Oh, yes; Joseph Sandeman, now president of the firm, started drinking. He also took a mistress—three times a week, to be exact. Alice was hardly home, what with all her clubs and bingo games, and when she was home they never talked, never smiled, never made love. Alice ate and watched television. Andrew sat in his room and did God-only-knew what. And Joseph...Joseph drank. And brooded. And dreamed of the sweaty, grunting afternoons with his mistress. At least he hadn't lost his knack for advertising. The firm was now listed as fifth in the nation in terms of clear year-end profit. Money was no problem. Everything else was.
As he carried the chainsaw upstairs and placed it on the back porch, Joseph Sandeman knew that all those problems which had been forced upon him would soon be taken care of. None of it was his fault. Never had been. But he would, as it seemed he always did, Take Care Of Things.
Just like a Well-Adjusted War Hero was supposed to do.
* * *
Alice looked up from her morning paper at him. "It's whose fault?"
"That damned apple tree in the back yard. I was sitting underneath it when I decided to join the Army. My father suffered the heart attack that killed him trying to pick apples off the goddamn thing. My mother died of grief because of that tree. Andrew fell from that tree and destroyed his leg. My grandmother choked to death on a pie made with the apples from that tree. I proposed to you under that tree."
She smiled, her nose in the paper, only half-listening. "I remember you'd only been home a few weeks and were getting ready to leave for college. We sang that dumb old song...what was it called?"
"'Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree.'"
"Yes, I remember."
"Laura's wedding ceremony took place in our back yard. She and Walter exchanged their vows under that tree. She's been miserable ever since. Karen was washing apples picked from that tree when John came over and apologized for hitting her and she forgave him and now they're married and he still hits her. Everything that's gone wrong in my life is because of that fucking tree. It's attached itself to my family and it won't let go. And now that it's old and dying it's trying to take my family with it. I won't allow it to happen, Alice, do you understand?"
"Did you read where they voted to raise property taxes? I think that's outrageous."
She wasn't listening. He didn't care. He was speaking for and to himself now.
"I always wanted us to be happy, Alice, but it hasn't worked out. I always wanted for us to be in love, I always wanted for us to be young and thin and attractive. But that tree has taken it all away. It's not my fault. But I'm going to fix things, you'll see. And maybe it will restore some decency to my life."
She looked up from her paper and blinked as she gulped down her coffee. "I'm sorry dear, you were saying about the tree?"
"I'm going to cut it down," he whispered, not looking at her.
"Well, you have a good time, but be careful." She rose and began packing herself into the outfit for that day. "I've got a few meetings this morning for the new cooking class and then Hazel and I are meeting some of the girls for lunch and shopping before class tonight. Andrew is staying over at the group home tonight to see if he likes it. I'll be back around ten. You've got the whole day to yourself." Then, with a dry peck on his cheek that he assumed was her version of a kiss, she was gone.
Forty minutes later his mistress was groaning underneath him in her apartment. When he was finished he gave her a savings account book with a balance of twenty-five thousand dollars and broke it off. She didn't seem hurt. He wasn't even out the door before she was on the phone with someone named Nick and talking about Las Vegas.
Then it was home. Changed into work clothes. Chainsaw in hand. Facing the tree.
Twelve feet high, all its branches barren. Only five thick limbs remained. He chose not to think about all the happy childhood memories he had associated with the beast. The chainsaw was hungry, its teeth oiled and shiny.
He let it roar and began the destruction.
Nine hours later he had the pieces stacked neatly on the front porch. All that remained of his life's frustrations was an ugly stump in the back of the yard. He'd hire someone to uproot it.
He felt good. Tired from solid hard work. Drained. Happy. Cleansed. Renewed.
He fell asleep in his favorite chair with a smile on his face. He was a better Joseph Sandeman.
* * *
Alice woke him a little after ten. "Decided against it, did you?"
"W-what? What time is it?"
"Decided not to cut the tree down after all?"
He jumped from the chair and ran to the back porch.
There it stood, no different than it looked last night.
"So it's to be this way, is it?" he whispered through clenched teeth. "Fine. You got yourself a fight."
The tree offered no response.
It only took him seven hours the next day. He ignored the howling pain of his muscles.
