Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

From the periodical display he took a copy of House magazine. He wanted a sense of the people who on Friday would be photographing his living room, breakfast room and kitchen. The proprietor rang up the purchase. Probst asked him if he’d ordered the Toblerone straight from Switzerland.

How so?

Well, there was no English on the boxes.

The proprietor frowned and looked. “Yes there is.”

Probst looked. There was English. Also German and Italian. How on earth had he mistaken the English for French?

“Yes, English, French and German,” the proprietor said. Probst shrugged and made to leave, but he couldn’t help seeing the man rub his nostrils with two of the fingers with which he’d just taken a five-dollar bill—

“Everything all right?”

Nodding over his shoulder, Probst found himself running into something which he grabbed to stabilize and came even closer to toppling before he saw what it was: a wooden cigar-store Indian, nearly as tall as he, rocking violently. He made it stop. The proprietor was shaking his head with annoyance and disapproval. Probst had overestimated his stamina today.

He crossed the atrium and sat down on a polished oak bench beneath a miniature tree with waxy leaves. He was in no condition to be shopping. But if he didn’t shop now he’d have to come back another time. Barbara had asked how long he’d be out and he’d said at least an hour. He couldn’t barge in on birthday preparations. Besides, if he went home, he’d go to bed. He hated to go to bed, on his birthday.

But what was a birthday anyway? All he could picture, when he thought of being born, was his head emerging from a hole between his mother’s legs. The picture became remarkably vivid when he thought about it, as if he really had seen it on TV or in a theater and was remembering. What camera, at bed level, had captured the emergence of his head? It was a flickering old film, from an old, old camera. No history seemed more ancient.

In the days when she still fed him nice questions, Luisa had asked what his earliest memory was. That would have to have been, he said, the streetcar accident when he wasn’t yet three. He remembered flying through the air and hitting a silvery bar. Yes. He’d been standing on a seat, not yet three…

The shoes and murmurs of shoppers passing him sounded impatient, as pedestrian movements always do to someone at rest, creating a patter so unbearable that only joining it can bring relief. Nevertheless Probst resisted. His throat was a tube of pain. He needed to sit a while longer. Then he’d shop, buy bath oil, books and earrings. He might not have the strength today to shop for bargains, but colds made him extravagant. He was sick, it was his birthday, he could do what he pleased. He could recall that for years he was haunted by the memory of propulsion, of collision with a bar, as by a nightmare undispelled by identification as such, without knowing that a thing like this had actually happened to him. People put accidents behind them, and it was only by chance that his mother, years later, had mentioned a time on the Grand Avenue line when you, Martin, were thrown and given a concussion.

He could reach back even further, into the history of his father. Carl Probst had had a farm and a house in Stillwater, he was young and unindebted and owned shares in the largest local bank, when the hard times blew into Oklahoma. His wife died, and the rain stopped falling. The banks began to foreclose on mortgages. He sold his shares in protest (so he later claimed, though undoubtedly he needed the cash, too) and sold them, moreover, in the face of what the whole town knew: there was oil in the area. By 1940 the bank was among the wealthiest in Oklahoma. By 1940 Carl Probst was in St. Louis handling the feet of strangers. If he’d hung on to his shares he’d have been not fabulously rich but not so poor that he couldn’t have weathered the dust-bowl years, and leased his land, and made it. He didn’t make it. Probst saw him trying to break that red brick dirt in February using two horses and his only son — Carl Jr. — to make way for seed on which no rain, or not enough, would fall, while on every horizon, on every unblacklisted tract, derricks rose. He heard him telling the young children of his young second wife that he’d done the Right Thing. And he remembered, as a child, believing him.

He popped a Sucret. Tennis shoes squeaked on the parquet floor. The feeling he had now was a feeling he’d had as a younger man sitting on benches, the feeling of being an old man sitting on a bench and able to watch the world go by. The world was Frontenac women in boots with salt stains, flitting typists who glanced at their watches, businessmen fueling one another’s laughter, small children unraveling from mothers to point at the lavender elephants in the window opposite Probst, to paw from a distance. But there were parallel worlds — worlds of the invisible, of viruses, of latent behavior, of phrases of his father’s. On Sunday when Wesley had made his pitch and mentioned the world “circle” and Probst had decided to leave at once, it had not actually been a decision. He had found himself below the threshold of cause and effect, following an action that came straight and swiftly from the soul of what he was, as he reenacted his father’s central denial: I won’t be a part of this; no matter what it costs me, I won’t be a part.

An elderly woman in red rubber boots was sitting down beside him on the bench. He began to make more room between them and heard her say, quite distinctly, “Little prissy.” He made it a whole yard between them.

We’re at the center of things, Martin.

Probst had not stopped thinking about his morning in the sauna with the — with Sam. Sam found it important that Probst had bled at the stadium. Probst found it strange that his injuries had not been listed in the papers or on the airwaves. The more he thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed. He was Municipal Growth chairman, he’d been as seriously hurt as some of those other twelve; how much more did it take to get yourself counted? Had some police sergeant or hospital clerk refused to count a thirteenth injury for the same reason that high-rises lacked thirteenth floors? Probst didn’t mind not having his name in the papers, it appeared there often enough in other contexts, but he wondered why the powers of information had seen fit, for once, to ignore him. If Trudy Churchill’s name and address and broken leg were Known to them, then Probst’s broken finger and blood loss must have been equally Known. A suppression had obviously occurred.

Conspiracy. Coincidence. Conspiracy .

Jammu controlled the police. Hutchinson, who’d spoken ominously of professional courtesy, controlled KSLX. Duane Thompson’s parents were both powerful figures at Barnes, where Probst had been treated. Pete Wesley controlled the city press office. The owners of the Big Red were intimate with everyone else who mattered, with Meisner, Norris, Buzz, Ross Billerica, Harvey Ardmore.

Probst trusted no one. He had no knowledge of anyone’s motives. How could he be central when he was so abysmally ill-informed? Was he uninformed because he was central? If so, then the conspiracy was working both ways, excluding him from the news and the news from him. He was sick. Men kept away from him. He could hear them laughing and shouting and whispering like schoolboys outside the window of his inner sickroom. He was sick, and he could no more clear his head than he could find his way back into an involvement in the city’s public life, though he was nominally still at the center of it. All was treachery all of a sudden, Wesley, Meisner, Ripley, Ardmore, his own daughter, much of Municipal Growth. They wanted to use him without letting him in on the secret. He wasn’t counted because the conspiracy didn’t want him to count.