Freedom [116]
“Now that what.”
“Nothing. She was doing something else with her money, before, that I thought was very bad.”
“Is she sick? Is there a medical problem?”
“No. Not physically. By dying soon I think she means in the next forty years. The way we’re all going to die soon.”
“I’m really sorry, man. I had no idea.”
A navigational beacon in Katz’s black Levi’s, a long-dormant transmitter buried by a more advanced civilization, was sparking back to life. Where he ought to have felt guilty, he instead was getting hard. Oh, the clairvoyance of the dick: it could see the future in a heartbeat, leaving the brain to play catch-up and find the necessary route from occluded present to preordained outcome. Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unreadable to Walter at ground level but clear as could be to Katz at great height. IT’S NOT OVER, IT’S NOT OVER. The parallels between his life and hers were really almost eerie: a brief period of creative productivity, followed by a major change that turned out to be a disappointment and a mess, followed by drugs and despair, followed by the taking of a stupid job. Katz had been assuming that his situation was simply that success had wrecked him, but it was also true, he realized, that his worst years as a songwriter had precisely coincided with his years of estrangement from the Berglunds. And, yes, he hadn’t given much thought to Patty in the last two years, but he could feel now, in his pants, that this was mainly because he’d assumed their story was over.
“How do Patty and the girl get along?”
“They don’t speak,” Walter said.
“So not buddies.”
“No, I’m saying they literally don’t speak to each other. Each of them knows when the other’s usually in the kitchen. They go out of their way to avoid each other.”
“And which one started that?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“OK.”
On the station bar’s sound system, “That’s What I Like About You” was playing. It seemed to Katz the perfect soundtrack for the neon Bud Light signage, the fake leaded-glass lampshades, the durably polyurethaned crap furniture with its embedded commuter grime. He was still reasonably safe from hearing one of his own songs played in a place like this, but he knew it was a safety only of degree, not of category.
“Patty’s decided she doesn’t like anybody under thirty,” Walter said. “She’s formed a prejudice against an entire generation. And, being Patty, she’s very funny on the subject. But it’s gotten pretty vicious and out of control.”
“Whereas you seem quite taken with the younger generation,” Katz said.
“All it takes to disprove a general law is one counterexample. I’ve got at least two great ones in Jessica and Lalitha.”
“But not Joey?”
“And if there are two,” Walter said, as if he hadn’t even heard his son’s name, “there are bound to be a lot more. That’s the premise of what I want to do this summer. Trust that young people still have brains and a social conscience, and then give them something to work with.”
“You know, we’re very different, you and me,” Katz said. “I don’t do vision. I don’t do belief. And I’m impatient with the kiddies. You remember that about me, right?”
“I remember that you’re often wrong about yourself. I think you believe in a lot more than you give yourself credit for. You’ve got a whole cult following because of your integrity.”
“Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.”
“So, what, should I not have called you?” Walter said