Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Yes, you’ll see. It’s only a form we have to follow. You remind me so much of myself when I was at your age and needed a purpose in my life.”

  Pip didn’t care for the sound of this. “OK,” she said. “I’m sorry to ask, but is the Sunlight Project a cult?”

  “Cult?” Martin, all stubble and Palestinian kaffiyeh, laughed from the end of the table. “Cult of personality, maybe.”

  “Ist doch Quatsch, du,” Annagret said with some heat. “Also wirklich.”

  “Sorry, what?” Pip said.

  “I said it’s really bullshit, what he’s saying. The Project is the opposite of cult. It’s about honesty, truth, transparency, freedom. The governments with a cult of personality are the ones who hate it.”

  “But the Project has a very cherissmetic leader,” Martin said.

  “Charismatic?” Pip said.

  “Charismatic. I made it sound like arissmetic. Andreas Wolf is very charismatic.” Martin laughed again. “This could nearly be in a textbook for vocabulary. How to use the word charismatic in a sentence. ‘Andreas Wolf is very charismatic.’ Then the sentence makes immediate sense, you know right away what the word means. He is the definition of the word itself.”

  Martin seemed to be needling Annagret and Annagret not liking it; and Pip saw, or thought she saw, that Annagret had slept with Andreas Wolf at some point in the past. She was at least ten years older than Pip, maybe fifteen. From a semitransparent plastic folder, a European-looking office supply, she took some pages slightly longer and narrower than American pages.

  “So are you like a recruiter?” Pip asked. “You travel with the questionnaire?”

  “Yes, I have authority,” Annagret said. “Or not authority, we reject authority. I’m one of the people who do this for the group.”

  “Is that why you’re here in the States? Is this a recruiting trip?”

  “Annagret is a multitasker,” Martin said with a smile somehow both admiring and needling.

  Annagret told him to leave her and Pip alone, and he went off in the direction of the living room, apparently still serenely unaware that Dreyfuss didn’t like having him around. Pip took the opportunity to pour herself a second bowl of cereal; she was at least putting a check mark in the nourishment box.

  “Martin and I have a good relationship, except for his jealousy,” Annagret explained.

  “Jealousy of what?” Pip said, eating. “Andreas Wolf?”

  Annagret shook her head. “I was very close with Andreas, for a long time, but that’s some years before I knew Martin.”

  “So you were really young.”

  “Martin is jealous of my female friends. Nothing more threatens a German man, even a good man, than women being close friends with each other behind his back. It really upsets him, like it’s something wrong with how the world is supposed to be. Like we’re going to find out all his secrets and take away his power, or not need him anymore. Do you have this problem, too?”

  “I’m afraid I tend to be the jealous party.”

  “Well, this is why Martin is jealous of the Internet, because this is how I primarily communicate with my friends. I have so many friends I haven’t even met—real friends. Email, social media, forums. I know Martin sometimes watches pornography, we don’t have secrets from each other, and if he didn’t watch it he probably would be the only man in Germany who didn’t—I think Internet pornography was designed for German men, because they like to be alone and control things and have fantasies of power. But he says he only watches it because I have so many female Internet friends.”

  “Which of course may just be porn for women,” Pip said.

  “No. You only think that because you’re young and maybe don’t need friendship so much.”

  “So do you ever think about just going with girls instead?”

  “It’s pretty terrible right now in Germany with men and women,” Annagret said, which somehow amounted to a no.

  “I guess I was just trying to say that the Internet is good at satisfying needs from a distance. Male or female.”

  “But women’s need for friendship is genuinely satisfied on the Internet, it’s not a fantasy. And because Andreas understands the power of the Internet, how much it can mean for women, Martin is jealous of him also—because of that, not because I was close with Andreas in the past.”

  “Right. But if Andreas is the charismatic leader, then he’s the guy with the power, which to me makes it sound like he’s just like all the other men, in your opinion.”

  Annagret shook her head. “The fantastic thing about Andreas is he knows the Internet is the greatest truth device ever. And what does it tell us? That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.”

  “I think you’re forgetting about gay sex and pet videos,” Pip said. “But maybe we can do the questionnaire now? I’ve kind of got a boy upstairs waiting for me, which is why I’m kind of just wearing a bathrobe with nothing underneath it, in case you were wondering.”

  “Right now? Upstairs?” Annagret was alarmed.

  “I thought it was just going to be a quick questionnaire.”

  “He can’t come back another night?”

  “Really trying to avoid that if I can.”

  “So go tell him you only need a few minutes, ten minutes, with a girlfriend. Then you don’t have to be the jealous one for a change.”

  Here Annagret winked at her, which seemed a real feat to Pip, who was no good at winking, winks being the opposite of sarcasm.

  “I think you’d better take me while you’ve got me,” she said.

  Annagret assured her that there were no right or wrong answers to the questionnaire, which Pip felt couldn’t possibly be true, since why bother giving it if there were no wrong answers? But Annagret’s beauty was reassuring. Facing her across the table, Pip had the sense that she was being interviewed for the job of being Annagret.

