The Overstory

by Richard Powers

The standing boy must have laughed then, as the sitting one wants to now.

  Pita? Don’t be crazy. It’s a redwood!

  The father lays it out: All the world’s trunks come from the same root and are rushing outward, down the spreading branches of the one tree, trying for something.

  Think of the code that made this gigantic thing, my Neelay. How many cells inside? How many programs is it running? What do they all do? Where are they trying to reach?

  Lights go on all over the inside of Neelay’s cranium. And there, in the dark woods, waving his tiny beam and feeling a hum come from the towering black column, he knows the answer. The branch wants only to go on branching. The point of the game is to keep playing. He can’t possibly sell the company. There’s a bit of ancestral code, already present in the earliest programs he and his father wrote, that has yet to have its way with him. He sees the next project, and it’s the simplest thing. Like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before. Like evolution, it just means unfolding.

  Now he can’t afford to wait until tomorrow to be found. He has another brainstorm, much smaller, but more immediate. He lifts the cassock off his back and drops it on the ground in front of his stuck tire. A push of the joystick and he is free, up the path and into the van, where he rides, bare-chested, via a thousand steps and subroutines, back down to Redwood City and his workstation.

  The next day, he calls Digit-Arts and breaks off the deal. Their property lawyers threaten and bellow. But the only thing they really wanted from the merger was him. He is Sempervirens’ only capital worth acquiring. Without his goodwill, the deal means nothing.

  With the merger broken off, he assembles his staff into the conference room and tells them how the next project will go. The player will start in an uninhabited corner of a freshly assembled new Earth. He’ll be able to dig mines, cut down trees, plow fields, construct houses, build churches and markets and schools—anything his heart desires and his legs can reach. He’ll travel down all the spreading branches of an enormous technology tree, researching everything from stone working to space stations, free to follow any ethos, to make whatever culture floats his state-of-the-art boats.

  But there’s a kicker: other people, real people, on the other end of modems, will each be furthering their own culture in other parts of this virgin world. And every one of those other, actual people will want the land beneath any other player’s empire.

  Within nine months, an alpha copy floating around the office brings Sempervirens to a standstill. Once the employees get playing, they want nothing else. They stop sleeping. They forget to eat. Relationships are a minor irritation. One more turn. Just one more turn.

  The game is called Mastery.

  THEY SPEND TWO WEEKS closing the Hoel house, Nick and his drive-by visitor. The Des Moines Hoels come by to buy Nick’s car and take possession of the family heirlooms. They’re followed by the auctioneers, who put a green sticker on any furnishings and appliances that might fetch anything. Large men with legible biceps load the movable goods and rusting farm equipment into a twenty-four-foot truck and haul it two counties away, where everything will sell on consignment. Nick sets no minimum bids. The accumulated possessions of generations disperse like wind-borne pollen. Then it’s the Hoel house no longer.

  “My ancestors came to this state empty-handed. I should leave the same way, don’t you think?”

  Olivia touches his shoulder. They’ve spent fourteen days and thirteen nights closing up a house together, as if, after half a century of planting crops and outlasting the whims of weather, they’re retiring at last to Scottsdale to die hunched, forehead to forehead, over a checkerboard. The bottomless weirdness of the situation keeps Nick up at night. He’s going to California with a woman who pulled off the interstate on impulse, seeing his absurd sign. A woman who hears silent voices. Now, this, thinks Nicholas Hoel, is a real performance piece.

  People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end. Nicholas knows all this; he has cleaned house after his dead parents and grandparents, made all the terrible discoveries that only death affords. How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life’s passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.

  The fact is, their obsessions interlock. Each has half of a secret message. What else can he do but try to fit the halves together? And if they spin out, wake from the dream with nothing, what has he sacrificed but solitary waiting?

