Freedom полностью

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 State was canceled, it was stupid that so many kids left Grounds to be with their families (and it was stupid that everybody at Virginia said “Grounds” instead of “campus”). The four liberal kids on Joey’s hall had endless stupid arguments with the twenty conservative kids, as if anybody cared what a bunch of eighteen-year-olds thought about the Middle East. A stupidly big fuss was made about the students who’d lost relatives or family friends in the attacks, as if the other kinds of horrible death that were constantly occurring in the world mattered less, and there was stupid applause when a vanful of upperclassmen solemnly departed for New York to give succor to the Ground Zero workers, as if there weren’t enough people in New York to do the job. Joey just wanted normal life to return as fast as possible. He felt as if he’d bumped his old Discman against a wall and knocked its laser out of a track he’d been enjoying and into a track he didn’t recognize or like and also couldn’t make stop playing. Before long, he was so lonely and isolated and hungry for familiar things that he made the rather serious mistake of giving Connie Monaghan permission to take a Greyhound bus to visit him in Charlottesville, thereby undoing a summer’s worth of spadework to prepare her for their inevitable breakup.

All summer, he’d labored to impress on Connie the importance of not getting together for at least nine months, so as to test their feelings for each other. The idea was to develop independent selves and see if these independent selves were still a good match, but to Joey this was no more a “test” than a high-school chemistry “experiment” was research. Connie would end up staying in Minnesota while he pursued a business career and met girls who were more exotic and advanced and connected. Or so he’d imagined before 9/11.

He was careful to schedule Connie’s visit while Jonathan was at home in NoVa for a Jewish holiday. She spent the entire weekend camped out on Joey’s bed with her overnight bag beside her on the floor, zipping her things back inside it as soon as she was done with them, as if trying to minimize her footprint. While Joey endeavored to read Plato for a Monday-morning class, she pored over the faces in his first-year facebook and laughed at the ones with odd expressions or unfortunate names. Bailey Bodsworth, Crampton Ott, Taylor Tuttle. By Joey’s reliable count, they had sex eight times in forty hours, stoning themselves repeatedly on the hydroponic bud she’d brought along. When it came time to take her back to the bus station, he loaded a bunch of new songs onto her MP3 player for the punishing twenty-hour return trip to Minnesota. The sorry truth was that he felt responsible for her, knew he needed to break up with her anyway, and couldn’t think how.

At the bus station, he raised the subject of her education, which she’d promised to pursue but somehow, in her obdurate way, without explanation, hadn’t.

“You need to start taking classes in January,” he told her. “Start at Inver Hills and then maybe transfer to the U. next year.”

“OK,” she said.

“You’re really smart,” he said. “You can’t just keep being a waitress.”

“OK.” She looked away desolately at the line forming by her bus. “I’ll do it for you.”

“Not for me. For you. Like you promised.”

She shook her head. “You just want me to forget about you.”

“Not true, not true at all,” Joey said, although it was fairly true.