Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

He went back to the sofa and studied Eric in pain. "I think we should talk."

"We're talking. We've been talking."

"I feel I know you better than anyone knows you. I have uncanny insights, true or false. I used to watch you meditate, online. The face, the calm posture. I couldn't stop watching. You meditated for hours sometimes. All it did was send you deeper into your frozen heart. I watched every minute. I looked into you. I knew you. It was another reason to hate you, that you could sit in a cell and meditate and I could not. I had the cell all right. But I never had the fixation where I could train the mind, empty the mind, think one thought only. Then you shut down the site. When you shut down the site I was I don't know, dead, for a long time after."

There was a softness in the face, a regret at the mention of hate and coldheartedness. Eric wanted to respond. The pain was crushing him, making him smaller, he thought, reducing him in size, person and value. It wasn't the hand, it was the brain, but it was also the hand. The hand felt necrotic. He thought he could smell a million cells dying.

He wanted to say something. The wind blew through again, stronger now, stirring the dust of these toppled walls. There was something intriguing in the sound, wind indoors, the edge of something, the feel of something unprotected, an inside-outness, papers blowing through the halls, the door banging nearly shut, then swinging out again.

He said, "My prostate is asymmetrical."

His voice was barely audible. There was a pause that lasted half a minute. He felt the subject regard him carefully, the other. There was a sense of warmth, of human involvement.

"So is mine," Benno whispered.

They looked at each other. There was another pause. "What does it mean?"

Benno nodded for a while. He was happy to sit there nodding.

"Nothing. It means nothing," he said. "It's harmless. A harmless variation. Nothing to worry about. Your age, why worry?"

Eric didn't think he'd ever known such relief, hearing these words from a man who shared his condition. He felt a sweep of well-being. An old woe gone, the kind of halfsmothered knowledge that haunts the idlest thought. The hankies were blood-soaked. He felt a peace, a sweetness settle over him.

He still held the gun in his good hand.

Benno sat nodding in his towel shroud.

He said, "You should have listened to your prostate."

"What?"

"You tried to predict movements in the yen by drawing on patterns from nature. Yes, of course. The mathematical properties of tree rings, sunflower seeds, the limbs of galactic spirals. I learned this with the baht. I loved the baht. I loved the cross-harmonies between nature and data. You taught me this. The way signals from a pulsar in deepest space follow classical number sequences, which in turn can describe the fluctuations of a given stock or currency. You showed me this. How market cycles can be interchangeable with the time cycles of grasshopper breeding, wheat harvesting. You made this form of analysis horribly and sadistically precise. But you forgot something along the way."

"What?"

"The importance of the lopsided, the thing that's skewed a little. You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal sides. I know this. I know you. But you should have been tracking the yen in its tics and quirks. The little quirk. The misshape."

"The misweave."

"That's where the answer was, in your body, in your prostate."

Benno's gentle intelligence carried no trace of rebuke. He was probably right. There was something in what he said. It made hard sense, charting sense. Maybe he was turning out to be a worthy assassin after all.

He came around the table and lifted the handkerchiefs to look at the wound. They both looked. The hand was stiff, a crude cardboard part, veins shattered near the knuckles, going gray. Benno went to his desk and found some take-out paper napkins. He came back to the table, removing the bloody compress and placing napkins against the wound on both sides of the hand. Then he held his own hands apart, suspensefully, in a gesture of expectation. The napkins stuck to the wound. He stood and watched until he was satisfied that they'd remain in place.

They sat a while, facing each other. Time hung in the air. Benno leaned across the table and took the gun out of his hand.

"I still need to shoot you. I'm willing to discuss it. But there's no life for me unless I do this."

The pain was the world. The mind could not find a place outside it. He could hear the pain, staticky, in his hand and wrist. He closed his eyes again, briefly. He could feel himself contained in the dark but also just beyond it, on the lighted outer surface, the other side, belonged to both, feeling both, being himself and seeing himself.

Benno got up and began to pace. He was restless, shoeless, a gun in each hand, and he moved past the boarded windows at the north wall, stepping over electrical wiring and breastworks of plaster and wallboard.

"Don't you ever walk through the park behind the library and see all those people sitting in their little chairs and drinking at those tables on the terrace after work and hear their voices mingling in the air and want to kill them?"

Eric thought about this. He said, "No."

The man circled back past the remains of the kitchen, stopping to draw open a loose board and look out at the street. He said something into the night, then resumed his pacing. He was jittery, dance-walking, mumbling something audible this time, about a cigarette.

"I'm having my Korean panic attack. This is from holding in my anger all these years. But not anymore. You need to die no matter what."

"I could tell you my situation has changed in the course of the day."

"I have my syndromes, you have your complex. Icarus falling. You did it to yourself. Meltdown in the sun. You will plunge three and a half feet to your death. Not very heroic, is it?"

He was behind Eric now, and stationary, and breathing.

"Even if there's a fungus living between my toes that speaks to me. Even if a fungus told me to kill you, even then your death is justified because of where you stand on the earth. Even a parasite living in my brain. Even then. It relays messages to me from outer space. Even then the crime is real because you're a figure whose thoughts and acts affect everybody, people, everywhere. I have history, as you call it, on my side. You have to die for how you think and act. For your apartment and what you paid for it. For your daily medical checkups. This alone. Medical checkups every day. For how much you had and how much you lost, equally. No less for losing it than making it. For the limousine that displaces the air that people need to breathe in Bangladesh. This alone."

"Don't make me laugh."

"Don't make you laugh."

"You just made that up. You've never spent a minute of your life worrying about other people."

He could see the subject back down.

"All right. But the air you breathe. This alone. The thoughts you have."

"I could tell you my thoughts have evolved. My situation has changed. Would that matter? Maybe it shouldn't."

"It doesn't. But if I had a cigarette it might. One cigarette. One drag on one cigarette. I probably wouldn't have to shoot you."

"Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God."

He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole shapeless narrative of his unraveling.

Benno came around the table and slumped on the sofa. He set the old revolver down and regarded his advanced weapon. Maybe it was advanced, maybe the military had scrapped it a day or two before. He pulled the towel lower on his face and aimed the pistol at Eric.

"Anyway you're already dead. You're like someone already dead. Like someone dead a hundred years. Many centuries dead. Kings dead. Royals in their pajamas eating mutton. Have I ever used the word mutton in my life? Came into my head, out of nowhere, mutton."