Shouts greet him at the top. Those above him fasten him with two clamps into the tree. Olivia scampers about the platforms, connected by rope ladder. Buzzard and Sparks have long since talked her through every clause in the lease. They want only to be down before night traps them. They climb down the rope to Loki, who calls up through the encroaching dark. “Someone will be by with your replacements in a few days. All you need to do until then is stay aloft.”
THEN NICK IS ALONE with this woman who has commandeered his life. She takes his hand, which still has not unkinked from gripping. “Nick. We’re here. In Mimas.”
She speaks the creature’s name like it’s an old friend. Like she’s been talking with it for a long time. They sit next to each other in needle-grazed darkness, two hundred feet in the air, on what Buzzard and Sparks called the Grand Ballroom: a seven-by-nine-foot platform made of three doors bolted together. Sliding tarp walls shelter them on three sides.
“Bigger than my room at college,” Olivia says. “And nicer.”
Balanced on another branch just beneath, reachable by rope ladder, is a smaller piece of plywood. A rain barrel, collecting jar, and sealable bucket complete the bathroom. Six feet above them on a higher spur, another platform serves as pantry, kitchen, and den. It’s filled with water, food, tarps, and supplies. A hammock stretched between two limbs cradles a substantial lending library, left here by previous sitters. The whole three-level tree house balances on the top of an enormous fork made when the trunk was hit by lightning centuries ago. It sways with every breeze.
A kerosene lamp illuminates her face. He has never seen her look so confirmed. “Come here.” She takes his wrist and guides it to her. “Here. Closer.” As if farther away were an option. And she takes him like someone who’s sure that life has need of her.
IN THE NIGHT, something soft and warm grazes his face. It’s her hand, he thinks, or the fall of her hair as she leans over him. Even the slow, seasick barcarole of the sleeping bag bed feels blessed—the cramped quarters of love. A claw cuts into his cheek, and the succubus lets loose with falsetto jibbers. Watchman bolts up, screaming, “Shit!” He pitches toward the platform ledge, but his safety cable catches him. One palm punches through the fantasy of tarp walls. Lives go shrieking off into the branches.
She’s up in a flash, pinning his arms. “Nick. Stop. Nick! It’s okay.” Danger breaks up into little pieces. In the hail of chatter, he’s slow to hear what she keeps saying. “Flying squirrels. They’ve been playing all over us for ten minutes.”
“Jesus! Why?”
She laughs and pets him and pulls him back down horizontal. “You’ll just have to ask them. If they ever come back.”
She nuzzles him, her belly in the small of his back. Sleep won’t come. There are creatures that live so high up and far away from man that they never learned fear. And thanks to the insanity in his cells, Nick has—this very first night on his very first tree-sit—taught them.
LIGHT GATHERS in speckled fistfuls on his face. He has slept almost not at all, but rises refreshed in a way normally reserved for the industrious. He rolls onto his side and lifts the tarp. The whole spectrum streams in, from blues to browns, greens to absurd golds. “Look at that!”
“L’see.” Her voice, sleepy but eager, breathes in his ear. “Oh, goodness.”
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