fall asleep to songs of protest and wake to the free hot meal served by five-star chefs donating their efforts to the cause. Only, Adam isn’t sure what the cause is. The cause is a work in progress. Justice for the ninety-nine percent. The jailing of financial traitors and thieves. An eruption of fairness and decency on all continents. The overthrow of capitalism. A happiness not born of rape and greed.
The city prohibits all amplified sound, but the human megaphone is in full swing. One woman chants, and the people all around her pick up the words.
“Banks got bailed out.”
“BANKS GOT BAILED OUT!”
“We got sold out.”
“WE GOT SOLD OUT!”
“Occupy.”
“OCCUPY!”
“Whose streets?”
“WHOSE STREETS?”
“Our streets.”
“OUR STREETS!”
Still the resolutely young, keeping true to the world-saving dreams of their youth. But among the ethnic vests and backpacks are men older than Adam. In breakout sessions around the square, women in their sixties pass along the institutional memory of insurgence. People in leotards pedal stationary bikes to generate electricity for the occupation’s laptops. Barbers give away free haircuts, since the bankers seem unwilling to get theirs cropped. People in Guy Fawkes masks hand out leaflets. College kids stand in a ring and drum. Lawyers behind flimsy card tables donate legal advice. Someone has been hard at work defacing signs:
NO SKATEBOARDING, ROLLER BLADING, OR BICYCLING ALLOWED IN THE PARK
OTHERWISE, ALL GOOD, BRO
And what’s a circus without a band? A whole battalion of guitars—one with the inscription This Machine Kills Day-Traders—joins together in a chorus of high lonesome:
For the po-lice make it hard, wherever I may go,
’Cause I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
Just beyond the square’s far corner is the wound that won’t heal. The hole in the canopy has long since filled in, but it still oozes. A decade has passed since the buildings fell. The math astounds Adam. His own son is only five, but the attacks feel younger. A tree, a Callery pear that survived half burned and with roots snapped, has just returned in good health to Ground Zero.
He squeezes through a channel in the milling crowd, alongside the People’s Library. He can’t help grazing the shelves and bins. There’s Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, marked up with a million tiny marginal words. There’s a collection of Tagore. Lots of Thoreau, and even more copies of You vs. Wall Street. Free circulation, on the honor system. Smells like democracy, to him.
Six thousand books, and out of them all, one small volume floats up to the surface of its heap like a fossil coughed out of a peat bog. The Golden Guide to Insects. Bright yellow—the only real edition that classic ever had. In shock, Adam picks it up and opens to the title page, ready to see his own name gouged there in smudgy No. 2 all-caps balloons. But the name is someone else’s, inked in in Palmer Method cursive: Raymond B.
The pages stink of mildew and the purity of child science. Adam flips through, recalling everything. The field notebooks and home natural history museum. The pond scum under the cheap, child’s microscope. Above all, the daubs of fingernail polish on the abdomens of ants. Somehow, he has managed to spend his entire life repeating that experiment. He lifts his eyes from the miniature page—“Weevils and Caddisflies”—to watch this happy, furious, anarchic swarm. For a few seconds, he sees the system of ranks and duties, the waggle-dances, the trails of pheromone that feel, from inside the hive, like pure physics, the pull of gravity. He wants to paint them all with a daub of polish and climb up forty floors in the next-door high rise, for a better look. The look of a real field scientist. The look of a ten-year-old.
He sticks the Golden Guide into his pants pocket and ducks back into the crowd. Ten steps down, seated on the edge of a granite slab bench, a ghost swings its face toward him and startles. “Occupy,” someone shouts, into the human megaphone. And the word comes a hundred times louder out the other end: “OCCUPY!”
The ghost’s surprise turns into a grin. Adam knows the guy like it’s his brother, back from the dead. The man he sees is balding, in a ball cap, where the one he remembers had a luxurious ponytail. He can’t for the life of him say who the man is. Then he can, and he doesn’t want to. It’s too late for anything but to walk up and clasp the intruder by the forearm, laughing at the