The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  “You won’t be able to get your rent back. It’s too late for any kind of tuition refund. Just finish up, and you can do your volunteer work in the summer. I’m sure your mother—”

  In the background, Olivia’s mother shouts, “I’m sure your mother what?”

  Olivia hears her mother yell something about paying for her own education. People mill around her. She feels their anxiety—the moving goal line of hunger. Her own life had been a haze of privilege, narcissism, and impossibly extended adolescence, filled with mean, sardonic hipness and self-protection. Now she has been called.

  “Look,” her father whispers into the phone. “Be sensible. If you can’t deal with one more semester right now, just come home.”

  More love courses through Olivia than she has felt since childhood. “Dad? Thank you. But I need to do this.”

  “Do what? Where? Honey? Are you still there? Sweetheart?”

  “I’m here, Daddy.” Bits of the girl that she was only days ago tug at her, chanting, Fight, fight. But the fight is real now, and elsewhere.

  “Ollie, sit tight. I’ll come get you. I can be out there by . . .”

  Everything is so obvious, so blissfully clear. But her parents can’t see it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

  “Daddy, I’m good. I’ll call when I have more information.”

  A recorded woman cuts in, asking for another seventy-five cents. Olivia has no more change. All she has is a message, spoken by the flashing-eyed woman on the wall of discount televisions and reworked by the light-beings, who dictate to her now as clearly as if they were on the other end of the phone. The most wondrous things alive need you.

  Through the front glass doors of the truck stop, Olivia sees the dozens of gas pumps, and beyond them, the flat expanse of I-80 in the dawn, the snowcapped fields, the endless hostage swap of travelers east and west. Her father goes on talking, using all the persuasion techniques they teach you in law school. The sky does amazing things. It bruises a little in the freedom of the west, while to the east it spills open like a pomegranate. The phone clicks and goes dead. Olivia hangs up, a newly minted orphan. A thing reaching toward the sun, ready for anything.

  SHE LEAVES THE TRUCK STOP, in love with aimless humanity. Back on the interstate, the sun rises again in her rearview mirror. Drumlins lift and fall. The road cuts a double trench through winter’s white, all the way to the horizon. Attractions are few, but each one delights her. The Herbert Hoover Library and Museum. Sharpless Auction. Amana Colonies. The interstate exits sound like characters in a novel about wayward, fey southern aristocracy: Wilton Muscatine, Ladora Millersburg, Newton Monroe, Altuna Bondurant . . .

  Something comes over her, strange and beautiful courage. She has no resources, only a name for a destination, and no real clue about what she must do once there. Outside the car, it’s bleak and arctic, and all her worldly possessions are back in her rooming house. Yet she has a bank card linked to a small war chest, a sense of destiny that won’t quit, and friends in what she can only assume are very high places.

  Hours pass like the rolling clouds. She’s a ways down that flattening surveyor’s line between Des Moines and Council Bluffs, with nothing in any direction except endless frozen-over chaff, when something beckons from the side of her eye. She turns to see a phantom hitchhiker standing in the snow beyond the interstate’s right shoulder. He waves more arms than Vishnu. One of them holds a banner she can’t read.

  She pulls her foot off the gas and taps the brake. The hitchhiker turns into a tree so big it could fill an entire car of that lumber death train back in Indiana. The fissured trunk corkscrews up for dozens of feet before fountaining into several hulking limbs. The tree stands back from the interstate, a column against the sky, the only thing taller than a farmhouse for miles around. Presences stir in the passenger seat. As she draws abreast of the tree, Olivia makes out words painted on the shingle hanging from one enormous branch: FREE TREE ART. The presences run their twigs up the back of her neck.

  She pulls off at the next exit. Under the stop sign where the ramp meets a county highway, a hand-painted poster with the same vine-like lettering signals her to turn right. A second sign, half a country mile along, points her back toward the fabulous tree. Down the rolling road, Eden leaps out at her—a glade of broadleaf trees flowering as if it’s May. It’s like an opening in the side of this frozen, forgetting Earth onto a hidden summer. A hundred yards closer, the glade becomes the wall of an old barn, transformed by fabulous tromp l’oeil. She heads up the gravel drive into a pull-off alongside the barn and gets out. She stands staring at the mural. Even up close, the illusion knocks her out.

  “You’re here about the sign?”

  She whirls. A man in jeans and a gray-white waffle shirt with hair like a Bronze Age prophet regards her. His breath steams. Bare hands clasp each opposite elbow. He’s a few years older than she is, sad and wild, frightened to see a customer. The door of the farmhouse twenty feet behind him hangs open. The tree stands off alongside the house. It strikes Olivia that someone planted it here a very long time ago simply to attract her attention. “Yes. I think I might be.”

  She stands shivering, wanting her parka from the car. He studies her as if he means to flee. His chin rises and falls twice. “Well. You’re the first.” He points a long finger toward the painted barn, hand of a Renaissance Crucifixion. “Would you like to see the gallery?”

  He leads her up a slight rise and ducks into the building. A flick of a switch reveals a space half homeless-person’s midden, half pharaonic tomb. Talismans everywhere: totems, drawings, and cargo cult, laid out on plywood planks spread across sawhorses. They look like the work of an autistic Neolithic pantheist, unearthed by archaeology.

