“Do you think she could’ve had a horse inside her?”
“What? No. How?”
“It was a dream. Unthink accordingly. Just because you don’t see them around here, doesn’t mean they can’t be somewhere else, like inside someone.”
“She ate it?”
Sono looked over at his grandpa, hoping that he’d shed some much needed light on his enigmatic dream, even if only a sliver of it; he’d be perfectly happy with that, but his presence had in an instance turned alarmingly static. His eyes were riveted on something in the distance, but no matter how hard Sono tried to spot it, even walking up right next to him to see it from his point of view, he couldn’t spot it.
“Grandpa?”
Edgar hushed him, both vocally and with a raised index finger at chest level.
“What is it?” Sono asked nonetheless and backed up slightly. By the looks of it, he seemed to have given up all nonessential functions to boost his sight, widening his eyes and hoisting his eyebrows, all the while his posture began to sag dramatically. He slumped down bit by bit until his ass hit the ground, like his wax crutches finally gave in to the heat his feverish passion exuded as a result of the emerging spectacle. A spectacle only he saw. And apparently it was stunning.
Once his form had set, neither slumping down nor springing back up, Sono walked right up to him, leaned over, and peered into his unblinking eyes, nose to nose. He even waved a hand in front of his face, but Edgar was lost, temporarily or not only time would tell.
Unsure of what exactly to do next, Sono sat down beside him, staring more or less in the same direction, and trying feebly to produce a whistle.
Quickly bored from the lack of stimulus, Sono grabbed hold of his own legs, and tipped himself over onto his back. Remaining on his back among the dirt and concrete pebbles, he stretched his legs out and stared at the defiled sky. It was a challenge to properly ascertain the distance between him and the mass presently colored a mottled, sickly brown; though he knew it hung low, at times it felt like gazing at the very fabric of the universe, an unfathomable distance away, simply because it was so languid.
He scooped some of the airborne filth up with his cupped hand and piled it on top of his grandpa’s head. The invisible adornment brought him little joy.
After a while, during which he had almost dozed off, he heard his grandpa breathing; pushing out the exhale much more vigorously than he dragged the mix of gases into him, the kind of breath one lets loose after a strenuous yet exhilarating event.
“The tree. I saw the tree again. Huh...”
Sono turned his head sluggishly toward his grandpa, the sharp pieces digging into unaccustomed parts of his head.
“You totally zoned out…”
“I had to.”
Keeping his eyes on his grandpa’s left ear, Sono raised himself laboriously, brushed the debris off from the back of his head, and then pulled his legs in to sit cross-legged next to his grandpa.
“You had to? The despotic tree ordered you?”
“No, but unless I free myself to it completely, it disappears. I wanted to Sono. But I have to be delicate. Concentration can hamper it, or destroy it. But you can’t be indifferent either. It’s a balance, I guess…”
Edgar laughed good-humoredly. Sono searched for the tree a final time, its absence neither elucidating nor debunking his grandpa’s dissolving presence.
“Was it the same tree?”
“Yes, I believe it was. And I could smell its leaves this time…”
“Really? Leaves? Fresh green leaves? What did it smell like?”
Sono watched his grandpa slowly troll the top of his eyelids with his eyes.
“I don’t know how to describe it to you…”
“Come on, please…try.”
Edgar grunted something that seemed to signify acceptance.
As the seconds passed, without any further noises from his grandpa, making space for silence to comfortably entrench itself, Sono’s excitement slowly turned itself inside out.
“Wait…how do you know it was leaves you smelled? You’re just fucking with me as usual.”
“I smell what I think it smells like. I’ve read countless books on the smells of trees.”
“Books? Do you even know how to read? Most people I know learn to read in prison…so, is there something you’re keeping from me, Grandpa? Because you haven’t been to prison, have you?”
Edgar shook his head innocently.
“Nothing worth mentioning about your past?”
