Mendocino Fire

Mendocino Fire

One time in the library in town a boy has a rat inside his shirt. Its head pokes out under the boy’s chin, its clawey hands clinging and whiskers quicked forward. It is as if Finn has never wanted anything before: this, this is her destiny, to be a girl with a rat inside her shirt. Wherever she goes the rat will hang on, the alert small subject of her gigantic solicitude. How long do you think a rat will last in the woods against foxes and ravens and owls and hawks. But if I was really careful and kept it in a cage and was really careful. Do you think a rat wants to be your little Gitmo prisoner, or do you think a rat wants to be free like you are.

Nights when the fog holds off they laze around the illicit summer fire, smoking and telling stories and feeding twigs to the flames for the love of seeing small things burn, story after story, and there is Finn, almost seven, riding the high end of a canted redwood log in the dark. Mary, too, tells stories. Whenever Mary tells how Finn was born, Finn feels both beloved and ashamed, her helpless, ridiculous baby-self held up for them to dote on. That story ends with Mary crying in ever-renewed astonishment: Finn you were so beautiful! Finn works her arms from too-long sleeves and pulls her knees to her chest under the sloppy tent of Goodwill sweater smelling of the grown man who gave it away. Who smoked. Who was not her father, because she’s asked and Mary shook her head. The baggy sweater hem covers the boots so only their toes show, and she evens the boot toes so neither is ahead, neither is winning, not the left, not the right, old black boot toes in a setting of moss and fingerlength ferns and upthrust mushrooms whose caps are pale, pushy, tender, mute. A boot toe edges into the gang of mushrooms. One is uprooted and maimed by the slow back-and-forthing of the toe of the boot. Then she is sorry. Finn shuts her eyes and fills up with sorriness.

That is killing, Finn.

For a while she is absorbed in accusing herself, then blame loses its electrical charge and if she wants that absorption again another mushroom will have to die. Boredom nudges her boot toe close to another cocky little button of rooted aliveness.

What is that like: not to be able to move out of the way.

Another night, that summer or the summer after. If firelight flashes high enough there’s laughter, first because it’s a freaking face up there in the dark, then because it’s a little kid. Now and then Finn has come down when coaxed, and that was a mistake. They may not intend it thus, but their solicitude is an oblique condemnation of Mary. Finn resents this even if her mother doesn’t.

Aren’t you cold in just that sweater and your poor legs bare? And Jesus look how scratched up.

How long since you seen chocolate? — I think I got some somewhere.

My little girl is your age just about and she can say her ABCs, can you say your ABCs?

In this full-moon circle there’s a stranger, though the grown-ups don’t at first know that, each person assuming the lean bearded dude with the hostile vibe arrived with somebody else. Afterward no one will own up to having told him about the circle, but that could have been from remorse at showing the kind of piss-poor judgment that fucks up everyone’s night. Finn who can go a long while unseen has been found out: he has noticed her. He has called, “What’s your name?” and gotten no response. The wiry dark shrub of his beard parts again, the teeth asking, “What’s your name?” Finn’s hesitation lasts long enough to offend him down there in his bared-nerve world and he shouts, “Don’t answer then you autistic little shit, not like I give a fuck.” Finn is being, for the first time, hated: her nerves memorize the shock. And him: she memorizes him, this shirtless shaven-headed hater, brows heavy and meaningful in contrast to the round gleaming exposure of his forehead, and, inked on the left upper slab of his chest, a tattoo, a spiral, big as her handprint would be if she left a handprint on his bare, slightly sweating, hard-breathing chest.

“Hey,” someone, not Mary, commands gently. “Hey, come on now. Hey.”

Another voice says, “Way disproportionate, man, going off on a kid like that.”

Someone else says, “Look, she never answers.” Adding, “But it’s not autism.”

Someone says, “Maybe, man, you should apologize to Finn.”

He says, “Finn.”

Mary, at last: “You know her name.”

“Finn,” he calls up to her. “Finn, man, I’m sorry, I lost it.”

The others wait for an utterance equal to the scale of his offense. He too, for reasons of his own, seems to want to say more. He calls, “You not telling me your name, it just hurt my feelings, I lost it.”

