Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  Cynthia, his press person, had e-mailed him final drafts of the full press release and of the preliminary announcement that was going out at noon tomorrow, as soon as the demolition of Forster Hollow had commenced. There was also a terse, unhappy note from Eduardo Soquel, the Trust’s point man in Colombia, confirming that he was willing to miss his eldest daughter’s quinceañera on Sunday and fly to Washington. Walter needed Soquel by his side at the press conference on Monday, to emphasize the Pan-American nature of the park and highlight the Trust’s successes in South America.

  It wasn’t unusual for big conservation land deals to be kept under wraps until they were finalized, but rare were the deals containing a bombshell on the order of fourteen thousand acres of forest being opened up to MTR. Back in late 2002, when Walter had merely suggested to the local environmental community that the Trust might allow MTR on its warbler preserve, Jocelyn Zorn had alerted every anti-coal reporter in West Virginia. A flurry of negative stories had resulted, and Walter had realized that he simply couldn’t afford to take his full case to the public. The clock was ticking; there was no time for the slow work of educating the public and shaping its opinion. Better to keep his negotiations with Nardone and Blasco secret, better to let Lalitha convince Coyle Mathis and his neighbors to sign nondisclosure agreements, and wait for all the faits to be accomplis. But now the jig was up, now the heavy equipment was moving in. Walter knew he had to get out in front of the story and spin it his way, as a “success story” of science-based reclamation and compassionate relocation. And yet, the more he thought about it now, the more certain he became that the press was going to slaughter him for the MTR thing. He could be tied up for weeks with putting out fires. And meanwhile the clock was also running on his overpopulation initiative, which was all he really cared about now.

  After rereading the press release, with deep unease, he checked his e-mail queue one last time and found a new message, from caperville @nytimes.com.

  Hello, Mr. Berglund,

  My name is Dan Caperville and I’m working on a story about land conservation in Appalachia. I understand the Cerulean Mountain Trust has recently closed a deal for the preservation of a large forested tract in Wyoming Co. WV. I’d love to talk about that with you at your earliest convenience . . .

  What the fuck? How did the Times already know about this morning’s signing? Walter was so unready to ponder this e-mail, under present circumstances, that he composed a reply immediately and fired it off before he had time to reconsider:

  Dear Mr. Caperville,

  Thank you so much for your query! I would love to talk to you about the exciting things the Trust has in the works. As it happens, I’m holding a press conference this coming Monday morning in Washington, announcing a major and very exciting new environmental initiative, which I hope you’ll be able to attend. In consideration of your paper’s stature, I can also send you an early copy of our press release on Sunday evening. If you’re available to speak with me early Monday morning, in advance of the presser, I might be able to arrange that as well.

  Looking forward to working with you—

  Walter E. Berglund

  Executive Director, Cerulean Mountain Trust

  He copied everything to Cynthia and Lalitha, with the comment WTF?, and then paced the room in agitation, thinking how welcome a second beer would be right now. (One beer in forty-seven years, and already he felt like an addict.) The right thing to do now was probably to wake Lalitha, drive back to Charleston, catch the first morning flight out, move the press conference up to Friday, and get out in front of the story. But it seemed as if the world, the insane-making velocitous world, was conspiring to deprive him of the only two things he truly wanted now. Having already been deprived of kissing Lalitha, he at least wanted to spend the weekend planning the overpopulation initiative with her and Jessica and Richard, before dealing with the mess in West Virginia.

  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 b
e 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?

  He went upstairs to her little room, where she was chattering happily with one of her old basketball friends—she still showered laughter and wit on the people in her life who weren’t Walter—and gave her to understand that he wasn’t leaving until she got off the phone.

  “It was cash,” she said when he showed her the printouts of account activity. “I wrote myself some checks for cash.”

  “Five hundred a month? Near the end of every month?”

  “That’s when I take my cash out.”

  “No, you take two hundred every couple of weeks. I know what your withdrawals look like. And there’s also a fee for a certified check here. The fifteenth of May?”

  “Yes.”

  “That sounds like a certified check, not cash.”

  Over in the direction of the Naval Observatory, where Dick Cheney lived, thunder was banging in an evening sky the color of Potomac water. Patty, on her little sofa, crossed her arms defiantly. “OK!” she said. “You caught me! Joey needed the whole summer rent up front. He’s going to pay it back when he earns it, but he didn’t have the cash in hand right then.”