“No. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Sono inhaled deeply, and when reaching the apex of inflation, he locked it in, sending an ominous stare sliding down his nose. “That’s even more alarming…” He smuggled out almost breathlessly from between his lips, before releasing the prisoner, peacefully. “You could’ve smelled your neighbor’s musky fart and you wouldn’t know the difference. Ten miles away from here. Yesterday’s grasshopper feast with an entire bottle of hot sauce. Yumma yumma.”
“It’s more about the sensation.”
Edgar snapped his fingers.
“Snap back at you too…what sensation, like massage? Then describe the delicate hands torturing you.”
“I can’t. Not even to myself, not anymore. Even if you experienced it with me, we’d describe it differently. I could spend the remainder of my life describing it to you, and you still wouldn’t be any wiser. It’s all a matter of perception. Everything moves. Your perception too.”
“I didn’t mean poke around at atomic level, just say if it was nice or not. That’s all. Keep it simple for the city boy…who didn’t grow up in flourishing surroundings like you, smelling trees and shit...”
His grandpa picked up something from the ground. “Take this pebble. Do you think you can comprehend how it feels if I describe it to you?”
“Yes, it’s a pebble. It’s not the first time I’ve seen one, Grandpa. Thanks a lot…”
“Can you really?”
“Yeah, I can. Do you want me to prove it?”
“What is similarity? Looks? You can’t be certain, and neither can I. The next time, the very next moment I feel it or look at it in my hand, the factors which we for lack of a better utilize, will have changed. It’s merely a description of the pebble. Don’t mistake it for the pebble.”
“Uh…I’d say that was wise, but then I’d be a liar. That was amazingly wise!”
Sono waited for Edgar to jump in, with anything, but he seemed to already be airborne.
“Do you even understand what you’re saying yourself?”
“Sometimes,” his grandpa responded musically.
“That’s comforting. So…is it an illusion or not?”
Edgar, his weary eyes lowered, shrugged his shoulders coolly.
“Great, thanks…”
Though Sono flicked a few pebbles away, the dejection remained.
“And don’t ask me what do you consider an illusion Sono?”
“I won’t.”
Fraught with doubt, Sono glanced at his grandpa.
“Did she feel illusory? When she was here,” Edgar asked smoothly. “Her speech, her movements; the way you responded to her presence, inside. Your hunch. Did it feel illusory?”
Rolling a pebble between his index finger and thumb, Sono froze.
“I didn’t ask any of that.”
“But you wanted to.”
“Uh…eventually, yeah…” He threw the pebble away. “Don’t dig into my brain like that, or I’ll do the same to you.”
Edgar slapped the twitching fingers Sono inched toward his head with surprising agility.
“You like her; it’s not difficult to figure out that everything revolves around her.”
“A few things, all right. Far from everything…”
Jumping from one incoherent thought to the other, Turn colored the inside of his mind once again; the trail seeped out and spread throughout his entire body, evoking sensations in colors that were utterly foreign to him
.
“Reality is not a fixed phenomenon,” Edgar said and then jiggled his lower jaw from side to side. ”Everyone sees different things here.”
“Why here?” Sono asked, his sour skepticism squishing his face, while his eyes darted across the concrete pieces with haste.
“It’s a sacred place.”
“It is?” Sono anchored his puzzlement to his grandpa’s dusty, tattooed cheek, his innumerable wrinkles expediting its grip. “Why couldn’t you have told me that before? Given me a little heads up?”
“Heads up about what? It’s sacred, not haunted.”
“It doesn’t really…inspire sacredness. Death is just a slip away with all these sharp pieces around. A little cut can mean your leg falls off a week later. It’s more like a leprosy field.”
“Go slower.”
“Na-uh.”
“Leprosy won’t cause your leg to fall off.”
Sono looked over at the broken pieces of concrete a mere pebble’s throw away.
“You’ve just grown accustomed to this desolation, because it looks like a graveyard...”
“Does it have to be beautiful to be sacred?”
“Yeah. At least not painful when you sit down.”
