After the Plague by T. C. Boyle Page B

learned that human life was expendable. Melanie had sat there in shocked silence—the silence of guilt, mortification and paranoia (what if someone should see her there in the crowd?)—while Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, the Stanford bioethicist, had informed them that humans, like pigs, chickens and guppies, were replaceable. In the doctor’s view, the infirm, the mentally impaired, criminals, premature infants and the like were non-persons, whose burden society could no longer be expected to support, especially in light of our breeding success. “We’re hardly an endangered species,” she said with a grim laugh. “Did you know, all of you good and earnest people sitting here tonight, that we’ve just reached the population threshold of six billion?” She was cocked back from the lectern in a combative pose, her penurious little silver-rimmed reading glasses flinging fragments of light out into the audience. “Do any of you really want more condominiums, more shantytowns and favelas, more cars on the freeway, more group homes for the physically handicapped right around the corner from you? On your street? Next door?” She leveled her flashing gaze on them. “Well, do you?”
    People shifted in their seats, a muted moist surge of sound that was like the timid lapping of waves on a distant shore. No one responded—this was a polite crowd, a liberal crowd dedicated to free expression, a university crowd, and besides, the question had been posed for effect only. They’d have their chance to draw blood during the Q&A.
    Sean sat at attention beside Melanie, his face shining and smug. He was midway through the Ph.D. program in literary theory, and the theoreticians had hardened his heart: Dr. Brinsley-Schneider was merely confirming what he already knew. Melanie took his hand, but it wasn’t a warm hand, a hand expressive of comfort and love—it was more like something dug frozen from the earth. She hadn’t yet told him what she’d learned at two thirty-three that afternoon, special knowledge, a secret as magical and expansive as a loaf of bread rising in a pan. Another sort of doctor had brought her the news, a doctor very different from the pinched and angry-looking middle-aged woman at the podium, a young dark-haired sylph of a woman, almost a girl, with a wide beatific face and congratulatory eyes, dressed all in white like a figure out of a dream.
    They walked to the car in silence, the mist off the ocean redrawing the silhouettes of the trees, the streetlights softly glowing. Sean wanted a burger—and maybe a beer—so they stopped off at a local bar and grill the students hadn’t discovered yet and she watched him eat and drink while the television over the bar replayed images of atrocities in the Balkans, the routine bombing of Iraq and the itinerary of the railroad killer. In between commercials for trucks that were apparently capable of scaling cliffs and fording rivers, they showed the killer’s face, a mug shot of a slightly built Latino with an interrupted mustache and two dead eyes buried like artifacts in his head. “You see that?” Sean said, nodding at the screen, the half-eaten burger clenched in one hand, the beer in the other. “That’s what Brinsley-Schneider and these people are talking about. You think this guy worries much about the sanctity of human life?”
    Can we afford compassion?
Melanie could hear the lecturer’s droning thin voice in the back of her head, and she saw the dour pale muffin of a face frozen in the spotlight when somebody in back shouted
Nazi!
“I don’t know why we have to go to these lectures, anyway,” she said. “Last year’s series was so much more—do I want to say ‘uplifting’ here? Remember the woman who’d written that book about beekeeping? And the old professor—what was his name?—who talked about Yeats and Maud