“I’ve thought a lot,” Douglas says. “About what happened.”
“Me, too.” Right away Adam wants to retract the lie.
“What were we hoping to accomplish? What did we think we were doing?”
They stand under the circle of camouflaged Platanus, that most resigned of eastern trees, on the spot where the island was sold, by people who listened to trees, to people who cleared them. They gaze together at the geyser fountain. Adam says, “We set buildings on fire.”
“We did.”
“We believed that humans were committing mass murder.”
“Yes.”
“No one else could see what was happening. Nothing was going to stop unless people like us forced the issue.”
The beak of Douglas’s ball cap swings back and forth. “We weren’t wrong, you know. Look around! Anyone paying attention knows the party’s over. Gaia’s taking her revenge.”
“Gaia?” Adam smiles, but pained.
“Life. The planet. We’re already paying. But even now a guy is still a lunatic for saying as much.”
Adam assesses the man. “So you’d do it all again? What we did?” The questions of rogue philosophers play in Adam’s head. The taboo ones. How many trees equal one person? Can an impending catastrophe justify small, pointed violence?
“Do it again? I don’t know. I don’t know what that means.”
“Burn buildings.”
“I ask myself at nights whether anything we did—anything we could have done—would ever make up for that woman’s death.”
And then it’s like the day is night, the city a spruce-pine woods, the park all on fire around them, and that fine, strange, pale woman is lying on the ground, begging for water.
“We accomplished nothing,” Adam says. “Not one thing.” They turn to leave the park, a place too crowded for this conversation. At the gate in the low iron fence, only then do they realize: there’s no place safer.
“She would have done it all again.”
Douglas points at Adam’s chest. “You loved her.”
“We all loved her. Yes.”
“You were in love with her. Same as Watchman. Same as Mimi.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“You would have bombed the Pentagon for her.”
Adam smiles, soft and pale. “She did have a power.”
“She said the trees were talking to her. That she could hear them.”
A shrug. A furtive watch-check. He needs to get back uptown to prep a lecture. Too much history sickens Adam. So he was younger once, angrier. Another species. Just a failed experiment. The only thing that needs negotiation is Now.
Douglas won’t leave him be. “Do you think anything was really talking to her? Or was she just . . . ?”
The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years. And whatever enough people say that all these vanishing trees are saying is what, in fact, they say. But the question interests Adam. What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.
Adam casts a look behind them, down the concrete canyon of Beaver Street. Beavers: the creatures whose pelts built this city. The original Manhattan Exchange. He hears himself answer. “Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them.” The only question is whether they’ll talk again, before the end.
“That night?” Douglas lifts his face to the skyscraper wall. “When we sent you for help? Why did you come back?”
Anger surges through Adam, as if the two of them will fight again. “It was too late. Finding help would have taken hours. She was dead already. If I’d gone to the police . . . she’d still be dead. And we’d all be locked up.”
“You didn’t know that, man. You don’t know that now.” Rage, the radical tip of a grief that time will never root out.
They pass a small European redbud, twenty feet tall. Its spine arches and its limbs curve like those of the ballerina bull dancer. The profusion of purple-pink, edible buds growing right out of the trunk and twigs is still a winter away. Now seedpods dangle from the branches like so many hanged men. They say Judas hanged himself from a Cercis. It’s a new enough myth, as tree myths go. Judas trees grow in corners hidden throughout Lower Manhattan. This one will be gone before it blooms twice more.
The men stop at Battery Place, where their paths split. Down the street and across the water, Liberty. There’s a certain squirrel, a ghost animal, the subject of endless eulogies, who runs forever through the canopies of a giant ghost forest from here to the Mississippi, without ever touching paws to the ground. It’s all island-hopping now, through scattered fragments of second growth subtended by highways littered with roadkill. But the men stop to look, as if the endless forest still starts there, in front of them.
They turn to one another and hug goodbye, like bears testing their strength against each other. Like they’ll never see each other again in this life. Like even then, it would be too soon.
THE TREES REFUSE to say a thing. Neelay sits in Stanford’s inner quad—the intergalactic botanical garden—waiting for an explanation. The lifelong calling has gone wrong. He’s lost the trail they set him on. What now?
But the trees snub him. The bulging water sack of the bottle tree, the spiked armor of the silk floss: not even a rustle of leaves. It’s as if his soul mate—in the only galaxy that ever offered him one—has plunged from bliss to panic at the first ripple and cut him dead. He’s ruining tourists’ photographs. No one wants a shot of a nice, fake Spanish Romanesque cloister with a crippled freak in the foreground. He spins to go, as furious as any jilted lover. But go where? Even returning to his apartment above the Sempervirens headquarters is a humiliation.
He’d call his mother, but it’s the middle of the night in Banswara, where she now spends most of her year, getting ready to die. She knows now, ten years too late, that there will never be any Rupal for him, that science will never reactivate his legs, and that the best way to love her son is to release him to his isolation. She comes back now only whenever he’s hospitalized, when the doctors must debride his epic bedsores or cut away parts of his necrotic feet and ass. Boarding a plane has become an exercise in pain. He won’t tell her, the next time he goes in.
