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

THE NICE MAN’S ANGER

Late on a dismal afternoon in March, in cold and greasy drizzle, Walter rode with his assistant, Lalitha, up from Charleston into the mountains of southern West Virginia. Although Lalitha was a fast and somewhat reckless driver, Walter had come to prefer the anxiety of being her passenger to the judgmental anger that consumed him when he was at the wheel-the seemingly inescapable sense that, of all the drivers on the road, only he was traveling at exactly the right speed, only he was striking an appropriate balance between too punctiliously obeying traffic rules and too dangerously flouting them. In the last two years, he’d spent a lot of angry hours on the roads of West Virginia, tailgating the idiotic slowpokes and then slowing down himself to punish the rude tailgaters, ruthlessly defending the inner lane of interstates from assholes trying to pass him on the right, passing on the right himself when some fool or cellphone yakker or sanctimonious speed-limit enforcer clogged the inner lane, obsessively profiling and psychoanalyzing the drivers who refused to use their turn signals (almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity, the compromised state of which was already manifest in the compensatory gigantism of their pickups and SUVs), experiencing murderous hatred of the lane-violating coal-truck drivers who caused fatal accidents literally once a week in West Virginia, impotently blaming the corrupt state legislators who refused to lower the coal-truck weight limit below 110,000 pounds despite bounteous evidence of the havoc they wreaked, muttering “Unbelievable! Unbelievable!” when a driver ahead of him braked for a green light and then accelerated through yellow and left him stranded at red, boiling while he waited a full minute at intersections with no cross traffic visible for miles, and painfully swallowing, for Lalitha’s sake, the invective he yearned to vent when stymied by a driver refusing to make a legal right turn on red: “Hello? Get a clue? The world consists of more than just you! Other people have reality! Learn to drive! Hello!” Better the adrenaline rush of Lalitha’s flooring the gas to pass uphill-struggling trucks than the stress on his cerebral arteries of taking the wheel himself and remaining stuck behind those trucks. This way, he could look out at the gray matchstick Appalachian woods and the mining-ravaged ridges and direct his anger at problems more worthy of it.

Lalitha was in buoyant spirits as they sailed in their rental car up the big fifteen-mile grade on I-64, a phenomenally expensive piece of federal pork brought home by Senator Byrd. “I am so ready to celebrate,” she said. “Will you take me celebrating tonight?”

“We’ll see if there’s a decent restaurant in Beckley,” Walter said, “although I’m afraid it’s not likely.”

“Let’s get drunk! We can go to the best place in town and have martinis.”

“Absolutely. I will buy you one giant-assed martini. More than one, if you want.”

“No but you, too, though,” she said. “Just once. Make one exception, for the occasion.”

“I think a martini might honestly kill me at this point in my life.”

“One light beer, then. I’ll have three martinis, and you can carry me to my room.”

Walter didn’t like it when she said things like this. She didn’t know what she was saying, she was just a high-spirited young woman-just, actually, the brightest ray of light in his entire life these days-and didn’t see that physical contact between employer and employee shouldn’t be a joking matter.

“Three martinis would certainly give new meaning to the word ‘headache ball’ tomorrow morning,” he said in lame reference to the demolition they were driving up to Wyoming County to witness.

“When was the last time you had a drink?” Lalitha said.

“Never. I’ve never had a drink.”

“Not even in high school?”

“Never.”

“Walter, that’s incredible! You have to try it! It’s so fun to drink sometimes. One beer won’t make you an alcoholic.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said, wondering, as he spoke, if this was true. His father and his older brother, who together had been the bane of his youth, were alcoholics, and his wife, who was fast becoming the bane of his middle age, had alcoholic proclivities. He’d always understood his own strict sobriety in terms of opposition to them-first, of wanting to be as unlike his dad and brother as possible, and then later of wanting to be as unfailingly kind to Patty as she, drunk, could be unkind to him. It was one of the ways that he and Patty had learned to get along: he always sober, she sometimes drunk, neither of them ever suggesting that the other change.

“What are you worried about, then?” Lalitha said.

“I guess I’m worried about changing something that’s worked perfectly well for me for forty-seven years. If it’s not broke, why fix it?”

“Because it’s fun!” She jerked the wheel of the rental car to pass a semi wallowing in its own spray. “I’m going to order you a beer and make you take at least one sip to celebrate.”

The northern hardwood forest south of Charleston was even now, on the eve of the equinox, a dour tapestry of grays and blacks. In another week or two, warm air from the south would arrive to green these woods, and a month after that those songbirds hardy enough to migrate from the tropics would fill them with their song, but gray winter seemed to Walter the northern forest’s true native state. Summer merely an accident of grace that annually befell it.

In Charleston, earlier in the day, he and Lalitha and their local attorneys had formally presented the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s industry partners, Nardone and Blasco, with the documents they needed to commence demolition of Forster Hollow and open up fourteen thousand acres of future warbler preserve for mountaintop removal. Representatives of Nardone and Blasco had then signed the towers of paper that Trust attorneys had been preparing for the last two years, officially committing the coal companies to a package of reclamation agreements and rights transfers that, taken together, would ensure that the mined-out land remain forever “wild.” Vin Haven, the Trust’s board chairman, had been “present” via teleconferencing and later called Walter directly on his cell to congratulate him. But Walter was feeling the opposite of celebratory. He’d finally succeeded in enabling the obliteration of dozens of sweet wooded hilltops and scores of miles of clear-running, biotically rich Class III, IV, and V streams. To achieve even this, Vin Haven had had to sell off $20 million in mineral rights, elsewhere in the state, to gas drillers poised to rape the land, and then hand over the proceeds to further parties whom Walter didn’t like. And all for what? For an endangered-species “strong-hold” that you could cover with a postage stamp on a road-atlas map of West Virginia.

Walter felt, himself, in his anger and disappointment with the world, like the gray northern woods. And Lalitha, who’d been born in the warmth of southern Asia, was the sunny person who brought a momentary kind of summer to his soul. The only thing he felt like celebrating tonight was that, having “succeeded” in West Virginia, they could now plunge forward with their overpopulation initiative. But he was mindful of his assistant’s youth and hated to dampen her spirits.

“All right,” he said. “I will try a beer, once. In your honor.”

“No, Walter, in your honor. This was all your doing.”

He shook his head, knowing she was specifically wrong about this. Without her warmth and charm and courage, the entire deal with Nardone and Blasco would probably have fallen through. It was true that he’d supplied the big ideas; but big ideas were all he seemed to have. Lalitha was in every other way the driver now. She was wearing a nylon shell, its thrown-back hood a basket filled with her lustrous black hair, over the pin-striped suit she’d put on for that morning’s formalities. Her hands were at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel, her wrists bare, her silver bracelets fallen down beneath the cuffs of her shell. Myriad were the things that Walter hated about modernity in general and car culture in particular, but the confidence of young women drivers, the autonomy they’d achieved in the last hundred years, was not among them. Gender equality, as expressed in the pressure of Lalitha’s neat foot on the gas pedal, made him glad to be alive in the twenty-first century.

The most difficult problem he’d had to solve for the Trust had been what to do with the two hundred or so families, most of them very poor, who owned houses or trailers on small or smallish parcels of land within the Warbler Park’s proposed boundaries. Some of the men still worked in the coal industry, either underground or as drivers, but most were out of a job and passed their time with guns and internal-combustion engines, supplementing their families’ diets with game shot deeper in the hills and carried out on ATVs. Walter had moved quickly to buy out as many families as possible before the Trust attracted publicity; he’d paid as little as $250 an acre for certain hillside tracts. But when his attempts to woo the local environmentalist community backfired, and a scarily motivated activist named Jocelyn Zorn began to campaign against the Trust, there were still more than a hundred families holding out, most of them in the valley of Nine Mile Creek, which led up to Forster Hollow.

Excepting the problem of Forster Hollow, Vin Haven had found the perfect sixty-five thousand acres for the core reserve. The surface rights of ninety-eight percent of it were in the hands of just three corporations, two of them faceless and economically rational holding companies, the third wholly owned by a family named Forster which had fled the state more than a century ago and was now comfortably dissipating itself in coastal affluence. All three companies were managing the land for certified forestry and had no reason not to sell it to the Trust at a fair market rate. There was also, near the center of Haven’s Hundred, an enormous, vaguely hourglass-shaped collection of very rich coal seams. Until now, nobody had mined these fourteen thousand acres, because Wyoming County was so remote and so hilly, even for West Virginia. One bad, narrow road, useless for coal trucks, wound up into the hills along Nine Mile Creek; at the top of the valley, situated near the hourglass’s pinch point, was Forster Hollow and the clan and friends of Coyle Mathis.

Over the years, Nardone and Blasco had each tried and failed to deal with Mathis, earning his abiding animosity for their trouble. Indeed, a major piece of bait that Vin Haven had offered the coal companies, during the initial negotiations, was a promise to rid them of the problem of Coyle. “It’s part of the magic synergy we got going here,” Haven had told Walter. “We’re a fresh player that Mathis’s got no reason to hold a grudge against. Nardone in particular I bargained way down on the reclamation front by promising to take Mathis off its hands. A little bit of goodwill I found lying by the side of the road, simply by virtue of me not being Nardone, turns out to be worth a couple million.”

If only!

Coyle Mathis embodied the pure negative spirit of backcountry West Virginia. He was consistent in disliking absolutely everybody. Being the enemy of Mathis’s enemy only made you another of his enemies. Big Coal, the United Mine Workers, environmentalists, all forms of government, black people, meddling white Yankees: he hated all equally. His philosophy of life was Back the fuck off or live to regret it. Six generations of surly Mathises had been buried on the steep creek-side hill that would be among the first sites blasted when the coal companies came in. (Nobody had warned Walter about the cemetery problem in West Virginia when he took the job with the Trust, but he’d sure found out about it in a hurry.)

Knowing a thing or two about omnidirectional anger himself, Walter might still have managed to bring Mathis around if the man hadn’t reminded him so much of his own father. His stubborn, self-destructive spite. Walter had prepared a fine package of attractive offers by the time he and Lalitha, after receiving no response to their numerous friendly letters, had driven the dusty road up the Nine Mile valley, uninvited, on a hot bright morning in July. He was willing to give the Mathises and their neighbors as much as $1,200 an acre, plus free land in a reasonably nice hollow on the southern margin of the preserve, plus relocation costs, plus state-of-the-art exhumation and reburial of all Mathis bones. But Coyle Mathis didn’t even wait to hear the details. He said, “No, N-O,” and added that he intended to be buried in the family cemetery and no man was going to stop him. And suddenly Walter was sixteen again and dizzy with anger. Anger not only with Mathis, for his lack of manners and good sense, but also, paradoxically, with Vin Haven, for pitting him against a man whose economic irrationality he at some level recognized and admired. “I’m sorry,” he said as he stood profusely sweating on a rutted track, in hot sunshine, by the side of a junk-strewn yard that Mathis had pointedly not invited him to enter, “but that is just stupid.”

Lalitha, beside him, holding a briefcase full of documents that they’d imagined Mathis might actually sign, cleared her throat in explosive regret for this deplorable word.

Mathis, who was a lean and surprisingly handsome man in his late fifties, directed a delighted smile up at the green, insect-buzzing heights that surrounded them. One of his dogs, a whiskery mutt with a demented physiognomy, began to growl. “Stupid!” Mathis said. “That’s a funny word to be using, mister. You almost done made my day there. Not every day I get called stupid. You might say people around here know better’n that.”

“Look, I’m sure you’re a very smart man,” Walter said. “I was referring to-”

“I reckon I’m smart enough to count to ten,” Mathis said. “How about you, sir? You look like you got some education. You know how to count to ten?”

“I, in fact, know how to count to twelve hundred,” Walter said, “and I know how to multiply that by four hundred and eighty, and how to add two hundred thousand to the product. And if you would just take one minute to listen-”

“My question,” Mathis said, “is can you do it backwards? Here, I’ll get you started. Ten, nine…”

“Look, I’m very sorry I used the word stupid. The sun’s a little bright out here. I didn’t mean-”

“Eight, seven…”

“Maybe we’ll come back another time,” Lalitha said. “We can leave you some materials that you can read at your leisure.”

