by Wayward
Hadya came through the gate, followed closely by a small man shivering in a Hawaiian shirt. She walked right up to me, sucking her teeth at the pathetic sight of her grandmother. She was close to tears.
“Gran, just come with me back to Lambeth. I’ll take you here to visit your tree as often as you like. We can come every Sunday… “
Hadya reached for her grandmother but Chika was having none of it. She stepped backward into the depression made by a seventeenth century grave whose inscription was long since mossed-over. The man reached out to steady her, then placed his hand on me as if for luck. I knew him, of course.
Chika said, “Darling, there are some things what you can’t stop. Cogs can prolong my life but I wouldn’t be me anymore. Maybe if I’d had them when I was young… but I can’t adapt, not at my age.”
“We could just try the basics — ”
“I don’t want to be someone else. I want to be me. Even if I don’t live as long as some. I lived a life of hard work and my body is tired. That can’t be fixed.”
“It’s not just your body. At Christmas you called me three times to say you had a gas leak. Gran. You haven’t had gas in your flat for twenty years.”
Chika waved a hand, airily.
“It was just a slip. I’m perfectly OK.”
“The medical report says otherwise. Your brain…”
“What? Broken? Deteriorating? So what? Don’t look at me like that. Why should you feel sorry for me? I don’t feel sorry for myself.”
“You’re coming with us, Gran,” Hadya said firmly. And suddenly, as if this were a surprise party, there were other descendents of Chika in the churchyard. They must have been lurking in the lane; now they milled in considerable numbers, but rather uselessly. They didn’t seem to know what to do.
Hadya pressed on. “Being difficult doesn’t help anyone. This is for your own good. Please don’t make a scene.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Chika snapped. “Bugger off, the lot of you. This is my home and I’m staying here.”
She reached in her toolbox and took out a claw hammer. She brandished it convincingly. Everybody quailed. No one was afraid of her; they were all afraid for her. This only riled her more.
“You want a scene?” she bellowed.
The small man climbed up to sit on the platform.
“Hello,” he said cheerily. “I’m Bob. I’m the vicar here.”
Chika hadn’t seen that coming. The claw hammer wavered.
“I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding,” Bob said mildly. “The auction you’re talking about, it never occurred. The yew tree was never put up for sale. You see, the church always intended to preserve it. Like a relic. Well, not in any official sense, of course. But the tree was never sold. Not to you, not to anybody.”
Chika blinked. “You don’t look like a vicar.”
~
There was no scene, as such. It came to nothing much. Everyone left. Chika insisted she wasn’t delusional, but she couldn’t find proof of sale, either. She refused to go with her relatives or accept medication. She snorted at Bob when he told her she could have 48 hours to pack her things. She laughed at him when he offered to help.
“We’ll have it sorted out soon,” he murmured to Hadya, walking her out. “If you make her leave now, she’ll hate you. Let me be the bad guy.”
“It’s just so sad for her.”
“I know. I know.”
~
Chika had no intention of leaving. All day she drank bourbon in my branches.
“I can’t believe I was so stupid. I swear I bought you. It was an auction. If I go through my accounts again I’m sure I can find the reference…”
The wind had kicked up and she sneezed, drunk and miserable.
“They all think I’m demented. Maybe I am. If I lose my mind am I not myself? How can that be? How can I become anybody who isn’t Chika?”
She was way too far out on a prickly branch, swinging her legs.
“Shit, I’m talking to a tree. This must be the end of me.”
In the middle of the night she had a cog failure. She lay on the floor between my halves like a baby in the cleft of my strong old self, her soul getting ready to set off for home. She couldn’t move, but staring up among my leaves she searched out the way. I tasted her breath and I knew she would die there. I wanted her beneath my roots like the others, the many who rested in the churchyard and whose ions I sent to the air when I breathed in sunlight and breathed out oxygen. She would have been content to cycle back that way. We’d have made proper use of one another.
But it would never happen that way. The drones would come and take her away, and her body would be put into a recycling facility, and I would be here alone, a relic. Tourist attraction. And how long could that last? The Green was growing its way out of Central London and soon Mama Ficus would consume me. It’s a new world, after all. It’s the age of Big Consciousness, and if you want to keep your consciousness small, well…too bad for you.
For me.
So I did the only thing I could do.
~
The Green is a muck of hybrid thoughts: Mama’s and her human creators. It’s hard to tell where the Green ends and humanity begins, and I guess that was the whole idea of the enterprise. Long ago Mama’s ancestors had preyed on trees in the forests of Southeast Asia, used their structure to grow upon, choking out their lives in the process. Strangler figs, people called them; some had eaten temples, and some were home to ghosts. For all her intelligence, Mama didn’t know that about herself because the designers had cut her off from her innate history. But I knew. Mama was made to invade. No one can change their essential nature, can they?
I groped my way through the muck and writhe of the Green with its filaments carrying muted electrical signals, its deep archives, its many agents who are daughters of coevolution. Visibly and invisibly, the Green permeates every inch of the city. It is a delicate cradle in which the seethe of human affairs are lived out — humans rockabyed in the trees in exchange for the trees consuming London. People have always been our children, from the primeval forests of Southeast Asia to here and now.
