The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  I’ve lied to my closest friends.

  Yes. I let my mother die unattended.

  I spied on my husband and read his private letters.

  Yes. I cleaned bits of my father’s brain off the backyard flagstones.

  My son won’t talk to me. He says I ruined his life.

  Yes. I helped kill my friend.

  How can you bear to look at me?

  There are harder things to bear.

  The sunlight changes. Slits of light crawl up the walls. It occurs to Stephanie to wonder if it’s still today, or if that was some time ago. Her pupils have long since started to seesaw, closing and dilating by turns, dimming and glaring the room. She can’t even summon up the will to stand and leave. When it can’t go on, that’s when this will end. Then they’ll never see each other again, except for always.

  Her eyes burn. She blinks, numb, dumb, ravenous, wrecked, and badly in need of emptying her bladder. Something keeps her from breathing—this frail, scarred woman who won’t look away. Pinned in that look, she becomes something else, huge and fixed, swaying in the wind and pelted by rain. The whole urgent calculus of need—what she called her life—shrinks down to a pore on the underside of a leaf, way out on the tip of a wind-dipped branch, high up in the crown of a community too big for any glance to take in. And way down below, subterranean, in the humus, through the roots of humility, gifts flow.

  Her cheeks tense up. She wants to shout, Who are you? Why won’t you stop? No one has ever looked at me like this, except to judge, rob, or rape me. In my whole life, my whole life, never. . . . Her face reddens. With slow, heavy, disbelieving swings of her head, she starts to cry. The tears do whatever they want. Call it sobbing. The therapist is crying, too.

  Why? Why am I sick? What’s wrong with me?

  Loneliness. But not for people. You’re mourning a thing you never even knew.

  What thing?

  A great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing. One you didn’t even know was yours to lose.

  Where did it go?

  Into making us. But it still wants something.

  Stephanie is up and out of the chair, clinging to the stranger. Taking her by the shoulders. Nodding, crying, nodding. And the stranger lets her. Of course, grief. Grief for a thing too big to see. Mimi pulls back to ask if Stephanie is all right. All right to leave. All right to drive. But Stephanie puts fingers on her mouth and hushes the therapist forever.

  The changed woman makes it out onto Hyde Street. Two façade painters up on a scaffold yell at each other over a blaring radio. Men with dollies unload stacks of boxes from a delivery truck six doors up the street. A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone—choose your schizophrenia. Stephanie steps into the street, and a car screams past. The rage of its horn Dopplers downward for another block. She fights to hold on to the thing she has just glimpsed. But traffic, bickering, business: the street’s brutality begins to close in. She walks faster, on the brink of the old panic. Everything she has just won begins to fade again into the irresistible force of other people.

  Something sharp grazes her face. She stops and touches her scraped cheek. The culprit floats in front of her, purple-pink, the colors of a five-year-old’s crazed sketch. Escaping from a metal cage in the sidewalk near her feet is a thing twice her height and half again as wide as her extended arms. A single stout upward path splits into a few thinner ones, and those divide into thousands more, thinner still, each one tentative, forked, full of scars, bent by history, and tipped out in insane flowers. The sight takes root in her, ramifying, and for a moment longer she remembers: her life has been as wild as a plum in spring.

  JUST DOWN THE ROAD two thousand miles east, Nicholas Hoel drives into an Iowa June. Every dimple in the land, every remembered silo just off the interstate twists his gut, like the last thing he sees before dying. Like coming home.

  The math stuns him—how few years he has been away. So much has gone untouched. The farms, the roadside warehouses, the desperate public service billboards: FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD . . . So many imprints from deepest childhood, permanent scars in the prairie and in him. Yet every landmark seems warped and remote, seen through dime store binoculars. Nothing here should have survived where he’s been.

  Over the last rise to the west before the exit, his pulse shoots up. He looks for the horizon’s lone mast. But where the column of the Hoel Chestnut should be, there’s only June’s annihilating blue. He heads the car up the exit ramp and drives the long square back around to the farm. Only: it’s not a farm anymore. It’s a manufactory. The owners have removed the tree. He parks the car halfway up the gravel drive and walks out across the field toward the stump, forgetting that the field is no longer his to walk across.

