The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  The operation’s concrete appurtenances had been destroyed. So had every financial record to which American investigators might have obtained access. All of Jammu’s agents were either dead or in India, where, if their emotional loyalty ever waned, they could easily be bribed into silence. The evidence Pokorny and Norris had gathered was purely circumstantial—the circumstances were, to be sure, sometimes rather damning on the surface, but Jammu had at her disposal a complete array of plausible justifications for everything from her meetings with Devi to the real-estate transactions her mother had made through Asha, and more important, she knew how to play a paranoid public inquiry to her own advantage by raising the spectres of McCarthyism and sexism and racial prejudice and such. What worried her more at the moment was the publicity that Barbara’s death would bring to bear on East St. Louis. Theoretically a city with an exceptional police force could not be faulted for having diverted unwanted elements into a neighboring community. But Jammu had staked much of her reputation as a problem-solver on her apparent ability to make street crime simply disappear. The real story would soil her in the eyes of the public. She was ready, naturally, to present a new aspect of her personality, the aspect of a woman calm under fire and willing to accept all the responsibility she bore, however indirectly, for Barbara’s death and for the situation as a whole in Illinois. A small scandal would humanize her; already, as of this morning, she’d lost her aura of invincibility. Public life required that popular figures sometimes play the sacrificial victim. It was a part she could handle and survive. Hadn’t Indira bounced back strong after the Emergency? As for the defeat of the merger and the squatters in Chesterfield and all the other minor bitches—well, as police chief, she of course could not be expected to take the blame in any way. She might even be allowed to accumulate political capital as the voice of moderation in these and other crises. No one would stop her from using her office like this, from venturing out to solve problems far afield and then retreating to her humble official position in the face of difficulties, so long as she was deft enough to avoid charges of hypocrisy and opportunism, and successful enough to reap the region’s love and appreciation for her efforts…

  The voice in her, the pressure of justification, the apology, went on and on. She pulled two paper towels from the dispenser and dried her hands. Then she changed her clothes, looking repeatedly at the mirror, at the face within the face.

  …When the reporters came, she would present the facts surrounding the shooting death of Barbara, explain how the prosecution of Deere and Judd would work, and personally take the lead in exposing the crime problem in East St. Louis. She’d make an example of Barbara and, without explicitly mentioning it, allow her audience to recall how close she and Barbara’s husband had become, how personal a tragedy this was for her. And then, donning a new mood, she’d make a brave joke about the outcome of the election. But first, before she could face them, she’d need a glass of vodka and a nap. She absolutely had to get some rest this morning. Mrs. Peabody would cheerfully inform the reporters that she was sleeping. The idea would charm them—Chief Jammu is sleeping—children sleep—sweet, innocent sleep—

  The shot ate its way into the walls and stalls and vanished, leaving only blood. Where one moment two individuals had faced each other in the mirror, the next moment there was no one. Wesley and the others threw down their pastries. They came running.

  Two months before they were due to be married, on a warm April Sunday afternoon, Probst and Barbara had gone out driving in his silver Valiant into the western sun on Big Bend Road, through Twin Oaks, Valley Park and Fern Glen, where the lawns tumbled down shaggily to the mailboxes at the shoulder and a passing car was an event of some note for the natives, and the roads wore their original concrete topping, unreplaced since the transition from dirt to pavement twenty and thirty years earlier. Barbara sat sideways in the passenger seat with her back against the door and the fingers of one hand out the half-open window, letting the wind smoke her cigarette. Her knee was braced against the glove compartment to stabilize her as the car bounced right and left at a disruptive frequency, a bit faster than breathing, a bit slower than heartbeats, when the tires hit the swollen joints between the slabs; the jolts, like skipped frames in a movie, created the impression of excessive speed, and she slowed her own movements accordingly. She was wearing a white blouse under a gray crew-neck sweater, blue dungarees with the cuffs rolled up to the tops of her argyle socks. The strip of tint on the windshield dyed her forehead green. One of her stockinged feet rested on Probst’s right thigh, and through his pants, through the difference in humidity, he could just feel the sweatiness of her sole. Her toes wiggled languidly, of their own volition, the reflex of a foot accustomed to shoes.