He'd just collapsed into his chair when the doorbell rang. Alice answered; probably the people bringing Andrew back from the group home. Joseph closed his eyes. Then Alice shrieked. Five minutes later he was holding her in his arms and listening to a detective explain how Andrew had turned up missing early this morning from the group home. His room had been destroyed and bloody. The FBI was being called in. Could they set up recording and tracing equipment in case a ransom call came in.
Two hours later, with his wife heavily sedated and several detectives and FBI men squatting in the living room, Joseph went out back and found the tree waiting for him.
After six days and no call the squatters pulled up stakes and left Joseph and his wife to their worry. Joseph had agreed to allow a tap on the phone that would be monitored around the clock for the next seven days. What would happen after that, no one would say.
He cut the tree down again that night. Then he lay in bed listening to Alice snore. It sounded weaker. He could detect the slightest dripping sound and realized that the pipes were going to hell again. If it were anything like the last time, the basement and attic would be flooded by the end of the week. But at least the tree was gone.
* * *
The next morning the FBI was back with news.
Not about Andrew. About Laura.
Her husband had turned up in a drunk tank in New Jersey covered with blood and babbling. When local police searched the house they'd found it a shambles, the walls splattered with blood. The FBI asked Joseph if he had any enemies who would want to hurt him like this. He could only think of one true enemy, and he didn't dare tell them about it.
Alice went into the hospital that night. Catatonia, they said. Shock coupled with extreme emotional trauma.
Joseph stayed up all night and annoyed the neighbors with his work. Then he drove out, rented a pickup truck, and loaded the pieces of the tree into the back. He drove out to an old abandoned strip mining sight and dumped the pieces into a pit, poured gasoline over them, and set them on fire. He stood there until the fire was gone and all that remained of the tree was ashes. Then he drove home. Parked in the driveway. Went to the sink and got himself a drink of water. Passed out when he looked up and saw what was standing in the back yard.
* * *
That night the dripping was back, tap-tapping everywhere. He couldn't find the source. He knew it was the pipes because the whole house was starting to stink.
He sat down and got good and drunk, then realized that, during all of this, Karen hadn't called once. Surely the authorities would have contacted her first, since she lived so close to Laura.
He called his only remaining child.
There was no answer.
The next morning he cut down the tree and let the pieces remain in a pile in the yard. It seemed easier that way. Then he got good and drunk again. He was still drunk when the police came and told him about Karen.
And Alice.
Both missing. Rooms trashed. Lots of blood.
"It's not my fault," he whispered.
The police asked hi
m to please repeat that.
He looked down at his shaking hands. He thought he was holding a bottle of scotch. He wasn't. He was holding the chainsaw. It was rusty, but that couldn't be because it was new. Dark, dripping rust.
He heard the pipes leaking again. Smelled the stench of the backed-up sewage. So did the police, he could see it on their faces.
He walked slowly toward the kitchen. The police followed him. He looked out the window. The tree stood strong and healthy, defiant, black-shiny with blood and shreds of tissue in the moonlight.
He knew he heard a lot of footsteps, people running, voices calling, and commotion. None of it really registered. He dropped the chainsaw and sat quietly at the kitchen table. He made himself a cold bologna sandwich, heavy on the ketchup. The two policemen with him had their guns out. He wondered why. They should be pointing them at the thing in the back yard. After all, everything was its fault, not his. It had manipulated him for as long as he could remember. But no more, never again.
And it all had started so innocently, when young war heroes were full of hope. He smiled as ketchup dribbled down his chest and began singing softly to himself: "Don't sit...under the...apple tree with...anyone else...but me..."
Not his fault.
"...anyone else but me..."
None of it.
"...anyone else but me..."
Large plastic bags, full of lumpy, warm, wet things were carried past him. Some of the pieces looked like things you might pick for use in a pie.
"...oh, no-no-no...don't sit under the apple tree..."
He was pulled to his feet and handcuffed. He stopped singing. He couldn't remember the rest of the words. But that was all right.
The tree had haunted his family long enough. Ruined everything. But that was all over now.
Except when he was leaving the kitchen he heard one of the officers say to another: "It's not even an apple tree. Any moron knows a pear tree when they see one."
