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

2004
MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL

When it became unavoidable that Richard Katz return to the studio with his eager young bandmates and start recording a second Walnut Surprise album-when he’d exhausted all modes of procrastination and flight, first playing every receptive city in America and then touring progressively more remote foreign countries, until his bandmates rebelled at adding Cyprus to their Turkish trip, and then breaking his left index finger while fielding a paperback copy of Samantha Power’s seminal survey of world genocide flung too violently by the band’s drummer, Tim, across a hotel room in Ankara, and then retreating solo to a cabin in the Adirondacks to score a Danish art film and, in his utter boredom with the project, seeking out a coke dealer in Plattsburgh and taking 5,000 euros of Danish government arts funding up his nose, and then going AWOL for a stretch of costly dissipation in New York and Florida which didn’t end until he was busted in Miami for DWI and possession, and then checking himself into the Gubser Clinic in Tallahassee for six weeks of detox and snide resistance to the gospel of recovery, and then recuperating from the shingles he’d taken insufficient care to avoid contracting during a chicken-pox outbreak at the Gubser, and then performing 250 hours of a greeably mindless community service at a Dade County park, and then simply refusing to answer his phone or check his e-mail while he read books in his apartment on the pretext of shoring up his defenses against the chicks and drugs that his bandmates all seemed able to enjoy without too seriously overdoing it-he sent Tim a postcard and told him to tell the others that he was dead broke and going back to building rooftop decks full-time; and the rest of Walnut Surprise began to feel like idiots for having waited.

Not that it mattered, but Katz really was broke. Income and outlays had more or less balanced during the band’s year and a half of touring; whenever there’d been danger of a surplus, he’d upgraded their hotels and bought drinks for bars full of fans and strangers. Though Nameless Lake and the newly kindled consumer interest in old Traumatics recordings had brought him more money than his previous twenty years of work combined, he’d managed to blow every dime of it in his quest to relocate the self he’d misplaced. The most traumatic events ever to befall the longtime front man of the Traumatics had been (1) receiving a Grammy nomination, (2) hearing his music played on National Public Radio, and (3) deducing, from December sales figures, that Nameless Lake had made the perfect little Christmas gift to leave beneath tastefully trimmed trees in several hundred thousand NPR-listening households. The Grammy nomination had been a particularly disorienting embarrassment.

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world’s general crappiness: for Katz’s Jewish paternal forebears, who’d been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother’s side, who’d labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn’t an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. Grim situations were Katz’s niche the way murky water was a carp’s. His best years with the Traumatics had coincided with Reagan I, Reagan II, and Bush I; Bill Clinton (at least pre-Lewinsky) had been something of a trial for him. Now came Bush II, the worst regime of all, and he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude. He was at once freer than he’d been since puberty and closer than he’d ever been to suicide. In the last days of 2003, he went back to building decks.

He was lucky with his first two clients, a couple of private-equity boys who were into the Chili Peppers and didn’t know Richard Katz from Ludwig van Beethoven. He sawed and nail-gunned on their roofs in relative peace. Not until his third job, begun in February, did he have the misfortune of working for people who thought they knew who he was. The building was on White Street between Church and Broadway, and the client, an independently rich publisher of art books, owned the entire Traumatics oeuvre in vinyl and seemed hurt that Katz didn’t remember seeing his face in various sparse crowds at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, over the years.

“There are so many faces,” Katz said. “I’m bad with faces.”

“That night when Molly fell off the stage, we all had drinks afterward. I still have her bloody napkin somewhere. You don’t remember?”

“Drawing a blank. Sorry.”

“Well, anyway, it’s been great to see you getting some of the recognition you deserve.”

“I’d rather not talk about that,” Katz said. “Let’s talk about your roof instead.”

“Basically, I want you to be creative and bill me,” the client said. “I want to have a deck built by Richard Katz. I can’t imagine you’re going to be doing this for long. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were in business.”

“Some rough idea of square footage and preference in materials would nevertheless be useful.”

“Really anything. Just be creative. It doesn’t even matter.”

“Bear with me, though, and pretend it does,” Katz said. “Because if it really doesn’t matter, I’m not sure I-”

“Cover the roof. OK? Make it vast.” The client seemed annoyed with him. “Lucy wants to have parties up here. That’s one reason we bought this place.”

The client had a son, Zachary, a Stuy High senior and hipster-in-training and apparently something of a guitarist, who came up to the roof after school on Katz’s first day of work and, from a safe distance, as if Katz were a lion on a chain, peppered him with questions calculated to demonstrate his own knowledge of vintage guitars, which Katz considered a particularly tiresome commodity fetish. He said as much, and the kid went away annoyed with him.

On Katz’s second day of work, while he was transporting lumber and Trex boards roofward, Zachary’s mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence-the drama of being her-was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity. He doubted he could get anywhere with her even if he felt like trying, but he knew that her pride would be hurt if he didn’t make at least a token effort to be disagreeable.

“I know,” he said, propping Trex against a wall. “That’s why it was such a breakthrough for me to produce a record of authentic adult feeling which women, too, could appreciate.”

“What makes you think I liked Nameless Lake?” Lucy said.

“What makes you think I care?” Katz gamely rejoined. He’d been up and down the stairs all morning, but what really exhausted him was having to perform himself.

“I liked it OK,” she said. “It was maybe just a teeny bit overpraised.”

“I’m at a loss to disagree with you,” Katz said.

She went away annoyed with him.

In the eighties and nineties, to avoid undercutting his best selling point as a contractor-the fact that he was making unpopular music deserving of financial support-Katz had been all but required to behave unprofessionally. His bread-and-butter clientele had been Tribeca artists and movie people who’d given him food and sometimes drugs and would have questioned his artistic commitment if he’d shown up for work before midafternoon, refrained from hitting on unavailable females, or finished on schedule and within budget. Now, with Tribeca fully annexed by the financial industry, and with Lucy lingering on her DUX bed all morning, sitting cross-legged in a tank top and sheer bikini underpants while she read the Times or talked on the phone, waving up at him through the skylight whenever he passed it, her barely clothed bush and impressive thighs sustainedly observable, he became a demon of professionalism and Protestant virtue, arriving promptly at nine and working several hours past nightfall, trying to shave a day or two off the project and get the hell out of there.

He’d returned from Florida feeling equally averse to sex and to music. This sort of aversion was new to him, and he was rational enough to recognize that it had everything to do with his mental state and little or nothing to do with reality. Just as the fundamental sameness of female bodies in no way precluded unending variety, there was no rational reason to despair about the sameness of popular music’s building blocks, the major and minor power chords, the 2/4 and the 4/4, the A-B-A-B-C. Every hour of the day, somewhere in greater New York, some energetic young person was working on a song that would sound, at least for a few listenings-maybe for as many as twenty or thirty listenings-as fresh as the morning of Creation. Since receiving his walking papers from Florida Probations and taking leave of his large-titted Parks Department supervisor, Marta Molina, Katz had been unable to turn on his stereo or touch an instrument or imagine letting anybody else into his bed, ever again. Hardly a day went by without his hearing an arresting new sound leaking from somebody’s basement practice room or even (it could happen) from the street doors of a Banana Republic or a Gap, and without his seeing, on the streets of Lower Manhattan, a young chick who was going to change somebody’s life; but he’d stopped believing this somebody could be him.

Then came a freezing Thursday afternoon, a sky of uniform grayness, a light snow that made the downtown skyline’s negative space less negative, blurring the Woolworth Building and its fairy-tale turrets, gently slanting in the weather’s tensors down the Hudson and out into the dark Atlantic, and distancing Katz from the scrum of pedestrians and traffic four stories below. The melty wetness of the streets nicely raised the treble of the traffic’s hiss and negated most of his tinnitus. He felt doubly enwombed, by the snow and by his manual labor, as he cut and fitted Trex into the intricate spaces between three chimneys. Midday turned to twilight without his thinking once of cigarettes, and since the interval between cigarettes was how he was currently sectioning his days into swallowable bites, he had the feeling that no more than fifteen minutes had passed between his eating of his lunchtime sandwich and the sudden, unwelcome looming-up of Zachary.

The kid was wearing a hoodie and the sort of low-cut skinny pants that Katz had first observed in London. “What do you think of Tutsi Picnic?” he said. “You into them?”

“Don’t know ’em,” Katz said.

“No way! I can’t believe that.”

“And yet it’s the truth,” Katz said.

