Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  Dear Pip Tyler,

  Your email is LOL—I could use many more like it. And of course you have questions, we would be disappointed if you didn’t. But, no, I am not a white-slaver, and our beverage of choice here is bottled beer. Also, we have more outstanding hackers and lawyers and theorists than I know what to do with. What we frankly (your funny word) never have enough of is laypeople of high intelligence and independent character who can help us to see the world as it is, and help the world to see us as we are. I have known and trusted Annagret for many years and never heard her more enthusiastic about an applicant. We would be delighted if you come and visit our operation. If you don’t like us, you can enjoy our beautiful surroundings as a vacation and then go home. But I think you’ll like us. Our dirty little secret is that we’re having lots of fun down here.

  Send me more questions, the more LOL the better.

  Yours,

  Andreas

  After everything she’d been reading about Wolf, she couldn’t believe she’d gotten such a long email from him, and so quickly. She reread it twice before getting on her bike and heading downhill, propelled by gravity and by the thrill of imagining that she really was an extraordinary person, and that this was the true reason her life was such a mess, and that Annagret had been the first to recognize it, and that even if Wolf turned out to be the world’s cleverest debaucher and Annagret his sexually traumatized procuress, and even if she, Pip, fell victim to Wolf herself, she would still be getting her revenge on Stephen; because, whatever else Wolf was, he wasn’t weak.

  She still had five minutes to kill when she reached the office. She stopped in the bike room and typed out the reply she’d been composing in her head.

  Dear Mr. Wolf, Thank you for the nice note and suspiciously speedy response. If I were trying to lure an innocent young person to Bolivia for purposes of sex slavery and/or cultish subservience, I would have written the exact same note. In fact … come to think of it … how do I know the note wasn’t written by a cultishly subservient sex-slave assistant of yours? Somebody of high intelligence and formerly independent character? We have a verification problem here! Yours, Pip T.

  Hoping this would make him LOL again, she went upstairs to her cubicle. Beside her computer was a sticky note from one of her outreach colleagues (Found this—☺ Janet) and a printout of a recipe: “White Whole Wheat Cake with Vegan Cream Cheese Frosting and Olallie-berries.” She dropped into her chair with a heavy sigh. As if she didn’t have enough to feel bad about already, she had to regret thinking ill of her colleagues.

  On the plus side, she seemed to have begun a flirtatious correspondence with somebody world-famous. She’d always considered herself immune to celebrity—had even, to some extent, resented it, for reasons hazily akin to her resentment of people with siblings. Her feeling was: what makes you so much worthier of attention than me? When a college friend of hers had landed a Hollywood job and started bragging about the famous actors he was meeting, she’d quietly severed communications with him. But now she saw that what mattered about celebrity was that other people were not immune to it: that they might be impressed with her connection to it, and that this might give her somewhat more than the zero power she currently felt she had. In a pleasantly seduced frame of mind, she waded back into her Rancho Ancho call sheet and deliberately refrained from checking her device, so as to prolong the anticipation.

  At her dinner break she found Wolf’s reply.

  I am seeing why Annagret likes you. My note would have reached you even faster if it hadn’t had to travel through four times the usual number of servers. Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don’t fall behind with email. Unfortunately, for security reasons, I can’t offer to video chat with you. More important, our Project needs risktakers with good judgement. You will have to judge for yourself the risk of trusting my emails. You may of course use every available internet tool to help you judge, and I can assure you, if you jump, we are here to catch you with open arms. But it is finally yours to decide whether to believe me. A.

  She noted with pleasure that he’d already dispensed with a salutation, and she did the same intimate thing in her reply.

  But trust goes both ways, right? Shouldn’t you also have to trust me? Maybe we should each tell the other some little thing we’re ashamed of. I’ll even go first. My real name is Purity. I’m so ashamed of it I always hold on tight to my wallet when I take it out with friends, because sometimes people grab wallets to make fun of people’s driver’s license pictures, and my name is on the license.

  How about that, Mr. Purity? Now it’s your turn.

  Too giddy with temerity to eat, she marched down the hall to Igor’s office. He was packing his briefcase, his day already done. He frowned when he saw her.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I haven’t washed my hair in three days.”

  “Your stomach’s better? You’re not contagious?”

  She plopped herself down in a guest chair. “So listen. Igor. Your twenty questions.”

  “Let’s forget that,” he said quickly.

  “The thing you wanted from me, that I was supposed to guess. What was it?”

  “Pip, I’m sorry. I’m taking my sons to the A’s game. This is not a good time.”

  “I was just kidding about the lawsuit.”

  “Are you really feeling all right? You don’t seem like yourself.”

  “Are you going to answer the question?”

  Igor’s look of fear was reminiscent of Stephen’s two nights earlier. “If you need more time off, you can take it. Take the rest of the week if you want.”

  “Actually, I’m thinking of taking the rest of my life off.”

  “It was a stupid joke, the twenty questions. I apologize. But my sons are waiting for me.”

  Sons: even worse than siblings!

  “Your sons can wait five minutes,” she said.

