The Book of Resting Places

by Thomas Mira y Lopez

  “Do you visit dad’s tree?” she’ll ask, meaning the horse chestnut she purchased in Central Park. I tell her not so much. I rarely have reason to pass it—I no longer play soccer or baseball on those fields; I have no desire to cross the park and visit Mount Sinai. I read a book underneath it once, Salinger’s Nine Stories. “No, Mom,” I’ll say, “I was a mile away.” I ask her if she ever visits and she says she doesn’t often end up around there, it’s out of her way and hard to reach. She means that from there she can see that big black building in the east. But she’s glad the tree’s there all the same.

  In the Times, I learn of more cases like Elmaz Qyra’s—dozens of incidents over the past decade, resulting in at least ten lawsuits against the city. In 2009, the year before Qyra died, a thirty-three-year-old Google engineer, father of two, was struck by a hundred-pound branch from an oak thirty-seven feet above him. He suffered traumatic brain injuries, paralysis, and damage to his spinal cord and lungs; his lawsuit, still pending, is worth $120 million. In June of 2010, a branch fell on a mother and her six-month-old daughter outside the Central Park Zoo, killing the infant. What seemed highly improbable—a fate for those with bad karma, for the superstitious to fear—has now entered the realm of possibility. The realm where we should be more careful about what hangs over our heads.

  Adrian Benepe, then New York City Parks commissioner, made a statement that the only way to prevent falling branches would be to cut down all of the city’s trees, a measure that would do more harm than good. The Central Park Conservancy writes: “The trees of Central Park have an important impact on the urban environment. They improve the quality of our air and water; reduce storm water runoff, flooding, and erosion; and lower the air temperature in the summer. This is why Central Park is called the lungs of New York City.” Benepe further added after Qyra’s accident, “There is no reason to believe anything else might happen like that.”

  At my grandparents’ house growing up, my cousins and I would play a game called Monster under my grandfather’s horse chestnut tree. The horse chestnut was so large one did not near it but enter it, a 200-year-old cathedral of a tree whose limbs ran down along the ground for thirty feet before rising up one hundred. My father would chase us around the yard, his face twisted into a rictus, lip upturned into sneer. “Now I’m coming to get you,” he would shout, once he had given us enough time to reach safety. If my father found and caught us, he would wrap us up in his arms and the game would be over. To avoid him, we hid under the canopy of the horse chestnut tree. When we heard him coming, his stomp and growl, we began to climb. We climbed a limb near the tree’s edge, one that ran along the ground until it rose upward again. My father would palm open the curtain of leaves and scowl, feigning disorientation, giving us time, pretending he did not know we had run to where we always ran. For reasons unexplained, he could not climb the tree, so elevation proved our safe haven. If we climbed beyond his grasp and kicked free of the hands that grabbed our ankles, he could do nothing but look up at us—our chests swelling against the bark, feet dangling—and glower. Then the game would end.

  Eventually a branch necessary to climb this limb snapped off. It was our first foothold and, without it, we were helpless. My father nailed a two-by-four to the trunk where the branch had been. Our feet could not wrap around it the same way, but it remained fixed and we could climb the limb again. I know that even if this limb were to continue growing, this two-by-four would stay in the same place and persist, at the perfect height for a four-year-old’s step. This plank, to me, is stable memory, oblivion’s antithesis. That is, until a new owner decides to prune the branches, or lightning strikes the thing, or Hurricane Sandy or Amelia or Rachel or Alexandra or Hannah moves in off the Atlantic, or the branch just rots and poisons the tree and I die.

  The last time I heard my father speak was on my birthday. I was in the shower, in Rome, and my cell phone rang. I turned off the water and answered. It was October and my mother was at Mount Sinai. She wished me happy birthday and put him on the phone. He was doing better and could form a few sounds. Mostly sighs. The word hey. He made it halfway through happy birthday. I waited on the other end, head leaning against the tiles, naked, dripping wet.

  The last time I heard him speak a complete sentence was at the airport in late August before I flew to Rome from New York. I had an evening flight, and he was to fly to Rio de Janeiro the following day. I don’t remember what he said, not knowing what the moment meant. But it must have been along the lines of: “Be safe, Tom. Remember x, remember y. Love you. Be safe.”

