Chapter Fourteen: Z

Z has yet to adjust to their freedom. If that’s what this is. Freedom? 

“I would say, it feels more like free fall,” they try to articulate it for Ann Tsing, who has just flown in from Los Angeles to shadow them for the week.

“I’m willing,” they said when she called with her proposal, to forsake her planned article on One Point Five in favor of a profile of Z, “I just have to say, I have to ask: where’s the story? I mean, with them, you’ve got it, your saviors. They’re aces. Let me tell you! This action in Alaska? It’s going to be one for the books. And, a real encapsulation of our current moment. One indigenous community organizing against the might of an empire? I mean, talk about symbolic. Talk about a story! This one’s going to have it all—the drama, the pathos, the landscape. A showdown at, basically, the top of the world. Ann, why would you walk away from that?” 

Ann laughed. “Are you sure you quit the group?”

Z laughed, too. “You know how old habits die.”

“Sure, sure. But, there’s a reason you’re not going to be there, right? I think the question is, the question that interests me is: Why are you walking away from all that?”

For twenty years it’s been Z’s job to talk to journalists. But not about themself! A mouthpiece for the movement, that’s been their gig—advocate, storyteller, never the story. It feels strange to have the spotlight swing around to them now. Strange, but not entirely unpleasant. 

“I guess…” they tried to think of a gentler way to say it than, I’ve lost all hope, but, “I’ve lost all hope,” they answered. Why mince words? “Not to be dramatic. Obviously, I can still see the beauty in what they’re doing. The struggle. It was my struggle, too. For forever. It was my whole life, right? But—and I wish this wasn’t true, Ann, I wish I still believed—but I can’t believe. I can’t make myself. Not anymore. I look at the science, I look at the state of the world, and I can’t see any way we survive. So I guess I finally asked: Why keep trying? What good does it do? I guess I walked away because I think, if these are the end of days—and I’m sorry but I think they are—there’s got to be a better way to spend them.” 

“Yes,” said Ann. “Yes, exactly. That’s the story I’m after.”

“You want the deserter’s tale.” 

“Is that how you think of yourself? The deserter?” 

“Oh, I don’t mean to say I’m a traitor, exactly. I mean, I sometimes feel like one. I feel guilty, certainly. I’m walking away from the fight, right? And I’m walking away from my friends. So…well, yes. That is how I think of myself. Why am I trying to backpedal? That’s literally who I am.” 

“Desertion can be a noble choice.” 

“Oh, I’m not noble. I’m not ignoble either. But there’s no heroism, no glory, no particular goodness in what I’m doing. I’m just doing what I have to do, because it’s the only honest action I can take.” 

“Honesty is important to you, then?” 

That Ann. Always observing. Always questioning. Always burrowing in deeper to the meaning of things. A little like watching a surgeon cut you open, mesmerizing to observe as long as you didn’t think about whose body was on the table. 

“But wait!” They said. “You never answered my question. Why, Ann? I still don’t understand. Why me?”

“Well,” Ann said, taking an audible breath, “if honesty is what you want, alright. Here it is: I read that report. You know, the IPCC AR6 S-whatever? I read it. Or, I read most of it. I got the gist. And the gist seems to be: you’re right. We’re screwed. And, frankly, I don’t know what to do with that information.”

“If you’re looking for answers I have to tell you, I don’t know what to do with it either. I mean, I see why maybe I should, since I’ve been thinking about the climate crisis so seriously for so long. But I never let myself think about, like, What if we failed? Never considered what I would, or should, do then. I’m just floundering in the dark here, that’s all.” 

“So, your metaphor has shifted,” she says now, reminding them of their inaugural conversation.

They’re strolling through McCarren Park, on a tour of Z’s first New York neighborhood, en route to lunch at Five Leaves, one of their original favorites. “From stumbling in the dark to free fall, that’s some kind of shift. A little lighter, a little brighter, maybe?”

“A little more deadly?” 

“Also that.” 

“Yeah, I stumbled around, found a doorknob and stepped out into thin air!”

They both laugh. Z loves Ann’s laugh, they realize, a sort of awkward sound, unmodulated, contrasting with the careful precision of her inquiry, reminding them of the guttural call of the great blue heron that clashes so glaringly with the bird’s elegant bearing. 

“Okay, no, but tell me about it,” Ann says. “What does it feel like, this free fall of yours, exactly?” 

“Well,” they take a minute to think, appreciating as they do the summer style of the kids—the twenty-somethings—lounging on their blankets, tossing frisbees, kissing on benches, living their lives, as Z did once upon a time, “Well, I’m in the clouds. Which is sort of nice, right? Better than the dark for sure. A sensation of floating. An illusion of peace. This soft white light all around me. Taken moment to moment, I could confuse it for pleasure, this uncommitted living, this lack of obligation. Like, hey, a vacation! A reprieve.

