Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

A high assistant called to a lesser, "Bobby, lock it up."

The street grew quiet in time. Voices died, the sense of outlying motion faded. He felt the presence of the bodies, all of them, the body breath, the heat and running blood, people unlike each other who were now alike, amassed, heaped in a way, alive and dead together. They were only extras in a crowd scene, told to be immobile, but the experience was a strong one, so total and open he could barely think outside it.

"Hello," someone said.

It was the person nearest him, a woman lying facedown, an arm extended, palm turned up. She had light brown hair, or brownish blond. Maybe it was fawn-colored. What is fawn? A grayish yellow-brown to a moderate reddish brown. Or sorrel. Sorrel sounded better.

"Are we supposed to be dead?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Nobody told us. I'm frustrated by that."

"Be dead then."

The position of her head forced her to speak into the blacktop, muffling her words.

"I assumed an awkward pose intentionally. Whatever has happened to us, I thought, probably happened without warning and I wanted to reflect that by individualizing my character. One entire arm is twisted painfully. But I wouldn't feel right if I changed position. Someone said that the financing has collapsed. Happened in seconds apparently. Money all gone. This is the last scene they're shooting before they suspend indefinitely. So there's no excuse for self-indulgence, is there?"

Didn't Elise have sorrel hair? He could not see the woman's face and she could not see his. But he'd spoken and she'd evidently heard him. If this was Elise, wouldn't she react to the sound of her husband's voice? But then why would she? It was not an interesting thing to do.

The rumble of a truck somewhere drummed on his spine.

"But I suspect we're not actually dead. Unless we're a cult," she said, "involved in a mass suicide, which I truly hope is not the case."

An amplified voice called, "Eyes closed, people. No sound or movement."

The crane shot commenced, camera slowly lowering, and he shut his eyes. Now that he was sightless among them, he saw the clustered bodies as the camera did, coldly. Were they pretending to be naked or were they naked? It was no longer clear to him. They were many shades of skin color but he saw them in black-and-white and he didn't know why. Maybe a scene such as this needed somber monochrome.

"Rolling," called another voice.

It tore his mind apart, trying to see them here and real, independent of the image on a screen in Oslo or Caracas. Or were those places indistinguishable from this one? But why ask these questions? Why see these things? They isolated him. They set him apart and this is not what he wanted. He wanted to be here among them, all-body, the tattoed, the hairy-assed, those who stank. He wanted to set himself in the middle of the intersection, among the old with their raised veins and body blotches and next to the dwarf with a bump on his head. He thought there were probably people here with wasting diseases, a few, undissuadable, skin flaking away. There were the young and strong. He was one of them. He was one of the morbidly obese, the tanned and fit and middle-aged. He thought of the children in the scrupulous beauty of their pretending, so formal and fine-boned. He was one. There were those with heads nested in the bodies of others, in breasts or armpits, for whatever sour allowance of shelter. He thought of those who lay faceup and wide-winged, open to the sky, genitals world-centered. There was a dark woman with a small red mark in the middle of her forehead, for auspiciousness. Was there a man with a missing limb, brave stump knotted below the knee? How many bodies bearing surgical scars? And who is the girl in dreadlocks, folded into herself, nearly all of her lost in her hair, pink toes showing?

He wanted to look around but did not open his eyes until a long moment passed and a man's soft voice called, "Cut."

He took one step and extended an arm behind him. He felt her hand in his. She followed him into the boardedoff section of sidewalk, where he turned in the dark and kissed her, saying her name. She climbed his body and wrapped her legs around him and they made love there, man standing, woman astraddle, in the stone odor of demolition.

"I lost all your money," he told her.

He heard her laugh. He felt the spontaneous breath of it, the lap of humid air on his face. He'd forgotten the pleasure of her laugh, a smoky half cough, a cigarette laugh out of an old black-andwhite movie.

"I lose things all the time," she said. "I lost my car this morning. Did we talk about this? I don't remember."

That's what this resembled, the next scene in the black-and-white film that was being screened in theaters worldwide, outside the script and beyond the need for refinancing. After the naked crowd, the two lovers in isolation, free of memory and time.

"First I stole the money, then I lost it." She said laughingly, "Where?"

"In the market."

"But where?" she said. "Where does it go when you lose it?"

She licked his face and shinnied up his body and he could not remember where the money went. She ran her tongue over his eye and brow He lifted her rhapsodically higher and mashed his face in her breasts. He felt them jump and hum.

"What do poets know about money? Love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Nothing but this," she said. "And this."

Here she put a hand to his head and took him, seized him by the hair, a thrilling fistful, drawing his head back and bending to kiss him, so prolonged and abandoned a kiss, with such heat of being, that he thought he knew her finally, his Elise, sighing, tonguing, biting his mouth, breathing muggy words and dying murmurs, whisperkissing, babytalking, her body fused to his, legs girdling, buttocks hot in his hands.

The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. Then she wedged herself through the narrow opening in the boards and he watched her cross the street. Nothing moved out there. She was the lone stroke of motion, crew and extras gone, equipment gone, and she was cool and silvery slim and walking headhigh, with technical precision, toward the last trailer in the service station, where she would find her clothes, dress quickly and disappear.

He dressed in the dark. He felt the street grit, minutely coarse, studding his back and legs. He poked around for his socks but couldn't find them and went barefoot out to the street, carrying his shoes.

The last trailer was gone, intersection empty. He didn't sit with the driver this time. He wanted to be in the rear cabin of his cork-lined limousine, in bronzy light, alone in the flow of space, noting the lines and grains, the sweet transitions, this shape or texture modulated to that. The long interior had a thrust, a fluid motion rearward, and he smelled the leather around him and the red cedar paneling up front, used in the partition. He felt the marble underfoot, bone cold. He looked at the ceiling mural, a dark ink wash, semi-abstract, that showed the arrangement of the planets at the time of his birth, calculated to the hour, minute and second.

They crossed Eleventh Avenue into the car barrens. Old junked-up garages and ratty storefronts. Car repair, car wash, used cars. A sign reading Collision Inc. Stripped cars ranked on the sidewalk, tail ends to the street. It was the last block before the river, nonresidential, nonpedestrian, car lots fenced with razor wire, an area suited to his limo in its current condition. He put on his shoes. The car stopped near the entrance to an underground garage, where it would sit overnight and probably forever, or until it was evicted, scavenged and scrapped.

The wind came up. He stood in the street, near a derelict tenement, windows boarded, a padlocked iron door where the entrance used to be. He thought he'd like to get a can of gasoline and set fire to the car. Create a riverside pyre of wood, leather, rubber and electronic devices. It would be a great thing to do and see. This is Hell's Kitchen. Burn the car to a blackened scrap of dead metal, right here in the street. But he could not subject Ibrahim to such a spectacle.