Cosmopolis

'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.'