Cosmopolis Read online

  Eric saw people stop at the foreign exchange booth on the southeast corner. This prompted him to open the sunroof and stick his head outside, able to get an unobstructed look at the currency prices skimming across the building just ahead. The yen was climbing, still, trading up against the dollar.

  He sat in the jump seat facing Kinski and told her what the situation was, broadly, that he was borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates and using this money to speculate heavily in stocks that would yield potentially high returns.

  "Please. Means nothing to me."

  But the stronger the yen became, the more money he needed to pay back the loan.

  "Stop. I'm lost."

  He kept doing this because he knew the yen could not go any higher. He explained that there were levels it could not reach. The market knew this. There were oscillations and shocks that the market tolerated to a certain point but not beyond. The yen itself knew it could not go higher. But it did go higher, time and again.

  She held the vodka glass between her palms, rolling it while she thought. He waited. She wore tiny tasseled loafers and white ankle socks.

  "The wise course would be to back down, stand off. You are being advised to do this," she said. "Yes."

  "But there's something you know. You know the yen can't go any higher. And if you know something and don't act upon it, then you didn't know it in the first place. There is a piece of Chinese wisdom," she said. "'lip know and not to act is not to know."

  He loved Vija Kinski.

  "To pull back now would not be authentic. It would be a quotation from other people's lives. A paraphrase of a sensible text that wants you to believe there are plausible realities, okay, that can be traced and analyzed."

  "When in fact what."

  "That wants you to believe there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it's all random phenomena. You apply mathematics and other disciplines, yes. But in the end you're dealing with a system that's out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live."

  She finished with a laugh. Yes, he admired her gift for cogent speech, shapely and persuasive, with a rubbed finish. This is what he wanted from her. Organized thoughts, challenging remarks. But there was something dirty in her laugh. It was scornful and coarse.

  "Of course you know this," she said.

  He did and did not. Not to this nihilistic degree. Not to the point where all judgments are baseless.

  "There's an order at some deep level," he said. "A pattern that wants to be seen."

  "Then see it."

  He heard voices in the distance.

  "I always have. But it's been elusive in this instance. My experts have struggled and just about given up. I've been working on it, sleeping on it, not sleeping on it. There's a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world."

  "An aesthetics of interaction."

  "Yes. But in this case I'm beginning to doubt I'll ever find it."

  "Doubt. What is doubt? You don't believe in doubt. You've told me this. Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing," she said. "We need a new theory of time."

  The car moved forward, clearing one stream of southbound traffic but stopping short of the next, suspended in the compressed space where Seventh Avenue and Broadway begin to intersect. He heard the voices more clearly now, carrying across the traffic, and saw people running, the vanguard of a crowd, coming this way, and others spilling off the sidewalks, startled and confused, and a styrofoam rat twenty feet tall dodging taxis in the street.

  He stuck his head out the sunroof and watched. What was happening? It was hard to say.

  Both avenues were impacted now, vehicles blocked and people everywhere. Pedestrians fled into the cross streets, outside the runners' line of advance. It wasn't a line but a warp in the crowd. There were runners and others, those trying to run, angling for space to move freely, handpaddling past knotted bodies.

  He wanted to understand, to separate one thing from another through detailed observation. There were horns and sirens sounding. The massed voices called above the ambient splash of the crowd. This only made it harder to see.

  He was looking south, into the heart of Times Square. He heard plate glass breaking, falling in sheets to the pavement. There was an isolated disturbance outside the Nasdaq Center a few blocks away. Shapes and colors were shifting, a slow lean of bodies. They were swarming the entrance and he imagined pandemonium inside, people racing through galleries surfaced in information. They would break into control rooms, attack the video wall and logo ticker.

  Directly in front of him, what? People on the traffic island buying discount theater tickets. They were still in line, most of them, not willing to lose their places, the only image in broad view that was not raw and tossing.

  The voices carried through bullhorns in intonations of chant, the same tonal contour he'd heard in the shouts of the young men at lunch. The styrofoam rat was on the sidewalk now, carried on a litter shouldered by four or five people in rodent spandex, coming this way.

  He saw Torval in the street with the two bodyguards, all three swiveling at different degrees of speed to scan the area, impressively. The woman looked Egyptian in profile, Middle Kingdom, leaning toward her left breast to speak into the wearable phone. It was time to retire the word phone.

  Runners began to emerge from both sides of the ticket outlet, most in ski masks, some pausing when they saw the car. The car made them pause. There were police vehicles racing and skidding to the edge of the cross streets. He began to feel involved. A bus deposited figures in riot gear, wearing snouted masks.

