Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

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.”