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,
