The shifting sand had turned to a strange soil of packed down vegetation that crunched with dryness as we walked on it, and then to overgrown pasture thick with head-high grass and then, before too long, Natasha and I found ourselves at the edge of a bright forest, a steep woody place under fierce sunlight broken by trees thrusting at odd angles toward the sky.
There was something about the trees, the way they were arranged. And then I realized: this was not a tropical forest, spiny and tough with lianas and vines and big buttress-rooted trunks and thick drops raining from the overhanging leaves. Instead, it was a mix of trees of all species clustered together in arbitrary formations: here a patch of aspens twinkling in the sharp blades of the sun, there a tawny mahogany thick as a bison bursting out of the humus, next to it a Lebanon cedar, a royal palm slim as a rubber band, a grey-black elm patched with pitch, a western hemlock towering over them all.
This was not only not a tropical forest, it was not a natural forest at all, not a logical forest where like-minded species intermingle, where maples grow with oaks and beeches as in New England, or palmettos grow with cecropia and jacaranda as in coastal Mexico, or laurels with pines and pepper trees as in the foothills of the Himalaya. No, this was some monstrous forest, and it spooked me.
There were tropical trees too, mixed in. Natasha and I walked guardedly at the edge of the treeline and up into the shade of the jungle for moments before stepping back out into the sun and sky. There were the angular buttress root of a silver ceiba tree pressing its spiked trunk against an elephantine baobab, next to it a giant sequoia whose fibrous sherry-red trunk was strangely strangled by the grasping aerial roots of a strangler fig, and then a lone mangrove spread spiderlike into a sudden pond of mud and bracken.
The impression was of an unplanned city where makeshift cardboard shacks abutted steel and glass towers and the lichen-encrusted marble colonnades of colonial monuments: here a blue spruce, there a gingko with its fan-like leaves and putrid fruits, and here a larch accompanied by magnolia, tulip trees, a valley oak, a chestnut, an ash, an alder, a guanacaste.
“This is…unnatural,” Natasha said.
“It is that,” I said. “That and more.”
“It’s nice to see some trees, though, isn’t it dad?”
This whole time Natasha seemed as if she’d been getting older. In fact, she had grown taller, her hair had lengthened, her body had stretched and thinned.
“Indeed,” I said. “It is indeed.”
Mystified, we sat down at the base of one of those trees – a royal palm – and Natasha dug in her rucksack for her opaline queen canteen. I put the plant down beside me and she quivered slightly and perked up, and immediately started pushing out her white rhizomes toward the loamy soil.
Natasha looked up at me quizzically.
She was a big girl.
*
And then we heard something startling, both of us at once: a distant rumbling as of thunder, but more persistent, a sound of a stampede, of charging footfalls, multitudes of them, a heaving and groaning accompanied by a higher sound, a shrill cry like animals in panic, and getting louder by the second. The sound was muffled somehow, loud but distant, close by but somehow remote.
“It’s like it’s…on the other side of the veil,” Natasha said. “But what, what is it? And where?”
Suddenly the sound grew deafening, and the earth rumbled beneath and around us. The strange barbed plant shot its feelers into the earth.
Cartoon sequence:
1) Natasha sees out of a corner of her eye: a spark.
2) A flame bursts in the open air and catches: Whoosh!
3) Suddenly it’s as of the very air is aflame.
4) “Fire!!!” Natasha screams.
5) She grips her queen canteen, twists the lid, opens it. “Water, water everywhere!” she hollers, and a cold wind rushes out.
6) She grabs Irving with her free hand. “Irving, down!”
7) The barbed plant quivers, roots itself, and starts to grow, sending tendrils upward like ganglion antennae, forming a cage over Natasha and Irving.
8) The two hunker down into the sand, as an enormous torrent of flame bursts over them like an ocean wave. The fire is monstrous, unrelenting, a wild sea of flame that seems almost animal, almost vindictive in its ferocity. But the plant surrounds them with its wiry stalks and casts the flames away from their bodies. Thanks to the magic of the Queen Canteen they are protected in a bubble of water vapor.
End cartoon sequence
*
The sand is charred and air is still and hot and filled with a thick haze. The motley stand of trees has turned into a forest of blackened toothpicks.
*
Natasha and I opened our eyes onto a scorched earth. The plant had withdrawn its cage from over us, but had grown tall and covered with whiplike shoots that trembled in the hot air.