“What about the Flagrants? Aren’t they awesome? That thirty-seven-minute song of theirs?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Hey,” Zachary said, undiscouraged, “what do you think about those psychedelic Houston bands that were recording on Pink Pillow in the late sixties? Some of their sound really reminds me of your early stuff.”

“I need the piece of material you’re standing on,” Katz said.

“I thought some of those guys might be influences. Especially Peshawar Rickshaw.”

“If you could just raise your left foot for a second.”

“Hey, can I ask you another question?”

“And this saw will be making some noise now.”

“Just one other question.”

“All right.”

“Is this part of your musical process? Going back to work at your old day job?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“See, because my friends at school are asking. I told them I thought this was part of your process. Like, maybe you were reconnecting with the working man to gather material for your next record.”

“Do me a favor,” Katz said, “and tell your friends to have their parents call me if they want a deck built. I’ll work anywhere below Fourteenth and west of Broadway.”

“Seriously, is that why you’re doing this?”

“The saw is very loud.”

“OK, but one more question? I swear this is my last question. Can I do an interview with you?”

Katz revved the saw.

“Please?” Zachary said. “There’s this girl in my class that’s totally into Nameless Lake. It would be really helpful, in terms of getting her to talk to me, if I could digitally record one short interview and put it up online.”

Katz set down the saw and regarded Zachary gravely. “You play guitar and you’re telling me you have trouble interesting girls in you?”

“Well, this particular one, yeah. She’s got more mainstream taste. It’s been a real uphill battle.”

“And she’s the one you’ve got to have, can’t live without.”

“Pretty much.”

“And she’s a senior,” Katz said by old calculating reflex, before he could tell himself not to. “Didn’t skip any grades or anything.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Her name?”

“Caitlyn.”

“Bring her over after school tomorrow.”

“But she’s not going to believe you’re here. That’s why I want to do the interview, to prove you’re here. Then she’ll want to come over and meet you.”

Katz was two days short of eight weeks of celibacy. For the previous seven weeks, abjuring sex had seemed like the natural complement to staying clean of drugs and alcohol-one form of virtue buttressing the other. Not five hours ago, glancing down through the skylight at Zachary’s exhibitionist mother, he’d felt uninterested to the point of mild nausea. But now, all at once, with divinatory clarity, he saw that he would be falling one day short of the eight-week mark: would be giving himself over to the meticulous acquisition of Caitlyn, obliterating the numberless moments of consciousness between now and tomorrow night by imagining the million subtly different faces and bodies that she might turn out to possess, and then exercising his mastery and enjoying the fruits of such exercise, all in the arguably worthy service of squishing Zachary and disillusioning an eighteen-year-old fan with “mainstream” taste. He saw that he’d simply made a virtue of being uninterested in vice.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “You set it up, think up your little questions, and I’ll be down in a couple of hours. But I need to see results tomorrow. I need to see this isn’t just some bullshit of yours.”

“Awesome,” Zachary said.

“You hear what I’m saying, though, right? I’m done interviewing. If I make an exception, we need results.”

“I swear she’s going to want to come over. She’s definitely going to want to meet you.”

“Good, then go contemplate what a large favor I’m doing you. I’ll be down around seven.”

Darkness had fallen. The snow had dwindled to a flurry, and the nightly nightmare of Holland Tunnel traffic had commenced. All but two of the city’s subway lines, as well as the indispensable PATH train, converged within three hundred yards of where Katz stood. This was still the pinch point of the world, this neighborhood. Here was the World Trade Center’s floodlit cicatrix, here the gold hoard of the Federal Reserve, here the Tombs and the Stock Exchange and City Hall, here Morgan Stanley and American Express and the windowless monoliths of Verizon, here stirring views across the harbor toward distant Liberty in her skin of green oxide. The stout female and wiry male bureaucrats who made the city function were crowding Chambers Street with brightly colored small umbrellas, heading home to Queens and Brooklyn. For a moment, before he turned his work lights on, Katz felt almost happy, almost familiar to himself again; but by the time he was packing up his tools, two hours later, he was aware of all the ways in which he already hated Caitlyn, and what a strange, cruel universe it was that made him want to fuck a chick because he hated her, and how badly this episode, like so many others before it, was going to end, and what a waste it would make of his accumulated clean time. He hated Caitlyn additionally for this waste.

And yet it was important that Zachary be squished. The kid had been given his own practice room, a cubical space lined with eggshell foam and scattered with more guitars than Katz had owned in thirty years. Already, for pure technique, to judge from what Katz had overheard in his comings and goings, the kid was a more hotdog soloist than Katz had ever been or ever would be. But so were a hundred thousand other American high-school boys. So what? Rather than thwarting his father’s vicarious rock ambitions by pursuing entomology or interesting himself in financial derivatives, Zachary dutifully aped Jimi Hendrix. Somewhere there had been a failure of imagination.

The kid was waiting in his practice room with an Apple laptop and a printed list of questions when Katz came in, his nose running and his frozen hands aching in the indoor warmth. Zachary indicated the folding chair he was to sit in. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could start by playing a song and then maybe play another when we’re done.”

“No, I won’t do that,” Katz said.

“One song. It would be really cool if you would.”

“Just ask me your questions, all right? This is fairly humiliating already.”

Q: So, Richard Katz, it’s been three years since Nameless Lake, and exactly two years since Walnut Surprise was up for a Grammy. Can you tell me a little bit about how your life has changed since then?

A: I can’t answer that question. You have to ask me better questions.

Q: Well, maybe you can tell me a little about your decision to go back to work as a manual laborer. Do you feel blocked artistically?

A: Really need to take a different tack here.

Q: OK. What do you think of the MP3 revolution?

A: Ah, revolution, wow. It’s great to hear the word “revolution” again. It’s great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavor and you have to spend another buck. That era which finally ended whenever, yesterday-you know, that era when we pretended rock was the scourge of conformity and consumerism, instead of its anointed handmaid-that era was really irritating to me. I think it’s good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general that we can finally see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were: as manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets.

Q: So you’re saying rock has lost its subversive edge?

A: I’m saying it never had any subversive edge. It was always wintergreen Chiclets, we just enjoyed pretending otherwise.

Q: What about when Dylan went electric?

A: If you’re going to talk about ancient history, let’s go back to the French Revolution. Remember when, I forget his name, but that rocker who wrote the “Marseillaise,” Jean Jacques Whoever-remember when his song started getting all that airplay in 1792, and suddenly the peasantry rose up and overthrew the aristocracy? There was a song that changed the world. Attitude was what the peasants were missing. They already had everything else-humiliating servitude, grinding poverty, unpayable debts, horrific working conditions. But without a song, man, it added up to nothing. The sansculotte style was what really changed the world.

Q: So what’s the next step for Richard Katz?

A: I’m getting involved in Republican politics.

Q: Ha ha.

A: Seriously. Getting nominated for a Grammy was such an unexpected honor, I feel duty bound to make the most of it in this critical election year. I’ve been given the opportunity to participate in the pop-music mainstream, and manufacture Chiclets, and help try to persuade fourteen-year-olds that the look and feel of Apple Computer products is an indication of Apple Computer’s commitment to making the world a better place. Because making the world a better place is cool, right? And Apple Computer must be way more committed to a better world, because iPods are so much cooler-looking than other MP3 players, which is why they’re so much more expensive and incompatible with other companies’ software, because-well, actually, it’s a little unclear why, in a better world, the very coolest products have to bring the very most obscene profits to a tiny number of residents of the better world. This may be a case where you have to step back and take the long view and see that getting to have your own iPod is itself the very thing that makes the world a better place. And that’s what I find so refreshing about the Republican Party. They leave it up to the individual to decide what a better world might be. It’s the party of liberty, right? That’s why I can’t understand why those intolerant Christian moralists have so much influence on the party. Those people are very antichoice. Some of them are even opposed to the worship of money and material goods. I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry really getting out in front on this one, and becoming more active politically, and standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, we’re not about accurate or objectively verifiable information, we’re not about meaningful labor, we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else. We’re about ridiculing people who have the bad manners not to want to be cool like us. We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes. We’re about the relentless enforcement and exploitation of our intellectual-property rights. We’re about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that it costs a licensed Apple Computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture.

Q: Seriously, though. There was a very strong antiwar mood at last year’s Grammys. Many of the nominees were very outspoken. Do you think successful musicians have a responsibility to be role models?

A: Me me me, buy buy buy, party party party. Sit in your own little world, rocking, with your eyes closed. What I’ve been trying to say is that we already are perfect Republican role models.

