Free Purity by Jonathan Franzen Page A

he’d refused to go downstairs with her, insisting that he wasn’t hungry, two of Stephen’s young friends from Occupy had arrived with quarts of low-end beer. She found the three of them sitting at the kitchen table, talking not about Marie but about wage/price feedback loops. She preheated the oven for the frozen pizzas that were Dreyfuss’s contribution to communal cooking, and it occurred to her that she would probably get stuck with more cooking now that Marie was gone. She considered the problem of communal labor while Stephen and his friends, Garth and Erik, imagined a labor utopia. Their theory was that the technology-driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.
    â€œI have a question, though,” Pip said as she tore up the head of romaine lettuce that Dreyfuss considered a salad in itself. “If one person is getting paid forty thousand dollars a year to be a consumer, and another person is getting forty thousand to change bedpans in a nursing home, isn’t the person changing bedpans going to kind of resent the person doing nothing?”
    â€œThe service worker would have to be paid more,” Garth said.
    â€œA lot more,” Pip said.
    â€œIn a fair world,” Erik said, “those nursing-home workers would be the ones driving the Mercedeses.”
    â€œYeah, but even then,” Pip said, “I’d rather just ride a bike and not have to change bedpans.”
    â€œYeah, but if you wanted a Mercedes and changing bedpans was the way to get it?”
    â€œNo, Pip’s right,” Stephen said, which gave her a modest thrill. “The way you’d have to do it is make labor compulsory but then keep lowering the retirement age, so you’d always have full employment for everybody under thirty-two, or thirty-five, or whatever, and full unemployment for everybody over that age.”
    â€œKind of sucks to be young in that world,” Pip said. “Not that it doesn’t already suck in this world.”
    â€œI’d be up for it,” Garth said, “if I knew that starting at thirty-five I’d have the rest of my life to myself.”
    â€œAnd then, if you could get the retirement age down to thirty-two,” Stephen said, “you could make it illegal to have kids before you retire. That would help with the population problem.”
    â€œYeah,” Garth said, “but when the population goes down, the retirement age necessarily goes up, because you still need service workers.”
    Pip took her phone out onto the back porch. She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was. While the light faded in the west, she replied, dutifully, to some texts from her remaining friends and then dutifully left a message for her mother, expressing hope that her eyelid was better. Her own body was still under the impression that something big was about to happen to it. Her heart went dunk, dunk, dunk as she watched the sky above the freeway turn from orange to indigo.
    Dreyfuss was serving pizza when she went back inside, and the talk had turned to Andreas Wolf, the famous bringer of sunlight. She poured herself a large glass of beer.
    â€œWas it a leak, or did they hack in?” Erik