The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  Outlasting Mr. Siang is as easy as breathing. Three seconds, and he looks away. As he turns, she sees into his art appraiser’s soul. He has stumbled on some reference to this very scroll somewhere in the record. The fact is as clear as the tic on his eyelid. The scroll is worth many times his offer. It’s a long-lost national treasure.

  She breathes in, fails to suppress a smile. “I wonder if someone over at the Asian Art Museum might help with identification.”

  The Four Arts revised offer is quick in coming. Neither Mimi nor her two sisters nor their children will need to worry about money for a long time to come. It’s a way out for her. Retraining. A new identity. Why stay here any longer?

  She calls them both, Carmen and Amelia, for the first time in a year. Carmen first. Mimi mentions nothing about her face. About losing her job. About selling her condo. About being wanted in three states. She apologizes for disappearing. “Sorry. I hit a rough patch.”

  Carmen laughs. “You mean there are smooth ones?”

  Mimi mentions the offer.

  “I don’t know, Mimi. It’s a family legacy. What else do we have left of Dad?”

  The three jade trees, Mimi wants to say. Waving their urgent arms. “I just want to do what he’d want.”

  “Then do what he did with it. It’s practically the only thing he kept with him his whole life.”

  Then Amelia. Amelia—healthy, forbearing saint, taming the savage, gleeful children in the background even while listening to her crazy sister. Mimi comes within a breath of saying, I’m on the run. A friend is dead. I’ve burnt private property to the ground. Instead, she reads the translated poem.

  “Nice, Mimi. I think it means relax. Relax, love, and do what you want.”

  “Carmen says it’s our only heirloom.”

  “Geez. Don’t get sentimental about it. Dad was the least sentimental man in the world.”

  “And careful with money.”

  “Careful? Cheap! Remember the basement full of fire sales? Cases of cola and down jackets and half-price socket wrenches?”

  “She says he kept that scroll with him his whole life.”

  “Pfff. He was probably trying to time the antiques market.”

  The world’s tie-breaking vote once again falls on shoulders no wider than a child’s. That night, the engineer with the abiding smile, the keeper of campsite notebooks, the gentle suicide, whispers to Mimi. He puts the answer right into her ear. The past is a lote. Prune it and it grows.

  . . .

  DOROTHY CAZALY BRINKMAN, smile way too bright, carries a rosewood tray of breakfast pap from the kitchen into her husband’s room. Eyes howl up at her from the mechanical bed. His warped mouth, stiffened in terror, looks like a Greek tragedy mask. She fights the urge to retreat through the doorway. “Morning, RayRay. Did you sleep?”

  She sets the tray on the bedstand. The awful eyes follow her. Buried. Alive. Forever. She drives herself forward. The lilies of the valley, in their shot glass, go to the bedside table. She turns down the top of the covers, damp with drool. Then she slings the rosewood, with its hot breakfast, over the half-paralyzed body.

  Each new morning of method-playacting makes her a little more convincing. Nothing in the world can tell her how many more days like this lie ahead, or how many more she can last. Sound comes out of him. She leans in until her ear touches his lips. All she can hear is, “Dddtt.”

  “I know, Ray. It’s okay. Ready?” She makes a comic show of pushing up her sleeves. His mask-mouth moves a little, and she reads that as she needs to. More than paralysis, more than his shattered speech, that mouth changes him into another thing. “It’s a new antique grain. From Africa. Good for cell repair.”

  He lifts his movable hand an inch, probably to stop her. Dorothy ignores him; she has gotten good at that. Soon antique grains dribble down his chin onto the bib. She wipes him with a soft cloth. His stroke-frozen face feels stiff to her touch. But his eyes—his eyes say, as clear as anything, You’re the last bearable thing left to me, aside from death.

  The spoon goes in and out. Some atavistic urge in her wants to make airplane sounds. “Did you hear the owls last night? Calling to one another?” She wipes his mouth and spoons again. She remembers a moment back in week two, when he was still in the hospital. An oxygen mask clung to his face. A drip hung in his arm. He wouldn’t stop flicking at them with his one working hand. She had to call the nurse, who bound his hand with gauze restraints. His eyes peeked over the mask and rebuked her. Let me end it. Don’t you see I’m trying to help you?

