Fruiting Body

1.

She came in on the Thursday, late, behind a line of headlights that had been crawling for an hour, and by the time she got the tent up the light was the colour of weak tea and everything smelled like cut grass and diesel and, faintly, somebody’s frying onions three rows over.

Kit had come alone. This was the fact she kept setting down and picking back up, the way you do with a bag that isn’t heavy but is awkward. Nobody had cancelled on her. She hadn’t asked anybody. That was the whole of it, and it had seemed reasonable in June and seemed less reasonable now, staking a tent in a field where every other pitch had at least two people laughing at each other about the poles.

She grew mushrooms for a living, or near enough to a living. Oysters mostly, on spent coffee grounds she picked up in five-gallon buckets from three cafés who were glad to be rid of them. Lion’s mane in the cold months. She sold at two markets and to one restaurant whose chef paid late but paid. It was not the career anyone had predicted for her, least of all the department she’d left in her second year, and she had stopped explaining it to people about four years ago. Now when someone asked what she did she said, I grow mushrooms, and let their face do whatever it did.

The tent went up crooked. She left it crooked.

There was a path that ran the whole loop of the campground, a wide dirt track worn down to pale grey, and camps went off it on either side like — well. Like nothing else, if you were being honest. Like camps. But Kit had spent eleven years looking at the same shape under glass and through a hand lens and in the wet dark of grow bags, and her eye went where her eye went. A main run and lateral branches. Some branches thick with traffic. Some petering out into a single tent and a single chair.

She walked it once before dark, because walking was easier than sitting alone in a crooked tent.

Some people had booths right up on the path. Not vendors exactly, or not only. A woman with a card table and a hand-lettered sign that said FREE ADVICE, WORTH IT. A man doing something with wire and pliers that was going to be a bird eventually. Two teenagers with a cooler of popsicles they were giving away, not selling, and taking a strange amount of joy in the giving. Further along, up near the RV section where the big rigs were, somebody had a van with the side door open and a small dome tent pitched off it, and a hand-painted sandwich board she didn’t stop to read.

Ahead of her, through the trees, the mainstage field opened out.

She had not expected the oaks. Nobody had told her about the oaks. They stood over the whole field, enormous, older than the festival by two hundred years, and the stage sat in under them like something sheltering, and the light coming through the leaves was doing that late-day thing where every gap becomes a small bright coin. There were maybe forty people out there so far, early, spread out, most of them lying down.

Kit stood at the edge of the field with her hands in her jacket pockets and did not go in.

2.

Here is the thing about a hypha, which she had explained badly at parties and well to almost nobody:

It only grows at the tip.

That is the whole miracle and the whole limitation. A fungus does not plan. It has no head end, no office, no place where the decision gets made. What it has is a growing tip — one single point of soft new wall, pushing forward into whatever is in front of it, dissolving what it can, going around what it can’t. Behind the tip everything hardens into plumbing. All the intelligence, if you want to call it that, lives at the front edge, in the part that is currently touching the unknown.

And when it reaches something it cannot use, it branches. That’s all. It doesn’t reconsider. It puts out another tip at a slight angle and tries again. And again. A hundred thousand tries a day, every one of them a small unspecified reaching-toward, and out of that, with no committee and no map, comes a network that can cross forty acres and find a fallen log with something like precision.

The word she loved was anastomosis. Two tips from two different threads meet in the dark. They test each other — chemically, briefly, in a way nobody has ever fully described — and if they agree, the walls open and the two become continuous. Not attached. Continuous. What was flowing in one is now flowing in both. Nothing was captured. Nothing was recruited. Two reaching ends agreed, and after that there was no boundary to speak of.

She had once tried to say this to a man at a wedding and he’d said, so it’s like the internet, and she’d said yes because it was 11pm.

It isn’t like the internet. The internet knows where it’s sending things.

Kit stood at the edge of the oak field with her tip out, feeling the front of the unknown, and did not push into it, and went back to her crooked tent and slept.

3.

Friday she made three connections and it took her most of the day.

The first was the coffee, because there was a trailer selling coffee and she was in line behind a man who was arguing pleasantly with his own thermos, and he turned around and said do you know if they do oat, and she said I think so, and he said bless you, and that was it, and it was more conversation than she’d had in eighteen hours and it changed something in her ribs.

The second was a dog. The dog counts.

The third was the popsicle teenagers, who had moved their cooler and now had a second cooler, and who asked her what she did, and she said I grow mushrooms, and one of them shouted, actually shouted, and said her uncle grew shiitake on oak logs in Wisconsin and did Kit know how long you had to soak a log to shock it into fruiting, and Kit did know, twenty-four hours in cold water, and she stood there for twenty minutes in the sun talking about log inoculation with a seventeen-year-old and their friend who was not listening at all, and by the end of it the friend was listening.