  A hundred and fifty steps in, he sees the green. Dozens of fresh chestnut shoots spring up from the dead stump. He sees the leaves, the straight-veined, toothed lances of his childhood that always meant leaf to him. For a few heartbeats, resurrection. Then he remembers. These fresh starts, too, will soon be blighted. They’ll die and rise again, over and over, just often enough to keep the deadly blight alive and vigorous.

  He turns toward the ancestral house. His hands lift, to reassure anyone in the parlor who might be watching. But it’s the house, in fact, and not the tree, that has stopped living. Siding pulls away from the walls. On the north side, half a length of gutter hangs down. He checks his watch. Six oh-five—obligatory dinner hour throughout the Midwest. He crosses the weedy lawn and walks up to the east windows. They’re matte, dusty, lusterless, dimmed with only dark behind them. The stiles, rails, head jamb, and all the wood around the double-hung panes soften into paint-peeled rot. Cupping one hand around his eyes, Nicholas peeks in. His grandparents’ living room is filled with metal basins and canisters. The oak trim that covered every doorway in the house has been stripped away.

  He walks around to the front porch. Its planks wobble beneath him. Five raps of the brass knocker yield nothing. He climbs the rise behind the house to the old outbuildings. One has been torn down. One is gutted. The third is locked. His old trompe l’oeil mural—that crack in the wall of the cornfield revealing a hidden broadleaf forest—is gunmetal-gray.

  On the front porch again, he sits where the rocker used to be, his back to the front window. It’s not clear how he should proceed. It crosses his mind to break in. He has spent the last three nights sleeping rough. Scared shitless by a cow near the Bighorns in Wyoming, who nuzzled him in his bag before dawn. Kept awake in a national forest in Nebraska by two campers setting endurance records in a nearby tent. A bed would be nice. A shower. But the house, it seems, has neither anymore.

  He waits for the softening smudge of midwestern dusk, though there’s no real need for cover. Far away, a satellite-guided agribiz monster, practically robotic, combs through the rolling fields. No one will pass here or see him at his task. He can do what he needs to and go.

  But he waits. Waiting has become his religion. There’s corn to listen to, miles of it. Beans to watch grow, sheds and silos on the horizon, an interstate, and a huge tree cut out of the sky in negative space, like a Magritte. He sits with his back against the house, feeling the farm emerge again, like wild animals from the edges of a trail when the hiker holds still long enough. As the clouds crimson out, he heads to the car and retrieves his folding campfire shovel. Wrong tool for the wrong job, but the best he has. In a minute, he’s on the rise behind the machine shed, looking for loose gravel. The ground feels different; the distances are wrong. Even the machine shed has been moved.

  The scree turns up, hiding under a lush green shag. He snicks the campfire shovel into the weeds and digs until he hits the past. Return of the repressed. He hauls up the carton and opens it. Panels and some works on paper. He holds the top painting to the day’s last light. A man lies in bed, staring down the tip of a large branch that comes growing in through his wi
ndow.

  That’s how it happened. He was sleeping, and she burst in. Each of them had half a prophecy. They put them together and read the message. They found their joint calling, their shared vocation. The spirits guaranteed that all would be well. Now she’s dead, he’s sleepwalking again, and the things they were to save are all going down.

  He sets the carton down beside the hole and digs again. The second box surfaces, filled with paintings he forgot he made: Family Tree, Shoe Tree, Money Tree, Barking up the Wrong Tree. All painted in the years before she came up the driveway with stories of resurrection and voices of light. The paintings proved that they were meant to head off together. The paintings were wrong.

