Jonathan Franzen - Purity

The Sonic parking lot was empty. She’d decided not to risk spooking Phyllisha by calling her a second time; if she happened to be off work, Leila could come back tomorrow. But Phyllisha was not only there but was hanging halfway out the drive-in window, trying to touch the ground without falling all the way out.

As Leila approached the window, she saw the dollar bill below it. She picked it up and put it in Phyllisha’s hand.

“Thank you, ma’am.” Phyllisha levered herself back inside. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Leila Helou. Denver Independent.”

“Whoa. I would of sworn you’d be Texan.”

“I am Texan. Can we talk?”

“I don’t know.” Phyllisha leaned out the window again and scanned the parking lot and the street. “I told you about my situation. He’s picking me up at ten, and sometimes he’s early.”

“It’s only eight thirty.”

“You’re not supposed to stand here anyway. This is for cars only.”

“Why don’t I come inside, then.”

Phyllisha shook her head pensively. “It’s one of those things that only makes sense when you’re inside it. I can’t explain it.”

“It’s like being a willing prisoner.”

“Prisoner? I don’t know. Maybe. The Prisoner of Pampa.” She giggled. “Somebody oughta write a novel about me and call it that.”

“How into him are you?”

“I’m kind of nuts about him, actually. Part of me doesn’t even mind the prisoner part.”

“I get that.”

Phyllisha looked into Leila’s eyes. “Do you?”

“I’ve been in situations myself.”

“Well, shit. I don’t care. You can sit on the floor, down out of sight. The manager won’t see you if you come in through the back. Everybody else back here is Mexican.”

The leading occupational hazard of Leila’s job was sources who wanted to be friends with her. The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them. These were always the single-story sources, the “amateurs” whom she seduced by appearing to be whomever they needed her to be. (She also dissembled with the professionals, the agency staffers, the congressional aides, but they used her as much as she used them.) Many of her colleagues, even some she liked, were brutal in betraying their sources afterward and severing all contact with them, adhering to the principle that it was actually kinder not to return a call from a person you’d slept with if you didn’t intend to sleep with him again. In reporting, as in sex, Leila had always been a caller-back. The only way she could morally tolerate her seductions was honestly to be, at some level, the person she was pretending to be. And then she felt obliged to return her sources’ calls and emails, even their Christmas cards, after she was done with them. She was still getting mail from the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, well over a decade after she’d written a sympathetic story about his legal plight. Kaczynski had been barred from serving as his own counsel at his trial, effectively muzzled from airing his radical opinions about the U.S. government, by reason of insanity. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

What Phyllisha told her, while she sat on the floor amid ketchup smears and Mexican music, was that Cody Flayner was an all-hat loser she’d counted the days till she could get away from. Between his fine ass and his soft eyes and his droopy little puppy eyelashes, she hadn’t been able to resist getting in the sack with him. But she swore to Leila that she’d never meant for him to leave his wife and kids. He’d surprised her with that, and then, for a while, she was stuck with him. All she’d wanted was a good time, and here she’d wrecked people’s lives. She felt bad about it, and so she lived with Cody for six whole months.

“You stayed with him because you felt guilty?” Leila said.

“Kind of! That and free rent and lack of immediate other options.”

“You know, I did the same thing when I was your age. Wrecked a marriage.”

“Maybe if it can be wrecked, it oughta be wrecked.”

“There are different schools of thought on that.”

“So how long’d you stick around? Or did you not even feel guilty?”

“That’s the thing.” Leila smiled. “I’m still married to him.”

“Well, that’s a happy ending.”

“Safe to say there’s been some guilt along the way.”

“You know, you seem OK to me. I never met a reporter before. You’re not what I expected.”

That’s because I’m freaking good at getting people to open up , Leila thought.

Phyllisha interrupted herself to serve a carload of teenagers and then to scold her co-workers. “Hey fellas, no quiero la musica. Menos loud-o, por favor?”

That Cody was the best thing that ever happened to Phyllisha was a conviction of his that she did not reciprocate. The more he tried to impress her, the less impressed she got. He picked a bar fight in her presence to show her how well he could take getting the crap beaten out of him. His wife, the baboon face, hadn’t managed to get his wages garnished for child support — count on Big Government to screw things up — and he bought Phyllisha piles of bling and other stuff, including a brand-new iPad, to impress her. The whole idea behind his July Fourth surprise was to impress her. She knew that he worked at the bomb plant and had the most boring of all the jobs there. He could jaw for hours about variable yields and bunker busters and kilotonnage , making himself out to be personally responsible for keeping the nation safe. She finally got fed up and told him the truth, namely, that he was a nobody and she wasn’t impressed with these bombs that he didn’t actually have anything to do with. She hurt his feelings, but she didn’t care. She’d already exchanged meaningful eye contact with his friend Kyle, who lived over in Pampa.

On the night of July 3, coming home late from drinking with her girlfriends, she found Cody waiting for her on the front steps. He said he had another present for her. He took her around to the back yard, where something big and cylindrical was lying on a blanket. Cody said it was a fully armed B61 thermonuclear warhead, and what did she think of that ?

Well, she was afraid, was what.

Cody said, “I want you to touch it. I want you to get buck-naked and lay on it, and then I’m gonna do you like you never been done in your whole life.”

She hedged by saying she didn’t want to get radiation poisoning or whatnot.

Cody said the warhead was totally safe to handle and be around. He made her touch it with her hand and explained to her about one-point safety and permission action links. It was the usual all-hat routine, talking about stuff he didn’t really understand and had nothing to do with, except that this time there was an actual thermonuclear warhead on a blanket in his yard.

“And I know how to set it off,” he said.

You do not, Phyllisha said.

“There’s a way if you got the codes, and I got the codes. I can wipe old Amarillo right off the map. Right now.”

Why would you do that, Phyllisha wanted to know. She half believed him and two-thirds didn’t.

“To make you see how much I love you,” Cody said.

Phyllisha said she didn’t see the connection between loving her and blowing up Amarillo. She thought that, conceivably, by saying this, by buying time, she was saving tens of thousands of innocent Amarillo lives, her own not least among them. She was listening out of one ear for police sirens.