The Girl Who Fell in Love with a Tree

Sheriff John Stone had gotten used to taking off his fifteen-year-old department issued Sears Roebuck & Co hat when walking through doorways – so much so he knew the rubbed gilt text on the perforated leather inner band by heart; Prime Felt Size 7 5/8 and in a gilt lasso in the well of the scarlet lining he always thought a little gaudy, Sears Roebuck Westerner with a stylised image of a cactus and a horseshoe. He was a tall man—almost, not quite gaunt—so when he took his hat off at the doorway most folks took it as a sign of respect—or of bad news. It was a tall hat with a wide, up-curled brim and a plaited whip-tail leather band, a gilt badge affixed to the front a little off centre. Well cared for, brushed, but stained and battered nevertheless. Its colour now somewhere between beige and lichen. Respect. He was a tall man, and he just didn’t want the damn thing knocked to the ground yet again. It fit with the ease and comfort of a sure and certain sign of his authority—he policed with the hat, not the gun—and they just didn’t make this style anymore.

So, when he cracked his head on the ancient redwood lintel of the station doorway he was a little nonplussed. He’d walked through this door thousands of times and never hit his head until a month or two ago. Now it seemed to be a regular occurrence, as if he was somehow misjudging the small slight duck required to traverse the doorway unimpeded. The building itself was an old lumberjack’s barracks, long past modernised so only the frame and lintels showed the rough-hewn redwood of its construction.

Inside, deputy Hornbacher—his sister’s boy—was leaning with two clenched fists on the steel interrogation desk, his face florid and flecks of spittle jeweling the fringe of his moustache. In the pool of light cast by an articulated, floor standing dentist’s lamp Herbert had confiscated for just this sort of moment, there was a youngish man—long face, long pale hair, beard, moustache—manacled to the steel ring welded to the desktop, and holding a big old brass and wood colander in his free hand like his life depended on it.

Herbert was raising a fist and growling, “Drop that fucking thing,” when the Sheriff hit the switch for the overhead fluorescents. They stuttered and flickered.

Herbert stood up straight.

“Sheriff.”

The kid—he looked younger under the hard glow of fluorescent lights—was saying, “Let me explain…”

“The suspect has this weapon. Won’t drop it. Also—stark naked.”

The kid was, indeed, stark naked, with a faint peculiar pattern like tie dye on his skin.

“Looks like a colander,” Stone said.

“It’s kind of stuck,” the kid replied.

Sheriff Stone thought, buck’s night prank. He’d seen this kind of thing before. Glued to the old ball and chain, so to speak.

“Crazy glue?”

“Not exactly.”

Sheriff Stone sighed. Put his hat back on. Sat in the steel chair opposite. Herbert had started leaning again.

“So, there was this girl…”

“Name? Address?” Herbert leaned in, breathed out coffee, tobacco, brisket.

“No one knows. Everyone calls her Alice Dee.”

“LSD?”

“Alice Dee. There’s even a little rhyme about her.”

“One of those Charles Manson types?”

“No. The greatest scientific mind ever known to humankind.”

“Now I know you’re delusional.”

Stone shook his head, took off his hat, read—well, remembered—the worn-thin words on the inner band, and tipped his head in that now well-practiced manner that invited listening. A confessional air. He had solicited confessions—from shoplifting to wife battery to murder—this way. The young naked man with the strangely patterned skin holding the old brass and wood colander like his life depended on it raised an eyebrow, and continued.

“When Alice Dee was young, she was a fan of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, you know it?”

“Prefer Dirty Harry,” said Hornbacher, mouth tight, squinting and blinking slowly.

“Something in your eye?” said the kid, “Anyway there’s one scene she played over and over, where Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak are in Big Basin National Park…”

“Muir State National Park,” Sheriff Stone added. Unlike his sister’s boy, he preferred a movie with a more contemplative tone.

