Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“I hate America,” she said. “I thought Obama would change things, but it’s still just guns, drones, Guantánamo.”

“Guantánamo is unfortunate, I agree. I’m not asking you to like the country. I’m just asking you to go there. I’d do it myself if I could, but I can’t.”

“I’m not sure I can, either,” she said. “I know you always thought I was a good liar, but I don’t like doing that anymore.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re not still good at it.”

“And maybe … Well. Is it really so terrible if this person tells the world what we did? I still think about it almost every day. I can’t watch movies with any violence in them. Twenty-five years later, it still gives me panic attacks.”

“I’m sorry about that. But Aberant is threatening to discredit everything I’ve done.”

“I understand. The Project is very important. And I’ve always wished there was some way to make up for what I did to you. But — how does bringing his daughter to Bolivia help you?”

“Leave that to me.”

A silence fell. Worrisome.

“Andreas,” she said finally. “Do you feel bad about what we did?”

“Of course I do.”

“OK. I don’t know what I’m thinking about. I guess our time together. Sometimes I feel really bad about it. I know I disappointed you. But that’s not why I feel bad. There’s something else — I can’t explain it.”

He was alarmed but spoke calmly. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I see your life now, all your girlfriends, and … Sometimes I wonder why you didn’t have affairs when you were with me. It’s OK if you did. You can tell me now.”

“I never did. I was trying to be good to you.”

“You are good. I know all the fantastic good things you’ve done. Sometimes I can’t believe I used to live with you. But still … Do you really feel bad about the thing we did?”

“Yes!”

“OK. I don’t know what I’m thinking about.”

He sighed. So many years, and they still had to have discussions .

“I feel bad about the sex,” she said suddenly. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it is.”

“What about it?” he managed to say.

“I don’t know. But I have more experience now, more to compare it to. And hearing your voice — I don’t know. It’s bringing back something I don’t like to think about. Some really bad feeling I can’t describe. It’s making me panic, a little bit. Right now. I’m feeling panic.”

“It was all mixed up with the thing we did. Maybe it was why we couldn’t stay together.”

She took an audibly deep breath. “Andreas, this girl — why do you want me to bring her to you?”

“To make her believe in the Project. That’s our best protection. If she’s on our side, her father won’t do anything.”

“OK.”

“Annagret, that’s all it is.”

“OK. OK. But can I at least take Martin with me?”

“Who is Martin?”

“A man I feel close with. Safe with.”

“Certainly. All the better. Just, obviously”—he laughed creakily—“don’t tell him anything.”

Safe with : the words pushed the button connected to the electrode. All these years, and he was still thinking of killing her. How much of his subatomic life he must have unwittingly betrayed in his ten years with her! He’d been lucky that she was too young to make sense of it. But she’d lived with it and become aware of it in hindsight. The thought of her latter-day awareness, his hideous exposure in the eyes of someone who wasn’t him, was almost as bad as the thought of what Tom had seen.

While he waited to hear from her in Oakland, he took honest stock of himself and saw how much ground he’d lost in his battle with the Killer. How laughably venial his old preoccupation with online porn now seemed; how poignantly tempered with good intentions his plot to murder Horst. His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of hating Tom and conspiring to take revenge on him. At the rate he was going, he might soon be all Killer. And again he sensed that he would be a dead man, literally, once the Killer was fully in command. That he was who the Killer was actually intent on killing.

It therefore came as something of a relief to hear from Annagret that she’d botched her sales pitch to Pip Tyler and alienated the girl. With a sense of reprieve, he threw himself into the less insane work of collaborating on the film that the American auteur Jay Cotter was making of his life, based in part on The Crime of Love . He holed up at the Cortez for two weeks with Cotter and his production designer; he had long phone talks with Toni Field, instructing her in the ways of Katya. When he returned to Los Volcanes, another project, no less dear to his heart, was coming to fruition — a splendid dump of emails and under-the-table agreements between the Russian petroleum giant Gazprom and the Putin government. Although the Project now ran substantially on autopilot, Andreas had personally brokered the Gazprom leak and dictated the terms of its release to the Guardian and the Times . The leak’s provenance had required intricate laundering, an impenetrable maze of electronic red herrings to protect the source. Andreas also particularly loathed Vladimir Putin, for his youthful work with the Stasi, and he was determined to inflict maximum embarrassment on Putin’s government, because it was harboring Edward Snowden, about whose purity of motive far too much had been said online. In the twelve-minute video he recorded for uploading the day before the Times and the Guardian ran their stories, he was at his artful best in needling Putin and rebuking, subtly, the online voices who’d allowed the one-hit wonder Snowden to distract them from his own twenty-five-year record. His continuing ability to rise to great occasions, coupled with the prospect of being the hero of a medium-budget movie with global distribution, was a welcome distraction from the problem of Tom Aberant.

The email that Pip Tyler then sent him, out of the blue, intensified his sense of reprieve. In reality, she was nothing like the figure from his vengeful imaginings. She was young-sounding, intelligent, amusingly reckless. The humor and hostility of her emails were a balm to his nerves. How sick of sycophancy he’d become since he succumbed to paranoia! How refreshing it was to be called out on his dishonesty! As he found himself warming to Pip’s emails, he imagined an escape route that the Killer had failed to foresee, a providential loophole: what if he could reveal to a woman, piece by piece, the complete picture of his depravity? And what if she liked him anyway?

Inconveniently, principal photography had commenced in Buenos Aires, and Toni Field had fallen for him hard. He appreciated, for the first time, the travails of male porn stars and the utility of Viagra. As if it weren’t bad enough that Toni was nearly his age and was portraying his mother, he couldn’t stop mentally comparing her with Pip Tyler. And yet, for any number of strategic reasons, not least to keep the leading actress happy, it was vital that he seem gratified by the affair. During his days in Argentina, and even more so after he’d returned to Bolivia and met Pip, he engaged in grueling Toni management. If it hadn’t been so inconvenient, it would have been hilarious how much like his mother Toni became before he managed to be rid of her.

He fell in love with Pip. There was no other way to describe it. His motives initially were nothing if not vile, and the dark part of his brain never stopped whirring with calculation, but real love couldn’t be willed. Yes, he did his manipulative best to create a bond of trust with her, he confessed to the murder, he persuaded her to spy for him. But when, at the Cortez, to his amazement and delight, she let him undress her, he wasn’t thinking about her father; he was simply grateful for the sweet good girl she was. Grateful that she’d lured him into her room even though he’d confessed to the murder; grateful that she wasn’t repelled when he told her what he wanted to do to her. And when she then chastely declined to go further, there was, to be sure, a moment when he felt like strangling her. But it was only a moment.