Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

The car moved at an inchworm creep.

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

Hasidim walked along the street, younger men in dark suits and important fedoras, faces pale and blank, men who only saw each other, he thought, as they disappeared into storefronts or down the subway steps. He knew the traders and gem cutters were in the back rooms and wondered whether deals were still made in doorways with a handshake and a Yiddish blessing. In the grain of the street he sensed the Lower East Side of the 1920s and the diamond centers of Europe before the second war, Amsterdam and Antwerp. He knew some history. He saw a woman seated on the sidewalk begging, a baby in her arms. She spoke a language he didn't recognize. He knew some languages but not this one. She seemed rooted to that plot of concrete. Maybe her baby had been born there, under the No Parking sign. FedEx trucks and UPS. Black men wore signboards and spoke in African murmurs. Cash for gold and diamonds. Rings, coins, pearls, wholesale jewelry, antique jewelry. This was the souk, the shtetl. Here were the hagglers and talebearers, the scrapmongers, the dealers in stray talk. The street was an offense to the truth of the future. But he responded to it. He felt it enter every receptor and vault electrically to his brain.

The car stopped dead and he got out and stretched. Traffic ahead was a long liquid shimmer of idling metal. He saw Torval walking toward him.

"Imperative that we reroute."

"The situation is what."

"This. We have flood conditions in the streets ahead. State of chaos. This. The question of the president and his whereabouts. He is fluid. He is moving. And wherever he goes, our satellite receiver reports a ripple effect in the traffic that causes mass paralysis. This also. There is a funeral proceeding slowly downtown and now deflecting westward. Many vehicles, numerous mourners on foot. And finally this. We have a report of imminent activity in the area.

"Activity."

"Imminent. Nature as yet unknown. The complex says, Use caution."

The man waited for a response. Eric was looking past him at a large shop window, one of the few on the street not showing rows of precious metal set with gems. He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational. Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute? No one wanted to be touched. There was a pact of untouchability. Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passersby mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.

He stood in the poetry alcove at the Gotham Book Mart, leafing through chapbooks. He browsed lean books always, half a fingerbreadth or less, choosing poems to read based on length and width. He looked for poems of four, five, six lines. He scrutinized such poems, thinking into every intimation, and his feelings seemed to float in the white space around the lines. There were marks on the page and there was the page. The white was vital to the soul of the poem.

Klaxons sounded to the west, the electric knell of emergency vehicles that were sometimes still called ambulances, fixed in stagnant traffic.

A woman moved past, behind him, and he turned to look, too late, not sure how he knew it was a woman. He didn't see her enter the back room but knew she had. He also knew he had to follow Torval had not come into the bookstore with him. One of the aides was stationed near the front door, the female of the set, eyes rising briefly from the book in her hands.

He passed through the doorway into the back room, where several customers disentombed lost novels from the deep shelves. There was a woman among them and he only had to glance at her to know she was not the one he was looking for. How did he know this? He didn't but did. He checked the offices and staff toilet and then saw there were two doorways to this part of the shop. When he'd entered one, she'd left by the other, the woman he was looking for.

He went back to the main room and stood on the old floorboards, among the unpacked boxes, in the redolence of faded decades, scanning the area. She wasn't among the customers and staff. He realized his bodyguard was smiling at him, a black woman with a striking face, letting her eyes range playfully toward the door to her right. He walked over there and opened the door to a hallway that had stacks of books on one wall, photographs of sociopath poets on the other. A flight of stairs led to the gallery above the main floor and a woman sat on the stairs, unmistakably the one. There was a quality discernible in her repose, a lightness of bearing, and then he saw who she was. She was Elise Shifrin, his wife, reading a book of poems.

He said, "Recite to me."

She looked up and smiled. He knelt on the step beneath her and put his hands on her ankles, admiring her milky eyes above the headband of the book.

"Where is your necktie?" she said.

"Had my checkup. Saw my heart on a screen."

He ran his hands up her calves to the rills behind the knees.

"I don't like saying this."

"But."

"You smell of sex."

"That's my doctor's appointment you smell."

"I smell sex all over you."

"It's what. It's hunger you smell," he said. "I want to eat lunch. You want to eat lunch. We're people in the world. We need to eat and talk."

He held her hand and they moved single file through groggy traffic to the luncheonette across the street. A man sold watches from a bath towel spread across the pavement. The long room was thick with bodies and noise and he pushed past the take-out crowd and found seats at the counter.

"I'm not sure how hungry I am."

"Eat. You'll find out," he said. "Speaking of sex."

"We've been married only weeks. Barely weeks."

"Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live."

"We don't want to start counting the times, do we? Or having solemn discussions on the subject."

"No. We want to do it."

"And we will. We shall."

"We want to have it," he said.

"Sex."

"Yes. Because there isn't time not to have it. Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day. What. You don't know this?"

She looked at the menu that extended across the upper wall and seemed discouraged by its scope and mood. He cited aloud certain items he thought she might like to eat. Not that he knew what she ate.

There was a cross-roar of accents and languages and a counterman announcing food orders on a loudspeaker. Horns were blowing in the street.

"I like that bookshop. Do you know why?" she said. "Because it's semi-underground."

"You feel hidden. You like to hide. From what?"

Men talked business in tattoo raps, in formally metered chant accompanied by the clang of flatware.

"Sometimes only noise," she said, leaning into him, whispering the words cheerfully.