She walked away with a blue popsicle and a feeling she distrusted.

That was the thing about the reaching. It felt so precarious from inside. Every tip goes out alone and most of them find nothing and harden into plumbing that leads nowhere, and the fungus doesn’t experience this as failure because the fungus doesn’t experience anything, but Kit was not a fungus and she experienced it as failure, every time, for eleven years, at markets and at weddings and at the two or three parties a year she still let herself be dragged to.

And then one tip touches another tip and the walls open and something flows both ways.

You cannot get the second thing without the first. That is not a moral. It’s just the physics of how a body with no centre finds anything at all.

4.

The second stage was down a footpath under a different stand of oaks, smaller, ringed with strung lights, and it had a name she kept forgetting and a fire pit off to one side that was already going at nine.

She got there for the last band on the Friday and hung at the back, which is where she always was, and had a good time in the specific muted way she always did — that thing where you’re genuinely enjoying it and also standing three feet outside your own body, taking attendance on yourself. Am I having a good time. Am I appearing to have a good time. Is my face doing anything.

At one point a woman with fire poi came out past the edge of the crowd and did a slow figure-eight against the black and the whole back of the field went ohhh at once, involuntarily, four hundred people making the same small noise on the same beat because a light moved, and Kit felt her own mouth make it before she’d decided to, and that was interesting.

Later, near midnight, someone was blowing bubbles.

She didn’t see who. Somewhere up by the light rig a person had one of those enormous rope-and-wand contraptions and they were pulling bubbles the size of small cars out of the air, and the stage lights caught them, and the surfaces went oil-slick and shifting, and inside the big ones there were smaller ones, whole bubbles suspended in the belly of other bubbles, drifting over the heads of the crowd in slow procession before they went.

Kit watched a bubble inside a bubble travel forty feet and burst, and thought, unhelpfully, fruiting body.

Because that’s what a mushroom is. People think the mushroom is the fungus. The mushroom is a temporary structure a network throws up when the conditions come right — moisture, cold snap, some threshold crossed in a body that stretches under half an acre of forest floor and has been alive for decades. The mushroom is not the organism. The mushroom is what the organism does when it’s ready. And it lasts four days and rots and the network doesn’t grieve it, because the network is still there, and next year, if it rains right, it does it again.

She stood at the back of the second stage at midnight thinking about the difference between a thing and what a thing does, and went to bed at one, and slept badly and well.

5.

Saturday night was the horns.

She’d heard about them in the coffee line — a bass player and a horn player, two people making a sound that had no business coming from two people, and the horn player apparently did something at the end of the set that everyone in the line had a slightly different account of. So Kit went. She went early, which she never did, and she went to the second stage, and she got there in that half-hour when the field is filling and the light is down and nothing has started and the whole place is holding its breath in a completely ordinary way, people finding each other, someone’s kid on someone’s shoulders, the fire already up.

She did not stay at the back.

She could not have told you why. There was no decision she could point at afterward. She simply found that she had moved forward twenty feet, and then another twenty, threading the gaps the way you do, sorry, sorry, thanks, and then she was not at the back anymore. She was in it. Bodies on all four sides of her, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off the person to her left, near enough the front that the stage lights were above her and not in front of her.

Her whole nervous system went up like an antenna.

That’s the only way she could put it, then or later. Something in her extended. Some tip pushed out of her sternum into the dark of the crowd and started feeling around. The man on her left had a beer and a bad shoulder — you could tell by how he held it. The two women behind her had been friends for a long time; you could tell by the silence between their sentences. The very young couple in front had arrived at the festival separately, which she also somehow knew, and were about eleven hours into something.

None of this was mystical. This was just what a person can read off other people when they stop protecting themselves for a second. Everybody can do it. Most people are too busy taking attendance on themselves to try.

The horns started and the field made a noise and Kit made it too.

6.

The first thing she noticed, four songs in, was that the lights were wrong.

Not wrong. Off-pattern. She’d been to enough shows to know what a light rig does — it hits the downbeat, it strobes the drop, it does the thing everyone can predict half a second before it happens, which is most of the pleasure. This rig was not doing that. It had done it for the first two songs and then it had quietly stopped, and now the lights were moving on some other schedule entirely, and the strange part was that the other schedule was not random.

It was slower than the music. It was arriving a half-beat after things. It was, she realised with a cold drop in her stomach, arriving after the crowd, not after the band.

The horn player would go up and hold a note and the field would surge, four hundred bodies going up at once, and only then — after — would the lights bloom, as if they’d been told rather than telling. As if the rig was not conducting and was not even accompanying. As if the rig was listening.

