Too Much of Nothing

by Jim Washburn

Are we together in agreeing that life is growing weirder by the day? I’ve harped on this before, but I can’t get over the fact that we are living in the future.

Sure, we got here one day at a time, with each day never much different than the one before it, but no number of increments seem to add up to the era we’re in now, one barely conceived of in science fiction forty years ago.

Show off your iPhone’s apps to someone in 1968, and they’d have no choice but to assume you’re a time traveler from the 24th century. The computers being used in ’68 to plot mankind’s course to the moon filled entire rooms, and clunked along at the speed of a shopping cart. Even the computers in the incipient Star Trek’s imagined 23rd century occupied walls of the bridge and got the vapors at the first mention of pi.

And now, something the size of a Hershey bar carries more computing power than was used for the Moon launch, plus it’ll let you know in real time exactly where you’re standing on the planet; will transact your stock trades; will make movies you instantly share with the world; and will hook you up to a live webcam feed from a Korean coed’s dorm shower.

We’re immured to so much, but if you woke from a 20-year coma to see things today, you’d be sure you were still dreaming: The New York skyline missing its two middle fingers? US troops mired in the same war the Soviets were losing in the 80s, battling guys today whom we’d armed and trained back then? Troops stuck in yet another country after overthrowing a leader once considered among America’s closest Middle East allies, to whom Reagan had given money, arms and intelligence? The North Pole melting away, leaving polar bears and elves stranded? Century-old newspapers blowing away? And at airports, how come my shoes rate a conveyor belt and I don’t? 

Don’t forget, buddy, we also have a black president, something you previously only saw in movies where a comet was about to obliterate the world, so maybe the unspoken thought was, well, why not? What difference will it make?

Perhaps it’s resultant Karma that now we have a black president who we’d all better pray makes a difference, because the fallow days are here.

Is Don DeLillo any fun at parties at all? He’s one of my favorite writers, but I take little pleasure in his books of the past many years. His greatest gift is writing in a way that mirrors how we think: it’s not so much narrative as a synaptic slalom ride, veering from sensation to association to thoughts so overlapped the paragraphs become moments of pure beehive hum.

I was in Seattle once, bugged that the next day I’d be on a flight home while DeLillo was doing a reading at Elliot Bay Books. I wandered down there anyway on my last night because it is such a big ol’ indie bookstore. In the downstairs coffee nook, I’m pretty sure I saw DeLillo at a table, alone, overcast.

I wouldn’t have talked to him anyway, figuring the nicest thing you can do for famous people is leave them alone. But seeing him, even if it wasn’t necessarily him in that café, did make me curious to know where his head was at, because along with looking like a human toothache, in more than one of his books, the protagonist spends the whole tale purposefully careering towards his own annihilation.

I bought Cosmopolis when it came out in 2003, read a couple of chapters and felt no pull to read any more. I finally took it up again a few weeks ago on a plane. It rang better this time, maybe because its mood resonates with the national mood now. Who ever thought the fallow days would be so frenetic?

The book’s 28-year-old Eric Packer is a multi-billionaire Manhattan assets manager, who after a sleepless night determines he needs a haircut, across town, from the barber who’s cut his hair since he was a baby. He rides there ensconced in his Carrara marble-floored stretch limo, replete with multiple monitor screens, toilet and medical exam table. 

It might as well be a sarcophagus on a funeral barge. In the limo or in its swath he carries on with the eat-fuck-kill of human existence, while street by street sloughing off like dead cells the things that bind him to the world, from mores and manners to his and his investors’ billions. The latter he’s pissing away in real time from the limo, betting against the yen on the currency market, which throws the world immediately outside his tinted glass into tumult: banks failing, explosions, protestors hurling rats at the well-to-do while quoting poet Zbigniew Herbert, whom Packer’s read: “A rat became the unit of currency.”

You know by page 61 of the book’s 209 that Packer is heading to his death, thanks to a flash-forward chapter of his killer’s musings. His path to oblivion is impeded by a presidential motorcade, a flood, a riot, a Sufi rapper’s funeral procession, meals, trysts—one with a female bodyguard, to whom he insists she give him a post-coital zap with her stun gun, “Show me what it feels like. Stun me to my DNA”—an apocalyptic location movie set, and a medical exam—one he has daily in the limo. During the latter on this final day, the doctor, who’d met the limo at a given intersection, has a finger searching Packer’s prostate while Packer’s other end is engaged in mind sex with his female CFO, who’d also joined at an intersection. They achieve some manner of mess-free orgasm when he tells her, “I want to bottle-fuck you with my sunglasses on.” Pretty well outside the guidelines for employer-employee relations, but so what, he’s dead. He later kills another of his bodyguards for less reason than the guy in the Johnny Cash song who shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Live rats, dead rats, flying through the air, scurrying over tables. As a unit of currency, at least they have substance and some sort of value. Currency trading, on the other hand, may be the most useless occupation on earth: Shifting numbers on a flat screen, you might as well be playing Tetris, except, thanks to our mutual illusion, those numbers are given value out here, and lives rise or fall on them. The currency trader toils not, neither does he spin; neither does he lend beauty to the world; he’s not even the shit that feeds the lily.

Yet Parker’s doings presage the derivatives mumbo jumbo that led to today’s financial meltdown, the fallout of what happens when rich guys grow richer with arcane money games far from the places where people actually do anything.

Amid his mid-city ramble, Packer gets a pie in the face from a detractor. Aside from that meringue, he might as well be Tutankhamun, the boy king, who was the sort of guy Bibles warn against, leavening his bread with the sweat of another man’s brow. “We’re all working for Pharaoh,” Richard Thompson sang in a song whose point was that things really haven’t changed much regarding kings and slaves.

DeLillo wrote Cosmopolis just after 9/11; he sets it a year before that. Is this the foreshadowing: a city where all meaning is lost in the swirl; where the individual unmoored from society and the context of the tribe sews chaos and feels nothing; where the dervish dance of spiritual communion and the drugged-out nihilist rave commingle?

“Stun me to my DNA.” Did 9/11 do that, or has the soulless bustle and chaos just flooded past our “it’s changed us forever” event? The street still hums with inconsequence; the moneychangers are still in the temple, setting the world a-tumble with numbers less palpable than a rat’s ass.

Herbert’s “A rat became the unit of currency” line is from a poem called “Report from the Besieged City.” He was a Pole who lived through the Nazi occupation, indeed was part of the resistance, so a rat almost certainly did have value, as food. That’s the story as well in King Rat, where in a POW camp the edible rat becomes the unit of exchange.

There’s a piece in the May 11 New Yorker—the Innovators issue—by Adam Gopnik called “The Fifth Blade” positing that necessity isn’t the mother of invention; frivolity is. When times are tough and need is great, everything is locked tight in the struggle to survive, from your DNA’s ability to evolve to scientific advances. It’s only when we’re at leisure that we can safely mutate or develop razors with three, then five blades. Is this true of novels, too?

Back in the olden days, I saw the film Sid and Nancy in London, and detested it, thinking no relationship could be that stupid and fucked up. I saw it again stateside a few months later to review it. In the interim a relationship I was in had gone remarkably blows-thrown-in-the-middle-of-the-street stupid, and the movie said something to me the second time.

Similarly, Cosmopolis didn’t grab me the first time around, but now, post meltdown, the book seems still joyless, but necessary. Inching through its streets and pages it asks: What have we become? What can we be? If this is the future we’ve made, why isn’t it the future we want? As Dylan put it, when we have too much of nothing, no one’s in control.

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