The Arborist

by P. T. Phronk

  Then again, Amy had never been interested in the same things that I was, so unless she needed something, I did my things while she did hers. Shortly after we moved in, I had asked her if she wanted to go for a hike in the forest on the other side of the ravine behind the house. It looked beautiful, and I wanted to see what it had to offer. Amy refused; she saw no enjoyment in walking around in the wilderness gawking at nature. I went on a hike alone, and it was, indeed, a lush forest with much to offer—too much to fully comprehend, especially without another person to bounce ideas off of. I was overwhelmed at the sheer variety of trees—oaks, birches, pines—each subtly different from every other. I drifted through the sea of green and brown, absorbing the spicy smell of pine needles and fresh soil, then came home refreshed. I wish I did it more, but, responsibility.

  At the end of the week, I had quantifiable evidence of the red tree’s rapid growth. It had grown from 1.2 meters to 1.5 meters in just one week. Its growth rate had slowed since it first appeared, but its change was certainly significant.

  One of the guys at work asked if it was just the snow melting because of the warmer weather. Maybe the meter stick was sinking lower and making the tree appear higher in comparison. He was a bright young man, and the idea was a good one, but I told him that I had made sure to push the stick all the way to the ground before each measurement. There was no question about it: the tree was growing faster than any tree had in the history of plantkind.

  I uploaded the pictures to my computer. Looking at the tree on the screen, I was again struck with a sense of unease. I must have detected some difference from the Socratic form of a tree that made it less tree-like than a tree should be. I was also struck by its beauty. Close-up shots revealed tiny dew drops reflecting the early-morning light. Other shots emphasized the stark contrast of the maroon bark against the untouched white snow. Impressed by my photography skills, I hit the print button and stashed several photographs in my briefcase.

  I also attached a few key pictures to an email and addressed it to Robert Urban, the tree expert. I explained how I had taken them over just one week—“note the time stamps,” I wrote—and had carefully kept the measurement apparatus consistent. I included a close-up of the bark to show him its unique colour and texture. I wrote that I would love to hear what he thought, Sincerely, Wesley Burnett.

  That night, as I emptied my briefcase and removed the printouts, I realized what was wrong with the red tree. I had taken one shot from near the house, looking out toward the ravine. Trees of all shapes and sizes filled the background. In front of these stood the giant oak tree that had been there when we moved in. Then, in the foreground of the shot, sat the red tree. My red tree.

  I had thought it was not tree-like enough, but I was wrong. Seeing it in direct comparison to the others, the problem—and I am sure this is what was causing me awe and dread whenever I stared at it for too long—was that it was too perfect. The oak tree had a few more branches on one side than the other, like it decided it was more comfortable resting its weight to the right. The branches themselves stuck out at every possible angle. Some were broken, some were thicker than others. My red tree was almost perfectly symmetrical. Each branch flowed from another branch at the same angle. The tiniest branches at the outside edges were nearly all the same length and thickness, as were all the slightly thicker branches they sprung from, this pattern holding all the way down to the four thick branches coming from the main trunk, reaching at right angles to every direction on the compass.

  I pinned the picture that best illustrated this impossible symmetry to the wall of my home office. Then I took out the other pictures and pinned them to the wall, too. I stood for a long time, surveying the pictures of my perfect little red tree.

  Then I found the imperfection.

  It was only visible in some of the more recent pictures. Looking at the trunk of my tree, one side was a perfect vertical edge—a straight line dividing foreground from background. The other side, however, had a slight outward curve to it. It was bulging, just a bit.

  My chest filled with ice. What if my tree had some sort of disease—a fungus or something—that would kill it before I could unlock its mystery?

  The bulge was something I would have to keep my eye on.

  CHAPTER 6

  I HEARD BACK FROM THE tree expert the next day:

  Dear Wesley,

  I apologize for my terse response to your first inquiry. From your photos, it appears that you do have a rare species in your yard. In fact, I do not recognize it at all. I suggest that you continue to document its growth, as you have been doing. I would also like to send a student to take a look at your tree and collect samples, if that is all right with you. My number is below, so that we can discuss this further by phone. I look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, I will do some research to determine what you have on your hands.

  His phone number and address were below. He was located at a university just a few hours up the highway. I did not want to make a personal call at work, so I saved the email and tried to concentrate on my duties, but I could not. A new species! Would I get to name it? Silly sounding names would not do for my tree. I’d have to name it after something I cared about. Nothing immediately came to mind.

  I found myself searching the Internet for information on trees and the diseases that could kill them. Eutypella canker was a fungus that could destroy a maple if left untreated, and caused a deformity like the warts I used to get on my feet when I spent time outside barefoot. While worrisome, the disease, and indeed all of the diseases that I found information about, were specific to certain species. Since I had no idea what kind of tree mine was, it was impossible to research what could afflict it. I decided to wait and see how the bulge progressed before worrying. I could ask Robert Urban’s student about it when he came to take samples.

