Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

And now her footsteps were coming down the hallway. Walter stopped speaking and took a deep breath, visibly bracing himself. Katz swiveled his chair toward the doorway; and there she was. The fresh-faced mom who had a dark side. She was wearing black boots and a snug red-and-black silk brocade skirt and a chic short raincoat in which she looked both great and not like herself. Katz couldn’t remember ever seeing her in anything but jeans.

“Hi, Richard,” she said, glancing in his general direction. “Hi, everybody. How’s it going here?”

“We’re just getting started,” Walter said.

“Don’t let me interrupt you, then.”

“You’re all dressed up,” Walter said.

“Going shopping,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you guys tonight if you’re around.”

“Are you making dinner?” Jessica said.

“No, I have to work till nine. I guess, if you want, I could stop for some food before I leave.”

“That would be extremely helpful,” Jessica said, “since we’re going to be meeting all day.”

“Well, and I would be happy to make dinner if I didn’t have to work an eight-hour shift.”

“Oh, never mind,” Jessica said. “Just forget it. We’ll go out or something.”

“That does sound like the easiest thing,” Patty agreed.

“So anyway,” Walter said.

“Right, so anyway,” she said. “I hope it’s a really fun day for everybody.”

Having thus speedily irritated, ignored, or disappointed each of the four of them, she proceeded down the hallway and out the front door. Lalitha, who had been clicking on her BlackBerry since the moment Patty appeared, looked the most obviously unhappy.

“Does she work seven days a week now, or what?” Jessica said.

“No, not usually,” Walter said. “I’m not sure what this is about.”

“It’s always about something, though, isn’t it,” Lalitha murmured as she thumbed her device.

Jessica turned on her, instantly redirecting her pique. “Just let us know whenever you’re done with your e-mail, OK? We’ll just sit and wait until you’re ready, OK?”

Lalitha, tight-lipped, continued to thumb.

“Maybe you can do that later?” Walter said gently.

She slapped the BlackBerry onto the table. “OK,” she said. “Ready!”

As the nicotine coursed through Katz, he began to feel better. Patty had seemed defiant, and defiant was good. Nor had the fact of her dressing up escaped his attention. Dressing up for what reason? To present herself to him. And working both Friday and Saturday nights for what reason? To avoid him. Yes, to play the same hide-and-seek that he was playing with her. Now that she was gone, he could see her better, receive her signals without so much static, imagine placing his hands on that fine skirt of hers, and remember how she’d wanted him in Minnesota.

But meanwhile the problem of too much procreation: the first concrete task, Walter said, was to think of a name for their initiative. His own working idea was Youth Against Insanity, a private homage to “Youth Against Fascism,” which he considered (and Katz agreed with him) one of the finer songs that Sonic Youth had ever recorded. But Jessica was adamant about picking a name that said yes rather than no. Something pro, not contra. “Kids my age are way more libertarian than you guys were,” she explained. “Anything that smells like elitism, or not respecting somebody else’s point of view, they’re allergic to. Your campaign can’t be about telling other people what not to do. It’s got to be about this cool positive choice that we’re all making.”

Lalitha suggested the name The Living First, which hurt Katz’s ears, and which Jessica shot down with withering scorn. And so they brainstormed the morning away, sorely missing, in Katz’s opinion, the input of a professional P.R. consultant. They went through Lonelier Planet, Fresher Air, Rubbers Unlimited, Coalition of the Already Born, Free Space, Life Quality, Smaller Tent, and Enough Already! (which Katz rather liked but which the others said was still too negative; he filed it away as a possible future song or album title). They considered Feed the Living, Be Reasonable, Cooler Heads, A Better Way, Strength in Smaller Numbers, Less Is More, Emptier Nests, Joy of None, Kidfree Forever, No Babies on Board, Feed Yourself, Dare Not to Bear, Depopulate!, Two Cheers for People, Maybe None, Less Than Zero, Stomp the Brakes, Smash the Family, Cool Off, Elbow Room, More for Me, Bred Alone, Breather, Morespace, Love What’s Here, Barren by Choice, Childhood’s End, All Children Left Behind, Nucleus of Two, Maybe Never, and What’s the Rush? and rejected all of them. To Katz, the exercise was an illustration of the general impossibility of the enterprise and the specific rancidness of prefabricated coolness, but Walter ran the discussion with an upbeat judiciousness that bespoke long years in the artificial world of NGOs. And, somewhat incredibly, the dollars he planned to spend were real.

“I say we go with Free Space,” he said finally. “I like how it steals the word ‘free’ from the other side, and appropriates the rhetoric of the wide-open West. If this thing takes off, it can also be the name of a whole movement, not just our group. The Free Space movement.”

“Am I the only one who’s hearing ‘free parking space’?” Jessica said.

“That’s not such a bad connotation,” Walter said. “We all know what it’s like to have trouble finding a parking space. Fewer people on the planet, better parking opportunities? It’s actually a very vivid everyday example of why overpopulation’s bad.”

“We need to see if Free Space is trademarked,” Lalitha said.

“Fuck the trademark,” Katz said. “Every phrase known to man is trademarked.”

“We could put an extra space between the words,” Walter said. “Sort of like the opposite of EarthFirst! and without the exclamation point. If we get sued on the trademark, we can build a case on the extra space. That plays, doesn’t it? The Case for Space?”

“Better not to get sued at all, I think,” Lalitha said.

In the afternoon, after sandwiches had been ordered and eaten and Patty had come home and gone out again without interacting with them (Katz caught a quick glimpse of her black gym-greeter jeans as her legs receded down the hallway), the four-member advisory board of Free Space hammered out a plan for the twenty-five summer interns whom Lalitha had already set about attracting and hiring. She’d been envisioning a late-summer music and consciousness-raising festival on a twenty-acre goat farm now owned by the Cerulean Mountain Trust on the southern edge of its warbler reserve—a vision that Jessica immediately found fault with. Did Lalitha not understand anything about young people’s new relationship with music? It wasn’t enough just to bring in some big-name talent! They had to send twenty interns out to twenty cities across the country and have them organize local festivals—“A battle of the bands,” Katz said. “Yes, exactly, twenty different local battles of the bands,” Jessica said. (She had been frosty to Katz all day but seemed grateful for his help in squashing Lalitha.) By offering cash prizes, they would attract five great bands in each of the twenty cities, all competing for the right to represent their local music scene in a weekend-long battle of the bands in West Virginia, under the aegis of Free Space, with some big names there to do the final judging and lend their aura to the cause of reversing global population growth and making it uncool to have kids.

Katz, who even by his own standards had consumed colossal amounts of caffeine and nicotine, wound up in a nearly manic state in which he agreed to everything that was asked of him: writing special Free Space songs, returning to Washington in May to meet with the Free Space interns and aid in their indoctrination, making a surprise guest appearance at the New York battle of the bands, emceeing the Free Space festival in West Virginia, endeavoring to reconstitute Walnut Surprise so that it could perform there, and pestering big names to appear with him and join him on the final panel of judges. In his mind, he was doing nothing more than writing checks on an account with nothing in it, because, despite the actual chemical substances he’d ingested, the true substance of his state was a throbbing, single-minded focus on taking Patty away from Walter: this was the rhythm track, everything else was irrelevant high-end. Smash the Family: another song title. And once the family was smashed, he would not have to make good on any of his promises.