Chapter 6 #2
“In the spring, the flowers come in like little bells,” he said, “and in the fall, they get these bright red berries. Tons of birds eat them. Cedar waxwings, thrushes, quail, juncos. Mammals, too. Deer, bear. When the berries dry up they have hooked barbs that stick to the fur of the bigger animals. So the deer and bear become the madrone’s sharecroppers, in a way.
They haul the seeds off and plant them everywhere they go. ”
“This one looks pretty happy,” I said.
“It’s sunny here, and they’re sun seekers,” he said, patting the trunk. “They’ll grow any direction to get to that sun. They can’t wait to bloom. This one’s already impatient to do it again, I bet.”
“You think a tree gets impatient?” I said.
“Why not?” he said, continuing along the trail. “They know what’s coming. They want to show everyone what they’ve got. Imagine what it must feel like to be a blooming tree. Drinking all that light. The biggest madrone on record was in Big Sur. It was over 250 years old. It burned a few years ago.”
“Fuck,” I said. “That’s awful.”
“Yep,” he said. “A campfire. Those people deserve life in jail.”
He liked to talk about the inner mechanics of trees, that confounding transformation of light into energy, what he called the symphony of photosynthesis.
“Inside every plant are these little organelles,” he said, crouching in a bed of wild strawberries and clover, touching their delicate stems and leaves, “which are what store the energy of sunlight. They’re a subunit of a cell.
And inside the organelles, there are these little disks called chloroplasts.
And inside the chloroplasts are these things called thylakoids.
It’s actually the thylakoid membrane where the chlorophyll is stored. The light-absorbing pigment.”
“The green stuff,” I said.
“Yes and no,” he said. “Sunlight is full-spectrum light, obviously. Way more light than we can perceive with our eyes. During photosynthesis, the chlorophyll absorbs the blue- and red-light waves, and it reflects green-light waves, which is why the plants appear green to us. They’re green because the green light is no good for the plants.
They’re repelling green. Isn’t that funny?
You think of a plant as green all the way through. Green is exactly what they are not.”
We talked a lot about the current popular obsession with tree intelligence, the whole, stupid metaphor of the “wood wide web.” The wood wide web idea didn’t go far enough, Phil thought.
Trees were more than just circuit boards, trading practical information.
They were more like the mind of the world, thinking and dreaming, above us and below.
“What kind of dreams do you think they have?” I said, passing under a shining drop ceiling of big-leaf maple.
“We don’t know what our own dreams are doing,” he said. “How would we be able to interpret a tree’s?”
“You think they dream in pictures?” I said.
“They don’t have optic nerves,” he said. “But then again, blind people dream, don’t they? And what is an image, anyway? How does an image appear inside the mind? When you remember something, you can see it. But what is it? Where is it? Think of an image right now. Something not in front of you.”
I thought of his wife.
“So where is it, exactly?” he said.
“In my brain tissue,” I said.
“So there’s a picture inside your brain,” he said. “Like a tiny negative?”
“In some synapse inside a neuron somewhere,” I said. “Sure.”
“So it has a substance,” he said.
“Yes and no,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“When you see something out in the world, is it actually out there, or is it on your retina?” he said. “This is an old Zen trick. Where do you think the image actually resides?”
“Both,” I said. “Outside and on my retina. And then the brain interprets it.”
“But in your memory, where does the image live?” he said. “You can see it, and yet I can’t see it. Think of a blue elephant. I definitely can’t measure the image you see. How will we ever gauge a tree’s imagination?”
“Maybe someday we will,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it’s in the nature of some things to be hidden.”
“God attracts us to Himself,” said the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing .
“He draws us to Himself.” That summer, God was drawing me powerfully in two directions at once.
I was drawn to Sarah and drawn to Phil both, stretched on an invisible rack.
I was drawn to Sarah in the most complete and carnal way possible.
I wanted to be with her at every moment.
I wanted to be inside of her. And I was drawn to Phil too, in the way of an eager student to a mentor, or a humble disciple to a guru.
Increasingly, I saw Phil as the very model of what a man could be: innocent, giving, voracious, submissive.
