The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Gesundheit!” said the precocious voice.

  “Well! Thank you.”

  His words left a bad taste in his mouth. People were jostling him. He took refuge at the nearest plate-glass window, behind which white torsos displayed black lingerie. Well! Well! Well! He was sounding like his father. His father had made constant recourse to the word “well,” using it not as a dilatory particle but as an exclamation signifying both surprise and approval. If a customer at the Gamm’s shoe store where he worked complimented the suit and tie he was wearing (he was very particular about his clothes), he began his reply with a hearty, if occasionally somewhat baffling, “Well!” When Ginny or Martin came to Gamm’s to ask for money, the word expressed his delight at recalling his possession of such a pretty and vivacious young daughter, or such a serious and courteous young son. “Well!” The word put his customers on hold; these were his important young children; his children, mind you, not his grandchildren. From the store he brought home other usages, usages which did not seem at all distinctive at the time, but which forty years later were coming out of Martin’s mouth with increasing frequency, as he approached the age his father had been when Martin first became conscious of him as a person weaker than himself. In recent months he’d caught himself using the word “good” as an adverb, and worse, the construction “question whether,” a phrase characteristic of a man thinking aloud (there was an arrogance in thinking aloud) rather than addressing those around him. At the dinner table Ginny and Martin and their mother might have been discussing whether to replace their mutt Shannon, who one night had failed to return from his evening run; their father would sit silently with his beer while the table was cleared and freestone peaches were served in their syrup, and then, with a grunt: “Question whether it wouldn’t be simpler to get a stuffed animal for Gin and a sweetheart for Martin.”

  In the show window, right before Probst’s eyes, a white torso was coming alive. It rocked and spun as if in a frenzy over its lack of limbs; two saleswomanly hands had taken hold of it by the stump of its neck and were removing the bra from its conical alabaster breasts. He saw the saleswoman reading the size label on the bra. She turned to a customer, shook her head, and shrugged.

  To his left a little girl was crying. Her mother knelt and tugged her ringlets as if adjusting the picture. She wiped the tears with her thumb, obviously not realizing that this was an excellent way to introduce viruses to her daughter’s bloodstream. Probst moved on.

  He’d come to buy Christmas presents for Barbara, to make sure he got at least one thing finished today. On his list were books, bath products, and diamond earrings. He planned to let Plaza Frontenac give shape to his other, more abstract gift ideas. Fortunately Barbara was the only person he ever had to go shopping for.

  Yesterday evening, when he was trying to show his body who was boss by helping Mohnwirbel clear the latest eight inches of snow from the driveway, Barbara had called him inside. Jack DuChamp was on the phone. Jack hadn’t called since the night of the stadium incident. He said that he and Elaine always—heh, well, for years—threw a Christmas party on the twenty-third. Sorry about the late notice, but they’d sure like to have Martin and Barbara.

  Probst, under surveillance by Barbara, managed to tell Jack that it looked like they might not be able to make it, some relatives of Barbara had said they might be in town, that kind of thing, although they would definitely make an effort—

  “Great, great,” Jack said as Barbara, apparently satisfied, left the room. “We’re really looking forward to seeing you. Be sure and bring Luisa too, it’ll be a lot of families. Our kids would love seeing her.”

  On his way back out into the snow, Probst stuck his head in the smoky den. He said it looked as though they wouldn’t have to go. Wouldn’t have to go? Good grief, Martin. Of course they wouldn’t go.

  This morning he’d phoned in an additional order to the Florida citrus concern that provided for most of his and Barbara’s out-of-town gift needs. The DuChamps would get grapefruit in wintry February; the announcement should arrive by the day of the party. Probst hoped the citrus, the formality of the payoff, would somehow have the desired effect.

  Which was that Jack leave him alone.

