The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  When he wakes, she’s in the kitchen, wearing a change of clothes from her car, scrounging up pancakes from flour he has let get infested by weevils. He sits at the center-post table in his flannel robe. His voice catches on the words. “I need to clear out this house by the end of the month.”

  She nods at the pancakes. “This can be done.”

  “And I need to dispose of my art. Beyond that, I have a little window on my calendar for the rest of the year.”

  He looks out the many-paned kitchen window. Through the Hoel Chestnut, the sky is so stupid with blue that it looks like it was slathered on by a primary-schooler with finger paints.

  SPRING COMES AGAIN for Mimi Ma, the first without her father. The crabs, pears, redbuds, and dogwoods explode in pink and white. Every heartless petal mocks her. The mulberries, especially, make her want to set fire to everything that blooms. The man will never see a single part of this dazzlement. And still they overflow, the cruel, indifferent colors of Now.

  Another spring follows hard on that one, then a third. Work toughens her, or the flowers start to dull. Mimi’s frequent flier account turns platinum by May. They send her to Korea. They send her to Brazil. She learns Portuguese. She learns that people of all races, colors, and creeds have unlimited hunger for custom ceramic molding.

  She takes up running, hiking, and cycling. She takes up ballroom dancing, then jazz, then salsa, which banishes all other dance for her forever. She takes up bird-watching and soon has a life list 130 species long. The company promotes her to section leader. She takes a course in Renaissance art, night courses in modern poetry, all the Holyoke stuff she tossed to become an engineer. The goal is almost patriotic: play in every playground. Have it all. Be everything.

  A colleague talks her into playing hockey in the office league. Soon she can’t get enough. She plays poker with men on four continents and sleeps with men on two. She spends a week in San Diego with a girl of astonishingly varied appetites whose heart she breaks, despite their up-front agreement. She falls pretty much in love with a married guy on another hockey team who is ever so gentle when checking her into the boards. They meet once, in Helsinki, in December, for a magic three-day alternate life in the noonday dark. She never sees him again.

  She almost gets married. Immediately afterward, she can’t remember how it ever came so close to happening. She turns thirty. Then (dependable engineer) thirty-one and thirty-two. In her sleep, she’s forever passing through epic airports, in the middle of teeming crowds, when her name is paged.

  THE COMPANY MOVES HER into HQ. The nine-thousand-dollar raise does almost nothing for her but make her hungry right away, again. But she graduates from a cubicle in a production facility to a corner office with a floor-length window looking out on a stand of pines that in her head somehow becomes the destination at the end of a very long family car trip. The world’s smallest, most private wilderness stand-in.

  She decorates the office with things her mother doesn’t know she’s stolen. A suitcase covered in pennants—CARNEGIE INSTITUTE, GENERAL MEIGS, UNIVERSITY OF NANKING. A steamer trunk stenciled with an unpronounceable name. Framed on her desk is a photo of two people, reportedly her grandparents, holding a photo of their three inexplicable grandchildren. Next to that, there’s a print of that same photo-within-a-photo: three little racially ambiguous girls sitting primly on a couch, pretending they’re Wheaton’s Own. The oldest seems ready to bully her way into belonging. Ready to punch out anyone who thinks she’s lost.

  Around the walls of the office, like a classical frieze, runs her father’s scroll. It’s wrong to expose the paintings even to the tiny amounts of Northwest sun that trickle through her floor-to-ceiling window. Wrong to apply an adhesive to the backing of art so old and rare. Wrong to leave something priceless where anyone on the night crew might roll it up and pop it into an overall pocket. Wrong to hang the thing where it reminds her of her father’s suicide, every time she lifts her eyes.

  People who step into her office for the first time often ask about the Junior Buddhas in the foyer of Enlightenment. She hears her father, on the day he showed her the scroll for the first time. These men? They pass the final exam. There are days at her desk, in her furious professional success, looking up at the scroll from the rising tide of invoices and estimates, when she sees herself getting the same final grade her father did. When the drowning feel tightens up under her breasts, she looks out through the floor-length window onto her grove, where three briefly free and wild girls collect pine cone currencies on the shores of an ancient lake. Sometimes it almost calms her. Sometimes she can almost see the man, squatting on his haunches and writing everything there is to say about this campground into his copious notebook.

