"Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

THE FIEND OF WASHINGTON

Walter’s father, Gene, was the youngest child of a difficult Swede named Einar Berglund who had immigrated at the turn of the twentieth century. There had been a lot not to like about rural Sweden-compulsory military service, Lutheran pastors meddling in the lives of their parishioners, a social hierarchy that all but precluded upward mobility-but what had actually driven Einar to America, according to the story that Dorothy told Walter, was a problem with his mother.

Einar had been the oldest of eight children, the princeling of his family on its farm in south Österland. His mother, who was perhaps not the first woman to be unsatisfied in her marriage to a Berglund, had favored her firstborn outrageously, dressing him in finer clothes than his siblings were given, feeding him the cream from the others’ milk, and excusing him from farm chores so that he could devote himself to his education and his grooming. (“The vainest man I ever met,” Dorothy said.) The maternal sun had shone on Einar for twenty years, but then, by mistake, his mother had a late baby, a son, and fell for him the way she’d once fallen for Einar; and Einar never forgave her for it. Unable to stand not being the favored one, he sailed for America on his twenty-second birthday. Once he was there, he never went back to Sweden, never saw his mother again, proudly avowed that he’d forgotten every word of his mother tongue, and delivered, at the slightest provocation, lengthy diatribes against “the stupidest, smuggest, narrow-mindedest country on earth.” He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.

As a young man in Minnesota, working first as a logger clear-cutting the last virgin forests and then as a digger in a road-building gang, and not making good money at either, Einar had been attracted to the Communist notion that his labor was being exploited by East Coast capitalists. Then one day, listening to a Communist fulminator in Pioneer Square, he’d had a eureka moment in which he realized that the way to get ahead in his new country was to exploit some labor himself. With several of the younger brothers who’d followed him to America, he went into business as a road-building contractor. To keep busy in the frozen months, he and his brothers also founded a small town on the banks of the upper Mississippi and opened a general store. His politics may still have been radical at that point, because he extended endless credit to the Communist farmers, many of them Finnish, who were struggling to make a living beyond the grasp of East Coast capital. The store quickly became a money-loser, and Einar was at the point of selling his share in it when a former friend of his, a man named Christiansen, opened a rival store across the street. Purely out of spite (according to Dorothy), Einar operated the store for another five years, right through the Great Depression’s nadir, accumulating unpayable chits from every farmer within ten miles of town, until poor Christiansen was finally driven into bankruptcy. Einar then relocated to Bemidji, where he did good business as a road builder but ended up selling his company at a disastrously low price to an oily-mannered associate who’d pretended to have socialist sympathies.

America, for Einar, was the land of unSwedish freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a son could still imagine he was special. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. Having achieved, through his native intelligence and hard labor, a degree of affluence and independence, but not nearly enough of either, he became a study in anger and disappointment. After his retirement, in the 1950s, he began sending his relatives annual Christmas letters in which he lambasted the stupidity of America’s government, the inequities of its political economy, and the fatuity of its religion-drawing, for example, in one particularly caustic Christmas greeting, a cunning parallel between the unwed madonna of Bethlehem and the “Swedish whore” Ingrid Bergman, the birth of whose own “bastard” (Isabella Rossellini) had lately been celebrated by American media controlled by “corporate interests.” Though an entrepreneur himself, Einar detested big business. Though he’d made a career of government contracts, he hated the government as well. And though he loved the open road, the road made him miserable and crazy. He bought American sedans with the biggest engines available, so that he could do ninety and a hundred on the dead-flat Minnesota state highways, many of them built by him, and roar past the stupid people in his way. If an oncoming car approached him at night with its high beams on, Einar’s response was to put his own high beams on and leave them on. If some pinhead dared to try to pass him on a two-lane road, he floored the accelerator to keep pace and then decelerated to prevent the would-be passer from getting back in line, taking special pleasure when there was danger of a collision with an oncoming truck. If another driver cut him off or refused him the right of way, he pursued the offending car and tried to force it off the road, so that he could jump out and shout curses at its driver. (The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.) Einar was seventy-eight when an extremely poor driving decision forced him to choose between a head-on crash and a deep ditch by the side of Route 2. His wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat and, unlike Einar, was wearing a seat belt, lingered for three days at the hospital in Grand Rapids before expiring of her burns. According to the police, she might have survived if she hadn’t tried to pull her dead husband out of their burning Eldorado. “He treated her like a dog all his life,” Walter’s father said afterward, “and then he killed her.”

Of Einar’s four kids, Gene was the one without ambition who stayed close to home, the one who wanted to enjoy life, the one with a thousand friends. This was partly his nature and partly a conscious reproof of his father. Gene had been a high-school hockey star in Bemidji and then, following Pearl Harbor, to the chagrin of his antimilitarist father, an early enlister in the Army. He served two tours in the Pacific, emerging both unwounded and unpromoted past PFC, and returned to Bemidji to party with his friends and work at a garage and ignore his father’s stern injunctions to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. It wasn’t clear that he would have married Dorothy if he hadn’t made her pregnant, but once they were married he set about loving her with all the tenderness he believed his father had denied his mother.

That Dorothy ended up working like a dog for him anyway, and that his own son Walter ended up hating him for this, was just one of those twists of family fate. Gene at least did not insist, the way his father had, that he was superior to his wife. On the contrary, he enslaved her with his weakness-his penchant for drink in particular. The other ways in which he came to resemble Einar were similarly roundabout in origin. He was belligerently populist, defiantly proud of his unspecialness, and attracted, therefore, to the dark side of right-wing politics. He was loving and grateful to his wife, he was famed among his friends and fellow vets for his generosity and loyalty, and yet, ever more frequently as he got older, he was given to scalding eruptions of Berglundian resentment. He hated the blacks, the Indians, the well-educated, the hoity-toity, and, especially, the federal government, and he loved his freedoms (to drink, to smoke, to hole up with his buddies in an ice-fishing hut) the more intensely for their being so modest. He was ugly to Dorothy only when she suggested, with timid solicitude-for she mostly blamed Einar, not Gene, for Gene’s shortcomings-that he should drink less.

Gene’s share of Einar’s estate, though much diminished by the self-spiting terms of Einar’s sale of his business, was large enough to put him within reach of the little roadside motel he’d long believed it would be

“neat” to own and manage. The Whispering Pines, when Gene bought it, had a stove-in septic line and a serious mold problem and was already too close to the shoulder of a highway heavily trafficked by ore trucks and due to be widened soon. Behind it was a ravine full of trash and eager young birch trees, one of them growing up through a mangled grocery cart that would eventually strangle and stunt it. Gene should have known that a more cheerful motel was bound to appear on the local market, if he could only be a little patient. But poor business decisions have their own momentum. To invest wisely, he would have had to be a more ambitious kind of person, and since he wasn’t this other kind of person, he was impatient to get his error over with, to shoot his wad and begin the work of forgetting how much money he’d spent, literally forgetting it, literally remembering a sum more like the one he later told Dorothy that he’d paid. There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness. Gene no longer had to fear a big disappointment in the future, because he’d already accomplished it; he’d cleared that hurdle, he’d permanently made himself a victim of the world. He took out a crushing second mortgage to pay for a new septic system, and every subsequent disaster, large or small-a pine tree falling through the office roof, a cash-paying guest in Room 24 cleaning walleyes on the bedspread, the Vacancy sign’s neon NO burning through most of a July Fourth weekend before Dorothy noticed it and turned it off-served to confirm his understanding of the world and his own shabby place in it.

For the first few summers at the Whispering Pines, Gene’s better-off siblings brought their families in from out of state and stayed for a week or two at special family rates whose negotiation left everyone unhappy. Walter’s cousins appropriated the tannin-stained swimming pool while his uncles helped Gene apply sealant to the parking lot or shore up the property’s eroding back slope with railroad ties. Down in the malarial ravine, near the remains of the collapsed shopping cart, Walter’s sophisticated Chicago cousin Leif told informative and harrowing stories of the big-city suburbs; most memorable and worry-provoking, for Walter, was the one about an Oak Park eighth-grader who’d managed to get naked with a girl and then, unsure about what was supposed to happen next, had peed all over her legs. Because Walter’s city cousins were much more like him than his brothers were, those early summers were the happiest of his childhood. Every day brought new adventures and mishaps: hornet stings, tetanus shots, misfiring bottle rockets, ghastly cases of poison ivy, near-drownings. Late at night, when the traffic abated, the pines near the office did honestly whisper.

Soon enough, though, the other Berglund spouses put their collective foot down, and the visits ended. To Gene, this was just more evidence that his siblings looked down on him, considered themselves too fancy for his motel, and generally belonged to that privileged class of Americans which it was becoming his great pleasure to revile and reject. He singled out Walter for derision simply because Walter liked his city cousins and missed seeing them. In the hope of making Walter less like them, Gene assigned his bookish son the dirtiest and most demeaning maintenance tasks. Walter scraped paint, scrubbed stains of blood and semen out of carpeting, and used coat-hanger wire to fish masses of slime and disintegrating hair from bathtub drains. If a guest had left a toilet especially diarrhea-spattered, and if Dorothy was not around to clean it preemptively, Gene took all three of his boys in to view the mess and then, after egging Walter’s brothers into disgusted hilarity, left Walter alone to clean it. Saying: “It’s good for him.” The brothers echoing: “Yeah, it’s good for him!” And if Dorothy got wind of this and chided him, Gene sat smiling and smoking with special relish, absorbing her anger without returning it-proud, as always, of raising neither voice nor hand against her. “Aaaa, Dorothy, leave it alone,” he said. “Work’s good for him. Teach him not to get too full of himself.”

It was as if all of the hostility that Gene might have directed at his college-educated wife, but refused to allow himself for fear of being like Einar, had found a more permissible target in his middle son, who, as Dorothy herself could see, was strong enough to bear it. Dorothy took the long view of justice. In the short run, it may have been unjust for Gene to be so hard on Walter, but in the long run her son was going to be a success, whereas her husband would never amount to much. And Walter himself, by uncomplainingly doing the nasty tasks his father set him, by refusing to cry or to whine to Dorothy, showed his father that he could beat him even at his own game. Gene’s nightly late-night stumblings into furniture, his childish panics when he ran out of cigarettes, his reflexive denigration of successful people: if Walter hadn’t been perpetually occupied with hating him, he might have pitied him. And there was little that Gene feared more than being pitied.

When Walter was nine or ten, he put a handmade No Smoking sign on the door of the room he shared with his little brother, Brent, who was bothered by Gene’s cigarettes. Walter wouldn’t have done it for his own sake-would sooner have let Gene blow smoke straight into his eyes than give him the satisfaction of complaining. And Gene, for his part, didn’t feel comfortable enough with Walter to simply tear the sign down. He contented himself instead with making fun of him. “What if your little brother wants a smoke in the middle of the night? You going to force him to go outside in the cold?”

“He already breathes funny at night from too much smoke,” Walter said.

“This is the first I’ve heard of that.”

“I’m there, I hear him.”

“I’m just saying you posted the sign for the two of you, right, and what does Brent think? He shares the room with you, right?”

“He’s six years old,” Walter said.

“Gene, I think Brent might be allergic to the smoke,” Dorothy said.

“I think Walter is allergic to me.”

“We don’t want anyone having a cigarette in our room, that’s all,” Walter said. “You can smoke outside the door but not in the room itself.”

“I don’t see what difference it makes if the cigarette’s on one side of the door or the other.”

“It’s just the new rule for our room.”

“So you’re making the rules around here now, are you?”

“In our room, yes, I am,” Walter said.

Gene was on the verge of saying something angry when a tired look came over him. He shook his head and produced the crooked, refractory grin with which he’d responded to assertions of authority all his life. He may already have seen, in Brent’s allergy, the excuse he’d been looking for to attach to the motel office a “lounge” where he could smoke in peace and his friends could come and pay a little bit to drink with him. Dorothy had rightly foreseen that such a lounge would be the end of him.

The great relief of Walter’s childhood, besides school, had been his mother’s family. Her father was a small-town doctor, and among her siblings and aunts and uncles were university professors, a married pair of former vaudevillians, an amateur painter, two librarians, and several bachelors who probably were gay. Dorothy’s Twin Cities relatives invited Walter down for dazzling weekends of museums and music and theater; the ones still living in the Iron Range hosted sprawling summer picnics and holiday house parties. They liked to play charades and antiquated card games like canasta; they had pianos and held sing-alongs. They were all so patently harmless that even Gene relaxed around them, laughing off their tastes and politics as eccentricities, amiably pitying them for their uselessness at manly pursuits. They brought out a domesticated side of him which Walter loved but otherwise very seldom got to see, except at Christmastime, when there was candy to be made.

