Jonathan Franzen - Purity

On the third day, when she managed to drag herself to dinner, she found herself unpopular again. She ate with her head down and went back to bed. Nobody was honest with her now. She couldn’t tell if she was being ostracized because she was believed to have seduced Andreas or because he was known to be unhappy with her. Either way, she felt she deserved it. She composed an email epistle to Colleen, a full confession, before she realized that Colleen would only hate her more for it. She cut all but a few sentences:

You did the right thing, leaving. He really is a weird dude. All I did with him was talk, and that’s all it’s ever going to be. I’m not long for this place myself.

When Andreas returned, three days later, he was the same as before with her, cordial but distant, which made her feel all the guiltier. She believed that he really had told her a secret he’d told no one else at Los Volcanes — that he really had specially wanted her — and that, behind his smile, he had to be feeling hurt and ashamed. Unable to relive the moment of her decision, she fell to thinking that she’d made a ghastly mistake. What if she’d gone ahead and been his lover? What if she’d learned to be deliriously happy with him? Now his desire was bottled up inside him and she couldn’t enjoy it. She thought of begging him for a third chance, but she was afraid she’d chicken out a third time. She walked around for a week with a lump of near-clinical depression in her throat. She pretended to go for hikes but sat down after the first bend in the trail and wept.

He discovered her on one of these crying jags. It was late afternoon and getting dark; rain was falling from the outskirts of a thunderhead. He came around the bend in a yellow slicker and rubber boots and saw her with her back against a tree, her arms around her knees, getting soaked.

“I came looking for you.” He crouched down by her. “I didn’t realize you were so close.”

“I don’t hike anymore,” she said. “I just come here and cry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I ruined everything.”

“Don’t blame yourself. I’m a grown man. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m never going to betray you,” she blubbered. “You can trust me.”

“I won’t pretend that I don’t love you. I do love you.”

“I’m sorry,” she blubbered.

“But here, enough of that.” He took off his slicker, draped it over her, and sat down. “Let’s think about what you want to do now.”

She wiped her nose with her hand. “Just send me home,” she said. “I had one big opportunity here, and I blew it.”

“Willow tells me the search for your missing parent isn’t going well.”

“Sorry, two opportunities. Two things I failed at.”

“I’m afraid that Annagret and I did you a disservice, telling you we could help. What you’re looking for is pre — digital era, which makes it very hard. I spoke with Chen about you.” Chen was the chief hacker. “I asked if we could do a facial-recognition search with an older picture of your mother. It would take a lot of pirated computing power, and I’m willing to do it for you. But Chen thinks it would be a waste of time.”

In the clear gray light of her depression, Pip saw that she’d done again what she’d done with Igor at Renewable Solutions — had fallen for an employer’s empty sales pitch.

“It’s OK,” she said. “Thank you for asking him.”

“I’ll keep making your student loan payments as long as you’re here. But we should think about your next step. You’re a good writer, and Willow says you’re a very fast learner. You were miserable at your sales job. Have you ever thought about being a journalist?”

She managed a wan smile. “Isn’t the Project destroying the field of journalism?”

“Journalism will survive. There’s a lot of nonprofit money going into it now. Somebody as capable as you can find a job if she wants one. I’m thinking that old media might be more suited to you anyway, given how little you like what I’m doing.”

“I wanted to like it. I’m so sorry I can’t.”

“Enough of that.” He took her hand and kissed it. “You are what you are. I love what you are. I’m going to miss it.”

She started crying all over again. From somewhere in the mist came the thundercrack sound of sandstone splitting off the face of a pinnacle, followed by a muffled crash. She’d been on trails where shards of rock had fallen so close to her that she could hear the whistle of their plummeting.

“Can you order me?” she said.

“What?”

“Give me an order. Say I have to do journalism. Can you do that? I still want you to give me orders…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m such a mess.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said. “But, yes, if you insist. I can order you to do it.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“So let’s work on that. I have a little present for you, to get you started. Talk to Willow. She’ll show it to you.”

“You’re being really nice to me.”

“Don’t worry. There’s something in it for me, too. Do you see what it is?”

She shook her head.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said.

He must have given Willow another talking-to that afternoon. After ten days of coolness to Pip, she’d saved her a place at dinner and was eerily friendly to her again. In the evening, in the barn, she showed Pip a set of photographs deleted by a Facebook user but still retrievable, by the likes of Chen, from Facebook’s bowels. On the back of a pickup truck, at somebody’s party in Texas, was what appeared to be an operational nuclear warhead. It couldn’t possibly be a real one, but it looked exactly like the real ones Pip had seen in presentations at her study group in Oakland.

In the weeks that followed, she tried to teach herself journalism. With the help of a hacker boy, she friended the Facebook user who’d put up the pictures, but this went nowhere. She had no idea how to approach the Air Force or the weapons plant with questions, and, even if she had, she would have been calling without credentials on a Skype-like connection from Bolivia. This gave her new respect for real journalists but was personally discouraging. She might have given up if Andreas hadn’t then connected her with a Bay Area whistle-blower who had information about groundwater contamination at a Richmond landfill. Using the information, and making phone calls to less intimidating local authorities — she wasn’t afraid of cold-calling; she’d developed at least one usable skill at Renewable Solutions — she produced a story that then magically appeared online at the East Bay Express , whose editor was a fan of Andreas. The Express also ran her next piece, “Confessions of an Outreach Associate,” which Willow had helped her with by failing to laugh at it until she’d made it genuinely funny.

Early in January, after she’d written two further, shorter pieces for the Express , on subjects supplied by the editor and reportable by telephone, Andreas went for a walk with her and suggested that she apply to work as a research intern at an online magazine called Denver Independent. “It specializes in investigative journalism,” he said. “It wins prizes.”

“Why Denver?” she said.

“There’s a very good reason why.”

“ East Bay Express seems to like me. I’d rather be closer to my mom.”

“Are you asking me to order you?”

It was three months since their morning at the Cortez, and she was still wishing he’d ordered her to go to bed with him.

“Denver’s just a name to me,” she said. “I don’t know anything about the place. But sure. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”