The Overstory

  “This?” Merciless Lady M. Mocking. “Destiny, you mean?”

  It’s like he’s frozen-floating across the stage in time-lapse again, disguised as Birnham Wood. “I earn a good salary. I’ll be all paid up on my loans in five more years. They’ll make me a partner before you know it.”

  Her eyes squeeze shut. In a few years, the bombs will be falling, the Earth will be spent, and the only humans left will be fleeing the planet in rockets to nowhere.

  “You wouldn’t have to work, if you didn’t want to.”

  She sits up. Her hand presses down on his sternum, pinning him. “Hang on. Oh, god. Are you proposing?”

  He cocks his head and dares her. Heart of oak.

  “Because we slept together? Once?” She doesn’t need her special gift to see how badly the mockery stings him. “Wait. Am I your first?”

  He holds still, frozen, halfway across the stage. “Maybe you should’ve asked me that two hours ago.”

  “Look. I mean . . . marriage?” The mere word in her mouth turns baroque and alien. “I can’t get married. I’m supposed to . . . I don’t know! Go backpacking in South America for two years. Move to the Village and take drugs. Get involved with a light plane pilot who moonlights for the CIA.”

  “I have a backpack. They have patent lawyers in New York. I’m not sure about the pilot part.”

  She’s ambushed and laughing and shaking her head. “You’re joking. You’re not joking. What the hell?” She does a back dive onto the pillows. “What the hell, I say. Lead on, Macduff!”

  They have each other again. This time, it’s binding. In the stillness of afterward, she can feel the wet on his temple. “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t scare the crap out of you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying to me. First time.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But you love me.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “ ‘Perhaps?’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Something huge and heavy and slow and far away and altogether unknown to him begins to say what it might mean. And then he proceeds to show her.

  . . .

  RAY’S PREDICTION COMES TRUE. It takes just five years to pay off all his debts. He makes partner soon after. He’s brilliant at what he does: nailing intellectual property thieves and getting them to cease and desist or pay up. His earnestness is hypnotic, his commitment to fairness and stability. You’re profiting from something that belongs to someone else. The world can’t work that way. Almost always, the other side settles out of court.

  Dorothy’s prediction, for her part, is not exactly wrong. The bombs are indeed falling. But mid-sized bombs, all over the globe, small enough that nobody has to flee the planet, just yet. She, for one, keeps the day job, transcribing the words of people under oath as fast as they can speak. The secret is not to care what the words mean. Paying attention decimates your speed.

  Half a dozen years pass as if a single season. They break up. They get re-engaged, while playing the romantic leads in an Alter Ego Community Theater production of You Can’t Take It with You. Her feet go stone-cold again. They recommit, after walking five hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail together in twenty-eight days. Then again by hand signals, while skydiving.

  Their average run is five months. The fourth time she breaks things off, it’s so traumatic she quits her job and disappears for weeks. Her friends won’t tell Ray anything. He begs them for news, a phone number—anything. He tasks them with long letters, which they say they can’t deliver. Then a note from her, neither apologizing nor cruel. She won’t say where she is. She simply lays out the deathly claustrophobia, the killing panic she feels at signing a legally binding document determining the bearing and conduct of the rest of her life.

  I want to be with you. You know that. That’s why I keep saying yes. But a legal business deal? Rights and ownership? Oh Ray, if only you were a discredited doctor or a bankrupt businessman. A shyster real estate agent. Anything but a property lawyer.

  He writes to the return address—a post office box in Eau Claire. He tells her that slavery is outlawed everywhere in the world. She’ll never be anyone’s property. He won’t change his career for her; copyright and patent law is what he knows. It’s necessary work, the engine of the world’s wealth, and he’s good at it. Maybe better than good. But if he must choose between giving up the idea of marriage or giving up the idea of acting in another amateur theatrical production with her, well, nolo contendere.

  Just come back, and we’ll live together in sin with two separate cars, two separate bank accounts, two separate houses, two separate wills.

