an asphalt path meanders in a gentle S. And just beyond the path, a zoo of trees. A voice up close in her ear says, Look the color! More shades than there are names, as many shades as there are numbers, and all of them green. There are squat date palms that predate the dinosaurs. Towering Washingtonia with their fan fringes and dense inflorescence. Through the palms, a whole spectrum of broadleaves run from purple to yellow. Coast live oaks, for certain. Shameless naked eucalypts. Those specimens with the odd, warty bark and exuberant compound leaves she could never find in any guidebook.
Beyond the trees, the pastel project of the city piles up in cubes of white, peach, and ocher. It builds over the hills toward the towering center, where the buildings rise skyward and turn denser. The raw force of this self-feeding engine, the countless lives that power the enterprise down at ground level, come clear to her. Across the horizon, stands of building cranes break and remake the skyline. All the spreading, urging, testing, splitting, and regenerating course of history, the rings within rings, paid for at every step with fuel and shade and fruit, oxygen and wood. . . . Nothing in this city is older than a century. In seventy plus seventy years, San Francisco will be saintly at last, or gone.
The afternoon fades. She goes on staring at the city, waiting for the city to stare back. The knots of people around her put their clothes back on. They shift and fuss and finish eating, laugh and stand, raise their bikes and scatter too quickly, as if in a film fast-forwarded to comic effect. She leans back against the trunk behind her and closes her eyes. Tries to summon the ponytailed boy-man and make him appear, as he did when local government cut down her magic grove outside her office window. A red thread once tied them together, the shared work of trying to care and see more. She tugs on the thread. It’s still taut.
The fact plows into her, what should have been obvious: why there has been no knock on her door. She slams backward, her spine against the pine. Another gift, even worse than Adam’s. That hapless boy-man has sold two lives for hers. Turn herself in now, and she’ll kill him, destroy the point of his awful sacrifice. Keep hidden, and she must live with the fact that two lives have paid for her freedom. A wail starts in the base of her lungs, but traps there and swells. She’s not strong enough, not generous enough for either path. She wants to rage at him; she wants to rush him a message of absolute forgiveness. In the absence of any word from her, he’ll torture himself without limit. He’ll think she despises him. His betrayal will bore into him and fester, fatal. He’ll die of some simple, stupid, preventable thing—a rotten tooth, an infected cut he fails to treat. He’ll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong. He’ll die without knowing what she’s powerless to tell him—that he has helped her. That his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.
DOUGLAS, BENEATH THE WINDOW, palpates the lump in his side. When that fascination fades, he sits back down at the desk. He starts up the audio, puts his buds back in. The course resumes. The prof gets rambling about forest fires. Some metaphor, apparently. The way that fire creates new life. She mentions a word that she really ought to spell for the listeners at home. A name for cones that open only in heat. For trees that will spread and grow only through fire.
The prof returns to her one great theme: the massive tree of life, spreading, branching, flowering. That’s all it seems to want to do. To keep making guesses. To go on changing, rolling with the punches. She says, “Let me sing to you, about how creatures become other things.” He’s not sure what the lady is going on about. She describes an explosion of living forms, a hundred million new stems and twigs from one prodigious trunk. She talks about Ta-ne Mahuta, Yggdrasil, Jian-Mu, the Tree of Good and Evil, the indestructible Asvattha with roots above and branches below. Then she’s back at the original World Tree. Five times at least, she says, the tree has been dropped, and five times it has resprouted from the stump. Now it’s toppling again, and