The Overstory

  CONTROL KILLS

  CONNECTION HEALS

  COME HOME OR DIE

  For you have five trees in Paradise . . .

  Collective wisdom settles on the most plausible explanation. It’s the work of a deranged killer.

  . . .

  ADAM SLIPS BACK into Santa Cruz. Unthinkable, after everything. But dropping out of the program with his thesis at the finish line would only point a spotlight at him. His year-long fellowship is mostly spent. He sits for days in his sublet with the curtains drawn. He hovers, two feet above his own head, looking down on his body. At strange hours, excitement comes over him, then crashes into wild anxiety. Even a ten-minute walk to the convenience store feels life-threatening.

  Late on a Friday night, he ducks into the department to fetch his university mail. He can’t even calculate the last time he was in the building. It takes three tries to remember his combination. The mailbox is so wedged with flyers he must pry them out. The logjam bursts, and months of neglected junk spill across the mailroom floor. A voice behind him says, “Hey, stranger.”

  “Hey!” he answers, too exuberant, before he even turns to see.

  Mary Alice Merton, fellow All But Dissertation. Sweet farm-girl face and smile like a dental brochure. “We thought you died.”

  The worst freedom courses through him. Not dead. But I helped kill someone. “Nope. Fellowship.”

  “What happened? Where have you been?”

  He hears his dead undergrad mentor quoting Mark Twain. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. “In the field. I seem to have gotten a little lost.”

  She flicks his upper arm with the back of her fingernails. “Not the first, mister.”

  “I have all the facts. Just can’t get them put down in a coherent way.”

  “Completion anxiety. What’s so damn hard about turning in a diss? So it’s a mess. Screw it, and deposit.”

  He struggles to kill his crazy excitement and retrieve the pitch of normal speech. To pass himself off as himself, not an arsonist and accomplice to manslaughter. Psychologists should be the greatest liars on the planet. Years of training in how people deceive themselves and others. The lessons come back to him. Do the opposite of what your felon impulses tell you to. And when subpoenaed to appear before the court of public opinion, dazzle with misdirection.

  “Hungry?” He remembers to lift his eyebrows just a hair.

  He sees the warnings going off in her. Who is this guy? Three years of nothing but business, borderline autistic, and now he wants to play at being human? But confirmation bias will always beat out common sense. All the data prove it. “Starving.”

  He crams the months of mail into his backpack and they head for late-night falafel. Five years later, he has a folder full of respected publications on in-group idealism and is up for early tenure at Ohio State. Fifteen more beyond that—no time at all—he’ll be a noted figure in his field.

  IT’S EASIER TO LIVE for months high up in the redwood canopy than to pass seven days at ground level. Everything is owned; a one-year-old knows that. It’s as much a law as Newton’s. Walking down the street without cash is a crime, and no one alive would imagine for a minute that things in real life might go any other way. Nick can’t afford to be picked up for anything—not for vagrancy, not for camping without a permit, not for grazing on manzanita berries in a state park. He finds a cabin, rented by the week, in a depressed little town at the foot of the logged mountains. His yard backs onto a stand of juvenile redwoods, straight and clear, only a foot and a half thick, but known to him. The closest thing left to kin.

  He must leave this place, get as far away as possible, for banal safety if not sanity. But he can’t stop waiting, can’t give up on the chance of a message that might redeem even a fraction of disaster. He lived in this place, with her. Here, for almost a year, he knew what purpose was. Of all the places on this forgetting Earth, this is the one she’d return to.

  He talks to no one, goes nowhere. It’s the rainy season again, the season that just ended. He falls asleep in a drizzle and wakes to a downpour. The roof comes alive with the assault of water. He’s up, listening, and can’t let go. No sooner does he fall asleep than he wakes in panic to daylight and the rain’s cease-fire.

  He goes out back to check the culvert. It’s overflowing into an improvised creek through the rented porch. Nick stands in T-shirt and sweats, watching dawn pour down over the mountain. The hour smells moist and loamy, and the soil hums under his bare feet. Two thoughts fight over him. The first, so much older than anyone’s childhood, is: Joy comes in the morning. The second, brand-new, is: I’m a murderer.