The candy job was too large and important to be left to Dorothy and Walter alone. Production began on the first Sunday of Advent and continued through most of December. Necromantic metalware-iron cauldrons and racks, heavy aluminum nut-processing devices-came out of deep closets. Great seasonal dunes of sugar and towers of tins appeared. Several cubic feet of unsweetened butter was melted down with milk and sugar (for chocolateless fudge) or with sugar alone (for Dorothy’s famous Christmas toffee) or was smeared by Walter onto the reserve squadron of pans and shallow casseroles that his mother, over the years, had bought at rummage sales. There was lengthy discussion of “hard balls” and “soft balls” and “cracking.” Gene, wearing an apron, stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman, doing his best to keep cigarette ash out of them. He had three ancient candy thermometers whose metal casings were shaped like fraternity paddles and whose nature it was to show no increase in temperature for several hours and then, all at once and all together, to register temperatures at which fudge burned and toffee hardened like epoxy. He and Dorothy were never more a team than when working against the clock to get the nuts mixed in and the candy poured. And later the brutal job of cutting too-hard toffee: the knife blade bowing out under the tremendous pressure Gene applied, the nasty sound (less heard than felt in the bone marrow, in the nerves of the teeth) of a sharp edge dulling itself on the bottom of a metal pan, the explosions of sticky brown amber, the paternal cries of God fucking damn it, and the querulous maternal entreaties not to swear like that.

On the last weekend of Advent, when eighty or a hundred tins had been lined with waxed paper and packed with fudge and toffee and garnished with Jordan almonds, Gene and Dorothy and Walter went out giving. It took the entire weekend, often longer. Walter’s older brother, Mitch, stayed behind at the motel with Brent, who, although he later became an Air Force pilot, as a child was easily made carsick. The candy went first to Gene’s many friends in Hibbing and then, with much backtracking and dead-ending, to farther-flung friends and relatives, down through the Iron Range to Grand Rapids and beyond. It was unthinkable not to accept coffee or a cookie at every house. Between stops, Walter sat in the back seat with a book, watching a feeble window-shaped patch of sunlight hold steady on the seat and then, when a right-angle turn was finally reached, slide across the canyon of the floor and reappear, in twisted form, on the back of the front seat. Outside were the eternal paltry wood lots, the eternal snowed-over bog, the circular tin fertilizer advertisements tacked to telephone poles, the furled hawks and bold ravens. On the seat beside him was the growing pile of packages from homes already visited-Scandinavian baked goods, Finnish and Croatian delicacies, bottles of “cheer” from Gene’s unmarried friends-and the slowly dwindling pile of Berglund tins. These tins’ chief merit was that they contained the same candy that Gene and Dorothy had been giving since they were married. The candy had gradually morphed, over the years, from a treat into a reminder of treats past. It was the annual gift the poor Berglunds could still be wealthy in.

Walter was finishing his junior year in high school when Dorothy’s father died and left her the little lakeside house in which she’d spent her girlhood summers. In Walter’s mind, the house was associated with his mother’s disabilities, because it was here, as a girl, that she’d spent long months battling the arthritis that had withered her right hand and deformed her pelvis. On a low shelf by the fireplace were the sad old “toys” with which she’d once “played” for hours-a nutcracker-like device with steel springs, a five-valved wooden trumpet-to try to preserve and increase mobility in her ravaged finger joints. The Berglunds had always been too busy with the motel to stay long at the little house, but Dorothy was fond of it, had dreams of retiring there with Gene if they could ever get rid of the motel, and so did not immediately assent when Gene proposed selling it. Gene’s health was bad, the motel was mortgaged to the hilt, and whatever small curb appeal it had once possessed was now fully eroded by the harsh Hibbing winters. Though Mitch was out of school and working as an auto-body detailer and still living at home, he blew his paychecks on girls, drink, guns, fishing equipment, and his souped-up Thunderbird. Gene might have felt differently about the house if its little unnamed lake had had fish in it more worth catching than sunnies and perch, but, since it didn’t, he didn’t see the point of holding on to a vacation home they wouldn’t have time to use anyway. Dorothy, normally the paragon of resigned pragmatism, became so sad that she went to bed for several days, complaining of a headache. And Walter, who was willing to suffer himself but couldn’t stand to see her suffering, intervened.

“I can stay in the house myself and fix it up this summer, and maybe we can start renting it out,” he told his parents.

“We need you helping here,” Dorothy said.

“I’m only here for another year anyway. What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Gene said.

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to hire somebody.”

“That’s why we need to sell the house,” Gene said.

“He’s right, Walter,” Dorothy said. “I hate to see the house go, but he’s right.”

“Well, what about Mitch, though? He could at least pay some rent, and you could hire somebody with that.”

“He’s on his own now,” Gene said.

“Mom still cooks for him and does his laundry! Why isn’t he at least paying rent?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“It’s Mom’s business! You’d rather sell Mom’s house than make Mitch grow up!”

“That’s his room, and I’m not going to throw him out of it.”

“Do you really think we could rent the house?” Dorothy said hopefully.

“We’d be cleaning it every week and doing laundry,” Gene said. “There’d be no end to it.”

“I could drive down once a week,” Dorothy said. “It wouldn’t be so bad.”

“We need the money now,” Gene said.

“And what if I do what Mitch does?” Walter said. “What if I just say no? What if I just go over to the house this summer and fix it up?”

“You’re not Jesus Christ,” Gene said. “We can get along here without you.”

“Gene, we can at least try to rent the house next summer. If it doesn’t work out, we can always sell it.”

“I’ll go there on weekends,” Walter said. “How about that? Mitch can take over for me on the weekends, can’t he?”

“If you want to try selling Mitch on that, go ahead,” Gene said.

“I’m not his parent!”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Gene said, and retreated to the lounge.

Why Gene gave Mitch a free pass was clear enough: he saw in his oldest son a nearly exact replica of himself, and he didn’t want to ride him the way he’d once been ridden by Einar. But Dorothy’s timidness with Mitch was more mysterious to Walter. Maybe she was already so worn out by her husband that she just didn’t have the strength or the heart to battle her son as well, or maybe she could already see Mitch’s failed future and wanted him to enjoy a few more years of kindness at home before the world had its tough way with him. In any case, it fell to Walter to knock on Mitch’s door, which was plastered with STP and Pennzoil stickers, and try to be a parent to his older brother.

Mitch was lying on his bed, smoking a cigarette and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive on the stereo he’d bought with his bodyshop earnings. The refractory way he smiled at Walter was similar to their father’s, but more sneering. “What do you want?”

“I want you to start paying rent here, or do some work around here, or else get out.”

“Since when are you the boss?”

“Dad said I should talk to you.”

“Tell him to talk to me himself.”

“Mom doesn’t want to sell the lake house, so something’s got to change.”

“That’s her problem.”

“Jesus, Mitch. You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah, right. You’re going to go away to Harvard or wherever, and I’m going to end up taking care of this place. But I’m the selfish one.”

“You are!”

“I’m trying to save up some money in case Brenda and I need it, but I’m the selfish one.”

Brenda was the very pretty girl whose parents had practically disowned her for dating Mitch. “What exactly is your great savings plan?” Walter said. “Buying yourself a lot of stuff now that you can pawn later?”

“I work hard. What am I supposed to do, never buy anything?”

“I work hard, too, and I don’t have stuff, because I don’t get paid.”

“What about that movie camera?”

“That’s on loan from school, moron. It’s not mine.”

“Well, nobody’s loaning me any stuff, because I’m not a candy-assed suck-up.”

“That still doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay rent, or at least help out on the weekend.”

Mitch peered down into his ashtray as into a prison yard crowded with dusty inmates, considering how to squeeze another in. “Who appointed you Jesus Christ around here?” he said, unoriginally. “I don’t have to negotiate with you.”

But Dorothy refused to talk to Mitch (“I’d rather just sell the house,” she said), and Walter, at the end of the school year, which was also the start of the motel’s high season, such as it was, decided to force the issue by going on strike. As long as he was around the motel, he couldn’t not do the things that needed doing. The only way to make Mitch take responsibility was to leave, and so he announced that he was going to spend the summer fixing up the lake house and making an experimental nature film. His father said that if he wanted to get the house into better shape to be sold, that was fine with him, but the house would be sold in any case. His mother begged him to forget about the house. She said it had been selfish of her to make such a big deal about it, she didn’t care about the house, she just wanted everyone to get along, and when Walter said that he was going anyway, she cried out that if he really cared about her wishes he would not be leaving. But he was feeling, for the first time, truly angry with her. It didn’t matter how much she loved him or how well he understood her-he hated her for submitting so meekly to his father and his brother. He was sick to death of it. He got his best friend, Mary Siltala, to drive him down to the lake house with a duffel bag of clothes, ten gallons of house paint, his old one-speed bike, a secondhand paperback copy of Walden, the Super-8 movie camera that he’d borrowed from the high-school AV Department, and eight yellow boxes of Super-8 film. It was by far the most rebellious thing he’d ever done.

The house was full of mouse droppings and dead sow bugs and needed, besides repainting, a new roof and new window screens. On his first day there, Walter cleaned house and cut weeds for ten hours and then went walking in the woods, in the changeless late-afternoon sunlight, seeking beauty in nature. He had only twenty-four minutes of film stock, and after wasting three of these minutes on chipmunks he realized he needed something less attainable to pursue. The lake was too small for loons, but when he took his grandfather’s fabric canoe out into its seldom-disturbed recesses he flushed a heronlike bird, a bittern that was nesting in the reeds. Bitterns were perfect-so retiring that he could stalk them all summer without using up twenty-one minutes of film. He imagined making an experimental short called “Bitternness.”

He got up at five every morning, applied DEET, and paddled very slowly and silently toward the reeds, the camera on his lap. The bittern way was to lurk among the reeds, camouflaged by their fine vertical striping of buff and brown, and spear small animals with their bills.

When they sensed danger, they froze with their necks outstretched and their bills pointing skyward, looking like dry reeds. When Walter edged closer, hoping to see more of bitternness and less of nothing in the range finder, they usually slipped out of sight but sometimes, instead, heaved themselves into flight, which he leaned back wildly to follow with the camera. Although they were pure killing machines, he found them highly sympathetic, especially for the contrast between their drab stalking plumage and the dramatic bold gray and slaty black of their outstretched wings when they were airborne. They were humble and furtive on the ground, near their marshy home, but lordly in the sky.

Seventeen years in cramped quarters with his family had given him a thirst for solitude whose unquenchability he was discovering only now. To hear nothing but wind, birdsong, insects, fish jumping, branches squeaking, birch leaves scraping as they tumbled against each other: he kept stopping to savor this unsilent silence as he scraped paint from the house’s outer walls. The round trip to the food co-op in Fen City took ninety minutes on his bicycle. He made big pots of lentil stew and bean soup, using recipes of his mother’s, and in the evening he played with the ancient but still workable springdriven pinball machine that had been in the house forever. He read in bed until midnight and even then didn’t fall asleep immediately but lay soaking up the silence.

One late afternoon, a Friday, his tenth day at the lake, when he was returning in the canoe with some fresh unsatisfactory bittern footage, he heard car engines, loud music, and then motorcycles coming down the long driveway. By the time he got the canoe out of the water, Mitch and sexy Brenda and three other couples-three goon buddies of Mitch’s and three girls in sprayed-on bell-bottoms and halter tops-were unloading beer and camping gear and coolers onto the lawn behind the house. A diesel pickup was idling with a smoker’s cough, powering a sound system loaded with Aerosmith. One of the goon friends had a stud-collared Rottweiler on a towing-chain leash.

“Hey, nature boy,” Mitch said. “I hope you don’t mind some company.”

“Yeah, I do mind,” Walter said, blushing, in spite of himself, at how uncool he must have looked to the company. “I mind a lot. I’m here alone. You can’t be here.”

“Yes I can,” Mitch said. “In fact, it’s you that shouldn’t be here. You can stay tonight if you want, but I’m here now. You are on my property.”

“This is not your property.”

“I’m renting it now. You wanted me to pay rent, and this is what I’m renting.”

“What about your job?”

“I quit. I’m out of there.”

Walter, near tears, went into the house and hid the camera in a laundry basket. Then he rode his bicycle through a twilight suddenly drained of charm and filled with mosquitoes and hostility, and called home from the pay phone outside the Fen City Co-op. Yes, his mother confirmed, she and Mitch and his father had had angry words and decided that the best solution was to keep the house in the family and let Mitch do the repairs on it and learn to take more responsibility.

“Mom, it’s going to be party central. He’s going to burn the house down.”

“Well, I just feel more comfortable having you here and Mitch on his own,” she said. “You were right about that, sweetie. And now you can come home. We miss you, and you’re not really old enough to be by yourself all summer.”

“But I’m having a great time out here. I’m getting so much done.”

“I’m sorry about that, Walter. But this is what we’ve decided.”

