Jonathan Franzen - Purity

How strange that he went through life loving who he was, savoring himself, enjoying his capabilities and levity, only to see something loathsome when a store clerk uttered a chance word and he saw himself objectively. He recalled his jump from the bridge — at first a delicious sense of floating on air but then a merciless acceleration, the ground lurching up at him viciously uncontrollable momentum body impact pain. Gravity was objective. And who had set him up to jump? It was so easy to blame the mother. He was her instrumentality, the accouterment of her sociopathy. There was a submerged but killing violence in what she’d done to him, but being a killer didn’t accord with her self-regard, and so, to help her out, he’d jumped from the bridge, and so he’d published those poems.

The black car shadowed him to their building and stopped when he went inside. Upstairs, on the top floor, he found the flat filled unusually with cigarette smoke, an ashtray heaping on a faux-Danish end table. He looked for Katya in her bedroom, in her study, in his own room, and finally in the bathroom. She was on the floor by the toilet, in the half-uncurled position of a stillbirth, her eyes staring at the toilet’s base.

For a moment, his guts twisted up. He was a four-year-old again, stricken at the sight of his beloved red-haired mother in distress. It all came back, especially the love. But the fact that it was coming back made him angry.

“Ah, so here we are,” he said. “What happened — the cigarettes make you sick?”

She didn’t move or answer.

“It’s wise to go slowly when you take up a habit again after twenty years.”

No response. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

“It’s just like old times,” he said jovially. “You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It’s remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I’m the only one who gets to see you on the floor.”

She breathed out and her lips grasped feebly at the exhalation, forming a few faint fricatives but nothing like a word.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” Andreas said.

Her next exhalation seemed to form the words what’s wrong with you .

“What’s wrong with me ? I’m not the one on the floor in a fugue state.”

No response.

“I bet you’re rethinking your decision not to abort me, right around now. It turns out to be so much more painful to wait twenty years for me to do it myself.”

Her eyes weren’t even blinking.

“I’ll be in my room if you want me,” he said, standing up. “Maybe you’d like to come and watch me masturbate — speaking of taking up old habits again.”

In truth he had no inclination to jerk off and wasn’t sure he ever would again. Nor was he sleepy or depressed — didn’t feel like lying down. He was in a state unlike any he’d ever known, a state of having absolutely nothing to do. No point in studying math or logic, no point in writing poetry, no interest in reading, no energy for throwing things away, no responsibilities, nothing. He thought of packing a bag, but he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to take to wherever he was going. He was afraid that if he went back into the bathroom he would kick his mother, and although it was true that his father could slap her out of her states, he somehow doubted that blows from him would do the trick. He perched on a windowsill and looked down at the black car on the street. The man in the passenger seat was reading a newspaper. This seemed to Andreas a poignant futility.

After a few hours, the telephone rang. He guessed that the caller was his father and that he wasn’t supposed to answer the phone himself. This was convenient, because he was afraid of speaking to his father. And maybe he wasn’t a total sociopath after all, because the thought of his father’s anger and shame and disappointment brought tears to his eyes. His father was the earnest little German boy who believed in socialism. He worked hard, he had a disturbed wife, and he’d lovingly raised a child who wasn’t his, not even spiritually. Beyond pity, Andreas had a sense of identification with him, for sharing the burden of Katya.

The phone rang and rang. It was a form of slapping but one so attenuated by distance that he counted more than fifty rings before he heard Katya stirring. The uncertain padding of her little feet. The ringing stopped, and he heard her murmur a few times and then hang up. Then sounds of her putting herself back together. By the time she approached his room, her steps were brisk, her false self reassembled.

“You have to leave here,” she said from the doorway. She was holding a lighted cigarette and the ashtray, which she’d emptied.

“You don’t say.”

“For now, you’re safe from arrest, thanks to your father. Of course, that could change at any time, depending on how you behave.”

“Tell him I appreciate it. Seriously.”

“He’s not doing it for you.”

“Even so. It’s nice for me, too. He’s been a good stepfather.”

Rather than take the bait, she dragged hard on the cigarette, not looking at him.

“How are those tasting, after all these years?”

“It’s not out of the question that you can do your service now. It would be hard service, on the worst base, and you’d be watched. Your deferment was already a costly embarrassment to your father, and it would be an immense favor to me if you’d do the service now. You may recall that I interceded for you.”

“When have you ever done anything but intercede for me? Everything I am I owe to you. Mother.”

“You’ve put both him and me in a terrible position. Me especially, since I was the one who interceded for you. The best thing you can do now is accept this extremely merciful offer.”

“ Hup , two, three, four. Are you out of your mind?” He laughed and slapped his head. “Sorry, tactless question.”

“Will you accept the offer?”

“How much do you want it? Enough to have an honest conversation with me?”

She snapped off a drag with the practice of a former smoker. “I’m always honest with you.”

“See what I mean? It’s not going to be so easy for you. But all you have to do is tell the truth for once, and I’ll do the service for you.”

She snapped off another drag. “That’s no bargain at all if you refuse to believe the truth.”

“Trust me. I’ll know it when I hear it.”

“The only other option is that you sever all contact with us permanently and take your chances on your own.”

That she could say such a thing, and say it so coolly, was an unexpectedly painful blow to him. He saw that, in her own way, she really was being honest with him now: there was room for only one fuckup in the home of Undersecretary Wolf. His father had enough trouble covering for her, cleaning up her messes, talking her out of rose gardens. He’d had at least one lover of hers imprisoned, he’d performed untold further miracles of suppression, and Katya wasn’t so bonkers that she didn’t know a good thing when she had it. Andreas had been flattering to her when he was the world’s most precocious boy, when he was in love with her, when he was her pretty prince. But as soon as she’d seen the pictures he was drawing, she’d ratted him out to his father and had him sent to a psychologist, and now there was nothing at all for her in him. The time had come to give him the boot.

And again tears came to his eyes, because, no matter how he’d come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. He’d even believed, at some level, that the cleverness of “Muttersprache” would please her. He was twenty years old and as duped as ever. And he didn’t want to leave her. That was the saddest, sickest part of it. He was still a wanting four-year-old, still betrayed by shit that had happened to his brain before he had a self that remembered.