Jonathan Franzen - Purity

She stared straight ahead, her jaw set.

“Knotty little problem, right?”

She slumped against the rear cushions of her sofa, continuing to stare blankly. It was as if he were witnessing his question’s short-circuiting of her troubled brain. He imagined the fugue: A loving mother always puts her son’s welfare first, and to be a loving mother looks good, but in this case putting my son’s welfare first would entail my looking bad, and the whole point is not to look bad, and yet to worry about looking bad is not to put my son’s welfare first, and a loving mother always puts her son’s welfare first … Around and around like that.

“No-answer is an answer,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to leave now.”

She didn’t stop him; didn’t say anything at all. The last look he’d seen on her face had been so desolate that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d jumped out a window to her death. But the difference between him and her was her capacity for self-deception. She didn’t kill herself. Instead, after he’d worked his magazine connections and found a book publisher for The Crime of Love , and after it had spent twelve weeks on the Spiegel bestseller list and he’d reaped universal praise for promoting it, she moved to London and rented a flat near the house of her widowed sister. She published — in the London Review of Books , no less — a long and self-justifying and chokingly dishonest essay on the unreliability of East German memory. She kept living, living.

He did, too. There were plenty of women who really liked sex and wanted it with him, and there was global fame to be pursued. Both were compulsions but not pathological ones. For a long time, while talented young people flocked to the Sunlight Project, and while he applied his math and logic skills to becoming a crack technologist and a pretty good writer of code, and while the excitement of leaking increased with the pervasiveness of the Internet, until he had a bodyguard to protect him from crazies and a team of pro bono lawyers to defend him against the governments and corporations he lived to taunt, his ten years in prison with Annagret and the Killer seemed to him like a long bad dream that he’d awakened from. He never saw his mother, but in the great decade that followed the nineties, as he savored the ease of serial monogamy and the joy of consistently winning at the fame game, he sometimes thought back on her rhetorical question: how bad could his childhood have been? Even when he fled arrest in Germany, fled extradition from Denmark, found precarious refuge in Belize, luck was with him.

And then one day, in Belize, the Killer was back. Probably it had never been away, but he didn’t become aware of it until he was leaving the beachside compound of Tad Milliken, after a delicious lunch. Tad Milliken was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who’d retired to Belize to avoid the inconvenience of a statutory-rape charge pending against him in California. He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar,” but he was surprisingly good company if you kept him on topics like tennis and fishing. He considered Andreas the second-most world-historical person residing in Belize, a fellow Übermensch , and wanted to be his friend, but this was awkward. Andreas badly needed money and hoped that Tad might give him some, and Tad still had Internet apologists who remembered him fondly as a father of the Revolution and insisted that he had an airtight insanity defense on the rape charge, but Tad had recently been in the news again for shooting a neighbor’s pet macaw with the silver-plated Colt.45 he carried with him everywhere, and Andreas couldn’t afford to be seen in public with him. Creepy sex stuff had already tarred Assange’s reputation. Andreas imagined people googling “tad milliken,” seeing “Andreas Wolf” and “statutory rape” on the first page of results, conflating his blondness and his line of work with the unfortunate orthographic proximity of “Andreas” to “Assange,” and receiving the subliminal impression that he had a thing for fifteen-year-olds. Which he no longer did. And so he went to socially contortionate lengths to conceal from Tad his wish to see him only at his compound or on his fishing boat. It helped that, whenever they had a date, Tad sent a driver in a dark-windowed Escalade.

Tad was a self-documentarian. He had a self-activating camera in the Yankees cap he always wore and a tiny video device on a lanyard around his neck. At lunch, which was served poolside by a barefoot beauty named Carolina, conceivably as old as sixteen, Andreas had asked whether Tad might, for once, turn the cameras off. Tad, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to show off his sea-turtle belly, his tanned and heavily crunched abdominals, laughed and said, “You have something to hide today?”

“I’m just wondering where all this data goes.”

“Let the sun shine in, man. You’re on Candid Camera .” Tad laughed again.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you. But if something were to happen to you…”

“You mean, if I die? I’m never going to die. That’s the whole point of life-logging.”

“Right.”

“The data’s in the cloud, and the cloud is eternally self-renewing. The error rate compared to DNA self-replication? Five orders of magnitude lower. Everything will be there, pristinely preserved, when they reboot me. I want to remember this lunch. I want to remember Carolina’s little toes.”

“I see what’s in it for you. But from my point of view—”

“You don’t care for the cloud.”

“Not so much.”

“It’s still in its infancy. You’ll love it when they reboot you.”

“I already spend every day fishing unsavory things out of it.”

“Ah, speaking of fish—”

Carolina had appeared with a platter of grilled fish on banana leaves. She moved Tad’s silver gun to one side and set down the platter, and he pulled her onto his lap and kissed the side of her neck. Her smile seemed somewhat pained. Pulling the low-cut bodice of her dress away from her chest, Tad pointed his video device down inside the dress. “I’m going to want to remember these, too,” he said. “These especially.”

Carolina slapped away the camera and wordlessly extricated herself.

“She’s still mad at me about the bird,” Tad said, watching her go.

“I can’t say it’s playing well in the press, either.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that she liked the bird. It was worse than living next door to a sheet-metal plant, the shrieking of that thing. She just didn’t think I could bag it without a shotgun. It was almost religious-superstitious. Thou shalt not use a revolver on a bird. She was deaf to my argument that a revolver is more sporting.”

Andreas took some fish. “Let’s talk about Bolivia.”

“The country has no coast,” Tad said. Possibly the most repellent thing about him was the dainty way he stabbed at food and poked it into his mouth, as if contact with it were a necessary evil. “It had a coast, but Chile stole it. Anyway, I can’t live there. I need the sea. But there’s a place in the mountains, Los Volcanes. Used to be owned by a German guy who does ecological survey work. I’d hired him when I was thinking I could corner the world market in lithium. He told me he’d been flying in a small plane and seen this little Shangri-la valley and said to himself, What the fuck ? Bought it for thirty-five thousand American, unbelievable. I took an extra day to go and see it, and he was right. The place is unearthly. I offered him a million, he settled for one and a half. Some things you see and you just gotta have ’em.”