“What were we hoping to accomplish? What did we think we were doing?”
They stand under the circle of camouflaged Platanus, that most resigned of eastern trees, on the spot where the island was sold, by people who listened to trees, to people who cleared them. They gaze together at the geyser fountain. Adam says, “We set buildings on fire.”
“We did.”
“We believed that humans were committing mass murder.”
“Yes.”
“No one else could see what was happening. Nothing was going to stop unless people like us forced the issue.”
The beak of Douglas’s ball cap swings back and forth. “We weren’t wrong, you know. Look around! Anyone paying attention knows the party’s over. Gaia’s taking her revenge.”
“Gaia?” Adam smiles, but pained.
“Life. The planet. We’re already paying. But even now a guy is still a lunatic for saying as much.”
Adam assesses the man. “So you’d do it all again? What we did?” The questions of rogue philosophers play in Adam’s head. The taboo ones. How many trees equal one person? Can an impending catastrophe justify small, pointed violence?
“Do it again? I don’t know. I don’t know what that means.”
“Burn buildings.”
“I ask myself at nights whether anything we did—anything we could have done—would ever make up for that woman’s death.”
And then it’s like the day is night, the city a spruce-pine woods, the park all on fire around them, and that fine, strange, pale woman is lying on the ground, begging for water.
“We accomplished nothing,” Adam says. “Not one thing.” They turn to leave the park, a place too crowded for this conversation. At the gate in the low iron fence, only then do they realize: there’s no place safer.
“She would have done it all again.”
Douglas points at Adam’s chest. “You loved her.”
“We all loved her. Yes.”
“You were in love with her. Same as Watchman. Same as Mimi.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“You would have bombed the Pentagon for her.”
Adam smiles, soft and pale. “She did have a power.”
“She said the trees were talking to her. That she could hear them.”
A shrug. A furtive watch-check. He needs to get back uptown to prep a lecture. Too much history sickens Adam. So he was younger once, angrier. Another species. Just a failed experiment. The only thing that needs negotiation is Now.
Douglas won’t leave him be. “Do you think anything was really talking to her? Or was she just . . . ?”
The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years. And whatever enough people say that all these vanishing trees are saying is what, in fact, they say. But the question interests Adam. What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.
Adam casts a look behind them, down the concrete canyon of Beaver Street. Beavers: the creatures whose pelts built this city. The original Manhattan Exchange. He hears himself answer. “Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them.” The only question is whether they’ll talk again, before the end.
“That night?” Douglas lifts his face to the skyscraper wall. “When we sent you for help? Why did you come back?”
Anger surges through Adam, as if the two of them will fight again. “It was too late. Finding help would have taken hours. She was dead already. If I’d gone to the police . . . she’d still be dead. And we’d all be locked up.”
“You didn’t know that, man. You don’t know that now.” Rage, the radical tip of a grief that time will never root out.
They pass a small European redbud, twenty feet tall. Its spine arches and its limbs curve like those of the ballerina bull dancer. The profusion of purple-pink, edible buds growing right out of the trunk and twigs is still a winter away. Now seedpods dangle from the branches like so many hanged men. They say Judas hanged himself from a Cercis. It’s a new enough myth, as tree myths go. Judas trees grow in corners hidden throughout Lower Manhattan. This one will be gone before it blooms twice more.
The men stop at Battery Place, where their paths split. Down the street and across the water, Liberty. There’s a certain squirrel, a ghost animal, the subject of