“Ah it was set at Muir, but filmed at Big Basin … not far from here in fact—there’s an ancient redwood cross section for the tourists that Hitchcock wanted for the scene. Novak’s character is a small time actress, pretending to be the cold, elegant, haunted socialite Madeleine Elster, the performance of a lifetime—Elster, the imaginary Elster, is sometimes possessed—mad or possessed—driven to suicidal impulses by the spirit of Carlotta—the tragic daughter of one of old San Francisco’s great families.”

“Stewart’s character, Scottie is hired to keep an eye on her. All part of an elaborate charade, if you will forgive the pun,” added Stone, “to use him as an unimpeachable witness to Madeleine’s death, apparently by suicide.”

“Yes, exactly. Scottie was badly damaged during a pursuit across the rooftops when he slipped and almost fell—as Scottie hangs by his fingertips from a gutter another officer tries to help, loses balance, plunges to his death far, far below. Survivor guilt, acrophobia—fear of heights—manifesting as vertigo—an overpowering, swirling dizziness. The vulnerable and psychologically damaged ex-detective, is set up by his old college chum, shipping magnate Gavin Elster, and this hustling actress—as you say—as an unimpeachable witness in the murder—made to look like suicide—of the real Madeleine.”

“It’s a great film,” said Stone. “Layered, psychologically complex. I’d even go so far as to say they don’t make ’em like that anymore, and I like a little film talk as much as anyone, well almost anyone—but is any of this relevant as to who you are, why you’re running about our town naked as a jay bird, carrying, according to a report I received on the wire not half an hour ago, a mid-18^th century wood and brass colander that once belonged to founding father Benjamin Franklin, stolen this morning by a … according to the report … ‘naked hippy,’ from the Franklin Institute Museum in Philadelphia, witnessed by a dozen visitors and staff, at about 9:37 am this morning?”

The hippy—the kid—with that strange tie-dye pattern tanned skin—in the reflection of the dentist’s lamp the pattern seemed to run like a silt-laden river through his eyes for a moment—seemed like a particular exotic kind, held up the colander the way a champion holds a victory wreath. Hornbacher, one hand on his holster, went to grab it, Stone blanched, held up his own hand, motioning the deputy to sit. Stone had dealt with all types; hikers, campers, nudists, naturists, hunters, stalkers, photographers, documentarians, covens, tree-huggers, survivalists and hippies —a little acid, a little weed—sometimes lost wandering the forest, or antagonising hunters or members of the mostly defunct forestry industry. This kid was something different.

The patterned skin of his hand seemed to have sunk into, fused with the noisy grain of the colander’s age darkened oak base. Where skin ended, and wood began, it was impossible to tell.

“Sometimes,” the kid continued, “it’s hard to tell exactly what’s relevant and what isn’t, but if you’ll allow me?”

Sheriff Stone bent, nodded, read/remembered the fragmentary letters inside his hat again.

“So, it’s a stunning scene. This damaged everyman, Scottie, the devastating femme fatale Madeleine, wandering amongst the cathedral silence of the sequoia forest, comes across this cross section as tall as this room of a giant redwood, it’s rings marked with the dates of historical events—the birth of Jesus, Magna Carta, Columbus, WWI, and so on—dendrochronology—the tree rings mapping events over thousands of years, and in this deep, almost hypnotic state Madeleine points a white gloved finger somewhere near the outer edge of the cross section and says, ‘Here I was born, here I died, and here you were cut down, and no one noticed.’ Scottie has of course fallen madly in love with haunted, utterly unobtainable Madeleine—she is in love only with death, death on a grand, an immense scale, and our genius—Alice Dee—instantly falls in love.”

“With Scottie? With Jimmy Stewart?”

“With Madeleine?”

“Alice Dee—fell in love with a tree.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

Hornbacher jerked up, paced the room, face and clenched fists gone bright crimson, bulled up to the cuffed, seated kid, who leaned forward, lips poised in with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile.

“Do you want to hear the rest of it?”

“Go on.”

