Mycelium

“I wonder where the beginning is, if we are all but a part in an endless mycelium of possibilities.”

That was Aran Lezalde’s thought as he drew circles with his index finger on the exposed roots of the fig tree. He unearthed some rickety mushrooms and carefully placed them in the basket. He did not understand what was happening with the trees everywhere. They were dwindling, dying. Even there in Anderssons Växthus, that little haven where climate change and ecological collapse were just abstract concepts. He did not understand what was happening. Rather, he understood what, but not why. The mycelium in the world’s soil, the endless expanse of fungi hyphae that connected and supplied kilometres and kilometres of root systems everywhere, was withering. The soil was becoming barren. Nobody understood; it shouldn’t be possible.

Yet it was. And now his research was this: registering all the decay, chronicling the death of entire ecological civilizations. He scratched his cheek with dirty fingers. The tree was dying. He could feel it in the texture of the roots: feeble, soft, bland. Languid. He did not understand. Aran looked at the tree as if he would find the venerable face carved onto its bark, a fairy tree.

But the tree was faceless, and its eyes were not two; they were many, and they were not on the bark but on the roots and the leaves. A being of two gazes on opposite directions: earth, and sky. With its roots, it watched the underground currents. It crept down below, there where the fungi bred million tickling fingers and burrowed, where it was so noisy with chemicals in transaction. Or it used to be. The subterranean languages had grown silent: the fungi no longer whispered chemicals, and thus the fig tree was dying. Hardly had it the strength to rise, to watch. The tickling, the lightning of the earth was ceasing to be.

Where are the fungi?

Tremor. Faint... Pulse; thud. Protein eyes on the soil, searching, seeking, growing. Pulse, thunder. Faint, so faint... Budding. So few. Once there were buds per million, an orgy of decomposition. Being without centre. Brain without self. Pulsing, thudding, thundering. Caressing scents, smelling growth...

So faint now, the whispers…they could not send their sonnets of nitrogen and phosphor to the canals of the tree anymore, their chemical glaciered towards the leaves of the fig tree, leaves drinking the sky. The tree watched prisms of colour up there with its leaf-eyes, and it sang perfumes to the other trees even when it was dying. The tree loved, also in death.

There were love songs on the fig tree’s canopy. A song was being sung by the Anderssons Växthus resident hummingbird. She was a gust, a breath. Some news came with the wind; the bird listened and acted upon. She took flight. She swooped around and whirled towards the ceiling of the greenhouse; she danced among the railings, up and down, up and down again. Her singing sounded like laughter. Suddenly, she plummeted down, an expert pilot in her own parade. She dropped a green feather as she raised up again, a gift to those below, and she returned to her home on the fig tree, its leaves rustling a tired welcome.

Aran saw the bird and her feather levitating down like a magic carpet. The feather never touched ground, for it was snatched mid-air by the ashen, wild, polite, untamedly gracile cat who nobody claimed and everyone loved; she leaped from a wooden bench in the Mediterranean plaza of the garden and landed in perfect, wavy harmony between the roots of the fig tree, her prey well secured between her teeth.

The tree hugged the cat. In between its roots. It knew she would die before it died, even if it was dying. She lived a spark of a life, an instant, a leap in the air, and no more. The tree took pity.

But the cat did not take pity on herself. She was a tiger. Smaller, fluffier, sweeter maybe... Irrelevant. She was a tiger anyway, a hunter, and so she took methodically apart that feather—her feather—piece by piece, cracking and reaping, until the barbs knotted and intertwined with her whiskers. Very pleased, she sat on her hind legs, there between the roots, and sphynxly contemplated the world of humans.

The commonest humans in the greenhouse, the gardeners and employees, did not mind her presence there. Nobody owned her, nobody came asking for her, and yet she was gentle and patient with humans, playful and sweet with children, and only disdainful towards onions and the elderly. She was untamed, wild, and yet courteous: a royalty cat. She had befriended the trees and the flowers in the greenhouse, kept chivalrous survival competitions with the birds, ate canned food in hedonistic fashion, and hedonistically watched her own silvery fur by the greenhouse's lights. The human people there called her Cinderella, but that was a pet name. She was unnamed in words. She had named herself the perfume of camellias and azaleas in a shadow of breeze.

She had decorated her whiskers with the green of her victim, and that made Edith Lindgren stop writing in her notebook, stop thinking about her thesis on anthropology and the alcoholism of her mother and the growing violence in the southern suburbs that was the focus of her studies, and laugh. She put aside her notebook and pen and indulged in the cat's indulgence. She was the real deal, that cat. So many years studying the exotic corners of the Earth, the classics by Evans Pritchard and Lévi-Strauss, all the dusty books on natives and disappearing worlds, and there it was, the real deal, that cat, the noble savage painting herself green for battle. Edith laughed.

Her worries dwindled in the presence of the sphynx. They were rather silly, at least some of them. Not the alcoholism or the violence, of course. But she had been worried to death about the lack of funding for her research project. Her research project about people who were torn apart on a daily basis... Even a researcher in anthropology, a field that fewer and fewer people cared about—and fewer and fewer governmental agencies were interested in funding—, a rebel pointing to the flaws of society, was elite: a sphynx on its hind legs, eating canned food. Edith sighed and basked in the light of the greenhouse. It was about time to stop worrying. Enough for today. There was still the light, and perfumes, and the creatures and their joy in living. There was still hope. Watching the cat, she felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

She looked up and watched. Watching people was her profession, and it was what she did best. She watched, she listened. There were languages in the world, human and non-human, vibrations in the air, rhythms in the soil, in the bodies of greenhouse people, trees, and birds. A continuous movement. A wheel, a root system of connections. Sometimes it could feel oppressive, suffocating even. When she started noticing the patterns, all the threads that kept people bound together, she wondered about freedom. “I wonder...”, she thought.

She saw a young man then. He had soil on his fingers and a woven basket full of mushrooms. He was looking at the cat with a smile on his lips, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He looked up then, looked at Edith.

“I wonder where the beginning is”, Edith pondered while her eyes rooted down on Aran's eyes, and a star died in another galaxy and the nova gave birth to new stars, new planets, and new life. “I wonder if we are just a knot in the tapestry of life. I wonder where the beginning is.”

Written by Miguel Vian.

Cover photo by Merle Emrich.