  “We’ll talk first thing in the morning.”

  “You said you liked me, although you don’t know why. You said you wanted to see me succeed.”

  “Both things completely true.”

  “But you can’t take five minutes to tell me why I shouldn’t quit?”

  “I can take the whole morning, tomorrow. But right now—”

  “Right now you don’t have time to flirt.”

  Igor sighed, looked at his watch, and sat down in the other guest chair. “Don’t quit tonight,” he said.

  “I think I’m going to quit tonight.”

  “Is it the flirting? I don’t have to do that. I thought you enjoyed it.”

  Pip frowned. “So there wasn’t actually anything you wanted from me.”

  “No, just fun. Just teasing around. You’re so funny when you’re hostile.” He seemed pleased with his explanation, pleased with his own good nature, not to mention his good looks. “You could have California’s Most Hostile Employee of the Year Award.”

  “So it was never going to be anything but flirting.”

  “Of course not. I’m happily married, this is an office, there are rules.”

  “So in other words I’m nothing to you except your worst employee.”

  “We can talk about a new position for you in the morning.”

  She saw that all she’d done by confronting him was ruin the long-running game with him, the game that had made her work here halfway bearable. Earlier in the day, she’d thought she couldn’t feel more alone than she already did, but now she saw that she could.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” she said, with a catch in her throat. “But could you possibly ask your wife to go to the game tonight? Could you possibly take me to dinner and give me some advice?”

  “Ordinarily, yes. But my wife has other plans. I’m already late. Why don’t you go home and come back in the morning?”

  She shook her head. “I really, really, really need a friend right now.”

  “I’m so sorry. But I can’t help you.”

  “Clearly.”<
br />
  “I don’t know what happened to you, but maybe you should go home and see your mother for a few days. Come back on Monday and we’ll talk.”

  Igor’s phone rang, and while he took the call she sat with her head bowed, envying the wife to whom he was apologizing for being late. When he was finished, she could feel him hesitating behind her shoulder, as if weighing whether to lay a hand on it. He apparently decided against it.

  When he was gone, she returned to her cubicle and typed out a letter of resignation. She checked her texts and emails, but there was nothing from either Stephen or Andreas Wolf, and so she dialed her mother’s number and left a message, telling her that she was coming to Felton a day early.

  THURSDAY

  The Oakland bus station was a mile-and-a-half walk from her friend Samantha’s apartment. By the time Pip got there, wearing her knapsack and carrying, in a roller-skate box that she’d borrowed from Samantha, the vegan olallieberry cake that she’d spent the morning making, she needed to pee. The door to the ladies’ room was blocked, however, by a cornrowed girl her own age, an addict and/or prostitute and/or crazy person, who shook her head emphatically when Pip tried to get past her.

  “Can’t I quickly pee?”

  “You just gonna have to wait.”

  “Like, how long, though?”

  “Long as it takes.”

  “Takes for what? I won’t look at anything. I just want to pee.”

  “What’s in the box?” the girl demanded. “Those skates?”

  Pip boarded the Santa Cruz bus with a full bladder. It went without saying that the bathroom at the back was out of order. Apparently it was not enough that her entire life was in crisis: all the way to San Jose, if not to Santa Cruz, she would have to worry about wetting herself.

  Control pee, she told herself. Control-P. As a teenager, when she was living in Felton and going to school in Santa Cruz, all her friends had owned Apple computers, but the laptop her mother had bought her was a cheap, generic PC from OfficeMax, and what she’d typed on it, when she needed to print, was Control-P. Printing, like peeing, was evidently a thing you needed to do. “I need to print,” the people at Renewable Solutions were always saying. This exact, strange phrase: I need to print. Need to P. Need to control pee … The thought struck her as good; she prided herself on having thoughts like this; and yet it went around in circles without leading anywhere. At the end of the day (people at Renewable Solutions were always saying “at the end of the day”), she still needed to pee.

  When the freeway momentarily rose out of the industrial East Bay bottomlands in which it wallowed, she could see fog piling up behind the mountains across the bay. There would be fog over the hill tonight, and she hoped that if she had to wet her pants she could wait and do it under its merciful cover. To get her mind off her bladder, she stuffed her ears with Aretha Franklin—at least she could finally stop trying to like Stephen’s hard-core boy rock—and reread her latest exchanges with Andreas Wolf.

  He’d emailed back to her the night before, while she was knocked out with Samantha’s Ativan on Samantha’s couch.

  The secret of your name is safe with me. But you know public figures must be especially careful. Imagine the state of distrust in which I move through the world. Revealing anything shameful to anyone, I run the risk of exposure, censure, mockery. Everyone should be told this about fame before they start pursuing it: you will never trust anyone again. You will be a kind of damned person, not only because you can’t trust anyone but, still worse, you must always be considering how important you are, how newsworthy, and this divides you from yourself and poisons your soul. It sucks to be well-known, Pip. And yet everyone wants to be well-known, it’s what the whole world is made of now, this wanting to be well-known.

