Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Ramón, sweetie?”

“Hi Pip,” he said, not moving at all.

She sat down on his bed and touched his fat arm. “Stephen said you wanted to see me. Do you want to turn around and see me?”

“I want us to be famlee,” he said, not moving.

“We’re still family,” she said. “None of us is going anywhere.”

“I’m going somewhere. Marie said. I’m going to the home where she works. It’s a different famlee but I like our famlee. Don’ you like our famlee, Pip?”

“I do like it, very much.”

“Marie can go but I wanna stay with you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss, just like before.”

“But we’ll all still see you, and now you can make some new friends, too.”

“I don’ wan’ new frens. I wan’ my old frens, just like before.”

“You like Marie, though. And she’ll be there every day, you’ll never be alone. It’ll be sort of the same and sort of new — it’ll be nice.”

She sounded to herself just like she did when she was lying on the phone at work.

“Marie don’ do things with me like you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss do,” Ramón said. “She’s too busy. I don’ see why I have to go with her an’ not stay here.”

“Well, she takes care of you in a different way. She earns money, and we all benefit from that. She loves you just as much Stephen does, and anyway she’s your mother now. A person has to stay with their mother.”

“But I like it here, like famlee. Wha’s gonna happen to us, Pip?”

She was already imagining what would happen to them: how much more time she’d have alone with Stephen. The best part of living here, even more than discovering her capacity for charity, had been that she got to be around him every day. Having grown up with a mother so unworldly that she couldn’t even hang a picture on a wall, because it would have entailed buying a hammer to drive the nail, Pip had arrived on Thirty-Third Street with a hunger to learn practical skills. And Stephen had taught her these skills. He’d shown her how to spackle, how to caulk, how to operate a power saw, how to glaze a window, how to rewire a scavenged lamp, how to take apart her bicycle, and he’d been so patient with her, so generous, that she (or at least her body) had had a feeling of being groomed to be a worthier mate for him than Marie, whose domestic skills were strictly of the kitchen. He took her dumpster-diving, demonstrating how to jump right in and toss things around, digging for the good stuff, and sometimes she even did this by herself now, when she saw a promising dumpster, and exulted with him when she brought home something usable. It was a thing they had together. She could be more like him than Marie was, and thus, in time, more liked. This promise made the ache of her desire more bearable.

By the time she and Ramón had had a good cry together, and he’d refused to go downstairs with her, insisting that he wasn’t hungry, two of Stephen’s young friends from Occupy had arrived with quarts of low-end beer. She found the three of them sitting at the kitchen table, talking not about Marie but about wage/price feedback loops. She preheated the oven for the frozen pizzas that were Dreyfuss’s contribution to communal cooking, and it occurred to her that she would probably get stuck with more cooking now that Marie was gone. She considered the problem of communal labor while Stephen and his friends, Garth and Erik, imagined a labor utopia. Their theory was that the technology-driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.

“I have a question, though,” Pip said as she tore up the head of romaine lettuce that Dreyfuss considered a salad in itself. “If one person is getting paid forty thousand dollars a year to be a consumer, and another person is getting forty thousand to change bedpans in a nursing home, isn’t the person changing bedpans going to kind of resent the person doing nothing?”

“The service worker would have to be paid more,” Garth said.

“A lot more,” Pip said.

“In a fair world,” Erik said, “those nursing-home workers would be the ones driving the Mercedeses.”

“Yeah, but even then,” Pip said, “I’d rather just ride a bike and not have to change bedpans.”

“Yeah, but if you wanted a Mercedes and changing bedpans was the way to get it?”

“No, Pip’s right,” Stephen said, which gave her a modest thrill. “The way you’d have to do it is make labor compulsory but then keep lowering the retirement age, so you’d always have full employment for everybody under thirty-two, or thirty-five, or whatever, and full unemployment for everybody over that age.”

“Kind of sucks to be young in that world,” Pip said. “Not that it doesn’t already suck in this world.”

“I’d be up for it,” Garth said, “if I knew that starting at thirty-five I’d have the rest of my life to myself.”

“And then, if you could get the retirement age down to thirty-two,” Stephen said, “you could make it illegal to have kids before you retire. That would help with the population problem.”

“Yeah,” Garth said, “but when the population goes down, the retirement age necessarily goes up, because you still need service workers.”

Pip took her phone out onto the back porch. She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was. While the light faded in the west, she replied, dutifully, to some texts from her remaining friends and then dutifully left a message for her mother, expressing hope that her eyelid was better. Her own body was still under the impression that something big was about to happen to it. Her heart went dunk, dunk, dunk as she watched the sky above the freeway turn from orange to indigo.

Dreyfuss was serving pizza when she went back inside, and the talk had turned to Andreas Wolf, the famous bringer of sunlight. She poured herself a large glass of beer.

“Was it a leak, or did they hack in?” Erik said.

“They never say,” Garth said. “It could be that somebody just leaked them the passwords or the keys. That’s part of Wolf’s M.O. — protect the source.”

“He’s making people forget there ever was a Julian.”

“At least Julian still blows him out of the water as a coder. Wolf’s hackers are all hired guns. He couldn’t even hack an Xbox by himself.”

“But Wiki was dirty — people died because of Wiki. Wolf is still reasonably pure. In fact, that’s his whole brand now: purity.”

The word purity made Pip shudder.

“This definitely helps us,” Stephen said. “There’s a bunch of East Bay properties in the document dump. This is exactly the kind of shit we’ve been trying to document from the outside. We need to reach out to all the East Bay homeowners in the leak and get them on our side, do a rally with them or something.”

Pip turned to Dreyfuss for an explanation. He ate with such pleasureless speed that food just disappeared from his plate without his seeming to touch it. “The Sunlight Project,” he said, “released thirty thousand internal emails from its undisclosed tropical location on Saturday night. Most of the emails are from the Bank of Relentless Pursuit, which is, interestingly, as you know, my own bank. Although my own case is nowhere mentioned in the emails, I believe it falls short of pathological to imagine that the German spies might have tried to do us a favor, having nosed out the identity of my bank. In any event, the emails are highly damning. Relentless Pursuit is still engaged in a pattern of misrepresentation, deceit, bullying, stonewalling, and the attempted theft of equity from homeowners in temporary distress. In toto, it casts a devastatingly unflattering light on the federal government’s settlement with the banks.”