Where are we now, Neelay-ji?
It doesn’t work like that, Dad. All brand-new.
Yes. No. I understand. But these plants and animals. We’ve walked from Africa into Asia?
Follow me. I’ll show you something. The beggar leads them down a switchback into the thickening jungle. They enter a maze of twisty trails, all alike. Creatures dart through the undergrowth.
Neem trees, Neelay. Magic!
Wait. There’s more.
The jungle thickens and the trail thins. Shapes play in the fronds and creeping vines. Then the father sees it, hidden in the foliage of this sprawling simulation: a ruined temple, swallowed by a single fig.
Oh, my prince. You’ve really made something.
Not just me. Hundreds of people. Thousands, really. I don’t even know their names. You’re in here, too. The work you did. . . . The beggar turns. He waves at the roots that snake across the ancient stones, looking for cracks to slither into and sip from. He raises the tip of his gnarled pinkie. You see, Pita? All from out of a seed this big. . . .
Vishnu wants to ask: How do I make my eyes water? Instead, he says, Thank you, Neelay. I should go now.
Yes, Dad. I’ll see you soon. It’s a harmless enough lie. In this world, the beggar has just walked across half a continent. But in the other, he’s too frail and wasted to risk an airplane. And the blue god, who has just crossed a jagged mountain range in bare feet: in the world above, his body is so riddled with rogue programs and syntax errors he won’t make it to this world’s opening day.
His puppet body nods and his palms join together. Thank you for this walk, dear Neelay. We’ll be home soon.
FROM ENLIGHTENMENT to the dam burst in Ray Brinkman’s brain takes thirteen seconds.
The bedroom television blares the nightly news. Israeli forces are plowing up Palestinian olive groves. Beneath the quilt, Ray squeezes the remote, boosting the sound enough to drown out thoughts. Dorothy’s in the bathroom, prepping for bed. Her nightly ritual graduates from one noise to another: blow-dryer becoming electric toothbrush becoming water coursing into the ceramic basin. Each sound says night to him, the way wolves must have, once, or the calls of a loon. And like the calls of those animals, these sounds, too, will soon disappear.
She takes forever—and for what? After this night’s catastrophe . . . Which, of all these preparations, couldn’t she do to more purpose in the morning? She’ll be clean for sleep and ready for anything night might bring, though night can bring no worse nightmare than day already has.
Nothing makes sense to him. After this evening, it’s unthinkable that she’ll climb back into the bed of their last dozen years. But it’s even more unthinkable that she’ll sleep down the hall, that room she once, so many years ago, dreamed of converting into a nursery. He’ll destroy this bed. Chop the carved oak headboard up for firewood. The newscaster says, “Meanwhile, other trees in schoolyards all over Canada are being cut down to protect the lives of children after . . .”
Ray regards the screen but can’t make out what he’s seeing. That happens in seconds one through three. He thinks, with what is still coherent thought: I’ve been a man who happily confuses the agreed-on for the actual. A man who has never doubted that life has a meaningful future. Now that’s done.
These thoughts take less than another quarter second. His eyes shut a moment, and he’s auditioning. Their first date. The witches tell him to take no care for tomorrow. He’s beyond all harm until the forest gets up and walks for miles, until the woods climb up the side of a faraway hill. He’s safe, safe from now on, for who can impress the forest or bid the tree unfix his earthbound root? Our high-placed Macbeth shall live the lease of nature. But he was given another part. The man, not of woman born, who makes the woods move.
Ray’s eyelids close for half a second. On the insides of those living screens he watches the two of them sleep together, the night of their first venture into amateur theater. All our yesterdays, over and over. The baby Lady Macbeth, no more than twenty-four, fretful in the foyer of adulthood. His high-strung friend, alongside him in the dark, barraging him with an anxious job interview: How do you feel about your parents? Have you ever had racist thoughts? Did you ever shoplift? Even then, on night one, he saw how they would take care of each other into old age. The two of them, following a design laid out long in advance that promised to explain itself in the run of time. Forever. And forever. And forever.
