heads home on foot. The day is one of those eerie Central Peninsula imitations of heaven—seventy degrees and clear, the air thick with bay laurel and eucalyptus. He drags along the familiar route at half his usual pace, past the modest middle-class bungalows that people will soon pay a million and a half for, just to tear down and rebuild. He has to make a plan. He swore at a teacher, and his old, golden life shatters in the single, terrible syllable. This disrespect of white people will cripple his father. Patience, Neelay. Reserve. Remember? Remember? Word will spread through the community of Indian expats. His mother will die of disgrace.
He walks along the fingerprint-whorl of tree-lined streets, that neighborhood hemmed in by three highways. Four blocks from home, he cuts through the park, the place he goes whenever his parents force him outdoors. The path snakes through a gauntlet of low-slung encinas with phantasmagoric branches growing since California was Spain’s remotest outpost. If he’s ever noticed the species at all, it was only in the movies: the trees of Sherwood and Bagworthy, stand-in forests to frighten Pilgrims and challenge castaways. When Hollywood needs trees, it turns to the only nearby broadleaf that will do.
They beckon, bizarre, dreamlike, contorted. One huge beam of branch swoops toward the ground like it’s lying down to rest. A single swing, and from that low branch Neelay shimmies up into the roost, where he sits like he’s seven again. There, he takes stock of his ruined life. From high up in this crazy cantilevered oak, looking down on the sidewalk where two kids swing a stick at pebbles and a humpbacked white-haired woman walks her dachshund, he can see this whole mess from Ms. Gilpin’s eyes. She wasn’t wrong to reprimand him. And yet, she stole his property. The whole disaster, from up in this crow’s nest, has what Ms. Gilpin might call moral ambiguity.
He makes room on the oak’s sinuous branch for the two boys from A Separate Peace. He watches them play their white-guy, prep school games of love and war in their tree above their river. Way below, the brown-green California ground bounces each time a breeze pitches the branches. He knows almost nothing of his parents’ world, but one thing is as certain as math. Shame, for Indians, is worse than death. Ms. Gilpin may already have called them with details of his crime. His head throbs at the thought and his tongue tastes metal. He hears his mother howl: You let that rat-haired woman humiliate your whole family? Soon a distant country filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins will know what he has done.
And his poor father, who has made himself invisible for years, just for the right to live and work in this Golden State: he stares at Neelay in horror, wondering how a child might be so arrogant as to think that he could talk back to an American authority and live.
Neelay peers down from this oak aerie onto the path below, his mind a mass of tangled code. An idea flashes through him, a glimpse of easy peace. If he could get dusted up a little bit, it might win him the sympathy vote. You can’t beat up on a wounded boy. Delicious terror strokes his neck, like it does when he watches old Twilight Zones. The idea is nuts. He must suck things up, go home, and take his punishment. He leans out for a good look at the big picture, his last for a while. His parents will ground him for months.
He sighs. Steps down onto the branch below him to descend. And slips.
There will be years to wonder whether the branches jerked. Whether the tree had it in for him. Limbs slam him on the way down. They bat him back and forth like a pinball. Earth rushes up. He lands on the concrete path and bounces on his coccyx, which cracks the base of his spine.
Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward. The dome above him hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand—a thousand thousand—green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening. Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, rings of them banded together into pipes that draw dissolved minerals up through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twig and out