Q: If that’s the case, then why was there a censor at the awards last year, making sure that nobody spoke out against the war? Are you saying Sheryl Crow is a Republican?

A: I hope so. She seems like such a nice person, I’d hate to think she was a Democrat.

Q: She’s been very vocally antiwar.

A: Do you think George Bush actually hates gay people? Do you think he personally gives a shit about abortion? Do you think Dick Cheney really believes Saddam Hussein engineered 9/11? Sheryl Crow is a chewing-gum manufacturer, and I say that as a longtime chewing-gum manufacturer myself. The person who cares what Sheryl Crow thinks about the war in Iraq is the same person who’s going to buy an obscenely overpriced MP3 player because Bono Vox is shilling for it.

Q: But there’s a place for leaders in a society, too, right? Wasn’t that what corporate America was trying to suppress at the Grammys? The voices of potential leaders of an antiwar movement?

A: You want the CEO of Chiclets to be a leader in the fight against tooth decay? Use the same advertising methods to sell gum and tell the world that gum is bad for you? I know I just made a crack about Bono, but he has more integrity than the rest of the music world combined. If you made a fortune selling Chiclets, you might as well go ahead and sell overpriced iPods, too, and get even richer, and then use your money and your status to get entrée to the White House and try to do some actual hands-on good in Africa. Like: be a man, suck it up, admit that you like being part of the ruling class, and that you believe in the ruling class, and that you’ll do whatever it takes to consolidate your position in it.

Q: Are you saying you supported the invasion of Iraq?

A: I’m saying, if invading Iraq had been the kind of thing that a person like me supported, it never would have happened.

Q: Let’s get back to Richard Katz the person for a minute.

A: No, let’s turn your little machine off. I think we’re done here.

“That was great,” Zachary said, pointing and clicking. “That was perfect. I’m going to put this up right now and send the link to Caitlyn.”

“You have her e-mail address?”

“No, but I know who does.”

“Then I’ll see you both after school tomorrow.”

Katz made his way down Church Street toward the PATH train under a familiar cloud of post-interview remorse. He wasn’t worried about having given offense; his business was giving offense. He was worried about having sounded pathetic-too transparently the washed-up talent whose only recourse was to trash his betters. He strongly disliked the person he’d just demonstrated afresh that he unfortunately was. And this, of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.

Back in Jersey City, he stopped at the gyro joint that provided three or four of his dinners every week, departed with a heavy stinking bag of lowest-grade meats and pita, and climbed the stairs to his apartment, which he’d been away from so much in the last two and a half years that it seemed to have turned against him, to no longer wish to be his place. A little bit of coke could have changed that-could have restored the apartment’s lost luster of friendliness-but only for a few hours, or at most a few days, after which it would make everything much worse. The one room he still halfway liked was the kitchen, whose harsh fluorescent lighting suited his mood. He sat down at his ancient enamel-top table to distract himself from the taste of his dinner by reading Thomas Bernhard, his new favorite writer.

Behind him, on a counter crowded with unwashed dishes, his landline rang. The readout said walter berglund.

“Walter, my conscience,” Katz said. “Why are you bothering me now?”

He was tempted, in spite of himself, to pick up, because he’d lately found himself missing Walter, but he remembered, in the nick of time, that this could just as easily be Patty calling from their home phone. He’d learned from his experience with Molly Tremain that you shouldn’t try to save a drowning woman unless you were ready to drown yourself, and so he’d stood and watched from a pier while Patty floundered and cried for help. Any way she might be feeling now was a way he didn’t want to hear about. The great benefit of touring Nameless Lake to death-toward the end, he’d been able to entertain long trains of thought while performing, able to review the band’s finances and contemplate the scoring of new drugs and experience remorse about his latest interview without losing the beat or skipping a verse-had been the emptying of all meaning from the lyrics, the permanent severing of his songs from the state of sadness (for Molly, for Patty) in which he’d written them. He’d gone so far as to believe the touring had exhausted the sadness itself. But there was no way he was going to touch the phone while it was ringing.

He did, however, check his voice mail.

Richard? It’s Walter-Berglund. I don’t know if you’re there, you’re probably not even in the country, but I’m wondering if you might be around tomorrow. I’m going up to New York on business, and I have a little proposal for you. Sorry about the late notice. I’m mostly just saying hi. Patty says hi, too. Hope everything’s OK with you!

To delete this message, press 3.

It was two years since Katz had heard from Walter. As the silence had lengthened, he’d begun to think that Patty, in a moment of stupidity or misery, had confessed to her husband what had happened at Nameless Lake. Walter, with his feminism, his infuriating reverse double standard, would quickly have forgiven Patty and left Katz alone to bear the blame for the betrayal. It was a funny thing about Walter: circumstances kept conspiring to make Katz, who otherwise feared nobody, feel lessened and intimidated by him. In renouncing Patty, sacrificing his own pleasure and brutally disappointing her in order to preserve her marriage, he’d risen momentarily to the level of Walter’s excellence, but all he’d gotten for his trouble was envy of his friend for his unexamined possession of his wife. He’d tried to pretend that he was doing the Berglunds a favor by ceasing communication with them, but mainly he just hadn’t wanted to hear that they were happy and securely married.

Katz couldn’t have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable age, before the contours of his personality were fully set. Walter had slipped into his life before he’d shut the door on the world of ordinary people and cast his lot with misfits and dropouts. Not that Walter was so ordinary himself. He was at once hopelessly naïve and very shrewd and dogged and well-informed. And then there was the complication of Patty, who, although she’d long tried hard to pretend otherwise, was even less ordinary than Walter, and then the further complication of Katz’s being no less attracted to Patty than Walter was, and arguably more attracted to Walter than Patty was. This was definitely a weird one. No other man had warmed Katz’s loins the way the sight of Walter did after long absence. These groinal heatings were no more about literal sex, no more homo, than the hard-ons he got from a long-anticipated first snort of blow, but there was definitely something deep-chemical there. Something that insisted on being called love. Katz had enjoyed seeing the Berglunds as their family grew, enjoyed knowing them, enjoyed knowing they were out there in the Midwest, having a good life that he could drop in on when he wasn’t feeling great. And then he’d wrecked it by letting himself spend a night alone in a summer house with a former basketball player who was skilled at scooting through narrow lanes of opportunity. What had been his diffusely warm world of domestic refuge had collapsed, overnight, into the hot, hungry microcosm of Patty’s cunt. Which he still couldn’t believe he’d had such cruelly fleeting access to.

Patty says hi, too.

“Yeah, fuck that,” Katz said, eating gyro. But as soon as he’d replaced his appetite with a deep gastric unease about his means of satisfying it, he returned Walter’s call. Luckily, Walter himself answered.

“What’s up,” Katz said.

“What’s up with you?” Walter countered with giddy niceness. “It seems like you’ve been everywhere.”

“Yeah, really singing the body electric. Heady times here.”

“Tripping the light fantastic.”

“Exactly. In a Dade County jail cell.”

“Yeah, I read about that. What on earth were you doing in Florida anyway?”

“South American chick I mistook for a human being.”

“I figured it was all part of the fame thing,” Walter said. “ ‘Fame requires every sort of excess.’ I remembered we used to talk about that.”

“Well, fortunately, I’m past having to deal with it. I’ve stepped off the bus.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m building decks again.”

“Decks? Are you kidding? That’s crazy! You should be out trashing hotel rooms and recording your most repellent fuck-you songs ever.”

“Tired moves, man. I’m doing the only honorable thing I can think of.”

“But that’s such a waste!”

“Be careful what you say. You might offend me.”

“Seriously, Richard, you’re a great talent. You can’t just stop because people happened to like one of your records.”

“ ‘Great talent.’ That’s like calling somebody a genius at tic-tac-toe. We’re talking about pop music here.”

“Wow, wow, wow,” Walter said. “This is not what I expected to be hearing. I thought you’d be finishing a record and getting ready for more touring. I would have called you sooner if I’d known you were building decks. I was trying not to bother you.”

“You never have to feel that.”

“Well, I never heard from you, I figured you were busy.”

“Mea culpa,” Katz said. “How are you guys doing? Everything OK with you?”

“More or less. You know we moved to Washington, right?”

Katz closed his eyes and flogged his neurons to produce a confirming memory of this. “Yes,” he said. “I think I knew that.”

“Well, things have gotten somewhat complex here, it turns out. In fact, that’s what prompted me to call. I have a proposal for you. Do you have some time tomorrow afternoon? On the late side?”

“Late afternoon’s no good. How about morning?”

