The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  All day long, she has followed Johnny Appleseed’s path into the interior. Olivia read about the man once, in a comic her father gave her. The comic made him a superhero, with the power to make things spring up from the dirt. It said nothing about the philanthropist with a shrewd sense of property, the tramp who’d die owning twelve hundred acres of the richest land in the country. She always thought he was just myth. She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

  Here’s the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It’s a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It’s a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It’s the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.

  And here’s the thing about an apple’s seeds: they’re unpredictable. Offspring might be anything. Staid parents generate a wild child. Sweet can go sour, or bitter turn buttery. The only way to preserve a variety’s taste is to graft a cutting onto new rootstock. It would surprise Olivia Vandergriff to learn: every apple with a name goes back to the same tree. Jonathan, McIntosh, Empire: lucky rolls in Malus’s Monte Carlo game.

  And a named apple is a patentable apple, as Olivia’s father would tell her. She once fought with him over a case of his. He was helping a transnational company prosecute a farmer who’d saved some of last year’s soybean crop and replanted, without paying royalties again. She was outraged. “You can’t own the rights to a living thing!”

  “You can. You should. Protecting intellectual property creates wealth.”

  “What about the soybean? Who’s paying the soybean for its intellectual property?”

  He looked at her with that judging frown: Whose child are you?

  The man who once owned the lot she sleeps in—the wandering apple missionary in the stove-pot hat—was sure that grafting caused a tree pain. He’d pick apple seeds out of the pomace of a mill and sow an orchard with them, a little farther west. And whatever seeds he sowed ran their own willful and unpredictable experiments. Like arcane magic, the man’s waving hand transformed a swath from Pennsylvania to Illinois into fruit trees. All day long, she drove that country. She sleeps now in a parking lot that was once an orchard full of unpredictable apples. The trees have vanished and the town forgets. But not the land.

  She wakes early, stiff with cold, under a pile of clothing. The car is filled with beings of light. They’re everywhere, unbearable beauty, the way they were the night her heart stopped. They pass into and through her body. They don’t scold her for forgetting the message they gave her. They simply infuse her again. Her joy at their return spills over, and she starts to cry. They speak no words out loud. Nothing so crude as that. They aren’t even they. They’re part of her, kin in some way that isn’t yet clear. Emissaries of creation—things she has seen and known in this world, experiences lost, bits of knowledge ignored, family branches lopped off that she must recover and revive. Dying has given her new eyes.

  You were worthless, they hum. But now you’re not. You have been spared from death to do a most important thing.

  What thing? she wants to ask. But she must keep silent and still.

  Life’s moment is here. A test that it has not yet had.

  She lives through eternity, under a pile of clothes, in the back seat of a freezing car. Disembodied entities from the far side of death make themselves known, here, now, in the parking lot of this store, calling on her for help. The sun edges up out of the earth. Two shoppers exit the store. It’s only dawn, and they’re pushing a cart with a carton as large as her car. Her thoughts narrow to a point. Just tell me. Say what you want, and I’ll do it. A container truck passes, grinding its gears on its way to the loading docks. In the noise, the beings disperse. Olivia panics. They haven’t finished giving her the assignment. She scrambles in her shoulder bag for something to write with. On the back of a box of cough drops, she scribbles, spared, test. But these words mean nothing.

  It’s morning in earnest now. Her bladder is bursting. A minute more, and nothing matters but peeing. She leaves the car and crosses the lot into the store. Inside, an older man greets her as if she’s an old friend. The store is a drag show of well-being and mirth. Televisions line a wall at the back, ranging in size from bread box to monolith. They’re all tuned to the same morning diversion. Hundreds of skydivers join for a simultaneous midair church service. She plunges fifty yards through the gauntlet of screens into the bathroom. Relief, when it comes, is heavenly. Then sad again. Just a sign, she pleads, drying herself. Just say what you want of me.

  Back in the TV gauntlet, the mass aerial church service gives way to another gathering. All down the wall, on scores of different sets, people sit chained together in a trench in front of a bulldozer, in a small town that the title text identifies as Solace, California. A quick cut, and a dozen people form a human ring around a tree they barely enclose. The tree looks like a special effect. The shot, even from a distance, encompasses only the bare base. Blue paint stains the behemoth trunk. A voice-over narrates the showdown, but the tree, replicated across a wall of screens, so stuns Olivia that she misses the details. The camera cuts away, to a woman of fifty with pulled-back hair, a plaid shirt, and eyes like beacons. She says, “Some of these trees were around before Jesus was born. We’ve already taken ninety-seven percent of the old ones. Couldn’t we find a way to keep the last three percent?”

  Olivia freezes. The creatures of light that ambushed her out in the car swarm her again, saying, This, this, this. But the instant she knows she must pay strict attention, the segment ends and another begins. She stands, staring at a debate over whether flamethrowers are protected by the Second Amendment. The light beings vanish. Revelation collapses into consumer electronics.

  She wanders, dazed, out of the monster store. She’s starving, but she buys nothing. She can’t even imagine eating. In the car, she knows now that she must press on west. The sun rises behind her, filling her rearview mirror. Dawn-pinked snow coats the fields. Across the western sky, pewter clouds begin to lighten, and somewhere beneath them lies life’s moment.

