Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

He stuck his head out the sunroof and watched. What was happening? It was hard to say.

Both avenues were impacted now, vehicles blocked and people everywhere. Pedestrians fled into the cross streets, outside the runners' line of advance. It wasn't a line but a warp in the crowd. There were runners and others, those trying to run, angling for space to move freely, handpaddling past knotted bodies.

He wanted to understand, to separate one thing from another through detailed observation. There were horns and sirens sounding. The massed voices called above the ambient splash of the crowd. This only made it harder to see.

He was looking south, into the heart of Times Square. He heard plate glass breaking, falling in sheets to the pavement. There was an isolated disturbance outside the Nasdaq Center a few blocks away. Shapes and colors were shifting, a slow lean of bodies. They were swarming the entrance and he imagined pandemonium inside, people racing through galleries surfaced in information. They would break into control rooms, attack the video wall and logo ticker.

Directly in front of him, what? People on the traffic island buying discount theater tickets. They were still in line, most of them, not willing to lose their places, the only image in broad view that was not raw and tossing.

The voices carried through bullhorns in intonations of chant, the same tonal contour he'd heard in the shouts of the young men at lunch. The styrofoam rat was on the sidewalk now, carried on a litter shouldered by four or five people in rodent spandex, coming this way.

He saw Torval in the street with the two bodyguards, all three swiveling at different degrees of speed to scan the area, impressively. The woman looked Egyptian in profile, Middle Kingdom, leaning toward her left breast to speak into the wearable phone. It was time to retire the word phone.

Runners began to emerge from both sides of the ticket outlet, most in ski masks, some pausing when they saw the car. The car made them pause. There were police vehicles racing and skidding to the edge of the cross streets. He began to feel involved. A bus deposited figures in riot gear, wearing snouted masks.

A driver stood by his taxi, smoking, arms crossed at his chest, South Asian and patiently waiting, in the world city, for things to make some sense.

There were people approaching the car. Who were they? They were protesters, anarchists, whoever they were, a form of street theater, or adepts of sheer rampage. The car was hemmed in, of course, enveloped by paralysis, with vehicles on three sides and the ticket booths on the fourth. He saw Torval confront a man carrying a brick. He dropped him cold with a right cross. Eric decided to admire this.

Then Torval looked up at him. A kid on a skateboard flew past, bouncing off the windshield of a police cruiser. It was clear what his chief of security wanted him to do. The two men stared balefully at each other for a long moment. Then Eric lowered himself into the body of the car and eased the sunroof shut.

It made more sense on TV He poured two vodkas and they watched, trusting what they saw. It was a protest all right and they were smashing the windows of chain stores and loosing battalions of rats in restaurants and hotel lobbies.

Masked figures roamed the area on the tops of cars, tossing smoke bombs at the cops.

He could hear the chant more clearly now, channeled through the dish antennas of TV trucks and extracted from the rolling clamor of sirens and car alarms.

A specter is haunting the world, they cried.

He was enjoying this. Teenagers on skateboards sprayed graffiti at advertising displays on the sides of buses. The styrofoam rat was toppled now and there were police in tight formation advancing behind riot shields, helmeted men who moved with a totalistic grimness that made Kinski seem to sigh.

Protesters were rocking the car. He looked at her and smiled. There were close-ups on TV of faces scorched by pepper gas. The zoom lens caught a man in a parachute dropping from the top of a tower nearby. Chute and man were striped in anarchist red-and-black and his penis was exposed, likewise logotyped. They were knocking the car back and forth. Projectiles came popping from tear-gas launchers and cops free-lanced in the crowd, wearing masks with twin filtration chambers out of some lethal cartoon.

"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."

"Its own grave-diggers," he said.

"But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."

The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment.

"The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are marketdriven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system."

He watched the vodka slosh in her glass as the car bounced back and forth. There were people banging on the windows and hood. He saw Torval and the bodyguards sweep them off the chassis. He thought briefly about the partition behind the driver. It had a cedar frame with an inlaid fragment of ornamental Kufic script on parchment, late tenth century, Baghdad, priceless.

She tightened her seat belt.

"You have to understand."

He said, "What?"

"The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?"

He said, "What?"

"It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present."

There were cars burning in the street, metal hissing and spitting, and stunned figures in slow motion, in tides of smoke, wandering through the mass of vehicles and bodies, and others everywhere running, and a cop down, genuflected, outside a fast food shop.

"The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there," she said. "This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it."

Someone flung a trash can at the rear window. Kinski flinched but barely. To the immediate west, just across Broadway, the protesters created barricades of burning tires. All along there'd seemed a scheme, a destination. Police fired rubber bullets through the smoke, which began to drift high above the billboards. Other police stood a few feet away, helping Eric's security detail protect the car. He didn't know how he felt about this.

"How will we know when the global era officially ends?"

He waited.

"When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhattan."

Men were urinating on the car. Women pitched sandfilled soda bottles.

"This is controlled anger, I would say. But what would happen if they knew that the head of Packer Capital was in the car?"

She said this evilly, eyes alight. The protesters' eyes were blazing between the red-and-black bandannas they wore across their heads and faces. Did he envy them? The shatterproof windows showed hairline fractures and maybe he thought he'd like to be out there, mangling and smashing.

"They are working with you, these people. They are acting on your terms," she said. "And if they kill you, it's only because you permit it, in your sweet sufferance, as a way to re-emphasize the idea we all live under."