Page 19 of Under Story

Then a door opened, a rectangle of light stretched inward, and she was there, standing briefly at the top of the stairs before making her way to the stage. Laurel had never seen Gloria in person, only the sepia-toned author photo on the back flap of her books. She was sixty-four but looked older: Lyme disease, contracted on a foraging expedition, had left her with nerve pain and severe arthritis. The sound of her cane marked every stair. She had a halo of curls, wild as Einstein’s, white.

Gloria leaned her cane against the lectern. The body of the cane was made of wood, but its brass head was shaped like a lion. She wore a many-colored patchwork coat, and her gaze was tinged with impish curiosity.

“A brief history,” she said, “of life on earth.”

The old wooden chairs creaked as a few students shifted, wondering whether to start writing.

“The universe is fourteen billion years old,” said Gloria, “but let us borrow from Carl Sagan, who compressed that to the timescale of a calendar year. Each month represents more than a billion years. Each day is forty million. On the first second of January 1, the universe expands from a point smaller than a single atom.

“For two hundred million years, there is darkness. Then, on January 10: the first stars. The Milky Way forms in March; our sun alights on the last day of August. Not until September 21 do single-celled organisms spark to life, formed in the chemical soup of primordial oceans. Multicellular organisms stir on the tenth of December. Forests, reptiles, insects, birds: all of these evolve in the final week of the year. The dinosaurs reign by Christmas, and on December 28, the first flowers bloom.”

Whoever taught earlier that morning had left the projector on, but Gloria ignored it. Nor did she use notes: her large black bag remained unopened on the floor.

“And what of human beings? We newcomers arrive in the last day’s last hour. Writing is invented fourteen seconds before midnight, and recorded human history tells us some of what happened after that.” Gloria smiled. “So let’s rewind: back to the ocean, and to the remarkable new life-forms that appeared billions of years ago: microbes—fungi and bacteria—which stagger to land from sea in September.

“The first terrestrial fungi survive by mining minerals from rocks. A clever trick, you might think, but not a radical one. Wrong! This act, which turns rock to soil, sets the foundation for everything that follows. On December 20, the earliest land plants appear, but these ancient species lack roots. To compensate, they join forces with fungi: the fungi extract nutrients from soil, and the plants offer carbon in return. By the time of the dinosaurs, the land throngs with tree ferns and conifers, and fungi—sick, perhaps, of being nibbled by insects—retreat underground. This time, they partner with trees. Forests spring forth, along with new fungal species, which fruit into mushrooms aboveground and form vast networks below.”

Gloria must have given this lecture hundreds of times, but she seemed no less excited by the subject matter. Now she leaned forward with zeal.

“Fungi are not saints or Good Samaritans: they can be parasitic, or cause disease. We should not presume that any living organism is driven by motives more noble than the urge to keep living. But fungi also sustain our ecosystems. By sequestering carbon in soil, they slow the change in our climate. Through decomposition, they bring the gifts of death to the living. Since 1928, when penicillium spores blew through the window of a London hospital and landed in Alexander Fleming’s petri dish, they have shielded us from bacterial disease. And penicillin,” she added, “is far from the only fungal compound with medicinal value. Why? For the same reason that fungal infections are particularly difficult to treat: genetically, human beings are more similar to fungi than they are to plants. Treatments that harm fungal cells tend to do the same to ours.

“Yet the kingdom of fungi remains underappreciated and understudied. There are over two million species, and less than ten percent have ever been described. Despite all they do for us, many people regard fungi with fear and suspicion, if they think of them at all.”

No one dared raise a hand. Laurel’s pencil and composition book lay forgotten.

“It is classic human error,” Gloria said, “to disregard what we cannot see. But the continuation of life on this planet, just like its beginning, depends on relationships. No organism can function—or be understood—alone. Everywhere, life tangles.”

—

In Gloria’s office, Laurel explained her predicament. She had spent her first two years of college as a botany major, studying trees. Or, rather, she was studying tree: her classes focused on the individual. Laurel had been drawn to the roots. They did more than anchor the trunk; the roots were sensory organs, able to detect environmental signals and react, communicating to the upper branches. Roots that identified drought, for example, could adjust growth and reallocate resources. Charles Darwin had compared them to brains.

But the roots didn’t act alone. In her sophomore year, Laurel took a course on plant ecology. One unit highlighted fungi.

“Most people, hearing fungi, think mushrooms,” said Tess (“Teresa for long”) Torrez, the graduate student who taught Laurel’s section. But mushrooms, Tess explained, were merely fruiting bodies, just as an apple fruited from a tree. Most fungi also had a subterranean body: the mycelium, a branching network made of ghostly white strands called hyphae. These linked to plant roots, creating highways of exchange. If laid end to end, the hyphae in one teaspoon of soil could stretch for more than five miles.

This research was relatively new. To Laurel, it seemed like a crucial missing piece. The relationships between trees and other organisms had often gone unnoticed, in part because they were concealed. Gloria’s lab was embedded underground, and Laurel wanted to become a member.

She made her case at Gloria’s office hours. Gloria listened with sympathy, but when she spoke, her voice was firm. “I’m afraid it’s too late. My junior students joined the lab when they were freshmen; by now, they’re conducting their own projects.”

Laurel had expected such a response, but she wasn’t any less deflated by it. Still, she persisted. “I’m a quick study. I don’t mind if I spend all day sterilizing glassware. I—”

Tears came to her so frequently now: she might be watching a commercial when the image of her father, roaming the orchard with his backpack sprayer, sucked the breath right out of her.

“My father died when I was a freshman,” she said. “Sudden cardiac arrest. I couldn’t handle going through his things until this summer. When I did, I found one of your books.”

In Pete’s bedside table was a rattling drawer that held an old pencil and a couple of earplugs and a very weathered copy of The Uses of Death: How Fungi Turn the Past into the Future. Pete had starred the introduction.

It is my belief that fungi have been alternately ignored and villainized because they deal with death. Most of us find few things more frightening than our own mortality. We shrink from rot and decay. We struggle to relinquish our selfhood, to accept that our bodies do not—in the end—belong to us.

Perhaps this is because we don’t think of ourselves as products of the natural world. We are human, we insist: our own category. But the same oxygen that fills the atmosphere runs through our blood. The same calcium in rock makes up our bones. The carbon in our genes, the phosphorus in cells: these can be found in the farthest stars. Even the word “human” comes from “humus”: Latin for soil.

We are not apart from the earth. We are of it.

Laurel reached into her backpack and produced the book, a tree tag used to mark the page. There was now a second set of markings, her own: she’d read it cover to cover.

Quietly, Gloria looked. “I’m very sorry about your father.”

Laurel felt agitated. She hadn’t explained herself correctly. The point was not just what the book had meant to Pete. The point was what it meant to her. When she read it, wearing a T-shirt that still smelled like him, she thought that her father might not be entirely gone.