Tree

Stop.

He heard.

Stop.

It was his own voice.

In the wild there is a dead fawn Wrapped in white speargrass

The Book of Poetry

13

14

He slammed on the brakes. His body lunged forward, and remained in a leaning position. For an instant. Then, it jolted back, hitting the leather seat, with a muffled slap. The quickness, almost simultaneity, with which this chain of action unfurled created in him a momentary illusion that his soul had been yanked out of him.

The vehicle stopped.

With his hands still on the steering wheel, he fixed his gaze on the truck hood, beyond the windshield. The bright autumn morning sunlight shone, and reflected on the smooth, deep blue metallic surface in a luminous straight white line down the middle, perpendicular to the windshield, leading to a small silver, upside-down triangle composed of four smaller triangles affixed to the very front tip of the hood, flashing, shimmering.

It made him squint. He shifted his gaze, to the dark mound, just in front of the truck and a few inches below the ornament in his line of sight. The large mass appeared simply as an irregular black shape amidst the brightness that suffused the surroundings.

He cut the ignition, pushed the car door open, and stepped into the light.

[Essex, Bluff Point, intersection of Cold Spring and Barksdale, 44.159, -73.415 approximate, unknown.]

Tree. What a funny name.

[Lewis, 5048 Mud Lake, 43.472, -75.513 approximate, deer.]

Tree was tall and lanky, with long arms and long legs, a bit bony in places, but still rather handsome.

[Minerva, Stillwater, 648, Thirty-two, 42.596, -73.382, snake.]

In contrast to his body, his face possessed a more delicate, feminine quality: short, curly cherub-like hair the color of raw

hazelnuts, fine brows and narrow eyes that tapered up toward just above the temples, a straight but small nose, and thin, pale pink lips barely a shade ruddier than the skin around them, with a dark pin-sized mole above the left corner, reminiscent of a certain Hollywood star from a bygone era.

[Essex, Station and Elm, 44.373, -73.405 approximate, raccoon/unknown.}

He had an intense gaze that would not be diminished by the small frame of his face, or lost in the height of his overall stature—a gaze, a ray, that was focused through the narrow slits of his eyes, that seemed to want nothing but to reduce the world to rubble, to flatten everything into one surface, to a single line, and set fire to that horizon.

[Keene, Glenmore, County Road 13, coordinates unknown, unknown.]

But the truth wasn’t like that. Most often, he didn’t feel anger, or resentment, or contempt, or interest, or passion, or really anything in particular. Usually, he wasn’t thinking about anything, and in general he held no stalwart ideas or opinions of things or people. There was neither algebra nor fire, neither crystal nor flame, behind his gaze; there was a mere brown wilderness, interspersed with some green, under a sky like a large, flat piece of white, opaque paper, and the rustling of the wind.

He was born in August 1969, and his parents named him Tree. But one could say also he named himself. He never really liked his name, not because of the name itself, but because of the reactions to it—from teasing when he was little, to a kind of curiosity and inquisitiveness after he became an adult. It brought him attention, before people even met him. They expected some sort of summary, some interesting and insightful bon mot, an explanation, as if he were a line in a poem, a walking, breathing text with a title over his head, behind his parents, family, even an entire generation—where, just as with his gaze, there was none. If he were a tree, he would be a ficus or banyan tree, sending his roots flying straight up into the sky. Tree had a choice, but he never changed his name.

15

Unknown. Unknown. Unknown.

The voice coming from the radio was a woman’s. It was a medium voice, even, enunciated, but not too much so, neither loud nor soft, making it difficult to imagine what she looked like. Somebody at central dispatch. A silhouette, with a few characteristics to denote gender as on a public sign. A shadow of some woman, perhaps. That’s all. Each time the voice came though, it was accompanied by an outburst of static, crackling, burning, parching the words, and turning them into ashes. He was reminded of a photo he’d seen a few times, the shadow of the woman who had been sitting on the stone steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima and waiting for the bank to open for business, and then incinerated in an instant.

Leaving nothing behind.

Tree reached for and popped open the glove compartment and got out a large white candle. A strong waft of vanilla scent escaped the glove box as soon as he opened it, and quickly filled the inside of the truck, thickening the air. He turned the hand crank to roll down the window on the passenger side, and then sat back up and rolled down the window on his side.

He looked at the dark mound just in front of his truck. The large mass appeared simply as an irregular black shape amidst the brightness suffusing the surroundings. He turned off the engine, opened the car door, and walked into the light.

[43.472. -75.513.]

The deer’s head was detached from its body.

More precisely, there was simply nothing above the neckline. The head was not there anymore, and had vanished.

The wound itself was exceptionally clean, an almost straight line, as if somebody had removed simply a piece from a puzzle, or couldn’t find the right piece to finish it,

and just abandoned it, in the middle of nowhere.

The gravel where its head should be appeared darker, as if it were wet, in the shape of an uneven, childishly drawn circle, a few shades of gray deeper than the areas around it. From directly above, it looked like a thought or speech bubble coming out and expanding gradually from the throat opening itself.

The flesh around the opening, in light pink and salmon, encircled by a ring of short, white and chestnut brown fur, had contracted and involved into a rosebud-like, somewhat crusty maroon-colored center. Beyond it, was a quite plump body, covered in soft brown fur, its legs all crisscrossed, with a large, distended white belly. Something appeared to strike against the belly, from the inside, causing the skin and muscle to ripple and wave somewhat.

