Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Jack, it appears the situation is under control. I spoke moments ago with Chief Jammu, who is at the command post here, the explosive charges beneath the stadium have been located, and it appears that we’re looking at enough explosives to do what was threatened, namely, to kill all of the fans — at — the game . Now, it’s by no means certain the charges are in fact authentic, the Bomb and Arson Squad is at work defusing the charges, but the estimate I got from Chief Jammu is — that — the threat is real . There have been several serious disturbances in the stands, as the fans move towards the exits, but as you say, the police force has kept Spruce Street relatively clear, so it appears that ambulances are reaching the stadium in sufficient numbers to deal — with — the problem . The police were able to mobilize very quickly, they’ve done an excellent job so far, the evacuation has proceeded as well as could be expected , and…”

In the hot breath of the mob Probst felt his knees give way. He grabbed for the pipes beneath a drinking fountain and hit the ground, unconscious of everything but a deep unhappiness.

Words crowd together single file, individuals passing singly through a single gate. The pressure is constant, the flight interminable. There is plenty of time. Born in motion, borne by syntax, stranger marrying stranger, they stream into the void…

Probst came to. The throng in front of him was thinning, the fans on their toes in their hurry, their fingertips resting on the shoulders of the fans ahead of them. He looked up at the rusty porcelain underside of the drinking fountain. Mineral cysts had formed at the pipe joints.

Sitting up he saw a glowing word revealed, eclipsed, and revealed again by the heads in the crowd. The word was INFORMATION. There was an information office across the hall.

“We are going to break for the two o’clock network news, we’ll be back immediately following with the latest on the situation at the stadium, I’m Jack Strom, Information Radio, KSLX, St. Louis, it’s — two o’clock.”

“Here! You son of a gun.” Jack raised a leg for balance and took a drink of water.

“I guess I passed out,” Probst said, wiping a drop of water off his forehead.

“Jesus, Martin, that’s a nasty gash.”

Jack was looking at the back of Probst’s neck. Probst reached and felt under his collar. His hand came away dripping. Now he could feel the blood pooling at the waist of his pants, but he couldn’t feel the wound. “Where’re the Churchills?”

“I got ’em on an elevator. But let me take a look at you. Why didn’t you say something?”

Probst let him probe the back of his neck. “Yi!” Jack said. “Tsk.” Probst still couldn’t feel anything. His finger was throbbing, twitching. Jack’s shoes gritted on the concrete. “Tsk. Oooo. Martin. Tsk.”

“What is it?”

“Tsk.”

“I think we better go.”

“Tsk. You have a handkerchief?”

Probst realized his handkerchief had gone the way of his coat. As had his car keys. Barbara would have to drive down with the other set. She’d have to drive down anyway. Her husband was bleeding.

Once upon a time, the land had been a hunting ground for the Cahokia people, native Americans leading lives which bore so little connection with the subsequent Caucasian experience of the eastern plains that it seemed they must have taken the very land along with them when they vanished. History lives or dies in buildings, and the Cahokians didn’t build with stone. Across the river in Illinois and further down it in Missouri they did build huge earthen burial mounds, which survived to loom above the succeeding tribes like the worn peaks of a sunken Atlantis; but up here in the hills hardly a trace remained of the Cahokians, and only arrowheads marked the passage of the later Iowas and Sauks and Foxes, those Americans modern enough to be misnamed Indians.

It had taken white men to fix the land within a grid. They’d logged it over in the nineteenth century, hauling the wood five miles east to the Mississippi and floating it downstream to St. Louis, where it was chopped for steamboats or milled for houses. They had also tried to farm the land, but crops grew poorly on the rocky, uneven terrain. By the turn of the century it had fallen into the hands of creditors, who let it go to seed, as creditors will, the low land marshing over, the high ground gradually effacing the pioneer scars.

Buzz Wismer had bought up two sections in 1939 for little more reason than his faith in real estate, which couldn’t disintegrate the way his fledgling airplane business might. Ten years later, after the war had made a rich man of him once and for all, the land proved to offer security of a different sort. He had an extensive bomb shelter dug in the north face of the highest ridge here, a winter haven for the months when the prevailing winds blew from the north. His summer shelter was in the Ozarks, optimally situated to avoid fallout from both the silos and the urban centers. Unless, of course, the wind played tricks.

The land was beautiful. Secondary growth, the scrub oak and cottonwood, sycamore and sassafras, hawthorn and sumac, had crept from the safety of the ravines and vaulted, annually, ever farther into the old cornfields, converging and rising. Conifers consolidated early gains, blackberry brambles and cattails reaffirmed the swamps, the old apple orchard let down its hair, grew crazy in the sweet rot of its droppings, and no man could touch a twig of any of all of this without Buzz’s permission. He’d enclosed it with an eight-foot fence topped with barbed wire and bearing strongly worded signs at the few points where it broke to let deer in and out. Within the enclosure he let the woods grow. He avoided even making paths, preferring to forge rough ones as he went, fending off thorns with his machete and his boots and gloves. Farther up, on the stonier slopes, the going was easier.

At sixteen Buzz had been a barnstorming wunderkind, touring his way out of Warren County and into the city and then cross-country from there. He’d flown the upper Midwest, Alberta, Toronto, Quebec. He’d walked wings over New England, he’d buzzed rooftops in Aurora, and with cash in his pocket and his nickname on his fuselage, he’d headed home again. At an air show in St. Charles he bailed out from six hundred feet and broke both his legs. He restructured his priorities, marrying a nurse named Nancy George and going into business. His business throve, but his Nancy, having entered his life on a flight path nearly vertical, like the VTOLs he would later build, soon took off again. She was married to an oil man now, a fellow by the name of Howard Green.

Buzz’s current wife, Bev, was his third. People didn’t like Bev, and although Buzz didn’t either anymore, the slow revelation of the world’s lack of charity had appalled him. In order to have any daytime social life at all beyond the occasional lunch with Barbara Probst, Bev was reduced to giving bridge parties for the wives of Buzz’s lower-echelon engineers, wives who were honored that Wismer’s wife took an interest in them. In the evenings, lacking any sort of invitations, Bev made Buzz take her to dinner at the St. Louis Club — a duty which Buzz had for many years resented and taken pains to shirk. This fall, however, evenings at the St. Louis Club had become much more agreeable, because Princess Asha Hammaker had begun to dine there regularly with her husband Sidney.

Buzz was really enthusiastic about this Indian newcomer. Jammu he could take or leave; Asha Hammaker had depth. He and Bev had shared a television with the Hammakers at the Club’s election-night party. They had all shared a table at the Murphy girl’s wedding reception. And finally, in the Club bar on the first Saturday in December, Buzz had had a chance to spend several minutes alone with the Princess—“Call me Asha”—while Bev freshened up and Sidney was detained by Desmond, the maître d’. With a graceful sweeping motion Asha pushed her black hair off her forehead, off her dot, and caught it in back with both hands. “I’ve heard a secret about you,” she said, leaning closer to Buzz. “I’ve heard you’ve bought property in the city.”