At this skewed sincerity they laugh, and he sits down and reaches to accept the joint, and everyone in the mended, redeemed circle relaxes. Finn is almost asleep when she hears his voice again: “You know what I saw on TV last night. This bear. Polar bear. It teeters on this little dwindling raft of ice and it can’t stay where it is and it can’t go because there’s no other ice in sight, it’s swimming and swimming, this small, like a dog’s, polar bear head in a world of water, forever and ever water, this bear swimming hard against the drag of its fur with nowhere to swim to, nothing to climb out onto, ice gone, ice melted, and it’s despair, what he feels, what we feel, that is despair and we all know it, you think Mendocino is different, your safe hole to hide in, well wake the fuck up, they’re coming for the last scraps, who stops them? Us? Have we stopped them from screwing over the planet? Let me tell you their ideology. Want me to tell you their ideology? Take take take take take take take. Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill.” When he says kill they hear not only fucked up and pissed off, there’s a personal element, some provocation an ordinary person could tolerate, which he, being crazy, can’t endure. “What’s coming should terrify us. Tell me this. Why aren’t we fucking terrified. Why don’t we do a fucking thing to stop them.” He gets to his feet. “Now it all falls on children.” He tilts his face up but the fire has died down and Finn doubts he can make her out against the darkness. He says, “She’s gonna see—,” and means her. He’s forgotten her name.

He tries again. “She’s gonna live to see—”

He’s forgotten the end of the sentence.

With soft concern, the kind that doesn’t presume to insist, someone drawls, “Come on, man, sit down, why don’t you sit down”—and other voices, fastidiously soft, tug at him. “Come on, it’s all right, sit back down, good, that’s good, don’t cry, it’s a beautiful night, you’re among friends, there’s the moon.”

Finn has things to fix — terrors, gaps in knowledge — that wolves can help with, and for a time, alongside her love of Mary, her passion for her mother’s weather-roughened fair skin and the wealth of her never-cut hair and her habit of rubbing a leaf between thumb and forefinger and asking the plant What’s wrong here? Am I missing something? and her woodsmoke, damp wool, and patchouli scent and her voice and the millet-flour pancakes she makes in their cast-iron skillet when she’s in a good mood with wild blackberries that burst and bleed inky streaks through the batter, alongside all of that Finn’s love of wolves runs parallel. Protective yellow-eyed posse: Agnes, Bone, Donedeal, Moody, Sid. Slipsliding through the woods with her. Finn can’t remember mentioning their existence ever, so how does Mary know? Mary says Sometimes it’s like that, beloveds from the life before stick with the child into the child’s new existence, and ignorants call them imaginary. Because they regard human doings with supreme contempt, there are limits to what the wolves can teach Finn. And one day Mary says Outgrow the fucking fairy tale, Finn. There are no wolves. There never were.

Not a road, you can’t call it a road, just the dirt ruts someone would drive down when the orchard needed attention. That time, the time when these trees badly needed pruning, came and went years ago, and now thickets of water shoots, pretty much impenetrable, swarm once-elegant branches. Mary’s lover, Teague, says the orchard is asleep. The last four or five winters were too warm, with so few chill hours that the trees — who break into blossom only after experiencing what they believe to be a whole winter’s worth of cold — never wake from dormancy. They have been stranded by global warming in a kind of dream. Teague likes explaining things about his land, even troubling things that keep him awake at night. Listen when I’m talking to you, Teague says. Finn was listening. He doesn’t like it when she tells him so. Why do you have to piss him off, Mary says, pressing a rustling bag of frozen peas to Finn’s jaw. After a couple of tries, Finn perfects a listening expression. Finn has to climb several trees before finding an apple. She twists it from its twig. Where some old trees were taken out there is a shaggy clearing sheltered from rough wind, hidden from low-flying planes, perfect for Mary’s little darlings. From her loft Finn hears Teague say There’s shit kids need, and when Mary says Like what he says Like has she ever had a birthday cake? Wherever Mary goes, Teague’s dog follows at a bowlegged pitbull trot. The handsomer the man the uglier the dog, Mary says. Do your thing, goofball goonface, Mary says, scratching what’s left of a torn-off black ear. Pitbull pee is the flashing neon keep-out sign of the animal world. As backup, tarnished spoons clink and tinsel shimmers along strands of salvaged wire strung trunk to trunk in a critter-proof perimeter, the plants leafing out in the grow-bags Finn and Mary drag into new, sunnier configurations as summer progresses. A real secret is one your life depends on, Mary says. The apple is as small as Finn’s fist, gone in five bites. Finn has taken to counting bites. Did you remember to feed her? is one of the accusing questions Teague aims at Mary. If he finds out about the grow, he’ll do more than accuse. It’s his land, he’s supposed to know what’s going on. Even if he didn’t know, he can still lose the land, that’s the law. The bigger danger is the patch being found by accident and ripped off. Say some new guy came to work for Teague, Mary said, then I’d worry. The beauty of this semiwild sixty-acre slice of Mendocino is that it’s too much for Teague to handle without help, and he puts off hiring help because he’s paranoid. The downside is that in Teague’s paranoia he’s convinced Mary cheats on him. They can’t stay. My fucking luck, Mary says. Those seeds came from Afghanistan.

