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SHE COMES IN rosy from the cold. Her scarf trails as she pushes the door shut behind her. The Requiem score drops from her hands. She bends to pick it up, and when she straightens, their eyes catch, spilling everything. Scared, defiant, pleading, thuggish. Wanting to be home again, with an old friend.
“Hey! You haven’t budged from that chair.”
“Good rehearsal?”
“The best!”
“I’m glad. What sections did you sing?”
She crosses to where he sits. Something of their old rhythm. She hugs him, Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck. Before he can stand, she slips past, into the kitchen, smelling on herself that blend of salt and bleach. “I’ll just take a quick shower before bed.”
She’s a smart woman, but she has never had much patience with the obvious. Nor does she think him capable of simple observation. She showered twenty minutes before heading out to sing her Brahms.
They look together: high-wire surveyors of a newfound land. The view cracks open his chest. Cloud, mountain, World Tree, and mist—all the tangled, rich stability of creation that gave rise to words to begin with—leave him stupid and speechless. Reiterated trunks grow out of Mimas’s main line, shooting up parallel like the fingers of a Buddha’s upraised hand, recouping the mother tree on smaller scales, repeating the inborn shape again and again, their branches running into each other, too mazy and fused to trace.
Fog coats the canopy. Through an opening in Mimas’s crown, the tufted spires of nearby trunks stand swirled in the gauze of a Chinese landscape. There’s more substance to the grayish puffs than there is to the green-brown spikes poking through them. All around them spreads a phantasmagoric, Ordovician fairy tale. It’s morning like the morning when life first came up on dry land.
Watchman sweeps back another wall of tarp along its rope runner and looks up. Dozens more feet of Mimas unfold above—trunks that took over when lightning clipped this one. The top of the tangled system disappears into low cloud. Fungi and lichen everywhere, like splatters of paint from a heavenly can. He and Maidenhair perch, most of the way up the Flatiron Building. He looks down. The floor of the forest is a dollscape a little girl might make out of acorns and ferns.
[...]
Nicholas watches the drama as if thumbing an infinite flip-book. The land unfolds, ridge beyond ridge. His eyes adjust to the baroque abundance. Forests of five different shades bathe in the mist, each one a biome to creatures still to be discovered. And every tree he looks on belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.
The judge frowns. “What grows back after a clear-cut isn’t a forest?”
Frustration boils over in her. “You can replace forests with plantations. You can also arrange Beethoven’s Ninth for solo kazoo.” Everyone laughs but the judge. “A suburban backyard has more diversity than a tree farm!”
“How much untouched forest is left?”
“Not much.”
“Less than a quarter of what we started with?”
“Oh, heavens! Much less. Probably no more than two or three percent. Maybe a square, fifty miles on each side.” What’s left of her vow of circumspection blows away. “There were four great forests on this continent. Each was supposed to last forever. Each went down in decades. We barely had time to romanticize! These trees out here are our last stands, and they’re disappearing—a hundred football fields a day. This state has seen rivers of logjam six miles long.
“If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you’ll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century’s soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can’t even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.”
DAYS PASS, wet and icy, each more miserable than the last. The sitters that were to relieve Watchman and Maidenhair never show. The standoff enters week two, and the ring of workers at the foot of Mimas turns angry.
“You’re out in the middle of nowhere. Four miles from the nearest person. Things could happen. Nobody would know.”
Maidenhair beams down on them, beatific. “You guys are too decent. You can’t even make a credible threat!”
“You’re killing our livelihood.”
“Your bosses are doing that.”
“Bullshit!”
“One-third of forest jobs lost to machines in the last fifteen years. More trees cut, fewer people working.”
Stumped, the loggers wander into other tactics. “For Christ’s sake. It’s a crop. It grows back! Have you seen the forests south of here?”
“It’s a onetime jackpot,” Watchman shouts down. “A thousand years before the systems are back in place.”
“What’s the matter with you two? Why do you hate people?”
“What are you talking about? We’re doing this for people!”
“These trees are going to die and fall over. They should be harvested while they’re ripe, not wasted.”
“Great. Let’s grind up your grandfather for dinner, while he still has some meat on him.”
“You’re insane. Why are we even talking to you?”
“We have to learn to love this place. We need to become natives.”
One of the loggers revs up his chain saw and whacks the branches of one of Mimas’s largest basal sprouts. He steps back and looks up, brandishing a limb like a sailboat mast. “We feed people. What do you do?”
They shout at Maidenhair, tag team. “We know these forests. We respect these trees. These trees have killed our friends.”
Maidenhair holds still. The idea of a tree killing a person is too much for her to think about.
The men below press their advantage. “You can’t stop growth! People need wood.”
Watchman has seen the numbers. Hundreds of board feet of timber, half a ton of paper and cardboard per person per year. “We need to get smarter about what we need.”
“I need to feed my kids. How about you?”
