Freedom [117]
“No, it’s good you called. It’s been too long.”
“I think I figured you’d outgrown us or something. I mean, I know I’m not a cool person. I figured you were done with us.”
“Sorry, man. I just got really busy.”
But Walter was becoming upset, nearly tearful. “It almost seemed like you were embarrassed by me. Which I understand, but it still doesn’t feel very good. I thought we were friends.”
“I said I was sorry,” Katz said. He was angered both by Walter’s emotion and by the irony or injustice of needing to apologize, twice, for having tried to do him a favor. It was generally his policy never to apologize at all.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Walter said. “But maybe some acknowledgment of the fact that Patty and I helped you. That you wrote all those songs in my mother’s house. That we’re your oldest friends. I’m not going to dwell on this, but I want to clear the air and let you know what I’ve been feeling, so I don’t have to feel it anymore.”
The angry stirring of Katz’s blood was of a piece with the divinations of his dick. I’m going to do you a different kind of favor now, old friend, he thought. We’re going to finish some unfinished business, and you and the girl will thank me for it.
“It’s good to clear the air,” he said.
WOMANLAND
Growing up in St. Paul, Joey Berglund had received numberless assurances that his life was destined to be a lucky one. The way star halfbacks talk about a great open-field run, the sense of cutting and weaving at full speed through a defense that moved in slow motion, the entire field of play as all-visible and instantaneously graspable as a video game at Rookie level, was the way every facet of his life had felt for his first eighteen years. The world had given unto him, and he was fine with taking. He arrived as a first-year student in Charlottesville with the ideal clothes and haircut and found that the school had paired him with a perfect roommate from NoVa (as the locals called the Virginia suburbs of D.C.). For two and a half weeks, college looked like it would be an extension of the world as he had always known it, only better. He was so convinced of this—took it so much for granted—that on the morning of September 11 he actually left his roommate, Jonathan, to monitor the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon while he hurried off to his Econ 201 lecture. Not until he reached the big auditorium and found it all but empty did he understand that a really serious glitch had occurred.
Try as he might, in the weeks and months that followed, he could not recall what he’d been thinking as he’d crossed the semi-deserted campus. It was highly uncharacteristic of him to be so clueless, and the deep chagrin he’d then experienced, on the steps of the Chemistry Building, became the seed of his intensely personal resentment of the terrorist attacks. Later, as his troubles began to mount, it would seem to him as if his very good luck, which his childhood had taught him to consider his birthright, had been trumped by a stroke of higher-order bad luck so wrong as not even to be real. He kept waiting for its wrongness, its fraudulence, to be exposed, and for the world to be set right again, so that he could have the college experience he’d expected. When this failed to happen, he was gripped by an anger whose specific object refused to come into focus. The culprit, in hindsight, seemed almost like bin Laden, but not quite. The culprit was something deeper, something not political, something structurally malicious, like the bump in a sidewalk that trips you and lands you on your face when you’re out innocently walking.
In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to Joey. It was stupid that a “Vigil of Concern” was held for no conceivable practical reason, it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster footage over and over, it was stupid that the Chi Phi boys hung a banner of “support” from their house, it was stupid that the football game against Penn