The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  They wanted Luisa to come along with them to Edgar’s house to watch Gilligan’s Island and drink lime Kool-Aid, two activities that seemed to have come into vogue since she stopped spending time with them. She wondered what else was in vogue. Group sex? Riflery? They gave no hint of disappointment when they turned up a side street off Glendale Road and she kept on towards Clark. She watched them shoving each other, playing chicken with the puddles, and not looking back at her. It was just like the day before, when no one at school would comment on her hair, not even Stacy. In a bleak mood on Saturday she’d had it cut very short, shorter than she’d ever worn it before. She was positive everyone had noticed—she looked like a punk where three days earlier she’d looked like Stanford material—and it hurt her that they should be so freaked out they couldn’t say anything at all. Maybe they were being delicate because they thought she had emotional problems. But she couldn’t have had emotional problems if she tried.

  Wet weather didn’t stop cigarettes from burning. In war footage soldiers smoked through the muddiest of battle scenes. Luisa wondered if anyone passing in a car now, any of her mother’s friends, would recognize her with her glasses and her hair like this, and the cigarette. It wasn’t really her friends who hurt her. She herself, when she got home on Saturday and locked herself in the bathroom, had almost cried at the sight. Her scalp showed white all over. Her lenses were coated with soapy light. She looked so strange and old and unhappy. But what really hurt was that the new style matched the inside of her. This was how she’d look on the inside, too, if anyone could see in there.

  Worst of all was that Duane had come home with his cameras and said she looked great. She more or less agreed. She wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t get a haircut that destroyed her looks. It just seemed unfair that the person who sympathized with her the most was someone she didn’t even get along with anymore.

  “Light rain is falling,” Nissing said to Barbara in a calm, accessible voice. “We sit in this room like two lifelong friends, having this last conversation.”

  Last? She raised herself onto two elbows. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you, but you should know by now. Can’t you feel? In this room that could be anywhere in the world when the rain falls and the afternoon is dark? You’ve said it yourself. You’re still as lonely as you were when you left your husband. Some things can’t be changed, and it seems that you are one of them. It was a happy dream for a while, when you’d broken free and everything was new, living in Manhattan or wherever it was, living with a man who understood you. It was fun while it lasted, until the problem of originality put an end to it and you became, conceptually, what you’d actually been all along: just another forty-three-year-old woman who’d left her home for a younger man and a life of more complete self-expression. Just another victim of the age, with too little youth remaining in you to dismiss your entire past as a prelude and then fashion another life. Maybe other women are braver than you, maybe their stories at this point are the stories of looking bravely to an uncertain and difficult future. But other women aren’t Barbara Probst, and you don’t want to be those other women. And if nothing else you’ve recognized that the apparent novelty of taking up with me and leaving Webster Groves hasn’t been novel at all. The emancipation will begin when you go home. You’re telling me, as we sit here, that you’ve decided to return to St. Louis. Admit it. That’s what you’ve wanted to do all along.”

  “But not for any reasons like this.”

  He slowed his words even more. “Are you saying you don’t miss your husband and daughter?”

  She shook her head. “I hate this game. But if I’d been doing all the things you say I have, I don’t think I’d be making this decision.”

  “While I’m saying it’s the easiest decision you’ve ever made.”

  “Because you’re making it for me.”

  “Leave me out of this. These are thoughts you might think. If my presentation isn’t perfect you should blame it on my not being in your head. I don’t believe I’m that far off the mark.” He stood up and fished in the pocket of his sport coat. He came up with a syringe and a glass bottle with a silver cap.

  “What’s that,” she said dully.

  “It is immaterial. We continue to talk in our quiet room.” He knelt by her bed and laid the syringe and bottle on the carpeting. He ripped open a small packet, grasped her left forearm, and wiped a patch of skin with an antiseptic swab. She didn’t resist—but she did remember that if anyone had tried to shoot something foreign into her before she’d done time in this cell she would have gone down biting and kicking. Hadn’t she tried to run from him when he kidnapped her? Hadn’t she screamed when he drugged her?

  Had she?

