The gawky, gap-toothed man shouts over him. “You should be joining us down here.”
The officer recoils. Someone off-camera calls, “You’re all criminals. You just want to shit on other people!”
The ring starts chanting again. More police crowd the circle’s circumference. The sheriff steps forward again. His speech is slow, clear, and loud, like a grade school teacher’s. “Release your hands from whatever restraints . . . from inside your tubes. If you do not release yourselves within five minutes, we intend to use pepper spray to compel you to comply.”
Someone in the ring says, “You can’t do that.” The camera settles on a small Asian woman with round face and black bob. Off-camera the sheriff says, “We certainly can. And we will.” There’s shouting from the ring. The camera doesn’t know where to point. The round-faced woman can be heard saying, “It’s forbidden under United States law for any public official to use pepper spray unless he’s in danger. Look at us! We can’t even move!”
The sheriff consults his watch. “Three minutes.”
Everyone talks at once. A pan across the confused lobby cuts back to frightened close-ups. There’s a scuffle; a young man in the ring gets kicked in the kidney from behind. The camera swings and lands on the gap-toothed man. His ponytail whips back and forth. “She’s asthmatic, man. Bad. You can’t use pepper spray on an asthmatic. People die from that, man.”
Someone off-camera calls, “Do what the officer says.”
The gap-toothed man nods like his neck is broken. “Do it, Mimi. Unlock. Do it.”
The gray-haired woman shouts him down. “We all agreed to stay in this together.”
The sheriff calls out, “You are in violation of the law and your actions are damaging to the community. Please vacate these premises. You have sixty seconds.”
Sixty seconds pass in the same confusion. “I’m asking you again to unlock and remove your hands from those tubes and leave peacefully.”
“I won an Air Force Cross for being shot down protecting this country.”
“I gave the order for you to disperse over five minutes ago. You have been warned of the consequences, and you have accepted them.”
“I don’t accept them!”
“We will now use pepper spray and other chemical agents to get you to release your hands from your metal pipes. We will continue to apply these agents until you agree to release yourselves. Are you ready to release now, and avoid this application?”
DOUGLAS LEANS ONE WAY, then the other. He can’t see her. The pole is between them, and the ring is going nuts. He yells her name and she’s there, tilting her scared gaze into his. He shouts things she can’t hear over all the other noise. They lock eyes for the tiniest forever. He rushes a dozen urgencies into that narrow channel. You don’t have to do this. You’re worth more to me than all the forests this outfit can slaughter.
Her look is even thicker with messages, all of which come down to the hardest of nibs: Douglas. Douglas. What they do?
. . .
THEY START AT THE BODY nearest the sheriff’s feet—a woman in her forties, overweight, with blond-tipped hair and last year’s stylish glasses. An officer comes up behind her, holding a paper cup in one hand and a Q-tip in the other. The sheriff’s voice is calm. “Do not resist. Any threats toward us will be considered an assault on a police officer, which is a felony.”
“We’re locked up! We’re locked up!”
A second officer comes alongside the one with the swab and paper cup. He reaches down and restrains the woman with one hand while tipping her head back with the other. The woman blurts, “I teach biology at Jefferson Junior High. I have given twenty years to teaching kids about—”
Someone off-camera shouts, “You’re about to get schooled!”
The sheriff says, “Release yourself from the tube.”
The teacher sucks in her breath. There’s shouting. The officer with the swab brings it down into the woman’s right eye. He struggles to get a little more into her left. Chemicals pool under the lid and stream down the side of the woman’s tipped-back face. The woman’s moans are pure animal. Each one rises in pitch until she’s screaming. Someone shouts, “Stop it! Now!”
“We have water for your eyes. Release yourself and we’ll give it to you. Are you going to release yourself?” The assisting officer tips her head back again, and the one with the swab spreads it into her eyes and nose. “Release yourself and we’ll give you cool water to rinse with.”
Someone yells, “You’re killing her. She needs a doctor.”
The cop with the swab waves toward his backup. “We’re going to use Mace next. It’s much worse.”
The woman’s screams collapse into bleating. She’s too sunk into her pain to release. Her hands can’t find the carabiner to unclick it. The two communion servers proceed clockwise to the next person in the ring—a muscular man in his early thirties who looks more like a logger than an owl-lover. He clamps down his head and clenches shut his eyes.
“Sir? Are you going to release?”
His broad, strong shoulders curl inward, but the black bears on both his arms keep him splayed. The assisting officer fights to bend back the man’s head. Leverage is with the police, and when a third officer steps in to help, the neck is soon crooked. Getting the eyes open is not as clean. They work the swab into the eyelid slits while locking the great head. Concentrated pepper slops all over. A thimbleful gets up his nose, and he starts to choke. The camera slashes around the room. It hovers on the window outside, where the crowd of protesters on the lawn chants with no clue what is happening indoors. The choking sounds are broken by an officer. “Are you going to release? Sir? Sir. Can you hear me? Are you ready to let go?”
