Cosmopolis

IN THE YEAR 2000

A Day in April

1

Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five. What did he do when this happened? He did not take long walks into the scrolling dawn. There was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call. What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words.

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, in the rotating room at the top of the triplex.

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

There was no answer to the question. He tried sedatives and hypnotics but they made him dependent, sending him inward in tight spirals. Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic. The palest thought carried an anxious shadow. What did he do? He did not consult an analyst in a tall leather chair. Freud is finished, Einstein's next. He was reading the Special Theory tonight, in English and German, but put the book aside, finally, and lay completely still, trying to summon the will to speak the single word that would turn off the lights. Nothing existed around him. There was only the noise in his head, the mind in time.

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

He stood at the window and watched the great day dawn. The view was across bridges, narrows and sounds and out past the boroughs and toothpaste suburbs into measures of landmass and sky that could only be called the deep distance. He didn't know what he wanted. It was still nighttime down on the river, half night, and ashy vapors wavered above the smokestacks on the far bank. He imagined the whores were all fled from the lamplit corners by now, duck butts shaking, other kinds of archaic business just beginning to stir, produce trucks rolling out of the markets, news trucks out of the loading docks. The bread vans would be crossing the city and a few stray cars out of bedlam weaving down the avenues, speakers pumping heavy sound.

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

He watched a hundred gulls trail a wobbling scow downriver. They had large strong hearts. He knew this, disproportionate to body size. He'd been interested once and had mastered the teeming details of bird anatomy. Birds have hollow bones. He mastered the steepest matters in half an afternoon.

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

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

He wore a suit and tie. A suit subdued the camber of his overdeveloped chest. He liked to work out at night, pulling weighted metal sleds, doing curls and bench presses in stoic repetitions that ate away the day's tumults and compulsions.

He walked through the apartment, forty-eight rooms. He did this when he felt hesitant and depressed, striding past the lap pool, the card parlor, the gymnasium, past the shark tank and screening room. He stopped at the borzoi pen and talked to his dogs. Then he went to the annex, where there were currencies to track and research reports to examine.

The yen rose overnight against expectations.

He went back up to the living quarters, walking slowly now, and paused in every room, absorbing what was there, deeply seeing, retaining every fleck of energy in rays and waves.

The art that hung was mainly color-field and geometric, large canvases that dominated rooms and placed a prayerful hush on the atrium, skylighted, with its high white paintings and trickle fountain. The atrium had the tension and suspense of a towering space that requires pious silence in order to be seen and experienced properly, the mosque of soft footfall and rock doves murmurous in the vaulting.

He liked paintings that his guests did not know how to look at. The white paintings were unknowable to many, knife-applied slabs of mucoid color. The work was all the more dangerous for not being new. There's no more danger in the new.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator that played Satie. His prostate was asymmetrical. He went outside and crossed the avenue, then turned and faced the building where he lived. He felt contiguous with it. It was eighty nine stories, a prime number, in an undistinguished sheath of hazy bronze glass. They shared an edge or boundary, skyscraper and man. It was nine hundred feet high, the tallest residential tower in the world, a commonplace oblong whose only statement was its size. It had the kind of banality that reveals itself over time as being truly brutal. He liked it for this reason. He liked to stand and look at it when he felt this way. He felt wary, drowsy and insubstantial.

The wind came cutting off the river. He took out his hand organizer and poked a note to himself about the anachronistic quality of the word skyscraper. No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born.

The hand device itself was an object whose original culture had just about disappeared. He knew he'd have to junk it.

The tower gave him strength and depth. He knew what he wanted, a haircut, but stood a while longer in the soaring noise of the street and studied the mass and scale of the tower. The one virtue of its surface was to skim and bend the river light and mime the tides of open sky. There was an aura of texture and reflection. He scanned its length and felt connected to it, sharing the surface and the environment that came into contact with the surface, from both sides. A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other. He'd thought about surfaces in the shower once.

He put on his sunglasses. Then he walked back across the avenue and approached the lines of white limousines. There were ten cars, five in a curbside row in front of the tower, on First Avenue, and five lined up on the cross street, facing west. The cars were identical at a glance. Some may have been a foot or two longer than others depending on details of the stretch work and the particular owner's requirements.

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

For now they talked, in accented voices, some of them, or first languages, others, and they waited for the investment banker, the land developer, the venture capitalist, for the software entrepreneur, the global overlord of satellite and cable, the discount broker, the beaked media chief, for the exiled head of state of some smashed landscape of famine and war.

In the park across the street there were stylized ironwork arbors and bronze fountains with iridescent pennies scattershot at the bottom. A man in women's clothing walked seven elegant dogs.

He liked the fact that the cars were indistinguishable from each other. He wanted such a car because he thought it was a platonic replica, weightless for all its size, less an object than an idea. But he knew this wasn't true. This was something he said for effect and he didn't believe it for an instant. He believed it for an instant but only just. He wanted the car because it was not only oversized but aggressively and contemptuously so, metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thing that stood astride every argument against it.

His chief of security liked the car for its anonymity.

Long white limousines had become the most unnoticed vehicles in the city. He was waiting on the sidewalk now, Torval, bald and no-necked, a man whose head seemed removable for maintenance.

"Where?" he said.

"I want a haircut."

"The president's in town."

"We don't care. We need a haircut. We need to go crosstown."

"You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches."

"Just so I know Which president are we talking about?"

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

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

The driver held the door open, ready to jog around the rear of the car and down to his own door, thirty-five feet away. Where the file of white limousines ended, parallel to the entrance of the Japan Society, another line of cars commenced, the town cars, black or indigo, and the drivers waited for members of diplomatic missions, for the delegates, consuls and sunglassed attaches.

Torval sat with the driver up front, where there were dashboard computer screens and a night-vision display on the lower windshield, a product of the infrared camera situated in the grille.

Shiner was waiting inside the car, his chief of technology, small and boy-faced. He did not look at Shiner anymore. He hadn't looked in three years. Once you'd looked, there was nothing else to know.

You'd know his bone marrow in a beaker. He wore his faded shirt and jeans and sat in his

masturbatory 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's overloading the system or manipulating our sites."

"When did we do all this?"

"Yesterday. At the complex. Our rapid-response team. There's no vulnerable point of entry. Our insurer did a threat analysis. We're buffered from attack."

"Everywhere."

"Yes."

"Including the car."

"Including, absolutely, yes."

"My car. This car."

"Eric, yes, please."

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

"This car. Your car."

"The relentless will. Because I keep hearing about our legend. We're all young and smart and were raised by wolves. But the phenomenon of reputation is a delicate thing. A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable. I know I'm asking the wrong man."

"What?"

"Where was the car last night after we ran our tests?"

"I don't know"

"Where do all these limos go at night?"

Shiner slumped hopelessly into the depths of this question.

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

The car ran into stalled traffic before it reached Second Avenue. He sat in the club chair at the rear of the cabin looking into the array of visual display units. There were medleys of data on every screen, all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers pulsing. He absorbed this material in a couple of long still seconds, ignoring the speech sounds that issued from lacquered heads. There was a microwave and a heart monitor. He looked at the spycam on a swivel and it looked back at him. He used to sit here in hand-held space but that was finished now The context was nearly touchless. He could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go blank.

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

Shiner stirred in the jump seat near the liquor cabinet, facing rearward. He was drinking fresh orange juice through a plastic straw that extended from the glass at an obtuse angle. He seemed to be whistling something into the shaft of the straw between intakes of liquid.

Eric said, "What?"

Shiner raised his head.

"Do you get the feeling sometimes that you don't know 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 an onboard implement of transmission.

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

There was a long pause. He looked at Shiner finally. What did he say to the man? He did not direct a remark that was hard and sharp. He said nothing at all in fact.

They sat in the swell of blowing horns. There was something about the noise that he did not choose to wish away. It was the tone of some fundamental ache, a lament so old it sounded aboriginal. He thought of men in shaggy bands bellowing ceremonially, social units established to kill and eat. Red meat. That was the call, the grievous need. The cooler carried beverages today. There was nothing solid for the microwave.

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

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

"If I answer that question."

"Based on what premise?"

"I know I'll say something that's halfway clever but mostly shallow and probably inaccurate on some level. Then you'll pity me for having been born."

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

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

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

He shifted position in his chair and watched the surveillance camera adjust. His image used to be accessible nearly all the time, videostreamed worldwide from the car, the plane, the office and selected sites in his apartment. But there were security issues to address and now the camera operated on a closed circuit. A nurse and two armed guards were on constant watch at three monitors in a windowless room at the office. The word office was outdated now. It had zero saturation.

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

He coded a word to Torval up front. Then he stepped into the street and tapped on the taxi window. She smiled up at him, surprised. She was in her mid-twenties, with an etched delicacy of feature and large and artless eyes. Her beauty had an element of remoteness. This was intriguing but maybe not. Her head rode slightly forward on a slender length of neck. She had an unexpected laugh, a little weary and experienced, and he liked the way she put a finger to her lips when she wanted to be thoughtful. Her poetry was shit.

She slid over and he got in next to her. The horns subsided and resumed in ritualistic cycles. Then the taxi shot diagonally across the intersection to a point just west of Second Avenue, where it reached another impasse, with Torval jogging hot behind.

