Don Delillo: Cosmopolis

"Where is Shiner?"

"On his way to the airport."

"Why do we still have airports? Why are they called airports?"

"I know I can't answer these questions without losing your respect," Chin said.

"Shiner told me our network is secure."

"Then it is."

"Safe from penetration."

"He's the best there is at finding holes."

"Then why am I seeing things that haven't happened yet?

The floor of the limousine was Carrara marble, from the quarries where Michelangelo stood half a millennium ago, touching the tip of his finger to the starry white stone.

He looked at Chin, adrift in his jump seat, lost in rambling thought.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-two. What? Twenty-two."

"You look younger. I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change."

"I don't feel younger. I feel located totally nowhere. I think I'm ready to quit, basically, the business."

"Put a stick of gum in your mouth and try not to chew it. For someone your age, with your gifts, there's only one thing in the world worth pursuing professionally and intellectually. What is it, Michael? The interaction between technology and capital. The inseparability."

"High school was the last true challenge," Chin said.

The car drifted into gridlock on Third Avenue. The driver's standing orders were to advance into blocked intersections, not hang feebly back.

"There's a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of currency."

"Yes. That would be interesting," Chin said.

"Yes. That would impact the world economy."

"The name alone. Better than the dong or the kwacha."

"The name says everything."

"Yes. The rat," Chin said.

"Yes. The rat closed lower today against the euro."

"Yes. There is growing concern that the Russian rat will be devalued."

"White rats. Think about that."

"Yes. Pregnant rats."

"Yes. Major sell-off of pregnant Russian rats."

" Britain converts to the rat," Chin said.

"Yes. Joins trend to universal currency."

"Yes. U.S. establishes rat standard."

"Yes. Every U.S. dollar redeemable for rat."

"Dead rats."

"Yes. Stockpiling of dead rats called global health menace.

"How old are you?" Chin said. "Now that you're not younger than everyone else."

He looked past Chin toward streams of numbers running in opposite directions. He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.

The car began to move. He saw the first of the haircutting salons to his right, on the northwest corner, Filles et Garcons. He sensed Torval waiting, up front, for the order to stop the car.

He glimpsed the marquee of the second establishment, not far ahead, and spoke a coded phrase to a signal processor in the partition, the slide between the driver and rear cabin. This generated a command on one of the dashboard screens.

The car came to a stop in front of the apartment building that was situated between the two salons. He got out and went into the tunneled passage, not waiting for the doorman to shuffle to his phone. He entered the enclosed space of the courtyard, mentally naming what was in it, the shade-happy euonymus and lobelia, the dark-star coleus, the honey locust with its pinnate leaves and unsplit pods. He could not quite summon the Latin name of the tree but knew it would come to him within the hour or somewhere deep in the running lull of the next sleepless night.

He walked under a cross-vaulted arch of white latticework planted with climbing hydrangeas and then stepped into the building proper.

A minute later he was in her apartment.

She put a hand to his chest, self-dramatically, to determine he was here and real. Then they began to stumble and clutch, working toward the bedroom. They hit the doorpost and bounced. One of her shoes began to angle off but she could not shake free and he had to kick it away. He pressed her against the wall drawing, a minimalist grid executed over several weeks by two of the artist's adjutants working with measuring instruments and graphite pencils.

They did not get serious about undressing until they were finished making love.

"Was I expecting you?"

"Just passing by."

They stood on opposite sides of the bed, bending and flexing to remove final items of clothing.

"Thought you'd drop in, did you? That's nice. I'm glad. Been a while. I read about it, of course."

She lay prone now, head turned on the pillow, and watched him.

"Or did I see it on TV?"

"What?"

"What? The wedding. How strange you didn't tell me."

"Not so strange."

"Not so strange. Two great fortunes," she said. "Like one of the great arranged marriages of old empire Europe."

"Except I'm a world citizen with a New York pair of balls."

Hoisting his genitals in his hand. Then he lay on the bed on his back staring into a painted paper lamp suspended from the ceiling.

"How many billions together do you two represent?"

"She's a poet."

"Is that what she is? I thought she was a Shifrin."

"A little of both."

"So rich and crisp. Does she let you touch her personal parts?"

"You look gorgeous today."

"For someone who's forty-seven and finally understands what her problem is."

"What's that?"

"Life is too contemporary. How old is your consort? Never mind. I don't want to know Tell me to shut up. One more question first. Is she good in bed?"

"I don't know yet."

"That's the trouble with old money," she said. "Now tell me to shut up."

He placed a hand on her buttock. They lay a while in silence. She was a scorched blonde named Didi Fancher. "I know something you want to know." He said, "What?"

"There's a Rothko in private hands that I have privileged knowledge of. It is about to become available."

"You've seen it."

"Three or four years ago. Yes. And it is luminous." He said, "What about the chapel?"

"What about it?"

"I've been thinking about the chapel."

"You can't buy the goddamn chapel."

"How do you know? Contact the principals."

"I thought you'd be thrilled about the painting. One painting. You don't have an important Rothko. You've always wanted one. We've talked about this."

"How many paintings in his chapel?"

"I don't know. Fourteen, fifteen."

"If they sell me the chapel, I'll keep it intact. Tell them."

"Keep it intact where?"

"In my apartment. There's sufficient space. I can make more space.

"But people need to see it."

"Let them buy it. Let them outbid me."

"Forgive the pissy way I say this. But the Rothko Chapel belongs to the world."

"It's mine if I buy it."

She reached back and slapped his hand off her ass.

He said, "How much do they want for it?"

"They don't want to sell the chapel. And I don't want to give you lessons in self-denial and social responsibility. Because I don't believe for a minute you're as crude as you sound."

"You'd believe it. You'd accept the way I think and act if I came from another culture. If I were a pygmy dictator," he said, "or a cocaine warlord. Someone from the fanatical tropics. You'd love it, wouldn't you? You'd cherish the excess, the monomania. Such people cause a delicious stir in other people. People such as you. But there has to be a separation. If they look and smell like you, it gets confusing."