Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“You absolutely did. I was just checking.”

“Well, you can check, but the answer will always be the same.”

“Do you know why? Why you’re different?”

“No, but I know what I am. I’m the girl that doesn’t want a baby. That’s my mission in the world. That’s my message.”

“I love what you are.”

“Then let this be the thing that isn’t perfect for you.”

They spent the month of June in Santa Cruz, where Lalitha’s best college friend, Lydia Han, was a grad student in literature. They crashed on her floor, then they camped in her back yard, then they camped in the redwoods. Using Joey’s money, Lalitha had bought plane tickets for the twenty interns she’d chosen. Lydia Han’s faculty adviser, Chris Connery, a wild-haired Marxist and China scholar, allowed the interns to unroll their sleeping bags on his lawn and use his bathrooms, and he provided the Free Space cadre with a campus conference room for three days of intensive training and planning. Walter’s apparent fascination to the eighteen girls among them—dreadlocked or scalped, harrowingly pierced and/or tattooed, their collective fertility so intense he could almost smell it—made him blush constantly as he preached to them the evils of unchecked population growth. He was relieved to escape and go hiking with Professor Connery in the free spaces surrounding Santa Cruz, through the brown hills and dripping redwood glades, listen to Connery’s optimistic prophecies of global economic collapse and workers’ revolution, see the unfamiliar birds of coastal California, and meet some of the young freegans and radical collectivists who were living on public lands in principled squalor. I should have been a college professor, he thought.

Only in July, when they forsook the safety of Santa Cruz and hit the road again, were they immersed in the rage that was gripping the country that summer. Why the conservatives, who controlled all three branches of the federal government, were still so enraged—at respectful skeptics of the Iraq War, at gay couples who wanted to get married, at bland Al Gore and cautious Hillary Clinton, at endangered species and their advocates, at taxes and gas prices that were among the lowest of any industrialized nation, at a mainstream media whose corporate owners were themselves conservative, at the Mexicans who cut their grass and washed their dishes—was somewhat mysterious to Walter. His father had been enraged like that, of course, but in a much more liberal era. And the conservative rage had engendered a left-wing counter-rage that practically scorched off his eyebrows at the Free Space events in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Among the young people he spoke to, the all-purpose epithet for everyone from George Bush and Tim Russert to Tony Blair and John Kerry was “shithead.” That 9/11 had been orchestrated by Halliburton and the Saudi royal family was a near-universal article of faith. Three different garage bands performed songs in which they artlessly fantasized about torturing and killing the president and vice president ( I shit in your mouth / Big Dick, it feels pretty nice / Yeah, little Georgie / A gunshot to the temple will suffice ). Lalitha had impressed on the interns and especially on Walter the need to be disciplined in their message, to stick to the facts about overpopulation, to stake out the biggest possible tent. But without the draw of name-brand acts such as Richard might have provided, the events mostly attracted the already persuaded fringe, the sort of discontents who hit the streets in ski masks to riot against the WTO. Every time Walter took the stage, he was cheered for his Whitmanville meltdown and his intemperate blog entries, but as soon as he spoke of being smart and letting the facts argue for themselves, the crowds went quiet or started chanting the more incendiary words of his that they preferred—“Cancer on the planet!” “Fuck the pope!” In Seattle, where the mood was especially ugly, he left the stage to scattered booing. He was better received in the Midwest and South, particularly in the college towns, but the crowds were also much smaller. By the time he and Lalitha reached Athens, Georgia, he was having a hard time getting up in the morning. He was worn out by the road and oppressed by the thought that the country’s ugly rage was no more than an amplified echo of his own anger, and that he’d let his personal grudge against Richard cheat Free Space out of a broader fan base, and that he was spending money of Joey’s that would better have been given to Planned Parenthood. If it hadn’t been for Lalitha, who was doing most of the driving and all of the enthusiasm-providing, he might have abandoned the tour and just gone birdwatching.

“I know you’re discouraged,” Lalitha said while driving out of Athens. “But we’re definitely getting the issue on the radar. The free weeklies all print our talking points verbatim in their previews for us. The bloggers and the online reviews all talk about overpopulation. One day, there hasn’t been any public talk about it since the seventies. Then suddenly, the next day, there’s talk. The idea is suddenly out there in the world. New ideas always take hold on the fringes. Just because it’s not always pretty, you shouldn’t be discouraged.”

“I saved a hundred square miles in West Virginia,” he said. “Even more than that in Colombia. That was good work, with real results. Why didn’t I keep doing it?”

“Because you knew it’s not enough. The only thing that’s really going to save us is to get people to change the way they think.”

He looked at his girlfriend, her firm hands on the steering wheel, her bright eyes on the road, and thought he might burst with his desire to be like her; with gratitude that she didn’t mind that he was himself instead. “My problem is I don’t like people enough,” he said. “I don’t really believe they can change.”

“You do so like people. I’ve never seen you be mean to one. You can’t stop smiling when you talk to people.”

“I wasn’t smiling in Whitmanville.”

“Actually, you were. Even there. That was part of the weirdness of it.”

There weren’t many birds to watch in the dog days anyway. Once territory had been claimed and breeding accomplished, it was to no small bird’s advantage to make itself conspicuous. Walter took morning walks in refuges and parks that he knew were still full of life, but the overgrown weeds and heavily leafed trees stood motionless in the summer humidity, like houses locked against him, like couples who had eyes for nobody but themselves. The northern hemisphere was soaking up the sun’s energy, plant life silently converting it to food for animals, the burring and whining of insects the only sonic by-product. This was the time of payoff for the neotropical migrants, these were the days that needed to be seized. Walter envied them for having a job to do, and he wondered if he was becoming depressed because this was the first summer in forty years he hadn’t had to work.

The national Free Space battle of the bands was scheduled to happen on the last weekend in August and, unfortunately, in West Virginia. The state was uncentrally located and hard to reach by public transportation, but by the time Walter had proposed changing the location, on his blog, his fans were already excited about traveling to West Virginia and shaming it for its high birth rates, its ownership by the coal industry, its large population of Christian fundamentalists, and its responsibility for tipping the 2000 election in George Bush’s favor. Lalitha had asked Vin Haven for permission to hold the event on the Trust-owned former goat farm she’d always had in mind for it, and Haven, dumbfounded by her temerity, and as helpless as anybody else to resist her velvet-gloved pressure, had consented.