Someone yells, “Don’t you have a conscience?”
Someone shrieks, “Use the bottle. Squirt their eyes.”
“This is torture. In America!”
The camera turns dizzy. It bobs like a drunk.
WORDS POUR OUT of Douglas as the cops disappear behind the pillar. “She’s asthmatic. You can’t use pepper spray on her, man. For God’s sake, it’ll kill her.”
He leans hard to his right, against the pinch of the black bears. He sees the officers flanking her, the uniformed man bending down from behind and taking her head in a loving embrace. Gangbanged in the eyes by three guys. The sheriff says, “Ma’am, just release your arms and you can walk away. It doesn’t have to hurt.” The woman past Mimi retches.
Douglas shouts Mimi’s name. The officer with the swab cups her neck with one hand. “Miss? Would you like to release?”
“Please don’t hurt me. I don’t want to be hurt.”
“Then just release.”
Douglas wrenches almost double. “Let go!” Mimi’s eyes lock onto his. They flash crazy and her nostrils quiver like a snared rabbit’s. He doesn’t understand the look, some kind of prediction. Her eyes say: Whatever happens, remember what I tried to do. The police tip back her beautiful head. Her throat opens onto a gurgled ahhgh . . .
Then he remembers. He can move. So easy: he fumbles with the clips that fasten his wrists to the black bears’ center posts, and he’s free. He scrambles up, howling, “Back off!”
It’s not that things slow down. It’s that his brain speeds up faster than the movements of men. He has all the minutes in the world to think, several times, Assaulting a police officer. Felony. Ten to twelve years in prison. The police have him cuffed and spread-eagled on the floor before he can even start to swing. Before anyone can call, Timber.
That night, a shaken camera operator dupes the tape and leaks a copy to the press.
DENNIS BRINGS squash soup to Patricia’s cabin for lunch. “Patty? I don’t know if I should even bring this up.”
She head-butts his shoulder. “A little late to wonder, isn’t it?”
“The injunction isn’t going to hold. It’s over already.”
She pulls back and sobers. “What does that mean?”
“They said on the te
levision last night. Another court decision. The Forest Service isn’t bound by the temporary stay handed down in your hearing.”
“Not bound.”
“They’re ready to approve a backlog of new harvest plans. People are going nuts all over the state. There was an action at the headquarters of a logging company. The police poured chemicals into people’s eyes.”
“What? Den, that doesn’t sound right.”
“They showed a clip. I couldn’t watch.”
“Are you sure? Here?”
“I saw it.”
“But you just said you couldn’t watch.”
“I saw it.”
His tone slaps her. They’re fighting—something neither of them knows how to do. Dennis, too, ducks his head in shame. Bad dog; will do better. She takes his hand. They sit over their empty soup bowls, peering at a narrow opening in the copse of hemlocks. The questions the judge asked at the hearing come back to her. What use is wilderness? What difference will it make, once the right to unlimited prosperity turns all forests into geometric proofs? The wind blows and the hemlocks wave their feathery leading shoots. Such a graceful profile, so elegant a tree. A tree embarrassed for people, embarrassed by efficiency, injunctions. The bark gray, the branches beginner green; the needles flat along the shoots, pointing outward and on. The habit tranquil, philosophical, even, in its repose. Its cones, small, downward sleigh bells content in constant silence.
She’s the guilty one, breaking that silence, when it just starts to get interesting. “In their eyes?”
“Pepper spray. With cotton swabs. It looked like something out of . . . not this country.”
“People are so beautiful.”
He turns to her, horrified. But he’s a man of faith, and waits to hear whatever explanation she cares to deliver. And, Yes, she thinks. The thought makes her stubborn. Yes: beautiful. And doomed. Which is why she has never been able to live among them.
“Hopelessness makes them determined. Nothing’s more beautiful than that.”
“You think we’re hopeless?”
“Den. How is extraction ever going stop? It can’t even slow down. The only thing we know how to do is grow. Grow harder; grow faster. More than last year. Growth, all the way up to the cliff and over. No other possibility.”
“I see.”
Clearly he doesn’t. But his willingness to lie for her also breaks her heart. She would tell him—how the towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man.
People are putting their bodies in the line of fire. Even here, in this land where the damage has long since been done, where this year’s losses are nothing compared to those racked up in the distant south . . . people beaten and abused. People getting their eyes swabbed with pepper while she—she who knows that one trillion leaves are lost without replacement, every day—she has done nothing.
“Would you say I’m a peaceful man?”
“Oh, Den. You’re almost as peaceful as a plant!”
“I feel miserable. I want to hurt those cops.”
She squeezes his hand in time to the swaying hemlocks. “People. So much pain.”
THEY PACK the dirty dishes into his truck for the ride back to town. She grabs him at the car door.
“I’m a rich woman, right?”
