Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “It breeds in treetops in mature deciduous forest,” Walter said. “And then, as soon as the babies can fly, the family moves down into the understory for safety. But the original forests were all cut down for timber and charcoal, and the second-growth forests don’t have the right kind of understory, and they’re all fragmented with roads and farms and subdivisions and coal-mining sites, which makes the warbler vulnerable to cats and raccoons and crows.”

  “And so, before you know it, no more cerulean warblers,” Lalitha said.

  “That does sound tough,” Katz said. “Although it is just one bird.”

  “Every species has an inalienable right to keep existing,” Walter said.

  “Sure. Of course. I’m just trying to figure out where this is coming from. I don’t remember you caring about birds when we were in college. Back then, as I recall, it was more about overpopulation and the limits to growth.”

  Walter and Lalitha again exchanged glances.

  “Overpopulation is exactly what we want you to help us with,” Lalitha said.

  Katz laughed. “Doing my best with that already.”

  Walter was shuffling through some laminated charts. “I started walking it back,” he said, “because I still wasn’t sleeping. You remember Aristotle and the different kinds of causes? Efficient and formal and final? Well, nest-predation by crows and feral cats is an efficient cause of the warbler’s decline. And fragmentation of the habitat is a formal cause of that. But what’s the final cause? The final cause is the root of pretty much every problem we have. The final cause is too many damn people on the planet. It’s especially clear when we go to South America. Yes, per capita consumption is rising. Yes, the Chinese are illegally vacuuming up resources down there. But the real problem is population pressure. Six kids per family versus one point five. People are desperate to feed the children that the pope in his infinite wisdom makes them have, and so they trash the environment.”

  “You should come with us to South America,” Lalitha said. “We drive along these little roads, there’s terrible exhaust from bad engines and too-cheap gasoline, the hillsides are all denuded, and the families all have eight or ten children, it’s really sickening. You should come along with us sometime and see if you like what you see down there. Because it’s coming soon to a theater near you.”

  Crackpot, Katz thought. Hot little crackpot.

  Walter handed him a laminated bar chart. “In America alone,” he said, “the population’s going to rise by fifty percent in the next four decades. Think about how crowded the exurbs are already, think about the traffic and the sprawl and the environmental degradation and the dependence on foreign oil. And then add fifty percent. And that’s just America, which can theoretically sustain a larger population. And then think about global carbon emissions, and genocide and famine in Africa, and the radicalized dead-end underclass in the Arab world, and overfishing of the oceans, illegal Israeli settlements, the Han Chinese overrunning Tibet, a hundred million poor people in nuclear Pakistan: there’s hardly a problem in the world that wouldn’t be solved or at least tremendously alleviated by having fewer people. And yet”—he gave Katz another chart—“we’re going to add another three billion by 2050. In other words, we’re going to add the equivalent of the world’s entire population when you and I were putting our pennies in UNICEF boxes. Any little things we might do now to try to save some nature and preserve some kind of quality of life are going to get overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, because people can change their consumption habits—it takes time and effort, but it can be done—but if the population keeps increasing, nothing else we do is going to matter. And yet nobody is talking about the problem publicly. It’s the elephant in the room, and it’s killing us.”

  “This is all sounding more familiar,” Katz said. “I’m remembering some rather lengthy discussions.”

  “I was definitely into it in college. But then, you know, I did some breeding myself.”

  Katz raised his eyebrows. Breeding was an interesting way of speaking of one’s wife and children.

  “In my own way,” Walter said, “I guess I was part of a larger cultural shift that was happening in the eighties and nineties. Overpopulation was definitely part of the public conversation in the seventies, with Paul Ehrlich, and the Club of Rome, and ZPG. And then suddenly it was gone. Became just unmentionable. Part of it was the Green Revolution—you know, still plenty of famines, but not apocalyptic ones. And then population control got a terrible name politically. Totalitarian China with its one-child policy, Indira Gandhi doing forced sterilizations, American ZPG getting painted as nativist and racist. The liberals got all scared and silent. Even the Sierra Club got scared. And the conservatives, of course, never gave a shit in the first place, because their entire ideology is selfish short-term interest and God’s plan and so forth. And so the problem became this cancer that you know is growing inside you but you decide you’re just not going to think about.”

  “And this has what to do with your cerulean warbler?” Katz said.

  “It has everything to do with it,” Lalitha said.