  I asked my mother why they didn’t call me from the hospital more often, if my father could manage a few words. She said she didn’t really know. “Dad was tired,” she said, “It was very hard for him. He preferred silence.” Now it’s hard to know how he felt about us, if he was mad I wasn’t there, if I was acting the right way or hurting him further. We could have just remained speechless over the line, but I do not say that, just as my mother does not ask me why I did not call the hospital myself, why I stayed in Rome.

  The above is not exactly true. The last time I heard my father’s voice was a few years after his death. He had recorded the message on the answering machine at the house in Pennsylvania. I would call from time to time, when I knew my mother was not there. His voice sounded distracted, caught off guard, because either my mother or I had just walked into the room. You could hear the kitchen chair creak as he leaned in to begin recording. I didn’t tell my mother I would listen, but I am almost certain she did the same because sometime later, when I was away or abroad, she changed the recording to an automated message and erased his last remaining words. Though I wouldn’t have done so, I only hope the agony of deleting his voice, the willful choice to try and forget it, weighed less for her than the pain of its reminder.

  While there’s no account of what Elmaz Qyra heard before he died, others describe the sound of a falling branch in various ways. A thunderclap. Or the creak of a floorboard in a horror movie. A booming. A loud crack or snap. It sounds like something. A warning or a taunt or a condemnation.

  Trees rot because of fungus and internal decay. A tree suffers a significant wound, anything larger than three to four inches in diameter, and fungi will establish their presence in the time it takes it to form a callous over the injury. It’s a common phenomenon for a tree to suffer significant injury: lightning can strike or a thunderstorm can break a limb; roots can be damaged underground or insects can infest it; there’s human harm, say someone who prunes one large limb instead of several smaller ones. As a defense mechanism, trees will compartmentalize their decay to maintain structural integrity. That is, fungi will only rot away the dead wood in the center of the tree. A tree can sustain the hollowing of its core as long as new rings are forming and widening around its circumference; its structure can bear a central emptiness if there is something to compensate. Just like humans do, I figure. Some trees do a better job of compartmentalizing decay than others. Oaks, for example. Some trees do not. Hackberries. Ash. Horse chestnuts.

  Technically, my mother did not buy the horse chestnut tree in Central Park, but an endowment for it. The Tree Trust of the Central Park Conservancy offers New Yorkers the opportunity to “create a living memory that will last for generations to come.” In exchange for a donation, the Conservancy will engrave a paving stone along the southern end of Poet’s Walk. The endower receives the more or less false sense that he or she owns a tree.

  Donations range depending on the tree endowed. For $1,000, you can purchase a new sapling. For $5,000, “a remarkable tree” and an engraved granite paving stone. For $12,000, a tree cluster family. For $25,000, a historic tree, planted 150 years ago at Central Park’s inception. For $250,000, you can purchase allées. Allées are “a unique arrangement of two or more rows of the same species.” The example the Conservancy gives is of the majestic American elms along Poet’s Walk itself. With these come an engraved bronze plaque. />
  My mother purchased a remarkable tree. Her engraved granite paving stone reads somewhere on Poet’s Walk: Endowed by JUDY THOMAS in honor of RAFAEL MIRA Y LOPEZ. But I am not sure. I’ve never visited.

  I flew from Rome to New York in early November. I landed on a Thursday and was scheduled to fly back on Sunday, but my father died that Sunday night and so I stayed. That day, around noon or one in the afternoon, a doctor told my mother and me that my father would not last very long. I told my mother I would be right back. I took the elevator down the eight or nine floors from the ICU my father had been moved into the night before and stepped out onto the street. Across Fifth Avenue was Central Park and I began to run. I ran into the park, past the dust field, past the North Meadow, past the horse chestnut, out onto the Upper West Side and north ten blocks until I reached the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I entered and told the man behind the donation booth that I would like to buy the $3.95 candle. I handed him a twenty and he told me he could not make change and pointed to a sign. I left, bought an apricot Linzer cookie at the pastry shop next door, came back, put a five-dollar bill on the counter, took my candle, and threw the cookie at the man. I walked down the nave until I reached the bed of candles by the altar. I laid the wick in a neighboring candle’s flame and placed mine among the others. Written on the glass of the other candles were messages and well-wishes for loved and lost ones. I did not write anything, but I did make a wish. A wish that, if I were to say what it was, I’d be afraid wouldn’t come true.