She turned her head and found the light desk, off the side of the stage under a tarp, a person in a headset with both hands nowhere near the faders, watching.

Kit did not know then what the SP-Δ was. Almost nobody in that field did, that year; it was a strange word on a strange little sign back up on the path, and a small box in a road case, and a person from the Twin Cities who’d been trying to explain it all week to people who mostly wanted to know if it was legal. She learned all of that later, in the winter, reading the plans somebody had put out for free.

What she knew right then, at 11:40 on a Saturday in a field under oak trees, was that something in the environment was responding to the room rather than instructing it, and that this had never once happened to her at a show, and that her whole body had opinions about it.

7.

And here is what she wanted to be clear about, afterward, when she tried to write it down and mostly failed:

Nothing pulled her.

There was no moment where she felt taken. There was no wave that came out from the stage and picked her up. Nobody did anything to her at all — she’d have known, she was watching for it, she had spent four years in a departmental culture that would have made her extremely sensitive to being handled, and she was not handled.

What happened was smaller than that and much stranger. What happened was that the landscape changed and she moved differently in it, the way you walk differently on sand than on tile, and nobody has to push you to do that. Nobody pushes anybody on a beach.

The lights came down. Not off — down, and warm, and slow, and the field got legible. Suddenly you could see people. Not spotlit, just visible: the man with the bad shoulder had his eyes shut, the two old friends were leaning on each other without noticing, the young couple had stopped performing at each other. Four hundred faces at the low end of the light, all doing the thing a face does when it isn’t being looked at.

Kit put her tip out.

That’s what it felt like. Not a leap and not a surrender. A reaching. She turned her attention outward on purpose, all the way outward, past the ordinary two-foot bubble a person carries around in a crowd, and she let it go into the field the way she’d have let a hypha go into a new bag of substrate: slowly, blindly, at a hundred angles, with no idea what was out there and no guarantee of anything.

And it was met.

She could not tell you by what. Some tip out there from some other body doing the same thing at the same time, some stranger three feet to her right who had also just decided to stop defending themselves — that is the only mechanism she could ever propose. Two reaching ends found each other in the dark and tested each other in a way nobody has ever fully described. And then the wall opened.

The horn went up.

And Kit came up off the ground with four hundred other people, and there was no boundary to speak of.

8.

She has tried to describe this to about six people in the years since and it goes badly every time, because the available words are all wrong.

Lost herself — no. She was more herself than she had been in a decade. Every private thing about her was intact and present and, for once, not costing her anything to carry.

Became one with the crowd — no, and also, ugh.

Merged — closer, but merged sounds like the smaller thing disappears into the bigger thing, and that isn’t what happens in the dark under a log either. When two threads fuse, neither one stops. What changes is that whatever was moving in one is now also moving in the other. The traffic goes both ways. That’s the entire event. Nothing is absorbed. Something starts flowing.

So: she was still Kit. Kit was still the whole crooked business of Kit, the dropped degree and the five-gallon buckets and the chef who paid late and the specific way she had of standing at the backs of rooms. Nothing about that was edited. She just wasn’t sealed anymore.

And things went through her. Somebody’s grief was in the field that night — she felt it come across, three or four songs in, the way you feel a cold current in a lake, and she has never known whose it was and never will, and she carried a little of it for about ninety seconds and then it moved on to somebody else. Somebody’s ridiculous joy came the other way. She was, briefly, plumbing. It was the least lonely thing that has ever happened to her.

Underneath it all was the enormous other thing, the thing she’d been standing at the edge of since Thursday: four hundred people at this stage, and eight thousand up at the mainstage under the oaks, and the whole loop of the path with its lateral branches, and the woman with the free advice and the man building a bird out of wire and the popsicle teenagers with their two coolers, all of it running at once, all night, with nobody in charge of it. No conductor anywhere. She looked for one for eleven years and there isn’t one. There’s just a very large number of growing tips, each one only able to touch what is directly in front of it, and out of that, with no plan, comes a thing that crosses forty acres.

Her whole trade had been telling her this since she was nineteen. She had needed to stand in a field at midnight to hear it.

9.

The hush came between songs, which is the part people get wrong when she tells it.

They expect the hush to be the climax — the big engineered silence, the crowd brought to stillness by a machine. It wasn’t like that. The still moment was already there. It is always already there. Every show has them: the gap between the last note and the first cheer, the two seconds after a set ends, the pause while someone finds a mouthpiece. Four hundred people spend those seconds every night of every festival and never once notice them, because the lights are already stabbing off into the next thing and the noise closes over the gap before anyone can get down into it.

That night the lights didn’t close it.