Dev plays guitar in a band with gigs throughout the county and even, two or three times that winter, down in the city, where Mary wears high heels and a vintage dress with pansies on it and they eat Chinese. In potholed parking lots outside bars in Arcata and Hopland and Forestville, Finn finds quarters, earrings, condoms she knows better than to touch, a lipstick whose red Mary likes, a dog collar complete with tags, a real bullet, a run-over T-shirt that, uncrumpled, says Mendocino Fire and was a fireman’s, Dev says, and then says We should look for a puppy to go with that collar. Someone, a drunk, breaks the van’s left taillight with a baseball bat. For no reason, Mary says. Wrapped in an old flannel shirt of Dev’s, zipped in his sleeping bag against the cold in the rear of the van, Finn sleeps alongside instrument cases and the sawdust-sweet carpentry tools of Dev’s day job. All night the van is a tin drum for the rain. Most mornings she gets to school. A cough ransacks her chest and scrapes her throat raw. When the shoplifted thermometer says 104, Dev sings If that mockingbird don’t sing, Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring and by dawn her forehead is cool under Mary’s palm. Far out in the country a curve of road stampedes her heart and right there is the dirt drive that winds to Teague’s house. She studies Mary’s profile. Nothing. When Dev likes the song on the radio, he turns it up high and they all sing.

Mary is still asleep inside. At the table of recycled redwood near Kafka’s trailer, Finn is fed tea and slice after slice of toast dripping with honey by Kafka, fresh from her shower, the mown contours of her crewcut pinheaded with glisten, all six feet of her clean and slender and unbothered in cargo pants and a white wifebeater that exposes the zoo sleeving her forearms. Ocelot, macaw, monkey, winding vines. From this intricacy Kafka’s hands emerge naked and in need of something to do. A near-drowned bee orbits the bowl of Kafka’s spoon. Does Finn know about bees? “Because this is some ominous shit. By far the most important pollinators on the planet, disappearing. Flying away, never coming back, hives empty. No one knows why. So now, if I see a bee floundering around in my teacup, I’m like, ‘Sister Bee, just you take hold of the tip of this spoon, just you rest a while, calm down, dry your wings.’” Since Kafka keeps talking, Finn’s confusion plays out exclusively within her own head, where it can’t complicate the good impression she hopes to make. In case they’re staying.

Rick is a tattooed sea urchin diver who has custody of his eleven-year-old daughter, and Maddie and Finn share a pink room looking out over unmown fields and patchy woods to the barn that still has its old copper running-horse weathervane. On Maddie’s laptop they research sex and try what they find out. In a cinderblock room they’re forbidden to go into, she and Maddie run their hands over sleekly wrapped bricks of cash and fit their index fingers into triggers. From a FedEx box slithers a dream of a dress and Rick tells Mary try it on. Bare-legged she spins around and he says what’s it like wearing five thousand dollars on your back. Finn squints from down below: daylight rays through bullet holes in the horse’s chest. Inside the barn, down the lengths of parallel benches, the long-fingered leaves bask under metered lights, in rainforest warmth, to the music of Mozart. Music Finn can’t believe Mary has known about all along.

