Fiction, Eli Sugerman
I stopped walking when I saw him. He was in a tree, straddling a thick bough. His dangling sandals seemed at risk of falling off at any moment. Otherwise, he seemed secure, comfortable, even serene. He was handsome. There was a short growth of beard on his cheeks, and his dark hair was long, thick and tangled, pulled back under a tie-dye bandana. He was examining a branch. The branch had yellowing leaves and wore a band of green tape like a choker.
That summer, all over the city, tree leaves had been turning yellow and brown. No one knew why, though some had outlandish theories, and most people took it as an ill omen of some kind. In any case, it felt very strange—the sweaty heat of summer and the autumn-colored leaves. It was like the year had been scrunched, the seasons overlapping. I wondered if soon it would snow, though the sky was clear.
A couple with a stroller walked by on the sidewalk. They didn’t seem to notice the man in the tree, or didn’t care. They had a destination. They were going somewhere. I had been walking simply to walk, to escape my apartment and see what the outside world had to offer, so I felt no qualms about stopping to look at the man in the tree. All of a sudden, he swung down very gracefully just in front of me.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m you.”
“You’re me?” I narrowed my eyes at him. It was preposterous. We looked nothing alike. And as a rule, I never climbed anything taller than myself.
He shook his head. “No, Y-E-W, Yew.”
“Oh,” I said, a little embarrassed. Though back on the ground, he was still much taller than me. “What were you doing up there?”
“Examining a patient,” he said. “Healing is a slow process, even more so for trees. But this one is coming along nicely.”
I unconsciously ran a finger over the stitches on my right hand, then realized what I was doing, and hid it in my pocket. “You’re an arborist? Do you work for the city?”
“No, I operate independently. And I prefer the term tree surgeon, if you don’t mind. Most people who claim to be tree surgeons actually kill trees, which goes against the spirit of medicine. I think it’s time to reclaim the title for good.”
“Sure,” I smiled. He seemed very serious. “What do you think about all the yellow leaves? Is it really so bad?”
“Of course it’s bad.” He started walking, eyes sweeping across the canopy. But he kept talking, so I followed him. “Trees may be sturdy, but they’re more thoughtful and sensitive than people realize. Even here in the city, they communicate through root systems that long predate our puerile internet. They love each other. They warn each other. They mourn their dead. Something’s spooked them, no doubt, so they’ve been passing the message along.”
“You mean a message for us?”
He turned to me. “No. Why would you think that?”
I shrugged. Yew took quick, determined strides with his long legs and I had to fight to keep up with him. We turned a corner. Though still not very far from home, I didn’t recognize the street, and felt certain I had never walked this way before. The houses seemed more wizened than the others around town, with antique features, rusted fences and worn facades. A windswept plastic bag rolled past us like tumbleweed. He soon paused to look at another tree branch with a band of green tape. This time he stayed on the ground.
“Another patient?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s a little project of mine. I’ve been grafting fruit-bearing scions to ornamental flowering trees. There are trees like this all over the city. They could bear fruit, but the people in charge don’t want us to be able to provide for ourselves, to pick our own apples and plums on the public streets. They want to keep us buying from their stores, relying on their paychecks, and eating their processed foods. This one is apricot.”
He fondled the branch lovingly.
“But is that legal? Grafting things like that?”
“It’s for the common good. So no, of course not.”
I stepped closer to examine the branch. It did look subtly different than the rest of the tree. “I don’t see any apricots.”
“No, it won’t bear fruit for a few years still, maybe more.”
“That’s too bad. I’m hungry now.”
I was just teasing him, but when he sighed and produced a handful of mixed nuts from his pocket, I accepted them politely and popped a cashew into my mouth. It was unsalted.
“This project isn’t for now. Everyone cares about now. I care about the future.”
He said the word future like it was a living entity, a god requiring regular tribute.
“Hey, I care about the future too.”
“Of course you do,” he said, looking me in the eyes. “I could tell right away that you were someone who cared.”
I blushed, and couldn’t help feeling like an imposter. Despite what I’d just claimed, I doubted that I was really doing enough. I did try to shop responsibly. I only ordered things from Amazon when it was absolutely necessary. I read all the right articles. “I was reading an article about bananas this morning,” I began, thinking I might impress him. “They’re all genetically identical, apparently, and at risk of extinction from some pest or disease. I was eating a banana when I read the article. I eat a banana every day.”
“It’s a fungus,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s a fungus that’s killing the banana trees. Though they’re not really trees, anyway. Not in the pure taxonomical sense.”
I wasn’t sure how that mattered, if they were all dying, whether or not they were really trees. What else could you call them? I figured Yew would be able to answer that, but I didn’t feel like asking him. “I don’t know what I would do without bananas.”
We started walking again, somehow even faster than before. I was getting out of breath, and fell a little behind. A puddle had formed in the center of a nearby parking lot, so deep from recent rainfall that a single duck floated in its center as though in a natural pond. I tossed the rest of the nuts in my hand to the duck. They splashed into the dark water and disappeared.
“Are you coming?” said Yew, looking back. He was already far away.
