Falling From Grace (19 page)

The mystery of the human brain.

“Did I ever tell you about my trip on Radeau de Cimes?” I watched his eyelids for an imperceptible tremor, his hand for the twitch of a finger. Nothing.
Paul, you in there
? “Did I tell you about the jungle from above?”

Radeau de Cimes. The raft on the rooftop of the world— a triangular web of inflated plastic tubing supported a mesh floor the size of a public swimming pool. Suspended by cables from the undercarriage of a multicoloured dirigible, it rose from the forest floor through the trees—a rainbow of colour illuminated by the ascending sun—and emerged above the Amazon rainforest canopy like an alien ship. The balloon cruised above the rumpled treetop where the tallest of emergent trees broke through the canopy like spires. The raft skimmed the brain of the world, the green cerebral cortex of living valleys, hills, and canyons. Gas hissed from the balloon on its descent and the raft settled onto the surface of the canopy. A flock of parrots exploded squawking out of the treetops. The arbornauts, roped to the raft with safety lines, scurried like spiders across the mesh floor. For an hour, we clipped branches, netted insects, read instruments, took notes and photographs. At a signal from the crew, we darted back to the balloon. With a roar, the canopy raft lifted from the trees and moved on to another patch of forest.

“We collected more data in one day, Paul,” I said, “than we could collect in a lifetime with our climbing.” I wished I could study Paul's brain the way the scientists studied the brain of the world in Brazil. Cruise his frontal lobes, his cerebral cortex in an airborne boat on a clear sea, hunt for damage, pinpoint the injury that held him captive, unconscious of the world, of me and my need for him to waken. I gathered up his hand from the blanket, struck by how it felt both heavy and weightless at the same time, as if he couldn't decide to which world he belonged. “Come back,” I whispered.

I drew a bit of cedar bough from my pocket and crushed it between my fingers. The sharp scent displaced the cloying odour of antiseptic. I didn't know if Daniel, who sat outside at a desk where he could see Paul's monitors at a glance, would approve. I didn't care. “Do you smell the forest, Paul? Can you imagine yourself at the top of this cedar?”

Science had invented myriad ways to access the canopy. Ladders, walkways, towers, cherry pickers, cranes, and a metal-framed single cell designed to house a lone researcher in the treetops. Electronic probes to read the heartbeat of a tree, laser photographs, a conifer
MRI
, a botanical
EKG
. But what did science know about the human brain?

On the rooftop of the world, I had helped a female biochemist from Sweden collect plant material to study for potential medicinal properties. Had I cradled in my hands an emerald leaf, smooth and veined like a fan, a mistletoe or a crimson orchid, yet unnamed, that held the cure for Paul's wounded mind?

“Did you see the murrelet?” I longed for movement in his passive face, for the twitch of an eyebrow, a curl at the corner of his mouth, a sigh. “The murrelet,” I repeated, seeing in my mind's eye the video camera buried in the climbing gear on my basement floor, its battery dead, the contents of the tape unknown.

17

A long
row of white cloth extractors glowed like Japanese lanterns from the curtain rod in the lab. Inside each extractor, a core sample of ancient forest from one of my study trees lay scattered on a wire mesh platform—clumps of green moss and black soil, decomposed wood. Over the next two days, the heat from the forty-watt light bulb inside the extractor would force a migration of mites from the samples, the tiny arthropods crawling away from the light into a funnel where they would drop into a plastic vial half full of alcohol. Preserved and ready to identify.

I hung the last bag, secured the final vial, and turned on the light inside. It illuminated the translucent cloth like a weak sun on a cloudy day. I climbed from the counter and tidied up the lab, Paul, not mites, on my mind. But my field samples couldn't wait another day without drying out too much. The specimens might be dead, a field season down the drain. Paul would want me to carry on. I fingered my cell phone in the pocket of my lab coat for the hundredth time that morning. The nurse promised she'd call at any change in his condition.

I walked the row of glowing extractors and tightened the vials. I'd have to wait until the extraction was finished and the samples processed to know for sure if I'd caught them in time.

I switched on the lamp for the dissecting microscope and took a vial off the shelf. I spilled the contents into the sorting tray, dark flecks floating in a few spoonsful of alcohol. Last year's sample, unsorted and uncounted. I slid the dish onto the microscope stage and began the methodical counting and sorting of specimens. Normally I found the hunt thrilling— the discovery of an unusual specimen, a potential new species or an animal whose beauty took my breath away. Today I sought distraction.

A small black speck floated into the illuminated field of view, its tiny appendages visible. A mite. I plucked it from the sorting tray, and transferred it with a fine-tipped paint brush to a shallow depression full of alcohol on a ceramic well plate. I switched the sorting tray for the plate and adjusted the microscope focus, illuminating the body of the mite: medium brown, pear-shaped, it measured about a third of a millimetre in length. Too tiny to identify without slide mounting.

I can't say why I love mites. Any more than I could say why I loved Paul. Why do we love anything? Mites gave me no fame and fortune. No notoriety in science circles. No social standing. At parties, the conversation crashed when I mentioned mites, and people excused themselves to get another drink. Or asked if mites really lived on eyelids and cleaned crap from eyeballs. “Yes,” I would explain, barely hiding my annoyance. “Mites do live on eyelids and in dust bunnies.” I didn't go to many parties.

I scooped up the mite with a tool I'd fashioned myself, a tiny metal loop sticky with Hoyer's mounting medium inserted into the end of a moist balsam stick. I transferred the specimen into a drop of Hoyer's on a clean slide. Using the corner of a paper-thin glass slide cover, I carefully flipped the mite face down and floated it into position, then dropped the slide cover over it. A few seconds over the flame of a Bunsen burner to clear the soft tissues and the slide was ready to view.