“Not rich enough to run for public office, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
She laughs too hard for the joke, and sobers too quickly. “In situ preservation is failing. And I see now it always will.” He looks at her and waits. She thinks: If the rest of the species were as comfortable with looking and waiting as this man, we might yet be saved. “I want to start a seed bank. There are half as many trees in the world as there were before we came down out of them.”
“Because of us?”
“One percent of the world forest, every decade. An area larger than Connecticut, every year.”
He nods, as if no one paying attention would be surprised.
“A third to a half of existing species may go extinct by the time I’m gone.”
Her words puzzle him. She’s going somewhere?
“Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about. Species we’ve barely classified. Like burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once.”
“You want to start an ark.”
She smiles at the word, but shrugs. It’s as good as any. “I want to start an ark.”
“Where you can keep . . .” The strangeness of the idea gets him. A vault to store a few hundred million years of tinkering. Hand on the car door, he fixes on something high up in a cedar. “What . . . would you do with them? When would they ever . . . ?”
“Den, I don’t know. But a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years.”
THEY MEET on a hillside at evening, overlooking the sea. Father and son. It has been some time. After this hour together in a brand-new place, it will be so much longer.
Neelay-ji. Is that you?
Pita. Here we are. It works!
The old beggar walks up to the blue-skinned god and waves. The god stands still. Sound is very bad, Neelay.
I can hear you, Dad. Not to worry. It’s just you and me.
I can’t believe it. So amazing!
This is nothing. Just wait.
The blue god stumbles as he tries to walk. Look at your costume! Look at me!
Hoping to make you laugh, Pita.
Side by side, with shaky steps, they make their way along the ocean-battered cliffs. Since long before the father left for that clinic in distant Minnesota, such a walk together has been impossible. Not since the boy’s early childhood have they gone out like this, chattering side by side, their words rushing to keep up with their steps.
It’s so big, Neelay.
There’s more. Lots more.
And the details! How did you do it?
Pita, this is just the beginning, trust me.
The blue god staggers up to the cliff’s edge. My goodness. Look down there. Waves!
They stand at the top of a waterfall that plunges down onto the coast below. Surf-carved rocks dot the sand like fairy castles. Tidal pools shimmer beneath.
Neelay. So beautiful. I want to see it all! They follow the coast awhile before turning inland. Where are we now? What is this place?
It’s all imaginary, Pita.
Yes, but familiar.
That’s good!
The father will tell the boy’s mother afterward. How he was plucked up and dropped back down in the infant world, before the rise of people. The misty air and slant, tropical light confuse him. The tan of the sand and azure sea, the dry mountains ringing them in. He squints at the vegetation, so lavish. He has never paid much attention to plants. He never had time, in his life, to learn them. And now he never will.
They walk down a path alongside trunks that open into giant gnarled parasols against the sun. What on Earth, Neelay? Your sci-fi? As if his son’s pulp magazines still gather dust balls in stacks under the boyhood bed.
No, Pita. Earth. Dragon blood trees.
They’re real? Trees like that, in our world?
The beggar smiles and points. Everything based on a true story!
It dawns on the blue god: the fish in these seas, the birds in the air, and all that creeps on this made Earth is just a crude start for some future refuge, saved from the vanishing original. He walks up close to one of the monster toadstools. What can the players do with this place?
The words spill out of the beggar unplanned. What do you want it to do, Dad?
Ach, Neelay. I remember. Good answer!
The beggar describes just how large the sandbox is. A person can gather herbs, hunt animals, plant crops, cut trees and fashion boards, dig deep mines for minera
ls and ore, trade and negotiate, build cabins and town halls and cathedrals and world wonders. . . .
They walk again. The climate changes to something lusher. Beasts prowl in the undergrowth. Above them, flocks wheel. When do people start to arrive?
End of next month.
I see. Soon!
You’ll still be here, Dad.
Yes, of course, Neelay. How do I nod, again? The blue god learns to nod. So much new to learn. What happens then?
Then we get flooded. Five hundred thousand have signed up already. Twenty dollars a month. We’re planning for a few million.
I’m glad to see it like this. Before.
Yes. Just the two of us!
The novice Vishnu stumbles up the trail. They have mountains to cross now. Vine-covered canyons. The god stands for a moment, awed by his surroundings. Then he wanders down the forest path again.
Only a quarter century, Dad. Since we wrote that “Hello World” program. And the curve is still heading straight upwards.
From two thousand miles apart, for a few trillion cycles of the processor’s clock—a processor descended from the one the blue-skinned god helped build—father and son look across the mountains together and into the future. This land of animated wishes will expand without limits. It will fill with richer, wilder, more surprising life beyond life. The map will grow as full as the thing it stands for. And still people will be hungry and alone.
They walk along magnificent crests. Far below, a wide, old river meanders through a jungle dense with many greens. The blue god stands and looks. All his life, he has been homesick. Yearning drove him from a village in Gujarat to the Golden State. He has had no country, except for work and family. And all his life he has thought: It’s only me. Now he looks down on the snaking river. Millions will pay a monthly rent to come here. And he’ll be gone.
The Overstory Page 33