"Where's your car?"

"We can't seem to find it," she said. "I'd offer you a ride."

"I couldn't. Absolutely. I know you work en route. And I like taxis. I was never good at geography and I learn things by asking the drivers where they come from."

"They come from horror and despair."

"Yes, exactly. One learns about the countries where unrest is occurring by riding the taxis here."

"I haven't seen you in a while. I looked for you this morning.

He took off his sunglasses, for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily, with fixed attention. "Your eyes are blue," she said.

He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.

"Eat breakfast yet?"

"No," she said.

"Good. I'm hungry for something thick and chewy."

"You never told me you were blue-eyed."

He heard the static in her laugh. He bit her thumb knuckle and opened the door and they stepped across the sidewalk to the coffee shop near the corner.

He sat with his back to the wall, watching Torval position himself near the front door, where he had a broad view of the room. The place was crowded. He heard stray words in French and Somali seeping through the ambient noise. That was the disposition of this end of 47th Street. Dark women in ivory robes walking in the river wind toward the UN secretariat. Apartment towers called Mole and Octavia. There were Irish nannies pushing strollers in the parks. And Elise of course, Swiss or something, sitting across the table.

"What are we going to talk about?" she said.

He sat before a plate of pancakes and sausages, waiting for the square of butter to melt and run so he could use his fork to swirl it into the torpid syrup and then watch the marks made by the tines slowly fold into the soak. He realized her question was serious.

"We want a heliport on the roof. I've acquired airrights but still need to get a zoning variance. Don't you want to eat?"

It seemed, the food, to make her draw back. Green tea and toast untouched before her.

"And a shooting range next to the elevator bank. Let's talk about us."

"You and I. We're here. So might as well."

"When are we going to have sex again?"

"We will. I promise," she said.

"We haven't in a while now."

"When I work, you see. The energy is precious."

"When you write."

"Yes."

"Where do you do this? I look for you, Elise."

He watched Torval move his lips thirty feet away. He was speaking into a mouthpiece concealed in his lapel. He wore an ear bud. The handset of his cell phone was belted under his jacket not far from his voice-activated firearm, Czech-made, another emblem of the international tenor of the district.

"I curl up somewhere. I've always done this. My mother used to send people to find me," she said. "Maids and gardeners combing the house and grounds. She thought I was dissolvable in water."

"I like your mother. You have your mother's breasts."

"Her breasts."

"Great stand-up tits," he said.

He ate quickly, inhaling his food. Then he ate her food. He thought he could feel the glucose entering his cells, fueling the body's other appetites. He nodded to the owner of the place, a Greek from Samos, who waved from the counter. He liked to come here because Torval did not want him to.

"Tell me this. Where will you go now?" she said. "To a meeting somewhere? To your office? Where is your office? What do you do exactly?"

She peered at him over bridged hands, her smile in hiding.

"You know things. I think this is what you do," she said. "I think you're dedicated to knowing. I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful. You're a dangerous person. Do you agree? A visionary."

He watched Torval bend a hand to the side of his head, listening to the person who was speaking into his ear bud. He knew these devices were already vestigial. They were degenerate structures. Maybe not the handgun just yet. But the word itself was lost in blowing mist.

He stood by the car, parked illegally, and listened to Torval.

"Report from the complex. There's a credible threat. Not to be dismissed. This means a ride crosstown."

"We've had numerous threats. All credible. I'm still standing here."

"Not a threat to your safety. To his."

"Who the fuck is his?"

"The president's. This means a ride crosstown does not happen unless we make a day of it, with cookies and milk."

He found that Torval's burly presence was a provocation. He was knotted and sloped. He had the body of a heavy lifter, appearing to stand and squat simultaneously. His bearing was one of blunt persuasion, with the earnest alertness that thickset men bring to a task. These were hostile incitements. They engaged Eric's sense of his own physical authority, his standards of force and brawn.

"Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets," he said.

He looked for steady temperament in his security staff. Torval did not match the pattern. Times he was ironic and other times faintly disdainful of standard procedures. Then there was his head. There was something in the jut of his shaved head and the aberrant set of his eyes that carried an inference of abiding anger. His job was to be selective in his terms of confrontation, not hate a faceless world.

He'd noticed that Torval had stopped calling him Mr. Packer. He called him nothing now. This omission left a space in nature large enough for a man to walk through.

He realized Elise was gone. He'd forgotten to ask where she was headed.

"In the next block there are two haircutting salons. One, two," Torval said. "No need to go crosstown. The situation isn't stable."

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

They were here to make the point that you did not have to look at them.

Michael Chin was in the jump seat now, his currency analyst, calmly modeling a certain sizable disquiet. "I know that smile, Michael."

"I think the yen. I mean there's reason to believe we may be leveraging too rashly"

"It's going to turn our way."

"Yes. I know. It always has."

"The rashness you think you see."

"What is happening doesn't chart."

"It charts. You have to search a little harder. Don't trust standard models. Think outside the limits. The yen is making a statement. Read it. Then leap."

"We are betting big-time here.

"I know that smile. I want to respect it. But the yen can't go any higher."

"We are borrowing enormous, enormous sums."

"Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first."

"Eric, come on. We are speculating into the void."

"Your mother blamed the smile on your father. He blamed her. There's something deathly about it."

"I think we ought to adjust."

"She thought she'd have to enroll you in special counseling."

Chin had advanced degrees in mathematics and economics and was only a kid, still, with a gutterpunk stripe in his hair, a moody beet-root red.

The two men talked and made decisions. These were Eric's decisions, which Chin entered resentfully in his hand organizer and then synched with the system. The car was moving. Eric watched himself on the oval screen below the spycam, running his thumb along his chinline. The car stopped and moved and he realized queerly that he'd just placed his thumb on his chinline, a second or two after he'd seen it on-screen.

"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."

He pushed his armpit toward her face.

"Here lies Didi. Trapped in all the old puritanisms." He rolled belly down and they lay close, hips and shoulders touching. He licked along the rim of her ear and put his face in her hair, rooting softly. He said, "How much?"

"What does it mean to spend money? A dollar. A million."

"For a painting?"

"For anything."

"I have two private elevators now One is programmed to play Satie's piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I'm in a certain, let's say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole."

"Who's the other elevator?"

"Brutha Fez."

"Who's that?"

"The Sufi rap star. You don't know this?"

"I miss things."

"Cost me major money and made me an enemy of the people, requisitioning that second elevator."

"Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," she said. "I grew up comfortably. Took me a while to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt intensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. But I don't know what money is anymore."

"I'm losing money by the ton today. Many millions. Betting against the yen."

"Isn't the yen asleep?"

"Currency markets never close. And the Nikkei runs all day and night now. All the major exchanges. Seven days a week."

"I missed that. I miss a lot. How many millions?"

"Hundreds of millions."

She thought about that. She began to whisper now. "How old are you? Twenty-eight?"

"Twenty-eight," he said.

"I think you want this Rothko. Pricey. But yes. You totally need to have it."

"Why?"

"It will remind you that you're alive. You have something in you that's receptive to the mysteries."

He laid his middle finger lightly in the rut between her buttocks.

He said, "The mysteries."

"Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew."

He made a fist and wedged it between her thighs, turning it slowly back and forth.

"I want you to go to the chapel and make an offer. Whatever it takes. I want everything that's there. Walls and all.'

She didn't move for a moment. Then she disengaged, the body easing free of the goading hand.

He watched her getting dressed. She dressed in a summary manner, appearing to think ahead to some business that needed completing, whatever he'd interrupted on his arrival. She was in post-sensual time, fitting an arm to a creamy sleeve, and looked drabber and sadder now He wanted a reason to despise her.

"I remember what you told me once."

"What's that?"

"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted."

"What did I mean?" she said.

"You meant I was ruthlessly efficient. Talented, yes. In business, in personal acquisitions. Organizing my life in general."

"Did I mean lovemaking as well?"

"I don't know. Did you?"

"Not quite ruthless. But yes. Talented. And a commanding presence as well. Dressed or undressed. Another talent, I suppose."

"But there was something missing for you. Or nothing missing. That was the point," he said. "All this talent and drive. Utilized. Consistently put to good use." She was looking for a lost shoe.

"But that's not true anymore," she said.

He watched her. He didn't think he wanted to be surprised, even by a woman, this woman, who'd taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color.

She dipped toward the bed. But before she plucked her shoe from under a quilt that had spilled to the floor, she engaged him at eye level.

"Not since an element of doubt began to enter your life."

"Doubt? What is doubt?" He said, "There is no doubt. Nobody doubts anymore."

She stepped into the shoe and adjusted her skirt.

"You're beginning to think it's more interesting to doubt than to act. It takes more courage to doubt."

She was whispering, still, and turned away from him now.

"If this makes me sexier, then where are you going?" She was going to answer the telephone that was ringing in the study.

He had one sock on when it came to him. G. triacanthos. He knew it would come to him and it did. The botanical name of the tree in the courtyard. Gleditsia triacanthos. The honey locust.

He felt better now. He knew who he was and reached for his shirt, dressing in double time.

Torval was standing outside the door. Their eyes did not meet. They went to the elevator and rode to the lobby in silence. He let Torval exit first and check the area. He had to concede that the man did this well, in a soft choreography of tacking moves, disciplined and clean. Then they walked through the courtyard and out to the street.

