez, who mixed languages, tempos and themes.

Only Kozmo was alive and popping.

"Me being big as I am, and a retro-nigger, I have to love what I'm seeing. Because this is something I could never dream of doing in my thinnest day on earth."

Yes, they spun on their heads, bodies upright and legs spread slightly, and one of the breakers had his hands cuffed behind his back. Eric thought there was something mystical about this, well beyond the scan of human encompassment, the half-crazed passion of a desert saint. How lost to the world he must be, here in the grease and tar of Ninth Avenue.

Family and friends came next, in thirty-six white stretch limousines, three abreast, with the mayor and police commissioner in sober profile, and a dozen members of Congress, and the mothers of unarmed blacks shot by police, and fellow rappers in the middle phalanx, and there were media executives, foreign dignitaries, faces from film and TV, and mingled throughout were figures of world religion in their robes, cowls, kimonos, sandals and soutanes.

Four news choppers passed overhead.

"He liked having his clergy nearby," Kozmo said. "He showed up in my office once with an imam and two white boys from Utah in suits. He was always excusing himself so he could pray"

"He lived in a minaret for a while, in Los Angeles."

"I heard that."

"I went to visit once. He built it next to his house and then moved out of the house and into the minaret."

The dead man's voice was louder now as the sound truck approached. His best songs were sensational and even the ones that were not good were good.

Behind his voice the handclapping of the chorus became intense, driving Fez into improvised rhythms that sounded reckless and unsustainable. There were great howls of devotion, whoops and street shouts. The clapping spread from the recorded track to the people in the limos and the crowd on the sidewalks and it brought a clear emotion to the night, a joy of intoxicating wholeness, he and they, the dead and provisionally living.

A line of elderly Catholic nuns in full habit recited the rosary, teachers from the grade school he'd attended.

His voice was going ever faster, in Urdu, then slurry English, and it was pierced by the shrill cries of a female member of the chorus. There was rapture in this, fierce elation, and something else that was inexpressible, dropping off the edge, all meaning exhausted until nothing was left but charismatic speech, words sprawling over themselves, without drums or handclaps or the woman's pitched cries.

The voice fell into silence finally. People thought the event was over now. They were shaking and drained. Eric's delight in going broke seemed blessed and authenticated here. He'd been emptied of everything but a sense of surpassing stillness, a fatedness that felt disinterested and free.

Then he thought about his own funeral. He felt unworthy and pathetic. Never mind the bodyguards, four versus three. What set of elements might be configured that could possibly match what was happening here? Who would come to see him laid out? (An embalmed term in search of a matching cadaver.) Men he'd crushed, to nourish their rancor. Those he'd presumed to be wallpaper, to stand over him and gloat. He would be the powdered body in the mummy case, the one they'd all lived long enough to mock.

It was dispiriting, then, to think about this collection of mourners. Here was a spectacle he could clearly not command. And the funeral wasn't over yet.

Because here came the dervishes, turning to the faint call of a single flute. They were lean men in tunics and long flared skirts, with topaz caps, brimless, cylindrical, tall. They spun, they turned slowly with arms wide and heads titled slightly.

Now the voice of Brutha Fez, hoarse and unaccompanied, moving slowly through a plainsong rap Eric hadn't heard before.

Kid used to think he was wise to the system Prince of the street always do things his way But he had a case of conventional wisdom Never say nothing the others don't say

The young breakdancer who invites the peril of the street, his arrests and beatings, the panhandling dances on subway platforms, his shame in verse after verse, women shiny in tights, unaffordable, and then the moment of disclosure.

Thread of dawn that wakes the East To the cry of souls unfolding

His embrace of Sufi tradition, the struggle to become another kind of panhandler, a beggar for rhymes, singing his anti-matter rap (as he called it) and learning languages and customs that seemed natural to him, not sealed in mystery and foreignness, a blessing embedded in the skin.

O God O Man living high at last Sucking the titmilk of prayer and fast

Wealth, honor in a hundred countries, armored cars and bodyguards, shiny women, yes, again, everywhere now, another blessing of the flesh, women veiled and bluejeaned, clutching the bedposts, painted women and plain, and he sang a little sorrowfully of this and of the voice in a visionary dream that spoke to him of a failing heart.

Man gave me the news in a slanted room And it felt like a sliver of icy truth

Felt my sad-ass soul flying out of my mouth My gold tooth splitting down to the root

There were twenty dervishes in the street and they were the archetype, perhaps, the early and sacred model, maybe, of the posse of breakdancers, only rightside-up. And Fez 's final words could find no beauty in dying young.

