“And now is the time to share an intimate detail that, under different circumstances, I would spare you. As many of you know, I met a woman ten days ago and we have fallen in love. A woman, not an alias. Sandrine Montesquieu. My partner shocked me when she asked me to clarify the inexplicable suddenness of her death. Much like you, I figured it was just another one of those accidents that happen when an uprooter breaks off a branch inadvertently. I examined the relevant tree and couldn’t ignore the unequivocal signs. In addition, I noted the strange coincidence—the tree was in the same plot as the Mendelssohns’. Still, I did not act. I knew that only when the pathology report landed on my desk could it verify or dispel my suspicions.
“Yesterday, late in the evening, the report arrived. I won’t bore you with the details; I’ll merely state that the evidence of repeated criminal acts was irrefutable. The poor family’s tree suffered shocking abuse, systematic and intentional! I decided that my first task of the morning would be to confront the uprooter with the facts. I figured I’d be faced with vociferous resistance, overarching denial, or at the very least a great feigning of innocence. But I had no idea what would transpire before the first glint of dawn.
“Once again I must share a personal anecdote with you. Today, after not having seen each other for a year, my partner is to meet her best friend. They were to have met yesterday, but a certain hitch delayed the meeting and my partner had to wait on pins and needles until I could pull her friend’s faraway address from the central thumb directory. Last night, Sandrine couldn’t get to sleep and said she’d like to go out and clear her head. I asked where she’d like to go, and she giggled and said she’d been yearning to see her family tree, voicing a deep desire to witness her sap mark, where the branch had been severed. I explained that the rules forbid humans from entering and that even non-staff aliases are prohibited from going into the forest, but she had a hard time understanding me. At the end of a long argument, she convinced me to break the rules. ‘After all, you’re the forest director and you’ll be by my side,’ she said.
“And so it was. We reached the forest in the dead of night. Sandrine insisted that I tell her as much as possible—about the death crackles of the drooping branches, the fine threads strung by the Weavers, linking the crowns of the trees so that the binds of marriage could be accurately marked, and even about the gentle breeze that whistles slyly through the leaves. She was utterly enchanted by the forest and questioned me incessantly as I urged her toward the plot. I wanted to show her the mark and return home.
“When at long last we crossed into the desired plot and approached her family’s tree, Sandrine stopped me, said she thought there was someone there. We approached the tree with caution and could not believe our eyes. The criminal was in the midst of a wild attack, hanging at the two-point-oh-five-meter mark and ripping at branches as he spewed insults and invective. He didn’t notice us, and when I ordered him to cease and desist from his crazed behavior, he looked at me surprised and kept at it. Not left with much of a choice, I asked my partner to call the guards and I climbed after him, easily recognizing the criminal on the basis of his tattered boots, the footwear of an uprooter who spent much of his time brutally bashing the Mendelssohn trunk, as Billionandaquarter stated in his report. I grabbed his legs and pulled him down with all my might. He dropped wordlessly and, much to my surprise, passively. When I demanded an explanation for his actions, he started to warn me about my love: ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘she’ll do just what my alias did. She’s already made you violate the law.’ He got down on his knees and burst into tears. He told me that his beloved had left him again, that she had already left him twelve times, and that after each breakup he’d come to the plot to release his rage on the branches. This was the thirteenth and final time! He disclosed the whole truth as pertains to the Mendelssohns—seven detachments. As far as the tree’s final branch is concerned, he swears he was uninvolved. And in fact, an inspection of the dossier revealed a story of a meticulously planned suicide characteristic of natural withering, not malice. I asked him who the other four branches had been, and he said that three of them had fallen victim to the first three breakups. Turns out that as the uprooter’s modus operandi grew methodical, his confidence rose to levels that all of us combined would have a hard time attaining. The first three were ripped from random multi-limbed trees, but in the aftermath of the fourth breakup he focused, with parasitic criminality, on the aforementioned family. He explained that from the moment he happened upon their tree, the matter of choosing had been put to rest. An almost naked trunk, sporting eight final branches, a dynasty on the cusp of extinction. He didn’t grasp the paradox—on the contrary, he was sure that in this way he spared random branches and focused on one single tree, as though he were doing right by the rest of the plot when attacking the chosen tree. Once their tree was uprooted, a fresh victim in the form of my beloved’s tree was found, and in the aftermath of the twelfth breakup, he viciously severed the branch that brought her to my bosom. Surely the morbid and macabre interpretation of these events is that I should thank the murderer for his twelfth crime, but I refuse to accept that. The perpetrator of these crimes used his own lack of restraint and, instead of addressing his worsening problem, chose to draw malevolent strength from his “unpremeditated” murders. He claimed that he felt euphoric after the acts, as though his twisted soul had found solace.