They stood by the car. Torval indicated the haircut that waited in either direction, only yards away.

Then his eyes went cool and still. He was hearing a voice in his ear bud. There was a pitch to the

moment, a sense of intent expectation.

"Threat condition blue," he said finally. "Man down."

The driver held open the door. Eric did not look at the driver. There were times when he thought he might look at the driver. But he had not done this yet.

The man down was Arthur Rapp, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Arthur Rapp had just been assassinated in Nike North Korea. Happened only a minute ago. Eric watched it happen again, in obsessive replays, as the car crawled toward a choke point on Lexington Avenue. He hated Arthur Rapp. He'd hated him before he met him. It was a hatred with the purest bloodlines, orderly, based on differences of theory and interpretation. Then he met the man and hated him personally and chaotically, with sizable violence of heart.

He was killed live on the Money Channel. It was past midnight in Pyongyang and he was making final comments to an interviewer for the benefit of North American audiences after a historic day and night of ceremonies, receptions, dinners, speeches and toasts.

Eric watched him sign a document on one screen and prepare to die on another.

A man in a short-sleeve shirt came into camera range and began to stab Arthur Rapp in the face and neck. Arthur Rapp clutched the man and seemed to draw him nearer as if to share a confidence. They tumbled together to the floor, tangled in the mike cord of the interviewer. She was dragged down with them, a willowy woman whose slit skirt ran up her thigh and became the pivotal point of observation.

Horns were blowing in the street.

There was a close-up on one of the screens. It was Arthur Rapp's pulpy face blowing outward in spasms of shock and pain. It resembled a mass of pressed vegetable matter. Eric wanted them to show it again. Show it again. They did this, of course, and he knew they would do it repeatedly into the night, our night, until the sensation drained out of it or everyone in the world had seen it, whichever came first, but he could see it again if he wished, any time, through scan retrieval, a technology that seemed already oppressively sluggish, or he could recover a slow-motion shot of the willowy woman and her hand mike being sucked into the terror and he could sit here for hours wanting to fuck her then and there in the bloodwhirl of knife and random limbs and slashed carotids, amid the staccato cries of the flailing assassin, cell phone clipped to his belt, and the gaseous bloated moans of the dying Arthur Rapp.

A tour bus blocked the route across the avenue. It was a double decker with smoke rolling from its underbelly and rows of woeful heads poking from the top tier, unstirring Swedes and Chinese, their fanny packs stuffed with currency.

Michael Chin was still in the jump seat, facing rearward. He'd listened to the audio account of the assassination but had not turned to look at the screens.

Eric watched him now, wondering whether the young man's restraint was a form of moral rigor or an apathy so deep it was not pierced by the muses, even, of sex and death.

"While you were away," Chin said. "Yes. Tell me."

"There was a report that consumer spending is weakening in Japan." He spoke in a newscaster's voice. "Raising doubts about the country's economic strength."

"See. What. I said as much."

"The yen is expected to fade. The yen will sink a bit."

"There we are. See. Has to happen. The situation has to change. The yen can't go any higher."

Torval came walking back to this end of the car. Eric lowered the window. Windows still had to be lowered.

Torval said, "A word."

"Yes."

"The complex recommends extra security."

"You're not happy about this."

"First a threat to the president."

"You're confident you can handle whatever comes up."

"Now this attack on the managing director."

"Accept their recommendation."

He raised the window. How did he feel about additional security? He felt refreshed. The death of Arthur Rapp was refreshing. The prospective dip in the yen was invigorating.

He scanned the visual display units. They were deployed at graded distances from the rear seat, flat plasma screens of assorted sizes, some in a cluster framework, a few others projected singly from side cabinets. The grouping was a work of video sculpture, handsome and airy, with protean potential, each unit designed to swing out, fold up or operate independent of the others.

He liked the volume low or the sound turned off.

They were climbing down out of the tour bus now. It seemed to be sinking into the dark smoke that foamed up around it. A derelict tried to board, dressed in bubble wrap. There were sirens in the distance, fire trucks caught in traffic, the sound hanging in the air, undopplered, and car horns blowing locally, another hardness upon the day.

He felt his elation deepen. He slid open the sunroof and thrust his head into the reeling scene. The bank towers loomed just beyond the avenue. They were covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them.

They looked empty from here. He liked that idea. They were made to be the last tall things, made empty, designed to hasten the future. They were the end of the outside world. They weren't here, exactly. They were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it.

He sat down and looked at Chin, who was biting the dead skin at the side of his thumbnail. He watched him gnaw. This was not another of Michael's tender reveries. He was gnawing, grinding his teeth on the hangnail, then the nail itself, the base of the nail, the pale arc of quarter moon, the lunula, and there was something awful and atavistic in the scene, Chin unborn, curled in a membranous sac, a scary little geek-headed humanoid, sucking his scalloped hands.

Why is a hangnail called a hangnail? It's an alteration of agnail, which is Middle English, Eric happened to know, from Old English, with roots in torment and pain.

Chin loosed one of his vegetarian farts. Mode control ate it at once. Then there was an opening and the car bucked and lurched, veering in a screech around the tour bus and across the avenue. The man at the taco cart solemnly watched. The car wobbled over the curbstone and sphinctered free and Chin's eyes came out of lunar seclusion when it raced all the way to Park along a surreal length of empty street.

"Time for you to do what."

"Yes. All right," Chin said.

"You don't know this? We both know this."

"There's work to do at the office. Yes. I need to retrace events over time and see what I can find that applies."

"Nothing applies. But it's there. It charts. You'll see it." "I need to back-test currencies, I don't know, like into the misty dawn."

"We can't wait for the misty dawn."

"Then I'll do it here. To save time. That should make you happy. I do time cycles in my sleep. Years, months, weeks. All the subtle patterns I've found. All the mathematics I've brought to time cycles and price histories. Then you start finding hourly cycles. Then stinking minutes. Then down to seconds."

"You see this in fruit flies and heart attacks. Common forces at work."

"I'm so obsolete I don't have to chew my food."

"You can't stay here."

"I like it here."

"No, you don't."

"I like riding backwards." Chin spoke in his newscaster voice. "He died as he lived. Backwards. Details after the game.

He felt good. He felt stronger than he had in days, or weeks maybe, or longer. The light was red. He saw Jane Melman on the other side of the avenue, his chief of finance, dressed in jogging shorts and a tank top, moving in a wolverine lope. She stopped at the prearranged pickup spot, next to the bronze statue of a man hailing a cab. Then she looked in Eric's direction, squinting, trying to determine whether the limousine was his or someone else's. He knew what she would say to him, first line, word for word, and he looked forward to hearing it. He could hear it already in the nasal airstream of her vernacular. He liked knowing what was coming. It confirmed the presence of some hereditary script available to those who could decode it.

Chin hopped out the door before the car crossed Park Avenue. There was a woman in gray spandex on the median strip holding a dead rat aloft. A performance piece, it seemed. The light went green and horns began to blow. On buildings everywhere in the area the names of financial institutions were engraved on bronze markers, carved in marble, etched in gold leaf on beveled glass.

Melman was running in place. When the car stopped at the corner, she left the shadow of the glass tower behind her and came bumping through the rear door, all elbows and gleaming knees, a web phone pouched on her belly. She was breathless and sweaty from her run and fell into the jump seat with the kind of grim deliverance that marks a deadweight drop to the toilet.

"All these limos, my god, that you can't tell one from another."

He narrowed his eyes and nodded.

"We could be kids on prom night," she said, "or some dumb wedding wherever. What's the charm of identical?"

He glanced out the window, speaking softly, so cool to the subject that he had to deliver his remark to the steel and glass out there, the indifferent street.

"That I'm a powerful person who chooses not to demarcate his territory with singular driblets of piss is what? Is something I need to apologize for?"

"I want to go home and tongue-kiss my Maxima."

The car was not moving, There was a noise beating down that made people cover up when they walked past, rumbling gutturals from the granite tower being raised on the south side of the street, named for a huge investment firm.

"You know what today is, incidentally."

"I know"

"It's my day off, damn it."

"I know this."

"I need this extra day desperately."

"I know this."

"You don't know this. You can't know what it's like. I am a single struggling mother."

"We have a situation here."

"I am a mother running in the park when my phone explodes in my navel. I think it's the kids' nanny, who never calls until the fever reaches a hundred and five. But it's the situation. We have a situation all right. We have a yen carry that could crush us in hours."

"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.

He did this and was facing his chief of finance.

She said, "So look. We have two rumors working in our favor. First there's bankruptcies for six straight months. More each month. More on the way. Large Japanese corporations. This is good."

"The yen has to drop."

"This is loss of faith. It will force the yen to drop."

"The dollar will settle up."

"The yen will drop," she said.

He heard a slidy rustle of latex. Then the Ingram finger entered.

"Where is Chin?" she said.

"Working on visual patterns."

"This thing doesn't chart."

"It charts."

"It doesn't chart the way you chart technology stocks. You can find real patterns there. Locate predictable components. This is different."

"We are teaching him to see."

"You should do the seeing. You're the seer. What is he? A kid. He has the streak in the hair. He has the earring."

"He doesn't have the earring."

