commotion. A man in a wheelchair rolls up to the right-hand stair. His hair and beard flow down around his shoulders. He’s as thin as the talking tree-person of the Yaqui, the one no one could understand. Alone of all the people in this paralyzed room, he pushes down against his chair, trying to stand. The green liquid splatters over the glass’s lip, into her hand. She looks again. The man in the chair waves wildly. His twig-arms fling outward. How can something so small matter so much to him?
The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can’t escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
NEELAY’S SHOUTS come too late to break the room’s spell. The speaker raises her glass, and the world splits. Down one branch, she lifts the glass to her lips, toasts the room—To Tachigali versicolor—and drinks. Down another branch, this one, she shouts, “Here’s to unsuicide,” and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience. She bumps the podium, backs away, and stumbles into the wings, leaving the room to stare at an empty stage.
IN THE SPRING, the lush, too-warm spring, when the buds and flowers go mad on every dogwood and redbud and pear and weeping cherry in the city, Adam’s case at last runs out of delays and heads to a federal court on the West Coast. Reporters fill the courtroom like ants swarming a peony. The bailiff leads Adam in. He’s stocky now, bearded. Furrows contour-plow his face. He wears the suit he last wore to the awards banquet where he accepted his university’s top teaching prize. His wife is there, seated in the row behind him. But not his boy. His boy will only ever see his father like this many years later, on video.
How do you plead?
The psych professor blinks, as if he’s another form of life altogether and human speech is way too fast to understand.
OVER THE EMPTY SILL, through the kitchen window, Dorothy Brinkman looks out onto a jungle. The man who never once failed to feed a parking meter has launched her on a made-to-order revolution—the Brinkman Woodlands Restoration Project. Wildness advances on all sides of the house. The grass is foot-high, clumped, weedy, seeding, and thick with native volunteers. Maples pop up everywhere, like paired hands. Ankle-high hackberries flaunt their paisley leaves. The speed of the reclamation stuns her. A few more years and their stand of woods will half reprise whatever came before the invading subdivision.
Her own second growth is even faster. Once, long ago, she jumped from airplanes, played a bloody-minded murderess, did terrible things to anyone who tried to confine her. Now she’s almost seventy, at war with the entire city. Jungle in an upscale suburb: it’s up there with child-molesting. The neighbors have come by on three separate occasions to ask if there’s anything wrong. They volunteer to mow, for free. She plays herself, sweet, demented, just adamant enough to hold them at bay—a last amateur theatrical comeback tour.
Now the whole street is ready to stone her. The city has written twice, the second time a registered letter giving her a deadline to clean up the place or face a fine of several hundred dollars. The deadline has come and gone, and with it, another threatening letter, another deadline, and another assessed fine. Who would have thought the foundations of society would be so shaken by a little runaway green?
The new deadline is today. She looks out on the chestnut, the tree that shouldn’t be there. Last week she heard a radio story about how thirty years of cross-breeding has at last produced a blight-resistant American chestnut tree, about to be tested in the wild. The tree that seemed to her like a spared memory now looks like a prediction.
A flash of orange at the window catches her eye: American redstart, male, flushing insects from the thicket with its tail and wings. Twenty-two species of birds this last week alone. Two days ago, at twilight, she and Ray saw a fox. Civil disobedience may cost them thousands in compounding penalties, but the view from the house has been much improved.
She’s making fruit compote for Ray’s lunch when the awaited angry knock comes on the front