Walter explained that he was meeting Robert Kennedy Jr. at noon and had to return to Washington in the evening for a flight to Texas on Saturday morning. “We could talk on the phone now,” he said, “but my assistant really wants to meet you. She’s the one you’d be working with. I’d rather not steal her thunder by saying anything now.”

“Your assistant,” Katz said.

“Lalitha. She’s incredibly young and brilliant. She actually lives right upstairs from us. I think you’ll like her a lot.”

The brightness and excitement in Walter’s voice, the hint of guilt or thrill in the word “actually,” did not escape Katz’s notice.

“Lalitha,” he said. “What kind of name is that?”

“Indian. Bengali. She grew up in Missouri. She’s actually very pretty.”

“I see. And what’s her proposal about?”

“Saving the planet.”

“I see.”

Katz suspected that Walter was calculatedly dangling this Lalitha as bait, and it irritated him to be thought so easily manipulated. And yet-knowing Walter to be a man who didn’t call a female pretty without good reason-he was manipulated, he was intrigued.

“Let me see if I can rearrange some things tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“Fantastic,” Walter said.

What would be would be and what would not would not. In Katz’s experience, it seldom hurt to make chicks wait. He called White Street and informed Zachary that the meeting with Caitlyn would have to be postponed.

The following afternoon, at 3:15, only fifteen minutes late, he strode into Walker’s and saw Walter and the Indian chick waiting at a corner table. Before he even reached the table, he knew he had no chance with her. There were eighteen words of body language with which women signified availability and submission, and Lalitha was using a good twelve of them at once on Walter. She looked like a living illustration of the phrase hanging on his words. As Walter rose from the table to embrace Katz, the girl’s eyes remained fixed on Walter; and this was indeed a weird twist for the universe to have taken. Never before had Katz seen Walter in studly mode, turning a pretty head. He was wearing a good dark suit and had gained some middle-aged bulk. There was a new breadth to his shoulders, a new projection to his chest. “Richard, Lalitha,” he said.

“Very nice to meet you,” Lalitha said, loosely shaking his hand and adding nothing about being honored or excited, nothing about being a huge fan.

Katz sank into a chair feeling sucker-punched by a damning recognition: contrary to the lies he’d always told himself, he wanted Walter’s women not in spite of his friendship but because of it. For two years, he’d been consistently oppressed by avowals of fandom, and now suddenly he was disappointed not to receive one of these avowals from Lalitha, because of the way she was looking at Walter. She was dark-skinned and complexly round and slender. Round-eyed, round-faced, round-breasted; slender in the neck and arms. A solid B-plus that could be an A-minus if she would work for extra credit. Katz pushed a hand through his hair, brushing out bits of Trex dust. His old friend and foe was beaming with unalloyed delight at seeing him again.

“So what’s up,” he said.

“Well, a lot,” Walter said. “Where to begin?”

“That’s a nice suit, by the way. You look good.”

“Oh, you like it?” Walter looked down at himself. “Lalitha made me buy it.”

“I kept telling him his wardrobe sucked,” the girl said. “He hadn’t bought a new suit in ten years!”

She had a subtle subcontinental accent, percussive, no-nonsense, and she sounded proprietary of Walter. If her body hadn’t been speaking of such anxiousness to please, Katz might have believed she already owned him.

“You look good yourself,” Walter said.

“Thank you for lying.”

“No, it’s good, it’s kind of a Keith Richards look.”

“Ah, now we’re being honest. Keith Richards looks like a wolf dressed up in a grandmother’s bonnet. That headband?”

Walter consulted Lalitha. “Do you think Richard looks like a grandmother?”

“No,” she said with a curt, round O sound.

“So you’re in Washington,” Katz said.

“Yeah, it’s sort of a strange situation,” Walter said. “I work for a guy named Vin Haven who’s based in Houston, he’s a big oil-and-gas guy. His wife’s dad was an old-school Republican. Served under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He left her a mansion in Georgetown that they hardly ever used. When Vin set up the Trust, he put the offices on the ground floor and sold Patty and me the second and third floors at a price below market. There’s also a little maid’s apartment on the top floor where Lalitha’s been living.”

“I have the third-best commute in Washington,” Lalitha said. “Walter’s is even better than the president’s. We all share the same kitchen.”

“Sounds cozy,” Katz said, giving Walter a significant look that seemed not to register. “And what is this Trust?”

“I think I told you about it the last time we talked.”

“I was doing so many drugs there for a while, you’re going to have to tell me everything at least twice.”

“It is the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Lalitha said. “It’s a whole new approach to conservation. It’s Walter’s idea.”

“Actually, it was Vin’s idea, at least to begin with.”

“But the really original ideas are all Walter’s,” Lalitha assured Katz.

A waitress (nothing special, already known to Katz and dismissed from consideration) took orders for coffee, and Walter launched into the story of the Cerulean Mountain Trust. Vin Haven, he said, was a very un usual man. He and his wife, Kiki, were passionate bird-lovers who happened also to be personal friends of George and Laura Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney. Vin had accumulated a nine-figure fortune by profitably losing money on oil and gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma. He was now getting on in years, and, having had no children with Kiki, he’d decided to blow more than half his total wad on the preservation of a single bird species, the cerulean warbler, which, Walter said, was not only a beautiful creature but the fastest-declining songbird in North America.

“Here’s our poster bird,” Lalitha said, taking a brochure from her briefcase.

The warbler on its cover looked nondescript to Katz. Bluish, small, unintelligent. “That’s a bird all right,” he said.

“Just wait,” Lalitha said. “It’s not about the bird. It’s much bigger than that. You have to wait and hear Walter’s vision.”

Vision! Katz was beginning to think that Walter’s real purpose in arranging this meeting had simply been to inflict on him the fact of his being adored by a rather pretty twenty-five-year-old.

The cerulean warbler, Walter said, bred exclusively in mature temperate hardwood forests, with a stronghold in the central Appalachians. There was a particularly healthy population in southern West Virginia, and Vin Haven, with his ties to the nonrenewable energy industry, had seen an opportunity to partner with coal companies to create a very large, permanent private reserve for the warbler and other threatened hardwood species. The coal companies had reason to fear that the warbler would soon be listed under the Endangered Species Act, with potentially deleterious effects on their freedom to cut down forests and blow up mountains. Vin believed that they could be persuaded to help the warbler, to keep the bird off the Threatened list and garner some much-needed good press, as long as they were allowed to continue extracting coal. And this was how Walter had landed the job as executive director of the Trust. In Minnesota, working for the Nature Conservancy, he’d forged good relationships with mining interests, and he was unusually open to constructive engagement with the coal people.

“Mr. Haven interviewed half a dozen other candidates before Walter,” Lalitha said. “Some of them stood up and walked out on him, right in the middle of the interviews. They were so closed-minded and afraid of being criticized! Nobody else but Walter could see the potential for somebody who was willing to take a big risk and not care so much about conventional wisdom.”

Walter grimaced at this compliment, but he was clearly pleased by it. “Those people all had better jobs than I did. They had more to lose.”

“But what kind of environmentalist cares more about saving his job than saving land?”

“Well, a lot of them do, unfortunately. They have families and responsibilities.”

“But so do you!”

“Face it, man, you’re just too excellent,” Katz said, not kindly. He was still holding out hope that Lalitha, when they stood up to leave, would prove to be big in the butt or thick in the thighs.

To help save the cerulean warbler, Walter said, the Trust was aiming to create a hundred-square-mile roadless tract-Haven’s Hundred was its working nickname-in Wyoming County, West Virginia, surrounded by a larger “buffer zone” open to hunting and motorized recreation. To be able to afford both the surface and mineral rights to such a large single parcel, the Trust would first have to permit coal extraction on nearly a third of it, via mountaintop removal. This was the prospect that had scared off the other applicants. Mountaintop removal as currently practiced was ecologically deplorable-ridgetop rock blasted away to expose the underlying seams of coal, surrounding valleys filled with rubble, biologically rich streams obliterated. Walter, however, believed that properly managed reclamation efforts could mitigate far more of the damage than people realized; and the great advantage of fully mined-out land was that nobody would rip it open again.

Katz was remembering that one of the things he’d missed about Walter was good discussion of actual ideas. “But don’t we want to leave the coal underground?” he said. “I thought we hated coal.”

“That’s a longer discussion for another time,” Walter said.

“Walter has some excellent original thoughts on fossil fuels versus nuclear and wind,” Lalitha said.

“Suffice it to say that we’re realistic about coal,” Walter said.