Biking back to the house in near-darkness, he could hear the noise from half a mile away. Cock-rock guitar soloing, blunt drunken shouting, the dog baying, firecrackers, a motorcycle engine sputtering and screaming. Mitch and his friends had pitched tents and built a big fire and were attempting to flame-broil hamburgers in a cloud of pot smoke. They didn’t even look at Walter as he went inside. He locked himself in the bedroom and lay in bed and let himself be tortured by the noise. Why couldn’t they be quiet? Why this need to sonically assault a world in which some people appreciated silence? The din went on and on and on. It produced a fever to which everyone else was apparently immune. A fever of self-pitying alienation. Which, as it raged in Walter that night, scarred him permanently with hatred of the bellowing vox populi, and also, curiously, with an aversion to the outdoor world. He’d come openhearted to nature, and nature, in its weakness, which was like his mother’s weakness, had let him down. Had allowed itself so easily to be overrun by noisy idiots. He loved nature, but only abstractly, and no more than he loved good novels or foreign movies, and less than he came to love Patty and his kids, and so, for the next twenty years, he made himself a city person. Even when he left 3M to do conservation work, his primary interest in working for the Conservancy, and later for the Trust, was to safeguard pockets of nature from loutish country people like his brother. The love he felt for the creatures whose habitat he was protecting was founded on projection: on identification with their own wish to be left alone by noisy human beings.

Excepting some months in prison, when Brenda was alone with their little girls, Mitch lived in the lake house continuously until Gene died, six years later. He put a new roof on it and arrested its general decay, but he also felled several of the biggest and prettiest trees on the property, denuded the lakeside slope as a playground for his dogs, and hacked a snowmobile trail around to the far corner of the lake, where the bitterns had once nested. As far as Walter could determine, he never paid Gene and Dorothy a cent of rent.

Did the founder of the Traumatics even know what trauma was? This was what trauma was: going downstairs to your office early on a Sunday morning, thinking happily of your children, both of whom had made you very proud in the last two days, and finding on your desk a long manuscript, composed by your wife, that confirmed the worst fears you’d ever had about her and yourself and your best friend. The only remotely comparable experience in Walter’s life had been the first time he’d masturbated, in Room 6 of the Whispering Pines, following the friendly instructions (“Use Vaseline”) provided by his cousin Leif. He’d been fourteen, and the pleasure had so dwarfed all previous known pleasures, and the outcome had been so cataclysmic and astonishing, that he’d felt like a sci-fi hero wrenched four-dimensionally from an aged planet to a fresh one. And Patty’s manuscript was similarly compelling and transformative. His reading of it seemed, like that first masturbation, to last a single instant. He stood up once, early on, to lock his office door, and then he was reading the last page, and it was exactly 10:12 a.m., and the sun beating on his office windows was a different sun from the one he’d always known. It was a yellowy, mean star in some strange, forsaken corner of the galaxy, and his own head was no less altered by the interstellar distance he’d traversed. He carried the manuscript out of his office and past Lalitha, who was typing at her desk.

“Good morning, Walter.”

“Good morning,” he said with a shudder at her nice morning smell. He walked on through the kitchen and up the back staircase to the little room where the love of his life was still in her flannel pajamas, ensconced in a nest of bedding on her sofa, holding a mug of creamed coffee, and watching some sports-channel roundup of the NCAA basketball tournament. The smile she gave him-a smile that was like the last flash of the familiar sun he’d lost-turned to horror when she saw what he was holding.

“Oh, shit,” she said, turning off the television. “Oh, shit, Walter. Oh, oh, oh.” She shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

He closed the door behind him and slid down with his back against it until he was sitting on the floor. Patty drew breath, and then drew more breath, and more breath, and didn’t speak. The light in the windows was unearthly. Walter shuddered again, his molars clicking as he sought to control himself.

“I don’t know where you got that,” Patty said. “But it was not for you. I gave it to Richard last night to get him away from me. I wanted him out of our life! I was trying to get rid of him, Walter. I don’t know why he did that! It’s so horrible that he did that!”

From a distance of many parsecs, he heard her start crying.

“I never meant you to read that,” she said in a keening high voice. “I swear to God, Walter. I swear to God. I’ve spent my whole life trying not to hurt you. You’re so good to me, you don’t deserve this.”

She cried for some long while then, some ten or a hundred minutes. All regular Sunday-morning programming was suspended for the emergency, the day’s normal course so thoroughly obliterated that he couldn’t even feel nostalgia for it. As chance would have things, the spot on the floor directly in front of him had been the scene of a different kind of emergency just three nights earlier, a benign emergency, a pleasurably traumatic coupling that in hindsight now looked like a harbinger of this malignant emergency. He’d come upstairs late on Thursday evening and attacked Patty sexually. Had performed, with her surprised consent, the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist’s: had yanked off her black work pants, pushed her to the floor, and rammed his way inside her. If it had ever occurred to him to do this in the past, he wouldn’t have done it, because he couldn’t forget that she’d been raped as a girl. But the day had been so long and disorienting-his near-infidelity with Lalitha so inflaming, the roadblock in Wyoming County so infuriating, the humility in Joey’s voice on the telephone so unprecedented and gratifying-that Patty had suddenly seemed, when he walked into her room, like his object. His obstinate object, his frustrating wife. And he was sick of it, sick of all the reasoning and understanding, and so he threw her on the floor and fucked her like a brute. The look of discovery on her face then, which must have mirrored the look on his own face, made him stop almost as soon as they’d got started. Stop and pull out and straddle her chest and stick his erection, which seemed twice its usual size, into her face. To show her who he was becoming. They were both smiling like crazy. And then he was back inside her, and instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement she was giving forth loud screams, and this inflamed him all the more; and the next morning, when he went down to the office, he could tell from Lalitha’s chilly silence that the screaming had filled the whole large house. Something had begun on Thursday night, he hadn’t been sure what. But now her manuscript had shown him what. The end was what. She’d never really loved him. She’d wanted what his evil friend had. The whole thing now made him glad he hadn’t broken the promise he’d given Joey at dinner in Alexandria the following night, the promise that he not tell anybody, but especially not tell Patty, that he’d married Connie Monaghan. This secret, as well as several other more alarming ones that Joey had vouchsafed, had been weighing on Walter all weekend, all through the long meeting and the concert the day before. He’d been feeling bad about keeping Patty in the dark about the marriage, feeling as if he were betraying her. But now he could see that, as betrayals went, this one was laughably small. Cryably small.

“Is Richard still in the house?” she said finally, wiping her face with a bedsheet.

“No. I heard him go out before I got up. I don’t think he’s come back.”

“Well, thank goodness for small mercies.”

How he loved her voice! It murdered him to hear it now.

“Did you guys fuck last night?” he said. “I heard talking in the kitchen.”

His own voice was harsh like a crow’s, and Patty took a deep breath, as if settling in for prolonged abuse. “No,” she said. “We talked and then I went to bed. I told you, it’s over. There was a little problem years ago, but it is over.”

“Mistakes were made.”

“You have to believe me, Walter. It is really, really over.”

“Except I don’t do for you physically what my best friend does. Never did, apparently. And never will.”

“Ohhh,” she said, closing her eyes prayerfully, “please don’t quote me. Call me a whore, call me the nightmare of your life, but please try not to quote me. Have that little bit of mercy, if you can.”

“He may suck at chess, but he’s definitely winning at the other game.”

“OK,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut tighter. “You’re going to quote me. OK. Quote me. Go ahead. Do what you have to do. I know I don’t deserve mercy. Just please know that it’s the worst thing you can do.”

“Sorry. I thought you liked talking about him. In fact, I thought that was the main point of interest in talking to me.”

“You’re right. It was. I won’t lie to you. It was, for about three months. But that was twenty-five years ago, before I fell in love with you and made a life with you.”

“And what a satisfying life that’s been. ‘Nothing so wrong with it,’ I believe your phrase was. Although the facts on the ground would appear to suggest otherwise.”

She grimaced, her eyes still shut. “Maybe you want to just read through the whole thing now and pick out all the worst lines. Do you want to just do that and get it over with?”

“Actually, what I want to do is stuff it down your throat. I want to see you fucking gag on it.”

“OK. You can do that. It would sort of be a relief from what I’m feeling now.”

He’d been clutching the manuscript so hard that his hand was cramped. He released it and let it slide between his legs. “I don’t actually have anything else to say,” he said. “I think we’ve pretty much covered the main points.”

She nodded. “Good.”

“Except I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to be in the same room with you again. I don’t want to hear that person’s name again. I don’t want to have anything to do with either of you. Ever. I just want to be alone so I can contemplate having wasted my entire life loving you.”

“Yes, OK,” she said, nodding again. “But also no? No, I don’t agree to that.”

“I don’t care if you agree.”

“I know you don’t. But listen to me.” She sniffed hard, composing herself, and set her mug of coffee on the floor. Her tears had softened her eyes and reddened her lips and made her very pretty, if you cared about her prettiness, which Walter no longer did. “I never intended you to read that,” she said.

“What the fuck is it doing in my house if you didn’t intend that?”

“You can believe me or not, but it’s the truth. It was just a thing I had to write for myself, to try to get better. It was a therapy project, Walter. I gave it to Richard last night to try to explain why I stayed with you. Always stayed with you. Still want to stay with you. I know there’s stuff in there that must be horrible for you to read, I can hardly even imagine how horrible, but that’s not all there is in it. I wrote it when I was depressed, and it’s full of all the bad things I was feeling. But I’ve finally been starting to feel better. Especially after what happened the other night-I was feeling better! Like we were finally having some kind of breakthrough! Isn’t that how you felt, too?”

“I don’t know what I felt.”

“I wrote nice things about you, too, didn’t I? Many, many more nice things than not nice? If you look at it objectively? Which I know you can’t, but still, anybody else except you could see the nice things. That you’ve been kinder to me than I ever thought I deserved to have someone be. That you’re the most excellent person I’ve ever met. That you and Joey and Jessie are my whole life. That it was only one small bad part of me that ever looked anywhere else, for a little while, at a really bad point in my life.”

“You’re right,” he cawed. “I did somehow overlook all that.”

“It’s there, Walter! Maybe when you think about it, later, you’ll remember that it’s there.”

“I’m not intending to do much thinking about it.”

“Not now, but later. Even if you still don’t want to talk to me, maybe you’ll at least forgive me a little bit.”

The light in the windows dimmed suddenly, a spring cloud passing by. “You did the worst thing you could possibly do to me,” he said. “The worst thing, and you knew very well it was the worst thing, and you did it anyway. Which part of that am I going to want to think back on?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, weeping afresh. “I’m so sorry you can’t see it the way I see it. I’m so sorry this happened.”

“It didn’t ‘happen.’ You did it. You fucked the kind of evil shit who would leave this on my desk for me to read.”

“For God’s sake, though, Walter, it was just sex.”

“You let him read things about me you never would have let me read.”

“Just stupid sex four years ago. What’s that compared to our whole life?”

“Look,” he said, standing up. “I don’t want to shout at you. Not with Jessica in the house. But you have to help me with that and not be dis ingenuous about what you did, or I’m going to shout your fucking head off.”

“I’m not being disingenuous.”

“I mean it,” he said. “I’m not going to shout at you. I’m going to leave this room, and I don’t want to see you after that. And we have a bit of a problem, because I actually have to work in this house, so it’s not very easy for me to move out.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I know I have to go. I’ll wait until Jessie’s gone, and then I’ll get out of your sight. I totally understand how you’re feeling. But I have to tell you one thing before I go, just so you know. I want to make sure you know that it’s like being stabbed in the heart for me to leave you with your assistant. It’s like having the skin ripped off my breasts. I can’t stand it, Walter.” She looked at him imploringly. “I’m so hurt and jealous, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“Maybe. Some year. A little bit. But do you see what it means that I’m feeling it now? Do you see what it means about who I love? Do you see what’s really going on here?”

The sight of her wild, pleading eyes became, at that moment, so crestingly painful and disgusting to him-produced such a paroxysm of cumulative revulsion at the pain they’d caused each other in their marriage-that he began to shout in spite of himself: “Who drove me to it? Who was I never quite good enough for? Who always needed more time to think it over? Don’t you think twenty-six years is long enough to think it over? How much fucking more time do you need? Do you think there’s anything in your writing that surprised me? Do you think I didn’t know every fucking bit of it every fucking minute of the way? And love you anyway, because I couldn’t help it? And waste my entire life?”

“That’s not fair, oh, that’s not fair.”

“Fuck fairness! And fuck you!”

He kicked the manuscript into a white flurry, but he was disciplined enough not to slam the door behind him as he left. Downstairs in the kitchen, Jessica was toasting herself a bagel, her overnight bag standing by the table. “Where is everybody this morning?”

“Mom and I had a little bit of a fight.”

“Sounded like it,” Jessica said with the ironic eye-widening that was her customary response to belonging to a family less even-keeled than she. “Is everything OK now?”

“We’ll see, we’ll see.”

“I was hoping to get the noon train, but I can take a later one if you want.”

Because he’d always been close to Jessica and felt he could count on her support, it didn’t occur to him that he was making a tactical error in brushing her off now and sending her on her way. He didn’t see how crucial it was to be the first to give the news to her and frame the story properly: didn’t imagine how quickly Patty, with her game-winning instincts, would move to consolidate her alliance with their daughter and fill her ears with her version of the story (Dad Dumps Mom on Flimsy Pretext, Takes Up with Young Assistant). He wasn’t thinking of anything beyond the moment, and his head was aswirl with precisely the kind of feelings that had nothing to do with fatherhood. He gave Jessica a hug and thanked her profusely for coming down to help launch Free Space, and then he went into his office to stare out the windows. The state of emergency had waned enough for him to remember all the work he needed to be doing, but not nearly enough for him to do it. He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air’s buoyancy even for an hour: the trade was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.