He rolls down into the Oval toward the grandiose line of palms. The sky is too clear, the day too hot, and all the trunks have turned to synchronized sundials. He finds a shady spot—an increasingly popular sport, worldwide. Then he sits still, trying to be only where he is, here, home. No good. In a minute, he’s agitated, checking his phone for messages not yet posted to him. Where can people live? His elves must be right: only in symbols, in simulation.
As he puts the device back in its wheelchair pouch, it buzzes like a fistful of cicadas. It’s a message from his personal AI. The thing is alive, cagey, teasing him with the clickbait game of humanity. Since childhood, even before his fall, he has dreamed of such a robot pet. This one is better than anything the prophets of his childhood sci-fi predicted—faster, sleeker, and suppler. It goes out at all hours and scours humankind’s entire activity, then reports back to him. It’s obedient and untiring, and like the only creatures that he trusts these days, it has no legs. Legs, Neelay suspects, may be where evolution went berserk.
He and his people made the pet, and now it’s busy making him. He told it to watch for any news of his new obsession: tree communication, forest intelligence, fungal networks, Patricia Westerford, The Secret Forest. . . . The book is shot through with uncanny echoes of what he heard whispered, decades ago, by alien life-forms that now won’t give him the time of day. It has cost him his role as the creative head of his company. It wants more from him, more payment, more salvage. But what?
He opens the messa
ge from the bot. It contains a link and a title: Words of Air and Light. The recommendation strength is as high as his pet gives. Even in his spot of shade, Neelay can’t read the screen. He rolls to the van, parked not far away. Back inside his emptied-out interstellar ship, he clicks on the link and watches in confusion. Shadows and sun burst forth. A hundred years of chestnut erupt in twenty seconds, like a scene in a hand-cranked kinetoscope. It’s over before Neely makes it out. He starts the clip again. The tree fountains up once more into a crown. The upward-wavering twigs reach for the light, for things hidden in plain sight. Branches fork and thicken in the air. At this speed, he sees the tree’s central aim, the math behind the phloem and xylem, the intermeshed and seething geometries, and that thin layer of living cambium swelling outward.
Code—wildly branching code pruned back by failure—builds up this great spiraling column from out of instructions that Vishnu managed to cram into something smaller than a boy’s fingernail. When the tree is done with its century of unfolding, old chestnut words of extinct Transcendentalism scroll upward, line by line, on a sea of black:
The gardener sees
only the gardener’s garden.
The eyes were not made
for such grovelling uses as they
are now put to and worn out by,
but to behold beauty now invisible.
MAY
WE
NOT
SEE
GOD?
And when Neelay looks up from the tiny screen, that’s exactly what he sees.
JUST ACROSS CAMPUS from his van, beyond the eucalyptus groves, invitations go out. They disperse in clumps, like airborne pollen. One lands on Patricia Westerford, in a cabin in an institute in the Great Smoky Mountains. She’s searching out prime strains of the dozens of hardwoods that may fall in a few years to the ash borer and long-horned beetles. These days such invitations reach her by the dozens, and she mostly ignores them. But this one—Home Repair: Countering a Warming World—this one sounds so painful that she reads the letter twice. Someone wants to fly her two thousand five hundred and ninety-six miles and back again, for a conference about the ruined atmosphere. She can’t wrap her head around that title: Home Repair. As if we just need to fix the gutters, put in a rooftop swamp cooler, and get back to good times.
She sits on her Shaker chair at the table, listening to the crickets. Long ago her father taught her an old formula, one that converts cricket chirps per minute into degrees Fahrenheit. For sixty years, the nighttime orchestra all around her has been playing one of those folk dances that keep speeding up until all the players tumble in a heap. We would be thrilled if you could talk about any role trees might play in helping mankind to a sustainable future. The conference organizers want a keynote from a woman who once wrote a book on the power of woody plants to restore the failing planet. But she wrote that book decades ago, when she was still young enough for courage and the planet still well enough to rally.
These people need dreams of technological breakthrough. Some new way to pulp poplar into paper while burning slightly fewer hydrocarbons. Some genetically altered cash crop that will build better houses and lift the world’s poor from misery. The home repair they want is just a slightly less wasteful demolition. She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.
California means three days of lost work. Jesus spent less time cleaning out hell. Her agoraphobia has grown over the years, and in those crowded auditoriums she can never hear anyone. But the guest list is incredible: a roll call of wizards and engineers, each of them only one large grant away from dimming the sun with particulates, cloning endangered species, or tapping into unlimited cheap energy. There will be artists and writers to address the messy question of the human spirit. Venture capitalists looking for the next green bonanza. She’ll never have such an audience again.
She rereads the request, picturing a place where “sustainable future” means something more than “dry drunk.” She reads through to the letter’s stirring closing. As Toynbee once wrote, “Man achieves civilization . . . as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.” The invitation feels like a test of the honesty she has tried to cultivate since her days as a hobo. Someone is asking her what people need to do to save this dying place. Could she possibly tell a gathering of such prominent and powerful people what she thinks is true?