Even more exciting, he continued, was the money the Trust was pouring into South America, where the cerulean warbler, like so many other North American songbirds, spent its winters. The Andean forests were disappearing at a calamitous rate, and for the last two years Walter had been making monthly trips to Colombia, buying up big parcels of land and coordinating with local NGOs that encouraged ecotourism and helped peasants replace their wood-burning stoves with solar and electric heating. A dollar still went fairly far in the southern hemisphere, and the South America half of the Pan-American Warbler Park was already in place.

“Mr. Haven hadn’t planned to do anything in South America,” Lalitha said. “He’d completely neglected that part of the picture until Walter pointed it out to him.”

“Apart from everything else,” Walter said, “I thought there could be some educational benefit in creating a park that spanned two continents. To drive home the fact that everything’s interconnected. We’re eventually hoping to sponsor some smaller reserves along the warbler’s migratory route, in Texas and Mexico.”

“That’s good,” Katz said dully. “That’s a good idea.”

“Really good idea,” Lalitha said, gazing at Walter.

“The thing is,” Walter said, “the land is disappearing so fast that it’s hopeless to wait for governments to do conservation. The problem with governments is they’re elected by majorities that don’t give a shit about biodiversity. Whereas billionaires do tend to care. They’ve got a stake in keeping the planet not entirely fucked, because they and their heirs are going to be the ones with enough money to enjoy the planet. The reason Vin Haven started doing conservation on his ranches in Texas was that he likes to hunt the bigger birds and look at the little ones. Self-interest, yeah, but a total win-win. In terms of locking up habitat to save it from development, it’s a lot easier to turn a few billionaires than to educate American voters who are perfectly happy with their cable and their Xboxes and their broadband.”

“Plus you don’t actually want three hundred million Americans running around your wilderness areas anyway,” Katz said.

“Exactly. It wouldn’t be wilderness anymore.”

“So basically you’re telling me you’ve gone over to the dark side.”

Walter laughed. “That’s right.”

“You need to meet Mr. Haven,” Lalitha said to Katz. “He’s really an interesting character.”

“Being friends with George and Dick would seem to tell me everything I need to know.”

“No, Richard, it doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t tell you everything.”

Her charming pronunciation of the O in “no” made Katz want to keep contradicting her. “And the guy’s a hunter,” he said. “He probably even hunts with Dick, right?”

“As a matter of fact, he does hunt with Dick sometimes,” Walter said. “But the Havens eat what they kill, and they manage their land for wildlife. The hunting is not the problem. The Bushes aren’t the problem, either. When Vin comes to town, he goes to the White House to watch Longhorns games, and at halftime he works on Laura. He’s got her interested in seabirds in Hawaii. I think we’re going to see some action there soon. The Bush connection per se is not the problem.”

“So what is the problem?” Katz said.

Walter and Lalitha exchanged uneasy glances.

“Well, there are several,” Walter said. “Money is one of them. Given how much we’re pouring into South America, it would really have helped to get some public funding in West Virginia. And the mountaintop-removal issue turns out to be a real tar baby. The local grassroots groups have all demonized the coal industry and especially MTR.”

“MTR is mountaintop removal,” Lalitha said.

“The New York Times gives Bush-Cheney a total free pass on Iraq but keeps running these fucking editorials about the evils of MTR,” Walter said. “Nobody state, federal, or private wants to touch a project that involves sacrificing mountain ridges and displacing poor families from their ancestral homes. They don’t want to hear about forest reclamation, they don’t want to hear about sustainable green jobs. Wyoming County is very, very empty-the total number of families directly impacted by our plan is less than two hundred. But the whole thing gets turned into evil corporations versus the helpless common man.”

“It is so stupid and unreasonable,” Lalitha said. “They won’t even listen to Walter. He has really good news about reclamation, but people just close their ears when we walk into a room.”

“There’s this thing called the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative,” Walter said. “Are you at all interested in the details?”

“I’m interested in watching the two of you talk about them,” Katz said.

“Well, very briefly, what’s given MTR such a bad name is that most surface-rights owners don’t insist on the right sort of reclamation. Before a coal company can exercise its mineral rights and tear down a mountain, it has to put up a bond that doesn’t get refunded until the land’s been restored. And the problem is, these owners keep settling for these barren, flat, subsidence-prone pastures, in the hope that some developer will come along and build luxury condos on them, in spite of their being in the middle of nowhere. The fact is, you can actually get a very lush and biodiverse forest if you do the reclamation right. Use four feet of topsoil and weathered sandstone instead of the usual eighteen inches. Take care not to compact the soil too much. And then plant the right mixture of fast- and slow-growing tree species in the right season. We’ve got evidence that forests like that might actually be better for warbler families than the second-growth forests they replace. So our plan isn’t just about preserving the warbler, it’s about creating an advertisement for doing things right. But the environmental mainstream doesn’t want to talk about doing things right, because doing things right would make the coal companies look less villainous and MTR more palatable politically. And so we couldn’t get any outside money, and we’ve got public opinion trending against us.”

“But the problem with going it alone,” Lalitha said, “was that we were either looking at a much smaller park, too small to be a stronghold for the warbler, or at making too many concessions to the coal companies.”

“Which really are somewhat evil,” Walter said.

“And so we couldn’t ask too many questions about Mr. Haven’s money.”

“It sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” Katz said. “If I were a billionaire, I’d be taking out my checkbook right now.”

“There’s even worse, though,” Lalitha said, her eyes strangely glittering.

“Are you bored yet?” Walter said.

“Not at all,” Katz said. “I’m frankly a little starved for intellectual stimulus.”

“Well, the problem is, unfortunately, that Vin has turned out to have some other motives.”

“Rich people are like little babies,” Lalitha said. “Fucking little babies.”

“Say that again,” Katz said.

“Say what?”

“Fucking. I like the way you pronounce it.”

She blushed; Mr. Katz had gotten through to her.

“Fucking, fucking, fucking,” she said happily, for him. “I used to work at the Conservancy, and when we’d have our annual gala, the rich people were happy to buy a table for twenty thousand dollars, but only if they got their gift bag at the end of the night. The gift bags were full of worthless garbage donated by somebody else. But if they didn’t get their gift bags, they wouldn’t donate twenty thousand again the next year.”

“I need your assurance,” Walter said to Katz, “that you won’t mention any of this to anybody else.”

“So assured.”

The Cerulean Mountain Trust, Walter said, had been conceived in the spring of 2001, when Vin Haven had traveled to Washington to participate in the vice president’s notorious energy task force, the one whose invite list Dick Cheney was still spending taxpayer dollars to defend against the Freedom of Information Act. Over cocktails one night, after a long day of task-forcing, Vin had spoken to the chairmen of Nardone Energy and Blasco and sounded them out on the subject of cerulean warblers. Once he’d convinced them that their legs weren’t being pulled-that Vin was actually serious about saving a non-huntable bird-an agreement in principle had been reached: Vin would go shopping for a huge tract of land whose core would be opened to MTR but then reclaimed and made forever wild. Walter had known about this agreement when he took the job as the Trust’s executive director. What he hadn’t known-had discovered only recently-was that the vice president, during that same week in 2001, had privately mentioned to Vin Haven that the president intended to make certain regulatory and tax-code changes to render natural-gas extraction economically feasible in the Appalachians. And that Vin had proceeded to buy large bundles of mineral rights not only in Wyoming County but in several other parts of West Virginia that were either coalless or had been mined out. These big purchases of seemingly useless rights might have raised a red flag, Walter said, if Vin hadn’t been able to claim that he was safeguarding possible future preserve sites for the Trust.

“Long story short,” Lalitha said, “he was using us for cover.”

“Keeping in mind, of course,” Walter said, “that Vin really does love birds and is doing great things for the cerulean warbler.”

“He just wanted his little gift bag also,” Lalitha said.

“His not-so-little gift bag, as it turns out,” Walter said. “This is still mostly under the radar, so you probably haven’t heard about it, but West Virginia’s about to get the shit drilled out of it. Hundreds of thousands of acres that we all assumed were permanently preserved are now in the process of being destroyed as we sit here. In terms of fragmentation and disruption, it’s as bad as anything the coal industry’s done. If you own the mineral rights, you can do whatever the fuck you want to exercise them, even on public land. New roads everywhere, thousands of wellheads, noisy equipment running night and day, blazing lights all night.”

“And meanwhile your boss’s mineral rights are suddenly a lot more valuable,” Katz said.

“Exactly.”

“And now he’s selling off the land he was pretending to buy for you?”

“Some of it, yeah.”

“Incredible.”