Some otherworldly amount of time later, after he’d heard the rolling of a large suitcase and the clunk of the front door, Lalitha came tapping on his office door and stuck her head in. “Everything OK?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Come sit on my lap.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Now?”

“Yes, now. When else? My wife’s gone, right?”

“She left with a suitcase, yes.”

“Well, she’s not coming back. So come on. Why not. There’s nobody else in the house.”

And she did. She was not a hesitant person, Lalitha. But the executive chair was ill suited for lap-sitting; she had to hang on to his neck to stay aboard, and even then the chair rocked hazardously. “This is what you want?” she said.

“Actually, no. I don’t want to be in this office.”

“I agree.”

He had so much to think about, he knew he would be thinking uninterruptedly for weeks if he let himself start now. The only way not to think was to plunge forward. Up in Lalitha’s slope-ceilinged little room, the onetime maid’s quarters, which he hadn’t visited since she’d moved in, and whose floor was an obstacle course of clean clothes in stacks and dirty ones in piles, he pressed her against the side wall of the dormer and gave himself blindly to the one person who wanted him without qualification. It was another state of emergency, it was no hour of no day, it was desperate. He lifted her onto his hips and staggered around with her mouth locked to his, and then they were humping fiercely through their clothes, between piles of other clothes, and then one of those pauses descended, an uneasy recollection of how universal the ascending steps to sex were; how impersonal, or pre-personal. He pulled away abruptly, toward the unmade single bed, and knocked over a pile of books and documents relating to overpopulation.

“One of us has to leave at six to pick up Eduardo at the airport,” he said. “Just want to note that.”

“What time is it now?”

He turned her very dusty alarm clock to check. “Two-seventeen,” he marveled. It was the strangest time he’d seen in his entire life.

“I apologize that the room is so messy,” Lalitha said.

“I like it. I love how you are. Are you hungry? I’m a little hungry.”

“No, Walter.” She smiled. “I’m not hungry. But I can get you something.”

“I was thinking, like, a glass of soy milk. Soy beverage.”

“I’ll get you one.”

She went downstairs, and it was strange to think that the footsteps he heard coming back up, a minute later, belonged to the person who would take Patty’s place in his life. She knelt by him and watched intently, greedily, as he drank down the soy milk. Then she unbuttoned his shirt with her nimble pale-nailed fingers. OK, then, he thought. OK. Forward. But as he undressed himself the rest of the way, the scenes of his wife’s own infidelity, which she’d narrated so exhaustively, came churning up in him, bringing with them a faint but real impulse to forgive her; and he knew he had to crush this impulse. His hatred of her and his friend was still newborn and wavering, it hadn’t hardened yet, the piteous sight and sound of her crying were still too fresh in his mind. Thankfully Lalitha had stripped down to a pair of red-polka-dotted white briefs. She was standing over him insouciantly, offering herself for inspection. Her body, in its youth, was preposterously fabulous. Unblemished, defiant of gravity, all but unbearable to look at. It was true that he’d once known a woman’s body even quite a bit younger, but he had no memory of it, he’d been too young himself to notice Patty’s youth. He reached up and pressed the heel of his hand to the hot, clothed mound between Lalitha’s legs. She gave a little cry, her knees buckled, and she sank onto him, bathing him in sweet agony.

The struggle not to compare began in earnest then, the struggle in particular to clear his head of Patty’s sentence, “There was nothing so wrong with it.” He could see, in retrospect, that his earlier plea that Lalitha go slow with him had been founded on accurate self-knowledge. But going slow, once he’d thrown Patty out of the house, was not an option. He needed the quick fix simply in order to keep functioning-to not get leveled by hatred and self-pity-and, in one way, the fix was very sweet indeed, because Lalitha really was crazy for him, almost literally dripping with desire, certainly strongly seeping with it. She stared into his eyes with love and joy, she pronounced beautiful and perfect and wonderful the manhood that Patty in her document had libeled and spat upon. What wasn’t to like? He was a man in his prime, she was adorable and young and insatiable; and this, in fact, was what wasn’t to like. His emotions couldn’t keep up with the vigor and urgency of their animal attraction, the interminability of their coupling. She needed to ride him, she needed to be crushed underneath him, she needed to have her legs on his shoulders, she needed to do the Downward Dog and be whammed from behind, she needed bending over the bed, she needed her face pressed against the wall, she needed her legs wrapped around him and her head thrown back and her very round breasts flying every which way. It all seemed intensely meaningful to her, she was a bottomless well of anguished noise, and he was up for all of it. In good cardiovascular shape, thrilled by her extravagance, attuned to her wishes, and extremely fond of her. And yet it wasn’t quite personal, and he couldn’t find his way to orgasm. And this was very odd, an entirely new and unanticipated problem, due in part, perhaps, to his unfamiliarity with condoms, and to how unbelievably wet she was. How many times, in the last two years, had he brought himself off to the thought of his assistant, each time in a matter of minutes? A hundred times. His problem now was obviously psychological. Her alarm clock showed 3:52 when they finally subsided. It wasn’t actually clear that she’d come, either, and he didn’t dare ask her. And here, in his exhaustion, the lurking Contrast seized its opportunity to obtrude, for Patty, whenever she could be persuaded to interest herself, had pretty reliably got the job done for both of them, leaving them both reasonably content, leaving him free to go to work or read a book and her to do the little Pattyish things she liked to do. Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction…

Lalitha kissed his swollen mouth. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Lots of things.”

“Are you sorry we did this?”

“No, no, very happy.”

“You don’t look quite happy.”

“Well, I did just throw my wife out of the house after twenty-four years of marriage. That did just happen a few hours ago.”

“I’m sorry, Walter. You can still go back. I can quit and leave the two of you be.”

“No, that’s one thing I can promise you. I am never going back.”

“Do you want to be with me?”

“Yes.” He filled his hands with her black hair, which smelled of coconutty shampoo, and covered his face with it. He now had what he’d wanted, but it was making him somewhat lonely. After all his great longing, which was infinite in scope, he was in bed with a particular finite girl who was very pretty and brilliant and committed but also messy, disliked by Jessica, and no kind of cook. And she was all there was, the sole bulwark, between him and the multitude of thoughts he didn’t want to have. The thought of Patty and his friend at Nameless Lake; the very human and witty way the two of them had spoken to each other; the grownup reciprocity of their sex; their gladness that he wasn’t there. He began to cry into Lalitha’s hair, and she comforted him, brushed his tears away, and they made love again more tiredly and painfully, until he did finally come, without fanfare, in her hand.

There ensued some difficult days. Eduardo Soquel, arriving from Colombia, was picked up at the airport and installed in “Joey’s” bedroom. The press conference on Monday morning was attended by twelve journalists and survived by Walter and Soquel, and a separate lengthy phone interview was given to Dan Caperville of the Times. Walter, having worked in public relations all his life, was able to suppress his private turmoil and stay on message and decline inflammatory journalistic bait. The Pan-American Warbler Park, he said, represented a new paradigm of science-based, privately funded wildlife conservation; the undeniable ugliness of mountaintop-removal mining was more than offset by the prospect of sustainable “green employment” (ecotourism, reforestation, certified forestry) in West Virginia and Colombia; Coyle Mathis and the other displaced mountain people had fully and laudably cooperated with the Trust and would soon be employed by a subsidiary of the Trust’s generous corporate partner LBI. Walter needed to exercise particular self-control in praising LBI, given what Joey had told him. When he got off the phone with Dan Caperville, he went out for a late dinner with Lalitha and Soquel and drank two beers, bringing to three his total lifetime consumption.

The next afternoon, after Soquel had returned to the airport, Lalitha locked the door of Walter’s office and knelt down between his legs to reward him for his labors.

“No, no, no,” he said, rolling the chair away from her.

She pursued him on her knees. “I just want to see you. I’m so greedy for you.”

“Lalitha, no.” He could hear his staffers going about their business at the front of the house.

“Just for a second,” she said, unzipping him. “Please, Walter.”

He thought of Clinton and Lewinsky, and then, seeing his assistant’s mouth full of his flesh and her eyes smiling up at him, he thought of his evil friend’s prophecy. It seemed to make her happy, and yet-

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, pushing her away as gently as he could.

She frowned. She was hurt. “You have to let me,” she said, “if you love me.”

“I do love you, but this is not the right time.”

“I want you to let me. I want to do everything right now.”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

He stood up and zipped himself back into his pants. Lalitha remained kneeling for a moment with her head bowed. Then she, too, stood up, smoothed her skirt on her thighs, and turned away in an attitude of unhappiness.

“There’s a problem we have to talk about first,” he said.

“All right. Let’s talk about your problem.”

“The problem is we have to fire Richard.”

The name, which he’d refused to speak until now, hung in the air. “And why do we have to do that?” Lalitha said.

“Because I hate him, because he had an affair with my wife, and I never want to hear his name again, and there’s no earthly way I’m going to work with him.”

Lalitha seemed to shrink as she heard this. Her head sank, her shoulders slumped, she became a sad little girl. “Is that why your wife left on Sunday?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

“No!”

“Yes you are. That’s why you don’t want me near you now.”

“No, that’s not true. That’s totally not true.”

“Well, be that as it may,” she said, straightening herself briskly, “we still can’t fire Richard. This is my project, and I need him. I’ve already advertised him to the interns, and I need him to get our talent for August.

So you can have your problem with him, and be very sorry about your wife, but I’m not firing him.”

“Honey,” Walter said. “Lalitha. I really do love you. Everything’s going to be OK. But try to see this from my side.”

“No!” she said, wheeling toward him with spirited insurrection. “I don’t care about your side! My job is to do our population work, and I’m going to do it. If you really care about that work, and about me, you’ll let me do it my way.”

“I do care. I totally do. But-”

“But nothing, then. I won’t mention his name again. You can go out of town somewhere when he meets with the interns in May. And we’ll figure out August when we get there.”

“But he’s not going to want to do it. He was already talking on Saturday about backing out.”

“Let me talk to him,” she said. “As you may remember, I’m rather good at persuading people to do things they don’t want to do. I’m a rather effective employee of yours, and I hope you’ll be nice enough to let me do my work.”

He rushed around his desk to put his arms around her, but she escaped to the outer office.

Because he loved her spirit and commitment and was stricken by her anger, he didn’t press the issue further. But as the hours passed, and then several days, and she didn’t report that Richard was backing out of Free Space, Walter deduced that he must still be on board. Richard who didn’t believe in a fucking thing! The only imaginable explanation was that Patty had talked to him on the phone and guilted him into sticking with the program. And the idea of those two talking about anything at all, even for five minutes, and specifically talking about how to spare “poor Walter” (oh, that phrase of hers, that abominable phrase) and save his pet project, as some kind of consolation prize, made him sick with weakness and corruption and compromise and littleness. It came between him and Lalitha as well. Their lovemaking, though daily and protracted, was shadowed by his sense that she’d betrayed him with Richard, too, a little bit, and so did not become more personal in the way he’d hoped it might. Everywhere he turned, there was Richard.

Equally unsettling, in a different way, was the problem of LBI. Joey, at their dinner together, with moving expenditure of humility and self-reproach, had explained the sordid business deal he’d been involved with, and the key villain, as Walter saw it, was LBI. Kenny Bartles was clearly one of those daredevil clowns, a bush-league sociopath who would end up in jail or in Congress soon enough. The Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd, whatever the fetor of their motives for invading Iraq, surely still would have preferred to receive usable truck parts instead of the Paraguayan trash that Joey had delivered. And Joey himself, though he should have known better than to get involved with Bartles, had convinced Walter that he’d only followed through for Connie’s sake; his loyalty to her, his terrible remorse, and his general bravery (he was twenty years old!) were all to his credit. The responsible party, therefore-the one with both full knowledge of the scam and the authority to approve it-was LBI. Walter hadn’t heard of the vice president whom Joey had spoken to, the one who’d threatened him with a lawsuit, but the guy undoubtedly worked right down the hall from the buddy of Vin Haven who’d agreed to locate a body-armor plant in West Virginia. Joey had asked Walter, at dinner, what he thought he should do. Blow the whistle? Or just give away his profits to some charity for disabled veterans, and go back to school? Walter had promised to think about it over the weekend, but the weekend had not, to put it mildly, proved conducive to calm moral reflection. Not until he was facing the journalists on Monday morning, painting LBI as an outstanding pro-environment corporate partner, had the degree of his own implication hit him.