Finn’s hair turns pink. A friend’s older brother gives her the Earth First! shirt she wears under a baggy old-man cardigan, whose pockets hold crusts for sparrows wintering in the woods behind the school. Fall of sophomore year she writes a history paper on the FBI’s involvement in the attempted assassination of Judi Bari. That spring Finn hides the rats from another student’s science fair project in a pillowcase under her oversize hoodie and saunters from the school. When she stops to peer in, they’re scrambling and clutching, whiskers vibrating with fear. Finn kneels in the woods. She holds the first at eye level, his hind legs scrabbling, and checks the petal of chest under the albino fur. “Hello after all these years,” she tells it. “You thought I wouldn’t come back to save you?” A heart batters against her thumb. Live! live! live! live! live! thuds the heart. You’ve been asleep, Finn! Half as alive as this rat! Dreaming, while death after death streams out from your existence like ripples when a finger touches a river. Fed from a slaughterhouse, Finn, educated with cunning lies, your clothes stitched by enslaved children. Mr. Hahn seeks her out. Nobody’s accusing her. It’s not as if anyone saw who took the rats. But, hypothetically. Hypothetically, even if one student holds extremely strong views, other students are entitled to do projects for the science fair. Right? Can she accept the fairness of that? She likes Mr. H, his unfunny jokes and love of zombie movies, the surfboard on top of his Jeep when the sets are good. He wants her to assure him that for the duration — meaning till she graduates — she will respect others’ property.

“Living beings can’t be property.”

“Have you thought about college?” Mr. Hahn says.

“My family couldn’t afford it.” In general the word family suffices to fend off intrusiveness.

But it doesn’t deter him. “Trust me, Finn, it can happen,” he says. “Bright mind like yours. All you have to do is want it.”

Jared’s black hair goes unwashed week after week, Jared buys his Scarlet Letter essay off the Internet and argues he deserves more than a B+, in the boys’ locker room Jared holds a lit match under the tick in his armpit, then wears it in a glass phial around his neck till it withers into tick dust. His dad is the foreman at the lumber mill, and when he was eleven Jared was supposed to have talked someone’s little sister into taking off her underpants at Abo’s company picnic and to have been caught by her older brother and beat up pretty bad. Finn’s outward appearance — kohl eyeliner, slip dress, combat boots — isn’t what moves him. This goes way deeper. When they share a match — his cigarette, then hers — his world is rocked by her presence, her being, the Finn-ness of her eyes and nose and mouth and hard-beating heart, she can tell. Her skin can tell. No part of her doesn’t love him, nothing holds its tongue. God, that he is alive! While she was in the woods he was playing World of Warcraft on the flat-screen TV in his room. If only she could go back and tell her little kid self Hold on because your soul mate exists, you just have to live long enough to get to him. Bliss, this is what they mean by bliss. Or it would be if she could forget the death awaiting the two of them and all living beings. Everything for me’s not all melting arctic ice, Finn, not all dead birds falling from midair and viruses spread by monkey rape, he says. I’m not you. Sometimes I need it to be a sunny day with no problems. What won’t go away is one sentence. I’m not you. That stops her in her tracks. What is wrong with him that he can say I’m not you. They spend a night in zipped-together sleeping bags with stars transiting the gap between redwood spires and he says Tell me again how you made up the wolves and their names and what they said. For as long as it takes to tell him about the wolves, she’s not lonely.

Rubber bullets have been fired, five protesters seriously injured, two others dead. Rumors tremor through the group of nuns in the van with Finn, who bends forward uncomfortably, her bound hands wedged against the small of her back. River and Trespass and the others were muscled into a different van, leaving Finn the only Earth First!er among nuns. The crush of ambulances and police cars and rescue vehicles allows no exit from the bridge, and for an hour after the doors are slammed on them they swelter and wait. Marshaled on the tech plate of the van’s floor, eleven pairs of practical black lace-up oxfords and one set of dirty red high-tops, the chorus line of black skirts and fawn stockings interrupted by Finn’s filthy jeans, a tear exposing her banged-up left knee. Her wrists aching, Finn makes small talk with an elderly sister whose gaze is magnanimously fond behind cat’s-eye glasses, and whose upper lip sports a wispy Frida Kahlo mustache Finn finds endearing, the righteousness of the calm white superior face undercut by this roguish touch of androgyny. She’s never been this close to a nun before, and is worried about giving offense, not by saying something inappropriate, because she means to keep a close watch on that, but merely by being dirty and young and an anarchist. The cat’s-eye nun’s inquiries break the ice, and soon Finn is the object of their concerted attention. It is a van full of mothers, Finn thinks. It’s nothing to do with today’s protest, but she ends up explaining the threat to the last remaining old growth in Mendocino County and confesses that she believes a treesit is her destiny and there’s some redwood, as yet unmet, she was born to save. Neat coiffed heads, dark or graying, nod benignly. The van rolls a few feet, and the women sigh in approving relief, but then it jolts to a halt, and a nun says, “Oh, nuts.” Finn closes her eyes, thinking that when she tells River about this, she will report, The worst expletive they allow themselves is “nuts.” One of the nuns sneezes repeatedly, but nobody can offer her a tissue since their hands are locked behind their backs. The van jolts forward again, and Finn is thrown against the cat’s-eye nun, and rests close against her a fraction of an instant longer than she needs to, for the skin-and-bone kindness of the woman — to take that in.