“Yes,” I said, and jogged to meet him.
Leaving a few more blocks behind, we entered a public park I had never seen before. A long green lawn snaked between dense groves of trees. Unusually dense, I thought. Trees in public parks were generally much more solitary. Yew led us along a footpath, then veered off into one of the groves. We stopped at a tree with shaggy, peeling bark. Like many others in the park, its leaves had taken on that sickly yellow hue.
“This is me,” he said.
“It’s a yew tree, you mean?”
“No, it's hickory. I mean this is my home.”
I took a closer look into the branches, and saw for the first time that there was a large wooden structure stationed between three thick boughs. Its walls were coated with twigs and leaves, so that at first glance it seemed a natural part of the crown.
“Do you want to come up?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say. I was a little disappointed. I thought we had been walking simply to walk, but now I realized that, all along, we had a destination. We were going somewhere. Just then, my phone started buzzing in my pocket. It was my boyfriend.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Where are you?”
Yew was watching me closely.
“I told you, I was going for a walk. What’s wrong?”
“It’s the Wi-Fi, it’s down again, or, I don’t know. The light on the router is yellow. Is it supposed to be yellow? Or is it supposed to be green? I guess it's not red, at least. If it was red, that would be very bad, I think.”
I imagined him bent over the little machine. I felt glad to be in the park, among the trees, and not there in our apartment. “Did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?”
“Of course I tried that. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“No, I’m just… I’ll take a look when I get back.”
“And when will that be? I’m already late for Fortnite.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up.
For a moment, Yew and I didn’t say anything. I think we were both reconsidering each other. I wondered how old he was, and thought about asking, but felt sure for some reason that he would lie or refuse to say. He was probably in his thirties. But maybe older.
“That was my boyfriend,” I said. “He’s having trouble with the router.”
Yew seemed to wince. “Do you need to go, then?”
“No,” I decided. “Let’s go up.”
There was no ladder, and Yew went up first to help lift me to the entrance, a trap door at the bottom of the treehouse. I gave him my left hand, and his grip was strong—I barely had to work to climb inside. Still, my heart beat fast with anticipation. I wondered why I didn’t tell my boyfriend the truth. I wasn’t necessarily planning on doing anything illicit. But I suppose not telling him was already a kind of infidelity.
The inside of the treehouse was dim, with sunlight streaming only through a small window and a dozen little cracks. The floor seemed to be made of plywood, unlike the walls, which were woven in a cone of many branches, apparently foraged from the ground. I saw a sleeping bag on a pad, a bulging backpack, and a few stacks of books. The pages of the books looked yellowed and warped, as though they had been waterlogged and dried out again several times. The smell of mildew was strong. There was barely enough room for the two of us to sit, cross-legged, facing each other. Yew didn’t say anything. He removed a reusable water bottle from his backpack, and offered it to me. The bottle was covered in peeling stickers. I shook my head. He unscrewed the cap to take a sip. I decided to be honest with him.
“We just moved in together, like a few weeks ago. I guess it’s been almost a month now. And it hasn’t been easy, you know. It’s a big transition. And it’s a small place, just a studio. It’s big for a studio. But it’s still cramped for two people. No offense.”
Yew just looked at me and nodded.
“I didn’t really have a choice, is the thing. After my accident.” I extended my right hand to show him, and he took hold of it at once. His skin was rough and dry, but his touch felt gentle even though it was firm. He examined the stitches on my wrist very closely. “I fell on a saw blade. This guy was cutting lumber right next to the sidewalk, and I tripped over one of the cables. That jerk. Though it was my fault, really, I guess I wasn’t paying attention. And the doctors said I was lucky it wasn’t worse. They were able to reattach it no problem. I’ve had to do some physical therapy, but it’s all coming back.”
He let go of my hand, and I put it back on my knee. I almost wished he’d held on.
“The problem was, I had to miss work for a few weeks. And the hospital bills were more than I could afford. So I had to move out of my place, and move into his. And I loved my old place. There was so much room—I had so much room to myself. I mean, we were going to move in together eventually anyway, so it wasn’t that crazy, but I guess I wanted to do it when we actually wanted to, not when it felt like I had no other choice.”
Yew nodded. “It’s hard to accept what’s out of our control.” This felt like the kind of hollow platitude my boyfriend would share—obviously true, unnecessarily spoken.
“Are all the trees going to die?”
“No,” he said, confidently. “They’re quite resilient.”
“And your fruit will grow.”
“Yes. So there’s no need to worry. Now, should we take off our clothes?”
As he said this, I became certain for some reason that he was wrong—about the trees, at least. I felt sure now that all of the trees would lose their leaves well before winter, and the leaves would not grow back in the spring. I wanted to cry. At that moment, a bird flew over and perched in the open window. I think it was a robin. It looked back and forth between me and Yew. It seemed to make up its mind about us, and then flew away again.
Eli Sugerman (he/him) is a writer and illustrator based in Chicago, Illinois. His writing has appeared in Mangoprism, Two Headed Press, and Raging Opossum Press. His illustrations can be found on Instagram at @eli_comics.
Comentarios