  “Like I said,” Walter said, “we’ve decided to take some liberties with interpreting the mission of the Trust, which is to ensure the survival of the warbler. We keep walking the problem back, walking it back. And what we finally arrive at, in terms of a final cause or an unmoved mover, in 2004, is the fact that it’s become totally toxic and uncool to talk about reversing population growth.”

  “And so I ask Walter,” Lalitha said, “who is the coolest person you know?”

  Katz laughed and shook his head. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  “Listen, Richard,” Walter said. “The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing ‘God Bless America,’ stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet’s future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it’s beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslet is pregnant, hooray hooray. Some dimwit in Iowa just had octuplets, hooray hooray. The conversation about the idiocy of SUVs stops dead the minute people say they’re buying them to protect their precious babies.”

  “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.”

  “And yet we did admire them in our youth.”

  “God, I love the New York subway!” Walter said as he followed Katz down to the uric uptown platform. “This is the way human beings are supposed to live. High density! High efficiency!” He cast a beneficent smile upon the weary subway riders.

  It occurred to Katz to ask about Patty, but he felt too gutless to say her name. “So is this chick single, or what?” he said.

  “Who, Lalitha? No. She’s had the same boyfriend since college.”

  “He lives with you, too?”

  “No, he’s in Nashville. He was in med school in Baltimore, and now he’s doing his internship.”

  “And yet she stayed behind in Washington.”

  “She’s very invested in this project,” Walter said. “And, frankly, I think the boyfriend’s on his way out. He’s very old-school Indian. He threw a huge, huge fit when she didn’t move to Nashville with him.”

  “And what did you advise her?”

  “I tried to get her to stand up for herself. He could have matched somewhere in Washington if he’d really wanted to. I told her she didn’t have to sacrifice everything for his career. She and I’ve got a kind of father-daughter thing. Her parents are very conservative. I think she appreciates working for somebody who believes in her and doesn’t just see her as somebody’s future wife.”

  “And just so we’re clear,” Katz said, “you’re aware that she’s in love with you?”

  Walter blushed. “I don’t know. Maybe a little bit. I actually think it’s more like an intellectual idealization. More father-daughter.”

  “Yeah, dream on, buddy. You expect me to believe you’ve never imagined those eyes shining up at you while her head’s bobbing on your lap?”

  “Jesus, no. I try not to imagine things like that. Especially not with an employee.”

  “But maybe you don’t always succeed in not imagining it.”

  Walter glanced around to see if anyone on the platform was listening, and lowered his voice. “Aside from everything else,” he said, “I think there’s something objectively demean
ing about a woman on her knees.”

  “Why don’t you try it sometime and let her be the judge of that.”

  “Well, because, Richard,” Walter said, still blushing, but also laughing unpleasantly, “I happen to understand that women are wired differently than men.”

  “Whatever happened to gender equality? I seem to recall that you were into that.”

  “I just think, if you ever had a daughter yourself, you might see the woman’s side with a little more sympathy.”

  “You’ve named my best reason for not wanting a daughter.”

  “Well, if you did have one, you might let yourself recognize the actually-not-terribly-hard-to-recognize fact that very young women can get their desire and their admiration and their love for a person all mixed up, and not understand—”

  “Not understand what?”

  “That to the guy they’re just an object. That the guy might only be wanting to get his, you know, his, you know”—Walter’s voice dropped to a whisper—“his dick sucked by somebody young and pretty. That that might be his only interest.”

  “Sorry, not computing,” Katz said. “What’s wrong with being admired? This is not computing at all.”

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  An A train arrived, and they crowded onto it. Almost immediately, Katz saw the light of recognition in the eyes of a college-age kid standing by the opposite doors. Katz lowered his head and turned away, but the kid had the temerity to touch him on the shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but you’re the musician, right? You’re Richard Katz.”

  “Perhaps not sorrier than I am,” Katz said.

  “I’m not going to bother you. I just wanted to say I really love your stuff.”

  “OK, thanks, man,” Katz said, his eyes on the floor.

  “Especially the older stuff, which I’m just starting to get into. Reactionary Splendor? Oh, my God. It is so fucking brilliant. It’s on my iPod right now. Here, I’ll show you.”

  “That’s OK. I believe you.”

  “Oh, sure, no, of course. Of course. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m just a huge fan.”