She’s been warned against it — subjected to detailed lectures on safety — but on her third day Finn abandons the ropes that are her only insurance against a fall. She free-climbs into the vaults of this aerial brazil, gardens of licorice fern, couches of moss, single boughs as grand as reverend oaks, thickets, hidey-holes, moths indistinguishable from bark till they flutter away, dewy arboreal salamanders insinuated in crevices, forest after forest ascending this five-hundred-year-old tree whose lightning-charred pinnacle, visible only when fog melts away, looms far above. Finn wants to climb that spar, but decides to practice more before attempting it. The sun slants thus across a continent of cloud, igniting its upper verge in flaring platinum, streaking through space, silvering the drops beading a cobweb wide as a bedsheet, so that the spider legging it down the shining strands is forced to step high. A satellite blinks across the gray chasm between two cloud summits.

About dealing with the human threats, there have been other lectures, equally detailed. How you conduct yourself reflects on the movement. Defuse aggression, don’t feed it, Trespass told her. Try to connect.

They are Smoke River boys, the fallers, they catcall, invite her to get naked, accuse her of being a dyke, ask how long since she’s had a bath and how bad she smells, unzip their pants and urinate on the tree, promise her pizza if she comes down, say hey why don’t we all just go out for a beer, say they’ll marry her if she cleans up good. And why not come down and get it over with, this tree’s gonna die one way or the other, either rotting out from sheer age or because they cut it down, and why shouldn’t they get the wood while it’s still worth something. Finn answers according to the doctrine of nonviolence, hanging out over the platform’s edge or walking barefoot down the tree as she leans back into her ropes, trying for rapport, smiling twelve stories down with her hair falling every which way around her face, her smile slipping at Fuck you, cunt, I’m just trying to feed my kids.

The original treesit, improvised from salvaged and secondhand finds, has mostly disappeared, supplanted piecemeal by newer, safer, higher-tech materials. River says it’s like the ax in the fable whose handle gets replaced three times and head gets replaced twice but is still the same ax. Still the same treesit, the fallers thwarted for going on two years by a series of sitters. Within, the shelter is clean-swept and orderly, the medley of jars comprising Finn’s garden of alfalfa, lentil, and sunflower sprouts positioned to catch the sun, her climbing gear stashed, sleeping bag aired out and lashed tight, lanterns, laptop, cell phone, radio snug in the waterproof locker, clothes mended and folded like the housekeeping of an Amish control freak, River teases over brown rice with goat cheese and shiitakes on his next visit, adding, when Finn doesn’t laugh, “This is what comes of raising a kid around a bunch of potheads, right? This kind of rage for order.” He licks his chopsticks clean, studying her tattered shirt. “Why ‘Fire’?”

Finn, who has never been sure why, doesn’t answer.

“Be mysterious then.”

He lights the joint, draws the smoke in and holds it, slouching into a more restful pose against Tara’s trunk, and so embracing is his well-being that Finn breaks the fundamental law of her private universe, taking the joint from between his fingers, sipping the smoke, angling her head back to rest against Tara’s bark alongside his, slipping into the dream he’s in the middle of, the dream Mary was continually dreaming, the dream Finn swore she’d never get sucked into, but she’s been lonely in this tree whose life depends on her, and he is the lover who’s come to spend the night, his closeness so right, his company so easeful it makes her want to laugh — she would laugh, except he’s talking again. “Interesting being alive. So far it’s interesting, though there’s been what you’d call long stretches of despair. I forget about them when I’m with you. You’re like the anti-despair angel, the way you’ve held on. The commitment. One hundred forty-three days,” he says. “The doubters said you wouldn’t last two weeks.”

He’s older. Emotion has had its way with River’s face, strenuously so, inscribing brackets at the corners of the witty mouth. An earring in the ear toward her, a silver lightning bolt visible only when he drags hard and the ember sparkles. Flannel shirt, mussed dreadlocks with the prized loofah-like gnarliness. When she waves it off he smokes the joint down, pinching it out and tucking the tiny burnt tip into the pocket of his jeans. With most visitors she remains covertly vigilant for the clumsiness or oversight that will jeopardize either the guest or her precariously cobbled-together shelter; his meticulousness soothes her. They sit side by side, backs to the tree, no movement in the forest stretching away below them, no wind bothering Tara’s branches, the world asleep as far as they can see.