"If he was any more dreamy, we'd have to put him on life support."

He said, "What's the second rumor?"

Ingram examined the prostate for signs. He palpated, the finger slyly prodding the surface of the gland through the rectal wall. There was pain, probably just muscles tensing in the anal canal. But it hurt. It was pain. It traveled the circuitry of nerve cells. From his stooped position, Eric looked directly into Jane's face. He liked doing this, which surprised him. In the office she was an edgy presence, skeptical, adversarial, aloof, with a gift for sustained complaint. Here, she was a single running mother in a foldout seat, knock-kneed and touchingly, somehow, gaunt. A splash of hair lay moist and flat on her forehead, showing the first faint veining of gray. The water bottle dangled from a lank hand.

She did not recede from his gaze. She made complete eye contact. Her clavicle showed knobby above the droop of her tank top. He wanted to lick the sweat off the inside of her wrist. She was wrists and shinbones and unbalmed lips.

"There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now," she said. "Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing."

When Nevius did the finger, it was in and out in seconds. Ingram was probing for some murky fact. Jane was the fact. She had the bottle in her crotch, knees flopped outward now, and watched him. Her mouth was open, showing large gapped teeth. Something passed between them, deeply, a sympathy beyond the standard meanings that also encompassed these meanings, pity, affinity, tenderness, the whole physiology of neural maneuver, of heartbeat and secretion, some vast sexus of arousal drawing him toward her, complicatedly, with Ingram's finger up his ass.

"So the whole economy convulses," she said, "because the man took a breath."

He felt these things. He felt the pain. It traveled the pathways. It informed the ganglion and spinal cord. He was here in his body, the structure he wanted to dismiss in theory even when he was shaping it under the measured effect of barbells and weights. He wanted to judge it redundant and transferable. It was convertible to wave arrays of information. It was the thing he watched on the oval screen when he wasn't watching Jane.

"You grip the water bottle."

"It's that soft type plastic."

"You grip it. You choke it."

"It's a matter-of-fact thing."

"It's sexual tension."

"It's everyday nervousness in a life."

"It's sexual tension," he said.

He told Ingram to reach over with his free hand and fish the sunglasses out of the suit jacket on the hanger nearby. The associate managed to do this. Eric put on the glasses.

"Days like this."

"What?" she said.

"My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. That's why you have to run, to escape the drift of your basic nature. Tell me I'm making it up. You can't do that. It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face. What do I see? Something lazy, sexy and insatiable."

"I'm comfortable with that."

"This is the woman you are inside the life. Looking at you, what? I'm more excited than I've been since the first burning nights of adolescent frenzy. Excited and confused. I look at you and feel an erection stirring even as the situation argues strenuously against it."

"It can't afford to be hard. It won't allow itself psychologically," she said. "It knows what's going on back there."

"All the same. Days like this. I look at you and feel electric. Tell me you don't feel it too. The minute you sat there in that whole tragic regalia of running. That whole sad business of Judeo-Christian jogging. You were not born to run. I look at you. I know what you are. You are sloppy-bodied, smelly and wet. A woman who was born to sit strapped in a chair while a man tells her how much she excites him."

"How come we've never spent this kind of time together?"

"Sex finds us out. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances. I see a near naked woman in her exhaustion and need, stroking a plastic bottle pressed between her thighs. Am I honor-bound to think of her as an executive and a mother? She sees a man in a posture of rank humiliation. Is that who I think he is, pants around his ankles and butt flung back? What are the questions he asks himself from this position in the world? Large questions maybe. Questions such as science obsessively asks. Why something and not nothing? Why music and not noise? Beautiful questions strangely suited to his low moment. Or is he limited in perspective, thinking only about the moment itself? Thinking about the pain."

The pain was local but seemed to absorb everything around it, organs, objects, street sounds, words. It was a point of hellish perception that was steady-state, unchanging in degree, and not a point at all but some bundled other brain, a counter-consciousness, but not that either, located at the base of his bladder. He operated from within. He could think and speak of other things but only within the pain. He was living in the gland, in the scalding fact of his biology.

"Does he regret surrendering his dignity and pride? Or is there a secret wish for self-abasement?" He smiled at Jane. "Is his manhood a sham? Does he love himself or hate himself? I don't think he knows. Or it changes minute to minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can't get outside it to answer."

He thought he was serious. He did not think he was speaking for effect. These were serious questions. He knew they were serious but was not sure.

"Days like this. He snaps a finger and a flame shoots up. Every sensitivity, all his attunements. Things are ready to happen that normally never do. She knows what he means, that they don't even have to touch. The same thing that's happening to him is happening to her. She doesn't need to crawl under the table and suck his dick. Too trite to interest either one of them. The flow is strong between them. The emotional tone. Let it express itself. He sees her in her wallow and feels his pelvic muscles begin to quiver. He says, Tell me to stop and I'll stop. But he doesn't wait for her to reply. There isn't time. The tails of his sperm cells are lashing already. She is his sweetheart and lover and slut undying. He doesn't have to do the unspeakable thing he wants to do. He only has to speak it. Because they're beyond every model of established behavior. He only has to say the words."

"Say the words."

"I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.

Her feet flew out from under her. She uttered a thing, a sound, herself, her soul in rapid rising inflection.

He saw his face on the screen, eyes closed, mouth framed in a soundless little simian howl.

He knew the spycam operated in real time, or was supposed to. How could he see himself if his eyes were closed? There wasn't time to analyze. He felt his body catching up to the independent image.

Then man and woman reached completion more or less together, touching neither each other nor themselves.

The associate tore the glove off his hand and slapped it in the waste bin, the rip and the discard, dark with meaning.

Horns were blowing up and down the street. Eric began to dress, waiting for Ingram to use the word asymmetrical. But he said nothing. His real doctor, Nevius, had used the word once, in palpation, without elaborating. He saw Nevius nearly every day but had never asked what the word implied.

He liked to track answers to hard questions. This was his method, to attain mastery over ideas and people. But there was something about the idea of asymmetry. It was intriguing in the world outside the body, a counterforce to balance and calm, the riddling little twist, subatomic, that made creation happen. There was the serpentine word itself, slightly off kilter, with the single additional letter that changes everything. But when he removed the word from its cosmological register and applied it to the body of a male mammal, his body, he began to feel pale and spooked. He felt a certain perverse reverence toward the word. A fear of, a distance from. When he heard the word spoken in a context of urine and semen and when he thought of the word in the shadow of pissed pants, one, and limp-dick desolation, two, he was haunted to the point of superstitious silence.

He took off his sunglasses and looked closely at Ingram. He tried to read his face. It was empty of affect. He thought of putting his sunglasses on the associate's face, to make him real, give him meaning in the sweep of other people's perceptions, but the glasses would have to be clear and thicklensed and life-defining. If you knew the man ten years, it might take you all that time to notice he did not wear glasses. It was a face that was lost without them.

It was not Ingram who spoke. It was Jane Melman, pausing at the open door before she resumed her interrupted run.

"I want to say something that is deeply uncomplicated. There is time to choose. You can ease off and take a loss and come back stronger. It is not too late. You can make this choice. You've done great work for our investors in strong and choppy markets both. Most asset managers underperform the market. You've outperformed it, consistently, and you've never been influenced by the sweep of the crowd. This is one of your gifts."

He was not listening. He was looking past her to a figure at the cash machine outside the Israeli bank on the northeast corner, a slight man mumbling in his teeth.

"We've profited, we've flourished even as other funds have stumbled," she said. "Yes, the yen will fall. I don't think the yen can go any higher. But in the meantime you have to draw back. Pull back. I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today."

He was not looking at her now. She shut the door and began running north on Fifth Avenue, past the shabby man at the ATM. There was something familiar about him. It wasn't his khaki field jacket or paper-shredded hair. Maybe it was his slouch. But Eric didn't care whether this was someone he'd once known. There were many people he'd once known. Some were dead, others in forced retirement, spending quiet time alone in their toilets or walking in the woods with their three-legged dogs.

He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inference of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.

Ingram folded the examining table back into the cabinet. He packed his satchel and went out the door, turning briefly to look at Eric. He was stationary, only a couple of feet away, but already lost in the crowd, forgotten even as he spoke, wide-eyed, with studied detachment in his voice.

"Your prostate is asymmetrical," he said.

2

The Confessions of Benno Levin

NIGHT

He is dead, word for word. I turned him over and looked at him. His eyes were mercifully closed. But what does mercy have to do with it? There was a brief sound in his throat that I could spend weeks trying to describe. But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

This resembles something he would say. I must be mouthing his words again. Because I'm sure he said it once, walking past my workstation to the person who was with him, in reference to such and such. Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

Allow me to speak for myself. I had a job and a family. I struggled to love and provide. How many of you know the true and bitter force of that simple word provide? They always said I was erratic. He is erratic. He has problems of personality and hygiene. He walks, whatever, funny. I never heard a single one of these statements but knew they were being made the way you sense something in a person's look that does not have to be spoken.

I made a phone threat that I didn't believe. They took the threat to be credible, which I knew they had to do, considering my knowledge of the firm and the personnel. But I didn't know how to track him down. He moved about the city without pattern. He had armed escorts. The building where he lived was unapproachable in my current state of randomized attire. And I accepted this. Even at the firm, it was not easy to find his office. It changed all the time. Or he voided it to work elsewhere, or work wherever he happened to be, or work at home in the annex because he did not really separate live and work, or to travel and think, or to spend time reading in his rumored lake house in the mountains.