  Shortly after he mails the letter, she shows up on the doorstep of his bungalow, late at night, with two tickets to Rome. It raises some questions at his office, but he leaves with her on a non-honeymoon two days later. On the third night in the Eternal City, with the prosecco flowing freely and all the pretty lights, and the crumbling antiquities, and the damn street music, and the lime trees with their glorious crowns and white lights strung all through their graceful boughs, she asks him—“What the hell, hey, Ray?”—if he will be her lawfully acquired chattel, contractually bound to her forever. They end up chucking coins over their left shoulders into the Trevi Fountain. Not an original idea, and they probably owe someone royalties.

  They make it back to St. Paul in time for Octoberfest. They swear to each other never to tell anyone, to deny everything. But their friends guess, the moment the couple steps out smirking in public together. What happened to you two in Rome? Nothing special. No one needs any superpower in reading facial muscles to know they’re lying through their teeth. Did you get thrown in jail or something? Did you get married? You two got married, didn’t you? You’re married!

  And it makes no earthly difference in the world. Dorothy moves back in. She insists on scrupulous bookkeeping, splitting every shared expense down the exact middle. But something in the back of her brain thinks, as she drifts through his lovely library and dining room and sunroom: When it happens, when it’s time to brood, when I turn all weird and hot to propagate, then all of this will belong to my babies!

  On their first anniversary, he writes her a letter. He puts some time into the wording. He can’t possibly speak the words, so he leaves them on the breakfast table when he goes to work.

  You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”

  He says there’s nothing on Earth he can give to her, for their anniversary, to thank her for what she has given him. Nothing, except for a thing that grows. Here’s what I propose we do. He doesn’t know where he gets the idea. He has forgotten the slow, heavy, outside prophecies that came over him on his first amateur theatrical outing, when he had to play a man who had to play a tree.

  Dorothy reads the words while driving herself to the courthouse for an afternoon of transcribing hearings.

  Every year, as close to this day as we can, let’s go to the nursery and find something for the yard. I don’t know anything about plants. I don’t know their names or how to care for them. I don’t even know how to tell one blurry green thing from another. But I can learn, as I’ve had to re-learn everything—myself, my likes and dislikes, the width and height and depth of where I live—again, alongside you.

  Not everything we plant will take. Not every plant will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.

  As she reads, her eyes cloud, and she drives up onto the curb and wraps the car around a parkway linden wide enough to destroy her front grille.

  Now, the linden, it turns out, is a radical tree, as different from an oak as a woman is from a man. It’s the bee tree, the tree of peace, whose tonics and teas can cure every kind of tension and anxiety—
a tree that cannot be mistaken for any other, for alone in all the catalog of a hundred thousand earthly species, its flowers and tiny hard fruit hang down from surfboard bracts whose sole perverse purpose seems to be to state its own singularity. The lindens will come for her, starting with this ambush. But the full adoption will take years.

  She requires eleven stitches to close the gash above her right eye, where the steering wheel cut her open. Ray rushes from his office to the hospital. In his panic, he crunches the rear right bumper of a doctor’s BMW in the hospital parking garage. He’s in tears when they lead him into surgery. She’s sitting up in a chair with bandages wrapped around her head, trying to read things. Everything is double. The brand name on the gauze wrappings looks to her like Johnson & Johnson & Johnson & Johnson.

  Her eyes light up to see him—both of him. “RayRay! Honey! What’s wrong?” He rushes to her, and she recoils in confusion. Then she gets it. “Hush. It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s plant something.”

  DOUGLAS PAVLICEK

  THE COPS ARRIVE on the landing of Douglas Pavlicek’s tiny efficiency in East Palo Alto just before breakfast. The actual police: a nice touch. What you might call realism. They charge him with armed robbery and read him his Miranda. Violations of Penal Codes 211 and 459. He can’t help smirking as they frisk and handcuff him.

