#13 Leveraging the Void, part 3

The penultimate part of a series inspired by Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.

..I heard, in my soul I suppose, where the acoustics are so bad..

Samuel Beckett, Molloy¹

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Heraclitus²

ix

..It was slathered in red-and-black spray paint. There were dozens of bruises and punctures, long burrowing scrape marks, swaths of impact and discolor..

After its daytime encounter with the mob, those rat- and aerosol-wielding anticapitalists who brought explosive chaos to downtown Manhattan, Eric Packer’s white stretch rolls into the second, after-dark part of Cosmopolis in a still-roadworthy but disheveled state. The defacement of the limo heightens the sense of crossing a threshold. DeLillo is fond of his signs and portents. The first hint of trouble to come was the eccentric shape of Eric’s prostate, the second the ‘credible threat’; now we have the third—a spray-painted omen of the billionaire’s coming descent, from Randian hero as rich as Croesus³ to pauperised American Psycho.

Eric is worried about his prostate. His worries are heightened by his awareness of the circumstances of his father’s death⁴. That anxiety, maybe, goes some way toward explaining his behaviour in Part One—by which I mean his hubris, his recklessness. That lack of caution which leads him to make ruinous mistakes in the currency markets, errors whose consequences will extend to ‘shit’ poet Elise Shifrin (his wife, in case you need a reminder) and the unfortunate Torval (his chief of security). As Eric will later confess to his incompetent assassin:

“The yen eluded me. This had never happened. I became halfhearted.“

An asymmetrical prostate, an exercise bike missing a pedal, the driver Ibrahim’s collapsed eye, half a haircut, half a heart—it’s curious how asymmetry is a motif throughout the book. It seems to me this leitmotif is linked in a not-entirely-clear way⁵ to dissolution, fate and death, the foremost themes of the pair of chapters (three and four) that make up Part Two.

At this point it’s worth recalling Eric was already deceased in Part One. Let’s rewind to the relevant point: news of Packer’s death came in a text sandwiched between chapters one and two (of course, going back in time here also means going forward):

He is dead, word for word. I turned him over and looked at him. His eyes were mercifully closed. But what does mercy have to do with it? There was a brief sound in his throat that I could spend weeks trying to describe. But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

So begins the Night section of ‘The Confessions of Benno Levin’. It soon becomes clear there is something not quite right with this ‘confessor’, and that ‘he’ refers—to the reader’s natural surprise—to Eric Packer:

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.

A bitter ex-employee of Packer Capital and an utter failure, at this early point in the book Levin comes across as something like Eric’s opposite. A Beckettian man: a wretch, a near-derelict. Yet by the time of the final confrontation in a ruined Hell’s Kitchen apartment, Packer’s assassin is someone the billionaire (in fact ex-billionaire) will in a way resemble, spiritually and materially. Benno Levin’s role in Cosmopolis is more than that of a side character. He’s almost a second—though secondary—protagonist⁶.