My obsessions are mind things, not geared to action.

Now I'm in a position where I can talk to his corpse. I can speak without interruptions or corrections. He can't tell me this or that is the case or I am shaming myself or fooling myself. Not thinking straight. This is the crime he placed in the hall of fame of horrors.

When I try to suppress my anger, I suffer spells of hwabyung (Korea). This is cultural panic mainly, which I caught on the Internet.

I was assistant professor of computer applications. Maybe I said this already, in a community college. Then I left to make my million.

The pencil I'm writing with is yellow, with the numeral 2. I want to note the tools I'm using, just for the record.

I was always aware of what they said in words or looks. It is what people think they see in another person that makes his reality. If they think he walks at a slant, then he walks at a slant, uncoordinated, because this is his role in the lives around him, and if they say his clothes don't fit, he will learn to be neglectful of his wardrobe as a means of scorning them and inflicting punishment on himself.

I make mind speeches all the time. So do you, only not always. I do it all the time, long speeches to someone I can never identify. But I'm beginning to think it's him.

I have my paper, legal size, white with blue lines. I want to write ten thousand pages. But already I see that I'm repeating myself. I'm repeating myself.

After I turned him over I went through his pockets and found nothing. One of his pockets was torn. He had a crusty purple wound on his head, not that I am interested in description. I am interested in money. I was looking for money. He had one half a haircut but not the other and wore shoes but no socks. The body smell was foul.

I steal electricity from a lamppost. I doubt if this occurred to him, for my living space.

I've suffered many reversals but I'm not one of those scanted men you see in the street, living and thinking in minutes. I live at the ends of the earth philosophically. I collect things, it is true, from local sidewalks. What people discard could make a nation. Sometimes I hear my voice when I am speaking. I am speaking to someone and hear the sound of my voice, third person, filling the air around my head.

The windows were sealed by the City when they condemned the building. But I pried one board loose to let in air. I don't live an unreal life. I live a practical life of starting over, with middle-class values intact. I'm knocking down walls because I don't want to live in a set of little quads where other people lived, doors and narrow hallways, whole families with their packed lives and so many steps to the bed and so many steps to the door. I want to live an open life of the mind where my Confessions can thrive.

But there are times when I want to rub myself against a door or wall, for the sympathetic contact.

I wanted his pocket money for its personal qualities, not its value so much. I wanted its intimacy and touch, his touch, the stain of his personal dirt. I wanted to rub the bills over my face to remind me why I shot him.

For a while I could not stop looking at the body. I looked inside his mouth for signs of rot. That's when I heard the sound in his throat. I thought in all expectancy he was going to talk to me. I wouldn't mind talking to him some more. After all we'd said in the long night I realize there's more for me to say. There are great themes running through my mind. The themes of loneliness and human discard. The theme of who do I hate when there's no one left.

The complex is the intelligence unit of the firm. This is who I called with my mostly empty threat. I knew they would interpret my comments as the specialized knowledge of a former employee and would gather rapid data on such. It was satisfying to me, telling them their own names, even somebody's mother's maiden name in a brilliant and telling thrust, and detailing the procedures and routines. I was in their heads, now, making contact. I didn't have to carry the burden alone.

I have my writing desk, which I dragged along the sidewalk, through the alley and up the stairs. This was an undertaking of days, with a system of wedges and ropes. This was two days I needed to do this.

I never felt a distinction over time between child and man, boy and man. I was never consciously a child as the term is usually applied. I feel like the same thing I always was.

I used to write him letters after they let me go but stopped because I knew it was pathetic. I also knew there was something in my life that needed to be pathetic but I forced myself to break off contact. The fact that he would never see the letters was not an issue. I would see them. The issue was writing them and seeing them myself. So think how surprised I was that I did not have to track him and stalk him, which I was unfitted to do and anyway haunted by opposing forces concerning does he die or not.

And whatever I said to them on the phone and however rapidly they gathered data, how could they trace me to where and how I live?

I don't own a watch or clock. I think of time in other totalities now. I think of my personal time-span set against the vast numerations, the time of the earth, the stars, the incoherent light-years, the age of the universe, etc.

World is supposed to mean something that's selfcontained. But nothing is self-contained. Everything enters something else. My small days spill into lightyears. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.

I still have my bank that I visit systematically to look at the last literal dollars remaining in my account. I do this for the ongoing psychology of it, to know I have money in an institution. And because cash machines have a charisma that still speaks to me.

I am working on this journal while a man lies dead ten feet away. I wonder about this. Twelve feet away They said I had problems of normalcy and they demoted me to lesser currencies. I became a minor technical element in the firm, a technical fact. I was generic labor to them. And I accepted this. Then they let me go without notice or severance package. And I accepted this.

One of my syndromes is agitated behavior and extreme confusion. This is known in Haiti and East Africa as delirious gusts in translation. In the world today everything is shared. What kind of misery is it that can't be shared?

I did not read for pleasure, even as a child. I never read for pleasure. Take this any way you will. I think about myself too much. I study myself. It sickens me. But this is all there is to me. I'm nothing else. My so-called ego is a little twisted thing that's probably not so different from yours but at the same time I can say confidently that it's active and bursting with importance and has major defeats and triumphs all the time. I have a stationary bike with a missing pedal that someone left on the street one night.

I also have my cigarettes close at hand. I want to feel like a writer and his cigarette. Except I'm out, they're gone, the pack has those little specks at the bottom that I already licked out of existence, and I'm tempted to smell the dead man's breath for a taste of whatever's there, the cigar he smoked a week ago in London.

All through the day I became more convinced I could not do it. Then I did it. Now I have to remember why.

I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left that's worth the telling?

The car crossed the avenue into the West Side and had to slow down at once, moving through the crosswalk against the light, shedding waves of pedestrians.

Torval's voice reported a water-main break somewhere up ahead.

Eric saw his security aides, one to each side of the limo, walking at a calculated pace and wearing similar outfits of dark blazer, gray trousers and turtleneck shirt.

One of the screens showed a column of rusty sludge geysering high from a hole in the ground. He felt good about this. The other screens showed money moving. There were numbers gliding horizontally and bar charts pumping up and down. He knew there was something no one had detected, a pattern latent in nature itself, a leap of pictorial language that went beyond the standard models of technical analysis and out-predicted even the arcane charting of his own followers in the field. There had to be a way to explain the yen.

He was hungry, he was half starved. There were days when he wanted to eat all the time, talk to people's faces, live in meat space. He stopped looking at computer screens and turned to the street. This was the diamond district and he lowered the window to a scene that was rocking with commerce. Nearly every store had jewelry on display and shoppers worked both sides of the street, slipping between armored bank trucks and private security vans to look at fine Swiss watches and eat in the kosher luncheonette.

The car moved at an inchworm creep.

Hasidim in frock coats and tall felt hats stood in doorways talking, men with rimless spectacles and coarse white beards, exempt from the tremor of the street. Hundreds of millions of dollars a day moved back and forth behind the walls, a form of money so obsolete Eric didn't know how to think about it. It was hard, shiny, faceted. It was everything he'd left behind or never encountered, cut and polished, intensely three-dimensional. People wore it and flashed it. They took it off to go to bed or have sex and they put it on to have sex or die in. They wore it dead and buried.

Hasidim walked along the street, younger men in dark suits and important fedoras, faces pale and blank, men who only saw each other, he thought, as they disappeared into storefronts or down the subway steps. He knew the traders and gem cutters were in the back rooms and wondered whether deals were still made in doorways with a handshake and a Yiddish blessing. In the grain of the street he sensed the Lower East Side of the 1920s and the diamond centers of Europe before the second war, Amsterdam and Antwerp. He knew some history. He saw a woman seated on the sidewalk begging, a baby in her arms. She spoke a language he didn't recognize. He knew some languages but not this one. She seemed rooted to that plot of concrete. Maybe her baby had been born there, under the No Parking sign. FedEx trucks and UPS. Black men wore signboards and spoke in African murmurs. Cash for gold and diamonds. Rings, coins, pearls, wholesale jewelry, antique jewelry. This was the souk, the shtetl. Here were the hagglers and talebearers, the scrapmongers, the dealers in stray talk. The street was an offense to the truth of the future. But he responded to it. He felt it enter every receptor and vault electrically to his brain.

The car stopped dead and he got out and stretched. Traffic ahead was a long liquid shimmer of idling metal. He saw Torval walking toward him.

"Imperative that we reroute."

"The situation is what."

"This. We have flood conditions in the streets ahead. State of chaos. This. The question of the president and his whereabouts. He is fluid. He is moving. And wherever he goes, our satellite receiver reports a ripple effect in the traffic that causes mass paralysis. This also. There is a funeral proceeding slowly downtown and now deflecting westward. Many vehicles, numerous mourners on foot. And finally this. We have a report of imminent activity in the area.

"Activity."

"Imminent. Nature as yet unknown. The complex says, Use caution."

The man waited for a response. Eric was looking past him at a large shop window, one of the few on the street not showing rows of precious metal set with gems. He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational. Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute? No one wanted to be touched. There was a pact of untouchability. Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passersby mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.