  She always wanted to go driving that year. Looking back, he was inclined to see in the impulse a scientific method of filling up their time together, as they hadn’t yet developed that body of mutual friends whose weaknesses, in later years, would provide the staple of their conversational diet, and as they’d begun to tiptoe around the engineering lessons which made her face go blank, and the French literature and German science to which he tiresomely responded with comic ignorance or earnest distrust because he didn’t yet dare ask to be educated. To a couple separated by age and background and not in the mood to buy entertainment, almost any alternative to silly games or love talk, any cruising or walking or sex, was welcome. But at the time, her proposals of drives they might take had seemed more positively motivated. They seemed to spring from a hunger which he himself lacked. They were promises—as though, whenever she proposed a destination, she had been there already and could attest to its beauty or interest and then, when they arrived, she were vouchsafing him glimpses of the twenty-two years hidden inside her, in the fall foliage at the Algonquin Country Club, the Creve Coeur lake that was indeed frozen and could be skated on, the fritters and ham hocks at the all-Negro restaurant off North Jefferson Avenue. The world she promised was latent in how she looked, three-dimensional and life-sized, sinking into the seat cushion and dimpling its plaid upholstery as she said planets dimpled outer space, a woman in his car brought through the agency of something like grace, as if it were the exception, not the rule, that young people fell in love and went out together and he, Probst, were specially blessed. It was because she betrayed no consciousness of being his reward. She didn’t smile unnecessarily, didn’t comment on the route they were taking out to Rockwood Reservation, but sat in his car neutrally, as she might have sat in her father’s car, occupying herself without relation to him, intense only in anticipation of arriving. Hers was the indifference of a foreign country to a new immigrant: he was allowed to stay, but the rest was up to him. Nor could he imagine becoming used to her, although, in the universal and destructive ambition of fresh love, he wanted to know everything about her. He looked forward to fighting with her, to seeing the pink cords of her will exposed.

  Winding and braking, skirting a small Ozark spread with budding oaks, they came to the intersection with Route 109, the road to Rockwood. Probst looked both ways before making his left turn. On his right, in the lane he was about to enter, he saw a pickup truck approaching fast, but for reasons he’d never understand he did not really see it. He pulled out into the intersection, aware enough of making a mistake that he floored the gas pedal. The truck was heading straight for the passenger-side door. Barbara gasped. The horn blew. Probst braced himself, accelerating. The truck swerved and slammed into the rear fender and trunk, and careened into the opposite lanes. The Valiant, half demolished, landed in the ditch. Barbara split her lip and broke a tooth on the dashboard.

  After the police had come and the wrecker had towed away the Valiant and Barbara’s brother had come out to pick them up and they’d stopped at the hospital and left and had a couple of drinks, Probst asked her not to marry him. And for a while that night two distinct personalities had wrestled visibly in her, one assuring him, with the haste that grips a shy woman when a fellow diner has
spilled gravy on her dress, that everything was fine and nothing had changed, and the other, like a girl too young to be mindful of any obligations but to herself, regarding him with revulsion and thinking how close this man just came to killing me.

  He saw that sometime in the last twenty years the county had installed a traffic light at the intersection. The morning sun was shining on long pools of water in the ditches, on the silver propane tanks outside the houses in the distance, on his left shoulder as he drove south on 109. The asphalt was seamless. He’d been driving all night except for the two or three hours he’d spent parked in front of a Schnucks after hearing the news on the KSLX midnight roundup. He’d thought his mother’s death four years ago had demonstrated once and for all that he wasn’t a man to cry in anything but anger. But he hadn’t been married to his mother. But the intervals between the contractions of grief in him had gradually increased as the individual memories that triggered the contractions melted together into a more general history, a sad book that was closing. By the time he’d watched the sun rise over the Chrysler assembly plant on I-44 he felt he’d be strong enough to function through the day—but felt it with a dread, the fear of soberness, because when the grief ended the questions began.

  Highways didn’t help. The landscapes offended the eye passively, by disappointing it, leaving unfulfilled the traveler’s hope that the opening of the country might, as roads actually did in England or Africa, reveal significant traces of the indwelling spirit. There were, for instance, the zinc-plated standards of exit signs and mileage signs—upright I-beams whose burrs and pits reflected low-cost fabrication, wide tolerances, U.S. government specifications. The structure of each sign was sturdy enough and the design pleasing enough that it teased travelers with the possibility of being appreciated as a less literal sign of place. But its impersonal adequacy denied that possibility, at least to any native. Maybe if foreign travelers passed one of these signs they might find the name “Fenton” as exotic and indicative as Probst had found “Oberammergau” and “Oaxaca” when he’d toured them, or they might have been delighted by the mile as an outsized unit of distance, or by the greeny green of the sign as it contrasted with the yellow or white signs of home, or even by the stocky proportions of the upright I-beams. But maybe not.

  Having had thoughtful road experiences in other countries and in his youth, Probst wanted to have them still, longed to be foreign again—as Jammu, in relation to the city, had made him. To be young, to live in the world as opposed to merely inhabiting it, a man had to stay foreign. But in the country there were only hillsides scarred with driveways and pastures, billboards for inexpensive ryes and inexpensive motels and inexpensive restaurants at the pinnacle of whose menus stood New York strip steak and batter-fried jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce, the prices working down from there. License plates bore unhelpful combinations of characters, with too few letters to play word games, too few numbers to hunt for patterns. The rivers were muddy. Nothing raised or lowered the horizon by more than a few degrees. All the cars had four wheels, all the trucks had mud flaps behind the tires, all curves in the road translated into a single mechanism, the turning of the steering wheel. The interesting architecture—new churches with derricklike campaniles or nautical profiles, corporate headquarters with nonrectilinear floor plans or geodesic atria—was ugly. The uninteresting architecture was uninteresting. Distance diluted the color of flowers. If glamorous women or criminal men drove on the highways, the windows of their cars were smoked, or else it didn’t matter, as it didn’t matter if a truck was loaded with unusual cargo like poisonous chlorine or sheep, because everything hurried past. Probst wasn’t an aesthete. There was no cause for hatred. But as he approached the city, the countryside filled him with a sense of betrayal, a pain intense enough to counterbalance his fear and begin to answer the questions. He was alive. Sadly, angrily, in a world he was only now realizing he didn’t like, he was alive.

