They listen to a book on tape: myths and legends of the first people of the Northwest. The old man of the ancients, Kemush, springs up from the ashes of the northern lights and makes everything. Coyote and Wishpoosh tear up the landscape in their epic fight. The animals get together to steal fire from Pine Tree. And all the darkness’s spirits shift shapes, as numerous and fluid as leaves.
Night falls in the Bitterroots. The last few miles are the hardest—slow, winding, and remote. At last they pull up to the staging area, two miles off the state highway. The site looks just the way Watchman drew it. Mimi stays in the van, a scarf around her scarred face, sweeping the radio frequencies with a police scanner. The others set wordlessly to work. All tasks have been talked through dozens of times. They move like a single creature, wrestling five-gallon fuel containers into place and daisy-chaining them with wicks of towel and sheet doused in propellant. Then they affix the Tupperware timers.
WATCHMAN SETS OFF on the job assigned to him. Tonight is his last chance to work in a medium that will be seen by millions. He heads away from the future resort’s half-framed main lodge, where the others deploy their devices. Across the graded meadow he comes to a pair of trailers, too far from the action for the blasts to reach. Their walls are his best available canvas. He takes two cans of spray paint from his coat pockets and steps up to the cleaner of the trailers’ wall. In letters filled with all the care his hand can compose, he writes:
CONTROL KILLS CONNECTION HEALS
He steps back to appraise the germ of the only thing he knows for certain. With a large felt marker, he adorns the block caps in stems and twigs, until the letters seem to be sprouting back from apocalypse. They look like Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the dancing figures of an op-art bestiary. Below these two lines he adds the trailing hope:
COME HOME OR DIE
Back at the detonation site, wrestling the tubs into place, Adam and Doug mistime their movements. Fuel slops onto the hem of Adam’s jacket and down his black denims. Stinking of petrochemicals, he squeezes his fists until his soaked gloves drip. His grip is shot from so much lifting. He looks up at the peaked roof of the construction office and thinks, What the hell am I doing? The clarity of recent weeks, the sudden waking from sleepwalk, his certainty that the world has been stolen and the atmosphere trashed for the shortest of short-term gains, the sense that he must do all he can to fight for the living world’s most wondrous creatures: all these abandon Adam, and he’s left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
ON THE SIDE of the other trailer, Watchman paints words in an alphabet wild and vivid. Verse springs up and flows over the empty white:
For you have five trees in Paradise
which do not change,
either in summer or in winter,
and their leaves do not fall.
He who knows them
shall not taste of death.
He steps back, his throat tightening, a little surprised by what has come out of him, this prayer he needs so badly to send out to no one who will understand it. Then: whump, and he’s hit in the back by a concussion wave. Heat blows outward on the air, long before there should be anything like an explosion. Watchman turns to see a ball of orange leap up in a quick, simulated sunrise. His legs pitch forward, and he’s running toward the blaze.
Another figure cuts in on the edge of his sight. Douglas, his hobbled run, one leg stiff, a dotted rhythm. They reach the burning at the same time. Then, Douglas, shout-whispering, “Fuck no. Fuck no!” He’s on his knees, mewling at what has happened. Two figures lie on the ground. One of them starts to move as Nick closes in, and not the one Nick needs to be moving.
Adam pulls his shoulders off the ground. His head periscopes in all directions. A veil of blood trickles down his face. “Oh,” he says. “Oh!”
Douglas steadies him. Nick swoops down to lift Olivia. She’s lying on her back, her face to the stars. Her eyes are open. All around them, the air turns orange. “Livvy?” His voice is horrible. The thick, slurring burr of it, worse for her than the blast. “Can you hear me?”
A bubble forms on her lips. Then the word, “Nnn.”
Something seeps from her side, down by her waist. The front of her black shirt glistens in the dark. He lifts it and cries out, rushing it back down. A hushed wail comes out of him. Then he’s a monster of competence again. The injured woman looks at him in terror. He shuts himself up and blanks his face. Goes through all the motions of every possible aid. The air starts to flicker. Two figures cowl over them. Douglas and Adam. “Is she . . . ?”
Something in the words hits Olivia. She tries to raise her head. Nick gentles her down. “I’m,” she says. Her eyes close again.
Everything scalds. Douglas spins around in tight circles, his hands pressed against his skull. Clipped sounds come out of him. “Shit, shit, shit, shit . . .”
“We have to move her,” Adam says.
Nick blocks his advance. “We can’t!”
“We have to. The flames.”
Their clumsy scuffle is over before it starts. Adam takes the woman under her arms and drags her across the stony ground. Sounds percolate up her throat. Nick bends down beside her again, helpless. He’ll see the image for the next twenty years. He rises, stumbles away, and vomits on the ground.
Then Mimi is there, next to them in the dark. Relief runs through Nick. Another woman. A woman will know how to save them. At a glance, the engineer sees everything. She pushes the van keys into Adam’s hands. “Go. Back to that last town we came through. Ten miles. Get the police.”
