Cosmopolis (18 page)

Then he turned his head and looked at the gun, inches from his face.

He said, "I had a weapon I could talk to. Czech. But I threw it away. Or I'd be standing here trying to mimic Torval's voice so I could get the mechanism to respond. I happen to know the code. I can see myself standing here whispering Nancy Babich Nancy Babich in Torval's voice. I can say his name because he's dead. It was a weapons system, not a gun. You're a gun. I've seen a hundred situations like this. A man and a gun and a locked door. My mother used to take me to the movies. After my father died my mother took me to the movies. This is what we did as a parent and a child. And I saw two hundred situations where a man stands outside a locked room with a gun in his hand. My mother could tell you the actor's name in every case. He stands the way I'm standing, back to the wall. He is ramrod straight and he holds the gun the way I'm holding the gun, pointed up. Then he turns and kicks open the door. The door is always locked and he always kicks it open. These were old movies and new movies. Didn't matter. There was the door, there was the kick. She could tell you the actor's middle name, his marital history, the name of the rest home where his abandoned mother dozes in a chair.

Always a single kick suffices. The door flies open at once. I left my sunglasses in the car or at the barbershop. I can see myself standing here whispering in vain. Nancy Babich, you fucking cunt. But then again, what? Once he said her name, maybe the firing system became operative for a specified period of time, or until every round was discharged. Because I can't imagine that you'd have to keep saying her name, rapidfiring in an alley at expressionless killers. These mothers with their movies in the afternoon. We used to sit in empty theaters where I'm telling her it's not possible to kick a door once and expect it to open. We're not talking about rickety screen doors in bad neighborhoods where the killing tends to be random type of movie. I was a kid and a little pedantic but I still maintain I had a point. He didn't say my name and I didn't say his. But now that he's dead, I can say his name. I know a little Czech, useful in restaurants and taxis, but I never studied the language. I could stand here and list the languages I've studied but what would be the point? I've never liked thinking back, going back in time, reviewing the day or the week or the life. To crush and gut. To eviscerate. Power works best when there's no memory attached. Ramrod straight. Whenever it happened as a parent and a child I used to tell her that whoever made this movie has no idea how hard it is to kick in a sturdy wooden door in real life. I left them at the barbershop, didn't I? Titanium and neoplastic. Because no matter what kind of movie we went to, it was a spy thriller, it was a western, it was a romance, it was a comedy, there was always a man with a gun outside a locked room who was ready to kick in the door.

At first I didn't care about their relationship. But now I'm thinking they did amazing things because why else would he want to whisper her name to his handgun? Power works best when it makes no distinctions. Even science fiction, he stands there with his ray gun and kicks in a door. What's the difference between the protector and the assassin if both men are armed and hate me? I can see his 79/91

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Cosmopolis

dumb bulk on top of her. Nancy Nancy Nancy. Or he says her full name because this is what he tells his gun. I'm wondering where does she live, what does she think about when she rides the bus to work.

I can stand here and see her coming out of the bathroom drying her hair. Women barefoot on parquet floors make me weak-kneed and crazy. I know I'm talking to a gun that can't respond but how does she undress when she undresses? I'm thinking did she meet him at her place or his place to do whatever they did. These mothers with their afternoons at the movies. We went to the movies because we were trying to learn how to be alone together. We were cold and lost and my father's soul was trying to find us, to settle itself in our bodies, not that I want or need your sympathy. I can picture her in the heat of sex, expressionless, because this is a Nancy Babich thing she does, blank-face. I say her name but not his. I used to be able to say his name but now I can't because I know what went on between them. I'm thinking is his picture in a frame on her dresser. How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die? I'm standing here enraged in my head. In other words how many times do I have to kill him? These mothers who accept the fiction of kicking in a door. What is a door? It's a movable structure, usually swinging on hinges, which closes off an entranceway and requires a tremendous and prolonged pounding before it can finally be forced open."

He stepped away from the wall and turned, positioning himself directly in front of the door. Then he kicked it, heel-first. It opened at once.

He entered shooting. He did not aim and fire. He just fired. Let it express itself.

The walls were down. This was the first thing he saw in the wobbly light. He was looking into a sizable space with wall rubble everywhere. He tried to spot the subject. There was a shredded sofa, unoccupied, with a stationary bike nearby. He saw a heavy metal desk, battleship vintage, covered with papers. He saw the remains of a kitchen and bathroom, with brutally empty spaces where major appliances had stood. There was a portable orange toilet from a construction site, seven feet tall, mud-smoked and dented. He saw a coffee table with an unlit candle in a saucer and a dozen coins scattered around an Mk.23 military pistol with a matte black finish and an overall length of nine and a half inches, equipped with a laser-aiming module.

The toilet door opened and a man came out. Eric fired again, indifferently, distracted by the man's appearance.

He was barefoot in jeans and T-shirt, with a bath towel over his head and shoulders, draped in the manner of a prayer shawl.

"What are you doing here?"

"That's not the question. The question," Eric said, "is yours to answer. Why do you want to kill me?"

"No, that's not the question. That's too easy to be the question. I want to kill you in order to count for something in my own life. See how easy?"

He walked over to the table and picked up the weapon. Then he sat on the sofa, hunched forward, half lost in the towel shroud.

"You're not a reflective man. I live consciously in my head," he said. "Give me a cigarette."

"Give me a drink."

"Do you recognize me?"

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He was slight and unshaven and looked absurd trying to manage such a formidable weapon. The gun dominated him, even in the drama of the towel on his head.

"I can't see you clearly."

"Sit. We'll talk."

Eric didn't want to sit on the exercise bike. The confrontation would crumble into farce. He saw a molded plastic chair, the desk chair, and took it to the coffee table.

