Whenever he’s not working, Henry’s reading. Sometimes, when Alice thinks he’s working, he’s next to the woodstove in the barn with one of these books about birds, or about climate, about the inevitable, horrifying devastation that still lies in front of all of them. He prefers the terror that arises from this reading to the amorphous sort of dread that he imagines Martin and Kate, his whole family, with their vaguely unexamined good intentions, their offhanded burning world jokes, must walk around with every day. For years, this knowledge made him angry: eleven-mile-long cracks in the ice shelf, carbon trapped inside of sheets of ice that, when released, will turn to methane, heatwaves so extreme that people will die out on the street; tens of millions of people displaced, Miami, Bangkok, Bangladesh, all gone; 17 percent less crop yield; unprecedented storms, unprecedented fires, unprecedented droughts; air that isn’t breathable; new and resurgent and more widespread plagues; a hundred times more species extinct than would have been extinct if not for human beings; a hundred thousand birds each year dying, just in New York City—running into buildings, flying into the sharp glint of high-rise windows, spiraling straight down to the ground; a 10 to 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflicts, three, four, more new Syrias a year. For years, he had compiled and acquired information and then enacted the fury that he felt about it in his work.