His stunned students stare, helpless bystanders as the agents lead their professor away in cuffs. The agents nudge Appich out of the auditorium onto the sidewalk. The day is beautiful and the sky the color of a young man’s hopes. People cut across their path. The posse must pause for a second for a break in the foot traffic. The whole city is out on an autumn morning, making things happen.
A light breeze drives the stink of rancid butter up Adam’s nose. He has smelled that medicinal, fruity vomit many times before, but the source of it eludes him now. The navy field jackets lead him a few yards up the sidewalk toward a black Suburban. The men are brusque but civil, that odd mix of purpose, nerves, and tedium that accompanies the program of enforcement. They rush Adam into the open door. One agent cups his head as they fold him into the rear seat.
Adam sits in the secured enclosure, his wrists chained in his lap. In the front seat, an agent talks into a square of black glass, logging the successful capture. The words might as well be birdsong. Someone waves to him through the tinted street-side window. He turns to look. Just alongside the idling vehicle, up through a hole in the concrete, a tree flutters, its leaves like the yellow crayon in a child’s eight-pack. Trees have ruined his life. Trees are the reason these men have come to lock him up for whatever years he has left. The van doesn’t move. His captors go through the paperwork required for departure. The yellow leaves say, Look. Now. Here. You won’t be outside again for a while.
Adam looks and sees just this: a tree he has walked past three times a week for seven years. It’s the lone species of the only genus in the sole family in the single order of the solitary class remaining in a now-abandoned division that once covered the earth—a living fossil three hundred million years old that disappeared from the continent back in the Neogene and has returned to scratch out a living in the shadow, salt, and fumes of Lower Manhattan. A tree older than the conifers, with swimming sperm and cones that can put out a trillion and more grains of pollen a year. In ancient island temples on the other side of the Earth, thousand-year-olds, molten and blasted, close to enlightenment, swell to incredible girth, their elbows growing back down from giant branches to re-root into new trunks of their own. Adam could reach out and touch the scrawny trunk, if the windows weren’t closed. If his hands weren’t cuffed together. A tree like this grew on the street just outside the house of the man who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, and a small few of them survived that blast. The fruit flesh has a smell that curdles thought; the pulp kills even drug-resistant bacteria. The fan-shaped leaves with their radiating veins are said to cure the sickness of forgetting. Adam doesn’t need the cure. He remembers. He remembers. Ginkgo. The maidenhair tree.
Its leaves leap out sideways into the wind. The Suburban creeps away from the curb and noses into traffic. Adam twists around to look through the rear window. There, as he watches, the whole tree bares. It falls from one moment to the next, the most synchronized drop of leaves that nature ever engineered. A gust of air, some last fluttered objection, and all the veined fans let go at once, releasing a flock of golden telegrams down West Fourth Street.
HOW FAR can a leaf blow? Over the East River, to be sure. Across the shipyard where a Norwegian immigrant sanded down the massive curved oak beams of frigate hulls. Through Brooklyn, once hilly and forested, full of chestnuts. Upriver, where every thousand feet along the waterfront, on every high-water mark he can reach, the shipbuilder’s descendant has stenciled:
Above the submerged letters, stands of new buildings compete for something like the sun.
OFF TO THE WEST, across a distance that would take a forest tens of millennia to cross, an old man and woman journey into the world. Over the course of weeks, they’ve invented a game. Dorothy heads outside and collects twigs, nuts, and shed leaves. Then she brings the evidence back to Ray, and together, with the help of the branching book, they narrow down and name another species. Each time they add a stranger to their list, they stop for days to learn everything they can. There’s mulberry, maple, Douglas-fir, each one with its unique history, biography, chemistry, economics, and behavioral psychology. Each new tree is its own distinct epic, changing the story of what is possible.
Today, though, she comes back inside, a little baffled. “There’s something wrong, Ray.”
For Ray, deep into postmortem life, nothing will ever be wrong again. What? he asks her, without saying a thing.
Her answer is subdued, even mystified. “We must have made a mistake somewhere.”
They retrace the branches of the decision tree but end up out on the same limb. She shakes her head, refusing the evidence. “I just don’t get it.”
Now he must croak out loud, a single, hard syllable. Something like, Why?
It takes her a while to answer. Time has become something so very different for them both. “Well, for starters, we’re hundreds of miles out of the native range.”
His body jerks, but she knows the violent spasm is just a shrug. Trees in cities can grow far from anywhere they might call home. The two of them have learned as much, from weeks of reading.
“Worse than that: There’s no range left. There aren’t supposed to be more than a handful of mature American chestnut trees left anywhere.” This one is almost as tall as the house.
They read everything they can about America’s perfect, vanished tree. They learn about a holocaust that ravaged the landscape just before they were born. But nothing they discover can explain how a tree that shouldn’t exist is spreading a great globe of shade across their backyard.
“Maybe there are chestnuts up here that no one knows about.” A sound comes out of Ray that Dorothy knows must be a laugh. “Okay, then we have the ID wrong.” But there’s no other creature in all their growing tree library that it could be. They let the mystery rankle, and keep on reading.