  If I told you, when I was seven years old my mother showed me her genitals, what would you do with this information?

  Reading this message in the morning, and immediately doubting that Wolf had actually entrusted her with a shameful secret, she’d searched andreas wolf mother genitals seven years old and found only seven quality matches, all random. Among them was “72 Interesting Facts About Adolf Hitler.” She wrote back:

  I would say holy shit and keep it to myself. Because I think you might be overdoing the self-pitying famous-person thing. Maybe you’ve forgotten how it sucks to have nobody be interested in you and not have any power. People will believe you if you expose my secret. But if I expose yours, they’ll just say I fabricated your email for some sick reason, because I’m a girl. We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.

  Afternoons in Bolivia must have been Wolf’s time for emailing, because his reply came back quickly, the security of umpteen extra servers notwithstanding.

  I’m sorry that I sounded self-pitying—I was trying to sound tragic!

  It’s true I’m male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won’t accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it’s like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.

  I hope you’ll come down and join us. You might find out you have more kinds of power than you think you do.

  This reply discouraged her. Already the agreeable flirtation was slipping into German abstraction. While the cake layers were baking, she replied:

  Mr. Appropriately Named Wolf!

  No doubt due to my psychology, the messed-up state of which many people in my life can now attest to, I’m feeling more like the smaller animal that accepts its nature and just wants to be eaten. All I can picture about your Project is lots of better-adjusted people happily realizing their potential. Unless you have a spare $130000 lying around, so I can pay off my student loans, and unless you feel like writing to my (single, isolated, depressed) mother and convincing her to do without me indefinitely, I’m afraid I won’t be finding out about these amazing other powers of mine.

  Sincerely, Pip

  The email had stunk of self-pity, but she’d sent it anyway, and then mentally replayed her latest rejections by men while she frosted the cake with puttylike vegan icing and packed her knapsack for the trip to Felton.

  Because of heavy traffic, the bus didn’t stop long enough in San Jose for her to get off. Bladder ache radiated throughout her abdomen as the bus proceeded up Route 17 and over the Santa Cruz Mountains. Around Scotts Valley, the dear fog appeared, and suddenly the season was different, the hour less determinate. Most evenings in June, a great paw of Pacific fog reached into Santa Cruz, over the wooden roller coaster, along the stagnant San Lorenzo, up through the wide streets where surfers lived, and into the redwoods on the hills. By morning the ocean’s outward breath condensed in dew so heavy that it ran in gutters. And this was one Santa Cruz, this ghostly gray late-rising place. When the ocean inhaled again, midmorning, it left behind the other Santa Cruz, the optimistic one, the sunny one; but the great paw lurked offshore all day. Toward sunset, like a depression following euphoria, it rolled back in and muted human sound, closed down vistas, made everything very local, and seemed to amplify the barking of the sea lions on the underpinnings of the pier. You could hear them from miles away, their arp, arp, arp a homing call to family members still out diving in the fog.

  By the time the bus pulled off Front Street and into the station, the streetlights had come on, tricked by atmospherics. Pip hobbled to the station’s ladies’ room and into an unoccupied stall, dropped her knapsack on the dirty floor, put the cake box on top of it, and yanked down her jeans. While various muscles were unclenching, her device beeped with an incoming message.

  The internship lasts three months, with an option for renewal. Your stipend should cover your loan pa
yments. And maybe it would do your mother good to be without you a little while.

  I’m sorry you’re feeling bad and powerless. Sometimes a change of scene can help with that.

  I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator’s jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.

  She was scrutinizing the last paragraph, trying to discern a veiled threat or promise in it, when her knapsack made a small comment, a kind of dry sigh. It was slumping under the weight of the cake box. Before she could stem the flow of her pee and lunge for the box, it fell to the floor and opened itself, dumping the cake facedown onto tiles smeared with condensed fog and cigarette ash and the droppings and boot residues of girl buskers and panhandlers. Some olallieberries went rolling.

  “Oh, that is so nice of you,” she said to the ruined cake. “That is so special of you.”

  Weeping at her ineffectiveness, she conveyed the uncontaminated chunks of cake into the box and then worked for so long to wipe the icing from the floor with paper towels, as if it were smeary albino shit, as if anybody but her actually cared about cleanliness, that she nearly missed the bus to Felton.

  A fellow rider, a dirty girl with blond dreads, turned around and asked her, “You going up to ’Pico?”

  “Just to the bottom of the road,” Pip said.

  “I’d never been up there till three months ago,” the girl said. “There’s nothing else quite like it! There’s two boys there that let me sleep on their couch if I have sex with them. I don’t mind that at all. Everything’s different in ’Pico. Do you ever go up there?”

  It happened that Pip had lost her virginity in Lompico. Maybe there really was nothing else quite like it.

  “It sounds like you’ve got a good thing going,” she said politely.

  “’Pico’s the best,” the girl agreed. “They have to truck in their water on this property, because of the elevation. They don’t have to deal with the suburban scum, which is great. They give me food and everything. There’s nothing else quite like it!”