Not my fault. I'm not the one responsible, he thought. I did my part, I fixed it, I left it better than I found it.
Humming an old tune to himself as he walked proudly out the door....
Redaction
Introduction by Usman Tanveer Malik
Gary Braunbeck’s stories aren’t written but sculpted. He chisels them out of darkness and shapes them with a hammer or perfect melancholy. He blows his spirit into them until they gleam with his immortal soul. “Redaction,” a story as startling as it is inevitable, is no different.
Redaction
“We can’t hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love.”
—Lori Deschene
In college he wrote a paper for a Philosophy 101 class entitled “The Lie of the ‘I,’ the Deception of All Nouns.” It was intended as a joke, a swipe at how utterly pretentious he found the professor, his classmates, and the course as a whole to be. “‘I’,” he’d written, “is at once a lie, because once you’ve spoken that word, you are no longer the ‘I’ of whom you speak but rather a representation of that ‘I,’ the ‘you’ you wish others to think of when you say ‘I.’ By speaking of yourself in the first person, you at once separate yourself from the person you are claiming to be, so what is intended as proof of authenticity is actually the most deceptive pronoun of all; nothing but a ‘he’ in disguise, wearing a phony moustache and fright wig, a ‘her’ with hair shorn short and a false beard and breasts held flat by sports bandages beneath the shirt of the tuxedo. It is no better when considering the deception of nouns, for they do nothing more than delineate a class—my chair, my car, my life—it’s a blur, a flippant label, a lazy summary, and if the ‘my’ coupled with the noun—that is, the ‘my’ that is the ‘I’ that is ‘you’—is also a misrepresentation, then the two taken together create a terminal oversimplification of how we gather knowledge, experience, and memory, the three things that are—or so we are taught—de rigueur to forming and maintaining individuality. If the ‘I’ is a lie, then so is the conceit of individuality, all of it tantamount to the total annihilation of the Self. In short, we’re all hosed.”
He’d expected to get drummed out of the class after handing it in a day late (on purpose); instead, he received glowing comments from the professor and several members of the Philosophy department, one of whom insisted on entering his paper in a national competition. He declined, feigning humility, but the truth was he’d plagiarized several key passages from papers written by his very professor several decades before. If the guy didn’t recognize his own words, it was probably because he was too damned old—but that didn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t find themselves wondering why things rang a bell. So, as it turned out, the joke he wanted to play on the professor, his classmates, and the Philosophy department, he wound up playing on himself. There was a lesson in there someplace but he was damned if he was going to go digging for it.
He hadn’t thought of that paper in years but for some reason, waking from a night’s very bad sleep, aching and taut and sluggish and grunting, dry-coughing so hard he could have sworn he saw dust fly out of his mouth, not so much rolling out of bed as crawling toward something like an upright position, he for some reason recalled that opening passage and wished, momentarily, that he could find it in him to swallow a little bit of that happy horseshit, because if the “I” was a lie, then it wasn’t “him” who was feeling so lousy.
He made his way into the kitchen, started the coffee maker. Turning on the under-cabinet mounted television, he saw the hot young comedian of the moment adapting his shtick in order to make it sound like conversation with the host of the show. The host, good morning drone that she was, knew precisely the questions to feed the comedian so that he could dazzle the audience with excerpts from his stand-up act.
“You’ve got a massive web presence,” said the host. “Doesn’t the threat of having your information hacked worry you—especially considering how highly visible you are, being a celebrity? Is something like identity theft a concern?”
The comedian’s eyes brightened considerably—you could tell he’d been waiting for the host to feed him this exact question. He cleared his throat and sat back, trying to look nonchalant. “I don’t have to worry about identity theft any longer. Mine got up and left on its own.”
It didn’t get quite the laugh the comedian had hoped for—that was obvious—but there was a smattering of applause.
The coffee maker finished brewing the morning’s fuel, and he allowed himself one large, relaxing cup before readying himself for the day, which turned out to be nothing special until his lunch break; the morning commute, fighting in the garage for a parking space wasn’t on the fucking roof, slogging through the crowds to get to his office building, and then up to the Cubicle Farm to spend the next four hours entering data and information and making sure the company’s massive website was slick and functional and so easy to navigate that a legally retarded chimpanzee with Parkinson’s Disease could find its way through the links while half asleep. Binary code, he thought. The “I” might be a lie, and all nouns might be lies, but binary code existed on another plane, where lies did not and arguably could not exist. Something coded in binary might be wrong, but it could never be a lie; its very existence was all the proof it needed of its own authenticity. A nothing-special thought to end the nothing-special morning of a nothing-special day, until it came time to pay for his lunch.
