Cosmopolis Read Free Page A

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 7/91

    Don DeLillo
    Cosmopolis
    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."
    8/91

    Don DeLillo
    Cosmopolis
    "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