He tried, now, to separate his own interests-the fact that, if the son of the Trust’s executive director took his ugly story to the media, Vin Haven might well fire him and LBI might even renege on its West Virginia agreement-from what was best for Joey. However arrogantly and greedily Joey had behaved, it seemed very harsh to ask a twenty-year-old kid with problematic parents to take full moral responsibility and endure a public smearing, maybe even prosecution. And yet Walter was aware that the advice he therefore wanted to give Joey-“Donate your profits to charity, move on with your life”-was highly beneficial to himself and to the Trust. He wanted to ask Lalitha for guidance, but he’d promised Joey not to tell a soul, and so he called Joey and said he was still thinking about it, and would he and Connie like to join him for dinner on his birthday next week?

“Definitely,” Joey said.

“I also need to tell you,” Walter said, “that your mother and I have separated. It’s a hard thing to tell you, but it happened on Sunday. She’s moved out for a while, and we’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”

“Yep,” Joey said.

Yep? Walter frowned. “Did you understand what I just said?”

“Yep. She already told me.”

“Right. Of course. How not. And did she-”

“Yep. She told me a lot. Too much information, as always.”

“So you understand my-”

“Yep.”

“And you’re still OK with having dinner on my birthday?”

“Yep. We’ll definitely be there.”

“Well, thank you, Joey. I love you for that. I love you for a lot of things.”

“Yep.”

Walter then left a message on Jessica’s cell phone, as he’d done twice a day since the fateful Sunday, without yet hearing back from her. “Jessica, listen,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve talked to your mother, but whatever she’s saying to you, you need to call me back and listen to what I have to say. All right? Please call me back. There are very much two sides to this story, and I think you need to hear both of them.” It would have been useful to be able to add that there was nothing between him and his assistant, but, in fact, his hands and face and nose were so impregnated with the smell of her vagina that it persisted faintly even after showering.

He was compromised and losing on every front. A further bad blow landed on the second Sunday of his freedom, in the form of a long front-page story in the Times by Dan Caperville: “Coal-Friendly Land Trust Destroys Mountains to Save Them.” The story wasn’t greatly inaccurate factually, but the Times was clearly not beguiled by Walter’s contrarian view of MTR mining. The South American unit of the Warbler Park wasn’t even mentioned in the article, and Walter’s best talking points-new paradigm, green economy, science-based reclamation-were buried near the bottom, well below Jocelyn Zorn’s description of him shouting “I own this [expletive] land!” and Coyle Mathis’s recollection, “He called me stupid to my face.” The article’s take-away, besides the fact that Walter was an extremely disagreeable person, was that the Cerulean Mountain Trust was in bed with the coal industry and the defense contractor LBI, was allowing large-scale MTR on its supposedly pristine reserve, was hated by local environmentalists, had displaced salt-of-the-earth country people from their ancestral homes, and had been founded and funded by a publicity-shy energy mogul, Vincent Haven, who, with the connivance of the Bush administration, was destroying other parts of West Virginia by drilling gas wells.

“Not so bad, not so bad,” Vin Haven said when Walter called him at his home in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “We got our Warbler Park, nobody can take that away from us. You and your girl did good. As for the rest of it, you can see why I’ve never bothered talking to the press. It’s all downside and no upside.”

“I talked to Caperville for two hours,” Walter said. “I really thought he was with me on the main points.”

“Well, and your points are in there,” Vin said. “Albeit not too conspicuously. But don’t you worry about it.”

“I am worried about it! I mean, yes, we got the park, which is great for the warbler. But the whole thing’s supposed to be a model. This thing reads like a model of how not to do things.”

“It’ll blow over. Once we get the coal out and start reclaiming, people will see you were right. This Caperville fella will be writing obits by then.”

“But that’s going to be years!”

“You got other plans? Is that what this is about? You worried about your résumé?”

“No, Vin, I’m just frustrated with the media. The birds don’t count for anything, it’s all about the human interest.”

“And that’s the way it’ll stay until the birds control the media,” Vin said. “Am I going to see you in Whitmanville next month? I told Jim Elder I’d make an appearance at the armor-plant opening, provided I don’t have to pose for any pictures. I could pick you up in the jet on the way there.”

“Thanks, we’ll fly commercial,” Walter said. “Save some fuel.”

“Try to remember I make a living selling fuel.”

“Right, ha ha, good point.”

It was nice to have Vin’s fatherly approval, but it would have been nicer had Vin been seeming less dubious as a father. The worst thing about the Times piece-leaving aside the shame of looking like an asshole in a publication read and trusted by everyone Walter knew-was his fear that the Times was, in fact, right about the Cerulean Mountain Trust. He’d dreaded being slaughtered in the media, and now that he was being slaughtered he had to attend more seriously to his reasons for dreading it.

“I heard you doing that interview,” Lalitha said. “You nailed it. The only reason the Times can’t admit we’re right is they’d have to take back all their editorials against MTR.”

“That’s what they’re doing right now with Bush and Iraq, actually.”

“Well, you’ve paid your dues. And now you and I get our little reward. Did you tell Mr. Haven we’re going ahead with Free Space?”

“I was feeling lucky not to be fired,” Walter said. “It didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him I’m planning to spend the entire discretionary fund on something that’ll probably get even worse publicity.”

“Oh, my sweetheart,” she said, embracing him, resting her head against his heart. “Nobody else understands what good things you’re doing. I’m the only one.”

“That may actually be true,” he said.

He would have liked to just be held by her for a while, but her body had other ideas, and his own body agreed with them. They were spending their nights now on her too-small bed, since his own rooms were still full of Patty’s traces, which she’d given him no instructions for dealing with and he couldn’t begin to deal with on his own. It didn’t surprise him that Patty hadn’t been in touch, and yet it seemed tactical of her, adversarial, that she hadn’t. For a person who, by her own admission, made nothing but mistakes, she cast a daunting shadow as she did whatever she was doing out there in the world. Walter felt cowardly to be hiding from her in Lalitha’s room, but what else could he do? He was beset from all sides.

On his birthday, while Lalitha showed Connie the Trust offices, he took Joey into the kitchen and said he still didn’t know what course of action to recommend. “I really don’t think you should blow the whistle,” he said. “But I don’t trust my motives on that. I’ve sort of lost my moral bearings lately. The thing with your mother, and the thing in the New York Times-did you see that?”

“Yep,” Joey said. He had his hands in his pockets and was still dressing like a College Republican, in a blue blazer and shiny loafers. For all Walter knew, he was a College Republican.

“I didn’t come off very well, did I?”

“Nope,” Joey said. “But I think most people could see it wasn’t a fair article.”

Walter gratefully, no questions asked, accepted this reassurance from his son. He was feeling very small indeed. “So I have to go to this LBI event in West Virginia next week,” he said. “They’re opening a body-armor plant that all those displaced families are going to be working at. And so I’m not really the right person to ask about LBI, because I’m so implicated myself.”

“Why do you have to go to that?”

“I have to give a speech. I have to make grateful on behalf of the Trust.”

“But you’ve already got your Warbler Park. Why not just blow it off?”

“Because there’s this other big program Lalitha’s doing with overpopulation, and I have to stay on good terms with my boss. It’s his money we’re spending.”

“Sounds like you’d better go, then,” Joey said.

He sounded unpersuaded, and Walter hated looking so weak and small to him. As if to make himself look even weaker and smaller, he asked if he knew what was up with Jessica.

“I talked to her,” Joey said, hands in pockets, eyes on the floor. “I guess she’s a little mad at you.”

“I’ve left her like twenty phone messages!”

“You can probably stop doing that. I don’t think she’s listening to them. People don’t listen to every cellphone message anyway, they just look to see who’s called.”

“Well, did you tell her that there are two sides to this story?”

Joey shrugged. “I don’t know. Are there two sides?”

“Yes, there are! Your mother did a very bad thing to me. An incredibly painful thing.”

“I don’t really want any more information,” Joey said. “I think she probably already told me about it anyway. I don’t feel like taking sides.”

“She told you about it when? How long ago?”

“Last week.”

So Joey knew what Richard had done-what Walter had let his best friend, his rock-star friend, do. His smallening in his son’s eyes was now complete. “I’m going to have a beer,” he said. “Since it’s my birthday.”

“Can Connie and I have one, too?”

“Yes, that’s why we asked you here early. Actually, Connie can drink whatever she wants at the restaurant, too. She’s twenty-one, right?”

“Yep.”

“And this is not nagging, this is just a request for information: did you tell Mom you’re married?”

“Dad, I’m working on it,” Joey said with a tightening of his jaw. “Let me do this my way, OK?”

Walter had always liked Connie (had even, secretly, rather liked Connie’s mother, for how she’d flirted with him). She was wearing perilously high heels and heavy eye shadow for the occasion; she was still young enough to be trying to look much older. At La Chaumière, he observed with swelling heart how tenderly attentive Joey was to her, leaning over to read her menu with her and coordinate their selections, and how Connie, since Joey wasn’t of legal age, declined Walter’s offer of a cocktail and ordered a Diet Coke for herself. They had a tacit trusting way with each other, a way that reminded Walter of his and Patty’s way when they were very young, the way of a couple united as a front against the world; his eyes misted up at the sight of their wedding bands. Lalitha, ill at ease, trying to distance herself from the young people and align herself with a man nearly twice her age, ordered a martini and proceeded to fill the conversational vacuum with talk of Free Space and the world population crisis, to which Joey and Connie listened with the exquisite courtesy of a couple secure in their two-person world. Although Lalitha avoided proprietary references to Walter, he had no doubt that Joey knew that she was more than simply his assistant. As he drank his third beer of the evening, he became more and more ashamed of what he’d done and more and more grateful to Joey for being so cool about it. Nothing had enraged him more about Joey, over the years, than his shell of coolness; and now, how glad of it he was! His son had won that war, and he was glad of it.

“So Richard’s still working with you guys?” Joey said.

“Um, yes,” Lalitha said. “Yes, he’s being very helpful. In fact, he just told me the White Stripes might help us with our big event in August.”

Joey, as he frowned and considered this, took care not to look at Walter.

“We should go to that event,” Connie said to Joey. “Is it OK if we come?” she asked Walter.

“Of course it’s OK,” he said, forcing a smile. “Should be a lot of fun.”

“I like the White Stripes a lot,” she declared happily, in her subtextless way.

“I like you a lot,” Walter said. “I’m really glad you’re part of our family. I’m really glad you’re here tonight.”

“I’m happy to be here, too.”

Joey didn’t seem to mind this sentimental talk, but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. On Richard, on his mother, on the family disaster that was unfolding. And there was nothing Walter could say to make it any easier for him.

“I can’t do it,” Walter told Lalitha when they’d returned, by themselves, to the mansion. “I can’t have that asshole involved anymore.”

“We already had this discussion,” she said, walking briskly down the corridor to the kitchen. “We already resolved this.”

“Well, we need to have it again,” he said, pursuing her.

“No, we don’t. Did you see how Connie’s face lit up when I mentioned the White Stripes? Who else can get us talent like that? We made our decision, it was a good one, and I really don’t need to hear how jealous you are of the person your wife had sex with. I’m tired, and I drank too much, and I need to go to bed now.”

“He was my best friend,” Walter murmured.

“I don’t care. I really don’t, Walter. I know you think I’m just another young person, but in fact I’m older than your children, I’m almost twenty-eight. I knew it was a mistake to fall in love with you. I knew you weren’t ready, and now I’m in love with you, and all you can still think about is her.”

“I think about you constantly. I depend on you so much.”

“You have sex with me because I want you and you can. But everybody’s world still revolves around your wife. What is so special about her, I will never understand. She spends her whole life upsetting other people. And I just need a little break from it, so I can get some sleep. So maybe you should sleep in your own bed tonight, and think about what you want to do.”

“What did I say?” he pleaded. “I thought we were having a nice birthday.”

“I’m tired. It was a tiring evening. I’ll see you in the morning.”

They parted without a kiss. On his home phone he found a message from Jessica, timed carefully while he was out to dinner, wishing him a happy birthday. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your messages,” she said, “I’ve just been really busy and not sure what I wanted to say. But I was thinking of you today, and I hope you had a nice day. Maybe we can talk sometime, although I’m not sure when I’m going to have a chance.”

Click.

It was a relief, for the next week, to sleep by himself. To be in a room still full of Patty’s clothes and books and pictures, to learn to steel himself against her. During the daytime, there was plenty of deferred office work to do: land-management structures to be organized in Colombia and West Virginia, a media counteroffensive to be launched, fresh donors to be sought. Walter had even thought it might be possible to take a break from sex with Lalitha, but their daily propinquity made it not possible-they needed and needed. He did, however, repair to his own bed for sleep.

The night before they flew to West Virginia, he was packing his overnight bag and got a call from Joey, who reported that he’d decided not to blow the whistle on LBI and Kenny Bartles. “They’re disgusting,” he said. “But my friend Jonathan keeps saying I’d only be hurting myself if I went public. So I’m thinking I’ll just give the extra money away. It’ll spare me a lot of taxes at least. But I wanted to make sure you still think it’s OK.”

“It’s fine, Joey,” Walter said. “It’s fine with me. I know how ambitious you are, I know how hard it must be to give away all that money. That’s a lot to do right there.”