  Olivia swings her head, baffled. “You’re giving these away?”

  “It’s not going to work, is it?”

  “I don’t understand.” She wants to say, This is crazy. But since she started hearing voices, the word has become less useful. It occurs to her to worry, here in the middle of nowhere with a man who by any generous measure would count as strange. But a glance is enough to verify: the strangest thing about him is his innocence.

  And the art is real. She leans in toward a painting with a weird Gothic feel. Even in the dim barn light, the image is clear enough. A man lies in a narrow bed, staring down the tip of a tree branch that grows in through his window, right up to his face. A green sticker on the panel reads $0. She drifts to the piece next to it. It’s painted on a piece of recessed door panel stood on its side. The inset panel in turn becomes a door, which opens onto a clearing through a thick tangle of branches.

  She scans the table, covered in works with similar subjects. Always trees, snaking in through the windows, walls, or ceilings of seemingly safe rooms, seeking out some human target like heat-seeking probes. In some of the works, painted words float above the surreal scenes: Family Tree. Shoe Tree. Money Tree. Barking up the Wrong Tree. On another table, four sculptures of black clay wave like the hands of the dead rising out of the ground on the Judgment Day. Every one of the pieces bears a green tag reading $0.

  “Okay. First of all . . .”

  “I’ll give you two for the price of one. Since you’re my first customer.”

  She sets down the drawing in her hands and looks at its maker. His arms cross his chest and grasp his shoulders, like he’s putting himself in a straitjacket before the world does. “Why are you doing this?”

  He shrugs. “Free seems to be what the market will bear.”

  “You should be selling these in New York. Chicago.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Chicago. I drew anamorphic sidewalk chalk illusions down in Grant Park for two and a half years. Got stepped on a lot.”

  She purses her lips, listening for guidance. But, having brought her here—FREE TREE ART—the beings of light abandon her. “I’m the first person who has stopped?”

  “
I know! Like: Who wouldn’t stop for a sign like that? The nearest town is twelve miles away, and that one has fifty people. I was thinking I’d get mainly fleeing felons. You’re not a fleeing felon, by any chance?”

  She must think, figure out how this fits into the mission she has just been given. She goes from one table to the next. Surreal Cornell boxes filled with intricate woody contraband. Assemblages of broken ceramic, beads, and slices of tire rubber made to look like roots and tendrils. The branches that led her here. “You made all this? And they’re all . . . ?”

  “My tree period. Nine years and a couple months.”

  She studies his face for the key it must contain. Perhaps she has a key for him. But she doesn’t even know what the lock might be. She steps toward him and he lurches back, sticking out his hand. She takes it, and they trade names. Olivia Vandergriff holds Nick Hoel’s hand for a moment, feeling for an explanation. Then she lets it drop and turns back toward the art. “Almost a decade? And everything . . . is trees?”

  For some reason, this makes him laugh. “Another half a century, and I’ll be my own grandfather.”

  She looks at him, puzzled. By way of explanation, he leads her to a card table on the side of the exhibit. He passes her a thick, handmade book. She opens to the first page, a fanatically detailed pen-and-ink drawing of a young tree. The next page has the same drawing.

  “Flip it.” He mimes the suggestion with his own thumbs.

  She does. The thing spirals upward into life. “Jesus! That’s the tree out front.” Another fact he doesn’t deny. She flips again. The simulation runs too accurately to be the product of mere imagination. “How did you make these?”

  “From photographs. One a month for seventy-six years. I come from a long and distinguished line of obsessive-compulsives.”

  She browses some more. He watches, edgy, eager, a small business owner on the brink of bankruptcy. “If there’s anything you like, I can pack it up for you.”

  “Is this your farm?”

  “My extended family’s. They just sold it, to the devil and all his subsidiaries. I have two months to vacate.”

  “How do you live?”

  The man grins and tips his head. “You’re making a big assumption.”

  “You have no income?”

  “Life insurance policies.”

  “You sell them?”

  “No. I get paid by them. Until now.” He looks at the tables of stock like a dubious auctioneer. “I’m thirty-five years old. Not a whole lot to show for a life’s work.”

  The man’s confusion radiates from him like heat from a log fire. She feels it from two yards away. “Why?” The word comes out wilder than she planned.

  “Why the giveaway? I don’t know. It felt like another artwork. The last of the series. Trees give it all away, don’t they?”

  The equation electrifies her. Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

  The man casts a cold eye over the sawhorses and planks. “You could call it a fire sale. No—a fungus sale.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Here.” He moves toward the barn door. “I’ll show you.”

  They cut across the snow-crusted field, past the house. She stops to grab her parka; he has nothing but jeans and the waffle shirt. “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Always. Cold is good for you. People keep themselves way too warm.”

  Nick leads her across the property, and there the mammoth thing stands, spread out against the porcelain sky. Strange and beautiful math governs the subtending of the hundred branches, thousand twigs, ten thousand twiglets, a beauty that the barn full of art has just primed her to see.

