The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  CONTROL KILLS

  CONNECTION HEALS

  Their old slogans. It makes no sense. The newscaster only makes things worse. “Authorities believe that the seven-million-dollar blaze is linked to similar attacks conducted over the last several years in Oregon, California, and northern Idaho.”

  The world divides and doubles, and Adam turns into his own imitation. Then, a more economical explanation: one or more of the others is carrying on alone. Nick, most likely, after his lover’s death. Or the childlike vet, Douglas. Or both, joining up with new believers to carry on burning. Whoever set this new fire used the old slogans as if they owned the copyright.

  The camera pans over the ruined lab’s charred ceiling joist. Adam recognizes the wreckage like he set the charge himself. Not five years ago; last night. Like he just came home and must now incinerate his smoky clothing. The shot lingers on a last bit of spray-paint scrawl at the end of the hallway:

  NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY

  Six weeks after becoming an associate professor, he’s an arsonist again.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, a machine shed in a lumberyard up near the Olympic Peninsula explodes. Mimi reads about it in the Chronicle. She’s sitting on the grass by the Conservatory of Flowers, in the corner of Golden Gate Park, a ten-minute walk from the Hilltop, University of San Francisco, where she’s finishing her master’s degree in rehabilitation and mental health counseling. She recognizes the slogans scrawled at the site—slogans that were once all theirs. A sidebar accompanies the news account: “Timeline of Ecological Terror, 1980–1999.”

  Arrests must be just a matter of time. Next month, next year, a knock on the door, the flash of a badge. . . . People walk past as she sits reading. A drifter with all his worldly belongings in a greasy backpack. Tourists in yellow caps following a woman waving a Japanese flag. Lovers laughing and throwing a stuffed giraffe at each other. Mimi sits on the grass, reading about crimes that she seems to have committed. She spreads the newspaper on the grass in front of her and tilts her head back. The sky swarms with invisible satellites that can locate her coordinates to within ten feet. Cameras in space that can read the headlines in front of her: “Timeline of Ecological Terror.” She stares upward, waiting for the future to swoop down and arrest her. Then she gathers up the paper along with her lunch trash and heads past a line of coast live oaks toward Lone Mountain and her afternoon lecture in Ethical and Professional Issues in Therapy.

  WORD OF THE NEW FIRES never reaches Nick. He gets his news from bus stops and coffee shops, telemarketers and census takers, panhandlers in small towns all the way up the coast willing to reveal secrets hidden from almost every commentator and analyst, often for free.

  In Bellevue, Washington, he lands the perfect job: glorified stock boy, hurtling around on a mini-forklift in an enormous Fulfillment Center, unpacking mountainous pallets of books, scanning their bar codes, then storing their precise locations in the vast, 3-D storage matrix. He’s supposed to set land speed records. He does. It’s a kind of performance piece for that most rarefied of audiences, no one.

  The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

  Nick unpacks the next carton, number thirty-three for today. He can open, scan, and shelve over a hundred crates on a good day, one every four minutes. The faster he goes, the longer he can stave off his inevitable robot replacement. He counts on a couple of years before efficiency comes to kill him. The harder he works, the less he needs to think.

  He gets the crate of paperbacks up on their steel shelves and takes stock. The aisle rises on girders into an endless chasm of books. Dozens of aisles in this Fulfillment Center alone. And every month, new Fulfillment Centers across several continents. His employers won’t stop until everyone is fulfilled. Nick squanders a full five precious seconds of his time-motion gazing down the gorge of books. The sight fills him with a horror inseparable from hope. Somewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper, encoded in the millions of tons of loblolly pine fiber, there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfillment and bring back danger, need, and death.

  At night, he works on his murals. He cuts the stencils in his apartment, then carries them throughout the city to bare walls he finds on his rambles. It’s tempting fate, doing anything that could bring him to the attention of the police. But the compulsion to scream in images is too strong for him. He can complete a medium-sized job, from tape-up to tear-down, in a few dozen minutes. Between two and four a.m., when he would otherwise lie awake feeding on his own insides, he can mark several neighborhoods. Cows with Kevlar jackets. Protesters lobbing maple samara grenades. Tiny warplanes and helicopters swarming the flowers of real trellis-espaliered roses, as if to pollinate them.

  Tonight’s job is large: covering a suite of lawyers’ offices in sixteen overlapping stencils. Up on a stepladder, Nick tapes the numbered sheets together in a great vase that spreads at both top and bottom. Stencils cover the cinder-block façade and turn ninety degrees, where they flow across the sidewalk. Out comes the spray paint, and the cutaway lines fill with colors that leak down the masking paper. A moment to dry, and he pulls away the templates to reveal a chestnut. The branches climb up into the office’s second story. Its trunk plunges down and into a mass of roots that tumble over the curb into the street’s sewer. At breast height, a little below eye level, the furrows of bark resolve into a two-foot-wide UPC bar code.

