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Purity
Jonathan Franzen
The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The CorrectionsYoung Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother – her only family – is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal life.Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world – including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters – Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers – and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.







Copyright (#ulink_00b7fd6e-0e8a-5890-b65c-d695ffcf56b4)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015
Copyright © Jonathan Franzen 2015
Cover image © Image Source/Getty Images
Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it either are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007532766
Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007532797
Version: 2017-03-28

Dedication (#ulink_531fdd7c-76f7-5dec-b82b-f78d06fa69b0)
for Elisabeth Robinson
… Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft
Contents
Cover (#u0353ffd1-3b4f-53f8-ae37-758a58db93a3)
Title Page (#u7dc03347-8f8d-503d-9a02-48287751fed2)
Copyright (#u83669e31-ac76-5c30-b4a6-5f014ded5530)
Dedication (#ue1f67975-0731-5ff8-951d-9fdf62fcb0c0)
Purity in Oakland (#u1f70ed36-1767-599a-9975-f8e270c1d86c)
The Republic of Bad Taste (#uac10956a-7fbd-52b9-b657-55070029d51d)
Too Much Information (#litres_trial_promo)
Moonglow Dairy (#litres_trial_promo)
[le1o9n8a0rd] (#litres_trial_promo)
The Killer (#litres_trial_promo)
The Rain Comes (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Jonathan Franzen (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Purity in Oakland (#ulink_cdf04fc9-e573-5a46-9e77-493679f03b1e)

MONDAY
Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice,” the girl’s mother said on the telephone. “My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.”
“Isn’t that everybody’s life?” the girl, Pip, said. She’d taken to calling her mother midway through her lunch break at Renewable Solutions. It brought her some relief from the feeling that she wasn’t suited for her job, that she had a job that nobody could be suited for, or that she was a person unsuited for any kind of job; and then, after twenty minutes, she could honestly say that she needed to get back to work.
“My left eyelid is drooping,” her mother explained. “It’s like there’s a weight on it that’s pulling it down, like a tiny fisherman’s sinker or something.”
“Right now?”
“Off and on. I’m wondering if it might be Bell’s palsy.”
“Whatever Bell’s palsy is, I’m sure you don’t have it.”
“If you don’t even know what it is, pussycat, how can you be so sure?”
“I don’t know—because you didn’t have Graves’ disease? Hyper-thyroidism? Melanoma?”
It wasn’t as if Pip felt good about making fun of her mother. But their dealings were all tainted by moral hazard, a useful phrase she’d learned in college economics. She was like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail, an employee too indispensable to be fired for bad attitude. Some of her friends in Oakland also had problematic parents, but they still managed to speak to them daily without undue weirdnesses transpiring, because even the most problematic of them had resources that consisted of more than just their single offspring. Pip was it, as far as her own mother was concerned.
“Well, I don’t think I can go to work today,” her mother said. “My Endeavor is the only thing that makes that job survivable, and I can’t connect with the Endeavor when there’s an invisible fisherman’s sinker pulling on my eyelid.”
“Mom, you can’t call in sick again. It’s not even July. What if you get the actual flu or something?”
“And meanwhile everybody’s wondering what this old woman with half her face drooping onto her shoulder is doing bagging their groceries. You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. The invisibility of it.”
“Let’s not romanticize the cubicle,” Pip said.
“This is the terrible thing about bodies. They’re so visible, so visible.”
Pip’s mother, though chronically depressed, wasn’t crazy. She’d managed to hold on to her checkout-clerk job at the New Leaf Community Market in Felton for more than ten years, and as soon as Pip relinquished her own way of thinking and submitted to her mother’s she could track what she was saying perfectly well. The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues’ cubicles were covered with photos and clippings, but Pip herself understood the attraction of invisibility. Also, she expected to be fired any month now, so why settle in.
“Have you given any thought to how you want to not-celebrate your not-birthday?” she asked her mother.
“Frankly, I’d like to stay in bed all day with the covers over my head. I don’t need a not-birthday to remind me I’m getting older. My eyelid is doing a very good job of that already.”
“Why don’t I make you a cake and I’ll come down and we can eat it. You sound sort of more depressed than usual.”
“I’m not depressed when I see you.”
“Ha, too bad I’m not available in pill form. Could you handle a cake made with stevia?”
“I don’t know. Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There’s no fooling a taste bud, in my experience.”
“Sugar has an aftertaste, too,” Pip said, although she knew that argument was futile.
“Sugar has a sour aftertaste that the taste bud has no problem with, because it’s built to report sourness without dwelling on it. The taste bud doesn’t have to spend five hours registering strangeness, strangeness! Which was what happened to me the one time I drank a stevia drink.”
“But I’m saying the sourness does linger.”
“There’s something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That’s what stevia tastes like to me.”
“I’m not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”
“I’m saying I don’t need a cake.”
“No, I’ll find a different kind of cake. I’m sorry I suggested a kind that’s poison to you.”
“I didn’t say it was poison. It’s simply that stevia does something funny—”
“To your mouth chemistry, yeah.”
“Pussycat, I’ll eat whatever kind of cake you bring me, refined sugar won’t kill me, I didn’t mean to upset you. Sweetheart, please.”
No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched. The problem, as Pip saw it—the essence of the handicap she lived with; the presumable cause of her inability to be effective at anything—was that she loved her mother. Pitied her; suffered with her; warmed to the sound of her voice; felt an unsettling kind of nonsexual attraction to her body; was solicitous even of her mouth chemistry; wished her greater happiness; hated upsetting her; found her dear. This was the massive block of granite at the center of her life, the source of all the anger and sarcasm that she directed not only at her mother but, more and more self-defeatingly of late, at less appropriate objects. When Pip got angry, it wasn’t really at her mother but at the granite block.
She’d been eight or nine when it occurred to her to ask why her birthday was the only one celebrated in their little cabin, in the redwoods outside Felton. Her mother had replied that she didn’t have a birthday; the only one that mattered to her was Pip’s. But Pip had pestered her until she agreed to celebrate the summer solstice with a cake that they would call not-birthday. This had then raised the question of her mother’s age, which she’d refused to divulge, saying only, with a smile suitable to the posing of a koan, “I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“No, but how old are you really?”
“Look at my hands,” her mother had said. “If you practice, you can learn to tell a woman’s age by her hands.”
And so—for the first time, it seemed—Pip had looked at her mother’s hands. The skin on the back of them wasn’t pink and opaque like her own skin. It was as if the bones and veins were working their way to the surface; as if the skin were water receding to expose shapes at the bottom of a harbor. Although her hair was thick and very long, there were dry-looking strands of gray in it, and the skin at the base of her throat was like a peach a day past ripe. That night, Pip lay awake in bed and worried that her mother might die soon. It was her first premonition of the granite block.
She’d since come fervently to wish that her mother had a man in her life, or really just one other person of any description, to love her. Potential candidates over the years had included their next-door neighbor Linda, who was likewise a single mom and likewise a student of Sanskrit, and the New Leaf butcher, Ernie, who was likewise a vegan, and the pediatrician Vanessa Tong, whose powerful crush on Pip’s mother had taken the form of trying to interest her in birdwatching, and the mountain-bearded handyman Sonny, for whom no maintenance job was too small to occasion a discourse on ancient Pueblo ways of being. All these good-hearted San Lorenzo Valley types had glimpsed in Pip’s mother what Pip herself, in her early teens, had seen and felt proud of: an ineffable sort of greatness. You didn’t have to write to be a poet, you didn’t have to create things to be an artist. Her mother’s spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility. There was never a television in their cabin and no computer before Pip turned twelve; her mother’s main source of news was the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which she read for the small daily pleasure of being appalled by the world. In itself, this was not so uncommon in the Valley. The trouble was that Pip’s mother herself exuded a shy belief in her greatness, or at least carried herself as if she’d once been great, back in a pre-Pip past that she categorically refused to talk about. She wasn’t so much offended as mortified that their neighbor Linda could compare her frog-catching, mouth-breathing son, Damian, to her own singular and perfect Pip. She imagined that the butcher would be permanently shattered if she told him that he smelled to her like meat, even after a shower; she made herself miserable dodging Vanessa Tong’s invitations rather than just admit she was afraid of birds; and whenever Sonny’s high-clearance pickup rolled into their driveway she made Pip go to the door while she fled out the back way and into the redwoods. What gave her the luxury of being impossibly choosy was Pip. Over and over, she’d made it clear: Pip was the only person who passed muster, the only person she loved.
This all became a source of searing embarrassment, of course, when Pip hit adolescence. And by then she was too busy hating and punishing her mother to clock the damage that her mother’s unworldliness was doing to her own life prospects. Nobody was there to tell her that it might not be the best idea, if she wanted to set about doing good in the world, to graduate from college with $130,000 in student debt. Nobody had warned her that the figure to pay attention to when she was being interviewed by Igor, the head of consumer outreach at Renewable Solutions, was not the “thirty or forty thousand dollars” in commissions that he foresaw her earning in her very first year but the $21,000 base salary he was offering, or that a salesman as persuasive as Igor might also be skilled at selling shit jobs to unsuspecting twenty-one-year-olds.
“About the weekend,” Pip said in a hard voice. “I have to warn you that I want to talk about something you don’t like to talk about.”
Her mother gave a little laugh intended to be winsome, to signal defenselessness. “There’s only one thing I don’t like to talk about with you.”
“Well, and that is exactly the thing I want to talk about. So just be warned.”
Her mother said nothing to this. Down in Felton, the fog would have burned off by now, the fog that her mother was daily sorry to see go, because it revealed a bright world to which she preferred not to belong. She practiced her Endeavor best in the safety of gray morning. Now there would be sunlight, greened and goldened by filtration through the redwoods’ tiny needles, summer heat stealing through the sleeping porch’s screened windows and over the bed that Pip had claimed as a privacy-craving teenager, relegating her mother to a cot in the main room until she left for college and her mother took it back. She was probably on the bed practicing her Endeavor right now. If so, she wouldn’t speak again until spoken to; she would be all breathing.
“This isn’t personal,” Pip said. “I’m not going anywhere. But I need money, and you don’t have any, and I don’t have any, and there’s only one place I can think to get it. There’s only one person who even theoretically owes me. So we’re going to talk about it.”
“Pussycat,” her mother said sadly, “you know I won’t do that. I’m sorry you need money, but this isn’t a matter of what I like or don’t like. It’s a matter of can or can’t. And I can’t, so we’ll have to think of something else for you.”
Pip frowned. Every so often, she felt the need to strain against the circumstantial straitjacket in which she’d found herself two years earlier, to see if there might be a little new give in its sleeves. And, every time, she found it exactly as tight as before. Still $130,000 in debt, still her mother’s sole comfort. It was kind of remarkable how instantly and totally she’d been trapped the minute her four years of college freedom ended; it would have depressed her, had she been able to afford being depressed.
“OK, I’m going to hang up now,” she said into the phone. “You get yourself ready for work. Your eye’s probably just bothering you because you’re not sleeping enough. It happens to me sometimes when I don’t sleep.”
“Really?” her mother said eagerly. “You get this, too?”
Although Pip knew that it would prolong the call, and possibly entail extending the discussion to genetically heritable diseases, and certainly require copious fibbing on her part, she decided that her mother was better off thinking about insomnia than about Bell’s palsy, if only because, as Pip had been pointing out to her for years, to no avail, there were actual medications she could take for her insomnia. But the result was that when Igor stuck his head in Pip’s cubicle, at 1:22, she was still on the phone.
“Mom, sorry, gotta go right now, good-bye,” she said, and hung up.
Igor was Gazing at her. He was a blond Russian, strokably bearded, unfairly handsome, and to Pip the only conceivable reason he hadn’t fired her was that he enjoyed thinking about fucking her, and yet she was sure that, if it ever came to that, she would end up humiliated in no time flat, because he was not only handsome but rather handsomely paid, while she was a girl with nothing but problems. She was sure that he must know this, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said to him. “I’m sorry I went seven minutes over. My mom had a medical issue.” She thought about this. “Actually, cancel that, I’m not sorry. What are the chances of me getting a positive response in any given seven-minute period?”
“Did I look censorious?” Igor said, batting his eyelashes.
“Well, why are you sticking your head in? Why are you staring at me?”
“I thought you might like to play Twenty Questions.”
“I think not.”
“You try to guess what I want from you, and I’ll confine my answers to an innocuous yes or no. Let the record show: only yeses, only nos.”
“Do you want to get sued for sexual harassment?”
Igor laughed, delighted with himself. “That’s a no! Now you have nineteen questions.”
“I’m not kidding about the lawsuit. I have a law-school friend who says it’s enough that you create an atmosphere.”
“That’s not a question.”
“How can I explain to you how not funny to me this is?”
“Yes–no questions only, please.”
“Jesus Christ. Go away.”
“Would you rather talk about your May performance?”
“Go away! I’m getting on the phone right now.”
When Igor was gone, she brought up her call sheet on her computer, glanced at it with distaste, and minimized it again. In four of the twenty-two months she’d worked for Renewable Solutions, she’d succeeded in being only next-to-last, not last, on the whiteboard where her and her associates’ “outreach points” were tallied. Perhaps not coincidentally, four out of twenty-two was roughly the frequency with which she looked in a mirror and saw someone pretty, rather than someone who, if it had been anybody but her, might have been considered pretty but, because it was her, wasn’t. She’d definitely inherited some of her mother’s body issues, but she at least had the hard evidence of her experience with boys to back her up. Many were quite attracted to her, few ended up not thinking there’d been some error. Igor had been trying to puzzle it out for two years now. He was forever studying her the way she studied herself in the mirror: “She seemed good-looking yesterday, and yet …”
From somewhere, in college, Pip had gotten the idea—her mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by—that the height of civilization was to spend Sunday morning reading an actual paper copy of the Sunday New York Times at a café. This had become her weekly ritual, and, in truth, wherever the idea had come from, her Sunday mornings were when she felt most civilized. No matter how late she’d been out drinking, she bought the Times at 8 a.m., took it to Peet’s Coffee, ordered a scone and a double cappuccino, claimed her favorite table in the corner, and happily forgot herself for a few hours.
The previous winter, at Peet’s, she’d become aware of a nice-looking, skinny boy who had the same Sunday ritual. Within a few weeks, instead of reading the news, she was thinking about how she looked to the boy while reading, and whether to raise her eyes and catch him looking, until finally it was clear that she would either have to find a new café or talk to him. The next time she caught his eye, she attempted an invitational head-tilt that felt so creaky and studied that she was shocked by how instantly it worked. The boy came right over and boldly proposed that, since they were both there at the same time every week, they could start sharing a paper and save a tree.
“What if we both want the same section?” Pip said with some hostility.
“You were here before I was,” the boy said, “so you could have first choice.” He went on to complain that his parents, in College Station, Texas, had the wasteful practice of buying two copies of the Sunday Times, to avoid squabbling over sections.
Pip, like a dog that knows only its name and five simple words in human language, heard only that the boy came from a normal twoparent family with money to burn. “But this is kind of my one time entirely for myself all week,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, backing away. “It just looked like you wanted to say something.”
Pip didn’t know how not to be hostile to boys her own age who were interested in her. Part of it was that the only person in the world she trusted was her mother. From her experiences in high school and college, she’d already learned that the nicer the boy was, the more painful it would be for both of them when he discovered that she was much more of a mess than her own niceness had led him to believe. What she hadn’t yet learned was how not to want somebody to be nice to her. The not-nice boys were particularly adept at sensing this and exploiting it. Thus neither the nice ones nor the not-nice ones could be trusted, and she was, moreover, not very good at telling the two apart until she was in bed with them.
“Maybe we could have coffee some other time,” she said to the boy. “Some not-Sunday morning.”
“Sure,” he said uncertainly.
“Because now that we’ve actually spoken, we don’t have to keep looking at each other. We can just read our separate papers, like your parents.”
“My name’s Jason, by the way.”
“I’m Pip. And now that we know each other’s names, we especially don’t have to keep looking at each other. I can think, oh, that’s just Jason, and you can think, oh, that’s just Pip.”
He laughed. It turned out that he had a degree in math from Stanford and was living the math major’s dream, working for a foundation that promoted American numeracy while trying to write a textbook that he hoped would revolutionize the teaching of statistics. After two dates, she liked him enough to think she’d better sleep with him before he or she got hurt. If she waited too long, Jason would learn that she was a mess of debts and duties, and would run for his life. Or she would have to tell him that her deeper affections were engaged with an older guy who not only didn’t believe in money—as in U.S. currency; as in the mere possession of it—but also had a wife.
So as not to be totally undisclosive, she told Jason about the afterhours volunteer “work” that she was doing on nuclear disarmament, a subject he seemed to know so much more about than she did, despite its being her “work,” not his, that she became slightly hostile. Fortunately, he was a great talker, an enthusiast for Philip K. Dick, for Breaking Bad, for sea otters and mountain lions, for mathematics applied to daily life, and especially for his geometrical method of statistics pedagogy, which he explained so well she almost understood it. The third time she saw him, at a noodle joint where she was forced to pretend not to be hungry because her latest Renewable Solutions paycheck hadn’t cleared yet, she found herself at a crossroads: either risk friendship or retreat to the safety of casual sex.
Outside the restaurant, in light fog, in the Sunday-evening quiet of Telegraph Avenue, she put the moves on Jason and he responded avidly. She could feel her stomach growling as she pressed it into his; she hoped he couldn’t hear it.
“Do you want to go to your house?” she murmured in his ear.
Jason said no, regrettably, he had a sister visiting.
At the word sister, Pip’s heart constricted with hostility. Having no siblings of her own, she couldn’t help resenting the demands and potential supportiveness of other people’s; their nuclear-family normalcy, their inherited wealth of closeness.
“We can go to my house,” she said, somewhat crossly. And she was so absorbed in resenting Jason’s sister for displacing her from his bedroom (and, by extension, from his heart, although she didn’t particularly want a place in it), so vexed by her circumstances as she and Jason walked hand in hand down Telegraph Avenue, that they’d reached the door of her house before she remembered that they couldn’t go there.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Could you wait outside for a second while I deal with something?”
“Um, sure,” Jason said.
She gave him a grateful kiss, and they proceeded to neck and grind for ten minutes on her doorstep, Pip burying herself in the pleasure of being touched by a clean and highly competent boy, until a distinctly audible growl from her stomach brought her out of it.
“One second, OK?” she said.
“Are you hungry?”
“No! Or actually suddenly maybe yes, slightly. I wasn’t at the restaurant, though.”
She eased her key into the lock and went inside. In the living room, her schizophrenic housemate, Dreyfuss, was watching a basketball game with her disabled housemate, Ramón, on a scavenged TV set whose digital converter a third housemate, Stephen, the one she was more or less in love with, had obtained by sidewalk barter. Dreyfuss’s body, bloated by the medications that he’d to date been good about taking, filled a low, scavenged armchair.
“Pip, Pip,” Ramón cried out, “Pip, what are you doing now, you said you might help me with my vocabbleree, you wanna help me with it now?”
Pip put a finger to her lips, and Ramón clapped his hands over his mouth.
“That’s right,” said Dreyfuss quietly. “She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s here. And why might that be? Could it be because the German spies are in the kitchen? I use the word spies loosely, of course, though perhaps not entirely inappropriately, given the fact that there are some thirty-five members of the Oakland Nuclear Disarmament Study Group, of which Pip and Stephen are by no means the least dispensable, and yet the house that the Germans have chosen to favor with their all too typically German earnestness and nosiness, for nearly a week now, is ours. A curious fact, worth considering.”
“Dreyfuss,” Pip hissed, moving closer to him to avoid raising her voice.
Dreyfuss placidly knit his fat fingers on his belly and continued speaking to Ramón, who never tired of listening to him. “Could it be that Pip wants to avoid talking to the German spies? Perhaps especially tonight? When she’s brought home a young gentleman with whom she’s been osculating on the front porch for some fifteen minutes now?”
“You’re the spy,” Pip whispered furiously. “I hate your spying.”
“She hates it when I observe things that no intelligent person could fail to notice,” Dreyfuss explained to Ramón. “To observe what’s in plain sight is not to spy, Ramón. And perhaps the Germans, too, are doing no more than that. What constitutes a spy, however, is motive, and there, Pip—” He turned to her. “There I would advise you to ask yourself what these nosy, earnest Germans are doing in our house.”
“You didn’t stop taking your meds, did you?” Pip whispered.
“Osculate, Ramón. There’s a fine vocabulary word for you.”
“Whassit mean?”
“Why, it means to neck. To lock lips. To pluck up kisses by their roots.”
“Pip, you gonna help me with my vocabbleree?”
“I believe she has other plans tonight, my friend.”
“Sweetie, no, not now,” Pip whispered to Ramón, and then, to Dreyfuss, “The Germans are here because we invited them, because we had room. But you’re right, I need you not to tell them I’m here.”
“What do you think, Ramón?” Dreyfuss said. “Should we help her? She’s not helping you with your vocabulary.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Help him yourself. You’re the one with the huge vocabulary.”
Dreyfuss turned again to Pip and looked at her steadily, his eyes all intellect, no affect. It was as if his meds suppressed his condition well enough to keep him from butchering people in the street with a broadsword but not quite enough to banish it from his eyes. Stephen had assured Pip that Dreyfuss looked at everyone the same way, but she persisted in thinking that, if he ever stopped taking his meds, she would be the person he went after with a broadsword or whatever, the person in whom he would pinpoint the trouble in the world, the conspiracy against him; and, what’s more, she believed that he was seeing something true about her falseness.
“These Germans and their spying are distasteful to me,” Dreyfuss said to her. “Their first thought when they walk into a house is how to take it over.”
“They’re peace activists, Dreyfuss. They stopped trying to be world conquerors, like, seventy years ago.”
“I want you and Stephen to make them go away.”
“OK! We will! Later. Tomorrow.”
“We don’t like the Germans, do we, Ramón?”
“We like it when it’s jus’ the five of us, like famlee,” Ramón said.
“Well … not a family. Not exactly. No. We each have our own families, don’t we, Pip?”
Dreyfuss looked into her eyes again, significantly, knowingly, with no human warmth—or was it maybe simply no trace of desire? Maybe every man would look at her this heartlessly if sex were entirely subtracted? She went over to Ramón and put her hands on his fat, sloping shoulders. “Ramón, sweetie, I’m busy tonight,” she said. “But I’ll be home all night tomorrow. OK?”
“OK,” he said, completely trusting her.
She hurried back to the front door and let in Jason, who was blowing on his cupped fingers. As they passed by the living room, Ramón again clapped his hands to his mouth, miming his commitment to secrecy, while Dreyfuss imperturbably watched basketball. There were so many things for Jason to see in the house and so few that Pip cared for him to see, and Dreyfuss and Ramón each had a smell, Dreyfuss’s yeasty, Ramón’s uriney, that she was used to but visitors weren’t. She climbed the stairs rapidly on tiptoe, hoping that Jason would get the idea to hurry and be quiet. From behind a closed door on the second floor came the familiar cadences of Stephen and his wife finding fault with each other.
