The Overstory
The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can’t escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
NEELAY’S SHOUTS come too late to break the room’s spell. The speaker raises her glass, and the world splits. Down one branch, she lifts the glass to her lips, toasts the room—To Tachigali versicolor—and drinks. Down another branch, this one, she shouts, “Here’s to unsuicide,” and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience. She bumps the podium, backs away, and stumbles into the wings, leaving the room to stare at an empty stage.
IN THE SPRING, the lush, too-warm spring, when the buds and flowers go mad on every dogwood and redbud and pear and weeping cherry in the city, Adam’s case at last runs out of delays and heads to a federal court on the West Coast. Reporters fill the courtroom like ants swarming a peony. The bailiff leads Adam in. He’s stocky now, bearded. Furrows contour-plow his face. He wears the suit he last wore to the awards banquet where he accepted his university’s top teaching prize. His wife is there, seated in the row behind him. But not his boy. His boy will only ever see his father like this many years later, on video.
How do you plead?
The psych professor blinks, as if he’s another form of life altogether and human speech is way too fast to understand.
OVER THE EMPTY SILL, through the kitchen window, Dorothy Brinkman looks out onto a jungle. The man who never once failed to feed a parking meter has launched her on a made-to-order revolution—the Brinkman Woodlands Restoration Project. Wildness advances on all sides of the house. The grass is foot-high, clumped, weedy, seeding, and thick with native volunteers. Maples pop up everywhere, like paired hands. Ankle-high hackberries flaunt their paisley leaves. The speed of the reclamation stuns her. A few more years and their stand of woods will half reprise whatever came before the invading subdivision.
Her own second growth is even faster. Once, long ago, she jumped from airplanes, played a bloody-minded murderess, did terrible things to anyone who tried to confine her. Now she’s almost seventy, at war with the entire city. Jungle in an upscale suburb: it’s up there with child-molesting. The neighbors have come by on three separate occasions to ask if there’s anything wrong. They volunteer to mow, for free. She plays herself, sweet, demented, just adamant enough to hold them at bay—a last amateur theatrical comeback tour.
Now the whole street is ready to stone her. The city has written twice, the second time a registered letter giving her a deadline to clean up the place or face a fine of several hundred dollars. The deadline has come and gone, and with it, another threatening letter, another deadline, and another assessed fine. Who would have thought the foundations of society would be so shaken by a little runaway green?
The new deadline is today. She looks out on the chestnut, the tree that shouldn’t be there. Last week she heard a radio story about how thirty years of cross-breeding has at last produced a blight-resistant American chestnut tree, about to be tested in the wild. The tree that seemed to her like a spared memory now looks like a prediction.
A flash of orange at the window catches her eye: American redstart, male, flushing insects from the thicket with its tail and wings. Twenty-two species of birds this last week alone. Two days ago, at twilight, she and Ray saw a fox. Civil disobedience may cost them thousands in compounding penalties, but the view from the house has been much improved.
She’s making fruit compote for Ray’s lunch when the awaited angry knock comes on the front door. She flushes with excitement. More than excitement: purpose. A touch of fear, but the most delicious kind. She rinses and dries her hands, thinking: Here I am, near the finish line, loving life again.
The knock gets faster and louder. She crosses through the living room, reviewing in her head the defense of their property rights that Ray has helped her prepare. She has spent days at the public library and the municipal building, learning how to read local ordinances, legal precedent, and municipal code. She has brought back copies to her husband for explanation, one stunted syllable at a time. She has pored through books, compiling stats on just how criminal mowing, watering, and fertilizing are, just how much good a reforested acre and a half can do. All the arguments of sanity and sense are on her side. Against her there is only one unreasoning and primal desire. But when she opens the door, it’s on a scrawny kid in jeans and polo shirt, stringy blond hair sticking out from under his Made in the USA ball cap, and the whole plan of defense changes.
“Mrs. Brinkman?” Behind the kid, out by the curb, three even younger boys shouting back and forth in Spanish unload lawn equipment from a pickup truck and flatbed trailer. “We’re here from the city to clean up your place. We’ll only take a few hours, and the city won’t bill you until later.”
“No,” she says, and the rich, warm, wise sound of that single syllable confuses the boy. He opens his mouth, but he’s way too baffled to make it say anything. She smiles and heaves her chest. “You really don’t want to do that. Tell the city that would be a terrible mistake.”
