Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“The questionnaire,” she said. “You didn’t really ever use it with anybody else. It was just for me.”

He smiled. “You were a special case.”

“Nobody else had to take it.”

“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you came here.”

“But why me ? Wouldn’t you rather have a true believer?”

“Precisely not. We’ve had some anomalies in our internal network. Little things missing, transmission log discrepancies. This is going to sound extremely paranoid, but it’s really only moderately paranoid. I have some reason to worry that we have a journalist embedded with us.”

“No, that’s fairly high-grade paranoia.”

“Think about it. Somebody who wants to come and spy on us would pretend to be the truest of believers. That’s how they’d get in. And all I have is true believers.”

“What about Colleen?”

“She came as a true believer. I almost completely trust her. But not quite.”

“Jesus. You really are paranoid.”

“Sure.” Andreas smiled again, more broadly. “I’m out of my fucking mind. But this guy who I confessed to in Berlin — who got me to confess — he was a journalist. And do you know what he does now? He runs an investigative-journalism nonprofit.”

“Which one?”

“It’s better if you don’t know, at least for a while.”

“Why not?”

“Because I just want to you to listen. Keep your ears open, without preconceptions. Tell me your sense of what’s going on. I already know you have very good sense.”

“So basically be a horrid spy.”

“Maybe. If you want to use that word. But my spy. The person I can talk to and trust. Would you do that for me? You can keep learning from Willow. We’ll still help you try to find your father.”

She thought of good old mentally ill Dreyfuss— There was something not right about those Germans. She said, “You didn’t actually kill anyone, did you.”

“No, I did, Pip. I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It’s really not a matter of opinion.”

“Hmm. And you say Annagret helped you?”

“It was terrible. But yes. She did. Her mother had married a very evil person. I have to live with what I did, but part of me doesn’t regret it.”

“And if the story comes out, that’s the end of Mr. Clean.”

“It destroys the Project, yes.”

“And the Project is you. You’re the product.”

“So you say.”

Something in Pip’s chest spasmed, almost retched. “I don’t like you,” she said involuntarily. She was having an outburst with no advance warning. She scrambled out of the booth, reached back into it for her knapsack, and ran to the door of the restaurant and out onto the sidewalk. Was she sick to her stomach? Yes, she was. She dropped to her knees beneath a streetlight and spat up a dark rope of liquid.

She was still on her hands and knees when Andreas crouched beside her and put his hands on her shoulders. For a while he didn’t say anything, just gently massaged her shoulders.

“We should get some food in you,” he said finally. “I think it would help.”

She nodded. She was at his mercy — it wasn’t like there was anywhere else she could go. And the way he was rubbing her shoulders was undeniably tender. No man old enough to be her father had ever touched her like that. She allowed herself to be led back to the booth, where he ordered her an omelet and french fries.

After she’d eaten part of the omelet, she started drinking again, really putting it away. In the haziness that ensued, there were the actual words he spoke, many more words about his crime, about Annagret, about East Germany, about the Internet, about his mother and his father, about honesty and dishonesty, about his breakup with Toni Field, and then there was the deeper nonverbal language of intention and symbol which constituted the wooden spoon. The working over her brain was getting now was far more prolonged and thorough than the first one. Each of the two languages, the verbal and the nonverbal, kept distracting her from the other, and she was in any case increasingly drunk, and so it was hard to follow what was being said in either language. But when a second bottle of wine had been emptied, and Andreas had paid the waiter, and they’d walked back to the Hotel Cortez, where Pedro was waiting with the Land Cruiser, she found that it didn’t matter whether or not she liked Andreas.

“You’ll be home by midnight,” he was saying. “You can make up whatever story you like. A broken tooth, emergency dental work — whatever you like. Colleen will still be your friend.”

Pedro was holding open the door of the Land Cruiser.

“Wait,” Pip said. “Can I go to my room and lie down first? Just for an hour. My head’s a little spinny.”

Andreas looked at his watch. It was clear that he wished she would leave now.

“Just for an hour,” she said. “I don’t want to be sick on the highway.”

He nodded reluctantly. “One hour.”

As soon as she was in her room, she felt sick again and threw up. Then she drank a Coke from the minibar and felt much better. But instead of going downstairs, she sat on the bed and waited for some time to pass. Making Andreas impatient seemed to her the only form of resistance available, the only way to assert herself against the spoon. But was resisting what she even wanted? The longer she waited, the more erotic the suspense felt. The mere fact of waiting in a hotel room implied sex — what else was a hotel room for?

When the phone rang, she ignored it. It rang fifteen times before it stopped. A minute later, there was a knock on the door. Pip stood up and opened it, afraid it would be Pedro, but it was Andreas. He was pale, tight-lipped, furious.

“You’ve been here an hour and a half,” he said. “You didn’t hear the phone ring?”

“Come in for a second.”

He looked up and down the hallway and came in. “I need to be able to trust you,” he said, locking the door. “This is not a good start.”

“Maybe you just won’t be able to trust me.”

“That’s not acceptable.”

“I have poor impulse control. This is a known fact about me. You knew what you were getting into.”

Still pale, still angry, he moved toward her, backing her into the corner behind the TV. He grasped her arms. Her skin felt alive to his, but she didn’t dare be the one to make the move.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “Strangle me?”

He could have found this funny, but he didn’t. “What do you want?” he said.

“What does every girl want from you?”

This did seem to amuse him. He let go of her arms and smiled wistfully. “They want to tell me their secrets.”

“Really. I find that hard to relate to, not having any myself.”

“You’re an open book.”

“Pretty much.”

He walked away and sat down on the bed. “You know,” he said, “it’s difficult to trust a person with no secrets.”

“I find it hard to trust people, period.”

“I’m not happy that Pedro knows I’m up here with you. But now that I’m here, we’re not leaving until I know I can trust you.”

“Then we could be here quite a while.”

“Do you want to hear my theory of secrets?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“My theory is that identity consists of two contradictory imperatives.”

“OK.”

“There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you’re just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen knows what you secretly think of Willow. You know what Colleen secretly thinks of Flor. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust. Am I making any sense?”