Denzel shrugged. “I wash my hands of it, Gerald. Also, we’re all getting hungry.”

“Hey, Park,” I called, as if the Asian were half a block away, “you didn’t tell me if you voted. Did you vote? And how did you vote? As a feminist, I want to know if you believe a woman has the right to choose.”

Ava turned to Denzel. “This asshole? He’s your buddy?”

“None of your business,” Park said. “This is still the United States, Gerald.”

“Are you sure about that?” I said. “Have you been paying attention lately?”

Ava walked back to the deck very slowly, as if she didn’t know the way or was terrified she might trip on a blade of grass. I watched her take her time.

Denzel crowded me. “Let’s go cook some food,” he said. My blood rose and I nudged him hard. I remembered how a friend, after two years in the military, told me that overseas under fire he could keep his cool most of the time, but now and then he saw red mist instead of air and went batshit crazy. “Hey, Park,” I shouted. “When the cops arrive, I’m going to ask them to take a look at your papers. Are you legal, my friend?”

The blood drained from Denzel’s face. “A bridge too far,” he said. He retreated and followed the mysterious Ava across the green lawn to the deck. They all sat there on deck chairs as if on the Titanic. Louise opened two more bottles of wine. I expected that she was unhappy with me. The wine would help with that.

Park crossed his arms, checked his watch. For the next ten minutes, until the constabulary arrived, I lectured him on nature, ecology, and the secret life of trees. I told him about the root system that was crying out in pain. I told him the tree was sending out a banshee wail to every other tree. “That tree is a magnificent woman,” I said. “Imagine if I cut your wife’s throat with a slice-and-dice knife. That tree is about to feel the way you would feel if I did that.”

“Is that something you might do, Gerald?” Park said, his vocal fry revealing his stress.

“Imagine it,” I said. “Imagine how that would feel.”

The cop car arrived and pulled into a vacant spot next to Fred’s tree truck. Fred, seeing the cavalry, started up his chain saw, moved to the oak, and made a cut into the trunk away from the house at an angle from above. It was a deep gash, maybe a quarter of the way into the gnarled trunk, just below a burl that might be saved and polished and made into an ashtray.

I walked over to Fred and reached out to grab him at the elbow of the hand holding the saw, but Peter—it was Peter in the cop car, burly Peter with his cross around his mottled neck as if he was the disciple and not a local rube with his belly jingling like a cow’s udder—wrenched me from behind, threw me down, and fell on top of me like a sack of grain. He cuffed me. “What the fuck,” I said, feeling my shoulder wrench, breathing in the smell of grass and soil, and turning my head to one side to catch my breath. “Get the hell off me, Pumpkin Eater.”

Breathing hard, Peter pulled himself up, fiddled with his uniform some, and then helped me to my feet, wrenching me up with the help of the handcuffs, which caused searing pain. For the next twenty minutes, after I caught my breath, there was a heated discussion. “Listen,” Peter finally said, “this tree is entirely in his yard. This community does not have a heritage tree ordnance. I looked it up. The trunk of this tree stands completely on Park’s land. That means it belongs exclusively to him.”

“The root system,” I said. “You’re forgetting the roots.”

Peter stared me down and continued. “If you had wanted to protect this tree, you could have brought it up to the homeowner’s association. You didn’t. Now, sir, it’s too late. Mr. Park has the right to do what he’s doing.” He caught his breath. He was winded. “Besides, don’t you folks—don’t all of us?—have more important things to worry about these days?”

“It’s murder, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re condoning murder, aren’t you?”

Peter shrugged and raised his eyes to heaven. He conferred with Park. He blew out a deep breath and perp-walked me not to his car but to my deck, where a G&T, the ice cubes melted, still sat on the round table beside my sun chair. I turned in time to see Fred make another gash, this one horizontal, in the bur oak deep enough to meet the first cut, which really is the deepest, I thought, and made a notch so that the oak would fall like a shot.

Ava was far away, in another country, the Boundary Waters maybe, her eyes bright, polychromatic. “You’re lit up, aren’t you?” I said. “Wish I was too.” She didn’t hear me, but the others wouldn’t look my way. Even so, they made my case with due diligence to Peter that seeing a resplendent oak cut down in the prime of its long life drove a stake through my heart that had to bleed when it was pulled out. “Damn right,” I muttered, though now, embarrassed myself, my voice sounded feeble. I had nothing more to say. Louise smiled as if one of our knock-down arguments had gone in her favor. “Gerry means well,” she said. She smiled sweetly, but I could tell she wanted to say something mean. And would, later, when we were alone.

“This settled, then?” Peter said. “Park won’t have to call me back?” We all agreed. Peter uncuffed me. “Sorry about that, sir,” he said. He held out his hand.