She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.
The boy wavers. The city failed to prepare him for such authority. “Well, if it’s all right . . .”
She smiles and shakes her head, embarrassed for him. “It isn’t all right. It really isn’t.” You know better. Please don’t make me shame you even worse. The boy panics. She looks at him with affection, understanding, most of all pity, until he turns away and calls the crew and the gear back into the truck. Dorothy shuts the door and cackles as they drive away. She always did enjoy playing a good madwoman.
It’s the smallest of victories, the slightest postponement. The city will be back. The mowers and clippers will set to work, next time swarming without asking. They’ll shave the yard clean. The fines will pile up, with the late fees and penalties. Dorothy will countersue, fighting in court until the last appeal. Let the city confiscate the house and throw a paralyzed man in jail. She will outlast them. The anarchy of new seedlings and next spring is on her side.
She heads back to the kitchen, where she finishes making lunch. She feeds Ray, telling him about the poor boy and his foreign work crew who never knew what hit them. She acts out all the parts. The most fun is playing herself. She can see him smile, although no one else in the world would be able to confirm.
After lunch they work the crossword. Then, as he often does these days, Ray says, “Tell more.” Dorothy smiles and climbs into bed next to him. She looks out back, through the window, on the riot of new growth. In its middle, the tree that shouldn’t be there. Its branches rush outward, toward the house, slowly, to be sure, but fast enough to inspire her. How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery Dorothy can’t wrap her head around. But there it is: the ability to see, all at once, in all its concurrent branches, all its many hypotheticals, this thing that bridges past and future, earth and sky.
“She’s a good girl, you know.” She takes her husband’s stiff claw. “She was just lost for a little while. All she needs to do is find herself. Find a cause. Something bigger than she is.”
THE PROSECUTION shows photos from the scene of one of the man’s alleged crimes—a bit of graffiti on a charred wall. The first letters of each line sprout tendrils and vines, like the capitals of an illuminated manuscript:
CONTROL KILLS
CONNECTION HEALS
COME HOME OR DIE
It’s the centerpiece of their case, the grounds for the extraordinary sentence they’re demanding. They mean to prove intimidation. An attempt to influence the conduct of government by force.
ADAM’S LAWYERS argue for mercy. They claim the fires
were set by a young idealist calling the public’s attention to a crime against everyone. They say the sales of the forest were themselves illegal and the government failed to protect lands entrusted to it. Countless peaceful protests had come to nothing. But they have no case. The law is clear on every count. He’s guilty of arson. Guilty of destruction of private property. Guilty of violence against the public well-being. Guilty of manslaughter. Guilty, the jury of Adam Appich’s peers concludes, of domestic terrorism.
The law is simply human will, written down. The law must let every acre of living Earth be turned into tarmac, if such is the desire of people. But the law lets all parties have their say. The judge asks, “Would you care to address any final words to the court?”
Thoughts ring Adam’s head. The verdicts have cut him loose, like windthrow or fire. “Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.”
The court sentences Adam Appich to two consecutive terms of seventy years each. The lenience shocks him. He thinks: Seventy plus seventy is nothing. A black willow plus a wild cherry. He was thinking oak. He was thinking Douglas-fir or yew. Seventy plus seventy. With reductions for good behavior, he might even finish out the first half of the sentence just in time to die.
SEEDS
What was the wood, what the tree out of which heaven and earth were fashioned?
—RIG VEDA, 10.31.7
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, “What may this be?” And it was answered generally thus, “It is all that is made.”
—JULIAN OF NORWICH
Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.
First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells.
Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.
The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.
Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.
Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.
Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.
By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.
NICK WAKES IN THE TENT with his head against the ground. But the earth is soft, as soft as any pillow. The soil beneath is several feet deep with needles, so many dropping, dying needles turning to microscopic life again, under his ear.
The birds wake him. They always do, the daily prophets of forgetting and remembering, deep into their songs even before the light starts to break. He’s grateful to them. They give him, each day, an early start. He lies still in the dark, hungry, listening to the birds discuss life in a thousand ancient dialects: bickering, turf war, recollection, praise, joy. It’s cold this morning, fogged in with gloom, and he doesn’t want to get out of the bag. Breakfast will be meager. There’s not much food left. He has been north for days, and he’ll have to find a town and resupply before long. There’s a road within earshot, with trucks shuttling, but the sound is abstract, muffled, far away.
