Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

They were on the shabby outskirts of town when his BlackBerry sang its cerulean song, making official their return to civilization. The call was from a Twin Cities number, possibly familiar, possibly not.

“Dad?”

Walter frowned with astonishment. “Joey? Wow! Hello.”

“Yeah, hey. Hello.”

“Everything OK with you? I didn’t even recognize your number, it’s been so long.”

The line seemed to go dead, as if the call had been dropped. Or maybe he’d said the wrong thing. But then Joey spoke again, in a voice like someone else’s. Some quavering, tentative kid. “Yeah, so, anyway, Dad, um—do you have a second?”

“Go ahead.”

“Yeah, well, so, I guess the thing is, I’m sort of in some trouble.”

“What?”

“I said I’m in some trouble.”

It was the kind of call that every parent dreaded getting; but Walter, for a moment, wasn’t feeling like Joey’s parent. He said, “Hey, so am I! So is everybody!”

Within days of young Zachary’s posting of their interview on his blog, Katz’s cellular voice mailbox began to fill with messages. The first was from a pesty German, Matthias Dröhner, whom Katz vaguely recalled having struggled to fend off during Walnut Surprise’s swing through the Fatherland. “Now that you are giving interviews again,” Dröhner said, “I hope you’ll be so kind as to give one to me, like you promised, Richard. You did promise!” Dröhner, in his message, didn’t say how he’d come by Katz’s cell number, but a good guess was via blogospheric leakage from the bar napkin of some chick he’d hit on while touring. He was undoubtedly now getting interview requests by e-mail as well, probably in much greater numbers, but he hadn’t had the fortitude to venture online since the previous summer. Dröhner’s message was followed by calls from an Oregonian chick named Euphrosyne; a bellowingly jovial music journalist in Melbourne, Australia; and a college radio DJ in Iowa City who sounded ten years old. All wanted the same thing. They wanted Katz to say again—but in slightly different words, so that they could post it or publish it under their own names—exactly what he’d already said to Zachary.

“That was golden, dude,” Zachary told him on the roof on White Street, a week after the posting, while they were awaiting the arrival of Zachary’s object of desire, Caitlyn. The “dude” form of address was new and irritating to Katz but entirely consonant with his experience of interviewers. As soon as he submitted to them, they dropped all pretense of awe.

“Don’t call me dude,” he said nevertheless.

“Sure, whatever,” Zachary said. He was walking a long Trex board as if it were a balance beam, his skinny arms outstretched. The afternoon was fresh and blustery. “I’m just saying my hit-counter’s going crazy. I’m getting hot-linked all over the world. Do you ever look at your fan sites?”

“No.”

“I’m right up at the very top of the best one now. I can get my computer and show you.”

“Really no need for that.”

“I think there’s a real hunger for people speaking truth to power. Like, there’s a little minority now that’s saying you sounded like an asshole and a whiner. But that’s just the player-hating fringe. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,” Katz said.

When the girl Caitlyn appeared on the roof, accompanied by a pair of female sidekicks, Zachary remained perched on his balance beam, too cool to make introductions, while Katz set down his nail gun and suffered examination by the visitors. Caitlyn was clad in hippie garb, a brocade vest and a corduroy coat such as Carole King and Laura Nyro had worn, and would certainly have been worthy of pursuit had Katz not, in the week since he’d seen Walter Berglund, become preoccupied again with Patty. Meeting a choice adolescent now was like smelling strawberries when you were hungry for a steak.

“What can I do for you girls?” he said.

“We baked you some banana bread,” the pudgier sidekick said, brandishing a foil-wrapped loaf.

The other two girls rolled their eyes. “ She baked you banana bread,” Caitlyn said. “We had nothing to do with it.”

“I hope you like walnuts ,” the baker girl said.

“Ah, I getcha,” Katz said.

A confused silence fell. Helicopter rotors were pounding the lower Manhattan airspace, the wind doing funny things with the sound.

“We’re just big fans of Nameless Lake ,” Caitlyn said. “We heard you were building a deck up here.”

“Well, as you see, your friend Zachary’s as good as his word.”

Zachary was rocking the Trex board with his orange sneakers, affecting impatience to be alone with Katz again, and thus evincing some good basic pickup skills.

“Zachary’s a great young musician,” Katz said. “I wholeheartedly endorse him. He’s a talent to watch.”

The girls turned their heads toward Zachary with a kind of sad boredom.

“Seriously,” Katz said. “You should get him to go downstairs with you and listen to him play.”

“We’re actually more into alt country,” Caitlyn said. “Not so much boy rock.”

“He’s got some great country licks,” Katz persisted.

Caitlyn squared her shoulders, aligning her posture like a dancer, and gazed at him steadily, as if to give him a chance to amend the indifference he was showing her. She clearly wasn’t used to indifference. “Why are you building a deck?” she said.

“For fresh air and exercise.”

“Why do you need exercise? You look pretty fit.”

Katz felt very, very tired. To be unable to bring himself to play for even ten seconds the game that Caitlyn was interested in playing with him was to understand the allure of death. To die would be the cleanest cutting of his connection to the thing—the girl’s idea of Richard Katz—that was burdening him. Away to the southwest of where they were standing stood the massive Eisenhower-era utility building that marred the nineteenth-century architectural vistas of almost every Tribecan loft-dweller. Once upon a time, the building had offended Katz’s urban aesthetic, but now it pleased him by offending the urban aesthetic of the millionaires who’d taken over the neighborhood. It loomed like death over the excellent lives being lived down here; it had become something of a friend of his.

“Let’s have a look at that banana bread,” he said to the pudgy girl.

“I also brought you some wintergreen Chiclets,” she said.

“Why don’t I autograph the box for you, and you can keep it.”

“That would be awesome!”

He took a Sharpie from a toolbox. “What’s your name?”

“Sarah.”

“It’s great to meet you, Sarah. I’m going to take your banana bread home and have it for dessert tonight.”

Caitlyn briefly, with something like moral outrage, observed this dissing of her pretty self. Then she walked over to Zachary, trailed by the other girl. And here, Katz thought, was a concept: instead of trying to fuck the girls he hated, why not simply snub them for real? To keep his attention on Sarah and away from the magnetic Caitlyn, he took out the tin of Skoal that he’d bought to give his lungs a break from cigarettes, and inserted a big pinch of it between gum and cheek.

“Can I try some of that?” the emboldened Sarah said.

“It’ll make you sick.”

“But, like, one shred?”

Katz shook his head and pocketed the tin, whereupon Sarah asked if she could fire the nail gun. She was like a walking advertisement of the late-model parenting she’d received: You have permission to ask for things! Just because you aren’t pretty doesn’t mean you don’t! Your offerings, if you’re bold enough to make them, will be welcomed by the world! In her own way, she was just as tiring as Caitlyn. Katz wondered if he’d been this tiring himself at eighteen, or whether, as it now seemed to him, his anger at the world—his perception of the world as a hostile adversary, worthy of his anger—had made him more interesting than these young paragons of self-esteem.