Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I think of it as our house.”

  “I know you do. And you know I don’t. Which is a long discussion I don’t feel like having right now.”

  “I didn’t promise her anything.”

  “Well, I’m not loving the position that puts me in. Of being the one who nixed it, and her knowing it was me.”

  “I can tell her I had second thoughts myself, so you’re not in that position. But help me understand why you’re nixing it? I thought you wanted her to live with you.”

  “You didn’t even like being in the same room with the girl until tonight. It seems like a pretty fast one-eighty on your part.”

  “Leila. Come on. You’re the one who’s smitten with her. I’m not going to take her from you. And she couldn’t take me from you if she made it her entire life’s mission. She’s a child.”

  Leila didn’t know who to be more jealous of, Tom or Pip. But together the two jealousies made her feel like simply bowing out.

  “It’s fine with me,” she said. “Do whatever you want.”

  “When you say it like that?”

  “What do you want me to say? That there’s something wrong with my head? That I’m smitten with a girl I’ve only known two months? That I’m jealous? I’m not going to fight about this. You just caught me by surprise.”

  “She and I talked about you.”

  “How nice.”

  “She wants to be like you.”

  “She must be out of her mind.”

  “Well, there is one thing. Or rather, isn’t. She should probably tell you this herself, but she’s so in awe of you that she’s afraid to. There isn’t any boyfriend.”

  “What?”

  “She’s in a Lakewood share with two other girls. She made up the whole thing about a boyfriend. Or, to be precise, there is a guy, who is named Stephen. But he lives in California and has a wife.”

  “She told you this?”

  “I have some skill at eliciting things myself.”

  Leila ought to have felt betrayed, but mostly she felt sorry for Pip. Happy people didn’t tell lies. “Why did she do that?”

  “Didn’t want to seem overeager to be in Denver. Didn’t want you to know how alone she is. Didn’t want to seem pathetic to you. I gather the reason she wanted to get out of California was her situation with the married guy there. But this is part of why it occurred to me that she could live with us. She’s very talented but kind of a mess.”

  “You’re not attracted to her.”

  “I can’t even describe how far off the radar that is.”

  The risk of a fight was waning. To talk about something else, Leila mentioned her meeting with Earl Walker and her idea of letting Pip write the story, since it was small.

  “Why did Walker meet with you?” Tom said.

  As soon as he said it, she saw it.

  “Ah,” she said. “You’re good.”

  “All I said was ‘Why did he meet with you?’”

  “No, but that’s it. I was so fixated on Pip, on her being disappointed. It’s a good question.”

  “Happy to help.”

  “Because there was one thing Walker said. He said Albuquerque had sent over a car full of investigators. It just sailed right past me.”

  “You were fixated on Pip.”

  “OK, OK.”

  “We’re the team, right? I’m not the enemy.”

  “I said OK.”

  “Reinterview.”

  When she got off the phone, she saw that a text from Pip had come in: I have a confession to make. Good girl, Leila thought. Good for her.

  She herself was off her game. She’d totally botched her meeting with Walker. He’d been rushed and flighty, but this didn’t excuse her not having asked the obvious question: Why did Kirtland AFB ship a dummy weapon to Amarillo in the first place? This was the question that Walker had met with her to be asked. The plant wouldn’t have paid a quarter-million dollars to shut him up about some harmless prank. But a weapon that had gone missing in Albuquerque? Swapped out for a training dummy?

  Even more embarrassing was why she hadn’t thought to ask the question. She’d assumed that the reason that Walker was meeting with her was her self-presentation, her feminine wiles. She’d taken his allusion to her bed in Denver straight, when in fact it had been sarcastic. She was fifty-two. The hair she’d made a show of toying with was graying.

  Ugh. Ugh.

  Ambien normally knocked her right out, but on the nights when it didn’t she had no recourse; she’d heard too many somnambulism stories to take another dose. She lay and tossed on the drought-dry bed, which somehow smelled more strongly of cigarettes than it had the previous night, and considered the fact that Pip had lied to her. That Pip had fallen for somebody’s husband; had done or tried to do to a marriage what Leila herself had once done. That she herself was now the older, drier, pouchier-faced woman who once had been, as Pip was now, a mobile destabilizing menace, a kind of rogue warhead …

  How terribly easy it had turned out to be to transform naturally occurring uranium into hollow spheres of plutonium, pack the spheres with tritium and surround them with explosives and deuterium, and do it all in such miniature that the capacity to incinerate a million people could fit on the bed of Cody Flayner’s pickup. So easy. Incomparably easier than winning the war on drugs or eliminating poverty or curing cancer or solving Palestine. Tom’s theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. Leila neither liked this theory nor had a better one; her feeling about all doomsday scenarios was Please make me the first person killed; but she’d forced herself to read accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what it was like to have had your skin burned off entirely and still be staggering down a street, alive. Not just for Pip’s sake did she want the Amarillo story to be large. The world’s fear of nuclear weapons was unaccountably unlike her fear of fighting and vomiting: the longer the world lasted without ending in mushroom clouds, the less afraid people seemed to be. The Second World War was remembered more for the extermination of Jews, more even for the firebombing of Dresden or the siege of Leningrad, than for what had happened on two August mornings in Japan. Climate change got more ink in a day than nuclear arsenals did in a year. To say nothing of the NFL passing records that Peyton Manning had broken as a Denver Bronco. Leila was afraid and felt like the only one who was.

