The place is more arena than restaurant, massed heads, jabbering voices, the buzz and tweet of video games. The theme is Mexican — a couple of shabby parrots and half a dozen drooping banana trees in enormous pots — but the smell is of the deep-fryer, deep-fried everything. I'm bleeding through the front of my shirt. My pants are bound to my crotch with sweat. "I'll bet they don't have a bar," I say.
Andrea doesn't respond. She's a ramrod, eyes like pincers, sprung fully formed from the tile in front of the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign. Run five minutes off the clock. Run ten. We're still standing there, though three hostesses in their twenties have managed to seat whole busloads ahead of us. What it is, is age discrimination. We young-old, we of the Baby Boom who are as young and vital in our seventies as our parents were in their fifties, we who had all the power and invented the hits of the sixties, have suddenly become invisible, irrelevant, window dressing in an overpopulated, resource-stressed world. What are all these young people telling us? Die, that's what. And quickly.
They don't know Andrea. In the next moment she's got a startled-looking hostess with caterpillar hair in the grip of one big hand and the manager in the other and we're being led to our table right in the middle of that roiling den of gluttony and noise, sorry for the wait, no problem at all, enjoy your meal. I want a beer. A Mexican beer. But they don't have any beer. "Sorry," the twelve-year-old waiter says, looking at me as if my brain's been ossified, "only sake"
What else?
Andrea orders the catfish enchilada and a sake margarita, and after vacillating between the catfish fajitas and the Bagre al carbon before finally settling on the former, I lift my glass of sake on the rocks and click it against the frosted rim of her margarita. "To us," I offer, "and our new life in the mountains."
"Yes," she says, a quiet smile pressed to her lips, and I'm thinking about that, about our life together as it stretches out before me, a pale wind-torn sun in the windows, voices roaring around us, and I can't help wondering just what it's going to be like. We could live another twenty-five or fifty years even. The thought depresses me. What's going to be left by then?
"You're not eating," she says. A dozen kids-children, babies-run bawling down the aisle, ducking under the upraised arms of as many waiters, and disappear into the sea of faces. They are infinite, I am thinking, all these hungry, grasping people chasing after the new and improved, the super and imperishable, and I stand alone against them — but that's the kind of thinking that led me astray all those years ago. Better not to think. Better not to act. Just wave the futilitarian banner and bury your nose in a glass of sake. "Mine's good," Andrea says, proffering a forkful of pus-yellow catfish basted in salsa. "Want a bite?"
I just shake my head. I want to cry. Catfish.
Her voice is soft, very low, so low I can barely hear her in the din: "You know" — and she's digging through her purse now, a purse the size of a steamer trunk suspended from two black leather straps- "I have something for you. I thought you'd want it."
What do I show her in response? Two dog's eyes, full and wet and pathetic. There is nothing I want, except the world the way it was, my daughter restored to me, my parents, all the doomed and extinguished wildlife of America — the white-faced ibis, the Indiana bat, the margay, the Perdido Key beach mouse, the California grizzly and the Chittenango ovate amber snail-put back in their places. I don't want to live in this time. I want to live in the past. The distant past. "What?" I ask, and my voice is dead.
The rustle of paper. The strings rumble and then reach high to wash all the life out of a down-tempo version of "Sympathy for the Devil." I watch her hand come across the table with it, a sheaf of paper-real paper — and the bands of type that are like hieroglyphs encoded on it. And now I'm holding it out at arm's length, squinting till my eyes water and patting down my pockets for my reading glasses.
"I borrowed it," she says. "Stole it, actually."
Pm about to say, "What? What is it?" When the glasses find their way to the bridge of my nose and I can see for myself.
It's a manuscript. A book. And the title, suddenly revealed, stares out at me from beneath the cellophane wrapper of the cover: MARTYR TO THE TREES: THE SIERRA TIERWATER STORY BY APRIL F. WIND I already know how it ends.
But here it is, a concrete thing, undeniable, a weight in my hands. April F. Wind? And what does the "E" stand for? I wonder, Flowing? Full of? Forever? I rifle the pages, the crisp sound of paper, the printout, the stuff of knowledge as it used to be before you could plug it in. No need to talk about the inaccuracies here, or the sappy woo-woo-drenched revisionism or New Age psychoanalysis, but only the end, just that.
Sierra set the record. Set it anew each day, like Kafka's hunger artist, but, unlike the deluded artist, she had an audience. A real and ever-growing audience, an audience that made pilgrimages to the shrine of her tree, sent her as many as a thousand letters a week, erected statues to her, composed poems and song lyrics, locked arms and marched in her name till Axxam showed black through to the core. In all, she spent just over three years aloft, above the fray, the birds her companions, as secure in her environment as a snail in its shell or a goby in the smooth, sculpted jacket of its hole.
In the beginning-in the weeks and months after Climber Deke's frustrated effort to dislodge her — the timber company initiated a campaign of harassment designed either to bring her down or to drive her mad, or both. They logged the trees on all sides of her, the screech of the saws annihilating the dawn and continuing unabated till dark, and all around her loggers cupping their hands over their mouths and shouting abuse. Hey, you little cunt-want to put your lips around this? There's five of us here and we'll be up tonight, you wait for us, huh? And keep the slit clean, 'cause I got sloppy seconds. At night they set up a wall of speakers at the base of the tree and blared polkas, show tunes and Senate testimony into the vault of the sky till the woods echoed like some chamber of doom. They brought in helicopters, the big workhorses they used for wrestling hundred-foot logs off of remote hilltops, and the helicopters hovered there beside her tree, beating up a hurricane with the wash of their props. It was funny. It was a joke. She could see the pilots grinning at her, giving her the thumbs-up sign, A-OK, and let's see if we can blow you out of there. Do you copy? Roger and out.
They tried starvation too. On the morning after Climber Deke made off with the lower platform and all her cooking gear and foodstuffs, the hired goons established a perimeter around the grove and refused to let her support team in. For three nights running, in the company of a loping, rangy kid named Starlight who haltingly confessed that he was in love with my daughter and wanted to marry her as soon as she came down from her tree, I lugged supplies in to her, and for many more nights than that I wandered the dark woods with a baseball bat, just praying that one of those foul-mouthed sons of bitches would try to make good on his threats. Sierra was unfazed. They couldn't intimidate her. "Don't worry, Dad," she whispered one night as she descended as low as she dared to collect the provisions we'd brought her (Starlight straining against gravity from the top rung of an aluminum ladder while I braced him from below). "They're all talk." Her face glowed palely against the black vacancy that was her tree. "They're scared, that's all."