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.