  “Everyone has secrets,” he said, plunging the needle into the bottle’s cap. “They’re good for the soul. They’re a form of nourishment for the grimmer days. I have a feeling that for the sake of your pride you will recall only the brighter days we’ve spent together, and let Martin believe you’ve had the best time a woman could have had.”

  She felt the needle enter. “You’re letting me go?”

  “That’s right.” He held her hand ominously. “I’m giving you your freedom, though it hurts us both. There’s no place like home. A funny notion. There’s no place like home. You say it.”

  Her blood ran cold. “What are you doing to me?”

  “There’s no place like home.”

  Already the room was turning. There’s no place like home. He was speaking from the other side, and a pounding heart moves poisons all the faster. This was her last thought.

  “…Jack Strom. We’re very pleased to have as our guest Dr. Carl Sagan on the topic of nuclear winter. We have time for just a few more calls from our listeners. Hello, you’re on the air—”

  “Thank you, Jack. I wonder if I could ask Dr. Sagan whether he thinks that publicizing this issue might not force the U.S. and Russia to invest more heavily in weapons like the, the neutron bomb. That is, instead of making war unthinkable, whether your research might actually be putting even more stress on destroying soft targets instead of on weapons that would, you know, start fires. Uh?”

  “Thank you very much. Doctor?”

  “Well. In the first place—”

  “An overnight low down around forty. Tomorrow should be mostly sunny and much warmer, with highs in the low to mid sixties. The outlook for Thursday and the weekend calls for—”

  “K-A-K-A, Music Radio, closing in on four o’clock on a durreary Tuesday afternoon, the Moody Blues with a song by the same name. We have a traffic report coming up at a little after four, and Kash Kallers remember the number one thousand, six hundred and three dollars and eighteen cents, that’s one thousand—”

  “Cannot simultaneously reduce the number of warheads in the arsenal and introduce a new doctrine like the one the caller—”

  “Jesus didn’t turn his back on these people. Jesus said—”

  The gym was miniature. In the entryway, on either side of the inner doors, a volleyball pole stood on an inverted metal dish with a bite taken out for a pair of wheels. The pole on the left had the net wrapped around it, the one on the right just a rope. Luisa wiped her feet on the rubber mat.

  The American flag was planted in a weighted wooden base which had reminded her, when she went here, of one of the disks in her Tinkertoy set. There were curtained voting machines against the stage, against the low trellised doors that swung open to let barges laden with folding chairs roll out. The pollwatchers sat at tables from the cafeteria, doll tables. Thick climbing ropes looped from rafter to rafter at a height no longer dizzying; wires attached to the cranks on the gym’s pale green walls held the knotted ends aloft.

  The clerks smiled when Luisa stepped up to their tables. She was the only citizen voting in the gym. When they paged through the rolls and found her name, she could see that her father had been checked off as voting while her mother, of course, had not.

  Cakes could
be confusing. The directions called for cream, but there wasn’t any in the list of ingredients or in the refrigerator. And she couldn’t see how to mix the sticks of butter in with the sugar and spices and wheat germ. She decided to melt them, leaving them in their paper so they wouldn’t drip into the stove element. She wasn’t really thinking clearly. She was starting to care again. She needed to make a trip to the ladies’ room. She needed to step out for a minute. She needed to excuse herself for just one sec. She had to make a call. She could use a breath of fresh air. She had to fix her face. She required a moment to compose herself. The directions called for cream, but there wasn’t any in the list of ingredients or in the refrigerator. She went upstairs.

  All through the house something rustled like dogs in autumn leaves. She opened her purse and looked for a vein, and started to regret undertaking a cake, if only because the smoke was so bad. But in a minute she’d forget all about it. She’d take a luxurious bath. Splash, splash. When Martin came home. Splash, splash. The many bottles of colorful fluids suggested their own scents, orange blossom, musk, and nature’s pure honey. The sensuous woman knew how to please her husband when he came home from work. She’d seen it in a book. A peignoir could be very sexy.

  When Jack DuChamp came home from work, Elaine was studying in the living room. “Did you vote?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh, for pete’s sake.”