High above, a faint and distant sound of wings flapping, circled, and circled. *

[Keene, Glenmore, County Road 13, coordinates unknown, unknown.]

That was where he saw her.

A deep maroon red, probably 80s-model, small Volvo, with its blinkers on, illuminating the mist, was parked near the side of the tree-lined road, about ten feet away from a telephone pole. Its lights were off.

It was the beginning of September, and the day was overcast, humid and foggy. Tree pulled up his truck slowly next to the car to see if everyone was all right.

He didn’t know why, but for some reason he automatically assumed there was more than one person in the car, perhaps a family. But when he pulled up, he saw only a woman.

He had rolled down his passenger side window, and her window was also down, so he could see her relatively clearly. At least her face.

It was a beautiful, almost angelic face. Oval, with near-translucent skin and just a flush of red seeping through her cheeks, like a bloom of watercolor across a sheet of thin pulp paper;

long, somewhat wild dark grayish brown hair parted near the center falling past her chest; dark, angular, masculine brows, giving her a slight, unintentionally indignant, hard-lined expression that would have bordered on cruel had it not been soothed and placated by her large, soft, doe-like eyes, short nose, and full, luscious, carmine-red lips.

Maybe it was the mist, but he thought she looked like she had been crying.

Tree was slightly in front of her. She was simply staring straight ahead. Not at him. His eyes followed hers, to her windshield. There was a brilliant red splat in the center of the glass, and a few red trickles were slowly dripping down to the wipers and drain opening. It was as if something collided with the car in midair, and then vanished. The blood was so unusually and eerily bright, it made everything else seem black and white. It alone was present, this esoteric blot, this stain. Everything else receded into mere memory. Like a sign of some sort, left in the sand, whose referent had receded with the tides, like time moving simultaneously forward and backward, into at once a vast past, and an unfathomable future, now between him and her.

He imagined that something, that unknown creature, as it burst against the transparent glass, in the moment of impact, imagining it as it was happening frame by frame: hitting, the masses of muscles shifting, rupturing, unfurling, unfolding, flattening. The ecstasy of opening up oneself to the void, of becoming nothing but pure surface, of emptying the body of all its content. Like a modernist painting, that was at once the work, and the exhibit. The artist would become superfluous and, in his final act with the final stroke, would erase himself and disappear.

Leaving nothing behind. Except the bright red mark of pure pleasure; he could hear its screams of insuppressible joy and merriment.

[Crown Point, Cold Spring, intersection at County 7, 43.949, -73.418, dog.]

The voice came through, and jolted him out of his imagination. He looked over at the woman again, and wanted to say something, but before he could open his mouth, he heard a

loud revving noise, followed by a sharp, dry screech. Before he could process what had happened, he saw the Volvo speeding away.

Already it was at a distance. It disappeared around the bend. A few seconds later, the road was silent again.

He’d been having the same dream a couple of nights in a row.

He looked at the dark mound, just in front of his truck below the triangular ornament. The large mass appeared simply as an irregular black shape.

It was night.

He turned off his truck but left the lights on, opened the door, and stepped out in front of the headlights. He was in a desert.

In the sand was a headless human body. A woman. The body had decomposed.

He knew it was her. He woke up to rain tapping on the windows.

Autumn sunlight poured in through the floor-length windows of the storefront, turning the interior golden. Tree stared at the unused metal spoon, reflecting the light as flashes, shimmers, of white, on the concave side, on top of a folded white paper napkin with a pressed lace pattern along its bottom edge.

He had just finished breakfast. For some reason, maybe it was the light, he suddenly thought of her.

Some memory from dozens of years ago. The mist, the telephone pole, the blood stain. The large, glimmering eyes. The sound of the car driving away. It all came flooding back to him.

This would happen once in a while. Without warning. And just for a moment, after, he would feel empty, like he just awoke from a long-forgotten, childhood dream.

Maybe it wasn’t really so misty. He woke up.

The bells jangled with the opening creak of the door, and then quickly rang again as the door slammed shut.

Tree got up, pushed the door open, and walked out into the light.

Stop.

Tree was on the same road. He had wanted to come back, ever since his dream.

He didn’t know why. But Tree was Tree; he didn’t need a reason.

Even though it wasn’t exactly the same spot. Nothing could be exactly the same, all the time.

The squirrel on the ground had been completely flattened, probably by countless cars having driven over it. The body was parched and gray, with no real distinguishing features except a general shape, resembling more an old, threadbare, tattered, dirty dried-up rag, disintegrating, becoming, gradually, merely one more layer of dust, of grime, mixed in with the gravel and, eventually, the road itself.

Tree tried to scrape it off with his metal bench scraper, to no avail. The squirrel remained stuck as if it had grown straight out of the ground, out of the earth itself. He sighed, and wrapped the tip of the scraper in the black plastic trash bag he had in his other hand, and wiped the scraper off inside the bag.

He took the scraper back out, tied up the bag, and just as he was about to toss them both in the back of the truck near the crane, he saw a pair of deer, a large one and a small one, about ten feet in front of his truck, standing still, side by side. In the middle of the road.

A doe and a fawn.

Out from the wilderness, the animals watched him in solemn silence.