  There’s a tearing in the air. Nicholas looks up, where the mountainside begins to liquefy. Last night’s rains have loosened the earth, and, stripped of the covering that held it in place for a hundred thousand years, the mountain slides down with a roar. Trees taller than lighthouses snap like twigs and plunge into one another, slamming down the slope in a swollen wave. Nick turns to run. Above him, a wall of rock and wood twenty feet high heads home. He scrambles down a footpath, wheeling to look back as a river of trees hits the cabin head-on. His living room fills with stump and rock. The building lifts off its foundation and bobs on the flow.

  He runs toward the neighbors, screaming, “Get out! Now!” Then his neighbors are running, too, with their two little boys, down the drive to the family truck. But debris reaches the truck first and blocks it in. Trees wash up against the ranch house, bulging like woody lava.

  “This way,” Nick shouts, and the neighbors follow. He leads them down another gully along a shallower slope. And there, the tide of landslide comes to rest behind a thin line of redwoods. Mud and rubble ooze against the final barrier, but the trees hold. The mother breaks down. She sobs and grabs her children. The father and Nick stare upward at the denuded mountainside, a ridge wildly lowered. The man whispers, “Jesus.” Nick jerks at the word. He looks where his neighbor points. On each of the trunks in the standing barricade that just saved their lives is a bright blue painted X. Next week’s harvest.

  DOUGLAS RETURNS to Mimi’s, like a dog, at hours not exactly optimal. At first just to check in, make sure she’s okay. Then to tell her his most remarkable dream. She has unplugged her answering machine. So he comes by her place in person, which makes her a little crazy.

  In the dream, he and Mimi are sitting face-to-face, in a park in a beautiful city by an even more beautiful bay. Maidenhair appears. She smiles and says, Wait! They’ll explain. You’ll see. Douggie can’t keep still, with the excitement of recounting. “It was like she’d seen everything! And she was letting us know. When I woke up, it was so clear. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Mimi is less than enthusiastic. The whole idea of okayness makes her kind of scream. So he stays away for a bit. But the dream comes again, with fresh, new refinements that he’s sure she’ll want to hear. After a fair amount of extreme knocking, Mimi opens and drags Douggie inside. She sits him at the dining table where they addressed so many thousands of protest letters. “Douglas. We burned buildings to the ground. We were out of our heads. Criminally insane. They’ll kill us. Do you get that? We’ll spend the rest of our lives in a federal prison.”

  He says nothing. The word prison has him watching a clip of his own past—the one that started him down this twisting path. “Okay, I get that. But in the dream, she had her arm around you, and she was saying—”

  “Douglas!” she yells loud enough to be heard through the walls. She starts again, in a hush. “Don’t come by anymore. I’m closing on the condo. Leaving.”

  His eyes bulge, like a frog trying to swallow. “Leaving?”

  “Listen to me. You have. To go. Away. Start a new life. Take a new name. This is arson. Manslaughter.”

  “Anybody could have started those fires. There’s nothing to trace us.”

  “We have arrest records. We’re known environmental radicals. They’ll go through the lists. They’ll trace ever
y record—”

  “What record? We paid for everything in cash. Drove hundreds of miles. Lots of people are on those lists. Lists don’t prove a thing.”

  “Douglas. Disappear. Go underground. Don’t come back. Don’t look for me.”

  “Fine.” His eyes are burning. There’s no reaching her. One hand on the door, he turns. “You know, I’m not exactly aboveground as it is.”

  He has the dream again. They’re sitting on a rise above the city of the future. Maidenhair is telling them, Wait! You’ll see! And sure enough, forests spring up all around them. It’s beyond extraordinary, and Mimi needs to know. But when he gets to her place, there’s a big red sign out front: SOLD.

  He has less than no place else to go. East seems the best of the three available options. So he loads his movable estate into the truck and heads up the Columbia Gorge. Doesn’t even tell his boss at the hardware store. They can keep his last two weeks of wages.

  Over the Idaho border, it dawns on him that he needs to see the site. He’s practically next door, by western standards. A chance, if nothing else, for a better goodbye. Mimi screams in his ear, telling him he’s nuts. Any reasonable person would say the same. But reason is what’s turning all the forests of the world into rectangles.

