Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

"Take some water. Sit on the banquette."

"I like face-to-face. And I don't need to look at all those screens," she said. "I know what's happening."

"The yen will fall."

"That's right."

"Consumer spending's down," he said.

"That's right. Besides which the Bank of Japan left interest rates unchanged."

"This happened today?"

"This happened tonight. In Tokyo. I called a source at the Nikkei."

"While running."

"While flinging my body down Madison Avenue to get here on time."

"The yen can't go any higher."

"That's true. That's right," she said. "Except it just did."

He looked at her, pink and dripping. The car moved faintly forward now and he felt the stir of a melancholy that seemed to cross deep vales of space to reach him here in the midtown grid. He looked out the window, seeing them in odd composite, people on the street, and they waved at taxis and crossed against the light, all and one together, and stood in line at cash machines in the Chase Bank.

She told him he looked mopish.

Buses rumbled up the avenue in pairs, hacking and panting, buses abreast or single file, sending people to the sidewalk in sprints, live prey, nothing new, and that's where construction workers were eating lunch, seated against bank walls, legs stretched, rusty boots, appraising eyes, all trained on the streaming people, the march-past, checking looks and pace and style, women in brisk skirts, half running, sandaled women wearing headsets, women in floppy shorts, tourists, others high and slick with fingernails from vampire movies, long, fanged and frescoed, and the workers were alert for freakishness of any kind, people whose hair or clothing or manner of stride mock what the workers do, forty stories up, or schmucks with cell phones, who rankled them in general.

These were scenes that normally roused him, the great rapacious flow, where the physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds shape every anecdotal moment.

He heard himself speak from some middle distance. "I didn't sleep last night," he said.

The car crossed Madison and stopped in front of the Mercantile Library as planned. There were eating places up and down the street. He thought of people eating, lives running out over lunch. What was behind such a thought? He thought of bussers combing crumbs off the tables. The waiters and bussers did not die. It was only the patrons who failed to show up, one by one, over time, for soup with packaged crackers on the side.

A man in a suit and tie approached the car, carrying a small satchel. Eric looked away. His mind went blank except for some business concerning the pathos of the word satchel. It is possible for the mind to go blank in a tactic of evasion or suppression, the reaction to a menace so impending, a tailored man with a suitcase bomb, that there is no blessing to be found in the most resourceful thought, no time for an eddy of sensation, the natural rush that might accompany danger.

When the man tapped on the window, Eric did not look at him.

Then Torval was there, tight-eyed, a hand in his jacket, with two of his aides angling in, male and female, becomingly strikingly lifelike as they emerged from the visual static of the lunch swarm in the street.

Torval leaned into the man.

He said, "Who the fuck are you?"

"Excuse me."

"There's a time limit."

"Dr. Ingram."

Torval had the man's arm yanked up behind him now. He pressed the man into the side of the automobile. Eric leaned toward the window and lowered it. Food odors mingled in the air, coriander and onion soup, the funk of beef patties frying. The aides formed a loose cordon, both facing outward from the action.

Two women came out of Yodo of Japan, then went back in.

Eric looked at the man. He wanted Torval to shoot him or put the weapon at least to his head. He said, "Who the fuck are you?"

"Dr. Ingram."

"Where is Dr. Nevius?"

"Called away suddenly. Personal matter."

"Speak slowly and clearly."

"Called away suddenly. I don't know Family crisis. I'm the associate."

Eric thought about this.

"I flushed out your ear holes once."

Eric looked at Torval and nodded briefly. Then he raised the window.

He sat stripped to the waist. Ingram opened the satchel to a set of vivid instruments. He put the stethoscope to Eric's chest. He realized, Eric did, why his undershirt was missing. He'd left it on the floor of Didi Fancher's bedroom.

He looked past Ingram while the doctor listened to his heart valves open and close. The car moved incrementally westward. He didn't know why stethoscopes were still in use. They were lost tools of antiquity, quaint as bloodsucking worms.

Jane Melman said, "You do this what."

"What. Every day."

"No matter."

"Wherever I am. That's right. No matter."

She tipped back her head and plunged a bottle of spring water into the middle of her face.

Ingram did an echocardiogram. Eric was on his back, with a skewed view of the monitor, and wasn't sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself. It throbbed forcefully on-screen. The image was only a foot away but the heart assumed another context, one of distance and immensity, beating in the blood plum raptures of a galaxy in formation. What mystery he glimpsed in this functional muscle. He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars. How dwarfed he felt by his own heart. There it was and it awed him, to see his life beneath his breastbone in image-forming units, hammering on outside him.

He said nothing to Ingram. He didn't want to talk to the associate. He talked to Nevius now and then. Nevius had definition. He was white-haired, tall and stalwart, with a trace of Middle Europe in his voice. Ingram spoke in mutters of instruction. Breathe deep. Turn left. It was hard for him to say something he hadn't already said, words arranged in the same tedious sequence, a thousand times before.

Melman said, "So you do what. Same routine every day.

"Varies, depending."

"So he comes to your house, nice, on weekends."

"We die, Jane, on weekends. People. It happens."

"You're right. I didn't think of that."

"We die because it's the weekend."

He was still on his back. She sat facing the top of his head, speaking to a point slightly above it.

"I thought we were moving. But we're not anymore." "The president's in town."

"You're right. I forgot. I thought I saw him when I ran out of the park. There was an entourage of limousines going down Fifth, with a motorcycle escort. I thought all these limos for the president I can understand. But it was somebody famous's funeral."

"We die every day," he told her.

He sat on the table now and Ingram looked for swollen lymph nodes under his arms. Eric pointed out a plug of sebum and cell debris on his lower abdomen, a blackhead, slightly sinister.

"What do we do about this?"

"Let it express itself."

"What. Do nothing."

"Let it express itself," Ingram said.

Eric liked the sound of that. It was not unevocative. He tried to notice the associate. He had a mustache, for example. Eric hadn't seen it until now He expected to see glasses as well. But the man did not wear glasses although he seemed to be someone who should, based on facial typology and general demeanor, a man who'd worn glasses since early boyhood, looking overprotected and marginalized, persecuted by the other kids. He was a man you'd swear wore glasses.

He asked Eric to stand. He adjusted the examining table to half length. Then he asked him to drop his pants and shorts and to bend over the near end of the table, legs apart.