  For weeks her only thought was, I can’t do this. But practice pares back the impossible. Practice got her past the pragmatism of doctors and the pity of friends. Practice helps her shift his petrified torso without gagging. Practice teaches her how to hear his iceberg words. With a little more practice, she’ll master even being dead.

  After breakfast, she checks if he needs cleaning. He does. The disgrace of the first time—suctioned out by a veteran nurse, back in the hospital—left him moaning. Even now, the rubber gloves, the sponge and hose and warm curds she carts away to the bathroom, wet his gargoyle eyes.

  She cleans and shifts him in the bed and checks the bedsores. She’s all alone today. Carlos and Reba, the mobile care people, come only four times a week, twice as often as Ray would like and half as often as Dorothy needs. She puts her hand on his stone shoulder. Gentleness is the deputy of her fatigue. “TV? Or should I read?”

  She thinks he says read. She starts in on the Times. But the headlines agitate him.

  “Me, too, Ray.” She sets the paper aside. “Ignorance can’t hurt you, huh?”

  He says something. She leans in. “Crss.”

  “Cross? Not cross, Ray. A stupid joke.” He says it again. “You’re cross? Why?” Aside from the million perfect reasons, she means.

  Another syllable squeezes from his rigid lips: “Wrd.”

  It chills her. His morning ritual, for all the years they’ve lived together. Impossible now. Worst of all, it’s Saturday, demon puzzle day. The only day she has ever heard him curse.

  They work the puzzle all morning. She gives the clues, and Ray stares off into the arctic. Took a hit, maybe. Like Brown’s Blue. Held at arms’ length. At geologic intervals, he groans out things that might be words. To her surprise, it’s easier on her than parking him in front of the TV. She even catches herself fantasizing that a daily crossword—just going through the motions—might help rebuild his brain.

  “Early sign of spring. Five letters. Starts with an A.”

  He stabs out two syllables she can’t make out. She asks him to repeat. A growl this time, still nothing but melted slag.

  “Could be. I’ll pencil it in, and we’ll come back to it.” Like waltzing with a rag doll. “How about: Bud’s comforting comeback? Six letters, first one R, fourth one E, fifth one A.”

  He stares at her, hemmed inside himself. Impossible to say what’s left, inside that locked room. His head hangs and his movable hand scrapes the covers, like some grazing beast pawing at the winter snow.

  The morning overstays its welcome long before noon. She sets aside the grid, a mess of revisions and appeals. It’s time to think about lunch. Something he won’t choke on, that she hasn’t already served him several times this week.

  Lunch is like crossing the Atlantic in a rowboat. In the afternoon, she reads to him. War and Peace. The campaign has been long and arduous, stretching out over weeks, but he seems to want it. She has spent so many years trying to convert him to fiction. Now she has a captive audience.

  The story runs away, even from her. Too many people having too many feelings to keep track of. The Prince-hero goes down in the middle of an immense battle. He lies paralyzed on his back on the cold earth, with chaos all around. Nothing above the soldier but sky, lofty sky. He can’t move; he can only look up. The hero lies wondering how he could have missed the central truth of existence until that moment: the whole world and all the hearts of men are as nothing, lined
up underneath the infinite blue.

  “I’m so sorry, Ray. I forgot about this part. We can skip ahead.”

  The eyes howl up at her again. But maybe it’s not the fiction that baffles him. Maybe he just can’t figure out why his wife keeps crying.

  Dinner turns again into a protracted campaign, another land war in Asia. She tucks him in front of the TV. Then she goes out, for a second dinner. Hers. Alan meets her at the door of his workshop. His hair is powdered with wood shavings. His eyes, too, howl a little. She looks away. He takes her in his arms, and it’s horribly like coming home. Her fiancé-to-be. Can you have a fiancé, when the divorce has been held up by what her husband’s profession likes to call an act of God?

