“Testosterone,” his father explains. He’s now afraid of the hulking boy, and Adam knows it. “Storms of hormones, and no port in sight.”
Though Adam wants to hurt the man, his father is not wrong. There are girls, but they baffle him. They pretend to be stupid, by way of protective coloration. Passive, still, and cryptic. They say the opposite of what they mean, to test if you can see through them. Which they want. Then resent when you do.
He organizes raids on the neighboring high school, intricate nighttime operations involving miles of toilet paper tossed up in the branches of lindens. The strips dangle for months like giant white flowers. He passes under them on his mountain bike, feeling like a genius guerrilla artist.
He and a friend map the school, the supermarket, the branch bank. They plan what kind of hardware they’d need to make a heist. The plans get elaborate. They price weapons, just for grins. It’s a game for Adam: logistics, planning, resource management. For his friend, it’s one step away from religion. Adam watches the precarious boy, fascinated. A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.
HE GROWS GOOD at figuring the absolute minimum work required to pass any class. No adult gets anything from him but what he’s required to give. The plummeting report cards baffle his mother. “What’s going on, Adam? You’re better than that!” But her voice is flat and defeated. Jean sees him going down. She scolds, jokes, and pleads. But then she heads to college, in Colorado. There’s no one left to make him answer for himself.
Leigh never comes back. Adam’s father’s search tapers off to nothing. His mother starts nursing quantities of codeine. Soon enough, she’s on a circuit of drugstores across many towns. She stops cooking and cleaning house. Adam’s lifestyle isn’t impacted. He adapts and evolves. Survival of those who survive.
A JOKE OFFER from a friend—Three bucks if you do my algebra—and he finds himself with easy pocket money. So easy, in fact, that he starts to advertise. Assignments completed in any subject except foreign languages, at any desired quality, as fast as you need them. It takes a while to find the right price point, but when he does, the clients fall in line. He experiments with volume discounts and pay-ahead plans. Soon he’s the proprietor of a successful small business. His parents are relieved to see him doing homework again, for hours each night. They love that he stops bugging them for cash. It’s like win-win-win. Morning in America, with the free market doing its thing, and Adam goes to bed each night thankful to have been born into an entrepreneurial culture.
He’s quick and conscientious. Every assignment is ready by deadline. Soon he has built the most reliable and respected cheating franchise at Harding High. The business makes him almost popular. He socks away most of the cash. There’s nothing he can spend it on that gives him more pleasure than looking at the balance accumulating in his passbook savings account and calculating dollars per duped educator.
Demanding work does requires sacrifice, however. He’s forced to learn all kinds of interesting things that shouldn’t interest him.
EARLY IN THE FALL of senior year, Adam’s in the public library cranking out a psychology paper for a classmate who understands the bipedal beast even less than he does. Cite at least two books. Whatever. He rises from his carrel and wanders to the proper spot in the library shelves. Hours of work leave him cross-eyed. In the low library light, the books look like town houses for pipe-cleaner people.
One spine jumps out at him. Its electric lime letters scream out against a black field: The Ape Inside Us, by Rubin M. Rabinowski. Adam pulls down the hefty volume and plops into a nearby armchair. The book falls open to an image of four cards:
Beneath, a caption reads:
Each of these cards has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Suppose someone tells you that if a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other. Which card or cards would you need to turn over to see if the person is right?
He perks up. Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence. He solves the puzzle fast, with total confidence. But when he checks his solution, it’s wrong. At first he thinks the printed answer is in error. Then he sees what should have been obvious. He tells himself he’s just wiped out from hours of working on other kids’ assignments. He wasn’t focusing. He would have gotten it, if he’d been paying attention.
He reads on. The book claims that only four percent of typical adults get the problem right.
What’s more, almost three quarters of people who miss the problem, when shown the simple answer, make excuses about why they failed.
He sits in the armchair, explaining to himself why he has just done what almost every other human being also does. Below the first row of cards, there’s another:
Now the caption says:
Each one of these cards stands for a person in a bar. One side shows their age and the other shows their drink. If the legal drinking age is 21, which card or cards do you need to turn over to see if everyone is legal?
The answer is so obvious Adam doesn’t even need to find it. He gets it right this time, along with three-quarters of typical adults. Then he reads the punch line. The two problems are the same. He laughs out loud, drawing looks from the gray-haired, late-night public library crowd. People are an idiot. There’s a big old OUT OF ORDER sign hanging from his species’ pride-and-joy organ.
Adam can’t stop reading. Again and again, the book shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they’re fast and fantastic at figuring out who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant. Whole new rooms open up in Adam’s brain, ready to be furnished. He looks up from the book to see a library closing down and throwing him out.