  “I’ve never seen a tree anything like that.”

  “Few living people have.”

  From the interstate, she failed to notice the thing’s thick, tapering grace. The way it flows upward to the first, generous cleave. She wouldn’t have noticed, except for the flip-book. “What is it?”

  “Chestnut. The redwoods of the East.”

  The word puckers her flesh all over. Confirmation, though she hardly needs it. They pass through the drip line and under the crown.

  “All gone now. Why you’ve never seen one.”

  He tells her. How his great-great-great grandfather planted the tree. How his great-great-grandfather started photographing, at the century’s start. How blight crossed the map in a few years and wiped out the best tree in eastern America. How this rogue and loner specimen, so far from any contaminant, survived.

  She looks up into the net of branches. Each limb is a study for another of those stricken sculptures back in the barn. Something happened to this man’s family: She sees that as if reading it off a crib sheet. And he has been living in this ancestor-built house for a decade, making art from a freak titan survivor. She puts her hand on the fissured bark. “And you’ve . . . outgrown it? Moving on?”

  He recoils, horrified. “No. Never. It’s done with me.” He circles to the other side of the gigantic bole. The long, Renaissance finger points again. Dry rings with orange spots spread from several places across the bark. He presses the spots. They cave in at his touch.

  She touches the spongy trunk. “Oh, shit. What is this?”

  “Death, unfortunately.” They back away from the dying god. With slow steps, they make their way up the rise toward the house. He kicks his shoes against the back-door stoop, to clear the snow from them. He waves toward the barn, his would-be gallery. “Would you please take a piece or two with you? That would make today a very good day.”

  “First I have to tell you why I’m here.”

  HE MAKES TEA on the stove in the kitchen where his parents and grandmother sat on that morning a decade ago when he said goodbye to them and drove to the art museum in Omaha. His visitor tells her story, through grimaces and smiles. She describes the night of her transformation—the hash, the damp nakedness, the fatal lamp socket. He sits and listens, blushing and hanging on her every description.

  “I don’t feel crazy. That’s the weird thing. I was crazy before. I know what crazy feels like. This all feels . . . I don’t know. Like I’m finally seeing the obvious.” She cups her hands over the hot teacup.

  The dead chestnut agitates her in a way he doesn’t fully get. She’s young, free, impulsive, and full of a new cause. By every reliable measure, she’s more than a little tilted. But he wants her to stay like this, talking crazy theories in his kitchen, all night. There’s company in the house. Someone has come back from the dead. “You don’t sound crazy,” he fibs. Not crazy dangerous, anyway.

  “Believe me, I know what I sound like. Resurrection. Bizarre coincidences. Messages from television sets in a discount warehouse store. Beings of light I can’t see.”

  “Well, when you put it that way . . .”

  “But there’s an explanation. There must be. Maybe it’s all my subconscious, finally paying attention to something other than me. Maybe I heard about these tree protesters weeks ago, before I electrocuted myself, and now I’m finally seeing them everywhere.”

  He knows what it means to take dictation from ghosts. He has been alone for so long, sketching his own dying tree, that he wouldn’t dare gainsay anyone’s theories. No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things. He chuckles, chewing on the bitter nib. “I’ve made magical trinkets for the last nine years. Secret signals are my idiom.”

  “That’s what I don’t get.” Her eyes beg him for mercy. Her tea, the steam on her face, the wilds of snowy Iowa: a story so old and large she can’t wrap her head around it. “I’m driving down the road and see your sign, hanging from a tree that looks like . . .”

  “Well, you know, if you drive far enough . . .”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe. It’s stupid to believe anything at all. We’re always, always wrong.”

  He sees himself painting that face in bright war paint.

  “Call it whatever you want. Something’s trying to get my attention.�
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  Someone thinks all his studies of the Hoel Chestnut over the last decade might mean something. That’s enough for him. He shrugs. “It’s amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.”

  She goes from distress to conviction in zero seconds. “That’s what I’m saying! What’s crazier? Believing there might be nearby presences we don’t know about? Or cutting down the last few ancient redwoods on Earth for decking and shingles?”

  He lifts a finger and excuses himself upstairs. He comes back down carrying an old road atlas and three volumes from a shelf of encyclopedias his grandfather bought from a traveling salesman back in 1965. There is, indeed, a Solace, California, in the heart of the tall trees. There are, in fact, redwoods thirty stories tall and as old as Jesus. Crazy is a species under no threat at all. He looks at her; her face glows with purpose. He wants to follow wherever her vision leads. And when that vision fails, he wants to follow wherever she goes next.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she asks.

  “Always. Hunger’s good for you. People should stay hungry.”

  He makes her oatmeal with melted cheese and hot peppers. He tells her, “I’ll need to think about it overnight.”

  “You’re like me.”

  “How so?”

  “I hear myself best when I’m sleeping.”

  He puts her in his grandparents’ room, which he hasn’t entered since Christmas, 1980, except to dust. He sleeps down below, in his childhood cubby, under the stairs. And all night long he listens. His thoughts stretch in every direction, seeking the light. It comes to his attention that nothing else in his life can even generously be called a plan.