She finds a book at the public library: The Secret Forest. She brings it home for read-aloud. She gets as far as the first paragraph before having to stop:
You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .
A page or two may take them a day. Everything they thought their backyard was is wrong, and it takes some time to grow new beliefs to replace the ones that fall. They sit together in silence and survey their acreage as if they have traveled to another planet. Every leaf out there connects, underground. Dorothy takes the news like a shocking revelation in a nineteenth-century novel of manners, where one character’s awful secret ripples through every life in the entire village.
They sit together in the evening, reading and looking, as the sun glints chartreuse off their chestnut’s scalloped leaves. Every baring twig seems to Dorothy like a trial creature, apart from but part of all the others. She sees in the chestnut’s branching the several speculative paths of a lived life, all the people she might have been, the ones she could or will yet be, in worlds spreading out just alongside this one. She watches the limbs move for a while, then looks back down to the page and reads on out loud. “ ‘It’s sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it’s a million.”
She starts in on the next startling sentence, when a growl from her husband interrupts her. She thinks he’s saying, Paper cup.
“Ray?”
He says the syllables again, and they sound the same. “Sorry, Ray. I’m not sure what that means.”
Paper cup. Seedling. On the windowsill.
The words come out excited, and they make her skin crawl. His crazed intensity, in the falling light, makes her think he’s having another cerebral accident. Her pulse spikes and she struggles to her feet. Then she understands. He’s entertaining her, turning Things as They Are into something better. Telling her a story, in return for the years of stories she has read to him.
Planted it. The chestnut. Our daughter.
“YOURS?” a voice as
ks.
Patricia Westerford clenches. A uniformed man behind the conveyor belt indicates her carry-on as it exits the scanner. She nods, almost nonchalant.
“Can we have a look?”
It’s not really a question, and he doesn’t wait for an answer. The bag opens; the hands root through. The pawing is like the bear who works Patricia’s blackberry patch at the Smokies cabin.
“What’s this?”
She slaps her forehead. Senile. “My collection kit.”
He examines the three-quarter-inch blade, the pruner that opens to the width of a pencil, the tiny saw shorter than her first pinkie joint. The country has been more than a decade without a serious air travel incident, paid for by a billion pocketknives, toothpaste tubes, bottles of shampoo . . .
“What do you collect?”
A hundred wrong answers, and not a single right. “Plants.”
“You’re a gardener?”
“Yes.” A time and place, even for perjury.
“And this?”
“That?” she echoes. Stupid, but it buys her three seconds. “That’s just vegetable broth.” Her heart pounds so hard it will kill her as cleanly as anything in the jar. The man has power over her, the total power of a panicked nation in pursuit of impossible safety. One glare too blatant and she’ll miss the flight.
“This is more than three ounces.”
She stuffs her shaking hands into her pockets and clamps her jaw. He’ll notice; that’s his job. He pushes the two items back toward her with one hand and her riffled bag with the other.
“You can go back into the terminal and mail these.”
“I’ll miss my flight.”
“Then I’ll have to confiscate them.” He drops the plastic jar and collection kit into an already full oil drum. “Have a safe journey.”
On the plane, she goes through her keynote one last time. “The Single Best Thing a Person Can Do for Tomorrow’s World.” Everything is written out. She hasn’t read a speech out loud for years. But she can’t trust herself to improvise this one.
She comes through the arrival chute at SFO. Drivers stand in a ring at the mouth of the passenger exit, holding up names on pieces of paper. Hers isn’t one. An organizer from the conference was supposed to meet her. Patricia waits for several minutes, but no one comes. That’s fine with her. Any reason not to go through with this. She sits in a chair against the wall in a corner of the meeting area. A board of glowing letters across the concourse reads Boston Boston Chicago Chicago Chicago Dallas Dallas . . . Human goings. Human doings. Ever faster, ever fuller, ever more mobile, ever more empowered.
A motion catches her eye. Even a newborn will turn to look toward a bird in preference to slower, closer things. Her eyes follow the erratic arc. A house sparrow is hopping about on the top of a signboard, fifteen feet away. It darts on short, purposeful flights around the meeting area. No one in the crowd pays any notice. It skims up into a hidden cranny near the ceiling, then swoops back down again. Soon two, then three, scouting out the trash cans. The first things since boarding that have made her glad.
There’s something on their legs, like tracking tags, but bigger. She retrieves the roll she stuffed into her purse for dinner, crumbles it onto the chair next to hers. She half expects a security guard to come arrest her. The birds want the prize badly. Each nervous lunge takes them a little nearer, for a little longer. At last gluttony overcomes caution, and one of the sparrows flits in for the steal. Patricia holds still; the sparrow hops closer, feeding. When the angle is right, she reads the ankle bracelet. Illegal alien. She laughs, and the startled bird bolts.
A feline woman bears down on her. “Dr. Westerford?” Patricia smiles and stands.
“Where have you been? Why haven’t you answered your phone?”
Patricia wants to say, My phone lives in Boulder, Colorado, plugged into the wall.
