Purity (38 page)

“This doesn't have to change anything.”

“It's already changed everything,” Leila said. “And it'll be good. You can normalize things with Anabel, have a nice relationship with Pip, stop being haunted. Spend your holidays together. It'll be great.”

“Please. Leila. I need you to help me think about this.
Why did she come to Denver?
”

“I have no idea. Bizarre coincidence.”

“No way.”

“OK, so she knows, and she's a good liar.”

“You really believe she's that good?”

She shook her head.

“So she doesn't know,” Tom said. “And if she doesn't know … then how the fuck did she end up in our house?”

Leila shook her head again. Whenever the time came to vomit, it wasn't just the thought of food that sickened her; it was the thought of wanting
anything
. Nausea the negation of all desire. And so, too, fighting. She was remembering the old desolation and feeling it again now, the conviction that love was impossible, that however deeply they buried their conflict it would never go away. The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.

 

Moonglow Dairy

 

But smell had also been heaven. Not outside the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where the waftings of cow shit from adjacent pastures mingled with the smellable inefficiencies of engines banned from California long before Pip was born; not in the Land Cruiser sure-handedly piloted by a taciturn Bolivian, Pedro, through diesel particulates on the city's ring boulevards; not along the Cochabamba highway, where every half kilometer another brutally effective speed bump gave Pip a chance to smell fruit rotting and things frying and be approached by the sellers of oranges and fried things who'd installed the speed bumps in the first place; not in the swelter of the dusty road that Pedro veered onto after Pip had counted forty-six bumps (
rompemuelles
Pedro called them, her first new word in Spanish); not when they reached a ridge and headed down a narrow road as steep as anything in San Francisco, the noontime sun boiling plastic volatiles out of the Land Cruiser's upholstery and vaporizing gasoline from the spare can in the cargo area; but when the road, after plunging through dry forest and through cooler woods half cleared for coffee plantings, finally bottomed out along a stream leading into a little valley more beautiful than any place Pip could have imagined: then the heaven had commenced. Two scents at once, distinct like layers of cooler and warmer water in a lake—some intensely flowering tropical tree's perfume, a complex lawn-smell from a pasture that goats were grazing—flooded through her open window. From a cluster of low buildings on the far side of the valley, by a small river, came a trace of sweet fruitwood smoke. The very air had a pleasing fundamental climate smell, something wholly not North American.

The place was called Los Volcanes. There were no volcanoes, but the valley was enclosed by red sandstone pinnacles five hundred meters high or more. The sandstone absorbed water during the rainy season and released it year-round into a river that meandered through a pocket of wet forest, an oasis of jungle in otherwise dry country. Well-maintained trails branched through the forest, and during Pip's first two weeks at Los Volcanes, while the other Sunlight Project interns and employees did their shadowy work and she had only small menial jobs to do (because Andreas Wolf was away, in Buenos Aires, and she hadn't yet had the entry interview at which he told new interns what to do), she hiked the trails every morning and again late in the afternoon. To keep herself from dwelling on what she'd left behind in California, the piteous maternal cries of “Purity! Be safe! Pussycat!” that had followed her down the lane when she left for the airport, she immersed herself in smells.

The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she'd been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She remembered a college professor explaining why all the colors the human eye could see could be represented by a two-dimensional color wheel: it was because the retina had receptors for three colors. If the retina had evolved with four receptors, it would have taken a three-dimensional color
sphere
to represent all the ways in which one color could bleed into another. She hadn't wanted to believe this, but the smells at Los Volcanes were convincing her. How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn't smell like in the tropics? She searched in the woods, off the trail, until she found the mushroom with a roasted-coffee smell so powerful it reminded her of skunk, which reminded her of chocolate, which reminded her of tuna; smells in the woods rang each of these notes and made her aware, for the first time, of the distinguishing receptors for them in her nose. The receptor that had fired at Californian cannabis also fired at Bolivian wild onions. Within half a mile of the compound were five different flower smells in the neighborhood of daisy, which itself was close to sun-dried goat urine. Walking the trails, Pip could imagine how it felt to be a dog, to find no smell repellent, to experience the world as a seamless many-dimensional landscape of interesting and interrelated scents. Wasn't this a kind of heaven? Like being on Ecstasy without taking Ecstasy? She had the feeling that if she stayed at Los Volcanes long enough she would end up smelling every smell there was, the way her eyes had already seen every color on the color wheel.

For a week, because nobody was paying much attention to her, she let herself go a little nuts. In the evening, after the sudden fall of tropical night, she tried to interest the other young women at dinner (which was breakfast for the hacker boys) in her olfactory discoveries, her pursuit by nose of previously unsmelled smells, and her theory that there was actually no such thing as a bad smell: that even the supposedly worst smells, like human shit or bacterial decay or death, were bad only out of context; that in a place like Los Volcanes, where the smellscape was so richly complete, it might be possible to find the good in them. But the other girls—every one of whom was, perhaps not incidentally, beautiful—seemed not to have noses like hers. They agreed that the flowers and the rain smelled nice here, but she could see them exchanging glances with one another, forming judgments. It was like her first week in college dining hall all over again.

