The Overstory

  In the spring, he takes a .22 out into the brush. But he can’t pull the trigger, even on a lame hare. There’s something wrong with him, he is aware. When his employers return in early summer, he thanks them and quits. He’s not sure where he’s going. Since his last flight as a loadmaster, such knowledge has been an impossible luxury.

  He wants to keep heading west. Trouble is, the only strip still west of him feels like going east again. And yet he’s got his used but solid F100, new tires, a fair amount of coin, his veteran’s disability, and a friend in Eugene. Beautiful back roads lead through the mountains all the way to Boise and beyond. Life is as good as it has been since he fell out of the sky and into the banyan. The truck radio drifts in and out through the canyons, like the songs are coming from the moon. High lonesome blending into techno. He’s not listening anyway. He’s trancing out on the miles-long walls of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir. He pulls off onto the shoulder to relieve himself. Out here on these ridges, he could pee on the highway’s center line and humanity would be none the wiser. But savagery is a slippery slope, as he has often read to the horses. He steps off the road and into the woods.

  And there, flag at half mast, eyes toward the wilderness, waiting for his bladder to lift the lockdown, Douglas Pavlicek sees slabs of light through the trunks where there should be shadow all the way to the forest’s heart. He zips and investigates. Walks deeper into the undergrowth, only deeper in turns out to be farther out. The shortest of hikes, and he pops out again into . . . you can’t even call it a clearing. Call it the moon. A stumpy desolation spreads in front of him. The ground bleeds reddish slag mixed with sawdust and slash. Every direction for as far as he can see resembles a gigantic plucked fowl. It’s like the alien death rays have hit, and the world is asking permission to end. Only one thing in his experience comes even close: the patches of jungle that he, Dow, and Monsanto helped to clear. But this clearing is much more efficient.

  He stumbles back through the curtain of concealing trees, crosses the road, and peers through the woods on the other side. More moonscape stretches down the mountainside. He starts up the truck and drives. The route looks like forest, mile after emerald mile. But Douggie sees through the illusion now. He’s driving through the thinnest artery of pretend life, a scrim hiding a bomb crater as big as a sovereign state. The forest is pure prop, a piece of clever artistry. The trees are like a few dozen movie extras hired to fill a tight shot and pretend to be New York.

  He stops at a gas station to tank up. He asks the cashier, “Have they been clear-cutting, up the valley?”

  The man takes Douggie’s silver dollars. “Shit, yeah.”

  “And hiding it behind a little voter’s curtain?”

  “They’re called beauty strips. Vista corridors.”

  “But . . . isn’t that all national forest?”

  The cashier just stares, like maybe there’s some trick to the question’s sheer stupidity.

  “I thought national forest was protected land.”

  The cashier blows a raspberry big as a pineapple. “You’re thinking national parks. National forest’s job is to get the cut out, cheap. To whoever’s buying.”

  Well—education run amok. Douglas makes it a practice to learn something new every day. This little datum will last him for some days to come. Anger starts to boil over, somewhere before Bend. It’s not just the hundreds of thousands of acres that have vanished on him from one morning to its adjacent afternoon. He can accommodate the fact that Smoky Bear and Ranger Rick are socking away pensions paid by Weyerhaeuser. But the deliberate, simpleminded, and sickeningly effective trick of that highway-lining curtain of trees makes him want to smack someone. Every mile of it dupes his heart, just like they planned. It all looks so real, so virgin, so unspoiled. He feels like he’s on the Cedar Mountain, from that Gilgamesh, which he found back in the ranch library and read to the horses last year. The forest from the first day of creation. But it turns out Gilgamesh and his punk friend Enkidu have already been through and trashed the place. Oldest story in the world. You could drive across the state and never know. That’s the fury of the thing.

  In Eugene, Douglas converts a hefty tower of silver dollars into a ride in a small prop plane. “Just take me in the biggest circle you can make for the money. I want to see what down here looks like from up there.”