The shadow of a phantasm cut across his mind. Sono leapt hungrily after the crumbling tail of its logic. “So, wait…you agree that this place looks horrible?”
Edgar peered at him thoughtfully. “Hmm…”
“You do. You don’t think it’s beautiful either, you just admitted that, indirectly...”
Edgar bobbed his head from side to side as if tossing the possibility between his uncooperative brain halves.
“Stop doing that.”
Sono had seen a fellow prisoner doing the same motion for hours on end.
Watching his grandpa’s still face in profile, his skin hanging from the protruding bones like a crumpled garment, he flung away another pebble along with his interest in it.
“I could just bulldoze the whole place…flatten it all, like a bug pancake. Feed everyone. With dust!” He sliced through the air horizontally with his right hand.
“There’s no need to turn horrible like that Sono. No…that would be irrevocable. Very, very damaging.” Edgar shook his head in fearful little tremors.
“How would you like to have beachfront property, with two drops of water and dusty beaches?” Sono planted his palm flat onto the coarse ground, and looked at his grandpa, his face clutched by a burdensome wonder.
“No…don’t worry; I was just messing with you. I won’t touch your sacred leprosy fields...”
Together, in silence, they stared across the jagged gray landscape around them.
With no considerable effort, his grandpa’s recent statements sprouted before him vividly, one quicker than the next, each shoot instantly developing into a sturdy branch on his tree of disbelief. In the very space Edgar had seen the invisible tree, his own burst into bloom with a fresh clarity.
Sono gazed at his grandpa with taut eyes and brows guarding them fiercely. “Now I see…what you’re doing…” Sono nodded to himself, and produced a succession of clicks as his tongue repeatedly parted with the roof of his mouth. “I’ve caught the scent of the tree too, and I smell bullshit. Ripe as ever.” His slanted mouth hinted of an expression eager to put its teeth to use. “Since you’re a wise old man, a nail-licking, finger-sucking shaman, and a tree symbolizes knowledge, of course you see a tree. Of course, what else? As for me, I’m superficial, young and dumb, so I see a girl. You’re full of shit Grandpa. Full of it.”
“That depends on how you see it. I don’t have the precise percentage now, but–”
“No, you’re full of it. Like if that hole in the ground you call toilet was elbow deep; that’s you. It’s all over the place. You’re full of it.”
Sono waited anxiously for him to retort to what he believed to be a very sound observation.
“It merely takes on a form familiar to me,” his grandpa offered harmlessly. “I wouldn’t pick it up otherwise, in its natural form, its spiritual form. Its lack of what we’d call form. It’s beyond our comprehension. We’re very limited as a species...”
“So if I saw, uh…a dancing shoe, then I’d be a genius? Waltz, waltz, backflip, tadaa!”
“Who’s to say you aren’t already?”
“Eeeh…thanks for that insincere compliment, but you won’t be able to sugarcoat this. I’m on to you for once…you sugarfiend.”
Despite Sono’s ominous slits for eyes, his grandpa freed a cherubic little smile.
“The best thing I can do is to just sit down. Sit down on my bony rump.”
“That’s it?” Sono fired back unhappily.
“The less the better. The more I try to reach it, or get more of it in any way, it becomes something else. It disappears. Sometimes I even close my eyes, and listen to the rustling leaves, the energy running through it…”
The whole thing didn’t sit right will Sono, not at all.
“What you’re saying is that my ant brain can’t comprehend anything else but the image of a girl? You’re the one living in a cave.”
“Did we establish that she was an illusion?” Edgar slid in innocuously.
“What? You’re gonna give me a brain tumor…or something’s definitely gonna implode.”
Sono rubbed his temples, finding it remarkably soothing.
“What’s wrong with what you saw? Isn’t it wonderful? My guess is you have a romantic streak, even though you do your best to hide it.”
Halting his busy fingers immediately, Sono hoisted his eyebrows in blatant skepticism.