“My partner lost control when she realized that he was responsible for her death and the wholly unnecessary deaths of two other family members, and she pounced on him, whipping his face with the generous help of the two downed branches. The task of disentangling them was not simple, especially considering that rather than express remorse, the idiot ranted about merely moving people from one world to another and that the latter was considered far superior anyway. I asked Sandrine to relax as I tried to convey to him the severity of his deeds. I explained that he had murdered fourteen innocent mortals, with only the abstract of motives. Much to the guards’ astonishment, he laughed and said he had no idea what all the fuss was about. In the end, all branches are severed. A moment before he was taken by the guards, he smiled and asked, ‘When a man raises a gun and shoots another man, and at exactly that same second an uprooter breaks off the victim’s branch, who is responsible? The one who pulled the trigger or the one who pulled the branch?’
“I wasn’t tripped up by his question, and I requested that he quit trying to avoid taking responsibility for his offenses. He glared at me with a pair of fossilized eyes and repeated the question in a toying voice. This time I didn’t relent and I said, ‘The one responsible for the death is the one who’s taken the life, and in the case you’ve described, there seems to be a random collaboration.’ ‘But how can I collaborate with someone I don’t even know?’ he asked, playing innocent. ‘The same way you can kill them,’ I responded, unwilling to listen to another word.
“Two hours later, in accordance with the Code of Unusual Criminal Offenses, I called the five former forest directors to my office in order to sentence the tree uprooter. The six of us unanimously decided that he was responsible for the deaths of fourteen innocent mortal beings, seven of them from the same family, and therefore will be punished with the utmost severity, with no extenuating circumstances. We brought the accused into the room and informed him we’d reached a decision. He thought, wrongly, that we’d suffice with ceremonial banishment from the forest and a request for him to return his uprooter’s boots. At that point I realized how right we were in our judgment, not least for his lack of contrition and comprehension. Billion asked to elucidate the linkage between the severing of branches and death.
“Allow me to quote from the protocol of Unusual Criminal Trials, 2001: ‘For those living in the previous world, death has no meaning beyond the negation of their existence. Many of them are albeit involved in the development of different and strange theories that help them contend with the fear of the unknown, but until they reach the Other World their anxiety
is alive and well. They cling to their lives with all their might, resisting the end. Imagine, 57438291108, that one day you ceased to exist. Are you even able to envision such a terrifying notion? After all, even a seven over three pales in comparison to their understanding of the black hole that awaits them. Now that we’ve established the fear, let us turn to the element of danger. For the living human being, danger lurks at all times, in all places. He can cross the street and find himself under the wheels of a moving vehicle, he can frolic in a body of water and find himself pulled to the depths by a whirlpool, he can stand on a mountaintop in the middle of a summer hike and fall into an abyss, and he can, of course, fall victim to his own traitorous body. We are absolutely forbidden from intervening in any way! We are merely responsible for the documentation of the trees’ development, providing them with the best possible care. And not for naught do we guard the forest of family trees with such stridency. We, too, much like our friends from that other world, wish to protect them as much as possible from the many dangers that existence holds, and we, too, bow our heads in anguish when humanity brings awful calamities down upon itself or when nature strikes an unexpected blow. The devoted care we provide the trees is our effort to afford them a tranquil, storm-free existence, in the hope that in death the formerly living will arrive here with as light a load as possible. The uprooter’s job is to pick up the fallen branches and uproot the naked trees. When an uprooter takes the law into his own hands and maliciously tears branches away, he does not merely transfer an individual from one world to the other. With his own hands he uproots the living’s ability to survive in their danger-filled universe and seeds indescribable suffering among the loved ones left behind. Such a person hastens the end! I looked long and hard at the Mendelssohn family dossier and I am forced to conclude with frightful grief that each and every one of those eight family members fell prey to the type of circumstance that only strengthens my argument regarding the diversity of existential dangers.
“‘Several hours ago you asked the forest director who he thought was responsible for the death of a shooting victim. I would like for you to ask yourself the following questions: Why, despite the well-documented slackening syndrome, did you have to pull the branch to and fro several times before it gave way? Why did you encounter such stout resistance from the branch when all that was holding it to the tree were a few thin, virtually invisible fibrous strands? And what the hell do you think happens down there when you’re battling a branch up here? Not when you sever it, but when you twist it and turn it, when the soul understands the danger that awaits it and tries to overcome the dizzying distress but, to its dismay, there lives an alias in a faraway world who’s squeezing the life out of it, draining it of its powers of resistance, its last reserves of strength, its survival instinct? The alias launches a surprise attack and the soul surrenders with devilish haste. The person facing the drawn weapon, succumbs, not because he lacks any choices but because they’ve been denied him. In the first instance, he has the option of struggling and winning, wounded, but alive. In the latter one, he has no chance. In the heat of that awful moment the wretched victim loses all hope. In no way is it similar to a light severing blow, which is equivalent to split-second accidents, instantaneous death, because, in the case before us, the victim is not spared the final anguish of submission, the spasms of the soul, the fearful realization that he is leaving the only known world forever! I’m not sure you’re smart enough to grasp the finer points of branch dislocation and their direct impact on the victim because it seems clear you never fully understood the significance of the trees of life, and therefore,’ he turned to me and waited for me to finish his sentence.”
