“You’d really want to live for a thousand years?”

“You wouldn’t?”

“I’ve barely made it this far.” It was warm in the car, and I asked October to hold the wheel while I took off my fleece jacket. “Anyway, trees are so much smarter, stronger, and more reliable than humans. If we could actually live that long, imagine how much more fucked up the Earth would be.” I tossed my jacket into the back seat. “Who am I kidding? We would have destroyed the Earth by now. We’d be long gone.”

“That’s very pessimistic, Joey.” A minute later she said, “Wait. The coast redwood is actually a cypress tree, not a sequoia?”

“Coast redwoods and sequoias are both part of the cypress family.”

“And the coast redwood is the tallest?”

“Yup.”

“And that’s what Hyperion is? A coast redwood?”

“Correct. All the trees we’re going to see today, those are coast redwoods too. The giant sequoias grow in the Sierra Nevada.”

“Sequoia sempervirens.”

“Always alive. Forever green.”

“Redwoods are nature’s art installations,” she decided firmly.

A quote came back to me, one I’d memorized when I was doing research with Sid for my college thesis. “Aristotle once said: ‘There is more both of beauty and of raison d’être in the works of nature than in those of art.’”

She nodded with so much enthusiasm she had to sit up to do it. “That’s why I love these trees. They’re universal symbols of strength, perseverance, and survival. They’re living poems to time.”

I’ll admit it: I wanted to fuck her when she said that. And as I drove on, an image popped into my head. I saw myself as the pith inside one of those colossal trees, living in darkness, buried deep inside the trunk, hidden under centuries of growth, a heartbeat muffled and faint. And then I imagined October coming along and scraping off long pieces of bark, peeling away layer after ancient layer, trying to reach me. And still it would take years to get deep enough to set me free.

She said, “Redwood trees are poetic, don’t you think?”

Her voice brought me back into the car, back into my body.

“Yup,” I told her. “Always have.”

We made it to the little town of Willits, known as the gateway to the redwoods, in two hours and stopped at a coffee shop on Main Street for breakfast. There were few patrons inside—couple of burly loggers and some old hippies. We drank strong coffee and ate runny egg sandwiches, and after we finished, October got out her sketchbook and asked if she could do a portrait of me.

The plan, she said, was to do one now and then another later, after the mushrooms kicked in.

“No talking, no moving,” she directed.