  Her colleagues use her office as a lunchroom, during lunches when she isn’t eating thousand-year eggs. Today her menu is chicken sandwich, so the place is safe for all ethnicities. Three other managers and a punk from HR pile in for penny ante Up and Down the River. Mimi’s in. She’s always in for any game involving pointless risk and temporary oblivion. Her only stipulation is that she gets the Commander’s Chair.

  “What exactly does it command, Captain?”

  She waves toward the window. “This view.”

  The other players look up from their cards. They squint and shrug. Okay: A small parkway across the shallow lot, filled with trees. Trees are what the Northwest does. Trees everywhere at every elevation, crowding each other out, creeping in, closing out the sky.

  “Pines?” the VP of marketing guesses.

  A QC manager who wants Mimi’s job declares, “Ponderosas.”

  “Willamette Valley ponderosa pine,” says Britannica Man, director of R&D.

  Cards float across the office table. Penny piles change hands. Mimi fingers her jade ring. She wears it carving-inward, so no one’s tempted to hack off her finger to steal it. She gives the ring a twist. The gnarled mulberry of Fusang—the tree she drew when the sisters divvied up her father’s possessions—spins around her finger. Her palm cups toward the dealer, all business. “Come on. Give me something to work with, here.”

  Another bust hand. She raises her eyes again. Blue noon pours through her private woodland. The sun cuts starbursts in the needles’ verdigris, a thousand sconces of astral light. The great dinosaur plates of the trunks turn shades of orange, terra-cotta, and cinnamon. The QC man, who wants her job, says, “You ever smell the bark?”

  “Vanilla,” the QC guy says.

  “That’s the Jeffrey pine,” announces Britannica Man.

  “Look who’s an expert. Again!”

  “Not vanilla. Turpentine.”

  “I’m telling you,” says the QC guy. “Ponderosa pine. Vanilla. I took a course.”

  Britannica Man shakes his head. “Nope. Turpentine.”

  “Somebody go sniff the cracks.” Snickers all around.

  The QC guy smacks the table. Cards skim and pennies fall. “Ten bucks.”

  “Now we’re talking!” says the punk from HR.

  Mimi’s halfway to the door before anyone knows what’s happening.

  “Hey! We’ve got a game going here.”

  “Data,” the engineer’s engineer daughter answers. And in a few steps, she’s outside. The smell is on her before she reaches the trees—the scent of resin and wide western places. The clean smell of her childhood’s only untouched days. The music of the trees, too, tuning the wind. She remembers. Her nose slips into one of those dark fissures between the flat terra-cotta plates. She falls into the smell, a devastating whiff of two hundred million years ago. She can’t imagine what such perfume was ever meant to do. But it does something to her now. Mind control. It’s neither vanilla nor turpentine, but replete with highlights of each. A shot of spiritual butterscotch. A sprig of pineapple incense. It smells like nothing but itself, pungent and sublime. She breathes in, eyes closed, the tree’s real name.

  She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a ho
spice patient self-administering the morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body’s provinces, across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul’s innermost national park.

  A woman passing by on the sidewalk sees her sniffing and wonders whether there might be an emergency. Blissed by memory and volatile organics, Mimi calms her with a look. Back in the office, her card-playing companions stand at her floor-length window, watching her like she’s turned dangerous. She leans back into the tree, falling one last time into that unnamable scent. Eyes shut, she summons up the arhat under his pine, that slight amusement on his lips as he tips over the brink into full-fledged acceptance of life and death. Something comes over her. The light grows brighter; the smell deepens. Detachment floats her upward, buoyed by the tides of her childhood. She turns from the trunk with a profound sense of well-being. Is this it? Am I there? Taped to the trunk of the next tree over is a handmade sign:

  Town hall meeting! May 23rd!

  She drifts toward the poster and reads. The city has declared the accumulation of dead needles and bark to be a fire hazard and the trees too old and expensive to clean up, year after year. They plan to replace the pines with a cleaner, safer species. Forces opposed to the removal have asked for a public hearing.