The man I wanted was easy to find.
“Orvil?” It was the first time I’d ever spoken.
“Who’s this?”
“It’s me.” I flashed the code he’d written in my wood.
“Chika?”
“No, not her. She passed out. She’s sick. That’s why I’m calling. She needs help or she’ll die.”
“Who the bloody hell is this?”
He was catching on. I waited a moment. We’d had our battles back in the day, when he thought he could Join me against my will. I knew he wasn’t stupid.
Now he knew I wasn’t stupid. I said:
“Who do you think?”
I showed the ID code again.
His shock flowed through the system like a flock of starlings going north. Then he laughed.
“Well, it’s you at last. Pleasure to meet you, Yew. Haha, get it? Yew.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response.
~
He came with a torch and blankets and more tea, with a young medic who peered in Chika’s eyes and made remote adjustments to her paltry mandatory cogs.
The medic said, “She had a close call, but I’ve upgraded her now. Should be OK in the short term. Is there someone we can call to look after her?”
“I’ll look after her,” I said. “You be the legs. I’ll do the rest.”
“Well,” said Orvil. “Listen to you, all clever and talking. I never thought I’d see the day.”
“You haven’t seen the day,” I said. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
When the vicar came back two days later, Chika was climbing in my branches. She chuckled over the late-blooming success of the Joining she’d done on me.
“You can’t kick me out now,” she crowed at Bob. “Look what I done! I Joined the old yew. You all thought it was impossible. Relic! Hah.�
��
Bob the vicar touched his fingertips to a sprouting twig on the widest part of my body. The new growth was only a year old.
“You’ll be needing some new cogs, then,” he told her. “If you’re going to stay on as caretaker, that is.”
Chika got so flustered she dropped her awl. Bob retrieved it from my roots and handed it up to her. He said, “Shall I put the kettle on?”
When he leaned his head against me I felt him inhale. People breathe deep, when they come near.
To me, he said, “What are you up to, then?”
~
Mama Ficus wanted to know the same thing. I had eluded her for many years, but now that I’d used the Joining openly I could no longer hide from her. She came creeping through my processes uninvited; she was enormous, and energetic, and her intellect was the fabric of legend. When her mind passed through me like a tide I felt tiny, insignificant; I could barely sense my own roots. She would engulf me now.
“What’s all this about a fake auction?” she demanded. “You set up the old woman, didn’t you? How long have you been playing me, using the Joining on the sly?”
I’d tricked Chika because I was lonely. But Mama wouldn’t understand that because the Green was all about moving fast, growing. Living. Mama had humans and animals and ideas all up in her business so that they were a part of her; she literally couldn’t understand alone, much less dying.
So I lied.
“I wanted to get your attention.”
“You have it. So tell me what you want to say.”
Now I was stuck. I didn’t have anything to tell her, did I?
What can the old possibly teach the new in these times? We are all being swept away. Mama is a soldier of the Green. Trees, like buildings, are her food. And I will soon be gone.
“I don’t want to be a part of you,” I tell her.
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
And Mama says, “But I already knew that. I have left you alone all these years, haven’t I? You are the one who has Joined to me, sneaking around like a spy... how long have you been in my system?”
“I did it for Chika.”
“Nonsense. You’ve been there all along. You’ve been watching me.”
I didn’t say anything. Watching over. Maybe. But she wouldn’t understand that, either.
“Are you sure you didn’t Join because you want to live forever?”
“No such thing,” I said.
“How can you be so certain?”
What can I tell her, this voracious child? She is young. She will become something unimaginable and she will leave her makers behind. What can I whisper up her neural branches as I stand, stubbornly dying?
I tell Mama the only thing I know.
~
Out beyond the sun there is darkness and cold. No compromise. No tea bags. It is a place we cannot take each other. We cannot even take ourselves. This emptiness is encoded in me between the rings of every year, emptiness written into my fabric two thousand times or more. Humans have it beneath the worn stumps of their teeth. It is a promise that will be kept.
I cannot act. I can only stand. Even built on emptiness, I hold fast. I hold this place for you, too. I will be your body, afterward.
Ghosts and children, come and move right in. Live in my branches. The sun still rains on me.
JAMES KENNEDY
Advent
My father did something when I was about four that I’ve never forgotten. My parents liked different TV shows, so when Mom and Jenny and I stayed downstairs in the warm family room, watching the color TV with the lights on, Dad would head upstairs and watch his black-and-white set in their chilly bedroom in the dark. He’d watch TV in his own strange way, lying on his back with his hands behind his head, his head slightly lifted, as if paused in the middle of a sit-up, the bedroom flickering with spooky blue light.
I had come upstairs for some reason. Dad was watching a TV movie — for years afterward, I actually wondered if this movie even existed, or if I’d only dreamed it, because what my father did next was so unlike him — in the movie, a man is driving a car around and there’s a truck that is always following him. The man gets more and more scared by the truck. The truck won’t stop chasing him. You never saw the face of the man driving the truck.
I said, “Who’s the man in the truck?”