  “Which of the following is the best superpower to have?” Annagret read. “Flying, invisibility, reading people’s minds, or making time stop for everyone except you.”

  “Reading people’s minds,” Pip said.

  “That’s a good answer, even though there are no right answers.”

  Annagret’s smile was warm enough to bathe in. Pip was still mourning the loss of college, where she’d been effective at taking tests.

  “Please explain your choice,” Annagret read.

  “Because I don’t trust people,” Pip said. “Even my mom, who I do trust, has things she doesn’t tell me, really important things, and it would be nice to have a way to find them out without her having to tell me. I’d know the stuff I need to know, but she’d still be OK. And then, with everyone else, literally everyone, I can never be sure of what they’re thinking about me, and I don’t seem to be very good at guessing what it is. So, it’d be nice to be able to just dip inside their heads, just for like two seconds, and make sure everything’s OK—just be sure that they’re not thinking some horrible thought about me that I have no clue about—and then I could trust them. I wouldn’t abuse it or anything. It’s just so hard not to ever trust people. It makes me have to work so hard to figure out what they want from me. It gets to be so tiring.”

  “Oh, Pip, we hardly have to do the rest. What you’re saying is fantastic.”

  “Truly?” Pip smiled sadly. “You see, even here, though, I’m wondering why you’re saying that. Maybe you’re just trying to get me to keep doing the questionnaire. For that matter, I’m also wondering why you care so much about my doing it.”

  “You can trust me. It’s only because I’m impressed with you.”

  “You see, but that doesn’t even make any sense, because I’m actually not very impressive. I don’t know all that much about nuclear weapons, I just happened to know about Israel. I don’t trust you at all. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust people.” Pip’s face was growing hot. “I should
really go upstairs now. I’m feeling bad about leaving my friend there.”

  This ought to have been Annagret’s cue to let her go, or at least to apologize for keeping her, but Annagret (maybe this was a German thing?) seemed not very good at taking cues. “We have to follow the form,” she said. “It’s only a form, but we have to follow it.” She patted Pip’s hand and then stroked it. “We’ll go fast.”

  Pip wondered why Annagret kept touching her.

  “Your friends are disappearing. They don’t respond to texts or Facebook or phone. You talk to their employers, who say they haven’t been to work. You talk to their parents, who say they’re very worried. You go to the police, who tell you they’ve investigated and say your friends are OK but living in different cities now. After a while, every single friend of yours is gone. What do you do then? Do you wait until you disappear yourself, so you can find out what happened to your friends? Do you try to investigate? Do you run away?”

  “It’s just my friends who are disappearing?” Pip said. “The streets are still full of people my age who aren’t my friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honestly, I think I’d go see a psychiatrist if this happened to me.”

  “But the psychiatrist talks to the police herself and finds out that everything you said is true.”

  “Well, then, at least I’d have one friend—the psychiatrist.”

  “But then the psychiatrist herself disappears.”

  “This is a totally paranoid scenario. That is like something out of Dreyfuss’s head.”

  “You wait, investigate, or run away?”

  “Or kill myself. How about kill myself?”

  “There are no wrong answers.”

  “I’d probably go live with my mom. I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. And if she somehow disappeared anyway, I’d probably kill myself, since by then it would be obvious that having any connection to me wasn’t good for a person’s health.”

  Annagret smiled again. “Excellent.”

  “What?”

  “You’re doing very, very well, Pip.” She reached across the table and put her hands, her hot hands, on Pip’s cheeks.

  “Saying I’d kill myself is the right answer?”

  Annagret took her hands away. “There are no wrong answers.”

  “That sort of makes it harder to feel good about doing well.”

  “Which of the following have you ever done without permission: break into someone’s email account, read things on someone’s smartphone, search someone’s computer, read someone’s diary, go through someone’s private papers, listen to a private conversation when someone’s phone accidentally dials you, obtain information about someone on false pretenses, put your ear to a wall or door to listen to a conversation, and the like.”

  Pip frowned. “Am I allowed to skip a question?”

  “You can trust me.” Annagret touched her hand yet again. “It’s better that you answer.”

  Pip hesitated and then confessed: “I’ve been through every scrap of paper my mother owns. If she had a diary, I would have read it, but she doesn’t. If she had an email account, I would have broken into it. I’ve gone online and searched every database I can think of. I don’t feel good about it, but she won’t tell me who my father is, she won’t tell me where I was born, she won’t even tell me what her real name is. She says she’s doing it for my protection, but I think the danger is only in her head.”

  “These are things you need to know,” Annagret said gravely.

  “Yes.”

  “You have a right to know them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand that these are things the Sunlight Project can help you find out?”

  Pip’s heart began to race, in part because this had not, in fact, occurred to her before, and the prospect was frightening, but mainly because she sensed that a real seduction was kicking into gear now, a seduction to which all of Annagret’s touchings had merely been a prelude. She took her hand away and hugged herself nervously.

  “I thought the Project was about corporate and national security secrets.”

