Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  Denied this particular satisfaction, he was prone to Killer-sponsored fantasies, some of them so offensive to his self-image (for example, the fantasy of coming on Annagret while she was sleeping) that it took a huge exertion of honesty to clock them before he suppressed them. All of the fantasies, without exception, involved darkness at night, the darkness at his parents’ dacha, the darkness of a hallway down which he was eternally walking to a bedroom. In his subatomic self, no chronology was stable. The object he wanted predated the piercings, the hair choppings, the gauzy Indian smocks she’d taken to wearing, and not because he “secretly” preferred fifteen-year-olds (if he ever had, he’d outgrown it) but because it was Annagret the socialist judo girl who’d helped him kill. Had made him kill; was equivalent to killing. The older Annagret, who was going to absurdly altruistic lengths to atone for the murder, didn’t suit the Killer’s purposes one bit, and so the Killer, in its fantasies, reversed the arrow of time and made her fifteen again. And more than that: when he examined certain fantasies closely, it was sometimes not he but her stepfather who walked down the dark hallway to the bedroom where she was sleeping. He was at once the man he’d killed and the man who’d killed him, and since another dark hallway existed in his memory, the dark hallway between his childhood bedroom and his mother’s, there was a further twisting of chronology whereby his mother had given birth to the monster who was Annagret’s stepfather, he was that monster, and he’d killed him in order to become him. In the shadowy world of the Killer, nobody was ever dead.

  He would have loved not to believe in his theory, would have loved to lump it with the mumbo-jumbo of contemporary physics and dismiss it, but the thing he loved most about himself was his refusal to lie to himself, and no matter how busy he got and how much he traveled, there always seemed to come another night when he found himself alone at home, in the grip of a homicidal rage that he had no other way of explaining.

  On one such night, Annagret returned from his mother’s with an especially earnest look on her face. He was sitting on the sofa, not even pretending to be reading something. It was all he could do not to punch a wall; it was that bad.

  “I thought you were coming home at nine,” he managed to say.

  “We got to talking about things,” Annagret said. “I asked her about the fifties, what the country was like then. She told me all sorts of interesting things. But then—this is very strange. It’s important. Do you mind talking to me now?”

  He could feel her looking at him, and he willed his lips to curl upward, to smile. “Of course not.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “I’ll make us some noodles later.” She sat down on the sofa by him. “Your mother was talking about your father’s career, how brilliant he was, how busy he was. And then suddenly she stopped and said, ‘I had a lover.’”

  The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was. How excellent it must have been for him to crush a man’s skull with a shovel. If only he could recall—reexperience—the relief of doing that! He couldn’t recall it. But the thought of it slightly calmed him; gave him something to hold on to.

  “That’s interesting,” he murmured.

  “I know. I couldn’t believe she was telling me. You said she’s always claimed it never happened. I was too afraid to ask her to say more about it, and she didn’t. Just ‘I had a lover.’ And then she changed the subject. But then she kept looking at me, I don’t know, like she wanted to make sure I’d noticed what she’d said.”

  “Mm.”

  “But listen. Andreas. I know we can’t tell anyone our secret. I know that. But I see her so often, she’s in her seventies, she is your mother. I had an impulse to tell her, and the impulse felt right. She would never tell anyone else, I’m sure of it. Do you think it’s all right if I tell her?”

  He didn’t think so, not one bit. That Annagret could even imagine telling Katya! Previously unguessed vistas of female closeness opened up to his mind’s eye. Katya having her way with him by way of pliant Annagret. Annagret so credulous, so earnest, so ready to betray him. Coming home at ten thirty when she’d promised to be home by nine—so many hours with Katya. Talking, talking, talking. Cunts, cunts, cunts. He was out of his mind.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he said.

  “No, I’m not,” she said, immediately on guard. “And she isn’t, either. I actually think she’s better. I know she was difficult when you were little, but that was a long time ago.”

  She knew? Difficult? She didn’t know. Nobody could know what having Katya as a mother had been like. What it was like to be psychically fucked with, day after day, and to be not only too young and weak to fight it but unable even to be angry, because she’d seduced him into wanting it. Annagret had wanted it from her stepfather for a week or two, a month at most. Andreas had wanted it throughout his childhood. And yet again he was trapped, because, unlike Annagret, he hadn’t been physically raped. He had to live with the possibility that there had never been anything so monstrous about Katya. Her version of reality was seamless, especially in old age, her youthful peccadilloes now forgotten or rendered harmless by a nice French word like lover. She’d always insisted that the disturbance was in him, not her; that it was sick of him not to believe she was a good and loving mother. And indeed it was he who’d been sitting for hours in a jealous rage, waiting for the ladies to finish with their cozy chat.

  “It can be a relief to confess things,” Annagret said. “Sometimes I think you forget that you got to confess to your father. I don’t get to confess to anyone.”

  COULD KILL HER WITH BARE HANDS RIGHT NOW

  “Once you start confessing,” he said chalkily.

  “What?”