  She needs to call her parents, but she has no way to tell them what’s happening. She drives another fifty miles, trying to reconstruct what she just saw. Plats of harvested Indiana farmland shine yellow-brown-black, all the way to the horizon. The road is clear and cars are few, with no towns to speak of. Two days ago, down a road like this, she would have been doing eighty. Today, she drives like her life might be worth something.

  Near the Illinois border, she crests a rise. Down the road, a railroad gate flashes. A long, slow, heartland freight rolls through on its way north to the superhub of Gary and Chicago. The steady ka-thump of the wheels through the intersection sets up a dub tune in her head. The train is endless; she settles in. Then she notices the cargo. Car after car clicks past, each loaded with pallets of dimensional lumber. A rolling river of wood cut into uniform beams streams by without end. She begins to count cars, but stops at sixty. She has never seen so much wood. A map animates her head: trains like this, this very minute, thread the country in every direction, feeding all the great metro sprawls and their satellites. She thinks: They have arranged this for me. Then she thinks, No: such trains pass by all the time. But now she’s primed to see.

  The last of the wood-stacked cars passes, the zebra guard lifts, and the red lights stop flashing. She doesn’t move. Someone behind her honks. She holds still. The honker lays into the horn, then peels out around her, screaming in the sealed cabin and shaking a middle finger at her like he’s trying to ignite it. She closes her eyes; across her lids, small people sit chained together around an enormous tree.

  The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.

  She laughs and opens her eyes,
which fill with tears. Confirmed. I hear you. Yes.

  She looks over her left shoulder to see a car pointed the other direction, stopped alongside her with the window down. An Asian man wearing a T-shirt that reads NOLI TIMERE is asking her, for the second time, “Are you all right?” She smiles and nods and waves apology. She starts her engine, which stalled while she was watching the endless river of lumber. Then she rolls out west again. Only now she knows where she’s headed. Solace. The air all around sparks with connections. The presences light around her, singing new songs. The world starts here. This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.

  YEARS BEFORE and far to the northwest, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly Brinkman head back home after midnight from the party following the St. Paul Players’ opening night of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They’ve just played the young couple Nick and Honey, who, over a few drinks with new friends, learn what their species can do.

  Months ago, at the start of rehearsals, the four leads savored the play’s viciousness. “I’m nuts,” Dorothy announced to the rest of the cast. “I grant you that. But these people—these people are truly gone.” By opening night, all four of them are frayed and sick of each other and ready to do real damage. It makes for great community theater. The play is the Brinkmans’ best outing, by far. Ray stuns everyone with his petty conniving. Dorothy is brilliant in that two-hour free fall from innocence into knowing. It takes only the slightest Stanislavski to find their inner demons.

  Next Friday is Dorothy’s forty-second birthday. Over the course of several years, they’ve spent a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on fertility treatments that turn out to be voodoo. Three days before the play opened, they received the final blow. There’s nothing left to try.

  “My life, right?” Dorothy is looped and weepy in the passenger seat, coming home from her triumph. “All mine. I’m supposed to own it, right?”

  It has become a sore spot between them, ownership: what Ray spends all day safeguarding. He has never quite convinced his wife that prosecuting the theft of good ideas is the best way to make everyone richer. Drink does not help the level of debate. “My own private personal property. Can I have a fucking garage sale?”

  Dorothy’s own job now makes her ill. People suing other people, and she must record every slanderous sentiment with her narrow, chorded keyboard stenotype, word by precise word. All she wants is to have a child. A child would give her meaningful work at last. Barring that, she wants to sue someone.

  Ray makes an art of staying still under her attacks. He tells himself, not for the first time, that he has taken nothing away from her. If anything . . . he thinks. But he refuses to think that thought. That’s his right—not to think what it’s only fair to think.

  He doesn’t have to. She has the thought for him. He clicks the clicker and the garage opens. They pull in. “You should leave me,” she says.

  “Dorothy. Please stop. You’re making me crazy.”

  “Really. Leave. Go somewhere. Find somebody where you can have a family. Men do that forever. Guys can knock chicks up when they’re eighty, for fuck’s sake. I wouldn’t mind, Ray. Really. Only fair. You’re the fairness guy, remember? Oop. He says nothing. Got nothing to say. Nothing to say in his defense.”

  Silence is what he has. His first and last best weapon.

  They come in the front door. What a dump, they both think, though neither needs to say it. They drop their crap on the couch and head upstairs, where they take off their clothes, each in a separate walk-in closet. They stand at the his-and-hers sinks, brushing their teeth. The best night of acting they’ve ever done. A nice-sized theater full of enthusiastic applause. Calls for an encore.

  Dorothy puts one foot in front of the other, exaggerated, like the police—her husband—are making her walk a straight line. She raises her toothbrush to her mouth, waves it around, then breaks into tears, biting down on one end of the plastic stick while clutching the other.