Let me be who I was Unrhymed fool That's lost but living

Now music filled the night, ouds, flutes, cymbals and drums, and the dancers whirled, counterclockwise, faster with every turn. They were spinning out of their bodies, he thought, toward the end of all possessions.

The chorus chanting vigorously now Because whirl is all. Whirl is the drama of shedding everything. Because they are spinning into communal grace, he thought. And because someone is dead tonight and only whirl can appease their grief.

He believed these things. He tried to imagine a kind of fleshlessness. He thought of the whirlers deliquescing, resolving into fluid states, into spinning liquid, rings of water and fog that eventually disappear in air.

He began to weep as the follow-up security detail went past, a police van and several unmarked cars. He wept violently. He pummeled himself, crossing his arms and beating his fists on his chest. The press buses came next, three of them, and unofficial mourners on foot, many resembling pilgrims, all races and styles of belief and manner of dress, and he rocked and wept as mourners in cars went by, an improvised continuum, eighty, ninety cars in slack ranks.

He wept for Fez and everyone here and for himself of course, yielding completely to enormous body sobs. Others were weeping nearby. There was a wave of breastbeating and flailing. Then Kozmo wrapped an arm around him and drew him in. It did not seem strange that this was happening. When people die, you weep. The greater the figure, the more widespread the lamentation. People pulled their hair, wailing the dead man's name. Eric slowly grew still. In the leather and flesh of Kozmo's enveloping bulk, he felt the beginnings of thoughtful acceptance.

There was one thing more he wanted from this funeral. He wanted to see the hearse pass by again, the body tilted for viewing, a digital corpse, a loop, a replication. It did not seem right that the hearse had come and gone. He wanted it to reappear at intervals, proud body open to the night, to replenish the sorrow and wonder of the crowd.

He was tired of looking at screens. Plasma screens were not flat enough. They used to seem flat, now they did not. He watched the president of the World Bank address a chamber of tense economists. He thought the image could be crisper. Then the president of the United States spoke from his limo in English and Finnish. He knew a little Finnish. Eric hated him for that. He knew they would figure it out eventually, how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now. He coded the screens into their hatches and cabinets, restoring the interior of the car to its natural grandness of scale, with sightlines unobstructed and his body isolated in space, and he felt a sneeze begin to develop in his immune system.

The streets emptied fast, barricades loaded into trucks and hauled away. The car moved forward now, with Torval seated up front.

He sneezed and then felt a sense of incompleteness. He realized that he always sneezed twice, or so it seemed in retrospect. He waited and it came, rewardingly, the second sneeze.

What causes people to sneeze? A protective reflex of the nasal mucous membranes, to expel invasive materials.

The street was dead. The car moved past the Spanish church and the cluster of scaffolded brownstones. He poured a brandy and felt hungry again.

There was a restaurant ahead, on the south side of the street. He saw it was Ethiopian and imagined a chunk of spongy brown bread dragged through lentil stew. He imagined yebeg wat in berber sauce. It was too late for the place to be open but there was a dim light back toward the kitchen and he had the driver stop the car.

He wanted yebeg wat. He wanted to say it, smell it and eat it.

What happened next happened fast. He stepped onto the sidewalk and a man approached running and struck him. He raised an arm in defense, Eric did, too late, and threw a blind punch, maybe grazing the man on the head or shoulder. He felt the sludge, the sort of mush of blood and matter on his face. He could not see. His eyes were coated with the stuff but he heard Torval nearby, their rustles and grunts as the two men skirmished.

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and stood on the curbstone wiping his face, cautiously, in the event an eyeball had been dislodged. He was able to see that Torval had the man bent over the trunk of the limo, forearm locked behind his head.

"Subject reduced," Torval said into his lapel.

Eric smelled and tasted something. First there was the handkerchief, soured by his own secretions of the testes and seminal vesicles and various other glands, collected earlier in the day when he'd used the square of cloth to clean himself after one or another expulsion of fluid. But he was confused about the taste on his tongue.

The man, the subject was saying something and there were radiant bursts, as of muzzle flash nearby, but without ensuing reports. Torval yanked the man off the rear of the car and splayed him toward Eric, then snapped his head back smartly.

"I am after you long time. Son of bitch," he said. "I glop you good."

