stands not far away, under his pines, smiling at her.
DOUGLAS PAVLICEK WAKES as Mimi fills her lungs one last time and returns to climate control. He takes another brief forever to realize he’s in his motel room, the one he rented after giving away two hundred dollars in beers and losing another hundred at three-ball. None of that even makes him wince. This afternoon, the waking dread is more substantial. All his anxiety is trained on the annual allowable cut, and whether, for the last four years, he’s been suckered into wasting his life, or worse.
He’s missed the complimentary continental breakfast by four hours. But the clerk sells him an orange, a chocolate bar, and a cup of coffee, three priceless tree treasures that get him to the public library. There he finds a librarian to help him research. The man pulls several volumes of policy and code off the shelf, and together they search. The answer isn’t good. Thing Two, that loud bastard, was right. Planting seedlings has done nothing but green-light more colossal clear-cuts. It’s dinnertime when Douggie accepts this fact beyond all doubt. He has eaten nothing all day since his three tree gifts. But the idea of eating again—ever—nauseates him.
He needs to walk. Walking: the only sane thing left. What he really wants is to rush out to a scalped hillside and get the future back into the ground. It’s what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory—his soul. A shovel and a shoulder bag full of green recruits. What he, until today, thought of as hope.
He walks all evening, stopping only to compromise with his body: a burger, which skips his taste buds on the way down. The night is soft and the air so light that for half a mile he forgets his free-fall dread. But he can’t stop the questions: What do I do now, for the next forty years? What work can’t the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?
He walks for hours and miles, skirting downtown Portland into a peaceful mixed-use neighborhood, drawn along by a scent he can’t name. He stops into a corner grocery to get a bottle of greenish juice, which he drinks while reading notices on a bulletin board by the store’s exit. Highly Intelligent Missing Cat. Qi Rebalancing. Cheap Long Distance Calling. And then:
Town hall meeting! May 23rd!
Some lunatic legacy inside his species’ brains does not work and play well with others. He asks the kid at the cash register where the park in question is. Kid looks like a rat bit his nose. “That’s too far to walk.”
“Try me.” Turns out Douggie passed it on the way here. He doubles back along the route he came. He smells the little pocket park before he sees it—like a slice of God’s birthday cake. The condemned trees all have three needles to a bundle, large orange plates. Old friends. He sets up base camp on a bench under the pines. He lets the trees comfort him. It’s dark, but the neighborhood seems safe. Safer than flying transports over Cambodia. Safer than a lot of bars he’s fallen asleep in. He’d like to fall asleep here. Fuck practicality and all its binding obligations. Give a guy a night outdoors, with nothing between his bare head and a seed rain. The twenty-third, it occurs to him—town meeting—is only four days away.
His dream, when it comes, is more vivid than it has been for years. This time, the plane goes down in the Khmer jungle. Captain Straub is impaled on some malignant undergrowth Douglas can’t see. Levine and Bragg land nearby, but Douglas can’t reach them, and in a while they stop answering his shouts. He’s alone again, in what he realizes is a Bizarro Portland, swallowed entirely by a single banyan. He wakes to the sound of helicopters scouring the canopy, shining floodlights and looking for him.
Tonight the helicopters turn into trucks. Men pile out of them, with gear. For a minute, they’re still grunts, coming to immolate Douggie’s village in a final firefight. Then he wakes up enough to see chain saws. He checks his watch: a little after midnight. At first he thinks he has fallen asleep for four days. He gets himself vertical and heads out on recon.
“Hey!” He draws near the gear drop. “Hello!” The hard hats recoil, as from a crazy person. “You’re not setting up, are you?”
They keep working, gassing up the hardware. Running a tape corral around the