  Come make your feelings known!

  They want to cut her trees. She looks back across the way to the office. Her colleagues press to the glass, laughing at her. They wave their hands. They rap on the window. One of them takes her picture with a disposable camera. Her nose fills with a sachet beyond the crudity of words. Call it remembering. Call it prediction. Vanilla, pineapple, butterscotch, turpentine.

  A MAN JUST SHY OF FORTY hands out silver dollars in the Spar roadhouse, off Route 212, not far from a town aptly named Damascus. Damascus, Oregon. “Celebration, damn it. You have to spend it on a beer.”

  The request has its takers. “The hell we celebrating, Rockefeller?”

  “My fifty thousandth tree. Nine hours a day, rain or shine, five and a half days a week, through every planting month, for almost four years.”

  Scattered applause and one owl hoot. Everybody in the place says he’ll drink to that.

  “Tough work for an old guy.”

  “You replace your lumbar region yet?”

  “You know they’re just gonna cut them right back down again, couple more years.”

  Gratitude of roadhouse strangers, bought a drink for nothing. Douglas Pavlicek smiles and abides. He stacks twenty more silver dollars on the corner of a pool table and waves his stick with the hard rock maple shaft in the air, inviting all comers. Soon he has two takers, Dum and Dee.

  They play three-ball, in rotation. Douglas is beyond pitiful. Four years of scrambling across slash, slag, and mud, stooping and planting, has shot his nervous system, wrecked his bum leg, and left him with a motor tremor that shows up on seismometers down in the Bay Area. Dum and Dee feel almost bad, taking his money, rack after rack, inning after inning, pot after pot. But Douggie has a time of it, here in the big city, knocking back foamy dog piss and remembering the joy of anonymous company. He’ll sleep in a bed tonight. Take a hot shower. Fifty thousand trees.

  Dum sinks all three balls on the break. His second on-the-snap tonight. Maybe he’s racking them for an instant win. Douglas Pavlicek doesn’t care. Then Dee completes in four.

  “So. Fifty thousand trees,” Dum says, just to distract Douggie, who’s struggling enough without the cognitive load of having to carry on a conversation.

  “Yup. Could die now, and I’d be ahead of the game.”

  “What do you do for women, out there?”

  “Plenty of women tree slingers. Summer vacation for a lot of them. Anything goes.” Distracted by happy memories, he pockets the cue ball. Even that’s worth a laugh.

  “Who’re you planting for?”

  “Whoever pays me.”

  “Lotta new oxygen out there, because of you. Lotta greenhouse gases put to bed.”

  “People have no idea. You know they make shampoo with wood? Shatterproof glass? Toothpaste?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “Shoe polish. Ice-cream thickener.”

  “Buildings, am I right? Books and such. Boats. Furniture.”

  “People have no idea. Still the Age of Wood. Cheapest priceless stuff that ever has been.”

  “Amen, buddy. Twenty bucks on another round?”

  They play for hours. Douggie, who can drink without apparent consequence, battles back from the brink. Dee and Dum cycle out, replaced by newcomers, Things One and Two. Doug buys another round, explaining for the graveyard shift just what they’re celebrating.

  “Fifty thousand trees. Huh.”

  “It’s a start,” Douglas says.

  Thing Two is in strong contention for asshole of the night. Week, even. “Hate to burst your bubble, friend. But you know that BC alone takes out two million log trucks a year? By itself! You’d have to plant for like four or five centuries just to—”

  “Okay. Let’s keep shooting, here.”

  “And those companies you plant for? You realize they get good-citizen credits for every seedling you plant? Every time you stick one in the ground, it lets them raise the annual allowable cut.”

  “No,” Douglas says. “That can’t be right.”

  “Oh, it’s right, all right. You’re putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers. And when your seedlings grow out, they’ll be monocrop blights, man. Drive-through diners for happy insect pests.”

  “Okay. Shut the fuck up for a second, please.” Douglas holds up his cue, then his head. “You win, friend. Party’s over.”

  MIMI DROPS OUT of next noon’s card game. Eats her lunch al fresco, under the pines.

