He scoops up his keys and jacket, and with no more thought than to show himself, he heads downstairs. He cuts through the lobby, past the mailboxes, and out the door, heading east on Waverly toward the giant tree. The power brick tucked under Appich’s baggy khaki cuffs goes nuts and starts to shriek. Two freight-movers turn to look, and a pensioner, shuffling behind his walker, stops in terror.
Adam ducks back inside his building, but the bracelet won’t quit. It wails like avant-garde music all the way up the elevator. He trots down the hallway on his floor. The night shift computer operator next door pops his head out to locate the commotion. Adam waves an apology before barricading himself in his apartment. There, he phones in the mistake to his keepers.
“You were instructed,” the tracking clerk tells him. “Do not try to cross your geo-fence.”
“I understand. I’m sorry.”
“Next time we’ll have to take action.”
“It was an accident. Human failing.” His field of expertise.
“Reasons don’t matter. We’ll send force next time.”
Adam returns to the window, to watch the giant painting dry. He’s still standing there when his wife returns from Connecticut. “What is it?” Lois asks.
“A message. From a friend.”
And for the first time, it hits her, the truth of what the newspapers have been saying. The pictures of the charred mountain lodge. The dead woman. “Member of Radical Eco-Terror Group Charged.”
DOROTHY SLIPS into her husband’s room early one evening to check on him. He has made no sound for hours. She comes through the doorway and, in the instant before he hears and turns toward her, she sees it again, as she has so often in these spare, short, accelerating days: that look of pure astonishment at a performance unfolding just outside the window.
“What is it, Ray?” She comes around to the bedside, but as always she can make out nothing but the winter yard. “Was there something?”
The twisted mouth moves into what she has learned to see as a smile. “Oh, yes!”
It strikes her that she envies him. His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.
She spades her arms under his wasted body and draws him toward one side of the mechanical bed. Then she walks around to the other side and gets in next to him. “Tell me.” But of course he can’t. He makes that chuckle in the back of his throat that could mean anything. She reaches for his hand and they hold still, as if they are already the carved figures on top of their own tomb.
They lie for a long time, staring out across their property where hunter-gatherers made their way for millennia. She sees plenty—all the various trees of their would-be arboretum, their buds at the ready. But she knows she isn’t catching a tenth of what he is.
“Tell me more about her.” Her heart pumps harder at the taboo question. All her life she has flirted with craziness, and still this new winter game of theirs feels worse than scary. Strangers are out tonight, wandering, knocking on their door. And she lets them in.
His arm tightens, and his face does change. “Moves fast. Will-fed.” It’s like he’s just written Remembrance of Things Past.
“What does she look like?” She has asked before, but needs the answer again.
“Fierce. Fine. You.”
It’s enough to get her back into the book, and the yard opens like two pages spread in front of her. Tonight, in the growing darkness, the story runs in reverse. A succession of girls, younger and younger, head out the back door and into the miniature, simulated world. Their daughter at twenty, on spring break from college, in a sleeveless tank top that reveals a horrible new baroque tattoo on her left shoulder, sneaking out to smoke a joint after her parents have fallen asleep. Their daughter at sixteen, swilling cheap grocery store wine with two girlfriends in the farthest dark corner of the property. Their daughter at twelve, in a funk, kicking a soccer ball against the garage for hours. Their daughter at ten, floating across the grass, catching lightning bugs in a jar. Their daughter at six, heading out barefoot on the first seventy-degree spring day with a seedling in her hands.
The image appears against the shadowy trees. It’s so vivid that Dorothy is sure she’s seen some model for it somewhere. This is how read-aloud goes now, the two of them holding still and watching. Who knows what the lifelong stranger in her house is ever thinking? She does, now. Something like this. Something exactly like this.
The paper cup has sat on the kitchen windowsill of her imagination for so long now that Dorothy can see the brown and cyan curlicues of stylized steam printed on it and read the word beneath the design: SOLO. A mass of eager roots has punched through the waxy paper bottom, in need of more world. Marvelous long serrated leaves—American chestnut—paw at the air on their first trip outside. Dorothy watches the girl and her father kneel at the edge of a freshly dug hole. The fretful child chops at the dirt with a trowel. She administers the sacrament of first water. She steps away from the planting, back underneath the arm of her father. And when the girl turns around and lifts her face, in this other life unfolding invisibly alongside the one that happened, Dorothy sees the face of her daughter, ready to take on all of life.
Two words up close to her ear explode the silence. “Do nothing.” The words are as clear as they need to be, telling Dorothy that her husband has been out there with her in that other place, or not far away. Much the same thought has just occurred to her. They got the thought independently, from the same startling sentence in the same startling book that they just read together:
The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.
“No more mowing,” Ray whispers, and she doesn’t even have to ask for explanation. What better inheritance could they leave such a willful, fierce, and fine daughter than an acre and a half of woods?
Side by side, in his mechanical bed, they lie and gaze out the window, where great snows pile up and melt away, the rains come, transient birds return, days grow long again, buds on every branch put forth flowers, and hundreds of seedlings push up wildly through the recidivist lawn.
“YOU CAN’T DO THIS. You have a child.”
