Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

The thousand quiet voices of Plaza Frontenac could have been hospital visitors, mourners in a mausoleum, refugees, evacuees, late-night travelers or watchers at the scene of a crime or accident, such was the implacable unselfconsciousness of their collective voice. As Probst listened, a great waste seemed to open in the soundscape. Perceptual capillaries filled the entire indoor space, superexfoliating, dully aching, all of them translucent, and all of them Probst’s own; or had the shopping center shrunk, in that sick sensation of tininess, until it fit in Probst’s ear and reduced the thousand sounds to auditory dots, compressing them, in the shell of his cranium, into the pure white rushing of a lifeless ocean? The birthday feeling nagged him. His conception grew dropsical and comprehensive. What if he was the city? More than centrally located: the thing itself?

Born in the very pit of the Depression, he had groped and bullied his way into some kind of light, demolishing and steam-rolling and building higher, building the Arch, building developments of the most youthful and prosperous nature, the golden years of Martin Probst. Inside, though, he was sick, and the city was sick on the inside too, choking on undigested motives, racked by lies. The conspiracy invaded the city’s bloodstream while leaving the surfaces unchanged, raged around him and in him while he sat apparently unseen, uncounted, uninvolved, and it was right here, in this identity of his life with the city’s life, that he could see himself disappearing. The more he was a figure, the less he was a person. The more complete the identity, the more completely it excluded him. There were two Probsts, it seemed, and always had been; who else had run the camera in the delivery room, and who else was sitting thinking on this bench right now? But the personal Probst was disappearing. As his head had appeared fifty years ago, so he was disappearing now. He was a conspirator himself, as responsible for his disappearance as anyone else was. He let a childhood friend pester him, an old struggle with Barbara wear him down, he let anything and everything distract him, and meanwhile bugs were falling out of walls, personalities collapsing in the space of weeks, and everywhere Indians — planting bombs, teasing executives, dazzling the press and transferring stock and stopping traffic, like harbingers and furies both, storming back up the trail from the old Indian Territory, from which the Osage Warriors were telling him now there was no permanent escape. I’ve no use for cliques . It was a phrase of his father’s. The son should have said: I don’t have any use for . Nothing was safe from his xenophobia now, not even his own heart, not even the heart of his own city.

He heard a splash of water.

It was the old woman in red boots. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all,” she sang. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all.” She was swinging her legs, her coat spread open, and in a pale splashing flood she was urinating through the slats of the bench onto the polished parquet floor, gushing urine as if she’d been punctured. Probst staggered to his feet. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all!” She swung her legs, still splashing when he finally got out of earshot.

He wound up in Crabtree & Evelyn, a gift box of a store wrapped in subdued colors and drenched with scents that blended in an almost caustic potpourri. Unlike Barbara, Probst seldom lost his sense of smell. He saw brushes and sponges. Soap lozenges. Pink crystals. He was shaking all over.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Yes, I’d like to buy some bath oil.”

A woman with a greenish frost was smiling, trying to help. She looked simple and good. “What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

Probst allowed himself to be shown around. Usually he wasn’t so humble with sales help, but he wanted to be led. He answered questions about Barbara’s preferences. He took four different bottles, ridiculously many, but they were all flavors he’d seen at one time or another on the shelf by the tub. The more bottles he took, the more solicitous the woman became. Buying, he was calming down.

“This will be plenty,” he said pleasantly.

“Oh, I did want to show you one—”

“Thanks. This will be all.” He accompanied her to the cash register. Payment was an agreeable business. He used American Express. The woman spoke of snow. Much, he agreed. It would melt soon enough, however. As she handed him the form to sign, the telephone rang. She excused herself.

He stared at the words he had made. As always, he’d formed each letter individually, printing it. There were twelve of them, six letters in each name. The date was 12/12. Luisa was born on 11/1 and Barbara on 4/8. “Luisa” had five letters and “Barbara” had seven. Martin, born on 12/12, was both the average and the sum, and he was disappearing in the sudden blaze of schemes. Here the schemes were so perfect that there was no remainder at all, nothing left for him to do but die, his life explained.

“There you are, sir, all set.” The woman with the green frost was humoring him. “Have a good day.”

He tapped his card into its slot in his wallet as he left and slid the wallet into his pants as he entered the main hall. He had to get out of here. But he’d assured Barbara he wouldn’t barge in. He stopped in front of the little Johnston & Murphy store, where a salesman stood like a penguin in shiny black shoes. Neiman or Saks? That was the question. Saks was larger, but the path to it led past the woman in red boots. Well then, Neiman it was. He remembered Sam Norris’s striped cotton shirt.

I love you, Barbara. I love you, Barbara .

That was difficult, but ultimately he could manage it, because ultimately he could believe she was finite, ultimately he might see her on a stretcher and believe that she was dead.

But I am Martin Probst? I am Martin Probst?

There were limits — the speed of light, the moment of birth — and to pronounce his name to himself, to say it with conviction, was to pass the limit, split in two, and see himself being born. He disappeared in the crowd he saw around him. On his right was a rouged darling in sweat pants and pink running shoes and a long mink coat. On his left, two dowagers in blouses that buttoned at the neck were viewing with haughty distaste the places where they bought their gifts. Passing now, the pendular arms of a fat black man pumped affirmative glottals through his mouth. How easy it would be for a roving reporter, a Don Daizy or Cliff Quinlan, to stop these people one by one and say to each in turn, “I don’t want you to tell me your name, I want you to tell yourself who you are,” and for the camera to record the given face as the person did so, whatever surprise or discouragement crossed it as he or she confronted a world that was not a spherical enclosing screen on which pictures were projected, but a collection of objects to which the given person was dared to belong. It was a dreadful vision: in the mall and beyond, an infinity of carriers of latent awareness. The infection of the earth by seeing human beings.

But Probst had reached Neiman-Marcus and entered the dappled silence produced by serious shopping. He took an escalator, careful with his hands this time. He looked at the people around him in a new way: as co-conspirators. The General was right. His vision was too crude, though; he could only think in literal terms, in listening devices and docudramatic subterfuges. There weren’t any bugs in Probst’s house.

There were shirts galore. A line of rustic colors, woolly blends, by Ralph Lauren. Calvin Klein pastels. Outlandish Alexander Julians. Probst met the eyes of a deeply tanned man wearing frameless glasses. The eyes widened a little. There was suspicion between him and Probst. Suspicion of recognition. Probst looked for his size, which was medium in casuals and otherwise 15½–34.