“No,” the woman on the ground says, startling everyone. “Don’t. Keep . . .”
Adam points at the blaze. “I don’t care,” Mimi says. “Go. She needs help.”
Adam stands still, his body objecting. Help won’t help her. And it will kill us all.
“Finish,” the prone woman murmurs. The word is so soft not even Nick can make it out.
Adam stares at the keys in his hand. He leans forward until he’s trotting toward the van.
“Douglas,” Mimi snaps. “Stop.” The vet quits moaning and holds still. Then Mimi is on the ground ministering to Olivia, opening her collar, calming the animal panic. “Help is coming. Stay still.”
Words only agitate the gored woman. “No. Finish. Keep—”
Mimi hushes her, stroking the side of her face. Nick slinks back. He watches from a distance. Everything is happening, unfixable, forever, for real. But on another planet, to other people.
Things seep out of Olivia’s middle. The lips move. Mimi leans in, her ear to Olivia’s mouth. “A little water?”
Mimi spins and looks up at Nick. “Water!” He freezes, helpless.
“I’ll find some,” Douglas shouts. He sees a dimple in the hillside, beyond the blaze. “That’s a ravine. There must be a stream down there.”
The men search for something to hold the water. Every container they have is tainted with accelerants. There’s a baggie in Nick’s pocket. He empties it of its few sunflower seeds and gives it to Douglas, who heads off into the woods behind the construction site.
It’s not hard to find the stream. But a learned aversion grips Douglas as he dips the baggie. You can’t drink water from outside. There isn’t a lake, pond, stream, or rivulet in the country that’s safe to drink. He clenches down and fills the bag. The woman just needs to hold a thimble of cool, clear liquid in her mouth, however poisonous. Douglas cups the bag and runs it back up the hillside. He pours a little water into her mouth.
“Thank you.” Her eyes are feverish with gratitude. “That’s good.” She drinks a little more. Then her eyes close.
Douglas holds the baggie, helpless. Mimi dips her fingers into the fluid and wipes off Olivia’s streaked face. She cradles the head, strokes the chestnut hair. The green eyes
open again. They’re alert now, cognizant, fixing on the eyes of their nurse. Olivia’s face twists up in terror, like an ambushed mare. As clearly as if she speaks the words out loud, she puts the idea into Mimi’s skull: Something’s wrong. I’ve been shown what happens, and this isn’t it.
Mimi holds her gaze, absorbing what pain she can. Comfort is impossible. The two lock eyes, and neither can look away. The gutted woman’s thoughts pour into Mimi through a widening channel, thoughts too large and slow to understand.
Nick stands still, eyes closed. Douglas throws the baggie on the ground and stumbles away. The sky flares up, bright with refusal. Two new explosions rip through the air. Olivia cries out, searching for Mimi’s gaze again. Her stare turns violent, clutching, as if looking away, even for an instant, would be worse than the worst death.
A third man appears on the inferno’s edge. The sight of Adam, so much sooner than he should be back, restarts Nick. “Did you get help?”
Adam looks down at the pietà. Some part of him seems surprised to find that the drama is still going on.
“Is help coming?” Nick shouts.
Adam says nothing. With all his will, he pushes back from madness.
“You gutless . . . Give me the keys. Give me the keys.”
The artist charges the psychologist, grappling. Only the sound of his name in Olivia’s mouth stops Nick from violence. He’s on the ground next to her in a heartbeat. She’s breathing hard now. Her face fists up in pain. Whatever shock has kept her anesthetized is wearing off, leaving her contorted and panting.
“Nick?” The panting stops. Her eyes go huge. He must fight to keep from looking over his shoulder for the terror that she sees.
“I’m here. I’m here.”
“Nick?” A shriek now. She tries to sit, and soft things spill out under her shirt. “Nick!”
“Yes. I’m here. Right here. I’m with you.”
The panting starts up again. Objection trickles from her mouth. Hnn. Hnn. Hnn. Her grip crushes his fingers. She moans, and the noise leaks away until there’s no louder sound than the flames on three sides of them. Her eyes squeeze shut. Then they open, wild. She stares, unsure what she’s looking at.
“How long can it last?”
“Not long,” he promises.
She claws at him, an animal falling from a great height. Then she calms again. “But not this? This will never end—what we have. Right?”
He waits too long, and time replies for him. She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.
CROWN
A man in the boreal north lies on his back on the cold ground at dawn. His head extends from his one-man tent, facing upward. Five thin cylinders of white spruce register the breeze above him. Gravity is nothing. The evergreen tips sketch and scribble on the morning sky. He’s never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.
The man with his head sticking out of the tent asks himself: What are those treetops like? They’re like that cog-toothed drawing toy, spinning out surprise patterns from the simplest nested cycles. They’re like the tip of a Ouija planchette, taking dictation from beyond. They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men.
