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happened two years
before—the onset of dry weather conditions, combined with El Niño , resulted in an extraordinary explosion of color, where tens of thousands of trees in these forests, many of them a hundred and twenty or thirty feet high, and any single one of them bearing four million flowers, burst into bloom. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.
    â€œFour million?” Seana said. “You counted?”
    â€œEstimated,” I said.
    â€œBut these trees are dying—they’re being logged away to make room for your palm oil plantations, yes?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œPalm oil was used in the making of napalm, wasn’t it?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œSo you are a shit,” she said.
    â€œProbably. Still, I was wondering if you’d like to visit the forests with me and get to see them before they’re gone?”
    â€œSure,” she said. And then: “‘ Death is the mother of beauty,’ right?”
    â€œMax used to say the same thing—a line from a poem, right?”
    â€œâ€˜Sunday Morning,’ by Wallace Stevens—I heard the lines from Max the first time too. But you say you don’t feel guilty?”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œAbout taking pleasure from seeing the beauty of these forests because you know they’re dying.”
    â€œWhat good would guilt do?”
    â€œActually,” she said, “and take it from an Irish girl who knows about such matters—when it’s not self-destructive, guilt can be a splendid muse.”
    â€œIn some places I’ve been to in Borneo,” I said, “there can be more than seven hundred different species of trees in a twenty-five acre plot, which is more than the total number of tree species in the United States and Canada combined.”
    â€œImpressive.”

    â€œIt’s one reason—being able to get to Borneo easily and often—I’ve stayed at the job in Singapore.”
    â€œAnd you’d go there—to Borneo—if you knew you were dying, yes?”
    â€œYes.”
    Seana was quiet for a while, after which she said she’d come to the conclusion it would be a good idea if I was the one who wrote Charlie’s Story , that she liked listening to me talk—to what she called the sweet, innocent timbre of my voice—and that maybe I could make this voice work on the page.
    â€œI’m not as smart or talented as Max,” I said.
    â€œNeither am I.”
    â€œNot so,” I said.
    â€œWell, who knows, Charlie?” she said. “But you do have the main thing most writers begin with: you loved to read when you were young. Because no matter what other reasons writers may give for why they write, most of them, in the end, will tell you that what made them want to be writers was that they loved to read when they were kids, and that they wanted to be able some day to write books that would be for others like the books they’d loved when they were growing up.”
    â€œMax used to say pretty much the same thing when people asked him why he wrote,” I said.
    â€œOh yes,” Seana said. “And your father said you had a great thirst for advenure, right? So what could be more of an adventure than making up a story—creating a world that never actually existed, and peopling it with imaginary people you come to care about more than you often care about people you know, and all the while—all the while, Charlie—never knowing what’s going to happen to them next?”
    â€œWhen you start writing your novels, you really don’t know what’s going to happen to the people in it?”
    â€œNo,” Seana said.
    â€œSounds good to me,” I said.

    â€œSome writers—Nabokov most famously—claim they always know what’s going to happen next—that a writer is like an omniscient god who controls the destinies of all his characters.”
    â€œDoesn’t