She transfers to Berkeley. Best place for ceramic engineering she can find. The place is a staggering time warp. Future masters of the universe study alongside unrepentant revolutionaries who believe the Golden Age of Human Potential peaked ten years before.
She thrives, reborn Mimi, looking like a diminutive Kazakh carrying a programmable calculator, and, in the estimation of many, the cutest thing ever to mouth the Hall-Petch equation. She savors the eerie Stepford Wives climate. She sits in the eucalyptus grove, the trees that explode in the dry heat, solving problem sets and watching the protesters with their placards full of all-caps slogans. The better the weather, the more irate the demands.
The month before graduation, she dons a killer interview suit—sleek, gray, professional, inexorable as a NoCal earthquake. She interviews with eight campus reps and gets three offers. She takes a job as a casting process supervisor for a molding outfit in Portland, because it offers the most chance to travel. They send her to Korea. She falls in love with the country. In four months, she learns more Korean than she knows Chinese.
Her sisters, too, wander across the map. Carmen winds up at Yale, studying economics. Amelia gets a job nursing wounded wildlife in a discovery center in Colorado. Back in Wheaton, the Ma mulberry is assailed on all fronts. Mealybugs cover it in cottony wisps. Scale insects mass on its branches, invulnerable to all her father’s pesticides. Bacteria blacken the leaves. Her parents are helpless to save the thing. Charlotte, in her thickening fog, murmurs about bringing in a priest to pray over it. Winston pores through horticulture bibles and fills his notebooks with impeccably printed speculations. But each season brings the tree closer to capitulation.
Winston calls Mimi when she’s back in Portland from another Korea trip. He reaches her from the family phone booth, the Ma garage. His invention has shrunken down to the size of a hiking boot, so reliable and power-thrifty that Bell Labs starts licensing it to other outfits. But Winston takes no pleasure in telling his daughter that his life’s work has at last come to fruition. All he can talk about is his failed mulberry.
“That tree. What he do?”
“What’s wrong with it, Dad?”
“Bad color. All his leaves, falling.”
“Have you tested the soil?”
“My silk farm. Finish. It never make one thread.”
“Maybe you should plant another.”
“Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.”
“Yep. And you always said the next best time was now.”
“Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.”
Mimi has never heard this cheerful, endlessly resourceful man sound so low. “Take a trip, Dad. Take Mom camping.” But they’ve just come back from a ten-thousand-miler up to the salmon streams in Alaska, and the notebooks are filled with meticulous notes that will take years to go over.
“Put Mom on.”
There’s a sound—the car door opening and closing, then the door to the garage. After a while, a voice says, “Salve filia mea.”
“Mom? What the hell?”
“Ego Latinam discunt.”
“Don’t do this to me, Mom.”
“Vita est supplicium.”
“Put Dad back on. Dad? Is everything okay out there?”
“Mimi. My time coming.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“My work all done. My silk farm, finish. Fishing going down, little bit every year. What I do now?”
“What are you talking about? Do what you’ve always done.” Make charts and graphs of next year’s campsites. Fill up the basement with stacks of soap and soup and cereal and any other items that happen to go on sale. Fall asleep every night to the ten o’clock news. Freedom.
“Yes,” he says. But she knows the voice that formed her. Whatever he pretends that yes to mean, it’s a lie. She makes a note to call her sisters and discuss the Wheaton collapse. Parents on the fritz. What to do? But long-distance to the East Coast is two dollars a minute, if you don’t have a magic shoe phone. She decides to write them both that weekend. But that weekend is her ceramic sintering conference in Rotterdam, and the letters slip her mind.
IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi’s Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard. He leaves no note except a calligraphic copy of Wang Wei’s twelve-hundred-year-old poem left unfurled on parchment across the desk in his study:
An old man, I want
only peace.
The things of this world
mean nothing.
I know no good way
to live and I can’t
stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests.
The wind that waves the pines
loosens my belt.
The mountain moon lights me
as I play my lute.
You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?
The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.
Mimi is in SFO, on her way to Seattle for a site inspection. She’s mock-shopping the concourse when out of the cacophony of gate calls and public service announcements her name blares out. Something cold grabs at her scalp. Before the people at the customer service desk even hand her the phone, she knows. And all the way home to Illinois she thinks: How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?
HER MOTHER IS HELPLESS. “Your father doesn’t want to hurt us. He has some ideas. I don’t understand all of them. That’s just how he is.” Her words come from a place where the blast she heard from the basement is only one of several possibilities that branching time might try. She looks so gentled, so at peace in her confusion, so utterly under the surface of the flowing river that Mimi can do nothing but share her unreal calm. The job her father leaves is Mimi’s to finish. No one has touched the scene except to remove the body and the gun. Pieces of brain dot the stones and tree trunk, like new species of garden slug. She turns into a cleaning machine. Bucket, sponge, soapy water, for the spattered deck. She failed to alert her sisters or stop what she saw happening. But she can do this—clean up the backyard carnage forever. Cleaning, she becomes another thing. The wind loosens her hair. She looks at the bloodied paving stones, the bits of soft tissue that housed his ideas. She sees him by her side, amazed by the flecks of his own brain lying in the grass. Look the color! You ask how people rise or fall in this life? Like this.