  I put off calling Urban for a week. I was always too busy or too tired, and the phone was not my preferred method of communication. Perhaps I could insist he emailed me back. Every day, I documented the tree’s growth with my digital camera and the meter sticks. I had to buy another stick and a metal pole to stabilize the measuring apparatus, because the tree was nearly 2 meters tall by the end of the week.

  One morning, after measuring, I was overcome with a sense of terror generated by the tree’s unnamed anomalies. I stared until I could identify what jumped out this time—something I should have noticed in the pictures. It was a particularly cold morning, and all the nearby trees had fluffy puffs of snow atop their branches. My tree, however, was bare. I bent close and watched as snowflakes lightly touched down on its branches, then immediately melted into droplets. I took off my gloves and stroked a branch. Now I knew that I wasn’t imagining its subtle warmth.

  My fingers flitted along its branches, working their way down to its trunk. With my face close, I could smell its sickly-sweet odour. I slid my palm down the trunk, feeling its warmth. I got to the curved side. The bulge was bigger now—a deformity that would surely be noticeable even to an unfamiliar eye. It sloped smoothly down and out from about halfway down the trunk, then abruptly joined the trunk again near the bottom. Like half of a teardrop. The bark around the bulge did not split or strain; the ridges had simply flattened to accommodate the bulge. As if it had been meant to expand all along, accordion-like. My worry for its health was replaced with a more cosmic fear: an intuition that the bulge was a natural part of the tree’s lifecycle. Perhaps all trees of this kind grew bulges. If there were any more of this kind.

  That night, I woke up suddenly from a peaceful sleep. At first, I had no idea why I was awake. The clock read 3:12 A.M. Then I heard voices, coming from outside. I heard the crunching of snow. My heart thumped, fast and frustratingly loud in my ears.

  I laid motionless, not daring to breathe, so I could hear every noise. Had I imagined it? Sweat prickled my brow. I struggled to decide if I should get up and check the window, or ignore the problem, Amy-style, until I drifted back to sleep. Then I hea
rd more crunching, in the unmistakable pattern of footsteps.

  I jumped from the bed, flicked on the bedroom light, and raced to the window. At first I saw nothing, but then out of the corner of my eye, movement. A figure stood just outside the range of my sight. All I could make out was a pale orb, connected to the earth by a long, dark body. I thought for a moment that it was my imagination, but then a cloud of vapour puffed from the figure just before it disappeared into the darkness. Someone’s breath in the cold air. That couldn’t be imagination; my imagination wasn’t smart enough to add that detail.

  Amy’s reflection in the window, sitting up and rubbing her eyes, obscured my view of the yard, and I realized how stupid I was to turn the light on. I ran to flick it off again, but when I’d returned to the window, the figure was gone.

  “Honey, what the fuck?” Amy’s voice was hoarse.

  “I saw someone out there,” I said. I could still hear my heart thumping. “I heard voices. Someone is out there.”

  “Honey, it was probably the neighbours,” said Amy.

  “No, I saw something! In our yard!”

  “We’ll worry about it in the morning.” She sighed and rolled over.

  Typical Amy, putting it off. She always did things like that. I considered calling the police, but there wasn’t much to go on. Besides, with my heart racing with fear, excitement, and a bit of anger—and with both of us already awake—my thoughts turned away from the figure outside and onto the one in my bed. I slid under the covers and caressed her breasts from behind, my chest against her naked body.

  She breathed heavily, as if she had already fallen asleep, though I knew she hadn’t. My fingers slid lower, and she rolled onto her stomach to block them.

  I groaned and rolled to the other side of the bed. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

  CHAPTER 7

  I WENT DOWNSTAIRS FEELING LIKE I was hung over, though I had not had a drink in fifteen years. My father, and his father before him, battled alcoholism. Except battled is not the right word; they continually chose to get in the ring with alcoholism, and lost every time. I didn’t enjoy being drunk enough to risk continuing the tradition.

  Todd came downstairs just after me, also looking like he’d lost a fight in his sleep. I grunted a hello, and he grunted one back. You could say we shared a moment. I prepared four cups of coffee, extra strong, poured it into a large Thermos, and took it to the sun room. This morning was already far from ideal, and the last thing I wanted was to be interrupted.

  Of course, interruptions were what I got. Amy burst into the room, running late again and asking me to make Todd’s lunch. She didn’t mention the night before, which did not surprise me. I was still not entirely sure if the figure in the yard was real, but if there was even a chance, it was something that needed investigation. Discussion, at the very least. As Amy babbled unrelated instructions to me, I stared at the yard and said nothing. She seemed to take this as agreement.

  I had a few minutes of peace after she rushed off. Outside, grackles squabbled with sparrows for the best tree branches. Then Todd yelled from the kitchen, something about lunch.

  “Get your own damn lunch,” I shouted.

  There was a moment of silence. Then, “fuck this.”

  A moment later, a door slammed and I was left in silence.

  My head pounded. I felt anger and guilt rolled into one, gnawing away at me like a pair of teeth from a squirrel preparing a nest in my skull.

