“That’s great. It’s great to see the two of you taking care of each other like that. Was there anything else?”
“Well, only that I saw Mom.”
Walter was still holding two neckties, a red one and a green one, that he’d been trying to choose between. The choice, he realized, was not particularly consequential. “You did?” he said, choosing the green one. “Where? In Alexandria?”
“No, in New York.”
“So she’s in New York.”
“Well, actually, Jersey City,” Joey said.
Walter’s chest tightened and stayed tightened.
“Yeah, Connie and I wanted to tell her in person. You know, about being married. And it wasn’t so bad actually. She was actually fairly nice to Connie. You know, still patronizing, and sort of fake, the way she kept laughing, but not mean. I guess she’s distracted with a lot of other things. Anyway, we thought it went pretty well. At least Connie thought so. I thought it was kind of ehhnh. But I wanted you to know she knows, so, I don’t know, if you ever talk to her, you don’t have to keep it secret anymore.”
Walter looked at his left hand, which had turned white and looked very bare without its wedding ring. “She’s staying with Richard,” he managed to say.
“Um, yeah, I guess, for the moment,” Joey said. “Was I not supposed to say that?”
“Was he there? When you were there?”
“Yeah, actually. He was. And it was fun for Connie, because she’s fairly into his music. He let her see his guitars and everything. I don’t know if I told you she’s thinking of learning guitar. She’s got a really pretty singing voice.”
Where exactly Walter had thought Patty was staying he couldn’t have said. With her friend Cathy Schmidt, with one of her other old teammates, maybe with Jessica, conceivably even with her parents. But having heard her proclaim so righteously that everything was over between her and Richard, he hadn’t imagined for one second that she might be in Jersey City.
“Dad?”
“What.”
“Well, I know it’s weird, OK? The whole thing is very weird. But you’ve got a girlfriend, too, right? So, like, that’s it, right? Things are different now, and we should all just start dealing with it. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Walter said. “You’re right. We need to deal with it.”
As soon as he was off the phone, he pulled open a dresser drawer, took his wedding ring from the cuff-link box in which he’d left it, and flushed it down the toilet. With a sweep of his arm, he knocked all of Patty’s pictures from the top of her dresser—Joey and Jessica as innocents, team photos of girl basketball players in heartbreakingly seventies-style uniforms, her favorite and most flattering pictures of him—and crushed and ground the frames and glass with his feet until he lost interest and had to beat his head against the wall. Hearing that she’d gone back to Richard ought to have liberated him, ought to have freed him to enjoy Lalitha with the cleanest of consciences. But it didn’t feel like a liberation, it felt like a death. He could see now (as Lalitha herself had seen all along) that the last three weeks had merely been a kind of payback, a treat he was due in recompense for Patty’s betrayal. Despite his avowals that the marriage was over, he hadn’t believed it one tiny bit. He threw himself onto the bed and sobbed in a state to which all previous states of existence seemed infinitely preferable. The world was moving ahead, the world was full of winners, LBI and Kenny Bartles cashing in, Connie going back to school, Joey doing the right thing, Patty living with a rock star, Lalitha fighting her good fight, Richard going back to his music, Richard getting great press for being far more offensive than Walter, Richard charming Connie, Richard bringing in the White Stripes . . . while Walter was left behind with the dead and dying and forgotten, the endangered species of the world, the nonadaptive . . .
Around two in the morning, he staggered into the bathroom and found an old bottle of Patty’s trazodones eighteen months past their expiration date. He took three of them, unsure if they were still effective, but apparently they were: he was awakened at seven o’clock by Lalitha’s very determined shoving. He was still in yesterday’s clothes, the lights were all burning, the room had been trashed, his throat was raw from his presumably violent snoring, and his head ached for any number of good reasons.
“We need to be in a cab right now,” Lalitha said, pulling on his arm. “I thought you were ready.”
“Can’t go,” he said.
“Come on, we’re already late.”
He righted himself and tried to make his eyes stay open. “I should really take a shower.”
“There’s no time.”
He fell asleep in the cab and woke up still in the cab, on the parkway, in traffic stalled by an accident. Lalitha was on her phone with the airline. “We have to go through Cincinnati now,” she told him. “We missed our flight.”
“Why don’t we just bag it,” he said. “I’m tired of being Mr. Good.”
“We’ll skip the lunch and go straight to the factory.”
“What if I were Mr. Bad? Would you still like me?”
She gave him a worried frown. “Walter, did you take some kind of pill?”
“Seriously. Would you still like me?”
