analytical skills top out in the ninety-second percentile. In grade-point ranking, however, he barely manages to sneak into slot 212 in a graduating class of 269. No self-respecting college will even consider him.
His father waves him off. “Go to JC for two years. Wipe the slate clean and start again.”
But Adam doesn’t need to wipe the slate. He just needs to show it to someone who can read between the chalky lines. He sits down at the dining room table one Saturday morning before winter break and composes a letter. It feels like entering observations into his boyhood field notebooks. Outside the window are what remain of the children’s trees. He remembers how he once believed in some magic link between the trees and the children they were planted for. How he made himself into a maple—familiar, frank, easy to identify, always ready to bleed sugar, flowering top-down in the first sunny days of spring. He loved that tree, its simplicity. Then people made him into something else. He takes his pen to the top of the page and writes:
Professor R. M. Rabinowski
Department of Psychology
Fortuna College, Fortuna, California
Dear Professor Rabinowski,
Your book changed my life.
He tells a full-fledged conversion narrative: wayward boy saved by a chance encounter with brilliance. He describes how The Ape Inside Us awakened something in him, although the awakening has come, perhaps, too late. He says how he failed to take school seriously until the book fell into his lap, and how he may now have to spend years clearing his record at community college until he gets the chance to study psychology at a serious institution. No matter, he writes. He is in the professor’s debt, and as Rabinowski himself says, on page 231: “Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.” Perhaps unlooked-for kindness along the way might yet shorten the path ahead.
Outside the window, his maple catches a breeze. Its branches scold him. He’d turn scarlet for shame, if he wasn’t desperate. He forges on, larding the letter with half a dozen techniques picked up from Chapter 12, “Influence.” His words of thanks contain four of the top six releasers for producing action patterns in someone else: reciprocity, scarcity, validation, and appeal to commitment. He hides the evidence of his begging under another trick gleaned from Chapter 12:
If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.
It stuns his parents but doesn’t entirely shock Adam when a return letter shows up at the house from the author of The Ape Inside Us. Professor Rabinowski writes that Fortuna College is a small, alternative school for unconventional students seeking an intense, questioning approach to education. The admission process places no great store on high school transcripts but looks for other evidence of special motivation. And while he makes no guarantees, Professor Rabinowski promises that Adam’s application will be given serious consideration. Adam need only write the strongest entrance essay that he can.
Clipped to the formal letter is an unsigned index card. In wild and spooky blue-inked scrawl, someone has printed, “Don’t ever blow smoke up my ass again.”
RAY BRINKMAN AND DOROTHY CAZALY
THEY’RE NOT HARD TO FIND: two people for whom trees mean almost nothing. Two people who, even in the spring of their lives, can’t tell an oak from a linden. Two people who have never given woods a second thought until an entire forest marches for miles across the stage of a tiny black-box theater in downtown St. Paul, 1974.
Ray Brinkman, junior intellectual property lawyer. Dorothy Cazaly, stenographer for a company that does work for his firm. He can’t stop watching her as she takes depositions. The silent, fluid beauty of her manual ballet boggles him. Appassionata Sonata, slewing out of her miming fingers.
She catches him gazing, and dares him, with a glance, to own up. He does. It’s easier than dying from acute distant admiration. She agrees to go out with him, if she can pick the venue. He signs off on the deal, never imagining the hidden clauses. She picks an audition for an amateur production of Macbeth.
Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.
For amateur production, read terrifying. The audition is like monster-hunting without a flashlight. Neither has been in a