Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“A dead baby’s not a pretty thing,” Katz said. “I mean, presumably you guys aren’t advocating infanticide.”

“Of course not,” Walter said. “We just want to make having babies more of an embarrassment. Like smoking’s an embarrassment. Like being obese is an embarrassment. Like driving an Escalade would be an embarrassment if it weren’t for the kiddie argument. Like living in a four-thousand-square-foot house on a two-acre lot should be an embarrassment.”

“ ‘Do it if you have to,’ ” Lalitha said, “ ‘but don’t expect to be congratulated anymore.’ That’s the message we need to spread.”

Katz looked into her crackpot eyes. “You don’t want kids yourself.”

“No,” she said, holding his gaze.

“You’re, what, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“You might feel differently in five years. The oven timer goes off around age thirty. At least that’s been my experience with women.”

“It won’t be mine,” she said and widened, for emphasis, her already very round eyes.

“Kids are beautiful,” Walter said. “Kids have always been the meaning of life. You fall in love, you reproduce, and then your kids grow up and fall in love and reproduce. That’s what life was always for . For pregnancy. For more life. But the problem now is that more life is still beautiful and meaningful on the individual level, but for the world as a whole it only means more death. And not nice death, either. We’re looking at losing half the world’s species in the next hundred years. We’re facing the biggest mass extinction since at least the Cretaceous-Tertiary. First we’ll get the utter wipeout of the world’s ecosystems, then mass starvation and/or disease and/or killings. What’s still ‘normal’ at the individual level is heinous and unprecedented at the global level.”

“It’s like the problem with Katz,” it sounded like Lalitha said.

“Moi?”

“Kitty cats,” she said. “C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It’s just one cat—how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It’s one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat.”

“Nobody wants to think about it,” Walter said. “Everybody just wants their normal life.”

“We want you to help us get people thinking about it,” Lalitha said. “About overpopulation. We don’t have the resources to do family planning and women’s education overseas. We’re a species-oriented conservation group. So what can we do for leverage? How do we get governments and NGOs to quintuple their investment in population control?”

Katz smiled at Walter. “Did you tell her we’ve already been through this? Did you tell her about the songs you used to try to get me to write?”

“No,” Walter said. “But do you remember what you used to say? You said that nobody cared about your songs because you weren’t famous.”

“We’ve been Googling you,” Lalitha said. “There’s a very impressive list of well-known musicians who say they admire you and the Traumatics.”

“The Traumatics are dead, honey. Walnut Surprise is also dead.”

“So here’s the proposal,” Walter said. “However much money you’re making building decks, we’ll pay you a good multiple of, for however long you want to work for us. We’re imagining some sort of summer music-and-politics festival, maybe in West Virginia, with a bunch of very cool headliners, to raise awareness of population issues. All focused entirely on young people.”

“We’re ready to advertise summer internships to college students all over the country,” Lalitha said. “Also in Canada and Latin America. We can fund twenty or thirty internships with Walter’s discretionary fund. But first we need to make the internships look like something very cool to do. Like the thing for the very cool kids to do this summer.”

“Vin’s very hands-off in terms of my discretionary fund,” Walter said. “As long as we put a cerulean warbler on our literature, I can do whatever I want.”

“But it has to happen fast,” Lalitha said. “Kids are already making up their minds about this summer. We need to reach them in the next few weeks.”

“We’d need your name and your image at a minimum,” Walter said. “If you could do some video for us, better yet. If you could write us some songs, even better. If you could make some calls to Jeff Tweedy, and Ben Gibbard, and Jack White, and find us some people to work on the festival pro bono, or sponsor it commercially, best of all.”

“Also great if we can tell potential interns they’ll be getting to work with you directly,” Lalitha said.

“Even just the promise of some minimal contact with them would be fantastic,” Walter said.

“If we could put on the poster, ‘Join rock legend Richard Katz in Washington this summer’ or something like that,” Lalitha said.

“We need to make it cool, and we need to make it viral,” Walter said.

Katz, as he endured this bombardment, was feeling sad and remote. Walter and the girl seemed to have snapped under the pressure of thinking in too much detail about the fuckedness of the world. They’d been seized by a notion and talked each other into believing in it. Had blown a bubble that had then broken free of reality and carried them away. They didn’t seem to realize they were dwelling in a world with a population of two.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“Say yes!” Lalitha said, glittering.

“I’m going to be in Houston for a couple of days,” Walter said, “but I’ll send you some links, and we can talk again on Tuesday.”

“Or just say yes now,” Lalitha said.

Their hopeful expectancy was like an unbearably bright lightbulb. Katz turned away from it and said, “I’ll think about it.”

On the sidewalk outside Walker’s, taking leave of the girl, he ascertained that there was nothing wrong with her lower body, but it didn’t seem to matter now, it only added to his sadness about Walter. The girl was going to Brooklyn to see a college friend of hers. Since Katz could just as easily take the PATH from Penn Station, he walked with Walter toward Canal Street. Ahead of them, in the gathering twilight, were the friendly glowing windows of the world’s most overpopulated island.

“God, I love New York,” Walter said. “There is something so profoundly wrong with Washington.”

“Plenty of things wrong here, too,” Katz said, sidestepping a high-speed mom-and-stroller combo.

“But at least this is an actual place. Washington’s all abstraction. It’s about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I’m sure it’s fun if you’re living next door to Seinfeld, or Tom Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn’t what New York is about . In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry’s house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It’s a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist’s breakfast. Everybody’s obsessing 24/7, trying to position themselves in relation to power. Even the black scene has something wrong with it. It’s got to be more discouraging to be poor black in Washington than anywhere else in the country. You’re not even scary. You’re just an afterthought.”

“I will remind you that Bad Brains and Ian MacKaye came out of D.C.”

“Yeah, that was some weird historical accident.”