In her little bedroom, on the third floor, she led Jason to her mattress without turning any lights on, because she didn’t want him to see how poor she was. She was horribly poor but her sheets were clean; she was rich in cleanliness. When she’d moved into the room, a year earlier, she’d scrubbed every inch of floor and windowsill, using a spray bottle of disinfectant cleaner, and when mice had come to visit her she’d learned from Stephen that stuffing steel wool into every conceivable ingress point would keep them out, and then she’d cleaned the floors again. But now, after tugging Jason’s T-shirt up over his bony shoulders and letting him undress her and engaging in various pleasurable preliminaries, only to recall that her only condoms were in the toiletries bag that she’d left in the first-floor bathroom before going out, because the Germans had occupied her regular bathroom, her cleanliness became another handicap. She gave Jason’s cleanly circumcised erection a peck with her lips, murmured, “Sorry, one second, I’ll be right back,” and grabbed a robe that she didn’t get fully arranged and knotted until she was halfway down the last flight of stairs and realized she’d neglected to explain where she was going.
“Fuck,” she said, pausing on the stairs. Nothing about Jason had suggested wild promiscuity, and she possessed a still-valid morningafter prescription, and she was feeling, at that moment, as if sex were the only thing in her life that she was reasonably effective at; but she had to try to keep her body clean. Self-pity seeped into her, a conviction that for no one but her was sex so logistically ungainly, a tasty fish with so many small bones. Behind her, behind the marital bedroom door, Stephen’s wife was raising her voice on the subject of moral vanity.
“I’ll take my chances with moral vanity,” Stephen interrupted, “when the alternative is signing on with a divine plan that immiserates four billion people.”
“That is the essence of moral vanity!” the wife crowed.
Stephen’s voice triggered in Pip a longing deeper than any she felt for Jason, and she quickly concluded that she herself wasn’t guilty of moral vanity—was more like a case of moral low self-esteem, since the man she really wanted was not the one she was intent on fucking now. She tiptoed down to the ground floor and past the piles of scavenged building supplies in the hallway. In the kitchen, the German woman, Annagret, was speaking German. Pip darted into the bathroom, stuffed a three-strip of condoms into the pocket of her robe, peeked out of the door again, and pulled her head back quickly: Annagret was now standing in the kitchen doorway.
Annagret was a dark-eyed beauty and had a pleasing voice, confounding Pip’s preconceptions about the ugliness of German and the blue eyes of its speakers. She and her boyfriend, Martin, were vacationing in various American slums, ostensibly to raise awareness of their international squatters’ rights organization, and to forge connections with the American antinuke movement, but primarily, it seemed, to take pictures of each other in front of optimistic ghetto murals. The previous Tuesday evening, at a communal dinner that Pip had attended unavoidably, because it was her night to cook, Stephen’s wife had picked a fight with Annagret on the subject of Israel’s nuclear arms program. Stephen’s wife was one of those women who held another woman’s beauty against her (the fact that she held nothing against Pip, but tried to be maternal to her instead, confirmed Pip’s nongrandiose assessment of her own looks), and Annagret’s effortless loveliness, more accentuated than marred by her savage haircut and her severally pierced eyebrows, had upset Stephen’s wife so much that she began saying blatantly untrue things about Israel. Since it happened that Israel’s nuclear arms program was the one disarmament subject that Pip was well versed in, having recently prepared a report on it for the study group, and since she was also sorely jealous of Stephen’s wife, she’d cut loose with an eloquent five-minute summary of the evidence for Israeli nuclear capability.
Ridiculously, this had fascinated Annagret. Pronouncing herself “super impressed” with Pip, she led her away from the others and into the living room, where they sat on the sofa and had a long girl talk. There was something irresistible about Annagret’s attentions, and when she began to talk about the famous Internet outlaw Andreas Wolf, whom it turned out she knew personally, and to say that Pip was exactly the kind of young person that Wolf’s Sunlight Project was in need of, and to insist that Pip leave her terrible exploitative job and apply for one of the paid internships that the Sunlight Project was now offering, and to say that very probably, to win one of these internships, all she had to do was submit to a formal “questionnaire” that Annagret herself could administer before she left town, Pip had felt so flattered—so wanted—that she promised to do the questionnaire. She’d been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.
The next morning, sober, she’d regretted her promise. Andreas Wolf and his Project were currently conducting business out of South America, owing to various European and American warrants for his arrest on hacking and spying charges, and there was obviously no way that Pip was leaving her mother and moving to South America. Also, although Wolf was a hero to some of her friends and she was moderately intrigued by Wolf’s idea that secrecy was oppression and transparency freedom, she wasn’t a politically committed person; she mostly just tagged along with Stephen, dabbling in commitment in the same fitful way she dabbled in physical fitness. Also, the Sunlight Project, and the fervor with which Annagret had spoken of it, seemed possibly cultish. Also, as she was certain would become instantly clear when she did the questionnaire, she was nowhere near as smart and well-informed as her five-minute speech on Israel had made her seem. And so she’d been avoiding the Germans until this morning, when, on her way out to share the Sunday Times with Jason, she’d found a note from Annagret whose tone was so injured that she’d left a note of her own outside Annagret’s door, promising to talk to her tonight.
Now, as her stomach continued to register emptiness, she waited for some change in the stream of spoken German to indicate that Annagret was no longer in the kitchen doorway. Twice, like a dog overhearing human speech, Pip was pretty sure that she heard her own name in the stream. If she’d been thinking straight, she would have marched into the kitchen, announced that she had a boy over and couldn’t do the questionnaire, and gone upstairs. But she was starving, and sex was becoming more of an abstract task.
Finally she heard footsteps, the scrape of a kitchen chair. She bolted from the bathroom but snagged the hem of her robe on something. A nail in a piece of scavenged wood. As she danced out of the way of falling lumber, Annagret’s voice came up the hall behind her.
“Pip? Pip, I’m looking for you since three days ago!”
Pip turned around to see Annagret advancing.
“Hi, yeah, sorry,” she said, hastily restacking the lumber. “I can’t right now. I’ve got … How about tomorrow?”
“No,” Annagret said, smiling, “come now. Come, come, like you promised.”
“Um.” Pip’s mind was not prioritizing well. The kitchen, where the Germans were, was also where cornflakes and milk were. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible if she ate something before returning to Jason? Might she not be more effective, more responsive and energetic, if she could have some cornflakes first? “Let me just run upstairs for one second,” she said. “One second, OK? I promise I’ll be right back.”
“No, come, come. Come now. It takes only a few minutes, ten minutes. You’ll see, it’s fun, it’s only a form we have to follow. Come. We’re waiting the whole evening for you. You’ll come do it now, ja?”
Beautiful Annagret beckoned to her. Pip could see what Dreyfuss meant about the Germans; and yet there was relief in taking orders from someone. Plus, she’d already been downstairs for so long that it would be unpleasant to go up and beg Jason for further patience, and her life was already so fraught with unpleasantnesses that she’d adopted the strategy of delaying encounters with them as long as possible, even when the delay made it likely that they would be even more unpleasant when she did encounter them.
“Dear Pip,” Annagret said, stroking Pip’s hair when she was seated at the kitchen table and eating a large bowl of cornflakes and not greatly in the mood to have her hair touched. “Thank you for doing this for me.”
“Let’s just get through it quickly, OK?”
“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 humiliating 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—”
“I want to make normal love with you. Can’t we still do that? Even just for half an hour? You can tell your sister you’ll be home a little late.”
“Listen. Pip.” He frowned. “Is that your real name, by the way?”
“It’s what I call myself.”
“Somehow it doesn’t seem like I’m talking to you when I use it. I don’t know … ‘Pip.’ ‘Pip.’ It doesn’t sound … I don’t know …”
The last traces of apology drained from her face, and she took her hands away from him. She knew she had to resist an outburst, but she couldn’t resist it. The best she could do was keep her voice low.
“OK,” she said. “So you don’t like my name. What else don’t you like about me?”
“Oh, come on. You’re the one who left me up here for an hour. More than an hour.”
“Right. While your sister was waiting for you.”
Speaking the word sister again was like tossing a match into an oven full of unlit gas, the ready-to-combust anger that she walked around with every day; there was a kind of whoosh inside her head.
“Seriously,” she said, heart pounding, “you might as well tell me everything you don’t like about me, since we’re obviously never going to fuck, since I’m not normal enough, although what’s so abnormal about me I could use a little help in understanding.”
“Hey, come on,” Jason said. “I could have just left.”
The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the anisotropy of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the language of feelings while girls played the boys’ game of sex at their own risk, dupes if they objectified and victims if they didn’t.
“You didn’t seem to mind me when your dick was in my mouth,” she said.
“I didn’t put it there,” he said. “And it wasn’t there long.”
“No, because I had to go downstairs and get a condom so you could stick it inside me.”
“Wow. So this is all me now?”
Through a haze of flame, or hot blood, Pip’s eyes fell on Jason’s handheld device.
“Hey!” he cried.
She jumped up and ran to the far side of the room with his device.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” he shouted, pursuing her.
“Yes I can!”
“No, you can’t, it’s not fair. Hey—hey—you can’t do that!”
She wedged herself underneath the child’s writing desk that was her only piece of furniture and faced the wall, bracing her leg on a desk leg. Jason tried to pull her out by the belt of her robe, but he couldn’t dislodge her and was apparently unwilling to get more violent than this. “What kind of freak are you?” he said. “What are you doing?”
Pip touched the device’s screen with shaking fingers.


“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jason said, pacing behind her. “What are you doing?”
She pawed the screen and found the next thread.












She slumped to one side, put the device on the floor, and gave it a push in Jason’s direction. Her anger had burned off as quickly as it had ignited, leaving ashen grief behind.
“It’s only the way some of my friends talk,” Jason said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Please go away,” she said in a small voice.
“Let’s start over. Can we just, like, reboot? I’m really sorry.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, and she recoiled. He took the hand away.
“OK, look, let’s talk tomorrow, though, OK?” he said. “This was obviously the wrong night for both of us.”
“Just go away now, please.”
Renewable Solutions didn’t make or build or even install things. Instead, depending on the regulatory weather (not climate but weather, for it changed seasonally and sometimes seemingly hourly), it “bundled,” it “brokered,” it “captured,” it “surveyed,” it “client-provided.” In theory, this was all very worthy. America put too much carbon into the atmosphere, renewable energy could help with that, federal and state governments were forever devising new tax inducements, the utilities were indifferent-to-moderately-enthusiastic about greening their image, a gratifyingly non-negligible percentage of California households and businesses were willing to pay a premium for cleaner electricity, and this premium, multiplied by many thousands and added to the money flowing from Washington and Sacramento, minus the money that went to the companies that actually made or installed stuff, was enough to pay fifteen salaries at Renewable Solutions and placate its venturecapitalist backers. The buzzwords at the company were also good: collective, community, cooperative. And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions. From her mother she’d learned the importance of leading a morally purposeful life, and from college she’d learned to feel worried and guilty about the country’s unsustainable consumption patterns. Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.
At first, and in hindsight least confusingly, she’d sold powerpurchase agreements to small and midsize businesses, until a new state regulation put an end to the outrageous little cut that Renewable Solutions took of those. Then it was signing up households in potential renewable energy districts; each household earned Renewable Solutions a bounty paid by some shadowy third party or parties that had created an allegedly lucrative futures market. Then it was giving residents of progressive municipalities a “survey” to measure their level of interest in having their taxes raised or their municipal budgets rejiggered to switch over to renewables; when Pip pointed out to Igor that ordinary citizens had no realistic basis for answering the “survey” questions, Igor said that she must not, under any circumstances, admit this to the respondents, because positive responses had cash value not only for the companies that made stuff but also for the shadowy third parties with their futures market. Pip was on the verge of quitting her job when the cash value of the responses went down and she was shifted to solar renewable energy certificates. This had lasted six relatively pleasant weeks before a flaw in the business model was detected. Since April, she’d been attempting to sign up South Bay subdivisions for waste-energy micro-collectives.
Her associates in consumer outreach were flogging the same crap, of course. The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the “product,” they didn’t vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn’t make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer. Only when she was allowed to work on direct-mail and social-media outreach did her talents seem less wasted; having grown up with no television, she had good language skills.
Today being a Monday, she was telephonically harassing the many 65+s who didn’t use social media and hadn’t responded to the company’s direct-mail bombardment of a Santa Clara County development called Rancho Ancho. Micro-collectives only worked if you got near-total community buy-in, and a community organizer couldn’t be dispatched before a fifty percent response rate was achieved; nor could Pip earn any “outreach points,” no matter how much work she’d done.
She put on her headset and forced herself to look at her call sheet again and cursed the self she’d been an hour earlier, before lunch, because this earlier self had cherry-picked the sheet, leaving the names GUTTENSCHWERDER, ALOYSIUS and BUTCAVAGE, DENNIS for after lunch. Pip hated the hard names, because mispronouncing them immediately alienated the consumer, but she gamely clicked Dial. A man at the Butcavage residence answered with a gruff hello.
“Hiiiiii,” she said in a sultry drawl into which she’d learned to inject a note of apology, of shared social discomfort. “This is Pip Tyler, with Renewable Solutions, and I’m following up on a mailing we sent you a few weeks ago. Is this Mr. Butcavage?”
“Boocavazh,” the man corrected gruffly.
“So sorry, Mr. Boocavazh.”
“What’s this about?”
“It’s about lowering your electric bill, helping the planet, and getting your fair share of state and federal energy tax credits,” Pip said, although in truth the electric-bill savings were hypothetical, waste energy was environmentally controversial, and she wouldn’t have been making this call if Renewable Solutions and its partners had any intention of giving consumers a large share of the tax benefits.
“Not interested,” Mr. Butcavage said.
“Well, you know,” Pip said, “quite a few of your neighbors have expressed strong interest in forming a collective. You might do a little asking around and see what they’re thinking.”
“I don’t talk to my neighbors.”
“Well, no, of course, I’m not saying you have to if you don’t want to. But the reason they’re interested is that your community has a chance to work together for cleaner, cheaper energy and real tax savings.”
One of Igor’s precepts was that any call in which the words cleaner, cheaper, and tax savings could be repeated at least five times would result in a positive response.
“What is it you’re selling?” Mr. Butcavage said a mite less gruffly.
“Oh, this is not a sales call,” Pip lied. “We’re trying to organize community support for a thing called waste energy. It’s a cleaner, cheaper, tax-saving way to solve two of your community’s biggest problems at once. I’m talking about high energy costs and solid-waste disposal. We can help you burn your garbage at clean, high temperatures and feed the electricity directly into the grid, at a potentially significant cost savings for you and real benefit to the planet. Can I tell you a little bit more about how it works?”
“What’s your angle?” Mr. Butcavage said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Somebody’s paying you to call me when I’m trying to take a nap. What’s in it for them?”
“Well, basically we’re facilitators. You and your neighbors probably don’t have the time or the expertise to organize a waste-energy micro-collective on your own, and so you’re missing out on cleaner, cheaper electricity and certain tax advantages. We and our partners have the experience and the know-how to set you up for greater energy independence.”
“Yeah, but who pays you?”
“Well, as you may know, there’s an enormous amount of state and federal money available for renewable-energy initiatives. We take a share of that, to cover our costs, and pass the rest of the savings on to your community.”
“In other words, they tax me to pay for these initiatives, and maybe I get some of it back.”
“That’s an interesting point,” Pip said. “But it’s actually a little more complicated. In many cases, you’re not paying any direct tax to fund the initiatives. But you do, potentially, reap the tax benefits, and you get cleaner, cheaper energy, too.”
“Burning my garbage.”
“Yes, the new technology for that is really incredible. Super clean, super economical.” Was there any way to say tax savings again? Pip had never ceased to dread, in these calls, what Igor called the pressure point, but she now seemed to have reached it with Mr. Butcavage. She took a breath and said: “It sounds like this might be something you’re interested in learning more about?”
Mr. Butcavage muttered something, possibly “burn my own garbage,” and hung up on her.
“Yeah, bite me,” she said to the dead line. Then she felt bad about it. Not only had Mr. Butcavage’s questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.
Because her mother didn’t drive, and because she didn’t need a photo ID in a small community like Felton, and because the farthest she ever went from Felton was downtown Santa Cruz, her only official identification was her Social Security card, which bore the name Penelope Tyler (no middle name). To get this card, using a name she’d assumed as an adult, she would have had to present either a forged birth certificate or the original copy of her real birth certificate along with legal documentation of her name change. Pip’s repeated fine-toothed combings of her mother’s possessions had turned up no documents like these, nor any safe-deposit key, which led her to conclude that her mother had either destroyed the documents or buried them in the ground as soon as she had a new Social Security number. Somewhere, some county courthouse may have had a public record of her name change, but the United States contained a lot of counties, few of them put their records online, and Pip wouldn’t even have known what time zone to start looking in. She’d entered every conceivable combination of keywords into every commercial search engine and ended up with nothing but an acute appreciation of the limitations of search engines.
When Pip was very young, vague stories had satisfied her, but by the time she was eleven her questions had grown so insistent that her mother agreed to tell her the “full” story. Once upon a time, she said, she’d had a different name and a different life, in a state that wasn’t California, and she’d married a man who—as she discovered only after Pip was born—had a propensity to violence. He abused her physically, but he was very cunning about inflicting pain without leaving serious marks on her, and he was even more abusive psychologically. Soon she became a total hostage to his abuse, and she might have stayed married until he murdered her if he hadn’t been so enraged by Pip’s crying, as a baby, that she feared for Pip’s safety as well. She tried running away from him with Pip, but he tracked them down and abused her psychologically and brought them home again. He had powerful friends in their community, she couldn’t prove that he abused her, and she knew that even if she divorced him he would still get partial custody of Pip. And she couldn’t allow that. She’d married a dangerous person and could live with her own mistake, but she couldn’t put Pip at risk. And so, one night, while her husband was away on business, she packed a suitcase and boarded a bus and took Pip to a battered-wives shelter in a different state. The women at the shelter helped her assume a new identity and get a new, fake birth certificate for Pip. Then she boarded a bus again and took refuge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where a person could be whoever she said she was.
“I did it to protect you,” she’d told Pip. “And now that I’ve told you the story, you have to protect yourself and never tell anyone else. I know your father. I know how enraged he must have been that I stood up for myself and took you from him. And I know that if he ever found out where you are, he would come and take you from me.”
Pip at eleven was profoundly credulous. Her mother had a long, thin scar on her forehead which came out when she blushed, and her front teeth had a gap between them and didn’t match the color of her other teeth. Pip was so sure that her father had smashed her mother’s face, and felt so sorry for her, that she didn’t even ask her if he had. For a while, she was too afraid of him to sleep alone at night. In her mother’s bed, with stifling hugs, her mother assured her that she was completely safe as long as she never told anyone her secret, and Pip’s credulity was so complete, her fear so real, that she kept the secret until well into her rebellious teen years. Then she told two friends, swearing both to secrecy, and in college she told more friends.
One of them, Ella, a homeschooled girl from Marin, reacted with a funny look. “That is so weird,” Ella said. “I feel like I’ve heard that exact story before. There’s a writer in Marin who wrote a whole memoir with basically that story.”
The writer was Candida Lawrence (also an assumed name, according to Ella), and when Pip tracked down a copy of her memoir she saw that it had been published years before her mother had told her the “full” story. Lawrence’s story wasn’t identical, but it was similar enough to propel Pip home to Felton in a cold rage of suspicion and accusation. And here was the really weird thing: when she laid into her mother, she could feel herself being abusive like her absent father, and her mother crumpled up like the abused and emotionally hostage-taken person she’d portrayed herself as being in her marriage, and so, in the very act of attacking the full story, Pip was somehow confirming its essential plausibility. Her mother sobbed revoltingly and begged Pip for kindness, ran sobbing to a bookcase and pulled a copy of Lawrence’s memoir from a shelf of more self-helpy titles where Pip would never have noticed it. She thrust the book at Pip like a kind of sacrificial offering and said it had been an enormous comfort to her over the years, she’d read it three times and read other books of Lawrence’s too, they made her feel less alone in the life she’d chosen, to know that at least one woman had gone through a similar trial and come out strong and whole. “The story I told you is true,” she cried. “I don’t know how to tell you a truer story and still keep you safe.”
“What are you saying,” Pip said with abusive calm and coldness. “That there is a truer story but it wouldn’t keep me ‘safe’?”
“No! You’re twisting my words, I told the truth and you have to believe me. You’re all I have in the world!” At home, after work, her mother let her hair escape its plaits into a fluffy gray mass, which now shook as she stood and keened and gasped like a very large child having a meltdown.
“For the record,” Pip said with even more lethal calm, “had you or hadn’t you read Lawrence’s book when you told me your story?”
“Oh! Oh! Oh! I’m trying to keep you safe!”
“For the record, Mom: are you lying about this, too?”
“Oh! Oh!”
Her mother’s hands waved spastically around her head, as if preparing to catch the pieces of it when it exploded. Pip felt a distinct urge to slap her in the face, and then to inflict pain in cunning, invisible ways. “Well, it’s not working,” she said. “I’m not safe. You have failed to keep me safe.” And she grabbed her knapsack and walked out the door, walked down their steep, narrow lane toward Lompico Road, beneath the stoically stationary redwoods. Behind her she could hear her mother crying “Pussycat” piteously. Their neighbors may have thought a pet had gone missing.
She had no interest in “getting to know” her father, she already had her hands full with her mother, but it seemed to her that he should give her money. Her $130,000 in student debt was far less than he’d saved by not raising her and not sending her to college. Of course, he might not see why he should pay anything now for a child whom he hadn’t enjoyed the “use” of, and who wasn’t offering him any future “use,” either. But given her mother’s hysteria and hypochondria, Pip could imagine him as a basically decent person in whom her mother had brought out the worst, and who was now peaceably married to someone else, and who might feel relieved and grateful to know that his long-lost daughter was alive; grateful enough to take out his checkbook. If she had to, she was even willing to offer modest concessions, the occasional email or phone call, the annual Christmas card, a Facebook friendship. At twenty-three, she was well beyond reach of his custody; she had little to lose and much to gain. All she needed was his name and date of birth. But her mother defended this information as if it were a vital organ that Pip was trying to rip out of her.
When her long, dispiriting afternoon of Rancho Ancho calls finally came to an end, at 6 p.m., Pip saved her call sheets, strapped on her knapsack and bike helmet, and tried to sneak past Igor’s office without being accosted.
“Pip, a word with you, please,” came Igor’s voice.
She shuffled back so he could see her from his desk. His Gaze glanced down past her breasts, which at this point might as well have had giant eights stenciled on them, and settled on her legs. She would have sworn they were like an unfinished sudoku to Igor. He wore exactly that frown of preoccupied problem-solving.
“What,” she said.
He looked up at her face. “Where are we with Rancho Ancho?”
“I got some good responses. We’re at, like, thirty-seven percent right now.”
He nodded his head from side to side, Russian style, noncommittal. “Let me ask you. Do you enjoy working here?”
“Are you asking me if I’d prefer to be fired?”
“We’re thinking of restructuring,” he said. “There may be an opportunity for you to use other skills.”
“Good Lord. ‘Other skills’? You really are creating an atmosphere.”
“It will be two years, I think, on August first. You’re a smart girl. How long do we give the experiment in outreach?”
“It’s not my decision, is it?”
He waggled his head again. “Do you have ambitions? Do you have plans?”
“You know, if you hadn’t done that Twenty Questions thing to me, it would be easier to take the question seriously.”
He made a tsking sound with his tongue. “So angry.”
“Or tired. How about just tired? Can I go now?”