  Or almost the only one. Pip was afraid, too. The mother who’d named her Purity appeared to have taught her very little about how the world worked, and this meant that Pip looked at things with eyes unclouded by preconception. She saw a planet on which there were still seventeen thousand nukes, probably enough to wipe vertebrate life off the face of it, and thought This can’t be good.

  There had been a time when taking in a houseguest would have inhibited Leila and Tom; when they’d drawn the blinds and curtains and walked around his house naked for the pleasure of entrusting each other with the sight of their no longer so young bodies; when the refrigerator door and the living-room floor had been viable surfaces against which to brace herself for him. Although that time was long gone, they’d never formally acknowledged its passing—so much remained unspoken behind the glare on Tom’s glasses—and Leila couldn’t help feeling hurt that he’d unilaterally acknowledged it by inviting the girl to live with him.

  Fusion chain reactions were natural, the source of a sun’s energy, but fission chain reactions weren’t. Fissile plutonium atoms were nature’s unicorns, and nowhere in the universe could a critical mass of them naturally assemble itself. People had to force it to occur, and to force the mass f
urther, with explosives, into a superdense state in which the chain reaction could proceed through enough generations to ignite fusion. And how quickly it all happened. Jiggling atomic droplets of plutonium ingesting neutron newcomers, cleaving into smaller atomic droplets, spewing further neutrons. Skinless people staggering down the street with their entrails and eyeballs hanging out …

  They should have had a baby. In a way, it was an immense relief not to have had one, not to have brought another life to a planet that would be incinerated quickly or baked to death slowly; not to have to worry about that. And yet they should have done it. Leila loved Tom and admired him beyond measure, she felt blessed by the ease of her life with him, but without a child it was a life of leaving things unspoken. Of cuddling in the evening, watching cable dramas together, inhabiting broad areas of agreement, avoiding the few hots spots of past disagreements, and drifting toward old age. Her sudden ardor for Pip was irrational but not senseless, not sexual but intense; compensatory. She didn’t know what exactly would come of permitting a newcomer into the nucleus of her and Tom, but she pictured a mushroom cloud.

  * * *

  Three and a half weeks after Pip moved in, Leila went to Washington. Along with the warhead story, she was reporting a statistics-driven piece about the lax enforcement of tax law in the tech industry. All the Washington hotels in her permitted price class were dispiriting, and she was staying in one of them. She would have liked to go home to Denver sooner, but her favorite senator, the most liberal member of the Armed Services Committee, had promised her fifteen Friday-afternoon minutes before he followed the rest of Congress out of town. She’d arranged the meeting in person, with his chief of staff, so as not to leave a phone or email trail. Since the advent of NSA dragnets, she’d operated more and more by Moscow Rules. Members of Congress were especially attractive sources, because they weren’t polygraphed.

  Working her Pentagon contacts, some of whom she’d known since her Post days, she’d pieced together a sanitized version of what had happened in Albuquerque. Yes, ten B61 weapons had been trucked to Amarillo for scheduled refurbishment and circuitry upgrades. Yes, one of them had turned out to be an unarmed facsimile normally stored on the base near the real weapons, for use in training the accident-response team. Yes, bar coding and microchip self-identifiers had been tampered with. Yes, there had ensued eleven days when a real weapon was off the grid and presumably stored in a poorly secured shed. Yes, heads had rolled. Yes, the weapon was now “fully accounted for” and had never been less than fully safed. No, the Air Force would not provide any details of the theft or disclose the identity of the perpetrator(s).

  “There’s no such thing as ‘fully safed,’” Ed Castro, a nukes expert at Georgetown, had told her. “Safe from detonating if you whack it with a hammer, sure. Safe from circumventing the code mechanisms, probably. We also suspect that later-generation bombs ‘poison’ their own cores if you tamper with them. But the thing about mid-period weapons like the B61 is that they’re sickeningly simple at heart. All the really high technology comes in prior to the assembly of the weapon. Creating and refining the plutonium and hydrogen isotopes: unbelievably difficult and costly. Designing the lens geometry of the high explosives: difficult. But putting the pieces together and making them go boom? Sadly, not so difficult. If you’ve got time and a couple of PhDs, reverse engineering the ignition circuitry is eminently doable. The result won’t be so elegant and miniature, and the yield might be reduced, but you’ll have a working thermonuclear weapon.”

  “Who would want one?” Leila said, half rhetorically.