She sits under the diseased mulberry. Wind slaps at the coarse-toothed leaves. Wrinkles score the bark, like the folds in the arhats’ faces. Her eyes sour with animal confusion. Even now, every square foot of ground is stained with fruit, fruit stained, the myths say, with the blood of a suicide for love. Words come out of her, crumpled and tinny. “Dad. Daddy! What you do?”
Then the silent howls.
CARMEN AND AMELIA ARRIVE. United, the trio sit together one last time. They have no explanation. There never will be one. The least likely person in the world has gone on an impossible tour without them. In place of explanation, memory. They put their hands on each other’s shoulders and tell each other stories of how things were. Sunday opera. The epic car journeys. Trips to the lab, where the tiny man floated down the halls, celebrated by all his giant white colleagues, the happy maker of the cellular future. They remember the day the family scattered from the bear. Their mother holding Amelia above her head, in the water. Their father talking to the animal in Chinese—two creatures, not quite of the same order, sharing the same woods.
They hold a silent liturgy of memory and shock. But they hold it indoors. Mimi’s sisters don’t go near the yard. They can’t even look at the old breakfast tree, their father’s silk farm. Mimi tells them what she knows. The call. My time coming.
Amelia holds her. “It’s not you
r fault. You couldn’t know.”
Carmen says, “He told you that, and you didn’t tell us?”
Charlotte sits nearby, smiling a little. It’s like the family is still on a camping trip somewhere, and she is at lakeside, unsnagging the smallest knots in her husband’s fishing line. “He hates it when you three fight.”
“Mom.” Mimi shouts at the woman. “Mom. Enough. Clear your head. He’s gone.”
“Gone?” Charlotte frowns at her daughter’s foolishness. “What are you talking about? I’ll see your father again.”
THE THREE GIRLS attack the mountain of paperwork and reporting. It has never before occurred to Mimi: The law doesn’t stop with death. It reaches far beyond the grave, for years, entangling the survivors in bureaucratic hurdles that make the challenges of pre-death seem like a cakewalk. Mimi tells the others, “We have to divvy up his stuff.”
“Divvy?” Carmen says. “You mean, like take?”
Amelia says, “Shouldn’t we let Mom . . . ?”
“You see how she is. She’s not even here.”
Carmen rears up. “Can you stop solving problems for a minute? What’s the hurry?”
“I’d like to get things done. For Mom.”
“By throwing out his stuff?”
“Distribute. Each thing to the right person.”
“Like solving a big quadratic equation.”
“Carmen. We have to take care of it.”
“Why? You want to sell the house out from under Mom?”
“Like she’s going to be able to take care of it by herself, in her state?”
Amelia puts her arms around them both. “Maybe those things can wait for now? We only have a little while to be with each other.”
“We’re all here now,” Mimi says. “It could be a long time before that happens again. Let’s just get it done.”
Carmen shakes free of the hug. “So you’re not coming home for Christmas?” But something in her tone is as good as a signed confession. Home has gone wherever their father went.
CHARLOTTE CLINGS to a few token things. “This is his favorite sweater. Oh, don’t take the waders. And these are the slacks he wears when we go hiking.”
“She’s fine,” Carmen says, when the three of them are alone. “She’s managing. She’s just a little weird.”
“I can come back in a few weeks,” Amelia offers. “Check in. Make sure she’s okay.”
Carmen faces Mimi, pre-enraged. “Don’t even dream of putting her in a home.”
“I’m not dreaming anything. I’m just trying to take care of things.”
“Take care? Here. You’re the compulsive one. Knock yourself out. Eleven notebooks filled with report cards on every campsite we’ve ever stayed in. All yours.”
THE THREE OPERA HEROINES hover above a silver plate. On the plate are three jade rings. On each ring is a carved tree, and each tree branches in one of time’s three disguises. The first is the Lote, the tree at the boundary of the past that none may pass back over. The second is that thin, straight pine of the present. The third is Fusang, the future, a magical mulberry far to the east, where the elixir of life is hidden.
Amelia stares. “Who’s supposed to get which one?”
“There’s a right way to do this,” Mimi says. “And a dozen wrong ones.”
Carmen sighs. “Which one is this?”
“Shut up. Close your eyes. On the count of three, take one.”
On three, there’s some light grazing of arms, and each woman finds her fate. When they open their eyes, the platter is empty. Amelia has her eternal present, Carmen her doomed past. And Mimi is left holding the thin trunk of things to come. She puts it on her finger. It’s a little big—gift from a homeland she will never see. She spins the endless loop of inheritance around on her finger like an open sesame. “Now the Buddhas.”
They don’t understand her. But then, Amelia and Carmen haven’t been thinking about the scroll for the last seventeen years.
