early start. He lies still in the dark, hungry, listening to the birds discuss life in a thousand ancient dialects: bickering, turf war, recollection, praise, joy. It’s cold this morning, fogged in with gloom, and he doesn’t want to get out of the bag. Breakfast will be meager. There’s not much food left. He has been north for days, and he’ll have to find a town and resupply before long. There’s a road within earshot, with trucks shuttling, but the sound is abstract, muffled, far away.
He crawls from the nylon egg and looks. The first faint suggestion of dawn outlines the trees. The trees are smaller here, slender to the skirts, shaped for heavy snowfalls. But it happens to him again, as it always does now. The look of the waving trunks, the cones rustling, the way the branch tips feel each other out, the astringent, citrus scent of the needles all restore him to the crystalline reason he forever keeps forgetting.
“Up in the morning!”
His crazy singing adds to the dawn chorus.
“Out on the job!”
The nearest birds fall silent and listen.
“Work like the devil for my pay!”
A small fire suffices to boil the water, drawn from a generous stream. Pinch of coffee crystals, a fist of oats in a wooden cup, and he’s ready.
MIMI IN MISSION DOLORES PARK, San Francisco, many miles south. She sits in the grass surrounded by picnickers, under a knobcone pine, tapping at her phone. The news is a nightmare she can’t wake from. An accomplished social scientist with a wife and young son—a man she once trusted with her life—is going away for two lifetimes, for something she helped do. Convicted of domestic terrorism. Little or no attempt at defense. Found guilty of fires she can’t believe he set. “Eco-Radical Sentenced to 140 Years.” And another man, a man she loved for his earnest cartoon innocence, has sold him out.
Cross-legged on the ground, her back against the bark, she feeds key words into her phone. Adam Appich. Terrorist Penalties Enhancement Act. She no longer cares what bread-crumb trails she’s leaving. Getting caught would solve so many things. Pages swell and link faster than she can skim them—expert analysis and angry amateur conjecture.
She should be in prison. She should be tried and sentenced to life. Two lives. Guilt comes up her throat, and she tastes it. Her sick legs want to stand and take her into the nearest police station. But she doesn’t even know where that might be. That’s how law-abiding she has been, for two decades. Nearby sunbathers turn to look at her. She has said something out loud. She thinks it might have been, Help me.
OTHER EYES, invisible, read alongside hers. In the time it takes Mimi to scan ten paragraphs, the bodiless eyes read ten million. She retains no more than half a dozen details that fade as soon as she flips to a new page, but the invisible learners preserve every single word and fit them into branching networks of sense that grow stronger with each addition. The more she reads, the more the facts evade her. The more the learners read, the more patterns they find.
. . .
DOUGLAS SITS at a student desk in the room his captors call a cell. It’s the nicest accommodation he’s had for two decades. He’s listening to an audio course—Introduction to Dendrology. He can get college credit for it. Maybe he’ll earn a degree. Maybe that would make her proud, the woman he knows he hasn’t a chance in hell of ever seeing again.
The professor on the tapes is great. She’s like the grandmother and mother and spiritual guidance counselor Douglas never had. He loves how they’re using people with speech impediments, these days. For audio lectures. This woman is hearing other voices altogether. He listens and takes notes. At the top of the page, he writes, The Day of Life. It’s crazy, what the woman on the tape is saying. He had no idea. Life—flatlined for a billion years or more. Unbelievable. The whole escapade might never have happened. The tree of life might have stayed a shrub forever. And the day of life might have been a very quiet day.
He listens as she clicks off the hours. And when the brutes show up in the last seconds to turn the whole planet into a factory farm, he yanks out the buds, gets up, and lets loose. Maybe a little too long and loud. The duty guard looks in on him. “The hell’s