  Castro was the kind of quote hound reporters loved. “The usual suspects,” he said. “Islamic terrorists. Rogue states. James Bond movie villains. Would-be extortionists. Conceivably antinuke activists hoping to prove a point. These are the end users, and thankfully they’re a fairly feckless lot. The more interesting thing to think about is who their potential suppliers would be. Who’s really good at getting and moving stuff they’re not supposed to have? Who goes around collecting that kind of stuff in case it comes in handy?”

  “The Russian Mob, for example.”

  “In the years before Putin took over, I used to wake up in the morning and marvel that I was still alive.”

  “But then the Russian Mob became indistinguishable from the Russian government.”

  “The kleptocracy has definitely improved nuclear security.”

  Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them. And yet, like so many imitative pleasures, it was highly addictive. Outside the Dirksen Building, on Friday afternoon, Leila saw other Hill reporters milling in little clouds of self-importance that she could discern because she was inhabiting one herself and was affronted by the sight of others. Had they, like her, removed the batteries from their smartphones, to hide their location from the dragnet? She doubted it.

  The senator was only twenty-five minutes behind schedule. His staff chief, apparently preferring deniability, didn’t join him and Leila in his office.

  “You’re annoying the Air Force,” the senator said when they were alone. “Nice work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Obviously we’re strictly on background. I’m going to give you the names of other people who’ve been briefed, and you need to leave an electronic trail of contacting every one of them. I want this story told, but it’s not worth losing a committee seat over.”

  “Is it that big a deal?”

  “It’s not that big a deal. Medium-size, maybe. But the mania for secrecy is out of control. Are you aware that the agencies don’t just number and watermark the classified reports we get now? They do something with the spacing between the letters of each copy—the kerning?”

  “Kerning, yes.”

  “Apparently it creates a unique signature for each copy. In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.”

  Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him. And she did feel liked. Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.

  “So you could have heard this from any number of people,” he said when she’d written down the names. “The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard. That’s where the whole country is right now.”

  “Easier to put journalists out of work than to find something to replace us with.”

  “Drives me crazy. I don’t have to tell you what morale is like in the bomber and silo crews. We don’t trust technology quite enough to replace them with machines. We may yet reach that point, but in the meantime those postings are career suicide. You get the worst and the least bright, safeguarding our most terrible weapons and bored out of their minds. Cheating on their exams, breaking rules, flunking urine tests. Or not flunking them.”

  “In Albuquerque?”

  “If you’re thinking crystal meth, think again. These are career officers. Don’t even write down the name Richard Keneally, but remember it. The Man Who Can—apparently there’s at least one on every base. I hope you don’t mind that I’m summarizing many pages of a report that has a unique typographical signature, rather than letting you read it?”

  “You have a plane to catch.”

  “The drugs are almost all prescription stuff. Adderall, OxyContin. Drugs to help you pass the time while your classmates from the academy are flying actual missions or eating Lockheed’s shrimp. You know my feelings about the nation’s drug laws. Suffice it to say, we’re talking about officer drugs, not grunt drugs. But still, whatever the legal inequities, they’re a no-no in the armed services. They’ll still light up a tox scre
en. Which, if you’re the Man Who Can, is the real ceiling on the growth of your business. What to do about that?”

  Leila shook her head.

  “Have the friendly friends who supply you with the drugs quietly take over the lab that tests the urine.”

  “Really,” Leila said.

  “I wish I could show you the report,” the senator said. “Because it gets better, which is to say worse. Who are the friendly friends? I hate the word cartel, it’s completely wrong. We should call them DHLes Especiales or FedExes Extralegales, because that’s what they are. If you’re manufacturing fake cancer drugs in Wuhan and you need to get a container of your product to the American consumer, who are you going to call? DHL Especial. Same thing for weapons, designer knockoffs, underage prostitutes, and, obviously, drugs of all kinds. One call serves all. The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth. Their business is delivering the goods, and their offices aren’t far south of the border. And our Man Who Can, Richard Keneally, whose name you’re remembering but not writing down, was doing business with them for several years, right under the noses of sundry inspectors general, and it only came to light because a training-replica B61 turned up where it shouldn’t have.”

  “Did the real weapon leave the base?”

  “Fortunately no. The story is extremely sad and disturbing but also funny in a way. DHL Especial may or may not have had a buyer for the weapon—we’ll never know. But before Richard Keneally could even try to get the ‘replica,’ which is to say the real weapon—before he could get it off the base, he tripped on a parking stop and fell on a bottle of tequila he was carrying. The broken glass severed an artery, he nearly bled out, and he was stuck in a hospital for a week. That’s the part that’s a little bit funny. The part that isn’t is that Keneally apparently couldn’t deliver the warhead as scheduled, and he had no way of letting the Especiales know why he hadn’t. His two sisters had both disappeared, one in Knoxville, one in Mississippi, around the time the warhead swap occurred. Apparently they were kidnapped as security for the deal. They both ended up dead behind a car dealership in Knoxville, with single gunshots to the back of the head. One of the sisters had three children. The only bright spot is that the children weren’t harmed.”