Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

On Easter she’d lain on top of him, hipbones on hipbones, knees on knees, and he’d held his arms around her narrow body trying less to stop her shaking than to make it match his own. The shaking was steady, unprogressive, Brownian. They smiled to acknowledge it, but it didn’t stop. It excluded them, reduced them, made them equal in their mutual submission, and this was ideal, because in the ideal bed, in the twilight that came peculiarly to bedrooms, one wanted only to submit.

Don’t tell me this is just a midlife infatuation. Don’t tell me the lights are shining anyplace but here.

Halfway up the stairs Jammu stopped and sat down on the retaining wall on the right side of the landing. Probst felt the rainwater seeping through the seat of his pants. She drew the flaps of her trench coat together, crossed her arms, and put her hand to her mouth. He watched her chew her thumbnail. There was nothing left to want but her. And he could see how the year had happened, how a man in his prime, the envy of a state, could lose everything without even putting up a fight along the way: he hadn’t believed in what he had. Something had always been missing, or interposed, between possession and glory, a question: Why me?

Maybe if he’d known that all the things around him that he loved could vanish like this, he might have succeeded in controlling himself, in making himself love them, or in losing control, in letting himself believe. But how could any man know when the end was coming?

What remained was a room in his mind, all around which the world had fallen away to a whistling galactic distance. The eye of the camera had shifted from a December delivery room to a Main Street location a week after the bomb had dropped, beholding now the rubble in which the living Martin and Susan had vaporized, and beaming the image back to the room, where the world, in them, made love. He might wander through the remembered forms of a city, but the only future that would happen would happen in this room.

She was going to wait for him to come down the stairs. She would never have won him in the first place, even for one afternoon, without some basic readiness on his part, some identity between her planned and executed destruction of his life and his acceptance of each stage of the destruction. In its purest realization the State was an exhaustive sense of fate. But she, who’d ordered Barbara killed, who’d arranged this one minor violation, couldn’t share it. She’d thought she would be climbing these stairs all the way to the top and embracing him. But that wasn’t how it worked.

Election Tuesday, the underwater throbbing of tug engines, the river’s shallow sucking at the banks, the shrill of trucks, the sighing of tires in the sky, the vapid mutterings of St. Louis Night all lacked the volume to drown out the creature growing inside her, a creature glimpsed occasionally in mirrors or heard in fevers, a small, sad child. The child spoke aloud in her labors, able only, like Jammu, to plan and speak and work, to construct a life. Who of the two was the terror? Clearly the woman had fabricated the child as much as the child the woman. Both were cheap Taiwanese goods like everything else she’d ever thought or had a hand in, but the child, at least, had a name: Susan.

Gathering strings of lint from the inner folds of her coat pockets, glancing up at Martin, who sat like Patience at the top of the stairs, beneath the Arch, she began to cry. She pitied the child. She lacked the capacity, the basic instrumentation, the hardware, to love Martin as he loved her. But although the artifices had forever displaced the emotions, the child was making plans —I had no idea Devi was back in the country, she’d sent me a letter from Bombay, very self-dramatizing, you must believe me, you do believe me, I can see— only because she hadn’t yet learned the emotions.

Somehow Probst had imagined that obeying her summons and meeting her here, meeting her eyes and accepting with her the lovely evil of caring only about each other, would be as easy as facing her in bed had been, as uninhibited by shame and selfconsciousness, as purely a matter of compulsion. But when he saw that she was crying and that specific and ordinary words of comfort were required, he knew the affair was over.

He became impatient. The wind off the river was picking up again, and he noticed that his hands were cold, his feet wet, his butt sore, his bladder full. He noticed where he was. He raised his face to the shape above him, to the beams of yellow, blue and violet light streaming into it and cut, terminated, in the form of the great black curve. It merely stood. Raindrops fell on his eyes. While in the room in his head the pleasure could not relent, because if it did it would beg the question of what became of it when it was over. Sex wasn’t a life-prolonging satisfaction like food, and at their age the idea of reproduction couldn’t rationalize the pleasure. Only repetition could. After all, in that room on the edge of space, he and she weren’t just sitting around. They were eternally fucking. In an Eastern room, in a mode of existence in which the present life, the persistent problem of identity, was skirted by reference to past and future incarnations. But in Missouri you lived only once.

He stood up, finding in the stiffness of his shoulders an indication that he was ultimately not an evil person. His body was able to distract him. He was capable of growing impatient. He was not compelled. Actions emptied of meaning, feelings ceased to matter. The story of his life could not be all exclamation marks. He needed to find a bathroom or at least some secluded weeds, and it was with this practical haste that he shouted at the woman below him, who was slumped on the retaining wall, her posture shattered as if she’d fallen from the sky and landed in a heap: “Good bye!”

Without looking up she waved an arm at him, throwing an invisible stone.

Fear was getting the better of Barbara as tires squealed in the streets around her and people argued in the dark buildings. She wanted to walk briskly, purposefully, confidently, but walking required muscle control to maintain momentum. She started to jog. Relative to the warehouse she’d started from she was totally lost, but she could hold the Arch and part of the St. Louis skyline in view and she kept moving towards it. Only when she came to a block where there were men she didn’t like the looks of did she change direction and run tangentially, south. Jammuville. She waited in vain for a police car to pass or a police station to rise out of the darkness.

If she could have figured out where the warehouse was she would have run there more eagerly than she was running to St. Louis. For more than two months she’d lived there in safety, a safety she appreciated now that she saw what lay all around. There was no place like home. John brought her meals. Oh, she was crazy, but she couldn’t help it. She was lost in the place of her nightmares, of the nightmares of every citizen of Webster Groves, in a skeletal maze where every kid had a gun and every woman a knife, and a white female face was a ticket to gang rape after she’d been bludgeoned if she’d let them know she was afraid. Barbara was a good-hearted person and had never allowed herself to believe this. Who would hurt a defenseless woman without a purse? But the threat was physical and it surrounded her.

Still clutching the soggy slip of paper with John’s new address, she jogged towards the Interstate, through one block and into another, thinking, Get back, get back home . She jogged almost to the end of the street, close enough to see the bright green sign with its arrow pointing to ST. LOUIS, she came within a hundred steps of the chain-link fence she would climb to reach the shoulder from which she would flag down a car, before she spotted the four loitering black men. Keep running right past them . She couldn’t. She was making the Mistake but she couldn’t help it. She was turning around and running away from them, showing her fear, and she heard the reports on concrete of their feet as they skipped to keep up.