The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  Colored lights were playing on the stainless steel, mottling it garishly. They shifted, the reds and greens and yellows intermingling on the flat integral sections. It wasn’t Probst’s Arch anymore. It was the National Park Service’s.

  Games and German sausages, clowns and unicyclists, raffles, accordionists, and elected representatives waited for a throng of visitors who, since they hadn’t come by 9:00 in the evening, would surely not come at all. Probst himself had come only to seek necessity, to let himself be guided to Jammu. The Arch blushed as red lights rose and deepened to purple. He walked east, down the center of the Mall, under the eyes of lone policemen with billies.

  Beneath the largest tent on the Mall, Bob Hope was speaking to a meager gathering with a peculiar demographic profile. It consisted entirely of youngish men. Probst couldn’t find a single woman in it, nor any man under twenty or over forty. Two hundred rather small young men in London Fogs and Burberrys, in white shirts with tab collars and neckties of median width, in brown walking shoes with crepe soles, laughed on cue. Pete Wesley and Quentin Spiegelman and other dignitaries stood in a phalanx on the stage behind Hope, who was saying, “No, seriously, folks, I think it’s just great to see what’s been done in St. Louis. When you think what it looked like thirty years ago—of course, I only know from pictures. I was still a teenager in California.”

  The youngish men erupted in laughter, clapped their hands and nodded to each other.

  “You know, I was in Washington the other day—”

  Barbara hadn’t meant to leave. She’d picked up the Bombay address from the floor and stepped into the hall, intending to explore the building, find a window and figure out where she was, and then return to the apartment and try some numbers besides her old one, which seemed to be out of order. She had to know the address before anyone could come and get her. But the apartment door had fallen shut behind her, locking.

  There were no windows in the hall, only brick and steel, the brick painted gray and the steel a ferric orange, all lit by bulbs in cages. She boarded an elevator, stamping nervously on its worn wooden floor, descended to the ground floor and entered a hallway identical to the one on the top floor. The air was chilly and stale, the building completely silent. She walked to one end of the hallway and pushed open a heavy door, hanging at the threshold and looking out.

  Beyond a wet empty street was an elevated highway. Trucks with small amber lamps around the margins of their trailers were passing in the rain. Clouds beyond the highway captured the bright lights of a city, but whatever skyline loomed there was obscured.

  She shivered in her pants and sweater as the flavorless air blew in. On the floor lay a fragment of cinder block. She kicked it onto the threshold, against the jamb, stepped outside and carefully eased the door back against the cinder block. She looked up and down the street. It was a Hiroshima neighborhood in the spring of ’46, so flat and lifeless that it seemed almost to promise safe passage. She saw distant streetlights, traffic lights, vehicle lights, some very distant office lights, but not one sign of commerce, no light in the shape of letters. She could find an entrance to the highway and flag someone down. But she hesitated. Somewhere in the warehouse there might be another telephone, or at least some tool with which she could force her way back into the apartment. She’d call the operator and have the call traced. She didn’t want to leave.

  A hundred yards away from her a thin man in a dark coat without luster crossed the street on a diagonal. He approached her steadily, implacably, with the hypnotic steps of a frog-gigger who’d “fixed” his prey. She stepped away from the doorway, wringing her hands. It was a matter of balance. She broke in the direction she’d been leaning—away from the door. The man walked faster and she fled along the front of the building, away from the city lights. The pace of his steps matched hers. She began to run. He began to run.

  “Myth Madan!” he shouted.

  Her sneakers slapped the broken pavement, bending around irregularities to average them and overcome them. She was stretching muscles she hadn’t used since January. She kept running even when she heard the man stop, far behind her, with a scrabble of leather soles. Looking back, she saw him heading towards the warehouse. She ran between two sets of pillars beneath the highway, through a very black space, and suddenly into light.

  The light came from fires, from flames licking out of barrels and from bonfires built on the pavement of a narrow street, flames oppressed by the rain but not subdued, sprouting sideways, clinging to the square-edged boards that fed them. At the far end of the street a single filament shone on an intersection with what appeared to be a similar street. In between, in tents and under lean-tos on the sidewalk, in the hulks of four-door cars and vans without tires, leaning from frameless windows of blackened buildings, were many more people than Barbara could count. There were hundreds.

  She heard a few isolated voices, but for the most part the people sat and stood quiescent, crossing a leg here, raising an arm there, as if deep in thought. She looked back towards the warehouse. A pair of headlights had appeared in the gloom, expressionless disks of luminance, the distance between them slowly increasing as the car moved swiftly closer. She entered the street in front of her, and with a relief she tasted in her mouth and felt in her chest she realized that most of the people were women. She turned to the nearest group, a threesome on the corner, but the car was almost upon her. It was a station wagon. She ducked into an alley where more women stood warming their hands at a barrel. The smoke lacked the green aromatic complexity of nature; it smelled of old wood, of lumber, not logs. The women were lost in their clothing. They wore fishnet tights, platform heels of lacquered glitter, boots of licorice leather that hugged ankles and calves, leather mini-skirts and polyester hot pants, and short, padded jackets. Their faces, some black, some white, peered out from between mounded hair and fake fur collars. Two by two their eyes were coming to rest on Barbara. She pressed against a brick wall, catching her breath, as the station wagon passed in the street.

