Freedom [256]
“No, no, no, honey,” she said, smiling, nose to nose with him, when he brought it up in their tent, in a Kern County campground. “This is what you get with me. You knew that. I’m not like other girls. I’m a freak like you’re a freak, just in a different way. I made that clear, didn’t I?”
“You absolutely did. I was just checking.”
“Well, you can check, but the answer will always be the same.”
“Do you know why? Why you’re different?”
“No, but I know what I am. I’m the girl that doesn’t want a baby. That’s my mission in the world. That’s my message.”
“I love what you are.”
“Then let this be the thing that isn’t perfect for you.”
They spent the month of June in Santa Cruz, where Lalitha’s best college friend, Lydia Han, was a grad student in literature. They crashed on her floor, then they camped in her back yard, then they camped in the redwoods. Using Joey’s money, Lalitha had bought plane tickets for the twenty interns she’d chosen. Lydia Han’s faculty adviser, Chris Connery, a wild-haired Marxist and China scholar, allowed the interns to unroll their sleeping bags on his lawn and use his bathrooms, and he provided the Free Space cadre with a campus conference room for three days of intensive training and planning. Walter’s apparent fascination to the eighteen girls among them—dreadlocked or scalped, harrowingly pierced and/or tattooed, their collective fertility so intense he could almost smell it—made him blush constantly as he preached to them the evils of unchecked population growth. He was relieved to escape and go hiking with Professor Connery in the free spaces surrounding Santa Cruz, through the brown hills and dripping redwood glades, listen to Connery’s optimistic prophecies of global economic collapse and workers’ revolution, see the unfamiliar birds of coastal California, and meet some of the young freegans and radical collectivists who were living on public lands in principled squalor. I should have been a college professor, he thought.
Only in July, when they forsook the safety of Santa Cruz and hit the road again, were they immersed in the rage that was gripping the country that summer. Why the conservatives, who controlled all three branches of the federal government, were still so enraged—at respectful skeptics of the Iraq War, at gay couples who wanted to get married, at bland Al Gore and cautious Hillary Clinton, at endangered species and their advocates, at taxes and gas prices that were among the lowest of any industrialized nation, at a mainstream media whose corporate owners were themselves conservative, at the Mexicans who cut their grass and washed their dishes—was somewhat mysterious to Walter. His father had been enraged like that, of course, but in a much more liberal era. And the conservative rage had engendered a left-wing counter-rage that practically scorched off his eyebrows at the Free Space events in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Among the young people he spoke to, the all-purpose epithet for everyone from George Bush and Tim Russert to Tony Blair and John Kerry was “shithead.” That 9/11 had been orchestrated by Halliburton and the Saudi royal family was a near-universal article of faith. Three different garage bands performed songs in which they artlessly fantasized about torturing and killing the president and vice president (I shit in your mouth / Big Dick, it feels pretty nice / Yeah, little Georgie / A gunshot to the temple will suffice). Lalitha had impressed on the interns