He crawls from the nylon egg and looks. The first faint suggestion of dawn outlines the trees. The trees are smaller here, slender to the skirts, shaped for heavy snowfalls. But it happens to him again, as it always does now. The look of the waving trunks, the cones rustling, the way the branch tips feel each other out, the astringent, citrus scent of the needles all restore him to the crystalline reason he forever keeps forgetting.
“Up in the morning!”
His crazy singing adds to the dawn chorus.
“Out on the job!”
The nearest birds fall silent and listen.
“Work like the devil for my pay!”
A small fire suffices to boil the water, drawn from a generous stream. Pinch of coffee crystals, a fist of oats in a wooden cup, and he’s ready.
MIMI IN MISSION DOLORES PARK, San Francisco, many miles south. She sits in the grass surrounded by picnickers, under a knobcone pine, tapping at her phone. The news is a nightmare she can’t wake from. An accomplished social scientist with a wife and young son—a man she once trusted with her life—is going away for two lifetimes, for something she helped do. Convicted of domestic terrorism. Little or no attempt at defense. Found guilty of fires she can’t believe he set. “Eco-Radical Sentenced to 140 Years.” And another man, a man she loved for his earnest cartoon innocence, has sold him out.
Cross-legged on the ground, her back against the bark, she feeds key words into her phone. Adam Appich. Terrorist Penalties Enhancement Act. She no longer cares what bread-crumb trails she’s leaving. Getting caught would solve so many things. Pages swell and link faster than she can skim them—expert analysis and angry amateur conjecture.
She should be in prison. She should be tried and sentenced to life. Two lives. Guilt comes up her throat, and she tastes it. Her sick legs want to stand and take her into the nearest police station. But she doesn’t even know where that might be. That’s how law-abiding she has been, for two decades. Nearby sunbathers turn to look at her. She has said something out loud. She thinks it might have been, Help me.
OTHER EYES, invisible, read alongside hers. In the time it takes Mimi to scan ten paragraphs, the bodiless eyes read ten million. She retains no more than half a dozen details that fade as soon as she flips to a new page, but the invisible learners preserve every single word and fit them into branching networks of sense that grow stronger with each addition. The more she reads, the more the facts evade her. The more the learners read, the more patterns they find.
. . .
DOUGLAS SITS at a student desk in the room his captors call a cell. It’s the nicest accommodation he’s had for two decades. He’s listening to an audio course—Introduction to Dendrology. He can get college credit for it. Maybe he’ll earn a degree. Maybe that would make her proud, the woman he knows he hasn’t a chance in hell of ever seeing again.
The professor on the tapes is great. She’s like the grandmother and mother and spiritual guidance counselor Douglas never had. He loves how they’re using people with speech impediments, these days. For audio lectures. This woman is hearing other voices altogether. He listens and takes notes. At the top of the page, he writes, The Day of Life. It’s crazy, what the woman on the tape is saying. He had no idea. Life—flatlined for a billion years or more. Unbelievable. The whole escapade might never have happened. The tree of life might have stayed a shrub forever. And the day of life might have been a very quiet day.
He listens as she clicks off the hours. And when the brutes show up in the last seconds to turn the whole plan
et into a factory farm, he yanks out the buds, gets up, and lets loose. Maybe a little too long and loud. The duty guard looks in on him. “The hell’s going on in there?”
“Nothing, man. All good. Just . . . a little screaming, is all.”
THE WORST PART is the photo. Mimi wouldn’t recognize the man if she passed him on the street. Maple. How could they ever have called him that? Bristlecone now, the narrowest strips of living bark on a withered piece of driftwood that has been dying for five thousand years.
She looks up. People sprawl near her in small clans. Some sit on blankets. Others lie down right in the patchy grass. Shoes, shirts, bags, bicycles, and food spread around them. Lunch is on; the sky cooperates. No judgments can touch them, and all futures remain reachable.
She has performed Judith Hanson for so many years that it shocks her now, to remember the crimes she committed as Mimi Ma and the punishments that wait for her in that name. To get to this park, she has walked, hopped a bus, and taken the train, ludicrous serpentine evasion. But they’ll find her, wherever she is, whatever trail she leaves. She’s a multiple felon. A manslaughterer. Domestic terrorist. Seventy plus seventy years.
Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.