  Dodging a pair of cannonballs—squat boys in jean jackets hurtling into a video outlet—he gained the escalator, where he sneezed into his hand and then clutched the black plastic handrail for balance, infecting it. He saw the handrail race extrusively out ahead of him and round the horn into the mechanics of the operation. He saw his germs spreading out along the entire band. He turned. Ten faces looked up at him, some of them with tenuous recognition (Morton Priest…?). He’d made them sick.

  A shop projecting science and plenitude, a tobacconist’s, caught his eye. Gallon jars with bevelled glass stoppers were labeled and stationed on shelves as in a museum of soil types, some of the tobaccos as black as Iowa, some red as Arkansas, others austere and blond, others sandy, others loamy and variegated. The store sold candy and magazines, too. An olde time shoppe. Probst went in, acknowledged the proprietor, and shook his head—just looking. Running up and down the steps of the candy display, his eyes were tripped up by triangular boxes of Toblerone. He turned one over in his hands and saw messages in German, French, and Italian, one language on each side.

  No English? Well! How neat, how imported, how Swiss of these chocolatiers, to use all three languages of Switzerland. A minor mystery—why were the boxes triangular?—was clarified. He’d buy some. They came in Christmas colors.

  From the periodical display he took a copy of House magazine. He wanted a sense of the people who on Friday would be photographing his living room, breakfast room and kitchen. The proprietor rang up the purchase. Probst asked him if he’d ordered the Toblerone straight from Switzerland.

  How so?

  Well, there was no English on the boxes.

  The proprietor frowned and looked. “Yes there is.”

  Probst looked. There was English. Also German and Italian. How on earth had he mistaken the English for French?

  “Yes, English, French and German,” the proprietor said. Probst shrugged and made to leave, but he couldn’t help seeing the man rub his nostrils with two of the fingers with which he’d just taken a five-dollar bill—

  “Everything all right?”

  Nodding over his shoulder, Probst found himself running into something which he grabbed to stabilize and came even closer to toppling before he saw what it was: a wooden cigar-store Indian, nearly as tall as he, rocking violently. He made it stop. The proprietor was shaking his head with annoyance and disapproval. Probst had overestimated his stamina today.

  He crossed the atrium and sat down on a polished oak bench beneath a miniature tree with waxy leaves. He was in no condition to be shopping. But if he didn’t shop now he’d have to come back another time. Barbara had asked how long he’d be out and he’d said at least an hour. He couldn’t barge in on birthday preparations. Besides, if he went home, he’d go to bed. He hated to go to bed, on his birthday.

  But what was a birthday anyway? All he could picture, when he thought of being born, was his head emerging from a hole between his mother’s legs. The picture became remarkably vivid when he thought about it, as if he really had seen it on TV or in a theater and was remembering. What camera, at bed level, had captured the emergence of his head? It was a flickering old film, from an old, old camera. No history seemed more ancient.

  In the days when she still fed him nice questions, Luisa had asked what his earliest memory was. That would have to have been, he said, the streetcar accident when he wasn’t yet three. He remembered flying through the air and hitting a silvery bar. Yes. He’d been standing on a seat, not yet three…

  The shoes and murmurs of shoppers passing him sounded impatient, as pedestrian movements always do to someone at rest, creating a patter so unbearable that only joining it can bring relief. Nevertheless Probst resisted. His throat was a tube of pain. He needed to sit a while longe
r. Then he’d shop, buy bath oil, books and earrings. He might not have the strength today to shop for bargains, but colds made him extravagant. He was sick, it was his birthday, he could do what he pleased. He could recall that for years he was haunted by the memory of propulsion, of collision with a bar, as by a nightmare undispelled by identification as such, without knowing that a thing like this had actually happened to him. People put accidents behind them, and it was only by chance that his mother, years later, had mentioned a time on the Grand Avenue line when you, Martin, were thrown and given a concussion.