“I don’t know why, but I like you,” he said. “I’d like to see you succeed.”
She didn’t stick around to hear more. Out in the lobby, her three female outreach associates were putting on running shoes for their Monday after-work female-bonding jogging thing. They were in their thirties and forties, with husbands and in two cases children, and it required no superpowers to divine what they thought of Pip: she was the complainer, the underperformer, the entitled Young Person, the fresh-skinned magnet for Igor’s Gaze, the morally hazardous exploiter of Igor’s indulgence, the person with no baby pictures in her cubicle. Pip concurred in much of this assessment—probably none of them could have been as rude to Igor as she was and not been fired—and yet she was hurt that they’d never invited her to go jogging with them.
“How was your day, Pip?” one of them asked her.
“I don’t know.” She tried to think of something uncomplaining to say. “Do any of you happen to have a good recipe for a vegan cake with whole-grain flour and not too much sugar?”
The women stared at her.
“I know: right?” she said.
“That’s kind of like asking how to throw a good party with no booze, desserts, or dancing,” another of them said.
“Is butter vegan?” the third said.
“No, it’s animal,” the first said.
“But ghee. Isn’t ghee just fat with no milk solids?”
“Animal fat, animal fat.”
“OK, thank you,” Pip said. “Have a good run.”
As she descended the stairs to the bike rack, she was pretty sure she could hear them laughing at her. Wasn’t asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm? In truth, though, she had a dwindling supply of friends her own age, too. She was still valued in larger groups, for the relative bitterness of her sarcasm, but when it came to one-on-one friendships she had trouble interesting herself in the tweets and postings and endless pictures of the happy girls, none of whom could fathom why she lived in a squatter house, and she wasn’t bitter enough for the unhappy girls, the self-destructive ones, the ones with aggressive tattoos and bad parents. She could feel herself starting down the road to being a friendless person like her mother, and Annagret had been right: it made her too interested in the Ychromosomal. Certainly her four months of abstinence since the incident with Jason had been dreary.
Outside, the weather was unpleasantly perfect. She felt so beatendown that she poked along the Mandela Parkway in first gear, going no faster than the jammed traffic above her on the freeway. Across the bay, the sun was still well up in the sky over San Francisco, not dimmed but made gentler by a hint of high ocean mist. Like her mother, Pip was coming to prefer drizzle and heavy fog, for their absence of reproach. As she pedaled up through the sketchy blocks of Thirty-Fourth Street, she shifted into higher gears and avoided eye contact with the drug sellers.
The house where she lived had once belonged to Dreyfuss, who had drawn the down payment from an inheritance with which he’d also opened a used-book store off Piedmont Avenue, following his mother’s suicide. His house had mirrored the condition of his mind, for a long time fairly orderly, then more eccentrically cluttered with things like vintage jukeboxes, and finally filled floor to ceiling with papers for his “research” and foodstuffs for a coming “siege.” His bookstore, which people had enjoyed visiting for the experience of talking to someone smarter than themselves (because nobody was smarter than Dreyfuss; he had a photographic memory and could solve high-level chess and logic problems in his head), became a place of putrescent smells and paranoia. He snarled at his customers when he rang up their purchases, and then he started shouting at anybody who walked in the door, and then he took to hurling books at them, which led to visits from the police, which led to an assault, which led to his being involuntarily committed. By the time he was released, on a new cocktail of meds, he’d lost the store, its stock had been liquidated to cover unpaid rent and real or trumped-up damages, and his house was in foreclosure.
Dreyfuss had moved back into the house anyway. He spent his days writing ten-page letters to his bank and its agents and various governmental agencies. In the space of six months, he threatened four different lawsuits and managed to force the bank into a stalemate; it helped that the house was in terrible repair. But apart from his disability payments Dreyfuss had no money, and so he allied himself with the Occupy movement, befriended Stephen, and agreed to share the house with other squatters in exchange for food and upkeep and utilities. At the height of Occupy, the place was a zoo of transients and troublemakers. Eventually, though, Stephen’s wife had imposed some order on it. They kept one room for short-term squatters and gave two others to Ramón and his brother, Eduardo, who’d come along with Stephen and his wife from the Catholic Worker house where they’d been living.
Pip had met Stephen at the Disarmament Study Group a few months before Eduardo was struck and killed by a laundry truck. These months were a happy time for her, because she had the distinct impression that Stephen and his wife were estranged. Pip had been instantly attracted to Stephen’s intensity, to his extreme-fighter physique and his little-boy mop of hair, and she sensed that other girls in the study group felt the same way. But she was the one bold enough to invite him out for an after-meeting coffee (to be paid for by her, since he didn’t believe in money). Given how warmly he said yes, it seemed not unreasonable to assume that they were having a sort-of first date.
Over subsequent coffees, she told him about her undergraduate phobia of nuclear weapons, her wish to do good in the world, and her fear that the study group was as useless as Renewable Solutions. Stephen told her how he’d married his college sweetheart, and how they’d spent their twenties in Catholic Worker houses, living under a vow of poverty, doing the whole Dorothy Day thing, uniting radical politics and religion, and how their paths had then diverged, the wife becoming more religious and less political and Stephen the opposite, the wife opening a bank account and going to work at a group home for the disabled, while Stephen devoted himself to organizing for Occupy and living cash-free. Even though he’d lost his faith and left the Church, his years at the Worker had given him an almost female emotional directness, an exciting propensity for cutting to the heart of things, which Pip had never encountered in a man before, let alone in a man so street-tough. In an access of trust, she spilled out more personal stuff, including the fact that she paid an unsustainably high rent for a share with college friends, and Stephen listened to her so intensely that when he offered her Eduardo’s room for zero rent, soon after Eduardo was killed, she took it to mean she had a chance with him.
When she went to the house for her tour and interview, she discovered that Stephen and his wife were not so estranged as not to be still sharing a bed. Also, Stephen hadn’t bothered to show up that night; maybe he’d known that the bed situation would be a shocker for Pip? She felt that he’d misled her about the status of his marriage. And yet: Why had he misled her? Wasn’t this, in itself, grounds for hope? The wife, Marie, was a red-faced blonde in her late thirties. She conducted the interview while Dreyfuss sat sphinxlike in a corner and Ramón wept about his brother. And either Marie was vain enough not to perceive a threat in Pip, or her Catholic charity was so true-believing that she was genuinely moved by her financial plight. She took to Pip with a mothering kindness which was then and remained ever after a reproach to the stomach-churning jealousy Pip felt toward her.
Except for this jealousy, and for the creepiness of Dreyfuss, which was itself offset by the pleasure of watching his mind work, she’d been happy in the house. The most consistent proof of her human worth was the care she gave Ramón. She’d learned, soon after moving in, that Stephen and Marie had legally adopted him a year before Eduardo’s death, so that Eduardo could develop his own life. Although Ramón was no more than a year or two younger than Stephen and Marie, he was now their son, which would have seemed utterly insane to Pip had she not so quickly come to love him herself. Helping him with his vocabulary, learning to play the basic video games that he was capable of, on a console that she’d bought for the house as a Christmas present, with money she didn’t really have, and making him heavily buttered popcorn, and watching his favorite cartoons with him, she understood the attraction of Christian charity. She might even have tried churchgoing if Stephen hadn’t come to hate the Church for its venality and its crimes against women and the planet. Through the marital bedroom door, she heard Marie throwing Stephen’s own love of Ramón in his face, shouting at him that he’d let his head poison his heart against the Gospel, that his heart was obviously still full of the Word, that the example of Christ was right there in his loving-kindness to their adopted son.
Even though she never went to church, Pip had been losing her college friends one by one, after texting them one too many times that she couldn’t hang with them because she’d promised to play a game with Ramón or take him to a thrift store to buy sneakers. This hampered social planning, but the real problem, she suspected, was that her friends had begun to write her off as a squatter-house weirdo. She was now down to three friends with whom she drank on Saturdays and stayed in textual touch while carefully withholding information; because she really was kind of a squatter-house weirdo. Unlike Stephen and Marie, who came from good middle-class Catholic families, she’d barely even lowered her station in going from her mother’s little cabin to Thirty-Third Street, and her student debt was functionally a vow of poverty. She felt more effective at doing her house chores and helping Ramón than at anything else in her life. And yet, to answer Igor’s question, she did have an ambition, if not a plan for achieving it. Her ambition was not to end up like her mother. And so the fact that she was effective at being a squatter didn’t give her much satisfaction; it filled her, more often, with dread.
As she rounded the corner onto Thirty-Third Street, she saw Stephen sitting on their front steps, wearing his little-boy clothes, his secondhand Keds and secondhand seersucker shirt, its short sleeves strained by his large biceps. The subtle evening mist was making shafts of the golden light beneath the nearby freeway viaducts. Stephen’s head was bowed.
“Hello, hello,” Pip said cheerily, as she dismounted.
Stephen raised his head and looked at her with reddened eyes. His face was wet.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s over,” he said.
“What’s over? What happened?” She let her bike fall to the ground. “Did Dreyfuss lose the house? What happened?”
He smiled wanly. “No, Dreyfuss did not lose the house. Are you kidding? I lost my marriage. Marie’s gone. She’s moved out.”
His face twisted, and cold fear surged outward from Pip’s center; but when it passed below her waist it became a terrible warmth. How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use. She took off her helmet and sat down on the stoop.
“Oh, Stephen, I’m so sorry,” she said. Until this moment, their only hugs had been of hello and good-bye, but her limbs were suddenly so shaky that she had to put her hands on his shoulders, as if to keep her arms from falling off. “This is so sudden.”
He snuffled a bit. “You didn’t see it coming?”
“No, no, no.”
“That’s right,” he said bitterly, “because how can she remarry? That was always my ace in the hole.”
Pip squeezed him and rubbed his biceps, and there was nothing wrong with this; he needed a comforting friend. But his muscles were testosterone-hardened and warm. And the great impediment was gone, moved out, gone.
“You guys have been fighting so much, though,” she suggested. “Almost every night, for months.”
“Not so much lately,” he said. “I actually thought things were getting better. But that was only because …”
He put his face in his hands again.
“Is there somebody else?” Pip said. “Somebody she …”
He rocked in a kind of whole-body nod.
“Oh, God. That’s terrible. That’s terrible, Stephen.” She pressed her face into his shoulder. “Tell me what I can do for you,” she whispered into the seersucker of his shirt.
“There is one thing,” he said.
“Tell me,” she said, nuzzling the seersucker.
“You can talk to Ramón.”
This brought her out of the unreality of what was happening; made her aware that she had her face in somebody’s shirt. She took her arms away and said, “Shit.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“She’s got it all figured out,” Stephen said. “She’s got the entire rest of her life plotted out like some corporate master plan. She gets custody and I get visitation, as if that was the point of adopting him—visitation. She’s been …” He took a deep breath. “She’s involved with the director of the home.”
“Oh, Jesus. Perfect.”
“Who is apparently friends with the archbishop, who can get the marriage annulled for her. Perfect, right? They’re going to put Ramón in the home and try to give him voc ed, and then she can pop out three quick babies in her spare time. That’s the plan, right? And what judge is not going to give full custody to the mother with a full-time paying job at a place for people like Ramón? That’s the plan. And you would not believe how righteous she is about every bit of it.”
“I can sort of believe it,” Pip ventured to say.
“And I love the righteousness,” Stephen said, his voice trembling. “She is righteous. She really does burn with moral purpose. I just didn’t want to have three babies.”
Well, thank God for that, Pip thought.
“So Ramón’s still here?” she said.
“She and Vincent are coming back for him in the morning. Apparently they’ve had the thing planned for weeks now—they were just waiting for a bed to open up.” Stephen shook his head. “I thought Ramón was going to be what saved us. To have a son we both loved, so it wouldn’t matter if we disagreed about everything else.”
“Well,” Pip said with some hostility, owing to the obvious persistence of Marie’s hold on him, “you’re not the first couple whose relationship having a child didn’t save. I was probably a child like that myself in fact.”
Stephen turned to her and said, “You’re a good friend.”
She took his hand and wove her fingers into his and tried to calibrate the pressure of her squeeze. “I am your good friend,” she agreed. But now that his hand was in direct contact with hers, her body was making clear, with thudding heart and shallow breath, that it expected to have his hands all over it in a matter of days, possibly hours. It was like a big dog straining on the leash of her intelligence. She allowed herself to bump his hand once on her thigh, where she most wanted him to place it at this moment, and then released it. “What did you say to Ramón?”
“I can’t face him. I’ve been out here since she left.”
“He’s just been sitting in there without your saying anything to him?”
“She only left like half an hour ago. He’s going to be upset if he sees me crying. I thought you could sort of prepare him, and then I could talk to him reasonably.”
Pip here recalled Annagret’s fateful word weak; but it didn’t make her want Stephen any less. It made her want to forget about Ramón and stay out here and keep touching, because being weak might mean being unable to resist.
“Will you talk to me, too, later on?” she said. “Just me? I really need to talk to you.”
“Of course. This doesn’t change anything, we’ll still have the house. Dreyfuss is a bulldog. Don’t worry about that.”
Although it was obvious to Pip’s body that, in fact, everything had changed, her intelligence could forgive Stephen for being unable to see this so soon after being dumped by his wife of fifteen years. Heart still thudding, she stood up and took her bike inside. Dreyfuss was sitting by himself in the living room, dwarfing a scavenged six-legged office chair and mousing at the house computer.
“Where’s Ramón?” Pip said.
“In his room.”
“I guess I don’t even have to ask you if you know what’s going on.”
“I don’t meddle in family affairs,” Dreyfuss said coolly. Like a six-legged spider, he rotated his bulk in Pip’s direction. “I have, however, been checking facts. The St. Agnes Home is a fully state-accredited and well-reviewed thirty-six-bed facility, opened in 1984. The director, Vincent Olivieri, is a forty-seven-year-old widower with three sons in their late teens and early twenties; he holds an MSW from San Francisco State. Archbishop Evans has visited the home on at least two occasions. Would you care to see a picture of Evans and Olivieri on the front steps of the home?”
“Dreyfuss, do you feel anything about this?”
He looked at Pip steadily. “I feel that Ramón will be getting more than adequate care. I will miss his friendly presence but not his video games or his very limited conversational range. It may take some time, but Marie will likely be able to get her marriage annulled—I’ve identified several precedents in the archdiocese. I confess to some concern about house finances in the absence of her paychecks. Stephen tells me we need a new roof. As much as you seem to enjoy helping him with house maintenance, I have trouble imagining the two of you in a roofing capacity.”
By Dreyfuss standards this was a very feeling speech. Pip went up to Ramón’s room and found him lying on his tangled bedsheets, his face to a wall covered with Bay Area sports posters. The combination of his strong smell and the smiling star athletes was so poignant that her eyes filled.
“Ramón, sweetie?”
“Hi Pip,” he said, not moving at all.
She sat down on his bed and touched his fat arm. “Stephen said you wanted to see me. Do you want to turn around and see me?”
“I want us to be famlee,” he said, not moving.
“We’re still family,” she said. “None of us is going anywhere.”
“I’m going somewhere. Marie said. I’m going to the home where she works. It’s a different famlee but I like our famlee. Don’ you like our famlee, Pip?”
“I do like it, very much.”
“Marie can go but I wanna stay with you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss, just like before.”
“But we’ll all still see you, and now you can make some new friends, too.”
“I don’ wan’ new frens. I wan’ my old frens, just like before.”
“You like Marie, though. And she’ll be there every day, you’ll never be alone. It’ll be sort of the same and sort of new—it’ll be nice.”
She sounded to herself just like she did when she was lying on the phone at work.
“Marie don’ do things with me like you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss do,” Ramón said. “She’s too busy. I don’ see why I have to go with her an’ not stay here.”
“Well, she takes care of you in a different way. She earns money, and we all benefit from that. She loves you just as much as Stephen does, and anyway she’s your mother now. A person has to stay with their mother.”
“But I like it here, like famlee. Wha’s gonna happen to us, Pip?”
She was already imagining what would happen to them: how much more time she’d have alone with Stephen. The best part of living here, even more than discovering her capacity for charity, had been that she got to be around him every day. Having grown up with a mother so unworldly that she couldn’t even hang a picture on a wall, because it would have entailed buying a hammer to drive the nail, Pip had arrived on Thirty-Third Street with a hunger to learn practical skills. And Stephen had taught her these skills. He’d shown her how to spackle, how to caulk, how to operate a power saw, how to glaze a window, how to rewire a scavenged lamp, how to take apart her bicycle, and he’d been so patient with her, so generous, that she (or at least her body) had had a feeling of being groomed to be a worthier mate for him than Marie, whose domestic skills were strictly of the kitchen. He took her dumpsterdiving, demonstrating how to jump right in and toss things around, digging for the good stuff, and sometimes she even did this by herself now, when she saw a promising dumpster, and exulted with him when she brought home something usable. It was a thing they had together. She could be more like him than Marie was, and thus, in time, more liked. This promise made the ache of her desire more bearable.
By the time she and Ramón had had a good cry together, and he’d refused to go downstairs with her, insisting that he wasn’t hungry, two of Stephen’s young friends from Occupy had arrived with quarts of low-end beer. She found the three of them sitting at the kitchen table, talking not about Marie but about wage/price feedback loops. She preheated the oven for the frozen pizzas that were Dreyfuss’s contribution to communal cooking, and it occurred to her that she would probably get stuck with more cooking now that Marie was gone. She considered the problem of communal labor while Stephen and his friends, Garth and Erik, imagined a labor utopia. Their theory was that the technologydriven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.
“I have a question, though,” Pip said as she tore up the head of romaine lettuce that Dreyfuss considered a salad in itself. “If one person is getting paid forty thousand dollars a year to be a consumer, and another person is getting forty thousand to change bedpans in a nursing home, isn’t the person changing bedpans going to kind of resent the person doing nothing?”
“The service worker would have to be paid more,” Garth said.
“A lot more,” Pip said.
“In a fair world,” Erik said, “those nursing-home workers would be the ones driving the Mercedeses.”
“Yeah, but even then,” Pip said, “I’d rather just ride a bike and not have to change bedpans.”
“Yeah, but if you wanted a Mercedes and changing bedpans was the way to get it?”
“No, Pip’s right,” Stephen said, which gave her a modest thrill. “The way you’d have to do it is make labor compulsory but then keep lowering the retirement age, so you’d always have full employment for everybody under thirty-two, or thirty-five, or whatever, and full unemployment for everybody over that age.”
“Kind of sucks to be young in that world,” Pip said. “Not that it doesn’t already suck in this world.”
“I’d be up for it,” Garth said, “if I knew that starting at thirty-five I’d have the rest of my life to myself.”
“And then, if you could get the retirement age down to thirty-two,” Stephen said, “you could make it illegal to have kids before you retire. That would help with the population problem.”
“Yeah,” Garth said, “but when the population goes down, the retirement age necessarily goes up, because you still need service workers.”
Pip took her phone out onto the back porch. She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was. While the light faded in the west, she replied, dutifully, to some texts from her remaining friends and then dutifully left a message for her mother, expressing hope that her eyelid was better. Her own body was still under the impression that something big was about to happen to it. Her heart went dunk, dunk, dunk as she watched the sky above the freeway turn from orange to indigo.
Dreyfuss was serving pizza when she went back inside, and the talk had turned to Andreas Wolf, the famous bringer of sunlight. She poured herself a large glass of beer.
“Was it a leak, or did they hack in?” Erik said.
“They never say,” Garth said. “It could be that somebody just leaked them the passwords or the keys. That’s part of Wolf’s M.O.—protect the source.”
“He’s making people forget there ever was a Julian.”
“At least Julian still blows him out of the water as a coder. Wolf’s hackers are all hired guns. He couldn’t even hack an Xbox by himself.”
“But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki. Wolf is still reasonably pure. In fact, that’s his whole brand now: purity.”
The word purity made Pip shudder.
“This definitely helps us,” Stephen said. “There’s a bunch of East Bay properties in the document dump. This is exactly the kind of shit we’ve been trying to document from the outside. We need to reach out to all the East Bay homeowners in the leak and get them on our side, do a rally with them or something.”
Pip turned to Dreyfuss for an explanation. He ate with such pleasureless speed that food just disappeared from his plate without his seeming to touch it. “The Sunlight Project,” he said, “released thirty thousand internal emails from its undisclosed tropical location on Saturday night. Most of the emails are from the Bank of Relentless Pursuit, which is, interestingly, as you know, my own bank. Although my own case is nowhere mentioned in the emails, I believe it falls short of pathological to imagine that the German spies might have tried to do us a favor, having nosed out the identity of my bank. In any event, the emails are highly damning. Relentless Pursuit is still engaged in a pattern of misrepresentation, deceit, bullying, stonewalling, and the attempted theft of equity from homeowners in temporary distress. In toto, it casts a devastatingly unflattering light on the federal government’s settlement with the banks.”
“The Germans weren’t spying, Dreyfuss,” Stephen said. “I told Annagret about your bank.”
“What?” Pip said sharply. “When?”
“When what?”
“When did you tell Annagret? Are you guys still in touch?”
“Of course we are.”
She searched Stephen’s beer-flushed face for evidence of guilt. She didn’t see any, but her jealousy discounted this and moved right on to imagining that, with Marie out of the picture, Annagret would dump her boyfriend and move to Oakland and take Stephen and drive Pip out of the house.
“It’s an amazing leak,” Stephen said to her. “It’s all there—how to work out a re-fi with the homeowner and then go nonresponsive, and then ‘lose’ the paperwork, and initiate foreclosure proceedings. They even name the numbers. Anybody with more than two consecutive missed or partial payments and seventy-five thousand in net equity gets the treatment. And quite a bit of it is right here in the East Bay. It’s an incredible gift to us. I’m pretty sure Annagret made it happen.”
Too agitated to eat, Pip drank down her beer and poured more. In the past four months, she’d received at least twenty emails from Annagret, all of which she’d marked as Read without reading. She wasn’t much of a Facebook user, in part because she felt bludgeoned by happier people’s photographs and in part because personal socialmedia use was frowned upon at work, but in order to keep using it at all she’d had to reject Annagret’s overture of friendship, so as not to be bombarded with messages there as well. Her memory of Annagret was tangled up with the memory of Jason, and it made her feel strangely dirty, as if she’d been not robed but fully naked when she did the questionnaire and had then inflicted her dirtiness on Jason; as if she’d had some very wrong sort of personal intercourse with Annagret, the sort a person had bad dreams about. And now it was connected with the word purity, which to her was the most shameful word in the language, because it was her given name. It made her ashamed of her own driver’s license, the PURITY TYLER beside her sullen head shot, and made filling out any application a small torture. The name had accomplished the opposite of what her mother had intended by giving it to her. As if to escape the weight of it, she’d made herself a dirty girl in high school, and she was still a dirty girl, desiring someone’s husband … She kept drinking beer until she felt dulled enough to excuse herself and take some pizza to Ramón.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, his face to the wall.
“Sweetie, you have to eat something.”
“I’m not hungry. Where’s Stephen?”
“He has friends over. He’ll be up soon.”
“I wanna stay here with you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss.”
Pip bit her lip and went back down to the kitchen.
“You guys need to go now,” she said to Garth and Erik. “Stephen needs to talk to Ramón.”
“I’ll go up soon,” he said.
The plain fear in his face made her angry. “He’s your son,” she said. “He’s not going to eat until you talk to him.”