He stood in the poetry alcove at the Gotham Book Mart, leafing through chapbooks. He browsed lean books always, half a fingerbreadth or less, choosing poems to read based on length and width. He looked for poems of four, five, six lines. He scrutinized such poems, thinking into every intimation, and his feelings seemed to float in the white space around the lines. There were marks on the page and there was the page. The white was vital to the soul of the poem.

Klaxons sounded to the west, the electric knell of emergency vehicles that were sometimes still called ambulances, fixed in stagnant traffic.

A woman moved past, behind him, and he turned to look, too late, not sure how he knew it was a woman. He didn't see her enter the back room but knew she had. He also knew he had to follow Torval had not come into the bookstore with him. One of the aides was stationed near the front door, the female of the set, eyes rising briefly from the book in her hands.

He passed through the doorway into the back room, where several customers disentombed lost novels from the deep shelves. There was a woman among them and he only had to glance at her to know she was not the one he was looking for. How did he know this? He didn't but did. He checked the offices and staff toilet and then saw there were two doorways to this part of the shop. When he'd entered one, she'd left by the other, the woman he was looking for.

He went back to the main room and stood on the old floorboards, among the unpacked boxes, in the redolence of faded decades, scanning the area. She wasn't among the customers and staff. He realized his bodyguard was smiling at him, a black woman with a striking face, letting her eyes range playfully toward the door to her right. He walked over there and opened the door to a hallway that had stacks of books on one wall, photographs of sociopath poets on the other. A flight of stairs led to the gallery above the main floor and a woman sat on the stairs, unmistakably the one. There was a quality discernible in her repose, a lightness of bearing, and then he saw who she was. She was Elise Shifrin, his wife, reading a book of poems.

He said, "Recite to me."

She looked up and smiled. He knelt on the step beneath her and put his hands on her ankles, admiring her milky eyes above the headband of the book.

"Where is your necktie?" she said.

"Had my checkup. Saw my heart on a screen."

He ran his hands up her calves to the rills behind the knees.

"I don't like saying this."

"But."

"You smell of sex."

"That's my doctor's appointment you smell."

"I smell sex all over you."

"It's what. It's hunger you smell," he said. "I want to eat lunch. You want to eat lunch. We're people in the world. We need to eat and talk."

He held her hand and they moved single file through groggy traffic to the luncheonette across the street. A man sold watches from a bath towel spread across the pavement. The long room was thick with bodies and noise and he pushed past the take-out crowd and found seats at the counter.

"I'm not sure how hungry I am."

"Eat. You'll find out," he said. "Speaking of sex."

"We've been married only weeks. Barely weeks."

"Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live."

"We don't want to start counting the times, do we? Or having solemn discussions on the subject."

"No. We want to do it."

"And we will. We shall."

"We want to have it," he said.

"Sex."

"Yes. Because there isn't time not to have it. Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day. What. You don't know this?"

She looked at the menu that extended across the upper wall and seemed discouraged by its scope and mood. He cited aloud certain items he thought she might like to eat. Not that he knew what she ate.

There was a cross-roar of accents and languages and a counterman announcing food orders on a loudspeaker. Horns were blowing in the street.

"I like that bookshop. Do you know why?" she said. "Because it's semi-underground."

"You feel hidden. You like to hide. From what?"

Men talked business in tattoo raps, in formally metered chant accompanied by the clang of flatware.

"Sometimes only noise," she said, leaning into him, whispering the words cheerfully.

"You were one of those silent wistful children. Glued to the shadows."

"And you?"

"I don't know. I don't think about it."

"Think about one thing and tell me what it was."

"All right. One thing. When I was four," he said, "I figured out how much I'd weigh on each of the planets in the solar system."

"That's nice. Oh I like that," she said and kissed the side of his head, a bit maternally. "Such science and ego combined." And she laughed now, lingeringly, as he gave the counterman their orders.

An amplified voice leaked from a tour bus stuck in traffic.

"When are we going to the lake?"

"Fuck the lake."

"I thought we liked it there. After all the planning, all the construction. To get away, be alone together. It's quiet at the lake."

"It's quiet in town."

"Where we live, yes, I suppose. High enough, far enough. What about your car? Not so quiet surely. You spend a lot of time there."

"I had the car prousted."

"Yes?"

"The way they build a stretch is this. They take a vehicle's base unit and cut it in half with a huge throbbing buzz-saw device. Then they add a segment to lengthen the chassis by ten, eleven, twelve feet. Whatever desired dimension. Twenty-two feet if you like. While they were doing this to my car, I sent word that they had to proust it, cork-line it against street noise."

"That's lovely actually. I love that."

They were talking, they were pressed together nestling. He told himself this was his wife.

"The vehicle is armored of course. This complicated the cork-lining. But they managed in the end. It's a gesture. It's a thing a man does."

"Did it work?"

"How could it work? No. The city eats and sleeps noise. It makes noise out of every century It makes the same noises it made in the seventeenth century along with all the noises that have evolved since then. No. But I don't mind the noise. The noise energizes me. The important thing is that it's there."

"The cork."

"That's right. The cork. This is what finally matters."

Torval was not in sight. He spotted the male bodyguard standing near the cash register, appearing to study a menu. He wanted to understand why cash registers were not confined to display cases in a museum of cash registers in Philadelphia or Zurich.

Elise looked into her bowl of soup, bobbing with life forms.

"Is this what I wanted?"

"Tell me what you wanted."

"Duck consomme with an herb twist."

She said this self-mockingly, affecting an accent that was extraterritorial and only slightly more elevated than her normal system of inflection. He looked at her closely, expecting to admire the arched nostrils and the fine slight veer along the ridge of the nose. But he found himself thinking that maybe she wasn't beautiful after all. Maybe she missed. It was a stab of awareness. Maybe she was middling, desperately unexceptional. She was better-looking back in the bookstore when he'd thought she was someone else. He began to understand that they'd invented her beauty together, conspiring to assemble a fiction that worked to their mutual maneuverability and delight. They'd married in the shroud of this unspoken accord. They needed the final term in the series. She was rich, he was rich; she was heir-apparent, he was self-made; she was cultured, he was ruthless; she was brittle, he was strong; she was gifted, he was brilliant; she was beautiful. This was the core of their understanding, the thing they needed to believe before they could be a couple.

She held the soup spoon above the bowl, motionless, while she formulated a thought.

"It's true, you know. You do actually reek of sexual discharge," she said, making a point of looking into the soup.

"It's not the sex you think I've had. It's the sex I want. That's what you smell on me. Because the more I look at you, the more I know about us both."

"Tell me what that means. Or don't. No, don't."

"And the more I want to have sex with you. Because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. It's the antidote to disillusion. The counterpoison."

"You need to be inflamed, don't you? This is your element."

He wanted to bite her lower lip, seize it between his teeth and bite down just hard enough to draw an erotic drop of blood.

"Where were you going," he said, "after the bookstore? Because there's a hotel."

"I was going to the bookstore. Period. I was in the bookstore. I was happy there. Where were you going?"

"To get a haircut."

She put a hand to his face and looked somber and complicated.

"Do you need a haircut?"

"I need anything you can give me."

"Be nice," she said.

"I need all the meanings of inflamed. There's a hotel just across the avenue. We can start over. Or finish with intense feeling. That's one of the meanings. To arouse to passionate feeling. We can finish what we barely started. Two hotels in fact. We have a choice."

"I don't think I want to pursue this."

"No, you don't. You wouldn't."

"Be nice to me," she said.

He waved his chopped liver sandwich, then took a loud bite, chewing and talking, and helped himself to her soup.

"Someday you'll be a grown-up," he said, "and then your mother will have no one to talk to."

Something was happening behind them. The nearest counterman spoke a line in Spanish that included the word rat. Eric swung around on his stool and saw two men in gray spandex standing in the narrow aisle between the counter and the tables. They stood motionless back to back, right arms raised, each man holding a rat by the tail. They began to shout something he could not make out. The rats were alive, forelegs pedaling, and he was fascinated, losing all sense of Elise. He wanted to understand what the men were saying and doing. They were young, in full body suits, rat suits, he realized, blocking the way to the door. He faced the long mirror on the far wall and could see most of the room, either reflected or direct, and behind him the countermen in baseball caps were arrayed in a state of thoughtful pause.

The two men separated, taking several long strides in opposite directions, and began to swing the rats over their heads, voices out of sync, shouting something about a specter. The face of the man who sliced pastrami hovered above his machine, eyes undecided, and the patrons didn't know how to react. Then they did, half frantic, ducking the arc of the circulating rats. A couple of people pushed through the kitchen door, disappearing, and general movement ensued, with toppled chairs and bodies spinning off the stools.

Eric was rapt. He was held nearly spellbound. He admired this thing, whatever it was. The bodyguard was at the counter, speaking into his lapel. Eric extended an arm, indicating there was no need for the man to take action. Let it express itself. People called out threats and curses that overwhelmed the voices of the two young men. He watched the nearest guy get jumpy, eyes beginning to drift. The threats sounded ancient and formulaic, one phrase eliciting the next, and even the remarks in English had an epic tenor, deathly and stretchable. He wanted to talk to the guy, ask him what the occasion was, the mission, the cause.

