Cosmopolis (11 page)

"I understand none of this," she said. "Microchips so small and powerful. Humans and computers merge. This is well beyond my range. And never-ending life begins." She took a moment to look at him. "Shouldn't the glory of a great man's death argue against his dream of immortality?"

Kinski naked on his chest.

"Men think about immortality. Never mind what women think. We're too small and real to matter here," she said. "Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down."

Kinski vivid in his nightmares, commenting on events therein.

"There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired. It's a mystery to me, how such a thing might happen. Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think. Later today perhaps. Maybe today is the day when everything happens, for better or worse, ka-boom, like that."

It was twilight, only dimmer, with a silvery twinge in the air, and he stood outside his car watching taxis extract themselves from the ruck. He didn't know how long it was since he'd felt so good.

How long? He didn't know.

With the currency ticker restored to normal function, the yen showed renewed strength, advancing against the dollar in microdecimal increments every sextillionth of a second. This was good. This was 46/91

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fine and right. It thrilled him to think in zeptoseconds and to watch the numbers in their unrelenting run. The stock ticker was also good. He watched the major issues breeze by and felt purified in nameless ways to see prices spiral into lubricious plunge. Yes, the effect on him was sexual, cunnilingual in particular, and he let his head fall back and opened his mouth to the sky and rain.

The rain came washing down on the emptying breadth of Times Square with the billboards ghost-lighted now and the tire barricades nearly cleared dead ahead, leaving 47th Street open to the west.

The rain was fine. The rain was dramatically right. But the threat was even better. He saw a few tourists creep along Broadway under bunched umbrellas to stare at the charred spot on the pavement where an unknown man had set fire to himself. This was grave and haunting. It was right for the moment and the day. But the credible threat was the thing that moved and quickened him. The rain on his face was good and the sour reek was fine and right, the fug of urine maturing on the body of his car, and there was trembling pleasure to be found, and joy at all misfortune, in the swift pitch of markets down. But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he'd always known would come clear in time.

Now he could begin the business of living.

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?"

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"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

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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 49/91

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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?"

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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.