Her frown intensified, and she didn’t answer. He fell asleep in the gate area at National; on the plane to Cincinnati; in Cincinnati; on the plane to Charleston; and in the rental car that Lalitha piloted at high speeds to Whitmanville, where he awoke feeling better, suddenly hungry, to an overcast April sky and a biotically desolate countryscape of the sort that America had come to specialize in. Vinyl-sided megachurches, a Walmart, a Wendy’s, capacious left-turn lanes, white automotive fortresses. Nothing for a wild bird to like around here unless the bird was a starling or a crow. The body-armor plant (ARDEE ENTERPRISES, AN LBI FAMILY OF COMPANIES COMPANY) was in a large cinder-block structure whose freshly rolled asphalt parking lot was ragged at the edges, crumbling into weeds. The lot was filling up with large passenger vehicles, including a black Navigator from which Vin Haven and some suits were emerging just as Lalitha screeched the rental car to a halt.
“Sorry we missed the lunch,” she said to Vin.
“I think dinner’s going to be the better meal,” Vin said. “Got to hope so, after what we saw for lunch.”
Inside the plant were pleasant strong smells of paint, plastics, and new machinery. Walter noted the absence of windows, the reliance on electric lighting. Folding chairs and a podium had been set up against a backdrop of towering shrink-wrapped oblongs of raw material. A hundred or so West Virginians were milling about, among them Coyle Mathis, who was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and even baggier jeans that looked so new he might have bought them at Walmart on his way over. Two local TV crews had cameras trained on the podium and the banner that hung above it: JOBS + NATIONAL SECURITY = JOB SECURITY.
Vin Haven (“You can Nexis me all night without finding one direct quote from my forty-seven years in business”) sat down directly behind the cameras, while Walter took from Lalitha a copy of the speech that he’d written and she’d vetted, and joined the other suits—Jim Elder, senior vice president at LBI, and Roy Dennett, CEO of his eponymous subsidiary—in the chairs behind the podium. In the front row of the audience, with his arms crossed high on his chest, was Coyle Mathis. Walter hadn’t seen him since their ill-fated encounter in Mathis’s front yard (which was now a barren field of rubble). He was staring at Walter with a look that reminded Walter, again, of his father. The look of a man attempting to preempt, with the ferocity of his contempt, any possibility of his own embarrassment or of Walter’s pity for him. It made Walter sad for him. While Jim Elder, at the mike, commenced praising our brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Walter gave Mathis a meek smile, to show that he was sad for him, sad for both of them. But Mathis’s expression didn’t change, and he didn’t stop staring.
“I think we have a few remarks now from the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Jim Elder said, “which is responsible for bringi
ng all these wonderful, sustainable jobs to Whitmanville and the local economy. Please join me in welcoming Walter Berglund, executive director of the Trust. Walter?”
His sadness for Mathis had become a more general sadness, a world sadness, a life sadness. As he stood at the podium, he sought out Vin Haven and Lalitha, who were sitting together, and gave them each a small smile of regret and apology. Then he bent himself to the mike.
“Thank you,” he said. “Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It’s a long way from Forster Hollow, isn’t it?”
Aside from low-level systems hum, there was no sound but the echoing of his amplified voice. He glanced quickly at Mathis, whose expression remained fixed in contempt.
“So, yes, welcome,” he said. “Welcome to the middle class! That’s what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don’t like me. And I don’t like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn’t like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And now you’re middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it’s a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It’s the mainstay of economies all around the globe!”
He could see Lalitha whispering to Vin.
“And now that you’ve got these jobs at this body-armor plant,” he continued, “you’re going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they’re not turned on! But that’s OK, because that’s why we threw you out of your homes in the first place, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It’s a perfect world, isn’t it? It’s a perfect system, because as long as you’ve got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don’t have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there’s no more Indonesia!”
Coyle Mathis was the first to boo. He was quickly joined by many others. Peripherally, over his shoulder, Walter could see Elder and Dennett standing up.
“Just quickly, here,” he continued, “because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you’re going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you’ve joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don’t want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn’t that perfect?”
The audience had stood up and begun to shout back at him, telling him to shut up.
“That’s enough,” Jim Elder said, trying to pull him away from the mike.
“Just a couple more things!” Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. “I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn’t give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That’s part of the perfect middle-class world you’re joining! Now that you’re working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI’s broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!”
The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. “And MEANWHILE,” he shouted, “WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON’T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!”