“Hell,” I said. I took it.

He shambled across the lawn to Park. They talked as if discussing the result of a blind date, whether any sparks had been struck, and then Peter turned to Fred and gave him a thumbs-up.

Peter and Park continued their talk. Both nodded twice. They shook hands once. Peter came back to us, and I laughed at his Santa Claus belly. “Santa Claus,” I said with bitterness, “about to give me a gift.” That’s what he did. “Mr. Park has agreed not to press charges,” he said. He had a high-pitched voice that sounded like the squeal of a mouse and made me laugh. It wasn’t a mean laugh. Such a big, clumsy man, such a tiny voice. “You know, I could charge you anyway if I feel like it. Public nuisance. Harassment. I’m only being nice for the sake of the neighborhood. This is one of the few that’s still intact.”

“Keep the peace and all that?” I said. Louise, sitting next to me in her own chair, pinched me hard. I felt emasculated and remembered what Ava had said about my wife’s plans. Surely it was BS. “There’s nothing to charge me with, and Park knows it.”

Peter shrugged again; it was his conflict-resolution gesture. I could see Park stare my way with a smirk on his face and thought about charging across the lawn like a gorilla. But I’m not that—a gorilla, I mean—and so I held my place, stewing in my own juices, the steak still not grilled.

In the middle of this mental hullabaloo, the tree fell with an anticlimactic whoosh, hardly the earth-shaking atrocity I had imagined. But bad enough. The earth shook beneath my feet.

Bad enough.

I nodded and waved a hand like a wand. “Look over there.” He did. I had to admire his equanimity. He could have put me in cuffs again just for the hell of it, to show me where things were at. My insides were boiling, but outside I was calm. My heart beat like a time machine taking me into a future I could only fear. I could see Peter pat himself on the back without moving a muscle. Another page from the new conflict-resolution package the local force received after a local young man in the right place at the wrong time was shot over nothing. “You see what I see?”

He pulled an ear as if turning on his battery and frowned. I nodded again. “Of course you do,” I said. “You know what you see? Absence. There was presence there and now there’s absence. Think of that when you wake at two in the morning to eat a doughnut. The something that was and the nothing that is.”

“You know what I see, dude?” Ava said. “A line of trees on the horizon—oaks, maple, birch, even a healthy elm or two. Who gets to have those anymore? Appreciate what you got.” She was talking about the faraway tree line a half mile beyond Park’s place that separated our tract neighborhood from farmland.

“We’ve had reports of Marauders coming this way,” Peter said. “If I were you, I’d make sure those armored vehicles are in place tonight.”

There was a stump and a dead tree cut into pieces where the bur oak had been. It was private property and Park, whether he voted or not, could do with it what he wanted. Soon Fred would return with a stump grinder. In a day or a week there would be nothing but new grass seed where the majestic tree had stood its ground for so many years. Park could burn the wood from the oak in his fireplace.

Peter drove away in his constabulary car.

“Dude,” Ava said, very relaxed after another long trip to the bathroom inside the house. “People tell me you’re the man when it comes to steak. How about it? We’re starving.”

“Coming right up,” I said. I’ve worked with junkies in the past. These days, who hasn’t? I had no intention of starting anything. Even so, Bobbi stepped between us. Louise buried her face in her hands. Denzel folded his arms, turned, and stared into the middle distance. Latesha was half-dozing on the chaise longue. Ava grinned. “Whatever gets us through the days, right?”

I grilled the steak and salmon. We went inside and ate and drank and came back out, woozy with booze and protein, to sit and stare at the place where the tree had been. Louise brought out homemade rhubarb pie and a bottle of chilled dessert wine and five long-stemmed glasses, but the mood of the evening was dead. The five of them drank wine. I had a cognac. The mysterious Ava disappeared again into the house. When she returned, her skin almost glowed in the dark. Those blue eyes had a light in them that wouldn’t go away. Whatever she stared at didn’t have anything to do with us.

Past the dead tree, along the tree line where the houses stopped, armored vehicles groaned into their designated slots. The mercenaries we had hired eased out of the vehicles. One of them turned on some music—hard stuff, drums and shouts, some kind of call-and-response. We sipped our drinks and listened.

The oak in Park’s yard was the first of many deaths in the neighborhood.