  He could reach back even further, into the history of his father. Carl Probst had had a farm and a house in Stillwater, he was young and unindebted and owned shares in the largest local bank, when the hard times blew into Oklahoma. His wife died, and the rain stopped falling. The banks began to foreclose on mortgages. He sold his shares in protest (so he later claimed, though undoubtedly he needed the cash, too) and sold them, moreover, in the face of what the whole town knew: there was oil in the area. By 1940 the bank was among the wealthiest in Oklahoma. By 1940 Carl Probst was in St. Louis handling the feet of strangers. If he’d hung on to his shares he’d have been not fabulously rich but not so poor that he couldn’t have weathered the dust-bowl years, and leased his land, and made it. He didn’t make it. Probst saw him trying to break that red brick dirt in February using two horses and his only son—Carl Jr.—to make way for seed on which no rain, or not enough, would fall, while on every horizon, on every unblacklisted tract, derricks rose. He heard him telling the young children of his young second wife that he’d done the Right Thing. And he remembered, as a child, believing him.

  He popped a Sucret. Tennis shoes squeaked on the parquet floor. The feeling he had now was a feeling he’d had as a younger man sitting on benches, the feeling of being an old man sitting on a bench and able to watch the world go by. The world was Frontenac women in boots with salt stains, flitting typists who glanced at their watches, businessmen fueling one another’s laughter, small children unraveling from mothers to point at the lavender elephants in the window opposite Probst, to paw from a distance. But there were parallel worlds—worlds of the invisible, of viruses, of latent behavior, of phrases of his father’s. On Sunday when Wesley had made his pitch and mentioned the world “circle” and Probst had decided to leave at once, it had not actually been a decision. He had found himself below the threshold of cause and effect, following an action that came straight and swiftly from the soul of what he was, as he reenacted his father’s central denial: I won’t be a part of this; no matter what it costs me, I won’t be a part.

  An elderly woman in red rubber boots was sitting down beside him on the bench. He began to make more room between them and heard her say, quite distinctly, “Little prissy.” He made it a whole yard between them.

  We’re at the center of things, Martin.

  Probst had not stopped thinking about his morning in the sauna with the—with Sam. Sam found it important that Probst had bled at the stadium. Probst found it strange that his injuries had not been listed in the papers or on the airwaves. The more he thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed. He was Municipal Growth chairman, he’d been as seriously hurt as some of those other twelve; how much more did it take to get yourself counted? Had some police sergeant or hospital clerk refused to count a thirteenth injury for the same reason that high-rises lacked thirteenth floors? Probst didn’t mind not having his name in the papers, it appeared there often enough in other contexts, but he wondered why the powers of information had seen fit, for once, to ignore him. If Trudy Churchill’s name and address and broken leg were Known to them, then Probst’s broken finger and blood loss must have been equally Known. A suppression had obviously occurred.

  Conspiracy. Coincidence. Conspiracy.

  Jammu controlled the police. Hutchinson, who’d spoken ominously of professional courtesy, controlled KSLX. Duane Thompson’s parents were both powerful figures at Barnes, where Probst had been treated. Pete Wesley controlled the city press office. The owners of the Big Red were intimate with everyone else who mattered, with Meisner, Norris, Buzz, Ross Billerica, Harvey Ardmore.

  Probst trusted no one. He had no knowledge of anyone’s motives. How could he be central when he was so abysmally ill-informed? Was he uninformed because he was central? If so, then the conspiracy was working both ways, excluding him from the news and the news from him. He was sick. Men kept away from him. He could hear them laughing and shouting and whispering like schoolboys outside the window of his inner sickroom. He was sick, and he could no more clear his head than he could find his way back into an involvement in the city’s public life, though he was nominally still at the center of it. All was treachery all of a sudden, Wesley, Meisner, Ripley, Ardmore, his own daughter, much of Municipal Growth. They wanted to use him without letting him in on the secret. He wasn’t counted because the conspiracy didn’t want him to count.