  It looks like the shaved flank of a sick beast being readied for surgery. Everywhere, in all directions. If the view were televised, cutting would stop tomorrow. Back on the planet’s concealing surface, Douglas spends three days on his buddy’s couch, mute. He has no capital. No political savvy. No golden tongue. No economic sophistication or social wherewithal. All he has is a clear-cut in front of him, whether his eyes are open or closed, haunting him all the way to the horizon.

  He makes some inquiries. Then he hires out his one and a half good legs to a contractor, planting seedlings back into the stripped lands. They kit him out with a shovel and a Johnny Appleseed bag filled with seedlings for which they charge him a few pennies each. And for each planted tree that’s still alive in a month, they promise to pay him twenty cents.

  Douglas-fir: America’s most valuable timber tree, so, sure—why not grow a tree farm full of nothing but? Five new houses per acre. He knows he’s slinging trees for middlemen to the same fuckers who cut down the primordial gods to begin with. But he doesn’t have to vanquish the lumber industry or even get nature’s revenge. He just needs to earn a living and undo the look of those cuts, a look that tunnels into him like a beetle into sapwood.

  He spends his days traversing the silent, slop-filled, sloping dead zones. He drags himself across the scattered crap on all fours, losing his footing in the impenetrable slash, hauling himself forward by his claws over the chaos of roots, sticks, branches, limbs, stumps, and trunks, fibrous and shredded, left to rot in a tangled graveyard. He masters the art of a hundred different ways to topple. He stoops, makes a little wedge in the ground, stuffs in a seedling, and closes the hole with a loving nuzzle from his boot tip. Then he does that again. And again. In starbursts and scattered nets. Up hillsides and down denuded gullies. Dozens of times an hour. Hundreds of times a day. Thousands by thousands every week until his whole throbbing thirty-four-year-old body puffs out like it’s filled with viper venom. Some days, he’d saw off his gimpy leg with a file if he had one handy.

  He sleeps in tree-planter camps filled with hippies and illegals, tough, lovable people too tired at day’s end to bother much with talk. A saying comes to him as he lies down at night, stiffened with pain—words he once read to his charges in his prior life as a ranch hand. If you’re holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah. Neither he nor the horses could make much of it. Until now.

  The smell of the cuts overwhelms him. Damp spice drawer. Dank wool. Rusty nails. Pickled peppers. Scents that return him to childhood. Aromas that inject him with inexplicable happiness. Smells that plunge him down to the bottom of the deepest well and hold him there for hours. Then there’s the sound, like his ears are wadded up with pillow. The snarl of saws and feller bunchers, somewhere in the distance. A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

  Some days, dawn breaks in Arthurian mists. There are mornings when the chill threatens to kill him, noons when the heat knocks him on his semi-numbed butt. Afternoons so profligate with blue he lies on his back and stares upward until his eyes water. There come mocking and merciless rains. Rain the weight and color of lead. Shy rain, auditioning with stage fright. Rain that leaves his feet sprouting moss and lichen. There were huge, spiked skeins of interwoven wood here once. They will come again.

  Sometimes he works alongside other tree slingers, some of whom speak no language he recognizes. He meets hikers who want to know where the forests of their youth have gone. The seasonal pineros come and go, and the hard cores, like him, keep on. Mostly, it’s
him and the brute, blank, stripped-down rhythm of the work. Wedge, squat, insert, stand, and boot-tip seal.

  They look so pitiful, his tiny Douglas-firs. Like pipe cleaners. Like props for a train set. From a distance, spread across these man-made meadows, they’re a crew cut on a balding man. But each weedy stem he puts into the dirt is a magic trick eons in the making. He rolls them out by the thousands, and he loves and trusts them as he would dearly love to trust his fellow men.