  A driver stood by his taxi, smoking, arms crossed at his chest, South Asian and patiently waiting, in the world city, for things to make some sense.

  There were people approaching the car. Who were they? They were protesters, anarchists, whoever they were, a form of street theater, or adepts of sheer rampage. The car was hemmed in, of course, enveloped by paralysis, with vehicles on three sides and the ticket booths on the fourth. He saw Torval confront a man carrying a brick. He dropped him cold with a right cross. Eric decided to admire this.

  Then Torval looked up at him. A kid on a skateboard flew past, bouncing off the windshield of a police cruiser. It was clear what his chief of security wanted him to do. The two men stared balefully at each other for a long moment. Then Eric lowered himself into the body of the car and eased the sunroof shut.

  It made more sense on TV He poured two vodkas and they watched, trusting what they saw. It was a protest all right and they were smashing the windows of chain stores and loosing battalions of rats in restaurants and hotel lobbies.

  Masked figures roamed the area on the tops of cars, tossing smoke bombs at the cops.

  He could hear the chant more clearly now, channeled through the dish antennas of TV trucks and extracted from the rolling clamor of sirens and car alarms.

  A specter is haunting the world, they cried.

  He was enjoying this. Teenagers on skateboards sprayed graffiti at advertising displays on the sides of buses. The styrofoam rat was toppled now and there were police in tight formation advancing behind riot shields, helmeted men who moved with a totalistic grimness that made Kinski seem to sigh.

  Protesters were rocking the car. He looked at her and smiled. There were close-ups on TV of faces scorched by pepper gas. The zoom lens caught a man in a parachute dropping from the top of a tower nearby. Chute and man were striped in anarchist red-and-black and his penis was exposed, likewise logotyped. They were knocking the car back and forth. Projectiles came popping from tear-gas launchers and cops free-lanced in the crowd, wearing masks with twin f
iltration chambers out of some lethal cartoon.

  "You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."

  "Its own grave-diggers," he said.

  "But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."

  The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment.

  "The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are marketdriven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system."

  He watched the vodka slosh in her glass as the car bounced back and forth. There were people banging on the windows and hood. He saw Torval and the bodyguards sweep them off the chassis. He thought briefly about the partition behind the driver. It had a cedar frame with an inlaid fragment of ornamental Kufic script on parchment, late tenth century, Baghdad, priceless.

  She tightened her seat belt.

  "You have to understand."

  He said, "What?"

  "The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?"

  He said, "What?"

  "It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present."

  There were cars burning in the street, metal hissing and spitting, and stunned figures in slow motion, in tides of smoke, wandering through the mass of vehicles and bodies, and others everywhere running, and a cop down, genuflected, outside a fast food shop.

  "The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there," she said. "This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it."

  Someone flung a trash can at the rear window. Kinski flinched but barely. To the immediate west, just across Broadway, the protesters created barricades of burning tires. All along there'd seemed a scheme, a destination. Police fired rubber bullets through the smoke, which began to drift high above the billboards. Other police stood a few feet away, helping Eric's security detail protect the car. He didn't know how he felt about this.

  "How will we know when the global era officially ends?"

  He waited.

  "When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhattan."

  Men were urinating on the car. Women pitched sandfilled soda bottles.

  "This is controlled anger, I would say. But what would happen if they knew that the head of Packer Capital was in the car?"

  She said this evilly, eyes alight. The protesters' eyes were blazing between the red-and-black bandannas they wore across their heads and faces. Did he envy them? The shatterproof windows showed hairline fractures and maybe he thought he'd like to be out there, mangling and smashing.

  "They are working with you, these people. They are acting on your terms," she said. "And if they kill you, it's only because you permit it, in your sweet sufferance, as a way to re-emphasize the idea we all live under."

  "What idea?"

  The rocking became worse and he watched her follow her glass from side to side before she was able to take a sip.

  "Destruction," she said.

  On one of the screens he saw figures descending a vertical surface. It took him a moment to understand that they were rappelling down the facade of the building just ahead, where the market tickers were located.

  "You know what anarchists have always believed."

  "Yes."

  "Tell me," she said.

  "The urge to destroy is a creative urge."

  "This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed.

  Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future."

  Her smile was private, as always, and a minor muscle twitched at a corner of her mouth. She was not in the habit of revealing sympathies or disaffections. She had no capacity for either, he'd thought, but wondered now if he'd been wrong about that.

