Freedom [255]
“To me,” Walter said, “the difference is that birds are only killing because they have to eat. They’re not doing it angrily, they’re not doing it wantonly. It’s not neurotic. To me that’s what makes nature peaceful. Things live or they don’t live, but it’s not all poisoned with resentment and neurosis and ideology. It’s a relief from my own neurotic anger.”
“But you don’t even seem angry anymore.”
“That’s because I’m with you every minute of the day, and I’m not so compromised, and I’m not having to deal with people. I suspect the anger will come back.”
“I don’t care for my sake if it does,” she said. “I respect your reasons for being angry. They’re part of why I love you. But it just makes me so happy to see you happy.”
“I keep thinking you can’t get any more perfect,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “And then you say something even more perfect.”
In truth, he was troubled by the irony of his situation. By finally venting his anger, first to Patty and then in Whitmanville, and thereby extricating himself from his marriage and from the Trust, he’d removed two major causes of the anger. For a while, in his blog, he’d tried to downplay and qualify his cancer-on-the-planet “heroism” and emphasize that the villain was the System, not the people of Forster Hollow. But his fans had so roundly and voluminously chided him for this (“grow some balls man, your speech totally rocked,” etc.) that he came to feel he owed them an honest airing of every venomous thought he’d entertained while driving around West Virginia, every hard-core antigrowth opinion he’d ever swallowed in the name of professionalism. He’d been storing up incisive arguments and damning data ever since he was in college; the least he could do now was share it with young people to whom it actually, miraculously, seemed to matter. The loony rage of his readership was worrisome, however, and discordant with his peaceable mood. Lalitha, for her part, had her hands full in sifting through hundreds of new intern applicants and phoning the ones who seemed most apt to be responsible and nonviolent; almost all the ones she deemed uncrazy were young women. Her commitment to fighting overpopulation was as practical and humanitarian as Walter’s was abstract and misanthropic, and it was a measure of his deepening love for her how much he envied her and wished he could be more like her.
On the day before the last destination of their pleasure trip—Kern County, California, home to dazzling numbers of breeding songbirds—they stopped to see Walter’s brother Brent in the town of Mojave, near the air base where he was stationed. Brent, who had never married, and whose personal and political hero was Senator John McCain, and whose emotional development seemed to have ended with his enlistment in the Air Force, could hardly have been more perfectly uninterested in Walter’s separation from Patty or his involvement with Lalitha, whom he addressed more than once as “Lisa.” He did pick up the tab for lunch, though, and he had news of their brother, Mitch. “I was thinking,” he said, “if Mom’s house is still empty, you might want to let Mitch use it for a while. He doesn’t have a phone or an address, I know he’s still drinking, and he’s about five years delinquent in his child support. You know, he and Stacy had another kid right before they split up.”
“How many does that make,” Walter said. “Six?”
“No, just five. Two with Brenda, one with Kelly, two with Stacy. I don’t think it helps to send money, because he only drinks it. But I was thinking he could use a place to stay.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Brent.”
“I’m just saying. I know your situation with him. Just, you know, if the house is empty anyway.”
Five was an appropriate-sized brood for a songbird, since birds were everywhere being persecuted and routed by humanity, but not for a human being, and the number made it harder for Walter