Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Fucking Kenny,” he said aloud, thinking what a very inconvenient time this was to be developing a conscience. “Fucking criminal.”

  Back in Miami, waiting for his last connecting flight, he forced himself to call Connie.

  “Hi, baby,” she said brightly. “How’s Buenos Aires?”

  He skated past the details of his itinerary and cut straight to an account of his anxieties.

  “It sounds like you did fantastic,” Connie said. “I mean, twenty thousand dollars, that’s a great price, right?”

  “Except that it’s about nineteen thousand more than the stuff is worth.”

  “No, baby, it’s worth what Kenny will pay you.”

  “And you don’t think I should be, like, morally worried about this? About selling total crap to the government?”

  She went silent while she considered this. “I guess,” she said finally, “if it makes you too unhappy, you maybe shouldn’t do it. I only want you to do things that make you happy.”

  “I’m not going to lose your money,” he said. “That’s the one thing I know.”

  “No, you can lose it. It’s OK. You’ll make some more money somewhere else. I trust you.”

  “I’m not going to lose it. I want you to go back to college. I want us to have a life together.”

  “Well, then, let’s have it! I’m ready if you are. I’m so ready.”

  Out on the tarmac, under an unsettled gray Floridian sky, proven weapons of mass destruction were taxiing hither and thither. Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else’s expense. “I got a message from your mom,” he said.

  “I know,” Connie said. “I was bad, Joey. I didn’t tell her anything, but she saw my ring and she asked me, and I couldn’t not tell her then.”

  “She was bitching about how I should tell my parents.”

  “So let her bitch. You’ll tell them when you’re ready.”

  He was in a somber mood when he got back to Alexandria. No longer having Jenna to look forward to or fantasize about, no longer being able to imagine a good outcome in Paraguay, no longer having anything but unpleasant tasks before him, he ate an entire large bag of ruffled potato chips and called Jonathan to repent and seek solace in friendship. “And here’s the worst of it,” he said. “I went down there as a married man.”

  “Dude!” Jonathan said. “You married Connie?”

  “Yeah. I did. In August.”

  “That is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I thought I’d better tell you, since you’ll probably hear about it from Jenna. Who it’s safe to say is not very happy with me right now.”

  “She must be royally pissed off.”

  “You know, I know you think she’s awful, but she’s not. She’s just really lost, and all anybody can see is what she looks like. She’s so much less lucky than you are.”

  Joey proceeded to tell Jonathan the story of the ring, and the ghastly scene in the bathroom, with his hands full of crap and Jenna knocking on the door, and in his own laughter and in Jonathan’s laughter and disgusted groans he found the solace he’d been looking for. What had been abhorrent for five minutes made a great story forever after. When he went on to admit that Jonathan had been right about Kenny Bartles, Jonathan’s response was clear and adamant: “You’ve got to bail out of that contract.”

  “It’s not so easy. I’ve got to protect Connie’s investment.”

  “Find a way out. Just do it. The stuff going on over there is really bad. It’s worse than you even know.”

  “Do you still hate me?” Joey said.

  “I don’t hate you. I think you’ve been a total asshole. But hating you doesn’t seem to be an option for me.”

  Joey felt enough cheered by this talk to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours. The next morning, when it was midafternoon in Iraq, he called Kenny Bartles and asked to be let out of his contract.

  “What about all the parts in Paraguay?” Kenny said.

  “There was plenty of weight. But it’s all useless rusted shit.”

  “Send it anyway. My ass is on the line.”

  “You’re the one who bought the stupid A10s,” Joey said. “It’s not my fault there’s no parts for them.”

  “You just told me there’s plenty of parts. And I’m telling you to send them. What am I not understanding here?”

  “I’m saying I think you should find somebody else to buy me out. I don’t want to be a part of this.”

  “Joey, whoa, man, listen. You signed the contract. And this is not the eleventh hour for Shipment Number One, this is the fucking thirteenth hour. You cannot back out on me now. Not unless you want to eat whatever you’re already out of pocket. At the moment, I don’t even have the cash to buy you out, because the Army hasn’t paid me for the parts yet, because your Polish shipment was too light. Try to look at this from my side, would you?”

  “But the stuff in Paraguay looks so bad, I don’t think they’re even going to accept it.”

  “You leave that to me. I know the LBI people on the ground here. I can make it work. You just need to send me thirty tons, and then you can go back to reading poetry or whatever.”

  “How do I know you can make it work?”

  “That’s my problem, right? Your contract is with me, and I’m saying just get me weight and you will get your money.”

  Joey didn’t know which was worse, the fear that Kenny was lying to him and that he would be screwed not only out of the money he’d already spent but out of the vast additional outlays still ahead of him, or the idea that Kenny was telling the truth and LBI was going to pay $850K for nearly worthless parts. He saw no choice but to go over Kenny’s head and talk directly to LBI. This entailed a morning of being passed around telephonically by people at LBI headquarters, in Dallas, before he was connected with the pertinent vice president. He laid out his dilemma as plainly as possible: “There aren’t any good parts available for this truck, Kenny Bartles won’t buy out the contract for me, and I don’t want to send you bad parts.”