“So, she fell in love with the tree. Not the cut down tree, the dead tree—not its ghost—its echo, its years exposed and made to serve the limited conception of human history. Alice Dee fell in love with the living tree, its ageless, silent grace—and the idea of restoring it to life, beyond paltry human desires, beyond the haunted living death mapped in petty human escapades, in this Alice Dee glimpsed the possibility of eternity. At that time, she was the youngest physics professor at an Ivy League university, and she schemed and lied and bent people to her will, and using both university and military grants studied the way trees communicate—by mycelium. There are vast networks of fungus webbing the soil both just below the surface, and deeper underground—plants—especially trees—communicate everything from weather, lightning, disease, frost, fire, axe, to solar flares—in waves along these underground mushroom filaments. Expanding on Simard’s work on mother trees and mycorrhizal networks, she found not only could they communicate about, for instance, a saw cutting through a two-thousand-year-old bole three hundred miles away, but they could communicate over time. Tree rings to us appear as memory, recording changes in the air, the soil, the weather—fires, floods, earthquakes, cold spells, heat waves, radiation, pollution—tree rings seem to record it all. But they don’t have memories the way we do. She found when they recorded the light and radiation of a super nova that reached us in the year 1006 from the Constellation Lupus—The Wolf—by following its trace along quantum mycelium. She found that a tree that witnessed, that absorbed that light almost a thousand years ago, communicated that light to trees across time. With the use of light, and psilocybin—quantum psilocybin—humans—some humans—could travel through wood—through the life of a tree, even through the objects that tree was made into—both over space, the fixed points from which the tree grew, and to the place the object made from it travelled along its moment in time—here I lived, here I died.”

“So, you’re saying you travelled—using Ben Franklin’s colander—to here, where the tree it was made from grew?”

“Almost. This colander is a fake. The oak came from a modern plantation—not far from here, and made at an artisanal forge in Pescadero that specialises in brass and copper reproductions of antique horse tack and kitchenware. I travelled to The Franklin Museum via a gilded cedar ankh that Franklin owned, from a market in Jerusalem in thirty-three AD.”

“A market.”

“Yes.”

“In Jerusalem.”

“Yes.”

“In thirty-three AD.”

“Yes.”

It was usually cool, here in early April, in the shadow of the great trees. Though Sheriff Stone felt sweat prickling his forehead, his back under his forester’s coat and beige cotton shirt.

“There’s rules, you see, for dendrochrononauts.”

“People who travel through trees, through time.”

“Yes, though we usually say we travel through time through wood. Or, that we touch wood.”

“Thus, your hand.”

“Yes, as I said there’s rules. This wood has been chemically treated, so it’s not safe. When we touch wood, it has to be a pure piece of wood, and we need light, preferably sunlight, and we need active quantum psilocybin in our system—luckily, it’s very long lasting. So that chair for instance, ply—multiple layers of heavily processed wood. I would be smeared over an expanse of plantation pine like a thin layer of blood and bone. So, we travel for instance through museums and antique stores, but not bookshops or libraries. You could imagine what recycled, multi-source, pulp would do.”

“How…”

“I don’t know the math, or the chemistry. I’m a mapper, not a hunter, or a scientist.”

“OK. Why?”

“So, at first, there were expeditions. For profit, for entertainment, for touristas. Though it was all a bit random. Only some people had the knack. Lots of people became … fertiliser. It’s also quite hard to track the provenance of a piece of wood from tree to object and back. And trees that were never made into anything, whose objects never travelled anywhere, means you can travel in time, in that spot, only along the period of the tree’s existence. Once the tree say, dies, decays, burns up in a forest fire, that’s the limit—you don’t want to go there. Ashes to ashes, pulp to pulp. It’s kind of an act of will—you sense the rings, the quantum pulses of a tree’s message over time, and you will yourself in, and you will yourself out, and your molecules become wood, quantum wood, for an unmeasurable moment. Getting to an exact spot can be tricky. So, after the chaos of the initial years, the Dendrochronowar, the protocols, the mappers went out to locate objects, fixed objects. Terminals. So, there are Tlingit totem poles—Western Red Cedar—in villages in the North-West that are fixed points, many hundreds of years old, and objects made from the same trees that enable some predictable travel. Certain items of Chippendale furniture. Some Stradivarius violins. Some old buildings. We map, we locate, we report back. An incredible time for history, as you can imagine.

