Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

He might have worried about admitting this to Jenna if she’d been paying attention, but she was now yanking on her onboard video screen, peevishly trying to wrest it from its stowage hole. He lent a gallant hand.

“So, I’m sorry,” she said, “you were saying . . . ? Something about not getting paid?”

“Oh, no, I’m definitely getting paid. In fact, I’m probably going to end up making more than Nick does this year.”

“I doubt that, frankly.”

“Well, it’s going to be a lot.”

“Nick’s in a whole different universe of remuneration.”

This was too much for Joey. “Why am I here?” he said. “Do you even want me here? You’ve either been ignoring me or talking about Nick, who I thought you were broken up with.”

Jenna shrugged. “I told you I was grouchy. But a little word to the wise? I’m not too terribly interested in your business deal. The whole reason you’re here and Nick isn’t is I got sick of hearing him talk about money all day and all night.”

“I thought you liked money.”

“It doesn’t mean I like to hear about it. You’re the one who brought it up.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up!”

“OK, then. Apology accepted. But also? I don’t see why I can’t mention Nick if you’re going to be talking about your woman all the time.”

“I talk about her because you ask about her.”

“I’m not sure I see the difference.”

“Well, and also, she’s still my girlfriend.”

“Right. I guess that is one difference.” And she leaned over suddenly and offered her mouth to his. First the merest brush, then a softness almost like warm whipped cream, and then full flesh. Her lips felt every bit as beautiful, as complexly animated and valuable, as they had always looked to him. He leaned into the kiss, but she pulled away and smiled approvingly. “Happy boy ,” she said.

When a flight attendant came to take their dinner orders, he asked for beef. He was planning to eat nothing but beef for the entire trip, on the theory that it was somewhat constipating; he hoped to make it all the way to Paraguay before he had to go ring-hunting in the bathroom. Jenna watched Pirates of the Caribbean while she ate, and he put on his headphones and watched it with her, leaning awkwardly into her space rather than pulling up his own screen, but there were no further kisses, and the one drawback of business-class seats, as he discovered when the movie ended and they bedded down beneath their respective comforters, was that no cuddling or incidental contact was possible.

He didn’t see how he was going to fall asleep, but then suddenly it was morning and breakfast was being served, and then they were in Argentina. It was nowhere near as exotic as he’d imagined it. Except that everything was in Spanish and more people were smoking, civilization here seemed like civilization anywhere. The plate glass and floor tiles and plastic seats and lighting fixtures were exactly the same, and the flight to Bariloche boarded with the rear seats first, like any American connecting flight, and there was nothing marvelously different about the 727 or the factories and farm fields and highways he could see from the window. Dirt was still dirt, and plants still grew in it. Most of the passengers in the first-class cabin were speaking English, and six of them—an English couple and an American mother with three children—joined Joey and Jenna in wheeling their Priority-tagged luggage to the cushy white Estancia El Triunfo van that was waiting for them in a no-parking zone outside the Bariloche airport.

The driver, an unsmiling young man with thick black chest hair pushing through his half-unbuttoned shirt, rushed over to take Jenna’s bag and stow it in the rear and install her in the front passenger seat before Joey could even clock what was happening. The English couple grabbed the next two seats, and Joey found himself sitting toward the rear with the mother and her daughter, who was reading a young-adult horse novel.

“My name is Félix,” the driver said into an unnecessary microphone, “welcome to Rio Negro Province please use the seat belts we are driving two hours the road will be bumpy in places I have cold drinks for those who want them El Triunfo is remote but lucksurious you must forgive the bumps in the road thank you.”

The afternoon was clear and blazing, and the way to El Triunfo led through prosperous subalpine country so similar to western Montana that Joey had to wonder why they’d flown eight thousand miles for it. Whatever Félix was saying to Jenna, nonstop, in hushed Spanish, was drowned out by the nonstop braying of the Englishman, Jeremy. He brayed about the good old days when England was at war with Argentina in the Falklands (“our second -finest hour”), the capture of Saddam Hussein (“ Har , I wonder how Mister smelled when he came out of that hole”), the hoax of global warming and the irresponsible fearmongering of its perpetrators (“Next year they’ll be warning us about the dangerous new ice age ”), the laughable ineptitude of South American central bankers (“When your inflation rate is a thousand percent, methinks your problem is more than bad luck”), the laudable indifference of South Americans to women’s “football” (“Leave it to you Americans to excel at that particular travesty”), the surprisingly drinkable reds coming out of Argentina (“They blow the best wines of South Africa out—of—the— water ”), and his own copious salivation at the prospect of eating steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (“I’m a carnivore , a carnivore , a terrible disgusting carnivore ”).

For relief from Jeremy, Joey struck up a conversation with the mother, Ellen, who was pretty without being attractive and was wearing the stretch cargo pants that a certain kind of mom favored nowadays. “My husband’s a very successful real estate developer,” she said. “I trained as an architect at Stanford, but I’m home with our children now. We decided to homeschool them, which is very rewarding, and great in terms of taking vacations when it suits our schedule, but a lot of work, let me tell you.”

Her children, the reading daughter and the game-playing sons behind her, either didn’t hear this or didn’t mind being a lot of work to her. When she heard that Joey had a small business in Washington, she asked him if he knew about Daniel Jennings. “Dan’s a friend of ours in Morongo Valley,” she said, “who’s done all this research on our taxes. He’s actually gone back and looked at the record of debates in Congress, and you know what he discovered? That there’s no legal basis for the federal income tax.”

“There’s no legal basis for anything, really, when you get right down to it,” Joey said.

“But obviously the federal government doesn’t want you to know that all the money it’s collected for the last hundred years rightfully belongs to us citizens. Dan has a website where ten different history professors say he’s right, there’s no legal basis whatsoever. But nobody in the mainstream media will touch it. Which, don’t you think that’s a little strange? Wouldn’t you think at least one network or one newspaper would want to cover it?”

“I guess there must be some other side to the story,” Joey said.

“But why are we only getting that other side? Doesn’t it seem news-worthy that the federal government owes us taxpayers three hundred trillion dollars? Because that’s the figure Dan came up with, including compound interest. Three hundred trillion dollars.”

“That’s a lot,” he agreed politely. “That would be a million dollars for every person in the country.”