Jonathan Franzen - Purity

He tapped on the window at the door where the guard sat. “Can you let me out?”

The guard half stood to read the pass hanging from Andreas’s neck. “You’ll have to wait for your escort.”

“I’m not feeling well. I might throw up.”

“There’s a bathroom down the hall to your left.”

He went to the bathroom and locked himself in a stall. If the game was on, there had to be some way for him to escape. He still had his stiffy, and he felt a curiously strong impulse to take it out and ejaculate, most gloriously, into a Stasi toilet. It had been three years since he’d felt so wildly aroused, but he told himself — spoke it out loud—“Wait. Soon. Not yet. Soon.”

Returning to the hallway, he saw an open door with daylight spilling through it, suggesting a window he might climb out of. Again boldly, he walked to the door. It was a conference room, with windows on the courtyard. The windows had heavy grates, but two of them had been opened, as if to let in more light. When he stepped into the room, a female voice spoke sharply, “Can I help you?”

A thick middle-aged woman was placing biscuits on a glass plate.

“No, sorry, wrong room,” he said, retreating.

More workers were entering the building, dispersing into stairwells and side hallways. He stationed himself at the end of the main hallway, keeping an eye on the conference room, waiting for the woman to step out. He was still waiting when a commotion developed at the far end of the hall, at the entrance. He hurried toward it, plastic bag in hand.

Eight or ten men and women, manifestly not Stasi, were making their way through the portal. A smaller group of Stasi officers, in decent suits, was standing inside to greet them. Andreas recognized several of the visitors’ faces — this had to be the ad hoc Citizens’ Committee of Normannenstraße, making its first inspection of the archives, under strict supervision. The committee members were holding themselves erect, with self-importance but also with awe and trepidation. Two of them were shaking Stasi hands when Andreas pushed past them and through the inner door.

“Stop,” came the voice of the guard behind glass.

An officer was locking the outer door but hadn’t got the job done yet. Andreas shoved him aside, turned the handle, and pushed through. He sprinted across the courtyard with his plastic bag. There was shouting behind him.

The gate in the fence was locked, but there was no barbed wire, no concertina. He scrambled up and vaulted down and sprinted for the main gate. The guards merely watched as he ran out to the street.

And there were the TV cameras. Three of them, pointing at him.

A phone was ringing at the guard station.

“Yes, he’s right here,” a guard said.

Andreas glanced over his shoulder and saw two guards coming for him. He dropped his bag, raised his hands, and addressed the cameras. “Are you rolling?” he shouted.

One television crew was scrambling. A woman in another gave him a thumbs-up. He turned to her camera and began to speak.

“My name is Andreas Wolf,” he said. “I am a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, and I am here to monitor the work of the Citizens’ Committee of Normannenstraße. I’m coming directly from the Stasi archives, where I have reason to fear that a whitewash is occurring. I’m not here in an official capacity. I’m not here to work with , I’m here to work against. This is a country of festering secrets and toxic lies. Only the strongest of sunlight can disinfect it!”

“Hey, stop,” called a member of the crew that had been scrambling. “Say that all again.”

He said it all again. He was utterly improvising, but the longer he spoke and the more his image was recorded, the safer he was from being seized by the guards behind him. It was his first moment of media fame, the first of many. He spent the rest of the morning on Normannenstraße, giving interviews and rallying onlookers, demanding that sunlight be shined on the abscess of the Stasi. By the time the members of the Citizens’ Committee emerged from the compound, they had no choice but to welcome him to their cause, because he’d already stolen their media moment.

His plastic shopping bag was visible in thousands of frames of video that day. It was firmly under his arm when, late in the afternoon, he ran home to the basement of the church. He was almost free. His only worry now was the unsecurely buried body, he was very close to having Annagret, his libido was back. He didn’t even glance at the files in the bag, just shoved them under his mattress and ran outside again. In a state of sex-mad lightness, he crossed the old border at Friedrichstraße and made his way west to the Kurfürstendamm, where he met the good American Tom Aberant.

Ordinarily, Leila looked forward to traveling on assignment. She was never more of a professional, never more defensibly excused from her caretaking duties in Denver, than when she was locked in a hotel room with her green-tea bags, her anonymized Wi-Fi connection, her two colors of ballpoint, her Ambien stash. But from the moment she arrived in Amarillo, on a commuter jet from Denver, something felt different. It was as if she didn’t even want to be in Amarillo. The normally pleasurable economies of her competence, the preferred-customer getaway from the rental-car lot, the optimal route she took to the small house of Janelle Flayner, the swiftness with which she secured Flayner’s trust and got her talking, weren’t pleasurable. Late in the afternoon, she stopped at a Toot’n Totum convenience mart and bought a chef salad in a polyethylene box. In her hotel room, which a recent occupant had smoked in, she uncapped the cup of salad dressing and felt nailed by the product’s targeting of her demographic: the solitary 50+ female looking for something sensible to eat. It occurred to her that what she was feeling wasn’t generic loneliness. She had a new research assistant, Pip Tyler, and she was wishing she could have brought the girl along.

With a little ache in her throat, for which only work was a remedy, she set out after dinner to meet the former girlfriend of Cody Flayner. She left her room lights burning and the privacy card on her doorknob. Outside, the sky was cloudless and nicked with random dull stars, their contextualizing constellations obscured by light and dust pollution. The Texas Panhandle was in year five of a drought that might soon be upgraded to permanent climate change. Instead of April snowmelt, dust.

While she drove, she Bluetoothed her phone into the car stereo and listened uncomfortably to her interview of Cody Flayner’s ex-wife. She considered herself a good-hearted person, an empathetic listener, but in playback she could hear herself manipulating.

Helou — what kind of last name is that?

It’s Lebanese … Christian. I grew up in San Antonio.

You know, I was just sitting here thinking you sound Texan.

But Leila no longer sounded Texan, except when she was interviewing Texans.

Layla, if you don’t mind my saying, you don’t strike me as the kind of gal who picks wrong.

Ha. Take a closer look.

So you know what cheated-on feels like.

Anything that’s unhappy and has to do with marriage — yes.

It’s a sisterhood, all right. That phone of yours close enough?

We don’t have to use it if—

I told you, I want it on. It’s about time somebody listened to me — I’d started thinking nobody cared. If you want to put me on the Internet saying Cody Flayner is a DEADBEAT CHEATER MORON, you be my guest.

I hear he’s become very active in a Baptist church.