Free Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo Page A

Tirana, the capital.
    Eric and Nikolai had tracked wild boar in Siberia. He told Kinski about this. They'd seen a tiger in the distance, a glimpse, a sting of pure transcendence, outside all previous experience. He described the moment to her, the precious sense of last life, a species in peril, and the vastness of the silence around them. They remained motionless, the two men, long after the animal had vanished. The sight of the tiger aflame in high snow made them feel bound to an unspoken code, a brotherhood of beauty and loss.
    But he was glad to see the man dead in the mud. The reporter kept using the word dacha. He stood at an angle to the camera, allowing a clear look at the villa, the dacha, through an alley of pines. On another screen a commentator made vague references to unsavory business associates, to anti-globalist elements and local wars. Then she talked about the dacha. Found dead facedown outside his dacha.
    They searched for security in the word, self-confidence. It was all they knew about the man and the crime, something Russian, that he was dead outside his dacha outside Moscow.
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    Don DeLillo
    Cosmopolis
    Eric felt good about it, seeing him there, unnumbered bullet wounds to the body and head. It was a quiet contentment, an easing of some unspecifiable pressure in the shoulders and chest. It relaxed him, the death of Nikolai Kaganovich. He didn't say this to Kinski. Then he did. Why not? She was his chief of theory. Let her theorize.
    "Your genius and your animus have always been fully linked," she said. "Your mind thrives on ill will toward others. So does your body, I think. Bad blood makes for long life. He was a rival in some sense, yes? He was physically strong perhaps. He had a large personality. Filthy rich, this chap.
    Women in his soup. Reasons enough to feel a sneaky sort of euphoria when the man dies horribly.
    There are always, always reasons. Don't examine the matter," she said. "He died so you can live."
    The car reached the corner and stopped. There were tourists pressing through the theater district in all the words that make a multitude. They moved in swirls and drifts, shuffling in and out of megastores and circling vendors' carts. They stood in a convoluted line, folded back against itself, for cut-rate tickets to Broadway shows. Eric watched them cross the street, stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. These were figures beyond gender and procreation, enchanted women in men's shorts, beyond commerce, even, men immortal in their muscle tone, in the clustered bulge at the crotchline.
    Heavy trucks went downtown bouncing, headed to the garment district or the meatpacking docks, and nobody saw them. They saw the cockney selling children's books from a cardboard box, making his pitch from his knees. Eric thought they were the same thing, these two, and the old Chinese was the same, doing acupoint massage, and the repair crew passing fiber-optic cable down a manhole from an enormous yellow spool. He thought about the amassments, the material crush, days and nights of bumper to bumper, red light, green light, the fixedness of things, the obsolescences, going mostly unseen. They saw the old man do his therapeutic massage, working a woman's back and temples as she sat on a bench, her face pressed to a raised cushion attached to a makeshift frame. They read the handwritten sign, relief from fatigue and panic. How things persist, the habits of gravity and time, in this new and fluid reality. The cockney from his knees said, I don't ask you where you get your money, don't ask me where I get my books. They stopped and looked, browsing his cardboard box. The old Chinese stood erect, kneading the woman's acupuncture points, thumbing the furrows behind her ears.
    Eric saw people stop at the foreign exchange booth on the southeast corner. This prompted him to open the sunroof and stick his head outside, able to get an unobstructed look at the