Finn says, “I dreamed I came down and there was this horse waiting for me with a look like Come on, get on, and I did and rode it out of the woods into a city with miniature people in it, who came up only to the horse’s knees and kept saying Hurry! hurry! like I was late.” Finn refrains from saying Late for something wonderful, though that was how it had seemed in the dream, and why this shyness about wonderful, does she think he’ll think wonderful means him? Such is her trepidation — she’s beginning to concede she’s in love — that what she says next is equally likely to mislead. “We can’t have children, can we? People like us, I mean. Who think, who are aware of what’s coming. Who wouldn’t want a child to live through that.”

River says, “That would keep me up at night, I guess, if I’d ever wanted a kid. But I haven’t.”

Sounds like you might, though.

Some risks are worth running.

Things she wants him to say, that he doesn’t say.

He says, “What do you think, can you get through the winter? They’ll mostly leave you alone in the winter. Spring’s when they try stuff like siccing the sheriff’s department on us, like sending in Climber Dan up in the dark to catch treesitters asleep. Spring is when we worry.” River straightens and stretches before saying, “All treesitters dream about the ground. Once you’re on the ground you’re gonna dream about the tree.” After a while he says, “‘Fire.’ Whoever wore that shirt before wanted to save live things from fire.”

Last night the rain came down so hard a bird couldn’t fly through it, literally. You think a bird won’t make any sound when it hits, but it cracks like a baseball against the plywood and lies there flattened out with its wings spread wide, so when I picked it up I had to fold its wings in, like wet paper fans that might tear. When it warmed up in my hands, to my complete amazement it wasn’t dead. The thing has a heart the size of a dime, you’d think it would make the softest little bumps. But no. The body was so light, but inside it was earthquakes. It’s called a fog wren around here, though its right name is marbled murrelet, and it’s almost extinct, since what it needs is the sheltered horizontal branch of an old-growth tree. About this it’s very particular, it’s not capable of adapting to forests devoid of old growth. It doesn’t make a nest, just presses its tiny self down into the moss, bringing all its strength to bear, but how much strength is that? The impression it makes in the moss, no deeper than if you pressed your hand against it and counted to ten, that’s where it lays its eggs. So you can guess what wind does, any wind at all, and the thing about Tara is, this wren might have wanted one of her branches because there are some nice big horizontal ones, but all her sister trees that once filtered the wind are long gone. She’s all alone and gets all the wind. Wind that will for sure roll the eggs right out of any hollow pressed into moss. What else can I tell you? How we are all to blame for that bird’s not knowing where to go? How I would have let her nest in my hand if I could have? How you would have too, if only you could have seen her?

Possum, one of the ground crew, came up with Mary’s slow-mail address, a post office box in Oregon. Somebody must have told him that Finn had lost touch with her mother. A stroke of luck, this chance to explain, to prove what she’s doing is necessary, because that’s a contention her mother, no great fan of causes, would be inclined to doubt.

Don’t get your hopes up too much, Possum warns. She may of moved on. I couldn’t find the other traces you’d expect — address, phone, credit card.

But a letter follows a person to her next address, right? Gets forwarded until it ends up in the right hands?

Ink on paper, Possum says, amused by the quaintness. Could be it has a chance.