“Oh, y’all reckon I can read, do you?” Mathis was beaming at them. All three of his dogs were growling now. “I believe I’m at six. Or was it five? Stupid old me, I done forgot already.”

“Look,” Walter said, “I sincerely apologize if I-”

“Four three two!”

The dogs, themselves apparently rather intelligent, advanced with flattened ears.

“We’ll come back,” Walter said, hastily retreating with Lalitha.

“I’ll shoot your car if you do!” Mathis called after them merrily.

All the way back down the terrible road to the state highway, Walter loudly cursed his own stupidity and his inability to control his anger, while Lalitha, ordinarily a font of praise and reassurance, sat pensively in the passenger seat, brooding about what to do next. It was not an over-statement to say that, without Mathis’s cooperation, all the other work they’d done to secure Haven’s Hundred would be for naught. At the bottom of the dusty valley, Lalitha delivered her assessment: “He needs to be treated like an important man.”

“He’s a two-bit sociopath,” Walter said.

“Be that as it may,” she said-and she had a particularly charming Indian way of pronouncing this favorite phrase of hers, a clipped lilt of practicality that Walter never tired of hearing-“we’re going to need to flatter his sense of importance. He needs to be the savior, not the sellout.”

“Yeah, unfortunately, a sellout is the only thing we’re asking him to be.”

“Maybe if I went back up and talked to some of the women.”

“It’s a fucking patriarchy up here,” Walter said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“No, Walter, the women are very strong. Why don’t you let me talk to some of them?”

“This is a nightmare. A nightmare.”

“Be that as it may,” Lalitha said again, “I wonder if I should stay behind and try to talk to people.”

“He’s already said no to the offer. Categorically.”

“We’ll need a better offer, then. You’ll have to talk to Mr. Haven about a better offer. Go back to Washington and talk to him. It’s probably just as well if you don’t go back up the hollow. But maybe I won’t seem so threatening by myself.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“I’m not afraid of dogs. He’d set the dogs on you, but not on me, I don’t think.”

“This is just hopeless.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Lalitha said.

Leaving aside her sheer bravery, as an unaccompanied dark-skinned woman, slight of build and alluring of feature, in returning to a poor-white place where she’d already been threatened with physical harm, Walter was struck, in the months that followed, by the fact that it was she, the suburban daughter of an electrical engineer, and not he, the small-town son of an angry drunk, who’d effected the miracle in Forster Hollow. Not only did Walter lack the common touch; his entire personality had been formed in opposition to the backcountry he’d come from. Mathis, with his poor-white unreason and resentments, had offended Walter’s very being: had blinded him with rage. Whereas Lalitha, having no experience with the likes of Mathis, had been able to go back with an open mind and a sympathetic heart. She’d approached the proud country poor the way she drove a car, as if no harm could possibly come to a person of such cheer and goodwill; and the proud country poor had granted her the respect they’d withheld from angry Walter. Her success made him feel inferior and unworthy of her admiration, and thus all the more grateful to her. Which then led him to a more general enthusiasm about young people and their capacity to do good in the world. And also-though he resisted conscious countenancing of it-to loving her far more than was advisable.

Based on the intelligence Lalitha gathered in her return to Forster Hollow, Walter and Vin Haven had crafted a new and outrageously expensive offer for its inhabitants. Simply offering them more cash, Lalitha said, wasn’t going to do the trick. For Mathis to save face, he needed to be the Moses who led his people to a new promised land. Unfortunately, as far as Walter could tell, the people of Forster Hollow had negligible skills beyond hunting, engine repair, vegetable growing, herb gathering, and welfare-check cashing. Vin Haven nevertheless obligingly made inquiries within his wide circle of business friends and returned to Walter with one interesting possibility: body armor.

Until he’d flown to Houston and met Haven, in the summer of 2001, Walter had been unfamiliar with the concept of good Texans, the national news being so dominated by bad ones. Haven owned a large ranch in the Hill Country and an even larger one south of Corpus Christi, both of them lovingly managed to provide habitat for game birds. Haven was the Texan sort of nature lover who happily blasted cinnamon teal out of the sky but also spent hours raptly monitoring, via closed-circuit spycam, the development of baby barn owls in a nest box on his property, and could expertly rhapsodize about the scaling patterns on a winter-plumage Baird’s sandpiper. He was a short, gruff, bullet-headed man, and Walter had liked him from the first minute of his initial interview. “A hundred-million-dollar ante for one passerine species,” Walter had said. “That’s an interesting allocation.”

Haven had tilted his bullet head to one side. “You got a problem with it?”

“Not necessarily. But given that the bird’s not even federally listed yet, I’m curious what your thinking is.”

“My thinking is, it’s my hundred million, I can spend it whatever way I like.”

“Good point.”

“The best science we got on the cerulean warbler shows populations declining at three percent a year for the last forty years. Just because it hasn’t passed the threshold of federally threatened, you can still plot that line straight down toward zero. That’s where it’s going: to zero.”

“Right. And yet-”

“And yet there’s other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about ’em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird’s life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?”

“Thankfully not a choice that anybody’s being asked to make.”

“In a sense, that’s right,” Haven said. “But in a bigger sense, it’s a choice that everybody’s making. I got a call from the director of National Audubon back in February, right after the inauguration. The man’s named Martin Jay, if that ain’t the damndest thing. Talk about the right name for the job. Martin Jay is wondering if I might arrange him a little meeting with Karl Rove at the White House. He says one hour is all he needs to persuade Karl Rove that making conservation a priority is a political winner for the new administration. So I say to him, I think I can get you an hour with Rove, but here’s what you got to do for me first. You got to get a reputable independent pollster to do a survey of how important a priority the environment is for swing voters. If you can show Karl Rove some good-looking numbers, he’s gonna be all ears. And Martin Jay falls all over himself saying thank you, thank you, fabuloso, consider it done. And I say to Martin Jay, there’s just one little thing, though: before you commission that survey and let Rove see it, you might want to have a pretty good idea what the results are going to be. That was six months ago. I never heard from him again.”

“You and I see very much eye to eye on the politics of this,” Walter said.

“Kiki and I are working a little bit on Laura, whenever we can,” Haven said. “Might be more promise in that direction.”

“That’s great, that’s incredible.”

“Don’t hold your breath. I sometimes think W.’s more married to Rove than to Laura. Not that you heard that from me.”

“But so why the cerulean warbler?”

“I like the bird. It’s a pretty little bird. Weighs less than the first joint of my thumb and flies all the way to South America and back every year. That’s a beautiful thing right there. One man, one species. Isn’t that enough? If we could just round up six hundred and twenty other men, we’d have every North American breeder covered. If you were lucky enough to get the robin, you wouldn’t even have to spend one penny to preserve it. Me, though, I like a challenge. And Appalachian coal country’s one hell of a challenge. That’s just something you’re going to have to accept if you’re going to run this outfit for me. You got to have an open mind about mountaintop-removal mining.”

In his forty years in the oil-and-gas business, running a company called Pelican Oil, Vin Haven had developed relationships with pretty much everyone worth knowing in Texas, from Ken Lay and Rusty Rose to Ann Richards and Father Tom Pincelli, the “birding priest” of the lower Rio Grande. He was especially tight with the people at LBI, the oilfield-services giant which, like its archrival Halliburton, had expanded into one of the country’s leading defense contractors under the administrations of Reagan and the elder Bush. It was LBI to which Haven turned for a solution to the problem of Coyle Mathis. Unlike Halliburton, whose former CEO was now running the nation, LBI was still scrambling for inside access to the new administration and thus particularly disposed to do a favor for a close personal friend of George and Laura.

An LBI subsidiary, ArDee Enterprises, had recently won a big contract to supply the high-grade body armor that American forces, as improvised explosive devices began exploding in every corner of Iraq, had belatedly discovered themselves in sore need of. West Virginia, which had cheap labor and a lax regulatory environment, and which had unexpectedly provided Bush-Cheney with their margin of victory in 2000-choosing the Republican candidate for the first time since the Nixon landslide of 1972-was viewed very favorably in the circles Vin Haven ran in. ArDee Enterprises was hastily constructing a body-armor plant in Whitman County, and Haven, catching ArDee before hiring for the factory had commenced, was able to secure a guarantee of 120 permanent jobs for the people of Forster Hollow in exchange for a package of concessions so generous that ArDee would be getting their labor practically for free. Haven promised Coyle Mathis, by way of Lalitha, to pay for free high-quality housing and job training for him and the other Forster Hollow families, and further sweetened the deal with a lump-sum payment to ArDee large enough to fund the workers’ health insurance and retirement plans for the next twenty years. As for job security, it was enough to point to the declarations, issued by various members of the Bush administration, that America would be defending itself in the Middle East for generations to come. There was no foreseeable end to the war on terror and, ergo, no end to the demand for body armor.

Walter, who had a low opinion of the Bush-Cheney venture in Iraq and an even lower opinion of the moral hygiene of defense contractors, was uneasy about working with LBI and providing further ammunition for the lefty environmentalists who opposed him in West Virginia. But Lalitha was intensely enthusiastic. “It’s perfect,” she told Walter. “This way, we can be more than a model of science-based reclamation. We can also be a model of compassionate relocation and retraining of people displaced by endangered-species conservation.”

“Kind of shitty luck, of course, for the people who sold out early,” Walter said.

“If they’re still struggling, we can offer them jobs, too.”

“For an additional however many million.”

“And the fact that it’s patriotic is also perfect!” Lalitha said. “The people will be doing something to help their country in time of war.”

“These people don’t strike me as losing a lot of sleep over helping their country.”

“No, Walter, you’re wrong about that. Luanne Coffey has two sons in Iraq. She hates the government for not doing more to protect them. She and I actually talked about that. She hates the government, but she hates the terrorists even more. This is perfect.”

And so, in December, Vin Haven flew into Charleston in his jet and personally accompanied Lalitha to Forster Hollow while Walter stayed simmering, with his anger and humiliation, in a motel room in Beckley. It had been no surprise to hear from Lalitha that Coyle Mathis was still given to lengthily riffing on what an arrogant, prissy-ass fool her boss was. She’d played the role of good cop to the hilt; and Vin Haven, who did have the common touch (as evidenced by his friendship with George W.), was apparently reasonably well tolerated in Forster Hollow as well. While a small band of protesters from outside the Nine Mile valley, led by nutcase Jocelyn Zorn, marched with placards (don’t trust the trust) outside the tiny elementary school where the meeting was held, all eighty families from the hollow signed away their rights and accepted, on the spot, eighty whopping certified checks drawn on the Trust’s account in Washington.

And now, ninety days later, Forster Hollow was a ghost hamlet owned by the Trust and available for demolition at 6 a.m. tomorrow. Walter had seen no reason to attend the first morning of demolition, and had seen several reasons not to, but Lalitha was thrilled by the imminent removal of the last permanent structures in the Warbler Park. He’d lured her, in hiring her, with the vision of a hundred square miles entirely free of human taint, and she’d bought the vision big-time. Since she was the one who’d brought the vision to the brink of realization, he couldn’t very well deny her the satisfaction of going to Forster Hollow. He wanted to give her every little thing he could, since he couldn’t give her his love. He indulged her the way he’d often been tempted to indulge Jessica but had mostly refrained from, for the sake of good parenting.

Lalitha was hunched forward with anticipation as she drove the rental car into Beckley, where rain was falling more heavily.

“That road’s going to be a mess tomorrow,” Walter said, looking out at the rain and noting, with displeasure, the elderly sourness in his voice.

“We’ll get up at four and take it slow,” Lalitha said.

“Ha, that’ll be a first. Have I ever seen you take a road slow?”

“I’m very excited, Walter!”

“I shouldn’t even be here,” he said sourly. “I should be doing that press conference tomorrow morning.”

“Cynthia says Mondays are better for the news cycle,” Lalitha said, referring to their press person, whose job, until now, had consisted mainly of avoiding contact with the press.

“I don’t know which I’m dreading more,” Walter said. “That nobody will show up, or that we’ll have a room full of reporters.”