  “It’s too crowded at the polls.”

  “It sure wasn’t crowded when I went,” she said. “You better go.”

  Jack opened the closet door and smiled bitterly. “You mean for Martin’s sake?”

  “Jack,” Elaine said. “How come everything always has to be so personal?”

  Singh left Barbara lying in the corner while he carried the dresser and chairs into the room and arranged her clothing and jewelry. He’d patched and repainted the bullet hole in the wall a month ago. He’d taken the lock and peephole off the door a week ago. All that remained was the cable by the bed. With a screwdriver he removed the cable anchor from the electrical box to which it had been bolted, and replaced the original outlet, wiring it nervously, as blue sparks popped on the tips of the live wires. He raised his pants leg and fastened the fetter around his calf; it was the only article besides the needle kit that he had to take with him. The cable he left coiled tightly in the cupboard with the household tools.

  He reflected on how fortunate Jammu was. He doubted there were five thousand people in the entire world conscientious enough to have prepared the apartment for evacuation as he’d prepared it.

  Taking Barbara on a slow trip through the three rooms and the kitchen, he applied her fingerprints to walls, dishes, fixtures, ashtrays, handles. He plucked hairs from her head and distributed them. Using her extra shoes he dotted the carpeting with footprints. A bachelor pad nevermore. He was just putting her back to bed, along with his own pillow, when Indira called him. “Well?” she said.

  “Throttled. Clearly at the hands of a strong and passionate man.”

  He heard a sigh of relief.

  The fire had begun in the basement when a forgotten cigarette, losing its ash, lost its balance and fell into the excelsior in which a Christmas fruitcake had been packed. The pine shavings and wrapping paper burned fiercely, igniting adjacent boxes. They were good sturdy boxes. Some of them were more than ten years old.

  Strengthened by a diet of magazines, books and clothing, the fire had climbed up the paneled walls and burned out a window, venting smoke on the front side of the house. Given fresh air, the flames sprawled in all directions, consuming the stairs and within minutes the ceiling above them, rupturing into the staircase between the first and second floors and developing, then, an intense circular draft which carried them on up to the third-story rooms. At this juncture it still seemed a peculiarly selective fire, having started in the first of Probst’s storage areas and traveled by the shortest route to the second. Box after box of unlabeled Kodak slides fed the flames. His collection of restaurant menus from around the world, from each of the countries he’d had the privilege of visiting, sets of towels and linen given as gifts and worn out but not thrown away, board games and books that Luisa had outgrown, World Series and World’s Fair ticket stubs, twenty sets of anniversary cards, small Halloween costumes, Salvation Army paper roses, it was the thin organic matter that was burning, the ephemera.

  But at approximately the same time Betsy LeMaster called the fire department, the blaze became a storm, indiscriminate and unstoppable. Probst’s passport burned in an instant. Flames engulfed Luisa’s bed, eating the dust ruffle and searing the mattress with a wolfing sound. Barbara’s letters to Probst disappeared in a yellow flash. Portraits of the family continued to smile up until the last moment, when a wave of ash-in-progress crossed their faces. Oil paintings blistered like marshmallows, blanched, and hung until the wires tore loose from their burning frames. Luisa’s old orthodontic retainers melted into pink plastic pools which boiled and took fire, the wires within them white hot. Barbara’s underwear burned, Probst’s favorite pajamas, Luisa’s two formal dresses, the toilet paper in the bathroom, the toothbrushes and bath mats, Paterson and The Winter’s Tale, the book of erotic verse hidden and forgotten in Luisa’s nightstand, the ribbons in the family typewriters, the pasta in the kitchen, the gum wrappers and sales slips beneath the sofa cushions. In a third-floor window, an Indian woman screamed in a low unnatural voice, a contralto, a word that began but didn’t end. Mohnwirbel staggered, drunk, from the garage and thought he saw Barbara.

  Luisa heard the sirens as she was walking down Rock Hill Road to catch the bus. By the time she crossed the Frisco tracks they were coming from every direction. She’d never heard so many all at once. They mounted from behind the horizon and rang from every house, in jarring keys and rhythms, punctuated by the difficult speeding of fire trucks. Two pumpers roared past her and headed down Baker.