  For the second summer in a row, Joey was working in Washington without living at home. His spurning of their help and hospitality was irritating enough to Walter, but even worse was the identity of his summer employer: a corrupt little start-up—backed financially (though this didn’t mean much to Walter at the time) by Vin Haven’s friends at LBI—that had won the no-bid contract to privatize the bread-baking industry in newly liberated Iraq. Walter and Joey had already had their big fight about it some weeks earlier, on the Fourth of July, when Joey had come over for a picnic and very belatedly divulged his summer plans. Walter had lost his temper, Patty had run and hidden in her room, and Joey had sat smirking his Republican smirk. His Wall Street smirk. As if indulging his stupid rube father, with his old-fashioned principles; as if he himself knew better.

  “So there’s a perfectly good bedroom here,” Walter said to Patty, “but that’s not good enough for him. That wouldn’t be grownup enough. That wouldn’t be cool enough. He might even have to ride a bus to work! With the little people!”

  “He has to maintain his Virginia residency, Walter. And he’s going to pay it back, OK? I knew what you’d say if I asked you, so I went ahead and did it without telling you. If you don’t want me making my own decisions, you should confiscate the checkbook. Take away my bank card. I’ll come to you and beg for money every time I need it.”

  “Every month! You’ve been sending money every month! To Mr. Independent!”

  “I’m lending him some money. OK? His friends basically all have limitless funds. He’s very frugal, but if he’s going to make those connections, and be in that world—”

  “That great frat-house world, full of the best sort of people—”

  “He has a plan. He has a plan and he wants you to be impressed with him—”

  “News to me!”

  “It’s just for clothes and socializing,” Patty said. “He pays his own tuition, he pays his own room and board, and maybe, if you could ever forgive him for not being an identical copy of you in every way, you might see how similar you two are. You were supporting yourself the exact same way when you were his age.”

  “Right, except I wore the same three pairs of corduroys for four years of college, and I wasn’t out drinking five nights a week, and I sure as hell wasn’t getting any money from my mother.”

  “Well, it’s a different world now, Walter. And maybe, just maybe, he understands better than you do what a person has to do to get ahead in it.”

  “Work for a defense contractor, get shitfaced every night with fratboy Republicans. That’s really the only way to get ahead? That’s the only option available?”

  “You don’t understand how scared these kids are now. They’re under so much pressure. So
they like to party hard—so what?”

  The old mansion’s air-conditioning was no match for the humidity pressing on it from outside. The thunder was becoming continuous and omnidirectional; the ornamental pear tree outside the window heaved its branches as if somebody were climbing in it. Sweat was running on every part of Walter’s body not directly in contact with his clothes.

  “It’s interesting to hear you suddenly defending young people,” he said, “since you’re normally so—”

  “I’m defending your son,” she said. “Who, in case you haven’t noticed, is not one of the brainless flipflop wearers. He’s considerably more interesting than—”

  “I cannot believe you’ve been sending him drinking money! You know what it’s exactly like? It’s exactly like corporate welfare. All these supposedly free-market companies sucking on the tit of the federal government. ‘We need to shrink the government, we don’t want any regulations, we don’t want any taxes, but, oh, by the way—’ ”

  “This isn’t sucking on tits, Walter,” Patty said with hatred.

  “I was speaking metaphorically.”

  “Well, I’m saying you picked an interesting metaphor.”

  “Well, and I picked it carefully. All these companies pretending to be so grownup and free-market when they’re actually just big babies devouring the federal budget while everybody else starves. Fish and Wildlife has its budget cut year after year, another five percent every year. You go to their field offices, they’re ghost offices now. There’s no staff, there’s no money for land acquisition, no—”

  “Oh the precious fish. The precious wildlife.”

  “I CARE ABOUT THEM. Can you not understand that? Can you not respect that? If you can’t respect that, what are you even living with me for? Why don’t you just leave?”

  “Because leaving is not the answer. My God, do you think I haven’t thought about it? Taking my great skills and work experience and great middle-aged body out on the open market? I actually think it’s wonderful what you’re doing for your warbler—”