Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“God, no.”

“Snowboarding accident. She’s still on major meds. And of course this is known to the Wolf. The Wolf can always spot the weak lamb in the flock.”

Pip was impressed, almost confounded, that Willow hadn’t played the dead-brother card with her. Had simply sat there under the tree and taken her punishment. It spoke to the intensity of whatever Andreas had said to her.

“I’m understanding a little better how you’re stuck here,” she said.

“Yeah, well. From what you’re telling me, I suspect my days have been numbered since you got here.”

“Colleen. You know I’d rather be your friend than his.”

“You say that now. But he’s only been back for one day.”

“I don’t want to be here if you’re not here.”

“Really? If what you need is time away from your mother, you should try to hold out longer than two weeks.”

“I don’t have to go back to California. Maybe we could both go somewhere else.”

“I thought you had a missing parent to find.”

“Maybe Flor can give me a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and then I won’t have to.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn about rich people,” Colleen said. “Flor won’t even share her dental floss.”

When Pip went to the barn the next morning, after her early hike, Willow was outwardly unchanged and yet seemed like a different person, a fragile person on antidepressants, a guilty survivor of her little brother’s death. This time it was Pip who initiated the hug. She couldn’t tell whether it was good that she’d overcome some of her hostility or sordid that she was now on hugging terms with a member of the in crowd; whether she was evolving or being corrupted. But Willow’s research chops were awesome. She typed and moused and clicked so rapidly, bouncing among so many windows at once — Australian property transfers, rosters of Australian corporate directorships, Australian business-news archives, dark-Web Australian government databases — that Pip could see it would be weeks before she could follow what Willow was doing in real time.

Andreas didn’t speak to her privately that day, nor the next day, nor for ten days after that. He was constantly conducting hushed powwows with the other girls, coming and going between the barn and the tech building, and having long informational conversations with Willow while Pip sat beginnerishly in a chair beside her. That he ignored only her, as if to emphasize that she was the only intern not contributing materially to the Project, was obviously deliberate. He was obviously trying to sharpen her appetite for further personal contact, further moments of intoxicating honesty. But she couldn’t bring herself either to confront him or to resent him. He’d got inside her head with a wooden spoon. She wanted more of what he was withholding. Not a whole lot more, she told herself. Just another taste, to be reminded of how it felt — to see if he could have that effect on her a second time.

And then one night he was gone again.

“Toni Field came to town,” Colleen explained after dinner.

“Really? To Santa Cruz? Why didn’t she just come here?”

“It’s part of his firewall between business and recreation. And apparently Toni needs special handling. She’s a little too into him. Doesn’t seem to understand who gets to set the rules. She way overstepped them by following him to Bolivia. He’s probably terminating their relationship as we speak. In the nicest way imaginable, of course.”

“He told you that?”

“He tells me a lot, sister. I’m still first among nobodies. Don’t you be forgetting that.”

“I hate you.”

“You’re kind of breaking my heart here, Pip. I gave you fair warning about him. And now you say a thing like that.”

Two mornings later, returning from her hike, Pip found Pedro waiting for her with the Land Cruiser on the grass in front of the main building. She still couldn’t understand every word Pedro said, but she gathered that El Ingeniero (as he called Andreas) wanted her to join him in Santa Cruz right away.

“ ¿Yo? ¿Está seguro? ”

“ Sí, claro. Pip Tyler. Va a necesitar su pasaporte. ”

Pedro was impatient to leave, but she begged permission to take a shower and put on fresh clothes. She was so out of her head that she found herself shampooing her hair a second time without intending to. She couldn’t even frame the question of why she’d been summoned. Her thoughts were jostling fragments. Too late to ask Colleen if interns ever traveled with Andreas. Too late to ask Pedro if she was supposed to bring anything but her passport, or what she should wear. She looked down at her left palm and saw that she’d filled it with shampoo a third time.

The inbound drive felt less epically long than the outbound had. Civilization reassembled itself in the form of dusty roadwork, cheap loudspeakers blasting música valluna , billboard ads for mobile devices, posses of kids in school uniforms, a deepening particulate pall. Not until they were into Santa Cruz’s ringed boulevards, passing stores that were simply small warehouses with the front wall removed, did Pip hazard to ask Pedro why he supposed El Ingeniero wanted her in town.

Pedro shrugged. “ Negocios. Él siempre tiene algún ‘negocito’ que atender. ”

In a less raw and more shaded neighborhood was a low-rise hotel called the Cortez. Pedro helped her register and instructed her to wait in her room for a call from El Ingeniero. She searched Pedro’s face for evidence of custodial worry, but he just smiled and told her to enjoy the city.

She’d never stayed in a hotel. Wandering through the lobby and bar, her knapsack on her shoulder, she heard conversations in English and possibly Russian. Out in the courtyard were jacaranda trees and a large fiberglass stork whose belly was a pay phone. She thought she saw Andreas at a table by the swimming pool, but it wasn’t him.

Having her own hotel room, cleaned expressly for her, was possibly the happiest-making gift she’d ever been given. There was a desinfectado -certifying strip of paper across the toilet seat, crisp paper wrappings on the drinking glasses, a TV, a built-in air conditioner, a minibar, total luxury. She remembered her high-school friends’ descriptions of Hawaiian resorts, her college friends’ raptures about room service, and how deprived she’d felt listening to them. Even poor people sometimes stayed at Motel 6. But her mother wouldn’t travel, and while her friends were taking spring-break road trips she’d always dutifully gone home to Felton.

She kicked off her shoes and rolled around on the bed, luxuriating in the cleanness of the pillowcases. She closed her eyes and saw a tropical highway with rompemuelles . She expected the phone to ring soon, but it didn’t, and so she lay for a while and listened to Aretha. She tried to watch soap operas that her Spanish wasn’t quite up to. She drank a beer from the minibar and finally cracked the Barbara Kingsolver novel that Willow had pressed on her. The sunlight in her window was mellowing to apricot by the time Andreas called.

“Good, you’re there.”

“Yah,” Pip said. Her voice sounded sultry from hours in a hotel-room bed. There was a bit of the wooden spoon simply in his having made her stay in bed all day.

“I had a very long meeting with an assistant defense minister.”

“That’s impressive. What about?”

“I’ll be in the bar. Come down when you can.”

When she hung up the phone, her hands were shaking, her whole arms, really, from the shoulders down. Again the sensation of having no idea where she was. She could almost see the thing her mother had claimed to see, the not-right thing about Andreas’s interest in her. The swiftness with which she’d arrived at this moment, the straightness of the line from Annagret’s questionnaire to a room at the Hotel Cortez, definitely gave her a feeling of no-control. And yet she’d emailed Andreas of her own free will. She’d come to Bolivia for good reasons of her own, and there was honestly nothing so outstanding or attractive about her. Was it simply that she was proving to be the weakest lamb?