"Yes, I'd like that. Sit and talk," he said. "I've had a long day. Things and people. Time for a philosophical pause. Some reflection, yes."

The man fired a shot into the ceiling. It startled him. Not Eric; the other, the subject.

"You're not familiar with that weapon. I've fired that weapon. It's a serious weapon. Whereas this,"

he said, wagging the revolver in his hand. "I'm thinking of installing a shooting range in my apartment."

"Why not your office? Line them up and shoot them."

"You know the office. Is that right? You've been in the office."

"Tell me who you think I am."

The awfulness of his need, the half-pandering expectancy made it clear that Eric's next word, or the one after, could be his last. They faced each other across the table. It almost didn't occur to him that he could shoot first. Not that he knew whether there was a bullet left in the chamber.

He said, "I don't know. Who are you?"

The man took the towel off his head. This meant nothing to Eric. There was the high forehead. He saw the scarified hair, hanging in unwashed strips, thin and limp. "Maybe if you told me your name."

"You wouldn't know my name."

"I know names more than faces. Tell me your name."

"Benno Levin."

"That's a phony name."

The man was a little stunned to hear this. "It's phony. It's fake."

He was rattled and embarrassed.

"It's fake. It isn't real. But I think I recognize you now. You were at the cash machine outside a bank sometime after noon."

"You saw me."

"You looked familiar. I didn't know why. Maybe you used to work for me. Hate me. Want to kill me. Fine."

"Everything in our lives, yours and mine, has brought us to this moment."

"Fine. I could use a tall cold beer about now."

For all his haggardness, his stringiness, the ash of despair, there was a light in the subject's eye. He found encouragement in the thought that Eric had recognized him. Not recognized so much as simply seen. Seen and found linkage, faintly, on a crowded street. It was nearly lost inside the desperate bearing of the man, an attentiveness that wasn't feral or deadly.

"How old are you? I'm interested."

"Do you think people like me can't happen?"

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"How old?"

"We happen. Forty-one."

"A prime number."

"But not an interesting one. Or did I turn forty-two, which is possible, because I don't keep track, because why should I?"

The wind was blowing through the halls. He looked chilled and put the towel back on his head, the ends falling over his shoulders.

"I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint

Augustine. And herein lies my sickness."

"That's a start. That's a crucial self-realization," Eric said.

"I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about you. Your whole waking life is a self-contradiction. That's why you're engineering your own downfall. Why are you here? That's the first thing I said to you when I came out of the toilet."

"I noticed the toilet. It's one of the first things I noticed. What happens to your waste?"

"There's a hole below the fixture. I knocked a hole in the floor. Then I positioned the toilet so that one hole fits over the other."

"Holes are interesting. There are books about holes."

"There are books about shit. But we want to know why you'd willingly enter a house where there's someone inside who's prepared to kill you."

"All right. Tell me. Why am I here?"

"You have to tell me. Some kind of unexpected failure. A shock to your self-esteem."

Eric thought about this. Across the table the man's head was lowered and he held the weapon between his knees, using both hands to grip it. The stance was patient and thoughtful.

"The yen. I couldn't figure out the yen."

"The yen."

"I couldn't chart the yen."

"So you brought everything down."

"The yen eluded me. This had never happened. I became halfhearted."

"This is because you have half a heart. Give me a cigarette."

"I don't smoke cigarettes."

"The huge ambition. The contempt. I can list the things. I can name the appetites, the people.

Mistreat some, ignore some, persecute others. The self-totality. The lack of remorse. These are your gifts," he said sadly, without irony.

"What else?"

"Funny feeling in your bones."

"What?"

"Tell me if I'm wrong."

"What?"

"Intuition of early death."

"What else?"

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"What else. Secret doubts. Doubts you could never acknowledge."

"You know some things."

"I know you smoke cigars. I know everything that's ever been said or written about you. I know what I see in your face, after years of study."

"You worked for me. Doing what?"

"Currency analysis. I worked on the baht."

"The baht is interesting."

"I loved the baht. But your system is so microtimed that I couldn't keep up with it. I couldn't find it.

It's so infinitesimal. I began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life."

"One hundred satang to the baht. What's your real name?"

"You wouldn't know it."

"Tell me your name."

He sat back and looked away. Telling his name seemed to strike him as an essential defeat, the most intimate failure of character and will, but also so inevitable there was no point resisting.

"Sheets. Richard Sheets."

"Means nothing to me."

He said these words into the face of Richard Sheets. Means nothing to me. He felt a trace of the old stale pleasure, dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel worthless. So small and forgettable a thing that spins such disturbance.

"Tell me. Do you imagine that I stole ideas from you? Intellectual property"

"What does anyone imagine? A hundred things a minute. Whether I imagine a thing or not, it's real to me. I have syndromes where they're real, from Malaysia for example. The things I imagine become facts. They have the time and space of facts."

"You're forcing me to be reasonable. I don't like that."

"I have severe anxieties that my sex organ is receding into my body."

"But it's not."

"Shrinking into my abdomen."

"But it's not."

"Whether it is or not, I know it is."

"Show me."

"I don't have to look. There are folk beliefs. There are epidemics that happen. Men in the thousands, in real fear and pain."

He closed his eyes and fired a shot into the floorboards between his feet. He didn't open his eyes until the report stopped vibrating through the room.

"All right. People like you can happen. I understand this. I believe it. But not the violence. Not the gun. The gun is all wrong. You're not a violent man. Violence is meant to be real, based on real motives, on forces in the world that what. That make us want to defend ourselves or take aggressive action. The crime you want to commit is cheap imitation. It's a stale fantasy. People do it because other people do it. It's another syndrome, a thing you caught from others. It has no history."