Here he was slugged in the jaw by Coyle Mathis himself. He reeled sideways, his vision filling with magnesium-flare insects, his glasses lost, and decided that perhaps he’d said enough. He was now surrounded by Mathis and a dozen other men, and they began to inflict really serious pain. He fell to the floor, trying to escape through a forest of legs kicking him with their Chinese-made sneakers. He curled into a ball, temporarily deaf and blind, his mouth full of blood and at least one broken tooth, and absorbed more kicks. Then the kicks subsided and other hands were on him, including Lalitha’s. As sound returned, he could hear her raging, “Get away from him! Get away from him!” He gagged and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. She let her hair fall in the blood as she peered into his face. “Are you all right?”
He smiled as well as he could. “Starting to feel better.”
“Oh, my boss. My poor dear boss.”
“Definitely feeling better.”
It was the season of migration, of flight and song and sex. Down in the neotropics, where diversity was as great as anywhere on earth, a few hundred bird species grew restless and left behind the several thousand other species, many of them close taxonomic relatives, that were content to stay put and crowdedly coexist and reproduce at their tropical leisure. Among the hundreds of South American tanager species, exactly four took off for the United States, risking the disasters of travel for the bounty of things to eat and places to nest in temperate woods in summer. Cerulean warblers winged their way up along the coasts of Mexico and Texas and fanned into the hardwoods of Appalachia and the Ozarks. Ruby-throated hummingbirds fattened themselves on the flowers of Veracruz and flew eight hundred miles across the Gulf, burning up half their body weight, and landed in Galveston to catch their breath. Terns came up from one subarctic to the other, swifts took airborne naps and never landed, song-filled thrushes waited for a southern wind and then flew nonstop for twelve hours, traversing whole states in a night. High-rises and power lines and wind turbines and cellphone towers and road traffic mowed down millions of migrants, but millions more made it through, many of them returning to the very same tree they’d nested in the year before, the same ridgeline or wetland they’d been fledged on, and there, if they were male, began to sing. Each year, they arrived to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centers, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses. Migrants exhausted by their five-thousand-mile journey competed with earlier arrivals for the remaining scraps of territory; they searched in vain for a mate, they gave up on nesting and subsisted without breeding, they were killed for sport by free-roaming cats. But the United States was still a rich and relatively young country, and pockets full of bird life could still be found if you went looking.
Which Walter and Lalitha, at the end of April, in a van loaded with camping equipment, set out to do. They had a free month before their work with Free Space commenced in earnest, and their responsibilities to the Cerulean Mountain Trust had ended. As for their carbon footprint, in a gas-thirsty van, Walter took some comfort in having commuted on bicycle or on foot for the last twenty-five years, and in no longer owning any residence besides the little closed-up house at Nameless Lake. He felt he was owed one petroleum splurge after a lifetime of virtue, one nature-filled summer in payment for the summer he’d been deprived of as a teenager.
While he’d still been in the Whitman County hospital, having his dislocated jaw and split-open face and bruised ribs attended to, Lalitha had desperately spun his
outburst as a trazodone-induced psychotic break. “He was literally sleepwalking,” she pleaded to Vin Haven. “I don’t know how many trazodones he took, but it was more than one, and just a few hours earlier. He literally didn’t know what he was saying. It was my fault for letting him make the speech. You should fire me, not him.”
“Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying,” Vin replied, with surprisingly little anger. “It’s a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.”
Vin had organized a conference call with his trustees, who had rubber-stamped his proposal to terminate Walter immediately, and he’d instructed his lawyers to exercise his repurchase option on the Berglunds’ condominium portion of the mansion in Georgetown. Lalitha notified the applicants for Free Space internships that her funding had been cut off, that Richard Katz was withdrawing from the project (Walter, from his hospital bed, had finally prevailed on this), and that the very existence of Free Space was in doubt. Some of the applicants e-mailed back to cancel their applications; two of them said they still hoped to volunteer; the rest did not reply at all. Because Walter was facing eviction from the mansion and refused to speak to his wife, Lalitha called her for him. Patty arrived with a rented van a few days later, while Walter hid out at the nearest Starbucks, and packed up the belongings she didn’t want put in storage.
It was at the end of that very unpleasant day, after Patty had departed and Walter had returned from caffeinated exile, that Lalitha checked her BlackBerry and found eighty new messages from young people all over the country, inquiring whether it was too late to volunteer for Free Space. Their e-mail addresses had more piquant flavors than the [email protected] of the earlier applicants. They were freakinfreegan and iedtarget, they were pornfoetal and jainboy3 and jwlindhjr, @gmail and @cruzio. By the following morning, there were a hundred more messages, along with offers from garage bands in four cities—Seattle, Missoula, Buffalo, and Detroit—to help organize Free Space events in their communities.
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