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 bringing 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!”