  He comes up the state highway, his heart sledging at his ribs. He heads up the lonely access road through the spruce defile, trees as rigid as judges in the falling dark. His muscles remember. It’s like the surviving four of them are in the van again, in the sick aftermath. But nearing the site, he sees another fire, sharp, controlled, and white—the electric arcs of night work. Hard hats swarming all over, repairing the damage. Capital’s answer to a slipped schedule is simply to add more shifts.

  A big rig loaded with trusses. A signalman with a red flag. Douglas slows down for a look. No sign that anything here ever burned. Mimi screams at him to get the hell out before some security cam mounted up on the side of a trunk reads his plates. Something else, too, tells him, Not here. Maidenhair.

  He blasts past the work site down the empty highway. At the next intersection, he heads east again. After midnight, the car gropes its way into Montana. He pulls off at a trailhead in a national forest and sleeps a few hours in the reclined driver’s seat.

  Daylight marbles the sky. He drives the back roads with no sense of direction, living off beef jerky and Atomic Fireballs he picks up when he stops for gas. He drives through a wide, flat basin flanked by peaks, flinty rangeland too dry for real use. But life still uses it in a million ways. A motion across a field catches his eye—pronghorn, fighting with a wire fence. Five of them, and one is injured. The numerology of it—the sign—steals over Douglas, and he begins to shake. He pulls onto the shoulder. A great, empty remoteness settles on him, the size of the sky. He falls asleep with the window cracked, coyotes howling as if the world still belonged to them.

  He drives on at random, the morning of the second day. The rising sun keeps him vaguely oriented. Miles pass, and hours, not always in straight lines. Something odd springs up on the road’s left. The sight is wrong before he even sees it. In all this open expanse of gold and gray, a lost oasis of working green. A riverbank outpost, without a river. He turns too fast onto the next exit, a crumbling macadam track beaten to hell by scores of snowy seasons and the roots of weeds that can never take no for an answer. His truck slows to a crawl, and still the road wants to break its axles and husk its undercarriage. Then he’s in a grove of poplars, shaggy as a gang of teens.

  He gets out and walks. A flock of sparrows unspools across the grass some yards ahead. The stand makes no sense. Trees shoot upward in fountains. Some split into bouquets of stems seven feet around. Contorted cottonwoods. No sign of habitation for miles around, but all the trees grow in a grid that looks like a child’s logic puzzle. Underneath the green arcades, it comes to him: he’s on the streets of an invisible town. Sidewalks, lots, yards, foundations, shops, churches, houses: everything has vanished, scavenged, but these few square blocks of windbreak. He sits beneath a thing once the pride of some family’s picture window. Now the giant’s shade falls on no one.

  There’s a sound like the gushing of a hidden stream. A sound of vigorous applause, but from a hundred years away. He glances down the cottonwood colonnades, a few squares of planted shade singing in the breeze, glad to have someone back in this abandoned town to marvel at them. Their rustle is like a hymn coming out of the missing church to play along the wide, missing boulevard, for all the missing people. Now the psalm preaches only to the gushing choir, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The choir, too, deserves to remember. Let the field be joyful and all that is therein. Then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice.

  MIMI SITS in a black crepe sheath by the reception desk of the Four Arts Gallery, on Grant. She balances in the slung-back leather chair, every few seconds hitching the wanton hem back down over her aging knees. The outfit seemed art-dealer-worthy this morning, good for a couple hundred dollars more in any negotiation with a man. She thought it might compensate for the scar running down her face. Now it feels like amateur hour.

  The pixie-cut assistant reappears, averting her eyes from Mimi’s gash, proffering more coffee, and promising that Mr. Siang will be with her almost right away. Mr. Siang is already seventeen minutes late. He’s had the scroll for weeks. He has put off this meeting twice. Something’s going on in the back room. Mimi’s being played, and she can’t tell how.