  I took a cab back to the hospital. I watched the New York Giants lose to the Chicago Bears, and that night, figuring things would hold, I told my mother I was going back to the apartment. I’d have a bite to eat and get some rest. My aunt had just driven down and we ordered take-out, General Tso’s chicken and scallion pancakes. The food arrived and a call came from my mother. “You should come back,” she said. I did. When I arrived, my father seemed the same and I fell asleep in an armchair at the foot of the bed. The overnight nurse came and left and, after she did so, when his breathing began to shallow, my mother told me, “You should come to the bed, Tom.”

  A remarkable tree is an interesting name for a common horse chestnut, especially when one considers that the Conservancy is naming things that do not know they have names. But a remarkable tree is exactly what my mother believes this chestnut to be.

  Endowments help ensure the maintenance of Central Park, but the Conservancy does not inform you what happens if your particular tree is damaged or destroyed. This is a valid concern. On Halloween in 2011, an unprecedented snowstorm damaged one thousand trees in Central Park. Earlier that year, Hurricane Irene destroyed one hundred trees.

  Before these, a thunderstorm downed more than one hundred trees in the park on August 19, 2009. Hundreds more were damaged, many fatally. This was the most severe destruction the park’s trees had sustained in decades, and it was concentrated in the northern third of the park, where my father’s horse chestnut stood. The storm was a microburst: straight-line winds reached speeds of seventy miles per hour. “Central Park has been devastated,” said Adrian Benepe. “You have personal relationships with certain trees and now they are gone.” “We’re not going to be around in eighty years when they grow back,” said Donna Castellano, director of operations of the cardiology department in the big black building at Mount Sinai.

  The storm lasted from around 10:00 to 10:30 p.m., a time when five years earlier my father would have been walking home from work, when I would have been in another part of the park, getting high with my friends. The storm destroyed another horse chestnut close to my father’s, near the entrance at 100th Street. The city temporarily closed the fields at North Meadow because of safety concerns.

  My father’s chestnut went unscathed. “It was terrible,” my mother reported to me, “but what a miracle. Nothing happened to dad’s tree. It was so lucky.” The tree survived with only a few broken branches. It had earned its remarkableness.

  After you watch someone die, an odd minute passes when you are unsure what to do next. It’s a minute removed from time’s flow, even though you are very sure of what time it is. When my father died, this happened. The nurses were not yet informed, the hall was silent, it was 11:11 p.m. There was not much for us to do. I did not know whether I was allowed or supposed to touch him. What I did—with the knowledge that one day I would look back, hovering over myself to scrutinize these actions—was take a penny from my pocket and place it in my father’s hand. This was not easy. I had to uncurl his hand (his right hand, the one that had been paralyzed, though now it made no difference), stick the penny against the palm’s flesh, and then close the hand again. But the penny would not stay put, his hand did not want to close, and so I wedged it in between his index and middle fingers, near the lowest knuckle.

  Why I did this puzzles me. It wasn’t Charon’s obol exactly—I did not open my father’s mouth and lay the coin on his tongue—but it was an act of superstition. I’m not a pagan or a polytheist; I don’t believe in Hades or the underworld. I am the son of a scientist. But, all the same, I told my mother as I struggled with his hand, “He might need this.”

  I believe now that this was not just superstition, but forgetting. Passage paid not for Acheron or Styx, but for Lethe. I was, in a way, trying to obscure memory, to make surreal or unreal what I would otherwise have to account for as the truth. I was not being me, but watching myself be me. That bad old habit of pretending you’re a character in a movie: this is one way of dealing with a situation you are unprepared for, to watch what motions you will go through as if from a distance. I watched myself put a penny in my father’s hand because I knew I would later replay that moment and not what happened the minute before. I ran a mile and a half to the cathedral when I could have taken a cab because to run was more cinematic.

