Freedom [112]
Katz laughed and shook his head. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”
“Listen, Richard,” Walter said. “The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing ‘God Bless America,’ stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet’s future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it’s beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslet is pregnant, hooray hooray. Some dimwit in Iowa just had octuplets, hooray hooray. The conversation about the idiocy of SUVs stops dead the minute people say they’re buying them to protect their precious babies.”
“A dead baby’s not a pretty thing,” Katz said. “I mean, presumably you guys aren’t advocating infanticide.”
“Of course not,” Walter said. “We just want to make having babies more of an embarrassment. Like smoking’s an embarrassment. Like being obese is an embarrassment. Like driving an Escalade would be an embarrassment if it weren’t for the kiddie argument. Like living in a four-thousand-square-foot house on a two-acre lot should be an embarrassment.”
“ ‘Do it if you have to,’ ” Lalitha said, “ ‘but don’t expect to be congratulated anymore.’ That’s the message we need to spread.”
Katz looked into her crackpot eyes. “You don’t want kids yourself.”
“No,” she said, holding his gaze.
“You’re, what, twenty-five?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You might feel differently in five years. The oven timer goes off around age thirty. At least that’s been my experience with women.”
“It won’t be mine,” she said and widened, for emphasis, her already very round eyes.
“Kids are beautiful,” Walter said. “Kids have always been the meaning of life. You fall in love, you reproduce, and then your kids grow up and fall in love and reproduce. That’s what life was always for. For pregnancy. For more life. But the problem now is that more life is still beautiful and meaningful on the individual level, but for the world as a whole it only means more death. And not nice death, either. We’re looking at losing half the world’s species in the next hundred years. We’re facing the biggest mass extinction since at least the Cretaceous-Tertiary. First we’ll get the utter wipeout of the world’s ecosystems, then mass starvation and/or disease and/or killings. What’s still ‘normal’ at the individual level is heinous and unprecedented at the global level.”
“It’s like the problem with Katz,” it sounded like Lalitha said.
“Moi?”
“Kitty cats,” she said. “C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It’s just one cat—how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It’s one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat.”
“Nobody wants to think about it,” Walter said. “Everybody just wants their normal life.”
“We want you to help us get people thinking about it,” Lalitha said. “About overpopulation. We don’t have the resources to do family planning and women’s education overseas. We’re a species-oriented conservation group. So what can we do for leverage? How do we get governments and NGOs to quintuple their investment in population control?”
Katz smiled at Walter. “Did you tell her we’ve already been through this? Did you tell her about the songs you used to try to get me to write?”
“No,” Walter said. “But do you remember what you used to say? You said that nobody cared about your songs because you weren’t famous.”
“We’ve been Googling you,” Lalitha said. “There’s a very impressive list of well-known musicians who say they admire you and the Traumatics.”
“The Traumatics are dead, honey. Walnut Surprise is also dead.”
“So here’s the proposal,” Walter said. “However much money you’re making building decks, we’ll pay you a good multiple of, for however long you want to work for us. We’re