Like everything else, his lunch was nothing special; a sandwich, potato chips, a soda, and a cup of yogurt at the faux-hip café that catered to the faux-hipsters who only ate at cafés and not “restaurants.” He was standing in line waiting for his turn to pay. When he came up to the young woman at the register he smiled, handed her his check, and began to pull his credit card from his wallet, but as soon as he had the thing in his hand he noticed that his name was missing. Jesus, had he used it so much that he’d worn down the slightly raised letters of his name? He turned toward a window where there was a bright slash of afternoon sunlight glaring off
the chrome of the café décor and angled the card slightly. No, it wasn’t that he’d worn down the raised letters because there were none there. Shouldn’t there have been at least a dim ghost of the letters, a curved bump here, something that might be a middle initial here? But … nothing. It was as if the card had been printed with no name on it. He turned it over to check the strip where his signature should have been and it too was blank. Shit—he was holding up the line. He shoved the wallet and blank credit card into his coat pocket and paid in cash.
More annoyed than confused, he walked outside and took a seat on a nearby bench, examining the card again. No name on either side. What the hell? He’d call the credit card company and request a new one, tell them he’d lost this one. Simple. He’d dispose of the card properly when he got back to the office; use the über shredder that could turn a sheet of Plexiglas into powder if the need were there. He rose, slipping the card back into his wallet, and accidentally knocked loose his driver’s license that tumbled out and hit the ground before he could grab it. Picking it up, he wiped if off on the side of his coat and turned it forward. There was his face. There was the state seal. There was the license number; there was his height, his weight, and his date of birth, everything that needed to be there. Except his name.
He felt sore and unsteady and uncomfortably rigid, just as he had upon waking this morning, but now there was the added bonus of a slight ache in the center of his chest. He was too young to be having a heart attack, he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink (much, anyway), he exercised and watched what he ate, so there was no point in indulging that particular anxiety but, just to be safe, he sat down again and placed a hand against his chest and concentrated on his breathing until it felt normal. It then occurred to him that the pressure seemed to be more in his torso than his chest, and almost laughed at his foolishness; he’d mistaken a case of rapid-onset heartburn for a coronary. It was to laugh, sincerely; it was to laugh. He did then what he always did whenever he had a bit of gas like this; he pressed the side of his fist into the center of his torso and applied a slight bit of pressure. It helped a little but not like it usually did, so he did the same again, only this time putting a little more force behind it, but it still didn’t improve things. Feeling both irrational and inept, he sat up straight and hammered the side of his fist into his chest with as much force as he could without drawing attention to himself and this time felt something dislodge up into his throat. God, please don’t let him vomit in public. He opened his hand and placed it against his chest, applying pressure, and began to cough—dry, scratchy, harsh coughs that left his throat feeling raw, and with each successive attack he saw the mist splutter out of him—no, not mist, not saliva, not phlegm, it was more like … dust, and the more he coughed, feeling as if his body might collapse in on itself with each wracking assault, the more dust came out of him, encircling him in a small cloud as if he were some cowboy cliché dusting himself off with his hat after weeks out on the lonesome trail, or that Peanuts character who was always surrounded by a churning haze of dirt. He continued coughing up dust for what felt like an hour but was actually less than a minute; if any passersby took notice of this odd little noisy vaudeville, none gave any indication. That was fine by him; he didn’t like being noticed under the best of circumstances, let alone for something this embarrassing. The next wave of coughing was the worst yet, each explosion causing his body to double over and lock up, blood pounding through his temples with such force his sight blurred even though there were no tears in his eyes, and for a moment, one moment in which he feared he was about to pass out from lack of oxygen, it seemed to him that the cloud swirling before and around him wasn’t composed of dust particles at all but recurring, overlapping series of tiny ones and zeroes scrolling upward with near-blurring speed.
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