  “How was your day?” And yes, he expects her to answer. But tonight, eating take-out General Tso amid the dismembered violins and violas and cellos, the neckless bodies, the bare white top plates hanging in rows on wires, the split maple backs, the smell of spruce and willow blocks, the chunks of pure ebony for fingerboards, the bits of boxwood and recovered mahogany for the fittings, it’s just a question of breathing in, one lungful after the other.

  She clicks her disposable chopsticks. “I wish we’d met when we were younger. You should have seen me then.”

  “Aw, no. Older wood is much better. Trees from high up on the northern faces of mountains.”

  “Glad to be of service.”

  “It’s a shame I’m so old. I could get good at this.” He waves at the plates of shaved, carved bodies hanging from the rafters. “I’m just now beginning to understand how wood works.”

  Two hours later, she comes home. Ray must hear the car pulling up the drive, the garage door opening, her key in the back door. But when she enters the room, his eyes are closed and his jagged mouth hangs slack. On the TV, people are laughing like banshees at each other’s jokes. She shuts off the set and comes around the bed to turn the stained covers back over his stiff frame. His one good claw snags her wrist. The eyes scream open, that look of hell and murder. She jumps and cries out. Then she’s calm and reassuring him.

  Always the gentlest man in the world. Sat through her escapades with the patience of a saint. Cried a little when she announced the end, and said he only wanted what was best for her. That she could stay and do what she wanted. That if she were in trouble, she would always have him. She’s in trouble now. And yes. Him. Hers. Always.

  “Ray! Gosh. I thought you were sleeping.” He slews out something murky enough to be chanted Sanskrit. “What’s that?” She leans in for an agonizing game of charades with no pantomime. Two syllables, both smeared. “Again, Ray.”

  As it did in life before death, his patience exceeds hers. The muscles on his unfrozen side thrash. All kinds of specters graze her skin and run their fingers through her hair. “RayRay. I’m sorry. I can’t tell what you’re saying.”

  More sounds trickle out of his half-moving lips. She leans back in and hears. At first she hears: Right. The real request seems so unlikely she doesn’t get it for a moment. Write. She hunts down pen and paper, despite all reason. She puts the pen into his marginal hand and watches the fingers move like the needle on a seismograph. It takes him minutes to make a few awful scratches.

  She stares at the tangle of tremors and sees nothing. Nonsense, but she can’t say that to whatever man is still trapped in the rubble. Then a word emerges, and sense crashes into her. She starts sobbing, tugging at his stiff arm, telling him what he already knows. “You’re right. You’re right!” Six letters, starts with an R. Bud’s comforting comeback. Releaf.

  TWENTY SPRINGS is no time at all. The hottest year ever measured comes and goes. Then another. Then ten more, almost every one of them among the hottest in recorded history. The seas rise. The year’s clock breaks. Twenty springs, and the last one starts two weeks earlier than the first.

  Species disappear. Patricia writes of them. Too many species to count. Reefs bleach and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.

  More people are born in twenty years than were alive in the year of Douglas’s birth.

  Nick hides and works. What’s twenty years, to work that’s slower than trees?

  We are not, one of Adam’s papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

  You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.

  IN MASTERY 8, Neelay is 145 pounds and whitish, with hair like Einstein’s. His features take on different racial casts depending on the light and what town he’s in. He’s only four-foot-eight, but his lithe calves and muscular thighs can take him anywhere. His name is Spore, and he’s nobody. Like every other homesteader on these eleven continents, he has won a few medals, built some monuments, and stashed away a bit of cash. There are girls in his life, in provinces far from each other. He’s the mayor of one flyspeck town and runs a tapestry workshop in another. For a while he served as a priest in a monastery that seems to have gone moribund. Mostly he likes to walk. To drop in on strangers. To watch the branches on the swaying cypresses and see which way the wind is swirling.