“All right,” he said with a little-boy irritation that he normally directed at Marie.
Pip watched him go and wondered if she and he were going to skip right over the bliss part to the bitchy-relationship part. Having broken up the party, she sat and finished off the beer. She could feel an outburst coming on, and she knew she ought to go to bed, but her heart was beating too hard. Eventually her desire and anger and jealousy and distrust coalesced into a single beery grievance: Stephen had forgotten that he’d promised to have a private talk with her tonight. He stayed in touch with Annagret but he abandoned Pip. She heard his bedroom door close upstairs, and while she waited to hear it open again she silently repeated her grievance, rewording and rewording it, trying to strengthen it to bear the weight of her feeling of abandonment; but it couldn’t bear the weight. She went upstairs anyway and knocked on Stephen’s door.
He was sitting on the marital bed reading a book with a red title, something political.
“You’re reading a book?” she said.
“It’s better than thinking about things I have no control over.”
She shut the door and sat down on a corner of the bed. “A person wouldn’t have guessed anything unusual had even happened today, the way you were talking with Garth and Erik.”
“What are they going to do about it? I still have my work. I still have my friends.”
“And me. You still have me.”
Stephen looked aside nervously. “Yeah.”
“Did you forget you’d said you’d talk to me?”
“Yeah, I did. I’m sorry.”
She tried to deepen and slow her breathing.
“What?” he said.
“You know what.”
“No, I don’t know what.”
“You promised you were going to talk to me.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot.”
Her grievance was as puny and useless as she’d feared. There was no point in airing it a third time.
“What’s going to happen to us?” she said.
“You and me?” He closed his book. “Nothing. We’ll find a couple of new housemates, preferably female, so you don’t have to be the only one.”
“So nothing changes. Everything the same.”
“Why would anything change?”
She paused, listening to her heart. “You know, a year ago, when we were having those coffees, I had the impression that you liked me.”
“I do like you. A lot.”
“But you made it sound like you were hardly even married.”
He smiled. “Yeah, well, it turns out I was right about that.”
“No, but back then,” she said. “Back then you made it sound that way. Why did you do that to me?”
“I didn’t do anything to you. We were having coffee.”
She looked at him beseechingly, searching his eyes, asking them if he really was so clueless or was just pretending to be clueless for some cruel reason. It killed her that she couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. Her breaths came harder, followed by tears. Not sad tears—upset tears, accusing tears.
“What is it?” he said.
She kept looking into his eyes, and finally he seemed to get it.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no. No, no, no.”
“Why not.”
“Pip, come on. No.”
“How could you not see,” she said with a gasp, “how much I want you?”
“No, no, no.”
“I thought we were just waiting. And now it’s happened. It finally happened.”
“God, Pip, no.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“Of course I like you. But not like that. Truly, I’m sorry, not like that. I’m old enough to be your father.”
“Oh, come on! It’s fifteen years! It’s nothing!”
Stephen looked at the window and then at the door, as if weighing escape options.
“Are you telling me you never felt anything?” she said. “It was all in my head?”
“You must have misinterpreted.”
“What?”
“I never wanted to have kids,” he said. “That’s the whole issue with Marie and me, I didn’t want babies. I kept telling her, ‘What do we need babies for? We have Ramón, we have Pip. We can still be good parents.’ And that’s what you are to me. Like a daughter.”
She stared at him. “That’s my role? To be like Ramón for you? Would you be even happier if I stank? I have a parent! I don’t need another parent!”
“Well, actually, it kind of seemed like you did,” Stephen said. “Like a father was exactly what you needed. And I can still do it. You can still stay here.”
“Are you out of your mind? Stay here? Like this?”
She stood up and looked around wildly. It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she’d been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting.
In a kind of anarchy of involition, she found herself pulling off her sweater, and then taking off her bra, and then dropping to her knees on the bed and pushing herself at Stephen, abusing him with her nakedness. “Do I look like a daughter? Is that what I look like to you?”
He cowered with his hands over his face. “Stop it.”
“Look at me.”
“I’m not going to look at you. You’re the one who’s out of your mind.”
“Fuck you! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Are you too fucking weak to even look at me?” Where were these words coming from? What hidden place? Already a riptide of remorse was swirling around her knees, and already she knew it would be worse than all of her previous remorses combined, and yet there was nothing to be done but see it through, and do what her body wanted, which was to collapse on Stephen. She rubbed her bare chest against his seersucker shirt, pulled his hands from his face and let her hair fall around it; and she could see that she’d really done it this time. He looked terrified.
“Just be sure, OK?” she said. “Be sure that’s all I am to you.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. Four hours after she left the house.”
“Oh, so four days would make a difference? Or four months? Four years?” She lowered her face toward his. “Touch me!”
She tried to guide his hands, but he was very strong and pushed her off him easily. He scrambled away from the bed and retreated to the door.
“You know,” he said, breathing hard, “I don’t really believe in therapy, but I’m thinking you could use it.”
“As if I could afford it.”
“Seriously, Pip. This is totally fucked up. Are you even thinking about what I’m feeling?”
“Last I checked, you were reading—” She picked up his book. “Gramsci.”
“If you’re pulling shit like this with other people, people who aren’t looking out for you, you’re not doing yourself any favors. I don’t like what it says about your impulse control.”
“I know. I’m abnormal. It’s like the refrain of my life.”
“No, you’re great. You’re wonderful, I mean it. But still—seriously.”
“Are you in love with her?” Pip said.
He turned back from the door. “What?”
“Annagret. Is that what this is about? You’re in love with her?”
“Oh, Pip.” His look of pity and concern was so pure that it almost overcame her distrust; she almost believed she had no reason to be jealous. “She’s in Düsseldorf,” he said. “I hardly even know her.”
“Riiiiight. But you’re in touch with her.”
“Try to listen to yourself. Try to see what you’re doing.”
“I’m not hearing a no.”
“For God’s sake.”
“Please tell me I’m wrong. Just say I’m wrong.”
“The person I want is Marie. Don’t you understand that?”
Pip squeezed her eyes shut, trying to understand it while also refusing to. “But Marie’s with someone else now,” she said. “And you’re in touch with Annagret. You don’t even know you’re in love with her yet, but I think you are. Or you will be soon. She’s the right age for you, right?”
“I’ve got to get some air. And you need to leave my room.”
“Just show me,” she said. “Come show me I’m wrong. Just hold my hand for a second. Please. I won’t believe you otherwise.”
“Then you’re going to have to not believe me.”
She drew herself into a ball. “I knew it,” she whispered. The pain of jealousy was delicious in comparison to the thought that she was simply being crazy. But the thought was getting stronger.
“I’m heading out,” Stephen said.
And he left her lying on his bed.

TUESDAY
She texted in sick to work, pleading stomach sickness, which wasn’t totally a lie. Around ten o’clock Marie came knocking on her door, asking her to say good-bye to Ramón, but the slightest movement of Pip’s body reminded her of what she’d done the night before. When Marie came upstairs a second time and ventured to open her door and look in on her, Pip could barely put any voice into the words go away.
“Are you all right?” Marie said.
“Please go away. Please shut the door.”
She heard Marie approaching her and kneeling. “I wanted to say good-bye,” she said.
Pip kept her eyes shut and said nothing, and the words that Marie then poured down on her were devoid of sense, were just blow after blow on her brain, a torment to be endured until it stopped. When it finally did stop, it was followed by the worse torment of Marie stroking her shoulder. “Won’t you talk to me at all?” she said.
“Please, please, please, go away,” Pip managed to say.
Marie’s reluctant departure was yet another nearly unendurable torment, and the sound of the door closing didn’t end it. Nothing could end it. Pip couldn’t leave her bed, let alone leave her room, let alone go outside, where the strong sunlight of another hideously perfect day might honestly have caused her to die of shame. She had half a bar of dark chocolate in her room, and this was all she ate all day, taking one bite and then lying completely still to recover from the reminder that she had a physical self—“so visible, so visible,” as her mother had said. Even to cry would have been a reminder, and so she didn’t cry. She did think that at least nightfall might bring some relief, but it didn’t. The only thing that changed was that she was able to sob at her loss of Stephen, off and on, for many hours.

WEDNESDAY
Thirst and hunger woke her up at dawn. With her senses sharpened by the need for stealth, she quickly changed her clothes and packed her knapsack and crept downstairs to the kitchen. Her one imperative was not to encounter Stephen, ideally for the rest of her life, and even though he wasn’t an early riser she didn’t slow down to eat anything but simply grabbed some food at random and stuffed it into her knapsack. Then she drank three glasses of water and made a stop in the bathroom. When she came out, Dreyfuss was standing in the front hallway, wearing his nighttime sweatclothes.
“Feeling better, I see,” he said.
“Yeah, I had a stomach thing yesterday.”
“I thought Wednesdays were one of your late days. And yet here you are at six fifteen.”
“Right, I have to make up for yesterday.”
Even the most transparent lies didn’t unsettle Dreyfuss. They merely gave his brain more to process, briefly slowing it down. “Am I correct in assuming that you’ll be moving out now, too?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“Why.”
“You obviously know why, since you assumed it, and so why are you asking me? You obviously know everything that happens in this house.”
He considered this affectlessly. “It may interest you to know that I’ve read through Stephen’s email and social-media correspondence with the German woman. It’s entirely innocent, if somewhat tediously ideological. I’d hate to think of losing your intelligent company over a matter as small as that.”
“Wow,” Pip said. “I was about to say I was going to sort of miss you, and now you tell me that not only do you eavesdrop, you read our email.”
“Just Stephen’s,” Dreyfuss said. “We share the computer, and he never logs out. I believe this constitutes ‘plain sight,’ in legal parlance.”
“Well, for your information, Annagret is the least of my worries now.”
“Interestingly, many of her messages to Stephen concern you. She’s evidently very distressed that you don’t want to be friends with her. I find your position eminently reasonable, perhaps even strongly advisable. Yes: advisable. But you might care to know that as far as the German woman is concerned, you are the person of interest in this house. Not our Stephen. Nor, it goes without saying, Ramón or Marie. Nor even, if I examine the facts with rigorous logic, I myself.”
Pip was putting on her bike helmet. “OK, great,” she said. “Good to know.”
“There was something not right about those Germans.”
At an anonymous Starbuck’s on Piedmont Avenue, while consuming scones and a latte, she wrote and then agonized over and finally found the courage to send an email to Stephen, who had no text capability, since phone plans cost money. That Dreyfuss would read the email didn’t much matter to her; it was like knowing that a dog or a computer “knew” things about her.
I apologize for what I did. Please tell me when you won’t be home this week, so I can get my stuff.
Sending this message made her loss more real, and she attempted to fantasize about how things might have gone in his bedroom if he’d been unable to resist her, but her imagination instead kept summoning up what had actually happened; and weeping in a public café was a bad idea.
Two tables over, a white-bearded chai-drinker type was looking at her. When she surprised him by looking back, his eyes dropped down guiltily to his tablet device. Why hadn’t Stephen looked at her like this? Was that so much to ask?
It seemed like a father was exactly what you needed: of all of Stephen’s cruelties in the bedroom, this had been the worst. And yet there was clearly something wrong with her, and clearly the more appropriate object of her anger was her missing father. She narrowed her eyes and stared at the chai drinker. When he looked at her again, she gave him a phony grimace, a mean smile, to which he responded with a courtly nod and then angled his body away from her.
She texted her friend Samantha and asked if she could crash with her. Of her remaining friends, Samantha was the most self-involved and thus the least likely to ask embarrassing questions. Samantha was also a cook, with equipment in her kitchen, and Pip hadn’t forgotten that she owed her mother a not-birthday cake on Friday.
She still had three hours to kill before her late workday started. This would have been a low-risk time to leave a message for her mother, since her mother was always too deep in her Endeavor in the early morning to pick up the phone, but Pip couldn’t do it. She watched the people lining up for pastries and coffee drinks, nice racially diverse Oakland people freshly showered and able to afford a daily bought breakfast. Oh, to have a job you liked, a mate you trusted, a child who loved you, a purpose in life. And it occurred to her that a purpose in life was what Annagret had offered her. Annagret had wanted her. Annagret had wanted her. She was ashamed to recall how crazily she’d latched on to the idea that there was anything between Annagret and Stephen. It must have been the beer she’d drunk.
She picked up her device and assembled all the emails that Annagret had sent her in the past four months. The earliest was headed please forgive me. As she read the message, savoring its pleading tone and its compliments to her intelligence and character, Pip found herself obeying the subject header and forgiving Annagret, with an alacrity that was perhaps itself a bit crazy. And yet maybe not so crazy, because Annagret not only liked her but had been right—right about Stephen, about men, about everything. And had not given up on her; had sent her twenty emails, the most recent just a week ago. Nobody else in her life would have been that persistent.
She opened a message headed wonderful news, from two months ago.
Dearest Pip, I know you must be still angry with me and maybe not even reading my emails, but I must tell you some very good news: You are APPROVED for an internship with the Sunlight Project! I hope you will take advantage of this superfun and awarding opportunity. I’m still thinking all the time of what you said about the private information you wanted—well this is your chance for that. TSP will pay your room and meals in the most interesting part of the world, in addition a small monthly stipendium, and often it can lend assistance with money for your air travel. You can read the attached letter and factsheet for more details. I only want you to know that I gave you the HIGHEST recommendation with every sincerity. And it looks like Andreas and the others still trust my determinations! ;) I’m very excited for you and hope you will consider. I’m only sorry, if you go, I won’t be there with you. But maybe, if you’re still angry with me, this will make you more interested to go? ;) With hugs, Annagret PS: here is Andreas’s email: ahw@sonnenlicht.org You can write to him personally with questions.
Reading this, Pip felt obscurely disappointed. It was like a questionnaire with no wrong answers: if an internship was this easy to get, how much could it be worth? And no sooner had she started to change her mind about Annagret than Annagret tried to fob her off on yet another man, albeit a rather famous and cherissmetic man. Peevishly, and without stopping to think, she put a fingertip on Wolf’s email address and fired off a message to him:
Dear Andreas Wolf, what’s your deal? A person named Annagret who I hardly know tells me I can be a paid intern with your project. Is this like a sex opportunity for you, or what? Do you guys have a keg of Kool-Aid? The whole thing frankly sounds deeply creepy to me. I don’t care very much about the work you’re doing down there, in the jungle or whatever, but Annagret doesn’t seem to think it even matters if I do. Which really makes me wonder. Yours, Pip Tyler, Oakland, California, USA
As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.
By way of penance, she opened a search engine and did some belated research on Wolf and his project. Given the multitude of haters on the Internet, it was impressive how few hostile comments about Wolf she was able to find if she disregarded the carpings of die-hard Julian Assange defenders and the statements of governments and corporations with an obvious self-interest in calling Wolf a criminal. Otherwise, in terms of universal admiration, he was right up there with Aung San Suu Kyi and Bruce Springsteen; a search of his name plus the word purity yielded a quarter million matches.
Wolf’s motto, and his project’s battle cry, was Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Born in East Germany in 1960, he’d distinguished himself in the 1980s as a daring and sensational critic of the Communist regime. After the Berlin Wall came down, he’d led the crusade to preserve the enormous East German secret-police archives and open them to the public; here again he was hated only by former police informants whose post-reunification reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their pasts to sunlight. Wolf had founded the Sunlight Project in 2000, focusing first on assorted German malfeasances but soon broadening his scope to social injustice and toxic secrets worldwide. Several hundred thousand Web images showed him to be a very good-looking man, but he’d apparently never married or had children. He’d fled prosecution in Germany in 2006 and Europe generally in 2010, receiving asylum first in Belize and more recently in Bolivia, whose populist president, Evo Morales, was a fan. The only thing Wolf kept secret was the identity of his major financial backers (thereby prompting a terabyte or two of heated online chatter about his “inconsistency”), and the only even vaguely unseemly thing about him was the intensity of his rivalry with Assange. Wolf had tauntingly denigrated Assange’s methods and personal life, while Assange had contented himself with pretending that Wolf did not exist. Wolf liked to contrast WikiLeaks—in his words, “a neutral and unfiltered platform”—with the work of his more “purpose-driven” Sunlight Project, and to make a moral distinction between his benign and openly admitted motive in protecting his backers’ privacy and the malignant concealed motives of the parties whose secrets he exposed.
Pip was struck by how many of the exposures had to do with the oppression of women: not just big issues like rape as a war crime and wage inequalities as a deliberate policy but stuff as small as the luridly sexist emails of a bank manager in Tennessee. Rare was the interview or press release in which Wolf’s militant feminism went unmentioned. She understood better how Annagret could prefer the company of women and still admire Wolf.
The high seriousness and sheer volume of the online information about Wolf deepened her remorse about the email she’d sent him. He: authentic risk-taking hero and friend of presidents. She: snarky little twerp. Not until she was about to leave for work could she bring herself to check for new messages. And here they were already, Stephen and Wolf, one after the other.
Apology accepted, incident on its way to being forgotten. There’s no reason for you to move out. You’re a great housemate, and we’ll have Ramon three evenings a week—Marie and I worked it out yesterday. S.
A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn’t crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who’d rejected you, than compassionate forbearance? Her anger momentarily chased away her remorse and shame. She wanted the “incident” to be remembered! She wanted his complete attention! She fired back:
With all this forgetting, I guess you forgot my question too: when will you not be home?
Despite having got up four hours early, she was now on the verge of being late to work, but while her blood was up and her remorse was at bay she went ahead and read Wolf’s message.
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 Olallieberries.” 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 longrunning 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.”
“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 payments. 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!”
The girl seemed perfectly contented with her life, while to Pip it seemed to be raining ashes in the bus. She forced a smile and put in her earbuds.
Felton was still fog-free, the air at the bus stop still scented with sunbaked redwood litter, but the sun had dropped behind a ridge, and Pip’s childhood bird friends, the brown towhees and the spotted ones, were hopping on the shadowed lane as she walked up it. As soon as she could see the cabin, its door flew open and her mother came running out to meet her, crying “Oh, oh!” She wore an expression of love so naked it seemed to Pip almost obscene. And yet, as always, Pip couldn’t help returning her mother’s hug. The body that her mother was at odds with felt precious to her. Its warmth, its softness; its mortality. It had a faint but distinctive skin smell that took Pip back to the many years when she and her mother had shared a bed. She would have liked to bury her face in her mother’s chest and stand there and take comfort, but she rarely came home without finding her mother in the middle of some thought that she was bursting to express.
“I just had the nicest conversation about you with Sonya Dawson at the store,” her mother said. “She was remembering how sweet you were to all the kindergarteners when you were in third grade. Do you remember that? She said she still has the Christmas cards you made her twins. I’d completely forgotten you made cards for all the kindergarteners. Sonya said, that whole year, whenever anybody asked the twins what their favorite anything was, they answered ‘Pip!’ Their favorite dessert—‘Pip!’ Their favorite color—‘Pip!’ You were their favorite everything! Such a loving little girl, so good to the smaller kids. Do you remember Sonya’s twins?”
“Vaguely,” Pip said, walking toward the cabin.
“They adored you. Revered you. The entire kindergarten did. I was so proud when Sonya reminded me.”
“How unfortunate that I couldn’t remain eight years old.”
“Everyone always said you were a special girl,” her mother said, pursuing her. “All the teachers said so. Even the other parents said so. There was just some kind of special magic loving-kindness about you. It makes me so happy to remember.”
Inside the cabin, Pip set down her things and promptly began to cry.
“Pussycat?” her mother said, greatly alarmed.
“I ruined your cake!” Pip said, sobbing like an eight-year-old.
“Oh that doesn’t matter at all.” Her mother enveloped her and rocked her, drawing her face to her breastbone, holding her tight. “I’m so happy that you’re here.”
“I spent all day making it,” Pip choked out. “And then I dropped it on the dirty floor at the bus station. It fell on the floor, Mom. I’m so sorry. I got everything so dirty. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Her mother shushed her, kissed her head, and squeezed her until she’d expelled some of her misery, in the form of tears and snot, and began to feel as if she’d ceded an important advantage by breaking down. She extricated herself and went to the bathroom to clean up.
On the shelves were the faded flannel sheets that she’d slept on as a girl. On the rack was the same tired bath towel that her mother had used for twenty years. The concrete floor of the tiny shower had long ago lost its paint to her mother’s scrubbing. When Pip saw that her mother had lit two candles by the sink for her, as for a romantic date or religious ceremony, she nearly fell apart again.
“I got the smoky lentils and the kale salad you like so much,” her mother said, hovering near the door. “I forgot to ask if you were still eating meat, so I didn’t get you a pork chop.”
“It’s hard to live in a communal house and not eat meat,” Pip said. “Although I’m no longer living in a communal house.”
While she opened the bottle of wine she’d bought for her exclusive use, and while her mother spread out the bounty of her New Leaf employee discount, Pip gave a mostly fictitious account of her reasons for leaving the Thirty-Third Street house. Her mother seemed to believe every word of it. Pip proceeded to attack the bottle while her mother reported on her eyelid (not spasming but still feeling as if it might spasm again at any moment), the latest workplace incursions on her privacy, the latest abrasions of her sensitivities by New Leaf shoppers, and the moral dilemma posed by the 3 a.m. crowing of her next-door neighbor’s rooster. Pip had imagined that she might hide out at the cabin for a week, to recover and to plan her next move, but despite her supposed centrality to her mother’s life she was feeling as if her mother’s miniature universe of obsession and grievance was sufficient unto itself. As if there was, actually, no place in her life for Pip now.
“So, I also quit my job,” she said when they’d eaten dinner and the wine was nearly gone.
“Good for you,” her mother said. “That job never sounded worthy of your talents.”
“Mom, I have no talents. I have useless intelligence. And no money. And now no place to live.”
“You can always live with me.”
“Let’s try to be realistic.”
“You can have the sleeping porch back. You love the sleeping porch.”
Pip poured the last of the wine into her glass. Moral hazard allowed her to simply ignore her mother when she felt like it. “So here’s what I’m thinking,” she said. “Two possibilities. One, you help me find my other parent, so I can try to get some money out of him. The other is I’m thinking of going to South America for a while. If you want me to stay around here, you have to help me find the missing parent.”
Her mother’s posture, fortified by her Endeavor, was as beautifully vertical as Pip’s was crappy and slouched. A faraway look was coming over her, almost a different kind of face altogether, a younger face. It could only be, Pip thought, the face of the person she’d once been, before she was a mother.
Looking into the now-dark window by the table, her mother said: “Not even for you will I do that.”
“OK, so I guess I’m going to South America.”
“South America …”
“Mom, I don’t want to go. I want to stay closer to you. But you have to help me out here.”
“You see!” her mother cried, still with her faraway look, as if she were seeing more than just her own reflection in the window. “He’s doing it to me even now! He’s trying to take you from me! And I will not let that happen!”
“This is fairly crazy talk, Mom. I’m twenty-three years old. If you saw where I’ve been living, you’d know I know how to take care of myself.”
Finally her mother turned to her. “What’s in South America?”
“This thing,” Pip said with some reluctance, as if confessing to an impure thought or action. “This kind of interesting thing. It’s called the Sunlight Project. They give paid internships and teach you all these skills.”
Her mother frowned. “The illegal leak thing?”
“What do you know about it.”
“I do read the newspaper, pussycat. This is the group that the sex criminal started.”