“Oh, we definitely want the room full. This is really amazing news, if you explain it right.”

“All I know is I’m dreading it.”

Staying in hotels with Lalitha had become perhaps the hardest single part of their working relationship. In Washington, where she lived upstairs from him, she at least was on a different floor, and Patty was around to generally disturb the picture. At the Days Inn in Beckley, they fitted identical keycards into identical doors, fifteen feet from each other, and entered rooms whose identical profound drabness only a torrid illicit liaison could have overcome. Walter couldn’t avoid thinking about how alone Lalitha was in her identical room. Part of his feeling of inferiority consisted of straightforward envy-envy of her youth; envy of her innocent idealism; envy of the simplicity of her situation, as compared to the impossibility of his-and it seemed to him that her room, though outwardly identical, was the room of fullness, the room of beautiful and allowable yearning, while his was the room of emptiness and sterile prohibition. He turned on CNN, for the blare of it, and watched a report on the latest carnage in Iraq while he undressed for a lonely shower.

The previous morning, before he’d left for the airport, Patty had appeared in the doorway of their bedroom. “Let me put it as plainly as possible,” she said. “You have my permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“You know what for. And I’m saying you have it.”

He might almost have believed she meant this if the expression on her face hadn’t been so ragged, and if she hadn’t been wringing her hands so piteously as she spoke.

“Whatever you’re talking about,” he said, “I don’t want your permission.”

She’d looked at him beseechingly, and then despairingly, and left him alone. Half an hour later, on his way out, he’d tapped on the door of the little room where she did her writing and her e-mailing and, more and more frequently of late, her sleeping. “Sweetie,” he said through the door. “I’ll see you on Thursday night.” When she gave no answer, he knocked again and went in. She was sitting on the foldout sofa, squeezing the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other. Her face was red, wrecked, tear-tracked. He crouched at her feet and held her hands, which were aging faster than the rest of her; were bony and thin-skinned. “I love you,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

She nodded quickly, biting her lips, appreciative but unconvinced. “OK,” she said in a whispery squeak. “You’d better go.”

How many thousand more times, he wondered as he descended the stairs to the Trust offices, am I going to let this woman stab me in the heart?

Poor Patty, poor competitive lost Patty, who wasn’t doing anything remotely brave or admirable in Washington, could not help noticing his admiration of Lalitha. The reason he couldn’t let himself even think of loving Lalitha, let alone do anything about it, was Patty. It wasn’t just that he respected the letter of marital law, it was also that he couldn’t bear the idea of her knowing there was someone he thought more highly of than her. Lalitha was better than Patty. This was simply a fact. But Walter felt that he would sooner die than acknowledge this obvious fact to Patty, because, however much he might turn out to love Lalitha, and however unworkable his life with Patty had become, he loved Patty in some wholly other way, some larger and more abstract but nevertheless essential way that was about a lifetime of responsibility; about being a good person. If he were to fire Lalitha, literally and/or figuratively, she would cry for some months and then move on with her life and do good things with someone else. Lalitha was young and blessed with clarity. Whereas Patty, although she was often cruel to him and lately, more and more, had been shrinking from his caresses, still needed him to think the world of her. He knew this, because why else hadn’t she left him? He knew it very, very well. There was an emptiness at Patty’s center that it was his lot in life to do his best to fill with love. A slim flicker of hope in her which he alone could safeguard. And so, although his situation was already impossible and seemed to be getting more impossible every day, he had no choice but to persist in it.

Emerging from the motel shower, taking care not to glance at the egregious white middle-aged body in the mirror, he checked his BlackBerry and found a message from Richard Katz.

Hey pardner, job’s done up here. Do we meet in Washington now or what? Do I stay in a hotel or sleep on your sofa? I want such perks as I am due.

All best to your beuatiful women. RK

Walter studied the message with an uneasiness of uncertain origin. Possibly it was just the typo’s reminder of Richard’s fundamental carelessness, but possibly also the aftertaste of their meeting in Manhattan two weeks earlier. Although Walter had been very happy to see his old friend again, he’d been haunted afterward by Richard’s insistence, in the restaurant, that Lalitha repeat the word fucking, and by his subsequent insinuations about her interest in oral sex, and by the way that he himself, at the bar in Penn Station, had proceeded to badmouth Patty, which he never let himself do with anybody else. To be forty-seven and still trying to impress his college roommate by denigrating his wife and spilling confidences better left unspilled: it was pathetic. Although Richard had seemed happy enough to see him, too, Walter couldn’t shake the old familiar feeling that Richard was trying to impose his Katzian vision of the world on him and, thereby, defeat him. When, to Walter’s surprise, before they parted, Richard had agreed to lend his name and likeness to the crusade against overpopulation, Walter had immediately called Lalitha with the great news. But only she had been able to savor it with complete enthusiasm. Walter had boarded the train to Washington wondering if he’d done the right thing.

And why, in his e-mail, had Richard mentioned the beauty of Lalitha and Patty? Why send his best to them but not to Walter himself? Just another careless oversight? Walter didn’t think so.

Down the road from the Days Inn was a steakhouse that was plastic to the core but equipped with a full bar. It was a ridiculous place to go, since neither Walter nor Lalitha ate cow, but the motel clerk had nothing better to recommend. In a plastic-seated booth, Walter touched the rim of his beer glass to Lalitha’s gin martini, which she proceeded to make short work of. He signaled to their waitress for another and then suffered through perusal of the menu. Between the horrors of bovine methane, the lakes of watershed-devastating excrement generated by pig and chicken farms, the catastrophic overfishing of the oceans, the ecological nightmare of farmed shrimp and salmon, the antibiotic orgy of dairy-cow factories, and the fuel squandered by the globalization of produce, there was little he could ever order in good conscience besides potatoes, beans, and freshwater-farmed tilapia.

“Fuck it,” he said, closing the menu. “I’m going to have the rib eye.”

“Excellent, excellent celebrating,” Lalitha said, her face already flushed. “I’m going to have the delicious grilled-cheese sandwich from the children’s menu.”

The beer was interesting. Unexpectedly sour and undelicious, like drinkable dough. After just three or four sips, seldom-heard-from blood vessels in Walter’s brain were pulsing disturbingly.

“Got an e-mail from Richard,” he said. “He’s willing to come down and work with us on strategy. I told him he should come down for the weekend.”

“Ha! You see? You didn’t even think it was worth the bother of asking him.”

“No, no. You were right about that.”

Lalitha noticed something in his face. “Aren’t you happy about it?”

“No, absolutely,” he said. “In theory. There’s just something I don’t… trust. I guess basically I don’t see why he’s doing it.”

“Because we were extremely persuasive!”

“Yeah, maybe. Or because you’re extremely pretty.”

She seemed both pleased and confused by this. “He’s your very good friend, right?”

“Used to be. But then he got famous. And now all I can see are the parts of him I don’t trust.”

“What don’t you trust about him?”

Walter shook his head, not wanting to say.

“Do you not trust him with me?”

“No, that would be very stupid, wouldn’t it? I mean, what do I care what you do? You’re an adult, you can look out for yourself.”

Lalitha laughed at him, simply pleased now, not confused at all.

“I think he’s very funny and charismatic,” she said. “But I mostly just felt sorry for him. You know what I mean? He seems like one of those men who have to spend all their time maintaining an attitude, because they’re weak inside. He’s nothing like the man you are. All I could see when we were talking was how much he admires you, and how he was trying not to show it too much. Couldn’t you see that?”

The degree of pleasure it brought Walter to hear this felt dangerous to him. He wanted to believe it, but he didn’t trust it, because he knew Richard to be, in his own way, relentless.

“Seriously, Walter. That kind of man is very primitive. All he has is dignity and self-control and attitude. He only has one little thing, while you have everything else.”

“But the thing he has is what the world wants,” Walter said. “You’ve read all the Nexis stuff on him, you know what I’m talking about. The world doesn’t reward ideas or emotions, it rewards integrity and coolness. And that’s why I don’t trust him. He’s got the game set up so he’s always going to win. In private, he may think he admires what we’re doing, but he’s never going to admit it in public, because he has to maintain his attitude, because that’s what the world wants, and he knows it.”

“Yes, but that’s why it’s so great that he’ll be working with us. I don’t want you to be cool, I don’t like a cool man. I like a man like you. But Richard can help us communicate.”

Walter was relieved when their waitress came to take their orders and terminated the pleasure of hearing why Lalitha liked him. But the danger only deepened as she drank her second martini.

“Can I ask a personal question?” she said.

“Ah-sure.”

“The question is: do you think I should get my tubes tied?”

She’d spoken loudly enough for other tables to have heard, and Walter reflexively put a finger to his lips. He felt conspicuous enough already, felt glaringly urban, sitting with a girl of a different race amid the two varieties of rural West Virginians, the overweight kind and the really skinny kind.

“It just seems logical,” she said more quietly, “since I know I don’t want children.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t… I don’t…” He wanted to say that, since Lalitha so seldom saw Jairam, her longtime boyfriend, pregnancy hardly seemed like a pressing worry, and that, if she ever did get pregnant accidentally, she could always have an abortion. But it seemed fantastically inappropriate to be discussing his assistant’s tubes. She was smiling at him with a kind of woozy shyness, as if seeking his permission or fearing his disapproval. “I guess basically,” he said, “I think Richard was right, if you remember what he said. He said people change their minds about these things. It’s probably best to leave your options open.”

“But what if I know that I’m right now, and my future self is the one I don’t trust?”

“Well, you’re not going to be your old self anymore, in the future. You’re going to be your new self. And your new self might want different things.”

“Then fuck my future self,” Lalitha said, leaning forward. “If it wants to reproduce, I already have no respect for it.”

Walter willed himself not to glance at the other diners. “Why is this even coming up now? You hardly even see Jairam anymore.”

“Because Jairam wants children, that’s why. He doesn’t believe how serious I am about not wanting them. I need to show him, so he’ll stop bothering me. I don’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.”

“I’m really not sure we should be discussing this kind of thing.”

“OK, but who else can I talk to, then? You’re the only one who understands me.”

“Oh, God, Lalitha.” Walter’s head was swimming with beer. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I feel like I’ve led you into something I never meant to lead you into. You still have your whole life ahead of you, and I… I feel like I’ve led you into something.”

This sounded all wrong. In trying to say something narrow, something specific to the problem of world population, he’d managed to sound like he was saying something broad about the two of them. Had seemed to be foreclosing a larger possibility that he wasn’t ready to foreclose yet, even though he knew it wasn’t actually a possibility.

“These are my own thoughts, not yours,” Lalitha said. “You didn’t put them in my head. I was just asking your advice.”

“Well, and I guess my advice is don’t do it.”

“OK. Then I’m going to have another drink. Or do you advise me not to?”

“I do advise you not to.”

“Please order me one anyway.”

A chasm was opening in front of Walter, available for immediate jumping into. He was shocked by how quickly such a thing could open up in front of him. The only other time-or, no, no, no, the only time-he’d fallen in love, he’d taken the better part of a year before acting on it, and even then Patty had ended up doing most of the heavy lifting for him. Now it appeared that these things could be managed in a matter of minutes. Just a few more heedless words, another slug of beer, and God only knew…

“I just meant,” he said, “that I might have led you too much into overpopulation. Into being crazy about it. With my own stupid anger, my own issues. I wasn’t trying to say anything larger than that.”

She nodded. Tiny pearls of tear were clinging to her eyelashes.

“I feel very fatherly toward you,” he babbled.

“I understand.”

But fatherly was also wrong-too foreclosing of the kind of love that it was still too painful to admit he was never going to allow himself.

“Obviously,” he said, “I’m too young to be your father, or almost too young, besides which, in any case, you have your own father. I was really just referring to your having asked me for fatherly advice. To my having, as your boss, and as a considerably older person, a certain kind of… solicitude toward you. ‘Fatherly’ in that respect. Not in some sort of taboo respect.”

This all sounded like patent nonsense even as he said it. His whole fucking problem was taboos. Lalitha, who seemed to know it, raised her lovely eyes and looked directly into his. “You don’t have to love me, Walter. I can just love you. All right? You can’t stop me from loving you.”