The prophecy was a trick. He must pick himself up and live. But how? Why? The news cuts to a wild scene. Ray watches in a fog: people locked down, and police culling them. The stream of water in the bathroom stops. These are seconds six and seven.
Every belonging turns into theft. That’s what his wife told him, just an hour ago: You think this will all blow over and I’ll come to my senses? That I’ll turn back into your quirky little Dot?
He tried to say that he’s known for months. For a year and more. That he’s still here. Still her husband. Come and go. Be with whoever. Do anything. Just stay near.
Worse than theft. Murder. You’re killing me, Ray.
He tried to remind her: Something between them has yet to happen. A reason why they must stay together. He has seen it already, a premonition that has kept him going, all these months of holding still. Some purpose to their union that already always existed. They belong.
No one belongs to anyone, Ray. You need to set me free.
Something is happening in the bathroom, an everything that sounds like nothing. Two seconds of silence, and he’s terrified. Nothing makes sense. There’s nothing to take care of. He looks back at the television. People are taking it in the eyes, for nothing. For no use at all.
In seconds nine and ten, his brain turns into a circuit court. It fills with a thought that he first had months ago, reading one night, while his lawful wife was off getting her brains fucked out in would-be secrecy. A thought he has stolen from someone else’s copyrighted book, one that he must now pay for. Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning. Humankind is utterly wrong about the neighbors, and no one can see it. We must repay the world for every idea, every thing we have ever stolen.
The people on the screen begin to scream. Or maybe the sound comes from him, watching himself turn brown and fall. She’s in the doorway, shouting his name. His lips move, but they make no sound.
It’s like I had the word “book,” and then you put one in my hands.
He slides from the bed onto the pine floorboards. His eyes land flush up against the whirlpool grain. A thing in his brain breaks, and everything that was once as safe as houses collapses like an over-dug mine. Blood floods his cortex, and he owns nothing. Nothing at all, but this.
A MAN STANDS by her desk in a taupe serge suit when Mimi arrives at seven-thirty on Monday morning. She knows, at a glance, who the stranger is. “Miss Ma?”
Flattened cardboard boxes lean against her desk. He has been here for some time. His job depends on getting there first, to ensure there will be no problems. Her computer has already been unplugged, and all the cables wound up in neat spools on top of the CPU. The files are long gone, removed while she was having coffee and bagel a mile away.
“My name is Brendan Smith. I’m here to assist your transition from the company.”
She has known this would happen, for days now. She’s been all over the news, criminal trespass. While her fellow engineers might overlook that error—the species is plagued by countless design flaws, after all—she’s also guilty of fighting against progress, freedom, and wealth. The race’s birthright. That’s not something her profession will ever forgive.
She stares at her professional ejector until he looks away. “Garreth thinks I’m going to trash the place? Steal some international ceramic molding secrets?”
The man assembles a carton. “We have twenty minutes to fill these. Personal items only. I’ll inventory everything you want to take, and we’ll get it approved before you sign out.”
“Sign out? Sig
n out?” Rage comes up her throat, the rage that this private escort firm has been hired to nullify. She turns and heads toward the door. Taupe Boy stops her, just short of force.
“Once you leave the office, we will consider it sealed.”
She wavers and sits at her desk. Not her desk. Her brain feels maced. How dare they? How dare anyone? I’ll sue for everything they’re worth. But all the rights and privileges of fair practice are theirs. Humankind is a thug. The law is a goon. Her colleagues pass her door, slowing just enough to catch a glimpse of the drama before slinking away in embarrassment.
She puts her books into a box her minder has made for her. Then her notebooks.
“No notes. The notebooks are company property.”
She fights the urge to hurl the stapler. She wraps her pictures in the paper her minder gives her and boxes them. Carmen and her Kentucky Mountain saddle horse. Amelia and kids, in the swimming pool in Tucson. Her father, standing in a stream in Yellowstone. Her grandparents in Shanghai, in their Sunday finest, holding up the photo of American girls they would never meet.