“No, you see?” Pip said. “You see? You’re thinking of WikiLeaks. You don’t know anything about the Project. You live in the mountains and you don’t know anything.”
For a moment her mother seemed to doubt herself. But then, emphatically: “Not Assange. Somebody else. Andreas.”
“OK, I’m sorry. You do know something.”
“But he’s the same as the other one, or worse.”
“No, Mom, actually not. They’re completely different.”
At this, her mother closed her eyes, sat up even straighter, and began to do her breathing. It always happened when she got too upset, and it put Pip in a bind, because she didn’t like to disturb her but also didn’t want to spend an hour waiting for her to resurface.
“I’m sure that’s very calming for you,” she said. “But I’m still sitting here, and you’re not dealing with me.”
Her mother just breathed.
“Do you want to at least tell me what really happened with my dad?”
“I told you,” her mother murmured, her eyes still shut.
“No, you lied. And you want to know something else? Andreas Wolf can help me find him.”
Her mother’s eyes sprang open.
“So you can either tell me,” Pip said, “or I can go to South America and find out for myself.”
“Purity, listen to me. I know I’m a difficult person, but you have to believe me: if you go to South America and do that, it will kill me.”
“Why? Lots of people my age travel. Why can’t you trust that I’ll come back? Can’t you see how much I love you?”
Her mother shook her head. “This is my worst nightmare. And now Andreas Wolf. This is a nightmare, a nightmare.”
“What do you know about Andreas?”
“I know that he is not a good person.”
“How? How do you know that? I just spent half a day researching him, and he’s the opposite of a bad person. I have emails from him! I can show you.”
“Oh my God,” her mother said, shaking her head.
“What? Oh my God what?”
“Has it occurred to you why a person like that is emailing you?”
“They have a paid internship program. You have to take a test, and I passed it. They do amazing work, and they actually want me. He’s been sending me all these personal emails even though he’s incredibly busy and famous.”
“It could be some assistant who’s writing to you. Isn’t that the thing about emails? You never know who’s writing them.”
“No, this is definitely him.”
“But think about it, Purity. Why do they want you?”
“You’re the one who’s been telling me I’m so special for twenty-three years.”
“Why does a man with bad morals pay a beautiful young woman to come to South America?”
“Mother, I’m not beautiful. I’m also not stupid. That’s why I researched him and wrote to him.”
“But pussycat, the Bay Area is full of people who could want you. Appropriate people. Kind people.”
“Well, it’s safe to say I haven’t been meeting them.”
Her mother took hold of Pip’s hands and searched her face. “Did something happen to you? Tell me what happened to you.”
The maternal hands suddenly seemed like grasping claws to Pip, and her mother like a stranger. She pulled her own hands away. “Nothing happened to me!”
“Dearheart, you can tell me.”
“I wouldn’t tell you if you were the last person on earth. You don’t tell me anything.”
“I tell you everything.”
“Nothing that matters.”
Her mother fell back in her seat and looked at the empty window again. “No, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t. I have my reasons, but I don’t.”
“Well, so then leave me alone. You don’t have any rights with me.”
“I have the right to love you more than anything in this world.”
“No you don’t!” Pip cried. “No you don’t! No you don’t! No you don’t!”

The Republic of Bad Taste (#ulink_0c8e513b-5725-52d1-8f17-35f6ae3ff0a6)
The church on Siegfeldstraße was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the friends of the Earth, the misfits who believed in human rights or didn’t want to fight in World War III—he was no less an embarrassment to himself.
For Andreas the most achievedly totalitarian thing about the Republic was its ridiculousness. It was true that people who tried to cross the death strip were unridiculously shot, but to him this was more like an oddity of geometry, a discontinuity between Eastern flatness and Western three-dimensionality that you had to assume to make the math work. As long as you avoided the border, the worst that could happen was that you’d be spied on and picked up and interrogated, do prison time and have your life wrecked. However inconvenient this might be for the individual, it was leavened by the silliness of the larger apparatus—the risible language of “class enemy” and “counterrevolutionary elements,” the absurd devotion to evidentiary protocol. The authorities would never just dictate your confession or denunciation and force or forge your signature. There had to be photos and recordings, scrupulously referenced dossiers, invocations of democratically enacted laws. The Republic was heartbreakingly German in its striving to be logically consistent and do things right. It was like the most earnest of little boys, trying to impress and outdo its Soviet father. It was even loath to falsify election returns. And mostly out of fear, but maybe also out of pity for the little boy, who believed in socialism the way children in the West believed in a flying Christkind who lit the candles on the Christmas tree and left presents underneath it, the people all went to the polls and voted for the Party. By the 1980s, it was obvious that life was better in the West—better cars, better television, better chances—but the border was closed and the people indulged the little boy’s illusions as if recalling, not unfondly, their own illusions from the Republic’s early years. Even the dissidents spoke the language of reform, not overthrow. Everyday life was merely constrained, not tragically terrible (Olympic bronze was the Berliner Zeitung’s idea of calamity). And so Andreas, whose embarrassment it was to be the megalomaniacal antithesis of a dictatorship too ridiculous to be worthy of megalomania, kept his distance from the other misfits hiding in the church’s skirts. They disappointed him aesthetically, they offended his sense of specialness, and they wouldn’t have trusted him anyway. He performed his Siegfeldstraße ironies privately.
Alongside the broad irony of being an atheist dependent on a church was the finer irony of earning his keep as a counselor of at-risk youth. Had any East German child ever been more privileged and less at risk than he? Yet here he was, in the basement of the rectory, in group sessions and private meetings, counseling teenagers on how to overcome promiscuity and alcohol dependency and domestic dysfunction and assume more productive positions in a society he despised. And he was good at what he did—good at getting kids back into school, finding them jobs in the gray economy, connecting them with trustworthy government caseworkers—and so he was himself, ironically, a productive member of that society.
His own fall from privilege served as his credential with the kids. Their problem was that they took things too seriously (self-destructive behavior was itself a form of self-importance), and his message to them was always, in effect, “Look at me. My father’s on the Central Committee and I’m living in a church basement, but do you ever see me serious?” The message was effective, but it shouldn’t have been, because, in truth, he was scarcely less privileged for living in a church basement. He’d severed all contact with his parents, but in return for this favor they protected him. He’d never even been arrested, the way any of his at-risk charges would have been if they’d pulled the shit he’d pulled at their age. But they couldn’t help liking him and responding to him, because he spoke the truth, and they were too hungry to hear the truth to care how privileged he was to speak it plainly. He was a risk the state seemed willing to run, a misleading beacon of honesty to confused and troubled adolescents, for whom the intensity of his appeal then became a different sort of risk. The girls practically lined up outside his office door to drop their pants for him, and if they could plausibly claim to be sixteen he helped them with their buttons. This, too, of course, was ironic. He rendered a valuable service for the state, coaxing antisocial elements back into the fold, speaking the truth while enjoining them to be careful about doing it themselves, and was paid for his service in teen pussy.
His unspoken agreement with the state had been in place for so long—for more than six years—that he assumed he was safe. Nevertheless, he continued to take the precaution of avoiding friendships with men. He could tell, for one thing, that the other men around the church envied his way with the youngsters and therefore disapproved of it. Avoiding men also made actuarial sense, since there were probably ten male informers for every female. (The actuarial odds further argued for preferring females in their teens, because the spy runners were too sexist to expect much of a schoolgirl.) The biggest drawback of men, though, was that he couldn’t have sex with them; couldn’t cement that deep complicity.
Although his appetite for girls seemed boundless, he prided himself on never knowingly having slept with anyone below the age of consent or anyone who’d been sexually abused. He was skilled at identifying the latter, sometimes by the fecal or septic imagery they used to describe themselves, sometimes merely by a certain telltale way they giggled, and over the years his instincts had led to successful prosecutions. When a girl who’d been abused came on to him, he didn’t walk away, he ran away; he had a phobia of associating himself with predation. The sort of things that predators did—groping in crowds, lurking near playgrounds, forcing themselves on nieces, enticing with candy or trinkets—made him murderously angry. He took only girls who were more or less of sound mind and freely wanted him.
If his scruples still left an apparent residuum of sickness—a worry about what it meant that he felt compelled to repeat the same pattern with girl after girl, or that he not only never tired of it but seemed to want it only more, or that he preferred having his mouth between legs to having it near a face—he chalked it up to the sickness of the country he lived in. The Republic had defined him, he continued to exist entirely in relation to it, and apparently one of the roles it demanded he play was Assibräuteaufreißer. It wasn’t he, after all, who’d made all men and any woman over twenty untrustable. Plus, he came from privilege; he was the exiled blond prince of Karl-Marx-Allee. Living in the basement of a rectory, eating bad food out of cans, he felt entitled to the one small luxury that his vestigial privileges afforded. Lacking a bank account, he kept a mental coitus ledger and regularly checked it, making sure that he remembered not only first and last names but the exact order in which he’d had them.
His tally stood at fifty-two, late in the winter of 1987, when he made a mistake. The problem was that number fifty-three, a small redhead, Petra, momentarily residing with her unemployable father in a cold-water Prenzlauer Berg squat, was, like her father, extremely religious. Interestingly, this in no way dampened her hots for Andreas (nor his for her), but it did mean that she considered sex in a church disrespectful to God. He tried to relieve her of this superstition but succeeded only in making her very agitated about the state of his soul, and he saw that he risked losing her altogether if he failed to keep his soul in play. Once he’d set his mind on sealing a deal, he could think of nothing else, and since he had no close friend whose flat he could borrow and no money for a hotel room, and since the weather on the crucial night was well below freezing, the only way he could think to gain access to Petra’s pants (which now seemed to him more absolutely imperative than any previous access to anyone else’s, even though Petra was somewhat loopy and not particularly bright) was to board the S-Bahn with her and take her out to his parents’ dacha on the Müggelsee. His parents rarely used it in the winter and never during the work week.
By rights, Andreas ought to have grown up in Hessenwinkel or even Wandlitz, the enclave where the Party leadership had its villas, but his mother had insisted on living closer to the city center, on Karl-Marx-Allee, in a high-floor flat with big windows and a balcony. Andreas suspected that her real objection to the suburbs was bourgeois-intellectual—that she found the furnishings and conversations out there unbearably spießig, dowdy, philistine—but she was no more capable of uttering this truth than any other, and so she claimed to be pathologically prone to carsickness, hence unable to commute by car to her important job at the university. Because Andreas’s father was indispensable to the Republic, nobody minded that he lived in town or that his wife, again on grounds of carsickness, had selected the Müggelsee as the site of the dacha where they went for weekends in the warmer months. As Andreas came to see it, his mother was not unlike a suicide bomber, forever carrying the threat of crazy behavior fully armed and ready to detonate, and so his father acceded to her wishes as much as possible, asking only that she help him maintain the necessary lies. This was never a problem for her.
The dacha, walkable from the train station, was set on a large plot of piney land sloping gently to the lake shore. By feel, in the dark, Andreas located the key hanging from the customary eave. When he went inside with Petra and turned on a light, he was disoriented to find the living room outfitted with the faux-Danish furniture of his childhood in the city. He hadn’t been out to the dacha since the end of his homeless period, six years earlier. His mother had apparently redecorated the city flat in the meantime.
“Whose house is this?” Petra said, impressed with the amenities.
“Never mind that.”
There was zero danger of her finding a photograph of him. (Sooner a portrait of Trotsky.) From the tower of beer crates he took two half liters and gave one to Petra. The topmost Neues Deutschland on the outgoing stack was from a Sunday more than three weeks earlier. Imagining his parents alone here on a winter Sunday, childless, their conversation infrequent and scarcely audible, in that older-couple way, he felt his heart veer dangerously close to sympathy. He didn’t regret having made their later years barren—they had no one but themselves to blame for that—but he’d loved them so much, as a child, that the sight of their old furniture saddened him. They were still human beings, still getting old.
He turned on the electric furnace and led Petra down the hall to the room that had once been his. The quick cure for nostalgia would be to bury his face in her pussy; he’d already touched it, through her pants, while they were making out on the train. But she said she wanted to take a bath.
“You don’t have to on my account.”
“It’s been four days.”
He didn’t want to deal with a damp bath towel; it would have to be dried and folded before they left. But it was important to put the girl and her desires first.
“It’s fine,” he assured her pleasantly. “Take a bath.”
He sat down with his beer on his old bed and heard her lock the bathroom door behind her. In the weeks that followed, the click of this lock became the seed of his paranoia: why would she have locked the door when he was the only other person in the house? It was improbable for eight different reasons that she could have known or been involved in what was coming. But why else lock the door, if not to protect herself against it?
Then again, maybe it was just his bad luck that she was immobilized in the bathtub with the water still running, her splashing and the flow in the pipes loud enough to have covered the sound of an approaching vehicle and footsteps, when he heard a pounding on the front door and then a barking: “Volkspolizei!”
The water in the pipes abruptly stopped. Andreas thought about making a run for it, but he was trapped by the fact that Petra was in the tub. Reluctantly, he heaved himself off the bed and went and opened the front door. Two VoPos were backlit by the flashers and headlights of their cruiser.
“Yes?” he said.
“Identification, please.”
“What’s this about?”
“Your identification, please.”
If the policemen had had tails, they wouldn’t have been wagging; if they’d had pointed ears, they would have been flattened back. The senior officer frowned at Andreas’s little blue book and handed it to the junior, who carried it back toward the cruiser.
“Do you have permission to be here?”
“In a certain sense.”
“Are you alone?”
“As you find me.” Andreas beckoned politely. “Would you care to come in?”
“I’ll need to use the telephone.”
“Of course.”
The officer entered circumspectly. Andreas guessed that he was more wary of the house’s owners than of any armed thugs who might be lurking in it.
“This is my parents’ place,” he explained.
“We’re acquainted with the undersecretary. We’re not acquainted with you. No one has permission to be in this house tonight.”
“I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. Your vigilance is commendable.”
“We saw the lights.”
“Really highly commendable.”
From the bathroom came a single plink of falling water; in hindsight, Andreas would find it noteworthy that the officer had shown no interest in the bathroom. The man simply paged through a shabby black notebook, found a number, and dialed it on the undersecretary’s telephone. In the moment, Andreas’s main feeling was a wish that the police would go away and let him get on with eating little Petra. Everything else was so unfortunate that he didn’t want to think about it.
“Mr. Undersecretary?” The officer identified himself and tersely reported the presence of an intruder who claimed to be a relative. Then he said “Yes” several times.
“Tell him I’d like to speak to him,” Andreas said. The officer made a silencing gesture.
“I want to talk to him.”
“Of course, right away,” the officer said to the undersecretary.
Andreas tried to grab the receiver. The officer shoved him in the chest and knocked him to the floor.
“No, he’s trying to take the phone … That’s right … Yes, of course. I’ll tell him … Understood, Mr. Undersecretary.” The officer hung up the phone and looked down at Andreas. “You’re to leave immediately and never come back.”
“Got it.”
“If you ever come back, there will be consequences. The undersecretary wanted to make sure you understand that.”
“He’s not really my father,” Andreas said. “We just happen to have the same last name.”
“Me personally?” the officer said. “I hope you come back, and I hope I’m on duty when you do.”
The younger officer returned and handed Andreas’s ID to the senior, who examined it with his lip curled. Then he flipped it into Andreas’s face. “Lock the door behind you, asshole.”
When the police were gone, he knocked on the bathroom door and told Petra to turn off the light and wait for him. He turned off the other lights and went out into the night, heading toward the train station. At the first bend in the lane, he saw the cruiser parked and dark and gave the officers a little wave. At the next bend, he ducked behind some pine trees to wait until the cruiser drove away. The evening had been damaging, and he wasn’t about to waste it. But when he was finally able to creep back into the dacha and found Petra cowering on his boyhood bed, mewling with fear of the police, he was too angry about his humiliation to care about her pleasure. He ordered her to do this and do that, in the dark, and it ended with her weeping and saying she hated him—a feeling he entirely reciprocated. He never saw her again.
Three weeks later, the German Christian Youth Conference invited him to speak in West Berlin. He presumed (though you could never know for sure; that was the beauty of it) that the conference had been thoroughly infiltrated by his cousin once removed, the spymaster Markus Wolf, because the invitation came forwarded from the Foreign Ministry with a notice to pick up a visa that had already been granted. It was laughably obvious that if he crossed the border he wouldn’t be allowed to reenter the country. Equally obvious was that the invitation was a warning from his father, a punishment for his indiscretion at the dacha.
Everyone else in the country wanted permission to travel even more than they wanted cars. The bait of attending some miserable three-day trade conference in Copenhagen was enough to entice the ordinary citizen to rat out colleagues, siblings, friends. Andreas felt singular in every way, but in none more than his disdain for travel. How the royal Danish poisoner and his lying queen had wanted their son out of the castle! He felt himself to be the rose and fair expectancy of the state, its product and its antic antithesis, and so his first responsibility was to not budge from Berlin. He needed his so-called parents to know that he was still there on Siegfeldstraße, knowing what he knew about them.
But it was lonely to be singular, and loneliness bred paranoia, and he soon reached the point of imagining that Petra had set him up, the whole rigmarole about sex in churches and the need for a bath a ruse to lure him into violating his tacit agreement with his parents. Now every time another at-risk girl appeared at his office door with that familiar burning look in her eyes, he remembered how uncharacteristically selfish he’d been with Petra, and how humiliated he’d been by the police, and instead of obliging the girl he teased her and drove her away. He wondered if he’d been lying to himself about girls forever—if the hatred he’d felt for number fifty-three was not only real but retroactively applicable to numbers one through fifty-two. If, far from indulging in irony at the state’s expense, he’d been seduced by the state at his point of least resistance.
He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and the girls, he denied himself the relief of it. He curtailed his individual conferences and ceased trolling the Jugendklubs for at-risk kids. Though he was jeopardizing the best job an East German in his position could hope to find, he lay on his bed all day and read British novels, detective and otherwise, forbidden and otherwise. (Having been force-fed Steinbeck and Dreiser and Dos Passos by his mother, he had little interest in American writing. Even the best Americans were annoyingly naïve. Life in the U.K. sucked more, in a good way.) Eventually he determined that what had depressed him was his childhood bed, the bed itself, in the Müggelsee house, and the feeling that he’d never left it: that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them. But it was one thing to identify the source of his depression, quite another to do anything about it.
He was seven months celibate on the October afternoon when the church’s young “vicar” came to see him about the girl in the sanctuary. The vicar wore all the vestments of renegade-church cliché—full beard, check; faded jean jacket, check; mod copper crucifix, check—but was usefully insecure in the face of Andreas’s superior street experience.
“I first noticed her two weeks ago,” he said, sitting down on the floor. He seemed to have read in some book that sitting on the floor established rapport and conveyed Christlike humility. “Sometimes she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry—she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.”
“So?”
“Well, you are the youth counselor.”
“The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.”
“It’s understandable that you’re burned out. We haven’t minded your taking some time for yourself.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I’m concerned about the girl, though. I talked to her again yesterday and asked if she was in trouble—my fear is that she’s been abused. She speaks so softly it’s hard to understand her, but she seemed to be saying that the authorities are already aware of her, and so she can’t go to them. Apparently she’s here because she has nowhere else to go.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“She might say more to you than to me.”
“How old is she?”
“Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.” Underage, abused, and pretty. Andreas sighed.
“You’ll need to come out of your room at some point,” the vicar suggested.
When Andreas went up to the sanctuary and saw the girl in the next-to-rear pew, he immediately experienced her beauty as an unwelcome complication, a specificity that distracted him from the universal female body part that had interested him for so long. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, unrebelliously dressed, and was sitting with a Free German Youth erectness of posture, a textbook open on her lap. She looked like a good girl, the sort he never saw in the basement. She didn’t raise her head as he approached.
“Will you talk to me?” he said.
She shook her head.
“You talked to the vicar.”
“Only for a minute,” she murmured.
“OK. Why don’t I sit down behind you, where you don’t have to see me. And then, if you—”
“Please don’t do that.”
“All right. I’ll stay in sight.” He took the pew in front of her. “I’m Andreas. I’m a counselor here. Will you tell me your name?”
She shook her head.
“Are you here to pray?”
She smirked. “Is there a God?”
“No, of course not. Where would you get an idea like that?”
“Somebody built this church.”
“Somebody was thinking wishfully. It makes no sense to me.”
She raised her head, as if he’d slightly interested her. “Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”
“With who? The minister? God’s only a word he uses against the state. Nothing in this country exists except in reference to the state.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that.”
“I’m only saying what the state itself says.”
He looked down at her legs, which were of a piece with the rest of her.
“Are you very afraid of getting in trouble?” he said. She shook her head.
“Afraid of getting someone else in trouble, then. Is that it?”
“I come here because this is nowhere. It’s nice to be nowhere for a while.”
“Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.”
She smiled faintly.
“When you look in the mirror,” he said, “what do you see? Someone pretty?”
“I don’t look in mirrors.”
“What would you see if you did?”
“Nothing good.”
“Something bad? Something harmful?”
She shrugged.
“Why didn’t you want me to sit down behind you?”
“I like to see who I’m talking to.”
“So we are talking. You were only pretending that you weren’t going to talk to me. You were being self-dramatizing—playing games.”
Sudden honest confrontation was part of his bag of counseling tricks. That he was sick of these tricks didn’t mean they didn’t still work.
“I already know I’m bad,” the girl said. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“But it must be hard for you that people don’t know how bad you are. They simply don’t believe a girl so pretty can be so bad inside. It must be hard for you to respect people.”
“I have friends.”
“So did I when I was your age. But it doesn’t help, does it? It’s actually worse that people like me. They think I’m funny, they think I’m attractive. Only I know how bad I am inside. I’m extremely bad and extremely important. In fact, I’m the most important person in the country.”
It was encouraging to see her sneer like an adolescent. “You’re not important.”
“Oh, but I am. You just don’t know it. But you do know what it’s like to be important, don’t you. You’re very important yourself. Everyone pays attention to you, everyone wants to be near you because you’re beautiful, and then you harm them. You have to go hide in a church to be nowhere, to give the world a rest from you.”
“I wish you’d leave me alone.”
“Who are you harming? Just say it.”
The girl lowered her head.
“You can tell me,” he said. “I’m an old harmer myself.”
She shivered a little and knit her fingers together on her lap. From outside, the rumble of a truck and the sharp clank of a bad gearbox entered the sanctuary and lingered in the air, which smelled of charred candle wick and tarnished brass. The wooden cross on the wall behind the pulpit seemed to Andreas a once magical object that had lost its mojo through overuse both for and against the state; had been dragged down to the level of sordid accommodation and dreary dissidence. The sanctuary was the very least relevant part of the church; he felt sorry for it.
“My mother,” the girl murmured. The hatred in her voice was hard to square with the notion that she cared that she was doing harm. Andreas knew enough about abuse to guess what this meant.
“Where’s your father?” he asked gently.
“Dead.”
“And your mother remarried.”
She nodded.
“Is she not at home?”
“She’s a night nurse at the hospital.”
He winced; he got the picture.
“You’re safe here,” he said. “This really is nowhere. There’s no one you can hurt here. It’s all right if you tell me your name. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m Annagret,” the girl said.