The chasm widened dizzyingly.

“I do love you!” he said. “I mean-in a sense. A very definite sense. I definitely do. A lot. A whole lot, actually. OK? I just don’t see where we can go with it. I mean, if we’re going to keep working together, we absolutely can’t be talking like this. This is already very, very, very, very bad.”

“Yes, I know.” She lowered her eyes. “And you’re married.”

“Yes, exactly! Exactly. And so there we are.”

“There we are, yes.”

“Let me see about your drink.”

Love declared, disaster averted, he went looking for their waitress and ordered a third martini, heavy on the vermouth. His blush, which all his life had been a thing that constantly came and went, had now come without going. He lurched, hot-faced, into the men’s room and attempted to pee. His need was at once pressing and difficult to connect to. He stood at the urinal, taking deep breaths, and was finally at the point of getting things flowing when the door swung open and somebody came in. Walter heard the guy washing his hands and drying them while he stood with burning cheeks and waited for his bladder to overcome its shyness. He was again on the verge of success when he realized that the guy at the sinks was lingering deliberately. He gave up on peeing, wasted water with an unnecessary flush, and zipped up his pants.

“You might want to see a doctor, pal, about your urinary difficulties,” the guy at the sinks drawled sadistically. White, thirtyish, with hard living in his face, he was an exact match of Walter’s profile of the kind of driver who didn’t believe in turn signals. He stood near Walter’s shoulder while Walter hastily washed his hands and dried them.

“Like the dark meat, do you?”

“What?”

“Said I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.”

“She’s Asian,” Walter said, stepping around him. “If you’ll excuse me-”

“Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker, ain’t that right, pal?”

There was so much hatred in his voice that Walter, fearing violence, made his escape through the door without delivering a rejoinder. He hadn’t thrown a punch or absorbed one in thirty-five years, and he suspected that a punching would feel far worse at forty-seven than it had at twelve. His whole body was vibrating with unreleased violence, his head reeling with injustice, as he sat down to an iceberg-lettuce salad in the booth.

“How’s your beer?” Lalitha asked.

“It’s interesting,” he said, drinking the rest of it right down. His head felt liable to detach from his neck and drift up to the ceiling like a party balloon.

“I’m sorry if I said things I shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m-” in love with you, too. I’m horribly in love with you. “I’m in a hard position, honey,” he said. “I mean, not ‘honey.’ Not ‘honey.’ Lalitha. Honey. I’m in a hard position.”

“Maybe you should have another beer,” she said with a sly smile.

“You see, the thing is, I also love my wife.”

“Yes of course,” she said. But she wasn’t even trying to help him out. She arched her back like a cat and stretched forward across the table, displaying the ten pale nails of her beautiful young hands on either side of his salad plate, inviting him to touch them. “I’m so drunk!” she said, smiling up at him wickedly.

He glanced around the plastic dining room to see if his bathroom tormentor might be witnessing this. The guy was not obviously in sight, nor was anybody else staring unduly. Looking down at Lalitha, who was snuggling her cheek against the plastic tabletop as if it were the softest of pillows, he recalled the words of Richard’s prophecy. The girl on her knees, head bobbing, smiling up. Oh, the cheap clarity of Richard Katz’s vision of the world. A surge of resentment cut through Walter’s buzz and steadied him. To take advantage of this girl was Richard’s way, not his.

“Sit up,” he said sternly.

“In a minute,” she murmured, wiggling her outstretched fingers.

“No, sit up now. We’re the public face of the Trust, and we have to be aware of that.”

“I think you might have to take me home, Walter.”

“We need to get some food in you first.”

“Mm,” she said, smiling with closed eyes.

Walter stood up and ran down their waitress and asked to have their entrées boxed for takeout. Lalitha was still slumped forward, her half-finished third martini by her elbow, when he returned to the booth. He roused her and held her firmly by the upper arm as he led her outside and installed her in the passenger seat. Going back inside for the food, he encountered, in the glassed-in vestibule, his tormentor from the bathroom.

“Fucking dark-meat lover,” the guy said. “Fucking spectacle. What the fuck you doin’ around here?”

Walter tried to step around him, but the guy blocked his way. “Asked you a question,” he said.

“Not interested,” Walter said. He tried to push past but found himself shoved hard against the plate glass, shaking the framework of the vestibule. At that moment, before anything worse could happen, the inner door opened and the restaurant’s hard-bitten hostess asked what was going on.

“This person’s bothering me,” Walter said, breathing hard.

“Fucking pervert.”

“You going to have to take this off the premises,” the hostess said.

“I ain’t going nowhere. This pervo’s the one that’s leaving.”

“Then go back to your table and sit down and don’t use that kind of language with me.”

“Can’t even eat, he makes me so sick to my stomach.”

Leaving the two of them to sort things out, Walter went inside and found himself in the crosshairs of the murderously hateful gaze emanating from a heavyset young blonde, clearly his tormentor’s woman, who was alone at a table near the door. While he waited for his food, he wondered why it was tonight, of all the nights, that he and Lalitha had provoked this kind of hatred. They’d received a few stares now and then, mostly in smaller towns, but never anything like this. In fact, he’d been agreeably surprised by the number of black-white couples he’d seen in Charleston, and by the generally low priority of racism among the state’s many ailments. Most of West Virginia was too white for race to be a fore-front issue. He was forced to the conclusion that what had attracted the young couple’s attention was the guilt, his own dirty guilt, that had radiated from his booth. They didn’t hate Lalitha, they hated him. And he deserved it. When the food finally came out, his hands were shaking so much that he could hardly sign the credit-card slip.

Back at the Days Inn, he carried Lalitha in his arms through the rain and set her down outside her door. He had little doubt that she could have walked, but he wanted to indulge her earlier wish to be carried to her room. And it actually helped to have her in his arms like a child, it reminded him of his responsibilities. When she sat down on the bed and toppled over, he covered her with a bedspread the way he’d once covered Jessica and Joey.

“I’m going to go next door and eat dinner,” he said, tenderly smoothing her hair from her forehead. “I’ll leave yours here for you.”

“No don’t,” she said. “Stay and watch TV. I’ll sober up and we can eat together.”

In this, too, he indulged her, locating PBS on cable and watching the tail end of the NewsHour-some discussion of John Kerry’s war record whose irrelevance made him so nervous he could barely follow it. He could hardly stand to watch news of any sort anymore. Everything was moving too fast, too fast. He felt a stab of sympathy for the Kerry campaign, which now had less than seven months to turn the country’s mood around and expose three years of high-tech lying and manipulation.

He himself had been under tremendous pressure to get the Trust’s contracts with Nardone and Blasco signed before their initial agreement with Vin Haven expired, on June 30, and became subject to renegotiation. In his rush to deal with Coyle Mathis and beat the deadline, he’d had no choice but to sign off on the body-armor deal with LBI, exorbitant and distasteful though it was. And now, before anything could be reconsidered, the coal companies were rushing to wreck the Nine Mile valley and move into the mountains with their draglines, which they were free to do because one of Walter’s few clear successes, in West Virginia, had been to get the MTR permits fast-tracked and persuade the Appalachian Environmental Law Center to remove the Nine Mile sites from its dilatory lawsuit. The deal was sealed, and Walter now needed to forget about West Virginia in any case and start work in earnest on his anti-population crusade-needed to get the intern program up and running before the nation’s most liberal college kids all finalized their summer plans and went to work for the Kerry campaign instead.

In the two and a half weeks since his meeting in Manhattan with Richard, the world population had increased by 7,000,000. A net gain of seven million human beings-the equivalent of New York City’s population-to clear-cut forests and befoul streams and pave over grasslands and throw plastic garbage into the Pacific Ocean and burn gasoline and coal and exterminate other species and obey the fucking pope and pop out families of twelve. In Walter’s view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church, although, admittedly, the Siamese-twin fundamentalisms of Bush and bin Laden were running a close second these days. He couldn’t see a church or a real men love jesus sign or a fish symbol on a car without his chest tightening with anger. In a place like West Virginia, this meant that he got angry pretty much every time he ventured into daylight, which no doubt contributed to his road rage. And it wasn’t just religion, and it wasn’t just the jumbo everything to which his fellow Americans seemed to feel uniquely entitled, it wasn’t just the Walmarts and the buckets of corn syrup and the high-clearance monster trucks; it was the feeling that nobody else in the country was giving even five seconds’ thought to what it meant to be packing another 13,000,000 large primates onto the world’s limited surface every month. The unclouded serenity of his countrymen’s indifference made him wild with anger.

Patty had recently suggested, as an antidote to road rage, that he distract himself with radio whenever he was driving a car, but to Walter the message of every single radio station was that nobody else in America was thinking about the planet’s ruination. The God stations and the country stations and the Limbaugh stations were all, of course, actively cheering the ruination; the classic-rock and news-network stations continually made much ado about absolutely nothing; and National Public Radio was, for Walter, even worse. Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion: literally fiddling while the planet burned! And worst of all were Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The NPR news unit, once upon a time fairly liberal, had become just another voice of center-right free-market ideology, describing even the slightest slowing of the nation’s economic growth rate as “bad news” and deliberately wasting precious minutes of airtime every morning and evening-minutes that could have been devoted to raising the alarm about overpopulation and mass extinctions-on fatuously earnest reviews of literary novels and quirky musical acts like Walnut Surprise.

And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.

He was aware, of course, that it was wrong to feel this way-if only because, for almost twenty years, in St. Paul, he hadn’t. He was aware of the intimate connection between anger and depression, aware that it was mentally unhealthy to be so exclusively obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios, aware of how, in his case, the obsession was feeding on frustration with his wife and disappointment with his son. Probably, if he’d been truly alone in his anger, he couldn’t have stood it.

But Lalitha was with him every step of the way. She ratified his vision and shared his sense of urgency. In his initial interview with her, she’d told him about the family trip she’d taken back to West Bengal when she was fourteen. She’d been exactly the right age to be not merely saddened and horrified but disgusted by the density and suffering and squalor of human life in Calcutta. Her disgust had pushed her, on her return to the States, into vegetarianism and environmental studies, with a focus, in college, on women’s issues in developing nations. Although she’d happened to land a good job with the Nature Conservancy after college, her heart-like Walter’s own when he was young-had always been in population and sustainability issues.

There was, to be sure, a whole other side of Lalitha, a side susceptible to strong, traditional men. Her boyfriend, Jairam, was thick-bodied and somewhat ugly but arrogant and driven, a heart surgeon in training, and Lalitha was by no means the first attractive young woman whom Walter had seen parking her charms with a Jairam type in order to avoid being hit on everywhere she went. But six years of Jairam’s escalating nonsense seemed finally to be curing her of him. The only real surprise about the question she’d asked Walter tonight, the question about sterilization, was that she’d even felt the need to ask it.

Why, indeed, had she asked him?

He turned off the TV and paced her room to give the matter closer thought, and the answer came to him immediately: she’d been asking whether he might want to have a kid with her. Or maybe, more precisely, she’d been warning him that even if he wanted to, she might not.

And the sick thing was-if he was honest with himself-that he did want to have a baby with her. Not that he didn’t adore Jessica and, in a more abstract way, love Joey. But their mother was suddenly feeling very far away to him. Patty was a person who probably hadn’t even wanted very much to marry him, a person he’d first heard about from Richard, who had mentioned, one long-ago summer evening in Minneapolis, that the chick he was sleeping with was living with a basketball star who confounded his preconceptions of lady jocks. Patty had almost gone with Richard, and out of the gratifying fact that she hadn’t-that she’d succumbed to Walter’s love instead-had grown their entire life together, their marriage and their house and their kids. They’d always been a good couple but an odd couple; nowadays, more and more, they seemed simply ill matched. Whereas Lalitha was a genuine kindred spirit, a soul mate who wholeheartedly adored him. If they ever had a son, the son would be like him.

He continued to pace her room, greatly agitated. While his attention was diverted by drink and rednecks, the chasm at his feet had been growing wider and wider. He was now thinking about having babies with his assistant! And not even pretending that he wasn’t! And this was all new within the last hour. He knew it was new because, when he’d advised her not to have her tubes tied, he truly had not been thinking of himself.

