Cosmopolis Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    15/91

    Don DeLillo
    Cosmopolis
    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