“The Luóhàn,” Mimi says, butchering the pronunciation. “The arhats.” She rolls the scroll out on the table where their father used to tie his trout flies. It’s older, stranger than any of them remembers. Like someone has been reworking it with colors and ink, from the world beyond this one. “We could take it to an auction house. Split the money.”
“Meem,” Amelia says. “Didn’t he leave us enough money?”
“Or Mimi could just take it for herself. That would be enlightened.”
“We could give it to a museum. In memory of Sih Hsuin Ma.” The name sounds hopelessly American in Mimi’s mouth.
Amelia says, “That would be beautiful.”
“And we’d have tax write-offs for life.”
“Those of us who are making money.” Carmen sneers.
Amelia rolls up the scroll in her small hands. “So how do we do that?”
“I don’t know. We should get it appraised first.”
“You do that, Mimi,” Carmen says. “You’re good at getting things done.”
. . .
THE POLICE give them back the gun. They own it, technically, by virtue of inheritance. But none of their names is on the permit. No one knows what to do with it. It sits on the buffet, huge and humming through the wooden crate. It has to be destroyed, like the ring that must be thrown into the volcano’s caldera. But how?
Mimi steels herself and takes the crate. She bungees it to the back carrier of her high school bicycle, which her parents have kept in the basement for years. Then she pedals down Pennsylvania toward the gun shop in Glen Ellyn, where the firearm came from. She doesn’t know if they’ll buy it back. She doesn’t care. She’ll donate it to charity. The box is ungodly heavy on her rear carrier, and she wants it gone. Cars pass her, the drivers annoyed. The neighborhood is too affluent for adults on bicycles. The crate looks like a tiny coffin.
Then a police car. She tries to act normal, that thing the Ma family always pretended to be. The squad car crawls behind her, flashing lights invisible at noon. It pops the siren for a quarter second, a hiccup of ultimate authority. Mimi wobbles to a stop and almost tips over. Mandatory jail sentence for handguns you aren’t licensed to carry. Gun recently wiped clean of so much human tissue. Her heart hits so hard she can taste the blood up under her tongue. The cop comes out and over to where she cowers on the bike. “You didn’t signal back there.”
Her head is quivering on its stalk. She can only let it bob.
“Always use your hand signals. It’s the law.”
THEN MIMI IS AT O’HARE, waiting for a flight back to Portland. She hears herself being paged over the airport speakers again and again. Each time she bolts upright, and each time the syllables turn back into other words. The flight is delayed. Then delayed again. She sits twisting the jade tree around her finger, tens of thousands of times. The things of this world mean nothing, except for this ring and the priceless ancient scroll in her carry-on. She wants only peace. But this is where she must live now: In the shadow of the bent mulberry. The inexplicable poem. The fisherman’s song.
ADAM APPICH
A FIVE-YEAR-OLD in 1968 paints a picture. What’s in it? First, a mother, giver of paper and paints, saying, Make me something beautiful. Then a house with a door floating in the air, and a chimney with curls of spiraling smoke. Then four Appich children in descending order like measuring cups, down to the smallest, Adam. Off to the side, because Adam can’t figure out how to put them behind the house, are four trees: Leigh’s elm, Jean’s ash, Emmett’s ironwood, and Adam’s maple, each made from identical green puffballs.
“Where’s Daddy?” his mother asks.
Adam sulks, but inserts the man. He paints his father holding this very drawing in his stick hands, laughing and saying, What are these—trees? Look outside! Is that what a tree looks like?
The artist, born scrupulous, adds the cat. Then the horned toad Emmett keeps in the basement, where the climate is better for reptiles. Then the snails under the flowerpot and the moth hatched from a cocoo
n spun by another creature altogether. Then helicopter seeds from Adam’s maple and the strange rock from the alley that might be a meteorite even if Leigh calls it a cinder. And dozens of other things, living or nearly so, until nothing more will fit on the newsprint page.
He gives his mother the finished picture. She hugs Adam to her, even in front of the Grahams from across the street, who are over for drinks. The painting doesn’t show this, but his mother only ever hugs him when her whistle is wet. Adam fights her embrace to save the painting from getting crushed. Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail.
The Grahams laugh as the boy speeds off. From the landing, halfway up the stairs, Adam hears his mother whisper, “He’s a little socially retarded. The school nurse says to keep an eye.”
The word, he thinks, means special, possibly superpowered. Something other people must be careful around. Safe in the boys’ room at the top of the house, he asks Emmett, who’s eight—almost grown—“What’s retarded?”
“It means you’re a retard.”
“What’s that?”
“Not regular people.”
And that’s okay, to Adam. There’s something wrong with regular people. They’re far from being the best creatures in the world.
The painting still clings to the fridge months later, when his father huddles up the four kids after dinner. They pile into the shag-carpeted den filled with T-ball trophies, handmade ashtrays, and mounds of macaroni sculpture. They spread on the floor around their father, who hunches over The Pocket Guide to Trees. “We need to find you all a little sibling.”
The Overstory Page 5