  They were spray-painting the car, doing adagios on their skateboards. Across the avenue the men dangling from belayed ropes were trying to kick in windows. The tower carried the name of a major investment bank, the lettering modestly sized beneath a sprawling map of the world, and the stock prices danced through the fading light.

  There were many arrests, people from forty countries, heads bloodied, ski masks in hand. They did not want to relinquish their masks. He saw a woman take off her mask, pull it off cursing, a cop prodding her ribs with his baton, and she swung the mask backhand, swatting his visored helmet as they passed out of camera range, and all the screens tossed to the heaving of the car.

  His own image caught his eye, live on the oval screen beneath the spycam. Some seconds passed. He saw himself recoil in shock. More time passed. He felt suspended, waiting. Then there was a detonation, loud and deep, near enough to consume all the information around him. He recoiled in shock. Everyone did. The phrase was part of the gesture, the familiar expression, embodied in the motion of the head and limbs. He recoiled in shock. The phrase reverberated in the body.

  The car stopped rocking. There was a general sense of contemplation. They were all of them out there bonded now in a second level of engagement.

  The bomb had been set off just outside the investment bank. He saw shadowy footage on another screen, figures running at digital speed down a corridor, stutter-running, with readouts of tenths of seconds. It was surveillance coverage from cameras in the tower. The protesters were storming the building, busting through the crumpled entrance and commanding the elevators and hallways.

  The struggle resumed outside with the police turning fire hoses on the burning barricades and the protesters chanting anew, alive, restored to fearlessness and moral force.

  But they seemed to be done with his car at last.

  They sat quietly for a moment.

  He said, "Did you see that?"

  "Yes, I did. What was it?"

  He said, "I'm sitting. We're talking. I look at the screen. Then suddenly."

  "You recoil in shock."

  "Yes."

  "Then the blast."

  "Yes."

  "Has this happened, I wonder, before?"

  "Yes. I had our computer security tested."

  "Nothing amiss."

  "No. Not that anyone, anyway, could produce such an effect. Could anticipate such a thing."

  "You recoiled in shock."

  "On-screen."

  "Then the blast. And then."

  "Recoiled for real," he said.

  "Whatever that might possibly mean."

  She worked her mole. She fingered the mole on her cheek, twisting it as she thought. He sat and waited. "This is the thing about genius," she said. "Genius alters the terms of its habitat."

  He liked that but wanted more.

  "Think of it this way. There are rare minds operating, a few, here and there, the polymath, the true futurist. A consciousness such as yours, hypermaniacal, may have contact points beyond the general perception."

  He waited.

  "Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumblebee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way."

  The tickers went dark on the face of the tower under assault.

  "You've been talking about the future being impatient. Pressing upon us."

  "That was theory. I deal in theory," she said sharply.
r />   He turned away from her and watched the screens. The top tier of the electronic display across the avenue showed this message now:

  A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD

  THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM

  He recognized the variation on the famous first sentence of The Communist Manifesto in which Europe is haunted by the specter of communism, circa 1850.

  They were confused and wrongheaded. But his respect for the protesters' ingenuity grew more certain. He slid open the sunroof and poked his head into the smoke and gas, with burning rubber thick in the air, and he thought he was an astronaut come upon a planet of pure flatus. It was bracing. A figure in a motorcycle helmet mounted the hood and began crawling across the roof of the car. Torval reached up and scraped him off. He tossed him to the ground, where the bodyguards took over. They had to use a stun gun to subdue him and the voltage delivered the man to another dimension. Eric barely noticed the crackling sound and the arced charge of current that jumped the gap between electrodes. He was watching the second ticker begin to operate, words racing north to south.

  A RAT BECAME THE UNIT OF CURRENCY

  It took him a moment to absorb the words and identify the line. He knew the line of course. It was out of a poem he'd been reading lately, one of the few longer poems he'd chosen to investigate, a line, half a line from the chronicle of a city under siege.

  It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around him, the gassed men and women in their defiance, waving looted Nasdaq T-shirts, and to realize they'd been reading the same poetry he'd been reading.

  He sat down long enough to take a web phone out of a slot and execute an order for more yen. He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. He wanted all the yen there was.

  Then he put his head outside again to watch the words leap repeatedly across the shiny gray facade. The police launched a counter-assault on the tower, led by a special unit. He liked special units. They wore bullet helmets and dark slickers, men with automatic weapons that were skeleton guns, all framework and no body.