Adam sits back on the love seat, toying with the black box on his ankle. Lois—his wife—sits across from him, palms on thighs, spine like a telephone pole. He sways, limp in the stale air. He can no longer explain himself. He has no answer. For two days, the two of them have followed that fact down to hell.
He stares out the window as the lights of the Financial District replace the day. Ten million points flicker in the falling dark, like the logic gates of a circuit cranking out solutions to a calculation generations in the making.
“A five-year-old. He needs a father.”
The child has been in Connecticut for only a day and a half, and already Adam can’t remember which of the boy’s earlobes has the nick in it. Or how the boy came to be five years old, when he was just born. Or how he, Adam, could be the father of anyone.
“He’ll grow up resenting you. You’ll be some stranger in federal prison that he goes to visit, until I stop making him.”
She doesn’t throw it in his face, although she should. He is, in fact, some stranger already. She just never knew. And the boy—the boy. Alien already, to Adam. For two weeks last year, Charlie wanted to be a firefighter, but soon realized that banker beat that in every measurable way. He likes nothing more than to line his toys up with a ruler, count them, and put them away in lockable containers. The only thing he has ever used nail polish for is to mark his little cars so neither parent can steal them.
Adam’s head swings back into the room, to the figure on the barstool across from him. His wife’s lips sour and her cheeks flush, like she�
��s choking. Since his arrest, she has begun to seem as vague to him as his own life did on the day he slipped back into Santa Cruz and began to simulate it. “You want me to make a deal.”
“Adam.” Her voice is a controlled skid. “You will never come out again.”
“You think I should condemn someone else. I’m just asking.”
“It’s justice. They’re felons. And one of them condemned you.”
He turns back to the window. House arrest. Below, the shimmer of NoHo, the flare of Little Italy, the country he’s now barred from. And farther away, beyond all neighborhoods, the Atlantic’s black cliff. The skyline is an experimental score for some euphoric music he can almost hear. Off to the right, out of sight, the twisted tower rises, replacing the gutted ones. Freedom.
“If it’s justice we’re after . . .”
A voice that should be familiar to him says, “What’s wrong with you? You’re going to put another person’s welfare before your own son?”
There it is: the ultimate commandment. Take care of your own. Protect your genes. Lay down your life for one child, two siblings, or eight first cousins. How many friends would that translate to? How many strangers who might still be out there, laying down their lives for other species? How many trees? He can’t begin to tell his wife the worst of it. Since his arrest—since beginning to think objectively again, after so many years of treating the question as an abstraction—he has begun to see that the dead woman was right: the world is full of welfares that must come even before your own kind.
“If I cut a deal, then my son . . . then Charlie grows up knowing what I did.”
“He’ll know you made a hard choice. That you righted a wrong.”
The laugh pops out of Adam. “Righted a wrong!” Lois bolts up. Fury chokes her words before she can spit them. As the door slams shut behind her, he remembers his wife, and what she’s capable of.
He falls into a half sleep imagining what the law will do to him. He turns, and fire shoots through his lower spine. The pain wakes him. A huge moon hangs low over the Hudson. Every steel-white pockmark in its face shines telescope-clear. The prospect of life in prison does wonders for his eyesight.
His bladder hurts. He stands and starts a reflex overland expedition across the apartment to the bathroom, when a wrong cloud falls over his view. He crosses to the window and puts his hand to it. Condensation rims his palm like cave art. Down in the canyon below, streaks of car lights clump and disperse. There, between the spotty traffic, a pack of gray wolves comes down Waverly from Washington Square, chasing a white-tailed deer.
He jerks forward, smacking his forehead against the plate glass. Obscenity shoots out of him, his first in years. He stumbles through the kitchen into the cramped living room, clipping his shoulder on the doorframe. The bump spins him, and, stabbing with his right hand to break his fall, he bounces face-first into the windowsill. The impact clamps his mouth shut on his lower lip and drops him to the floor. There he lies, stupid with agony.
His fingers test his mouth and come away sticky. His right incisor has bitten through his lower lip from both sides. He rises to his knees and looks out above the sill. The moon shines over the tip of a tree-covered island. Brick, steel, and right angles give way to moonlit, mounded green. A stream runs through a ravine that cuts toward West Houston. The towers of the Financial District are gone, changed into wooded hills. Above, the spill of the Milky Way, a torrent of stars.
It’s the mind-crushing pain of his cut lip. The stress of his arrest. He thinks: I’m not actually seeing this. I’m lying senseless from the blow on the living room floor. And yet it spreads outward below him, in all directions—a forest as dense, terrifying, and inescapable as childhood. Arboretum America.
His sight grows huge, magnifying the many colors and habits of the whole: hornbeam, oak, cherry, half a dozen kinds of maple. Honey locusts armored with thorns against extinct megafauna. Pignut hickories dropping meals for anything that moves. Waxy, flat white dogwood blooms float in the understory on invisibly thin twigs. Wilderness rushes down lower Broadway, the island as it was a thousand years back or a thousand years on.