  To the right of the front door was a grooved oblong button. Probst pressed it, hoping he’d found the right house. He hadn’t been here in nearly fifteen years.

  The door was opened by a woman with silvering hair and tiny burst capillaries in her cheeks. He identified her tentatively as Elaine DuChamp. “Martin?” He was dawning on her. “Why, come in!”

  They clasped hands and brushed cheeks, a form of greeting for which they’d both grown old enough in fifteen years. Probst caught a glimpse of a girl running down the hall to the bedrooms. A door closed sharply. Ground beef and onions were cooking in the kitchen, imparting a mildly nauseating atmosphere to the living room, where notebooks and notecards were spread out on the floor. Elaine sidled away from him, untying her apron in back. “This is sure a surprise,” she said, not unkindly. She dropped to her knees and with a few swift strokes gathered the notes into a pile.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” Probst said. “I thought I’d stop in and see Jack—see all of you. I’ve had to pass up your invitations lately, but the campaign’s over, the—”

  “He’ll be thrilled.” Elaine tucked the pile of notes into a niche in the wall unit. “He forgot to vote, but he’s just around the corner. Can I offer you something?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She left to attend to matters in the kitchen, and Probst, dumped on the sofa as if by time machine, scratched his head and looked around. The furniture had new slipcovers, but the shapes of the major pieces, of the couch and the three larger chairs, hadn’t changed since the last time he’d sat in the DuChamp living room. The closest thing in sight to plant life was a giant blown-glass snifter half filled with waxy plastic fruit. Little joysticks from a computer game protruded at cocky angles from the shelf above the television.

  He turned and studied the three pastel portraits in brass frames on the wall behind him. They must have been done at least seven years ago, because the younger girl didn’t look any older than ten. A spot of white chalk in each eye made her radiant. The boy had sat for the artist in a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a red neck
tie, each of which unraveled into squiggling chalkstrokes at the bottom of the portrait, above the artist’s black initials. The older girl had worn a pale pink dress with a high lace collar; she’d already had some chest, seven years ago, and the sheen on her lipstick was yellow-orange. Probst recalled that once upon a time the major department stores like Sears had hired portraitists who gave appointments at the various branches on a rotating basis and turned out drawings at very reasonable prices. It seemed to him that these itinerant artists had rendered something essential, that these three children would always live as they looked here, forever happy.

  “This has been one hell of a pincer movement. One half a pincer and nobody to pinch.”

  “At leatht we got Nithing trapped.”

  Herb’s brother Roy was parked on the far side of the target, ready to spot any and all action on that side and to follow anyone who tried to leave. In case things were still hopping in Missouri, Herb had also assigned three operatives to cover the Indian outposts that had looked the most heavily used. He’d assigned a fourth to keep an eye on Jammu.

  “Sure,” Sam said, peering down into the mirrored depths of the thermos. “After we give the rest of ’em four whole days to ditch their equipment and fly home to Katmandu.”

  “I’m thorry, Tham. You’re free to dithcontinue our relationship.”

  “Oh, never mind me.” Sam patted the small detective on the back. “We got a good enough shot at nailing Jammu if we quit right now. But I can just see ’em in there with their shredders.”

  “You’re free to terminate.”

  “No need to cry, Herb. You reckon there’s an open liquor store in these parts?”

  “Shhh!”

  Sam heard the zoom of Herb’s video camera. “What is it?”

  “Nithing!”

  Eagerly Sam pressed his eyes to the chink. Nissing was standing on the street under a red and white golf umbrella, looking left and right as though checking to see if the coast was clear. Sam raised the telephoto lens to the chink, aimed through the viewfinder, and depressed the shutter release, letting the auto-advance motor whiz while Nissing walked purposefully west towards the river. In his mind he was already writing the caption for the photos: John Nissing, close Jammu associate, leaving property owned by Hammaker. Property contains—What did it contain? Sam looked at his watch; it was 5:15. A swarm of heavily armed aliens? Regardless, in another four hours he and Herb were going in.