I was always happy to place myself under his power.
There were moments, standing in the shower or lying in bed late at night, when I could see I was doing something wrong.
I was deep in the woods, far off the path.
I wondered if I should end the affair with Sarah, or the friendship with Phil, but I didn’t want to end either one, not yet.
All my life, I’d lived so purely, I told myself.
I’d spent my hours practically like a monk in a cell, reading and writing and almost nothing else.
So maybe, I rationalized, I could allow myself this one transgression.
It was only a temporary situation, wasn’t it?
A passing, strange compromise. Soon, surely, Sarah would become bored with me.
My conversations with Phil would run their course.
We’d all drift back to the places we’d been and scan our horizons for the next objects of desire.
And if we continued living this lie? Maybe that was okay, too.
There were so many crimes in the world that went unseen.
So many infractions and misdemeanors that never got punished.
For every betrayal discovered, every infidelity exposed, there were ten thousand that went unsuspected.
Every day, I hoped ours would be one of those.
And then one night, my two realities converged.
It wasn’t my proudest moment. It was in mid-July, and Phil had invited me over for an evening drink again.
I’d refused so many of his invitations by then that it was becoming a little ridiculous, and on this night, I felt like I had to say yes.
Sarah and I consulted beforehand and agreed she’d make some excuse to leave the house when I got there, which meant the three of us would only overlap for a few minutes at most. We both assumed we could deal with that level of awkwardness.
We could act our parts, play our roles, and then the discomfort would end.
There was even a certain thrill to the prospect.
What kind of acting chops would we end up having?
It was a lovely night. The sun was bathing the valley in gold, sending long shadows through the streets, and the last midsummer cottonwood fluff floated in the air.
Children were playing hide-and-seek, sending their shrill calls back and forth from their ditches and cubbyholes.
As I climbed the now-familiar stairs, preparing myself for the uneasy scene, I did a quick mental rehearsal, reminding myself to act confidently and look both of them in the eyes.
Or maybe I should avoid Sarah’s eyes, I wasn’t sure.
Was that more natural? In any case, it turned out it didn’t matter.
As soon as Sarah opened the door, I could tell something was off.
“Phil’s sick,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, already playing my part. “Is it bad?”
“Summer flu,” she said. “He’s really out of it. He said he texted you. Maybe he forgot.”
“I didn’t get anything,” I said. “I guess I can come back another night if that’s better?”
“No, no,” she said. “You’re here now. Come on in. It’s fine.”
“You’re sure?” I said.
“Now it’d be weird if you didn’t.”
She opened the door and loudly invited me inside. “Come on in, Arthur!” she said. “Phil’s upstairs in bed! He’s got the flu! He’s sad to miss you!”
Her acting wasn’t very convincing. She was projecting her words much too loudly, practically throwing them up the stairs.
In a more normal voice, I told her that I could come back another time, but caught myself enunciating strangely.
My volume was okay, but I was mumbling out the side of my mouth like James Cagney.
And for the benefit of whom? Phil couldn’t hear us all the way upstairs anyway. We had to relax.
I followed Sarah into the kitchen. It was different than I remembered from the party, not different in itself, but different in my perception.
There was something almost poignant about it now, seen through the lens of our deception.
The machinery of their daily life seemed almost frail, with its old, stained coffee grinder, its fragile dish rack.
So this was the room where they stood around together in the mornings, half-dressed, sleep still pouring off their skin.
This was where they swept up bits of egg and stray dried beans.
It was a scene of lies, but, still, undeniably real.
I stood across the room as Sarah made us both margaritas.
She was wearing a cotton smock, and when the light hit her from behind, the silhouette of her hips and thighs showed through the fabric.
I watched her dividing the limes and inserting each juicy lobe into the press, as together we performed a generic conversation for the body lying upstairs.
We finally started to hit our stride. Our voices and transcript became flawlessly banal.
“We’ve been having a lot of palomas lately,” she said. “Summer is all about tequila around here. Today is a margarita day, though.”
“I just read an article about tequila,” I said. “Actually it was about jimadors, the guys who harvest the agave. They’re very skilled workers, it turns out.”