“Walter?” Lalitha said from the bed.

“Yeah, how are you doing?” he said, rushing to her side.

“I was thinking I might throw up, but now I’m thinking I won’t have to.”

“That’s good!”

She was blinking up at him rapidly, with a tender smile. “Thank you for staying with me.”

“Oh absolutely.”

“How are you with your beer?”

“I don’t even know.”

Her lips were right there, her mouth was right there, and his heart seemed liable to crack his rib cage with its heaving. Kiss her! Kiss her! Kiss her! it was telling him.

And then his BlackBerry rang. Its ringtone was the song of the cerulean warbler.

“Take it,” Lalitha said.

“Um…”

“No, take it. I’m happy lying here.”

The caller was Jessica, it wasn’t urgent, they talked every day. But seeing her name on the screenlet was enough to draw Walter back from the brink. He sat down on the other bed and answered.

“It sounds like you’re walking,” Jessica said. “Are you running somewhere?”

“No,” he said. “Celebrating, actually.”

“It sounds like you’re on a treadmill, the way you’re panting.”

There was too little strength in his arm even to hold a phone up to his ear. He lay down on his side and told his daughter about the events of the morning and his various misgivings, which she did her best to reassure him about. He had come to appreciate the rhythm of their daily calls. Jessica was the one person in the world he allowed to ask him about himself before plying her with questions about her own life; she looked after him that way; she was the child who’d inherited his sense of responsibility. Although her ambition was still to be a writer, and she was currently working as a barely paid editorial assistant in Manhattan, she had a deep green streak and hoped to make environmental issues the focus of her future writing. Walter told her that Richard was coming down to Washington and asked her if she was still planning to join them on the weekend, to lend her valuable young intelligence to the discussions. She said she definitely was.

“And how was your day?” he said.

“Eh,” she said. “My roommates didn’t magically replace themselves with better roommates while I was at the office. I’ve got clothes piled around my door to keep the smoke out.”

“You have to not let them smoke inside. You just have to tell them that.”

“Right, I get outvoted, is the thing. They both just started. It’s still possible they’ll see how stupid it is and stop. In the meantime, I’m literally holding my breath.”

“And how’s work?”

“As usual. Simon gets ever skeazier. He’s like a sebum factory. You have to wipe everything off after he’s been around your desk. He was hanging around Emily’s desk for like an hour today, trying to get her to go to a Knicks game with him. The senior editors get all these free tickets to stuff, including sporting events, for reasons unknown to me. I guess the Knicks must be fairly desperate to fill their luxury seats at this point. And Emily’s like, how many hundred ways can I find to say no? I finally went over and started asking Simon about his wife. You know-wife? Three kids in Teaneck? Hello? Stop looking down Emily’s shirt?”

Walter closed his eyes and tried to think of something to say.

“Dad? You there?”

“I’m here, yeah. How old is, um. Simon?”

“I don’t know. Indeterminate. Probably not more than twice Emily’s age. We speculate about whether he colors his hair. Sometimes the color seems to change a little, from week to week, but that could just be body-oil issues. I’m luckily not directly subordinate to him.”

Walter was suddenly worried that he might cry.

“Dad? You there?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“It’s just your cell goes so blank when you’re not talking.”

“Yeah, listen,” he said, “it’s terrific that you’re coming for the weekend. I think we’ll put Richard in the guest room. We’re going to do a long meeting on Saturday and then a shorter one on Sunday. Try to hammer out a concrete plan. Lalitha’s already got some great ideas.”

“No doubt,” Jessica said.

“That’s great, then. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“OK, I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, sweetheart.”

He let the phone slip from his hand and lay crying for a while, silently, shaking the cheap bed. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake. To throw away his marriage and follow Lalitha had felt irresistible until the moment he saw himself, in the person of Jessica’s older colleague, as another overconsuming white American male who felt entitled to more and more and more: saw the romantic imperialism of his falling for someone fresh and Asian, having exhausted domestic supplies. Likewise the course he’d charted for two and a half years with the Trust, convinced of the soundness of his arguments and the rightness of his mission, only to feel, this morning, in Charleston, that he’d made nothing but horrible mistakes. And likewise the overpopulation initiative: what better way to live could there be than to throw himself into the most critical challenge of his time? A challenge that then seemed trumped-up and barren when he thought of his Lalitha with her tubes tied. How to live?

He was drying his eyes, pulling himself together, when Lalitha got up and came over and put a hand on his shoulder. She smelled of sweet respired martini. “My boss,” she said softly, stroking his shoulder. “You’re the best boss in the world. You’re such a wonderful man. We’ll get up in the morning and everything will be fine.”

He nodded and sniffled and gasped a little. “Please don’t get sterilized,” he said.

“No,” she said, stroking him. “I won’t do that tonight.”

“There’s no hurry about anything. Everything has to slow down.”

“Slow, slow, yes. Everything will be slow.”

If she’d kissed him, he would have kissed her back, but she just kept stroking his shoulder, and eventually he was able to reconstruct some semblance of a professional self. Lalitha looked wistful but not too disappointed. She yawned and stretched her arms like a sleepy child. Walter left her with her sandwich and went next door with his steak, which he devoured with guilty savagery, holding it in his hands and tearing off pieces with his teeth, covering his chin with grease. He thought again of Jessica’s oily, despoiling colleague Simon.

Sobered by this, and by the loneliness and sterility of his room, he washed his face and attended to e-mail for two hours, while Lalitha slept in her undespoiled room and dreamed of-what? He couldn’t imagine. But he did feel that, by coming so close to the brink and then drawing back so awkwardly, they had inoculated themselves against the danger of coming so close again. And this was fine with him now. It was the way he knew how to live: with discipline and self-denial. He took comfort in how long it would be before they traveled together again.

Cynthia, his press person, had e-mailed him final drafts of the full press release and of the preliminary announcement that was going out at noon tomorrow, as soon as the demolition of Forster Hollow had commenced. There was also a terse, unhappy note from Eduardo Soquel, the Trust’s point man in Colombia, confirming that he was willing to miss his eldest daughter’s quinceañera on Sunday and fly to Washington. Walter needed Soquel by his side at the press conference on Monday, to emphasize the Pan-American nature of the park and highlight the Trust’s successes in South America.

It wasn’t unusual for big conservation land deals to be kept under wraps until they were finalized, but rare were the deals containing a bombshell on the order of fourteen thousand acres of forest being opened up to MTR. Back in late 2002, when Walter had merely suggested to the local environmental community that the Trust might allow MTR on its warbler preserve, Jocelyn Zorn had alerted every anti-coal reporter in West Virginia. A flurry of negative stories had resulted, and Walter had realized that he simply couldn’t afford to take his full case to the public. The clock was ticking; there was no time for the slow work of educating the public and shaping its opinion. Better to keep his negotiations with Nardone and Blasco secret, better to let Lalitha convince Coyle Mathis and his neighbors to sign nondisclosure agreements, and wait for all the faits to be accomplis. But now the jig was up, now the heavy equipment was moving in. Walter knew he had to get out in front of the story and spin it his way, as a “success story” of science-based reclamation and compassionate relocation. And yet, the more he thought about it now, the more certain he became that the press was going to slaughter him for the MTR thing. He could be tied up for weeks with putting out fires. And meanwhile the clock was also running on his overpopulation initiative, which was all he really cared about now.

After rereading the press release, with deep unease, he checked his e-mail queue one last time and found a new message, from caperville @nytimes.com.

Hello, Mr. Berglund,

My name is Dan Caperville and I’m working on a story about land conservation in Appalachia. I understand the Cerulean Mountain Trust has recently closed a deal for the preservation of a large forested tract in Wyoming Co. WV. I’d love to talk about that with you at your earliest convenience…

What the fuck? How did the Times already know about this morning’s signing? Walter was so unready to ponder this e-mail, under present circumstances, that he composed a reply immediately and fired it off before he had time to reconsider:

Dear Mr. Caperville,

Thank you so much for your query! I would love to talk to you about the exciting things the Trust has in the works. As it happens, I’m holding a press conference this coming Monday morning in Washington, announcing a major and very exciting new environmental initiative, which I hope you’ll be able to attend. In consideration of your paper’s stature, I can also send you an early copy of our press release on Sunday evening. If you’re available to speak with me early Monday morning, in advance of the presser, I might be able to arrange that as well.

Looking forward to working with you-

Walter E. Berglund

Executive Director, Cerulean Mountain Trust

He copied everything to Cynthia and Lalitha, with the comment WTF?, and then paced the room in agitation, thinking how welcome a second beer would be right now. (One beer in forty-seven years, and already he felt like an addict.) The right thing to do now was probably to wake Lalitha, drive back to Charleston, catch the first morning flight out, move the press conference up to Friday, and get out in front of the story. But it seemed as if the world, the insane-making velocitous world, was conspiring to deprive him of the only two things he truly wanted now. Having already been deprived of kissing Lalitha, he at least wanted to spend the weekend planning the overpopulation initiative with her and Jessica and Richard, before dealing with the mess in West Virginia.

At ten-thirty, still pacing the room, he was feeling so deprived and anxious and sorry for himself that he called home to Patty. He wanted to get some credit for his fidelity, or maybe he just wanted to dump some anger on a person he loved.

“Oh, hi,” Patty said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. Is everything OK?”

“Everything’s horrible.”

“I bet! It’s hard to keep saying no when you want to say yes, isn’t it?”

“Oh Jesus don’t start,” he said. “Please, for God’s sake, do not start that tonight.”

“Sorry. I was trying to be sympathetic.”

“I’ve actually got a professional problem on my hands here, Patty. Not just some petty little personal emotional thing, believe it or not. A serious professional difficulty that I could use a bit of reassurance about. Somebody at the meeting this morning leaked something to the press, and I have to try to get out in front on a story I’m not sure I even want to be out in front on, because I was already feeling like I’ve fucked everything up here. Like all I’ve managed to do is release fourteen thousand acres to be blasted into a moonscape, and now the world has to be informed, and I don’t even care about the project anymore.”

“Right, well, actually,” Patty said, “the moonscape stuff does sound sort of awful.”

“Thank you! Thank you for the reassurance!”

“I was just reading an article about it in the Times this morning.”

“Today?”

“Yeah, they actually mentioned your warbler, and how bad mountaintop removal is for it.”

“Unbelievable! Today?”

“Yes, today.”

“Fuck! Somebody must have seen the piece in the paper today and then called the reporter with the leak. I just heard from him half an hour ago.”

“Well, anyway,” Patty said, “I’m sure you know best, although mountaintop removal does sound fairly horrible.”

He clutched his forehead, feeling close to tears again. He couldn’t believe he was getting this from his wife, at this hour, on this of all days. “Since when are you such a big fan of the Times?” he said.

“I’m just saying it sounds pretty bad. It doesn’t even sound like there’s any disagreement about how bad it is.”

“You’re the person who made fun of your mother for believing everything she read in the Times.”

“Ha-ha-ha! I’m my mother now? Because I don’t like mountaintop removal, I’m suddenly Joyce?”

“I’m just saying there are other aspects to the story.”

“You think we should be burning more coal. Making it easier to burn more coal. In spite of global warming.”

He slid his hand down over his eyes and pressed them until they hurt. “You want me to explain the reason? Should I do that?”

“If you want to.”

“We’re heading for a catastrophe, Patty. We are heading for a total collapse.”

“Well, and, frankly, I don’t know about you, but that’s starting to sound like kind of a relief to me.”

“I’m not talking about us!”

“Ha-ha-ha! I actually didn’t get that. I truly didn’t realize what you meant.”

“I meant that world population and energy consumption are going to have to fall drastically at some point. We’re way past sustainable even now. Once the collapse comes, there’s going to be a window of opportunity for ecosystems to recover, but only if there’s any nature left. So the big question is how much of the planet gets destroyed before the collapse. Do we completely use it up, and cut down every tree and sterilize every ocean, and then collapse? Or are there going to be some unwrecked strongholds that survive?”

“Either way, you and I will be long dead by then,” Patty said.

