Why didn’t you do something? the tape asks Douggie. You, who were there?
And what is he supposed to say? What the fuck is he supposed to say? We tried? We tried?
He stops the audio and lies down. He’s going to have to graduate from college in ten-minute intervals. He fingers the walnut in his side. It’s something he should get checked out. But he has time to wait and see how things unfold.
He closes his eyes and lets his head loll. He’s a traitor. He has sent a man to prison for the rest of his life. A man with a wife and little boy, just like the wife and kid Douglas never had. Guilt presses down on his chest as it always does at this hour, like a car driving over him. He’s glad, again, that this prison has taken all sharp things away. He cries out like an animal that has just sprung a trap. The guard doesn’t even bother to check on him this time.
Above him, through the window too high to see, the World Tree rises, four billion years old. And next to it rises that tiny imitation he tried to climb once, long ago—spruce, fir, pine?—the time he got maced in the balls and Mimi watched them cut his jeans away. Again he steps up into the branches, like a ladder leading someplace above the blind and terrified.
He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, “I’m sorry.” No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here’s the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can’t see them, even when he can’t get near, even when he can’t remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.
THE MAN in the red plaid coat says a few words to the dog in a language so old it sounds like stones tossed in a brook, like needles in a breeze, humming. The dog sulks a little, but trots away through the woods. The visitor waves his hand to direct Nick to a different grappling spot on the heavy log. Together, in short, fierce spurts, they roll it into its only possible place.
“Thank you,” Nick says.
“Sure. What’s next?”
They don’t trade names. Names can’t help them any more than spruce or fir can help these beings all around them. They move logs that Nick was powerless to move alone. They execute each other’s ideas with almost no words at all. The man in the plaid coat, too, can see the snaking shapes as if from above. Soon enough, he starts refining them.
A distant branch snaps, and the crack shoots through the understory. There are mink nearby, in these same woods, and lynx. Bear, caribou, even wolverines, though they never let people glimpse them. The birds, though, give themselves as gifts. And everywhere there is scat, tracks, the evidence of things unseen. As they work, Nick hears voices. One voice, really. It repeats what it has been saying to him for decades now, ever since the speaker died. He has never known what to do with them, words of everything and nothing. Words that he has never fully grasped. Wounds that won’t heal. What we have will never end. Right? What we have will never end.
He and his companion work together as the light fades. They stop for dinner. It’s the same as lunch. Although he should just shut up, so much time has passed since Nick has had the luxury of saying anything to anyone that he can’t resist. His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. “It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.”
The man chuckles. “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.”
The man has jerked meat. Nick doles out the last of his fruit and nuts. “I’m going to have to think about restocking soon.”
For some reason, his colleague finds this funny, too. The man swivels his head around the woods as if there were forage everywhere. As if people could live here, and die, with just a little looking and listening. From nowhere, in a heartbeat, Nick understands what Maidenhair’s voices must always have meant. The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.
Not them; us. Help from all quarters.
HIGH ABOVE Adam’s prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the