Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online Page A

say. I must be mouthing his words again. Because I'm sure he said it once, walking past my workstation to the person who was with him, in reference to such and such. Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
    Allow me to speak for myself. I had a job and a family. I struggled to love and provide. How many of you know the true and bitter force of that simple word provide? They always said I was erratic. He is erratic. He has problems of personality and hygiene. He walks, whatever, funny. I never heard a single one of these statements but knew they were being made the way you sense something in a person's look that does not have to be spoken.
    I made a phone threat that I didn't believe. They took the threat to be credible, which I knew they had to do, considering my knowledge of the firm and the personnel. But I didn't know how to track him down. He moved about the city without pattern. He had armed escorts. The building where he lived was unapproachable in my current state of randomized attire. And I accepted this. Even at the firm, it was not easy to find his office. It changed all the time. Or he voided it to work elsewhere, or work wherever he happened to be, or work at home in the annex because he did not really separate live and work, or to travel and think, or to spend time reading in his rumored lake house in the mountains.
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    Don DeLillo
    Cosmopolis
    My obsessions are mind things, not geared to action.
    Now I'm in a position where I can talk to his corpse. I can speak without interruptions or corrections. He can't tell me this or that is the case or I am shaming myself or fooling myself. Not thinking straight. This is the crime he placed in the hall of fame of horrors.
    When I try to suppress my anger, I suffer spells of hwabyung (Korea). This is cultural panic mainly, which I caught on the Internet.
    I was assistant professor of computer applications. Maybe I said this already, in a community college. Then I left to make my million.
    The pencil I'm writing with is yellow, with the numeral 2. I want to note the tools I'm using, just for the record.
    I was always aware of what they said in words or looks. It is what people think they see in another person that makes his reality. If they think he walks at a slant, then he walks at a slant, uncoordinated, because this is his role in the lives around him, and if they say his clothes don't fit, he will learn to be neglectful of his wardrobe as a means of scorning them and inflicting punishment on himself.
    I make mind speeches all the time. So do you, only not always. I do it all the time, long speeches to someone I can never identify. But I'm beginning to think it's him.
    I have my paper, legal size, white with blue lines. I want to write ten thousand pages. But already I see that I'm repeating myself. I'm repeating myself.
    After I turned him over I went through his pockets and found nothing. One of his pockets was torn.
    He had a crusty purple wound on his head, not that I am interested in description. I am interested in money. I was looking for money. He had one half a haircut but not the other and wore shoes but no socks. The body smell was foul.
    I steal electricity from a lamppost. I doubt if this occurred to him, for my living space.
    I've suffered many reversals but I'm not one of those scanted men you see in the street, living and thinking in minutes. I live at the ends of the earth philosophically. I collect things, it is true, from local sidewalks. What people discard could make a nation. Sometimes I hear my voice when I am speaking.
    I am speaking to someone and hear the sound of my voice, third person, filling the air around my head.
    The windows were sealed by the City when they condemned the building. But I pried one board loose to let in air. I don't live an unreal life. I live a practical life of starting over, with middle-class values intact. I'm knocking down walls because I don't want to