“Well, before I’m dead, I’m trying to create a stronghold. A refuge. Something to help a couple of ecosystems make it past the pinch point. That’s the whole project here.”

“Like,” she persisted, “there’s going to be a worldwide plague, and there’ll be this long line for the Tamiflu, or the Cipro, and you’re going to make us be the very last two people in it. ‘Oh, sorry, guys, darn, we just ran out.’ We’ll be nice and polite and agreeable, and then we’ll be dead.”

“Global warming is a huge threat,” Walter said, declining the bait, “but it’s still not as bad as radioactive waste. It turns out that species can adapt a lot faster than we used to think. If you’ve got climate change spread over a hundred years, a fragile ecosystem has a fighting chance. But when the reactor blows up, everything’s fucked immediately and stays fucked for the next five thousand years.”

“So yay coal. Let’s burn more coal. Rah, rah.”

“It’s complicated, Patty. The picture gets complicated when you consider the alternatives. Nuclear’s a disaster waiting to happen overnight. There’s zero chance of ecosystems recovering from an overnight disaster. Everybody’s talking about wind energy, but wind’s not so great, either. This idiot Jocelyn Zorn’s got a brochure that shows the two choices-the only two choices, presumably. Picture A shows this devastated post-MTR desertscape, Picture B shows ten windmills in a pristine mountain landscape. And what’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is there are only ten windmills in it. Where what you actually need is ten thousand windmills. You need every mountaintop in West Virginia to be covered with turbines. Imagine being a migratory bird trying to fly through that. And if you blanket the state with windmills, you think it’s still going to be a tourist attraction? And plus, to compete with coal, those windmills have to operate forever. A hundred years from now, you’re still going to have the same old piss-ugly eyesore, mowing down whatever wildlife is left. Whereas the mountaintop-removal site, in a hundred years, if you reclaim it properly, it may not be perfect, but it’s going to be a valuable mature forest.”

“And you know this, and the newspaper doesn’t,” Patty said.

“That’s right.”

“And it’s not possible you’re wrong.”

“Not about coal versus wind or nuclear.”

“Well, maybe if you explain all this, the way you just did to me, then people will believe it and you won’t have any problems.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t have all the facts.”

“But I have the facts, and I’m telling you! Why can’t you believe me? Why can’t you reassure me?”

“I thought that was Pretty Face’s job. I’m kind of out of practice since she took over. She’s so much better at it anyway.”

Walter ended the conversation before it could take an even worse turn. He turned off all the lights and got ready for bed by the parking-lot glow in the windows. Darkness was the only available relief from his state of flayed misery. He drew the blackout curtains, but light still leaked in at the base of them, and so he stripped the spare bed and used the pillows and covers to block out as much of it as he could. He put on a sleep mask and lay down with a pillow over his head, but even then, no matter how he adjusted the mask, there remained a faint suggestion of stray photons beating on his tightly shut eyelids, a less than perfect darkness.

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from this circumstance. He and Patty couldn’t live together and couldn’t imagine living apart. Each time he thought they’d reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.

One thunderstormy night in Washington, the previous summer, he’d set out to check a box on his dishearteningly long personal to-do list by setting up an online banking account, which he’d been intending to do for several years. Since moving to Washington, Patty had pulled less and less of her weight in the household, not even shopping for groceries anymore, but she did still pay the bills and balance the family checkbook. Walter had never scrutinized the checkbook entries until, after forty-five minutes of frustration with the banking software, he had the figures glowing on his computer screen. His first thought, when he saw the strange pattern of monthly $500 withdrawals, was that some hacker in Nigeria or Moscow had been stealing from him. But surely Patty would have noticed this?

He went upstairs to her little room, where she was chattering happily with one of her old basketball friends-she still showered laughter and wit on the people in her life who weren’t Walter-and gave her to understand that he wasn’t leaving until she got off the phone.

“It was cash,” she said when he showed her the printouts of account activity. “I wrote myself some checks for cash.”

“Five hundred a month? Near the end of every month?”

“That’s when I take my cash out.”

“No, you take two hundred every couple of weeks. I know what your withdrawals look like. And there’s also a fee for a certified check here. The fifteenth of May?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds like a certified check, not cash.”

Over in the direction of the Naval Observatory, where Dick Cheney lived, thunder was banging in an evening sky the color of Potomac water. Patty, on her little sofa, crossed her arms defiantly. “OK!” she said. “You caught me! Joey needed the whole summer rent up front. He’s going to pay it back when he earns it, but he didn’t have the cash in hand right then.”

For the second summer in a row, Joey was working in Washington without living at home. His spurning of their help and hospitality was irritating enough to Walter, but even worse was the identity of his summer employer: a corrupt little start-up-backed financially (though this didn’t mean much to Walter at the time) by Vin Haven’s friends at LBI-that had won the no-bid contract to privatize the bread-baking industry in newly liberated Iraq. Walter and Joey had already had their big fight about it some weeks earlier, on the Fourth of July, when Joey had come over for a picnic and very belatedly divulged his summer plans. Walter had lost his temper, Patty had run and hidden in her room, and Joey had sat smirking his Republican smirk. His Wall Street smirk. As if indulging his stupid rube father, with his old-fashioned principles; as if he himself knew better.

“So there’s a perfectly good bedroom here,” Walter said to Patty, “but that’s not good enough for him. That wouldn’t be grownup enough. That wouldn’t be cool enough. He might even have to ride a bus to work! With the little people!”

“He has to maintain his Virginia residency, Walter. And he’s going to pay it back, OK? I knew what you’d say if I asked you, so I went ahead and did it without telling you. If you don’t want me making my own decisions, you should confiscate the checkbook. Take away my bank card. I’ll come to you and beg for money every time I need it.”

“Every month! You’ve been sending money every month! To Mr. Independent!”

“I’m lending him some money. OK? His friends basically all have limitless funds. He’s very frugal, but if he’s going to make those connections, and be in that world-”

“That great frat-house world, full of the best sort of people-”

“He has a plan. He has a plan and he wants you to be impressed with him-”

“News to me!”

“It’s just for clothes and socializing,” Patty said. “He pays his own tuition, he pays his own room and board, and maybe, if you could ever forgive him for not being an identical copy of you in every way, you might see how similar you two are. You were supporting yourself the exact same way when you were his age.”

“Right, except I wore the same three pairs of corduroys for four years of college, and I wasn’t out drinking five nights a week, and I sure as hell wasn’t getting any money from my mother.”

“Well, it’s a different world now, Walter. And maybe, just maybe, he understands better than you do what a person has to do to get ahead in it.”

“Work for a defense contractor, get shitfaced every night with fratboy Republicans. That’s really the only way to get ahead? That’s the only option available?”

“You don’t understand how scared these kids are now. They’re under so much pressure. So they like to party hard-so what?”

The old mansion’s air-conditioning was no match for the humidity pressing on it from outside. The thunder was becoming continuous and omnidirectional; the ornamental pear tree outside the window heaved its branches as if somebody were climbing in it. Sweat was running on every part of Walter’s body not directly in contact with his clothes.

“It’s interesting to hear you suddenly defending young people,” he said, “since you’re normally so-”

“I’m defending your son,” she said. “Who, in case you haven’t noticed, is not one of the brainless flipflop wearers. He’s considerably more interesting than-”

“I cannot believe you’ve been sending him drinking money! You know what it’s exactly like? It’s exactly like corporate welfare. All these supposedly free-market companies sucking on the tit of the federal government. ‘We need to shrink the government, we don’t want any regulations, we don’t want any taxes, but, oh, by the way-’ ”

“This isn’t sucking on tits, Walter,” Patty said with hatred.

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Well, I’m saying you picked an interesting metaphor.”

“Well, and I picked it carefully. All these companies pretending to be so grownup and free-market when they’re actually just big babies devouring the federal budget while everybody else starves. Fish and Wildlife has its budget cut year after year, another five percent every year. You go to their field offices, they’re ghost offices now. There’s no staff, there’s no money for land acquisition, no-”

“Oh the precious fish. The precious wildlife.”

“I CARE ABOUT THEM. Can you not understand that? Can you not respect that? If you can’t respect that, what are you even living with me for? Why don’t you just leave?”

“Because leaving is not the answer. My God, do you think I haven’t thought about it? Taking my great skills and work experience and great middle-aged body out on the open market? I actually think it’s wonderful what you’re doing for your warbler-”

“Bullshit.”

“So, OK, it’s not my personal thing, but-”

“What is your thing? You don’t have a thing. You sit around doing nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, every day, and it’s killing me. If you would actually go out and get a job, and earn an actual paycheck, or do something for another human being, instead of sitting in your room feeling sorry for yourself, you might feel less worthless, is what I’m saying.”

“Fine, but, honey, nobody wants to pay me a hundred eighty thousand a year to save the warblers. It’s nice work if you can get it. But I can’t get it. You want me to make Frappuccinos at Starbucks? You think eight hours a day at Starbucks is going to make me feel like I’m worth something?”

“It might! If you would ever try it! Which you never have, in your entire life!”

“Oh, finally it comes out! Finally we’re getting somewhere!”

“I never should have let you stay home. That was the mistake. I don’t know why your parents never made you get a job, but-”

“I had jobs! God damn it, Walter.” She tried to kick him and only by accident missed his knee. “I worked a whole horrible summer for my dad. And then you saw me at the U., you know I can do it. I worked two solid years there. Even when I was eight months’ pregnant, I was still going in.”

“You were hanging out with Treadwell and drinking coffee and watching game films. That’s not a job, Patty. That’s a favor from people who love you. First you worked for your dad, then you worked for your friends in the A.D.”

“And sixteen hours a day at home for twenty years? Unpaid? Does that not count? Was that just a ‘favor,’ too? Raising your kids? Working on your house?”

“Those were things you wanted.”

“You didn’t?”

“For you. I wanted them for you.”

“Oh, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You wanted them for you, too. You were competing with Richard the whole time, and you know it. The only reason you’re forgetting it now is that it didn’t work out so great. You’re not winning anymore.”

“Winning has nothing to do with it.”

“Liar! You’re just as competitive as I am, you just won’t tell the truth about it. That’s why you won’t leave me alone. That’s why I’ve got to get that precious job. Because I’m making you a loser.”

“I can’t listen to this. This is some alternate reality.”

“Well, whatever, don’t listen, but I’m still on your team. And, believe it or not, I still want you to win. The reason I’m helping Joey is he’s on our team, and I will help you, too. I will go out tomorrow, for your sake, and I will-”

“Not for my sake.”

“YES, FOR YOUR SAKE. Don’t you get it? I have no sake. I don’t believe in anything. I don’t have faith in anything. The team is all I’ve got. And so I’ll get some kind of job for your sake, and then you can just leave me the hell alone, and let me send Joey however much money I make. You won’t see so much of me anymore-you won’t have to be so disgusted.”

“I’m not disgusted.”

“Well, that is beyond my comprehension.”

“And you don’t have to get a job if you don’t want to.”

“Yes, I do! It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? You’ve made it pretty clear.”

“No. You don’t have to do anything. Just be my Patty again. Just come back to me.”

She cried then, torrentially, and he lay down with her. Fighting had become their portal to sex, almost the only way it ever happened anymore. While the rain lashed and the sky flashed, he tried to fill her with self-worth and desire, tried to convey how much he needed her to be the person he could bury his cares in. It never quite worked, and yet, when they were done, there came a stretch of minutes in which they lay and held each other in the quiet majesty of long marriage, forgot themselves in shared sadness and forgiveness for everything they’d inflicted on each other, and rested.

The very next morning, Patty had gone out and looked for work. She came back in less than two hours and skipped into Walter’s office, in the mansion’s many-windowed “conservatory,” to announce that the local Republic of Health had hired her as a front-desk greeter.

“I don’t know about this,” Walter said.

“What? Why not?” Patty said. “It’s literally the only place in Georgetown that doesn’t embarrass me or sicken me. And they had an opening! It’s a very lucky thing.”

“Front-desk greeter just doesn’t seem appropriate, given your talents.”

“Appropriate to who?”

“To people who might see you.”