Now Eric saw three photographers off to the right and a man shooting video from his knees. Their car sat with doors flung open.

"Today you are cremed by the master," he said. "This is my mission worldwide. To sabotage power and wealth."

He began to understand. This was Andre Petrescu, the pastry assassin, a man who stalked corporate directors, military commanders, soccer stars and politicians. He hit them in the face with pies. He blindsided heads of state under house arrest. He ambushed war criminals and the judges who sentenced them.

"I am three years waiting for this. Fresh baked only. I pass up president of the United States to make this strike. I creme him any time. You are major statement, I tell you this. Very hard to zero in."

He was a small guy with hair dyed glossy blond, in a Disney World T-shirt. Eric caught the note of admiration in his voice. Carefully he kicked him in the nuts, watching him spaz and crumple in Torval's grip. When the flash units lit up, he attacked the photographers, landing a number of punches, feeling better with each one. The three backpedaling men stumbled into a row of garbage cans, then scuttled up the street. The videographer fled in the car.

He walked back toward the limo, ladling whipped cream off his face and eating it, snowy topping with a trace of lemon in the taste. He and Torval were bonded now by violence and exchanged a look of respect and esteem. Petrescu was in pain.

"You lack of humor, Mr. Packer."

Eric gave him a forearm shiver, bouncing him off Torval's chest. It took the man a while to speak.

"You are living up to reputation, okay. But I am kicked and beaten by security so many times I am walking dead. They make me to wear a radio collar when I am in England, to safe the queen. Track me like rare crane. But believe one thing please. I cremed Fidel three times in six days when he is in Bucharest last year. I am action painter of creme pies. I drop from a tree on Michael Jordan one time. This is famous Flying Pie. It is museum quality video for the ages. I quiche Sultan of fucking Brunei in his bath. They put me in black hole until I am screaming from my eyes."

They watched him stumble away. The restaurant was locked and empty and they stood in the hush of the moment. Eric had whipped cream in his hair and ears. His clothes were streaked with cream and dashes of lemon pie. He could feel a cut on his forehead from a camera one of the men had wielded in self-defense. He needed to take a leak.

He felt great. He held his clenched fist in the other hand. It felt great, it stung, it was quick and hot. His body whispered to him. It hummed with the action, the charge at the photographers, the punches he'd thrown, the bloodsurge, the heartbeat, the great strewn beauty of garbage cans toppling.

He was brass-balled again.

He found his sunglasses in the champagne well and put them in his shirt pocket. There was a sound outside, a bouncing ball. He was about to give the driver the signal to move when he heard the sporadic heavy bounce of a basketball, unmistakable. He got out of the car and crossed to the north side of the street, where a playground was located. He looked through two fences and saw a couple of kids crouched and growling, going one-on-one.

The first gate was locked. He climbed the fence of spiked iron palings without hesitation. The second gate was also locked. He climbed the chain-link fence, which was twice as high. He went up and over and Torval followed, fence to fence, wordlessly.

They went to the far end of the park and watched the kids go at it, playing in shadow and murk. "You play?"

"Some. Not really my game," Torval said. " Rugby. That was my game. You play?"

"Some. I liked the action in the paint. I pump iron now"

"Of course you understand. There's still someone tracking you.

"There's still someone out there."

"This was a petty incursion. The whipped cream. Technically irrelevant."

"I understand. I realize. Of course."

They were intense, these kids, hand-slapping and banging for rebounds, making throaty sounds. "Next time no pies and cakes."

"Dessert is over."

"He's out there and he's armed."

"He's armed and you're armed."

"This is true."

"You will have to draw your weapon."

"This is true," Torval said.

"Let me see the thing."

"Let you see the thing. Okay. Why not? You paid for it." The two men made little snuffling sounds, insipid nasal laughter.

Torval removed the weapon from his jacket and handed it over, a handsome piece of equipment, silver and black, four-and-a-half-inch barrel, walnut stock.

"Manufactured in the Czech Republic."

"Nice."

"Smart too. Scary smart."

"Voice recognition."

"That's right," Torval said.

"You what. You speak and it knows your voice."

"That's right. The mechanism doesn't activate unless the voiceprint matches the stored data. Only my voice matches."

"Do you have to speak Czech before it fires?"

Torval smiled broadly. It was the first time Eric had seen him smile. With his free hand he took the sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and shook the temples loose.

"But the voice is only half the operation," Torval said, then paused invitingly.

