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By Root 1464 0

and recently; Harvard in the eighties and nineties—were places where environmentalism had a modest presence, academically and publicly, and his work had tended in other directions, toward questions of political and social selfhood, male identity mixed with sex and a smidgen of Marx. But he was a farmer by birth, a biologist by undergraduate degree, a hippie by year of birth, and a diligent student of Emerson and Thoreau, and so Owen’s growing and insistent interest in ecology was easy for him to assimilate. Perhaps he was a trend jumper, in terms of intellectual preoccupations, a humanist back when humanity was popular, now moved on to bigger things, but certain trends were better jumped late than never.

“Now that I think about it,” Owen said, “this whole building’s on one thermostat, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So every night and all weekend, when there’s nobody downstairs, the whole building gets heated just for you. And for me, sometimes. Which must be terrifically wasteful, given how drafty this place is and how old the furnace must be. You’d be better off with the house.”

“Yeah,” said Affenlight, “but they’d probably leave the heat on all the time anyway.”

“Who’s they? It’s your college.”

It wasn’t quite that simple, but Affenlight couldn’t disagree with the principle. Owen began enthusiastically concocting plots for the further greening of Westish, and for the installation of solar panels on Affenlight’s new house. Affenlight loved it when Owen grew enthusiastic, he even loved the plots, but his mind kept drifting away, away, away. Away to Pella. He was buying the house for her, in hopes that she would stay with him for four years. Or three—she might want to graduate in three. And then she could move on to grad school at Harvard or Yale, or even Stanford if she wished. Affenlight disliked the thought of sending her back to California, against which he harbored a grudge even though it was the source of Owen, because California had already once swallowed up Pella and kept her for four long years.

Not that grad school was the only respectable path in life; perhaps Pella would devise other plans. Affenlight, for his part, planned only to not be overbearing. She could visit the house whenever she liked—could come over for dinner, for pumpkin soup. Her rooms upstairs, should she choose to use them; his rooms down. Owen was right, it was a lot of space for two people, one of whom didn’t even live there, but the solar panels! He would install the solar panels, cost be damned, even if the cost-benefit analysis declared that they wouldn’t pay off until long after his projected life span had expired. He would outlive the actuaries’ projections, would leave the actuaries dejected and abashed at their own uselessness, would remain on this marvelous earth until his ingenious, responsible, not-quite-prohibitively-expensive solar panels had done the work of a thousand, of ten thousand, barrels of criminal oil. And by that time Owen and Pella would be nearing middle age themselves, and global warming—as Owen was now saying, though Affenlight was no longer more than half listening—would have accelerated its decimation of the world’s poor equatorial regions, and the true geopolitical shitstorm—as Owen was now saying, and Affenlight’s ears perked up because Owen rarely cursed—would be under way. Even as sleep closed in on Affenlight and expanded the realm of what was possible to include the stuff of dreams, there was no real way to incorporate Owen’s words into a rosy picture of what the world would be like after he, Affenlight, was gone, a world in which Pella and Owen, and any children Pella might someday have, would have to live, but at least he could bequeath to her (and maybe to them both, to share in some way, because who knew but that they’d eventually become close friends) a pretty white solar-paneled house near the lake in northeastern Wisconsin, and as the summers spoiled and the coasts flooded and the monocrops failed and the powers that be squabbled and panicked, as Owen was now describing in fearsome detail in his sonorous