The Overstory

by Richard Powers

A portion of the crowd drifts toward the gate. Mimi cocks an eyebrow at Douglas. “You’re sure?”

  “Shit yea-uh. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  She wonders if he means here, on the edge of a national forest being sold to the top bidder, or here, on Earth, the only entity capable of prospection. She shrugs away all philosophy. “Let’s go.”

  Ten more yards and they’re criminals. The roar grows sickening. In half a mile, they’re up against human ingenuity at its best. She can name the metal beasts better than she can name the different trees. Down through the clearing, there’s a feller buncher, snatching batches of small trunks, delimbing them, and bucking the logs to fixed lengths, doing in a day what a team of human cutters would need a week to get through. There’s a self-loading forwarder trailer, stacking the cut logs into itself. Nearer by, a front loader extends the roadbed, and a scraper rough-grades it prior to the arrival of the roller. She’s learned of machines that drop their maws onto fifty-foot trees and grind them to the ground faster than a food processor can shred a carrot. Machines that stack logs like toothpicks and haul them to mills where twenty-foot trunks twirl on spits so fast that the touch of an angled blade shaves off the flesh in a continuous layer of veneer.

  Hard hats block the road ahead of them. Their foreman says, “You’re trespassing.”

  The megaphone woman, on whom Mimi has developed a schoolgirl crush, says, “These are public lands.”

  The other megaphone wielder gives the command, and marchers fan out across the dirt roadbed. They sit down shoulder to shoulder, spanning the road. Mimi and Doug link arms, joining the solidifying line. Mimi locks in, clasping her hands in front of her. The inward-turned mulberry of her jade ring presses into her other wrist. By the time the loggers see what’s happening, the deed is done. The two ends of the human chain lock themselves with bike cables to trees on either side of the road.

  Two fellers walk right up to the arm-locked line. The tops of their steel-reinforced boots come almost to Mimi’s eyes. “Shit,” a blond one says. Mimi sees his genuine distress. “When are you people going to grow up and get real? Why don’t you take care of your own business, and let us get on with ours?”

  “This is everybody’s business,” Douglas answers. Mimi tugs at him.

  “You know where the real problems are? Brazil. China. That’s where the crazy cutting is. You should go protest down there. See what they think when you tell them they can’t get as rich as we are.”

  “You’re cutting down the last American old growth.”

  “You wouldn’t know old growth if it fell on you. We’ve been cutting these hillsides for decades, and we’ve been replanting. Ten trees for each one we cut.”

  “Correction. I’ve been replanting. Ten little paper pulp seedlings for each one of these varied, ancient geniuses.”

  Mimi watches the foreman make all kinds of cost-benefit calculations. It’s a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you’ve already made. One of the fellers swings his boot and flicks a pad of mud up into Douglas’s face. Mimi loosens her arm to clean it off, but Douglas clasps her in his bicep.

  Another fleck of mud. “Oh! Sorry, guy. My mistake.”

  Mimi erupts. “You punk thug!”

  “Take it up with these guys. Sue me from your jail cell.”

  The feller points off behind the seated line, where police are pouring down the Forest Service road in force. They break the chain like someone plucking a dandelion. Then they handcuff the broken links back together. Mimi and Douglas end up with two strangers chained between them and two more on each side. They’re left to sit in the muddy road while the police mop up the chaos.

  “I need to pee,” Mimi tells a cop, around two o’clock. Half an hour later, she tells the same cop again. “I really, really need to urinate.”

  “No, you don’t. You really don’t.”

  Urine leaks down her leg. She starts sobbing. The women she’s cuffed to gag and grimace.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t hold it.”

  “Shhh, it’s okay,” Douglas says, handcuffed two bodies down. “Don’t think about it.” Her sobs get frantic. “It’s okay,” Douglas keeps saying. “I’ve got my arm around you, in my head.”

  The crying stops. It won’t start up again for years. Smelling like an animal-marked stump, Mimi submits to arrest and booking. As the lady officer in the station takes her fingerprints, she feels, for the first time since her father’s death, like she’s given the day everything it wanted.

  THE KISS COMES DOWN on the crown of Ray’s head, from behind, where he sits in his study, reading. Kisses, brisk and precise, like wire-guided bomblets, are Dorothy’s trademarks these days. It never fails to make his blood run cold.

  “Off to sing.”

  He cranes to look at her. She’s forty-four, but looks to him as she did at twenty-eight. It’s the not having babies, he thinks. The bloom still coursing through her, the pure lure, as if ridiculous loveliness still had a job to do, this far past youth. Jeans and a white cotton blouse gathered in pleats that cling to her plaintive ribs. Topped with a lilac shawl, sweetly disheveled and swept across her neck, the one stretch of skin she thinks betrays her. Her hair falls on the shawl, shiny, chestnut, perfect, still the length it was when she tried out for Lady Macbeth on their first date.

  “You look so beautiful.”

  “Ha! I’m glad your eyes are failing.” She tickles the spot where her kiss landed. “Thinning, up here.”