“But I can’t forget gravity. I know this drifting is just temporary. Is, ultimately, illusory. I know I’m falling. I know the ground is somewhere. Probably coming up fast. And, did I pack a parachute? Did I pack it right? When the time comes to pull the cord, will it work? Or is the conclusion of this story that I crash into the Earth and I’m wrecked beyond repair?

“Can there be any other conclusion? Considering the laws of physics.”

“Maybe,” Ann suggests with a smile, “maybe it’s not that you’ve got a parachute. Maybe this is when you find out you’ve got wings. Or, you know, grow them.” 

Z laughs, imagining it. “Time to turn bird.” 

They laugh, but it gets them thinking. What would it mean, to learn to fly? Mapping this metaphor onto their life, what would wings be? It’s true, isn’t it? The time for parachutes is over. If they don’t want to crash, don’t they have to transform? Become a kind of being they’ve never been. Develop skills they’ve never had, or had but never exercised. 

How to fly? they slip the Moleskine from their back pocket to jot it down. 

At lunch, seated outside under the awning, in the full glory of this August afternoon, Ann guides them back in time with questions about Z’s Alabama youth, their collegiate era of independence, the first trailblazing years of One Point Five…the long and winding road of their becoming. 

She doesn’t ask them, What will you do next? What will you do instead? But the question hangs in the air. Every instant implies it. 

It has, of course, occurred to them that the question is a trap. That this belief in the necessity of doing something is the very thing that got them into this predicament—into this free fall—in the first place. Do something! The activist’s credo. But isn’t it likewise the capitalist’s command? Do your work!

They consider Audre Lorde’s famous line, tattooed in their mind, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Is it possible that action itself is one of the master’s tools? Is this why generation after generation of freedom fighters have only ever made the most halting, the most incremental progress? Because they’ve been making too much effort?  

It’s an absurd suggestion. What, besides effort, could produce change? But then, why has it been so difficult? When so many good people have fought so hard for so long? Could there be another way? Some secret method they’ve been missing. Like Ann’s suggestion of flight—an option they failed to consider. An option that seemed impossible. But maybe it’s not?

“Non-doing,” Ann says when they relate these machinations to her, walking back through the park toward the subway. “You don’t want to be a bird, you want to be a Taoist. Although, maybe that’s not so different.”

Z read the Tao Te Ching in college, in an “Intro to Eastern Religion” seminar their sophomore year, back when they were searching for purpose, back before they’d found the movement. 

“I loved it, but I didn’t understand it, really. I mean, it had this ring of truth, right? I believed its words were wisdom. But I didn’t see how to apply what felt like abstractions to my actual life.” 

Ann makes a small sound that sounds like agreement. “It can feel like a riddle, I think. It’s so teeming with paradox. Or, seeming paradox.” 

“Beyond logic, like.”

“Exactly.” 

“I wonder what I’d make of it now.” 

They leave Ann at the Bedford L. She has an evening meeting in NoLiTa with some industry pals, “A last bit of business, then I’m entirely yours,” but instead of descending with her they decide to keep strolling down Bedford to Spoonbill & Sugartown, another favorite place they’d almost forgotten, to look for a copy of the Tao.

Every bookstore is a blessing, but some bookstores are better than others, in direct proportion to how much they exist to serve the creative spirit, as opposed to the capitalist machine. Ask: is your bookstore more like the Met—where you can pay what you want and wander for hours in awe—or is it more like Whole Foods, a marketplace where, yes, you can buy something healthy, but you can’t feed yourself without lining Jeff Bezos’ pockets?

Like a museum or a cathedral or a park, that’s how Z thinks of Spoonbill. As a space where all are welcome to enter in, to wonder and to worship, to commune with their humanity, to feel their place in the cosmos. 

Stepping across the threshold, they exhale.

Instead of making straight for Religion, they begin a slow circuit of the bookstore’s perimeter. Browsing, taking their time, head tilted to read titles, inadvertent smile widening, their arms begin to fill: Robert AF Thurman’s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and, yes, Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. Books all of a piece. Proof of a mind—proof of a spirit—in search. 

In search of what? Z imagines Ann asking. 

Why, in search of what to search for, of course! And they imagine her laughing at that, her unguarded heron’s squawk, a sound they hope to hear more of. 

Back on the street, back amid the hustle and bustle, the sun is still high in the sky and the day is far too perfect to go underground. And, hey, they don’t have to. They have no agenda and they have no obligation. For today, at least, and for the next little while—Could it be, from now on?—they don’t have to do or say or think anything they don’t want to. 

