evidence, like luck is such a rascal and the strange old story will lurch forever on. “Doug-fir.”
“Maple. Whoa. This can’t be real.” They embrace like two old men already over the finish line. “Jesus. Man! Life is long, huh?”
Longer than anyone. The psychologist can’t stop shaking his head. He doesn’t want this. The corpse being pulled up out of the tumulus by brutal archaeologists is not him. But the run-in is funny, somehow. Chance, that comedian with the perfect timing.
“Is this . . . ? Are you here for . . . ?” Adam waves toward the teeming crowd saving mankind from itself. Pavlicek—Pavlicek, the name is. Pavlicek wrinkles up his eyebrows and scouts the square. Like he’s just seeing it, this moment.
“Aw, naw, man. Not me. I’m just a spectator, these days. Don’t get out much. Haven’t made a peep since . . . you know.”
Adam takes the man—still gawky, still adolescent—by the bony elbow. “Let’s walk.”
They stroll down Broadway, past Citibank, Ameritrade, Fidelity. The years they need to catch up on are done in a New York minute. Professor of psychology at NYU, with wife who publishes self-help books and five-year-old son who wants to be a banker when he grows up. Longtime BLM employee, between jobs and residences, here in town to see his friend. The end. But they keep walking, under the spire of Trinity Church, passing near the ghost of the buttonwood tree, that sycamore where businessmen once met to trade stock, now the site of free enterprise’s main engine room. And they keep talking, a slow circle around the past whose circumference Adam won’t be able to retrace even an hour later. Douglas keeps touching the brim of the baseball cap, like he’s tipping it to passersby.
Adam asks, “Are you . . . in touch with anyone?”
“In touch?”
“With the others.”
Douglas fiddles with the cap. “No. You?”
“I . . . no. Mulberry—no idea. But Watchman? This sounds crazy. It’s like he’s following me around.”
Douglas stops on the sidewalk in a sea of businessmen. “What does that mean?”
“I’m probably nuts. But I travel a lot for the job. Lectures and conferences, all over the country. And in at least three cities, I’ve seen street art that looks just like those drawings he used to make.”
“The tree people?”
“Yeah. You remember how weird . . . ?”
Douglas nods, fingering the brim. A group of tourists ring the sidewalk in front of them around a wild animal. It’s huge, muscular, charging, nostrils flared, with long, wicked horns ready to gore the throng ringing it and taking selfies. Seven thousand pounds of bronze guerrilla art, trucked in by its maker in the dead of night and left on the stoop of the Stock Exchange as a gift to the public. When the city tried to haul it away, people objected. The Trojan Bull.
A few short weeks ago, a ballerina riding the beast bareback in midpirouette became the stunning poster child of the latest Stop the Humans movement:
WHAT
IS OUR
ONE
DEMAND?
#OCCUPYWALLSTREET
BRING TENT
People take turns buddying up for a picture with the charging animal. Douglas doesn’t seem to get the irony. His eyes are everywhere except where the crowd is looking. Something fights out of him. “So.” He rubs his neck. “You have a pretty good life now?”
“Crazy lucky. Though I work long hours. The research . . . is a pleasure.”
“What exactly do you research?”
Adam has performed the sound bite thousands of times, for everyone from anthology editors to strangers on airplanes. But this man—he owes this man a little more. “I was working on the topic already when we met. When the five of us . . . The focus has changed, over the years. But it’s the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious?”
Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull’s horn. “And? What does?”
“Mostly other people.”
“You know . . .” Douglas looks up Broadway, to see what so enrages the bull. “I may have hit upon that idea independently.”
Adam laughs so loud the tourists turn to look. He remembers why he loved the man once. Why he trusted him with his life. “There’s a more interesting part of the question.”
“How some people manage to see . . . ?”
“Exactly.”
With a gesture, an Asian tourist asks the two men to step away from the statue for the length of a quick photo. Adam nudges Douglas and they walk some more, down into the teardrop of Bowling Green Park.
“I’ve thought a lot,” Douglas says. “About what happened.”