But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived through. The man in the tent lies bathed in signals hundreds of millions of years older than his crude senses. And still he can read them.
The five white spruces sign the blue air. They write: Light and water and a little crushed stone demand long answers.
Nearby lodgepoles and jack pines demur: Long answers need long time. And long time is exactly what’s vanishing.
The black spruces down the drumlin put it bluntly: Warm is feeding on warm. The permafrost is belching. The cycle speeds up.
Farther south, broadleaves agree. Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.
The man rolls over onto his back, face-to-face with the morning sky. The messages swarm him. Even here, homeless, he thinks: Nothing will be the same.
The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same.
We’re all doomed, the man thinks.
We have always all been doomed.
But things are different this time.
Yes. You’re here.
The man must rise and get to work, as the trees are already doing. His work is almost done. He’ll strike camp tomorrow, or the day after. But this minute, this morning, he watches the spruces writing and thinks, I wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this—this, the growing rings of light and water and stone—would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.
PEOPLE TURN INTO OTHER THINGS. Twenty years later, when everything depends on remembering what happened, the facts of that night will have long since turned to heartwood. They put her body into the fire, facedown. Three of them will remember that. Nick will remember nothing. Bedrock in the minute she needed him, he turns worthless in the aftermath, seated on the ground by the flames, close enough to singe his eyebrows, as senseless as the burning corpse.
The others place her on the ready pyre, a thing as old as night. Her clothes burn, then her skin. The flowery words on her scapula—A change is gonna come—blacken and vaporize. Flames bear the flecks of her carbonized soul into the air. The corpse will be found, of course. Teeth with fillings, the nubs of unburned bone. Every clue will be discovered and read. They aren’t getting rid of the corpse. They’re sending it into forever.
Of leaving the scene, none will recall anything but forcing Nick into the van. Orange flickers above the evergreen woods, as wraithlike as the northern lights. Then dark snapshots for dozens of miles. They pass no vehicle for half an hour, and the occupants of that first car, a retired couple from Elmhurst, Illinois, with five hours more to drive before sleeping, won’t even remember the white van speeding the other way by the time they see the fire.
The arsonists pass long stretches of silence punctuated by shouting. Adam and Nick threaten each other. Mimi drives in a soundproof bubble. Two hundred miles outside Portland, Douglas demands that they surrender. Something tells them not to. Olivia. That alone they’ll all remember.
“No one saw anything,” Adam tells the others, too many times.
“It’s over,” Nick says. “She’s dead. We’re finished.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Adam orders. “Nothing can trace this back to us. Just stay quiet.”
They have failed to protect anything at all. They agree, at least, to protect each other.
“Say nothing, no matter what. Time is with us.”
But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.
In Portland, they scatter.
NICHOLAS CAMPS on the ghost of Mimas. No tent, no sleeping roll. He lies on his side as night comes on, his head on a wadded jacket near the ring laid down the year Charlemagne died. Somewhere underneath his coccyx, Columbus. Past his ankles, the first Hoel leaves Norway for Brooklyn and the expanses of Iowa. Beyond the length of his body, crowding up to the cut’s cliff, are the rings of his own birth, the death of his family, the roadside visit of the woman who recognized him, who taught him how to hang on a
nd live.
The stump oozes from around its rim, the sap a color that the painter has no name for. He turns on his back and stares into the air, twenty stories straight up, trying to locate that precise spot where he and Olivia lived for a year. He doesn’t want to be dead. He just wants the play of that voice, its eager openness, for a few words more. He just wants the girl who always heard what life wanted from them to rise out of the fire and tell him what he’s supposed to do with himself, from now on. There is no voice. Not hers, not the imaginary beings’. No flying squirrels or murrelets or owls or any other creature that sang to them in their year. His heart contracts back down to the size it was when she found him. Silence, he decides, is better than lies.
He doesn’t sleep much, on his hard campsite. He won’t get many good nights for the next twenty years. And yet, twenty more rings would have been no wider than his ring finger.
MIMI AND DOUG strip the van and destroy every rag, hose, and rubber band. They scrub down the bed with several solvents. She sells the thing for a song and pays cash to buy a tiny Honda. She’s sure the sale will play out like a Poe story. The van’s new owner will turn up some damning paper scrap sitting in plain sight.
She puts her condo on the market. “Why?” Douglas asks.
“We have to split up. It’s safer.”
“How can it be safer?”
“We’ll give each other away if we stay together. Douglas. Look at me. Look at me. We are not going to do that.”
IT MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN anything but a page three item. Arson destroys foundations at resort construction site. Nuisance setback. Work to resume right away. But bone turns up in the sifted ash, a human victim. Every news outlet in nine western states picks up the story and runs it for days.
The investigators can make no identification. A woman, young, five-foot-seven. As for violence, violation, it’s impossible to say. The only leads are the cryptic inscriptions found near the blaze:
The Overstory Page 38