  Closed shop, sister!

  The laughter was loud and hit her like stones, fell dead on the ground. Two women threw cigarettes into the barrel, ritually. They were all looking at her.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  You in Jammuville.

  There was no laughter.

  She was beginning to breathe normally. “I mean what state am I in?”

  Same state we’s in!

  You lookin for work?

  Closed shop, closed shop.

  They fell silent.

  “I’m looking for the police,” she said.

  The police? She lookin for the po-lice? Oh ho.

  One of them pointed.

  See dat highway? You just follow it over the bridge.

  They laughed again. Somewhere deeper in Jammuville a gun was fired. Barbara headed up a cross street even more populated than the one she’d just left. Puppets paced the sidewalks, their seductions creaky in the cold, their turnings stiff and grindings labored, while male eyes gleamed in the shadows. Not a word was spoken. Barbara passed sore-looking breasts bared to the weather, ecstasies in which only the agony wasn’t simulated, a skirt raised above a meaningless vulva framed by black straps. She stepped off the curb into the street, where automobiles were cruising in a steady stream, almost bumper to bumper. One of them drew even with her. Through the open driver-side window she saw a jowly white man in a red blazer with an unlit cigar between his teeth. He removed the cigar and looked her over.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m—”

  He shook his head. “Tits.” The word was final, the voice prophetic. “I need mammoth tits.” He had a vision of them. “Monster tits.”

  The next car honked her out of the way, but the one after that stopped, and she rapped on the window with her knuckles. The meek-eyed man inside frowned and shook his head. She looked down into his lap. He followed with his eyes, smiling modestly at his exposure.

  Near the end of the street she saw the c
ity. It was St. Louis. The Arch stood huge and stationary against a backdrop of brightly colored mists. It was St. Louis. It was the city in which her dreams had taken place all her life, all through the last two and a half months, the city which whenever John left the room she peopled with her family and her friends, the city she’d never stopped trying to remember and imagine: this was the city itself, and it was completely different from the city in her head though identical in detail, completely itself, the quality of reality overpowering all the more specific landmarks. But even now she couldn’t shake the feeling—didn’t want to—that she was about to wake up in John’s arms.

  Beneath the Arch, Probst faced the river and the unconstellated urban stars that twinkled in Illinois. A northbound barge spanned invisibly the four hundred yards between its lighted cabin and its lighted bow. Cars were moving at sixty miles an hour across the Poplar Street Bridge, but their progress looked painfully slow. In the depths of downtown a metallic man barked to muted cheers.

  Piercing the seawall and leading down to Wharf Street was a long, wide set of concrete stairs. Probst sat down on the top step. He watched a familiar sedan travel along the street, halt, and back into a parking space between him and the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, both of which were moored at their docks. The car door opened. Jammu stepped out.

  On Easter she’d lain on top of him, hipbones on hipbones, knees on knees, and he’d held his arms around her narrow body trying less to stop her shaking than to make it match his own. The shaking was steady, unprogressive, Brownian. They smiled to acknowledge it, but it didn’t stop. It excluded them, reduced them, made them equal in their mutual submission, and this was ideal, because in the ideal bed, in the twilight that came peculiarly to bedrooms, one wanted only to submit.

  Don’t tell me this is just a midlife infatuation. Don’t tell me the lights are shining anyplace but here.

  Halfway up the stairs Jammu stopped and sat down on the retaining wall on the right side of the landing. Probst felt the rainwater seeping through the seat of his pants. She drew the flaps of her trench coat together, crossed her arms, and put her hand to her mouth. He watched her chew her thumbnail. There was nothing left to want but her. And he could see how the year had happened, how a man in his prime, the envy of a state, could lose everything without even putting up a fight along the way: he hadn’t believed in what he had. Something had always been missing, or interposed, between possession and glory, a question: Why me?

  Maybe if he’d known that all the things around him that he loved could vanish like this, he might have succeeded in controlling himself, in making himself love them, or in losing control, in letting himself believe. But how could any man know when the end was coming?

  What remained was a room in his mind, all around which the world had fallen away to a whistling galactic distance. The eye of the camera had shifted from a December delivery room to a Main Street location a week after the bomb had dropped, beholding now the rubble in which the living Martin and Susan had vaporized, and beaming the image back to the room, where the world, in them, made love. He might wander through the remembered forms of a city, but the only future that would happen would happen in this room.

  She was going to wait for him to come down the stairs. She would never have won him in the first place, even for one afternoon, without some basic readiness on his part, some identity between her planned and executed destruction of his life and his acceptance of each stage of the destruction. In its purest realization the State was an exhaustive sense of fate. But she, who’d ordered Barbara killed, who’d arranged this one minor violation, couldn’t share it. She’d thought she would be climbing these stairs all the way to the top and embracing him. But that wasn’t how it worked.