  “Where does it stop?”

  “I’m saying we tell one person. Your own mother. Don’t you want to? Your father was very understanding, and you felt better. I bet your mother would be all the more understanding, because she knows what it’s like to make mistakes.”

  Suddenly his mind changed temperature, as minds will do. In a cooler state, he imagined his mother knowing what they’d done. Katya was truly the last person in the world he had reason to be ashamed in front of, Katya who to him was vileness personified, and yet he imagined himself ashamed of being a killer. Ashamed of everything, every particle of himself, right up to this moment. Strangle his sweet judo girl to silence her? What was wrong with him?

  Without looking at her face, he rotated toward her and buried his own face in her chest. He swung his legs up onto her lap and hung his arms around her neck. He looked like that stupid picture of John Lennon in Yoko’s arms but who cared. He needed to be held. She was better than good, because she hadn’t always been good. Had known badness and chosen goodness.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, stroking his hair, babying him. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Shh.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Shh, shh.”

  “What is it?”

  “We can’t tell her,” he said.

  “We can, though. We should.”

  “Please, no. We can’t.”

  He began to cry. The Killer stirred in him again, sensing opportunity in his tears, his regression. The Killer liked regression. The Killer liked it when he was four and Annagret fifteen. Blindly, with his eyes squeezed shut, he sought her lips with his. For a moment, hers were open and available, but then, as if she were prey, instinctively sensing a Killer she couldn’t see, she averted her face. “We have to finish discussing this,” she said.

  Discuss, discuss, discuss. Talk, talk, talk. He hated her. Needed her, hated her, needed her, hated her. Eyes still shut, he tried to kiss her again.

  “I’m serious,” she said, trying to stand up. “Get off my lap.”

  He got off her lap and opened his eyes. “Go to a priest,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If you want to confess. Find a Catholic church,
go to the confessional, say what you have to say. You’ll feel better.”

  “I’m not Catholic.”

  “I can’t stop you from seeing her, but I don’t like it.”

  “She worships you! You’re practically her Jesus.”

  “She worships what she sees in a mirror. We’re just useful objects to her. The more you tell her, the more she can use us.”

  “I’m sorry, but I think you’re very wrong.”

  “Fine. I’m wrong. But I can’t keep living with you if you tell her what we did.”

  Her face went red. “Then maybe we shouldn’t live together!”

  “Maybe not. Maybe you should live with her instead.”

  “I’m trying to have a close relationship with your mother, because you can’t do it. I’m doing you a big favor, and now you’re jealous!”

  “I’m not jealous.”

  “I think you are.”

  “Not true. Not true.”

  Everything she said was accurate, every word of his a lie. And yet he was a well-paid transitional-justice consultant, and everywhere he went people were happy to see him. They fawned over his honesty and openness, they laughed at his irreverent humor, they took flattering pictures of him. He was trapped from all sides.

  Meanwhile the leaks kept coming, in plain brown envelopes and cartons without return addresses. Being German, and East German at that, he was technologically conservative and still thought in terms of paper documents and physical computer disks. As late as the summer of 2000, he shared a home computer and email address with Annagret. She, with her community-organizing, her fringe causes, was the tech-savvy one. More and more often, he came home to find her typing and clicking away, in her absurdly limber posture on a chair, knees drawn up to her chin, arms reaching around them, a tea mug by her computer mouse, and thought: My God, is this the rest of my life? To the Killer in him, it seemed as if she’d armed herself with the Internet to defend herself against the person he really was. There was no prying her away from it.

  But then she did him a seemingly lifesaving favor. She made him buy his own powerful computer and take full advantage of it. Which he proceeded to do. By night, he developed a network of malcontents and hackers and created the Sunlight Project; by day, while Annagret was off holding hands at her community center, he viewed pornography. It was really the latter more than the former that sold him on the Internet and its world-altering potential. The sudden wide availability of porn, the anonymity of access, the meaninglessness of copyright, the instantaneity of gratification, the scale of the virtual world within the real world, the global dispersion of file-sharing communities, the sensation of mastery that mousing and clicking brought: the Internet was going to be huge, especially for bringers of sunlight.

  It was only much later, when the Internet had come to signify death to him, that he realized he’d also been glimpsing death in online porn. Every compulsion, certainly his own viewing of digital images of sex, which quickly became day-devouringly compulsive, smacked of death in its short-circuiting of the brain, its reduction of personhood to a closed loop of stimulus and response. But there was also already, in the days of file-transfer protocols and “alt” newsgroups, a sense of the unfathomable vastness that would characterize the mature Internet and the social media that followed it; in the uploaded images of somebody’s wife sitting naked on a toilet, the characteristic annihilation of the distinction between private and public; in the mind-boggling number of wives sitting naked on toilets, in Mannheim, in Lübeck, in Rotterdam, in Tampa, a premonition of the dissolution of the individual in the mass. The brain reduced by machine to feedback loops, the private personality to a public generality: a person might as well have been already dead.