  Nick sits in his ancestors’ empty bedroom after midnight, reading by the lantern’s low glow. Ten years of squatting in this place, and he feels like he’s homesteading in a remote cabin. He keeps rereading the Redwood article in the encyclopedia, the encyclopedia marked with the auctioneers’ sticker. He reads of trees as tall as a football field is long. A tree whose stump made a floor where two dozen people danced a cotillion.

  He reads the encyclopedia article on mental disorders. The section on diagnosing schizophrenia contains this sentence: Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms.

  His housemate hums to herself as she prepares for departure. Her frown stops his breathing. She’s young and guileless, stripped of fear, with a calling stronger than any medieval nun’s. He could no more pass up a road trip with her than he can stop turning his dreams into drawings. He was decamping anyway. Now his life has a luxury he’s never had: a destination, and someone to head there with.

  Two weeks in a house together in a midwestern midwinter, and he doesn’t even try to touch her. That’s the only delusional part. And she knows he won’t. Her body, around him, is untainted by anything so crude as nervousness. She’s no warier of him than a lake’s surface is wary of the wind.

  They share a cold breakfast the morning after the auction truck hauls off the last of the Hoel possessions. They’ve spent the night in sleeping bags. Now she sits on the white pine floor, near where the oak table made by Nick’s great-great-great grandfather stood for more than a century. Dimples in the floorboards will remember it forever. She’s wearing an oxford shirt with fortunately long tails, and panties striped like a candy cane.

  “Aren’t you freezing?”

  “I seem to run hot these days. Since dying.”

  He averts his face and flaps his hand at her bare legs. “Could you—cover up, or something? A guy could get hurt.”

  “Oh, please. Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

  “Not on you.”

  “It’s all the same basic inventory.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Ha. Women have lived here. Recently.”

  “Wrong. I’m a celibate artist. I have a special gift.”

  “Wrinkle cream in the medicine cabinet. Nail polish.” She stops and blushes. “Unless you . . .”

  “No. Nothing so creative. Recent women. A woman.”

  “Story?”

  “She took off not long after I discovered the chestnut blight. Scared away. She thought a guy should paint something other than branches now and then.”

  “This reminds me. We need to house the gallery.”

  “House?” His smile twists like he’s sucking alum—memories of the U-Stor-It in Chicago that was home to the great works of his twenties, until he turned them into a large, combusting concept piece.

  She gets that faraway look, like she’s taking dictation from other life-forms again. “How about burying it out back?”

  Ancient techniques occur to him, patinas and crazings, subterranean ceramic practices he learned about back at art school. The idea feels at least as fine as trying to give the stuff away to passing motorists. “Why not? Let them decompose down there.”

  “I was thinking bubble wrap.”

  “It’s January, you know. However mild it has been. We’d have to rent a backhoe to dig any kind of hole.” Then he remembers.
The idea makes him laugh. “Put some clothes on. Your coat. Come on.”

  They stand side by side on the rise behind the machine shed, invisible from the house, gazing at a waist-sized hill of scree and the sizable hole next to it.

  “My cousins and I were always digging back here, when we were kids. Heading for the Earth’s molten core. Nobody ever bothered filling it back in.”

  She surveys the plot. “Huh. Nice. Thinking ahead.”

  They bury the art. The stack of photos—that flip-book of a century of chestnut growth—goes in, too. Safer there than anywhere aboveground.

  That night they’re in the kitchen again, prepping for a morning departure. She more modest, in sweatshirt and leggings. He pacing, filled with that stomach-flop feel that comes with leaping into the blue. Half terror, half thrill: Everything scattering on the air. We live, we get out a little, and then no more, forever. And we know what’s coming—thanks to the fruit of the taboo tree that we were set up to eat. Why put it there, and then forbid it? Just to make sure it gets taken.

  “What are they saying now? Your handlers.”

  “It’s not like that, Nicholas.”

  He folds his hands together under his mouth. “What’s it like, then?”

  “They’re saying, Check the oil. Okay?”

  “How are we going to find them?”

  “My handlers?”

  “No. The protesters. The tree people.”

