The Overstory

by Richard Powers

The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.

Dorothy touches the corpse’s bewildered face. Already it has started to soften, even as it grows cold. “Ray?” she says. “I’ll be right there.” Not fast enough, at the speed of her own need. But at the speed of trees, very soon.

Her left hand starts up again, tugging at the ring finger of her right. She’s like a dog unable to stop gnawing at its own foot. But this time, it yields. The jade band slips over her age-swollen knuckle and pops free. A weight flies up and out of her, and she cracks open. She sets the green circle in the grass, the one round thing amid a bedlam of growth and splitting. She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some 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.

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 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 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 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.