Over Newfoundland Clifford vomited onto the knee of Singh’s wool trousers. Over England, with a precision that presaged a future in the artillery, Clifford threw a glistening wad of scrambled egg through Singh’s open shirt collar. The egg dropped all the way down to his belt. Determined to spend the remainder of the flight away from his seat, he rose and repaired to the lavatory. He removed his shirt, deposited the egg in the toilet, and while he was brushing yellow morsels out of his chest hair the jet encountered turbulence, causing him to lose his balance. One of the cuffs of his white Pierre Cardin dress shirt swooped into the blue liquid in the toilet. On the loudspeakers the flight attendants were advising all passengers to return to their seats and fasten their safety belts. He soaked the soiled cuff in the sink and wrung it out. The next jolt of turbulence, in combination with the slick floor of the lavatory, threw him over backwards. He extended an arm to break his fall and brought his hand down directly into the center of the toilet, onto the steel plate on which the blue liquid rested. The plate was hinged; at the pressure of his hand, it opened, activating the flush mechanism.
By the time he emerged, smelling strongly of the candy-scented toilet fluid, the plane had entered more orderly German skies and was preparing to land at Frankfurt. The pilot, a relaxed and pedagogical captain, narrated the final moments of the descent.
“Ten meters…
“Fife meters…
“We are over se runway now…
“Two meters. One meter. We lend every second now…
“Ser.”
In the Frankfurt mega-terminal Singh changed fifty dollars and bought a new shirt. His comrades would jibe him, make him pay for every hour he’d wasted in America with at least a minute of embarrassment, but they would also be disappointed if he failed to come home looking dapper, their well-traveled brother in struggle.
By noon, local time, he was in the air again on a direct flight to Bombay. From his window seat he watched the refueling operations at Istanbul and fell asleep. When he awoke he was over the Indian Ocean, an hour west of Bombay.
And then he was there, in a motor cab leaving Santa Cruz and passing bicyclists on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, tooting aside the short spindly men in turbans and dhotis who loomed up in the morning dust, and tailing, at ten miles an hour, a gray lorry on the rear gate of which three teenagers sat and kicked their legs. It was spring, Singh noticed. The old was new. He made the cabbie stop and pressed a purple 100-rupee note into his hands. In his slippery oxfords he sprinted to catch up with the lorry. One of the youths, a round-eyed schoolboy in a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt and copper-colored bellbottoms, inched aside to make room for him on the gate. He jumped, turned in midair, and landed seated, looking back into the empty western sky as the lorry carried him east to set him free among the other thirty million Indians named Singh.
Also By Jonathan Franzen
Strong Motion
The Corrections
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY. Copyright © 1988 by Jonathan Franzen. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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The author is grateful for permission to quote the following copyrighted works: “The Red Wheel-Barrow” from William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems 1909–1939, Volume I, copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.
The “Chicken of the Sea” jingle, reprinted by permission of the Ralston Purina Company.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Franzen, Jonathan.
The twenty-seventh city / Jonathan Franzen.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-312-42014-7
I. Title.
PS3556.R352T8 1988
813?.54
88-3980
The author thanks the Artists Foundation of Boston and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities for their support in 1986.
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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