  “Is Bartles willing to accept what you’ve got?” the VP said.

  “Yeah. But they’re no good.”

  “Not your worry. If Bartles accepts them, you’re off the hook. I suggest you make the shipment right away.”

  “I don’t think you’re quite hearing me,” Joey said. “I’m saying you don’t want that shipment.”

  The VP digested this for a moment and said, “We will not be doing business with Kenny Bartles in the future. We’re not at all happy about the A10 situation. But that is not your worry. Your worry should be getting sued for nonfulfillment of contract.”

  “Who—by Kenny?”

  “It’s a total hypothetical. It’s never going to happen, as long as you send the parts. You just need to remember that this is not a perfect war in a perfect world.”

  And Joey tried to remember this. Tried to remember that the worst that could happen, in this less than perfect world, was that all the A10s would break down and need to be replaced by better trucks at a later date, and that victory in Iraq might thereby be infinitesimally delayed, and that American taxpayers would have wasted a few million dollars on him and Kenny Bartles and Armando da Rosa and the creeps in Lodz. With the same determination that he’d brought to grabbing hold of his own turds, he flew back to Paraguay and hired an expediter and oversaw the loading of thirty-two tons of parts into containers and drank five bottles of wine in the five nights he had to wait for Logística Internacional to forklift them into a veteran C-130 and fly off with them; but there was no gold ring hidden in this particular pile of shit. When he got back to Washington, he kept right on drinking, and when Connie finally came out with three suitcases and moved in with him, he kept drinking and slept badly, and when Kenny called from Kirkuk to say that the delivery had been accepted and that Joey’s $850,000 was in the pipeline, he had such a bad night that he called Jonathan and confessed wh
at he had done.

  “Oh, dude, that’s bad,” Jonathan said.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “You just better hope you don’t get caught. I’m already hearing a lot of stories from that eighteen billion in contracts they let in November. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get congressional hearings.”

  “Is there somebody I can tell? I don’t even want the money, except what I owe Connie and the bank.”

  “That’s very noble of you.”

  “I couldn’t screw Connie out of the money. You know that’s the only reason I did it. But I’m wondering if maybe you could tell somebody at the Post what’s going on. Like, that you heard something from an anonymous source?”

  “Not if you want it to stay anonymous. And if you don’t, you know who’s going to get smeared, don’t you?”

  “But if I’m the whistle-blower?”

  “The minute you blow the whistle, Kenny smears you. LBI smears you. They’ve got a whole line item in their budget for smearing whistle-blowers. You’ll be the perfect scapegoat. The pretty-faced college kid with the rusty truck parts? The Post will eat it up. Not that your sentiment doesn’t do you credit. But I highly recommend you stay mum.”

  Connie found work at a temp agency while they waited for the dirty $850,000 to filter down through the system. Joey wandered through his days watching TV and playing video games and trying to learn how to be domestic, how to plan a dinner and shop for it, but the simplest short trip to the supermarket exhausted him. The depression that for years had stalked the women nearest him seemed finally to have identified its rightful prey and sunk its teeth in him. The one thing he knew he absolutely had to do, which was tell his family that he’d married Connie, he could not do. Its necessity filled the little apartment like a Pladsky A10 truck, confining him to the margins, leaving him insufficient air to breathe. It was there when he woke up and there when he went to bed. He couldn’t imagine giving the news to his mother, because she would inevitably perceive the marriage as a pointed personal blow to her. Which, in a way, it probably was. But he dreaded no less the conversation with his father, the reopening of that wound. And so, every day, even as the secret suffocated him, even as he imagined Carol blabbing the news to all his former neighbors, one of whom would surely tell his parents soon, he put off making the announcement another day. That Connie never nagged him only made the problem more solely his.

  And then one night, on CNN, he saw the news of an ambush outside Fallujah in which several American trucks had broken down, leaving their contract drivers to be butchered by insurgents. Although he didn’t see any A10s in the CNN footage, he became so anxious that he had to drink himself to sleep. He woke up some hours later, in a sweat, mostly sober, beside his wife, who slept literally like a baby—with that world-trusting sweet stillness—and he knew he had to call his father in the morning. He’d never felt so afraid of anything as of making this call. But he could see now that nobody else could advise him what to do, whether to blow the whistle and suffer the consequences or stay mum and keep the money, and that nobody else could absolve him. Connie’s love was too unqualified, his mother’s too self-involved, Jonathan’s too secondary. It was to his strict, principled father that a full accounting needed to be made. He’d been battling him all his life, and now the time had come to admit that he was beaten.

