Cosmopolis

DeLillo, Don

ISBN 10: 0743528484 ISBN 13: 9780743528481

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audioworks, 2003

Synopsis

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end -- those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.

Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age 28, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.

His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to.

Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.

About this title

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of thirteen novels and two plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cosmopolis

By Don DeLillo

Simon & Schuster Audio

Copyright © 2003 Don DeLillo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743528481

Chapter One

Sleep failed him more often now, not once ortwice a week but four times, five. What did hedo when this happened? He did not take longwalks into the scrolling dawn. There was nofriend he loved enough to harrow with a call.What was there to say? It was a matter ofsilences, not words.

He tried to read his way into sleep but onlygrew more wakeful. He read science and poetry.He liked spare poems sited minutely in whitespace, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt intopaper. Poems made him conscious of hisbreathing. A poem bared the moment to things hewas not normally prepared to notice. This wasthe nuance of every poem, at least for him, atnight, these long weeks, one breath afteranother, in the rotating room at the top of thetriplex.

He tried to sleep standing up one night, in hismeditation cell, but wasn't nearly adept enough,monk enough to manage this. He bypassed sleepand rounded into counterpoise, a moonless calmin which every force is balanced by another.This was the briefest of easings, a small pausein the stir of restless identities.

There was no answer to the question. He triedsedatives and hypnotics but they made himdependent, sending him inward in tight spirals.Every act he performed was self-haunted andsynthetic. The palest thought carried an anxiousshadow. What did he do? He did not consult ananalyst in a tall leather chair. Freud isfinished, Einstein's next. He was reading theSpecial Theory tonight, in English and German,but put the book aside, finally, and laycompletely still, trying to summon the will tospeak the single word that would turn off thelights. Nothing existed around him. There wasonly the noise in his head, the mind in time.

When he died he would not end. The world wouldend.

He stood at the window and watched the great daydawn. The view was across bridges, narrows andsounds and out past the boroughs and toothpastesuburbs into measures of landmass and sky thatcould only be called the deep distance. Hedidn't know what he wanted. It was stillnighttime down on the river, half night, andashy vapors wavered above the smokestacks on thefar bank. He imagined the whores were all fledfrom the lamplit corners by now, duck buttsshaking, other kinds of archaic business justbeginning to stir, produce trucks rolling out ofthe markets, news trucks out of the loadingdocks. The bread vans would be crossing the cityand a few stray cars out of bedlam weaving downthe avenues, speakers pumping heavy sound.

The noblest thing, a bridge across a river, withthe sun beginning to roar behind it.

He watched a hundred gulls trail a wobbling scowdownriver. They had large strong hearts. He knewthis, disproportionate to body size. He'd beeninterested once and had mastered the teemingdetails of bird anatomy. Birds have hollowbones. He mastered the steepest matters in halfan afternoon.

He didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. Hewanted to get a haircut.

He stood a while longer, watching a single gulllift and ripple in a furl of air, admiring thebird, thinking into it, trying to know the bird,feeling the sturdy earnest beat of itsscavenger's ravenous heart.

He wore a suit and tie. A suit subdued thecamber of his overdeveloped chest. He liked towork out at night, pulling weighted metal sleds,doing curls and bench presses in stoicrepetitions that ate away the day's tumults andcompulsions.

He walked through the apartment, forty-eightrooms. He did this when he felt hesitant anddepressed, striding past the lap pool, the cardparlor, the gymnasium, past the shark tank andscreening room. He stopped at the borzoi pen andtalked to his dogs. Then he went to the annex,where there were currencies to track andresearch reports to examine.

The yen rose overnight against expectations.

He went back up to the living quarters, walkingslowly now, and paused in every room, absorbingwhat was there, deeply seeing, retaining everyfleck of energy in rays and waves.

The art that hung was mainly color-field andgeometric, large canvases that dominated roomsand placed a prayerful hush on the atrium,skylighted, with its high white paintings andtrickle fountain. The atrium had the tension andsuspense of a towering space that requires pioussilence in order to be seen and experiencedproperly, the mosque of soft footfall and rockdoves murmurous in the vaulting.

