The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  You’ve got nothing. I was writing a novel. It all came from my own damn head.

  They said his novel contained information about crimes that was never public. They said they already knew about his friends. Dossiers on all of them. They only wanted him to corroborate, and it would go much easier on Douglas if he helped.

  Help? That’s some Judas shit, man. It just slipped out of him. One word too many.

  He tells Mimi about the mistake. She seems to hear, even to flinch a little, although her face with its punji scar is turned away. He explains how he held out for days, how he told the agents to send him away forever—he wasn’t naming any names. He tells her how his questioners brought out the photos. The eeriest things: like home movie stills, grainy shots of events where no one had a camera. The events themselves he remembered well, especially the venues where he got beaten up. Lots of the pictures featured him. He’d forgotten how young he was, once. How naïve and volatile.

  You know, he told his questioners, I’m much cuter than I ever look.

  Anne smiled and noted something down. You see? David told him. We have them all. We don’t need anything from you. But cooperation could greatly reduce the charges against you. That was when Douglas began to realize that hiring his own lawyer might not be the same as an admission of guilt. Of course, hiring anybody for anything would require a lot more than the twelve hundred and thirty dollars he could lay his hands on.

  There was a problem with the pictures. They included people he’d never seen. There was a problem with the list of fires they wanted him to admit to. He’d never heard of half of them. Then the two agents began to ask who was who. Which one is Mulberry? Which one is Watchman? Which one is Maple? Is this her?

  They were bluffing. Writing their own novel.

  For two days, they held him in a place that looked like a dorm at a bankrupt Serbian college. He stuck to his silence. Then they told him what he was facing: domestic terrorism—attempting to influence the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion—punishable under the Terrorist Penalties Enhancement Act, the apparatus of a whole new security state. He’d never walk outside again. But if he simply confirmed one of these faces—one face, of someone they already had a dossier on—he’d go free in two to seven years. And they’d close the case on any of the fires he admitted to.

  Close the case?

  They would pursue no other people for those crimes.

  From now on? For any of the crimes I may or may not admit to?

  One face. And he’d have the full good faith of the federal government.

  He didn’t care whether he went to prison for seven years or seven hundred. He’d never last; his body didn’t have that kind of mileage left in it. But guaranteed reprieve for the woman who had taken him in and a man who seemed to be out there still, fighting against humanity’s death wish . . . it felt like meaning.

  Sprinkled among the gallery that his two investigators dangled in front of him were pictures of that man who always felt to Douggie like an infiltrator. A man who’d come to study them. The guy who they sent, that terrible night, to go get help for Olivia—any help at all—but who came back empty-handed.

  “There,” Douglas said, his finger waving like a twig in the breeze. “That’s Maple. Guy named Adam. Studying psychology at Santa Cruz.”

  That’s how it happened, he tells his partner in salvation. That’s what I did. That’s why. For you and Nick and maybe the trees.

  But when she swings around and turns her phantom face to him, she makes no sign. She just holds his eyes and stares, as if an endless glance will tell her all she needs to know.

  THE AUDITORIUM is dark and lined with redwood questionably obtained. Patricia looks out from the podium on hundreds of experts. She keeps her eyes high above the expectant faces and clicks. Behind her appears a painting of a naïve wooden ark with a parade of animals winding up into it.

  “When the world was ending the first time, Noah took all the animals, two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it’s a funny thing: He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders!”

  The house laughs. They’re rooting for her, but only because they don’t know what she means to say.

  “The problem was, Noah and his kind didn’t believe that plants were really alive. No intentions, no vital spark. Just like rocks that happened to get bigger.”

  She clicks again through several images: flytraps closing on their prey, sulking sensitive plants, a mosaic of kapur crowns in a canopy stopping just short of touching one another. “Now we know that plants communicate and remember. They taste, smell, touch, and even hear and see. We, the species that figured this out, have learned so much about who we share the world with. We’ve begun to understand the profound ties between trees and people. But our separation has grown faster than our connection.”

  She clicks, and her slide changes. “Here’s a satellite view of North America at night, 1970. And here, we are, a decade later. And another. And another. One more, and done.” Four clicks, and light screams across the continent, filling the blackness from sea to sea. She clicks, revealing a balding robber baron in high collar and shaggy mustache. “A reporter once asked Rockefeller how much is enough. His answer: Just a little bit more. And that’s all we want: to eat and sleep, to stay dry and be loved, and acquire just a little bit more.”