“I’ve been going around and around the arrivals loop. Where’s your luggage?” The entire project of Home Repair seems to be teetering.
“This is my luggage.”
The girl is dumbstruck. “But you’ll be here for three days!”
“These birds . . .” Patricia begins.
“Yeah. Somebody’s joke. The airport can’t figure out how to get rid of them.”
“Why would you want to?”
The driver isn’t built for philosophy. “We’re over this way,”
They crawl out of the city and down the Central Peninsula. The driver names the luminaries who’ll speak over the next few days. Patricia watches the scenery. On their right, the hills of second-growth redwood. On their left, Silicon Valley, the future’s factory. The driver loads Dr. Westerford with plastic folders and drops her at the Faculty Club. Patricia has all afternoon to wander the most extraordinary collection of campus trees in the country. She finds a marvelous blue oak, regal California planes, incense cedars, a gnarled anarchical pepper tree, dozens of the seven hundred species of eucalypts, kumquats in full fruit. Every student must be drunk on the air’s intoxicants without even knowing. It’s a Christmas of lignin. Old, lost friends. Trees she has never seen. Pines spinning out cones in perfect Fibonacci swirls. Backwater genera—Maytenus, Syzygium, Ziziphus. She combs them and all the bedding plants beneath for extracts to replace the ones the TSA confiscated.
A walkway takes her alongside the apse of a fake Romanesque church. She passes under a monumental three-trunked avocado, way too close to the wall, that probably began life on a secretary’s desk. Popping through a portal into a courtyard, she stops and touches a hand to her lips. Trees—mighty, improbable, outlandish trees that have come from some Golden Age pulp novel about the teeming jungles beneath the acid clouds of Venus—stand whispering to each other.
THE AGENTS put Adam Appich in a cell larger than the platform he once shared with two other people two hundred feet in the air. The state takes charge of him. He cooperates in all things and remembers almost nothing, even half an hour later. This morning he was a full professor of psychology at a great urban university. Now he’s held for ancient crimes involving several million dollars of property damage and the immolation of a woman.
His parents are blessedly dead. So is his sister Jean, his brother Charles, his one lifelong friend, and the mentor who opened his eyes to human blindness. He’s reached the age when dead is the new normal. He hasn’t spoken to his older brother since Emmett cheated Adam out of his inheritance. There’s no one to tell except his wife and his son.
Lois picks up, surprised to hear from him in midafternoon. She laughs when he tells her where he is. It takes a long silence to convince her. She comes to see him in the packed detention center during visiting hours the next morning. Her incomprehension has turned into action, and her face flushes with her first real cause in years. Through the bulletproof glass, she reads to him from a virgin four-inch notebook neatly labeled Adam, Legal. They’re almost artworks, all the things she has set in motion.
Her checklist is detailed and vigorous. The lines around her eyes square off against injustice. “I have some leads on lawyers. We need to request house detention. It’s pricey, but you’ll be home.”
“Lo,” he says, thick with years. “I can tell you what happened.”
Her one hand grazes the ballistic glass and her other draws a finger over her lips. “Shh. The ACLU guy said not to talk until you’re out.”
Her hope: so defiant, so her. He has made a living studying defiant hope. Defiant hope is what landed him here.
“I know you didn’t do any of this, Adam. You wouldn’t be capable.” But her eyes duck—the old mammalian tell, tens of millions of years in the making. She knows nothing, least of all about the man she has lived with for years, her lawfully wedded husband, her son’s father. A con man at the very least and, for all she knows, accessory to murder.
ACROSS TOWN in another holding facility, his betrayer slips off again tonight, away from the government, his employers turned captors, into his nightly search party for the woman w
ho turned Douglas Pavlicek into a radical. She has a different name now, he’s sure. She might be far away in another country, deep into a sequel life he can’t imagine. Forgiveness is more than he can ask her, more than he’ll ever give himself. He deserves much worse than what the Freddies have handed him—seven years in a medium-security prison, eligible for parole in two. But there’s something he needs to tell her. This is how it happened. This is how things went down. She’ll hear about what he did. She’ll know the worst, and she’ll despise him. Nothing he can ever say will change that. But she’ll wonder why, and the wonder will cause her pain. Pain he might change into something better.
His cell is a cinder-block cube coated in rubbery green paint, much like the fake cell he lived in for a week at the age of nineteen. The narrow confinement frees him to travel. He shuts his eyes and goes after her, as he does every night. The film is never more than dim and her features vague. He has forgotten even those things about her face that used to make him feel like he could suck in air and with a lazy sigh breathe out eternity. But tonight he can almost see her, not as she must look now, but as she was. This is how it happened, he says. He was betrayed—never mind by whom. Ambushed. And by the time the feds swooped in and took him, he was already lost.
His interrogators were kind. There was David, an older guy who looked like Douggie’s grandfather. And a thoughtful woman named Anne, who dressed in gray skirt-suits and took notes, trying to understand. They told him it was all over, that his handwritten memoir gave them all they needed to put him and all his friends away forever. Just a matter of clearing up a few details.