  “Time’s winged chariot.”

  “I’m trying to picture such a vehicle. How would that work, exactly?”

  He cranes further. Clasped in one hand against her runner’s thighs, she holds a pale green Peters Edition emblazoned with the giant black word:

  BR MS

  broken in two by her perfect forearm. Beneath that, smaller:

  Ein Deu equiem

  The concert is at the end of June. She’ll stand onstage with a hundred other voices, inconspicuous among the women except for being one of the few who are not yet gray, and sing:

  Siehe, ein Ackermann wartet

  auf die köstliche Frucht der Erde

  und ist geduldig darüber,

  bis er empfahe den Morgenregen und Abendregen.

  Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.

  Singing is now everything. It follows on a line of hobbies she has hit hard in the hopes of passing the week as maximally as possible. Swimming. Lifesaving. Life drawing in charcoal and pastels. Meanwhile, he has withdrawn into the stronghold of his study. He bills more hours of work than ever, in the vague hope of buying a second home for them, someplace more beautiful. Someplace surrounded, if not by wilderness, then by the memory of it.

  “Lots of rehearsals.” Two two-hour rehearsals every week, and she hasn’t missed one.

  “They’re fun.” She has been overprepared for weeks. Truth is, she has practiced so hard at home that she could sing this piece tonight from start to finish, every vocal line. “Sure you don’t want to come? We need more basses.”

  More than ever, she astonishes him. What would she do if he said yes? “Maybe in the fall. For the Mozart.”

  “You’ve got enough to keep you busy?”

  This is what people do—solve their own problems in others’ lives. He laughs. “At the moment, yes. I’m wrestling with this.” He holds the pages up to her: “Should Trees Have Standing?” She reads the title and frowns. Ray examines the words, puzzled himself. “He seems to be saying that the law’s shortfall is that it only recognizes human victims.”

  “And that’s a problem?”

  “He wants to extend rights to nonhuman things. He wants trees to be rewarded for their intellectual property.”

  She smirks. “Bad for business, huh?”

  “I don’t know whether to throw it across the room and laugh or to
set it on fire and kill myself.”

  “Let me know which you decide. See you between ten and eleven. Don’t wait up if you’re sleepy.”

  “I’m sleepy already.” He laughs again, as if he just made a joke. “You warm enough? It’s going to get chilly. Button up your overcoat.”

  She seizes up in the doorway, and the moment is there again, between them. The sudden upwell of anger and mutual defeat. “I’m not your property, Ray. We had a deal.”

  “What is this? I didn’t say you were my property.”

  “You certainly did,” she says, and is gone. Only when the door hammers shut does he make the leap. Overcoats. Buttons. Wind blowing free. Take good care of yourself. You belong to me.

  SHE DRIVES OFF down Birch to the west, under orange maples. He doesn’t bother to watch the taillights or see where she turns. It would be an indignity to them both. She’s too smart not to drive past the rehearsal auditorium first. Besides: he’s already stood at the window on previous nights and watched the taillights. He’s done it all, all things desperate and disgusting. Looked up the unknown numbers on the phone bill log. Checked the pockets of her previous night’s clothes. Gone through her purse for notes. He finds no notes. Just courtroom exhibits A through Z of his shame.

  His weeks of disbelief long ago changed into a free fall many times scarier than their youthful stint at skydiving. The panic of discovery soon thickened into grief, the kind he felt when his mother died. Then grief transmuted into virtue, which he nursed in secrecy for weeks, until virtue collapsed under its own explosive growth into bitter immobility. Every question is a voluntary madness. Who? Why? How long? How often before?

  What does it matter? Leave your overcoat unbuttoned. Now he just wants peace, and to be near her a little longer, for as long as he can, before she smashes everything just to punish him for finding out.

  SHE PARKS HER CAR in the lot behind the auditorium. She even goes in for a minute, not so much to establish an alibi as to make the trapdoor that opens under her feel that much crazier. When the hundred singers mill onto the risers, she slips out the back, as if to retrieve something she left in her car. In a minute, she’s on the rain-slicked street, cold, living, heart beating like mad. She’s going to get done, several different ways, long and lovingly and to no purpose, with no contractual obligations, by a man she doesn’t know from Adam. The thought runs the length of her, like she just injected something.

  She’s going to be bad. Bad again. Stupid bad. Do things she never imagined she could do. New things. Going to learn more about herself—scary more, at high speed, joyously. What she likes and doesn’t, when she isn’t lying the lazy lie of decency. Put the last thirty years to the heat-freeing flames. The thought shatters her—magic. Growth, and she’s damp and practically coming from the swish of her own legs, like a pith-green girl of sixteen, by the time she sees the black BMW at curbside and lets herself in.

  Forty-eight minutes of wilderness experiment. Immediately afterward, she has trouble remembering. Like maybe he did drug her just a little, for fun. She remembers sitting up on her spread knees on the giant bed, giggling like a blitzed sorority princess. She remembers growing huge, poetic, queenly, godlike, a flood of Brahms. Then falling back into the pain in her legs and lungs, a distance runner. She remembers him whispering in her ear as he fingered her—vague, threatening, worshipful, thrilling syllables that she fed on without quite making out.

