Jonathan Franzen - Purity

The spot he had in mind was behind the shed, where his father had always piled yard waste. Beyond the pile the pines were sparse, their fallen needles lying thick on soil furrowed by the frost heaves of winters past. The darkness was near total here, the only light a few grayish panels between the surrounding trees, in the direction of the West’s greater brightness. His mind was working so well that he thought to remove his watch and put it in his pocket, lest the shock of digging damage it. He turned on the flashlight and laid it on the ground while he cleared needles, setting aside the most freshly fallen in a separate pile. Then he turned out the light and dug.

Chopping through roots was the worst — hard work and loud work. But the neighboring houses were dark, and he stopped every few minutes to listen. All he heard was the rustle of rain and the faint generic sounds of civilization that collected in the basin of the lake. Again he was glad of the soil’s sandiness. He was soon into gravel, noisier to dig through but harder to slip on. He worked implacably, chopping roots, levering out larger stones, until he recalled, with some panic, that his sense of time was messed up. He scrambled out of the hole for the flashlight. Eight forty-five. The hole was more than half a meter deep. Not deep enough, but a good start.

He made himself keep digging, but now his anxiety was back, prompting him to wonder what time it was, what time. He knew he had to hold out and keep doing , not thinking, for as long as he could, but he soon became too anxious to wield the shovel with any force. It still wasn’t even nine thirty, Annagret hadn’t even met her stepfather in the city yet, but he climbed out of the hole and forced himself to eat some bread. Bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew, swallow. The problem was that he was parched and hadn’t brought water.

Fully out of his head, he dropped the bread on the ground and wandered back to the shed with the shovel. He could almost not remember where he was. He started to clean his gloved hands on the wet grass but was too out of his head to finish the job. He wandered around the edge of the yard, stepped wrong and left a deep footprint in a flower bed, dropped to his knees and madly filled it, and managed to leave an even deeper footprint. By now he was convinced that minutes were passing like seconds without his knowing it. From a great distance he could still discern his ridiculousness. He could picture himself spending the rest of the night leaving footprints while cleaning his hands after filling footprints he’d left while cleaning his hands, but he also sensed the danger of picturing it. His mind was drawn to silliness as if to some sweet infantile distraction from anxiety. If he let the native hue of his resolution be sicklied over with it, he was liable to put down the shovel and go back to the city and laugh at the idea of himself as a killer. Be the former Andreas, not the man he wanted to be now. He saw it clearly in those terms. He had to kill the man he’d always been, by killing someone else.

“Fuck it,” he said, deciding to leave the deep footprint unfilled. He didn’t know how long he’d knelt on the grass having extraneous and postponable thoughts, but he feared it was a lot more time than it had felt like. Again from a great distance, he observed that he was thinking crazily. And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.

Interesting thought, bad time to be having it. There were a lot of small things he should have been remembering to do now, in the proper sequence, and wasn’t. He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there. This couldn’t be a good sign. He took off his muddy boots and his slippery socks and went inside. What else, what else, what else? He’d left his gloves and the shovel on the front porch. He went back out for them and came inside again. What else? Shut the door and lock it. Unlock the back door. Practice opening it.

Extraneous bad thought: were the whorls of toeprints unique like those of fingerprints? Was he leaving traceable toeprints?

Worse thought: what if the fucker thought to bring a flashlight or routinely carried one on his bike?

Even worse thought: the fucker probably did routinely carry a flashlight on his bike, in case of a nighttime breakdown.

A still worse thought was available to Andreas — namely, that Annagret would be there and could use her body, could feign uncontrollable lust, to forestall any business with a flashlight — but he was determined not to entertain it, not even for the relief from his terrible new anxiety, because it would entail being conscious of an obvious fact, which was that she must already have used her body and feigned lust to get the fucker out here. The only way Andreas could stand to picture the killing was to leave her entirely out of it. If he let her into it — allowed himself to acknowledge that she was using her body to make it happen — the person he wanted to kill was no longer her stepfather but himself. For putting her through a thing like that; for dirtying her in the service of his plan. If he was willing to kill the stepfather for dirtying her, it logically followed that he should kill himself for it. And so, instead, he entertained the thought that, even with a flashlight, the stepfather might not see the trip wire.

He’d heard it said, possibly by Dr. Gnel, that every suicide was a proxy for a murder that the perpetrator could only symbolically commit; every suicide a murder gone awry. He was prepared to feel universally grateful to Annagret, but right now he was more narrowly grateful that she was bringing him a person worth killing. He imagined himself purified and humbled afterward, freed finally of the filth, freed of the sordid history of which this lakeside dacha was a part. Even if he ended up in prison, she would literally have saved his life.

But where was his own flashlight?

It wasn’t in his pockets. It could be anywhere, although he surely hadn’t dropped it randomly in the driveway. Without it, he couldn’t see his watch, and without seeing his watch he couldn’t ascertain whether he had time to put his boots back on and return to the back yard and find the flashlight and ascertain whether he did, in fact, have time to be looking for it. The universe, its logic, suddenly felt crushing to him.

There was, however, a small light above the kitchen stove. Turn it on for one second and check his watch? He had too complicated a mind to be a killer, too much imagination for it. He could see no rational risk in turning on the stove light, but part of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn’t think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. An interesting paradox. But it didn’t answer the question of whether he should turn the light on.

And why was it so important to look at his watch? He couldn’t actually think of why. This went to his point about intelligence and its limits. He leaned the shovel against the back door and sat down cross-legged on the mud rug. Then he worried that the shovel was going to fall over. He reached to steady it with such an unsteady hand that he knocked it over. The noise was catastrophic. He jumped to his feet and turned on the stove light long enough to check his watch. He still had at least thirty minutes, probably more like forty-five.

He sat down on the rug again and fell into a state like a fever dream in every respect except that he was fully aware of being asleep. It was like being dead without the relief from torment. And maybe the adage had it backward, maybe every murder was a suicide gone awry, because what he was feeling, besides an all-permeating compassion for his tormented self, was that he had to follow through with the killing to put himself out of his misery. He wouldn’t be the one dying, but he might as well have been, because the relief that would follow the killing had a deathlike depth and finality in prospect.