Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

I EXPECTED TOstart drinking and having sex that summer. Siebert had returned from college by herself (her family had moved to Texas), and we had already done some heavy stagnating on her grandmother’s living-room sofa. Now Lunte and his family were about to embark on a two-month camping trip, leaving Siebert to house-sit for them. She would be in the house by herself, every night, for two months.

She and I both took jobs downtown, and on our first Friday she failed to show up for a lunch date with me. I spent the afternoon wondering whether, as with Merrell, I might be coming on too strong. But that evening, while I was eating dinner with my parents, Davis came to our house and delivered the news: Siebert was in St. Joseph’s Hospital with a broken back. She’d asked Davis to take her to the top of the Eden Seminary bell tower the night before, and she’d fallen from a thirty-foot downspout.

I felt like throwing up. And yet, even as I tried to wrap my mind around the news, my most pressing concern was that my parents were getting it directly, before I could tailor it for them. I felt as if I and all my friends had been Caught in a new, large, irrevocable way. My mother, as she listened to Davis, was wearing her darkest scowl. She’d always preferred the well-spoken Manley to the lumpy Davis, and she’d never had much use for Siebert, either. Her disapproval now was radiant and total. My father, who liked Siebert, was upset nearly to the point of tears. “I don’t understand what you were doing on the roof,” he said.

“Yeah, well, so anyway,” Davis said miserably, “so she wasn’t on the roof yet. I was on the roof trying to reach down and, you know, help her.”

“But, Chris, my God,” my father cried. “Why were the two of you climbing on the roof at Eden Seminary?”

Davis looked a little pissed off. He’d done the right thing by giving me the news in person, and now, as a reward, my parents were beating up on him. “Yeah, well, so anyway,” he said, “she like called me last night and she wanted me to take her up to the top of the tower. I wanted to use rope, but she’s a really good climber. She didn’t want the rope.”

“There’s a nice view from the tower,” I offered. “You can see all around.”

My mother turned to me severely. “Have you been up there?”

“No,” I said, which was accidentally the truth.

“I don’t understand this at all,” my father said.

In Davis’s Pinto, as the two of us drove to Eden, he said that he’d gone up the downspout ahead of Siebert. The downspout was solid and well anchored to the wall, and Siebert had followed him easily until she reached the gutter. If she’d just extended her hand, Davis said, he could have reached down from the roof and pulled her up. But she seemed to panic, and before he could help her the focus went out of her eyes, her hands flew back behind her head, and she went straight down, twenty-five feet, landing flat on her back on the seminary lawn. The thud, Davis said, was horrible. Without thinking, without even lowering himself off the gutter, he jumped down thirty feet and broke his fall with the roll he’d practiced after lesser jumps. Siebert was moaning. He ran and banged on the nearest lighted windows and shouted for an ambulance.

The grass at the base of the downspout was not as trampled as I’d expected. Davis pointed to the spot where the EMTs had put Siebert on a rigid pallet. I forced myself to look up at the gutter. The evening air at Eden, incoherently, was mild and delicious. There was twilight birdsong in the freshly foliated oak trees, Protestant lights coming on in Gothic windows.

“You jumped down from there?” I said.

“Yeah, it was really dumb.”

Siebert, it turned out, had been fortunate in landing flat. Two of her vertebrae were shattered, but her nerves were intact. She was in the hospital for six weeks, and I went to see her every evening, sometimes with Davis, more often alone. A guitarist friend and I wrote inspirational songs and sang them for her during thunderstorms. It was dark all summer. I lay on the Luntes’ pool table with rum, Löwenbräu, Seagram’s, and blackberry wine in my stomach and watched the ceiling spin. I didn’t hate myself, but I hated adolescence, hated the very word. In August, after Siebert’s parents had taken her back to Texas with a cumbersome body brace and a lot of painkillers, I went out with the girl I’d been dating in the spring. According to my journal, we had an excellent time making out.

ADOLESCENCE IS BESTenjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart’s getting crushed or exalted, even when you’re absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come these moments when you’re aware that what’s happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You’re miserable and ashamed if you don’t believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you’re stupid if you do. This was the double bind from which our playing with Mr. Knight, our taking something so very useless so very seriously, had given us a miraculous fifteen-month reprieve.

But when does the real story start? At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I’ve become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who’s still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can’t belong, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I’m never going to die.

The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die. Along the way, however, Mr. Knight keeps reappearing: Mr. Knight as God, Mr. Knight as history, Mr. Knight as government or fate or nature. And the game of art, which begins as a bid for Mr. Knight’s attention, eventually invites you to pursue it for its own sake, with a seriousness that redeems and is redeemed by its fundamental uselessness.

FOR AN INEXPERIENCEDMidwesterner in the fast-living East, college turned out to be a reprise of junior high. I managed to befriend a few fellow lonelyhearts, but the only pranks I was involved in were openly sadistic — pelting a popular girl with cubes of Jell-O, hauling an eight-foot length of rail into the dorm room of two better-adjusted classmates. Manley and Davis sounded no happier at their respective schools; they were smoking a lot of pot. Lunte had moved to Moscow, Idaho. Holyoke, still with DIOTI, organized a final prank involving a classroom waist-deep in crumpled newspaper.

Siebert came back to St. Louis the next summer, walking without pain, wearing clothes in the style of Annie Hall, and worked with me on a farce about a police inspector in colonial India. My feelings toward her were an adolescent stew of love-and-reconsider, of commit-and-keep-your-options-open. Manley and Davis were the ones who took me to breakfast for my birthday, on the last morning of the summer. They picked me up in Davis’s car, where they also had a white cane, Davis’s dimwitted spaniel, Goldie, and a pair of swimming goggles that they’d dipped in black paint. They invited me to put on the goggles, and then they gave me the cane and Goldie’s leash and led me into a pancake house, where I amused them by eating a stack of pancakes like a blind man.