Too late tonight for a wise reply. There’s still time, though, for a wander down to the rapids of the Middle Prong. Outside her cabin door, dense, slow-growing hawthorns wave spooky prophecies under the near-full moon. Their scarlet fruits cling to the twigs, and many will last the winter. Crataegus, the heart healer. People will be discovering medicines there for as long as they go on looking.
Her path across the clearing frightens a wallow-rooting possum who wrote off humankind two hours ago. She waves the flashlight. The forest floor is piled high with orange and ocher duff smelling of sweet, moldy cake batter. Two barred owls, lugubrious and beautiful, call across a great distance. Up the ridge, acorns and hickories hit the ground. Bears everywhere sleep off the day’s feast, two per square mile.
She ducks through drooping rhododendron tunnels, along black cherries that remember old road cuts, past sourwoods and aromatic sassafras. Magnolia and striped maple fill in for the decimated chestnuts. The hemlocks are dying, hit by adelgids and helped along by acid rain. High above, on the Appalachian spine, the Fraser firs are all dead. All around her, the forest reels from the hottest, driest year since the beginning of record-keeping. Yet another freak, once-in-a-century event, almost annual these days. Fires are popping up all over the park. Code Red every third day.
But the priestly tulip trees still boost her immune system, while beeches lift her mood and focus her thoughts. Under these giants, she’s smarter, clearer. She sees an alligator-barked persimmon. Sweet-gum balls, like tiny, medieval morning stars, crunch under her feet. She tears just the tip of a fallen gum leaf and sniffs—a child’s whiff of heaven. There’s a venerable red oak not far from the trail, twelve feet around if it’s a foot. It might soothe even the awful restlessness the invitation has inflicted on her. Sustainable future. They don’t want a tree woman to keynote their gathering. They want a master illusionist. A sci-fi novelist. The Lorax. Maybe a colorful faith healer, with epiphytes for hair.
Down in the riverbed, at her favorite scramble, she removes her shoes. But she doesn’t need to. A stream that should be raging is just a boulder bed. She turns a few stones in search of salamanders. Thirty possible species, countless millions of them in the park, inhabiting every spot of dampness, and she can’t find one. She holds her bare feet in the imaginary current. What do you think, Den? Go talk Home Repair?
The memory of a hand rests on her shoulder. If you have to ask me, babe, you can’t afford the answer.
FROM STREAMSIDE on Tennessee’s Little River to New York City is a mere seven hundred miles. Pollen from an eastern white pine could travel it, given a good stiff breeze. At the far end of that route, Adam Appich looks out with puzzled smile across the bowl of 260 first-year psych students listening to his lecture on cognitive blindness to see an armed trio at the back of the auditorium waiting for him to finish. His shock lasts no longer than a few spiked heartbeats. A glance tells him what these men want and why they’re here. Of course, the Glock 23s and navy-blue raid jackets stenciled with the yellow letters FBI help nail down the ID. For decades now, at random moments in every season, from sober noon down into drugged sleep, he has dreaded these men and their arrival. He has waited for them for so long he forgot they were coming. Now, on this pretty fall day, late in this late year, his captors are here at last, lookin
g much as he always thought they would: solid, grim, and pragmatic, with wires in their ears. In another smiling blink, Appich’s dread gives way to its kissing cousin, the relief of completed predictions.
He thinks: They’ll come down the aisle and take me at the podium. But the men, five of them, pool in the back behind the last row of seats, waiting for Adam to wrap up the lecture.
Today’s topic has been a simple one. When a person makes a choice, so much happens by night, underground, or just out of sight that the chooser is the last to know. Pages of notes flow over the podium and Adam’s hands brush at nothing. After two decades with his shoulders up near his ears, bracing for this hammer fall, his long flinch is over at last. He has worked hard to disappear into achievement. Twice he has won the university’s teaching award, and only last month he was nominated for the APA’s Beauchamp Prize for research that empirically advances a materialistic understanding of the human mind. He has performed himself in public so long he’s been fooled by his own vita. Now the choices of his youth come back to blow that fantasy away.
Everything comes clear. The chance meeting with the old accomplice. All that tugging on the brim of a ball cap. The extracted confession. We set buildings on fire. We did. They would have given their lives for each other, the five of them. One of them did.
A glance down at his handwritten notes. On cue, words boxed in red swim up from the clairvoyant past to the forgetful future. Adam has delivered the line before, for several years running in this survey course, but their full sense has waited for now. He pushes his rimless glasses back up the slope of his sweating nose and shakes his head at the packed hall. What a lesson these students will leave with today.
“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”
A few in the hall chuckle; they can’t yet see the men standing behind them, at the back of the hall. Some of the students squirrel away the phrase for an exam that will come now in a form altogether different than they expect. Most keep dead still, waiting for education to pass over. Appich flips through his final slides. In fifteen seconds, he sums up the attentional studies and delivers his takeaways. He thinks: I haven’t been bad at this. Then he dismisses the room, strides up the raked aisle through the sea of students, and shakes the hands of the men who have come to arrest him. He wants to say, What took you so long?