trivial. He runs his data through various analysis packages.
Professor Van Dijk has a look. “Nice work. Took you a while. Anything exciting happen during the fieldwork?”
Something has happened to his libido while he was away. Professor Van Dijk is as hot as ever. But she seems to Adam like another species.
“Does five days in jail count as exciting?”
She thinks he’s kidding. He lets her think so.
CERTAIN TENDENCIES of radical environmentalist temperament emerge from the data. Core values, a sense of identity. The scores of only four of the thirty personality factors measured by the NEO inventory turn out to predict, with remarkable accuracy, whether a person will believe: A forest deserves protection regardless of its value to humans. He wants to give himself the exam, but it would say nothing now.
Back at his apartment after ten hours in the computer lab, Adam turns on the TV. Oil wars and sectarian violence. It’s way too early to think about sleeping, though that’s all he wants to do. He’s still a score of stories up in the air, held aloft by a nonexistent tree, listening to the creak of that high house and the calls of birds he’d like to be able to name. He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.
He heads out to a favorite grad student hang, where he consumes five beers, ninety-six decibels of blast beat, and a hundred minutes of wall-sized sine-wave basketball in the company of twenty instant friends. Ejected again from the cocoon of fun, he regroups in the bar’s parking lot. He’s not so buzzed as to imagine he’s fit to drive, but there’s no other way home.
Waves of simulated mirth pump out of the building as a parade of muscle cars snarls down Cabrillo. A woman under a streetlight shouts at no one, “Fuck me for even trying to understand you.” Across the alley, people wait to be admitted into the back entrance of some late-night invitation-only event that Adam, juked by the sight of the mini-throng, suddenly needs to attend. Another human irrationality he knows all about but is too fried to remember by name. He walks half a block, propelled by a tremendous wave that feeds on itself, jetting out refuse behind it: bubbles, genocides, crusades, manias from the pyramids to pet rocks—the desperate delusions of culture from which, for one brief night, high up above the Earth, he once awakened.
At the corner, he leans on a streetlight. A fact struggles to escape him, one he has felt for a long time but has never been able to formulate. Almost every part of need is created by a reflex, phantasmal, and democratic committee whose job is to turn one season’s necessities into the next’s yard sales. He stumbles on into a park full of people dealing in excitement and night. The air stinks a little of Wet-Naps, weed, and sex. Hunger everywhere, and the only food is salt.
Something hard hits his head, falls to the ground, and rolls a few feet away. He crouches down in the dark and searches. The culprit lies in the grass, a mysterious, industrial-grade button incised on its flat round face with a perfect X. It seems designed to be opened with a large Phillips-head screwdriver and has the look of steampunk: ingenious, Victorian, finely machined. But it’s made of wood.
The thing is too weird for words. He studies it for a full minute, learning again how he knows nothing. Nothing outside his own kind. He looks up into the branches of a willowy eucalyptus, from which the mystery fell. The thick bole has started its species’ trademark striptease. Sheaves of brown, thin bark litter the base, leaving behind a trunk so white it’s obscene.
“What?” he asks the tree. “What? ” The tree feels no need to reply.
THE SEVEN MILES of Forest Service road are so glorious it scares him. Adam follows the cut, climbing along sentry conifers—spruce to hemlock to Douglas-fir, yew, red cedar, three kinds of true firs, all of which he sees as pine.
A year-long dissertation completion fellowship—a gift from the gods—and this is how he spends it. His pack weighs down on his hips. Above him in the blue, the sun acts like it’ll never hide again. But the crisp air and early shadows in the switchbacks hint at what’s coming. A