Don DeLillo: The Angel Esmeralda

“What’s her name?”

“Sara Massey.”

“Good and direct. I see her as a strong woman with roots going back a long way. Principles, convictions. Getting revenge for your illegal activities, for the fact you got caught, maybe for joining your father’s business in the first place.”

“How smart I am not to know this. What grief it spares me.”

“This sneaky-pretty woman in your words. She’s reminding you what you did. She’s talking to you. Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi. Hang Seng, Hong Kong.”

All around us, entombed in cubicles, suspended in time, reliably muted now, men with dental issues, medical issues, marital issues, dietary demands, psychic frailties, sleep-breathing men, the nightly drone of oil-tax schemes, tax-shelter schemes, corporate espionage, corporate bribery, false testimony, medicare fraud, inheritance fraud, real estate fraud, wire fraud, fraud and conspiracy.

They started arriving early, men crowding the common room, some carrying extra folding chairs, snapping them open. There were others standing in the side aisles, a spillover of inmates, guards, kitchen staff, camp officials. I’d managed to squeeze into the fourth row, slightly off-center. The sense of event, news in high clamor, all the convergences of emotional global forces bringing us here in a wave of complex expectation.

A cluster of rain-swept blossoms was fixed to one of the high windows. Spring, more or less, late this year.

There were four common rooms, one for each dorm, and I was certain that all were packed, inmates and others collected in some odd harmonic, listening to children talk about economic collapse.

Here, as time approached, Feliks Zuber rose briefly from his seat up front, raising a weary hand to quiet the settling crowd.

I noticed at once that the girls wore matching jackets. This was new. The picture was sharper and steadier, in color. Then I realized they were seated at a long desk, a news desk, not an ordinary table. Finally the scripts — there were no scripts. They were using a teleprompter, delivering lines at fairly high speed with occasional tactical pauses, well placed.

“Greece is selling bonds, raising euros.”

“Markets are calming.”

“Greece is moving toward a new austerity.”

“Immediate pressure is relieved.”

“Greece and Germany are talking.”

“Votes of confidence. Calls for patience.”

“Greece is ready to restore trust.”

“Aid package of forty billion dollars.”

“How do they say thank you in Greek?”

“Efharisto.”

“Say it again, slowly.”

“F. Harry Stowe.”

“F. Harry Stowe.”

They exchanged a fist-bump, deadpan, without looking at each other.

“The worst may be over.”

“Or the worst is yet to come.”

“Do we know if the Greek bailout will do what it is designed to do?”

“Or will it do just the opposite?”

“What exactly is the opposite?”

“Think about markets elsewhere.”

“Is anyone looking at Portugal?”

“Everyone’s looking at Portugal.”

“High debt, low growth.”

“Borrow, borrow, borrow.”

“Euro, euro, euro.”

“Ireland has a problem. Iceland has a problem.”

“Have we thought about the British pound?”

“The life and death of the British pound.”

“The pound is not the euro.”

“Britain is not Greece.”

“But is the pound showing signs of cracking? Will the euro follow? Is the dollar far behind?”

“There is talk about China.”

“Is there trouble in China?”

“Is there a bubble in China?”

“What is the Chinese currency called?”

“Latvia has the lat.”

“Tonga has the ponga.”

“China has the rebimbi.”

“The rebimbo.”

“China has the rebobo.”

“The rebubu.”

“What happens next?”

“It already happened.”

“Does anyone remember?”

“Market plunges one thousand points in an eighth of a second.”

“A tenth of a second.”

“Faster and faster, lower and lower.”

“A twentieth of a second.”

“Screens glow and vibrate, phones jump off walls.”

“A hundredth of a second. A thousandth of a second.”

“Not real, unreal, surreal.”

“Who is doing this? Where is it coming from? Where is it going?”

“It happened in Chicago.”

“It happened in Kansas.”

“It’s a movie, it’s a song.”

I could feel the mood in the room, a pressing intensity, a need for something more, something stronger. I remained detached, watching the girls, wondering about their mother, what she had in mind, where she was leading us.

Laurie said softly, in a lilting voice: “Who do we trust? Where do we turn? How do we ever get to sleep?”

Kate said briskly, “Can computer technology keep up with computerized trading? Will long-term doubts yield to short-term doubts?”

“What is a fat-finger trade? What is a naked short sale?”

“How many trillions of dollars pledged to bleeding euro economies?”

“How many zeros is a trillion?”

“How many meetings deep in the night?”

“Why does the crisis keep getting worse?”

“Brazil, Korea, Japan, Wherever.”

“What are they doing and where are they doing it?”

“They’re on strike again in Greece.”

“They’re marching in the streets.”

“They’re burning banks in Greece.”

“They’re hanging banners from sacred temples.”

“Peoples of Europe, rise up.”

“Peoples of the world, unite.”

“The tide is rising, the tide is turning.”

“Which way? How fast?”

There was a long pause. We watched and waited. Then the news report reached its defining moment, do-or-die, the point of no return.

The girls recited together:

“Stalin Khrushchev Castro Mao.”

“Lenin Brezhnev Engels — Pow!”

These names, that exclamation, delivered in rapid singsong, roused the inmates to spontaneous noise. What kind of noise was it? What did it mean? I sat stone-faced, in the middle of it, trying to understand. The girls repeated the lines once, then again. The men yelled and clamored, these flabby white-collar felons, seeming to reject everything they’d believed all their lives.

“Brezhnev Khrushchev Mao and Ho.”

“Lenin Stalin Castro Zhou.”

The names kept coming. It resembled a school chant, the cry of leaping cheerleaders, and the men’s response grew in volume and feeling. It was tremendous, totally, and it scared me. What did these names mean to the inmates? We were a long way from the funny place-names of earlier reports. These names were immense imprints on history. Did the inmates want to replace one doctrine, one system of government with another? We were the end products of the system, the logical outcome, slabs of burnt-out capital. We were also men with families and homes, whatever our present situation. We had beliefs, commitments. It went beyond systems, I thought. They were asserting that nothing mattered, that distinctions were dead. Let the markets crash and die. Let the banks, the brokerage firms, the groups, the funds, the trusts, the institutes all turn to dust.

“Mao Zhou — Fidel Ho.”

The aisles, meanwhile, were still and hushed — guards, doctors, camp administrators. I wanted it to be over. I wanted the girls to go home, do their homework, withdraw into their cell phones.

“Marx Lenin Che — Hey!”

Their mother was crazy, perverting the novelty of a children’s stock market report. The inmates were confused, stirring themselves into mindless anarchy. Only Feliks Zuber made sense, pumping his fist, feebly, a man who was here for attempting to finance a revolution, able to hear trumpets and drums in that chorus of names. It took a while before the energy in the room began to recede, the girls’ voices becoming calmer now.