“Well, it’s not like I’m behind on the deal. I’m just not ahead. And now Connie can go back to school, so that’s good. I’m thinking of taking a year off to work and let her catch up with me.”

“That’s great. It’s great to see the two of you taking care of each other like that. Was there anything else?”

“Well, only that I saw Mom.”

Walter was still holding two neckties, a red one and a green one, that he’d been trying to choose between. The choice, he realized, was not particularly consequential. “You did?” he said, choosing the green one. “Where? In Alexandria?”

“No, in New York.”

“So she’s in New York.”

“Well, actually, Jersey City,” Joey said.

Walter’s chest tightened and stayed tightened.

“Yeah, Connie and I wanted to tell her in person. You know, about being married. And it wasn’t so bad actually. She was actually fairly nice to Connie. You know, still patronizing, and sort of fake, the way she kept laughing, but not mean. I guess she’s distracted with a lot of other things. Anyway, we thought it went pretty well. At least Connie thought so. I thought it was kind of ehhnh. But I wanted you to know she knows, so, I don’t know, if you ever talk to her, you don’t have to keep it secret anymore.”

Walter looked at his left hand, which had turned white and looked very bare without its wedding ring. “She’s staying with Richard,” he managed to say.

“Um, yeah, I guess, for the moment,” Joey said. “Was I not supposed to say that?”

“Was he there? When you were there?”

“Yeah, actually. He was. And it was fun for Connie, because she’s fairly into his music. He let her see his guitars and everything. I don’t know if I told you she’s thinking of learning guitar. She’s got a really pretty singing voice.”

Where exactly Walter had thought Patty was staying he couldn’t have said. With her friend Cathy Schmidt, with one of her other old teammates, maybe with Jessica, conceivably even with her parents. But having heard her proclaim so righteously that everything was over between her and Richard, he hadn’t imagined for one second that she might be in Jersey City.

“Dad?”

“What.”

“Well, I know it’s weird, OK? The whole thing is very weird. But you’ve got a girlfriend, too, right? So, like, that’s it, right? Things are different now, and we should all just start dealing with it. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Walter said. “You’re right. We need to deal with it.”

As soon as he was off the phone, he pulled open a dresser drawer, took his wedding ring from the cuff-link box in which he’d left it, and flushed it down the toilet. With a sweep of his arm, he knocked all of Patty’s pictures from the top of her dresser-Joey and Jessica as innocents, team photos of girl basketball players in heartbreakingly seventies-style uniforms, her favorite and most flattering pictures of him-and crushed and ground the frames and glass with his feet until he lost interest and had to beat his head against the wall. Hearing that she’d gone back to Richard ought to have liberated him, ought to have freed him to enjoy Lalitha with the cleanest of consciences. But it didn’t feel like a liberation, it felt like a death. He could see now (as Lalitha herself had seen all along) that the last three weeks had merely been a kind of payback, a treat he was due in recompense for Patty’s betrayal. Despite his avowals that the marriage was over, he hadn’t believed it one tiny bit. He threw himself onto the bed and sobbed in a state to which all previous states of existence seemed infinitely preferable. The world was moving ahead, the world was full of winners, LBI and Kenny Bartles cashing in, Connie going back to school, Joey doing the right thing, Patty living with a rock star, Lalitha fighting her good fight, Richard going back to his music, Richard getting great press for being far more offensive than Walter, Richard charming Connie, Richard bringing in the White Stripes… while Walter was left behind with the dead and dying and forgotten, the endangered species of the world, the nonadaptive…

Around two in the morning, he staggered into the bathroom and found an old bottle of Patty’s trazodones eighteen months past their expiration date. He took three of them, unsure if they were still effective, but apparently they were: he was awakened at seven o’clock by Lalitha’s very determined shoving. He was still in yesterday’s clothes, the lights were all burning, the room had been trashed, his throat was raw from his presumably violent snoring, and his head ached for any number of good reasons.

“We need to be in a cab right now,” Lalitha said, pulling on his arm. “I thought you were ready.”

“Can’t go,” he said.

“Come on, we’re already late.”

He righted himself and tried to make his eyes stay open. “I should really take a shower.”

“There’s no time.”

He fell asleep in the cab and woke up still in the cab, on the parkway, in traffic stalled by an accident. Lalitha was on her phone with the airline. “We have to go through Cincinnati now,” she told him. “We missed our flight.”

“Why don’t we just bag it,” he said. “I’m tired of being Mr. Good.”

“We’ll skip the lunch and go straight to the factory.”

“What if I were Mr. Bad? Would you still like me?”

She gave him a worried frown. “Walter, did you take some kind of pill?”

“Seriously. Would you still like me?”

Her frown intensified, and she didn’t answer. He fell asleep in the gate area at National; on the plane to Cincinnati; in Cincinnati; on the plane to Charleston; and in the rental car that Lalitha piloted at high speeds to Whitmanville, where he awoke feeling better, suddenly hungry, to an overcast April sky and a biotically desolate countryscape of the sort that America had come to specialize in. Vinyl-sided megachurches, a Walmart, a Wendy’s, capacious left-turn lanes, white automotive fortresses. Nothing for a wild bird to like around here unless the bird was a starling or a crow. The body-armor plant (ARDEE ENTERPRISES, AN LBI FAMILY OF COMPANIES COMPANY) was in a large cinder-block structure whose freshly rolled asphalt parking lot was ragged at the edges, crumbling into weeds. The lot was filling up with large passenger vehicles, including a black Navigator from which Vin Haven and some suits were emerging just as Lalitha screeched the rental car to a halt.

“Sorry we missed the lunch,” she said to Vin.

“I think dinner’s going to be the better meal,” Vin said. “Got to hope so, after what we saw for lunch.”

Inside the plant were pleasant strong smells of paint, plastics, and new machinery. Walter noted the absence of windows, the reliance on electric lighting. Folding chairs and a podium had been set up against a backdrop of towering shrink-wrapped oblongs of raw material. A hundred or so West Virginians were milling about, among them Coyle Mathis, who was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and even baggier jeans that looked so new he might have bought them at Walmart on his way over. Two local TV crews had cameras trained on the podium and the banner that hung above it: JOBS + NATIONAL SECURITY = JOB SECURITY.

Vin Haven (“You can Nexis me all night without finding one direct quote from my forty-seven years in business”) sat down directly behind the cameras, while Walter took from Lalitha a copy of the speech that he’d written and she’d vetted, and joined the other suits-Jim Elder, senior vice president at LBI, and Roy Dennett, CEO of his eponymous subsidiary-in the chairs behind the podium. In the front row of the audience, with his arms crossed high on his chest, was Coyle Mathis. Walter hadn’t seen him since their ill-fated encounter in Mathis’s front yard (which was now a barren field of rubble). He was staring at Walter with a look that reminded Walter, again, of his father. The look of a man attempting to preempt, with the ferocity of his contempt, any possibility of his own embarrassment or of Walter’s pity for him. It made Walter sad for him. While Jim Elder, at the mike, commenced praising our brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Walter gave Mathis a meek smile, to show that he was sad for him, sad for both of them. But Mathis’s expression didn’t change, and he didn’t stop staring.

“I think we have a few remarks now from the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Jim Elder said, “which is responsible for bringing all these wonderful, sustainable jobs to Whitmanville and the local economy. Please join me in welcoming Walter Berglund, executive director of the Trust. Walter?”

His sadness for Mathis had become a more general sadness, a world sadness, a life sadness. As he stood at the podium, he sought out Vin Haven and Lalitha, who were sitting together, and gave them each a small smile of regret and apology. Then he bent himself to the mike.

“Thank you,” he said. “Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It’s a long way from Forster Hollow, isn’t it?”

Aside from low-level systems hum, there was no sound but the echoing of his amplified voice. He glanced quickly at Mathis, whose expression remained fixed in contempt.

“So, yes, welcome,” he said. “Welcome to the middle class! That’s what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don’t like me. And I don’t like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn’t like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And now you’re middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it’s a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It’s the mainstay of economies all around the globe!”

He could see Lalitha whispering to Vin.

“And now that you’ve got these jobs at this body-armor plant,” he continued, “you’re going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they’re not turned on! But that’s OK, because that’s why we threw you out of your homes in the first place, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It’s a perfect world, isn’t it? It’s a perfect system, because as long as you’ve got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don’t have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there’s no more Indonesia!”

Coyle Mathis was the first to boo. He was quickly joined by many others. Peripherally, over his shoulder, Walter could see Elder and Dennett standing up.

“Just quickly, here,” he continued, “because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you’re going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you’ve joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don’t want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn’t that perfect?”

The audience had stood up and begun to shout back at him, telling him to shut up.

“That’s enough,” Jim Elder said, trying to pull him away from the mike.

“Just a couple more things!” Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. “I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn’t give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That’s part of the perfect middle-class world you’re joining! Now that you’re working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI’s broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!”

The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. “And MEANWHILE,” he shouted, “WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON’T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!”

Here he was slugged in the jaw by Coyle Mathis himself. He reeled sideways, his vision filling with magnesium-flare insects, his glasses lost, and decided that perhaps he’d said enough. He was now surrounded by Mathis and a dozen other men, and they began to inflict really serious pain. He fell to the floor, trying to escape through a forest of legs kicking him with their Chinese-made sneakers. He curled into a ball, temporarily deaf and blind, his mouth full of blood and at least one broken tooth, and absorbed more kicks. Then the kicks subsided and other hands were on him, including Lalitha’s. As sound returned, he could hear her raging, “Get away from him! Get away from him!” He gagged and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. She let her hair fall in the blood as she peered into his face. “Are you all right?”

He smiled as well as he could. “Starting to feel better.”

“Oh, my boss. My poor dear boss.”

“Definitely feeling better.”

It was the season of migration, of flight and song and sex. Down in the neotropics, where diversity was as great as anywhere on earth, a few hundred bird species grew restless and left behind the several thousand other species, many of them close taxonomic relatives, that were content to stay put and crowdedly coexist and reproduce at their tropical leisure. Among the hundreds of South American tanager species, exactly four took off for the United States, risking the disasters of travel for the bounty of things to eat and places to nest in temperate woods in summer. Cerulean warblers winged their way up along the coasts of Mexico and Texas and fanned into the hardwoods of Appalachia and the Ozarks. Ruby-throated hummingbirds fattened themselves on the flowers of Veracruz and flew eight hundred miles across the Gulf, burning up half their body weight, and landed in Galveston to catch their breath. Terns came up from one subarctic to the other, swifts took airborne naps and never landed, song-filled thrushes waited for a southern wind and then flew nonstop for twelve hours, traversing whole states in a night. High-rises and power lines and wind turbines and cellphone towers and road traffic mowed down millions of migrants, but millions more made it through, many of them returning to the very same tree they’d nested in the year before, the same ridgeline or wetland they’d been fledged on, and there, if they were male, began to sing. Each year, they arrived to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centers, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses. Migrants exhausted by their five-thousand-mile journey competed with earlier arrivals for the remaining scraps of territory; they searched in vain for a mate, they gave up on nesting and subsisted without breeding, they were killed for sport by free-roaming cats. But the United States was still a rich and relatively young country, and pockets full of bird life could still be found if you went looking.

Which Walter and Lalitha, at the end of April, in a van loaded with camping equipment, set out to do. They had a free month before their work with Free Space commenced in earnest, and their responsibilities to the Cerulean Mountain Trust had ended. As for their carbon footprint, in a gas-thirsty van, Walter took some comfort in having commuted on bicycle or on foot for the last twenty-five years, and in no longer owning any residence besides the little closed-up house at Nameless Lake. He felt he was owed one petroleum splurge after a lifetime of virtue, one nature-filled summer in payment for the summer he’d been deprived of as a teenager.

While he’d still been in the Whitman County hospital, having his dislocated jaw and split-open face and bruised ribs attended to, Lalitha had desperately spun his outburst as a trazodone-induced psychotic break. “He was 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 him on the check. The one real mistake he made was to mention it to Jessica. She had finally spoken to him when he’d landed in the hospital, but her tone made it clear that she wasn’t ready to be friends yet with Lalitha. She was also unimpressed with what he’d said in Whitmanville. “Even leaving aside the fact that ‘cancer on the planet’ is exactly the kind of phrase we all agreed was counterproductive,” she said, “I don’t think you picked the right enemy. You’re sending a really unhelpful message when you pit the environment against uneducated people who are trying to improve their lives. I mean, I know you don’t like those people. But you have to try to hide that, not lead with it.” In a later phone call, she made an impatient reference to her brother’s Republicanism, and Walter insisted that Joey was a different person since he’d married Connie. In fact, he said, Joey was now a major contributor to Free Space.

“And where did he get the money?” Jessica said immediately.

“Well, it’s not that much,” Walter backpedaled, realizing his mistake. “We’re a tiny group, you know, so everything’s relative. It’s just, symbolically, that he’s giving us anything at all-it says a lot about how he’s changed.”

“Hm.”

“I mean, it’s nothing like your contribution. Yours was huge. Spending that weekend with us, helping us create the concept. That was huge.”