The countermen were armed by now with cutlery.

Then the men flung the rats, stilling the room again. The animals tail-whipped through the air, hitting and rebounding off assorted surfaces and skimming tabletops on their backs, momentum-driven, two lurid furballs running up the walls, emitting a mewl and squeak, and the men ran too, taking their shout out to the street with them, their slogan or warning or incantation.

On the other side of Sixth Avenue, the car moved slowly past the brokerage house on the corner. There were cubicles exposed at street level, men and women watching screens, and he felt the safety of their circumstance, the fastness, the involution of it, their curling embryonic ingrowth, secret and creaturely. He thought of the people who used to visit his website back in the days when he was forecasting stocks, when forecasting was pure power, when he'd tout a technology stock or bless an entire sector and automatically cause doublings in share price and the shifting of worldviews, when he was effectively making history, before history became monotonous and slobbering, yielding to his search for something purer, for techniques of charting that predicted the movements of money itself. He traded in currencies from every sort of territorial entity, modern democratic nations and dusty sultanates, paranoid people's republics, hellhole rebel states run by stoned boys.

He found beauty and precision here, hidden rhythms in the fluctuations of a given currency.

He'd left the luncheonette with half a sandwich still in hand. He was eating it now and listening to ecstatic rap on the sound system, the voice of Brutha Fez, with a Bedouin fiddle as sole accompaniment. But an image on one of the onboard screens distracted him. It was the president in his limousine, visible from the waist up. This was a feature of the Midwood administration, the chief executive on live videostream, accessible worldwide. Eric studied the man. He watched for ten motionless minutes. He didn't move and neither did the president, except reflexively, and neither did the traffic in either location. The president was in shirtsleeves, sitting in a quotidian stupor. He twitched once, blinked a few times. His gaze was empty, without direction or content. There was an air of eternal flybuzz boredom. He did not scratch or yawn and began to resemble a person sitting in an offstage lounge waiting to do a guest spot on TV Only it was eerier and deeper than that because his eyes carried no sign of immanence, of vital occupancy, and because he seemed to exist in some little hollow of nontime, and because he was the president. Eric hated him for that. He'd talked to him several times. He'd waited in the yellow reception room in the west wing. He'd advised him on matters of some importance and had to stand where someone asked him to stand while someone else took pictures. He hated Midwood for being omnipresent, as he himself used to be. He hated him for being the object of a credible threat to his safety. And he hated and mocked him for his gynecoid upper body with its swag of dangling mammaries under the sheer white shirt. He looked vengefully at the screen, thinking the image did the president every justice. He was the undead. He lived in a state of occult repose, waiting to be reanimated.

"We want to think about the art of money-making," she said.

She was sitting in the rear seat, his seat, the club chair, and he looked at her and waited.

"The Greeks have a word for it." He waited.

"Chrimatistikos," she said. "But we have to give the word a little leeway. Adapt it to the current situation. Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself."

She usually wore a beret but was bareheaded today, Vija Kinski, a small woman in a button-down business shirt, an old embroidered vest and a long pleated skirt of a thousand launderings, his chief of theory, late for their weekly meeting.

"And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and planes. This has nothing to do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself."

The car sat in stationary traffic halfway between the avenues, where Kinski had boarded, emerging from the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin. This was curious but maybe it wasn't. He faced her from the jump seat, wondering why he didn't know how old she was. Her hair was smoky gray and looked lightning-struck, withered and singed, but her face was barely marked except for a large mole high on her cheek.

"Oh and this car, which I love. The glow of the screens. I love the screens. The glow of cybercapital. So radiant and seductive. I understand none of it."

She spoke in near whispers and wore a persistent smile, with cryptic variations.

"But you know how shameless I am in the presence of anything that calls itself an idea. The idea is time. Living in the future. Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently."

He said, "There's something I want to show you."

"Wait. I'm thinking."

He waited. Her smile was slightly twisted.

"It's cyber-capital that creates the future. What is the measurement called a nanosecond?"

"Ten to the minus ninth power."

"This is what."

"One billionth of a second," he said.

"I understand none of this. But it tells me how rigorous we need to be in order to take adequate measure of the world around us."

"There are zeptoseconds."

"Good. I'm glad."

"Yoctoseconds. One septillionth of a second."

"Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today," she said, looking slyly into her hands. "To correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less."

The south side of the street was nearly empty of pedestrians. He led her out of the car and onto the sidewalk, where they were able to get a partial view of the electronic display of market information, the moving message units that streaked across the face of an office tower on the other side of Broadway. Kinski was transfixed. This was very different from the relaxed news reports that wrapped around the old Times Tower a few blocks south of here. These were three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street. Financial news, stock prices, currency markets. The action was unflagging. The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed. But he knew that Kinski was absorbing it.

He stood behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Beneath the data strips, or tickers, there were fixed digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what she was thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the way data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment.

She said, "Does it ever stop? Does it slow down? Of course not. Why should it? Fantastic." He saw a familiar name flash across the news ticker.

Kaganovich. But he missed the context. Traffic began to move, barely, and they went back to the car with the two bodyguards providing discreet escort. He sat on the banquette this time, facing the visual displays, and learned that the context was the death of Nikolai Kaganovich, a man of swaggering wealth and shady reputation, owner of Russia 's largest media conglomerate, with interests that ranged from sex magazines to satellite operations.

He respected Kaganovich. The man was shrewd and tough, cruel in the best sense. He and Nikolai had been friends, he told Kinski. He took a bottle of blood orange vodka out of the cooler and poured two short glasses, neat, and they watched coverage of the event on several screens.

She flushed a little, sipping her drink.

The man lay facedown in the mud in front of his dacha outside Moscow, shot numerous times just after returning from a trip to Albania Online, where he'd set up a cable TV network and signed agreements for a theme park in Tirana, the capital.

Eric and Nikolai had tracked wild boar in Siberia. He told Kinski about this. They'd seen a tiger in the distance, a glimpse, a sting of pure transcendence, outside all previous experience. He described the moment to her, the precious sense of last life, a species in peril, and the vastness of the silence around them. They remained motionless, the two men, long after the animal had vanished. The sight of the tiger aflame in high snow made them feel bound to an unspoken code, a brotherhood of beauty and loss.

But he was glad to see the man dead in the mud. The reporter kept using the word dacha. He stood at an angle to the camera, allowing a clear look at the villa, the dacha, through an alley of pines. On another screen a commentator made vague references to unsavory business associates, to anti-globalist elements and local wars. Then she talked about the dacha. Found dead facedown outside his dacha. They searched for security in the word, self-confidence. It was all they knew about the man and the crime, something Russian, that he was dead outside his dacha outside Moscow.

Eric felt good about it, seeing him there, unnumbered bullet wounds to the body and head. It was a quiet contentment, an easing of some unspecifiable pressure in the shoulders and chest. It relaxed him, the death of Nikolai Kaganovich. He didn't say this to Kinski. Then he did. Why not? She was his chief of theory. Let her theorize.

"Your genius and your animus have always been fully linked," she said. "Your mind thrives on ill will toward others. So does your body, I think. Bad blood makes for long life. He was a rival in some sense, yes? He was physically strong perhaps. He had a large personality. Filthy rich, this chap. Women in his soup. Reasons enough to feel a sneaky sort of euphoria when the man dies horribly. There are always, always reasons. Don't examine the matter," she said. "He died so you can live."

The car reached the corner and stopped. There were tourists pressing through the theater district in all the words that make a multitude. They moved in swirls and drifts, shuffling in and out of megastores and circling vendors' carts. They stood in a convoluted line, folded back against itself, for cut-rate tickets to Broadway shows. Eric watched them cross the street, stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. These were figures beyond gender and procreation, enchanted women in men's shorts, beyond commerce, even, men immortal in their muscle tone, in the clustered bulge at the crotchline.

Heavy trucks went downtown bouncing, headed to the garment district or the meatpacking docks, and nobody saw them. They saw the cockney selling children's books from a cardboard box, making his pitch from his knees. Eric thought they were the same thing, these two, and the old Chinese was the same, doing acupoint massage, and the repair crew passing fiber-optic cable down a manhole from an enormous yellow spool. He thought about the amassments, the material crush, days and nights of bumper to bumper, red light, green light, the fixedness of things, the obsolescences, going mostly unseen. They saw the old man do his therapeutic massage, working a woman's back and temples as she sat on a bench, her face pressed to a raised cushion attached to a makeshift frame. They read the handwritten sign, relief from fatigue and panic. How things persist, the habits of gravity and time, in this new and fluid reality. The cockney from his knees said, I don't ask you where you get your money, don't ask me where I get my books. They stopped and looked, browsing his cardboard box. The old Chinese stood erect, kneading the woman's acupuncture points, thumbing the furrows behind her ears.

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 filtration 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.

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.

Something else was happening. There was a shift, a break in space. Again he wasn't sure what he was seeing, only thirty yards away but unreliable, delusional, where a man sat on the sidewalk with legs crossed, trembling in a length of braided flame.

He was close enough to see that the man wore glasses. There was a man on fire. People turned away crouching or stood with hands to faces, spun and crouched and went to their knees, or walked past unaware, ran past in the shuffle and smoke without noticing, or watched spell-struck, bodies going slack, faces round and dumb.