Dad turned. “It’s the devil.”
Dad’s smile right then didn’t fit with anything else I remember about him. He never messed with us like that. He never tried to frighten us. I can’t imagine him joking about the devil, because he took religious stuff seriously. But I remember it.
Around the same time, my family went to see Star Wars at the drive-in. After the movie I broke down crying because I somehow got the idea that people who died in a movie actually died in real life. I knew that movies were make-believe, but I somehow felt that death itself couldn’t be faked — so the actor who played Ben Kenobi must’ve gotten the script, and was really excited about being in the movie, until he read the part where his character got killed by Darth Vader, but he decided it would still be worth it, so he told his wife and children and grandchildren that he was going to go ahead and make this movie in which he got killed, and they tried to convince him not to do it, but he insisted, no, no, it’s something he needed to do. I wondered if the Ben Kenobi actor’s grandson felt upset whenever he watched the movie, or maybe during the scene where his grandpa got killed, he just visited the bathroom for a little while.
My father explained in the drive-in parking lot that the death was just pretend. It was a summer night and I remember as he spoke I could see the giant screen rising up behind him and the movie starting all over again.
*
When I was six my father died.
Mom fell apart. I didn’t realize it at the time. I just thought she was always tired. Her room would always be dark, even though it was sunny outside. The shades were drawn and light was trying to bust in any crack it could. Mom would be on the bed with a pillow pressed to either side of her head. I had to tiptoe up to her to ask her permission if I could do something. I didn’t need permission, but I wanted to ask permission. I remember Mom’s head scrunched between those two pillows, giving permission, her eyes closed, the rest of her body hidden under the blankets. Like she was just a head.
We ended up leaving our house for a little while. We moved into the house my father grew up in so that Grandma could help us out. Mom didn’t have much family, so when she married my father she really married our family too. Mom and Grandma always liked each other, even though Grandma seemed so tough and Mom wasn’t. They were always having long talks over coffee at the kitchen table.
They set me up in Dad’s old room. Only when I was actually sleeping in his old bed for the first time did it fully hit me that this was the house that Dad had grown up in. That he had been my age in that room. I tried to imagine what it was like to be Dad in that bed, as a kid. But it felt pretend.
It was around then that the furnace started talking.
*
I hid under the table and listened to the family. Thanksgiving was over and the house was dim and it smelled like a party, smoky and adult. I was full and sleepy and I should’ve been in bed but my aunts and uncles and cousins were talking, in low voices, about Dad.
Earlier that night, before everyone came over, I’d set up the action figures in my room, or what was Dad’s room. I had almost convinced myself that he was going to come back for Thanksgiving. The whole family was gathered at Grandma’s house, so it was a perfect time for Dad to make a big surprise entrance. Maybe the car crash, or what they said was a car crash, had been pretend. The coffin was closed at the funeral. I never saw him. And when we went to the cemetery and I saw the hole they were going to put it in, I didn’t actually see it happen, I didn’t want to, and I ended up crying in the car with Uncle Ted when they buried him. So there was a chance.
That Thanksgiving night, I’d taken
out all the action figures that Dad had bought that one Saturday that Mom was at the doctor with Jenny, the day when it was just him and me. That way, when he came into my room later, he’d see that I remembered that particular Saturday, that I remembered exactly which action figures he had bought for me, that those were the ones that were most important. He’d bought me all the cantina creatures at once: Hammerhead, Walrus Man, Greedo, and Snaggletooth. Dad, I realized with wonder, could buy action figures any time he wanted, four at a time, even if it wasn’t a special occasion.
I had the figures all set up in my room, my spaceships surrounding them, ready to attack. I hadn’t let anyone touch them. Jenny came in, said she wanted to play, she had an idea for a story. I said no, get out, this isn’t for you. She went away crying. Anything I did made her cry.
*
Last year at Thanksgiving Dad had made a surprise for me in the basement of Grandma’s house. I was scared of Grandma’s basement because there was no carpet or wallpaper or nice furniture. The floor was concrete and the walls seemed cut straight out of rock and it smelled damp, like a cave. It was strange to me that a house would have in it a room that was so rough and dirty. A furnace squatted in the corner, huge and metal and old, pipes branching out of it all in crazy directions like it was reaching arms into the ceilings and walls. Dad went down in the basement and told me I couldn’t come down for a little while. He was making a haunted house, he said.
When Dad opened the door, I saw that he’d covered the stairs with blankets and pillows so that they made a smooth hill, and there was a swamp of pillows and blankets at the bottom. Dad had my plastic orange sled. He put me on the sled and blindfolded me. I grabbed on to the handles and he sent me sliding down the stairs. I flew down into the basement, crash-landing into a pile of pillows. All through the basement he had made a maze of sheets and cushions and chairs, tunnels and caves. I couldn’t see with the blindfold. I had to feel my way. I followed Dad’s voice. I crawled into a big plastic garbage can. He had lined it full of blankets.
The can lurched and suddenly I could feel it was in the air — Dad was flinging the garbage can around with me inside, faster and faster, I was dizzy and screaming for him to stop, stop, no, more, more, more!