“And now what?” she said. “Are you going to grow your hair long and start wearing a do-rag? Riding around in your van? Doing the whole midlife thing? Do we have that to look forward to? Because I would like to be the still, small voice that says I liked you the old way you were.”

“I promise not to grow my hair out. I promise no do-rag. I will not embarrass you.”

“I’m afraid the horse may already be out of that particular barn.”

Perhaps it was bound to happen: she was sounding more and more like Patty. Her anger would have grieved him more had he not been so enjoying, every minute of every day, the love of a woman who wanted all of him. His happiness was reminiscent of his early years with Patty, their days of teamwork in child-raising and house renovation, but he was much more present to himself now, more vividly and granularly appreciative of his happiness, and Lalitha was not the worry and enigma and headstrong stranger that Patty, at some level, had always remained to him. With Lalitha, what you saw was what you got. Their time in bed, as soon as he’d recovered from his injuries, became the thing he’d always missed without knowing he was missing it.

After movers had removed all traces of the Berglunds from the mansion, he and Lalitha struck out in the van toward Florida, intending to sweep westward across the country’s southern belly before the weather got too warm. He was intent on showing her a bittern, and they found their first one at Corkscrew Swamp in Florida, beside a shady pool and a boardwalk creaking with the weight of retirees and tourists, but it was a bittern without bitternness, standing in plain sight while the strobing of tourist cameras bounced off its irrelevant camouflage. Walter insisted on driving the dirt-surfaced dikes of Big Cypress in search of a real bittern, a shy one, and treated Lalitha to an extended rant about the ecological damage wreaked by recreational ATVers, the brethren of Coyle Mathis and Mitch Berglund. Somehow, despite the damage, the scrub jungle and black-water pools were still full of birds, as well as countless alligators. Walter finally spotted a bittern in a marsh littered with shotgun shells and sun-bleached Budweiser packaging. Lalitha braked the van in a cloud of dust and duly admired the bird through her binoculars until a flatbed truck loaded with three ATVs roared past.

She’d never camped before, but she was game for it and impossibly sexy to Walter in her breathable safariwear. It helped that she was immune to sunburn and as repellent of mosquitoes as he was attractant. He tried to teach her some rudiments of cooking, but she preferred the tasks of tent assembly and route planning. He got up every morning before dawn, made espresso in their six-cup pot, and carried a soy latte back into the tent for her. Then they went out walking in the dew and the honey-colored light. She didn’t share his feelings for wildlife, but she had a knack for spotting little birds in dense foliage, she studied the field guides, and she crowed with delight when she caught and corrected his false identifications. Later in the morning, when avian life quieted down, they drove some hours farther west and sought out hotel parking lots with unencrypted wireless connections, so that she could coordinate by e-mail with her prospective interns and he could write entries for the blog that she’d set up for him. Then another state park, another picnic dinner, another ecstatic round of grappling in the tent.

“Have you had enough of this?” he said one night, at an especially pretty and empty campground in the mesquite country of southwest Texas. “We could check into a motel for a week, swim in the pool, do our work.”

“No, I love seeing how much you enjoy looking for animals,” she said. “I love seeing you happy, after all that time when you were so unhappy. I love being on the road with you.”

“But maybe you’ve had enough of it?”

“Not yet,” she said, “although I don’t think I really get nature. Not the way you do. To me it seems like such a violent thing. That crow that was eating the sparrow babies, those flycatchers, the raccoon eating those eggs, the hawks killing everything. People talk about the peacefulness of nature, but to me it seems the opposite of peaceful. It’s constant killing. It’s even worse than human beings.”

“To me,” Walter said, “the difference is that birds are only killing because they have to eat. They’re not doing it angrily, they’re not doing it wantonly. It’s not neurotic. To me that’s what makes nature peaceful. Things live or they don’t live, but it’s not all poisoned with resentment and neurosis and ideology. It’s a relief from my own neurotic anger.”

“But you don’t even seem angry anymore.”

“That’s because I’m with you every minute of the day, and I’m not so compromised, and I’m not having to deal with people. I suspect the anger will come back.”

“I don’t care for my sake if it does,” she said. “I respect your reasons for being angry. They’re part of why I love you. But it just makes me so happy to see you happy.”

“I keep thinking you can’t get any more perfect,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “And then you say something even more perfect.”

In truth, he was troubled by the irony of his situation. By finally venting his anger, first to Patty and then in Whitmanville, and thereby extricating himself from his marriage and from the Trust, he’d removed two major causes of the anger. For a while, in his blog, he’d tried to downplay and qualify his cancer-on-the-planet “heroism” and emphasize that the villain was the System, not the people of Forster Hollow. But his fans had so roundly and voluminously chided him for this (“grow some balls man, your speech totally rocked,” etc.) that he came to feel he owed them an honest airing of every venomous thought he’d entertained while driving around West Virginia, every hard-core antigrowth opinion he’d ever swallowed in the name of professionalism. He’d been storing up incisive arguments and damning data ever since he was in college; the least he could do now was share it with young people to whom it actually, miraculously, seemed to matter. The loony rage of his readership was worrisome, however, and discordant with his peaceable mood. Lalitha, for her part, had her hands full in sifting through hundreds of new intern applicants and phoning the ones who seemed most apt to be responsible and nonviolent; almost all the ones she deemed uncrazy were young women. Her commitment to fighting overpopulation was as practical and humanitarian as Walter’s was abstract and misanthropic, and it was a measure of his deepening love for her how much he envied her and wished he could be more like her.

On the day before the last destination of their pleasure trip-Kern County, California, home to dazzling numbers of breeding songbirds-they stopped to see Walter’s brother Brent in the town of Mojave, near the air base where he was stationed. Brent, who had never married, and whose personal and political hero was Senator John McCain, and whose emotional development seemed to have ended with his enlistment in the Air Force, could hardly have been more perfectly uninterested in Walter’s separation from Patty or his involvement with Lalitha, whom he addressed more than once as “Lisa.” He did pick up the tab for lunch, though, and he had news of their brother, Mitch. “I was thinking,” he said, “if Mom’s house is still empty, you might want to let Mitch use it for a while. He doesn’t have a phone or an address, I know he’s still drinking, and he’s about five years delinquent in his child support. You know, he and Stacy had another kid right before they split up.”

“How many does that make,” Walter said. “Six?”

“No, just five. Two with Brenda, one with Kelly, two with Stacy. I don’t think it helps to send money, because he only drinks it. But I was thinking he could use a place to stay.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Brent.”

“I’m just saying. I know your situation with him. Just, you know, if the house is empty anyway.”

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.

Only in July, when they forsook the safety of Santa Cruz and hit the road again, were they immersed in the rage that was gripping the country that summer. Why the conservatives, who controlled all three branches of the federal government, were still so enraged-at respectful skeptics of the Iraq War, at gay couples who wanted to get married, at bland Al Gore and cautious Hillary Clinton, at endangered species and their advocates, at taxes and gas prices that were among the lowest of any industrialized nation, at a mainstream media whose corporate owners were themselves conservative, at the Mexicans who cut their grass and washed their dishes-was somewhat mysterious to Walter. His father had been enraged like that, of course, but in a much more liberal era. And the conservative rage had engendered a left-wing counter-rage that practically scorched off his eyebrows at the Free Space events in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Among the young people he spoke to, the all-purpose epithet for everyone from George Bush and Tim Russert to Tony Blair and John Kerry was “shithead.” That 9/11 had been orchestrated by Halliburton and the Saudi royal family was a near-universal article of faith. Three different garage bands performed songs in which they artlessly fantasized about torturing and killing the president and vice president (I shit in your mouth / Big Dick, it feels pretty nice / Yeah, little Georgie / A gunshot to the temple will suffice). Lalitha had impressed on the interns and especially on Walter the need to be disciplined in their message, to stick to the facts about overpopulation, to stake out the biggest possible tent. But without the draw of name-brand acts such as Richard might have provided, the events mostly attracted the already persuaded fringe, the sort of discontents who hit the streets in ski masks to riot against the WTO. Every time Walter took the stage, he was cheered for his Whitmanville meltdown and his intemperate blog entries, but as soon as he spoke of being smart and letting the facts argue for themselves, the crowds went quiet or started chanting the more incendiary words of his that they preferred-“Cancer on the planet!” “Fuck the pope!” In Seattle, where the mood was especially ugly, he left the stage to scattered booing. He was better received in the Midwest and South, particularly in the college towns, but the crowds were also much smaller. By the time he and Lalitha reached Athens, Georgia, he was having a hard time getting up in the morning. He was worn out by the road and oppressed by the thought that the country’s ugly rage was no more than an amplified echo of his own anger, and that he’d let his personal grudge against Richard cheat Free Space out of a broader fan base, and that he was spending money of Joey’s that would better have been given to Planned Parenthood. If it hadn’t been for Lalitha, who was doing most of the driving and all of the enthusiasm-providing, he might have abandoned the tour and just gone birdwatching.

“I know you’re discouraged,” Lalitha said while driving out of Athens. “But we’re definitely getting the issue on the radar. The free weeklies all print our talking points verbatim in their previews for us. The bloggers and the online reviews all talk about overpopulation. One day, there hasn’t been any public talk about it since the seventies. Then suddenly, the next day, there’s talk. The idea is suddenly out there in the world. New ideas always take hold on the fringes. Just because it’s not always pretty, you shouldn’t be discouraged.”

“I saved a hundred square miles in West Virginia,” he said. “Even more than that in Colombia. That was good work, with real results. Why didn’t I keep doing it?”

“Because you knew it’s not enough. The only thing that’s really going to save us is to get people to change the way they think.”

He looked at his girlfriend, her firm hands on the steering wheel, her bright eyes on the road, and thought he might burst with his desire to be like her; with gratitude that she didn’t mind that he was himself instead. “My problem is I don’t like people enough,” he said. “I don’t really believe they can change.”

“You do so like people. I’ve never seen you be mean to one. You can’t stop smiling when you talk to people.”

“I wasn’t smiling in Whitmanville.”

“Actually, you were. Even there. That was part of the weirdness of it.”

There weren’t many birds to watch in the dog days anyway. Once territory had been claimed and breeding accomplished, it was to no small bird’s advantage to make itself conspicuous. Walter took morning walks in refuges and parks that he knew were still full of life, but the overgrown weeds and heavily leafed trees stood motionless in the summer humidity, like houses locked against him, like couples who had eyes for nobody but themselves. The northern hemisphere was soaking up the sun’s energy, plant life silently converting it to food for animals, the burring and whining of insects the only sonic by-product. This was the time of payoff for the neotropical migrants, these were the days that needed to be seized. Walter envied them for having a job to do, and he wondered if he was becoming depressed because this was the first summer in forty years he hadn’t had to work.

The national Free Space battle of the bands was scheduled to happen on the last weekend in August and, unfortunately, in West Virginia. The state was uncentrally located and hard to reach by public transportation, but by the time Walter had proposed changing the location, on his blog, his fans were already excited about traveling to West Virginia and shaming it for its high birth rates, its ownership by the coal industry, its large population of Christian fundamentalists, and its responsibility for tipping the 2000 election in George Bush’s favor. Lalitha had asked Vin Haven for permission to hold the event on the Trust-owned former goat farm she’d always had in mind for it, and Haven, dumbfounded by her temerity, and as helpless as anybody else to resist her velvet-gloved pressure, had consented.

A grueling haul across the Rust Belt pushed their total trip mileage past ten thousand, their petroleum consumption past thirty barrels. It happened that their arrival in the Twin Cities, in mid-August, coincided with the first autumn-smelling cold front of the summer. All across the great boreal forest of Canada and northern Maine and Minnesota, the still substantially intact boreal forest, warblers and flycatchers and ducks and sparrows had completed their work of parenting, shed their breeding plumage for better camouflaging colors, and were receiving, in the chill of the wind and the angle of the sun, their cue to fly south again. Often the parents departed first, leaving their young behind to practice flying and foraging and then to find their own way, more clumsily, and with higher mortality rates, to their wintering grounds. Fewer than half of those leaving in the fall would return in the spring.

The Sick Chelseas, a St. Paul band that Walter had once heard opening for the Traumatics and guessed would not survive another year, were still alive and had managed to pack the Free Space event with enough fans to vote them on to the main event in West Virginia. The only other familiar faces in the crowd were Seth and Merrie Paulsen, Walter’s old neighbors on Barrier Street, looking thirty years older than everybody else except Walter himself. Seth was very taken with Lalitha, could not stop staring at her, and overruled Merrie’s pleas of tiredness to insist on a late, post-battle supper at Taste of Thailand. It became a real noseynessfest, as Seth prodded Walter for inside dope on Joey and Connie’s now notorious marriage, on Patty’s whereabouts, on the precise history of Walter and Lalitha’s relationship, and on the circumstances behind Walter’s spanking in the New York Times (“God, you looked bad in that”), and Merrie yawned and arranged her face in resignation.