  And death, of course, was catnip to the Killer. The images on the screen of his computer distracted him from thoughts of dark hallways and secret defilements, and for a while he believed that he’d found a way to make life with Annagret livable in the long run. He could preserve his ideal self in his own eyes by remaining mindful of the male exploitation of women he was witnessing on his screen, deploring it even as it stimulated him, and then, after discharging his urges, he could preserve the ideal in Annagret’s eyes as well. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin. Maybe she was punishing him for forbidding her to confess their crime to Katya, or maybe it was gender politics or maybe just the normal course of things, but she seemed not to care if they ever had sex again. What she wanted—explicitly asked for, in her concept-heavy way—was closeness and togetherness. These could be achieved by cuddling, and Andreas, with his needs met elsewhere, was fine with cuddling. The Internet had made it easier for both of them to be like children.

  It took him half a year to realize that, far from escaping, he’d trapped himself more deeply. He believed that if he couldn’t make a life work with beautiful Annagret, wedded to her by their secret and by his old hope of redemption, he’d never again muster enough hope to make a life work with anyone. To leave her would be to admit that something had always been wrong with him. But something was wrong with him. He was even more of a compulsive masturbator now than he’d been as a teenager. Repetition was objectively boring but he couldn’t stop it. The right-thinking incantations that had worked for a while, his scrupulous efforts to imagine the circumstances under which a teenage girl would permit three thuggish Russian men to ejaculate on her face in front of a camera, and to feel compassion for such a girl, no longer worked. What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all. He became afraid of being touched by Annagret. He took a deep breath whenever he saw it coming, so that he wouldn’t flinch. Closeness and togetherness were precisely what he couldn’t bear now, and it was all the more desperately important that she not find this out and leave him in disgust. Without her idealization, there was no hope for him. He began to wonder if suicide, his own death, was what the Killer really wanted.

  Although he knew the Killer was his enemy, he could never quite bring himself to hate it. Whenever he tried to tell himself that he hated it, his mind took a step back and saw that he was lying: he didn’t honestly want to be anything but exactly who he was. This was especially evident in the lack of guilt he felt about killing Horst Kleinholz. He was never able to wish he hadn’t done it. Indeed, when he was being fully honest with himself, he was immensely glad he had. And the same was true of the afternoons he spent jerking off at his powerful computer. He condemned what he was doing by the principles he wanted to believe in, but he could never hate it in the moment. Instead he resented Annagret, resented his own moral considerations, resented his other responsibilities, for standing in the way of his compulsion. And yet it was complicated, because when his watchful self stepped back from the computer over which he was hunched with his pants around his ankles, he hated what he saw. He wasn’t constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world. The shameful, loathsome object with which something was very wrong. And it was beginning to occur to him that Annagret and his mother might be better off without that object; that he should have chosen a higher bridge to jump from as a teenager.

  In something near desperation, he wrote a letter to Tom Aberant. Over the years, he and Tom had kept up a postcard correspondence. Tom’s cards had the wry American tone that Andreas had liked in him, but they lacked the confessional warmth that had incited him to make his own confession. In his letter, he tried to revive the warmth. He said he now understood what had happened in Tom’s marriage; he mentioned, with what he hoped was self-deprecating humor, that he was somewhat overly preoccupied with Internet porn; he pretended he had business that might soon take him to New York. It shouldn’t have been hard for Tom to read between the lines and discern a plea for help. But the postcard Tom sent in reply was wry and distant and contained no invitation to New York.
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  It fell to Andreas’s mother, of all people, to rescue him. At her invitation, he went to her flat for lunch on a rainy September Friday, four days before Al Qaeda’s masterstroke. He was late because he’d found it necessary to experience orgasm one more time before he left, to bring himself as low as he could. Depression could be a sort of narcotic, dulling the impulse to argue with Katya and contradict her. The less he said to her, the better. Best of all would have been not to have lunch with her, but she’d told him that they needed to discuss Annagret’s future privately. She’d hinted that it had to do with drawing up a new will.

  Naturally, this turned out to have been a lie. At her flat, while she was setting out the prepared foods she’d bought at the Galeria, Andreas asked her, dully, about her will.

  “I didn’t invite you here to talk about my will,” she said. “That’s my own business.”

  He sighed. “I only asked because you mentioned it when you called me.”

  “The two things were not related. I’m sorry if you thought they were.”

  The narcotic was working. He didn’t argue.

  “You look so tired,” she said.

  “Life in the computer age.”

  When they sat down to eat, her little dog came over to her. She smiled at Andreas. “We go through the same charade at every meal.”

  “Which charade is that?”

  “The charade of withholding and discipline.”

  “I remember it well.”

  “Lessing,” she said to the dog. “Begging does not become you.”

  The dog barked and put its paws on her linen-clad thigh.

  “It’s terrible,” she said. “It’s as if I’m her pet, not the other way around.” She gave the dog a morsel of roast potato. “Be happy with that potato,” she told it. “That’s all you’re getting.”