Deep in the night, just after she’s dragged her Cathedral-issue comforter over her body and is preparing to pass out, she lifts the paperbook one last time and fans its grimy, hand-inked pages. How intimately a book is related to the tree and its rings, she thinks. The layers of time, preserved, for all to examine.
TWENTY-SEVEN AND FIVE-EIGHTHS
IT’S DAY. MURMURS of leafy light on the vaulted walls.
Why am I sleeping during the day? Without a blanket? he wonders as everything around him blurs and ripples. But he hasn’t been sleeping. He’s suffered something. An unconsciousness. For what duration he doesn’t know. Also, his legs are oddly numb and feel as heavy as sandbags. And the most basic facts seem to flit just beyond his reach—even his own name he can only brush with the tips of his fingers.
Laid out on his back, he swivels his head to the side, feels the cool floor against his face. The floor is concrete, buffed to a gleaming, wet-looking finish. Three tiers of scaffolding rise high into the air beside him. That’s what I fell from, he thinks. Though he remembers nothing about the fall, somehow he knows its height precisely. He’d measured the vaulted ceiling himself and never forgets a measurement: twenty-seven feet and five-eighths of an inch.
He lifts his ringing head, which feels like a bowling ball, and manages to prop himself up on his elbows to look around. The room is cavernous, spare, modern. A living room. Strewn with polygons of austere acrylic furniture. A fieldstone hearth. Arctic-white walls. Old-growth fir beamwork held together by vintage cast-iron fasteners. Custom floor-to-ceiling windows that frame a cliffside view of the ocean, the water like raw denim, flat as slate.
This is not my house, he thinks. It’s a rich person’s house. A weekend house. Used only a few weeks a year. Summers, most likely. And since he knows the exact height of the ceiling and has a tool belt strapped around his waist, he assumes he’s a carpenter, here doing a renovation. And though some deep, essential part of his brain orders him to quit slacking off and get back to work, his head is still too foggy and his legs are still too heavy for him to move. He’ll need to get checked out before he can work again.
He scans the end tables of the living room for a telephone he can use to call an ambulance but finds nothing. When he notices a cellphone poking out from a pouch in his tool belt he fishes it out, only to find its glass webbed with cracks, the screen beneath as black as a pupil. He presses the buttons but nothing happens, so in frustration he side-arms the aluminum carcass across the room. But the aggressive motion torques something deep inside his hips and suddenly it’s as if someone is holding an acetylene torch to his tailbone. He hears himself scream.
A flock of details rushes in with the pain, like birds returning to roost in his mind’s branches. His name is Liam. He’s Canadian though he’s working in the United States—this he can confirm by the air: warmer with a faint toxicity, like plastic burnt long ago. It’s November. He’s renovating a house in Darien, Connecticut. He’s thirty-four years old and despite his mother’s best efforts, he’s still a Greenwood.
SUPPLIES
1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Brown Rice
1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Chickpeas
1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Soybeans
5 Cans Krylon Spray-Paint, Chestnut Brown
1 Pair 36″ Bolt Cutters
4 Twenty-Five-Pound Bags White Sugar
2 Cartons Menthol Cigarettes
THE HALLOWEEN TREE
LIAM IS TEN years old again and curled in the passenger seat of his mother’s sky-blue Westfalia. Willow is driving them south from Vancouver, down the Pacific coast, and riffing on deforestation and acid rain and silent springs and thalidomide and the coming environmental Armageddon as she smokes menthols and shifts with her free hand, steering with a knobby knee. Liam doesn’t go to school (he tried a few weeks of it in Ucluelet, where they lived for six months while his mother blockaded a logging operation there, and hated every second), so she’s got him some old grade four workbooks from a thrift store to do in the van. But reading exhausts him, so instead he sits listening to the van’s diesel chortle, whittling a stick into a lethal point and occasionally checking for pursuing police cars in the side-view mirror.
It’s a Sunday, the only day that loggers are known to take off, which means it’s also when Willow performs her “direct actions.” Early this morning, Liam watched from the van as his mother took the bolt cutters and snipped a thick lock from a gate intended to keep trespassers out of an old-growth forest lot. While Liam’s guts clenched with anxiety, she drove them into the trees and parked beside some feller bunchers, monstrous logging machines that have always reminded him of yellow dinosaurs. Then Willow gathered up two of the twenty-five-pound bags of white sugar that she keeps hidden under the van’s seats and proceeded to funnel them into the gas tanks of the machines. After that, while Liam begged his mother to come back to the van before the Mounties or the loggers showed up, she spent an hour in the surrounding forest, carefully spray-painting over the markings that the loggers had put on the high-value trees they intended to take down. Liam often has nightmares about the feller bunchers, machines that are somehow powerful enough to devour whole forests. That his mother is insane enough to attack them seems like a heresy that will eventually invite a great disaster down upon them both.
But that’s all behind them now. The Mounties didn’t come. And since tomorrow is his tenth birthday, Willow is driving him to a beach in Oregon like he’s asked so he can try surfing. He’d have preferred California, but Willow has a protest to attend in Vancouver in three days. “So this is the best we can do,” she said, tousling his hair.
As a boy, Liam is asthmatic, watchful, and always clutching at his hippie mother’s batik-printed skirts whenever strangers are around. Originally, she named him Liam New Dawn, but he’ll change it to Liam Greenwood, her legal surname, the day he turns eighteen.
“And here I was trying to give you a fresh start,” she’ll say woundedly when he tells her, after all the paperwork’s filed. “Why degrade yourself with a name like that?”
Willow had him late in life, at forty—unplanned is a word he’s overheard her use—and she never entirely embraced the project of motherhood. With an embarrassing (for him, anyway) jungle in her armpits and a restless fever to pack her Westfalia and go, she’s a Rorschach test of a mother, a shape-shifting cloud drifting across his boyhood horizon. She changes her mind with a swiftness and conviction that terrifies him. A trusted brand commits some ecological sin and she’ll swear off their products forever. A lover contradicts her in some pot-warped argument about the military industrial complex and they’ll never so much as gas up the Westfalia in his city again. For as long as he can remember, Liam has known that his survival depends upon preventing a similar reversal of feeling about him. So he strains to please her: he repeats her phrases, wears the tattered clothes she finds in thrift shops, and marvels at the same sunsets and the same trees.
But mostly the shape Willow assumes is that of a wandering monk, fuelled by weed and chickpeas and the soymilk that she presses herself. Her true religion is Nature, trees especially. Her belief in green beings is as pure and fervent as any self-immolating Buddhist’s. This is why Liam fears her environmentalism above all else—he knows that it’s the thing that could someday steal her from him completely.