Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Which Walter and Lalitha, at the end of April, in a van loaded with camping equipment, set out to do. They had a free month before their work with Free Space commenced in earnest, and their responsibilities to the Cerulean Mountain Trust had ended. As for their carbon footprint, in a gas-thirsty van, Walter took some comfort in having commuted on bicycle or on foot for the last twenty-five years, and in no longer owning any residence besides the little closed-up house at Nameless Lake. He felt he was owed one petroleum splurge after a lifetime of virtue, one nature-filled summer in payment for the summer he’d been deprived of as a teenager.

While he’d still been in the Whitman County hospital, having his dislocated jaw and split-open face and bruised ribs attended to, Lalitha had desperately spun his outburst as a trazodone-induced psychotic break . “He was literally sleepwalking,” she pleaded to Vin Haven. “I don’t know how many trazodones he took, but it was more than one, and just a few hours earlier. He literally didn’t know what he was saying. It was my fault for letting him make the speech. You should fire me , not him.”

“Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying,” Vin replied, with surprisingly little anger. “It’s a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.”

Vin had organized a conference call with his trustees, who had rubber-stamped his proposal to terminate Walter immediately, and he’d instructed his lawyers to exercise his repurchase option on the Berglunds’ condominium portion of the mansion in Georgetown. Lalitha notified the applicants for Free Space internships that her funding had been cut off, that Richard Katz was withdrawing from the project (Walter, from his hospital bed, had finally prevailed on this), and that the very existence of Free Space was in doubt. Some of the applicants e-mailed back to cancel their applications; two of them said they still hoped to volunteer; the rest did not reply at all. Because Walter was facing eviction from the mansion and refused to speak to his wife, Lalitha called her for him. Patty arrived with a rented van a few days later, while Walter hid out at the nearest Starbucks, and packed up the belongings she didn’t want put in storage.

It was at the end of that very unpleasant day, after Patty had departed and Walter had returned from caffeinated exile, that Lalitha checked her BlackBerry and found eighty new messages from young people all over the country, inquiring whether it was too late to volunteer for Free Space. Their e-mail addresses had more piquant flavors than the liberalkid@expensivecollege.edus of the earlier applicants. They were freakinfreegan and iedtarget, they were pornfoetal and jainboy3 and jwlindhjr, @gmail and @cruzio. By the following morning, there were a hundred more messages, along with offers from garage bands in four cities—Seattle, Missoula, Buffalo, and Detroit—to help organize Free Space events in their communities.

What had happened, as Lalitha soon figured out, was that the local TV footage of Walter’s rant and the ensuing riot had gone viral. It had lately become possible to stream video over the internet, and the Whitmanville clip (CancerOnThePlanet.wmv) had flashed across the radical fringes of the blogosphere, the sites of 9/11-conspiracy-mongers and the tree-sitters and the Fight Club devotees and the PETA-ites, one of whom had then unearthed the link to Free Space on the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s website. And overnight, despite having lost its funding and its musical headliner, Free Space acquired a bona-fide fan base and, in the person of Walter, a hero.

It was a long time since he’d done much giggling, but he was giggling all the time now, and then groaning because his ribs hurt. He went out one afternoon and came home with a used white Econoline van and a can of green spray paint and crudely wrote free space on the van’s flanks and rear end. He wanted to go ahead and spend his own money, from the impending proceeds of the house sale, to fund the group through the summer, to print up literature and pay a pittance to the interns and offer some prize money to the battling bands, but Lalitha foresaw potential divorce-related legal issues and wouldn’t let him. Whereupon Joey, altogether unexpectedly, after learning of his father’s summer plans, wrote Free Space a check for $100,000.

“This is ridiculous, Joey,” Walter said. “I can’t take this.”

“Sure you can,” Joey said. “The rest is going to veterans, but Connie and I think your cause is interesting, too. You took care of me when I was little, right?”

“Yes, because you were my child . That’s what parents do. We don’t expect repayment. You never quite seemed to understand that concept.”

“But isn’t it funny that I can do this? Isn’t it a pretty good joke? This is just Monopoly money. It’s meaningless to me.”

“I have my own savings I could spend if I wanted to.”

“Well, you can save that for when you’re old,” Joey said. “It’s not like I’m going to be giving everything to charity when I start making money in a real way. This is special circumstances.”

Walter was so proud of Joey, so grateful not to be fighting him anymore, and so inclined, therefore, to let him be the big guy, that he didn’t fight him on the check. The one real mistake he made was to mention it to Jessica. She had finally spoken to him when he’d landed in the hospital, but her tone made it clear that she wasn’t ready to be friends yet with Lalitha. She was also unimpressed with what he’d said in Whitmanville. “Even leaving aside the fact that ‘cancer on the planet’ is exactly the kind of phrase we all agreed was counterproductive,” she said, “I don’t think you picked the right enemy. You’re sending a really unhelpful message when you pit the environment against uneducated people who are trying to improve their lives. I mean, I know you don’t like those people. But you have to try to hide that, not lead with it.” In a later phone call, she made an impatient reference to her brother’s Republicanism, and Walter insisted that Joey was a different person since he’d married Connie. In fact, he said, Joey was now a major contributor to Free Space.

“And where did he get the money?” Jessica said immediately.

“Well, it’s not that much,” Walter backpedaled, realizing his mistake. “We’re a tiny group, you know, so everything’s relative. It’s just, symbolically, that he’s giving us anything at all—it says a lot about how he’s changed.”

“Hm.”

“I mean, it’s nothing like your contribution. Yours was huge. Spending that weekend with us, helping us create the concept. That was huge.”

“And now what?” she said. “Are you going to grow your hair long and start wearing a do-rag? Riding around in your van? Doing the whole midlife thing? Do we have that to look forward to? Because I would like to be the still, small voice that says I liked you the old way you were.”

“I promise not to grow my hair out. I promise no do-rag. I will not embarrass you.”

“I’m afraid the horse may already be out of that particular barn.”

Perhaps it was bound to happen: she was sounding more and more like Patty. Her anger would have grieved him more had he not been so enjoying, every minute of every day, the love of a woman who wanted all of him. His happiness was reminiscent of his early years with Patty, their days of teamwork in child-raising and house renovation, but he was much more present to himself now, more vividly and granularly appreciative of his happiness, and Lalitha was not the worry and enigma and headstrong stranger that Patty, at some level, had always remained to him. With Lalitha, what you saw was what you got. Their time in bed, as soon as he’d recovered from his injuries, became the thing he’d always missed without knowing he was missing it.