Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

"What idea?"

The rocking became worse and he watched her follow her glass from side to side before she was able to take a sip.

"Destruction," she said.

On one of the screens he saw figures descending a vertical surface. It took him a moment to understand that they were rappelling down the facade of the building just ahead, where the market tickers were located.

"You know what anarchists have always believed."

"Yes."

"Tell me," she said.

"The urge to destroy is a creative urge."

"This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed.

Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future."

Her smile was private, as always, and a minor muscle twitched at a corner of her mouth. She was not in the habit of revealing sympathies or disaffections. She had no capacity for either, he'd thought, but wondered now if he'd been wrong about that.

They were spray-painting the car, doing adagios on their skateboards. Across the avenue the men dangling from belayed ropes were trying to kick in windows. The tower carried the name of a major investment bank, the lettering modestly sized beneath a sprawling map of the world, and the stock prices danced through the fading light.

There were many arrests, people from forty countries, heads bloodied, ski masks in hand. They did not want to relinquish their masks. He saw a woman take off her mask, pull it off cursing, a cop prodding her ribs with his baton, and she swung the mask backhand, swatting his visored helmet as they passed out of camera range, and all the screens tossed to the heaving of the car.

His own image caught his eye, live on the oval screen beneath the spycam. Some seconds passed. He saw himself recoil in shock. More time passed. He felt suspended, waiting. Then there was a detonation, loud and deep, near enough to consume all the information around him. He recoiled in shock. Everyone did. The phrase was part of the gesture, the familiar expression, embodied in the motion of the head and limbs. He recoiled in shock. The phrase reverberated in the body.

The car stopped rocking. There was a general sense of contemplation. They were all of them out there bonded now in a second level of engagement.

The bomb had been set off just outside the investment bank. He saw shadowy footage on another screen, figures running at digital speed down a corridor, stutter-running, with readouts of tenths of seconds. It was surveillance coverage from cameras in the tower. The protesters were storming the building, busting through the crumpled entrance and commanding the elevators and hallways.

The struggle resumed outside with the police turning fire hoses on the burning barricades and the protesters chanting anew, alive, restored to fearlessness and moral force.

But they seemed to be done with his car at last.

They sat quietly for a moment.

He said, "Did you see that?"

"Yes, I did. What was it?"

He said, "I'm sitting. We're talking. I look at the screen. Then suddenly."

"You recoil in shock."

"Yes."

"Then the blast."

"Yes."

"Has this happened, I wonder, before?"

"Yes. I had our computer security tested."

"Nothing amiss."

"No. Not that anyone, anyway, could produce such an effect. Could anticipate such a thing."

"You recoiled in shock."

"On-screen."

"Then the blast. And then."

"Recoiled for real," he said.

"Whatever that might possibly mean."

She worked her mole. She fingered the mole on her cheek, twisting it as she thought. He sat and waited. "This is the thing about genius," she said. "Genius alters the terms of its habitat."

He liked that but wanted more.

"Think of it this way. There are rare minds operating, a few, here and there, the polymath, the true futurist. A consciousness such as yours, hypermaniacal, may have contact points beyond the general perception."

He waited.

"Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumblebee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way."

The tickers went dark on the face of the tower under assault.

"You've been talking about the future being impatient. Pressing upon us."

"That was theory. I deal in theory," she said sharply.

He turned away from her and watched the screens. The top tier of the electronic display across the avenue showed this message now:

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD

THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM

He recognized the variation on the famous first sentence of The Communist Manifesto in which Europe is haunted by the specter of communism, circa 1850.

They were confused and wrongheaded. But his respect for the protesters' ingenuity grew more certain. He slid open the sunroof and poked his head into the smoke and gas, with burning rubber thick in the air, and he thought he was an astronaut come upon a planet of pure flatus. It was bracing. A figure in a motorcycle helmet mounted the hood and began crawling across the roof of the car. Torval reached up and scraped him off. He tossed him to the ground, where the bodyguards took over. They had to use a stun gun to subdue him and the voltage delivered the man to another dimension. Eric barely noticed the crackling sound and the arced charge of current that jumped the gap between electrodes. He was watching the second ticker begin to operate, words racing north to south.

A RAT BECAME THE UNIT OF CURRENCY

It took him a moment to absorb the words and identify the line. He knew the line of course. It was out of a poem he'd been reading lately, one of the few longer poems he'd chosen to investigate, a line, half a line from the chronicle of a city under siege.

It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around him, the gassed men and women in their defiance, waving looted Nasdaq T-shirts, and to realize they'd been reading the same poetry he'd been reading.

He sat down long enough to take a web phone out of a slot and execute an order for more yen. He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. He wanted all the yen there was.

Then he put his head outside again to watch the words leap repeatedly across the shiny gray facade. The police launched a counter-assault on the tower, led by a special unit. He liked special units. They wore bullet helmets and dark slickers, men with automatic weapons that were skeleton guns, all framework and no body.

Something else was happening. There was a shift, a break in space. Again he wasn't sure what he was seeing, only thirty yards away but unreliable, delusional, where a man sat on the sidewalk with legs crossed, trembling in a length of braided flame.

He was close enough to see that the man wore glasses. There was a man on fire. People turned away crouching or stood with hands to faces, spun and crouched and went to their knees, or walked past unaware, ran past in the shuffle and smoke without noticing, or watched spell-struck, bodies going slack, faces round and dumb.

When the wind blew, gusting suddenly, the flames dipped and flattened but the man remained rigid, his face unobscured, and they saw his glasses melt into his eyes.

The sound of moaning began to spread. A man stood wailing. Two women sat on the curbstone wailing. They draped their arms over their heads and faces. Another woman wanted to snuff the fire but only got close enough to wave her jacket at the man, careful not to hit him. He was rocking slightly and his head was burning independent of the body. There was a break in the flames.

His shirt was assumed, it was received spiritually into the air in the form of shreds of smoky matter, and his skin went dark and bubbly and this is what they began to smell now, burnt flesh mixed with gasoline.