Even twelve stories above the ground, spring throws a great party, competing frenzies of birdsong, fusillades of squirrel chatter — distracting. The intelligence conveyed to nerve and inner ear by the tree as she exists moment by moment, only that can be trusted, not the transit stored in the map-manufacturing brain even so recently as the last jaunt to the sleeping platform or out along the stargazing branch. Something is there. Presence, not absence. Soul, discerned via the disciplined high-wire mindfulness Finn practices. Practices and practices, growing more poised, the muscles of thighs and arms starkly defined, the veins in her feet hypertrophied, the pads of her fingertips schooled in nuances of texture she wouldn’t have deemed perceptible. There comes a moment, of course, when she forgets, climbs through the tree of the day before, and where the toehold of the familiar should be, shock blasts a hole. Having stepped off into the void, she adapts. Her feet pedal. She feels a pair of wings flung out from her shoulder blades, beginning to beat. This vision, commensurate with the terror, feels so sure and certain a way out, Finn says “Ah” to it. From deep in her throat, as naturally as in the throes of sex, the “Ah” of being scooped out of the death hole. Yet it’s not space that answers Finn, it’s the tree, whose soul unfolds time. Time slows and expands, wrapping terrified awareness in a confounded calm, because the tree tells her There is time. So she’s not afraid — fear is a kind of error stripped from her brain, and what she feels is that she’s been taken in by an element so sumptuous she repents, falling, of the waste and foolishness that have so far constituted her relation to time. Finn falls within this sense of cradling infinity, and what will later strike her as the deepest truth about falling, the thing she will never confide to anyone, is that she was curious. More mortally aware than ever before, thus more profoundly curious. She’s still breathing, her heart’s still beating — it’s a lie, she sees, that the heart stops from shock. Why lie when it’s like this: when there’s so much that can be comprehended and all the velvet time you need? Lie? When there’s this last-breath fearlessness? Within the singularity of the fall, time can be observed, it seems, both backward and forward. In life, it’s now clear, consciousness is always so pinned down, and time is so much bigger than that pinpoint known as I. The vault’s been thrown open, and if, eyes narrowed, Finn faces directly into the browbeating updraft, the end of time gleams in through her lashes like a ray of sunset that’s shot across space, no stranger than that in its amazingness. It’s always had an end, and she was always more or less falling. The ground will claim her. Accepting that, she turns her gaze away and takes up — what? a more ordinary consciousness? her right mind? — where she left off, swimming down through the battering sensorium of glare and dark, passing through a reef of green that shatters around her in a stinging full-body corona, and then Finn is yanked out of the fall, dragged down and whiplashed up. Her hands have seized a branch. The fall roars through her, incomplete.

A pendulum of saved girl, bones scraping their sockets, legs dangling.

A bird veers below her feet, then several birds in their businesslike apartness flash by, their minds on what flushed them out: a shock shudders down through the tree, and the air fills with a staggering, sighing rain of arboreal trash, needles and scrolling ocher dust. An irregular tapping and pattering, aural confetti, Finn’s face pelted by dust that smells sharp as fresh-shaved nutmeg, this scent shocked free from the compound of moss, cloud, mold, sap, sunstruck bark warm as horseflesh and evergreen cold as ozone, which together make up the essence of tree. Finn’s nose begins to run. She scuffs her nose on the torn sleeve of her taut arm, waiting for the air to clear and incredulity to wear off so she can pull herself up onto the branch. Below, there’s a saddle of branch wide enough for her to land on; she measures the distance and isn’t positive she can make it. Smarter to climb up, and the branch offers clefts and grooves for finger- and toeholds.

Time has resumed its ordinary momentum.

Cautiously she begins the ascent, relieved to find a smaller branch she can hook her left arm around, leaning forward to ease up onto the major branch, safe, rejoicing. High above in the canopy, at the height she fell from, her cell phone rings. The force of her longing startles her. To answer. To tell what just happened, to say I almost died. To say But I’m all right, I’m all right, to be believed. Settle down, Finn. Focus. It’s a long climb back up through the tree, and you need your wits about you.

That night, Finn closes her eyes and broadcasts the keenest thank you, thank you of her nineteen years. Thank you for my life. Mummified against the starry cold in her down bag, smelling the panic sweat of her underarms — when, falling, had she had time to sweat? — she registers the extent of the damage that proves she’s alive, the bruised muscles of her shoulders crying out, the palms of her hands skinned down to nerve. Nicks and scratches everywhere: those would have been noticed on her body if that was all she was now, body. She would have been a body with matted hair and filthy feet. They would have had to find Mary. Mary would have had to say Yes that’s her. Mary would have had to kneel down, picking needles and twigs from Finn’s hair, working frantically, as if nothing mattered but the twigs tangled in Finn’s hair, as if Finn could be saved if every bit of debris were combed from her snarled and bloodied hair, and when they tried to tear her away, she would resist, saying She needs me. Saying Live, live, I need you to live. With her mother’s voice close to her ear, Finn sleeps.

“Listen to me, Finn, there’s a glacier. An action in Iceland. Crazy beautiful, this glacier, one of the last great ones, and right where they want to put an aluminum smelting plant. Their genius idea is, blow it up. We can go there.”

