theater. In one quick jump cut, three gas burners appear on top of the butte, belching fire. One more cut, and a tentlike circlet of fabric materializes, draped over the burners. The camera pans; the lens refocuses. The burners disgorge again. The circlet inflates into a brown and green tube. The tent lifts in time-lapse. Ten seconds, and Mimi realizes just which stump this must be. The learners don’t know, yet, but it won’t be long. They’ll understand everything she does, soon enough, and orders of magnitude more.
On her phone in a crowded park, Mimi watches the ghost tree materialize. It rises above the felled grove. It flaps in the breeze, a redwood leviathan come back to life. As the trunk grows, the camera pulls back to reveal it as the only thing standing in a landscape of stumps as level as a geometric proof. Fabulous, surreal, the hot-air tree billows up into gauzy apotheosis. Its dozen immense and sewn-together limbs probe around for secret compartments, for messages in the air.
She knows who made this tree. Filled out now, the plates of cinnamon bark streak black where fires burned them, centuries ago. Something encircles the great bole at its base. The sight freezes her. She thinks she’s hallucinating. But a close-up confirms the sight, even on a five-inch screen. All around the circumference, facing outward, knee to knee in a campfire ring, a ring of figures sits on the brink of enlightenment. It’s her arhats, in the exact postures from the scroll—their robes, their hunched shoulders, their protruding ribs, the smiles across their sardonic faces. She sets the device down on the grass. She doesn’t understand. The film keeps going. Chinese characters run down the side of the floating tree. Even illiterate, she recognizes them from years of long looking:
On this mountain, in such weather,
Why stay here any longer?
Three trees wave to me with urgent arms.
Then she remembers the long hours Nicholas Hoel spent in her house. She can see him, sitting at the table and sketching, while the rest of them studied maps and planned attacks. It always bothered her, as if he were a courtroom artist documenting their trial in advance. Now she sees what he was sketching.
The tree on the screen of Mimi’s phone bucks in the air. Its limbs thrash. Smoke rises from the bottom of the shot. One of the burners ignites the base of the huge fabric column. Fire licks up the trunk, the way centuries of flames once lapped at Mimas. But this bark isn’t fire-resistant. In a moment, the column of heated silk both vaporizes upward and falls back toward the Earth like a failed space shot. Flaming limbs wave and drop. The ring of arhats glows yellow, then bright orange, then black as cinder.
Another few moments, and the entire sewn redwood smolders into ash. The chorale prelude stumbles through its last deceptive cadence and resolves to tonic. Then the shot itself blinks out in a trickle of smoke over the stumped hillside. As badly as she ever did, Mimi Ma wants to bomb something.
Through the blackness, words form again. The letters are made of autumn-tinted leaves, laid out with absurd patience in swaths across long tracts of forest floor:
For there is hope of a tree, if it
goes down, that it will sprout again,
and that its tender branches will not cease.
Though the root grows old in the earth,
and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent
of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs.
But man, man wastes away and dies
and gives up the ghost, and where is he?
The leaves blow away by twos and threes, vanishing in a stiff breeze. The film ends and asks her to rate it. She looks up on a hillside full of picnickers enjoying themselves on a perfect day.
NO CAMERA NOW. Nick is done with cameras. This piece must be its own and only record. He doesn’t know exactly where he is. North. In the woods. In other words, he’s lost. But sure enough, the trees around him aren’t. To the birds that woke him, every crook in every branch of each of these spruces and tamaracks and balsam firs has a name. He’s getting used to the idea that wherever he is, that’s where his largest and longest-lasting sculpture will be, until time and living creatures come to transform it.
The woods are blue-gray and covered in lichen. He works methodically, as he has for several days. He uses only those materials already on the ground,