“Well, he is still spending a ton of money. And he’ll be taking steps to mitigate the impact of drilling where he still owns the rights. But he’s had to sell a lot of rights to cover some big expenses that we were hoping not to have, if public opinion had gone our way. The bottom line is, he never intended the true cost of his investment in the Trust to be as big as I’d originally thought.”

“In other words, you got played.”

“I got played, a little bit. We’re still getting the Warbler Park, but I got played. And please don’t ever mention any of this to anyone.”

“So what does this mean?” Katz said. “I mean, besides my having been right about friends of Bush being evil.”

“It means that Walter and I have become rogue employees,” Lalitha said with her strange glittering look.

“Not rogue,” Walter corrected quickly. “Don’t say rogue. We’re not rogue.”

“No, in fact, we are fairly rogue.”

“I like the way you say ‘rogue,’ too,” Katz remarked to her.

“We still really like Vin,” Walter said. “Vin’s one-of-a-kind. We just feel like, since he wasn’t entirely straight with us, there’s no need for us to be entirely straight with him.”

“We have some maps and charts to show you,” Lalitha said, digging in her briefcase.

The early crowd at Walker’s, the van drivers and the cops from the precinct house around the corner, were filling the tables and laying siege to the bar. Outside, in the durable late-winter light of a February afternoon, streets were clogging with Friday tunnel traffic. In a parallel universe, dim with unreality, Katz was still up on the roof at White Street, flirting purposefully with nubile Caitlyn. She seemed hardly worth the bother now. Although he could take or leave nature, Katz couldn’t help envying Walter for taking on Bush’s cronies and trying to beat them at their own game. Compared to manufacturing Chiclets, or building decks for the contemptible, it seemed interesting.

“I took the job in the first place,” Walter said, “because I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t stand what was happening to the country. Clinton had done less than zero for the environment. Net fucking negative. Clinton just wanted everybody to party to Fleetwood Mac. ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow?’ Bullshit. Not thinking about tomorrow was exactly what he did environmentally. And then Gore was too much of a wimp to let his green flag fly, and too nice a guy to fight dirty in Florida. I was still halfway OK as long as I was in St. Paul, but I kept having to drive all over the state for the Conservancy, and it was like having acid thrown in my face every time I passed the city limits. Not just the industrial farming but the sprawl, the sprawl, the sprawl. Low-density development is the worst. And SUVs everywhere, snowmobiles everywhere, Jet Skis everywhere, ATVs everywhere, two-acre lawns everywhere. The goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns.”

“Here are the maps,” Lalitha said.

“Yeah, these show the fragmentation,” Walter said, handing Katz two laminated maps. “This one is undisturbed habitat in 1900, this one’s undisturbed habitat in 2000.”

“Prosperity will do that,” Katz said.

“The development was so stupidly done, though,” Walter said. “We still might have enough land for other species to survive if it wasn’t all so fragmented.”

“Nice fantasy, I agree,” Katz said. In hindsight, he supposed it was inevitable that his friend would become one of those people who carried around laminated literature. But he was still surprised by what an angry crank Walter had become in the last two years.

“This was what was keeping me awake at night,” Walter said. “This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet, or cable TV-there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.”

“There’s some pretty good porn on the internet,” Katz said. “Or so I’m told.”

“I wasn’t accomplishing anything systemic in Minnesota. We were just gathering little bits of disconnected prettiness. There are approximately six hundred breeding bird species in North America, and maybe a third of them are getting clobbered by fragmentation. Vin’s idea was that if two hundred really rich people would each pick one species, and try to stop the fragmentation of their strongholds, we might be able to save them all.”

“The cerulean warbler is a very choosy little bird,” Lalitha said.

“It breeds in treetops in mature deciduous forest,” Walter said. “And then, as soon as the babies can fly, the family moves down into the understory for safety. But the original forests were all cut down for timber and charcoal, and the second-growth forests don’t have the right kind of understory, and they’re all fragmented with roads and farms and subdivisions and coal-mining sites, which makes the warbler vulnerable to cats and raccoons and crows.”

“And so, before you know it, no more cerulean warblers,” Lalitha said.

“That does sound tough,” Katz said. “Although it is just one bird.”

“Every species has an inalienable right to keep existing,” Walter said.

“Sure. Of course. I’m just trying to figure out where this is coming from. I don’t remember you caring about birds when we were in college. Back then, as I recall, it was more about overpopulation and the limits to growth.”

Walter and Lalitha again exchanged glances.

“Overpopulation is exactly what we want you to help us with,” Lalitha said.

Katz laughed. “Doing my best with that already.”

Walter was shuffling through some laminated charts. “I started walking it back,” he said, “because I still wasn’t sleeping. You remember Aristotle and the different kinds of causes? Efficient and formal and final? Well, nest-predation by crows and feral cats is an efficient cause of the warbler’s decline. And fragmentation of the habitat is a formal cause of that. But what’s the final cause? The final cause is the root of pretty much every problem we have. The final cause is too many damn people on the planet. It’s especially clear when we go to South America. Yes, per capita consumption is rising. Yes, the Chinese are illegally vacuuming up resources down there. But the real problem is population pressure. Six kids per family versus one point five. People are desperate to feed the children that the pope in his infinite wisdom makes them have, and so they trash the environment.”

“You should come with us to South America,” Lalitha said. “We drive along these little roads, there’s terrible exhaust from bad engines and too-cheap gasoline, the hillsides are all denuded, and the families all have eight or ten children, it’s really sickening. You should come along with us sometime and see if you like what you see down there. Because it’s coming soon to a theater near you.”

Crackpot, Katz thought. Hot little crackpot.

Walter handed him a laminated bar chart. “In America alone,” he said, “the population’s going to rise by fifty percent in the next four decades. Think about how crowded the exurbs are already, think about the traffic and the sprawl and the environmental degradation and the dependence on foreign oil. And then add fifty percent. And that’s just America, which can theoretically sustain a larger population. And then think about global carbon emissions, and genocide and famine in Africa, and the radicalized dead-end underclass in the Arab world, and overfishing of the oceans, illegal Israeli settlements, the Han Chinese overrunning Tibet, a hundred million poor people in nuclear Pakistan: there’s hardly a problem in the world that wouldn’t be solved or at least tremendously alleviated by having fewer people. And yet”-he gave Katz another chart-“we’re going to add another three billion by 2050. In other words, we’re going to add the equivalent of the world’s entire population when you and I were putting our pennies in UNICEF boxes. Any little things we might do now to try to save some nature and preserve some kind of quality of life are going to get overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, because people can change their consumption habits-it takes time and effort, but it can be done-but if the population keeps increasing, nothing else we do is going to matter. And yet nobody is talking about the problem publicly. It’s the elephant in the room, and it’s killing us.”

“This is all sounding more familiar,” Katz said. “I’m remembering some rather lengthy discussions.”

“I was definitely into it in college. But then, you know, I did some breeding myself.”

Katz raised his eyebrows. Breeding was an interesting way of speaking of one’s wife and children.

“In my own way,” Walter said, “I guess I was part of a larger cultural shift that was happening in the eighties and nineties. Overpopulation was definitely part of the public conversation in the seventies, with Paul Ehrlich, and the Club of Rome, and ZPG. And then suddenly it was gone. Became just unmentionable. Part of it was the Green Revolution-you know, still plenty of famines, but not apocalyptic ones. And then population control got a terrible name politically. Totalitarian China with its one-child policy, Indira Gandhi doing forced sterilizations, American ZPG getting painted as nativist and racist. The liberals got all scared and silent. Even the Sierra Club got scared. And the conservatives, of course, never gave a shit in the first place, because their entire ideology is selfish short-term interest and God’s plan and so forth. And so the problem became this cancer that you know is growing inside you but you decide you’re just not going to think about.”

“And this has what to do with your cerulean warbler?” Katz said.

“It has everything to do with it,” Lalitha said.

“Like I said,” Walter said, “we’ve decided to take some liberties with interpreting the mission of the Trust, which is to ensure the survival of the warbler. We keep walking the problem back, walking it back. And what we finally arrive at, in terms of a final cause or an unmoved mover, in 2004, is the fact that it’s become totally toxic and uncool to talk about reversing population growth.”

“And so I ask Walter,” Lalitha said, “who is the coolest person you know?”

Katz laughed and shook his head. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

“Listen, Richard,” Walter said. “The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing ‘God Bless America,’ stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet’s future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it’s beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslet is pregnant, hooray hooray. Some dimwit in Iowa just had octuplets, hooray hooray. The conversation about the idiocy of SUVs stops dead the minute people say they’re buying them to protect their precious babies.”