She unscrews the lid of the thermos he handed her when she first climbed into the truck and takes a swallow of bitter coffee. She thinks of saying What if for a little while you just don’t talk but finds, where the will to deal with Mayhem — with anyone — ought to be, a scraped-bare deficit of interest. She doesn’t care how this turns out. It’s only an hour’s ride, and when she gets back to camp, they’ll know enough to let her be. They’ll take one look at her and know. Mayhem is the sort of person who doesn’t take that look.

In profile, his frown is pained. “Too soon to think about another action,” he says. “You’re, like, bleeding. Your heart is fucking broke. God, my obsessiveness appalls me, I just start right in. Finn, forgive me, okay? For acting like it’s just onto the next thing. You’re grieving. I’m insensitive sometimes, I get caught up, I was thinking how great it could be, Iceland. How amazing to do an action there with you, and meanwhile I’m blind to what you’re going through here and now, when you’re just out of jail and what you need is a bath and something to eat and not me telling you, hey, life goes on, there’s this glacier we need to save.”

“‘Who stops them?’” she says.

“What?”

“‘Who stops them? Us?’”

After a while he says, “Don’t explain. It’s okay. It’s a strange head space, grief, strange perceptions emerge, I know.”

Woods and more woods. No one else on the road, no lights behind or before. There’s this reckless blissful aloneness she used to indulge in, on road trips with a lover, the awareness that things are destined to go wrong but that for now they’re beautiful. Even if he’s not her lover he causes that same aloneness and feeling of beauty, as if the world is nearly gone and all that’s left is what shows in their headlights. It’s sacred. He keeps his hand down low, extending the joint. Finn takes it, inhales, holds it. Mary. Hands it back. His turn.

“Nother hit?”

“No.” She says, “You know I have no idea where my mother is?”

“You want her to hear you’re down from the tree?”

“Once — this one time when I badly wanted to hear from her — my cell rang and I thought It’s her but I couldn’t get to it in time. When I tried calling back, the number was blocked. Whoever it was never tried again. For all I know, she never even knew I was in Tara.”

“Jesus, Finn. She should know you were a fucking hero.”

Mayhem drives in silence, now and then checking her profile: not asleep.

After a while he says, “We got it all on film, that climber cussing with his knee in your back — I mean, he should know better than to say bitch—and you’re trying to reason with him, doesn’t he want his grandkids to see a tree like her, and he takes it wrong, he obviously feels guilty, and it’s dangerous, him holding you in one arm for the descent while your wrists are cuffed, which is insanely, criminally hazardous. Eleven hundred hits on YouTube, last time I checked.”

When she dreams of the tree it’s Mary who’s there on the platform with her, it’s her mother in one of those slapdash outfits pieced together from thrift-shop finds, a sweater collared in mink and missing only a couple of buttons, a satin slip, green wool stockings and over everything, wrapping it up into a single package, the cumbersome military surplus parka, its hood rimmed with another, rattier kind of fur, or maybe not fur but some sort of tufted, partially destroyed dirty synthetic fiber. Out of all the lost things that could come back in a dream, it has to be that dirty parka, Mary’s smoke-scented dark hair spilling out from the hood. The hair, though — that, she loves. The hair alone justifies the dream, which isn’t an ordeal while it’s being dreamed, which isn’t painful and strange until Finn wakes enough to remember that her mother is missing. Gone without a goodbye. Mary’s hair, swinging into a cave enclosing Finn’s face when she was kissed goodnight, was the single aspect of her mother guaranteed to comfort her, no matter how bad a day Mary was having. It was necessary to hide these bad days from customers, though not from her daughter, and to spin stories from her own existence that obscured its precariousness and exalted its triumphs — chief among them, the uniqueness of Finn, whose destiny was obvious to Mary the moment she was born, because I knew you’d come, Finn. For years I’d known you were on the way, and Finn has always suspected Mary would have said to save me except that it would have come across as frankly egotistical and needy. Your eyes holding such wisdom, like you had a thousand past lives behind you. Older, Finn would try to divert her mother from narrating the tale of Finn’s birth in the woods, but in storytelling, if nothing else, Mary was immune to distractions. And if no one can say what happened to Mary, why she left or where she ended up, throughout Mendocino county strangers can tell Finn how long her mother’s labor lasted, or how, bundled in a raggedy cast-off shirt, the newborn had never cried but only looked around all calm, like “Planet Earth, you are mine.”

Iceland is beautiful, far-flung cloudscapes sailing over drenched green moors where shaggy ponies prick their ears in wonder before wheeling away, running through the smoke of their own breath.