Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Yes, please.”

“Of course you do.” Tierney turned on his camera and let Andreas watch while he deleted, one by one, the images in which his face was visible. Andreas was reminded of the day, in a different decade, a different life, when he’d scrubbed the porn from his computer, and of his favorite lines of Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! “It’s over now!” What’s that supposed to mean? It’s as good as if it never was.

But it hadn’t never been. All Tierney had to do was mention the incident somewhere online, and it would stay in the cloud forever. In the weeks following the incident, while Andreas was closing down the beach house and exchanging strongly encrypted emails with Tad Milliken, his paranoia spread roots and flourished. With every different keyword he entered with his name in every different search engine, he was no longer content to read the first page or two of results. He wondered what was on the next page, the one he hadn’t read yet, and after he’d looked at the next page he found yet another page. Repeat, repeat. There seemed to be no limit to the reassurance he required. He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self. The eyes of the world, even the eyes of his followers, didn’t matter for their own sake, in the physical world. Who even cared what a person’s private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn’t exist in the retrievable, disseminable, and readable way that data did. And since a person couldn’t exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet’s image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. The Internet meant death , and, unlike Tad Milliken, he couldn’t take refuge in the hope of a cloud-borne afterlife.

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks — making things, learning things, remembering things — that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization. Once he was up and running in Bolivia, he created a small team of truest-believing hackers and female interns who performed SEO by means both fair and foul. Tad’s dream of luxury reincarnation may have been technically unrealistic, but it was a metaphor for something real: if — and only if — you had enough money and/or tech capability, you could control your Internet persona and, thus, your destiny and your virtual afterlife. Optimize or die. Kill or be killed.

For a year, he searched “tierney andreas milliken” two and three times a day. He monitored Tierney on Facebook and Twitter no less compulsively. His paranoia was evidently a fixed quantity. If he suppressed it in one place, it popped out in a different place. When Tierney finally ceased to worry him so much — if the guy was going to blab, he would have done it by now, and Andreas would have known about it — he didn’t become any less anxious. He worried, serially, about former girlfriends, about disgruntled former employees, about surviving Stasi functionaries, until he arrived at the mother of all worries: Tom Aberant.

For a long time, for twenty years, he’d assumed that the secret of his homicidal past was safe with Tom. By helping to move the body, Tom had committed a serious crime himself, and in the letter he’d sent Andreas some months later, from New York, he’d apologized for “bailing” on him, had assured him that nothing he’d said in Berlin would ever see the light of day, neither in Harper’s nor anywhere else, and had expressed the wish that their “little adventure” would allow Andreas to have the life he wanted with his girl. Injured though Andreas had felt by the distant tone of Tom’s later postcards, especially the one in reply to his confessional letter, he hadn’t been worried by it. Even when he’d taken one last stab at reviving their friendship, in 2005, by calling Tom in Denver and offering a major leak to Denver Independent, and Tom had rebuffed him, he hadn’t worried. At worst, he’d thought, Tom was in professional competition with him. It was the sort of thing that could happen in abortive friendships.

But then one morning, in the barn at Los Volcanes, reading the daily digest of news about himself, he came across an interview that a Denver Independent journalist, Leila Helou, had given to the Columbia Journalism Review .

The leakers just spew. It takes a journalist to collate and condense and contextualize what they spew. We may not always have the best of motives, but at least we have some investment in civilization. We’re adults trying to communicate with other adults. The leakers are more like savages. I don’t mean the primary leakers, not Snowden or Manning, they’re really just glorified sources. I mean the outlets like WikiLeaks and the Sunlight Project. They have this savage naïveté, like the kid who thinks adults are hypocrites for filtering what comes out of their mouths. Filtering isn’t phoniness — it’s civilization. Julian Assange is so blind and deaf to basic social functioning that he eats with his hands. Andreas Wolfis a man so full of his own dirty secrets that he sees the entire world as dirty secrets. Fling everything at the wall, like a four-year-old flinging poop, and see what sticks.

Dirty secrets? Andreas reread the offending passage with cold dread. Who the fuck was Leila Helou? A quick search turned up photos of her and Tom Aberant together at professional functions, along with catty remarks, on bottom-feeding blogs, to the effect that sleeping with Denver Independent’s publisher had done wonders for her talent. Leila Helou was Tom’s girlfriend.

Dirty secrets? Flinging poop? Where was the filtering in that ?

He thought of the call he’d made to Denver in 2005. The Halliburton Papers had been the Sunlight Project’s most significant international leak to date. He could have taken them straight to the New York Times , but he knew that Tom had started up an online news service and would probably jump at the chance for overnight notoriety. Although his motive in calling Tom was less than fully pure — he enjoyed the idea that Tom now needed something from the friend he’d abandoned, the friend who was now more famous and powerful than he was — the old yearning for his friendship was part of it. He’d imagined that Denver Independent could be the Project’s American mouthpiece; that he and Tom could finally work together, albeit from separate continents. And Tom, on the phone, had sounded interested. Yes, almost gushing — it was fifteen years since they’d heard each other’s voice. He’d asked Andreas for one hour to discuss the leak with a “trusted adviser.”

This had sounded like a mere formality. But when Tom had called back, after an hour and fifteen minutes, his tone of voice had changed. “Andreas,” he’d said, “I really appreciate the offer. It means a lot to me, and it’s a tough call. But I think I have to stick with my core mission, which is to nurture investigative journalism. Boots-on-the-ground journalism. I’m not saying there’s no place for what you’re doing. But I’m afraid that place isn’t here.”

Hanging up the phone, Andreas had vowed never to let himself be hurt by Tom again. But only now, eight years later, when he read the Helou interview, did he understand that Tom wasn’t merely indifferent to him. Tom was an existential threat.

What he saw all at once: that Tom had glimpsed the Killer. In the light of dawn, in the Oder valley. The monster stiffy that hugging Tom had given him was not, as he’d supposed, the natural unleashing of the libido he’d suppressed since the night of the murder. Nor was it a gay man’s stiffy, not in any meaningful sense. But it was nonetheless a stiffy for Tom . He had it for the same reason he’d had it for the fifteen-year-old Annagret: because Tom had made himself part of the murder. Man, woman — the Killer didn’t trouble with such distinctions. And what had he done then? He couldn’t remember for sure, it might have been a dream. But if it was a dream it must have been a vivid one. Straddling the grave, his stiffy in hand: had this really happened? It must have happened, because how else to explain why Tom had thenceforth shut him out? Tom had witnessed the thing the Killer had made him do. Tom had promised to have dinner with him but instead had run home to New York, taken refuge in his woman. And Andreas had proceeded to pursue him with a totally uncharacteristic lack of pride, sending him postcards, writing him a self-exposing letter, and finally calling him on the phone, not because the two of them were destined to be friends but because the Killer never forgot what it wanted, once it wanted it. There was no such thing as love.