Logic puzzles made of bent nails. Framed funny sayings: Reactions speak louder than words. Some see the glass as half empty, some as half full; an engineer sees a containment device twice as big as it needs to be.
“Are you finished?” her personal early retirement officer says.
A suitcase covered in pennants. A steamer trunk stenciled with a foreign name.
“Your keys.” She shakes her head, then hands over her corporate keys. He checks them off on a list that he makes her sign. “Please follow me.” He takes the boxes. She grabs the suitcase and steamer trunk. In the hallway, curious colleagues skitter away. He sets his boxes down and locks the door. The moment the lock clicks, she remembers.
“Shit. Open back up.”
“The office has been sealed.”
“Open it.”
He does. She reenters the room, goes to one wall, and gets up on a chair. She removes, foot by foot, the twelve-hundred-year-old scroll of arhats on the threshold of Enlightenment, rolls it up, and pockets it. Then she follows her escort to the front entrance, past the staff who greeted her warmly for years and who now attend to their pressing work. As she shuttles her accumulated professional life to the parking lot, the man posts himself at the firm’s door, like the angel at Eden’s east gate who kept the humans, poachers of one forbidden tree, from breaking back into the garden and eating the other fruit that would have solved everything.
THE ONLY ANIMALS that know they’re hosed: That, Douggie keeps saying—near midnight, over blaring headbanger anthems in a roadhouse full of off-duty militia and other armed patriots—that’s where all the trouble starts.
“I mean, how does knowing you’re going to die give you a leg up? Smart enough to see you’re a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that’s going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?”
His fellow philosopher seated next to him at the satinwood bar replies, “Could you shut the hell up for a second?”
“Now, a tree. Those guys know things on a scale and time frame we can’t even—”
A fist flings out and meets him in the cheekbone, so fast it’s like Douglas is frozen in place. He hits the fir floorboards headfirst and is out so fast he doesn’t even hear the man stand over him and deliver the eulogy. “I’m sorry. But you were warned.”
When he comes to, his pal Spinoza is long gone. He daubs at his head and face with tentative fingertips. Nothing’s missing, but there’s a mushiness that doesn’t feel quite right. Stars and lights, dark clouds and pain, though he has lived through worse. He lets the concerned waitress help him to his feet before shaking free. “People are not what they seem.” This time no one voices any opposition.
He sits in his vehicle in the roadhouse parking lot, working his unplanned plan. He has, to the best of his knowledge, no one to go to for aid and comfort except his partner in world salvation, the woman who has joined him to a cause bigger than mere doomed Pavlicek-ism. She alone knows how to take him and give him purpose in this life. It’s pushing a boundary, to drop in on Mimi at this hour. Though she has never expressly forbidden him to come over at night, she’s not going to be thrilled. Still, she’ll know what to do about that mess, his face.
She told him once, when they were chained together for tedious hours across a stretch of road that, it turned out, even the lumber companies weren’t all that interested in, about her great and youthful loves. Both sexes, no less. That disclosure, plus a feather, could have knocked him out. He’s down with whoever she might want to be. The world depends on so many different species, each a nutty experiment. He just wishes she’d let him into the inner sanctum sometime, trusted confidant, her manservant or something. Wishes she and whoever may be her life’s current answer might let him watch—watch over them, a sentry against the malevolent world.
He struggles to fit the key in the ignition. He’s probably not to be trusted with heavy machinery. But his cheek is loose and something’s oozing out the side of his eye. Nowhere else to turn, really. He noses out of the lot and back up the valley highway, toward town, and love.
He doesn’t see the truck pulled over on the shoulder outside the bar. Doesn’t see it edge onto the asphalt behind him. Sees nothing until two white eyes fill his rearview mirror and the beast smacks his rear bumper. He shudders forward, fishtailing. The truck looms up and rams him again. He can’t brake, can’t even think. The road dips. He gooses the pedal, but the truck stays with him. At the hill’s bottom, he skims over a railroad crossing, catching air.
