His face turns the color of sunset, scaring her. Her arm goes out to calm him. “No worries, Ray. It’s just words. Everything’s fine.”
In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
At that thought, the vessels in his brain give way, the way that earth does when roots no longer hold it together. The flood of blood brings a revelation. He lifts his eyes to the window, to the mysterious outside. There, two life sentences pass in a few heartbeats. The seedlings race upward toward the sun. The varied trunks thicken, shed, fall, and rise again. Their branches rush to enclose the house and punch through its windows. At the stand’s center, the chestnut folds and unfolds, girthing out, spiraling upward, patting the air for new paths, new places, further possibilities. Great-rooted blossomer.
“Ray?” Dorothy’s arms reach out to keep him from convulsing. “Ray!”
She’s on her feet, knocking the stack of books on the bedside table to the floor. But in another moment, another look, emergency turns into its opposite. Her throat clamps shut and her eyes sting, as if the air were full of pollen. She thinks: How can it happen now? We still had books to read. There was something the two of us were supposed to do. We were just beginning to understand each other.
At her feet, on the floor, is The New Metamorphosis, by the author of The Secret Forest. It was on the top of the pile of read-alouds, waiting for the readers who’ll never get to it:
The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .
Dorothy touches the corpse’s bewildered face. Already it has started to soften, even as it grows cold. “Ray?” she says. “I’ll be right there.” Not fast enough, at the speed of her own need. But at the speed of trees, very soon.
DARKNESS SETTLES IN. Mission Dolores Park’s inhabitants change, as do their purposes. But even these night visitors cut a path around Mimi. She leans forward, hands in her lap like two tender figs. She bows her head, weighed down by liberty. The lights blaze in front of her. The skyline turns into sublime allegory. She dozes and wakes, many times.
Her left hand starts up again, tugging at the ring finger of her right. She’s like a dog unable to stop gnawing at its own foot. But this time, it yields. The jade band slips over her age-swollen knuckle and pops free. A weight flies up and out of her, and she cracks open. She sets the green circle in the grass, the one round thing amid a bedlam of growth and splitting. She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright—the frantic need to steer—blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet.
The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.
They say: The air is a mix we must keep making.
They say: There’s as much belowground as above.
They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life.
There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate.
A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
She sees and hears this by direct gathering, through her limbs. The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted Earth will rebuild its pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick as cordwood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends.
The next day dawns. The sun rises so slowly that even the birds forget there was ever anything else but dawn. People drift back through the park on their way to jobs, appointments, and other urgencies. Making a living. Some pass within a few feet of the altered woman.
Mimi comes to, and speaks her very first Buddha’s words. “I’m hungry.”
The answer comes from right above her head. Be hungry.
“I’m thirsty.”
Be thirsty.
“I hurt.”
Be still and feel.
She lifts her eyes onto a trouser cuff of blackish blue. She follows the blue upward along the creases, past the belt with its radio and cuffs and gun and oak baton, up the blue-black pressed shirt and badge and on to the face—a man, a boy, a blood relation—whose eyes find hers. The man stares back at her, alerted by what he has just seen: an old woman talking to a thing whose answers are all mute, wooden, and spreading. “Are you all right?”
She tries to move, but can’t. Her voice won’t work. Her limbs stiffen. Only her fingers can wave a little. She holds the man’s gaze, open to every charge. Guilty, her eyes say. Innocent. Wrong. Right. Alive.
THE MAN in the red plaid coat comes back the next day, accompanied by two strapping twenty-year-old twins in sheepskin and a giant man with a raven profile and the girth of a middle linebacker. They pack in a hefty gas chain saw, two small dollies, and another block and tackle. That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world.
The ad hoc crew works for many hours, reading each other with little need for words. Together, they drag the last carcasses of pine and spruce, pain-killing willow and astringent birch, into place. Then they stand in silence and regard the design they’ve laid out across the forest floor. The shape arrests them. It reads them their rights. You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.
The man in plaid stands with his arms at his side and gazes on the message the five of them have just written. “It’s good,” he says, and his boys agree by saying nothing. Nick stands next to them, leaning on a staff of spruce, the kind of thing that might spring into bloom if you plunged it into the ground. His friends begin to chant in a very old language. It strikes Nick as strange, how few languages he understands. One and a half human ones. Not a single word of all the other living, speaking things. But what these men chant Nick half grasps, and when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.
The transported pieces of downed wood snake through the standing trees. Satellites high up above this work already take pictures from orbit. The shapes turn into letters complete with tendril flourishes, and the letters spell out a gigantic word legible from space:
STILL
The learners will puzzle over the message
that springs up there, so near to the methane-belching tundra. But in the blink of a human eye, the learners will grow connections. Already, this word is greening. Already, the mosses surge over, the beetles and lichen and fungi turning the logs to soil. Already, seedlings root in the nurse logs’ crevices, nourished by the rot. Soon new trunks will form the word in their growing wood, following the cursive of these decaying mounds. Two centuries more, and these five living letters, too, will fade back into the swirling patterns, the changing rain and air and light. And yet—but still—they’ll spell out, for a while, the word life has been saying, since the beginning.
“I’ll be getting back now,” Nick says.
“Back where?”
“Good question.”
He stares off into the north woods, where the next project beckons. Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.
ALSO BY
RICHARD POWERS
•
Orfeo (2014)
Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
The Echo Maker (2006)
The Time of Our Singing (2003)
Plowing the Dark (2000)
Gain (1998)
Galatea 2.2 (1995)
Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988)
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Richard Powers
All rights reserved
First Edition
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Powers, Richard, 1957– author.
Title: The overstory : a novel / Richard Powers.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2018
Identifiers: LCCN 2017051173 | ISBN 9780393635522 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3566.O92 O94 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051173
ISBN 978-0-393-63553-9 (e-book)
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The Overstory Page 54