"You were one of those silent wistful children. Glued to the shadows."

"And you?"

"I don't know. I don't think about it."

"Think about one thing and tell me what it was."

"All right. One thing. When I was four," he said, "I figured out how much I'd weigh on each of the planets in the solar system."

"That's nice. Oh I like that," she said and kissed the side of his head, a bit maternally. "Such science and ego combined." And she laughed now, lingeringly, as he gave the counterman their orders.

An amplified voice leaked from a tour bus stuck in traffic.

"When are we going to the lake?"

"Fuck the lake."

"I thought we liked it there. After all the planning, all the construction. To get away, be alone together. It's quiet at the lake."

"It's quiet in town."

"Where we live, yes, I suppose. High enough, far enough. What about your car? Not so quiet surely. You spend a lot of time there."

"I had the car prousted."

"Yes?"

"The way they build a stretch is this. They take a vehicle's base unit and cut it in half with a huge throbbing buzz-saw device. Then they add a segment to lengthen the chassis by ten, eleven, twelve feet. Whatever desired dimension. Twenty-two feet if you like. While they were doing this to my car, I sent word that they had to proust it, cork-line it against street noise."

"That's lovely actually. I love that."

They were talking, they were pressed together nestling. He told himself this was his wife.

"The vehicle is armored of course. This complicated the cork-lining. But they managed in the end. It's a gesture. It's a thing a man does."

"Did it work?"

"How could it work? No. The city eats and sleeps noise. It makes noise out of every century It makes the same noises it made in the seventeenth century along with all the noises that have evolved since then. No. But I don't mind the noise. The noise energizes me. The important thing is that it's there."

"The cork."

"That's right. The cork. This is what finally matters."

Torval was not in sight. He spotted the male bodyguard standing near the cash register, appearing to study a menu. He wanted to understand why cash registers were not confined to display cases in a museum of cash registers in Philadelphia or Zurich.

Elise looked into her bowl of soup, bobbing with life forms.

"Is this what I wanted?"

"Tell me what you wanted."

"Duck consomme with an herb twist."

She said this self-mockingly, affecting an accent that was extraterritorial and only slightly more elevated than her normal system of inflection. He looked at her closely, expecting to admire the arched nostrils and the fine slight veer along the ridge of the nose. But he found himself thinking that maybe she wasn't beautiful after all. Maybe she missed. It was a stab of awareness. Maybe she was middling, desperately unexceptional. She was better-looking back in the bookstore when he'd thought she was someone else. He began to understand that they'd invented her beauty together, conspiring to assemble a fiction that worked to their mutual maneuverability and delight. They'd married in the shroud of this unspoken accord. They needed the final term in the series. She was rich, he was rich; she was heir-apparent, he was self-made; she was cultured, he was ruthless; she was brittle, he was strong; she was gifted, he was brilliant; she was beautiful. This was the core of their understanding, the thing they needed to believe before they could be a couple.

She held the soup spoon above the bowl, motionless, while she formulated a thought.

"It's true, you know. You do actually reek of sexual discharge," she said, making a point of looking into the soup.

"It's not the sex you think I've had. It's the sex I want. That's what you smell on me. Because the more I look at you, the more I know about us both."

"Tell me what that means. Or don't. No, don't."

"And the more I want to have sex with you. Because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. It's the antidote to disillusion. The counterpoison."

"You need to be inflamed, don't you? This is your element."

He wanted to bite her lower lip, seize it between his teeth and bite down just hard enough to draw an erotic drop of blood.

"Where were you going," he said, "after the bookstore? Because there's a hotel."

"I was going to the bookstore. Period. I was in the bookstore. I was happy there. Where were you going?"

"To get a haircut."

She put a hand to his face and looked somber and complicated.

"Do you need a haircut?"

"I need anything you can give me."

"Be nice," she said.

"I need all the meanings of inflamed. There's a hotel just across the avenue. We can start over. Or finish with intense feeling. That's one of the meanings. To arouse to passionate feeling. We can finish what we barely started. Two hotels in fact. We have a choice."

"I don't think I want to pursue this."

"No, you don't. You wouldn't."

"Be nice to me," she said.

He waved his chopped liver sandwich, then took a loud bite, chewing and talking, and helped himself to her soup.

"Someday you'll be a grown-up," he said, "and then your mother will have no one to talk to."

Something was happening behind them. The nearest counterman spoke a line in Spanish that included the word rat. Eric swung around on his stool and saw two men in gray spandex standing in the narrow aisle between the counter and the tables. They stood motionless back to back, right arms raised, each man holding a rat by the tail. They began to shout something he could not make out. The rats were alive, forelegs pedaling, and he was fascinated, losing all sense of Elise. He wanted to understand what the men were saying and doing. They were young, in full body suits, rat suits, he realized, blocking the way to the door. He faced the long mirror on the far wall and could see most of the room, either reflected or direct, and behind him the countermen in baseball caps were arrayed in a state of thoughtful pause.

The two men separated, taking several long strides in opposite directions, and began to swing the rats over their heads, voices out of sync, shouting something about a specter. The face of the man who sliced pastrami hovered above his machine, eyes undecided, and the patrons didn't know how to react. Then they did, half frantic, ducking the arc of the circulating rats. A couple of people pushed through the kitchen door, disappearing, and general movement ensued, with toppled chairs and bodies spinning off the stools.

Eric was rapt. He was held nearly spellbound. He admired this thing, whatever it was. The bodyguard was at the counter, speaking into his lapel. Eric extended an arm, indicating there was no need for the man to take action. Let it express itself. People called out threats and curses that overwhelmed the voices of the two young men. He watched the nearest guy get jumpy, eyes beginning to drift. The threats sounded ancient and formulaic, one phrase eliciting the next, and even the remarks in English had an epic tenor, deathly and stretchable. He wanted to talk to the guy, ask him what the occasion was, the mission, the cause.

The countermen were armed by now with cutlery.

Then the men flung the rats, stilling the room again. The animals tail-whipped through the air, hitting and rebounding off assorted surfaces and skimming tabletops on their backs, momentum-driven, two lurid furballs running up the walls, emitting a mewl and squeak, and the men ran too, taking their shout out to the street with them, their slogan or warning or incantation.

On the other side of Sixth Avenue, the car moved slowly past the brokerage house on the corner. There were cubicles exposed at street level, men and women watching screens, and he felt the safety of their circumstance, the fastness, the involution of it, their curling embryonic ingrowth, secret and creaturely. He thought of the people who used to visit his website back in the days when he was forecasting stocks, when forecasting was pure power, when he'd tout a technology stock or bless an entire sector and automatically cause doublings in share price and the shifting of worldviews, when he was effectively making history, before history became monotonous and slobbering, yielding to his search for something purer, for techniques of charting that predicted the movements of money itself. He traded in currencies from every sort of territorial entity, modern democratic nations and dusty sultanates, paranoid people's republics, hellhole rebel states run by stoned boys.