  Nick takes a finger-wide camel-hair brush and a pot of black enamel out of the backpack and freehands a stanza of Rumi next to the coded bars:

  Love is a tree

  with branches

  in forever

  with roots

  in eternity

  and a trunk

  nowhere at all

  Someone once read the poem to him, in a tree house, far out on a limb, on the growing edge of creation. If one of us falls off the edge, he hears that someone remind him, the other is going with. He steps back to evaluate. The effect jars him, and he’s not sure he likes it. But liking and not liking—the rod and staff of commodity culture—mean little to him. He wants only to fill as many of these walls as possible with something that can’t be walled.

  He gathers the stencils and spray cans, stuffs them back into his rucksack, and stumbles back home to five more hours of half sleep in a bed that needs changing. Olivia haunts his dreams, calling again, in the panic of dying, But this will never end—what we have. Right?

  “LEAVE ME,” Ray Brinkman tells his wife, several times each week. But she can’t understand the coagulated lumps escaping his mouth, or she pretends not to. He’s most content when she’s gone for hours at night. Then all his hopes ride on the thought that she is with her friend, changing, talking, hurting, crying out in the dark of some distant room for all things just out of reach. And yet, in the mornings, when she enters his room and says, Morning, RayRay. All good in here?, then he can’t help feeling his paralyzed variant of joy.

  She feeds him and sets him up with the TV. The screen is news, travel, the company of others, a reminder of the luck he’d had all life long and failed to see. This morning, Seattle is at war. Something about the future of the world and all its wealth and property. The breakfast hosts, too, sound confused. Delegates from dozens of countries try to gather in a convention center; thousands of ecstatic protesters refuse to let them. Kids in ponchos and camo pants jump on the roof of a burning armored vehicle. Others tear a mailbox out of the concrete and send it through a plate-glass bank window while a woman screams at them. Under trees that twinkle with the white point lights of Christmas, ranks of black-clad, helmeted troops launch canisters of pink smoke into the crowd. Ray B
rinkman, who spent two decades in the trenches protecting patents, cheers each time the police subdue an anarchist. But Ray Brinkman, whom God stopped with a little backhand flick, is smashing glass.

  The crowd surges and splits, lashes out and regroups. A phalanx of riot shields beats them back. Synchronized lawlessness flows over the barricades and around the armored cars. The cameras linger on something remarkable in the throng: a herd of wild animals. Antlers, whiskers, tusks, and flapping ears, elaborate masks on the heads of kids in hoodies and bomber jackets. The creatures die, fall to the pavement, and rise again, as if in some Sierra Club snuff film.

  A memory steals into Ray’s altered head. He shuts his eyes from the pain of it. He recognizes the animal masks, the painted leotards. They’re all familiar. He has seen them, in something like a photograph. He knows that can’t be, but facts don’t erase the uncanny feel. He calls for Dorothy to come shut off the set.

  “Read?” she always asks, though she doesn’t need to. He’ll never tell her no. He lives for read-aloud now. For years, they’ve worked their way through The Hundred Greatest Novels of All Time. He can’t remember why fiction used to make him so impatient. Nothing else has more power now to get him through the hours before lunch. He hangs on the most ridiculous plot crumb, as if the future of humanity hinges on it.

  The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone. The heroes, villains, and walk-ons his wife gives him this morning are better than truth. Though I am fake, they say, and nothing I do makes the least difference, still, I cross all distances to sit next to you in your mechanical bed, keep you company, and change your mind.

  After tens of thousands of pages, they’ve circled back to Tolstoy and are now a good inch and a half into Anna Karenina. Dot resumes the story with no trace of self-consciousness or shame, no hint that art and life have enrolled in the same drawing class. And that, for Ray, is the greatest mercy fiction gives: proof that the worst the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day.

  As she reads, his eyelids slip. Soon he infiltrates the book, lurking in the margins, a minor character whose fate makes no difference to the story’s principals. He wakes to the sound that put him to sleep for a third of a century: his wife’s snores. And he’s left to do what he has had to do for half a dozen hours a day, every day of this newfound life: stare out the window onto the backyard.

  A woodpecker shuttles back and forth onto a blazing oak, stuffing nuts into a girdle of pits. Two squirrels fling themselves in crazed spirals up the trunk of a shed linden. Clouds of small black bugs swarm across the grass tips, unhinged by the coming cold. A shrub he and Dorothy must have put in years ago is clumping in shaggy yellow flowers, even with all its leaves long dead. High drama to a paralytic. The wind throws out gossip; the branches of all the Brinkman anniversary plantings wave, scandalized. There’s danger everywhere, readiness, intrigue, slow-motion rising action, epic changes of season once too slow to see that now blast past his bed too quickly to make sense of.

  Dorothy snorts herself awake. “Oh! Sorry, Ray. Didn’t mean to abandon you.”