At home, he reads on into the night. He picks up again, through breakfast the next morning. He almost misses the bus. He fails to deliver the day’s homework to his clients. It’s the first blow to his good name since he set up the cheating business. He holds The Ape Inside Us under his desk during the first three periods, educating himself on the sly. He finishes before lunch, then starts it all over again.
The book is so elegant that Adam kicks himself for not having seen the truth long before. Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.
For days, the book carries him along in a happy stupor. Armed with the patterns the book reveals, he imagines himself running experiments on every girl in school, a dollop of nail polish on their shoe-heels to keep track of their comings and goings. The best part is Chapter 12, “Influence.” Had he read it as a freshman, he’d be school president-for-life. The mere idea that human behavior—his lifelong nemesis—possesses hidden but knowable patterns as beautiful as anything he once witnessed in insects makes his insides sing. He feels lighter and righter than he has since his sister disappeared.
. . .
WHEN THE TIME COMES to take the college entrance exams, he nails them. His analytical skills top out in the ninety-second percentile. In grade-point ranking, however, he barely manages to sneak into slot 212 in a graduating class of 269. No self-respecting college will even consider him.
His father waves him off. “Go to JC for two years. Wipe the slate clean and start again.”
But Adam doesn’t need to wipe the slate. He just needs to show it to someone who can read between the chalky lines. He sits down at the dining room table one Saturday morning before winter break and compo
ses a letter. It feels like entering observations into his boyhood field notebooks. Outside the window are what remain of the children’s trees. He remembers how he once believed in some magic link between the trees and the children they were planted for. How he made himself into a maple—familiar, frank, easy to identify, always ready to bleed sugar, flowering top-down in the first sunny days of spring. He loved that tree, its simplicity. Then people made him into something else. He takes his pen to the top of the page and writes:
Professor R. M. Rabinowski
Department of Psychology
Fortuna College, Fortuna, California
Dear Professor Rabinowski,
Your book changed my life.
He tells a full-fledged conversion narrative: wayward boy saved by a chance encounter with brilliance. He describes how The Ape Inside Us awakened something in him, although the awakening has come, perhaps, too late. He says how he failed to take school seriously until the book fell into his lap, and how he may now have to spend years clearing his record at community college until he gets the chance to study psychology at a serious institution. No matter, he writes. He is in the professor’s debt, and as Rabinowski himself says, on page 231: “Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.” Perhaps unlooked-for kindness along the way might yet shorten the path ahead.
Outside the window, his maple catches a breeze. Its branches scold him. He’d turn scarlet for shame, if he wasn’t desperate. He forges on, larding the letter with half a dozen techniques picked up from Chapter 12, “Influence.” His words of thanks contain four of the top six releasers for producing action patterns in someone else: reciprocity, scarcity, validation, and appeal to commitment. He hides the evidence of his begging under another trick gleaned from Chapter 12:
If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.
It stuns his parents but doesn’t entirely shock Adam when a return letter shows up at the house from the author of The Ape Inside Us. Professor Rabinowski writes that Fortuna College is a small, alternative school for unconventional students seeking an intense, questioning approach to education. The admission process places no great store on high school transcripts but looks for other evidence of special motivation. And while he makes no guarantees, Professor Rabinowski promises that Adam’s application will be given serious consideration. Adam need only write the strongest entrance essay that he can.
Clipped to the formal letter is an unsigned index card. In wild and spooky blue-inked scrawl, someone has printed, “Don’t ever blow smoke up my ass again.”
RAY BRINKMAN AND DOROTHY CAZALY
THEY’RE NOT HARD TO FIND: two people for whom trees mean almost nothing. Two people who, even in the spring of their lives, can’t tell an oak from a linden. Two people who have never given woods a second thought until an entire forest marches for miles across the stage of a tiny black-box theater in downtown St. Paul, 1974.
Ray Brinkman, junior intellectual property lawyer. Dorothy Cazaly, stenographer for a company that does work for his firm. He can’t stop watching her as she takes depositions. The silent, fluid beauty of her manual ballet boggles him. Appassionata Sonata, slewing out of her miming fingers.
She catches him gazing, and dares him, with a glance, to own up. He does. It’s easier than dying from acute distant admiration. She agrees to go out with him, if she can pick the venue. He signs off on the deal, never imagining the hidden clauses. She picks an audition for an amateur production of Macbeth.
Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.
For amateur production, read terrifying. The audition is like monster-hunting without a flashlight. Neither has been in a play since high school. But they screw their courage to the sticking-place, and both end up squeezing a blackly masochistic, white-knuckle fun out of the evening.