  He has moved to the parallel world along with hundreds of millions of others, each in their game of choice. He can’t remember when the Web wasn’t here. That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be. Some days it feels like he and the rest of the Valley of Heart’s Delight didn’t invent online life, but just cut a clearing into it. Evolution in stage three.

  He’s out on the open road one Wednesday afternoon when he should be at a board meeting approving the acquisition of a 3-D modeling studio. Instead, he’s in the game, doing some private R&D. For days now, he’s been on a pilgrimage, trekking from pole to equator, talking to every citizen he meets in every latitude. Random focus groups. Product research and personal exercise, rolled into one.

  It’s market day outside the town hall of a prosperous city in a canton he has never visited. Under a summoning carillon, people haggle over all kinds of goods and services: carts, candles, engines, optics, precious metals, land, orchards. Homespun clothing, handmade furniture, lutes that make real music. Last year it would have been pure barter: people swapping hard-to-find commodities with one another. But these days it’s about real cash—dollars, yen, pounds, euros—millions in electronic transfers, conducted in the world above this one.

  “Idiots,” someone says, on the town market’s channel. Neelay looks around to see who’s talking. A buckskin-clad man stands next to him in the crowd. For a second, Neelay thinks it might be a bot, some clever nonplayer AI. But there’s something about the way the figure paces. Something hungry and human.

  “Who’s an idiot?”

  “Don’t they get enough of this upstairs?”

  “Upstairs?”

  “Redox world. Punch the clock, bring home the boar bacon, stuff the house full of shit. This place is as bad as BodyLand.”

  “Plenty else to do here.”

  “Used to think so,” the man in buckskin says. “You a god?”

  “No,” Neelay lies. “Why?”

  “You have all kinds of buffs.”

  He makes a note to tone it down the next time out. “Been playing awhile.”

  “You know where any gods hang out?”

  “No. You need something fixed?”

  “This whole place.”

  It angers Neelay. Revenues are at an all-time high. A kid in Korea just killed his mother because she was nagging him to get off the game. He went on for two days, using her credit card and racking up in-game triumphs, while his mother’s body lay in the next room. But everyone’s a critic.

  “What’s your problem?”

  “Just want to love this place again. Thought it was he
aven when I first started playing. A million ways to win. Couldn’t even tell what winning meant.” The buckskinned explorer hangs frozen for a moment. Maybe his animus has to take out the trash or answer the phone or rock the new baby. Then his avatar does a strange little two-step resurrection. “Now it’s same old crap over and over. Mine mountains, cut down woods, lay sheet metal across meadows, put up stupid castles and warehouses. Just when you have it how you want, some asshole with mercenaries blows the shit out of you. Worse than real life.”

  “You want to report some player?”

  “You are a god, aren’t you?”

  Neelay says nothing. A god who hasn’t been able to walk for decades.

  “Know what’s wrong with this place? Midas problem. People build shit until the place fills up. Then you gods just make another continent or introduce new weapons.”

  “There are other ways to play.”

  “I thought so, too. Mysterious things over the mountains and across the seas. But no.”

  “Maybe you should go somewhere else.”

  The buckskinned man waves his arms. “I thought this was somewhere else.”

  The boy who still wants to make a digital kite dance for his long-dead father knows the backwoodsman is right. Mastery has a Midas problem. Everything’s dying a gold-plated death.

  ADAM APPICH gets promoted to associate professor. It’s not a respite—just more pressure. His every minute is double-booked: conferences, lit reviews, fieldwork, class prep, office hours, teetering stacks of essays to grade, committees, promotion dossiers, and a long-distance relationship with a woman in publishing 536 miles away.

  He’s editing an article for publication while watching the news and eating microwave teriyaki in his starter home in Columbus, Ohio. He has time for neither current events nor a real meal. But, squeezing them together while working, he can almost justify. Ten seconds into the story, he realizes what he’s staring at: gutted buildings and blackened beams, the aftermath that his own memory can no longer retrieve with any resolution. Someone has bombed a research laboratory in Washington State that was modifying the genome of poplars. The camera lingers on a sooty wall. Spray-painted on the concrete are the words he once helped formulate: