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