Returning to their motel, very late, Walter and Lalitha had something resembling an actual quarrel. Their plan had been to take a few days off in Minnesota, to visit Barrier Street and Nameless Lake and Hibbing and to see if they could track down Mitch, but Lalitha now wanted to turn around and go straight to West Virginia. “Half the people we have on the ground there are self-described anarchists,” she said. “They’re not called anarchists for nothing. We need to get there right away and deal with the logistics.”

“No,” Walter said. “The whole reason we scheduled St. Paul last was so we could take some days here and rest up. Don’t you want to see where I grew up?”

“Of course I do. We’ll do it later. We’ll do it next month.”

“But we’re already here. It won’t hurt to take two days and then go straight to Wyoming County. Then we won’t have to come all the way back. It doesn’t make any sense to drive two thousand extra miles.”

“Why are you being this way?” she said. “Why don’t you want to deal with the thing that’s important right now, and deal with the past later?”

“Because this was our plan.”

“It was a plan, not a contract.”

“Well, and I guess I’m a little worried about Mitch, too.”

“You hate Mitch!”

“It doesn’t mean I want my brother living on the street.”

“Yes, but one more month won’t hurt,” she said. “We can come straight back.”

He shook his head. “I also really need to check the house out. It’s been more than a year since anyone was there.”

“Walter, no. This is you and me, this is our thing, and it’s happening right now.”

“We could even leave the van here and fly out and rent a car. We’d only end up losing one day. We’d still have a whole week to work on logistics. Will you please do this for me?”

She took his face in her hands and gave him a border-collie look. “No,” she said. “You please do this for me.”

“You do it,” he said, pulling away. “You fly out. I’ll follow in a couple of days.”

“Why are you being this way? Was it Seth and Merrie? Did they get you thinking too much about the past?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Well, put it out of your mind and come with me. We have to stay together.”

Like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake, old Swedish-gened depression was seeping up inside him: a feeling of not deserving a partner like Lalitha; of not being made for a life of freedom and outlaw heroics; of needing a more dully and enduringly discontented situation to struggle against and fashion an existence within. And he could see that simply by having these feelings he was starting to create a new situation of discontent with Lalitha. And it was better, he thought, depressively, that she learn sooner rather than later what he was really like. Understand his kinship with his brother and his father and his grandfather. And so he shook his head again. “I’m going to stick to the plan,” he said. “I’m going to take the van for two days. If you don’t want to come with me, we’ll get you a plane ticket.”

Everything might have been different if she’d cried then. But she was stubborn and spirited and angry with him, and in the morning he drove her to the airport, apologizing until she made him stop. “It’s OK,” she said, “I’m over it. I’m not worrying about it this morning. We’re doing what we have to do. I’ll call you when I get there and I’ll see you soon.”

It was Sunday morning. Walter called Carol Monaghan and then drove on familiar avenues up to Ramsey Hill. Blake had cut down a few more trees and bushes in Carol’s yard, but nothing else on Barrier Street had changed much. Carol embraced Walter warmly, pushing her breasts into him in a way that didn’t feel quite familial, and then, for an hour, while the twins ran squealing around the child-proofed great-room and Blake stood up nervously and left and came back and left again, the two parents made the best of being in-laws.

“I was dying to call you as soon as I found out,” Carol said. “I literally had to sit on my hand to keep from dialing your number. I couldn’t understand why Joey didn’t want to tell you himself.”

“Well, you know, he’s had some difficulties with his mother,” Walter said. “With me, too.”

“And how is Patty? I hear you guys are not together anymore.”

“That’s true enough.”

“I’m not going to bite my tongue on this one, Walter. I’m going to speak my mind even though it’s always getting me in trouble. I think this separation was a long time coming. I hated to see the way she treated you. It always seemed like everything had to be about her. So there-I said it.”

“Well, Carol, you know, these things are complicated. And she’s Connie’s mother-in-law, too, now. So I hope the two of you can find some way to work things out.”

“Ha. I don’t care about me, we don’t need to see each other. I just hope she recognizes what a heart of gold my daughter has.”

“I certainly recognize that myself. I think Connie’s a wonderful girl, with a lot of potential.”

“Well, you always were the nice one of the two of you. You always had a heart of gold yourself. I was never sorry to be your neighbor, Walter.”

He chose to let the unfairness of this pass, chose not to remind Carol of the many years of generosity that Patty had shown her and Connie, but he did feel very sad for Patty’s sake. He knew how hard she’d tried to be her better self, and it grieved him to be aligned now with the many people who could see only the unfortunate side of her. The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her. Dropping to his knees for some polite interaction with the twins, he was reminded of how much more comfortable than he she’d always been with little kids, how forgetful of herself she’d been with Jessica and Joey when they were the twins’ age; how blissfully absorbed. It was much better, he decided, that Lalitha had gone on to West Virginia and left him alone to suffer in the past.

After making his escape from Carol, and deducing from Blake’s cool good-bye that he hadn’t been forgiven for being a liberal, he drove up to Grand Rapids, stopped for some groceries, and reached Nameless Lake by late afternoon. There was, ominously, a for sale sign on the adjoining Lundner property, but his house had weathered 2004 as middling-well as it had weathered so many other years. The spare key was still hanging on the underside of the old rustic birch bench, and he found it not too intolerable to be in the rooms where his wife and his best friend had betrayed him; enough other memories flooded him vividly enough to hold their own. He raked and swept until nightfall, happy to have some real work to do for a change, and then, before he went to bed, he called Lalitha.

“It’s insane here,” she said. “It’s a good thing I came and good that you didn’t, because I think you’d be upset. It’s like Fort Apache or something. Our people practically need security to protect them from the fans who’ve shown up early. All those jerks in Seattle seem to have come straight here. We’ve got a little camp by the well, with one Porta Potti, but there’s already about three hundred other people laying siege to it. They’re all over the property, they’re drinking from the same creek they’re shitting right next to, and they’re antagonizing the locals. There’s graffiti all along the road leading up there. I have to send out interns in the morning to apologize to the people whose property’s been defaced, and offer to do some repainting. I went around trying to tell people to chill out, but everybody’s stoned and spread out over ten acres, and there’s no leadership, it’s totally amorphous. Then it got dark and started to rain, and I had to come back down to town and find a motel.”

“I can fly out tomorrow,” Walter said.

“No, come with the van. We need to be able to camp on-site. Right now you’d only get angry. I can deal with it without getting so angry, and things should be better by the time you get here.”

“Well, drive carefully out there, OK?”

“I will,” she said. “I love you, Walter.”

“I love you, too.”

The woman he loved loved him. He knew this for certain, but it was all he knew for certain, then or ever; the other vital facts remained unknown. Whether she did, in fact, drive carefully. Whether she was or wasn’t rushing on the rain-slick county highway back up to the goat farm the next morning, whether she was or wasn’t rounding the blind mountain curves dangerously fast. Whether a coal truck had come flying around one of these curves and done what a coal truck did somewhere in West Virginia every week. Or whether somebody in a high-clearance 4x4, maybe somebody whose barn had been defaced with the words free space or cancer on THE PLANET, saw a dark-skinned young woman driving a compact Korean-made rental car and veered into her lane or tailgated her or passed her too narrowly or even deliberately forced her off the shoulderless road.

Whatever did happen exactly, around 7:45 a.m., five miles south of the farm, her car went down a long and very steep embankment and crushed itself against a hickory tree. The police report would not even offer the faintly consoling assurance of an instant killing. But the trauma was severe, her pelvis was broken and a femoral artery severed, and she had certainly died before Walter, at 7:30 in Minnesota, returned the house key to its nail beneath the bench and headed over to Aitkin County to look for his brother.

He knew, from long experience with his father, that alcoholics were best conversed with in the morning. All Brent had been able to tell him about Mitch’s latest ex, Stacy, was that she worked at a bank in Aitkin, the county seat, and so he hurried from one to another of Aitkin’s banks and found Stacy in the third of them. She was pretty in a strapping farm-girl way, looked thirty-five, and spoke like a teenager. Although she’d never met Walter, she seemed ready to assign him significant responsibility for Mitch’s abandonment of their children. “You could try his friend Bo’s farm,” she said with a cross shrug. “The last I heard, Bo was letting him stay in his garage apartment, but that was like three months ago.”

Marshy, glacially scraped, oreless Aitkin County was the poorest county in Minnesota and therefore full of birds, but Walter didn’t stop to look for them as he drove up dead-straight County Road 5 and found Bo’s farm. There was a large field scattered with the overgrown remnants of a rapeseed crop, a smaller cornfield much weedier than it should have been. Bo himself was kneeling in the driveway near the house, repairing the kickstand of a girl’s bike adorned with pink plastic streamers, while an assortment of young children wandered in and out of the house’s open front door. His cheeks were gin-blossomed, but he was young and had the muscles of a wrestler. “So you’re the big-city brother,” he said, squinting in puzzlement at Walter’s van.

“That’s me,” Walter said. “I heard Mitch was living with you?”

“Yah, he comes and goes. You can probably find him up at Peter Lake now, the county campground there. You need him for something in particular?”

“No, I was just in the neighborhood.”

“Yah, he’s had it pretty rough since Stacy threw him out. I try to help him out a little bit.”

“She threw him out?”

“Oh, well, y’know. Two sides to every story, right?”

It was nearly an hour’s drive to Peter Lake, back up toward Grand Rapids. Arriving at the campground, which looked a little bit like an auto junkyard and was especially charmless in the midday sun, Walter saw a paunchy old guy squatting by a mud-stained red tent and scraping fish scales onto a sheet of newspaper. Only after he’d driven past him did he realize, from the resemblance to his father, that this was Mitch. He parked the van close against a poplar, to catch a little shade, and asked himself what he was doing here. He wasn’t prepared to offer Mitch the house at Nameless Lake; he thought that he and Lalitha might live in it themselves for a season or two while they figured out their future. But he wanted to be more like Lalitha, more fearless and humanitarian, and although he could see that it might actually be kinder just to leave Mitch alone, he took a deep breath and walked back to the red tent.

“Mitch,” he said.

Mitch was scaling an eight-inch sunny and didn’t look up. “Yeah.”

“It’s Walter. It’s your brother.”

He did look up then, with a reflexive sneer that turned into a genuine smile. He’d lost his good looks, or, more precisely, they had shrunk into a small facial oasis in a desert of sunburned bloat. “Holy shit,” he said. “Little Walter! What are you doing here?”

“Just stopped by to see you.”

Mitch wiped his hands on his very dirty cargo shorts and extended one to Walter. It was a flabby hand and Walter squeezed it hard.

“Yeah, sure, that’s great,” Mitch said generally. “I was just about to open a beer. You want a beer? Or are you still teetotaling?”

“I’ll have a beer,” Walter said. He realized that it would have been kind and Lalitha-like to have brought Mitch a few sixpacks, and then he thought that it was also kind to let Mitch be generous with something. He didn’t know which was the greater kindness. Mitch crossed his untidy campsite to an enormous cooler and came back with two cans of PBR.

“Yeah,” he said, “I saw that van go by and wondered what kind of hippies we had moving in. Are you a hippie now?”

“Not exactly.”

While flies and yellowjackets feasted on the guts of Mitch’s suspended fish-cleaning project, the two of them sat down on a pair of ancient camp stools, made of wood and mildew-splotched canvas, that had been their father’s. Walter recognized other similarly ancient gear around the site. Mitch, like their father, was a great talker, and as he filled Walter in on his present mode of existence, and on the litany of bad breaks and back injuries and car accidents and irreconcilable marital differences that had led to this existence, Walter was struck by what a different kind of drunk he was than their father had been. Alcohol or time’s passage seemed to have expunged all memory of his and Walter’s enmity. He exhibited no trace of a sense of responsibility, but also, therefore, neither defensiveness nor resentment. It was a sunny day and he was just doing his thing. He drank steadily but without hurry; the afternoon was long.

“So where are you getting your money?” Walter said. “Are you working?”

Mitch leaned over somewhat unsteadily and opened a tackle box in which there was a small pile of paper money and maybe fifty dollars in coins. “My bank,” he said. “I got enough to last through the warm weather. I had a night-watchman job in Aitkin last winter.”

“And what are you going to do when this runs out?”

“I’ll find something. I take pretty good care of myself.”

“You worry about your kids?”

“Yeah, I worry, sometimes. But they’ve got good mothers that know how to take care of them. I’m no help at that. I finally figured that out. I’m only good at taking care of me.”

“You’re a free man.”

“That I am.”

They fell silent. A small breeze had kicked up, casting a million diamonds across the surface of Peter Lake. On the far side, a few fishermen were lazing in aluminum rowboats. Somewhere closer, a raven was croaking, another camper was chopping wood. Walter had been spending his days outdoors all summer, many of them in far more remote and unsettled places than this, but at no point had he felt farther from the things that constituted his life than he was feeling now. His children, his work, his ideas, the women he loved. He knew his brother wasn’t interested in this life-was beyond being interested in anything-and he had no desire to speak of it. To inflict that on him. But at the very moment his telephone rang, showing an unfamiliar West Virginia number, he was thinking how lucky and blessed his life had been.