  Left alone—and there’s the catch—left alone to the air and light and rain, each one might put on tens of thousands of pounds. Any one of his starts could grow for the next six hundred years and dwarf the largest factory chimney. It could play host to generations of voles that never go to ground and several dozen species of insects whose only desire is to strip their host bare. Could rain down ten million needles a year on its own lower branches, building up mats of soil that grow their own gardens high in the air.

  Any one of these gangly seedlings could push out millions of cones over the course of its life, the small yellow males with their pollen that floats across entire states, the drooping females with their mouse tails sticking out from the coil of scales, a look he finds dearer than his own life. And the forest they might remake he can almost smell—resinous, fresh, thick with yearning, sap of a fruit that is no fruit, the scent of Christmases endlessly older than Christ.

  Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

  NEELAY MEHTA

  THE BOY WHO’LL HELP CHANGE humans into other creatures is in his family’s apartment above a Mexican bakery in San Jose watching tapes of The Electric Company. In the kitchen, his Rajasthani mother chokes on clouds of ground black cardamom that clash with the cinnamon of pan fino and conchas trickling up from the bakery below. Outside, in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, the ghosts of almond, cherry, pear, walnut, plum, and apricot trees spread for miles in every direction, trees only recently sacrificed to silicon. The Golden State, the boy’s parents still call it.

  The boy’s Gujarati father comes up the stairs balancing a massive box on his broomstick body. Eight years before, he arrived in this country with two hundred dollars, a degree in solid-state physics, and a willingness to work for two-thirds of his white colleagues’ salaries. Now he’s employee number 276 at a firm rewriting the world. He stumbles up two flights underneath his load, humming his son’s favorite song, the one they sing together at bedtime: Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.

  The child hears his steps and rushes to the landing. “Pita! What is it? A present for me?” He’s a seven-year-old little Rajput who knows that most of the world is a present for him.

  “Let me come in first, Neelay, please-thank-you. A present, yes. For both of us.”

  “I knew it!” The boy goose-steps around the coffee table hard enough to clack the steel balls on the pendulum toy. “A present for my birthday, eleven days early.”

  “But you have to help me build it.” The father nurses the box onto the table, pushing the clutter to the floor.

  “I’m a good helper.” The boy counts on his father’s forgetfulness.

  “And that will take patience, which you are working on, remember?”

  “I remember,” the boy assures him, tearing at the box.

  “Patience is the maker of all good things.”

  The father steers his son by the shoulders into the kitchen. Mother barricades the door. “Don’t come in here. Very busy!”

  “Yes, hello, too, moti. I got the computer kit.”

  “He tells me he got the computer kit.”

  “It’s a computer kit!” the boy shrieks.

  “Of course you got the computer kit! Now you two boys go play.”

  “It’s not exactly playing, moti.”

  “No? Go work, then. Like me.” The boy yips and tugs at his father’s paw, pulling him back to the mystery. Behind them, the mother calls out, “One thousand words memory or four?”

  The father blossoms. “Four!”

  “Four thousand, of course. Now go away and make something good.”

  THE BOY POUTS when the green fiberglass backplane comes out of the box. “That’s a computer kit? What use is that?”

  His father grins the most foolish grin. The day is coming when use will be rewritten by this thing. He reaches into the box and turns up the heart of the matter. “Here it is, my Neelay. Look!” He holds up a chip three inches long. His head wags with pleasure. A look dangerously like pride spreads across his ascetic face. “Your father helped make this one.”

  “That’s it, Pita? That’s a microprocessor? It’s like a bug with square legs.”

  “Oh, but think what we managed to put inside.”

  The boy looks. He remembers his father’s bedtime stories from the last two years—tales of heroic project managers and adventuring engineers who suffer more mishaps than the white monkey Hanuman and his entire monkey army. His seven-year-old brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees. He grins, cagey but uncertain. “Thousands and thousands of transistors!”

  “Ach, my smart little man.”

  “Let me hold it.”

  “Chh, chh, chh. Careful. Static. We could kill this fellow before he even comes to life.”

