blow that fantasy away.
Everything comes clear. The chance meeting with the old accomplice. All that tugging on the brim of a ball cap. The extracted confession. We set buildings on fire. We did. They would have given their lives for each other, the five of them. One of them did.
A glance down at his handwritten notes. On cue, words boxed in red swim up from the clairvoyant past to the forgetful future. Adam has delivered the line before, for several years running in this survey course, but their full sense has waited for now. He pushes his rimless glasses back up the slope of his sweating nose and shakes his head at the packed hall. What a lesson these students will leave with today.
“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”
A few in the hall chuckle; they can’t yet see the men standing behind them, at the back of the hall. Some of the students squirrel away the phrase for an exam that will come now in a form altogether different than they expect. Most keep dead still, waiting for education to pass over. Appich flips through his final slides. In fifteen seconds, he sums up the attentional studies and delivers his takeaways. He thinks: I haven’t been bad at this. Then he dismisses the room, strides up the raked aisle through the sea of students, and shakes the hands of the men who have come to arrest him. He wants to say, What took you so long?
His stunned students stare, helpless bystanders as the agents lead their professor away in cuffs. The agents nudge Appich out of the auditorium onto the sidewalk. The day is beautiful and the sky the color of a young man’s hopes. People cut across their path. The posse must pause for a second for a break in the foot traffic. The whole city is out on an autumn morning, making things happen.
A light breeze drives the stink of rancid butter up Adam’s nose. He has smelled that medicinal, fruity vomit many times before, but the source of it eludes him now. The navy field jackets lead him a few yards up the sidewalk toward a black Suburban. The men are brusque but civil, that odd mix of purpose, nerves, and tedium that accompanies the program of enforcement. They rush Adam into the open door. One agent cups his head as they fold him into the rear seat.
Adam sits in the secured enclosure, his wrists chained in his lap. In the front seat, an agent talks into a square of black glass, logging the successful capture. The words might as well be birdsong. Someone waves to him through the tinted street-side window. He turns to look. Just alongside the idling vehicle, up through a hole in the concrete, a tree flutters, its leaves like the yellow crayon in a child’s eight-pack. Trees have ruined his life. Trees are the reason these men have come to lock him up for whatever years he has left. The van doesn’t move. His captors go through the paperwork required for departure. The yellow leaves say, Look. Now. Here. You won’t be outside again for a while.
Adam looks and sees just this: a tree he has walked past three times a week for seven years. It’s the lone species of the only genus in the sole family in the single order of the solitary class remaining in a now-abandoned division that once covered the earth—a living fossil three hundred million years old that disappeared from the continent back in the Neogene and has returned to scratch out a living in the shadow, salt, and fumes of Lower Manhattan. A tree older than the conifers, with swimming sperm and cones that can put out a trillion and more grains of pollen a year. In ancient island temples on the other side of the Earth, thousand-year-olds, molten and blasted, close to enlightenment, swell to incredible girth, their elbows growing back down from giant branches to re-root into new trunks of their own. Adam could reach out and touch the scrawny trunk, if the windows weren’t closed. If his hands weren’t cuffed together. A tree like this grew on the street just outside the house of the man who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, and a small few of them survived that blast. The fruit flesh has a smell that curdles thought; the pulp kills even drug-resistant bacteria. The fan-shaped leaves with their