  Milton calls Lethe the “wat’ry labyrinth, whereof who drinks, forthwith his former state and being forgets.” I say Lethe because, when I look back, I see someone other than myself going through those motions. I see someone who, when not eating or sleeping, was wrapped up in the business of being another; who already then was planting a seed to obscure the past; who was busy constructing a labyrinth of oblivion. I see a boy who was prepared to wave happily goodbye to memory and his father if it meant circumnavigating the rivers of hate, pain, lamentation, and rage. I see someone content to lose sight, to let the boat slip into slick, still fog, if all it left him was a penny poorer.

  The trees Elmaz Qyra walked underneath were the allées, the American elms of Poet’s Walk, purchasable for $250,000. “These elms,” the Conservancy writes, “are one of the largest and last remaining stands in North America, and one of the Park’s most photographed areas.” It goes on: “They form a cathedral-like canopy above the Park’s widest pedestrian pathway.” The American elm that killed Qyra, the one scheduled to be removed, the one within which a five-foot cavity swelled, was given a special name for the way it always appeared bathed in light. It was called the Ghost Elm.

  I called my mother to find out what she inscribed along Poet’s Walk and discovered I had it wrong. She said she did not buy an endowment for a horse chestnut. She wanted to but they had none available. She had bought an endowment for an American elm.

  Midway through The Aeneid, Aeneas descends to the underworld and reunites with his father Anchises. When the Greeks sacked Troy, Aeneas fled the city carrying his elderly father upon his back. Before he reaches what will become Rome, before Dido and Carthage, Aeneas lands at the city of Drepanum in Sicily. There, Anchises dies. A year or so later, Aeneas breaks off a golden bough, gives it as a gift to Proserpina, Pluto’s queen, and wins entrance into the underworld. When eventually he finds his father there, he sees a multitude of people drinking from a river and asks Anchises what they are doing. Anchises tells him: “They are the souls who are destined for Reincarnation; and now at Lethe’s stream they are drinking the waters that quench man’s troubles, the
deep draught of oblivion . . . They come in crowds to the river Lethe, so that, you see, with memory washed out they may revisit the earth above.”

  So, you see, I had it backwards. The living do not drink from Lethe; the dead do. It is not my mother and I who drink for oblivion, but my father. Its waters wash his subterranean roots, wipe out all memories of pain and agony and paralysis and monstrosity, and perhaps, I hope, restore him to balance and peace. A tree that readies itself to grow and survive, to stand in symmetry, to speak in whispers and wind but to speak nonetheless. He would, of course, in his preparation for earthly life, forget all else. He would forget us, his wife and child; he would have to. It’s a fair trade, I think. The most my mother and I could hope for is something animate, something spirited and numinous to pass between us, some flash of sun to glance off the buckeye and catch my mother’s eye at the kitchen window, or some pattern of light and shade to fall across the pages of my book as I sit on a rock underneath my father the Remarkable American Elm.

  Let us pause on that rock, that tree, that American elm that survived one thunderstorm and the others to come. Let us stage another cinematic scene. Imagine an incision of three to four inches in diameter, imagine a fungus creeping in, imagine decay and rot and the loss of integrity. Imagine the penny was needed, but it fell loose from his hand. Imagine that Lethe was the wrong river all along, that really we are still stuck on the Styx or Acheron or Cocytus or Phlegethon, that the waters still bubble with hate and pain and lamentation and rage. Imagine there is no end, no true forgetting, that whatever already happened will continue to gnaw and plague and eat away at me and my father and mother. Imagine that’s how eternity works. And now imagine I have actually come to visit my father’s tree, to sit on the rock underneath its branches and read a book and occasionally look out at the children playing soccer and, farther away, the large black building where he died. And imagine what if, just what if, the sound I heard before the branch fell and split open a quarter of my skull was not a boom or crack or thunder or creak but a voice, his deprived voice, and it was mad as all hell and it said to me, “You motherfucker, you monster, you tried to sleep and eat your way past me, you tried to pretend I wasn’t there, you piece of shit, you stayed away while I was dying, you ingrate, you fuck, you ordered Chinese food two hours before my death, you asshole, you were content to let me go if it made your life easier, you selfish son of a bitch. But now I’m coming to get you.”