  THE FIEND OF WASHINGTON

  Walter’s father, Gene, was the youngest child of a difficult Swede named Einar Berglund who had immigrated at the turn of the twentieth century. There had been a lot not to like about rural Sweden—compulsory military service, Lutheran pastors meddling in the lives of their parishioners, a social hierarchy that all but precluded upward mobility—but what had actually driven Einar to America, according to the story that Dorothy told Walter, was a problem with his mother.

  Einar had been the oldest of eight children, the princeling of his family on its farm in south Österland. His mother, who was perhaps not the first woman to be unsatisfied in her marriage to a Berglund, had favored her firstborn outrageously, dressing him in finer clothes than his siblings were given, feeding him the cream from the others’ milk, and excusing him from farm chores so that he could devote himself to his education and his grooming. (“The vainest man I ever met,” Dorothy said.) The maternal sun had shone on Einar for twenty years, but then, by mistake, his mother had a late baby, a son, and fell for him the way she’d once fallen for Einar; and Einar never forgave her for it. Unable to stand not being the favored one, he sailed for America on his twenty-second birthday. Once he was there, he never went back to Sweden, never saw his mother again, proudly avowed that he’d forgotten every word of his mother tongue, and delivered, at the slightest provocation, lengthy diatribes against “the stupidest, smuggest, narrow-mindedest country on earth.” He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.

  As a young man in Minnesota, working first as a logger clear-cutting the last virgin forests and then as a digger in a road-building gang, and not making good money at either, Einar had been attracted to the Communist notion that his labor was being exploited by East Coast capitalists. Then one day, listening to a Communist fulminator in Pioneer Square, he’d had a eureka moment in which he realized that the way to get ahead in his new country was to exploit some labor himself. With several of the younger brothers who’d followed him to America, he went into business as a road-building contractor. To keep busy in the frozen months, he and his brothers also founded a small town on the banks of the upper Mississippi and opened a general store. His politics may still have been radical at that point, because he extended endless credit to the Communist farmers, many of them Finnish, who were struggling to make a living beyond the grasp of East Coast capital. The store quickly became a money-loser, and Einar was at the point of selling his share in it when a former friend of his, a man named Christiansen, opened a rival store across the street. Purely out of spite (according to Dorothy), Einar operated the store for another five years, right through the Great Depression’s nadir, accumulating unpayable chits from every farmer within ten miles of town, until poor Christiansen was finally driven into bankruptcy. Einar then relocated to Bemidji, where he did good business as a road builder but ended up selling his company at a disastrously low price to an oily-mannered associate who’d pretended to have socialist sympathies.

  America, for Einar, was the land of unSwedish freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a son could still imagine he was special. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. Having achieved, through his native intelligence and hard labor, a degree of affluence and independence, but not nearly enough of either, he became a study in anger and disappointment. After his retirement, in the 1950s, he began sending his relatives annual Christmas letters in which he lambasted the stupidity of America’s government, the inequities of its political economy, and the fatuity of its religion—drawing, for example, in one particularly caustic Christmas greeting, a cunning parallel between the unwed madonna of Bethlehem and the “Swedish whore” Ingrid Bergman, the birth of whose own “bastard” (Isabella Rossellini) had lately been celebrated by American media controlled by “corporate interests.” Though an entrepreneur himself, Einar detested big business. Though he’d made a career of government contracts, he hated the government as well. And though he loved the open road, the road made him miserable and crazy. He bought American sedans with the biggest engines available, so that he could do ninety and a hundred on the dead-flat Minnesota state highways, many of them built by him, and roar past the stupid people in his way. If an oncoming car approached him at night with its high beams on, Einar’s response was to put his own high beams on and leave them on. If some pinhead dared to try to pass him on a two-lane road, he
floored the accelerator to keep pace and then decelerated to prevent the would-be passer from getting back in line, taking special pleasure when there was danger of a collision with an oncoming truck. If another driver cut him off or refused him the right of way, he pursued the offending car and tried to force it off the road, so that he could jump out and shout curses at its driver. (The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.) Einar was seventy-eight when an extremely poor driving decision forced him to choose between a head-on crash and a deep ditch by the side of Route 2. His wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat and, unlike Einar, was wearing a seat belt, lingered for three days at the hospital in Grand Rapids before expiring of her burns. According to the police, she might have survived if she hadn’t tried to pull her dead husband out of their burning Eldorado. “He treated her like a dog all his life,” Walter’s father said afterward, “and then he killed her.”

  Of Einar’s four kids, Gene was the one without ambition who stayed close to home, the one who wanted to enjoy life, the one with a thousand friends. This was partly his nature and partly a conscious reproof of his father. Gene had been a high-school hockey star in Bemidji and then, following Pearl Harbor, to the chagrin of his antimilitarist father, an early enlister in the Army. He served two tours in the Pacific, emerging both unwounded and unpromoted past PFC, and returned to Bemidji to party with his friends and work at a garage and ignore his father’s stern injunctions to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. It wasn’t clear that he would have married Dorothy if he hadn’t made her pregnant, but once they were married he set about loving her with all the tenderness he believed his father had denied his mother.