  Ray, the night’s designated driver, soberer than he cares to be, sets down his brush and goes to her. She leans her head on his collarbone. Toothpaste dribbles out of her mouth down his plaid bathrobe. Toothpaste and saliva everywhere. Her words are full of pebbles. “I just want to stand in the lobby before the show and tell everyone as they come in. There’s no fucking baby!”

  He gets her to spit and wipes her off with a washrag. Then he leads her to bed, a place that has felt much like a double-wide pine box, these last two months. He must lift her feet in, then nudge her to make room. “We can go to Russia.” It feels good to speak in his own voice, after way too many hours as someone smarmy. He doesn’t want to play in any more plays, ever again. “Or China. So many babies that need parents who’ll love them.”

  There’s a thing people in the theater call hanging the lampshade. Say there’s a big ugly piece of pipe sticking out the backstage wall, and you can’t get rid of it. Stick a shade on it and call it a fixture.

  Her words blur into the damp pillow. “Wouldn’t be ours.”

  “Of course it would.”

  “I want a little RayRay. Your little guy. A boy. Like how you were.”

  “It wouldn’t be—”

  “Or a little girl, like you. I don’t care.”

  “Sweetie. Don’t be like this. A child is what you raise. Not what genes you—”

  “Genes are what you get, goddamn it.” She slaps the mattress and tries to bolt upright. The speed of the ascent tumbles her over. “The only. Thing. You. Truly. Own.”

  “We don’t own our genes,” he says, neglecting to add that companies can own them for us. “Listen. We go someplace where there are too many babies. We adopt two. We love them and play with them and teach them how to tell right from wrong, and they grow up all tangled together with us. I don’t care whose genes they have.”

  She pulls the pillow over her head. “Listen to him. This guy can love everybody. Let’s just get him a dog. Better yet, some vegetable we can stick out in the yard and forget about.” Then she remembers their anniversary custom, neglected for the past two years. She springs up to retrieve the words that fly out from her. But her shoulder clips him in the jaw just as he leans forward. His teeth mash up through the side of his tongue. He yells, then grabs his face, contorted with pain.

  “Oh, Ray. Shit. Damn me! I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

  He waves his hand in the air. I’m okay. Or: What’s wrong with you? Or even: Get away from me. She can’t tell, even after a decade of marriage and other amateur theatricals, which. Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they’ve planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But the humans hear nothing.

  FIVE INTERSTATES LEAD WEST, the fingers of a glove laid down on the continent with its wrist in Illinois. Olivia takes the middle one. She has a goal now—Northern California by the fastest route, before the last trees as big as rocket ships go down. She crosses the Mississippi at the Quad Cities and stops at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, on I-80, over the Iowa border. The place is a small town. She has her choice of more gas pumps than she can count before freezing. Several hundred trucks school around the spot where she pulls up, colossal sharks in a feeding frenzy.

  The light is gone. Olivia rents a shower and gets herself human again. She strolls down a crowded covered avenue of restaurants that offer hundreds of ways to partake of corn, corn syrup, corn-fed chicken, and corn-fed beef. There’s a dentist’s office and a masseuse. An enormous two-story showroom. A museum revealing how much of the world depends on trucks. There are game rooms and entertainment alleys, exhibits, lounges, and a fireplace flanked by stuffed chairs. She curls up in one and dozes off. She wakes to a security guard kicking her ankles. “No sleeping.”

  “I was just sleeping.”

  “No sleeping.”

  She returns to the car and dozes under her clothes again until dawn. Back in the food tunnel, she buys
a muffin, changes four dollars into quarters, finds a phone, and braces for the worst. But in her chest, a strange and newfound calm. The words will come.

  An operator tells her to deposit lots of money. Her father picks up. “Olivia? It’s six in the morning. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing! I’m fine. I’m in Iowa.”

  “Iowa? What’s going on?”

  Olivia smiles. What’s going on is too big to fit into the phone. “Dad, it’s all right. It’s something good. Very good.”

  “Olivia. Hello? Olivia?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No, Dad. Just the opposite.”

  “Olivia. What on Earth is happening?”

  “I’ve made . . . some new friends. Uh, organizers. They have work for me.”

  “What kind of work?”

  The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help. It’s simple enough, and self-evident, now that the light-beings have pointed it out. Every reasonable person on the planet should be able to see. “There’s a project. Out West. Important volunteer work. I’ve been recruited.”

  “What do you mean, recruited? What about your classes?”

  “I won’t be finishing school this term. That’s why I called. I need to take some time off.”

  “You what? Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t take time off four months before you graduate.”

  Generally true, although saints and soon-to-be billionaires have done exactly that.

  “You’re just tired, Ollie. It’s only a few weeks. It’ll be over before you know it.”

  Olivia looks out on the motorists gathering in the court for breakfast. Curious beyond saying: In one life, she dies of electrocution. In another, she’s in the world’s largest truck stop, explaining to her father that she’s been chosen by beings of light to help preserve the most wondrous creatures on Earth. The voice on the other end of the phone turns desperate. Olivia can’t help smiling: the life her father begs her to return to—the drugs, the unprotected sex, the psycho parties and life-threatening dares—is hell itself, while this trip westward is bringing her back from the dead.