Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

After movers had removed all traces of the Berglunds from the mansion, he and Lalitha struck out in the van toward Florida, intending to sweep westward across the country’s southern belly before the weather got too warm. He was intent on showing her a bittern, and they found their first one at Corkscrew Swamp in Florida, beside a shady pool and a boardwalk creaking with the weight of retirees and tourists, but it was a bittern without bitternness, standing in plain sight while the strobing of tourist cameras bounced off its irrelevant camouflage. Walter insisted on driving the dirt-surfaced dikes of Big Cypress in search of a real bittern, a shy one, and treated Lalitha to an extended rant about the ecological damage wreaked by recreational ATVers, the brethren of Coyle Mathis and Mitch Berglund. Somehow, despite the damage, the scrub jungle and black-water pools were still full of birds, as well as countless alligators. Walter finally spotted a bittern in a marsh littered with shotgun shells and sun-bleached Budweiser packaging. Lalitha braked the van in a cloud of dust and duly admired the bird through her binoculars until a flatbed truck loaded with three ATVs roared past.

She’d never camped before, but she was game for it and impossibly sexy to Walter in her breathable safariwear. It helped that she was immune to sunburn and as repellent of mosquitoes as he was attractant. He tried to teach her some rudiments of cooking, but she preferred the tasks of tent assembly and route planning. He got up every morning before dawn, made espresso in their six-cup pot, and carried a soy latte back into the tent for her. Then they went out walking in the dew and the honey-colored light. She didn’t share his feelings for wildlife, but she had a knack for spotting little birds in dense foliage, she studied the field guides, and she crowed with delight when she caught and corrected his false identifications. Later in the morning, when avian life quieted down, they drove some hours farther west and sought out hotel parking lots with unencrypted wireless connections, so that she could coordinate by e-mail with her prospective interns and he could write entries for the blog that she’d set up for him. Then another state park, another picnic dinner, another ecstatic round of grappling in the tent.

“Have you had enough of this?” he said one night, at an especially pretty and empty campground in the mesquite country of southwest Texas. “We could check into a motel for a week, swim in the pool, do our work.”

“No, I love seeing how much you enjoy looking for animals,” she said. “I love seeing you happy, after all that time when you were so unhappy. I love being on the road with you.”

“But maybe you’ve had enough of it?”

“Not yet,” she said, “although I don’t think I really get nature. Not the way you do. To me it seems like such a violent thing. That crow that was eating the sparrow babies, those flycatchers, the raccoon eating those eggs, the hawks killing everything. People talk about the peacefulness of nature, but to me it seems the opposite of peaceful. It’s constant killing. It’s even worse than human beings.”

“To me,” Walter said, “the difference is that birds are only killing because they have to eat. They’re not doing it angrily, they’re not doing it wantonly. It’s not neurotic . To me that’s what makes nature peaceful. Things live or they don’t live, but it’s not all poisoned with resentment and neurosis and ideology. It’s a relief from my own neurotic anger.”

“But you don’t even seem angry anymore.”

“That’s because I’m with you every minute of the day, and I’m not so compromised, and I’m not having to deal with people. I suspect the anger will come back.”

“I don’t care for my sake if it does,” she said. “I respect your reasons for being angry. They’re part of why I love you. But it just makes me so happy to see you happy.”

“I keep thinking you can’t get any more perfect,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “And then you say something even more perfect.”

In truth, he was troubled by the irony of his situation. By finally venting his anger, first to Patty and then in Whitmanville, and thereby extricating himself from his marriage and from the Trust, he’d removed two major causes of the anger. For a while, in his blog, he’d tried to downplay and qualify his cancer-on-the-planet “heroism” and emphasize that the villain was the System, not the people of Forster Hollow. But his fans had so roundly and voluminously chided him for this (“grow some balls man, your speech totally rocked,” etc.) that he came to feel he owed them an honest airing of every venomous thought he’d entertained while driving around West Virginia, every hard-core antigrowth opinion he’d ever swallowed in the name of professionalism. He’d been storing up incisive arguments and damning data ever since he was in college; the least he could do now was share it with young people to whom it actually, miraculously, seemed to matter. The loony rage of his readership was worrisome, however, and discordant with his peaceable mood. Lalitha, for her part, had her hands full in sifting through hundreds of new intern applicants and phoning the ones who seemed most apt to be responsible and nonviolent; almost all the ones she deemed uncrazy were young women. Her commitment to fighting overpopulation was as practical and humanitarian as Walter’s was abstract and misanthropic, and it was a measure of his deepening love for her how much he envied her and wished he could be more like her.

On the day before the last destination of their pleasure trip—Kern County, California, home to dazzling numbers of breeding songbirds—they stopped to see Walter’s brother Brent in the town of Mojave, near the air base where he was stationed. Brent, who had never married, and whose personal and political hero was Senator John McCain, and whose emotional development seemed to have ended with his enlistment in the Air Force, could hardly have been more perfectly uninterested in Walter’s separation from Patty or his involvement with Lalitha, whom he addressed more than once as “Lisa.” He did pick up the tab for lunch, though, and he had news of their brother, Mitch. “I was thinking,” he said, “if Mom’s house is still empty, you might want to let Mitch use it for a while. He doesn’t have a phone or an address, I know he’s still drinking, and he’s about five years delinquent in his child support. You know, he and Stacy had another kid right before they split up.”

“How many does that make,” Walter said. “Six?”

“No, just five. Two with Brenda, one with Kelly, two with Stacy. I don’t think it helps to send money, because he only drinks it. But I was thinking he could use a place to stay.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Brent.”

“I’m just saying. I know your situation with him. Just, you know, if the house is empty anyway.”

Five was an appropriate-sized brood for a songbird, since birds were everywhere being persecuted and routed by humanity, but not for a human being, and the number made it harder for Walter to feel sorry for Mitch. Imperfectly hidden at the back of his mind was a wish that everybody else in the world would reproduce a little less, so that he might reproduce a little more, once more, with Lalitha. The wish, of course, was shameful: he was the leader of an antigrowth group, he’d already had two kids at a demographically deplorable young age, he was no longer disappointed in his son, he was almost old enough to be a grandfather. And still he couldn’t stop imagining making Lalitha big with child. It was at the root of all their fucking, it was the meaning encoded in how beautiful he found her body.

“No, no, no, honey,” she said, smiling, nose to nose with him, when he brought it up in their tent, in a Kern County campground. “This is what you get with me. You knew that. I’m not like other girls. I’m a freak like you’re a freak, just in a different way. I made that clear, didn’t I?”