“Coast redwoods and sequoias are both part of the cypress family.”
“And the coast redwood is the tallest?”
“Yup.”
“And that’s what Hyperion is? A coast redwood?”
“Correct. All the trees we’re going to see today, those are coast redwoods too. The giant sequoias grow in the Sierra Nevada.”
“Sequoia sempervirens.”
“Always alive. Forever green.”
“Redwoods are nature’s art installations,” she decided firmly.
A quote came back to me, one I’d memorized when I was doing research with Sid for my college thesis. “Aristotle once said: ‘There is more both of beauty and of raison d’être in the works of nature than in those of art.’”
She nodded with so much enthusiasm she had to sit up to do it. “That’s why I love these trees. They’re universal symbols of strength, perseverance, and survival. They’re living poems to time.”
I’ll admit it: I wanted to fuck her when she said that. And as I drove on, an image popped into my head. I saw myself as the pith inside one of those colossal trees, living in darkness, buried deep inside the trunk, hidden under centuries of growth, a heartbeat muffled and faint. And then I imagined October coming along and scraping off long pieces of bark, peeling away layer after ancient layer, trying to reach me. And still it would take years to get deep enough to set me free.
She said, “Redwood trees are poetic, don’t you think?”
Her voice brought me back into the car, back into my body.
“Yup,” I told her. “Always have.”
We made it to the little town of Willits, known as the gateway to the redwoods, in two hours and stopped at a coffee shop on Main Street for breakfast. There were few patrons inside—couple of burly loggers and some old hippies. We drank strong coffee and ate runny egg sandwiches, and after we finished, October got out her sketchbook and asked if she could do a portrait of me.
The plan, she said, was to do one now and then another later, after the mushrooms kicked in.
“No talking, no moving,” she directed.
I sat still and stayed quiet while she focused on my face. The entire time she was drawing, I had a strong, somatic, dare I say synesthetic response to her attention. What I mean is I felt as if she were touching me with her pencil. Her hand made broad, sweeping strokes and small, intricate marks on the paper, each one like a gentle caress on my face. And as she tilted her head and squinted at my features, I had the sense she was examining my interior as much as my exterior.
“You have a beautiful mouth,” she told me matter-of-factly. “And your eyes are almost symmetrical.”
She used her hand for a bit, shading and smudging until her fingers were gray from the graphite.
“This is fun,” she mumbled, as if she were talking to herself. “There’s so much going on behind your eyes, and that makes for a very nuanced portrait. On the surface you’re all still water. But man, that water runs deep.”
“Swampy,” I mumbled.
“No talking.” She shook her head. “Besides, you’re wrong. I can see people’s spirits when I draw them, and yours isn’t swampy. It’s a little marine flare blinking at the bottom of a deep, dark ocean.”
She put her pencil down, examined her work, made a couple of additional adjustments, and then flipped the pad around for me to see.
“Well?”
She’d drawn me with a cup of coffee in my hands, looking a little off to the right, the cafe’s one big window behind me and to the left.
I studied the portrait for a while before I said anything. It looked exactly like me, and yet it looked like a stranger. She’d drawn a fiery light in my eyes that I didn’t think was really there.
“That’s how I see you,” she said.
Then I understood. She’d drawn the potential Joe Harper, not the actual one. Because that’s what a spirit is, right? Our best, brightest, purest self?
“I like it,” I told her. What I meant was I liked who I was in her eyes.
My coffee had gone cold, I went to get a refill, and when I returned to the table a young man who said his name was Finster had taken the seat beside October. Finster had no food or beverages in front of him and claimed he had been a lobster in a previous life.
“I had a beautiful lobster wife and a lobster daughter,” he explained.
Finster had broad shoulders like a swimmer, a square forehead, a square jaw,