“What the….? What happened?”
Natasha took a drink from her queen canteen and wiped her mouth on her sleeve and passed the bottle to me and I drank.
“Wow. That was something.”
Natasha periscoped her head to look around at the trees, charred to sticks under the eggshell blue sky. The plant, chlorophyll green, thick with thorns, had grown to the size of a man.
“This plant, dad. What is it?”
“I don’t know. But it saved us. She saved us.”
“Dad, this plant. I think it’s the last green thing.”
“Do you remember the sound, just before the fire?” Natasha said.
“It was horrific,” I said. “Like some kind of blitzkrieg. But what was it?”
“A stampede,” Natasha said firmly. Animals fleeing a conflagration. But in the beyond.”
“ ………….. ”
“It was a clue, dad. A clue to what’s been under our noses all along.”
“What? That an evil genie is out to destroy the world?”
Natasha tugged at the straps of her rucksack, still tightly bound to her, and mused, “Yes and no.”
“Yes it does appear that a powerful djinn or iffrit is … manipulating events in a bad way. But not evil, dadda. I don’t think so. Bad, yes. But evil, I don’t believe it.”
“The struggle between good and evil, my little Natasha, is the fundamental axis of the world. And we are now at ground zero of that struggle.”
“No, dad, you’re mistaken. The struggle between good and evil is the primal disease of the mind. It’s nothing but an illness. A pathology. It’s not real.”
Natasha’d gotten older alright. Her back talk was more reasoned, less…childlike.
“Perhaps, dad, it is only polarity that’s evil –the binary either-or – the measuring of one’s light versus another’s dark, one’s day versus another’s night, the men and the girls and no room for le diferénce,” she said, with a little French accent.
“Vive le diferénce!” I declared, inspired.
“The future is binary,” she continued. “In fact,” she added as an afterthought, “so is the past!”
“Touché,” I replied.
“Anyway…the plant…Do you think she knows good from evil? Or do you think she just…is?”
Was the fire and the desolation getting to her?
“Anyway, dad, that wasn’t my point. My point is, what happened to the animals. To the rhinos, and then all the others. Don’t you see, dad? They were bought. And by being bought, not just bought in their material bodies but bought in their essences, they were emptied of meaning.”
“Emptied of…?”
“Remember the speeches in Cancún? Jane Goodall, trapped and tortured like an Arab at Abu Ghraib?”
“ ………” I did remember. The frightening algal glow, the echo in the cavern of Chicxulub: “We at the World Bank are here with our partners at the World Wildlife Fund to announce the creation of a Wildlife Premium Market Initiative, to firmly establish a price for all living things….”
The words put a pain in my heart.
“Remember, dad: ‘Our dominance! Their misery!’ The orcs?
I shivered as if I’d been stabbed.
*
The plant waved and its tendrils lifted and dropped and it seemed to let off a high piercing note.
Natasha changed her tone.
“Dad, in the Wizard Oz, the lion, the tin man and the scarecrow are all on a quest, correct?”
“Yes…”
“And, for what?”
“For courage.”
“Right, and what else?”
“Well, for a heart, and for a brain.”
“Oh dad. You’re so literal. What else?”
“Uhm. A sense of wholeness?”
“That’s better, and, yes, true, but not the whole truth. Their quest, like all of our quests, was for meaning.”
“Mmmmm.”
“And, animals need meaning too. It may be true – may – that what separates us from the animals, as the animal scientists say, is alternatively an opposable thumb, laughter, tears, self-consciousness, the Will to Power, or the tendency to destroy for destruction’s sake.”
“Or dramatic fakery, as the toad pointed out,” I observed.
“That’s right, dad,” Natasha said. “Animals have none of this. What unites us with the animals is that animals, all animals, need a sense of meaning as deeply as they need air.”
Natasha suddenly broke into rhyme:
“Why does Rilke’s panther pace? Meaning!
What put the smile on the jackal’s face? Meaning!
Who put the Or in Orangatan? Meaning!
Why does the cave bear stick to her clan?”
“Meaning,” I said. “I get it.” Even as my body panicked in the blasted moonscape, I was charmed by my daughter’s genius.
“So, when the Djinn and his evil army sought to put a price on all beings, it caused the animals to vanish. Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She went on: “The economists say that when you give something a price, it gives it value – but in fact, dad, it does the opposite! It empties it of value. It drains it of meaning – evacuates it of its primordial spirit.