  Outside a convenience store on Big Bend he put a quarter in a telephone.

  Audrey’s voice was chiding, practical. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been driving.”

  “Well, you’d better come over. Luisa’s here. Everyone’s here.”

  Probst said nothing. A Hostess truck pulled up beside the booth, and out of the telephone receiver came flooding the interior of the Ripleys’ house—the smell of the cold fireplace, the clatter of cups in the kitchen and the rhythmic sucking of the coffeepot, the voices subdued in every room including the one in which the dead woman’s husband might already have been sitting, the Probst whose face the relatives, between sips, consulted like a template. Their expectations would not let him be. They pulled at his features, restoring the grieving contortions of the night before, voiding the experience and forcing a repetition—the rooms filled the phone booth, and Probst rose swiftly from the sofa, hurried down the hall past Audrey and her tray of cups, and reached the bathroom just in time to shut the door before the paroxysms overcame him.

  “Martin?”

  A man with pink Snoballs debouched from the Hostess truck.

  “You’re coming?” Audrey said.

  He swallowed. “Yes.”

  At Central Hardware the orange-coated experts were opening the main doors. Nine o’clock. Probst turned north on Lindbergh, and fifteen minutes later he was pulling to a stop in front of the Ripley residence, where he recognized Barbara’s parents’ Volvo and Duane’s Nova. All the curtains in the big house were drawn. The eastern chimney dribbled white woodsmoke into the pale blue sky.

  Behind the glaze of light on the storm door, whose mild concavity gathered the reflected trees into a single star-like tree with radiating branches, the front door opened and a figure looked out from the shadows inside. There was a reprimand in its indistinctness, in its seeing him without being seen. Then the storm door opened and a tall young woman in glasses stepped out. She hesitated before, looking aside, still reluctant, she made up her mind to come down the front walk to meet him. That it was Luisa brought joy to his recognition: she was a stranger to him.

  When Singh had boarded in Chicago he’d scanned the central compartment of the fully booked 747 to find his seat, which, he’d been told, was situated on an aisle. Passengers were stowing their last belongings and sinking into their seats, testing them to make sure all the comforts for which they’d paid were operational, and making immediate yawning preparations for sleep. Well before Singh had edged through the roil and found his row, he was certain that a particular aisle seat in the distance was his, because a small infant in the throes of a diaper change was lying on it.

  “Excuse me.”

  The mother, a young Southerner with an intricately layered coiffure, hastened to wrap up the infant and remove it. She confided to Singh that she had sort of hoped his seat would be empty.

  The infant was flying to be with its father, a lieutenant at the U.S. base outside Frankfurt. Apparently the anticipation ruled out the possibility of sleep, although the mother, under the influence of a split of Moselle, went out like a light after the late dinner was served. The infant lunged and knocked aside Singh’s eyeglasses and pushed into his left eye a fist covered with clear mucus. Singh awakened the mother. She collected the arms and legs into a bundle and went back to sleep. Singh reclined deeply. He opened one eye to ward off violations of his territorial limits and saw the infant staring at him, drooling through a smile, its eyebrows raised. Singh showed teeth. The infant shrieked with laughter. He shut his eyes but the laughter continued. He opened them. Reading lights were blinking on all around him. The mother, unbelievably, snored. A weary businessman leaned across the aisle to ask if the infant belonged to Singh (had sprung from his loins, was the fruit of his seed). He shook his head and awakened the mother again. She took the infant on a tour of the plane, returned, and went to sleep. The infant began to cry. The mother awoke and proffered a bottle. The infant took a deep draught, turned to Singh, and sprayed him.

  “Clifford.”


  A smell of decay arose, prompting another trip for Clifford, who, on departure, took a last swipe at Singh’s glasses, which were already well spattered with juice.

  Over Newfoundland Clifford vomited onto the knee of Singh’s wool trousers. Over England, with a precision that presaged a future in the artillery, Clifford threw a glistening wad of scrambled egg through Singh’s open shirt collar. The egg dropped all the way down to his belt. Determined to spend the remainder of the flight away from his seat, he rose and repaired to the lavatory. He removed his shirt, deposited the egg in the toilet, and while he was brushing yellow morsels out of his chest hair the jet encountered turbulence, causing him to lose his balance. One of the cuffs of his white Pierre Cardin dress shirt swooped into the blue liquid in the toilet. On the loudspeakers the flight attendants were advising all passengers to return to their seats and fasten their safety belts. He soaked the soiled cuff in the sink and wrung it out. The next jolt of turbulence, in combination with the slick floor of the lavatory, threw him over backwards. He extended an arm to break his fall and brought his hand down directly into the center of the toilet, onto the steel plate on which the blue liquid rested. The plate was hinged; at the pressure of his hand, it opened, activating the flush mechanism.