Their initial conversation was analogous, in its swiftness and directness, to his seductions, but in spirit it was just the opposite. Annagret’s beauty was so striking, so far outside the norm, that it seemed like a direct affront to the Republic of Bad Taste. It shouldn’t have existed, it upset the orderly universe at whose center he’d always placed himself; it frightened him. He was twenty-seven years old, and (unless you counted his mother when he was little) he’d never been in love, because he had yet to meet—had stopped even trying to imagine—a girl who was worth it. But here one was.
He saw her again on each of the following three evenings. He felt bad about looking forward to it just because she was so pretty, but there was nothing he could do about that. On the second night, to deepen her trust in him, he made a point of telling her that he’d slept with dozens of girls at the church. “It was a kind of addiction,” he said, “but I had strict limits. I need you to believe that you personally are way outside all of them.”
This was the truth but also, deep down, a total lie, and Annagret called him on it. “Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”
“Let me be the person who proves to you that some limits really are strict.”
“People say this church is a hangout for people with no morality. I didn’t see how that could be true—after all, it’s a church. But now you’re telling me it is true.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to disillusion you.”
“There’s something wrong with this country.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“The Judo Club was bad enough. But to hear it’s in the church …”
Annagret had an older sister, Tanja, who’d excelled at judo as an Oberschule student. Both sisters were university-tracked, by virtue of their test scores and their class credentials, but Tanja was boy crazy and overdid the sports thing and ended up working as a secretary after her Abitur, spending all her free time either dancing at clubs or training and coaching at the sports center. Annagret was seven years younger and not as athletic as her sister, but they were a judo family and she joined the local club when she was twelve.
A regular at the sports center was a handsome older guy, Horst, who owned a large motorcycle. He was maybe thirty and was apparently married only to his bike. He came to the center mostly to maintain his impressive buffness—Annagret initially thought there was something conceited about the way he smiled at her—but he also played handball and liked to watch the advanced judo students sparring, and by and by Tanja managed to score a date with him and his bike. This led to a second date and then a third, at which point a misfortune occurred: Horst met their mother. After that, instead of taking Tanja away on his bike, he wanted to see her at home, in their tiny shitty flat, with Annagret and the mother.
Inwardly, the mother was a hard and disappointed person, the widow of a truck mechanic who’d died wretchedly of a brain tumor, but outwardly she was thirty-eight and pretty—not only prettier than Tanja but also closer in age to Horst. Ever since Tanja had failed her by not pursuing her education, the two of them had quarreled about everything imaginable, which now included Horst, who the mother thought was too old for Tanja. When it became evident that Horst preferred her to Tanja, she didn’t see how it was her fault. Annagret was luckily not at home on the fateful afternoon when Tanja stood up and said she needed air and asked Horst to take her out on his bike. Horst said there was a painful matter that the three of them needed to discuss. There were better ways for him to have handled the situation, but probably no good way. Tanja slammed the door behind her and didn’t return for three days. As soon as she could, she relocated to Leipzig.
After Horst and Annagret’s mother were married, the three of them moved to a notably roomy flat where Annagret had a bedroom of her own. She felt bad for Tanja and disapproving of her mother, but her stepfather fascinated her. His job, as a labor-collective leader at the city’s largest power plant, was good but not quite so good as to explain the way he had of making things happen: the powerful bike, the roomy flat, the oranges and Brazil nuts and Michael Jackson records he sometimes brought home. From her description of him, Andreas had the impression that he was one of those people whose self-love was untempered by shame and thus fully contagious. Certainly Annagret liked to be around him. He gave her rides on his motorcycle to and from the sports center. He taught her how to ride it by herself, in a parking lot. She tried to teach him some judo in return, but his upper body was so disproportionately developed that he was bad at falling. In the evening, after her mother had left for her night shift, she explained the extra-credit work she was doing in the hope of attending an Erweiterte Oberschule; she was impressed by his quick comprehension and told him he should have gone to an EOS himself. Before long, she considered him one of her best friends. As a bonus, this pleased her mother, who hated her nursing job and seemed increasingly worn out by it and was grateful that her husband and daughter got along well. Tanja may have been lost, but Annagret was the good girl, her mother’s hope for the future of her family.
And then one night, in the notably roomy flat, Horst came tapping on her bedroom door before she’d turned her light out. “Are you decent?” he said playfully.
“I’m in my pajamas,” she said.
He came in and pulled up a chair by her bed. He had a very large head—Annagret couldn’t explain it to Andreas, but the largeness of Horst’s head seemed to her the reason that everything always worked out to his advantage. Oh, he has such a splendid head, let’s just give him what he wants. Something like that. On this particular night, his large head was flushed from drinking.
“I’m sorry if I smell like beer,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be able to smell it if I could have one myself.”
“You sound like you know quite a bit about beer drinking.”
“Oh, it’s just what they say.”
“You could have a beer if you stopped training, but you won’t stop training, so you can’t have a beer.”
She liked the joking way they had together. “But you train, and you drink beer.”
“I only drank so much tonight because I have something serious to say to you.”
She looked at his large head and saw that something, indeed, was different in his face tonight. A kind of ill-controlled anguish in his eyes. Also, his hands were shaking.
“What is it?” she said, worried.
“Can you keep a secret?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you have to, because you’re the only person I can tell, and if you don’t keep the secret we’re all in trouble.”
She thought about this. “Why do you have to tell me?”
“Because it concerns you. It’s about your mother. Will you keep a secret?”
“I can try.”
Horst took a large breath that came out again beer-smelling. “Your mother is a drug addict,” he said. “I married a drug addict. She steals narcotics from the hospital and uses them when she’s there and also when she’s home. Did you know that?”
“No,” Annagret said. But she was inclined to believe it. More and more often lately, there was something dulled about her mother.
“She’s very expert at pilfering,” Horst said. “No one at the hospital suspects.”
“We need to talk to her about it and tell her to stop.”
“Addicts don’t stop without treatment. If she asks for treatment, the authorities will know she was stealing.”
“But they’ll be happy that she’s honest and trying to get better.”
“Well, unfortunately, there’s another matter. An even bigger secret. Not even your mother knows this secret. Can I tell it to you?”
He was one of her best friends, and so, after a hesitation, she said yes.
“I took an oath that I would never tell anyone,” Horst said. “I’m breaking that oath by telling you. For some years now, I’ve worked informally for the Ministry for State Security. I’m a well-trusted unofficial collaborator. There’s an officer I meet with from time to time. I pass along information about my workers and especially about my superiors. This is necessary because the power plant is vital to our national security. I’m very fortunate to have a good relationship with the ministry. You and your mother are very fortunate that I do. But do you understand what this means?”
“No.”
“We owe our privileges to the ministry. How do you think my officer will feel if he learns that my wife is a thief and a drug addict? He’ll think I’m not trustworthy. We could lose this flat, and I could lose my position.”
“But you could just tell the officer the truth about Mother. It’s not your fault.”
“If I tell him, your mother will lose her job. She’ll probably go to prison. Is that what you want?”
“Of course not.”
“So we have to keep everything secret.”
“But now I wish I didn’t know! Why did I have to know?”
“Because you need to help me keep the secret. Your mother betrayed us by breaking the law. You and I are the family now. She is the threat to it. We need to make sure she doesn’t destroy it.”
“We have to try to help her.”
“You matter more to me than she does now. You are the woman in my life. See here.” He put a hand on her belly and splayed his fingers. “You’ve become a woman.”
The hand on her belly frightened her, but not as much as what he’d told her.
“A very beautiful woman,” he added huskily.
“I’m feeling ticklish.”
He closed his eyes and didn’t take away his hand. “Everything has to be secret,” he said. “I can protect you, but you have to trust me.”
“Can’t we just tell Mother?”
“No. One thing will lead to another, and she’ll end up in jail. We’re safer if she steals and takes drugs—she’s very good at not getting caught.”
“But if you tell her you work for the ministry, she’ll understand why she has to stop.”
“I don’t trust her. She’s betrayed us already. I have to trust you instead.”
She felt she might cry soon; her breaths were coming faster.
“You shouldn’t put your hand on me,” she said. “It feels wrong.”
“Maybe, yes, wrong, a little bit, considering our age difference.” He nodded his big head. “But look how much I trust you. We can do something that’s maybe a little bit wrong because I know you won’t tell anyone.”
“I might tell someone.”
“No. You’d have to expose our secrets, and you can’t do that.”
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me anything.”
“But I did. I had to. And now we have secrets together. Just you and me. Can I trust you?”
Her eyes filled. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me a secret of your own. Then I’ll know I can trust you.”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
“Then show me something secret. What’s the most secret thing you can show me?”
The hand on her belly inched southward, and her heart began to hammer.
“Is it this?” he said. “Is this your most secret thing?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpered, very frightened and confused.
“It’s all right. You don’t have to show me. It’s enough that you let me feel it.” Through his hand, she could feel his whole body relax. “I trust you now.”
For Annagret, the terrible thing was that she’d liked what followed, at least for a while. For a while, it was merely like a closer form of friendship. They still joked together, she still told him everything about her days at school, they still went riding together and trained at the sports club. It was ordinary life but with a secret, an extremely grown-up secret thing that happened after she’d put on her pajamas and gone to bed. While he touched her, he kept saying how beautiful she was, what perfect beauty. And because, for a while, he didn’t touch her with any part of himself except his hand, she felt as if she herself were to blame, as if the whole thing had actually been her idea, as if she’d done this to them with her beauty and the only way to make it stop was to submit to it and experience release. She hated her body for wanting release even more than she hated it for its supposed beauty, but somehow the hatred made it all the more urgent. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to need her. She was very bad. And maybe it made sense that she was very bad, being the daughter of a drug addict. She’d casually asked her mother if she was ever tempted to take the drugs she gave her patients. Every once in a while, yes, her mother had answered smoothly, if a little bit of something at the hospital was left unused, she or one of the other nurses might take it to calm their nerves, but it didn’t mean the person was an addict. Annagret hadn’t said anything about anyone being an addict.
For Andreas the terrible thing was how much the stepfather’s pussycentrism reminded him of his own. He felt only somewhat less implicated when Annagret went on to tell him that her weeks of being touched had been merely a prelude to Horst’s unzipping of his pants. It was bound to happen sometime, and yet it broke the spell that she’d been under; it introduced a third party to their secret. She didn’t like this third party. She realized that it must have been spying on the two of them all along, biding its time, manipulating them like a case officer. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want it near her, and when it tried to assert its authority she became afraid of being at home at night. But what could she do? The pecker knew her secrets. It knew that, if only for a while, she’d looked forward to being tampered with. She’d halfwittingly become its unofficial collaborator; she’d tacitly sworn an oath. She wondered if her mother took narcotics so as not to know which body the pecker really wanted. The pecker knew all about her mother’s pilferage, and the pecker was empowered by the ministry, and so she couldn’t go to the authorities. They’d put her mother in jail and leave her alone with the pecker. The same thing would happen if she told her mother, because her mother would accuse her husband, and the pecker would have her jailed. And maybe her mother deserved to be jailed, but not if it meant that Annagret remained at home and kept harming her.
This was the latest chapter of her unfinished story, and it came out on the fourth evening of Andreas’s counseling. When Annagret had finished her confession, in the chill of the sanctuary, she began to weep. Seeing someone so beautiful weeping, seeing her press her fists to her eyes like an infant, Andreas was gripped by an unfamiliar physical sensation. He was such a laugher, such an ironist, such an artist of unseriousness, that he didn’t even recognize what was happening to him: he, too, was starting to cry. But he did recognize why. He was crying for himself—for what had happened to him as a child. He’d heard many stories of childhood sexual abuse before, but never from such a good girl, never from a girl with perfect hair and skin and bone structure. Annagret’s beauty had broken something open in him. He felt that he was just like her. And so he was also crying because he loved her, and because he couldn’t have her.
“Can you help me?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Why did I tell you so much if you can’t help me? Why did you keep asking me questions? You acted like you could help me.”
He shook his head and said nothing. She put a hand on his shoulder, very lightly, but even a light touch from her was terrible. He bowed forward, shaking with sobs. “I’m so sad for you.”
“But now you see what I mean. I cause harm.”
“No.”
“Maybe I should just be his girlfriend. Make him divorce my mother and be his girlfriend.”
“No.” He pulled himself together and wiped his face. “No, he’s a sick fucker. I know it because I’m a little bit sick myself. I can extrapolate.”
“You might have done the same thing he did …”
“Never. I swear to you. I’m like you, not him.”
“But … if you’re a little sick and you’re like me, it means that I must be a little bit sick.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You’re right, though. I should go home and be his girlfriend. Since I’m so sick. Thank you for your help, Mr. Counselor.”
He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. There was nothing but distrust in her eyes now. “I want to be your friend,” he said.
“We all know where being friends goes.”
“You’re wrong. Stay here, and let’s think. Be my friend.”
She pulled away from him and crossed her arms tightly.
“We can go directly to the Stasi,” he said. “He broke his oath to them. The minute they think he might embarrass them, they’ll drop him like a hot potato. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just some bottom-tier collaborator—he’s nobody.”
“No,” she said. “They’ll think I’m lying. I didn’t tell you everything I did—it’s too embarrassing. I did things to interest him.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re fifteen. In the eyes of the law, you have no responsibility. Unless he’s very stupid, he’s got to be scared out of his mind right now. You’ve got all the power.”
“But even if they believe me, everybody’s life is ruined, including mine. I won’t have a home, I won’t be able to go to university. Even my sister will hate me. I think it’s better if I just give him what he wants until I’m old enough to move away.”
“That’s what you want.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be here if that was what I wanted. But now I see that nobody can help me.”
Andreas didn’t know what to say. What he wanted was for her to come and live in the basement of the rectory with him. He could protect her, homeschool her, practice English with her, train her as a counselor for at-risk youth, and be her friend, the way King Lear imagined life with Cordelia, following the news of the court from a distance, laughing at who was in, who was out. Maybe in time they’d be a couple, the couple in the basement, leading their own private life.
“We can find room for you here,” he said.
She shook her head again. “He’s already upset that I don’t come home until midnight. He thinks I’m out with boys. If I didn’t come home at all, he’d turn my mother in.”
“He said that to you?”
“He’s an evil person. For a long time, I thought the opposite, but not anymore. Now everything he says to me is some kind of threat. He’s not going to stop until he gets everything he wants.”
A different sensation, not tears, a wave of hatred, came over Andreas. “I can kill him,” he said.
“That’s not what I meant by helping me.”
“Somebody’s life has to be ruined,” he said, pursuing the logic of his hatred. “Why not his and mine? I’m already in a kind of prison. The food can’t be any worse in a real prison. I can read books at state expense. You can go to school and help your mother with her problem.”
She made a derisive sound. “That’s a good plan. Trying to kill a bodybuilder.”
“Obviously I wouldn’t warn him in advance.”
She looked at him as if he couldn’t possibly be serious. All his life, until now, she would have been right. Levity was his métier. But it was harder to see the ridiculous side of the casual destruction of lives in the Republic when the life in question was Annagret’s. He was already falling in love with this girl, and there was nothing he could do with the feeling, no way to act on it, no way to make her believe that she should trust him. She must have seen some of this in his face, because her own expression changed.
“You can’t kill him,” she said quietly. “He’s just very sick. Everyone in my family is sick, everyone I touch is sick, including me. I just need help.”
“There is no help for you in this country.”
“That can’t be right.”
“It’s the truth.”
She stared for a while at the pews in front of them or at the cross behind the altar, forlorn and murkily lit. After a time, her breaths became quicker and sharper. “I wouldn’t cry if he died,” she said. “But I should be the one to do it, and I could never do it. Never, never. I’d sooner be his girlfriend.”
On more careful reflection, Andreas didn’t really want to kill Horst, either. He could imagine surviving prison, but the label murderer didn’t accord with his self-image. The label would follow him forever, he wouldn’t be able to like himself as much as he did now, and neither would other people. It was all very well to be a Assibräuteaufreißer, a troller for sex with the antisocial—the label was appropriately ridiculous. But murderer was not.
“So,” Annagret said, standing up. “It’s nice of you to offer. It was nice of you to listen to my story and not be too disgusted.”
“Wait, though,” he said, because another thought had occurred to him: if she were his accomplice, he might not automatically be caught, and even if he were caught her beauty and his love for her would forever adhere to what the two of them had done. He wouldn’t simply be a murderer; he’d be the person who’d eliminated the molester of this singular girl.
“Can you trust me?” he said.
“I like that I can talk to you. I don’t think you’re going to tell anyone my secrets.”
These weren’t the words he wanted to hear. They made him ashamed of his fantasy of homeschooling her in the basement.
“I don’t want to be your girlfriend,” she added, “if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend.”
“You’re fifteen, I’m twenty-seven. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I’m sure you have your own story, I’m sure it’s very interesting.”
“Do you want to hear it?”
“No. I just want to be normal again.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
Her expression became desolate. The natural thing would have been to put his arms around her and console her, but nothing about their situation was natural. He felt completely powerless—another new sensation and one he didn’t like one bit. He figured that she was about to walk away and never come back. But instead she drew a stabilizing breath and said, without looking at him, “How would you do it?”
In a low, dull voice, as if in a trance, he told her how. She had to stop coming to the church and go home and lie to Horst. She had to say that she’d been going to a church to sit by herself and pray and seek God’s guidance, and that her mind was clearer now. She was ready to give herself fully to Horst, but she couldn’t do it at home, out of respect for her mother. She knew a better place, a romantic place, a safe place where some of her friends went on weekends to drink beer and make out. If he cared about her feelings, he would take her there.
“You know a place like that?”
“I do,” Andreas said.
“Why would you do this for me?”
“Who better to do it for? You deserve a good life. I’m willing to take a risk for that.”
“It’s not a risk. It’s guaranteed—they’d definitely catch you.”
“OK, thought experiment: if it were guaranteed they wouldn’t, would you let me do it?”
“I’m the one who should be killed. I’ve been doing something terrible to my sister and my mother.”
He sighed. “I like you a lot, Annagret. I’m not so fond of the self-dramatizing, though.”
This was the right thing to have said—he saw it immediately. Not a full-bore burning look from her but unmistakably a spark of fire. He almost resented his loins for warming at the sight; he didn’t want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he’d been living in.
“I could never do it,” she said, turning away from him.
“Sure. We’re just talking.”
“You self-dramatize, too. You said you were the most important person in the country.”
He could have pointed out that such a ridiculous claim could only be ironic, but he saw that this was only half true. Irony was slippery, the sincerity of Annagret was firm. “You’re right,” he said gratefully. “I self-dramatize, too. It’s another way the two of us are alike.”
She gave a petulant shrug.
“But since we’re only talking, how well do you think you could ride a motorbike?”
“I just want to be normal again. I don’t want to be like you.”
“OK. We’ll try to make you normal again. But it would help if you could ride his motorbike. I’ve never been on one myself.”
“Riding it is sort of like judo,” she said. “You try to go with it, not against it.”
Sweet judo girl. She continued like this, closing the door on him and then opening it a little, rejecting possibilities that she then turned around and allowed, until it got so late that she had to go home. They agreed that there was no point in her returning to the church unless she was ready to act on their plan or move into the basement. These were the only two ideas either of them had.
Once she stopped coming to the church, Andreas had no way to communicate with her. For the following six afternoons, he went up to the sanctuary and waited until dinnertime. He was pretty sure he’d never see her again. She was just a schoolgirl, she didn’t care about him, or at least not enough, and she didn’t hate her stepfather as murderously as he did. She would lose her nerve—either go alone to the Stasi or submit to worse abuse. As the afternoons passed, Andreas felt some relief at the prospect. In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable. What tormented him was the thought that he wouldn’t lay eyes on Annagret again. He pictured her studiously practicing her throws at the Judo Club, being the good girl, and felt very sorry for himself. He refused to picture what might be happening to her at home at night.
She showed up on the seventh afternoon, looking pale and starved and wearing the same ugly rain jacket that half the teenagers in the Republic were wearing. A nasty cold drizzle was falling on Siegfeldstraße. She took the rearmost pew and bowed her head and kneaded her pasty, bitten hands. Seeing her again, after a week of merely imagining her, Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.
He sat down not very close to her. For a long time, for several minutes, they didn’t speak. Love altered the way he perceived her uneven mouth-breathing and her trembling hands—again the disparity between the largeness of her mattering and the ordinariness of the sounds she made, the everydayness of her schoolgirl fingers. He had the strange thought that it was wrong, wrong as in evil, to think of killing a man who, in however sick a way, was also in love with her; that he instead ought to have compassion for that man.
“So I have to be at the Judo Club,” she said finally. “I can’t stay long.”
“It’s good to see you,” he said. Love made this feel like the most remarkably true statement he’d ever made.
“So just tell me what to do.”
“Maybe now is not a good time. Maybe you want to come back some other day.”
She shook her head, and some of her hair fell over her face. She didn’t push it back. “Just tell me what to do.”
“Shit,” he said honestly. “I’m as scared as you are.”
“Not possible.”
“Why not just run away? Come and live here. We’ll find a room for you.”
She began to shiver more violently. “If you won’t help me, I’ll do it myself. You think you’re bad, but I’m the bad one.”
“No, here, here.” He took her shaking hands in his own. They were icy and so ordinary, so ordinary; he loved them. “You’re a very good person. You’re just in a bad dream.”
She turned her face to him, and through her hair he saw the burning look, the full-bore burning look. “Will you help me out of it?”
“It’s what you want?”
“You said you’d help me.”
Could anyone be worth it? He did wonder, but he set down her hands and took a hand-drawn map from his jacket pocket.
“This is where the house is,” he said. “You’ll need to take the S-Bahn out there by yourself first, so you’ll know exactly where you’re going. Do it after dark and watch out for cops. When you go back there on the motorcycle, have him cut the lights at the last corner, and then go all the way back behind the house. The driveway curves around behind. And then make sure you take your helmets off. What night are we talking about?”
“Thursday.”
“What time does your mother’s shift start?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Don’t go home for dinner. Tell him you’ll meet him by his bike at nine thirty. You don’t want anyone to see you leaving the building with him.”
“OK. Where will you be?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just head for the back door. Everything will be like we talked about.”
She convulsed a little, as if she might retch, but she mastered herself and put the map in her jacket pocket. “Is that all?” she said.
“You suggested it to him. The date.”
She nodded quickly.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Is that all?”
“Just one other thing. Will you look at me?”
She remained hunched over, like a dog that had been bad, but she turned her head.
“You have to be honest with me,” he said. “Are you doing this because I want it, or because you want it?”
“What does it matter?”
“A lot. Everything.”
She looked down at her lap again. “I just want it to be over. Either way.”
“You know we won’t be able to see each other for a very long time, whichever way it goes. No contact of any kind.”
“That’s almost better.”
“Think about it, though. If you came here instead, we could see each other every day.”
“I don’t think that’s better.”
He looked up at the stained ceiling of the sanctuary and considered what a cosmic joke it was that the first person his heart had freely chosen was someone he not only couldn’t have but wouldn’t even be allowed to see. And yet he felt all right about it. His powerlessness itself was sweet. Who would have guessed that? Various clichés about love, stupid adages and song lyrics, flashed through his head.
“I’m late for judo,” Annagret said. “I have to go.”
He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave.
It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.
An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn’t remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your consciousness opened its little eyes for the first time and discovered that you were headlong in love with your mom. Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers’ state. Your mother herself, in her secret heart, might not have believed in it, but you did. You’d been a person long before you had a conscious self. Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father’s dick had ever gone, you’d squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you’d sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn’t for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.