What’s Good for the Goose Is Good for the Baba Ghanoush

This is the tale about what happened when Frankenstein (aka Frankincense), the former talk show host, lately a volunteer on the border, where he worked with an endless stream of battered refugees, most of them kids, came out of retirement. Once an acclaimed broadcaster, his gray beard now a mess, he agreed to do a talk show, his forte, at the despoiled civic center in Fargo, North Dakota. It became what we now call the Week of Riots. He still had his signature low-pitched gravelly bass voice. His gray hair, once jet black, became so again, stained for the occasion, but he didn’t touch what he called his baba ghanoush beard. His manner could still be smooth like flaxen grains of winter wheat when stimulated by an audience of any kind, the undercurrent of his laugh like the chop on a north Minnesota lake in a brisk wind. Or so we hoped.

His short, bald beauty of a buddy, Faust (aka Einstein) agreed to ride sidesaddle on stage, like in the old days, when talk show hosts had sidekicks, to provide wit and finesse if the script came apart, as it often did, making improvisation a must, but I grimaced at the thought. Faust had developed a tic as he aged that some compared to Tourette’s syndrome, but Tourette’s is an affliction, and Faust claimed that his incessant vulgarity was personal choice, a reaction to the times. Such language in Fargo, a town infantilized by church and state, could make for humiliation, disruption, chaos, and violence—maybe in that order, maybe not.

Even so, it was hope they sold. The two had lost a step from the stand-up glory days of long ago, when we compared them to Carson and Colbert, to Steve Allen and Richard Pryor, to Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, miscreants of a different order of insanity, but Frankenstein and Faust hadn’t lost their comic timing. That was their pitch. Entertainers were great like that after the country lost its chutzpah and embraced its status as a banana republic, refusing to nationalize the banks or hold to account the crooks who decided the entire economy and all of its treasures belonged to the privileged few. Pandemics, autocratic leadership, minority rule, racial and ethnic strife, sexism, indentured servitude, and climate change disasters like you wouldn’t believe. Women with minds of their own forced to have kids whether they wanted them or not. The troupers like Frankenstein and Faust did what they could to boost morale, working off the books for the good of us all, while the armed troopers and Militias, not to mention Marauders, busted heads and drank blood if that was the only nourishment at hand. Some in the Dakotas wore helmets with horns that made them look like the Vikings of old from the ancient Norwegian sagas. Ragnarok indeed: the Twilight of the Gods (also known as the despoilation of planet Earth).

In their glory days, they sometimes billed themselves as Frankenstein and Faust, sometimes as Frankincense and Einstein, depending on the time of year. The big Christmas fete that featured an a cappella boy band of aging boomers was a crowd favorite. Because nostalgia. It brought out the Einstein in Faust and the Frankincense in Frankenstein. When they laughed, the crowd laughed with them. If they cried, which they seldom did, they would cry for us all, a great, weeping hullabaloo.

Only Frankenstein’s personal friends knew his given name, and even most of them called him Frankie. When he wasn’t on the border, he resided in an intentional community near Tulsa, what we once called a commune, where he found, he claimed, off-scale contentment milking goats, shearing sheep—his belly getting beach-ball big, as though pregnant—and sitting on a rocking chair in his happy place.

The truth, as I recall, was not like that. Everybody lied. It was the new truth.

Faust spent time there too, when he wasn’t teaching local Fargo kids the new kinds of stuff they needed to know to survive in a failed state. Most Americans were no longer allowed to leave its borders. They carried too much disease. The rest of the world, except for the other failed states, was aghast at the recklessness, kinkiness, and complete irresponsibility of the millions of Americans whose prefrontal cortexes, the part of the brain that includes executive functions, including impulse control, had regressed. Many had the brains of irrepressible juvenile delinquents. They lived in a dystopia and called it exceptionalism. It was a national disease.

I call it Fantasyland. Heimlich, you might ask me, why? This story is the reason.

“They say go to Tulsa,” Faust said, back in Fargo and happy to be home. “Tulsa. Know what, friend? I’ve been to Tulsa. It’s a shithole.”

That wasn’t quite right. I too had joined that intentional community in hopes of finding peace and because, naively, I trusted Frankenstein and Faust not to lead me astray. There had been ninety of us living in the rugged foothills of eastern Oklahoma, what some call Green Country in those parts. All types, all kinds of creatures supposedly upholding the Ten Commandments but actually fornicating for the Lord, which they called the Eleventh Commandment. They named Frankenstein “Grandpa Frankincense,” something to do with Christmas bounty and his leadership style. I was known as “Little Heimlich from North Dakota.” I didn’t mind it much. Didn’t like it much, either. Faust often went by “Uncle Einstein” or “Brother Faust,” depending whether he was being straight-out smart or just smartass. His own forte is telling shaggy dog stories that never stop. The “Never Ending Book,” he calls it.

Sometimes I’d have to call out both of his names—”Faust! Einstein!”—to get his attention. “What say?” he’d answer. If he answered. “Who the fuck is that calling me way the fuck from Fargo? What are you doing here, Little Heimlich?”