Jonathan Franzen - Purity

The following week, returning from Washington, Leila had gone straight to the corner office of Tom Aberant, the founder and executive editor of Denver Independent. It was no secret at DI that she and Tom had been a couple for more than a decade, but the two of them kept things professional at work. She really just wanted to say, “Hi, I’m back.” But as she approached the open door of Tom’s office she caught a strange vibe.

A girl with long and lustrous hair was sitting with her back to the doorway. Leila had the distinct impression that Tom was ill at ease with her; and the thing about Tom was that nothing scared him. Leila herself was afraid of death, but Tom wasn’t. The threat of lawsuits and injunctions didn’t scare him, corporate money didn’t scare him, firing employees didn’t scare him. He was Leila’s mighty fortress. But in his haste to stand up, before she was even through the doorway, she sensed a perturbation. Uncharacteristic also his fumbling for words: “Pip — Leila — Leila — Pip—”

The girl had a strikingly deep suntan. Tom hurried around his desk and did a herding thing with his arms, bringing the two women together while also moving them toward the doorway, as if eager to get Pip away from him. Or as if to underline that he wasn’t trying to hide her from Leila. The girl’s face was honest and friendly and less than threateningly beautiful, but she seemed discomfited herself.

“Pip’s already turned up more good stuff in Amarillo,” Tom said. “I know you’re slammed, but I thought maybe the two of you should work together.”

Leila queried him with a frown and caught something in his averted eyes.

“I’m very busy this week,” she said pleasantly, “but I’m happy to try to help.”

Tom herded them through his doorway. “Leila’s the best,” he said to Pip. “She’ll take good care of you.” He looked at Leila. “If you don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Great.”

And he closed his door behind them. The door he almost never closed. A few minutes later, he came out to Leila’s work space for the exchange of greetings they ought to have had in his office. She knew she shouldn’t ask if he was OK, since she hated being asked this herself and had trained Tom never to do it: How about I just tell you if I’m ever not OK . But she couldn’t help doing it.

“Everything’s fine,” he said. His eyes were masked by the reflection of the overhead lighting on his wire-frame glasses. The glasses were of an awful seventies design and of a piece with the military buzz he gave to his remaining hair; another thing he wasn’t afraid of was anyone’s opinion of how he looked. “I think she’s going to be terrific.”

She . As if Leila’s question had referred to her.

“And … which of my other stories would you prefer that I neglect?”

“Your choice,” he said. “She says she owns the story, but we have no way of knowing who else knows about it. I don’t want us to be chasing it after it goes viral.”

“ Broken Arrow II . That’s quite the first pitch from a research intern.”

Tom laughed. “Right? Not Strangelove— Broken Arrow . That’s our association now.” He laughed again, sounding more like his usual self.

“I’m just saying it seems a little too good to be true.”

“She’s Californian.”

“Hence the impressive suntan?”

“Bay Area,” Tom said. “It’s like the flu viruses coming out of China — pigs, people, and birds all living under one roof. The Bay Area is where you’d expect a story like this to come from. All that hacker capability mingling with the Occupy mentality.”

“I guess that makes sense. It’s just interesting that she came to us. She could have taken the story anywhere. ProPublica. California Watch. CIR.”

“Apparently she has a boyfriend she followed here.”

“Fifty years of feminism, and women are still following their boyfriends.”

“Who better than you to straighten her head out? If you really don’t mind.”

“I really don’t mind.”

“What’s one more person on the long list of people Leila’s nice to?”

“You’re absolutely right. It’s just one more person.”

And so the handoff to Leila had occurred. Had Tom been vaccinating himself against the girl by teaming her with his girlfriend? Pip was by no means the most attractive intern to have worked at DI, and Tom had often stated, in the hard-fact-stating voice he had, that his type was Leila’s type (slight, flat, Lebanese). What could it be about Pip that had required vaccination? Eventually it dawned on Leila that the girl might be a former type of Tom’s, a type like his ex-wife. And it wasn’t quite true that nothing scared him. Anything to do with his ex-wife made him nervous. He squirmed whenever someone on TV reminded him of her; he talked back at the screen. As soon as Leila understood that she was doing him a favor by assuming responsibility for Pip, she went ahead and took the girl under her care.

Did Cody talk about perimeter security when you were married? Were you surprised when you heard he’d taken a weapon home with him?

There’s nothing so dumb that Cody could do it and surprise me. One time he was stripping paint off our garage and tried to light a cigarette with the blowtorch — took him a while to notice he’d set his shirt collar on fire.

But the perimeter?

They had a lot of parameters that him and his dad used to talk about. Parameter is a word I definitely overheard. Exposure parameters, and … what else? Something with protocols?

But the gates, the fences.

Oh, my. Perimeter . You meant perimeter and here I’m talking about parameters. I don’t even know what a parameter is.

So did Cody ever talk about people sneaking things in or out?

Mostly in. They have enough bombs in there to turn the whole Panhandle into a smoking crater. You’d think they’d be a little nervous and alert, but it’s the opposite, because the whole point of the bomb is to make sure we never have to use it. The whole show is kind of a big huge nothing, and the people who work there know it. That’s why they have their safety competitions, their softball league, their canned-food drives — to keep it interesting. The work’s better than meat packer or prison guard, but it’s still boring and dead-end. So they’ve had some problems with contraband coming in.

Alcohol? Drugs?

No booze, they’d catch you. But certain illegal stimulants. Also clean pee for the drug tests.

And what about things coming out?

Well, Cody had a whole chest of nice tools with a little bit of radioactive in ’em, enough so OSHA said they couldn’t use ’em anymore. Perfectly good tools.

But no bombs going missing.

Lord, no. They have bar codes, they have GPS, they have all these sheets you have to sign. They know where every bomb is every minute. I know about that because that’s where Cody worked.

Inventory Control.

That’s right.

Leila turned off the recording as she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila’s headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way.