Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

Having had thoughtful road experiences in other countries and in his youth, Probst wanted to have them still, longed to be foreign again — as Jammu, in relation to the city, had made him. To be young, to live in the world as opposed to merely inhabiting it, a man had to stay foreign. But in the country there were only hillsides scarred with driveways and pastures, billboards for inexpensive ryes and inexpensive motels and inexpensive restaurants at the pinnacle of whose menus stood New York strip steak and batter-fried jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce, the prices working down from there. License plates bore unhelpful combinations of characters, with too few letters to play word games, too few numbers to hunt for patterns. The rivers were muddy. Nothing raised or lowered the horizon by more than a few degrees. All the cars had four wheels, all the trucks had mud flaps behind the tires, all curves in the road translated into a single mechanism, the turning of the steering wheel. The interesting architecture — new churches with derricklike campaniles or nautical profiles, corporate headquarters with nonrectilinear floor plans or geodesic atria — was ugly. The uninteresting architecture was uninteresting. Distance diluted the color of flowers. If glamorous women or criminal men drove on the highways, the windows of their cars were smoked, or else it didn’t matter, as it didn’t matter if a truck was loaded with unusual cargo like poisonous chlorine or sheep, because everything hurried past. Probst wasn’t an aesthete. There was no cause for hatred. But as he approached the city, the countryside filled him with a sense of betrayal, a pain intense enough to counterbalance his fear and begin to answer the questions. He was alive. Sadly, angrily, in a world he was only now realizing he didn’t like, he was alive.

Outside a convenience store on Big Bend he put a quarter in a telephone.

Audrey’s voice was chiding, practical. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been driving.”

“Well, you’d better come over. Luisa’s here. Everyone’s here.”

Probst said nothing. A Hostess truck pulled up beside the booth, and out of the telephone receiver came flooding the interior of the Ripleys’ house — the smell of the cold fireplace, the clatter of cups in the kitchen and the rhythmic sucking of the coffeepot, the voices subdued in every room including the one in which the dead woman’s husband might already have been sitting, the Probst whose face the relatives, between sips, consulted like a template. Their expectations would not let him be. They pulled at his features, restoring the grieving contortions of the night before, voiding the experience and forcing a repetition — the rooms filled the phone booth, and Probst rose swiftly from the sofa, hurried down the hall past Audrey and her tray of cups, and reached the bathroom just in time to shut the door before the paroxysms overcame him.

“Martin?”

A man with pink Snoballs debouched from the Hostess truck.

“You’re coming?” Audrey said.

He swallowed. “Yes.”

At Central Hardware the orange-coated experts were opening the main doors. Nine o’clock. Probst turned north on Lindbergh, and fifteen minutes later he was pulling to a stop in front of the Ripley residence, where he recognized Barbara’s parents’ Volvo and Duane’s Nova. All the curtains in the big house were drawn. The eastern chimney dribbled white woodsmoke into the pale blue sky.

Behind the glaze of light on the storm door, whose mild concavity gathered the reflected trees into a single star-like tree with radiating branches, the front door opened and a figure looked out from the shadows inside. There was a reprimand in its indistinctness, in its seeing him without being seen. Then the storm door opened and a tall young woman in glasses stepped out. She hesitated before, looking aside, still reluctant, she made up her mind to come down the front walk to meet him. That it was Luisa brought joy to his recognition: she was a stranger to him.

When Singh had boarded in Chicago he’d scanned the central compartment of the fully booked 747 to find his seat, which, he’d been told, was situated on an aisle. Passengers were stowing their last belongings and sinking into their seats, testing them to make sure all the comforts for which they’d paid were operational, and making immediate yawning preparations for sleep. Well before Singh had edged through the roil and found his row, he was certain that a particular aisle seat in the distance was his, because a small infant in the throes of a diaper change was lying on it.

“Excuse me.”

The mother, a young Southerner with an intricately layered coiffure, hastened to wrap up the infant and remove it. She confided to Singh that she had sort of hoped his seat would be empty.

The infant was flying to be with its father, a lieutenant at the U.S. base outside Frankfurt. Apparently the anticipation ruled out the possibility of sleep, although the mother, under the influence of a split of Moselle, went out like a light after the late dinner was served. The infant lunged and knocked aside Singh’s eyeglasses and pushed into his left eye a fist covered with clear mucus. Singh awakened the mother. She collected the arms and legs into a bundle and went back to sleep. Singh reclined deeply. He opened one eye to ward off violations of his territorial limits and saw the infant staring at him, drooling through a smile, its eyebrows raised. Singh showed teeth. The infant shrieked with laughter. He shut his eyes but the laughter continued. He opened them. Reading lights were blinking on all around him. The mother, unbelievably, snored. A weary businessman leaned across the aisle to ask if the infant belonged to Singh (had sprung from his loins, was the fruit of his seed). He shook his head and awakened the mother again. She took the infant on a tour of the plane, returned, and went to sleep. The infant began to cry. The mother awoke and proffered a bottle. The infant took a deep draught, turned to Singh, and sprayed him.

“Clifford.”

A smell of decay arose, prompting another trip for Clifford, who, on departure, took a last swipe at Singh’s glasses, which were already well spattered with juice.

Over Newfoundland Clifford vomited onto the knee of Singh’s wool trousers. Over England, with a precision that presaged a future in the artillery, Clifford threw a glistening wad of scrambled egg through Singh’s open shirt collar. The egg dropped all the way down to his belt. Determined to spend the remainder of the flight away from his seat, he rose and repaired to the lavatory. He removed his shirt, deposited the egg in the toilet, and while he was brushing yellow morsels out of his chest hair the jet encountered turbulence, causing him to lose his balance. One of the cuffs of his white Pierre Cardin dress shirt swooped into the blue liquid in the toilet. On the loudspeakers the flight attendants were advising all passengers to return to their seats and fasten their safety belts. He soaked the soiled cuff in the sink and wrung it out. The next jolt of turbulence, in combination with the slick floor of the lavatory, threw him over backwards. He extended an arm to break his fall and brought his hand down directly into the center of the toilet, onto the steel plate on which the blue liquid rested. The plate was hinged; at the pressure of his hand, it opened, activating the flush mechanism.

By the time he emerged, smelling strongly of the candy-scented toilet fluid, the plane had entered more orderly German skies and was preparing to land at Frankfurt. The pilot, a relaxed and pedagogical captain, narrated the final moments of the descent.

“Ten meters…

“Fife meters…

“We are over se runway now…

“Two meters. One meter. We lend every second now…