Free Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo Page B

currency prices skimming across the building just ahead. The yen was climbing, still, trading up against the dollar.
    He sat in the jump seat facing Kinski and told her what the situation was, broadly, that he was borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates and using this money to speculate heavily in stocks that would yield potentially high returns.
    "Please. Means nothing to me."
    But the stronger the yen became, the more money he needed to pay back the loan.
    "Stop. I'm lost."
    He kept doing this because he knew the yen could not go any higher. He explained that there were levels it could not reach. The market knew this. There were oscillations and shocks that the market tolerated to a certain point but not beyond. The yen itself knew it could not go higher. But it did go 36/91

    Don DeLillo
    Cosmopolis
    higher, time and again.
    She held the vodka glass between her palms, rolling it while she thought. He waited. She wore tiny tasseled loafers and white ankle socks.
    "The wise course would be to back down, stand off. You are being advised to do this," she said.
    "Yes."
    "But there's something you know. You know the yen can't go any higher. And if you know something and don't act upon it, then you didn't know it in the first place. There is a piece of Chinese wisdom," she said. "'lip know and not to act is not to know."
    He loved Vija Kinski.
    "To pull back now would not be authentic. It would be a quotation from other people's lives. A paraphrase of a sensible text that wants you to believe there are plausible realities, okay, that can be traced and analyzed."
    "When in fact what."
    "That wants you to believe there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it's all random phenomena. You apply mathematics and other disciplines, yes. But in the end you're dealing with a system that's out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live."
    She finished with a laugh. Yes, he admired her gift for cogent speech, shapely and persuasive, with a rubbed finish. This is what he wanted from her. Organized thoughts, challenging remarks. But there was something dirty in her laugh. It was scornful and coarse.
    "Of course you know this," she said.
    He did and did not. Not to this nihilistic degree. Not to the point where all judgments are baseless.
    "There's an order at some deep level," he said. "A pattern that wants to be seen."
    "Then see it."
    He heard voices in the distance.
    "I always have. But it's been elusive in this instance. My experts have struggled and just about given up. I've been working on it, sleeping on it, not sleeping on it. There's a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world."
    "An aesthetics of interaction."
    "Yes. But in this case I'm beginning to doubt I'll ever find it."
    "Doubt. What is doubt? You don't believe in doubt. You've told me this. Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing," she said. "We need a new theory of time."
    The car moved forward, clearing one stream of southbound traffic but stopping short of the next, suspended in the compressed space where Seventh Avenue and Broadway begin to intersect. He heard the voices more clearly now, carrying across the traffic, and saw people running, the vanguard of a crowd, coming this way, and others spilling off the sidewalks, startled and confused, and a styrofoam rat twenty feet tall dodging taxis in the street.
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    He stuck his head out the sunroof and watched. What was happening? It was hard to say.
    Both avenues were impacted now, vehicles blocked and people everywhere. Pedestrians fled into