She was only slightly below the median age of the Project staff. She was surprised by how many of the others mentioned
making the world a better place
when she asked why they were working for Andreas. She thought that, however laudable the sentiment was, this particular phrase ought to have been ridiculed off the face of the earth by now; apparently a sense of irony was low on the list of employment qualifications here. If Pip had been Andreas, she might have started to make the world a better place by hiring some females to do tech work. With the exception of a beautiful gay male Swede, Anders, who had some journalism chops and wrote the digests of the Project's leaks, the division of labor by gender was perfect. The boys went to a windowless and heavily secured building beyond the goat pasture and wrote code there, while the girls hung out in the refurbished barn and did community development and PR and search-engine optimization, source verification and liaising, website and bookkeeping chores, research and social media and copywriting. To a person, they had backgrounds more fascinating than Pip's. They were Danish and British and Ethiopian, Italian and Chilean and Manhattanite, and they appeared to have spent their college years not going to class (they'd already read and reread
Ulysses
at twelve while attending private academies for the supergifted) but taking semesters off from Brown or Stanford to fabulously work for Sean Combs or Elizabeth Warren, combat AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, or sleep with college-dropout founders of billion-dollar Silicon Valley start-ups. Pip saw that TSP couldn't possibly be creepy or cultish, because the other young women weren't the kind who made mistakes.

Her own history and expectations were achingly unfabulous. She asked people if Annagret had recruited them, but nobody had heard of Annagret. They'd all come to Bolivia by personal referral or direct application. Pip attempted to amuse them by telling the story of Annagret's questionnaire and ended up feeling like a complainer. The others weren't complainers. If you were incredibly attractive and privileged and wanted only to make the world a better place, complaint was unbecoming.

At least the animals were poor like her. She befriended Pedro's dogs and tried to get the goats to like her. There were blue iridescent butterflies the size of saucers, smaller ones in every color, and tiny stingless bees whose hive on the back veranda of the main building, Pedro said, produced a kilo of honey every year. Prowling the riverbank and pursuing agoutis was an adorable dark-furred mini-wolverine sort of mammal that Pedro's dogs, though twice its size, were very afraid of. The forest was populated with Dr. Seuss birds, huge guans that clambered in fruit trees, tinamous that tiptoed in the shadows. Screeching acid-green parakeets executed group dives from cliff faces, their wings hissing loudly as they swooped past. Circling at the zenith were condors, wild condors, not captive-bred like the ones in California. Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she'd left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes.

And the place was amazingly clean. What looked from a distance like litter would turn out to be a fallen paper-white blossom, or fluorescent orange fungi shaped like industrial earplugs, or a dew-covered spiderweb imitating a scrap of cellophane. The river, which flowed out of a vast uninhabited park to the north, was clear and swimmably warm. Pip bathed in it before dinner and then got even cleaner in the well-water shower in the four-person room she'd been assigned. The room had white walls, red tile floors, and exposed beams cut from timber that had fallen on the property. Her roommates were a little messy but not dirty.

The word around the compound was that Andreas was in Buenos Aires for the shooting of the East Berlin scenes for a movie that was being made about him. The word was that he was having an affair with the American actress Toni Field, who was playing his mother in the movie, and that the affair, which had been rumored in the press, was good PR for the Project. “It's his first movie star,” Pip's roommate Flor explained to her one night. “All the women he has affairs with stay loyal to him, even after he ends them, so this should open doors for us in Hollywood.”

“Which presumably is a good thing?” Pip said.

Flor was a tiny American-educated Peruvian; if Disney ever made an animated feature for the South American market, its heroine would look like her. “‘Every hand is raised against the leaker,'” she said. “That's the first thing you learn from him. We take our friends wherever we can find them.”

“Nice for him that he does the dumping and women do the staying loyal.”

“His own loyalty is to the Project.”

“You know, my mother was convinced he only brought me down here to have sex with him.”

“That won't happen,” Flor said. “You'll see when you meet him. He's all about the work we do. He would never do anything to compromise it.”

“So it's about avoiding bad press?”

“I'm sorry if you're disappointed.”

“I'm not disappointed. But he did come on pretty strong in his emails.”

Flor frowned. “He sent you emails?”

“Yeah, a whole bunch of them.”

“That would be unusual for him.”

“Well, I emailed him first. Annagret gave me his address.”

“Do you have a lot of experience in work like this?”

“No, none. I'm more like somebody who wandered in off the street.”

“Who is this Annagret?”

“Somebody he apparently used to sleep with. I just assumed everyone here had taken her questionnaire.”

“She must be somebody from before he set up in Bolivia.”

Pip was seeing Annagret in a new and sadder light, as a middle-aged person inflating her importance to the Project, playing up her past importance to Andreas, remaining loyal after being discarded.

“Before Toni Field,” Flor said, “it was Arlaina Riveira. And Flavia Corritore, who writes for
La Repubblica
. Philippa Gregg, who wanted to be his biographer—I don't know what the status of that book is. And before that it was Sheila Taber—she's got the most followers on Twitter of any professor in America. All these people are helping us now.”

It seemed to Pip that Flor was enumerating Andreas's successful women to punish her for getting emails from him.

The first person after Pedro to be nice to her was an older girl, Colleen, who smoked cigarettes and had her own private bedroom in the main building. Colleen had grown up on an organic farm in Vermont and was, it went without saying, very pretty. She was TSP's business manager, overseeing the kitchen and Pedro and the other local staff. Because she reported directly to Andreas, and because social status at TSP appeared to be a function of proximity to him, whatever table she sat down at for dinner was the first to fill up. She was different from the rest, and Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.

Colleen always had two cigarettes after dinner, on the back veranda, where Pip had taken to sitting and listening to the frogs and owls and stridulators, the nocturnal orchestra. Colleen neither said much to her nor seemed to mind her being there. After her second cigarette, she went back inside and spoke to the staff in a Spanish whose fluency made Pip feel envious and discouraged. She didn't wish she were any of the other women, because it would have meant forsaking irony, but she could see wanting to be Colleen.