Watchman sets to shout some things he knows he’ll regret. Maidenhair’s hand on his arm stops him. She’s gazing downward, trying to hear these men, attacked for doing what they’ve been asked to do. For doing something dangerous and vital that they’ve learned to do so well.
“We’re not saying don’t cut anything.” She dangles her arm, reaching out to the men from two hundred feet away. “We’re saying, cut like it’s a gift, not like you’ve earned it. Nobody likes to take more gift than they need. And this tree? This tree would be a gift so big, it would be like Jesus coming down and . . .”
She trickles off on a thought that Watchman has at the same moment. Been there. Felled that, too.
“People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that.”
Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”
Adam can’t decide whether to smile or nod. He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand.
Maidenhair inspects Adam, as through a lab’s two-way mirror. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Anything you want.”
“It’s a simple question. How long do you think we have?”
He doesn’t understand. He looks to Watchman, but the man, too, is waiting for his answer. “I don’t know.”
“In your heart of hearts. How long, before we pull the place down around us?”
Her words embarrass Adam. It’s a question for undergrad dorms. For barrooms late on a Saturday night. He has let the situation get away from him, and none of this—the trespass through private land, the ascent, this fuzzy conversation—can be worth the two extra data points. He looks away, out on the ravaged redwoods. “Really. I don’t know.”
“Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?”
The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.”
“Thank you!” She’s pleased with her overgrown pupil. He grins back. Maidenhair’s head bobs forward and her eyebrows flare. “And would you say that the rate is falling or rising?”
He has seen the graphs. Everyone has. Ignition has only just started.
“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity. Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking. “Is the house on fire?”
A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.”
“And you want to observe the handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”
A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam’s observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group . . .”
“. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?”
“Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—”
“—lots of people would already have—”
“—with six billion other—”
“Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two-thirds of the planet’s net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”
A girl called Trillium shouts, “We’re just trying to protect a good thing.”
“Why don’t you protect what belongs to you, and let us protect our jobs and our family and our own mountains and our way of life?”
“The trees don’t belong to anyone,” Doug-fir says. “The trees belong to the forest.”
The passenger door opens, and the older man gets out. He walks around the front of the cab. Once, in another life, long ago, Adam took a seminar in the psychology of crisis and confrontation. Now he remembers nothing. The man is tall but stooped, gray hair falling in his face. He’s like a big grizzly pitching forward on his hind legs. Something flashes at the man’s wrist. Adam thinks: Gun. Knife. Run.
The old guy reaches the front left bumper and lifts the metal weapon. But the threat is soft, philosophical, perplexed, and the weapon only a metal hand. “I lost my arm at the elbow, cutting those trees.”
The heartthrob calls from the cab, “And I’ve got white finger, from working. You heard of working, haven’t you? Doing things other people need to have done?”
The old guy rests his good hand on the hood and shakes his head. “What do you people want? We can’t stop using wood.”
Maidenhair appears, walking through the drawbridge toward the men. The upright grizzly takes a step back. She says, “We don’t know what people can and can’t do. So little has been tried!”
The look of her sets the goateed driver on every kind of high alert. “You can’t put wood above the lives of decent people.” He’s stunned; he wants her. That much is clear to Adam a hundred yards away.
“We don’t,” she says. “We don’t put trees above people. People and trees are in this together.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“If people knew what went into making trees, they would be so, so thankful for the sacrifice. And thankful people don’t need as much.” She talks to the men for a while. She says, “We need to stop being visitors here. We need to live where we live, to become indigenous again.”
IT’S EASIER TO LIVE for months high up in the redwood canopy than to pass seven days at ground level. Everything is owned; a one-year-old knows that. It’s as much a law as Newton’s. Walking down the street without cash is a crime, and no one alive would imagine for a minute that things in real life might go any other way. Nick can’t afford to be picked up for anything—not for vagrancy, not for camping without a permit, not for grazing on manzanita berries in a state park. He finds a cabin, rented by the week, in a depressed little town at the foot of the logged mountains. His yard backs onto a stand of juvenile redwoods, straight and clear, only a foot and a half thick, but known to him. The closest thing left to kin.
“The treatment of the arhats is very skilled. Simply on its historical rarity and the quality of the drawing, we put the value between . . .” He mentions two figures that elicit a high-pitched primate giggle before she can throttle it. “Four Arts would be willing to pay you something in the middle of that range.”
She sits back, faking calm. She had hoped for a little freedom from the press of money. Two years, maybe three. But this is a fortune. Freedom. Enough to pay for a whole new life. Mr. Siang appraises her scarred face. His eyes remain impassive behind the blood-red frames. She stares back, ready for a showdown. She has watched the fiercest fire go dead. After Olivia, she can outlast any living gaze.
The scroll lies between them on the table. The wild, drunken calligraphy, the cryptic poem, the seated figures alone in their old forests, almost transformed, almost a part of everything—all hers to dispose of. But disposing of them suddenly feels criminal. Three trees want something from her. But she has less than no idea what.
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?
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.
kind of inspo for N's mother? that way of writing
[...] 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 Brinkman, 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.