balding man. But each weedy stem he puts into the dirt is a magic trick eons in the making. He rolls them out by the thousands, and he loves and trusts them as he would dearly love to trust his fellow men.
Left alone—and there’s the catch—left alone to the air and light and rain, each one might put on tens of thousands of pounds. Any one of his starts could grow for the next six hundred years and dwarf the largest factory chimney. It could play host to generations of voles that never go to ground and several dozen species of insects whose only desire is to strip their host bare. Could rain down ten million needles a year on its own lower branches, building up mats of soil that grow their own gardens high in the air.
Any one of these gangly seedlings could push out millions of cones over the course of its life, the small yellow males with their pollen that floats across entire states, the drooping females with their mouse tails sticking out from the coil of scales, a look he finds dearer than his own life. And the forest they might remake he can almost smell—resinous, fresh, thick with yearning, sap of a fruit that is no fruit, the scent of Christmases endlessly older than Christ.
Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.
NEELAY MEHTA
THE BOY WHO’LL HELP CHANGE humans into other creatures is in his family’s apartment above a Mexican bakery in San Jose watching tapes of The Electric Company. In the kitchen, his Rajasthani mother chokes on clouds of ground black cardamom that clash with the cinnamon of pan fino and conchas trickling up from the bakery below. Outside, in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, the ghosts of almond, cherry, pear, walnut, plum, and apricot trees spread for miles in every direction, trees only recently sacrificed to silicon. The Golden State, the boy’s parents still call it.
The boy’s Gujarati father comes up the stairs balancing a massive box on his broomstick body. Eight years before, he arrived in this country with two hundred dollars, a degree in solid-state physics, and a willingness to work for two-thirds of his white colleagues’ salaries. Now he’s employee number 276 at a firm rewriting the world. He stumbles up two flights underneath his load, humming his son’s favorite song, the one they sing together at bedtime: Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.
The child hears his steps and rushes to the landing. “Pita! What is it? A present for me?” He’s a seven-year-old little Rajput who knows that most of the world is a present for him.
“Let me come in first, Neelay, please-thank-you. A present, yes. For both of us.”
“I knew it!” The boy goose-steps around the coffee table hard enough to clack the steel balls on the pendulum toy. “A present for my birthday, eleven days early.”
“But you have to help me build it.” The father nurses the box onto the table, pushing the clutter to the floor.
“I’m a good helper.” The boy counts on his father’s forgetfulness.
“And that will take patience, which you are working on, remember?”
“I remember,” the boy assures him, tearing at the box.
“Patience is the maker of all good things.”
The father steers his son by the shoulders into the kitchen. Mother barricades the door. “Don’t come in here. Very busy!”
“Yes, hello, too, moti. I got the computer kit.”
“He tells me he got the computer kit.”
“It’s a computer kit!” the boy shrieks.
“Of course you got the computer kit! Now you two boys go play.”
“It’s not exactly playing, moti.”
“No? Go work, then. Like me.” The boy yips and tugs at his father’s paw, pulling him back to the mystery. Behind them, the mother calls out, “One thousand words memory or four?”
The father blossoms. “Four!”
“Four thousand, of course. Now go away and make something good.”
THE BOY POUTS when the green fiberglass backplane comes out of the box. “That’s a computer kit? What use is that?”
His father grins the most foolish grin. The day is coming when use will be rewritten by this thing. He reaches into the box and turns up the heart of the matter. “Here it is, my Neelay. Look!” He holds up a chip three inches