  “Yes, of course. But the Project has many resources.”

  “So I could just, like, write to them and ask for the information?”

  Annagret shook her head. “It isn’t a private detection agency.”

  “But if I actually went and did an internship.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “Something to think about, ja?”

  “Ja-ah,” Pip said.

  “You’re traveling in a foreign country,” Annagret read, “and one night the police come to your hotel room and arrest you as a spy, even though you haven’t been spying. They take you to the police station. They say that you may make one call that they will listen to both sides of. They warn you that anyone you call will also be under suspicion of spying. Whom do you call?”

  “Stephen,” Pip said.

  There was a flicker of disappointment in Annagret’s face. “This Stephen? The Stephen here?”

  “Yes, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Forgive me, but I thought you would say your mother. You’ve mentioned her in every other answer so far. She’s the only person you trust.”

  “But that’s only trust in a deep way,” Pip said. “She’d go insane with worry, and she doesn’t know anything about how the world works, and so she wouldn’t know who to call to help me. Stephen would know exactly who to call.”

  “To me he seems a bit weak.”

  “What?”

  “He seems weak. He’s married to that angry, controlly person.”

  “Yes, I know, his marriage is unfortunate—believe me, I know.”

  “You have feelings for him!” Annagret said with dismay.

  “Yes, I do, so what?”

  “Well, you didn’t tell me. We’re telling each other everything, on the sofa, and you didn’t tell me this.”

  “You didn’t tell me you used to sleep with Andreas Wolf!”

  “Andreas is a public person. I have to be careful. And that’s many years ago now.”

  “You talk about him like you’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

  “Pip, please,” Annagret said, seizing her hands. “Let’s not fight. I didn’t know you had feelings for Stephen. I’m sorry.”

  But the wound the word weak had inflicted was hurting Pip more now, not less, and she was aghast to realize how much personal data she’d already surrendered to a woman so confident of her beauty that she could fill her face with metal and chop her hair (so it looked) with lawn clippers. Pip, who had no grounds for such confidence, snatched her hands away and stood up and noisily dropped her cereal bowl in the sink. “I’m going upstairs now—”

  “No, we still have six questions—”

  “Because I’m obviously not going to South America, and I don’t trust you one bit, not the tiniest bit, and so why don’t you and your masturbating boyfriend go down to L.A. and squat in somebody else’s house and give your questionnaire to somebody who’s into somebody stronger than Stephen. I don’t want you in our house anymore, and neither does anybody else. If you had any respect for me, you would have seen I didn’t even want to be here now.”

  “Pip, please, wait, I’m really, really sorry.” Annagret did seem genuinely distressed. “We don’t have to do any more questions—”

  “I thought it was a form we had to follow. Had to, had to. God, I’m stupid.”

  “No, you’re really smart. I think you’re fantastic. I think only maybe your life revolves too much about men, a little bit, right now.”

  Pip stared in amazement at this fresh insult.

  “Maybe you want a female friend who’s something older but used to be so much like you.”

  “You were never like me,” Pip said.

  “No, I was. Sit down, please, ja? Talk with me.”

  Annagret’s voice was so silky and commanding, and her insult had cast such humiliati
ng light on Jason’s presence in Pip’s bedroom, that Pip almost obeyed her and sat down. But when she was gripped by her distrust of people it became physically unbearable to stay with them. She fled down the hallway, hearing the scrape of a chair behind her, the sound of her name being called.

  On the second-floor landing, she paused to seethe. Stephen was weak? She thought about men too much? That is so nice. That really makes me feel good about myself.

  Behind Stephen’s door, the marital fighting had stopped. Pip very quietly moved closer to it, away from the sound of basketball downstairs, and listened. Before long, there came a creak of a bedspring, and then an unmistakable whimpering sigh, and she understood that Annagret was right, that Stephen was weak, he was weak; and yet there was nothing wrong with a husband and a wife having sex. Hearing it and picturing it and being excluded from it filled Pip with a desolation that she had only one means of assuaging.

  She took the rest of the stairs two at a time, as if shaving five seconds off her ascent could make up for half an hour’s absence. Outside her door, she composed her face into an expression of sheepish apology. It was a face she’d used a thousand times on her mother, to reliably good effect. She opened the door and peeked in, wearing the look.

  The lights were on and Jason was in his clothes again, sitting on the edge of the bed, texting intently.

  “Psst,” Pip said. “Are you horribly mad at me?”

  He shook his head. “It’s just I told my sister I’d be home by eleven.”

  The word sister dispelled much of the apology from Pip’s face, but Jason wasn’t looking at her anyway. She went in and sat down by him and touched him. “It’s not eleven yet, is it?”

  “It’s eleven twenty.”

  She put her head on his shoulder and her hands around his arm. She could feel his muscles working as he texted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t explain what happened. I mean, I can, but I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t have to explain. I kind of knew it anyway.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “No, what, though? What did you know?”

  He stopped texting and stared at the floor. “It’s not like I’m so normal myself. But relatively speaking—”