  Election Tuesday, the underwater throbbing of tug engines, the river’s shallow sucking at the banks, the shrill of trucks, the sighing of tires in the sky, the vapid mutterings of St. Louis Night all lacked the volume to drown out the creature growing inside her, a creature glimpsed occasionally in mirrors or heard in fevers, a small, sad child. The child spoke aloud in her labors, able only, like Jammu, to plan and speak and work, to construct a life. Who of the two was the terror? Clearly the woman had fabricated the child as much as the child the woman. Both were cheap Taiwanese goods like everything else she’d ever thought or had a hand in, but the child, at least, had a name: Susan.

  Gathering strings of lint from the inner folds of her coat pockets, glancing up at Martin, who sat like Patience at the top of the stairs, beneath the Arch, she began to cry. She pitied the child. She lacked the capacity, the basic instrumentation, the hardware, to love Martin as he loved her. But although the artifices had forever displaced the emotions, the child was making plans—I had no idea Devi was back in the country, she’d sent me a letter from Bombay, very self-dramatizing, you must believe me, you do believe me, I can see—only because she hadn’t yet learned the emotions.

  Somehow Probst had imagined that obeying her summons and meeting her here, meeting her eyes and accepting with her the lovely evil of caring only about each other, would be as easy as facing her in bed had been, as uninhibited by shame and selfconsciousness, as purely a matter of compulsion. But when he saw that she was crying and that specific and ordinary words of comfort were required, he knew the affair was over.

  He became impatient. The wind off the river was picking up again, and he noticed that his hands were cold, his feet wet, his butt sore, his bladder full. He noticed where he was. He raised his face to the shape above him, to the beams of yellow, blue and violet light streaming into it and cut, terminated, in the form of the great black curve. It merely stood. Raindrops fell on his eyes. While in the room in his head the pleasure could not relent, because if it did it would beg the question of what became of it when it was over. Sex wasn’t a life-prolonging satisfaction like food, and at their age the idea of reproduction couldn’t rationalize the pleasure. Only repetition could. After all, in that room on the edge of space, he and she weren’t just sitting around. They were eternally fucking. In an Eastern room, in a mode of existence in which the present life, the persistent problem of identity, was skirted by reference to past and future incarnations. But in Missouri you lived only once.

  He stood up, finding in the stiffness of his shoulders an indication that he was ultimately not an evil person. His body was able to distract him. He was capable of growing impatient. He was not compelled. Actions emptied of meaning, feelings ceased to matter. The story of his life could not be all exclamation marks. He needed to find a bathroom or at least some secluded weeds, and it was with this practical haste that he shouted at the woman below him, who was slumped on the retaining wall, her posture shattered as if she’d fallen from the sky and landed in a heap: “Good bye!”

  Without looking up she waved an arm at him, throwing an invisible stone.

  Fear was getting the better of Barbara as tires squealed in the streets around her and people argued in the dark buildings. She wanted to walk briskly, purposefully, confidently, but walking required muscle control to maintain momentum. She started to jog. Relative to the warehouse she’d started from she was totally lost, but she could hold the Arch and part of the St. Louis skyline in view and she kept moving towards it. Only when she came to a block where there were men she didn’t like the looks of did she change direction and run tangentially, south. Jammuville. She waited in vain for a police car to pass or a police station to rise out of the darkness.

  If she could have figured out where the warehouse was she would have run there more eagerly than she was running to St. Louis. For more than two months she’d lived there in safety, a safety she appreciated now that she saw what lay all around. There was no place like home. John brought her meals. Oh, she was crazy, but she couldn’t help it. She was lost in the place of her nightmares, of the nightmares of every citizen of Webster Groves, in a skeletal maze where every kid had a gun and every woman a knife, and a white female face was a ticket to gang rape after she’d been blud
geoned if she’d let them know she was afraid. Barbara was a good-hearted person and had never allowed herself to believe this. Who would hurt a defenseless woman without a purse? But the threat was physical and it surrounded her.

  Still clutching the soggy slip of paper with John’s new address, she jogged towards the Interstate, through one block and into another, thinking, Get back, get back home. She jogged almost to the end of the street, close enough to see the bright green sign with its arrow pointing to ST. LOUIS, she came within a hundred steps of the chain-link fence she would climb to reach the shoulder from which she would flag down a car, before she spotted the four loitering black men. Keep running right past them. She couldn’t. She was making the Mistake but she couldn’t help it. She was turning around and running away from them, showing her fear, and she heard the reports on concrete of their feet as they skipped to keep up.

  “Hey there—”

  “Hey—”

  A rattling black Continental was passing through the intersection. She ran right in front of its headlights. It swerved and screeched. She let herself glance back. The four men were standing in a line, their faces inexpressive as they looked at her. The car started to drive away, but she grabbed the mirror on the driver’s side. The window unrolled. A pair of white men in polyester jackets and pastel sport shirts were sitting in the front seat. The driver looked out the window at the men behind her. “Need a lift, honey?” The voice was sedated, confident.

  “Yes. Please.”

  The driver consulted his companion, who gave her the once-over, shrugged, and unlocked the back door. As Barbara got in she saw a station wagon slowing to a stop halfway up the block behind the car. It was the same station wagon that had followed her away from John’s building. The four men crossed the intersection, waving through the rear window, receding swiftly.