from another. But I can learn, as I’ve had to re-learn everything—myself, my likes and dislikes, the width and height and depth of where I live—again, alongside you.
Not everything we plant will take. Not every plant will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.
As she reads, her eyes cloud, and she drives up onto the curb and wraps the car around a parkway linden wide enough to destroy her front grille.
Now, the linden, it turns out, is a radical tree, as different from an oak as a woman is from a man. It’s the bee tree, the tree of peace, whose tonics and teas can cure every kind of tension and anxiety—a tree that cannot be mistaken for any other, for alone in all the catalog of a hundred thousand earthly species, its flowers and tiny hard fruit hang down from surfboard bracts whose sole perverse purpose seems to be to state its own singularity. The lindens will come for her, starting with this ambush. But the full adoption will take years.
She requires eleven stitches to close the gash above her right eye, where the steering wheel cut her open. Ray rushes from his office to the hospital. In his panic, he crunches the rear right bumper of a doctor’s BMW in the hospital parking garage. He’s in tears when they lead him into surgery. She’s sitting up in a chair with bandages wrapped around her head, trying to read things. Everything is double. The brand name on the gauze wrappings looks to her like Johnson & Johnson & Johnson & Johnson.
Her eyes light up to see him—both of him. “RayRay! Honey! What’s wrong?” He rushes to her, and she recoils in confusion. Then she gets it. “Hush. It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s plant something.”
DOUGLAS PAVLICEK
THE COPS ARRIVE on the landing of Douglas Pavlicek’s tiny efficiency in East Palo Alto just before breakfast. The actual police: a nice touch. What you might call realism. They charge him with armed robbery and read him his Miranda. Violations of Penal Codes 211 and 459. He can’t help smirking as they frisk and handcuff him.
“You think this is funny?”
“No. No, of course not!” Well, maybe a little.
It gets less funny when the neighbors come out on their balconies in their pajamas as the cops perp-walk Douggie to the waiting squad car. He smiles—It’s not what you think—but the effect is mitigated a little, what with his hands cuffed behind his back.
One of the officers shoehorns him into the back seat. The rear doors have no handles. The cops call in his arrest on the radio. Everything very Naked City, although this perfect Central Peninsula August and the thought that he’s getting paid fifteen dollars a day brighten the sound track. He’s nineteen, two years orphaned, recently laid off from his job as supermarket stock boy, and living on his parents’ life insurance. Fifteen bucks a day for two straight weeks is a lot of dough, for doing nothing.
At the police station—the real police station—he’s fingerprinted, deloused, and blindfolded. They throw him back in the car and drive him around. When they remove the blindfold, he’s in prison. Warden’s office, superintendent’s office, and several cells. Chains on his legs. All very well thought out, convincing. He has no idea where he is, in real life. Some office building. The people running the show are improvising, same as he is.
All the guards and most of the prisoners are there already. Douggie becomes Prisoner 571. The guards are just Sir, with clubs and whistles, uniforms and sunglasses. They’re a little too liberal with the sticks, for hourly volunteers. Getting into their roles, pleasing the experimenters. They strip Doug down and put him in a smock. They mean to hit his pride, but Douglas preempts them by having none. There’s a “count”—roll call and ritual humiliation—several times that evening. Sloppy joes for dinner. It’s better than what he’s been eating.
Around lights-out, Prisoner 1037 gets a little truculent at the overdone theatrics. The guards smack him down. Clear already: there are good guards, tough guards, and crazy guards. Each slides down a grade when others are present.
As soon as Douggie—571—manages to doze off, he’s ripped out of bed for another gratuitous count. It’s two-thirty a.m. That’s when things turn weird. He gets the idea that the experiment isn’t about what they claim it’s about. He realizes they’re really testing something much scarier. But he only needs to survive fourteen