He asked if the thing was loaded and the man said no and now he has a weapon in his hands that has just apparently been fired.
He force-squeezed the trigger and looked into the smile on the other man's face.
But first he posed with the gun and pointed it at the man and asked if it was loaded.
Then the noise busted through the room and he stood there thinking weakly he didn't do it.
But first he force-squeezed the trigger and saw into the smile and it seemed to have the spirit of a dare.
Why would the man say no if it was loaded?
But first why would he point the gun at the man's head?
He pointed the gun at the man's head and asked if it was loaded.
Then he felt the action of the trigger and saw into the slyness of the smile.
He stood above the spraddled body in the blood muck of the room, not that he clearly saw the room, and he thought he heard a sucking sound come out of the man's face, the afterbirth of face, the facial remains of what was once a head.
But first he went through the sequence and it played out the same.
When they took him out to the cop car there were people on the stoops, in robes, some of them, and heads in many windows, hanging pale and hushed, and a number of young men stood near the car, some he knew well and some in passing, and they watched him closely and gravely, thinking this was a kind of history taking place, here in their own remote and common streets.
EPILOGUE. DAS KAPITAL
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire-not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.
We're sitting in a pub called the Football Hooligan. There's a man at the next table and I've been waiting for him to turn this way so I can confirm the uncanny resemblance.
I'm talking to Brian Classic, old buddy Brian, and he seems to listen intently below the music. This is a thing called cult rock, loud, yes, but mostly piercing and repetitive, on an icy kind of wavelength, and Brian sits with his head low, nodding now and then, in agreement or fatigue-it's hard to tell.
Some things fade and wane, states disintegrate, assembly lines shorten their runs and interact with lines in other countries. This is what desire seems to demand. A method of production that will custom-cater to cultural and personal needs, not to cold war ideologies of massive uniformity. And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.
Here the people are eating ethnic fast food and drinking five-star cognac and they are crowding the dance floor and falling down, some of them, and being dragged half senseless to the sidelines.
I have to lower my head to speak to Brian, who seems to be sinking into his drink, but I resist the urge to nod along with him. True, I am mostly quoting remarks made to me earlier in the day by Viktor Malt-sev, a trading company executive, but they are remarks worth repeating because Viktor has thought about these matters in the very ruck of every kind of changeover a society can bear.
Brian mutters that he finds this place frightening. I look at the kids on the bandstand, five or six gawks with fuzz heads and fatigue pants and bomb packs strapped to their bare chests-college boys probably who've appropriated a surface of suicide terror.
But it's not the music, he says, or the band and its trappings. And I think I know what he means. It's the sense of displacement and redefinition. Because what kind of random arrangement puts a club such as this up on the forty-second floor of a new office tower filled with brokerage houses, software firms, import companies and foreign banks, where private guards hired by various firms to patrol the corridors sometimes shoot at each other and where the man at the next table, with a bald dome, slit eyes and a jut beard, turning this way at last, is clearly a professional Lenin look-alike.
We take the elevator down and go out to the street, carrying our luggage. We can't find a taxi but after a while an ambulance comes along and the driver sticks his head out the window.
'You go airport?' he says.
We get in the back and Brian goes to sleep on a collapsible gurney.
About twenty minutes later, out the glass panel on the rear door, I see a huge billboard advertising a strip club.
INTERACTIVE SONYA Nude Dancing on the Information Highway
We get to Sheremetyevo and the driver wants dollars of course. I wake up Brian and we go into the terminal and manage to find the man from the trading company. He tells us there's no particular hurry because we're at the wrong airport anyway. 'Where should we be, Viktor?' 'No problem. I have arranged. You went to club?' 'The club was very interesting,' I tell him. 'Lenin was there.' 'There is Marx and Trotsky too,' he says. 'Very crazy thing.'
This is what I thought after we arrived at the military airfield and boarded a converted cargo plane that went bucking down the runway and lifted swayingly into the mist. And after the plane reached cruising altitude and I got up and found a window slit in an emergency exit behind the port wing and pressed my face to the glass to gather a sense of the great eastern reaches, endless belts of longitude, the map-projection arcs beyond the Urals and across the Siberian Lowland-a sense mainly of my own imagining, of course, a glimpse through falling dusk of whatever landmass was visible in the limited window space.
And this is what I thought after I sat down again.
I thought leaders of nations used to dream of vast land empires- expansion, annexation, troop movements, armored units driving in dusty juggernauts over the plains, the forced march of language and appetite, the digging of mass graves. They wanted to extend their shadows across the territories.
Now they want-
I explain my thinking to Brian Classic, who sits on the opposite side of the aircraft facing me. We're on parallel benches like paratroops waiting to reach the drop zone.
Brian says, 'Now they want computer chips.'
'Exactly. Thank you.'
And Viktor Maltsev says, 'Yes, it's true that geography has moved inward and smallward. But we still have mass graves, I think.'
Viktor sits near Brian, a slim figure in a leather coat. We have to shout at each other to converse above the noise that drones and rattles through the hollowed-out interior of the massive transport. He tells us the plane was originally designed for mixed loads of cargo and troops. There are dangling wires, fixtures jutting from the bulkhead. The aircraft is all cylinder, all ribs and slats and shaking parts.
'It's a company plane, Viktor?'
'I buy it this morning,' he says.
'And you will use it to ship material.'
'We fix it up good.'
His trading company is called Tchaika and they want to invite our participation in a business scheme. We are flying to a remote site in Kazakhstan to witness an underground nuclear explosion. This is the commodity that Tchaika trades in. They sell nuclear explosions for ready cash. They want us to supply the most dangerous waste we can find and they will destroy it for us. Depending on degree of danger, they will charge their customers-the