He liked paintings that his guests did not knowhow to look at. The white paintings wereunknowable to many, knife-applied slabs ofmucoid color. The work was all the moredangerous for not being new. There's no moredanger in the new.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator thatplayed Satie. His prostate was asymmetrical. Hewent outside and crossed the avenue, then turnedand faced the building where he lived. He feltcontiguous with it. It was eighty-nine stories,a prime number, in an undistinguished sheath ofhazy bronze glass. They shared an edge orboundary, skyscraper and man. It was ninehundred feet high, the tallest residential towerin the world, a commonplace oblong whose onlystatement was its size. It had the kind ofbanality that reveals itself over time as beingtruly brutal. He liked it for this reason. Heliked to stand and look at it when he felt thisway. He felt wary, drowsy and insubstantial.

The wind came cutting off the river. He took outhis hand organizer and poked a note to himselfabout the anachronistic quality of the wordskyscraper. No recent structure ought to bearthis word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe,to the arrowed towers that were a narrative longbefore he was born.

The hand device itself was an object whoseoriginal culture had just about disappeared. Heknew he'd have to junk it.

The tower gave him strength and depth. He knewwhat he wanted, a haircut, but stood a whilelonger in the soaring noise of the street andstudied the mass and scale of the tower. The onevirtue of its surface was to skim and bend theriver light and mime the tides of open sky.There was an aura of texture and reflection. Hescanned its length and felt connected to it,sharing the surface and the environment thatcame into contact with the surface, from bothsides. A surface separates inside from out andbelongs no less to one than the other. He'dthought about surfaces in the shower once.

He put on his sunglasses. Then he walked backacross the avenue and approached the lines ofwhite limousines. There were ten cars, five in acurbside row in front of the tower, on FirstAvenue, and five lined up on the cross street,facing west. The cars were identical at aglance. Some may have been a foot or two longerthan others depending on details of the stretchwork and the particular owner's requirements.

The drivers smoked and talked on the sidewalk,hatless in dark suits, sharing an alertness thatwould be evident only in retrospect when theireyes went hot in their heads and they shed theircigarettes and vacated their unstudied stances,having spotted the objects of their regard.

For now they talked, in accented voices, some ofthem, or first languages, others, and theywaited for the investment banker, the landdeveloper, the venture capitalist, for thesoftware entrepreneur, the global overlord ofsatellite and cable, the discount broker, thebeaked media chief, for the exiled head of stateof some smashed landscape of famine and war.

In the park across the street there werestylized ironwork arbors and bronze fountainswith iridescent pennies scattershot at thebottom. A man in women's clothing walked sevenelegant dogs.

He liked the fact that the cars wereindistinguishable from each other. He wantedsuch a car because he thought it was a platonicreplica, weightless for all its size, less anobject than an idea. But he knew this wasn'ttrue. This was something he said for effect andhe didn't believe it for an instant. He believedit for an instant but only just. He wanted thecar because it was not only oversized butaggressively and contemptuously so,metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thingthat stood astride every argument against it.

His chief of security liked the car for itsanonymity. Long white limousines had become themost unnoticed vehicles in the city. He waswaiting on the sidewalk now, Torval, bald andno-necked, a man whose head seemed removable formaintenance.

"Where?" he said.

"I want a haircut."

"The president's in town."

"We don't care. We need a haircut. We need to gocrosstown."

"You will hit traffic that speaks in quarterinches."

"Just so I know. Which president are we talkingabout?"

"United States. Barriers will be set up," hesaid. "Entire streets deleted from the map."

"Show me my car," he told the man.

The driver held the door open, ready to jogaround the rear of the car and down to his owndoor, thirty-five feet away. Where the file ofwhite limousines ended, parallel to the entranceof the Japan Society, another line of carscommenced, the town cars, black or indigo, andthe drivers waited for members of diplomaticmissions, for the delegates, consuls andsunglassed attachis.

Torval sat with the driver up front, where therewere dashboard computer screens and anight-vision display on the lower windshield, aproduct of the infrared camera situated in thegrille.

Shiner was waiting inside the car, his chief oftechnology, small and boy-faced. He did not lookat Shiner anymore. He hadn't looked in threeyears. Once you'd looked, there was nothing elseto know. You'd know his bone marrow in a beaker.He wore his faded shirt and jeans and sat in hismasturbatory crouch.

"What have we learned then?"

"Our system's secure. We're impenetrable.There's no rogue program," Shiner said.

"It would seem, however."

"Eric, no. We ran every test. Nobody'soverloading the system or manipulating oursites."

"When did we do all this?"

"Yesterday. At the complex. Our rapid-responseteam. There's no vulnerable point of entry. Ourinsurer did a threat analysis. We're bufferedfrom attack."

