Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Buzz, really. Don’t bother. You’ve told me what your plans are. I trust you.”

“No! I want you to believe what I’m saying, specifically.”

“Sure. It makes perfect sense. That’s why I’m involved in this campaign. The technical center, it makes perfect sense. I believe you.”

Rolf dallied at the mirror, teasing his hair with a silver comb. Insane indeed. His chest hair, clean and fluffy, buoyed a golden chain which rose and dipped over the individual tufts like exquisite roller-coaster tracks, disappearing, at his neck, in the collar of his ruby red robe. Craggy, rugged, his face was quite unlike all the Charlie Brown mugs of the rest of the St. Louis crowd. He wiggled Captain Caterpillar, the name which Mara as a wee lass had given to his mustache. The memory of the make-believe pinned her to her years of innocence.

He went to the door and opened it. Across the hall, honey-toned light flowed through the chinks around Audreykins’s door. Combing her tresses . Every time he happened to look across the hall at night, no matter how late the hour, he saw light, and the phrase wandered into his mind. Imagination was a wonderful thing. Combing her tresses .

He tore the late Telex printouts from the printer by his laundry hamper, poured himself a snifter of The Glenlivet, and went to bed. The time, half past one, nearly lost itself in his Gübelin’s maze of gilt.

In the morning he would oversleep himself a bit, tool over to Lambert, and fly to San Antonio to confer with the president of Gelatron, a plastics concern he was in the process of acquiring. He walked his fingers down the closing quotations his broker had forwarded.

Gelatrn 7 2061 8¼ 65/8 8¼ + 15/8

So the cat was out of the bag, and the response was favorable, a solid vote of confidence in Ripleycorp. In a few months San Antone would be losing a few jobs, as Gelatron pulled up stakes and headed for the north side of Saint Louis. Wholly owned subsidiary. The words, in combination with the whiskey, added warmth to Rolf’s post-acquisitional glow. He reached for his cordless for a chat with his favorite wholly owned subsidiary, but corrected himself in time. He called her far too often. His indiscreet little wholly owned…

He made his last trip to the jerry. The stillness on Audreykins’s side of the hall seemed a tribute to him. He was at the top of his game now. Never again would he fear a Probst, never again endure an evening with them, nor would Audreykins find refuge in the kitchen with Barbie. For a moment, as the tinkling started in the bowl, he found himself believing, unaccountably, that Barbie was dead. It didn’t disturb him. He had Devi, and Martin had no one. The best man had won. He flushed. In the window a pane vibrated with the drone of a late-night small plane.

“Don’t you think we should have had some, uh, radio contact?”

Past Ladue now, Asha closed the throttle and took the Cherokee into a shallow dive, straightening her out at 1,800 feet over University City. “At this hour I think it’s safe not to,” she said. “Visibility’s excellent. I like flying without a flight plan once in a while. It’s like skinny-dipping.”

She was taking them due east into the city. In New York or Chicago they would have been scraping high-rises, but St. Louis lay low, and desolate, its street intersections strange laneless crosses the color of bone. Lone cars pushed pale pools of light along in front of them. If this were a bombing mission…Night flight brought out a special proneness in American cities, or so it seemed to Buzz, who was thinking how America, St. Louis, had never been bombed and now never would be by anything short of nuclear warheads. The lack of an intermediate experience sharpened his feel for the frailty of the continent, whose population had no cultural memory of black plagues or air raids. A splendid illusion, this North America, gave rise to the most pitiful dread, the dread of a man who, like Buzz, had never so much as spent a night in a hospital but who, unlike him, now faced a certain, grisly death.

“Heading right over downtown, eh?”

“I thought we’d have a look,” Asha said.

“It’s kind of eerie this late. I’m getting to like this sort of thing.”

“I know you are. It’s exciting for me, too. The shapes are still so alien to me. That a city looks like this. Could find reasons to look like this.”

Losing altitude, they followed the Daniel Boone Expressway east. Like all the major roads, it led to the waterfront, to the Arch. It was the Arch that made St. Louis lie down. Buzz watched it with naïve fascination, an unthinking delight in its unlikely size, its reaching three-dimensionality, its steady sweep along the Illinois horizon. It stood nearly as high as they were flying. It transformed the downtown area into an indoor space, and Buzz and Asha into birds, wheeling through it. Martin! To be above the city but also in it: Buzz felt suddenly his kinship with his other friend, in whose speech and carriage and stature all the plasticity of the actual St. Louis found expression. Then he heard the engine grow quiet. He saw Asha pull the control column back and realized what was about to happen.

“Asha, don’t,” he said.

A city ordinance prohibited flying through the Arch. Asha concentrated. The colorful stadium opened up black and white beneath them.

It was already happening. Undangerously, with a speed proportional to theirs, the Arch spread its legs to permit them. Wharf Street was a gutter into which they were falling. For an instant Buzz could almost have touched the sharp steel inner angle. Then they were through. Asha pulled them into a steep climb.

I couldn’t, he told himself. I’m firmly committed to the way things are. No merger for me, no sir, no sir. It makes no profit sense for me to move I’ve found it’s vital close to the technical center much that—

“You saying prayers?” Asha said.

“Was I—?”

“I can’t quite hear you.”

Below them the Mississippi receded, swung down with East St. Louis, where Buzz glimpsed the yellow flares of tiny fires.

Probst was just sitting down to breakfast on the first Sunday in March when he noticed a pair of trespassers in his back yard.

One was Sam Norris, a lesser yeti in a blue loden coat. The other was a stranger, a short man in a green parka with the furlined hood thrown back. Probst saw Mohnwirbel plodding out of the garage, the legs of his pajamas bunched between his overcoat and the tops of his black rubber boots, and making his way stiffly across the snow to Norris and his companion. Words were exchanged. Probst took a bite of sticky bun. Norris pointed at something in a bank of leafless azaleas. Mohnwirbel shook his head and made emphatic little karate chops. Norris smiled and looked directly at Probst without a trace of recognition.

Mohnwirbel returned to the garage. Arms akimbo, Norris and the short man squinted and stamped. Probst could see himself finishing breakfast and reading the paper and never bothering to find out what was going on out there. But now Norris was beckoning impatiently.

He went out in shirtsleeves. “Morning, Sam. What brings you here?”

“Herb,” the General said, “Martin Probst. Martin, like you to meet Herb Pokorny.”

The little man folded his arms behind his back. He wore a thin helmet of blond, wet-looking hair. His nose was flat and small, his skin pockmarked like weathered stone, his eyes shallow-set and practically lashless, and his lips the same beige color as the rest of his face. He reminded Probst of the famous sphinx whose nose Napoleon’s soldiers had shot off.