Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Excuse me!”

Probst turned towards the voice, which seemed to be addressing him. He saw no one. He looked down and saw a little boy, nine or ten years old. “Yes?” he said.

“Excuse me,” the boy said, “are you Mr. Probst?”

“Yes?”

The boy pushed a curling cash register receipt into his hands. “Can I have your autograph?”

Probst groped in his coat pocket for a pen.

It had been a hot day, the hotter end of a long warming trend. Downtown, Jammu twisted in her weary swivel chair, trying to shift some of her weight off the calluses that eight months of desk work had inscribed on her ass. She had a backache that neither standing up nor lying down nor even, she imagined, traction could relieve. At night now she was too tired to sleep or to get a kick from any sort of pills, stimulant, narcotic, or depressant. She could feel the chemicals turning and slipping, as if they were bolts and she a nut whose threads were stripped.

But she could function. She was running, at the moment, on the six hours of sleep she’d stolen on Wednesday night. She’d had Martin over to her apartment for fried chicken. As soon as her stomach was full her eyes had closed. She told Martin she had to lie down for a few minutes. She awoke three hours later, a little after midnight, to find him twisting the knob on her television set. She wasn’t sick, but she felt as if she’d been sweating out a fever while he sat by her side. Too weak to be embarrassed, she sent him home and slept another three hours, as long as the faint protective smell of his visit lasted. She dressed at 4:00, her heart pounding. There was so much work to do.

She wanted to sleep with him again, just sleep.

The soft air lolling in through the open windows carried with it some of the heat the streets had trapped during the day. Traffic was sparse for a Friday, engines passing singly down below, not in packs. The latest issue of Time lay on the floor to her right. Cover headline: THE NEW SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS. Beneath the headline was a picture of her. Her lips were tight and her eyebrows raised; Time gave bizarre expressions to figures it considered bizarre.

Adroit as Jammu has been in dissociating herself from her Subcontinental origins, a wave of immigrants from the urban centers of Bombay, New Delhi and Madras has washed ashore on the banks of the Mississippi in seeming pursuit of her. The ensuing slew of curry joints, saris, saffron robes, and especially the parade of exotics spotted in the company of Jammu have produced pangs of paranoia in many St. Louisans, including Samuel Norris, the fiery sovereign of St. Louis-based General Synthetics. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a political leader who pretends she’s not political,” says Norris. “Jammu is animated by a deep-seated and foreign socialism, and I see no reason to apologize for being concerned about a non-St. Louisan calling the shots around here.”

Jammu, for her part, sees no reason to apologize…

She imagined Brett Stone interviewing Norris for hour after hour, ripening him until at last he yielded one quote mature enough to meet the presses. She could remember when she’d felt a deep-seated and foreign animosity towards journalists. She could remember being a committed socialist, being passionate about a variety of intellectual issues, as Singh still was. She could see that as an adult she still bore the scars of a younger anger, could remember a time when this Time article would have delighted her, infuriated her, called up a flood of critical insights. It didn’t now. She’d read it twice and thrown it aside. She only wanted to finish her operation. Her unideological, unscientific, inconclusive, wholly personal operation.

“We would have been a normal family, I think, if there had been more of us. None of my father’s siblings survived adolescence, and my mother had only one sister, my maiden aunt, who was blind. The Army moved my father around until he retired and we settled in Kashmir. By then there was no extended family left at all — and no more Sikhs than there’d ever been in Kashmir. I had a younger brother who died when I was four. My older brother had no thought apart from becoming an officer, the fifth generation of the family to do so, and the last. He was gung-ho. He was sent to a military academy in Delhi while I went to school in town, so I was an only child of sorts. I weighed seventy-eight pounds on my fourteenth birthday. My diet was very rich in butterfat, but it didn’t help. My mother worried. I started at the university in 1960, and within three years there’d been martial law in Kashmir and a dismal war with China. My father never left the house. He wore a silk jacket with sleeves he had to roll up half a dozen times. When they were unrolled it looked like a straitjacket waiting to be tied. My brother became a cadet. I hardly remember if there were summers. The streets were cold, winter always seemed to be coming on, troops always freezing in their insufficient bedding up in Ladakh. And I would go home to see my parents and I would be wearing perfectly ordinary clothes, and my mother would chide me.

“Balwan, she would say, it’s cold out there. How long have you been clearing your throat like that? Ibraim Masood’s second son has tuberculosis of the spine, and you in nothing but flannel. The son spent himself with low women, and now instead of inheriting the rug business he’ll be lucky to see his twenty-first birthday. He’s been in bed since he lost the use of his legs, and they tried to move him and he bent in two, backwards, Balwan, like a rotten banana. It ruptured his lower bowel, which had to be removed, and now they have him on a plastic bag. And they consider themselves lucky to have that plastic bag! I heard him on Tuesday, twelve degrees of frost and he with his window open shouting to the boys in the street: Don’t make the same mistake I did! Don’t spend yourself with low women!

“To which I would have to reply, Are you sure this is TB, Motherji?

“And she would say: That lump in your father’s abdomen is growing, I feel it every night when he’s snoring, and I can tell. The worst mistake I ever made in my life was sending him to that Anglo doctor Smythe. He wrote a ten-page report on your father’s health and it was all just words. But now your father has something to use against me, he waves that silly report in my face and says Smythe gave him a clean bill of health. And meanwhile, whatever it is he has in his stomach is only getting larger. I can feel it. I’m not stupid, no matter what your father says to you and I’m sure he says the worst. That man is very sick. And then there’s your brother’s growth.

“I would smile and say, Growth?

“In his mouth, she would say. He’s always had canker sores, you know, but this is something else. He wouldn’t open his mouth the last time I saw him because he doesn’t want to face the truth. Some fine, brave officer! He won’t even open his mouth for his mother. It’s the suicidal business that hurts me, Balwan. They refuse to take their problems seriously, and look what happened to Ibraim Masood’s son.

“But I didn’t spend myself with low women. My health has always been excellent. As has hers. She’s fading now, in the bitterness of justified fears, in the luxury of a fat Army pension. Her health remains good. My brother’s was also good, until a sniper shot him in Dacca in 1971. I believe he did have a benign form of herpes. My father’s tumor was benign. And still it killed him, in 1964, it hemorrhaged. The magic of suggestion, eh? Which could be your own Webster Groves, your own family. When there are no problems, the problems must be invented. I’m pleased to think my mother talked my father to death. I know she didn’t like him.”