Were you doing something you didn’t want to, then, when you worked for One Point Five? Again, they imagine what Ann might ask. 

It’s a confusing question. Because, of course they wanted to be doing what they were doing. Right? Working alongside their friends to try to save the world? What could be better than that? And, in the early days, it was the best. Their scrappy little band of idealists keeping impossible hours, dreaming impossible dreams, certain that their love and dedication would be enough to change the course of history. Oh yes, their whole heart was in their work at the beginning. 

When exactly did that change? Do you know what changed it? 

It must have happened gradually, imperceptibly. Somewhere along the way, their calling turned into a job, became rote, lost its joy. 

And if it hadn’t? If you’d realized the futility of the work, the same way you did, but you were still enjoying it, would you have stayed?

Gosh, would they? Z fully stops walking at the thought. Did they quit One Point Five just because they weren’t having fun? 

Or maybe you stopped having fun because the work felt futile? 

The chicken or the egg? Another riddle in a day full of riddles. Z looks around at where they’ve got to while they’ve been carrying on this imaginary conversation. They’ve been walking south, and now they’re a block from the Williamsburg Bridge, an invitation they can hardly refuse. 

When their phone rings, half way across, they expect it to be Ann. But instead it’s their Aunt Linda, calling from North Carolina. 

“Auntie!” Z answers instantly with the automatic joy Linda elicits. 

Growing up, Z hardly knew their aunt. She appeared only sporadically, at the most significant family events—weddings, funerals, that one Thanksgiving when Uncle Mark was just back from rehab and everyone was making an extra effort. Black sheep was the nicest thing whispered, not so quietly, behind her back. 

But this aspersion, as far as Z was concerned, only added to her mystery. Who was this bohemian with the feather braided into her hair, crossing her arms when the priest said to pray, looking askance at every buffet, this vegetarian in a family of carnivores, this peacenik in a family that prized its right to bear arms, this atheist in a family of bible thumpers, who said little to Z on those rare occasions when they met, but every year on their birthday sent a donation in their name to Save the Whales or Earth First! or the ALF. 

Their brief interactions provided few clues. And so she remained a mystery until their sophomore spring, that pivotal semester when they found the movement and, not unrelatedly, found the courage to proclaim the truth of their identity. It was the week following that disastrous phone call with their parents, when they’d informed them they had changed their name and got a dial tone in response, that Linda rang them up. They hadn’t known she had their number. 

“Your mother tells me you’re having an identity crisis.” Linda had never been one for pleasantries. 

“You talked to my mother?” This alone was news. 

“Oh, she likes to phone me when she’s got something to get off her chest that she can’t tell the ladies.”  

Z hadn’t known this, but it did sound like their mother. Perennially worried what the neighbors might think.

“I’m her confessor,” Linda said. 

Z choked back a laugh that their aunt ignored.  

“I told her,” she continued, “I thought that was wonderful. And now I’m telling you. Well done for knowing yourself, Z.” 

It was the first time a member of their family had spoken their chosen name aloud, and Z promptly burst into tears. Which is how, in an instant, a friendship was born, a bond cemented the following summer when Z took refuge in a spare room on the third floor of the dilapidated old Victorian Linda shared with her best friend—Linda Two in Z’s lexicon—and a revolving cast of wild animals whom the women rescued and rehabilitated, on an island in the Outer Banks. 

“How are you, Auntie!?” Z shouts to be heard over the passing train and the steady flow of cars below them. 

“Never mind!” Linda’s practically shouting herself. “We’ve got a crisis!” And, breathlessly she tells the tale of the approaching hurricane, of Linda Two’s confessed prognosis, of her refusal to evacuate. 

“I don’t think I can get her to leave,” Linda says. “I’ve pleaded, I’ve begged. She’s made up her mind. So, I’m going to have to stay with her. That’s why I called. I wanted you to know, Z—it’s so important that you know—I love you. Big time. I’m so proud of you! All you’ve done, but especially who you are.” 

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, Auntie! Why does it sound like you’re saying goodbye?”

“A precaution, that’s all. You never know, with these storms…” 

“Auntie, you have to evacuate.” 

They say it, but they know full well she won’t. And they know why. It’s the same reason that, the minute they get off this call, they’re going to run the remaining length of this bridge and hail a cab and get to their car and start driving south, to persuade both Lindas to leave the island or else ride out the hurricane with them: love. 

There’s no riddle now, no question of their purpose. It doesn’t matter if the world is ending or if it isn’t. They text Ann their apology, clutch their books to their chest and fly.