on a knot of people no bigger than bugs, a democratic majority of whom want him dead.
WHEN HE’S THIRTEEN, the leaves of his sister Leigh’s elm turn yellow long before autumn. Adam sees the withering first. The other kids have stopped looking. One by one, they’ve drifted out of the neighborhood of green things into the louder, flashier party of other people.
The disease that gets Leigh’s tree has been coming their way for decades. Back when Leonard Appich planted his first child’s tree in a fit of fifties optimism, Dutch elm had already ravaged Boston, New York, Philly, and Elm City, New Haven. But those places were so far away. Science, the man figured, would soon come up with a cure.
The fungus gutted Detroit while the kids were still small. Then Chicago, soon after. The country’s most popular street tree, vases that turned boulevards into great tunnels, was leaving this world. Now the disease comes to the outskirts of Belleville, and Leigh’s tree, too, succumbs. Fourteen-year-old Adam is the only one who mourns. His father curses the expense of taking the thing down. Leigh herself hardly notices. She’s on her way to college—tech theater, at Illinois State.
“Of course you’d pick an elm, Dad. You’ve had it out for me since before I was born.”
Adam salvages a bit of wood from the men who come to grind out the stump. He takes it into the basement, planes it down, and engraves it with his woodburning kit. He finds the words in a book: A tree is a passage between earth and sky. He messes up passage. Earth and sky both come out retarded. But he gives it to Leigh anyway, as a going-away present. She laughs at the gift and hugs him. He finds it after she moves out, in the crates she leaves behind for the Salvation Army.
THAT’S THE AUTUMN—1976—when Adam falls for ants. One September Saturday, he watches them flow across the neighbors’ sidewalk, carrying a spilled Popsicle back to their base. The rust-colored shag carpet stretches for several yards. Ants wind through obstacles, piling over themselves. Their massed deployment matches any human genius. Adam pitches camp in the grass alongside the living foam. Ants on the edge of the saturnalia seethe across his socks and up his skinny shins. They mount at his elbows into the sleeves of his tee. They scout his shorts and tickle his nuts. He doesn’t care. Patterns reveal themselves as he watches, and they’re wild. Nobody’s in charge of the mass mobilization, that much seems clear. Yet they port the sticky food back to the nest in the most coordinated way. Plans in the absence of any planner. Paths in the absence of a surveyor.
He goes home to get his notebook and camera. There, he has a brainstorm. He begs some nail polish off of Jean. His sister has gone foolish with age, lost in the swirl of fashion. But she’ll still do anything for her little brother Dammie. She, too, once loved the Golden Guides. But the humans have her in their grip, and she’ll never get free again.
She gives him five colors, a rainbow running from scarlet to cyan. Back at the site, he begins daubing. A tiny globe of Smokin’ Rose sticks to the abdomen of one of the scavengers. One by one, he brands dozens more ants with the same hue. Several minutes later, he starts in again with Neat Peach. By midmorning, the whole spectrum of polish is in play. Soon, colored daubs reveal a tangled conga line of unreal beauty. The colony possesses something; Adam doesn’t know what to call it. Purpose. Will. A kind of awareness—something so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing.
Emmett, passing by with rod and bait, finds him lying in the grass, snapping pictures and sketching in his notebook. “The fuck you doin’?”
Adam hedgehogs and keeps working.
“This is your idea of a Saturday? No wonder people don’t get you.”
Adam doesn’t get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets. He keeps his head down and keeps counting.
“Hey! Bug boy! Bug boy—I’m talking to you! Why’re you playing in the dirt?”
It startles Adam to hear the evidence in Emmett’s voice: he frightens his brother. He whispers to his notebook, “Why do you torture fish?”
A foot flicks out and catches Adam’s ribs. “The fuck you talking about? Fish can’t feel things, Shit-for-Brains.”