  “You think this is funny?”

  “No. No, of course not!” Well, maybe a little.

  It gets less funny when the neighbors come out on their balconies in their pajamas as the cops perp-walk Douggie to the waiting squad car. He smiles—It’s not what you think—but the effect is mitigated a little, what with his hands cuffed behind his back.

  One of the officers shoehorns him into the back seat. The rear doors have no handles. The cops call in his arrest on the radio. Everything very Naked City, although this perfect Central Peninsula August and the thought that he’s getting paid fifteen dollars a day brighten the sound track. He’s nineteen, two years orphaned, recently laid off from his job as supermarket stock boy, and living on his parents’ life insurance. Fifteen bucks a day for two straight weeks is a lot of dough, for doing nothing.

  At the police station—the real police station—he’s fingerprinted, deloused, and blindfolded. They throw him back in the car and drive him around. When they remove the blindfold, he’s in prison. Warden’s office, superintendent’s office, and several cells. Chains on his legs. All very well thought out, convincing. He has no idea where he is, in real life. Some office building. The people running the show are improvising, same as he is.

  All the guards and most of the prisoners are there already. Douggie becomes Prisoner 571. The guards are just Sir, with clubs and whistles, uniforms and sunglasses. They’re a little too liberal with the sticks, for hourly volunteers. Getting into their roles, pleasing the experimenters. They strip Doug down and put him in a smock. They mean to hit his pride, but Douglas preempts them by having none. There’s a “count”—roll call and ritual humiliation—several times that evening. Sloppy joes for dinner. It’s better than what he’s been eating.

  Around lights-out, Prisoner 1037 gets a little truculent at the overdone theatrics. The guards smack him down. Clear already: there are good guards, tough guards, and crazy guards. Each slides down a grade when others are present.

  As soon as Douggie—571—manages to doze off, he’s ripped out of bed for another gratuitous count. It’s two-thirty a.m. That’s when things turn weird. He gets the idea that the experiment isn’t about what they claim it’s about. He realizes they’re really testing something much scarier. But he only needs to survive fourteen days. A body can take two weeks of anything.

  On day two, a tiff over dignity in Cell One blows out of control. It starts as a shoving match and escalates. Some prisoners—8612, 5704, and a couple of others—barricade themselves in the cell by swinging their beds sideways against the door. The guards call in reinforcements from the night shift. Young males shove each other and grapple over the bedframes. Someone starts to scream: “It’s a simulation, dammit. It’s a fucking simulation!”

  Or maybe not. The guards crush the uprising with fire extinguishers, chain up the leaders, and throw them in the hole. Solitary. No dinner for the rebels. Eating, as the guards remind their captives, is a privilege. Douggie eats. He knows what hunger is. Number 571 isn’t going hungry for the sake of a little amateur theater. The others can all go nuts, if that’s how they want to pass the time. But nobody’s keeping him from his hot meal.

  The guards set up a privilege cell. If any prisoner wants to say what he knows about the insurrection, he can relocate his bunk to plusher quarters. Cooperators can wash and brush their teeth and even enjoy a special meal. Privilege is not something Prisoner 571 needs. He’ll watch out for himself, but he’s no snitch. In fact, none of the prisoners takes up the privilege cell offer. At first.

  The guards begin routine strip searches. Smoking becomes a special privilege. Going to the bathroom becomes a privilege. It’s shit buckets or hold it, for the next two days. There are grueling, hours-long, pointless chores. There are late-night counts. There’s cleaning out other people’s slop buckets. Anyone caught smirking must sing “Amazing Grace” with his arms flung out. Prisoner 571 is forced to do hundreds of push-ups for every little trumped-up offense.

  The guard who all the prisoners call John Wayne says, “What if I told you to fuck the floor? Five seventy-one, you’re Frankenstein. You, 3401, you’re the Bride of Frankenstein. Okay, kiss, motherfuckers.”

