Purity

“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.”