“And which people are these?”

“I don’t know. People I might be hitting up for money, or legislative backing, or regulatory help.”

“Oh, my God. Are you listening to yourself? Are you hearing what you just said?”

“Look, I’m trying to be honest with you. Don’t punish me for being honest.”

“I’m punishing you for your content, Walter, not your honesty. I mean! ‘Not appropriate.’ Wow.”

“I’m saying you’re too smart for an entry-level gym job.”

“No, you’re saying I’m too old. You wouldn’t have a problem with Jessica working there for the summer.”

“Actually, I’d be disappointed if that’s all she wanted to do with her summer.”

“Oh, good Lord, then. I truly cannot win. ‘Any job is better than no job, or, but, no, sorry, wait, the job that you actually want and are well qualified for is not better than no job.’ ”

“OK, fine. Take it. I don’t care.”

“Thank you for not caring!”

“I just think you’re selling yourself way short.”

“Well, maybe it’ll only be temporary,” Patty said. “Maybe I’ll get my realtor’s license, like every other unemployable wife around here, and start selling squalid little crooked-floored town houses for two million dollars. ‘In this very bathroom, in 1962, Hubert Humphrey had a large bowel movement, which, in recognition of this historic movement, the property has been placed on the National Registry, which explains the hundred-thousand-dollar premium its owners are demanding. There’s also a small but rather nice azalea bush behind the kitchen window.’ I can start wearing pinks and greens and a Burberry raincoat. I’ll buy a Lexus SUV with my first big commission. It’ll be much more appropriate.”

“I said OK.”

“Thank you, honey! Thank you for letting me take the job I want!”

Walter watched her stride out the door and stop by Lalitha’s desk. “Hi, Lalitha,” she said. “I just got a job. I’m going to work at my gym.”

“That’s nice,” Lalitha said. “You like that gym.”

“Yeah, but Walter thinks it’s inappropriate. What do you think?”

“I think any honest work can bring a human being dignity.”

“Patty,” Walter called. “I said it was OK.”

“See, now he’s changed his mind,” she said to Lalitha. “Before, he was saying it was inappropriate.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

“Right, ha-ha-ha, I’m sure you did. But it’s important to pretend otherwise, OK?”

“Don’t leave the door open if you don’t want to be heard,” Lalitha said coldly.

“We all have to work really hard on pretending.”

Becoming a front-desk greeter at Republic of Health did for Patty’s spirits everything Walter had hoped a job would do. Everything and, alas, more. Her depression immediately seemed to lift, but this only showed how misleading the word “depression” was, because Walter was certain that her old unhappiness and anger and despair were all still present beneath her bright and brittle new way of being. She spent her mornings in her room, worked the p.m. shift at the gym, and didn’t get home until after ten. She began reading beauty and fitness magazines and noticeably using eye makeup. The sweatpants and baggy jeans that she’d been wearing in Washington, the sort of unconfining clothes that mental patients spend their days in, gave way to closer-fitting jeans that cost actual money.

“You look great,” Walter said one evening, trying to be nice.

“Well, now that I have an income,” she said, “I need something to spend it on, right?”

“You could always make charitable contributions to the Cerulean Mountain Trust instead.”

“Ha-ha-ha!”

“Our need is great.”

“I’m having fun, Walter. A tiny little bit of fun.”

But she didn’t really seem like she was having fun. She seemed like she was trying to hurt him, or spite him, or prove some kind of point. Walter began working out at Republic of Health himself, using a stack of free passes she’d given him, and he was unsettled by the intensity of the friendliness she directed at the members whose cards she scanned. She wore tiny-sleeved, provocatively sloganed Republic T-shirts (PUSH, SWEAT, LIFT) that highlighted her beautifully toned upper arms. Her eyes had a speed-freak glitter, and her laugh, which had always thrilled Walter, sounded false and ominous when he heard it echoing behind him in the Republic’s foyer. She was giving it to everybody now, giving it indiscriminately, meaninglessly, to every member who walked in off Wisconsin Avenue. And then one day he noticed a breast-augmentation brochure on her desk at home.

“Jesus,” he said, examining it. “This is obscene.”

“Actually, it’s a medical brochure.”

“It’s a mental-illness brochure, Patty. It’s like a guide to how to become more mentally ill.”

“Well, excuse me, I just thought it might be nice, for the short remainder of my comparative youth, to have a little bit of actual chest. To see what that might be like.”

“You already have a chest. I adore your chest.”

“Well, that’s all very nice, dear, but in fact you don’t get to make the decision, because it’s not your body. It’s mine. Isn’t that what you’ve always said? You’re the feminist in this household.”

“Why are you doing this? I don’t understand what you’re doing with yourself.”

“Well, maybe you should just leave if you don’t like it. Have you considered that? It would solve the whole problem, like, instantly.”

“Well, that’s never going to happen, so-”

“I KNOW IT’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”

“So I might as well go ahead and buy myself some tits, to help make the years go by and give me something to save up my pennies for, is all I’m saying. I’m not talking about anything grotesquely large. You might even find you like ’em. Have you considered that?”

Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys. Where there were really huge coal deposits, as in Wyoming County, the coal companies built processing plants right next to their mines and used water from the nearest stream to wash the coal. The polluted water was collected in big ponds of toxic sludge, and Walter had become so worried about having sludge impoundments in the middle of the Warbler Park that he’d tasked Lalitha with showing him how not to worry about it so much. This hadn’t been an easy task, since there was no way around the fact that when you dug up coal you also unearthed nasty chemicals like arsenic and cadmium that had been safely buried for millions of years. You could try dumping the poison back down into abandoned underground mines, but it had a way of seeping into the water table and ending up in drinking water. It really was a lot like the deep shit that got stirred up when a married couple fought: once certain things had been said, how could they ever be forgotten again? Lalitha was able to do enough research to reassure Walter that, if the sludge was carefully sequestered and properly contained, it eventually dried out enough that you could cover it with crushed rock and topsoil and pretend it wasn’t there. This story had become the sludge-pond gospel that he was determined to spread in West Virginia. He believed in it the same way he believed in ecological strongholds and science-based reclamation, because he had to believe in it, because of Patty. But now, as he lay and sought sleep on the hostile Days Inn mattress, between the scratchy Days Inn sheets, he wondered if any of it was true…

He must have drifted off at some point, because when the alarm rang, at 3:40, he felt cruelly yanked from oblivion. Another eighteen hours of waking dread and anger lay ahead of him. Lalitha knocked on his door at 4:00 sharp, looking fresh in casual jeans and hiking shoes. “I feel horrid!” she said. “How about you?”

“Horrid also. At least you don’t look it, the way I do.”

The rain had stopped in the night, giving way to a dense, south-smelling fog that was scarcely less wetting. Over breakfast, at a truck stop across the road, Walter told Lalitha about the e-mail from Dan Caperville at the Times.

“Do you want to go home now?” she said. “Do the press conference tomorrow morning?”

“I told Caperville I was doing it on Monday.”

“You could tell him you changed it. Just get it out of the way, so we’ll have the weekend free.”

But Walter was so painfully exhausted that he couldn’t imagine holding a press conference the next morning. He sat and suffered mutely while Lalitha, doing what he had lacked the courage to do the night before, read the Times article on her BlackBerry. “This is only twelve paragraphs,” she said. “Not so bad.”

“I guess that’s why everybody else missed it and I had to hear about it from my wife.”

“So you spoke to her last night.”

Lalitha seemed to mean something by this, but he was too tired to figure out what. “I just wonder who did the leaking,” he said. “And how much they leaked.”

“Maybe your wife leaked it.”

“Right.” He laughed and then saw the hard look on Lalitha’s face. “She wouldn’t do a thing like that,” he said. “She doesn’t care enough, if nothing else.”

“Hm.” Lalitha took a bite of pancake and looked around the diner with the same hard, unhappy expression. She, of course, had every reason to be sore at Patty, and at Walter, this morning. To feel rejected and alone. But these were the first seconds in which he’d ever experienced anything like coldness from her; and they were dreadful. What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.

“I just want to have our weekend meeting,” he said. “If I can just have two days to work on overpopulation, I can face anything on Monday.”

Lalitha finished her pancakes without speaking to him. Walter forced down some of his own breakfast as well, and they went out into the light-polluted dark morning. In the rental car, she adjusted the seat and mirrors, which he’d moved the night before. As she was reaching across herself to fasten her seat belt, he put an awkward hand on her neck and pulled her closer, bringing them eye to serious eye in the all-night roadside light.

“I can’t go five minutes without you on my side,” he said. “Not five minutes. Do you understand that?”

After a moment’s thought, she nodded. Then, letting go of the seat belt, she placed her hands on his shoulders, gave him a solemn kiss, and drew back to gauge its effect. He felt as if he’d done his utmost now and could go no further on his own. He simply waited while, with a child’s frown of concentration, she took his glasses off, set them on the dashboard, put her hands on his head, and touched her little nose to his. He was momentarily troubled by how similar her face and Patty’s looked in extreme close-up, but all he had to do was close his eyes and kiss her and she was pure Lalitha, her lips pillowy, her mouth peach-sweet, her blood-filled head warm beneath her silky hair. He struggled against how wrong it felt to kiss somebody so young. He could feel her youth as a kind of fragility in his hands, and he was relieved when she drew back again to look at him, with shining eyes. He felt that some word of acknowledgment was called for now, but he couldn’t stop staring at her, and she seemed to take this as an invitation to clamber across the gear shift and straddle him awkwardly on the bucket seat, so that he could take her fully in his arms. The aggression with which she kissed him then, the hungry abandon, brought him a joy so extreme that it blew up the ground beneath him. He was in free fall, everything he believed in was receding into darkness, and he began to cry.

“Oh, what is it?” she said.

“You have to go slow with me.”

“Slow, slow, yes,” she said, kissing his tears, wiping them with her satiny thumbs. “Walter, are you sad?”

“No, honey, the opposite.”

“Then let me love you.”

“OK. You can do that.”

“Really OK?”

“Yes,” he said, crying. “But we should probably hit the road.”

“In a minute.”

She put her tongue to his lips, and he opened them to let her in. There was more desire for him in her mouth than in Patty’s entire body. Her shoulders, as he gripped them through her nylon shell, seemed to be all bone and baby fat and no muscle, all eager pliability. She straightened her back and bore down on him, pushing her hips into his chest; and he wasn’t ready for it. He was closer now but still not fully there. His resistance the night before hadn’t been simply a matter of taboo or principle, and his tears weren’t all for joy.

Sensing this, Lalitha pulled away from him and studied his face. In response to whatever she saw in it, she climbed back into the other seat again and observed him from a greater distance. Now that he’d driven her away, he keenly wanted her again, but he had a dim recollection, from the stories he’d heard and read about men in his position, that this was the terrible thing about them: that it was known as stringing a girl along. He sat for a while in the changeless purple-toned streetlight, listening to the trucks on the interstate.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m still trying to figure out how to live.”

“That’s OK. You can have some time.”

He nodded, taking note of the word some.

“Can I ask you one question, though?” she said.

“You can ask me a million questions.”

“Well, just one for now. Do you think you might love me?”

He smiled. “Yes, I definitely think that.”

“That’s all I need, then.” And she started the engine.

Somewhere above the fog, the sky was turning blue. Lalitha took the back roads out of Beckley at highly illegal speeds, and Walter was happy to gaze out the window and not think about what was happening to him, just inhabit the free fall. That the Appalachian hardwood forest was among the world’s most biodiverse temperate ecosystems, home to a variety of tree species and orchids and freshwater invertebrates whose bounty the high plains and sandy coasts could only envy, wasn’t readily apparent from the roads they were traveling. The land here had betrayed itself, its gnarly topography and wealth of extractable resources discouraging the egalitarianism of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, fostering instead the concentration of surface and mineral rights in the hands of the out-of-state wealthy, and consigning the poor natives and imported workers to the margins: to logging, to working in the mines, to scraping out pre- and then, later, post-industrial existences on scraps of leftover land which, stirred by the same urge to couple as had now gripped Walter and Lalitha, they’d overfilled with tightly spaced generations of too-large families. West Virginia was the nation’s own banana republic, its Congo, its Guyana, its Honduras. The roads were reasonably picturesque in summer, but now, with the leaves still down, you could see all the scabby rock-littered pastures, the spindly canopies of young second growth, the gouged hillsides and mining-damaged streams, the spavined barns and paintless houses, the trailer homes hip-deep in plastic and metallic trash, the torn-up dirt tracks leading nowhere.