“A dead baby’s not a pretty thing,” Katz said. “I mean, presumably you guys aren’t advocating infanticide.”

“Of course not,” Walter said. “We just want to make having babies more of an embarrassment. Like smoking’s an embarrassment. Like being obese is an embarrassment. Like driving an Escalade would be an embarrassment if it weren’t for the kiddie argument. Like living in a four-thousand-square-foot house on a two-acre lot should be an embarrassment.”

“ ‘Do it if you have to,’ ” Lalitha said, “ ‘but don’t expect to be congratulated anymore.’ That’s the message we need to spread.”

Katz looked into her crackpot eyes. “You don’t want kids yourself.”

“No,” she said, holding his gaze.

“You’re, what, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“You might feel differently in five years. The oven timer goes off around age thirty. At least that’s been my experience with women.”

“It won’t be mine,” she said and widened, for emphasis, her already very round eyes.

“Kids are beautiful,” Walter said. “Kids have always been the meaning of life. You fall in love, you reproduce, and then your kids grow up and fall in love and reproduce. That’s what life was always for. For pregnancy. For more life. But the problem now is that more life is still beautiful and meaningful on the individual level, but for the world as a whole it only means more death. And not nice death, either. We’re looking at losing half the world’s species in the next hundred years. We’re facing the biggest mass extinction since at least the Cretaceous-Tertiary. First we’ll get the utter wipeout of the world’s ecosystems, then mass starvation and/or disease and/or killings. What’s still ‘normal’ at the individual level is heinous and unprecedented at the global level.”

“It’s like the problem with Katz,” it sounded like Lalitha said.

“Moi?”

“Kitty cats,” she said. “C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It’s just one cat-how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It’s one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat.”

“Nobody wants to think about it,” Walter said. “Everybody just wants their normal life.”

“We want you to help us get people thinking about it,” Lalitha said. “About overpopulation. We don’t have the resources to do family planning and women’s education overseas. We’re a species-oriented conservation group. So what can we do for leverage? How do we get governments and NGOs to quintuple their investment in population control?”

Katz smiled at Walter. “Did you tell her we’ve already been through this? Did you tell her about the songs you used to try to get me to write?”

“No,” Walter said. “But do you remember what you used to say? You said that nobody cared about your songs because you weren’t famous.”

“We’ve been Googling you,” Lalitha said. “There’s a very impressive list of well-known musicians who say they admire you and the Traumatics.”

“The Traumatics are dead, honey. Walnut Surprise is also dead.”

“So here’s the proposal,” Walter said. “However much money you’re making building decks, we’ll pay you a good multiple of, for however long you want to work for us. We’re imagining some sort of summer music-and-politics festival, maybe in West Virginia, with a bunch of very cool headliners, to raise awareness of population issues. All focused entirely on young people.”

“We’re ready to advertise summer internships to college students all over the country,” Lalitha said. “Also in Canada and Latin America. We can fund twenty or thirty internships with Walter’s discretionary fund. But first we need to make the internships look like something very cool to do. Like the thing for the very cool kids to do this summer.”

“Vin’s very hands-off in terms of my discretionary fund,” Walter said. “As long as we put a cerulean warbler on our literature, I can do whatever I want.”

“But it has to happen fast,” Lalitha said. “Kids are already making up their minds about this summer. We need to reach them in the next few weeks.”

“We’d need your name and your image at a minimum,” Walter said. “If you could do some video for us, better yet. If you could write us some songs, even better. If you could make some calls to Jeff Tweedy, and Ben Gibbard, and Jack White, and find us some people to work on the festival pro bono, or sponsor it commercially, best of all.”

“Also great if we can tell potential interns they’ll be getting to work with you directly,” Lalitha said.

“Even just the promise of some minimal contact with them would be fantastic,” Walter said.

“If we could put on the poster, ‘Join rock legend Richard Katz in Washington this summer’ or something like that,” Lalitha said.

“We need to make it cool, and we need to make it viral,” Walter said.

Katz, as he endured this bombardment, was feeling sad and remote. Walter and the girl seemed to have snapped under the pressure of thinking in too much detail about the fuckedness of the world. They’d been seized by a notion and talked each other into believing in it. Had blown a bubble that had then broken free of reality and carried them away. They didn’t seem to realize they were dwelling in a world with a population of two.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“Say yes!” Lalitha said, glittering.

“I’m going to be in Houston for a couple of days,” Walter said, “but I’ll send you some links, and we can talk again on Tuesday.”

“Or just say yes now,” Lalitha said.

Their hopeful expectancy was like an unbearably bright lightbulb. Katz turned away from it and said, “I’ll think about it.”

On the sidewalk outside Walker’s, taking leave of the girl, he ascertained that there was nothing wrong with her lower body, but it didn’t seem to matter now, it only added to his sadness about Walter. The girl was going to Brooklyn to see a college friend of hers. Since Katz could just as easily take the PATH from Penn Station, he walked with Walter toward Canal Street. Ahead of them, in the gathering twilight, were the friendly glowing windows of the world’s most overpopulated island.

“God, I love New York,” Walter said. “There is something so profoundly wrong with Washington.”

“Plenty of things wrong here, too,” Katz said, sidestepping a high-speed mom-and-stroller combo.

“But at least this is an actual place. Washington’s all abstraction. It’s about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I’m sure it’s fun if you’re living next door to Seinfeld, or Tom Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn’t what New York is about. In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry’s house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It’s a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist’s breakfast. Everybody’s obsessing 24/7, trying to position themselves in relation to power. Even the black scene has something wrong with it. It’s got to be more discouraging to be poor black in Washington than anywhere else in the country. You’re not even scary. You’re just an afterthought.”

“I will remind you that Bad Brains and Ian MacKaye came out of D.C.”

“Yeah, that was some weird historical accident.”

“And yet we did admire them in our youth.”

“God, I love the New York subway!” Walter said as he followed Katz down to the uric uptown platform. “This is the way human beings are supposed to live. High density! High efficiency!” He cast a beneficent smile upon the weary subway riders.

It occurred to Katz to ask about Patty, but he felt too gutless to say her name. “So is this chick single, or what?” he said.

“Who, Lalitha? No. She’s had the same boyfriend since college.”

“He lives with you, too?”

“No, he’s in Nashville. He was in med school in Baltimore, and now he’s doing his internship.”

“And yet she stayed behind in Washington.”

“She’s very invested in this project,” Walter said. “And, frankly, I think the boyfriend’s on his way out. He’s very old-school Indian. He threw a huge, huge fit when she didn’t move to Nashville with him.”

“And what did you advise her?”

“I tried to get her to stand up for herself. He could have matched somewhere in Washington if he’d really wanted to. I told her she didn’t have to sacrifice everything for his career. She and I’ve got a kind of father-daughter thing. Her parents are very conservative. I think she appreciates working for somebody who believes in her and doesn’t just see her as somebody’s future wife.”

“And just so we’re clear,” Katz said, “you’re aware that she’s in love with you?”

Walter blushed. “I don’t know. Maybe a little bit. I actually think it’s more like an intellectual idealization. More father-daughter.”

“Yeah, dream on, buddy. You expect me to believe you’ve never imagined those eyes shining up at you while her head’s bobbing on your lap?”

“Jesus, no. I try not to imagine things like that. Especially not with an employee.”

“But maybe you don’t always succeed in not imagining it.”

Walter glanced around to see if anyone on the platform was listening, and lowered his voice. “Aside from everything else,” he said, “I think there’s something objectively demeaning about a woman on her knees.”

“Why don’t you try it sometime and let her be the judge of that.”

“Well, because, Richard,” Walter said, still blushing, but also laughing unpleasantly, “I happen to understand that women are wired differently than men.”

“Whatever happened to gender equality? I seem to recall that you were into that.”

“I just think, if you ever had a daughter yourself, you might see the woman’s side with a little more sympathy.”

“You’ve named my best reason for not wanting a daughter.”

“Well, if you did have one, you might let yourself recognize the actually-not-terribly-hard-to-recognize fact that very young women can get their desire and their admiration and their love for a person all mixed up, and not understand-”

“Not understand what?”

“That to the guy they’re just an object. That the guy might only be wanting to get his, you know, his, you know”-Walter’s voice dropped to a whisper-“his dick sucked by somebody young and pretty. That that might be his only interest.”