A crossroad swims toward him. He power-skids into a sudden right, at twice the speed of a controlled turn. In slow-mo slalom, his rear swings clean around, 270 clockwise. By the time he comes to rest, he’s in the intersection, perpendicular, as the empty logging truck slams down the highway, the driver laying into its horn, a long blast goodbye.
Douglas idles in the intersection, freaking. The attack putties him worse than anything the police have done. Worse than when his plane went down. That was just God, at His usual roulette. This is a crazy man, with a plan.
He carries on down the crossroad the long way back to town. He can’t keep off the rearview mirror, where he expects the twin white beams to swim up again at any moment. But he makes it all the way to Mimi’s condo without further incident. The light is still on at her place. When she opens the door, it’s obvious she’s drunk. Behind her, the room is trashed. A scroll unrolls across the living room floor.
She wobbles and slurs, “What happened?”
He touches his face in surprise. Forgot all about that. Before he can answer, she pulls him inside. And that’s how the trees bring them home at last.
ADAM APPICH puts his right foot into an imaginary niche and steps up. Slides the rope’s slipknot, steps again with his left. Fights to forget how many vaporous steps he has already taken. Tells himself: I used to climb trees all the time. But Adam isn’t climbing a tree. He’s climbing the air, on a rope as thin as a pencil, dangling from a trunk so wide he can’t see both edges at once. The furrows in its foot-thick bark are deeper than his hand. Above him, a long brown road vanishes into cloud. The rope starts to spin.
A voice from on high says, “Wait. Don’t fight.”
“I can’t do this.”
“You can. You will, sir.”
His throat fills with reflux and dread. Foot by foot, he closes the impossible gap. Near the top, he dares to look up. Two arboreal creatures speak soft encouragements he neither hears nor believes. He reaches something solid, still breathing. Not well, but breath.
“See?” The woman’s radiant face makes him wonder if he didn’t die somewhere on the way up. The man—clotted skin and Old Testament beard—hands him a cup of water. Adam drinks. He’s a while believing he’ll be okay. The platform under him tips in the wind. The tree couple hover, offering him berries.
“I’m good.” Then, “I suppose that would have been more con
vincing if I’d said it five minutes ago.”
The woman called Maidenhair scampers up a limb to the makeshift pantry, looking for a tea that she claims will help his vertigo. She’s attached to nothing. Barefoot, twenty stories up. He buries his face in the needle-stuffed pillow.
When he’s able, Adam looks down. Patchwork slop spreads through the forest below. He has passed through the massacre up close, smuggled in by the messenger Loki. But this bird’s-eye view is worse. The longest, most resolute tree-sit in the area—manned by the ideal subjects for his study of misguided idealism—is the last large remnant spared by the harvest. Scattered stands dot the bald patches, like the tufts missed by a teenage shaver. Fresh stumps everywhere, slag and burnt slash, refuse sprinkled with sawdust, the occasional trunks left in ravines too steep to bother with. And a clump circling the great tree that these sitters call by name.
The man, Watchman, points out the landmarks. “All that loosened topsoil is washing down this face into the Eel. Killing fish all the way to the ocean. Hard to remember, but when we came, ten months ago, everything was green as far as you could see. So much for trying to slow things down.”
Adam is no clinician, and 250 interviews of activists along the Lost Coast have left him gun-shy about diagnoses. But Watchman is either deeply depressed or a born-again realist.
A flare-up far below, the hornet buzz of heavy machinery, and Watchman bends to look. “There.” Yellow brighter than a banana slug, crisscrossing a half a mile away in the dissolving forest.
“What do we have?” Maidenhair asks.
“Skyline yarder. A couple of grappler Cats. We could be sealed off by tomorrow.” He looks at Adam. “You may want to ask whatever you want to ask, then head back down tonight.”
“Or join us,” Maidenhair says. “We’ll put you up in the guest room.”
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