so recently still expanding, and writes, in block caps that run like a wheel around half the circumference, CUT DOWN WHILE YOU SLEPT.
He’s still there, marking the stumps, when Mimi comes out for lunch. Anger is her new lunchtime card game, played solitaire while eating her egg and hot pepper sandwiches on a bench in the newly minimized Zen garden. Since the night raid, she has made scores of phone calls, attended an impotent public meeting, and talked to two lawyers, both of whom advised her that justice was a fantasy. Outdoor lunch is her only recourse, staring at the raw stumps and chewing her rage. She sees the man on his hands and knees annotating the damage and explodes. “What are you doing now?”
Douggie looks up at a woman the image of a Patpong B-girl named Lalida he once loved more than breathing. A woman worth punching any number of potholes to get next to. She advances, threatening him with a sandwich lance.
“It’s not enough to murder them? You have to deface them, too?”
He bares his palms, then points at the hieroglyphics on a cut stump. She stops and sees—the labeled rings running backward to the circle’s center. The year her father blew his brains all over the backyard. The year she graduated and got this godforsaken job. The year the whole Ma family scattered from the bear. The year her father showed her the scroll. The year of her birth. The year her father came to study at the great Carnegie Institute of Technology. And in the outermost ring, the caption: CUT DOWN WHILE YOU SLEPT.
She glances back down at the man on his knees. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry. I thought you were . . . I almost kicked you in the face.”
“Guys who did this beat you to it.”
“Wait. You were there?” Her eyebrows draw together as she does the yield-stress calculation. “If I’d been there, I’d have hurt someone.”
“Big trees are coming down all over.”
“Yeah. But this was my park. My daily bread.”
“You know, you look at those mountains, and you think: Civilization will fade away, but that will go on forever. Only, civilization is snorting like a steer on growth hormones, and those mountains are going down.”
“I talked to two lawyers. No laws were broken.”
“’Course not. The wrong people have all the rights.”
“What can you do?”
The crazy man’s eyes dance. He looks like the twelfth arhat, amused by the folly of all human aspiration. He wavers. “Can I trust you? I mean, you’re not here to steal one of my kidneys or anything?”
She laughs, and that’s all he needs to believe.
“Then listen. You wouldn’t happen to have three hundred bucks anywhere? Or maybe a car that works?”
THE BRINKMANS TAKE TO READING, when they’re alone together. And, together, they’re alone most of the time. Community theater is over; they haven’t acted in a play since the one about the nonexistent baby. They’ve never said out loud to each other that their acting days are over. No dialogue required.
In place of children, then, books. In their reading tastes, each of them stays true to the dreams of youth. Ray likes to glimpse the grand project of civilization ascending to its still-obscure destiny. He wants only to read on, late into the night, about the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race. Dorothy needs wilder reclamations, stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person’s ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.
Ray’s shelves are organized by topic; Dorothy’s, alphabetical by author. He prefers state-of-the-art books with fresh s. She needs to communicate with the distant dead, alien souls as different from her as possible. Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn’t mind skipping the author’s philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.
Life in their forties. Once any given volume enters the house, it can never leave. For Ray, the goal is readiness: a book for every unforeseeable need. Dorothy strives to keep local independent booksellers afloat and save neglected gems from the cutout bin. Ray thinks: You never know when you might finally get around to reading that tome