When the wind blew, gusting suddenly, the flames dipped and flattened but the man remained rigid, his face unobscured, and they saw his glasses melt into his eyes.

The sound of moaning began to spread. A man stood wailing. Two women sat on the curbstone wailing. They draped their arms over their heads and faces. Another woman wanted to snuff the fire but only got close enough to wave her jacket at the man, careful not to hit him. He was rocking slightly and his head was burning independent of the body. There was a break in the flames.

His shirt was assumed, it was received spiritually into the air in the form of shreds of smoky matter, and his skin went dark and bubbly and this is what they began to smell now, burnt flesh mixed with gasoline.

A jerry can stood upright close to his knee and it was also burning, ignited when he'd set himself on fire. There were no chanting monks in ochre robes or nuns in dappled gray. It seemed he'd done this on his own.

He was young or not. He'd made the judgment out of lucid conviction. They wanted him to be young and driven by conviction. Eric believed even the police wanted this. No one wanted a deranged man. It dishonored their action, their risk, all the work they'd done together. He was not a transient in a narrow room who suffers episodes of this or that, hearing voices in his head.

Eric wanted to imagine the man's pain, his choice, the abysmal will he'd had to summon. He tried to imagine him in bed, this morning, staring sideways at a wall, thinking his way toward the moment. Did he have to go to a store and buy a box of matches? He imagined a phone call to someone far away, a mother or lover.

The cameramen moved in now, abandoning the special unit that was retaking the tower across the street. They came running to the corner, broad men in haunchy sprints, cameras bouncing on their shoulders, and they closer in tight on the burning man.

He lowered himself into the car and sat in the jump seat, facing Vija Kinski.

Even with the beatings and gassings, the jolt of explosives, even in the assault on the investment bank, he thought there was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating, even, in the parachutes and skateboards, the styrofoam rat, in the tactical coup of reprogramming the stock tickers with poetry and Karl Marx. He thought Kinski was right when she said this was a market fantasy. There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.

Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric all the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at a pause, the protesters and riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling. What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach.

He could see the coverage in her face. She was downcast. The interior of the car tapered toward the rear, lending authority to the seat she was in, normally his of course, and he knew how much she liked to sit in the glove-leather chair and glide through the city day or night speaking ex cathedra. But she was dejected now and did not look at him.

"It's not original," she said finally.

"Hey. What's original? He did it, didn't he?"

"It's an appropriation."

"He poured the gasoline and lit the match."

"All those Vietnamese monks, one after another, in all their lotus positions."

"Imagine the pain. Sit there and feel it."

"Immolating themselves endlessly"

"To say something. To make people think."

"It's not original," she said.

"Does he have to be a Buddhist to be taken seriously? He did a serious thing. He took his life. Isn't this what you have to do to show them that you're serious?"

Torval wanted to talk to him. The door was dented and bent and it took Torval a moment to work it open. Eric moved in a crouch to exit the car, passing near Kinski as he did, but she would not look at him.

The members of an ambulance crew moved slowly through the crowd, using their gurney to clear the way. Sirens were blowing in the cross streets.

The body had stopped burning by now and was still rigidly set in a seated position, leaking vapors and haze. The stink came and went with the wind. The wind was stronger now, storm-bearing, and there was thunder in the distance.

At the side of the car the two men were in a state of formal avoidance, looking past each other. The car sat stunned. It was slathered in red-and-black spray paint. There were dozens of bruises and punctures, long burrowing scrape marks, swaths of impact and discolor. There were places where splashes of urine were preserved in pentimento stainage beneath the flourish of graffiti.

Torval said, "Just now."

"What?"

"Report from the complex. Concerns your safety."

"Little late, are they?"

"This is specific and categorical."

"There's been a threat then."

"Assessment, credible red. Highest order of urgency. This means an incursion is already in progress."

"Now we know"

"And now we have to act on what we know."

"But we still want what we want," Eric said.

Torval adjusted his point of view. He looked at Eric. It seemed a massive transgression, violating the logic of coded glances, vocal tones and other gestural parameters of their particular terms of reference. It was the first time he'd studied Eric in such an open manner. He looked and nodded, pursuing some somber course of thought.

"We want a haircut," Eric told him.

He saw a police lieutenant carrying a walkie-talkie. What entered his mind when he saw this? He wanted to ask the man why he was still using such a contraption, still calling it what he called it, carrying the nitwit rhyme out of the age of industrial glut into smart spaces built on beams of light.

He got back in the car to wait for the long untangling of traffic. People began to move off, some with bandannas still secured against the afterburn of tear gas and the probes of police cameras. There were skirmishes taking place, a few and scattered, men and women running on broken glass that covered the sidewalks and others catcalling at the stoic cops posted on the traffic island.

He told Kinski what he'd heard.

"Do they think the threat is credible?"

"Status urgent."

She was delighted. She began to be herself again, smiling inwardly. Then she looked at him and spilled into laughter. He wasn't sure what was funny about this but found himself laughing as well. He felt defined, etched sharply. He felt a burst of self-realization that heightened and clarified.

"It's interesting, isn't it?" she said. He waited.

"About men and immortality."

They covered the burnt body and wheeled it away, semi-upright, with rats in the streets and the first drops of rain coming down and the light changing radically in the preternatural way that's completely natural, of course, all the electric premonition that rides the sky being a drama of human devising.

"You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God."

She found this amusing.

"And you bought an airplane. I'd nearly forgotten this. Soviet or ex-Soviet. A strategic bomber. Capable of knocking out a small city. Is this right?"

"It's an old Tu-160. NATO calls it Blackjack A. It was deployed around 1988. Carries nuclear bombs and cruise missiles," he said. "These were not included in the deal." She clapped her hands, happy and charmed. "But they wouldn't let you fly it. Could you fly it?"

"Could and did. They wouldn't let me fly it armed."

"Who wouldn't?"

"The State Department. The Pentagon. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."

"The Russians?"

"What Russians? I bought it black-market and dirt cheap from a Belgian arms dealer in Kazakhstan. That's where I took the controls, for half an hour, over the desert. U.S. dollars, thirty-one million."

"Where is it now?"

"Parked in a storage facility in Arizona. Waiting for replacement parts that nobody can find. Sitting in the wind. I go out there now and then."

"To do what?"

"To look at it. It's mine," he said.

She closed her eyes and thought. The screens showed charts and graphs, market updates. She clutched one hand in the other, tightly, veins going flat and blood draining from her knuckles.

"People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They're melting into the texture of everyday life. This is true or not?"

"Even the word computer."

"Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb."

She opened her eyes and seemed to look right through him, speaking quietly, and he began to imagine her asquat his chest in the middle of the night, in candlelight, not sexually or demonically driven but there to speak into his fitful sleep, to trouble his dreams with her theories.

She talked. This was her job. She was born to it and got paid for it. But what did she believe? Her eyes were unrevealing. At least to him they were, faint, gray, remote to him, unalive to him, bright at times but only in the flush of an insight or conjecture. Where was her life? What did she do when she went home? Who was there besides the cat? He thought there had to be a cat. How could they talk about such things, these two? They were not qualified.

It would be a breach of trust, he thought, to ask if she had a cat, much less a husband, a lover, life insurance. What are your plans for the weekend? The question would be a form of assault. She would turn away, angry and humiliated. She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.

"I understand none of this," she said. "Microchips so small and powerful. Humans and computers merge. This is well beyond my range. And never-ending life begins." She took a moment to look at him. "Shouldn't the glory of a great man's death argue against his dream of immortality?"

Kinski naked on his chest.

"Men think about immortality. Never mind what women think. We're too small and real to matter here," she said. "Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down."

Kinski vivid in his nightmares, commenting on events therein.

"There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired. It's a mystery to me, how such a thing might happen. Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think. Later today perhaps. Maybe today is the day when everything happens, for better or worse, ka-boom, like that."

It was twilight, only dimmer, with a silvery twinge in the air, and he stood outside his car watching taxis extract themselves from the ruck. He didn't know how long it was since he'd felt so good.

How long? He didn't know.

With the currency ticker restored to normal function, the yen showed renewed strength, advancing against the dollar in microdecimal increments every sextillionth of a second. This was good. This was fine and right. It thrilled him to think in zeptoseconds and to watch the numbers in their unrelenting run. The stock ticker was also good. He watched the major issues breeze by and felt purified in nameless ways to see prices spiral into lubricious plunge. Yes, the effect on him was sexual, cunnilingual in particular, and he let his head fall back and opened his mouth to the sky and rain.

The rain came washing down on the emptying breadth of Times Square with the billboards ghost-lighted now and the tire barricades nearly cleared dead ahead, leaving 47th Street open to the west. The rain was fine. The rain was dramatically right. But the threat was even better. He saw a few tourists creep along Broadway under bunched umbrellas to stare at the charred spot on the pavement where an unknown man had set fire to himself. This was grave and haunting. It was right for the moment and the day. But the credible threat was the thing that moved and quickened him. The rain on his face was good and the sour reek was fine and right, the fug of urine maturing on the body of his car, and there was trembling pleasure to be found, and joy at all misfortune, in the swift pitch of markets down. But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he'd always known would come clear in time.

Now he could begin the business of living.