  Every so often in the bobbing sea, as they did the week before, details from her favorite adultery novels flashed in her head with horrible specificity. She remembers thinking, Now I’m the heroine of my own doomed story. Then a long and tender kiss good night, curbside in the dark car, three blocks from the auditorium. Ten steps down the slick sidewalk, she consigns the whole adventure to imagination, something that happened only in a book.

  She’s back inside and up on the risers with time to spare, waiting for the return of the choral swell as the baritone sings, Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

  RAY NIBBLES ON DINNER—pistachios and an apple. Reading is slow, and all things distract him. Staring at the bottom of the apple’s core, he realizes that the calyx—a word he’ll never know in this life—is nothing less than the leftover bits of a withered apple flower. He looks up from the thicket of words three times a minute, waiting for truth to hit like a falling oak smashing through the house’s roof. Nothing comes to kill him. Nothing at all happens, and it keeps on happening with great force and patience. Nothing happens so completely that when he checks his watch to see why Dorothy isn’t home yet, he’s stunned to discover that less than half an hour has passed.

  He bows his head and fixes on the page. The article stokes his distress. Should trees have standing? This time last month, it would have been his evening’s great sport to test the ingenious argument. What can be owned and who can do the owning? What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

  But tonight the words swim. Eight thirty-seven. Everything that was his is going down, and he doesn’t even know what brought on disaster. The terrible logic of the essay begins to wear him down. Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn’t trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages? The whole idea is a holy nightmare, a death dance of justice like the one he now lives through, watching the second hand of his watch refuse to move. His entire career until this moment—protecting the property of those with a right to grow—begins to seem like one long war crime, like something he’ll be imprisoned for, come the revolution.

  The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.

  Eight forty-two, and he’s desperate. He’ll do anything now, to deceive her, to make her think he has no idea. Her fit of craziness will run its course. The fever that has turned her into someone he can’t recognize will burn away and leave her well again. Shame will bring her back to herself, and she’ll remember everything. The years. The time they went to Italy. The time they jumped from the plane. The time she ran the car into a tree while reading his anniversary letter and almost killed herself. The amateur theatrics. The things they planted together, in the backyard they made.

  It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them.

  The key thing is for her never to learn that he knows. He must be cheerful, smart, funny. The minute she suspects, it’ll destroy them both. She might live with anything except being forgiven.

  But concealment is killing him. He never could play anyone but an earnest Macduff. Eight forty-eight. He tries to concentrate. The evening stretches out ahead like two consecutive life sentences. He has only this essay to keep him company and torture him.

  What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?

  The essay flickers under his fingers. He can’t follow it, can’t decide whether it’s brilliant or rubbish. His whole self is dissolving. All his rights and privileges, everything he owns. A great gift that has been his since birth is being taken away. It’s a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant’s: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

  DISGUST BREAKS over her as she drives home. But even disgust feels like freedom. If a person can see the worst in herself . . . If a person can find total honesty, c
omplete knowledge of what she really is . . . Now that she’s sated, she wants purity again. At the light at Snelling, she looks up into the rearview mirror and sees her eyes hiding from her own furtive glance. She thinks: I’ll stop. Get my life back. Decency. This doesn’t have to end in a flaming fireball. The coming concert performance can absorb her excess energy. After that, she’ll find something else to occupy her. To keep her sane and sober.

  By Lexington, ten blocks down, she’s planning one more dose. Just one more, to remind her what it feels like to ski this mountain continent. She won’t be pathetic. She’ll have the addiction, without the pitiful resolutions. She doesn’t know what’s addicted: her body or her will. She knows only that she’ll follow herself down, to wherever it takes her. By the time she turns onto their street’s leafy canyon, she’s calm again.

  SHE COMES IN rosy from the cold. Her scarf trails as she pushes the door shut behind her. The Requiem score drops from her hands. She bends to pick it up, and when she straightens, their eyes catch, spilling everything. Scared, defiant, pleading, thuggish. Wanting to be home again, with an old friend.

  “Hey! You haven’t budged from that chair.”

  “Good rehearsal?”

  “The best!”

  “I’m glad. What sections did you sing?”

  She crosses to where he sits. Something of their old rhythm. She hugs him, Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck. Before he can stand, she slips past, into the kitchen, smelling on herself that blend of salt and bleach. “I’ll just take a quick shower before bed.”

  She’s a smart woman, but she has never had much patience with the obvious. Nor does she think him capable of simple observation. She showered twenty minutes before heading out to sing her Brahms.

  IN BED, in peacock pajamas, scalded and renewed from the hot spray, she asks, “How’s the reading?”

  He needs a moment to remember what he spent all night trying to read. What is needed is a myth. . . .

  “Difficult. I wasn’t all there.”

  “Hmm.” She rolls on her side to face him, eyes closed. “Tell me.”