  She laughs and touches his shoulder. She has started doing that, and he wishes she wouldn’t.

  “They’re trying to get into the newspapers. It should be easy. If we get close and still can’t find them, we’ll start our own movement.”

  He tries to laugh back, but she seems to be serious.

  In the morning, they set off. Her car is crammed full to overflowing. Five hours west, they know each other as well as any two people can know each other, short of catastrophe. He tells her, as he drives, what he has never told anyone. About that unscheduled overnighter to Omaha, coming home to find his parents and grandmother gassed to death.

  She touches his upper arm. “I knew it was that. Almost exactly that.”

  TEN HOURS IN, she says, “You’re so comfortable with silence.”

  “I’ve had some practice.”

  “I like that. I have a lot of catching up.”

  “I wanted to ask . . . I don’t know. Your posture. Your . . . aura. Like you’re atoning for something.”

  She laughs like a ten-year-old. “Maybe I am.”

  “For what?”

  Olivia finds the answer on the western horizon, bubbling up with distant mountains. “For the bitch I was. For the attentive person I wasn’t.”

  “There’s a whole lot of comfort in saying nothing.”

  She tries on the idea and seems to agree. He thinks: If I were ever imprisoned, or trapped in a fallout shelter with someone, I’d choose this person.

  At the motel just past Salt Lake, the clerk asks, “King or two queens?”

  “Two queens,” Nick says, hearing that child’s laugh beside him. They take awkward turns in the bathroom. Then they lie awake for another hour, chatting across the two-foot chasm between the beds. Garrulous, compared to the thousand miles they’ve just passed.

  “I’ve never been part of a public protest.”

  He must think: surely some act of political anger, back in college. He’s surprised to have to say, “Me neither.”

  “I can’t imagine who wouldn’t join this one.”

  “Lumberjacks. Libertarians. People who believe in human destiny. People who need decks and shingles.” Soon his eyes close on their own accord, and he’s swept back into sleep, that nightly place of plantlike deliverance.

  NEVADA IS WIDE and bleak enough to mock all human politics. Desert in winter. He gazes in secret as she drives. She’s seasick with awe. Then up into the Sierras, where they hit a snowstorm. Nick must buy chains from a roadside scalper. In the Donner Pass, he gets trapped behind a semi, both lanes thick with metal going sixty on a sheet of packed snow. He guides the car by telepathy, finds a little gap in the left lane, and pulls out to pass. Then whiteout. Gauze bandages across the windshield.

  “Livia? Shit. I can’t see!”

  The car thuds onto the shoulder and veers back out. He fumbles into the lane, accelerates, blunders forward, and clears their death by snowy inches.

  Miles later, he’s still shaking. “Jesus God. I almost killed you.”

  “No,” she says, like someone’s telling her how things will go. “That’s not happening.”

  They come down the western slope into Shangri-la. In less than an hour, the world outside their capsule goes from conifer forests under feet of snow to the broad green Central Valley, with perennials flowering on the highway banks.

  “Cali,” she says.

  He does not even try to fight his smile. “I believe you may be right.”

  DOUGLAS has his day in court.

  “You are charged with obstructing official business,” the judge says. “How do you plead?”

  “Your Honor. The official business stank like something steamy somebody’s dog left on the parkway.”

  The judge removes his glasses and rubs his nose. He gazes down into the depths of jurisprudence. “Unfortunately, that has no bearing on your case.”

  “Why not, Your Honor, if I may respectfully ask?”

  In two minutes, the judge explains to him how the law works. Property. Civil governance. Done.

  “But the officials were trying to shut down democracy.”

  “The courts are here for any group of citizens to seek justice for any action that the city took.”

  “Your Honor. I’m a decorated veteran. They gave me a Purple Heart and an Air Force Cross. Over the last four years, I’ve planted fifty thousand trees.”

  He has the court’s attention.