  Then, staring out the windows of the sun room, I spotted footprints. My footprints, of course, were all around my tree, but now a second set led away from the house toward the ravine. I hadn’t been that way in a long time. I pictured the figure my groggy eyes had beheld: a white head and an elongated dark body. Now, here was physical evidence that it was no figment of my imagination, and it was certainly not the neighbours.

  I needed to photograph the footprints. For the police, so they could identify the intruder by their type of boot, like they did in that CSI show I sometimes found myself unable to stop watching. With photos, they would definitely catch whoever was sneaking around my yard, around my tree.

  But I could not find my camera. I could have sworn I’d left it on the dining room table—a table we used for storing junk more than eating on—but it was gone. I searched everywhere it could have possibly been. Gone.

  Was it stolen by the figure? Its footprints led from the ravine to my tree, where my footprints were everywhere. From my tree to the house, it could have walked in my prints to hide its own. I could have slept through the noise of the figure breaking into the house, and only noticed it as it fled.

  Why was I referring to the figure as “it”? I saw it in my mind’s eye again: a round, white orb, with a vague impression of eyes, steaming in the cold. No hair, no hat. I had heard voices, too; there must have been more than one.

  I went from room to room, checking for anything out of place. Nothing else appeared to be missing. Why would a person silently break into a house, only to steal a camera before taking off?

  What the Hell was it doing near my tree?

  Too many questions. Too many mysteries.

  I called in sick and bought another camera. I documented my entire yard, careful to take a picture before each step forward transformed the crime scene with my own footprints and filth. I pictured biological material—skin flakes, bacteria, spores—shedding off of me like fairy dust, contaminating the preserved environment.

  The sun had come out to erode the figure’s footprints, so they only looked like oval indentations in the snow. No way to identify the impression of a boot, or a foot, or a gnarled claw, which did not bode well for the CSI team.

  I snapped a picture of the big oak tree, just in case the old thing was hiding any clues. I panned down to take a shot of the base of the tree, then noticed an odd smudge in the snow. I bent down. Dark specks surrounded the base of the oak. I touched the bark, and a strip chipped off. This had never happened before. Under the spot where the bark had fallen off, I could see black lines criss-crossing the smooth underskin of the trunk, like lines of infection spreading from a dirty wound. The old oak appeared to be dying.

  My concern turned to my red tree. The oak had a good life, and with time all things must rot, but what if its disease spread? I approached my tree and caressed its trunk. It was as smooth as ever, with no sign of infection. I ran my fingers down its trunk, over the smooth curve of the bulge. I kept my hand there, feeling its warmth.

  From where did this concern arise? The oak had been in my yard since we moved in. It was one of the reasons for moving in, for Christ’s sake. Now it appeared to be sick, and all I could do was worry about this new thing that had appeared overnight. I headed back inside, trying to ignore it, but it was visible from every window, unrelenting. Disease. Rot. Death.

  I found myself back on the Internet, searching for ways to save my tree from the disintegrating world around it.

  CHAPTER 8

  A WEEK PASSED. I DID not go to work. I told my employers that I felt ill, which was somewhat true. I’d been so dedicated to projects at work that I hadn’t taken a sick day in two years, so my manager could not protest very strongly.

  Amy kissed my forehead and wished me well before leaving every morning, but she didn’t ask what was wrong or offer to help. Todd begged me to let him stay home too. He said that if I could stay home, then he also ought to be able to. It’s nice to be a role model to my son.

  After a few days off, I let him skip school. Why not? I thought that spending some time with the kid could be good for the family. Bonding time might make me feel better about myself and take my mind off the … other things. Disease. Rot. Death. The words floated through my mind whenever I spotted the tree, framed in one window or another.

  However, despite some cursory attempts to talk Todd into watching TV with me, he spent the day in his room. I sent him back to school the next day, even though he was on the verge of tears when he asked to stay home another day, a
nd really was looking unwell.

  I spent the afternoons drinking coffee and sitting in the sun room. When I tired of that, I sat on the couch and watched TV. There was nothing interesting on during the day. The talk shows were all troubled families arguing for the audience’s entertainment; the news was all doom and gloom because of the earthquakes; and even the “learning” channel had degenerated into conspiracy-minded garbage about mysterious lights in the sky and aliens. So I also got bored with that, and instead, I spent time doing research. I read of diseases that could spread from tree to tree, carried on the backs of worms and insects and other unsophisticated creatures. I got another email from Robert Urban, who I still had not gathered enough time or will to call back:

  Wesley,

  I have not heard from you yet, but I am afraid that may be my fault, as I have been rather unavailable. Some new opportunities have arisen, adding significant load to my already busy schedule. Perhaps we can continue our correspondence later in the year.

  Robert Urban

  An idea occurred to me. What if the figure in my back yard that night was not a thief after all, but Urban, or one of his students? Tired of waiting for me to contact him, he had searched for my address and come to study the tree himself. Why would he not tell me about it? Well, because he wanted to claim the discovery of the new tree species for himself. Give it his own name. First, he would have to verify its significance, of course. And after that, well, he’d have to get the entire tree in order to study it and publish the results and steal the discovery from me. He’d need to dig it up and take it with him. This, he could easily do this in the middle of the day, when nobody was home.