Cosmopolis Page #7

at the cash machine out side the bank

some time around noon.

You saw me.

You looked familiar.

I didn't know why.

Maybe you used to work for me.

Hate me, wanna to kill me. Fine.

Everything in our lives...

yours and mine

has brought us to this moment.

Fine.

I could use a tall beer

about now.

How old are you?

I'm interested.

Do you think people

like me can't happen?

- How old?

- We happen.

Forty-one.

Prime number.

But...not an interesting one.

Or did I turn forty-two. It's possible, because

I don't keep track. Because why should I?

I've become an enigma to myself.

So said St. Augustine.

And herein lies my sickness.

Well, that's a start. It's a crucial self-realization.

I'm not talking about myself.

I'm talking about you.

Your whole waking life

is a self-contradiction. That's why you're

engineering your own downfall.

Why are you here?

That's the first thing I said to you

when I came out of the toilet.

I noticed the toilet.

It's the first thing

I've noticed when I walked in the room.

What happens to your waste?

There's a...There's a whole below the fixture.

I knocked a hole in the floor

then I positioned the toilet so that

one hole fits over the other.

Holes are interesting.

There're books about holes.

There're books about...

sh*t.

But we wanna know why you would willingly

enter a house where there's someone

inside that's prepared to kill you.

Alright, tell me.

Why am I here?

You have to tell me.

Some kind of unexpected failure.

Shocked your self-esteem.

The yuan.

I couldn't figure out the yuan.

The yuan?

I couldn't chart the yuan.

The yuan eluded me.

And so you brought everything down.

This had never happened.

I've become half-hearted.

This is because you only have half heart.

Give me a cigarette.

I don't smoke cigarettes.

Huge ambition and contempt...

I can...

list the things, name the appetites,

people.

Mistreat some, ignore some.

Persecute others.

The self-totality.

The lack of remorse.

These are your gifts.

What else?

Intuition of early death.

What else?

What else...

Secret doubts.

Doubts that you

could never acknowledge.

You know some things.

I know you smoke cigars.

I know everything that's ever

said or written about you.

I know what I see in your face

after years of study.

You worked for me, doing what?

Currency analysis.

I worked on the baht.

The baht is interesting.

I loved the baht!

But your system is so micro-timed that I couldn't

keep up with it. I couldn't find it. It is so infinitesimal!

Then I began to hate

my work and you

and all the numbers on my screen

and every minute of my life.

One hundred satang to the baht.

What's your real name?

You wouldn't know it.

Tell me your name.

Sheets.

Richard Sheets.

Means nothing to me.

Tell me:
do you imagine that I stole

ideas from you?

Intellectual property.

What does anyone imagine?

A hundreds things a minute.

Whether I imagine a thing or not,

it's real to me.

I have syndromes. Where they real?

From Malaysia, for example.

The things that I believe become facts.

They have the time and space of facts.

You're forcing me to be reasonable.

I don't like that.

I have severe anxieties that my sex

organ is receding into my body.

But it's not.

Shrinking into my abdomen.

But it's not.

Either it is or not, I know it.

Show me.

I don't have to look.

There are folk beliefs.

There are epidemics that happen,

men in the thousands in real fear and pain.

Alright.

Alright.

People like you can't happen.

I understand this.

I believe it, but not the violence. No the gun.

The gun is all wrong.

You're not a violent man.

Violence is meant to be real

based on real motives,

on forces in the world that, what, make us want

to defend ourselves or take aggressive actions.

The crime you want to commit

is cheap imitation.

It's a stale fantasy.

People do it because other people do it.

It's just another syndrome,

it's a thing you caught from others.

It has no history.

It's all history, the whole thing is history.

You are foully and berserkly rich.

Don't tell me about

your charities.

I have no charities.

You don't resent the rich,

that's not your sensibility.

What's my sensibility?

Confusion!

This is why you're unemployable.

Why?

Because you wanna kill people.

That's not why I'm unemployable.

Then why?

Because I stink.

Smell me!

Even when you self-destruct, you have to fail

more, lose more, die more, stink more than others.

In...in the old tribes, the chief that destroyed more

property than the other chiefs, was the most powerful.

What else?

You have everything to live for,

I have nothing and neither.

That's another

reason to kill you.

Richard!

I want to be known as Benno!

You're unsettled 'cause you

feel you have no role.

You have no place.

But you have to ask yourself

whose fault you that is?

'Cause, in fact, there's very little in the society

that you have to hate. Think!

Think.

Violence...

needs a cause.

A truth.

There's nothing in

the world but other people.

I had this thought one day.

It was the thought of my life.

I'm surrounded by

other people.

It's "buy and sell". It's "let's have lunch".

I thought "look at them and look at me".

Light shines through me on the street.

I'm, what's the word, pervious to visible light.

I thought, "all these other people",

I thought...

How do they get to be

who they are?

It's...

...banks and car parks. It's airline tickets and their

computers. It's...restaurants filled with people

talking. It's people signing

the merchant copy.

It's people taking the merchant

copy out of the leather folder

and then signing it and

separating merchant copy

If I'm the customer copy and putting the credit

card back in their pocket, this alone could do it.

It's people who have doctors that order

tests for them. This alone...

I'm helpless in their system that makes no sense to me.

You want me to be a helpless robot soldier

and all I could be was helpless.

o.

It's women shoes.

It's all the names they have for shoes.

It's all those people in the park, behind the library.

Talking in the sun.

Your crime has no conscience.

You haven't been driven to it by some

oppressive social force.

I hate to be reasonable.

You're not against the rich.

Nobody is against the rich.

Everybody is ten seconds away from being

rich, or so that everybody thought.

No.

Your crime is in your head.

Another fool shooting up a diner because

Bullets flying through the walls. So useless and stupid.

Even your weapon is a fantasy.

What is it called?

What are the attachments mounted on the barrel?

What are they called, what do they do?

Alright.

I don't have the manhood to know these names. Men

know these names. You have the experience of manhood.

I can't think that far ahead.

It's all I can do to be a person.

Violence needs a burden.

It needs a purpose.

What are you doing?

I don't know.

Maybe nothing.

My prostate is asymmetrical.

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