  He stacks the second box on top of the first and keeps digging. The shovel tip hits something jagged, and he finds the sculpture lode. He and Olivia buried four of them loose, to see what the living soil might do to the ceramic skins. Dirt: Another thing she taught him to see. A new inch or two, every few centuries. A microscopic forest, a hundred thousand species in a few Iowa grams. He drops to his knees, pries out the pieces with his fingers, and wipes them with a spit-dampened handkerchief. Their monochrome surfaces now shine as rich-hued as Breughels. Bacteria, fungi, invertebrates—living workshops down in the underground horizons—have spattered patinas across the sculptures in a masterpiece of blooms.

  He sets the transmuted statues on top of the rescued boxes and returns for the real prize. He wonders again what he could have been thinking, leaving it here. Travel light, they thought. Bury the art. Digging it up later would be its own performance piece. But the thing still in the ground is worth more than his own life, and he should never have let it out of his sight. Six more shovelfuls, and it’s his again. He opens the box, unzips the bag, and holds the hundred-year stack of photos in his hands. Too dark to see now, to flip through them. He doesn’t need to. Holding the stack, he feels the tree spiraling up into the air like a corkscrew fountain, watched over by generations of Hoels.

  He carries half of the trove down the rise, back to his car. He gets the loot into the trunk and turns back for the rest. Halfway to the burial site, two white lights pierce the gravel driveway from the dark road. Police.

  The thing to do is walk toward the squad car with open palms. Every explanation can be documented. The evidence will support his story. Trespassing, yes, but only to retrieve what’s his. He comes out from behind the house and the headlights veer toward him. It occurs to him that the buried treasure in question might not, in fact, be his any longer. He sold the land and everything rooted in it. Buying and selling land: as absurd as getting arrested for recovering your own art.

  The squad car jerks up the drive, its wheels spewing gravel. A blast of spinning red stops Nicholas in place. The car swings to a stop, flaring into a barricade. Siren whoop gives way to an amplified voice: “Freeze! Down on the ground!”

  He can’t do both. He raises his hands and drops to his knees. Travels back forty years to a grade-school skit: The rain came down and washed the spider out. Two officers are on him in a heartbeat. Only then does it strike Nicholas that he’s in real trouble. If they fingerprint him, if they run his record . . .

  “Hands out.” One of the officers presses into Nick’s back and draws his wrists together. Once he’s cuffed, they sit him up on the ground, shine a flashlight in his face, and take his data.

  “It’s trinkets,” he tells them. “Worthless.”

  Their faces curl when he shows them his art. Why would someone want to make such things, let alone steal them back? The only part of the story that makes sense to them is the burying. But the older cop recognizes the name on Nick’s driver’s license. Part of local history. Landmark for the whole area: Keep going, a mile, mile and a half past the Hoel tree.

  They call the business manager in charge of the property. The man has zero interest in bits of dug-up rubbish. Rural Iowa: the police don’t look up his arrests in the national database. He’s just another semi-delusional, semi-vagrant from a ruined farm family, driving a dinged-up car and trying to hold on to a vanished past. “You can go now,” the police tell him. “No more digging on private property.”

  “Can I just . . . ?” Nick waves his hand toward the unburied treasure. The officers shrug: Knock yourself out. They watch as Nick puts the last cartons in his car. He turns to them. “Have you ever seen a tree grow eighty years in ten seconds?”

  “You take care, now,” says the cop who pinned him to the ground. Then they send the three-time arsonist on his way.

  NEELAY SITS at the head of the oval table facing his top five project managers. He spreads his bony fingers on the table in front of him. He doesn’t know where to start. It’s even hard to know how to address the game. There are no version numbers anymore. They’ve been replaced by continuous upgrades. Mastery Online is now a mammoth, expanding, ever-evolving enterprise. But it’s rotten at its core.

  “We have a Midas problem. There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.”

  The team listens, frowning. They all earn six figures; most are millionaires. The youngest is twenty-eight, the oldest forty-two. But in their jeans and skateboard tees, their mop tops and skewed baseball caps, they look like simulated teens. Boehm and Robinson kick back, sipping energy drinks and munching trail bars. Nguyen has his feet up on the table and gazes through the window as if it’s a virtual reality headset. All five beep and ding, whistle and vibrate with more prosthetic parts than sci-fi ever dreamed of.