“However, the scientists—later scientists, noticed something. Things began falling apart, especially precision things, where organic material and inorganic joined. Pacemakers, bionic limbs, Rolls Royce interiors. Sculptures, artisanal buildings. Each journey decreased the space between atoms, increased the density, the mass, the gravity of everything in the universe.

They actually first noticed it in this era. Hubble Tension. Imagine the universe is a giant balloon, being inflated with one great breath from God. I remember this from class—scientists have taken a measurement from the far, ancient stars and the early life of the universe, and from young, near stars. The speed, the rate of growth of the universe should be the same, but it’s not. I’m not a scientist—I did the basic course as part of my training. Space/time is a function mass. Of density. Scientists did the math. If Alice Dee restores the tree, the tree she fell in love with, the ghost tree, the absent tree, the imaginary tree—prevents it being cut down, being made into a cross section mapping two thousand and more years of fleeting human history, erases the scene in Vertigo, and countless junior high-school excursions, that process will accelerate to the point of no return—the universe will become one hard, immensely dense knot of wood, pulsing with a slow life in the vast realms of possibility and nothingness.

“So, they sent out the hunters. To kill Alice Dee. She is sitting back there in 33 AD trying to access a piece of wood that will bring her here, to the tree she loves. Though when a hunter finds her, she hits them with a piece of the True Cross—she forces her not inconsiderable will on them. Some have reported rows of men crucified inside out along the Cardo Maximus. Others, men of wood risen from the dead. You do not want to see the future we live in, or the pasts we travel to. They need to stop her before she gets here.”

The door to the small Sheriff’s station opened with a creak of hinges, spilling afternoon yellow rippling through the cathedral trees in a way that always gave John Stone the inklings of a headache. Two men in jeans and dark rain slickers embroidered with the five-pointed star of the Federal Marshall’s office stood in the doorway. One looked like he was cut from Mount Rushmore, the other looked like Bud Abbott. Both wore under their usual implacability a look of confusion at the scene of the Sheriff, head bowed, hat in hand, the sweating, looming, deputy, breathing hard, the slender, naked youth.

“Federal Marshalls,” said Mount Rushmore. “Taking custody of a prisoner for transport.” He read from has documents, “John B.—wanted for theft of federal property from the Franklin Institute—amongst other misdemeanours.”

Stone stood, felt, for reasons he couldn’t quite name, in the way his shoulders slumped, the weight of the world. The prisoner rattled the cuff and the chain that secured him to the desk. Stone nodded. The deputy uncuffed him. With hard fingers dug into the skin of the kid’s shoulders and elbow, felt muscle unforgiving as wood. The prisoner didn’t flinch. Hornbacher led him to the Marshalls and returned, arms folded, propped himself on the desk.

“You have something he can wear?”

Stone nodded. Fetched some prison-orange coveralls out of the supplies locker. Brought them. In the lowering sun, the youth, perhaps less youthful now, had eyes the glassy gold of polished white ash.

“So,” said Stone, “you were taking this colander back there, so the hunters can trace her—stop her?”

“Almost. After following her, learning about her, pursuing her, I kind of fell in love with her. I’m taking this colander, so she can come back here.”

“Arms up,” said the Marshall, trying to figure out exactly how to get the jumpsuit on the prisoner over the evidence stuck fast in his small, tanned hand.

Stone watched as the prisoner raised his arms, the light rippling, swelling around him, the colander now star bright in the sun. The ring patterns through his skin—Stone entertained the thought for a moment—mapped their own entangled history. Stone raised his hat.

The kid’s outstretched finger, with a sistine elegance, touched the ancient sequoia lintel.

And he was gone.