  This time the laugh is a polite murmur. A tough room. They’ve seen this exploding light show too many times before. Everyone in this auditorium has long ago numbed to the fact. Two people in back get up and walk out. An environmental conference. Five hundred attendees, seven warring factions, scores of objections to every plan to save the planet. All for just one tsunami.

  Next come four short aerial time-lapses—the forests of Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Pacific Northwest, melting away. “Just a little more timber. A few more jobs. A few more acres of cornfield to feed a few more people. You know? There’s never been any material more useful than wood.”

  There’s shifting in the plush seats, coughs and whispers, silent calls to kill all the preachers.

  “In this state alone, a third of the forested acres have died in the last six years. Forests are falling to many things—drought, fire, sudden oak death, gypsy moths, pine and engraver beetles, rust, and plain old felling for farms and subdivisions. But there’s always the same distal cause, and you know it and I know it and everyone alive who’s paying attention knows it. The year’s clocks are off by a month or two. Whole ecosystems are unraveling. Biologists are scared senseless.

  “Life is so generous, and we are so . . . inconsolable. But nothing I can say will wake the sleepwalk or make this suicide seem real. It can’t be real, right? I mean, here we are, all still . . .”

  Twelve minutes into the talk, and she’s quaking. Her palm goes up to beg for three seconds. She retreats behind the podium, retrieves a plastic water bottle left her by the well-meaning organizers of this conference on Home Repair. She twists off the cap and lifts the container. “Synthetic estrogen.” She clicks the crackly plastic. “Ninety-three of every one hundred Americans are laced with this stuff.” She pours some into a waiting glass. Out from her hip pocket comes the replacement glass vial. “And these are plant extracts I found while walking around this campus yesterday. My goodness, this place is an arbor. A little paradise!”

  Her hand shakes, splattering the pour. She cups the vial in both hands and puts it on top of the podium. “You see, a lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there’s a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They’re learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven’t even identified.”

  She clicks through a menagerie of bark behaving badly. Dragon tre
es that bleed as red as blood. Jabuticaba, whose billiard-ball fruits grow right out of the trunk. Thousand-year-old baobabs, like tethered weather balloons loaded with thirty thousand gallons of water. Eucalypts the color of rainbows. Bizarre quiver trees with weapons for branch tips. Hura crepitans, the sandbox tree, launching seeds from its exploding fruit at 160 miles per hour. Her audience relaxes, calmed by her turn back toward the picturesque. Nor does she mind taking a last detour through the world’s best things.

  “At some time over the last four hundred million years, some plant has tried every strategy with a remote chance of working. We’re just beginning to realize how varied a thing working might be. Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

  She can’t hear if her audience laughs or groans. She taps on the side of the podium. The thump is muffled under her fingers. Everything in the hall is muted.

  “My whole life, I’ve been an outsider. But many others have been out there with me. We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks.

  “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”

  Her words sound far away, cork-lined and underwater. Either both her hearing aids have died at once or her childhood deafness has chosen this moment to come back.

  “We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.

  “Men and trees are closer cousins than you think. We’re two things hatched from the same seed, heading off in opposite directions, using each other in a shared place. That place needs all its parts. And our part . . . we have a role to play in the Earth organism, and this . . .” She turns to see the image projected behind her. It’s the Arbre du Ténéré, the only thing up on a trunk for four hundred kilometers in every direction. Hit and killed by a drunk driver. She clicks on a Florida bald cypress one and a half millennia older than Christianity, killed a few months ago by a flicked cigarette. “This can’t be it.”

  Another click. “Trees are doing science. Running a billion field tests. They make their conjectures, and the living world tells them what works. Life is speculation, and speculation is life. What a marvelous word! It means to guess. It also means to mirror.

  “Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to.

  “If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!”

  One more click takes her to the next slide, a giant fluted trunk covered in red bark that ripples like muscle. “To see green is to grasp the Earth’s intentions. So consider this one. This tree grows from Colombia to Costa Rica. As a sapling, it looks like a piece of braided hemp. But if it finds a hole in the canopy, the sapling shoots up into a giant stem with flaring buttresses.”

