“Nothing, man. All good. Just . . . a little screaming, is all.”
THE WORST PART is the photo. Mimi wouldn’t recognize the man if she passed him on the street. Maple. How could they ever have called him that? Bristlecone now, the narrowest strips of living bark on a withered piece of driftwood that has been dying for five thousand years.
She looks up. People sprawl near her in small clans. Some sit on blankets. Others lie down right in the patchy grass. Shoes, shirts, bags, bicycles, and food spread around them. Lunch is on; the sky cooperates. No judgments can touch them, and all futures remain reachable.
She has performed Judith Hanson for so many years that it shocks her now, to remember the crimes she committed as Mimi Ma and the punishments that wait for her in that name. To get to this park, she has walked, hopped a bus, and taken the train, ludicrous serpentine evasion. But they’ll find her, wherever she is, whatever trail she leaves. She’s a multiple felon. A manslaughterer. Domestic terrorist. Seventy plus seventy years.
Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.
Near Mimi in the grass, a boy in chitin-looking clothing says, into his hand, “Where’s the nearest place I can buy some sunscreen?” A pleasant woman answers, “Here’s what I found for you!” Mimi holds her phone close to her face. She bounces from news to pictures, analysis to video. Somewhere in this tiny black monolith is a bit of her father. Pieces of his brain and soul. She whispers into her own phone’s mic, “Where’s the nearest police station?” A map appears, showing the fastest route and how many minutes it would take her to walk. Five-point-three. The boy in the bug-skeleton apparel tells his phone, “Play me some cowpunk,” and disappears into his wireless buds.
ADAM LIES in his bunk in a transfer facility, while the overflowing federal system searches for space to house him. There will be no appeal. He’s watching a film on the phosphenes inside his closed eyelids of a bearded man confronting the court. The lack of remorse or bargaining. The wife, two rows behind him, going to pieces. Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.
He wonders how he found it in him to use the word we. But he’s glad he did. Everything was we, back then. A surrender to cooperative existence. We, the five of us. No separate trees in a forest. What had they hoped to win? Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.
The coming massacre was their authority—a cataclysm large enough to pardon every fire the five of them lit. That cataclysm will still come, he’s sure of it, long before his seventy plus seventy years are up. But not soon enough to exonerate him.
THE WINDOW in Douggie’s cell is too high up to see through. He stands underneath, pretending. The audio course has made him crazy to see a tree. Any anemic, stunted thing—the one thing from free-range life aside from Mimi he misses most, despite the shit they got him in. But the weird thing is, he can’t remember how they go. How a noble fir looks in profile. How the parts of an ironwood connect, the way the branches run. He’s even getting shaky about Engelmanns and hemlocks—trees he saw so damn many of, for so damn long. An elm, a tupelo, a buckeye: forget it. If he drew one now, it would be like some five-year-old’s crude crayon sketch. Cotton candy on a stick.
He didn’t look hard enough. He loved too little. More than enough to jail him, too little to get him through today. But he has hour after empty hour, with no great obligation but to keep from