Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Meanwhile the country was at war, but it was an odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casualties were on the other side. Joey was glad to see that the taking of Iraq was every bit the cakewalk he’d expected it to be, and Kenny Bartles was sending him elated e-mails about the need to get his bread company up and running ASAP. (Joey kept having to explain that he was still a college student and couldn’t start work until after finals.) Jonathan, however, was sourer than ever. He was fixated , for example, on the Iraqi antiquities that had been stolen by looters from the National Museum.

“That was one little mistake,” Joey said. “Shit happens, right? You just don’t want to admit that things are going well.”

“I’ll admit it when they find the plutonium and the missiles tipped with smallpox,” Jonathan said. “Which they won’t, because it was all bullshit, all trumped-up bullshit, because the people who started this thing are incompetent clowns.”

“Dude, everybody says there’s WMDs. Even The New Yorker says there are. My mom said my dad wants to cancel their subscription, he’s so mad about it. My dad, the great expert on foreign affairs.”

“How much you want to bet your dad’s right?”

“I don’t know. A hundred dollars?”

“Done!” Jonathan said, extending his hand. “A hundred bucks says they find no weapons by the end of the year.”

Joey shook his hand and then proceeded to worry that Jonathan was right about the WMDs. Not that he cared about a hundred dollars; he was going to be making 8K a month with Kenny Bartles. But Jonathan, a political news junkie, seemed so very sure of himself that Joey wondered if he’d somehow missed the joke in his dealings with his think-tank bosses and Kenny Bartles: had failed to notice them winking or ironically inflecting their voices when they spoke of reasons beyond their own personal or corporate enrichment for invading Iraq. In Joey’s view, the think tank did indeed have a hush-hush motive for supporting the invasion: the protection of Israel, which, unlike the United States, was within striking distance of even the crappy sort of missile that Saddam’s scientists were capable of building. But he’d believed that the neocons at least were serious in fearing for Israel’s safety. Now, already, as March turned to April, they were waving their hands and acting as if it didn’t even matter if any WMDs came to light; as if the freedom of the Iraqi people were the main issue. And Joey, whose own interest in the war was primarily financial, but who’d taken moral refuge in the thought that wiser minds than his had better motives, began to feel that he’d been suckered. It didn’t make him any less eager to cash in, but it did make him feel dirtier about it.

In his soiled mood, he found it easier to talk to Jenna about his summer plans. Jonathan, among other things, was jealous of Kenny Bartles (he got pissy whenever he heard Joey talking on the phone to Kenny), whereas Jenna had dollar signs in her eyes and was all for making killings. “Maybe I’ll see you in Washington this summer,” she said. “I’ll come down from New York and you can take me out to dinner to celebrate my engagement.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds like a fun evening.”

“I have to warn you I have very expensive taste in restaurants.”

“How’s Nick going to feel about me taking you to dinner?”

“Just one less bite out of his wallet. It would never occur to him to be afraid of you. But how’s your girlfriend going to feel?”

“She’s not the jealous type.”

“Right, jealousy’s so unattractive, ha ha.”

“What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

“Yes, and there’s quite a bit she doesn’t know, isn’t there? How many little slips have you had now?”

“Five.”

“That is four more than Nick would get away with before I surgically removed his testicles.”

“Yeah, but if you didn’t know about it, it wouldn’t hurt you, right?”

“Believe me,” Jenna said, “I would know about it. That’s the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given.”

This was interesting to hear, since it was Jenna who had urged him, the previous fall, to avail himself of such casual opportunities as came his way at school, and it was Jenna to whom he’d imagined he was proving something by doing so. She’d given him instruction in the art of cutting dead, in the dining hall, a girl from whose bed he’d crawled four hours earlier. “Don’t be such a tender daisy,” she’d said. “They want you to ignore them. You’re not doing them any favors if you don’t. You need to pretend you’ve never seen them in your life. The last thing in the world they want is you mooning around or acting guilty. They’re sitting there praying to Jesus that you won’t embarrass them.” She’d clearly been speaking from personal experience, but he hadn’t quite believed her until the first time he’d tried it. His life had been easier ever since. Though he did Connie the kindness of not mentioning his indiscretions, he continued to think she wouldn’t much care. (The person he actively had to hide from was Jonathan, who had Arthurian notions of romantic comportment and had torn into Joey furiously, as if he were Connie’s older brother or knightly guardian, when word of a hookup had leaked back to him. Joey had sworn to him that not even a zipper had been lowered, but this falsehood was too absurd not to smirk at, and Jonathan had called him a dick and a liar, unworthy of Connie.) Now he felt as if Jenna, with her shifting standard of fidelity, had suckered him in much the same way his bosses at the think tank had. She’d done for sport, as a meanness to Connie, what the warmongers had done for profit. But it didn’t make him any less keen to buy her a great dinner or to earn, at RISEN, the money to do it.

Sitting alone in RISEN’s frigid one-room office in Alexandria, Joey wrote Kenny’s jumbled faxings out of Baghdad into persuasive reports on the judicious use of taxpayer dollars to remake Saddam-subsidized bakers as CPA-backed entrepreneurs. He used his case studies of the Breadmasters and Hot & Crusty chains, written the previous summer, to create a handsome business-plan template for these would-be entrepreneurs to follow. He developed a two-year plan for jacking bread prices up into the vicinity of fair market, with the basic Iraqi khubz as a loss-leader and overpriced pastries and attractively marketed coffee drinks as the moneymakers, so that, by 2005, Coalition subsidies could be phased out without sparking bread riots. Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit. He had not the foggiest notion of what a Basra storefront looked like; he suspected, for example, that plate-glass Breadmasters-style refrigerated pastry display windows might not fare well in a city of car bombings and 130-degree summer heat. But the bullshit of modern commerce was a language he’d been happy to find himself fluent in, and Kenny assured him that all that mattered was the appearance of tremendous activity and instantaneous results. “Make it look good yesterday ,” Kenny said, “and then we’ll do our best here on the ground to catch up with how it looks. Jerry wants free markets overnight, and that’s what we gotta give him.” (“Jerry” was Paul Bremer, head honcho in Baghdad, whom Kenny may or may not have even met.) In Joey’s idle hours at the office, especially on weekends, he chatted with school friends who were working unpaid internships or flipping burgers in their hometowns and showered him with envy and congratulations for having landed the most awesome summer job ever . He felt as if the progress of his life, which 9/11 had knocked off course, had now fully regained its sensational upward trajectory.