Andreas’s father was the second-youngest Party member ever elevated to the Central Committee, and he had the most creative job in the Republic. As the chief state economist, he was responsible for the wholesale massaging of data, for demonstrating increases in productivity where there weren’t any, for balancing a budget that every year drifted farther from reality, for adjusting official exchange rates to maximize the budgetary impact of whatever hard currency the Republic could finagle or extort, for magnifying the economy’s few successes and making optimistic excuses for its many failures. The top Party leaders could afford to be stupid or cynical about his numbers, but he himself had to believe in the story they told. This required political conviction, self-deception, and, perhaps especially, self-pity.
A refrain of Andreas’s childhood was his father’s litany of the unfairnesses with which the German workers’ state contended. The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent them to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border. “No state in world history has ever started at a greater disadvantage than ours,” he liked to say. “Beginning with sheer rubble, and with every hand raised against us, we’ve succeeded in feeding and clothing and housing and educating our citizens and providing every one of them with a level of security that only the wealthiest in the West enjoy.” The phrase every hand raised against us never failed to move Andreas. His father seemed to him the greatest of men, the wise and kindhearted champion of the conspired-against and spat-upon German worker. Was there anything more worthy of sympathy than a suffering underdog nation persevering and triumphing through sheer faith in itself? With every hand raised against it?
His father was overworked, however, and traveled a lot to Moscow and to other Eastern Bloc countries. Andreas’s real love affair was with his mother, Katya, who was no less perfect and much more available. She was pretty and lively and quick; rigid only in her politics. She had boyishly short hair of unrivaled redness, blazing but natural-looking redness, the product of a Western bottle obtainable only by the very privileged. She was a jewel of the Republic, a person of great physical and intellectual charm who’d elected to stay behind while others like her were getting out. Nobody toed the Party line with greater ease. Andreas had gone to lectures of hers and seen the hold she had on her classes, the way she mesmerized them with the redness of her hair and the torrent of words she delivered without notes. She could quote whole chunks of Shakespeare from memory, whatever random lines her thought process happened to call for, and then freely translate them into German for the slower students, and everything she said was shot through with orthodoxy: the Danish tragedy a parable of false consciousness and its downfall, Polonius a travesty of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the blond prince a prophetic prefigurement of Marx, Horatio his Engels, and Fortinbras the Lenin-like fulfiller and guarantor of revolutionary consciousness, arriving at the Danish equivalent of the Finland Station. If anyone was put off by how obviously well Katya thought of herself, if anyone found her liveliness unsettling (safety lay in drabness), she had her position as chair of her division’s political oversight committee to set their minds at rest.
She also came from heroic stock. In 1933, after the burning of the Reichstag and the banning of the Communist Party, the smart or lucky party leaders fled to the Soviet Union for advanced training by the NKVD while the others dispersed across Europe. Katya’s mother held a British passport and managed to emigrate to Liverpool with her husband and their two girls. The father found work at the dockyards and did enough spying for the Soviets to stay in their good graces; Katya claimed to remember Kim Philby coming to dinner once. When the war broke out, the family was politely but firmly relocated to the Welsh countryside and waited out the war there. Minus Katya’s older sister, who’d married a swing-band leader, the parents returned to East Berlin, marched in a celebratory parade, received public commendations for their resistance to fascism, and then were quietly exiled to Rostock by the NKVD-trained leaders whom the Soviets had installed in power. Only Katya was allowed to remain in Berlin, because she was a student. Her father hanged himself in Rostock in 1948; her mother had a nervous breakdown and was warehoused in a locked ward until she, too, died. Andreas later came to think it possible that the secret police had assisted his grandfather’s suicide and his grandmother’s breakdown, but such consolation was politically foreclosed to Katya. Her own star rose with the eclipse of her parents, who could now safely be remembered as martyrs. She became a full professor and eventually married a university colleague who’d weathered the war in the Soviet Union, along with his Wolf relatives, and learned his economics there.
Nothing about Andreas’s childhood with her was ordinary. She permitted him everything, and in return she required only that he be with her constantly, asked only that he be delighted with her. The delight came naturally to him. Her tenure at the university was in Anglistik, and from the beginning she spoke both German and English at home with him, best of all in the same sentence. Mixing up the two languages was endless fun. Du hast ein bloody awful mess gemacht! The Vereinigten Staaten are rotten! Is that a fart oder eine Ausfahrt I smell? Willst du ein otheres Stück creamcake? What goeth in thy little head on? She refused to entrust him to day care, because she wanted him all to herself, and she had the privilege to get away with it. He started reading so young he didn’t remember learning to do it. He did remember sleeping in her bed when his father was away; also remembered his father’s snoring when he tried to join the two of them at night, remembered feeling scared of the snores, remembered her getting up and taking him back to his room and sleeping with him there. He was apparently incapable of doing anything she didn’t like. When he had a tantrum, she sat down on the floor and cried with him, and if this upset him all the more, she became all the more upset herself, until finally the funniness of her make-believe distress distracted him from his own distress. Then he laughed, and she laughed with him.
One time he got so angry at her that he kicked her in the shin, and she stumbled around the living room in make-believe agony, crying, in English, “A hit, a palpable hit!” It was so funny and infuriating that he ran and kicked her again, harder. This time she collapsed on the floor and lay motionless. He giggled and thought about kicking her one more time, since they were having so much fun. But when she continued not to move he became worried and kneeled down by her face. She was breathing, not dead, but there was a strange empty look in her eyes. “Mama?”
“Do you like to be kicked?” she said in a low monotone.
“No.”
She didn’t say anything more, but he was highly precocious and immediately felt ashamed of kicking her. She never had to tell him what not to do, and she never did. He began to paw and prod her, trying to rouse her, saying, “Mama, Mama, I’m sorry I kicked you, please get up.” But now she was weeping—real tears, not make-believe. He stopped pawing her and didn’t know what to do. He ran to his bedroom and did some crying of his own, hoping she would hear him. He ended up howling, but she still didn’t come to him. He stopped crying and went back to the living room. She was still on the floor, in the exact same position, her eyes open.
“Mama?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she murmured.
“I didn’t hurt you?”
“You’re perfect. The world isn’t.”
She didn’t move. The only thing he could think to do was to go back to his room and lie very still, like her. But this was boring, so he opened a book. He was still reading it when he heard his father come home. “Katya? Katya!” His father’s footsteps sounded stern and angry. Then Andreas heard a slap. After a moment, a second slap. Then his father’s footsteps again, and then his mother’s, then a clatter of pots and pans. When he went out to the kitchen, his mother gave him a warm smile, her familiar warm smile, and asked what he’d been reading. At dinner the parental conversation was the same as ever, his father mentioning the name of some person, his mother saying something funny and slightly mean about this person, his father replying “From each according to his ability” or something similarly sententious and correct, his mother turning to Andreas and giving him the special wink she liked to give him. How he loved her! Loved both of them! The earlier scene had been a bad dream.
Many of his other early memories were of attending committee meetings at the university with her. She gave him a chair in the corner of the meeting room, away from the table, and he precociously read chapter-books—in German, Werner Schmoll, Nackt unter Wölfen, Kleine Shakespeare-Fabeln für junge Leser; in English, Robin Hood and Steinbeck—while the gathered professors outdid one another in proposing new ways to align the Anglistik curriculum with class struggle and better serve the German worker. Probably no meetings at the university were more suffocatingly doctrinaire, because no department was more inessential and embattled. Andreas developed an almost telepathic connection with his mother; he knew exactly when to look up from his book and receive her special wink, the wink that told him that she and he were suffering together and together were smarter than anyone else. Her colleagues probably didn’t love having a child in the room, but Andreas had a preternaturally long attention span and was so in tune with his mother that he knew what might embarrass her and never did it. Only in extreme situations did he get up and tug on her sleeve so that she could take him to the ladies’ room to pee.
At one of the longest of these meetings—so Katya’s story went; Andreas didn’t remember it—he became too drowsy to read and nestled his head on the armrest of his chair. One of Katya’s colleagues, trying to be tactful in the presence of her son, and presumably unaware of his language skills, suggested in English that perhaps the boy should go lay down in her office. According to Katya, Andreas immediately sat up straight and shouted out, in English: “To say ‘lay’ when you mean ‘lie’ is a lie!” It was true that he’d learned the distinction between lie and lay at some point, and that his estimation of his own intelligence was very high, but he still couldn’t believe that he’d been clever enough, at six, to say such a thing. Katya insisted that he had. It was one of many precocity stories that she liked to retell: how her six-year-old’s English was better than her tenured colleague’s. Her retellings didn’t embarrass Andreas as much as he later came to feel they should have. He learned early to tune out her pride in him, to take it as a given and move on.
He saw less of her as he advanced through the regimentations and indoctrinations of lower school and afterschool programs, but by then he was already convinced that he had the world’s best parents. He still loved coming home and matching wits with his mother bilingually, he was better able now to read her favorite plays and novels and be the person his father wasn’t, a person who read literature, and although he could also see better that she wasn’t entirely stable (there were further mental collapses, on the floor of her study, in the bathtub, and occasional unaccountable absences followed by unlikely explanations) he felt a kind of noblesse oblige toward his friends and classmates, taking it as a given that their mothers were less wonderful than his. This conviction persisted until puberty.
In theory, psychologists were unnecessary in the Republic of Bad Taste, because neurosis was a bourgeois malady, a morbid expression of contradictions that by definition could not exist in a perfect workers’ state. Nevertheless, there were psychologists, a few of them, and when Andreas was fifteen his father arranged for him to see one of them. He stood accused of having tried to kill himself, but his presenting symptom was excessive masturbation. In his opinion, excess was in the eye of the beholder, and in his mother’s opinion he was going through a natural adolescent phase, but he allowed that his father might be right in thinking otherwise. Ever since he’d discovered a secret passageway out of self-alienation, in the form of giving himself pleasure while also receiving it, he’d increasingly resented any activity that took him away from it.
The most time-consuming of these was football. No sport was less interesting to the East German intelligentsia, but by the age of ten Andreas had already absorbed his mother’s disdain for the intelligentsia. He argued to his father that the Republic was a workers’ state and football the sport of the working masses, but this was a cynical argument, worthy of his mother. Football’s real attraction was that it separated him from classmates who fancied themselves interesting but weren’t. He compelled his best friend, Joachim, for whom he was the glass of fashion and the mold of form, to sign on with him. They went to a sports center agreeably distant from Karl-Marx-Allee, and with their talk of Beckenbauer and Bayern München they made their classmates feel left out. Later on, after he saw the ghost, Andreas pursued the sport obsessively, practicing with his clubmates at the sports center and by himself at the Weberwiese, because he imagined himself as a star striker and it spared him from thinking about the ghost.
But he was never going to be a star striker, and the ease of masturbation only heightened his frustration with the defenders who kept thwarting his attempts to score. By himself, in his room, he could score at will. There, the only frustration was that he became bored and depressed when he’d scored too many times and couldn’t do it again for a while.
To sustain his interest, he had the inspiration of making pencil drawings of naked girls. His first drawings were extremely crude, but he discovered that he had some talent, especially when he could work from a model in an illustrated magazine, undressing her as he copied, and that by drawing with one hand and touching himself with the other he could prolong the pleasurable suspense for hours. The less successful drawings he came on, balled up, and threw away. The better ones he saved and improved and delayed adding filthy captions to, because, although the idealized faces and bodies remained lovely to him, the words he imputed to them embarrassed him the next day.
He informed his parents that he was quitting football. His mother approved ipso facto of everything he did, but his father said that if he quit he would have to find other healthful and commensurately time-consuming activities, and so, one evening, on the way home from practice, he jumped off the Rhinstraße bridge and down into the trashy bushes where, as it happened, he’d last seen the ghost. He broke his ankle and told his parents that he’d jumped on a stupid dare.
The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn’t do today really could be put off until tomorrow. Every other commodity may have been scarce, but never time, especially if you had a broken ankle and were extremely intelligent. Homework was a laugh for a boy who’d been reading since three and doing multiplication since five, there was a limit to the pleasure he could take in entertaining the boys at school with his intelligence, the girls didn’t interest him, and ever since he’d seen the ghost he’d stopped enjoying conversations with his mother. She was as interesting as ever, she dangled her interestingness at the dinner table like a piece of luscious fruit, but he’d lost his appetite for it. He lived in a vast proletarian desert of time and boringness, and so he didn’t see anything wrong or excessive in devoting a good chunk of each day to producing beauty with his hands, transforming blank paper into female faces that owed their very existence to him, transforming his dinky worm into something big and hard. He became so unashamed of his drawings that he took to working on the faces on the living-room sofa, sometimes touching his pants to maintain a moderate level of stimulation, sometimes becoming so absorbed in his art that he forgot to be stimulated.
“Whose face is that?” his mother asked him one day, looking over his shoulder. Her tone was coy.
“No one’s,” he said. “It’s just a face.”
“It must be someone’s face. Is it a girl you know at school?”
“No.”
“You seem very practiced. Is this what you’ve been working on with your door closed?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have other drawings that I can see?”
“No.”
“I’m really impressed with your talent. Can’t I see your other drawings?”
“I throw them away when I’m done with them.”
“You have no others?”
“That’s right.”
His mother frowned. “Are you doing this to hurt me?”
“Honestly, the thought of you never crosses my mind. You should be worried if it did.”
“I can protect you,” she said, “but you have to talk to me.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“It’s normal to be excited by pictures at your age. It’s healthy to have urges at your age. I’m just interested in knowing whose face that is.”
“Mother, it’s an invented face.”
“Your drawing looks so personal, though. Like you know very well who that’s supposed to be.”
Without another word, he put the drawing in a binder and went and shut himself in his bedroom. When he opened the binder again, the penciled face looked loathsome to him. Hideous, hideous. He tore up the paper. His mother knocked on the door and opened it.
“Why did you jump off the bridge?” she said.
“I told you. It was a dare.”
“Were you trying to harm yourself? It’s important that you tell me the truth. It would be the end of the world for me if you did what my father did to me.”
“Joachim dared me, just like I said.”
“You’re too intelligent to do something so stupid on a dare.”
“All right. I wanted to break my leg so I could spend more time masturbating.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Please go away so I can masturbate.” The words just popped out of his mouth, but the shock of hearing them jolted something loose in him. He jumped to his feet and came at his mother, trembling, grinning, and said, “Please go away so I can masturbate. Please go away so I can—”
“Stop!”
“I’m not like your father. I’m like you. But at least I keep to myself. I don’t harm anyone but myself.”
She blanched at the goal he’d scored. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No, of course not. I’m the crazy one. I can’t even tell a hawk from a handsaw.” He knew the line in English.
“Enough with the Hamletizing.”
“A little more than kin, a little less than kind.”
“You have some thoroughly wrong idea,” she said. “You got it from a book and it annoys me, all this hinting. I’m starting to think your father’s right—I let you read things when you were too young for them. I can still protect you, but you have to confide in me. You have to tell me what you’re really thinking.”
“I’m thinking—nothing.”
“Andreas.”
“Please go away so I can masturbate!”
He was protecting her, not the other way around, and when his father came home from yet another round of factory tours and informed him that he had a date with a psychologist, he assumed that his mission in the counseling sessions would be to continue protecting her. His father wouldn’t have entrusted him to anyone but the most politically rocksolid, Stasi-certified psychologist. However much Andreas was coming to hate his mother, there was no way that he was telling the psychologist about the ghost.
The Republic’s capital wasn’t just spiritually flat but literally flat. Such few hills as it had were composed of rubble from the war, and it was on a minor one of these, a grassy berm behind the back fence of the football pitch, that Andreas had first seen the ghost. Beyond the berm were disused rail tracks and a narrow stretch of wasteland too irrationally shaped to have fit into any five-year development plan to date. The ghost must have come up from the tracks on the late afternoon when Andreas, winded from sprints, hung his hands on the fence and pressed his face into its links to catch his breath. At the top of the rise, maybe twenty meters away, a gaunt and bearded figure in a ratty sheepskin jacket was looking at him. Feeling his privacy and privilege invaded, Andreas turned around and put his back to the fence. When he returned to running sprints and glanced up at the hill, the ghost was gone.
But he appeared again at dusk the following day, again looking directly at Andreas, singling him out. This time some of the other players saw the ghost and shouted at him—“Stinking deviant!” “Go wipe yourself!” etc.—with the morally untroubled contempt that club members had for anyone not playing by society’s rules. You couldn’t get in trouble for reviling a bum; quite the opposite. One of the boys peeled off and went to the fence to shout abuse from a closer range. Seeing him approach, the ghost ducked behind the hill and out of sight.
After that, he appeared after dark, loitering at the point on the hill where the light from the pitch ended, his head and shoulders dimly visible. Running up and down the pitch, Andreas kept looking to see if the ghost was still there. Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t; twice he seemed to beckon to Andreas with a motion of his head. But he was always gone by the time the final whistle blew.
After a week of this peek-a-boo, Andreas took Joachim aside when practice ended and everyone else was leaving the pitch. “That guy on the hill,” he said. “He keeps looking at me.”
“Oh, so it’s you he’s after.”
“Like he has something to say to me.”
“Gentlemen prefer blonds, man. Somebody should report him.”
“I’m going to jump the fence. Find out what his story is.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“There’s something weird about the way he looks at me. It’s like he knows me.”
“Wants to get to know you. It’s your curly golden locks, I’m telling you.”
Joachim was probably right, but Andreas had a mother in whose eyes he could do no wrong, and by now, at the age of fourteen, he was accustomed to following his impulses and taking what he wanted, so long as he didn’t directly disrespect authority. Things always turned out well for him: instead of falling on his face, he was praised for his initiative and creativity. He felt like talking to the ghost in the sheepskin jacket and getting his story, which was bound to be less boring than anything else he’d heard in the past week, and so, with a shrug, he went over to the fence and wedged a toe in its links.
“Hey, come on,” Joachim said.
“Call the police if I’m not back in twenty minutes.”
“You’re unbelievable. I’m coming with you.”
This was what Andreas had wanted, and, as usual, he was getting it.
From the top of the rise, they couldn’t see much in the shadows along the rail tracks. A truck skeleton, urban weeds, small prospectless trees, some pale lines that might have been the remains of walls, and their own attenuated shadows from the pitch lights. Banks of mediumrise socialist housing were massed in the far distance.
“Hey!” Joachim shouted at the darkness. “Antisocial Element! You here?”
“Shut up.”
Down by the tracks they saw a movement. They took the straightest line they could to it, picking their way slowly in the poor light, weeds grabbing at their bare legs. By the time they reached the tracks, the ghost was all the way down near the Rhinstraße bridge. It was hard to tell, but he seemed to be looking at them.
“Hey!” Joachim bellowed. “We want to talk to you!”
The ghost started moving again.
“Go back and shower,” Andreas said. “You’re scaring him.”
“This is stupid.”
“I’ll only go as far as the bridge. You can meet me there.”
Joachim hesitated, but in the end he almost always did what Andreas wanted. When he was gone, Andreas trotted down the tracks, enjoying his little adventure. He could no longer see the ghost, but it was interesting just to be in an unregulated space, in the dark. He was smart and knew the rules, and he wasn’t breaking any by being here. He felt entitled to it, just as he felt entitled to be the player on the football pitch whom the figure stared at. He wasn’t afraid; he felt unharmable. Still, he was glad of the safety of the streetlights on the bridge. He stopped in front of it and peered into its shadows. “Hello?” he said.
A foot scraped on something in the shadows.
“Hello?”
“Come under the bridge,” a voice said.
“You come out.”
“No, under here. I won’t hurt you.”
The voice sounded gentle and educated, which somehow didn’t surprise him. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for a person who wasn’t intelligent to stare at him and beckon to him. He moved under the bridge and made out a human shape by one of the pillars. “Who are you?” he said.
“Nobody,” the ghost said. “An absurdity.”
“Then what do you want? Do I know you?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I can’t stay here, but I wanted to see you before I go back.”
“Back to where?”
“Erfurt.”
“Well, here I am. You’re seeing me. Do you mind if I ask why you’re spying on me?”
The bridge above them shook and boomed with the weight of a passing truck.
“What would you say,” the ghost said, “if I told you I’m your father?”
“I’d say you’re a lunatic.”
“Your mother is Katya Wolf, née Eberswald. I was her student and colleague at Humboldt University from 1957 until February 1963, at which time I was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison for subversion of the state.”
Andreas involuntarily took a step backward. His fear of political lepers was instinctive. No good could come of contact with them.
“Needless to say,” the ghost added, “I did not subvert the state.”
“Obviously the People thought otherwise.”
“No, interestingly, no one ever thought otherwise. I went to prison for the crime of having relations with your mother before and after she was married. The after in particular was a problem.”
A horrible feeling seized Andreas, part loathing, part pain, part righteous rage.
“Listen to me, dirtbag,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t talk about my mother that way. You understand? If I see you again at the football pitch, I’m calling the police. You understand?” He turned and stumbled back toward the light.
“Andreas,” the dirtbag called after him. “I held you when you were a baby.”
“Go fuck yourself, whoever you are.”
“I’m your father.”
“Go fuck yourself. You’re filthy and disgusting.”
“Do one thing for me,” the dirtbag said. “Go home and ask your mother’s husband where he was in October and November of 1959. That’s all. Just ask him and see what he says.”
Andreas’s eyes fell on a scrap of lumber. He could bash the dirtbag’s head in, nobody would miss an enemy of the state, nobody would care. Even if they caught Andreas, he could say it was self-defense and they’d believe him. The idea was giving him a stiffy. There was a murderer in him.
“You don’t have to worry,” the dirtbag said. “You won’t see me again. I’m not allowed to enter Berlin. I’m almost certainly on my way back to prison, just for having disappeared from Erfurt.”
“You think I care?”
“No. Why would you. I’m nobody.”
“What’s your name?”
“It’s safer for you if you don’t know.”
“Then why are you doing this to me? Why did you even come here?”
“Because I sat in prison for ten years imagining it. I spent another year imagining it after I got out. Sometimes you imagine something for so long, you find that you have no choice but to do it. Maybe you’ll have a son of your own someday. You might understand better then.”
“People who tell filthy lies belong in prison.”
“It’s not a lie. I told you the question you need to ask.”
“If you did something bad to my mother, you deserve all the more to be in prison.”
“That’s the way her husband saw it, too. You can understand why I might see things rather differently.”
The dirtbag said this with a note of bitterness, and already Andreas could sense what later became transparent to him: the guy was guilty. Maybe not of the crime for which he’d been imprisoned, but certainly of having taken advantage of something unstable in his mother, and then of coming back to Berlin to make trouble; of caring more about getting even with his former lover than about the feelings of their fourteen-year-old son. He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. At no point did Andreas dream of reestablishing contact with him.
All he said in the moment was “Thanks for ruining my day.”
“I had to see you at least once.”
“Fine. Now go back to Erfurt and fuck yourself.”
Still muttering this phrase, Andreas hurried out from under the bridge and scrambled up the embankment to Rhinstraße. There was no sign of Joachim, so he made his way home, pausing twice in shadowed doorways to rearrange his underpants, because his homicidal stiffy was persisting in his football shorts. He had no intention of asking his father the question the ghost had suggested, but he was suddenly thinking of scenes from the past two or three years which had made so little sense to him that he’d dutifully put them out of his mind.
