Freedom полностью

Five was an appropriate-sized brood for a songbird, since birds were everywhere being persecuted and routed by humanity, but not for a human being, and the number made it harder for Walter to feel sorry for Mitch. Imperfectly hidden at the back of his mind was a wish that everybody else in the world would reproduce a little less, so that he might reproduce a little more, once more, with Lalitha. The wish, of course, was shameful: he was the leader of an antigrowth group, he’d already had two kids at a demographically deplorable young age, he was no longer disappointed in his son, he was almost old enough to be a grandfather. And still he couldn’t stop imagining making Lalitha big with child. It was at the root of all their fucking, it was the meaning encoded in how beautiful he found her body.

“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.