Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Meanwhile the leaks kept coming, in plain brown envelopes and cartons without return addresses. Being German, and East German at that, he was technologically conservative and still thought in terms of paper documents and physical computer disks. As late as the summer of 2000, he shared a home computer and email address with Annagret. She, with her community-organizing, her fringe causes, was the tech-savvy one. More and more often, he came home to find her typing and clicking away, in her absurdly limber posture on a chair, knees drawn up to her chin, arms reaching around them, a tea mug by her computer mouse, and thought: My God, is this the rest of my life? To the Killer in him, it seemed as if she’d armed herself with the Internet to defend herself against the person he really was. There was no prying her away from it.

But then she did him a seemingly lifesaving favor. She made him buy his own powerful computer and take full advantage of it. Which he proceeded to do. By night, he developed a network of malcontents and hackers and created the Sunlight Project; by day, while Annagret was off holding hands at her community center, he viewed pornography. It was really the latter more than the former that sold him on the Internet and its world-altering potential. The sudden wide availability of porn, the anonymity of access, the meaninglessness of copyright, the instantaneity of gratification, the scale of the virtual world within the real world, the global dispersion of file-sharing communities, the sensation of mastery that mousing and clicking brought: the Internet was going to be huge, especially for bringers of sunlight.

It was only much later, when the Internet had come to signify death to him, that he realized he’d also been glimpsing death in online porn. Every compulsion, certainly his own viewing of digital images of sex, which quickly became day-devouringly compulsive, smacked of death in its short-circuiting of the brain, its reduction of personhood to a closed loop of stimulus and response. But there was also already, in the days of file-transfer protocols and “alt” newsgroups, a sense of the unfathomable vastness that would characterize the mature Internet and the social media that followed it; in the uploaded images of somebody’s wife sitting naked on a toilet, the characteristic annihilation of the distinction between private and public; in the mind-boggling number of wives sitting naked on toilets, in Mannheim, in Lübeck, in Rotterdam, in Tampa, a premonition of the dissolution of the individual in the mass. The brain reduced by machine to feedback loops, the private personality to a public generality: a person might as well have been already dead.

And death, of course, was catnip to the Killer. The images on the screen of his computer distracted him from thoughts of dark hallways and secret defilements, and for a while he believed that he’d found a way to make life with Annagret livable in the long run. He could preserve his ideal self in his own eyes by remaining mindful of the male exploitation of women he was witnessing on his screen, deploring it even as it stimulated him, and then, after discharging his urges, he could preserve the ideal in Annagret’s eyes as well. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin. Maybe she was punishing him for forbidding her to confess their crime to Katya, or maybe it was gender politics or maybe just the normal course of things, but she seemed not to care if they ever had sex again. What she wanted — explicitly asked for, in her concept-heavy way — was closeness and togetherness . These could be achieved by cuddling, and Andreas, with his needs met elsewhere, was fine with cuddling. The Internet had made it easier for both of them to be like children.

It took him half a year to realize that, far from escaping, he’d trapped himself more deeply. He believed that if he couldn’t make a life work with beautiful Annagret, wedded to her by their secret and by his old hope of redemption, he’d never again muster enough hope to make a life work with anyone. To leave her would be to admit that something had always been wrong with him. But something was wrong with him. He was even more of a compulsive masturbator now than he’d been as a teenager. Repetition was objectively boring but he couldn’t stop it. The right-thinking incantations that had worked for a while, his scrupulous efforts to imagine the circumstances under which a teenage girl would permit three thuggish Russian men to ejaculate on her face in front of a camera, and to feel compassion for such a girl, no longer worked. What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all. He became afraid of being touched by Annagret. He took a deep breath whenever he saw it coming, so that he wouldn’t flinch. Closeness and togetherness were precisely what he couldn’t bear now, and it was all the more desperately important that she not find this out and leave him in disgust. Without her idealization, there was no hope for him. He began to wonder if suicide, his own death, was what the Killer really wanted.

Although he knew the Killer was his enemy, he could never quite bring himself to hate it. Whenever he tried to tell himself that he hated it, his mind took a step back and saw that he was lying: he didn’t honestly want to be anything but exactly who he was. This was especially evident in the lack of guilt he felt about killing Horst Kleinholz. He was never able to wish he hadn’t done it. Indeed, when he was being fully honest with himself, he was immensely glad he had. And the same was true of the afternoons he spent jerking off at his powerful computer. He condemned what he was doing by the principles he wanted to believe in, but he could never hate it in the moment. Instead he resented Annagret, resented his own moral considerations, resented his other responsibilities, for standing in the way of his compulsion. And yet it was complicated, because when his watchful self stepped back from the computer over which he was hunched with his pants around his ankles, he hated what he saw. He wasn’t constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world. The shameful, loathsome object with which something was very wrong. And it was beginning to occur to him that Annagret and his mother might be better off without that object; that he should have chosen a higher bridge to jump from as a teenager.

In something near desperation, he wrote a letter to Tom Aberant. Over the years, he and Tom had kept up a postcard correspondence. Tom’s cards had the wry American tone that Andreas had liked in him, but they lacked the confessional warmth that had incited him to make his own confession. In his letter, he tried to revive the warmth. He said he now understood what had happened in Tom’s marriage; he mentioned, with what he hoped was self-deprecating humor, that he was somewhat overly preoccupied with Internet porn; he pretended he had business that might soon take him to New York. It shouldn’t have been hard for Tom to read between the lines and discern a plea for help. But the postcard Tom sent in reply was wry and distant and contained no invitation to New York.

It fell to Andreas’s mother, of all people, to rescue him. At her invitation, he went to her flat for lunch on a rainy September Friday, four days before Al Qaeda’s masterstroke. He was late because he’d found it necessary to experience orgasm one more time before he left, to bring himself as low as he could. Depression could be a sort of narcotic, dulling the impulse to argue with Katya and contradict her. The less he said to her, the better. Best of all would have been not to have lunch with her, but she’d told him that they needed to discuss Annagret’s future privately. She’d hinted that it had to do with drawing up a new will.