"Everywhere."

"Yes."

"Including the car."

"Including, absolutely, yes."

"My car. This car."

"Eric, yes, please."

"We've been together, you and I, since thelittle bitty start-up. I want you to tell methat you still have the stamina to do this job.The single-mindedness."

"This car. Your car."

"The relentless will. Because I keep hearingabout our legend. We're all young and smart andwere raised by wolves. But the phenomenon ofreputation is a delicate thing. A person riseson a word and falls on a syllable. I know I'masking the wrong man."

"What?"

"Where was the car last night after we ran ourtests?"

"I don't know."

"Where do all these limos go at night?"

Shiner slumped hopelessly into the depths ofthis question.

"I know I'm changing the subject. I haven't beensleeping much. I look at books and drink brandy.But what happens to all the stretch limousinesthat prowl the throbbing city all day long?Where do they spend the night?"

The car ran into stalled traffic before itreached Second Avenue. He sat in the club chairat the rear of the cabin looking into the arrayof visual display units. There were medleys ofdata on every screen, all the flowing symbolsand alpine charts, the polychrome numberspulsing. He absorbed this material in a coupleof long still seconds, ignoring the speechsounds that issued from lacquered heads. Therewas a microwave and a heart monitor. He lookedat the spycam on a swivel and it looked back athim. He used to sit here in hand-held space butthat was finished now. The context was nearlytouchless. He could talk most systems intooperation or wave a hand at a screen and make itgo blank.

A cab squeezed in alongside, the driver pressinghis horn. This set off a hundred other horns.

Shiner stirred in the jump seat near the liquorcabinet, facing rearward. He was drinking freshorange juice through a plastic straw thatextended from the glass at an obtuse angle. Heseemed to be whistling something into the shaftof the straw between intakes of liquid.

Eric said, "What?"

Shiner raised his head.

"Do you get the feeling sometimes that you don'tknow what's going on?" he said.

"Do I want to ask what you mean by that?"

Shiner spoke into his straw as if it were anonboard implement of transmission.

"All this optimism, all this booming andsoaring. Things happen like bang. This and thatsimultaneous. I put out my hand and what do Ifeel? I know there's a thousand things youanalyze every ten minutes. Patterns, ratios,indexes, whole maps of information. I loveinformation. This is our sweetness and light.It's a fuckall wonder. And we have meaning inthe world. People eat and sleep in the shadow ofwhat we do. But at the same time, what?"

There was a long pause. He looked at Shinerfinally. What did he say to the man? He did notdirect a remark that was hard and sharp. He saidnothing at all in fact.

They sat in the swell of blowing horns. Therewas something about the noise that he did notchoose to wish away. It was the tone of somefundamental ache, a lament so old it soundedaboriginal. He thought of men in shaggy bandsbellowing ceremonially, social units establishedto kill and eat. Red meat. That was the call,the grievous need. The cooler carried beveragestoday. There was nothing solid for themicrowave.

Shiner said, "Any special reason we're in thecar instead of the office?"

"How do you know we're in the car instead of theoffice?"

"If I answer that question."

"Based on what premise?"

"I know I'll say something that's halfway cleverbut mostly shallow and probably inaccurate onsome level. Then you'll pity me for having beenborn."

"We're in the car because I need a haircut."

"Have the barber go to the office. Get yourhaircut there. Or have the barber come to thecar. Get your haircut and go to the office."

"A haircut has what. Associations. Calendar onthe wall. Mirrors everywhere. There's no barberchair here. Nothing swivels but the spycam."

He shifted position in his chair and watched thesurveillance camera adjust. His image used to beaccessible nearly all the time, videostreamedworldwide from the car, the plane, the officeand selected sites in his apartment. But therewere security issues to address and now thecamera operated on a closed circuit. A nurse andtwo armed guards were on constant watch at threemonitors in a windowless room at the office. Theword office was outdated now. It had zerosaturation.

He glanced out the one-way window to his left.It took him a moment to understand that he knewthe woman in the rear seat of the taxi that layadjacent. She was his wife of twenty-two days,Elise Shifrin, a poet who had right of blood tothe fabulous Shifrin banking fortune of Europeand the world.

He coded a word to Torval up front.



Continues...

Excerpted from Cosmopolisby Don DeLillo Copyright © 2003 by Don DeLillo. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audioworks
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743528484
• ISBN 13: 9780743528481
• Binding: Audio Cassette