Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

He went to make coffee. “I respect you, too,” he said as he filled the reservoir of the device with water. He removed the lid from the coffee canister and began to open drawers, yanking them out one after another, and heaving them shut.

“Where does she keep the filters?” he whispered.

Where?

Where?

Where?

He stalked from room to room, flashing angry and cooling off in the archetypical cycle of storm and lull, with pauses for whiskey, muddy coffee, chocolate cookies, until there was light in the eastern trees. He was a man who hadn’t been alone in his house, not really, for more than twenty years. His movements were driven by something more elemental than anger or grief, by the unleashing, maybe, of the self itself. At times he almost looked like he was having fun; what he did alone he alone could know. Though the temperature never fell below 65 all night, he left his coat on, kept it buttoned at the neck. It was as if sidewalks and open spaces and wind had been let inside his house.

In the morning he went to work and spent five hours at his desk, mainly barking into the telephone. Outside, the weather grew more menacing by the hour. The wind was blowing hard from the east, spraying the city with an oily coat of water which instantly congealed. Walkers clutched their heads, and squad cars leaving the precinct house and speeding west were overtaken by their own exhaust like women whose skirts billowed up under their armpits.

Traffic on I-44, normally light by six o’clock, was crawling. Probst had been downtown to sign a contract and had spent nearly an hour inching out to the black methane storage tanks at the city limits. Here the cause of the backup came into view. An eastbound semi had plowed into the double guardrail and half ripped, half flipped, to land in pieces in the westbound lanes, where at least six cars and another truck had struck it.

People had died, Probst could tell. When he passed through the one free lane he fixed his eyes on the car ahead of him, but the car braked. A stretcher moved into his vision and showed him, not six feet away, an inert body covered entirely by a blanket. The brake lights had plastic spines and vertebrae for reinforcement. They dimmed at last. Attendants were wresting ambulance doors out of the grip of the wind, and Probst broke free into the dark, unclogged lanes.

He was in the second lane when he saw his exit, Berry Road. His hands started to turn the wheels, but some danger or paralysis, either the ice on the road or the lactic acid in his muscles, seemed to prevent him from changing lanes in time. He sailed past. He sat up straighter and looked where he was going. He was going west. He shook his head and missed the Big Bend exit, missed the Lindbergh, too. The next cloverleaf slung the Lincoln north onto I-270.

“We’ll see what it looks like,” he was saying half an hour later. He’d parked the car on the snow at what had been the truck entrance to Westhaven, where the mixers had left deep ruts when they came to pour concrete in December. The Lincoln rocked on its springs in the wind. Snowflakes, dry ones, skidded across the windshield.

Wired to the gate above the heavy padlock was a sheet metal sign reading, PROPERTY OF THE U.S. BANKRUPTCY COURT OF MISSOURI, EASTERN DISTRICT. TRESPASSING IS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.

Probst slogged south from the gate, breaking the crust on the snow with his knees, until he came to the culvert that crossed under the fence. He ducked under the fence himself, in violation of federal law, and doubled back to the road. Ahead lay the foundations of Westhaven. It was a project tremendous and abandoned and now, in the winter, buried. It left a large white negative in the woods, an image of contemporary disaster, like a town bombed flat, or a pasture ostracized for harboring dioxin. The acres had been cleared and terraced, the foundations poured, and retaining walls built to separate the levels. Now the snow stuck to these walls in patches, in oval spots, in feathery ribbed fern formations, in vertical lines along the tar-sealed joints, in all the patterns of neglect. It was more desolate than a sod house on the prairie. It was a disappointment specific to the times. No project was begun with failure in mind; the spirit was eager; but the flesh was proverbial.

Trudging and resolute, Probst followed a branch of the road that curled down to the center of an excavation into what would have been — and might still somehow become? — the entrance to a parking garage. He plowed through drifts as high as his breastbone, aiming purposefully for the eastern wall. When he couldn’t go any farther, he turned and raised his face. He was a speck in a bowl. From where he stood he could see only gray sky and, in angry motion, a horde of black flakes that looked radioactive but felt like snow, when they melted and ran down his cheeks.

It was still nighttime. Undressing, he kicked his briefs over his shoulder and caught them. He froze. An anxious look crossed his face. The briefs dropped to the floor.

He got into bed. “How you doin’, hands?” he said to his hands, and grimaced. His eyes were roving the room. As if shying from something, he leaned to find a magazine to read. He heard Mohnwirbel’s car in the driveway, the crunch of tires on ice as he took it around to his parking space behind the garage. The door thumped. In his head Probst heard a German voice say, Martin Probst . On the cover of Time was a drawing of missiles, missile chess, black Russian missiles, white American missiles, the face of the President on the white-king missile, the face of the Soviet premier on the black-king missile, and above them the word STALEMATE?

With a jerk, Probst turned out the light and pulled the pillow over his head.

There had been nights, in every year of their marriage, when Barbara had waked him up and told him she was scared and couldn’t sleep. Her voice would be low and thick. “I’ve got to know when it’s coming. I’ve got to. I can’t stand it.” Then he’d held her, his fearless wife, in his arms. He’d loved her, because through the skin and bone of her back he could feel her heart beating, and he felt sorry. I respect you, Martin . That was the point. He respected her, too. She was the woman he slept with and faced death with. He’d thought they agreed. That they were modern only to the extent of not being vitalists, of facing the future and hoping that if love was organic then it could be synthesized out of respect, out of the memory of being in love, out of pity, out of familiarity and physical attraction and the bond of the daughter they both loved as parents. That they would not leave each other. That the project mattered. He’d thought they had an agreement.

How could she have left him ? He launched the question into space in a thousand directions and it hit everything but her. A magic shield protected her, something he’d never experienced before: an adamant incredulity. She didn’t. She couldn’t .

“God damn this country,” Probst said.

The resonance traveled through his skull to his ears. He heard himself from the inside. He heard the country answer, the muffled booms, the thousand reports. Get with the times, Martin Probst. You think she never looked at another man? I’m always rationalizing attractions. Because there’s plenty of pubic parking, Mr. Boabst. Plenty indeed. Women these days, they need that extra — I don’t know. Overtures of a, em, physical character. Are we quits? That region is so healthy, Martin. My game, old chap. This isn’t good and evil, Daddy.

He could see by the clock that it was only 12:30. He was wide awake again. He was lying on his back. His right arm was bent over his ribs, and the curve of his fingers fit the curve of his breast, covering his heart. His left hand lay flat between his legs, resting on his penis and thigh. Had he always lain with his hands in these positions? Or only now that he was alone? A peaceful feeling settled over him. Through his fingertips he felt the hair over his heart and his heart’s amazing labor. He felt the ribs. Hands sent messages via nerves to the brain. He felt the crinkly hair between his legs, and the pliant genital flesh. He was dropping off, into a state woolly and primitive, because now he knew what his hands covered while he slept and the world did not and he was vulnerable.