Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

At ten-thirty, still pacing the room, he was feeling so deprived and anxious and sorry for himself that he called home to Patty. He wanted to get some credit for his fidelity, or maybe he just wanted to dump some anger on a person he loved.

“Oh, hi,” Patty said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. Is everything OK?”

“Everything’s horrible .”

“I bet! It’s hard to keep saying no when you want to say yes, isn’t it?”

“Oh Jesus don’t start,” he said. “Please, for God’s sake, do not start that tonight.”

“Sorry. I was trying to be sympathetic.”

“I’ve actually got a professional problem on my hands here, Patty. Not just some petty little personal emotional thing, believe it or not. A serious professional difficulty that I could use a bit of reassurance about. Somebody at the meeting this morning leaked something to the press, and I have to try to get out in front on a story I’m not sure I even want to be out in front on, because I was already feeling like I’ve fucked everything up here. Like all I’ve managed to do is release fourteen thousand acres to be blasted into a moonscape, and now the world has to be informed, and I don’t even care about the project anymore.”

“Right, well, actually,” Patty said, “the moonscape stuff does sound sort of awful.”

“Thank you! Thank you for the reassurance!”

“I was just reading an article about it in the Times this morning.”

“Today?”

“Yeah, they actually mentioned your warbler, and how bad mountaintop removal is for it.”

“Unbelievable! Today?”

“Yes, today.”

“Fuck! Somebody must have seen the piece in the paper today and then called the reporter with the leak. I just heard from him half an hour ago.”

“Well, anyway,” Patty said, “I’m sure you know best, although mountaintop removal does sound fairly horrible.”

He clutched his forehead, feeling close to tears again. He couldn’t believe he was getting this from his wife, at this hour, on this of all days. “Since when are you such a big fan of the Times ?” he said.

“I’m just saying it sounds pretty bad. It doesn’t even sound like there’s any disagreement about how bad it is.”

“You’re the person who made fun of your mother for believing everything she read in the Times .”

“Ha-ha-ha! I’m my mother now? Because I don’t like mountaintop removal, I’m suddenly Joyce ?”

“I’m just saying there are other aspects to the story.”

“You think we should be burning more coal. Making it easier to burn more coal. In spite of global warming.”

He slid his hand down over his eyes and pressed them until they hurt. “You want me to explain the reason? Should I do that?”

“If you want to.”

“We’re heading for a catastrophe, Patty. We are heading for a total collapse.”

“Well, and, frankly, I don’t know about you, but that’s starting to sound like kind of a relief to me.”

“I’m not talking about us!”

“Ha-ha-ha! I actually didn’t get that. I truly didn’t realize what you meant.”

“I meant that world population and energy consumption are going to have to fall drastically at some point. We’re way past sustainable even now. Once the collapse comes, there’s going to be a window of opportunity for ecosystems to recover, but only if there’s any nature left. So the big question is how much of the planet gets destroyed before the collapse. Do we completely use it up, and cut down every tree and sterilize every ocean, and then collapse? Or are there going to be some unwrecked strongholds that survive?”

“Either way, you and I will be long dead by then,” Patty said.

“Well, before I’m dead, I’m trying to create a stronghold. A refuge. Something to help a couple of ecosystems make it past the pinch point. That’s the whole project here.”

“Like,” she persisted, “there’s going to be a worldwide plague, and there’ll be this long line for the Tamiflu, or the Cipro, and you’re going to make us be the very last two people in it. ‘Oh, sorry, guys, darn, we just ran out.’ We’ll be nice and polite and agreeable, and then we’ll be dead.”

“Global warming is a huge threat,” Walter said, declining the bait, “but it’s still not as bad as radioactive waste. It turns out that species can adapt a lot faster than we used to think. If you’ve got climate change spread over a hundred years, a fragile ecosystem has a fighting chance. But when the reactor blows up, everything’s fucked immediately and stays fucked for the next five thousand years.”

“So yay coal. Let’s burn more coal. Rah, rah.”

“It’s complicated, Patty. The picture gets complicated when you consider the alternatives. Nuclear’s a disaster waiting to happen overnight. There’s zero chance of ecosystems recovering from an overnight disaster. Everybody’s talking about wind energy, but wind’s not so great, either. This idiot Jocelyn Zorn’s got a brochure that shows the two choices—the only two choices, presumably. Picture A shows this devastated post-MTR desertscape, Picture B shows ten windmills in a pristine mountain landscape. And what’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is there are only ten windmills in it. Where what you actually need is ten thousand windmills. You need every mountaintop in West Virginia to be covered with turbines. Imagine being a migratory bird trying to fly through that. And if you blanket the state with windmills, you think it’s still going to be a tourist attraction? And plus, to compete with coal, those windmills have to operate forever. A hundred years from now, you’re still going to have the same old piss-ugly eyesore, mowing down whatever wildlife is left. Whereas the mountaintop-removal site, in a hundred years, if you reclaim it properly, it may not be perfect, but it’s going to be a valuable mature forest.”

“And you know this, and the newspaper doesn’t,” Patty said.

“That’s right.”

“And it’s not possible you’re wrong.”

“Not about coal versus wind or nuclear.”

“Well, maybe if you explain all this, the way you just did to me, then people will believe it and you won’t have any problems.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t have all the facts.”

“But I have the facts, and I’m telling you! Why can’t you believe me? Why can’t you reassure me?”

“I thought that was Pretty Face’s job. I’m kind of out of practice since she took over. She’s so much better at it anyway.”

Walter ended the conversation before it could take an even worse turn. He turned off all the lights and got ready for bed by the parking-lot glow in the windows. Darkness was the only available relief from his state of flayed misery. He drew the blackout curtains, but light still leaked in at the base of them, and so he stripped the spare bed and used the pillows and covers to block out as much of it as he could. He put on a sleep mask and lay down with a pillow over his head, but even then, no matter how he adjusted the mask, there remained a faint suggestion of stray photons beating on his tightly shut eyelids, a less than perfect darkness.

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from this circumstance. He and Patty couldn’t live together and couldn’t imagine living apart. Each time he thought they’d reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.

One thunderstormy night in Washington, the previous summer, he’d set out to check a box on his dishearteningly long personal to-do list by setting up an online banking account, which he’d been intending to do for several years. Since moving to Washington, Patty had pulled less and less of her weight in the household, not even shopping for groceries anymore, but she did still pay the bills and balance the family checkbook. Walter had never scrutinized the checkbook entries until, after forty-five minutes of frustration with the banking software, he had the figures glowing on his computer screen. His first thought, when he saw the strange pattern of monthly $500 withdrawals, was that some hacker in Nigeria or Moscow had been stealing from him. But surely Patty would have noticed this?