There was the time he’d gone out to the dacha on a Friday afternoon and found his mother sitting stark naked between two rosebushes, unable or unwilling to utter a word until his father finally arrived, after dark, and slapped her face. That was a weird one. And the time he’d been sent home from school with a fever and found his parents’ bedroom door locked and later seen two workers in blue coveralls hastening out of the bedroom. And the time he’d gone to her office at the university to have a permission slip signed, and again the door was locked, and after some minutes a male student had come out, his hair plastered with sweat, and Andreas had tried to go through the door but his mother had pushed it shut from inside and locked it again.
And what she’d said afterward, the bewitching gaiety of her explanations:
“I was just smelling the roses, and it was such a lovely day I took my clothes off, to be closer to nature, and then when I saw you I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t say a word to you.”
“They were fixing the electricity and they needed me to stand by the light switch and flip it on and off and on and off, and they were so silly with their rules that they wouldn’t even let me open the door. It was like I was their prisoner!”
“We’d had the most horribly excruciating disciplinary meeting, the poor boy is being expelled—you probably heard him crying—and I had to make some notes while it was still fresh in my mind.”
He remembered the determined pressure of her office door, the irresistible force pushing him back. He remembered remembering, when he saw her pussy in the rose garden, that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen it—that something he’d thought was a disturbing dream from his early childhood hadn’t actually been a dream; that she’d shown it to him once before, to answer some precocious question of his. He remembered that although he’d been sprawled with his fever in the living room, in plain sight, the two workmen in coveralls hadn’t said hello to him, hadn’t even glanced at him, as they made their escape.
When he got home, Katya was sitting on their fake-leather fauxDanish sofa—so tacky and yet two cuts above most other sofas in the Republic—reading the ND and drinking her after-work glass of wine. She had an air of knowing that she looked like an advertisement for life in East Berlin. In the window behind her were the pretty lights of another superior modern building across the street. “You’re still in your football clothes,” she said.
Andreas moved behind a chair to conceal his stiffy. “Yeah, I decided to run home.”
“You left your clothes at the pitch?”
“I’ll get them tomorrow.”
“Joachim just called. He wondered where you were.”
“I’ll call him back.”
“Is everything all right?”
He wanted to believe in the image she was presenting, since it obviously meant so much to her: the ideal worker and mother and wife relaxing after a productive day within a system that provided better security than capitalism and was, to boot, in the best of ways, more serious. Her ability to read every last dull word in the ND with seeming interest was undeniably impressive. The true extent of his love was becoming evident only now, when the sight of her also revolted him.
“Everything couldn’t be better,” he said.
Retreating to the bathroom, he took out his stiffy and was saddened by how minor it seemed, compared to how prominent it had felt on the street. Nevertheless, it was what he had to work with, and he proceeded to work with it that night, and the next night, and the next, until he succeeded in banishing the thought of asking his parents where his father had been in the fall of 1959. The ghost from Erfurt may have been wronged, but Andreas himself hadn’t been, not in any meaningful sense. Rather than stir up pointless trouble, rather than cause his parents anguish, he took what he knew and suspected about his mother and used it only to excuse his own solitary depravities. If she was entitled to entertain a random pair of workers in her bedroom on a Tuesday afternoon, he was certainly entitled to impute raunchy words to the women he drew and to shoot his seed all over them.
The psychologist, Dr. Gnel, had a spacious ground-floor office in the Charité complex and sat behind his desk in an impressively clinical white coat. Andreas, taking a seat opposite him, had the sense of being at a medical consultation or a job interview. Dr. Gnel asked him if he knew why his father had sent him here.
“He’s being sensible and careful,” Andreas said. “If I turn out to be a sex criminal, there’ll be a record of his having intervened.”
“So you personally don’t feel there’s any reason for you to be here?”
“I’d much rather be at home masturbating.”
Dr. Gnel nodded and jotted on his notepad.
“That was a joke,” Andreas said.
“What we choose to joke about can be revealing.”
Andreas sighed. “Can we establish right away that I’m much smarter than you are? My joke was not revealing. The joke was that you’d take it to be revealing.”
“But that in itself is revealing, don’t you think?”
“Only because I want it to be.”
Dr. Gnel set down his pen and notepad. “It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.”
Andreas felt unexpectedly sorry for the psychologist. How painful it must have been to know that your intelligence was limited. How shameful to have to confess your limitations to a patient. Andreas was well aware that he was brighter than the other kids at his school, but not one of them would have admitted it in the piteously limpid way that Dr. Gnel had. He decided that he would like the psychologist and try to take care of him.
Dr. Gnel returned the favor by pronouncing him not suicidal. After Andreas explained why he’d jumped from the bridge, the doctor simply complimented him on his resourcefulness: “There was something you wanted, you didn’t see how you could get it, and yet you found a way.”
“Thank you,” Andreas said.
But the doctor had follow-up questions. Was he attracted to any of the girls at his school? Were there ones he felt like kissing, or touching, or having sex with? Andreas honestly answered that all his female classmates were stupid and repellent.
“Really? All of them?”
“It’s like I see them through some distorting pane of glass. They’re the opposite of the girls I draw.”
“You wish you could have sex with the girls you draw.”
“Absolutely. It’s a great frustration that I can’t.”
“Are you sure you’re not drawing self-portraits?”
“Of course not,” Andreas said, offended. “They’re totally female.”
“I’m not objecting to your drawings. To me they’re another example of your resourcefulness. I don’t want to judge, I only want to understand. When you tell me you draw figments of your imagination, things that only exist inside your head, doesn’t that sound a bit like a self-portrait?”
“Maybe in the most narrow and literal sense.”
“What about the boys in your school? Are you attracted to any of them?”
“Nope.”
“You say that so flatly, it’s as if you didn’t honestly consider my question.”
“Just because I like my friends, it doesn’t mean I think about having sex with them.”
“All right. I believe you.”
“You say that like you don’t believe me.”
Dr. Gnel smiled. “Tell me more about this distorting pane of glass. What do your female classmates look like through it?”
“Boring. Stupid. Socialist.”
“Your mother is a committed socialist. Is she boring or stupid?”
“Not at all.”
“I see.”
“I don’t want to have sex with my mother, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I didn’t suggest that. I’m just thinking about sex. Most people think it’s exciting to have it with a real flesh-and-blood person. Even if she bores you, even if she seems stupid to you. I’m trying to understand why you don’t think that.”
“I can’t explain it.”
“Do you think the things you want are so dirty that no real girl could possibly want them?”
The doctor may have been smart about only one thing, but Andreas had to admit that, within his narrow speciality, the doctor was apparently smarter than he was. He himself was feeling quite mixed up, because he had evidence that his mother herself wanted to do dirty things, and had in fact done them, which ought to have suggested that other females might also want to do them, and do them with him; but somehow he felt just the opposite. It was as if he loved his mother so much, even now, that he subtracted the things that were disturbing about her and mentally implanted them in other females to make them frightening to him, make him prefer masturbation, and let his mother remain perfect. This didn’t make sense, but there it was.
“I don’t even want to know what a real girl wants,” he said.
“The same thing as you, maybe. Love, sex.”
“I’m worried that there’s something wrong with me. All I want to do is masturbate.”
“You’re only fifteen. That’s very young to be having sex with another person. I’m not telling you it’s what you should be doing. I just find it interesting that not one single classmate of yours, female or male, is attractive to you.”
Years later, Andreas still couldn’t say whether his sessions with Dr. Gnel had greatly helped him or grievously harmed him. Their immediate result, though, was that he started chasing girls. What he wanted above all was that there not be something wrong with him. Before the sessions had even ended, he applied his intelligence to the task of being more normal, and it turned out that Dr. Gnel was right: the real thing was more exciting—more challenging than drawing pictures, not as impossible as becoming a star striker. From dealing with his mother, he had a powerful arsenal of sensitivity, entitlement, and disdain to bring to bear on girls. Because there was so much time to talk and so little of interest to talk about, everyone at his school knew that his parents were important. This inclined girls to trust him and take their cues from him. They felt excited, not threatened, by his joking about the Free German Youth, or the senility of the Soviet politburo, or the Republic’s solidarity with the rebels in Angola, or the eugenic physiques of the Olympic diving team, or the appalling petit bourgeois taste of his countrymen. It wasn’t that he cared much, one way or another, about socialism. The point of his joking was to convey to his female listeners that he was capable of naughtiness, and to gauge their level of interest in being naughty with him. In his last years at the Oberschule, he got quite far with many of them. And yet, repeatedly, at the crucial moment, he ran aground on their narrow-minded working-class morality. The line they drew between finger fucking and real fucking was like the line between ridiculing German-Angolan brotherhood and calling the socialist workers’ state a failure and a fraud. He found only two girls willing to cross the line, and both of them had dismayingly romantic visions of their future with him.
It was the quest for wilder girls that led him into Berlin’s bohemian scene—to the Mosaik, the Fengler, the poetry readings. By then he was studying math and logic at the university, subjects “hard” enough to pass muster with his father and abstract enough to spare him from tedious political discussion. He got top marks in his classes, engaged intensively with Bertrand Russell (he’d turned against his mother but not against her Anglophilia), and still had copious free time. Unfortunately, he was by no means the only man to whom it had occurred to trawl the scene for sex, and although he did have the advantage of being young and good-looking he was also radiantly privileged. Not that anyone imagined the Stasi would be so dumb as to send a person like him undercover, but he sensed an aversion to his privilege everywhere he went, a feeling that he could get a person into trouble, whether he intended to or not. To succeed with the arty girls, he needed bona fides of disaffection. The first girl he set his sights on was a self-styled Beat poet, Ursula, whom he’d seen at two readings and whose ass was an amazement. Chatting her up after the second reading, he was inspired to claim that he wrote poetry himself. This was an outrageous lie, but it landed him a date to have coffee with her.
She was nervous when they met. Nervous somewhat on her own account but mostly, it seemed, on his.
“Are you suicidal?” she bluntly asked him.
“Ha. Only north-northwest.”
“What does that mean?”
“Shakespeare reference. It means not really.”
“I had a friend in school who killed himself. You remind me of him.”
“I did jump off a bridge once. But it was only an eight-meter drop.”
“You’re more of a reckless self-harmer.”
“It was rational and deliberate, not reckless. And that was years ago.”
“No, but right now,” she said. “It’s almost like I can smell it on you. I used to smell the same thing on my friend. You’re looking for trouble, and you don’t seem to understand how serious trouble can be in this country.”
Her face wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t matter.
“I’m looking for some other way to be,” he said seriously. “I don’t care what it is, just as long as it’s different.”
“Different how?”
“Honest. My father is a professional liar, my mother a gifted amateur. If they’re the ones who are thriving, what does it say about this country? Do you know the Rolling Stones song ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby’?”
“‘Standing in the Shadow.’”
“The very first time I heard it, on RIAS, I could tell in my gut that everything they’d told me about the West was a lie. I could tell it just from the sound—there was no way a society that produced that kind of sound could be as oppressed as they said it was. Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved. And what does that say about a country that wants to forbid that kind of sound?”
He was saying these things just to be saying them, because he hoped they would bring him closer to Ursula, but he realized, as he said them, that he also meant them. He encountered a similar irony when he went home (he still lived with his parents) and tried to write something that Ursula might mistake for actual poetry: the initial impulse was pure fraudulence, but what he found himself expressing was authentic yearning and complaint.
And so he became, for a while, a poet. He never got anywhere with Ursula, but he discovered that he had a gift for poetic forms, perhaps akin to his gift for realistically drawing naked women, and within a few months he’d had his first poem accepted by a state-approved journal and made his debut at a group reading. The male bohemians still distrusted him, but not the females. There ensued a happy period when he woke up in the beds of a dozen different women in quick succession, all over the city, in neighborhoods he’d never dreamed existed—in flats without running water, in absurdly narrow bedrooms near the Wall, in a settlement twenty minutes by foot from the nearest bus stop. Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning? The casual slaughter of a reasonable sleep schedule? The strangeness of passing someone’s hair-curlered mother in a bathrobe on your way to her heartrendingly hideous bathroom? He wrote poems about his experiences, intricately rhymed renderings of his singular subjectivity in a land whose squalor was relieved only by the thrill of sexual conquest, and none of it got him in trouble. The country’s literary regime had lately relaxed to the extent of permitting this kind of subjectivity, at least in poetry.
What got him in trouble was a cycle of word puzzles that he worked on when his brain was too tired to do math. The soothing thing about the sort of poetry he wrote was that it limited his choice of words. It was as if, after the chaos of a childhood with his mother, he craved the discipline of rhyme schemes and other formal constraints. At another cattle-call literary event, where he was given only seven minutes at the podium, he read his puzzle poems because they were short and didn’t betray their secrets to a listener, only to a reader. After the reading, an editor from Weimarer Beiträge complimented him on the poems and said she could fit a few of them into the issue she was closing. And why did he say yes? Maybe there really was something suicidal in him. Or maybe it was the looming of his military service, which it was already a small scandal that he’d deferred, given his father’s lofty position. Even if, as was likely, he served in an elite intelligence or communications corps, he couldn’t imagine himself surviving the military. (Poetic discipline was one thing, army discipline another.) Or maybe it was just that the magazine editor was about the same age as his mother and reminded him of her: somebody too blinded by self-regard and privilege to recognize what a total tool she was. She must have fancied herself a sensitive advocate of youthful subjectivity, a woman who really understood young people today, and it must have been inconceivable to her and her supervisors that a young man even more privileged than they were could wish to embarrass them, because none of them noticed what everyone else did within twenty-four hours of the magazine’s distribution:

The hullabaloo that followed was delicious. The magazine was yanked from every shelf and trucked away for pulping, the editor was fired, her boss demoted, and Andreas speedily expelled from the university. He left the office of his department chair wearing a grin so wide it made his neck hurt. From the way the heads of strangers swiveled toward him, from the way the students who knew him turned their backs at his approach, he could tell that the entire university had already heard the news of what he’d done. Of course it had—talking was pretty much the only thing that anyone in the Republic, except maybe his father, had to fill their days with.
When he went out onto Unter den Linden, he noticed a black Lada double-parked across from the main university entrance. Two men were in the car, watching him, and he gave them a wave that they didn’t return. He didn’t really see how he could be arrested, given who his parents were, but he also didn’t mind the thought of it. If anything, he’d relish the opportunity to not recant his poems. After all, didn’t he adore sex? Didn’t he dearly love coming? And so, if you took him at his literal word, what more heartfelt tribute to socialism could he offer than to dedicate his MoST gLoRIOUs orgasm to it? Even his wayward dick rose to attention and saluted it!
The Lada tailed him all the way to Alexanderplatz, and when he emerged from the U-Bahn at Strausbergerplatz, a different car, also black, was waiting for him on the Allee. For the previous two nights he’d been hiding out at the Müggelsee, but now that his expulsion was official there was no point in avoiding his parents. It was February, and the day was unusually warm and sunny, the coal pollution mild and almost pleasant, not throat-burning, and Andreas was in such sunny spirits that he felt like approaching the black car and explaining to its occupants, in a lighthearted tone, that he was more important than they could ever hope to be. He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string. He hoped he might never in his life be serious again.
The car tailed him to the Karl Marx Buchhandlung, where he went inside and asked a bad-smelling clerk if they had the latest issue of Weimarer Beiträge. The clerk, who knew his face but not his name, briskly replied that the issue wasn’t in yet.
“Really?” Andreas said. “I thought it was supposed to be in last Friday.”
“There was a problem with the content. It’s being reissued.”
“What problem? What content?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Why, no, I didn’t.”
The clerk evidently considered this so unlikely as to be suspicious. He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll have to ask someone else.”
“I always seem to be the last person to find out …”
“A stupid adolescent vandal caused a lot of trouble and cost a lot of money.”
What was it about bookstore clerks and their powerful body odor?
“They ought to hang the guy,” Andreas said.
“Maybe,” the clerk said. “What I don’t like is that he got innocent people in trouble. To me, that’s selfish. Sociopathic.”
The word landed in Andreas’s gut like a punch. He left the store in a state of deflation and doubt. Was that what he was—a sociopath? Was that what his mother and motherland had made him? If so, he couldn’t help it. And yet he had a horror of diagnostic labels that suggested there was something wrong with him. As he headed up the Allee toward his parents’ building, under a sun that now seemed wan, he mentally scurried to rationalize what he’d done to the magazine editor—tried to tell himself that she’d gotten only what every apparatchik deserved, that she was being punished for her own stupidity in failing to notice the obvious acrostics, and that, in any case, he was suffering consequences easily as dire as hers—but he couldn’t get around the fact that he hadn’t thought once, let alone twice, about what he might be doing to her by giving her his poems. It was as if he’d chosen to commit vehicular suicide by swerving at high speed into a car filled with children.
He racked his memory for an example of his having treated another human being as anything but an instrumentality. He couldn’t count his parents—his whole childhood was a sense-defying brainfuck. But what about Dr. Gnel? Hadn’t he felt compassion for the psychologist and tried to take care of him? Alas, the label sociopath reduced the example of Gnel to shit. Seducing the shrink who was investigating his sociopathy? His motives there were suspect, to say the least. He thought of the women he’d slept with on his poetry-sponsored spree and how grateful he’d felt to each of them—surely his gratitude counted as evidence in his favor? Maybe. But he couldn’t even remember half their names now, and the work he’d done to give them pleasure seemed in hindsight merely a device to heighten his own. He was dismayed to find no evidence at all of having cared about them as people.
How strange that he went through life loving who he was, savoring himself, enjoying his capabilities and levity, only to see something loathsome when a store clerk uttered a chance word and he saw himself objectively. He recalled his jump from the bridge—at first a delicious sense of floating on air but then a merciless acceleration, the ground lurching up at him viciously uncontrollable momentum body impact pain. Gravity was objective. And who had set him up to jump? It was so easy to blame the mother. He was her instrumentality, the accouterment of her sociopathy. There was a submerged but killing violence in what she’d done to him, but being a killer didn’t accord with her selfregard, and so, to help her out, he’d jumped from the bridge, and so he’d published those poems.
The black car shadowed him to their building and stopped when he went inside. Upstairs, on the top floor, he found the flat filled unusually with cigarette smoke, an ashtray heaping on a faux-Danish end table. He looked for Katya in her bedroom, in her study, in his own room, and finally in the bathroom. She was on the floor by the toilet, in the half-uncurled position of a stillbirth, her eyes staring at the toilet’s base.
For a moment, his guts twisted up. He was a four-year-old again, stricken at the sight of his beloved red-haired mother in distress. It all came back, especially the love. But the fact that it was coming back made him angry.
“Ah, so here we are,” he said. “What happened—the cigarettes make you sick?”
She didn’t move or answer.
“It’s wise to go slowly when you take up a habit again after twenty years.”
No response. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub.
“It’s just like old times,” he said jovially. “You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It’s remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I’m the only one who gets to see you on the floor.”
She breathed out and her lips grasped feebly at the exhalation, forming a few faint fricatives but nothing like a word.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” Andreas said.
Her next exhalation seemed to form the words what’s wrong with you.
“What’s wrong with me? I’m not the one on the floor in a fugue state.”
No response.
“I bet you’re rethinking your decision not to abort me, right around now. It turns out to be so much more painful to wait twenty years for me to do it myself.”
Her eyes weren’t even blinking.
“I’ll be in my room if you want me,” he said, standing up. “Maybe you’d like to come and watch me masturbate—speaking of taking up old habits again.”
In truth he had no inclination to jerk off and wasn’t sure he ever would again. Nor was he sleepy or depressed—didn’t feel like lying down. He was in a state unlike any he’d ever known, a state of having absolutely nothing to do. No point in studying math or logic, no point in writing poetry, no interest in reading, no energy for throwing things away, no responsibilities, nothing. He thought of packing a bag, but he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to take to wherever he was going. He was afraid that if he went back into the bathroom he would kick his mother, and although it was true that his father could slap her out of her states, he somehow doubted that blows from him would do the trick. He perched on a windowsill and looked down at the black car on the street. The man in the passenger seat was reading a newspaper. This seemed to Andreas a poignant futility.
After a few hours, the telephone rang. He guessed that the caller was his father and that he wasn’t supposed to answer the phone himself. This was convenient, because he was afraid of speaking to his father. And maybe he wasn’t a total sociopath after all, because the thought of his father’s anger and shame and disappointment brought tears to his eyes. His father was the earnest little German boy who believed in socialism. He worked hard, he had a disturbed wife, and he’d lovingly raised a child who wasn’t his, not even spiritually. Beyond pity, Andreas had a sense of identification with him, for sharing the burden of Katya.
The phone rang and rang. It was a form of slapping but one so attenuated by distance that he counted more than fifty rings before he heard Katya stirring. The uncertain padding of her little feet. The ringing stopped, and he heard her murmur a few times and then hang up. Then sounds of her putting herself back together. By the time she approached his room, her steps were brisk, her false self reassembled.
“You have to leave here,” she said from the doorway. She was holding a lighted cigarette and the ashtray, which she’d emptied.
“You don’t say.”
“For now, you’re safe from arrest, thanks to your father. Of course, that could change at any time, depending on how you behave.”
“Tell him I appreciate it. Seriously.”
“He’s not doing it for you.”
“Even so. It’s nice for me, too. He’s been a good stepfather.”
Rather than take the bait, she dragged hard on the cigarette, not looking at him.
“How are those tasting, after all these years?”
“It’s not out of the question that you can do your service now. It would be hard service, on the worst base, and you’d be watched. Your deferment was already a costly embarrassment to your father, and it would be an immense favor to me if you’d do the service now. You may recall that I interceded for you.”
“When have you ever done anything but intercede for me? Everything I am I owe to you. Mother.”
“You’ve put both him and me in a terrible position. Me especially, since I was the one who interceded for you. The best thing you can do now is accept this extremely merciful offer.”
“Hup, two, three, four. Are you out of your mind?” He laughed and slapped his head. “Sorry, tactless question.”
“Will you accept the offer?”
“How much do you want it? Enough to have an honest conversation with me?”
She snapped off a drag with the practice of a former smoker. “I’m always honest with you.”
“See what I mean? It’s not going to be so easy for you. But all you have to do is tell the truth for once, and I’ll do the service for you.”
She snapped off another drag. “That’s no bargain at all if you refuse to believe the truth.”
“Trust me. I’ll know it when I hear it.”
“The only other option is that you sever all contact with us permanently and take your chances on your own.”
That she could say such a thing, and say it so coolly, was an unexpectedly painful blow to him. He saw that, in her own way, she really was being honest with him now: there was room for only one fuckup in the home of Undersecretary Wolf. His father had enough trouble covering for her, cleaning up her messes, talking her out of rose gardens. He’d had at least one lover of hers imprisoned, he’d performed untold further miracles of suppression, and Katya wasn’t so bonkers that she didn’t know a good thing when she had it. Andreas had been flattering to her when he was the world’s most precocious boy, when he was in love with her, when he was her pretty prince. But as soon as she’d seen the pictures he was drawing, she’d ratted him out to his father and had him sent to a psychologist, and now there was nothing at all for her in him. The time had come to give him the boot.
And again tears came to his eyes, because, no matter how he’d come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. He’d even believed, at some level, that the cleverness of “Muttersprache” would please her. He was twenty years old and as duped as ever. And he didn’t want to leave her. That was the saddest, sickest part of it. He was still a wanting four-year-old, still betrayed by shit that had happened to his brain before he had a self that remembered.

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