"Ty," Andrea says.
"Andrea," Ty says.
And then we're on the way to the emergency room, where they've got a stretcher and an IV unit named in honor of me, snuggling, actually snuggling (though Andrea's got her right hand clamped round the pressure point in front of my elbow and Chuy is jerking at the wheel like a Dursban-addled stock-car driver), and for the life of me I just can't seem to recall the name of that woman who talks to the trees. She'll be here tomorrow, though. "I invited her for tomorrow," is the way Andrea puts it, Chuy slithering all over the road as if the car were a big Siamese walking catfish, traffic stalled all the way to Monterey and here we go up on the shoulder-look out, we're coming through. "What do you mean, 'tomorrow'?" I say, and she tightens her grip on the artery running up my arm.
She says — and the wind is raging, the Olfputt pitching, the blood flowing free- "I mean the day after today. Honey."
Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Tokyo, Dhaka, Cairo, Calcutta, Reykjavik, Caracas, Lagos, Guadalajara, Greater Nome, Sakhalinsky, Nanking, Helsinki-all bigger than New York now. Forty-six million in Mexico City. Forty in Sao Paulo. New York doesn't even rank in the top twenty. And how does that make me feel? Old. As if I've outlived my time — and everybody else's. Because the correction is under way-has been under way for some time now. Let's cat each other, that's what I propose — my arm tonight and yours tomorrow-because there's precious little of anything else left. Ecology. What a joke.
I'm not preaching. I'm not going to preach. It's too late for that, and besides which, preaching never did anybody any good anyway. Let me say this, though, for the record-for the better part of my life I was a criminal. Just like you. I lived in the suburbs in a three-thousand — square-foot house with redwood siding and oak floors and an oil burner the size of Texas, drove a classic 1966 Mustang for sport and a Jeep Laredo (red, black leather interior) to take me up to the Adirondacks so I could heft my three-hundred-twenty-dollar Eddie Bauer backpack and commune with the squirrels, muskrats and fishers. I went to the gym. Drank in fern bars. Bought shoes, jackets, sweaters and hair-care products. I guess I was dimly aware-way out there on the periphery of my consciousness-of what I was doing to the poor abused corpus of old mother earth, and 1 did recycle (when I got around to it, which was maybe twice a year), and I thought a lot about packaging. 1 Wore a sweater in the house in winter to conserve energy and turn the flame down on global warming, and still I burned fuel and more fuel, and the trash I generated plugged its own hole in the landfill like a permanent filling in a rotten tooth.
Worse, I accumulated things. They seemed to stick to me, like filings to a magnet, a whole polarized fur of objects radiating from my fingertips in slavish attraction. Paper clips, pins, plastic bags, ancient amplifiers, rusted-out cooking grills. Clothes, books, records, CDs. Cookware, Ginzu knives, food processors, popcorn poppers, coffeemakers, my dead father's overcoats and my dead mother's shoes. I kept a second Mustang, graffitied with rust, out behind the garage, on blocks. There were chairs in the attic that hadn't been warmed by a pair of buttocks in fifty years, trunks of neatly folded shorts and polo shirts I hadn't worn since I was five.
I drove fast, always in a hurry, and stuffed the glove box so full of tickets it looked like a napkin dispenser in a restaurant. I dated (women, whole thundering herds of them, looking-in vain-for another Jane). I parented. Cooked. Cleaned. Managed my dead father's crumbling empire-you've heard of him, Sy Tierwater, developer of tract homes in Westchester and Dutchess Counties? — and paid bills and collected rents and squeezed down the window of my car to add my share of Kleenex, ice-cream sticks and cigarette wrappers to the debris along the streaming sides of the blacktop roads.
Want more? I drank wine, spent money, spoiled my daughter and watched her accumulate things in her turn. And just like you — if you live in the Western world, and I have to assume you do, or how else would you be reading this? — I caused approximately two hundred fifty times the damage to the environment of this tattered, bleeding planet as a Bangladeshi or Balinese, and they do their share, believe me. Or did. But I don't want to get into that.
Let's just say I saw the light-with the help of a good nudge from Andrea, Teo (may he rot in hell or interplanetary space or wherever) and all the other hard chargers down at Earth Forever! Forces were put in motion, gears began to grind. I sold the house, the cars, the decrepit shopping center my father left me, my wind surfer and Adirondack chair and my complete set of bootleg Dylan tapes, all the detritus left behind by the slow-rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth. Friendship. That's what got me into the movement and that's what pushed me way out there on the naked edge of nothing, beyond sense or reason, or even hope. Friendship for the earth. For the trees and shrubs and the native grasses and the antelope on the plain and the kangaroo rats in the desert and everything else that lives and breathes under the sun.
Except people, that is. Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.
I've got no health care, of course-nobody does, the whole system long since gone bankrupt, and don't bother to ask about Social Security — but they're happy to see a paying customer hustling through the emergency-room doors. Whatever it takes — and in this case it won't be much — they know Mac is good for it. Maclovio Pulchris. It's a magical name, better than cash, because you can only carry so much of that-Mac's my Medicare and Social Security, all wrapped up in one. And now I've got Andrea too, a woman who breeds emergencies, one night of love and here we are. She's lending me support-literally-as we crabwalk through the doors, Chuy somewhere behind us, hurtling up the ramp of the parking structure as if he's trying to launch the 4x4 out of the atmosphere. "What's the problem?" The attendant wants to know, a monster of a man who looks vaguely familiar (Swenson's? Last night?), His nose, lips, scalp and forearms a patchwork of skin cancers past and present. "It's nothing, moron: 'Andrea says, and there's that snarl again-" he's just bleeding to death, that's all."
Then it's the ordeal of the forms — there must be twenty, twenty-five pages of them. Andrea squeezes up close beside me, her big thumb still locked in place over the wound, the woman behind the desk yawning, the intercom hissing, somebody strolling off to find a ligature of some sort and wake one of the doctors out of his trance. All the windows are boarded up because they got tired of replacing them every third or fourth day, and the quality of the light is what you might expect from a high-end mausoleum. Depressing. Depressing in the extreme. Just to lighten things up, I make a joke about how it's a good thing Petunia got my left arm or I'd be up shit creek as far as checking off the relevant box is concerned. Nobody laughs. And even here, deep in the recesses of the bleach-rubbed and almost spanking-clean corridors, with six floors of steel and concrete and body fluids above us, I can hear the rain. Ssssssss, it hisses, background music to every mortal drama, ssssssss.
What does it take? Thirty-two stitches and half a mile of gauze, no big deal and no offense, I tell the doctor, but I've been hurt worse. A whole lot worse. I give Andrea a meaningful glance, but her mind is off someplace else. With each stitch, that little burn and the bigger hurt to follow, 1 study her, first in profile and then from the rear as she moves across the room to gaze out the window that isn't a window at all but the naked whorled face of some sort of artificial plywood with predrilled holes for easy application (and there's another business). I still can't get used to her. How can that old lady's face belong to those shoulders and legs? That's what I'm thinking as the doctor — an infant of twenty and — something who probably doesn't even shave yet-sticks his needle in me, and more: If you want to start gauging degrees of pain, what does it mean that she's finally come back?