Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

The limousine was a striking sight under the streetlamp, with a bruised cartoonish quality, a car in a narrative panel, it feels and speaks. The opera lights were on, twelve per side, placed between windows in sets of four. The driver stood at the rear, holding open the door. Eric did not enter immediately. He stopped and looked at the driver. He'd never done this before and it took him a while to see the man.

The man was slim and black, medium height. He had a longish face. He had an eye, the left, that was hard to find beneath the deep sag of the lid. The lower rim of the iris was visible, shut off in a corner. The man had a history, evidently. There were evening streaks in the white of the eye, a sense of blood sun. Things had happened in his life.

Eric liked the idea that a man with a devastated eye drove a car for a living. His car. This made it even better.

He remembered that he needed to urinate. He did it in the car, stooping, and watched the bowl fold back into its housing. He didn't know what happened to the waste. Maybe it was tanked up somewhere in the underside of the automobile or possibly dumped directly in the street, violating a hundred statutes.

The car's fog lamps were glowing. The river was only two blocks away, bearing its daily inventory of chemicals and incidental trash, floatable household objects, the odd body bludgeoned or shot, all ghosting prosaically south to the tip of the island and the seamouth beyond.

The light was red. Only the sparsest traffic moved on the avenue ahead and he sat in the car and realized how curious it was that he was willing to wait, no less than the driver, just because a light was one color and not another. But he wasn't observing the terms of social accord. He was in a patient mood, that's all, and maybe feeling thoughtful, being mortally alone now, with his bodyguards gone.

The car crossed Tenth Avenue and went past the first small grocery and then the truck lot lying empty. He saw two cars parked on the sidewalk, shrouded in torn blue tarp. There was a stray dog, there's always a lean gray dog nosing into wadded pages of a newspaper. The garbage cans here were battered metal, not the gentrified rubber products on the streets to the east, and there was garbage in open boxes and a scatter of trash fanning from a supermarket cart upended in the street. He felt a silence descend, an absence unrelated to the mood of the street at this hour, and the car passed the second small grocery and he saw the ramparts above the train tracks that ran below street level and the garages and body shops sealed for the night, steel shutters marked with graffiti in Spanish and Arabic.

The barbershop was on the north side of the street and faced a row of old brick tenements. The car stopped and Eric sat there, thinking. He sat for five, six minutes. Then the door croaked open and the driver stood on the sidewalk, looking in.

"We are here," he said finally.

Eric stood on the sidewalk looking at the tenements across the street. He looked at the middle building in a line of five and felt a lonely chill, fourth floor, windows dark and fire escape bare of plants. The building was grim. It was a grim street but people used to live here in loud close company, in railroad flats, and happy as anywhere, he thought, and still did, and still were.

His father had grown up here. There were times when Eric was compelled to come and let the street breathe on him. He wanted to feel it, every rueful nuance of longing. But it wasn't his longing or yearning or sense of the past. He was too young to feel such things, and anyway unsuited, and this had never been his home or street. He was feeling what his father would feel, standing in this place.

The barbershop was closed. He knew it would be closed at this hour. He went to the door and saw that the back room was lighted. It had to be lighted, whatever the hour. He knocked and waited and the old man came moving through the dimness, Anthony Adubato, in his working outfit, a striped white tunic, short-sleeved, with baggy pants and running shoes.

Eric knew what the man would say when he opened the door.

"But how come you're such a stranger lately?"

"Hello, Anthony."

"Long time."

"Long time. I need a haircut."

"You look like what. Get in here so I can look at you."

He flipped the light switch and waited for Eric to sit in the one barber chair that was left. There was a hole in the linoleum where the other chair had been and there was the toy chair for kids, still here, a green roadster with red steering wheel.

"I never seen such ratty hair on a human."

"I woke up this morning and knew it was time."

"You knew where to come."

"I said to myself. I want a haircut."

The man eased the sunglasses off Eric's head and placed them on the shelf under the room-length mirror, checking them first for smudges and dust. "Maybe you want to eat something first."

"I could eat something."

"There's take-out in the fridgerator that I nibble at it when I get the urge."

He went into the back room and Eric looked around him. Paint was coming off the walls, exposing splotches of pinkish white plaster, and the ceiling was cracked in places. His father had brought him here many years ago, the first time, and maybe the place had been in better shape but not by much.

Anthony stood in the doorway, a small white carton in each hand.

"So you married that woman."

"That's right."

"That her family's got like money unbeknownst. I never thought you'd get married so young. But what do I know? I have chickpeas mashed up and I have eggplant stuffed with rice and nuts."

"Give me the eggplant."

"You got it," Anthony said, but stood where he was, in the doorway.

"He went fast once they found it. He was diagnosed and then he went. It was like he was talking to me one day and gone the next. In my mind that's how it feels. I also have the other eggplant with garlic and lemon all mashed up together if you want to try that instead. He was diagnosed it was January. They found it and told him. But he didn't tell your mother until he had to. By March he was gone. But in my mind it feels like a day or two. Two days tops."

Eric had heard this a number of times and the man used the same words nearly every time, with topical variations. This is what he wanted from Anthony. The same words. The oil company calendar on the wall. The mirror that needed silvering.

"You were four years old."

"Five."

"Exactly. Your mother was the brains of the outfit. That's where you get your mentality. Your mother had the wisdom. He said that himself."

"And you. You're keeping well?"

"You know me, kid. I could tell you I can't complain. But I could definitely complain. The thing is I don't want to.

He leaned into the room, upper body only, the old stubbled head and pale eyes.

"Because there isn't time," he said.

After a pause he went to the shelf in front of Eric and put the cartons down and took two plastic spoons out of his breast pocket.

"Let me think what I have that we could drink. There's water from the tap. I drink water now. And there's a bottle of liqueur that's been here don't ask how long."

He was wary of the word liqueur, Anthony was. All the words he'd spoken were the ones he'd always spoken and would always speak except for this one word, which made him nervous.

"I could drink some of that."

"Good. Because if your father himself walked in here and I offered him tap water, god forbid, he would rip out my last chair."

"And maybe we could ask my driver to come in. My driver's out in the car."

"We could give him the other eggplant."

"Good. That would be nice. Thank you, Anthony."

They were halfway through the meal, sitting and talking, Eric and the driver, and Anthony was standing and talking. He'd found a spoon for the driver and the two of them drank water out of unmatching mugs.