Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

He was standing by the cash register. Then he reached down and opened the cabinet beneath the shelf and lifted out some hand towels.

"But what did I do for protection?"

Eric had seen it before, an old pockmarked revolver lying at the bottom of the drawer.

They talked to him. They bared their teeth and ate. They insisted that he take the gun. He wasn't sure it mattered much. He was afraid the night was over. The threat should have taken material form soon after Torval went down but it hadn't, from that point to this, and he began to think it never would. This was the coldest possible prospect, that no one was out there. It left him in a suspended state, all that was worldly and consequential in blurry ruin behind him but no culminating moment ahead.

The only thing left was the haircut.

Anthony billowed the striped cape. He squirted water on Eric's head. The talk was easy now. He refilled the shot glass with sambuca. Then he scissored the air in preparation, an inch from Eric's ear. The talk was routine barbershop, rent hikes and tunnel traffic. Eric held the glass at chin level, arm indrawn, sipping deliberately.

After a while he threw off the cape. He couldn't sit here anymore. He burst from the chair, knocking back the drink in a whiskey swig.

Anthony looked very small, suddenly, with the rake comb in one hand, clippers in the other. "But how come?"

"I need to leave. I don't know how come. That's how come.

"But let me do the right side at least. So both sides are equal."

It meant something to Anthony. This was clear, getting the sides to match.

"I'll come back. Take my word. I'll sit and you'll finish."

It was the driver who understood. Ibrahim went to the cabinet and removed the gun. Then he handed it butt-first to Eric, a vein flashing on the back of his hand.

There was something determined in his face, a solemn insistence on one's duty to recognize what is harsh and remorseless in the world, and Eric wanted to respond to the staid grave manner of the man, or risk disappointing him.

He took the gun in hand. It was a nickel-plated piece of junk. But he felt the depth of Ibrahim's experience. He tried to read the man's ravaged eye, the bloodshot strip beneath the hooded lid. He respected the eye. There was a story there, a brooding folklore of time and fate.

Steam came venting from a manhole through a tall blue stack, the most common sight, he thought, but beautiful now, carrying the strangeness, the indecipherability of a thing seen new, steam heaving from the urban earth, nearly apparitional.

The car approached Eleventh Avenue. He rode up front with the driver, asking him to cut off all means of communication with the complex. Ibrahim did this. Then he activated the night-vision display A series of thermal images appeared on the windshield, lower left, objects beyond the range of headlights. He brightened the shot of dumpsters down by the river, adjusting the projection slightly upward. He activated the microcameras that monitored activity on the perimeter of the automobile. Anyone approaching from any angle could be seen on one of the dashboard screens.

These features seemed playthings to Eric, maybe useful in video art.

"Ibrahim, tell me this."

"Yes."

"These stretch limousines that fill the streets. I've been wondering."

"Yes."

"Where are they parked at night? They need large tracts of space. Out near the airports or somewhere in the

Meadowlands. Long Island, New Jersey " "I will go to New Jersey. The limo stays here."

"Where?"

"Next block. There will be an underground garage. Limos only. I will drop off your car, pick up my car, drive home through the stinking tunnel."

An old industrial loft building stood on the southeast corner, ten stories, blocklike, a late medieval sweatshop and firetrap. There were sealed windows and scaffolding and the sidewalk was boarded off. Ibrahim nosed the car farther right, keeping a distance from closed-off areas. A vehicle pulled out in front of them, a lunch van, unlikely at this hour, abnormal, worth watching.

He'd fitted the gun under his belt, uncomfortably. He remembered that he'd slept. He was alert, eager for action, for resolution. Something had to happen soon, a dispelling of doubt and the emergence of some design, the subject's plan of action, visible and distinct.

Then lights came on, dead ahead, flaring with a crack and whoosh, great carbon-arc floodlights that were set on tripods and rigged to lampposts. A woman in jeans appeared, flagging down the car. The intersection was soaked in vibrant light, the night abruptly alive.

People crisscrossed the streets, calling to each other or speaking into handsets, and teamsters unloaded equipment from long trucks parked on both sides of the avenue. Trailers sat in the gas station across the street. The man in the van ahead lowered the fold-over side, for meals, and it was only now that Eric saw the heavy trolley with movable boom attached, rolling slowly into place. Installed at the high end of the boom was a platform that held a movie camera and a couple of seated men.

The crane wasn't the only thing he'd missed. When he got out of the car and moved to a spot that wasn't blocked by the lunch truck, he saw the elements of the scene in preparation.

There were three hundred naked people sprawled in the street. They filled the intersection, lying in haphazard positions, some bodies draped over others, some leveled, flattened, fetal, with children among them. No one was moving, no one's eyes were open. They were a sight to come upon, a city of stunned flesh, the bareness, the bright lights, so many bodies unprotected and hard to credit in a place of ordinary human transit.

Of course there was a context. Someone was making a movie. But this was just a frame of reference. The bodies were blunt facts, naked in the street. Their power was their own, independent of whatever circumstance attended the event. But it was a curious power, he thought, because there was something shy and wan in the scene, a little withdrawn. A woman coughed with a headjerk and a leap of the knee. He did not wonder whether they were meant to be dead or only senseless. He found them sad and daring both, and more naked than ever in their lives.

Technicians weaved through the group with light meters, soft-stepping over heads and between spread legs, reciting numbers in the night, and a woman with a slate stood ready to mark the scene and take. Eric went to the corner and squeezed through a pair of warped boards that blocked the sidewalk. He stood inside the plywood framework breathing mortar and dust and removed his clothes. It took him a while to remember why his midsection smarted so badly. That's where he'd been frizzed by the stun gun, and how sensational she'd looked in the arc and strobe, his bodyguard in her armored vest. He felt a lingering sting, mid-dick, from the vodka she'd dribbled thereon.

He rolled his trousers tightly around the handgun and left all his clothes on the sidewalk. He felt his way in the dark, turning the corner and putting his shoulder to a board until he could see a fringe of light. He pushed slowly, hearing the board scrape the asphalt, and then sidled around the plywood and stepped into the street. He took ten baby steps, reaching the limits of the intersection and the border of fallen bodies.

He lay down among them. He felt the textural variation of slubs of chewing gum compressed by decades of traffic. He smelled the ground fumes, the oil leaks and rubbery skids, summers of hot tar. He lay on his back, head twisted, arm bent on chest. His body felt stupid here, a pearly froth of animal fat in some industrial waste. Out of one eye he could see the camera sweep the scene at a height of twenty feet. The master shot was still being prepared, he thought, while a woman with a hand-held camera prowled the area shooting digital video.