Deeper in the country, the scenes were less discouraging. Remoteness brought the relief of no people: no people meant more everything else. Lalitha swerved violently around a grouse on the road, a grouse greeter, an avian goodwill ambassador inviting appreciation of the brawnier forestation and less marred heights and clearer streams of Wyoming County. Even the weather was brightening for them.

“I want you,” Walter said.

She shook her head. “Don’t say anything else, OK? We still have work to do. Let’s just do our jobs and then see.”

He was tempted to make her stop at one of the little rustic picnic areas along Black Jewel Creek (of which the Nine Mile was a principal tributary), but it would be irresponsible, he thought, to lay a hand on her again until he was certain he was ready. Delay was bearable if gratification was assured. And the beauty of the land up here, the sweet spore-laden dampness of the early-spring air, was so assuring him.

It was after six by the time they reached the turnoff for Forster Hollow. Walter had expected to encounter heavy truck and earth-moving-equipment traffic on the Nine Mile road, but there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Instead they found deep tire and tractor chewings in the mud. Where the woods encroached, freshly broken branches were lying on the ground and dangling lamely from the overarching trees.

“Looks like somebody got here early,” Walter said.

Lalitha was applying gas in fitful spurts, fishtailing the car in the mud, veering dangerously close to the road’s edge to avoid the larger fallen branches.

“I almost wonder if they got here yesterday,” Walter said. “I wonder if they misunderstood and brought the equipment in yesterday to get an early start.”

“They did have the legal right, as of noon.”

“But that’s not what they told us. They told us six a.m. today.”

“Yes, but they’re coal companies, Walter.”

They came to one of the narrowest pinches in the road and found it roughly bulldozed and chainsawed, the tree trunks pushed down into the ravine below. Lalitha revved the engine and shimmied and jounced across a hastily graded stretch of mud and stone and stump. “Glad this is a rental car!” she said as she accelerated zestfully onto the clearer road beyond.

Two miles farther up, at the boundary of property now belonging to the Trust, the road was blocked by a couple of passenger cars backed up in front of a chainlink gate being assembled by workers in orange vests. Walter could see Jocelyn Zorn and some of her women conferring with a hard-hatted manager who was holding a clipboard. In another, not too dissimilar world, Walter might have been friends with Jocelyn Zorn. She resembled the Eve in the famous altarpiece painting by van Eyck; she was pallid and dull-eyed and somewhat macrocephalic-looking in the highness of her hairline. But she had a fine, unsettling cool, an unflappability suggestive of irony, and was the sort of bitter salad green for which Walter ordinarily had a fondness. She came down the road to meet him and Lalitha as they were stepping out into the mud.

“Good morning, Walter,” she said. “Can you explain what’s going on here?”

“Looks like some road improvement,” he said disingenuously.

“There’s a lot of dirt going in the creek. It’s already turbid halfway to the Black Jewel. I’m not seeing much in the way of erosion mitigation here. Less than none, actually.”

“We’ll talk to them about that.”

“I’ve asked DEP to come up and have a look. I imagine they’ll get here by June or so. Did you buy them off, too?”

Through the brown spatters on the bumper of the rearmost car Walter could read the message been done by nardone.

“Let’s rewind a little bit, Jocelyn,” he said. “Can we step back and look at the bigger picture?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the dirt in the stream. I’m also interested in what’s happening beyond the fence.”

“What’s happening is we’re preserving sixty-five thousand acres of roadless woodland for eternity. We’re securing unfragmented habitat for as many as two thousand breeding pairs of cerulean warbler.”

Zorn lowered her dull eyes to the muddy ground. “Right. Your species of interest. It’s very pretty.”

“Why don’t we all go somewhere else,” Lalitha said cheerfully, “and sit down and talk about the bigger picture. We’re on your side, you know.”

“No,” Zorn said. “I’m going to stay here for a while. I asked my friend from the Gazette to come up and have a look.”

“Have you been talking to the New York Times, too?” it occurred to Walter to ask.

“Yes. They seemed pretty interested, actually. MTR’s a magic term these days. That’s what you’re doing up there, isn’t it?”

“We’re having a press conference on Monday,” he said. “I’m going to lay out the whole plan. I think, when you hear the details, you’re going to be very excited. We can get you a plane ticket if you want to join us. I’d love to have you there. You and I could even have a little public dialogue, if you want to voice your concerns.”

“In Washington?”

“Yes.”

“Figures.”

“That’s where we’re based.”

“Right. It’s where everything’s based.”

“Jocelyn, we have fifty thousand acres here that will never be touched in any way. The rest of it will be successional within a few years. I think we’ve made some very good decisions.”

“I guess we disagree about that, then.”

“Seriously think about joining us in Washington on Monday. And have your friend at the Gazette give me a call today.” Walter gave Zorn a business card from his wallet. “Tell him we’d love to bring him to Washington, too, if he’s interested.”

From farther up in the hills came a murmur of thunder that sounded like blasting, probably up at Forster Hollow. Zorn put the business card in a pocket of her rain parka. “By the way,” she said, “I’ve been talking to Coyle Mathis. I already know what you’re doing.”

“Coyle Mathis is legally barred from discussing it,” Walter said. “I’m happy to sit down with you and talk about it myself, though.”

“The fact that he’s living in a brand-new five-bedroom ranch house in Whitmanville speaks for itself.”

“That’s a nice house, isn’t it?” Lalitha said. “Much, much nicer than where he was.”

“You might want to pay him a visit and see if he agrees with you about that.”

“Anyway,” Walter said, “you need to move your cars out of the way so we can get through.”

“Hm,” Zorn said, uninterested. “I guess you could call somebody to tow us, if there were cell reception here. Which there isn’t.”

“Oh, come on, Jocelyn.” Walter’s anger was outflanking his barricades against it. “Can we at least be adults about this? Acknowledge that we’re fundamentally on the same side, even if we disagree about our methods?”

“Sorry, no,” she said. “My method is to block the road.”

Not trusting himself to say more, Walter strode up the hill and let Lalitha hurry after him. A flail, the whole morning was becoming a flail. The hard-hatted manager, who looked no older than Jessica, was explaining to the other women, with remarkable courtesy, why they needed to move their cars. “Do you have a radio?” Walter asked him abruptly.

“I’m sorry. Who are you?”

“I’m the director of the Cerulean Mountain Trust. We were expected at the top of the road at six o’clock.”

“Right, sir. I’m afraid that’s going to be a problem if these ladies don’t move their cars.”

“Well, then, how about radioing for somebody to come down and get us?”

“Out of range, unfortunately. These damned hollers are dead zones.”

“OK.” Walter took a deep breath. He could see a pickup parked beyond the gate. “Maybe you can run us up in your truck, then.”

“I’m afraid I’m not authorized to leave the gate area.”

“Well, then, lend it to us.”

“I can’t do that, either, sir. You’re not insured for it on the work site. But if these ladies would just move aside for a sec, you’d be free to proceed in your own vehicle.”

Walter turned to the women, none of whom looked younger than sixty, and smiled in vague supplication. “Please?” he said. “We’re not with a coal company. We’re conservationists.”

“Conservationists my ass!” the oldest one said.

“No, seriously,” Lalitha said in a soothing tone. “It would be to everyone’s benefit if you would let us through. We’re here to monitor the work and make sure it’s being done responsibly. We’re very much on your side, and we share your concerns about the environment. In fact, if one or two of you would like to come along with us-”

“I’m afraid that’s not authorized,” the manager said.

“Fuck the authorization!” Walter said. “We need to get through here! I own this fucking land! Do you understand that? I own everything you can see here.”

“How you likin’ it?” the oldest woman said to him. “Doesn’t feel so good now, does it? Being on the wrong side of the fence.”

“You’re more than free to walk in, sir,” the manager said, “although it’s a pretty far piece. I reckon you’re looking at two hours with all the mud.”

“Just lend me the truck, OK? I will indemnify you, or you can say I stole it, or whatever you like. Just lend me the fucking truck.”

Walter felt Lalitha’s hand on his arm. “Walter? Let’s go sit in the car for a minute.” She turned to the women. “We’re very much on your side, and we appreciate your coming out to show your concern for this wonderful forest, which we’re very dedicated to preserving.”

“Interesting way you got of going about that,” the oldest woman said.

As Lalitha led Walter back down toward the rental car, they could hear heavy equipment coming rumbling up the road behind it. The rumble became a roar which then resolved itself into a pair of giant, road-wide backhoes with mud-caked tractors. The driver of the front one left the engine coughing out fumes while he hopped down for a word with Walter.

“Sir, you’re going to have to move your vehicle up ahead to where we can pass it.”

“Does it look like I can do that?” he said wildly. “Is that what it fucking looks like to you?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. But we can’t be backing up. Be near a mile back down to a turnout.”

Before Walter could get even angrier, Lalitha took him by both arms and peered up fervently into his face. “You have to let me handle this. You’re too upset now.”

“I’m upset for good reason!”

“Walter. Sit in the car. Now.”

He did as he was told. He sat for more than an hour, fiddling with his non-receiving BlackBerry and listening to the mindless waste of fossil fuels as the backhoe behind him idled. When the driver finally thought to turn it off, he heard a chorus of engines from farther back-another four or five heavy trucks and earthmovers were backed up now. Somebody needed to summon the state police to deal with Zorn and her zealots. In the meantime, incredibly, in deepest Wyoming County, he was stopped dead in traffic. Lalitha was running up and down the road, conferring with the various parties, doing her best to spread goodwill. To pass the time, Walter did mental tallies of what had gone wrong in the world in the hours since he’d awakened in the Days Inn. Net population gain: 60,000. New acres of American sprawl: 1,000. Birds killed by domestic and feral cats in the United States: 500,000. Barrels of oil burned worldwide: 12,000,000. Metric tons of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere: 11,000,000. Sharks murdered for their fins and left floating finless in the water: 150,000… The tallies, which he recalculated as the hour grew even later, brought him a strange spiteful satisfaction. There are days so bad that only their worsening, only a descent into an outright orgy of badness, can redeem them.

It was getting on toward nine o’clock when Lalitha returned to him. One of the drivers, she said, had found a spot two hundred yards back down the road where a passenger car could pull off and let the big equipment pass. The rearmost driver was going to back his truck all the way down to the highway and phone for the police.

“Do you want to try to walk up to Forster Hollow?” Walter said.

“No,” Lalitha said, “I want us to leave immediately. Jocelyn has a camera. We don’t want to be photographed anywhere near a police action.”

There ensued half an hour of grinding gears and squawking brakes and black bursts of diesel smoke, followed by a further forty-five minutes of breathing the rear truck’s foul exhaust as it inched backward down the valley. Out on the highway at last, in the freedom of the open road, Lalitha drove back toward Beckley at frantic speeds, flooring the gas on the shortest of straightaways, leaving rubber on the curves.

They were on the shabby outskirts of town when his BlackBerry sang its cerulean song, making official their return to civilization. The call was from a Twin Cities number, possibly familiar, possibly not.

“Dad?”

Walter frowned with astonishment. “Joey? Wow! Hello.”

“Yeah, hey. Hello.”

“Everything OK with you? I didn’t even recognize your number, it’s been so long.”

The line seemed to go dead, as if the call had been dropped. Or maybe he’d said the wrong thing. But then Joey spoke again, in a voice like someone else’s. Some quavering, tentative kid. “Yeah, so, anyway, Dad, um-do you have a second?”

“Go ahead.”

“Yeah, well, so, I guess the thing is, I’m sort of in some trouble.”

“What?”

“I said I’m in some trouble.”

It was the kind of call that every parent dreaded getting; but Walter, for a moment, wasn’t feeling like Joey’s parent. He said, “Hey, so am I! So is everybody!”