“It’s a good thing. A good trait to have. You’re very lucky.”
“Lucky me, I have a romantic streak that I’m hiding,” Sono said with levity, finding his assertion ludicrous. “What other barbaric feelings am I hiding?”
“It’s what makes us human.”
“Romance is what makes us human? What kind of hallucination did you have today? Are you that lonely out here?”
“Passion. Compassion. Affection. Wonder. Love. Take your pick. And no, I’m never lonely. None of us ever are.”
Sono nodded drearily, appeasing his own distrust rather than substantiating his interest.
“None of us?”
He peered at his grandpa with claw-like doubt.
“What do you think this is?” Edgar looked out over the jagged gray surroundings. “Death? Sterility?”
Sono did as his grandpa, swiveling his head lithely as he inspected the concrete.
“You left out merciless. And it’s ugly too. Leprosy fields, remember?”
“Do you feel lonely?”
“Here?”
After Edgar’s nod, Sono swept his gaze across the jagged landscape once more.
“Yeah...when you’re not around, of course. Who wouldn’t?”
“Because you’re alone?”
“Uh…what other reason is there?”
“How do you know you’re alone?”
Sono pursed his lips. “Are you trying to scare me? Are you gonna tell me this is actually a burial ground and ghosts roam these leprosy fields day and night? That means I’ve been dancing on someone’s grave…”
“Stop calling it leprosy fields.”
“Fine. Your haunted backyard. Your messy acres. Your dusty kingdom…”
Sono puffed up his chest and assumed a lordly countenance.
“You create the distance in your head. And you create the closeness too. Do you know how much empty space you’re made up of? Tons!”
“Tons of empty space? Grandpa, come on,” Sono tilted his head endearingly. “How can emptiness weigh tons? And how did you manage to weigh empty space in the first place?”
He responded only with a benign smile.
“Is it a shaman secret? Tickle a wall and it whispers?” Sono swept his gaze across the concrete landscape for a third time. “Look at all the destruction your vertical shenanigans caused. They puked their grainy guts out to the po
int that they couldn’t even stand upright…”
“You expect something from your surroundings, and by doing so, you cut yourself off. Initiate yourself.”
Edgar pointed at him with all five fingers of his hand, which was something Sono had never before seen him do. It was much more disquieting than a simple index finger pointed at him, no matter how close to his cornea.
“Initiate what?”
“A connection.”
“With this?” Sono surveyed the jagged landscape for a fourth time. “That sounds like fun, when it’s all in ruins…can I at least get a swing on my smelly tree? Or just a rope would do...”
“You decide what the tree is, just as much as you decide what I am. What Turn is. What everything is. You have tremendous powers, Sono.”
Sono took a few moments to try and compartmentalize, if not all, then at least some of his grandpa’s assertions.
“You’re saying I’m omniscient and omnipotent? Careful with what you fill my impressionable mind with…I might just become obnoxious.” Sono nodded with affected importance. “What do the other shamans think about you granting these highflying qualities to an infantile dumbass? Uh, I mean strikingly handsome boy god. Man god. Especially the wise old women...”
“They taught me this.”
“Really?” Sono erupted in bright surprise. “I was just joking…there are actually other shamans around here?”
Omitting his teeth, Edgar nonetheless made room for an impressively broad smile on his worn face.
“You’re joking too…”
“No I’m not.”
Edgar’s eyes seemed to reflect something much more colorful than the monochrome surroundings.
“The tree is life. So is Turn.”
“Wow, what an insight…”
Edgar remained quiet.
“No response? Did I just break your sarcasm gauge? I’ll give you some time to sweep up the pieces. Don’t cut yourself.”
“Life flows through the tree in the same way it flows through you and me; it just looks different to us. We have roots just like the tree, and the tree has veins just like us. They have feelings just like us too, and they can even speak to each other, through fungal networks or by releasing chemicals to the wind. Some of them even reproduce with the help of the wind. There is literally life in every breath Sono.”
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