  “Can we use your office anyway?” the HR punk asks.

  “All yours. Knock yourself out.”

  She sits, her back to the orange trunks. Looks up into the flares of light cutting through the sheaths of needles. Imitates the arhat, waits, breathes. This is how it was with the Indian prince Siddhartha, when life abandoned him and his pleasures went away. He sat under a magnificent peepul—a Bo, Ficus religiosa—and vowed not to stand up again until he understood what life wanted from him. One month passed, then another. Then he woke up from the dream of humankind. Truths blazed into his head, things so simple, hidden in broad light. At that moment, the tree above the new Buddha—cuttings from which still grow across the globe—burst into flowers, and the flowers changed into plump purple figs.

  Mimi waits for nothing even a hundredth so grandiose. In fact, she waits for nothing at all—for enough nothing to lose herself in. That unnameable scent—that’s all she wants. This grove. That two-hundred-million-year-old scent. Her family at its freest best, their own native nation. Fishing again, at the side of the only man who ever knew her, in the current of a river that isn’t long gone.

  A woman with a double-wide stroller packed with twins sits for a moment on a nearby bench. “Nice spot of shade,” Mimi says. “Did you know the city wants to cut these down?”

  Getting political. Agitating. She hates agitators, how they’re always in your face about something that has nothing to do with you. In another minute, she’s telling the frightened young mom about the town hall meeting on the twenty-third. And the ghost of her father stands not far away, under his pines, smiling at her.

  DOUGLAS PAVLICEK WAKES as Mimi fills her lungs one last time and returns to climate control. He takes another brief forever to realize he’s in his motel room, the one he rented after giving away two hundred dollars in beers and losing another hundred at three-ball. None of that even makes him wince. This afternoon, the waking dread is more substantial. All his anxiety is trained on the annual allowable cut, and whether, for the last four years, he’s been suckered into wasting his life, or worse.

  He’s missed the
complimentary continental breakfast by four hours. But the clerk sells him an orange, a chocolate bar, and a cup of coffee, three priceless tree treasures that get him to the public library. There he finds a librarian to help him research. The man pulls several volumes of policy and code off the shelf, and together they search. The answer isn’t good. Thing Two, that loud bastard, was right. Planting seedlings has done nothing but green-light more colossal clear-cuts. It’s dinnertime when Douggie accepts this fact beyond all doubt. He has eaten nothing all day since his three tree gifts. But the idea of eating again—ever—nauseates him.

  He needs to walk. Walking: the only sane thing left. What he really wants is to rush out to a scalped hillside and get the future back into the ground. It’s what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory—his soul. A shovel and a shoulder bag full of green recruits. What he, until today, thought of as hope.

  He walks all evening, stopping only to compromise with his body: a burger, which skips his taste buds on the way down. The night is soft and the air so light that for half a mile he forgets his free-fall dread. But he can’t stop the questions: What do I do now, for the next forty years? What work can’t the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?

  He walks for hours and miles, skirting downtown Portland into a peaceful mixed-use neighborhood, drawn along by a scent he can’t name. He stops into a corner grocery to get a bottle of greenish juice, which he drinks while reading notices on a bulletin board by the store’s exit. Highly Intelligent Missing Cat. Qi Rebalancing. Cheap Long Distance Calling. And then:

  Town hall meeting! May 23rd!

  Some lunatic legacy inside his species’ brains does not work and play well with others. He asks the kid at the cash register where the park in question is. Kid looks like a rat bit his nose. “That’s too far to walk.”

  “Try me.” Turns out Douggie passed it on the way here. He doubles back along the route he came. He smells the little pocket park before he sees it—like a slice of God’s birthday cake. The condemned trees all have three needles to a bundle, large orange plates. Old friends. He sets up base camp on a bench under the pines. He lets the trees comfort him. It’s dark, but the neighborhood seems safe. Safer than flying transports over Cambodia. Safer than a lot of bars he’s fallen asleep in. He’d like to fall asleep here. Fuck practicality and all its binding obligations. Give a guy a night outdoors, with nothing between his bare head and a seed rain. The twenty-third, it occurs to him—town meeting—is only four days away.