literally sleepwalking,” she pleaded to Vin Haven. “I don’t know how many trazodones he took, but it was more than one, and just a few hours earlier. He literally didn’t know what he was saying. It was my fault for letting him make the speech. You should fire me, not him.”
“Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying,” Vin replied, with surprisingly little anger. “It’s a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.”
Vin had organized a conference call with his trustees, who had rubber-stamped his proposal to terminate Walter immediately, and he’d instructed his lawyers to exercise his repurchase option on the Berglunds’ condominium portion of the mansion in Georgetown. Lalitha notified the applicants for Free Space internships that her funding had been cut off, that Richard Katz was withdrawing from the project (Walter, from his hospital bed, had finally prevailed on this), and that the very existence of Free Space was in doubt. Some of the applicants e-mailed back to cancel their applications; two of them said they still hoped to volunteer; the rest did not reply at all. Because Walter was facing eviction from the mansion and refused to speak to his wife, Lalitha called her for him. Patty arrived with a rented van a few days later, while Walter hid out at the nearest Starbucks, and packed up the belongings she didn’t want put in storage.
It was at the end of that very unpleasant day, after Patty had departed and Walter had returned from caffeinated exile, that Lalitha checked her BlackBerry and found eighty new messages from young people all over the country, inquiring whether it was too late to volunteer for Free Space. Their e-mail addresses had more piquant flavors than the [email protected] of the earlier applicants. They were freakinfreegan and iedtarget, they were pornfoetal and jainboy3 and jwlindhjr, @gmail and @cruzio. By the following morning, there were a hundred more messages, along with offers from garage bands in four cities—Seattle, Missoula, Buffalo, and Detroit—to help organize Free Space events in their communities.
What had happened, as Lalitha soon figured out, was that the local TV footage of Walter’s rant and the ensuing riot had gone viral. It had lately become possible to stream video over the internet, and the Whitmanville clip (CancerOnThePlanet.wmv) had flashed across the radical fringes of the blogosphere, the sites of 9/11-conspiracy-mongers and the tree-sitters and the Fight Club devotees and the PETA-ites, one of whom had then unearthed the link to Free Space on the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s website. And overnight, despite having lost its funding and its musical headliner, Free Space acquired a bona-fide fan base and, in the person of Walter, a hero.
It was a long time since he’d done much giggling, but he was giggling all the time now, and then groaning because his ribs hurt. He went out one afternoon and came home with a used white Econoline van and a can of green spray paint and crudely wrote free space on the van’s flanks and rear end. He wanted to go ahead and spend his own money, from the impending proceeds of the house sale, to fund the group through the summer, to print up literature and pay a pittance to the interns and offer some prize money to the battling bands, but Lalitha foresaw potential divorce-related legal issues and wouldn’t let him. Whereupon Joey, altogether unexpectedly, after learning of his father’s summer plans, wrote Free Space a check for $100,000.
“This is ridiculous, Joey,” Walter said. “I can’t take this.”
“Sure you can,” Joey said. “The rest is going to veterans, but Connie and I think your cause is interesting, too. You took care of me when I was little, right?”
“Yes, because you were my child. That’s what parents do. We don’t expect repayment. You never quite seemed to understand that concept.”
“But isn’t it funny that I can do this? Isn’t it a pretty good joke? This is just Monopoly money. It’s meaningless to me.”
“I have my own savings I could spend if I wanted to.”
“Well, you can save that for when you’re old,” Joey said. “It’s not like I’m going to be giving everything to charity when I start making money in a real way. This is special circumstances.”
Walter was so proud of Joey, so grateful not to be fighting him anymore, and so inclined, therefore, to let him be the big guy, that he didn’t fight