* * *
“‘We sentence you to life!’”
* * *
“Dear aliases, this is one of the few times in the history of the Other World that we have meted out the stiffest sentence of all. The alias who uprooted life will be uprooted from his world without further delay, and as we speak the guards are dragging the criminal, whose screams echo in your ears, the screams of a fearful creature who will land in the truly other world in no more than twenty-four hours, without any memory, without any knowledge of where he came from or where he’s going, adrift, without roots. He will be forced to deal with life as though he were born into it.
“And regarding the question that interests you all. As far as we’re concerned, that alias stopped being an alias the moment he denigrated the existence of others. His death was denied him. Believe me, there is no harsher punishment. I ask that you remember his story and never forget how it ended. It will make you better aliases.
“And one last confession before adjourning. I apologize from the depths of my heart for abusing your trust and allowing my human partner into the restricted areas of the forest. I violated the oath of the forest directors and am unworthy of continuing in my position. I hereby announce my immediate dismissal and the appointment of Billionandthreequarters as my successor. I’ve always hated good-byes, so I will not continue to tire you with my words. I wish all of us a good day and a brighter future. Thank you.”
34
A Comedy of Terrors
A thick, stubborn fog dampened the small murderess’s ability to think, hovering as it did from compartment to compartment in the rooms of her brain, refusing to part even when she squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated. No ray of light pierced through the cloud that bound her to her spot, planted in a chair alongside the kitchen table. When she tried to move, to rage against the cruelty of her fate, she felt stricken by a gust of dizziness, which turned the entire room into a colorful melting pot of blurry particles. She sat back down. Her eyes waded around the obstacles of several dull objects that inhabited the living room, freezing, finally, on the central object. A body drained of life, sprawled across the floor. The body of a foreign woman. In death, Marian had become that much more foreign. Or at least so thought Ann, peering at her through the mysterious fog, which intensified the fear about what she might discover when it parted. If it parted. And if she was afraid. She wasn’t. She found the murderer’s survival instinct, the urge to detach herself from her victim, funny. “Truly, Ann, truly,” she chastised herself, “survival is what got you into this mess in the first place.”
She nodded without so much as moving her head, verifying what she knew long ago, that the man of her dreams was nothing more than bait meant to keep her alive, something to clutch at just before drowning. She was a small fish begging to be eaten, a little minnow who forgot that its presence slipped under the radar of the predators as they whooshed past with an ambitious fluttering of their fins. False hope encouraged her to carry on, to drift toward the glint of the enticing hook. How uncalculating she had been when she failed to think the story through in her limited imagination: Even if the unknown creature had reeled her out of the water, did she really believe he would wrap her in his brawny arms and carry her to the promised land? What could bind her and him? Oceans languished between them.
Ann blanched when she resolved the twisted trickery of survival. Even the body by her side was of no use. In death she had denied her his acquaintance. In death she put an end to the subterfuge. The intoxicating contradiction carved a thin smile through her parted lips. In order to survive, she murdered the woman whose survival she depended on, only to discover, in the end, that survival itself is an unconvincing pretext. How distorted—she marveled at her understanding, mesmerized by the raucous discoveries that continued to shine through the foggy screen—under one set of circumstances, she had saved the woman’s life, under another, she had taken it. Her eyes drifted over the lingering fog and examined the full length of the body, passionately studying the newly revealed irony: the pottery shards around the body. She had saved her life with one vase, and with another … Was it structured, planned, or mere chance?
A dull noise from the back of the house reached her ears. She didn’t bother checking. Must be the prying neighbor’s grandkids over for a visit again, playing
with a ball. The sweetish stinging in her eyes accentuated her tiredness. She launched an exhibitionistic yawn into the stifled space of the room, leaned forward, placed her head on the table, and shut her eyes, hoping not to wake. In her dream she saw a spirited pair of swordfish dueling on the bottom of a worm-infested aquarium. The two lashed at each other in remarkable silence, the tiny organs torn from their bodies floating all around, mingling with the worms on the sides of the tank, when a pair of manicured female hands lifted the aquarium into the air and smashed it on the ground. Forest. Helicopters hovering in the sky, casting purple beams of light from three different directions all aimed at the small male figure, working out. Deserted beach. A manicured feminine hand digs in the sand. Someone’s laughing in the background, a mirthless laugh. The hand draws a dead eel from the deep hole. Then it produces a dead sea horse. A dead baby crocodile. A dead baby shark. An octopus. Dead. The laugh dies, too. A cheap lightbulb hangs from the sky above the sea; a latex-gloved hand stretches toward it, revealing in its advance a forearm clothed in a white doctor’s cloak; the fingers wrap themselves around the scorching bulb and twist slowly. Absolute darkness.
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