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“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 imagining some sort of summer music-and-politics festival, maybe in West Virginia, with a bunch of very cool headliners, to raise awareness of population issues. All focused entirely on young people.”

“We’re ready to advertise summer internships to college students all over the country,” Lalitha said. “Also in Canada and Latin America. We can fund twenty or thirty internships with Walter’s discretionary fund. But first we need to make the internships look like something very cool to do. Like the thing for the very cool kids to do this summer.”

“Vin’s very hands-off in terms of my discretionary fund,” Walter said. “As long as we put a cerulean warbler on our literature, I can do whatever I want.”

“But it has to happen fast,” Lalitha said. “Kids are already making up their minds about this summer. We need to reach them in the next few weeks.”

“We’d need your name and your image at a minimum,” Walter said. “If you could do some video for us, better yet. If you could write us some songs, even better. If you could make some calls to Jeff Tweedy, and Ben Gibbard, and Jack White, and find us some people to work on the festival pro bono, or sponsor it commercially, best of all.”

“Also great if we can tell potential interns they’ll be getting to work with you directly,” Lalitha said.

“Even just the promise of some minimal contact with them would be fantastic,” Walter said.

“If we could put on the poster, ‘Join rock legend Richard Katz in Washington this summer’ or something like that,” Lalitha said.

“We need to make it cool, and we need to make it viral,” Walter said.