“Whoa,” he says, walking her from the hall. “What in the world was that?”
“I’ve always wanted to pretend I could act. I just needed an accomplice.”
“So what do we do for an encore?”
“You pick.”
“How about something a little less nerve-crushing, next time?”
“Ever gone cliff diving?”
HERE’S THE THING: they both get cast. Of course they get cast. They were cast already, before they tried out. That’s how myths work. Macduff, and Lady Macbeth.
Ray calls up Dorothy in a total panic. Like he’s been playing with his father’s shotgun and it just went off. “We don’t actually have to take the parts, right?”
“It’s community theater. I think they’re counting on you.”
She knows already the precise worst button she can press in him, right there in their first week together. Criminally responsible, this man. Pathologically accountable to the hopes and expectations of his kind. And the lady, reckless enough for ten of him. She pretty much tells him: no Macbeth, no more dates. They take the parts.
Dorothy is a natural. But Ray: even the casting director, the night of the first read-through, thinks she may have made a terrible mistake. Dorothy watches the man, awed. He’s the best worst actor she has ever seen. He just speaks his lines, with a lanky gall and astonishing naïveté, as if he’s putting forward the case for his own existence in front of the End of Time Debate Club.
She raids the public library for books on method acting and getting into character. He falls back on stoicism. “I’ll be lucky to memorize all the lines.”
After two weeks, he’s almost competent. After three, something more starts to happen.
“No fair,” she says. “Have you been practicing?”
He has been, in ways he just now discovers. He never realized it before, but the law itself is theater, long before you take anyone to court. Ray has one gift: to play himself with a fearsome intensity. This will make him, over the coming years, a highly successful litigator of copyright and patent. Now that simple gift turns his Macduff weirdly hypnotic. By standing still in deadpan earnestness, he seems to tap into the planetary will.
Dorothy’s main superpower, in place since girlhood, is being able to read every muscle around a person’s mouth and eyes and tell with perfect accuracy whether he’s lying. This does nothing for her stenography or her Lady Macbeth. But it does make her want to test the outer limits of this man’s innocence. Three nights a week of rehearsals for five weeks, and she’s convinced: Ray Brinkman would indeed leave his wife and kids alone and unprotected, out in a castle in the sticks, just to save his godforsaken country.
The staging is very seventies. Very Watergate. Admission is free, and the community gets its money’s worth. For three nights running, Lady Macbeth goes down in spectacular flames. For three nights running, Macduff and his men, kitted out as trees, help the forest migrate from Birnam Wood all the way to Dunsinane. Trees actually journey across the stage. Oak, hearts of oak, armies and navies of oak, post and lintel of the house of history. The men hold great branches, and while unwitting Macbeth declares his prophecy-ensured safety, his attackers dance so slowly across the boards they seem not to move at all. And each night, Ray has almost forever to think: Something is happening to me. Something heavy, huge, and slow, coming from far outside, that I do not understand.
He has no idea. The thing that comes for him is a genus more than six hundred species strong. Familiar, protean, setting up camp from the tropics all the way up through the temperate north: the generalist emblem of all trees. Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.
The oaks swear him in as temporary deputy in their fight against the human monster. Good Macduff hides behind their cut branches (Many living things were harmed in the making of this production), h
oping he’ll remember his next lines, praying he’ll defeat the usurper again tonight, and marveling at the strange, irregular, lobed shapes fleshing out his camouflage like the letters of an alphabet from outer space, each glyph shaped by something that looks for all the world like deliberation. He can’t read the text on his banner. It’s written by a thing with five hundred million root tips. It says, Oak and door come from the same ancient word.
After the closing night party, Ray and Dorothy end up in bed. Theater and Dorothy’s whim have held them in suspended thrall for that long. Then, a cliff dive for him, after all. It’s dark enough to hush the worst of their many inner sirens and alarms. But six inches from his candlelit face, she can still make out the smallest muscles around his eyes.
“How do you feel about your parents? Have you ever had racist thoughts? Did you ever shoplift?”
“Am I on trial? Why are you torturing me?”
“No reason.” Her whole face twitches like a Mexican jumping bean.
He rolls onto his back and looks up to the ceiling. “I’ve never been onstage like that before. It makes you feel like you’re talking to the gods.”
“Doesn’t it, just?”
And then: “Do you think we’re going somewhere?”
She scrambles up on her elbow to find his face. “We? You mean, like, humanity?”
“Sure. But you and me, first. Then everybody.”
“I don’t know. How the hell should I know?”
He hears her anger, and thinks he understands. His hand pats about on the sheets, feeling for hers. “I feel like this was supposed to happen.”