  He can’t tell her. No one can ever be abandoned, anywhere, ever. Full-out, four-alarm, symphonic narrative mayhem plays out all around them. She has no idea, and there’s no way he can let her know. Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

  THE CLOCKS of hundreds of millions of interconnected computers prepare to roll over into digits they weren’t designed to accommodate. People are stocking their cellars for the end of the Information Age. Douglas doesn’t know just when the millennium ends. Where he is, nothing bigger than a week much matters. Daylight these days lasts only a few hours, the snow is six feet deep, and even noontime temperatures will snap the little hairs off your arms. For all Douglas knows, computers have already freaked and taken down the globe’s entire infrastructure. Deep in a BLM cabin in his Montana hideaway, he’ll be the last to know.

  He wakes when the fire dies and he must choose between stoking it or freezing to death. He springs from his arctic bag in his long johns, like something from a cocoon that didn’t quite make it out of the larval stage. He dons the parka, but his fingers are so numb he needs fifteen scary minutes to get a couple of pine splits blazing. He toasts his hands on the fire like a couple of s’mores, until he can wiggle his digits again. Breakfast is two eggs, three Viking slices of bacon, and a hunk of stale bread cooked on the top of the woodstove.

  Out on the porch, he surveys the town. Gray-brown wooden façades dot the snowy hillside below. The three-story crumbling hotel, the gutted general store, the doctor’s office and barbershop, the whorehouse and assorted saloons: all his alone. High on a crest beyond, whitebark pines. The snow is covered with visitors’ tracks—elk, deer, jackrabbit—compressed drama he’s learning how to read. He sees the cratered snow-poem of a raptor where it swept down, thrashed its prey, then disappeared with no forwarding address.

  Winter caretaker for the Friendliest Ghost Town in the West: He has worked some pointless jobs in his life, but never as pointless as this. The passes on both sides—twenty miles of steep rocky potholes—are barricaded in snow. No one will be up here until late May. Okay: Something might happen on his watch. A quake, maybe, or a meteor. Aliens. Nothing he’d be able to do anything about. Even his BLM truck with plow blade isn’t going anywhere for a good long while.

  The mountains are high, the soil steep and thin, the trees have been culled once too often, and all the precious metal mines are spent. All that’s left to sell up here is nostalgia, those recent yesterdays when tomorrow seemed the answer to everything a human might ever want. When summer comes, he’ll don his miner togs and tell stories to tourists who brave the washboard roads to penetrate to a place whose remoteness alone makes it worth checking off the conquest list. Kids will think he’s a hundred and fifty. Families will blast through and snap a few pictures on their way to Old Faithful or Glacier or someplace worth noticing.

  He sits at the wobbly kitchen table and picks up the treasure he keeps next to the fused-solid saltshaker. It turned up last fall, a dark brown bottle half buried near the mine’s headframe. What’s left of the faded label shows a few Chinese characters, creatures from the planet’s early oceans. The bottle is a mystery—what it says, what it contained. It belonged to one of the many Chinese laborers who worked in the mine and ran the laundry. He squints at the characters and whispers, “What they do?” His friend taught him the phrase—he can’t remember where or when. It had to do with China and her father. It made her laugh every time he said it. He tried to say it often.

  He sets the bottle down and starts his morning ritual: the scripture he’s writing for his new religion of abject humility. Since mid-November, he has been at work on a Manifesto of Failure. Yellow legal-paper pages scribbled in ballpoint pile up where the table meets the wall. They hold the story of how he became a traitor to his species. He names no names except the forest ones. But it’s all there: How the scales fell from his eyes. How awareness turned to anger. How he came across some like-minded people and heard the trees speak. He writes what they’d hoped to do and how they tried to do it. He says where they went wrong and why. Passion everywhere, and bursting with details, but without much structure. His words just branch and bud and branch
again. It keeps him busy. It beats cabin fever, though some days not by much.

  Today he rereads yesterday’s effort—two pages about what it meant to watch his Mimi get her eyes swabbed with fire. Then he takes up the Bic and pushes it in furrows across the page. It’s like he’s slinging trees again, up and down the contours of a hillside. Problem is, while he’s on the general subject of Failure, he can’t help probing the nearby, related topic of What the Fuck Went Wrong with Mankind.

  The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

  He stops to build the fire back up. He finds more forage—peanut butter on crackers and a potato cooked right on the burning pine logs. Then it’s time to walk to town and make sure the ghosts are behaving themselves. He layers up and straps on the secondhand snowshoes. The big webbed feet—his winter adaptation—transform him into a hybrid creature, half man, half upright giant hare. Out in the drifts, pegging down the mountain to the husk of town, he postholes anyway, a dozen times or more.

  Not a lot of action on Main Street. He checks the tilting buildings, their display cases and exhibits, for any signs of unwelcome nests, gnaw marks, or denning. It’s all make-work. Truth is, his Crow Nation boss gives him winter use of the cabin because it costs the BLM nothing, and Douggie invents the inspection routine to earn the freebie. From the upper balcony of the hotel, he calls out, “This place is dead.” The ed bangs around the Garnet Range two or three times before giving up. He climbs back up the long way, along the ridge, to get an extra half a mile of exercise and look out over the gorge. When a day is as clear as today, he can see the distant stands of larch miles away. Conifers that shed in winter.