He put the glasses on and looked at me calmly, tucking the handkerchief back into his shirt pocket. “It seems to me,” he said, “that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only ‘Take what you want, says God’; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone’s outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that’s come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can’t afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture-theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth.”
He didn’t sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. “I don’t consider this anything to become incensed about,” he said, reading my look. “In fact, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising to anyone. We’ve taken what we wanted and we’re paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man-what’s his name? the prime minister-comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television,” he added, a little peevishly. “We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle and blinked at me through the lenses. “I have always accepted,” he said simply, “that there is a price to pay.”
“For what?” I said. “What do you want?”
Daniel considered this-not the answer itself, I think, but how best to explain it to me-in silence. “At first,” he said eventually, “it was more a matter of what I didn’t want. Well before I finished college, it had become clear to me that the standard deal-a modicum of luxury, in exchange for one’s free time and comfort-wasn’t for me. I was happy to live frugally, if that was what it took, in order to avoid the nine-to-five cubicle. I was more than willing to sacrifice the new car and the sun holidays and the-what are those things?-the iPod.”
I was on the edge of my nerves already, and the thought of Daniel on a beach in Torremolinos, drinking a technicolor cocktail and bopping along to his iPod, almost made me lose it. He glanced up at me with a faint smile. “It wouldn’t have been much of a sacrifice, no. But what I failed to take into account is that no man is an island; that I couldn’t simply opt out of the prevailing mode. When a specific deal becomes standard throughout a society-reaches critical mass, so to speak-no alternatives are readily available. Living simply isn’t actually an option these days; either one becomes a worker bee, or one lives on toast in a wretched bedsit with fourteen students directly overhead, and I wasn’t particularly taken with that idea either. I did try it for a while, but it was practically impossible to work with all the noise, and the landlord was this sinister old countryman who kept coming into the flat at the oddest hours and wanting to chat, and… well, anyway. Freedom and comfort are at a high premium just now. If you want those, you have to be willing to pay a correspondingly high price.”
“Didn’t you have other options?” I said. “I thought you had money.”
Daniel gave me a fishy stare; I gave him a bland one back. Eventually he sighed. “I believe I’d like a drink,” he said. “I think I left-Yes, here it is.” He had leaned sideways to feel under the bench, and I was braced and ready before I knew it-there was nothing handy that could make a weapon, but if I whipped ivy in his face, it might give me enough of a start to get to the mike and yell for backup-but he came back up with a half-full whiskey bottle. “I brought it out here last night, and then forgot it in all the excitement. And there should be-Yes.” He brought out a glass. “Will you have some?”
It was good stuff, Jameson’s Crested Ten, and God knows I could have used a drink. “No, thanks,” I said. No unnecessary risks; this guy was a whole lot smarter than your average bear.
Daniel nodded, examined the glass and bent to rinse it in the trickle of water. “Have you ever considered,” he inquired, “the sheer level of fear in this country?”
