his arrest—since beginning to think objectively again, after so many years of treating the question as an abstraction—he has begun to see that the dead woman was right: the world is full of welfares that must come even before your own kind.
“If I cut a deal, then my son . . . then Charlie grows up knowing what I did.”
“He’ll know you made a hard choice. That you righted a wrong.”
The laugh pops out of Adam. “Righted a wrong!” Lois bolts up. Fury chokes her words before she can spit them. As the door slams shut behind her, he remembers his wife, and what she’s capable of.
He falls into a half sleep imagining what the law will do to him. He turns, and fire shoots through his lower spine. The pain wakes him. A huge moon hangs low over the Hudson. Every steel-white pockmark in its face shines telescope-clear. The prospect of life in prison does wonders for his eyesight.
His bladder hurts. He stands and starts a reflex overland expedition across the apartment to the bathroom, when a wrong cloud falls over his view. He crosses to the window and puts his hand to it. Condensation rims his palm like cave art. Down in the canyon below, streaks of car lights clump and disperse. There, between the spotty traffic, a pack of gray wolves comes down Waverly from Washington Square, chasing a white-tailed deer.
He jerks forward, smacking his forehead against the plate glass. Obscenity shoots out of him, his first in years. He stumbles through the kitchen into the cramped living room, clipping his shoulder on the doorframe. The bump spins him, and, stabbing with his right hand to break his fall, he bounces face-first into the windowsill. The impact clamps his mouth shut on his lower lip and drops him to the floor. There he lies, stupid with agony.
His fingers test his mouth and come away sticky. His right incisor has bitten through his lower lip from both sides. He rises to his knees and looks out above the sill. The moon shines over the tip of a tree-covered island. Brick, steel, and right angles give way to moonlit, mounded green. A stream runs through a ravine that cuts toward West Houston. The towers of the Financial District are gone, changed into wooded hills. Above, the spill of the Milky Way, a torrent of stars.
It’s the mind-crushing pain of his cut lip. The stress of his arrest. He thinks: I’m not actually seeing this. I’m lying senseless from the blow on the living room floor. And yet it spreads outward below him, in all directions—a forest as dense, terrifying, and inescapable as childhood. Arboretum America.
His sight grows huge, magnifying the many colors and habits of the whole: hornbeam, oak, cherry, half a dozen kinds of maple. Honey locusts armored with thorns against extinct megafauna. Pignut hickories dropping meals for anything that moves. Waxy, flat white dogwood blooms float in the understory on invisibly thin twigs. Wilderness rushes down lower Broadway, the island as it was a thousand years back or a thousand years on.
A flash hooks his eye. Off toward a ridge of oak, a great horned owl sweeps its wings above its head and drops like a shot onto something moving in the leaf litter below. A black bear sow and two cubs track across a hillock where Bleeker Street was. Sea turtles lay their eggs by the full moon on the sandy banks of the East River.
Adam’s breath fogs the glass and the view grays over. Blood trickles down his chin. He touches his mouth and comes away with grit, stony between his fingertips. He glances down to inspect the bits of chipped tooth. When he looks up again, Mannahatta is gone, replaced by the lights of Lower Manhattan. He smacks the window with his palm. The metropolis on the other side fails to hiccup. His pulse pounds in his forearms and he starts to shake. The buildings like crossword puzzles, the red and white corpuscles of traffic: more hallucinatory than what just vanished.
He picks his way through the minefield of furniture and scattered journals to the foyer and out the door. Six steps down the hall, he remembers his anklet. He slumps against one wall with his eyes squeezed shut. When the vision dies at last, he turns back into the apartment and seals himself up in the only habitat allowed him, his lone biome for a long time to come.