  “How do you win? I mean, how would you even lose? The only thing that really counts is hoarding a little bit more. You reach a certain level in the game, and going on just feels hollow. Dirty. More of the same.”

  The man in the wheelchair at the table’s head bows and stares into his own grave. The long, Sikh-style hair still flows down around his middle, but it’s shot through now with a river of white. A beard erupts from his chin and falls like a bib onto his Superman sweatshirt. His arms still have some meat on them, from decades of lifting himself in and out of bed. But his legs inside their cargo pants are little more than vague suggestions.

  In front of him, on the table, is a book. The elves know what that means: the boss has been reading again. Another visionary idea has taken possession of him. Soon he’ll badger them all to read it, in search of solutions to what is a problem only to him.

  Kaltov, Rasha, Robinson, Nguyen, Boehm: five ebullient honors students huddle up in a super-smart war room, equipped with banks of screens and all the electronic conferencing toys tomorrow might need. But today they can only stare at the boss, slack-jawed. He’s saying Mastery is broken. A magic, money-printing franchise needs to be rethought.

  Exasperation threatens to set Kaltov’s mustache on fire. “It’s a god game, for god’s sake. They pay us so that they can enjoy a god’s problems.”

  “We’re up to seven million subscribers,” Rasha says. “A quarter of them have been playing for a decade. Players are hiring Chinese inmates with Web connections to level up their characters while they sleep.”

  The boss does that thing with his eyebrows. “If leveling was still fun, they wouldn’t have to do that.”

  “There might be a problem,” Robinson concedes. “But it’s the same problem we’ve been dealing with since Mastery began.”

  Neelay’s head bobs up and down, but not in a nod. “I wouldn’t say ‘dealing.’ ‘Postponing,’ maybe.” He’s grown so gaunt he’s set for sainthood. The lip of the sagging Superman sweatshirt reveals his protruding collarbone. He’s like one of those ascetic Indian statues, a skin-wrapped skeleton seated under a holy fig or neem.

  Boehm projects some visuals. “Here’s what we’re thinking. We raise the experience level caps again. We add a bunch of technologies. We call them Future Tech One, Future Tech Two . . . They all generate different flavors of prestige points. Then we release another volcanic event out in the middle of the Western Ocean and start a new continent.”

  “That sounds li
ke postponing to me.”

  Kaltov flings up his hands. “People want to grow. Expand their empires. That’s why they pay us every month. The place fills in. We make it a little bigger. There’s no other way to run a world.”

  “I see. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you die of consummation.”

  Kaltov slaps the table. Robinson laughs, giddy. Rasha thinks: It’s just the boss, the guy who writes a million memos a week, the guy who built the company from nothing, exercising his genius right to be wrong.

  “Which is more interesting?” Neelay asks. “Two hundred million square miles filled with a hundred kinds of biome and nine million species of living things? Or a handful of flashing colored pixels on a 2-D screen?”

  Nervous laughter around the table. They get which should make the better home. But each one knows his own delight’s current mailing address.

  “Pretty clear where the species is emigrating, boss.”

  “Why? Why give up an endlessly rich place to live in a cartoon map?”

  It’s a little too much philosophy for the boy millionaires. But they humor the man who hired them all. They loosen into the question, listing the glories of symbol-space: the cleanness, the speed, the instant feedback, the power and control, the connectivity, the sheer amount of stuff you can amass, the buffs and badges. All the compliant pleasures that light up the whole cortex. They talk about the purity of the game, how it’s always going somewhere, at a clip that’s clearly visible. You can see progress unfold. Effort means something.

  Neelay nods his refusal again. “Until it doesn’t. Until it turns tedious.”

  The group falls silent. Mass sobriety sets in. Nguyen takes his feet off the table. “People want a better story than they get.”

  The wild-haired sadhu leans forward so fast he almost pitches out of his wheelchair. “Yes! And what do all good stories do?” There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”