Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online Page B

live in a set of little quads where other people lived, doors and narrow hallways, whole families with their packed lives and so many steps to the bed and so many steps to the door. I want to live an open life of the mind where my Confessions can thrive.
    But there are times when I want to rub myself against a door or wall, for the sympathetic contact.
    I wanted his pocket money for its personal qualities, not its value so much. I wanted its intimacy and touch, his touch, the stain of his personal dirt. I wanted to rub the bills over my face to remind me why I shot him.
    For a while I could not stop looking at the body. I looked inside his mouth for signs of rot. That's when I heard the sound in his throat. I thought in all expectancy he was going to talk to me. I wouldn't mind talking to him some more. After all we'd said in the long night I realize there's more for me to 25/91

    Don DeLillo
    Cosmopolis
    say. There are great themes running through my mind. The themes of loneliness and human discard.
    The theme of who do I hate when there's no one left.
    The complex is the intelligence unit of the firm. This is who I called with my mostly empty threat.
    I knew they would interpret my comments as the specialized knowledge of a former employee and would gather rapid data on such. It was satisfying to me, telling them their own names, even somebody's mother's maiden name in a brilliant and telling thrust, and detailing the procedures and routines. I was in their heads, now, making contact. I didn't have to carry the burden alone.
    I have my writing desk, which I dragged along the sidewalk, through the alley and up the stairs.
    This was an undertaking of days, with a system of wedges and ropes. This was two days I needed to do this.
    I never felt a distinction over time between child and man, boy and man. I was never consciously a child as the term is usually applied. I feel like the same thing I always was.
    I used to write him letters after they let me go but stopped because I knew it was pathetic. I also knew there was something in my life that needed to be pathetic but I forced myself to break off contact. The fact that he would never see the letters was not an issue. I would see them. The issue was writing them and seeing them myself. So think how surprised I was that I did not have to track him and stalk him, which I was unfitted to do and anyway haunted by opposing forces concerning does he die or not.
    And whatever I said to them on the phone and however rapidly they gathered data, how could they trace me to where and how I live?
    I don't own a watch or clock. I think of time in other totalities now. I think of my personal time-span set against the vast numerations, the time of the earth, the stars, the incoherent light-years, the age of the universe, etc.
    World is supposed to mean something that's selfcontained. But nothing is self-contained.
    Everything enters something else. My small days spill into lightyears. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.
    I still have my bank that I visit systematically to look at the last literal dollars remaining in my account. I do this for the ongoing psychology of it, to know I have money in an institution. And because cash machines have a charisma that still speaks to me.
    I am working on this journal while a man lies dead ten feet away. I wonder about this. Twelve feet away They said I had problems of normalcy and they demoted me to lesser currencies. I became a minor technical element in the firm, a technical fact. I was generic labor to them. And I accepted this.
    Then they let me go without notice or severance package. And I accepted this.
    One of my syndromes is agitated behavior and extreme confusion. This is known in Haiti and East Africa as delirious gusts in translation. In the world today everything is shared. What kind