of reading. They have no idea when their next provisions might make it through the cordon, whether there still is a cordon, still an LDF or any earthly institution that remembers the pair of them, high up in a thousand-year-old tree, in need of supplies.
She takes his hand in the dark, all the signal he needs. They burrow into one another, as they do every night, against the black. “Where are they?”
There are only two choices, which they she means. Three if you count the creatures of light. And his answer is the same for all three. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe they’ve forgotten about this stand.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t think they have.”
The moonlight behind her throws a hood across her features. “They can’t win. They can’t beat nature.”
“But they can mess things over for an incredibly long time.”
Yet on such a night as this, as the forest pumps out its million-part symphonies and the fat, blazing moon gets shredded in Mimas’s branches, it’s easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.
“Shh,” she says, although he’s already silent. “What’s that?”
He knows and he doesn’t. Another experimental incarnation checking in, announcing its whereabouts, testing the blackness, calibrating its place in the enormous hive. Truth is, his eyes are drooping and he can’t quite keep her question from turning into hieroglyphics. With no way to domesticate the dark or turn it to the smallest use, he’s done for. But he’s wakeful enough still to realize: This is the longest stretch of time I’ve ever gone without the black dog coming to bite at my ass.
They sleep. They don’t strap in anymore. But they still clutch each other hard enough, most nights, that they’d pitch over the side of the platform together, all the same.
WHEN IT’S LIGHT AGAIN, he makes a meaningless tick mark on his DIY calendar. He washes, evacuates, eats, and crawls into the traditional waking position—head alongside her feet, so they can see each other. It crosses Nick’s mind to wonder how he ever took it in his head to move his life twenty stories into the open air. But how does a person get anywhere? And who could stay on the ground, once he has seen life in the canopy? As the sun skids by in smallest increments across the summer sky, he draws. He begins to see how it might work, how a few black marks on a blank white field might change what’s in the world.
She sits on the platform edge with the tarp up, looking out across the tumbling forest. Bald patches in the middle distance are coming closer. She listens for her disembodied voices, her constant reassurance. They don’t check in every day. She retrieves her own notebook and scribbles down tiny poems smaller than a redwood seed.
He watches her take a sponge bath with water that collected in the tarp. “Do your parents know where you are? In case something . . . comes down?”
She turns, naked and shivering, frowns, like the question is advanced nonlinear dynamics. “I haven’t spoken to my parents since we left Iowa.”
Clean and clothed again, seven degrees of solar descent later, she adds, “And it won’t.”
“Won’t what?”
“Nothing’s coming down. I’ve been assured that this story has a good ending.” She pats Mimas, who has, that very day, eaten four pounds of carbon from the air and added them to its mass, even in late middle age.
THEY SPEND the endless hours reading in their sleeping bags. They read all the books previous sitters left in the hammock lending library. They read Shakespeare, holding the thick volume across their twinned bellies. They read a play every afternoon, taking all the parts between them. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. King Lear. Macbeth. They read two fabulous novels, one three years old and the other a hundred and twenty-three. She has trouble, as they near the end of the older story, keeping her voice under control.
“You love these people?” The stories have captivated him. He cares about what happens. But she—she’s broken.
“Love? Wow. Okay. Maybe. But they’re all imprisoned in a shoe box, and they have no idea. I just want to shake them and yell, Get out of yourselves, damn it! Look around! But they can’t, Nicky. Everything alive is just outside their field of view.”
Her face crabs up and her eyes go raw again. Crying for the blindness, even of fictional beings.