Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

After making his escape from Carol, and deducing from Blake’s cool good-bye that he hadn’t been forgiven for being a liberal, he drove up to Grand Rapids, stopped for some groceries, and reached Nameless Lake by late afternoon. There was, ominously, a for sale sign on the adjoining Lundner property, but his house had weathered 2004 as middling-well as it had weathered so many other years. The spare key was still hanging on the underside of the old rustic birch bench, and he found it not too intolerable to be in the rooms where his wife and his best friend had betrayed him; enough other memories flooded him vividly enough to hold their own. He raked and swept until nightfall, happy to have some real work to do for a change, and then, before he went to bed, he called Lalitha.

“It’s insane here,” she said. “It’s a good thing I came and good that you didn’t, because I think you’d be upset. It’s like Fort Apache or something. Our people practically need security to protect them from the fans who’ve shown up early. All those jerks in Seattle seem to have come straight here. We’ve got a little camp by the well, with one Porta Potti, but there’s already about three hundred other people laying siege to it. They’re all over the property, they’re drinking from the same creek they’re shitting right next to, and they’re antagonizing the locals. There’s graffiti all along the road leading up there. I have to send out interns in the morning to apologize to the people whose property’s been defaced, and offer to do some repainting. I went around trying to tell people to chill out, but everybody’s stoned and spread out over ten acres, and there’s no leadership, it’s totally amorphous. Then it got dark and started to rain, and I had to come back down to town and find a motel.”

“I can fly out tomorrow,” Walter said.

“No, come with the van. We need to be able to camp on-site. Right now you’d only get angry. I can deal with it without getting so angry, and things should be better by the time you get here.”

“Well, drive carefully out there, OK?”

“I will,” she said. “I love you, Walter.”

“I love you, too.”

The woman he loved loved him. He knew this for certain, but it was all he knew for certain, then or ever; the other vital facts remained unknown. Whether she did, in fact, drive carefully. Whether she was or wasn’t rushing on the rain-slick county highway back up to the goat farm the next morning, whether she was or wasn’t rounding the blind mountain curves dangerously fast. Whether a coal truck had come flying around one of these curves and done what a coal truck did somewhere in West Virginia every week. Or whether somebody in a high-clearance 4x4, maybe somebody whose barn had been defaced with the words free space or cancer on THE PLANET, saw a dark-skinned young woman driving a compact Korean-made rental car and veered into her lane or tailgated her or passed her too narrowly or even deliberately forced her off the shoulderless road.

Whatever did happen exactly, around 7:45 a.m., five miles south of the farm, her car went down a long and very steep embankment and crushed itself against a hickory tree. The police report would not even offer the faintly consoling assurance of an instant killing. But the trauma was severe, her pelvis was broken and a femoral artery severed, and she had certainly died before Walter, at 7:30 in Minnesota, returned the house key to its nail beneath the bench and headed over to Aitkin County to look for his brother.

He knew, from long experience with his father, that alcoholics were best conversed with in the morning. All Brent had been able to tell him about Mitch’s latest ex, Stacy, was that she worked at a bank in Aitkin, the county seat, and so he hurried from one to another of Aitkin’s banks and found Stacy in the third of them. She was pretty in a strapping farm-girl way, looked thirty-five, and spoke like a teenager. Although she’d never met Walter, she seemed ready to assign him significant responsibility for Mitch’s abandonment of their children. “You could try his friend Bo’s farm,” she said with a cross shrug. “The last I heard, Bo was letting him stay in his garage apartment, but that was like three months ago.”

Marshy, glacially scraped, oreless Aitkin County was the poorest county in Minnesota and therefore full of birds, but Walter didn’t stop to look for them as he drove up dead-straight County Road 5 and found Bo’s farm. There was a large field scattered with the overgrown remnants of a rapeseed crop, a smaller cornfield much weedier than it should have been. Bo himself was kneeling in the driveway near the house, repairing the kickstand of a girl’s bike adorned with pink plastic streamers, while an assortment of young children wandered in and out of the house’s open front door. His cheeks were gin-blossomed, but he was young and had the muscles of a wrestler. “So you’re the big-city brother,” he said, squinting in puzzlement at Walter’s van.

“That’s me,” Walter said. “I heard Mitch was living with you?”

“Yah, he comes and goes. You can probably find him up at Peter Lake now, the county campground there. You need him for something in particular?”

“No, I was just in the neighborhood.”

“Yah, he’s had it pretty rough since Stacy threw him out. I try to help him out a little bit.”

“She threw him out?”

“Oh, well, y’know. Two sides to every story, right?”

It was nearly an hour’s drive to Peter Lake, back up toward Grand Rapids. Arriving at the campground, which looked a little bit like an auto junkyard and was especially charmless in the midday sun, Walter saw a paunchy old guy squatting by a mud-stained red tent and scraping fish scales onto a sheet of newspaper. Only after he’d driven past him did he realize, from the resemblance to his father, that this was Mitch. He parked the van close against a poplar, to catch a little shade, and asked himself what he was doing here. He wasn’t prepared to offer Mitch the house at Nameless Lake; he thought that he and Lalitha might live in it themselves for a season or two while they figured out their future. But he wanted to be more like Lalitha, more fearless and humanitarian, and although he could see that it might actually be kinder just to leave Mitch alone, he took a deep breath and walked back to the red tent.

“Mitch,” he said.

Mitch was scaling an eight-inch sunny and didn’t look up. “Yeah.”

“It’s Walter. It’s your brother.”

He did look up then, with a reflexive sneer that turned into a genuine smile. He’d lost his good looks, or, more precisely, they had shrunk into a small facial oasis in a desert of sunburned bloat. “Holy shit,” he said. “Little Walter! What are you doing here?”

“Just stopped by to see you.”

Mitch wiped his hands on his very dirty cargo shorts and extended one to Walter. It was a flabby hand and Walter squeezed it hard.

“Yeah, sure, that’s great,” Mitch said generally. “I was just about to open a beer. You want a beer? Or are you still teetotaling?”

“I’ll have a beer,” Walter said. He realized that it would have been kind and Lalitha-like to have brought Mitch a few sixpacks, and then he thought that it was also kind to let Mitch be generous with something. He didn’t know which was the greater kindness. Mitch crossed his untidy campsite to an enormous cooler and came back with two cans of PBR.

“Yeah,” he said, “I saw that van go by and wondered what kind of hippies we had moving in. Are you a hippie now?”

“Not exactly.”

While flies and yellowjackets feasted on the guts of Mitch’s suspended fish-cleaning project, the two of them sat down on a pair of ancient camp stools, made of wood and mildew-splotched canvas, that had been their father’s. Walter recognized other similarly ancient gear around the site. Mitch, like their father, was a great talker, and as he filled Walter in on his present mode of existence, and on the litany of bad breaks and back injuries and car accidents and irreconcilable marital differences that had led to this existence, Walter was struck by what a different kind of drunk he was than their father had been. Alcohol or time’s passage seemed to have expunged all memory of his and Walter’s enmity. He exhibited no trace of a sense of responsibility, but also, therefore, neither defensiveness nor resentment. It was a sunny day and he was just doing his thing. He drank steadily but without hurry; the afternoon was long.