Freedom [207]
Then, on the Fourth of July, during a family visit he was making only to be nice, he vouchsafed to his father the details of his work at RISEN, hoping to impress him with the size of his salary and the scope of his responsibilities; and his father all but disowned him on the spot. Until now, all his life, their relationship had essentially been a standoff, a stalemate of wills. But now his dad was no longer content to send him on his way with a lecture about his coldness and his arrogance. Now he was shouting that Joey made him sick, that it physically disgusted him to have raised a son so selfish and unthinking that he was willing to connive with monsters trashing the country for their personal enrichment. His mother, instead of defending him, ran for her life: upstairs, to her little room. He knew she would be calling him the next morning, trying to smooth things over, feeding him crap about how his dad was only angry because he loved him. But she was too cowardly to stick around, and there was nothing he could do himself but cross his arms tightly and make his face a mask and shake his head and tell his dad, over and over, not to criticize things he didn’t understand.
“What’s not to understand?” his father said. “This is a war for politics and profit. Period!”
“Just because you don’t like people’s politics,” Joey said, “it doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong. You’re pretending that everything they do is bad, you’re hoping they’re going to fail at everything, because you hate their politics. You don’t even want to hear about the good things that are happening.”
“There are no good things happening.”
“Oh, right. It’s a black-and-white world. We’re all bad and you’re all good.”
“You think the way the world works is that Middle Eastern kids the same age as you are getting their heads and their legs blown off so you can make a ton of money? That’s the perfect world you live in?”
“Obviously not, Dad. Would you stop being stupid for a second? People are getting killed over there because their economy is fucked up. We’re trying to fix their economy, OK?”
“You shouldn’t be making eight thousand dollars a month,” his dad said. “I know you think you’re very smart, but there is something wrong with a world where an unskilled nineteen-year-old can do that. Your situation stinks of corruption. You smell really bad to me.”
“Jesus, Dad. Whatever.”
“I don’t even want to know what you’re doing anymore. It makes me too sick. You can tell it to your mother, but do me a favor and leave me out.”
Joey smiled fiercely to keep himself from crying. He was experiencing a hurt that felt structural, as if he and his dad had each chosen their politics for the sole purpose of hating the other, and the only way out of it was disengagement. Not telling his dad anything, not seeing him again unless he absolutely had to, sounded good to him, too. He wasn’t even angry, he just wanted to leave the hurt behind. He taxied home to his furnished studio apartment, which his mom had helped him rent, and sent messages to both Connie and Jenna. Connie must have gone to bed early, but Jenna called him back at midnight. She wasn’t the world’s best listener, but she got enough of the gist of his rotten Fourth to assure him that the world wasn’t fair and was never going to be fair, that there would always be big winners and big losers, and that she personally, in the tragically finite life that she’d been given, preferred to be a winner and to surround herself with winners. When he then confronted her with not having called him from McLean, she