  “I’ve walked I don’t know how many thousands of miles, sticking seedlings in the ground, trying to roll back progress just a tiny bit. Then I learn that all I’m doing is giving the bastards credits to cut down more and older trees. I’m sorry, but seeing stupidity up close in that city park put me over the edge. Simple as that.”

  “Have you ever been to jail before?”

  “Tough question. Yes and no.”

  The court deliberates. The defendant obstructed a job being done by a private tree-cutting company on city orders in the dead of night. He took no pokes at the crew. No destruction of property. The judge gives Douglas a seven-day suspended sentence, plus a two-hundred-dollar fine or three days of labor, planting Oregon ashes for the city arborist. Douglas chooses the planting. When he rushes from the courtroom back to the motel, his truck has already been towed. The henchmen want three hundred bucks to return it. He asks them to hold the truck until he rakes the money together. He’s got some silver dollars buried here and there.

  He busts his hump for the city, planting trees for a week—days longer than his obligatory service requires. “Why?” the arborist asks. “When you don’t have to?”

  “The ash is a noble tree.” Resilient as all get-out. Stuff of tool handles and baseball bats. Douglas loves those compound, pinnate leaves, how they feather the light and make life feel softer than it is. Loves the tapered, sailboat seeds. He likes the idea of planting a few ashes, before doing that only thing that anyone really has to do.

  The harder the man works, the guiltier the arborist feels. “Not the city’s finest hour, what happened in that park.” It’s a small concession, but for a man on the city payroll, it’s almost incendiary.

  “Shit straight. Cover of darkness. Days before a town hall hearing people were planning.”

  “Life’s a blood sport,” the arborist says. “Like nature.”

  “Humans don’t know shit about nature. Or democracy. You ever think the crazies might be right?”

  “Depends. Which crazies?”

  “Green crazies. Bunch of them were helping plant a cut, down in the Siuslaw. I met some others at
a protest in the Umpqua. They’re coming out of the woodwork all over Oregon.”

  “Kids and druggies. Why do they all take after Rasputin?”

  “Hey!” Douggie says. “Rasputin had a look.” He hopes the arborist won’t turn him in for sedition.

  HE DOESN’T LEAVE PORTLAND right away. He heads back to the public library, to read up on guerrilla forestry. His old librarian friend there continues to be more than helpful. The man seems to have a little thing for Douggie, despite his aroma. Or maybe because. Some people get off on loam. A news story of an action near the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness gets his attention—an outfit training people how to blockade logging roads. All Douglas needs to do is get his truck out of hock. First, though, he must perform a little guerrilla action of his own. He’s not sure of the legality of returning to the scene of his crime. Another act of civil disobedience could very possibly land him back in jail. The part of Douglas that likes to gaze on the Earth from way up high, like he did when he was a loadmaster, almost hopes it does.

  Rage builds as he nears the park. It’s not quite midday. His shoulders, neck, and bum leg feel it again—thrown to the ground by thugs pulling one over on the general populace. Rage doesn’t puff him up, though. Just the opposite. It stoops him over and sucker-punches his solar plexus until, by the time he’s in the grove, he’s shuffling.

  The first of the fresh stumps still oozes resin. He drops down alongside it on the ground and pulls out a fine-line Magic Marker and his driver’s license, to use as a straight edge. He holds both to the sawn wood like he’s doing surgery, and counts backward. The years roll away under his fingers—their floods and droughts, their cold spells and scorched seasons all written into the varying rings. When the countdown reaches 1975, he makes a fine black X and pens in that date. Then he peels back another twenty-five years, makes another X on a ray just a little bit counterclockwise from the first, and labels it 1950.

  The work goes on, in quarter-century increments, until he reaches the still center. He doesn’t know how old this city is, but the tree was clearly a sturdy sapling before any white people came near this spot. When Douglas pens in the closest year he can count with accuracy, he travels back out to the rim, so recently still expanding, and writes, in block caps that run like a wheel around half the circumference, CUT DOWN WHILE YOU SLEPT.