"You're saying there's a code as well." "A preprogrammed spoken code." Eric put on the glasses.

"What is it?"

Torval smiled privately this time, then raised his eyes to Eric, who leveled the weapon now "Nancy Babich."

He shot the man. A small white terror of disbelief flickered in Torval's eye. He fired once and the man went down. All authority drained out of him. He looked foolish and confused.

The basketball stopped bouncing twenty yards away.

He had mass but no flow. This was clear as he lay there dying. He had discipline and a sense of pace, okay, but no true fluency of movement.

Eric glanced at the kids, who stood motionless watching. The ball was on the ground and slowly rolling. He gave them a casual hand signal indicating they ought to continue their game. Nothing so meaningful had happened that they were required to stop playing.

He tossed the weapon in the bushes and walked toward the chain-link fence.

There were no windows flying open or concerned voices calling. The weapon was not equipped with a sound suppressor but there'd been only one shot and maybe people needed to hear three, four, more to rouse them from sleep or television. This was one of the routine ephemera of the night, no different from cats at sex or a backfiring car. Even if you know it's not a backfiring car, because it never is, you don't feel a prod to conscience unless the apparent gunfire is repeated and there are sounds of running men. In the dense stir of the neighborhood, living so close to street level, with noises all the time and the dead-ass drift of your personal urban anomie, you can't be expected to react to an isolated bang.

Too, the shot was less annoying than the basketball game. If the effect of the shot was to end the game, be grateful for moonlit favors.

He paused imperceptibly, thinking he ought to go back for the weapon.

He'd tossed the weapon in the bushes because he wanted whatever would happen to happen. Guns were small practical things. He wanted to trust the power of predetermined events. The act was done, the gun should go.

He climbed the chain-link fence, tearing his pants at the pocket.

He'd tossed the weapon rashly but how fantastic it had felt. Lose the man, shed the gun. Too late now to reconsider.

He dropped to the ground and advanced to the iron fence.

He didn't wonder who Nancy Babich was and he didn't think that Torval's choice of code humanized the man or required delayed regret. Torval was his enemy, a threat to his self-regard. When you pay a man to keep you alive, he gains a psychic edge. It was a function of the credible threat and the loss of his company and personal fortune that Eric could express himself this way. Torval's passing cleared the night for deeper confrontation.

He scaled the iron fence and walked to the car. A man from the century past played a saxophone on the corner.

The Confessions of Benno Levin

MORNING

I am living offline now. I am all bared down. I am writing this at my iron desk, which I pushed along the sidewalk and into this building. I have my exercise bike where I realpedal with one foot, simulate with the other.

I am planning to make a public act of my life through these pages I will write. This will be a spiritual autobiography that runs to thousands of pages and the core of the work will be either I track him down and shoot him or do not, writing longhand in pencil.

When I was employed I kept small accounts at five major banks. The names of major banks are breathtaking in the mind and there are branches all over town. I used to go to different banks or to branches of the same bank. I had episodes where I went from branch to branch well into the night, moving money between accounts or just checking my balances. I entered codes and examined numbers. The machine takes us through the steps. The machine says, Is this correct? It teaches us to think in logic blocks.

I was briefly married to a disabled woman with a child. I used to look at her child, who was barely out of infancy, and think I'd fallen down a hole.

I was teaching and lecturing then. Lecturing is not the word. I dart from subject to subject in my mind. I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone. It is in me to hurt someone and I haven't always known this. The act and depth of writing will tell me if I'm capable.

I frankly want your sympathy. I spend my bare cash every day on bottled water. This is for drinking and bathing. I have my toilet arrangements that I made, my take-out places that I patronize and my water needs in a building without water, heat or lights, except what I provide.

It's hard for me to speak directly to people. I used to try to tell the truth. But it's hard not to lie. I lie to people because this is my language, how I talk. It's the temperature inside the head of who I am. I don't aim remarks at the person I'm speaking to but try to miss him, or glance a remark so to speak off his shoulder.

After a time I began to take satisfaction in this. It was never in me to mean what I said. Every unnecessary lie was another way to build a person. I see this clearly now. No one could help me but myself.

I watched the live video feed from his website all the time. I watched for hours and realistically days. What he said to people, how he turned so sharply in his chair. He thought chairs were largely stupid and demeaning. How he swam when he swam, ate meals, played cards on camera. The way he shuffled the cards. Even though I worked in the same headquarters I waited out on the street to see him leave. I wanted to pinpoint him in my mind. It was important to know where he was, even for a moment. It put my world in order.