I stood and stretched, my neck stiff from the intricate work. I glanced at the clock and was surprised to see that fifteen minutes had passed without a thought of Paul. I switched chairs and placed the slide on the viewing mount of a compound microscope, then flicked on the lamp, positioned the eyepieces, and adjusted the focus. The sample was perfectly mounted, all the internal organs and appendages visible and symmetrical. I recognized the specimen.
Cyrtozetes lindoae
, a fungus-eating oribatid mite. A new species identified from a sample I had collected six years ago from a section of stringy bark thirty metres up a six-hundred-year-old cedar and that took four years and several experts to name. I felt an odd affinity with this microscopic creature. It would be too easy to say it was because it was small like me. To a mite, I was giant. A square centimetre of fungus would appear to a mite like a mountain covered in trees or a vast plain. I adjusted my position on the stool, nowhere to rest my dangling feet. Unlike me, this mite was precisely adapted to her environment. I examined the large club-shaped antennae on the head used to sense wind currents and the long setae on the front pair of legs for smelling and tasting.

Maybe it was the mystery that attracted me to mites. My own sad life on display for all to see
.
Only twenty specimens of
C. lindoae
existed, all living on bark in old cedars, all in British Columbia. It didn't live with other mite species in the arm-deep suspended soils that formed in the crotches of trees, or with the wading mites that filtered nutrients from the sap oozing from a wound in the bark. It couldn't be found on the ferns and orchids that grow at the base of the tree on the forest floor, or on mushrooms and conks, on the epiphytic plants, between the hairs on leaves and stems, or in pools of water that collected in the cavities and depressions of the tree.

I labelled the slide with name and sample
ID
using a felt-tipped pen. “How did you get up there?” I asked out loud. “To the tops of those trees?” People likely wondered the same thing about me. Where did this odd specimen come from? Did I blow here like dust in the wind? A hitchhiker on a bird or a squirrel? In the nostril of a hummingbird? In the eye of a bat? Between the feather quills of an owl? I knew that mites were old souls, known to have lived with trees since trees appeared hundreds of millions of years ago, the association recorded in amber from the Cretaceous era. And the diversity of mites that had evolved over time was staggering, a dozen or more species on a single bee, forty thousand species of bees in the world. The math was simple. The implications to the forest ecosystem profound. What would decompose the mountains of organic matter, build soil, cycle nutrients? Under current careless logging practices,
C. lindoae
and others like her could soon go extinct.

My court date was scheduled for early August, along with two dozen other protesters including Marcel and Mr. Kimori. I had cancelled my summer course and sent a grad student to the conference in my place.
I'm tied up with personal issues
, I had explained in a brief phone call, suspecting the word of my arrest had spread like wildfire through the intimate canopy science community. The upcoming trials dominated the media. Mel refused phone calls from reporters to the Qualicum house and though I distrusted his motives, I was grateful to be spared the torment. At home I let the phone ring, left the communication with the world to Marcel, who had moved into my house to await trial.

I had taken the footage of the murrelets to one of the lawyers who had volunteered pro bono to coach protesters who, like me, declined legal representation for financial or personal reasons. The footage was perfect. I inhaled sharply when Paul's hushed voice dictated the date, time, location, and a description of the tree. A pan from ground to canopy, close-ups of the timber tag, the metal
ID
label. A murrelet keered, clear as a bell. The branch, its surface thick with moss, the murrelet, stubby wings open, landing on the broad limb. The bird frozen in place, the chick's fluffy head appearing from the shallow nest in the moss. The act of feeding, the adult bird stepping out into mid-air. Then a startled cry from Paul and the picture erupted into a dizzying confusion of colours and sounds: the crack of snapping branches, grunts, and bumps. The video ended with a shot of the ground far below, pitching violently back and forth, back and forth, the audio silent.

The lawyer talked throughout the viewing, making notes on a yellow legal pad.

“It's great evidence,” he agreed. “The question remains how and when to use it?”

“What do you mean? Shouldn't it go straight to the government? Show the company's true colours. The sooner the better,” I argued. “They could take out those trees any day if they haven't already.”

“One option,” he said. “Or you could use it to support your case in court.” He rewound the tape and played the images again. Paul's hand swept across the field of view; I could see the life lines in his palm. I wanted to weep. “These kinds of mass trials are unpredictable. At Clayoquot, you blocked the road, you were guilty.” He paused and leaned forward. “Listen, Faye, criminal contempt of court is a serious charge and an anomaly in our justice system. Sentencing is up to the presiding judge. There is no set schedule. Hell, a judge could impose a life sentence for this if he wanted to. In the past? A month of jail time at worst, fines and electronic monitoring at best. But you deserve the finest defence and this”—he pointed at the murrelet squatting on the mossy branch—“the proven destruction of threatened species habitat, could get you off and lots of publicity too.”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's still weeks to go. Can we risk the time? Can't we use it for both, the trial and a—”

“Possible,” he interrupted, “but if the application is rejected out of hand, your video would lose its power as evidence. The trees are still standing. Think about this. You have a right to use the best evidence and to have your day in court.”

I was drawn from my thoughts by the vibration of my phone in the pocket of my lab coat and I fumbled to retrieve it. “Yes?” My heart flapped in my chest like a trapped bird.

“It's Grace. Have you heard anything more?”

“No, nothing.” I tried not to sound disappointed.

“Rainbow is asking about you.” Grace had driven Mary, Cedar, and Rainbow from Qualicum to visit a few days before. They were refused entry into the
ICU
. Mary had cried in the waiting room, while Rainbow rang the bell for the nurse every five minutes.