slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright—the frantic need to steer—blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet.
The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.
They say: The air is a mix we must keep making.
They say: There’s as much belowground as above.
They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life.
There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate.
A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
She sees and hears this by direct gathering, through her limbs. The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted Earth will rebuild its pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick as cordwood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends.
The next day dawns. The sun rises so slowly that even the birds forget there was ever anything else but dawn. People drift back through the park on their way to jobs, appointments, and other urgencies. Making a living. Some pass within a few feet of the altered woman.
Mimi comes to, and speaks her very first Buddha’s words. “I’m hungry.”
The answer comes from right above her head. Be hungry.
“I’m thirsty.”
Be thirsty.
“I hurt.”
Be still and feel.
She lifts her eyes onto a trouser cuff of blackish blue. She follows the blue upward along the creases, past the belt with its radio and cuffs and gun and oak baton, up the blue-black pressed shirt and badge and on to the face—a man, a boy, a blood relation—whose eyes find hers. The man stares back at her, alerted by what he has just seen: an old woman talking to a thing whose answers are all mute, wooden, and spreading. “Are you all right?”
She tries to move, but can’t. Her voice won’t work. Her limbs stiffen. Only her fingers can wave a little. She holds the man’s gaze, open to every charge. Guilty, her eyes say. Innocent. Wrong. Right. Alive.
THE MAN in the red plaid coat comes back the next day, accompanied by two strapping twenty-year-old twins in sheepskin and a giant man with a raven profile and the girth of a middle linebacker. They pack in a hefty gas chain saw, two small dollies, and another block and tackle. That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world.
The ad hoc crew works for many hours, reading each other with little need for words. Together, they drag the last carcasses of pine and spruce, pain-killing willow and astringent birch, into place. Then they stand in silence and regard the design they’ve laid out across the forest floor. The shape arrests them. It reads them their rights. You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.
The man in plaid stands with his arms at his side and gazes on the message the five of them have just written. “It’s good,” he says, and his boys agree by saying nothing. Nick stands next to them, leaning on a staff of spruce, the kind of thing that might spring into bloom if you plunged it into the ground. His friends begin to chant in a very old language. It strikes Nick as strange, how few languages he understands. One and a half human ones. Not a single word of all the other living, speaking things. But what these men chant Nick half grasps, and when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.
The transported pieces of downed wood snake through the standing trees. Satellites high up above this work already take pictures from orbit. The shapes turn into letters complete with tendril flourishes, and the letters spell out a gigantic word legible from space:
STILL
The learners will puzzle over the message that springs up there, so near to the methane-belching tundra. But in the blink of a human eye, the learners will grow connections. Already, this word is greening. Already, the mosses surge over, the beetles and lichen and fungi turning the logs to soil. Already, seedlings root in the nurse logs’ crevices, nourished by the rot. Soon new trunks will form the word in their growing wood, following the cursive of these decaying mounds. Two centuries more, and these five living letters, too, will fade back into the swirling patterns, the changing rain and air and light. And yet—but still—they’ll spell out, for a while, the word life has been saying, since the beginning.
“I’ll be getting back now,” Nick says.
“Back where?”
“Good question.”
He stares off into the north woods, where the next project beckons. Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.