  She turns to regard the image over her shoulder. It’s the bell of an enormous angel’s trumpet, plunged into the Earth. So many miracles, so much awful beauty. How can she leave so perfect a place?

  “Did you know that every broadleaf tree on Earth has flowers? Many mature species flower at least once a year. But this tree, Tachigali versicolor, this one flowers only once. Now, suppose you could have sex only once in your entire life. . . .”

  The room laughs now. She can’t hear, but she can smell their nerves. Her switchback trail through the woods is twisting again. They can’t tell where their guide is going.

  “How can a creature survive, by putting everything into a one-night stand? Tachigali versicolor’s act is so quick and decisive that it boggles me. You see, within a year of its only flowering, it dies.”

  She lifts her eyes. The room fills with wary smiles for the weirdness of this thing, nature. But her listeners can’t yet tie her rambling keynote to anything resembling home repair.

  “It turns out that a tree can give away more than its food and medicines. The rain forest canopy is thick, and wind-borne seeds never land very far from their parent. Tachigali’s once-in-a-lifetime offspring germinate right away, in the shadow of giants who have the sun locked up. They’re doomed, unless an old tree falls. The dying mother opens a hole in the canopy, and its rotting trunk enriches the soil for new seedlings. Call it the ultimate parental sacrifice. The common name for Tachigali versicolor is the suicide tree.”

  She takes up the vial of tree extracts from where she set it down on the podium. Her ears are worthless, but her hands, at least, have found their old steadiness. First there was everything. Soon there will be nothing.

  “I’ve asked myself the question you brought me here to answer. I’ve thought about it based on all the evidence available. I’ve tried not to let my feelings protect me from the facts. I’ve tried not to let hope and vanity blind me. I’ve tried to see this matter from the standpoint of trees. What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?”

  A trickle of extract hits the glass of clear water and turns into tendrils of green.

  GREEN SWIRLS spread through Astor Place. Just a lime splash at first, against the gray pavement. Then another splash, this one avocado. Adam stands at a window gazing down a dozen stories. Cars traveling the four skewed streets pull green streaks into the irregular intersection. In another moment, a third pool—olive—spreads in great Pollock swipes across the concrete canvas. Someone and his crew are dropping paint bombs.

  It’s his second day of home detention, in the downtown apartment where he and his family have lived for four years. The authorities have fitted him with a tracking anklet—top of the line of the HomeGuard series—and released him to his square of air above Waverly and Broadway. Tracking bands: the jewelry shared by endangered species and traitors to the race. He and Lois pay a private contracting company an insane amount of money fo
r the device, and the firm splits the revenues with the state. Everyone wins.

  Yesterday, a technical officer trained Appich in the rules of his confinement. “You can use the telephone and listen to the radio. You can browse the Net and read the papers. You can have visitors. But if you want to leave your building, you need to clear the trip with the Command Center.”

  Lois has taken little Charlie to his grandparents in Cos Cob. To give them a couple of days to concentrate on Adam’s defense, she says. In fact, it traumatizes the boy to see the black slab strapped to his father’s ankle. Five years old, and the kid knows.

  “Take it off, Daddy.”

  So much earlier than he’d hoped, Adam breaks his vow never to lie to his own son. “Soon, buddy. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

  From on high, Appich gazes down at the growing action painting. Another pool—jade—hits the concrete. The car that dumped the paint carries on through the plaza toward Cooper Square. It’s guerrilla theater, a coordinated strike. With every new car, green arcs blend through the five-way intersection, adding a few more brushstrokes to the growing whole. Another vehicle comes down Eighth Street and releases three canisters of brown. Where the green streaks spread and branch, the browns lay down in a furrowed column. It’s easy enough to see what’s growing, twelve stories beneath.

  Patches of red and yellow appear near the top of the subway station stairs. As unwitting pedestrians surface, they paint with their shoes. An angry businessman tries to skirt the mess and fails. Two lovers dance through arm-in-arm, their footsteps daubing in colored fruit and flowers among the spreading branches. Someone has gone to a fair amount of effort to make what must be the world’s largest painting of a tree. Why here, Appich wonders, in a relative backwater neighborhood? It’s a work worthy of Midtown, say outside Lincoln Center. Then he knows why it’s here. Because he is.