“Sorry, not computing,” Katz said. “What’s wrong with being admired? This is not computing at all.”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

An A train arrived, and they crowded onto it. Almost immediately, Katz saw the light of recognition in the eyes of a college-age kid standing by the opposite doors. Katz lowered his head and turned away, but the kid had the temerity to touch him on the shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but you’re the musician, right? You’re Richard Katz.”

“Perhaps not sorrier than I am,” Katz said.

“I’m not going to bother you. I just wanted to say I really love your stuff.”

“OK, thanks, man,” Katz said, his eyes on the floor.

“Especially the older stuff, which I’m just starting to get into. Reactionary Splendor? Oh, my God. It is so fucking brilliant. It’s on my iPod right now. Here, I’ll show you.”

“That’s OK. I believe you.”

“Oh, sure, no, of course. Of course. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m just a huge fan.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Walter was following this exchange with a facial expression as ancient as the college parties that he’d been masochistic enough to attend with Katz, an expression of wonderment and pride and love and anger and the loneliness of the invisible, none of it agreeable to Katz, not in college and even less so now.

“It must be very strange to be you,” Walter said as they exited at 34th Street.

“I have no other way of being to compare it to.”

“It’s got to feel great, though. I don’t believe that at some level you don’t love it.”

Katz considered the question honestly. “It’s more like a situation where I would hate the absence of the thing but I don’t like the thing itself, either.”

“I think I would like it,” Walter said.

“I think you would, too.”

Unable to grant Walter fame, Katz walked with him all the way up to the Amtrak status board, which was showing a forty-five-minute delay for his southbound Acela.

“I strongly believe in trains,” Walter said. “And I routinely pay the price.”

“I’ll wait with you,” Katz said.

“No need, no need.”

“No, let me buy you a Coke. Or did D.C. finally make you a drinker?”

“No, still teetotaling. Which is such a stupid word.”

To Katz, the train’s delay was a sign that the subject of Patty was destined to be broached. When he broached it, however, in the station bar, to the nerve-grating sounds of an Alanis Morissette song, Walter’s eyes grew hard and distant. He drew breath as if to speak, but no words came out.

“Must be a little odd for you guys,” Katz prompted. “Having the girl upstairs and your office downstairs.”

“I don’t know what to say to you, Richard. I really don’t know what to tell you.”

“You guys getting along? Patty doing anything interesting?”

“She’s working at a gym in Georgetown. Does that count as interesting?” Walter shook his head grimly. “I’ve been living with a depressed person for a very long time now. I don’t know why she’s so unhappy, I don’t know why she can’t seem to get out of it. There was a little while, around the time we moved to Washington, when she seemed to be doing better. She’d seen a therapist in St. Paul who got her started on some kind of writing project. Some kind of personal history or life journal that she was very mum and secretive about. As long as she was working on that, things weren’t so bad. But for the last two years they’ve been pretty much all bad. The plan had been for her to look for a job as soon as we got to Washington, and start some kind of second career, but it’s a little tough at her age with no marketable skills. She’s very smart and very proud, and she couldn’t stand being rejected and couldn’t stand being entry-level. She tried volunteering, doing afterschool athletics with the D.C. schools, but that didn’t work out, either. I finally got her to try an antidepressant, which I think would have helped her if she’d stuck with it, but she didn’t like the way it made her feel, and she really was pretty unbearable while she was on it. It gave her kind of a crankhead personality, and she quit before they got the cocktail adjusted right. And so finally, last fall, I more or less forced her to get a job. Not for my sake-I’m way overpaid, and Jessica’s out of school now, and Joey’s not my dependent anymore. But she had so much free time, I could see that it was killing her. And the job she chose to get was working at the reception counter of a gym. I mean, it’s a perfectly nice gym-one of my board members goes there, and at least one of my bigger donors. And there she is, there’s my wife, who’s one of the smartest people I know, scanning their membership cards and telling them to have a great workout. She’s also got a pretty serious exercise addiction going. She works out at least an hour a day, minimum-she looks great. And then she comes home at eleven with takeout, and if I’m in town we eat together, and she asks me why I’m still not having sex with my assistant. Sort of like what you just did, only not as graphically. Not as directly.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“How could you? Who would think? I tell her the same thing every time, which is that she’s the person I love, she’s the person I want. And then we change the subject. Like, for the last couple of weeks-I think mainly to drive me crazy-she’s been talking about getting a boob job. It makes me want to cry, Richard. I mean, there is nothing wrong with her. Nothing on the outside. It’s totally crazy. But she says she’s going to die soon and she thinks it might be interesting, before she dies, to see what it’s like to have some chest. She says it might help her to have some goal to be saving up her money for, now that…” Walter shook his head.

“Now that what.”

“Nothing. She was doing something else with her money, before, that I thought was very bad.”

“Is she sick? Is there a medical problem?”

“No. Not physically. By dying soon I think she means in the next forty years. The way we’re all going to die soon.”

“I’m really sorry, man. I had no idea.”

A navigational beacon in Katz’s black Levi’s, a long-dormant transmitter buried by a more advanced civilization, was sparking back to life. Where he ought to have felt guilty, he instead was getting hard. Oh, the clairvoyance of the dick: it could see the future in a heartbeat, leaving the brain to play catch-up and find the necessary route from occluded present to preordained outcome. Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unreadable to Walter at ground level but clear as could be to Katz at great height. IT’S NOT OVER, IT’S NOT OVER. The parallels between his life and hers were really almost eerie: a brief period of creative productivity, followed by a major change that turned out to be a disappointment and a mess, followed by drugs and despair, followed by the taking of a stupid job. Katz had been assuming that his situation was simply that success had wrecked him, but it was also true, he realized, that his worst years as a songwriter had precisely coincided with his years of estrangement from the Berglunds. And, yes, he hadn’t given much thought to Patty in the last two years, but he could feel now, in his pants, that this was mainly because he’d assumed their story was over.

“How do Patty and the girl get along?”

“They don’t speak,” Walter said.

“So not buddies.”

“No, I’m saying they literally don’t speak to each other. Each of them knows when the other’s usually in the kitchen. They go out of their way to avoid each other.”

“And which one started that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“OK.”

On the station bar’s sound system, “That’s What I Like About You” was playing. It seemed to Katz the perfect soundtrack for the neon Bud Light signage, the fake leaded-glass lampshades, the durably polyurethaned crap furniture with its embedded commuter grime. He was still reasonably safe from hearing one of his own songs played in a place like this, but he knew it was a safety only of degree, not of category.

“Patty’s decided she doesn’t like anybody under thirty,” Walter said. “She’s formed a prejudice against an entire generation. And, being Patty, she’s very funny on the subject. But it’s gotten pretty vicious and out of control.”

“Whereas you seem quite taken with the younger generation,” Katz said.

“All it takes to disprove a general law is one counterexample. I’ve got at least two great ones in Jessica and Lalitha.”

“But not Joey?”

“And if there are two,” Walter said, as if he hadn’t even heard his son’s name, “there are bound to be a lot more. That’s the premise of what I want to do this summer. Trust that young people still have brains and a social conscience, and then give them something to work with.”

“You know, we’re very different, you and me,” Katz said. “I don’t do vision. I don’t do belief. And I’m impatient with the kiddies. You remember that about me, right?”

“I remember that you’re often wrong about yourself. I think you believe in a lot more than you give yourself credit for. You’ve got a whole cult following because of your integrity.”

“Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.”

“So, what, should I not have called you?” Walter said with a tremor in his voice. “Part of me didn’t want to bother you, but Lalitha talked me into it.”

“No, it’s good you called. It’s been too long.”

“I think I figured you’d outgrown us or something. I mean, I know I’m not a cool person. I figured you were done with us.”

“Sorry, man. I just got really busy.”

But Walter was becoming upset, nearly tearful. “It almost seemed like you were embarrassed by me. Which I understand, but it still doesn’t feel very good. I thought we were friends.”

“I said I was sorry,” Katz said. He was angered both by Walter’s emotion and by the irony or injustice of needing to apologize, twice, for having tried to do him a favor. It was generally his policy never to apologize at all.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Walter said. “But maybe some acknowledgment of the fact that Patty and I helped you. That you wrote all those songs in my mother’s house. That we’re your oldest friends. I’m not going to dwell on this, but I want to clear the air and let you know what I’ve been feeling, so I don’t have to feel it anymore.”

The angry stirring of Katz’s blood was of a piece with the divinations of his dick. I’m going to do you a different kind of favor now, old friend, he thought. We’re going to finish some unfinished business, and you and the girl will thank me for it.

“It’s good to clear the air,” he said.