A flash hooks his eye. Off toward a ridge of oak, a great horned owl sweeps its wings above its head and drops like a shot onto something moving in the leaf litter below. A black bear sow and two cubs track across a hillock where Bleeker Street was. Sea turtles lay their eggs by the full moon on the sandy banks of the East River.
Adam’s breath fogs the glass and the view grays over. Blood trickles down his chin. He touches his mouth and comes away with grit, stony between his fingertips. He glances down to inspect the bits of chipped tooth. When he looks up again, Mannahatta is gone, replaced by the lights of Lower Manhattan. He smacks the window with his palm. The metropolis on the other side fails to hiccup. His pulse pounds in his forearms and he starts to shake. The buildings like crossword puzzles, the red and white corpuscles of traffic: more hallucinatory than what just vanished.
He picks his way through the minefield of furniture and scattered journals to the foyer and out the door. Six steps down the hall, he remembers his anklet. He slumps against one wall with his eyes squeezed shut. When the vision dies at last, he turns back into the apartment and seals himself up in the only habitat allowed him, his lone biome for a long time to come.
MIMI MA SITS in the auditorium’s second row, transfixed by something the tree woman just said. Patricia Westerford: The five of them shared her discoveries over campfires, back when the Free Bioregion of Cascadia was still a place. Her words made them real, those alien agents doing things beyond the narrow consciousness of humans. The woman is older than Mimi imagined. Frightened and faltering, and there’s something wrong with her speech. But she has just delivered this fine, sane, but somehow taboo rule: What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.
What the forest makes of the mountain is better than the mountain. What people might make of the forest . . . The thought barely germinates when Dr. Westerford jolts Mimi back.
“I’ve asked myself the question you brought me here to answer.”
Mimi’s first thought is that she’s mistaken. A distinguished researcher and author—someone who has spent decades saving seeds from the world’s endangered trees. . . . It can’t be happening. She must be wrong.
“I’ve thought about it based on all the evidence available. I’ve tried not to let my feelings protect me from the facts.”
The whole soliloquy is a piece of theater, heading toward some last-minute reverse or reveal.
“I’ve tried not to let hope and vanity blind me. I’ve tried to see this matter from the standpoint of trees.”
Mimi looks down her aisle. People sit in disbelief, pinned in their seats with the full weight of shame.
“What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?”
Another woman once asked Mimi this. And the answer, so obvious, so reason-driven: burn down a luxury ski resort before it could be built.
The plant extracts hit the glass. Green spreads through the water, snaking like a time-lapse bud sped up a hundred-thousandfold. Mimi, forty feet from the podium, can’t move. Dr. Westerford lifts the glass like a priest raising a sacrament. Her speech thickens to a paste. “Many living things choose their own season. Maybe most of them.”
It’s happening. It’s real. But hundreds of the world’s smartest people hold still.
“You asked me here to talk about home repair. We’re the ones who need repairing. Trees remember what we’ve forgotten. Every speculation must make room for another. Dying is life, too.”
Dr. Westerford glances down, and Mimi is waiting for her. She locks on to the tree woman’s gaze and won’t let go. Long ago, in another life, she was an engineer and could make matter do so many things. Now she knows only this one skill: how to look at another being until it looks back.
Mimi pleads, her eyes burning. No. Don’t. Please.
The speaker frowns. E
verything else is hypocrisy.
You’re needed.
Needed for this. We are too many.
That’s not for you to decide.
A new city the size of Des Moines every day.
What about your work? Your seed vault?
It has run itself for years.
There’s so much more to do.
I’m an old woman. What better work than this is left?
People won’t understand. They’ll hate you. It’s too theatrical.
It will get a moment of attention, amid all the screaming.
It’s immature. Not worthy of you.
We need to remember how to die.
You’ll die horribly.
No. I know my plants. This one will be easier than most.
I can’t watch this again.
Watch. Again. It’s all there is.
The glance lasts no longer than it takes a leaf to eat a chunk of light. Mimi fights to hold the speaker’s gaze, but with a last act of will, the tree-woman breaks away. Patricia Westerford lifts her gaze back onto the cavernous room. Her smile insists that this isn’t defeat. It’s use by another name. A small thing, a way to buy a little more time, a few more resources. She glances back down at a horrified Mimi. The things we might see, the things we could still give!
THERE’S A BEECH in Ohio Patricia would like to see again. Of all the trees she’ll miss like breathing, a simple, smooth-boled beech with nothing special to it except a notch on its trunk four feet up from the ground. Maybe it has thrived. Maybe the sun and rain and air have been good to it. She thinks: Maybe we want to hurt trees so much because they live so much longer than we do.
Plant-Patty raises her glass. She scans her speech for the last line on the last page. To Tachigali versicolor. She looks up. Three hundred brilliant people watch her, awed. The sound track is silent except for muffled shouting by the lip of the stage. She glances over at the commotion. A man in a wheelchair rolls up to the right-hand stair. His hair and beard flow down around his shoulders. He’s as thin as the talking tree-person of the Yaqui, the one no one could understand. Alone of all the people in this paralyzed room, he pushes down against his chair, trying to stand. The green liquid splatters over the glass’s lip, into her hand. She looks again. The man in the chair waves wildly. His twig-arms fling outward. How can something so small matter so much to him?
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