Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

"There's pain enough for everybody now," Eric told him.

It was hard work to talk and listen. Finally they had to look at each other, read lips through the stunning noise. Now that he knew Danko's name, he could see him, partially. This was a man about forty, average size, scarred across the forehead and cheek, with a bent nose and bristled hair cut close. He did not live in his clothes, his turtleneck and blazer, but in a body hammered out of raw experience, things suffered and done to extreme limits.

Music devoured the air around them, issuing from enormous speakers set among the ruined murals on facing walls. He began to feel an otherworldliness, a strange arrhythmia in the scene. The dancers seemed to be working against the music, moving ever more slowly as the tempo compressed and accelerated. They opened their mouths and rolled their heads. All the boys had ovoid heads, the girls were a cult of starvelings. The light source was in the tech level above the balcony, radiating long cool waves of banded gray. To someone watching from above, light fell upon the ravers with a certain clemency of effect, a visual counterstroke to the ominous sound. There was a remote track under the music that resembled a female voice but wasn't. It spoke and moaned. It said things that seemed to make sense but didn't. He listened to it speak outside the range of any language ever humanly employed and he began to miss it when it stopped.

"I don't believe I am here," Danko said.

He looked at Eric and smiled at the idea of being here, among American teenagers in stylized riot, with music that took you over, replacing your skin and brain with digital tissue. There was something infectious in the air. It wasn't the music and lights alone that drew you in, the spectacle of massed dance in a theater stripped of seats and paint and history. Eric thought it might be the drug as well, the novo, spreading its effect from those who took it to those who did not. You caught what they had. First you were apart and watching and then you were in, and with, and of the crowd, and then you were the crowd, densely assembled and dancing as one.

They were weightless down there. He thought the drug was probably dissociative, separating mind from body. They were a blank crowd, outside worry and pain, drawn to the glassy repetition. All the menace of electronica was in repetition itself. This was their music, loud, bland, bloodless and controlled, and he was beginning to like it.

But he felt old, watching them dance. An era had come and gone without him. They melted into each other so they wouldn't shrivel up as individuals. The noise was nearly unbearable, taking root in his hair and teeth. He was seeing and hearing too much. But this was his only defense against the spreading mental state. Never having touched or tasted the drug, not even having seen it, he felt a little less himself, a little more the others, down there, raving.

"You tell me when we leave. I take you out."

"Where is he?"

"At the entrance. Torval? He watches at the entrance."

"Have you killed people?"

"What do you think? Like lunch," he said.

They were in a trance state now, dancing in slowest motion. The music took a turn toward dirge, with lyrical keyboard flourishes bridging every segment of regret. It was the last techno-rave, the end of whatever it was the end of.

Danko led him down the long stairway and through the passage. There were dressing rooms with ravers inside, sitting and lying everywhere, slumped against each other. He stood in a doorway and watched. They could not speak or walk. One of them licked another's face, the only movement in the room. Even as his self-awareness grew weaker, he could see who they were in their chemical delirium and it was tender and moving, to know them in their frailty, their wistfulness of being, because kids is all they were, trying not to scatter in the air.

He'd walked nearly to the stage door when he realized Danko was not with him. This he understood. The man was back there somewhere dancing, beyond the reach of his wars and corpses, his mind snipers firing at first light.

He went stride for stride with Torval to the car. The rain had stopped. This was good. This was clearly what it should have done. The street carried a shimmer of sodium lamps and a mood of slowly unfolding suspense.

"Where is he?"

"Decided to stay inside," Eric said. "Good. We don't need him."

"Where is she?"

"Sent her home."

"Good."

"Good," Torval said. "It's looking good."

There was someone camped in the limo. She sat tilted on the banquette, nodding off, all plastic and rags, and Torval rousted her out. She did a little dance of twisting free and remained there in aggregate, a standing heap of clothes, bundled possessions and sandwich bags for alms looped over her belt.

"I need a gypsy. Anybody here read palms?"

One of those unused voices that sound outside the world.

"What about feet?" she said. "Read my feet."

He searched his pockets for money, feeling a little foolish, a little chagrined, having made and lost sums that could colonize a planet, but the woman was moving up the street on shoes with flapping soles and there were no bills or coins in any case to find inside his pants, or documents of any kind.

The car crossed Eighth Avenue, out of the theater district, out of the row of supper clubs and lounges, beyond the retail atriums now, beyond the airline offices and auto showrooms and into the local, the mixed, the mostly unnoticed blocks of dry cleaner and schoolyard, just an inkling here of the old brawl, the old seethe and heat of Hell's Kitchen, the rake of fire escapes on old brick buildings.

Traffic was scant but the car kept to the daylong draggy pace. This is because Eric was in his seat talking through the open window to Torval, who walked alongside the automobile.

"What do we know?"

"We know it's not a group. It's not an organized terror cell or international kidnappers with ransom demands."

"It's an individual. Do we care?"

"We don't have a name. But we have a phone call. The complex is analyzing voice data. They've made certain assessments. And they're projecting a course of action on the part of the individual."

"Why can't I work up any curiosity on the subject?"

"Because it doesn't matter," Torval said. "Whoever it is, that's who it is."

Eric agreed with this, whatever it meant. They moved down the street between rows of garbage cans set out for collection and past the gaunt hotel and the synagogue for actors. There was muddy water in the street, deepening as they proceeded, three, four inches now, the residue of the water-main break earlier in the day. Workers in dayglo vests and high boots were still in the area, under floodlights, and Torval high-stepped through generations of muck, making a splash with each bitter stride until the river diminished to an inch of standing water.

There were police barricades just ahead, blocking access to Ninth Avenue. At first Torval believed this was related to the flooded streets. But there were no clean-up crews on the other side of the avenue. Then he thought the president's motorcade was on the way downtown to some official function after finally shaking free of midtown traffic. But there was music in the distance and people beginning to gather, too many, too young, with headsets attached, to account for a presidential drive-by. Finally he talked to one of the cops at the barricades.

There was a funeral on the way.

Eric got out of the car and stood near the bicycle shop on the corner, with Torval planted nearby. An enormous man approached through the gathering crowd, broad, meaty, solemn, wearing pale linen slacks and a black leather shirt, sleeveless, with platinum accessories here and there. It was Kozmo Thomas, who managed a dozen rappers and had once owned a stable of racehorses in partnership with Eric.