  The boy blooms with luscious horror. “It’s coming to life?”

  “If . . . !” The paternal finger wags. “If we get all our solders right.”

  “Then what will it do, Dad?”

  “What do you want it to do, Neelay?”

  In front of the boy’s widening eyes, the component turns into a jinn. “It does whatever we want?”

  “We just have to figure out how to get our plans into its memory.”

  “We’re putting our plans in there? How many plans will fit?”

  The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe’s weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits. “Someday, it may hold all the plans we have.”

  His son scoffs. “This little thing?”

  The man scrambles up to the bookshelf, takes down the family scrapbook. A few flips, and he calls out in triumph. “Hee! Neelay. Come see.”

  The photo is small, green, and mysterious. A tangle of giant boa constrictors pour out of broken stone.

  “See, na? A tiny seed fell on this temple roof. After centuries, the temple collapsed under the seed’s weight. But this seed just keeps going and going.”

  Dozens of braided trunks and roots feed on the ruined walls. Tentacles drip down to fill the chinks and split stones open. A root thicker than Neelay’s father’s body creeps across a lintel and seeps like a stalactite into the doorway beneath. This vegetable probing horrifies the boy, but he can’t look away. There’s something so animal in the way the trunks find and follow the openings in the masonry. Like those other kinds of trunks—the trunks of elephants. They seem to know, want, find their way. The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil. But his father holds the photo in front of Neelay as if it proves the happiest destiny.

  “You see? If Vishnu can put one of these giant figs into a seed this big . . .” The man leans down to pinch the tip of his son’s pinkie. “Just think what we might fit into our machine.”

  THEY BUILD THE BOX over the next several days. All their solders are good. “Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do?”

  The boy sits frozen by possibility. They can release any process they want into the world, any kind of willful thing. The only impossible thing is how to choose.

  His mother calls from the kitchen. “Teach it to cook the bhindi, please.”

  They make it say, “Hello World,” in flashing coded lights. They make it say, “Happy Birthday, Neelay Dear.” The words that fa
ther and son write arise and start doing. The boy has just turned eight, but in this moment, he comes home. He has found a way to turn his innermost hopes and dreams into active processes.

  Right away, the creatures they make begin to evolve. A simple, five-command loop expands into a beautiful segmented structure of fifty lines. Little portions of program detach into reusable parts. Neelay’s father hooks up a cassette tape player, for easy reloading of their hours of work in mere minutes. But the volume button must be set just right, or everything explodes with a read error.

  Over the course of a few months, they graduate from four thousand bytes of memory to sixteen. Soon they leap again, to sixty-four. “Pita! More power than any human has ever had to himself in all of history!”

  The boy loses himself in the logic of his will. He housebreaks the machine, trains it for hours like it’s a little puppy. It only wants to play. Lob a cannonball over the mountain onto your enemy. Keep the rats out of your corn harvest. Spin the wheel of fortune. Seek and destroy every alien in the quadrant. Spell the word before the poor stick man hangs.

  His father sits watching what he has unleashed. His mother bunches up her blouse-tails in her fist and berates all males within earshot. “Look at the boy! He just sits and types. He’s like a sadhu, stoned on something. He’s hooked, worse than paan-chewing.” His mother’s hectoring will go on for years, until her son’s checks start rolling in. The boy never stops to answer. He’s busy making worlds. Small ones, at first, but his.

  There’s a thing in programming called branching. And that’s what Neelay Mehta does. He will reincarnate himself, live again as people of all races, genders, colors, and creeds. He’ll raise decaying corpses and eat the souls of the young. He’ll tent high up in the canopies of lush forests, lie in broken heaps at the bottom of impossibly high cliffs, and swim in the seas of planets with many suns. He’ll spend his life in the service of an immense conspiracy, launched from the Valley of Heart’s Delight, to take over the human brain and change it more than anything since writing.