Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Vin Haven (“You can Nexis me all night without finding one direct quote from my forty-seven years in business”) sat down directly behind the cameras, while Walter took from Lalitha a copy of the speech that he’d written and she’d vetted, and joined the other suits—Jim Elder, senior vice president at LBI, and Roy Dennett, CEO of his eponymous subsidiary—in the chairs behind the podium. In the front row of the audience, with his arms crossed high on his chest, was Coyle Mathis. Walter hadn’t seen him since their ill-fated encounter in Mathis’s front yard (which was now a barren field of rubble). He was staring at Walter with a look that reminded Walter, again, of his father. The look of a man attempting to preempt, with the ferocity of his contempt, any possibility of his own embarrassment or of Walter’s pity for him. It made Walter sad for him. While Jim Elder, at the mike, commenced praising our brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Walter gave Mathis a meek smile, to show that he was sad for him, sad for both of them. But Mathis’s expression didn’t change, and he didn’t stop staring.

“I think we have a few remarks now from the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Jim Elder said, “which is responsible for bringing all these wonderful, sustainable jobs to Whitmanville and the local economy. Please join me in welcoming Walter Berglund, executive director of the Trust. Walter?”

His sadness for Mathis had become a more general sadness, a world sadness, a life sadness. As he stood at the podium, he sought out Vin Haven and Lalitha, who were sitting together, and gave them each a small smile of regret and apology. Then he bent himself to the mike.

“Thank you,” he said. “Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It’s a long way from Forster Hollow, isn’t it?”

Aside from low-level systems hum, there was no sound but the echoing of his amplified voice. He glanced quickly at Mathis, whose expression remained fixed in contempt.

“So, yes, welcome,” he said. “Welcome to the middle class! That’s what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don’t like me. And I don’t like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn’t like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And now you’re middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it’s a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It’s the mainstay of economies all around the globe!”

He could see Lalitha whispering to Vin.

“And now that you’ve got these jobs at this body-armor plant ,” he continued, “you’re going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they’re not turned on! But that’s OK, because that’s why we threw you out of your homes in the first place, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It’s a perfect world, isn’t it? It’s a perfect system, because as long as you’ve got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don’t have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there’s no more Indonesia!”

Coyle Mathis was the first to boo. He was quickly joined by many others. Peripherally, over his shoulder, Walter could see Elder and Dennett standing up.

“Just quickly, here,” he continued, “because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you’re going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you’ve joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don’t want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn’t that perfect?”

The audience had stood up and begun to shout back at him, telling him to shut up.

“That’s enough,” Jim Elder said, trying to pull him away from the mike.

“Just a couple more things!” Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. “I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn’t give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That’s part of the perfect middle-class world you’re joining! Now that you’re working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI’s broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!”

The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. “And MEANWHILE,” he shouted, “WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON’T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!”

Here he was slugged in the jaw by Coyle Mathis himself. He reeled sideways, his vision filling with magnesium-flare insects, his glasses lost, and decided that perhaps he’d said enough. He was now surrounded by Mathis and a dozen other men, and they began to inflict really serious pain. He fell to the floor, trying to escape through a forest of legs kicking him with their Chinese-made sneakers. He curled into a ball, temporarily deaf and blind, his mouth full of blood and at least one broken tooth, and absorbed more kicks. Then the kicks subsided and other hands were on him, including Lalitha’s. As sound returned, he could hear her raging, “ Get away from him! Get away from him! ” He gagged and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. She let her hair fall in the blood as she peered into his face. “Are you all right?”

He smiled as well as he could. “Starting to feel better.”

“Oh, my boss. My poor dear boss.”

“Definitely feeling better.”

It was the season of migration, of flight and song and sex. Down in the neotropics, where diversity was as great as anywhere on earth, a few hundred bird species grew restless and left behind the several thousand other species, many of them close taxonomic relatives, that were content to stay put and crowdedly coexist and reproduce at their tropical leisure. Among the hundreds of South American tanager species, exactly four took off for the United States, risking the disasters of travel for the bounty of things to eat and places to nest in temperate woods in summer. Cerulean warblers winged their way up along the coasts of Mexico and Texas and fanned into the hardwoods of Appalachia and the Ozarks. Ruby-throated hummingbirds fattened themselves on the flowers of Veracruz and flew eight hundred miles across the Gulf, burning up half their body weight, and landed in Galveston to catch their breath. Terns came up from one subarctic to the other, swifts took airborne naps and never landed, song-filled thrushes waited for a southern wind and then flew nonstop for twelve hours, traversing whole states in a night. High-rises and power lines and wind turbines and cellphone towers and road traffic mowed down millions of migrants, but millions more made it through, many of them returning to the very same tree they’d nested in the year before, the same ridgeline or wetland they’d been fledged on, and there, if they were male, began to sing. Each year, they arrived to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centers, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses. Migrants exhausted by their five-thousand-mile journey competed with earlier arrivals for the remaining scraps of territory; they searched in vain for a mate, they gave up on nesting and subsisted without breeding, they were killed for sport by free-roaming cats. But the United States was still a rich and relatively young country, and pockets full of bird life could still be found if you went looking.