Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

With 41 percent of the corporation under his direct control, Buzz Wismer was, on paper, one of the twenty wealthiest men in the country. But Wismer had never diversified in the classical sense, since aerospace was already sufficiently diversified to adapt to a changing market, and the company’s cash assets, though comfortable, were relatively small. A high proportion of its other assets took the form of accounts receivable, primarily from the airlines. Buzz’s wealth was therefore not the wealth of the speculator or oil tycoon who spent in panics. It was tied up in the firm, and he’d tailored his tastes accordingly. He liked good company, virgin land, peace and quiet. Salty foods, cool drinks. He came from a large heartland family in rural Missouri. One of the pities of his life was that he’d never become the head of such a family. His three marriages had brought him two daughters, one of whom would probably remain in therapy for life. Unlike Martin Probst, Buzz had been too busy and too constitutionally flawed to enjoy ordinary family pleasures. The older he grew, the more acutely he experienced the lack. After the fire on his land, he threw himself obsessively into his computer work. Like a splayed beetle clinging to a great globe of wealth and importance, he tried to hang on. Then the globe began to roll.

“Deviiiii?” The hinge squealed slowly. Uncle Rolf cased his head past the jamb and the key from the door. “Dev — iiiii?” He crept in on tippy-toe.

Something clattered behind the bathroom door, but whatever sounds followed were lost in the thunder of a rising jet. It was frightfully loud; he saw she’d left a window open. The room felt and smelt like a train platform. Crossing to close the window, Rolf glimpsed a face reflected from the telly. The face was Martin’s, in a flock of microphones. The thunder exhausted itself in the time it took Rolf to reach the set.

“…I’m not saying we’ve ruled it out, but it is indicative of their entire approach. Debates don’t resolve issues, they never have. They’re personality contests, and that’s precisely the kind of confusion about the referendum I’m interested in seeing eliminated.”

“Oh it is, is it?” Rolf smeared Martin’s face with his palm. The screen was hot. “Poophead! Fart!”

“We’ll have a definite answer on Thursday.”

“Can’t wait, y’old turdbrain.”

Rolf had never much liked Martin Probst, but he’d never known until this winter how deep a revulsion lay buried in his bosom. Tittering, he zapped him off the screen.

As he leaned to shut the casement it caught a gust of wind and swung out of reach. He braced himself on the sill and stretched after it. Above him, on a shelf cut into the exterior wall above the window, he noticed a small box wrapped in plastic. He closed the window and latched it. He stroked his mustache. Small box. Hm. Wrapped in plastic. He opened the window again and leaned out — but best not to inquire, eh? An uninspected pet was the only kind worth having. He shut the window just as she emerged from the bathroom.

“Evening, Rolf,” she said with coy flatness.

“Good evening, my love.”

She was wearing new glasses modeled after Barbie’s reading specs, flat black mules to play down her height, blue Levi’s, and a large white shirt. Rolf hadn’t seen the genuine article in more than two months, not since the holidays, and his blood pressure rose. Five months into the relationship she could still reduce him to a knock-kneed juvenile. Her hands approached. He stood fascinated as they slowly closed in, nudging aside the lapels of his jacket, brushing along the sweater beneath his arms, and the rest of her following, to begin an embrace in slowest motion. He lived for this. He coughed.

The look crossed her face. He pushed her roughly aside and gagged on another cough, his ears popping.

“I’m sorry.” She went limp on the sofa.

He saw the little band-aid on her forearm, the dry makeup. He didn’t care what she did when she was by herself, but when her control lapsed in his presence…

“Why did you call me?” he said.

She looked up and made him love her again with the perfect half-ironic smile. “Rolf,” she said, “I’m totally dependent on you. I can’t survive a day without hearing your voice. After all these years, every day counts, every minute. Don’t you see? We’ve waited so long for each other.”

He cupped his hand and pushed a small cough into it.

“Don’t be angry with me, Rolf. I’m a weak woman, but things will be better soon, just the way you want them to be. I’ve left Martin. The whole world knows it. Oh, the years I wasted with him! Just waiting. I was missing something, I knew I was missing what other women had, and, well, I’ve left him now. And the way he yelled at me I couldn’t ever go back.”

“Accent.”

“The way he yelled at me I could never go back . And you complain when I call you at the office.” She curled her lip. The likeness was uncanny. Rolf dropped to his knees and pressed his cheek against her chest, and bit with his lips, like a toothless baby. Sweat filled his eyes.

“Just think,” she said, “if Martin could see you doing this to me.”

Began to roll on Christmas Eve when Buzz was toiling at his office and the lobby guard called to inform him that Mrs. Sidney Hammaker would like to see him. “Send her up,” Buzz said. While he waited, he ran a systems check on himself and found red alert lights flashing in every sector, his moral processor spewing error messages across the screen — FLOATING POINT DIVISION BY ZERO AT 14000822057G — broken ventilators in the power regulator, a board out in the vocalization unit, and his whole program TERMINATED BY A SUPERIOR PROCESS, FATAL AOS ERROR, DO YOU WISH A SYSTEM DUMP? He unplugged the telephone and checked his hair in the green plotting screen, the convexity of which doubled the scale of his double-barreled nose and oval mouth and made his head outrageously round. He was a green-faced monster.

Asha tapped on the open door. She hoped she wasn’t disturbing him. He said heck no, Christmas Eve, shouldn’t be working anyway. She perched on the table by his console. The dot on her forehead seemed suspended somewhere just beneath the surface of her clear, cool skin, like the decimal point in an LCD.

In the minutes and hours that followed her arrival, her skirt began to creep upwards with a life of its own, a pace independent of their conversation. It revealed more and more of her legs, steadily raising the line at which shadows deepened the color of her sheer charcoal nylons from gray to black. The skirt would halt its upward journey and camp for half an hour, forty-five minutes, as if it planned positively to go no farther. Then Buzz would look and another inch of thigh had come to light.

Asha, it turned out, knew her way around tensor analysis. She listened actively to Buzz’s presentation of his iterative method, and as the December sun went down on the North County snowfields, she spotted a redundancy in his tensor, a hidden symmetry, and suggested he collapse it and add new variables. She was trying, she said, to bring Hammaker into line with the times. Only the cola companies could rival Hammaker’s success and originality in marketing, but even Hammaker hadn’t, so far, faced up to the most fundamental mystery of the day: did advertising work? Sales proved little. Market testing — pools of randomly selected TV-viewing drinkers surveyed in soundproofed conference rooms — was pure shamanism. Asha shuddered at the terrific overkill implicit in blanket advertising, the shameful waste of resources. She longed to attain a god’s-eye perspective from which she would see at a glance the formula that would make Hammaker the beer of everyone’s choice, not the choice of 37 percent or 43 percent or even 65 percent, but of everyone. The formula would have to consist of more than a single slogan or tactic, of course, because those would inevitably be copied by Hammaker’s two major rivals. It would be an infinite series which took into dialectical account all counterattacks, and overcame them automatically. This was where Buzz came in. Asha had read his papers on n-variable tensor simulation of meteoro-dynamics. She wanted to apply his method to selling beer.