  Nobody—not the guards, not the prisoners—ever breaks character. It’s insane. These people are dangerous; even 571 can see that. All of them, out of control. And they’re laying him low along with them. He doubts that he can make it two weeks, after all. Sitting in his efficiency reading the want ads with the lights turned low starts to seem pretty luxurious.

  Some small incident during a count and Prisoner 8612 loses it. “Call my parents. Let me out of here!” But that’s not possible. His term must last two weeks, like everybody’s. He starts to rave. “This really is a prison. We’re really prisoners.”

  They all see what 8612 is doing: feigning craziness. The bastard wants to escape the game and leave everyone else to shovel shit for however many days are left. Then the act becomes real.

  “Jesus Christ, I’m burning up! I’m fucked up inside. I want out! Now!”

  Doug has seen a guy go crazy once before, back in high school in Twin Falls. This one is number two. Just watching scrambles his own brain.

  They take 8612 away. The warden won’t say where. The experiment must stay intact. The experiment must extend itself. There’s nothing 571 wants more than to get out himself. But he can’t do that to the others. His fellow inmates would hate him forever, as he now hates 8612. It’s sick—symptom of a little pride he didn’t think he had—but he wants to keep 571’s reputation intact. He doesn’t want any university psychologist, peering through the two-way mirror and videotaping, saying, Ah, that one—we got that one to crack, too.

  A priest comes to visit, a Catholic prison chaplain. A real one, from the outside. All the prisoners must go see him in the consultation cell. “What’s your name?”

  “Five seventy-one.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “They say I committed armed robbery.”

  “What are you doing to secure your release?”

  The question sinks down 571’s spine and settles into his bowels. He’s supposed to be doing something? And if he doesn’t—if he fails to figure it out? Could they keep him in this hellhole beyond the agreed-on term?

  The next day is shaky for all the prisoners. The guards play on their distress. They make the prisoners write letters home, but they dictate the words. Dear Mom. I fucked up. I was evil. One of them tears into 819 for being hapless, and the guy breaks down. The authorities have had it out for him since the barricade, and now they throw him in the hole. His sobs carry throughout the prison. The rest of the inmates are cal
led out into the hallway for a count. The guards make them chant, Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Because of what he did, my shit bucket won’t be emptied tonight. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Because of what he did . . .

  A new prisoner, 416—8612’s replacement—organizes a hunger strike. He gets a couple prisoners to join him, but others slam him for stirring shit. When there’s trouble, everybody suffers. Five seventy-one refuses to choose sides. He’s not a joiner, but he’s no Kapo, either. Everything’s falling apart. The prisoners are turning on each other. He can’t afford to get involved. He tells everyone he’s nonaligned. But there is no nonaligned.

  John Wayne threatens 416. “Eat the damn sausage, boy, or you are going to regret it.” Four-sixteen throws the sausage on the floor, where it rolls around in the filth. Before anyone knows what’s happening, he’s shoved into the hole, the dirty sausage in his hand. “And you’ll stay there until it’s eaten.”

  There’s a general announcement: If any prisoner wants to give up his blanket for tonight, 416 will be released. If no one does, 416 will spend the night in solitary confinement. Five seventy-one lies in bed, under his blanket, thinking: This isn’t life. It’s just a fucking simulation. Maybe he should fight back against the experimenters, screw with their expectations, turn into a holy Superman. But damn it: no one else does. Everyone’s waiting for him to sleep cold tonight. He hates to disappoint them all, but he’s not the one who told 416 to pull his dumbfuck stunt. They could all have bored each other to death for two weeks and everything would’ve been fine.

  He lies there warm all night, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t turn off the thoughts. He wonders: And if this were all real? If he were put away for two years, or ten, or two hundred? Locked up for eighteen years for manslaughter, like the drunken junior high teacher back in Townsend who smashed into his parents’ Gremlin while they were coming back from line dancing? Put away behind bars, like the invisible millions across this country who he’s never thought twice about? He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.