Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

He stepped away from the wall and turned, positioning himself directly in front of the door. Then he kicked it, heel-first. It opened at once.

He entered shooting. He did not aim and fire. He just fired. Let it express itself.

The walls were down. This was the first thing he saw in the wobbly light. He was looking into a sizable space with wall rubble everywhere. He tried to spot the subject. There was a shredded sofa, unoccupied, with a stationary bike nearby. He saw a heavy metal desk, battleship vintage, covered with papers. He saw the remains of a kitchen and bathroom, with brutally empty spaces where major appliances had stood. There was a portable orange toilet from a construction site, seven feet tall, mud-smoked and dented. He saw a coffee table with an unlit candle in a saucer and a dozen coins scattered around an Mk.23 military pistol with a matte black finish and an overall length of nine and a half inches, equipped with a laser-aiming module.

The toilet door opened and a man came out. Eric fired again, indifferently, distracted by the man's appearance.

He was barefoot in jeans and T-shirt, with a bath towel over his head and shoulders, draped in the manner of a prayer shawl.

"What are you doing here?"

"That's not the question. The question," Eric said, "is yours to answer. Why do you want to kill me?"

"No, that's not the question. That's too easy to be the question. I want to kill you in order to count for something in my own life. See how easy?"

He walked over to the table and picked up the weapon. Then he sat on the sofa, hunched forward, half lost in the towel shroud.

"You're not a reflective man. I live consciously in my head," he said. "Give me a cigarette."

"Give me a drink."

"Do you recognize me?"

He was slight and unshaven and looked absurd trying to manage such a formidable weapon. The gun dominated him, even in the drama of the towel on his head.

"I can't see you clearly."

"Sit. We'll talk."

Eric didn't want to sit on the exercise bike. The confrontation would crumble into farce. He saw a molded plastic chair, the desk chair, and took it to the coffee table.

"Yes, I'd like that. Sit and talk," he said. "I've had a long day. Things and people. Time for a philosophical pause. Some reflection, yes."

The man fired a shot into the ceiling. It startled him. Not Eric; the other, the subject.

"You're not familiar with that weapon. I've fired that weapon. It's a serious weapon. Whereas this," he said, wagging the revolver in his hand. "I'm thinking of installing a shooting range in my apartment."

"Why not your office? Line them up and shoot them."

"You know the office. Is that right? You've been in the office."

"Tell me who you think I am."

The awfulness of his need, the half-pandering expectancy made it clear that Eric's next word, or the one after, could be his last. They faced each other across the table. It almost didn't occur to him that he could shoot first. Not that he knew whether there was a bullet left in the chamber.

He said, "I don't know. Who are you?"

The man took the towel off his head. This meant nothing to Eric. There was the high forehead. He saw the scarified hair, hanging in unwashed strips, thin and limp. "Maybe if you told me your name."

"You wouldn't know my name."

"I know names more than faces. Tell me your name."

"Benno Levin."

"That's a phony name."

The man was a little stunned to hear this. "It's phony. It's fake."

He was rattled and embarrassed.

"It's fake. It isn't real. But I think I recognize you now. You were at the cash machine outside a bank sometime after noon."

"You saw me."

"You looked familiar. I didn't know why. Maybe you used to work for me. Hate me. Want to kill me. Fine."

"Everything in our lives, yours and mine, has brought us to this moment."

"Fine. I could use a tall cold beer about now."

For all his haggardness, his stringiness, the ash of despair, there was a light in the subject's eye. He found encouragement in the thought that Eric had recognized him. Not recognized so much as simply seen. Seen and found linkage, faintly, on a crowded street. It was nearly lost inside the desperate bearing of the man, an attentiveness that wasn't feral or deadly.

"How old are you? I'm interested."

"Do you think people like me can't happen?"

"How old?"

"We happen. Forty-one."

"A prime number."

"But not an interesting one. Or did I turn forty-two, which is possible, because I don't keep track, because why should I?"

The wind was blowing through the halls. He looked chilled and put the towel back on his head, the ends falling over his shoulders.

"I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint

Augustine. And herein lies my sickness."

"That's a start. That's a crucial self-realization," Eric said.

"I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about you. Your whole waking life is a self-contradiction. That's why you're engineering your own downfall. Why are you here? That's the first thing I said to you when I came out of the toilet."

"I noticed the toilet. It's one of the first things I noticed. What happens to your waste?"

"There's a hole below the fixture. I knocked a hole in the floor. Then I positioned the toilet so that one hole fits over the other."

"Holes are interesting. There are books about holes."

"There are books about shit. But we want to know why you'd willingly enter a house where there's someone inside who's prepared to kill you."

"All right. Tell me. Why am I here?"

"You have to tell me. Some kind of unexpected failure. A shock to your self-esteem."

Eric thought about this. Across the table the man's head was lowered and he held the weapon between his knees, using both hands to grip it. The stance was patient and thoughtful.

"The yen. I couldn't figure out the yen."

"The yen."

"I couldn't chart the yen."

"So you brought everything down."

"The yen eluded me. This had never happened. I became halfhearted."

"This is because you have half a heart. Give me a cigarette."

"I don't smoke cigarettes."

"The huge ambition. The contempt. I can list the things. I can name the appetites, the people. Mistreat some, ignore some, persecute others. The self-totality. The lack of remorse. These are your gifts," he said sadly, without irony.

"What else?"

"Funny feeling in your bones."

"What?"

"Tell me if I'm wrong."

"What?"

"Intuition of early death."

"What else?"

"What else. Secret doubts. Doubts you could never acknowledge."

"You know some things."

"I know you smoke cigars. I know everything that's ever been said or written about you. I know what I see in your face, after years of study."

"You worked for me. Doing what?"

"Currency analysis. I worked on the baht."

"The baht is interesting."

"I loved the baht. But your system is so microtimed that I couldn't keep up with it. I couldn't find it. It's so infinitesimal. I began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life."

"One hundred satang to the baht. What's your real name?"

"You wouldn't know it."

"Tell me your name."

He sat back and looked away. Telling his name seemed to strike him as an essential defeat, the most intimate failure of character and will, but also so inevitable there was no point resisting.

"Sheets. Richard Sheets."

"Means nothing to me."

He said these words into the face of Richard Sheets. Means nothing to me. He felt a trace of the old stale pleasure, dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel worthless. So small and forgettable a thing that spins such disturbance.

"Tell me. Do you imagine that I stole ideas from you? Intellectual property"