Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

There were no windows in the hall, only brick and steel, the brick painted gray and the steel a ferric orange, all lit by bulbs in cages. She boarded an elevator, stamping nervously on its worn wooden floor, descended to the ground floor and entered a hallway identical to the one on the top floor. The air was chilly and stale, the building completely silent. She walked to one end of the hallway and pushed open a heavy door, hanging at the threshold and looking out.

Beyond a wet empty street was an elevated highway. Trucks with small amber lamps around the margins of their trailers were passing in the rain. Clouds beyond the highway captured the bright lights of a city, but whatever skyline loomed there was obscured.

She shivered in her pants and sweater as the flavorless air blew in. On the floor lay a fragment of cinder block. She kicked it onto the threshold, against the jamb, stepped outside and carefully eased the door back against the cinder block. She looked up and down the street. It was a Hiroshima neighborhood in the spring of ’46, so flat and lifeless that it seemed almost to promise safe passage. She saw distant streetlights, traffic lights, vehicle lights, some very distant office lights, but not one sign of commerce, no light in the shape of letters. She could find an entrance to the highway and flag someone down. But she hesitated. Somewhere in the warehouse there might be another telephone, or at least some tool with which she could force her way back into the apartment. She’d call the operator and have the call traced. She didn’t want to leave.

A hundred yards away from her a thin man in a dark coat without luster crossed the street on a diagonal. He approached her steadily, implacably, with the hypnotic steps of a frog-gigger who’d “fixed” his prey. She stepped away from the doorway, wringing her hands. It was a matter of balance. She broke in the direction she’d been leaning — away from the door. The man walked faster and she fled along the front of the building, away from the city lights. The pace of his steps matched hers. She began to run. He began to run.

“Myth Madan!” he shouted.

Her sneakers slapped the broken pavement, bending around irregularities to average them and overcome them. She was stretching muscles she hadn’t used since January. She kept running even when she heard the man stop, far behind her, with a scrabble of leather soles. Looking back, she saw him heading towards the warehouse. She ran between two sets of pillars beneath the highway, through a very black space, and suddenly into light.

The light came from fires, from flames licking out of barrels and from bonfires built on the pavement of a narrow street, flames oppressed by the rain but not subdued, sprouting sideways, clinging to the square-edged boards that fed them. At the far end of the street a single filament shone on an intersection with what appeared to be a similar street. In between, in tents and under lean-tos on the sidewalk, in the hulks of four-door cars and vans without tires, leaning from frameless windows of blackened buildings, were many more people than Barbara could count. There were hundreds.

She heard a few isolated voices, but for the most part the people sat and stood quiescent, crossing a leg here, raising an arm there, as if deep in thought. She looked back towards the warehouse. A pair of headlights had appeared in the gloom, expressionless disks of luminance, the distance between them slowly increasing as the car moved swiftly closer. She entered the street in front of her, and with a relief she tasted in her mouth and felt in her chest she realized that most of the people were women. She turned to the nearest group, a threesome on the corner, but the car was almost upon her. It was a station wagon. She ducked into an alley where more women stood warming their hands at a barrel. The smoke lacked the green aromatic complexity of nature; it smelled of old wood, of lumber, not logs. The women were lost in their clothing. They wore fishnet tights, platform heels of lacquered glitter, boots of licorice leather that hugged ankles and calves, leather mini-skirts and polyester hot pants, and short, padded jackets. Their faces, some black, some white, peered out from between mounded hair and fake fur collars. Two by two their eyes were coming to rest on Barbara. She pressed against a brick wall, catching her breath, as the station wagon passed in the street.

Closed shop, sister!

The laughter was loud and hit her like stones, fell dead on the ground. Two women threw cigarettes into the barrel, ritually. They were all looking at her.

“Where am I?” she asked.

You in Jammuville .

There was no laughter.

She was beginning to breathe normally. “I mean what state am I in?”

Same state we’s in!

You lookin for work?

Closed shop, closed shop .

They fell silent.

“I’m looking for the police,” she said.

The police? She lookin for the po-lice? Oh ho .

One of them pointed.

See dat highway? You just follow it over the bridge .

They laughed again. Somewhere deeper in Jammuville a gun was fired. Barbara headed up a cross street even more populated than the one she’d just left. Puppets paced the sidewalks, their seductions creaky in the cold, their turnings stiff and grindings labored, while male eyes gleamed in the shadows. Not a word was spoken. Barbara passed sore-looking breasts bared to the weather, ecstasies in which only the agony wasn’t simulated, a skirt raised above a meaningless vulva framed by black straps. She stepped off the curb into the street, where automobiles were cruising in a steady stream, almost bumper to bumper. One of them drew even with her. Through the open driver-side window she saw a jowly white man in a red blazer with an unlit cigar between his teeth. He removed the cigar and looked her over.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m—”

He shook his head. “ Tits .” The word was final, the voice prophetic. “I need mammoth tits.” He had a vision of them. “Monster tits.”

The next car honked her out of the way, but the one after that stopped, and she rapped on the window with her knuckles. The meek-eyed man inside frowned and shook his head. She looked down into his lap. He followed with his eyes, smiling modestly at his exposure.

Near the end of the street she saw the city. It was St. Louis. The Arch stood huge and stationary against a backdrop of brightly colored mists. It was St. Louis. It was the city in which her dreams had taken place all her life, all through the last two and a half months, the city which whenever John left the room she peopled with her family and her friends, the city she’d never stopped trying to remember and imagine: this was the city itself, and it was completely different from the city in her head though identical in detail, completely itself, the quality of reality overpowering all the more specific landmarks. But even now she couldn’t shake the feeling — didn’t want to — that she was about to wake up in John’s arms.

Beneath the Arch, Probst faced the river and the unconstellated urban stars that twinkled in Illinois. A northbound barge spanned invisibly the four hundred yards between its lighted cabin and its lighted bow. Cars were moving at sixty miles an hour across the Poplar Street Bridge, but their progress looked painfully slow. In the depths of downtown a metallic man barked to muted cheers.

Piercing the seawall and leading down to Wharf Street was a long, wide set of concrete stairs. Probst sat down on the top step. He watched a familiar sedan travel along the street, halt, and back into a parking space between him and the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer , both of which were moored at their docks. The car door opened. Jammu stepped out.