“Even in the zoo, the animals are okay – not great, but not entirely alienated. They continue being animals, even if only a shadow of their wild selves. Because even in a zoo, like a kid at boarding school, or an inmate in a prison each animal finds its place – and its meaning – in the community. And in the ecosystem: ruminants browse the grasses to replenish earth’s fertility; lions maintain enough antelopes that the antelopes don’t eat themselves out of house and home; deer eat the manzanita fruit and their digestion germinates the seeds. All of this generates meaning. Without it, well, why go on?”
As the prophet says, there it was.
*
And then a strange sprinkling began from the sky: a flurry of green flakes, like snow but with the color of St Patrick’s Day confetti drifted down from the listless clouds in the china blue sky. It whirled and eddied in currents of air and we watched the strange emerald flakes cover the land like ash at Pompeii.
“But truth is always a matter of reconciling opposites, too, isn’t it dadda?” Natasha said, holding out her hands to catch the green sprinkling snow. “A dialectic: first, thesis; then, anti-thesis; then the conjoining of the two: synthesis. This is where we find ourselves. At the crux of dichotomy, wending toward resolution.”
I looked around at the wasted landscape. At best we were lost and alone in Sumatra with not a soul around to help us get home. At worst, it was the end of the world. Wending toward resolution.
“You’re awfully chipper about it all, aren’t you sweetie?”
“Dad…We’ve been through a lot, haven’t we? I miss mama like crazy, and I know we’re a long way from home…. But I don’t know how else to be. This plant, this strange barbed plant that saved us from the fire…she seems to have the key to our survival…It’s the simplest thing isn’t it?…. The simple fact that life begets life…. That life doesn’t know how else to be, but to be.”
“… the last of life that hasn’t been bought and paid for by the demon banker… “ I said. “The last green thing. As if the key to the treasure, is the treasure itself…”
I uncurled my body and stood up, and Natasha stood up beside me and we admired the green personlike barbed and tendril’d succulent that stood over us both.
“That’s right,” Natasha agreed. “The key to the treasure is the treasure.”
*
The air, already pungent with charcoal, became infused with sulfur…
*
The sultry air coagulated and turned elastic and wove itself into molten pearly shapes: a tree with anthropoid limbs, a hunched black beast, the solid form of a man, seven feet tall with narrow shoulders, and terribly thin. Rather than a business suit, he now appeared wrapped in a sort of toga, but black and vinyl and shimmering with petroleum rainbows. His copper hair, trimmed short, was bristly and thinning and his mouth was hidden beneath his wiry red moustache, and his pale mousy face was the same one that I’d first seen in that casino in Cancún.
The plant shook her tendrils wildly and curled her barbs as that thick smoky voice began to rasp:
“I am King Solomon, returned at last,” said the djinn, smiling menacingly down at us, without appearing to care that we were huddled there. “I am the Prophet Elijah. I am Ephraim, Ezekiel, Tiresius, Tyrannosaurus, Rex…”
He tilted his head and looked about him but his eyes looked right through us.
“I was a Prince of Peace, a Prince of Justice. I served an angry God, and served Him well. But my greed overcame me, and I am as the angel Lucifer, cast into Hell. I am reduced to nothing.”
He paused, and turned his eyes to us. For the first time I noticed that his eyes were two different colors: his left eye was green and appeared completely loose in its socket, as if unhinged; and his right eye was black, expressionless, and dead. He locked us in his gaze.
“Is this the sort of speech you expect of me, Irving? Natasha, dear little one…is this the devil as you have conceived of Him? Or are you puzzled? Perhaps you thought you’d figured out the nature of my game. Or perhaps you realize you are at the end of the road.”
He spread his arms and threw his gaze into the distance and continued his mad ranting: “Now the cities over which I ruled are dead! Now the Kingdom that was given unto me is deserted. Only a blue shimmering wilderness remains. And somewhere round a small, yellow, nameless star there circles, pointlessly, everlastingly, this radioactive earth…”
“You, Natasha, you take me for a vampire, setting my fangs into every being and draining it of meaning, all through the simple act of buying and selling….Well, you may be right. Yesss,” he hissed. “You may be right….”
He took a step toward us and the air rippled around him. The plant whined. Natasha unstrapped her rucksack and brought it around to her front.
“For like a vampire, my dominance is …. your misery.”