  Other treasures clog the gallery. Lacquerware yachts. A cloud-swathed, floating mountain inked in the meticulous style. Thousand-figure ivory spheres, each intricate world nested inside another. A painting on the far wall catches her eye: a great black tree with rainbow branches against a blue sky. She stands, tugs at the hem, and drifts across the room. What seemed like a cornucopia of tiny leaves turns into hundreds of meditating figures. She reads the tag: The Field of Merit, also called The Refuge Tree. Tibet, circa mid-seventeenth century. In the spreading crown, the human leaves seem to wave in the wind.

  A voice behind her calls, “Miss Ma?”

  Mr. Siang, in pewter suit and blood-red spectacles, ushers her into the back room. He gazes at the gully in her face and doesn’t blink. With one peremptory hand he seats her at a conference table made of outlawed mahogany, the scroll box between them. Addressing the window, he says, “Your piece is very beautiful. Wonderful arhats, in a distinctive style. Sad you have no papers or provenance.”

  “Yes. I . . . we never had any.”

  “You say this scroll came to America with your father. It belonged to his family’s art collection in Shanghai?”

  She fiddles with her dress beneath the table. “That’s right.”

  Mr. Siang turns from the window and sits across from her, at attention. His left palm cups his right elbow, and his right hand holds out its first two fingers, gripping an imaginary cigarette. “We cannot date it as precisely as we’d like. And we aren’t certain about the artist.”

  Her guard goes up. “What about the owners’ seals?”

  “We’ve traced them back in chronological order. It isn’t clear how your father’s family actually came into possession.”

  She knows now what she has suspected for weeks. Bringing the scroll in for appraisal was a mistake. She wants to grab it and run.

  “The script of the inscriptions is also difficult. A form of Tang Dynasty calligraphy we call wild cursive. Specifically, Drunken Su. It may have been done later.”

  “What does it say?”

  He tilts his head back, the better to frame her impudence. “There is a poem, author unknown.” He rolls the scroll out between them. His finger flows down the column of words.

  On this mountain, in such weather,

  Why stay here any longer?

  Three trees wave to me with urgent arms.

  I lean in to hear, but their emergency

  sounds just like the wind.

  New buds test the branches, even in winter.

  Her skin welts up before t
he poem ends. She’s in SFO, hearing her name get paged. She’s reading the poem her father left in lieu of a suicide note. How does a man rise or fall in this life? She’s setting urgent fires on the side of a mountain in the pitch-black cold. Fires that kill a woman.

  “Three trees?”

  Mr. Siang’s palms apologize. “It’s poetry.”

  Her face flashes hot and cold. Her mind won’t work. Something is trying to get at her, from a long way away. Why stay here any longer? She sees her sister Amelia, twelve years old and packed in a snowsuit that doubles her size, waddle in the back door, crying. The breakfast tree is budding too early. The snow is going to kill it. And her father, just smiling. The new leaf always there. Even before winter. A fact that Mimi, in her sixteen winters, had somehow missed.

  “Would that poem be readable . . . to an average person?”

  “A scholar, maybe. A student of calligraphy.”

  She has no idea what her father was a student of. Miniature electronics. Campsites. Talking to bears. “This ring.” She holds her fist out to the art dealer across the table. He tilts his head. His smile is embarrassed for them both.

  “Yes? A jade tree, Ming style. Good workmanship. We could appraise it.”

  She pulls it back. “Never mind. Tell me about the scroll.”

  “The treatment of the arhats is very skilled. Simply on its historical rarity and the quality of the drawing, we put the value between . . .” He mentions two figures that elicit a high-pitched primate giggle before she can throttle it. “Four Arts would be willing to pay you something in the middle of that range.”

  She sits back, faking calm. She had hoped for a little freedom from the press of money. Two years, maybe three. But this is a fortune. Freedom. Enough to pay for a whole new life. Mr. Siang appraises her scarred face. His eyes remain impassive behind the blood-red frames. She stares back, ready for a showdown. She has watched the fiercest fire go dead. After Olivia, she can outlast any living gaze.

  The scroll lies between them on the table. The wild, drunken calligraphy, the cryptic poem, the seated figures alone in their old forests, almost transformed, almost a part of everything—all hers to dispose of. But disposing of them suddenly feels criminal. Three trees want something from her. But she has less than no idea what.