  The thousand quiet voices of Plaza Frontenac could have been hospital visitors, mourners in a mausoleum, refugees, evacuees, late-night travelers or watchers at the scene of a crime or accident, such was the implacable unselfconsciousness of their collective voice. As Probst listened, a great waste seemed to open in the soundscape. Perceptual capillaries filled the entire indoor space, superexfoliating, dully aching, all of them translucent, and all of them Probst’s own; or had the shopping center shrunk, in that sick sensation of tininess, until it fit in Probst’s ear and reduced the thousand sounds to auditory dots, compressing them, in the shell of his cranium, into the pure white rushing of a lifeless ocean? The birthday feeling nagged him. His conception grew dropsical and comprehensive. What if he was the city? More than centrally located: the thing itself?

  Born in the very pit of the Depression, he had groped and bullied his way into some kind of light, demolishing and steam-rolling and building higher, building the Arch, building developments of the most youthful and prosperous nature, the golden years of Martin Probst. Inside, though, he was sick, and the city was sick on the inside too, choking on undigested motives, racked by lies. The conspiracy invaded the city’s bloodstream while leaving the surfaces unchanged, raged around him and in him while he sat apparently unseen, uncounted, uninvolved, and it was right here, in this identity of his life with the city’s life, that he could see himself disappearing. The more he was a figure, the less he was a person. The more complete the identity, the more completely it excluded him. There were two Probsts, it seemed, and always had been; who else had run the camera in the delivery room, and who else was sitting thinking on this bench right now? But the personal Probst was disappearing. As his head had appeared fifty years ago, so he was disappearing now. He was a conspirator himself, as responsible for his disappearance as anyone else was. He let a childhood friend pester him, an old struggle with Barbara wear him down, he let anything and everything distract him, and meanwhile bugs were falling out of walls, personalities collapsing in the space of weeks, and everywhere Indians—planting bombs, teasing executives, dazzling the press and transferring stock and stopping traffic, like harbingers and furies both, storming back up the trail from the old Indian Territory, from which the Osage Warriors were telling him now there was no permanent escape. I’ve no use for cliques. It was a phrase of his father’s. The son should have said: I don’t have any use for. Nothing was safe from his xenophobia now, not even his own heart, not even the heart of his own city.

  He heard a splash of water.

  It was the old woman in red boots. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all,” she sang. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all.” She was swinging her legs, her coat spread open, and in a pale splashing flood she was urinating through the slats of the bench onto the polished parquet floor, gushing urine as if she’d been punctured. Probst staggered to his feet. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all!” She swung her legs, still splashing when he finally got out of earshot.

  He wound up in Crabtree & Evelyn, a gift box of a store wrapped in subdued colors and drenched with scents tha
t blended in an almost caustic potpourri. Unlike Barbara, Probst seldom lost his sense of smell. He saw brushes and sponges. Soap lozenges. Pink crystals. He was shaking all over.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Yes, I’d like to buy some bath oil.”

  A woman with a greenish frost was smiling, trying to help. She looked simple and good. “What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

  Probst allowed himself to be shown around. Usually he wasn’t so humble with sales help, but he wanted to be led. He answered questions about Barbara’s preferences. He took four different bottles, ridiculously many, but they were all flavors he’d seen at one time or another on the shelf by the tub. The more bottles he took, the more solicitous the woman became. Buying, he was calming down.

  “This will be plenty,” he said pleasantly.

  “Oh, I did want to show you one—”

  “Thanks. This will be all.” He accompanied her to the cash register. Payment was an agreeable business. He used American Express. The woman spoke of snow. Much, he agreed. It would melt soon enough, however. As she handed him the form to sign, the telephone rang. She excused herself.

  He stared at the words he had made. As always, he’d formed each letter individually, printing it. There were twelve of them, six letters in each name. The date was 12/12. Luisa was born on 11/1 and Barbara on 4/8. “Luisa” had five letters and “Barbara” had seven. Martin, born on 12/12, was both the average and the sum, and he was disappearing in the sudden blaze of schemes. Here the schemes were so perfect that there was no remainder at all, nothing left for him to do but die, his life explained.