The horn player finished something enormous and took the horn off their mouth and the field started to roar and then — didn’t. It’s very hard to describe the shape of it. The roar started and got about a third of the way up and then found that nothing was pushing back, and it came down, and what came down instead was a hush, spreading sideways.

You could feel it travel. That was the thing. It did not arrive from the stage. It moved across the field the way a change moves through a stand of grass — she was aware of it reaching her from her left, from people she couldn’t see, and she was aware of passing it on to her right, and she did nothing to pass it on, she just stopped, and the person beside her felt her stop, and stopped.

Nobody made anybody quiet.

Four hundred people noticed, at very nearly the same moment, that four hundred people had gone quiet, and that nobody had asked them to.

The fire crackled off to the left. Somebody’s kid said something and somebody laughed, once, quietly, and it was fine, it didn’t break anything. Above them the strung lights were doing almost nothing. There was a plane, very high. The oaks moved.

Kit stood in the middle of it with her eyes open and her chest wide and the plain understanding, arriving in her like weather, that this was not something that had been done to them.

They had done it. All of them, together, out of a lot of small private reachings, without a single instruction passing between them.

She thought: fruiting body.

Because that’s what it was. Not a state anyone had imposed. A structure a network throws up when the conditions come right. The conditions had come right — the dark, the oaks, the horn, the lights that stopped pushing, four hundred people who’d all separately decided to stop defending themselves for one night — and the network did the thing networks do when the threshold gets crossed. It fruited.

It lasted perhaps eleven seconds.

Then the bass player leaned on a note and the field came apart in the best way and everybody screamed, and Kit screamed, and it was gorgeous and loud and completely undignified, and none of it undid the eleven seconds. The mushroom rots. The mycelium stays.

10.

She walked back at two, along the path, taking the branch to her camp.

The fires were still up, most of them. Somebody was playing a guitar badly and someone else was singing over it worse and both of them were extremely happy. The wire bird was finished and mounted on a pole and was, in fact, a bird. The popsicle coolers were empty and open and had been abandoned in a way that suggested the teenagers had gone somewhere better.

The RV section was quiet except for that one van with the door still open and the small dome pitched off the side, and a lamp on inside it, and someone sitting in the doorway not talking to the person sitting next to them. Kit slowed as she went past. She read the sandwich board this time. It didn’t tell her much. She thought about stopping and didn’t, and by the time she came back on the Sunday to ask about it there was a line, and that is a different story and not really hers.

Her tent was still crooked. She got in it and lay there with her boots on and looked at the nylon and listened to the guitar.

What she kept turning over was not the eleven seconds. It was the twenty feet.

Because she had gone forward. That was the only act in the entire night that was hers, the only place where anything was decided — some unglamorous moment in the fill-up before the set when she found herself threading gaps saying sorry, thanks, sorry, and did not stop and go back. Everything else followed from that and none of it could have been made to happen. If she had stayed at the back she’d have had a lovely time and gone home and told nobody anything.

Nobody had asked her to come forward. Nobody had known she was there.

And that, she thought, lying in a crooked tent at 2am with her boots on, is exactly and precisely how it works in the dark under a log. Nothing calls the hypha. There is no signal from the log saying come here. The tip goes out because going out is what a tip does, blind, at a hundred angles, mostly into nothing — and then one day the front edge of a small thing touches the front edge of a large thing and they test each other, and agree, and the wall opens, and the traffic goes both ways forever after.

The reaching isn’t how you find the network.

The reaching is the network. It was already the network on Thursday, when she stood at the edge of the oak field with her hands in her pockets and didn’t go in. It was the network in the coffee line. It was the network with the dog. It was the network for twenty minutes in the sun with a seventeen-year-old talking about how long you soak an oak log to shock it into fruiting, which is twenty-four hours, in cold water, and which she thought about now with an unreasonable amount of feeling.

She’d been treating the whole of her life as a thing that hadn’t started yet.

Outside, the guitar stopped. Somebody put a log on a fire and the sparks would have gone up, and Kit didn’t see them, and they went up anyway, and that was fine.

She got her boots off eventually. She slept until the heat woke her.

In the fall she found a dead oak on a property line two roads over from her place, and got permission, and cut it into metre lengths, and drilled it, and plugged it with spawn, and waxed the plugs, and stacked it in the shade on the north side of her shed where it would stay damp. Nothing happened for fourteen months. That is normal. That is the whole discipline.

The following winter, after a cold snap, she went out with a flashlight at six in the morning because she couldn’t sleep, and there they were, all along one log, small and brown and ridiculous, dozens of them, having come up overnight out of a body she had never once seen and could not have found if she’d split the wood.

She stood in the frost in her coat and laughed out loud, alone, in the dark, for nobody.