They were not lies anyway. They were not falsehoods, most of them, but simple deflections off the listener's body, his or her shoulders, or they were total misses.

To speak directly to a person was unbearable. But in these pages I am going to write my way into truth. Trust me. They demoted me to lesser currencies. I write to slow down my mind but sometimes there is leakage.

Now I bank at one location only because I am dwindling down financially to nothing. It's a small bank with one machine inside, one in the street set into the wall. I use the street machine because the guard will not let me in the bank.

I could tell him I have an account and prove it. But the bank is marble and glass and armed guards. And I accept this. I could tell him I need to check Recent Activity, even though there is none. But I am willing to do my transactions outside, at the machine in the wall.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

Allow me to speak. I'm susceptible to global strains of illness. I have occasions of susto, which is soul loss, more or less, from the Caribbean, which I contracted originally on the Internet some time before my wife took her child and left, carried down the stairs by her illegal immigrant brothers.

On the one hand it's all a figment and a myth. On the other hand I'm susceptible. This work will include descriptions of my symptoms.

He is always ahead, thinking past what is new, and I'm tempted to admire this, always arguing with things that you and I consider great and trusty additions to our lives. Things wear out impatiently in his hands. I know him in my mind. He wants to be one civilization ahead of this one.

I used to keep a roll of bills wrapped in a blue rubberband that was stamped California Asparagus. That money is in circulation now, hand to hand, unsanitized. I have a stationary bike that I found one night with a missing pedal.

I advertised clandestinely for a used gun and bought it subtly and privately when I was online and still employed but barely, knowing the day was coming, he is erratic, his work habits are disintegrating, which was visible in their faces, despite the humor and pathos of owning such a complicated weapon for a person such as me.

I can see the scornful humor and pity in what I do sometimes. And I can almost enjoy it on the level of being helpless.

My life was not mine anymore. But I didn't want it to be. I watched him knot his tie and knew who he was. His bathroom mirror had a readout telling him his temperature and blood pressure at that moment, his height, weight, heart rate, pulse, pending medication, whole health history from looking at his face, and I was his human sensor, reading his thoughts, knowing the man in his mind.

It tells your height in case you shrink at night, which can happen anabolically.

Cigarettes are not part of the profile of the person you think I am. But I'm a violent smoker. I need what I need very badly. I don't read for pleasure. I don't bathe often because it isn't affordable. I buy my clothes at Value Drugs. You can do this in America, dress yourself from a drugstore head to toe, which I admire quietly. But whatever the sundry facts, I'm not so different from you in your inner life in the sense that we're all uncontrollable.

They carried her down the stairs in her wheelchair with her baby. I was disoriented in my head. Maybe you have seen the spikes on a lying polygraph. This is my wave of thought sometimes, thinking how do I respond to this. I left teaching to make my million. It was the right time and tide to do this. But then I felt derived, sitting at my workstation. I felt inserted there, a person in a situation not of his choosing, even though I'd made the choice to be there, and the closest he ever came was overhearing distance.

I'm ambivalent about killing him. Does this make me less interesting to you, or more?

I'm not one of those trodden bodies you try not to look at when you walk down certain streets. I don't look at them either. I'm knocking down the walls in my living space, a task of many weeks that's nearly done now I buy my bottled water in the Mexican grocery up the street. There are two clerks or an owner and a clerk and they both say No problem. I say Thank you. No problem.

I used to lick coins as a child. The fluting at the edge of a common coin. The milling it is called. I lick them still, sometimes, but worry about the dirt trapped in the milling.

But to take another person's life? This is the vision of the new day. I am determined finally to act. It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before. But how to imagine the moment? I'm not sure I can reach the point of even doing it mentally, two faceless men with runny colored clothes.

And how will I find him to kill, much less actually aim and shoot? So it is largely academic, this give-and-take.

When I pay with coins I go into small fixations of miscounting and fumbling.

But how do I live if he's not dead? He can be a dead father. I will offer this hope. They can harvest his sperm, then freeze it for fifteen months. After this it's a simple matter to impregnate his widow or a voluntary mother.

Then another person will grow into his form and flesh and I will have something to hate when it is old enough to be a man.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

I have my iron desk that I hauled up three flights of stairs, with ropes and wedges. I have my pencils that I sharpen with a paring knife.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?