Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  Heike looks at him, at his grey bark, at his softened grooves and ridges, and she knows she’s made a mistake. She’s made so many—running from Dr. Meyer, bringing Baum to the city, hiring Ana—and she wonders how far back it goes. Where did it start? Was there a single choice from which all her mistakes sprung? If she could change that one thing, maybe everything would be different. The answer comes almost immediately, and it makes her so sick she can barely form the thought.

  If she’d never met Reiter. Maybe if she’d never met Reiter then …

  She glances at Baum.

  “I ever tell you about the day I first met my Reiter? He was seven; I was nine. His aunt lived in the house next to mine, so he’d sometimes visit there. Once, he was visiting because the aunt was sick, and when he was shooed outside I was already there playing. So, he joined me and we played till the sun went in. Then his aunt died and his family took him away and never came back.

  “That’s the story he told me a year after we married. I didn’t remember it then. Don’t remember it now. But it makes sense it happened like that. Reiter and me, we belonged to each other from the very beginning. No bad luck or hardship or nothing can change that. Not even him dying. Those people back there who stared at you, all the people you hide from? They don’t get it. They don’t get belonging. It’s not about pushing away things that are different, it’s about finding how things are the same. It’s about finding your place. I found mine and a piece of me is still with him underground, wrapped in a sheet. Forget those people. Forget Dr. Meyer and the rest. Just worry about where you belong.”

  Baum stares unblinkingly at her, each bump on the road shaking his bare branches. Heike twists her hands on the wheel, frustrated the words came out wrong. She wanted them to make Baum feel better, to reassure him. They were the wrong words. But before she can fumble for the right ones, he reaches out and gently touches her hand.

  The forest materializes out of aether and mist. It isn’t that Heike doesn’t recognize the highway as it takes them into the woods, but that the day is late and her back is hurting from the bent spring in her seat, so everything appears slightly distorted and foreign. Trees look older than they had earlier in the day, thicker and balder, and they glare down at the truck passing at their feet as though they’ve been expecting this return. Heike leans forward, looks up at the imperfect canopy, and considers how bizarre it is that such a sparse mesh can still snare so much light.

  She has no plan beyond reaching the farm as soon as possible, driving through the night if necessary, but all of Heike’s fight drains once the truck enters the thickest section of the forest. The endless shadows overtake the truck, clawing it back as the fading day stretches time to its thinnest strand. Heike feels the drag of exhaustion slowing her movements, filling her arms with sand, and she knows she won’t be able to drive much farther. At least Baum is slowly shaking his stupor. Once among the endless web of trunks and brush he stirs, presses his face against the window, and looks intensely among the trees for something.

  If the clerk at the motel recognizes Heike from the morning, she doesn’t show it. Or, perhaps it’s a different clerk at a different place. Heike cannot be sure when every motel looks like the one before. Bored, irritated without obvious reason, the pudgy woman gives Heike the key and turns away before Heike can retrieve it. Heike staggers back to the car in a race to get to bed before the sleep hurtling towards her arrives, wondering how much of what she is experiencing is real and not waking dream. The truck wavers in the lot and she feels a chill when she sees it, sees Baum’s face behind the glass; his ashen, leafless face moulded with an emptiness Heike cannot define any better than she can her own.

  They settle in the room for the night, speaking little to each other. Baum sits by the open window, watching the forest outside while Heike sits on the edge of the bed, staring down at the wrinkled photograph of Reiter she carries with her. Between them lays nothing but worn and dirty carpet. Eventually, exhaustion comes for Heike, but she doesn’t question its source for fear of the answer. Instead she pulls the covers up to her chest and turns out the light. Baum remains in the window, so Heike watches him—his leafless branches fracturing the rectangle of sky that’s cut into the room’s darkness—and listens for his breathing. It’s slow and steady and mirrors her own. When sleep comes, and reality softens, a moment before Heike succumbs she wonders if Baum’s breathing is so familiar because it’s always only been Heike’s. A reflection in darkness. She rolls over before she can wonder more and the thought is gone.

  There is a solitary light on the highway, illuminating a small circle of road, and those few leafed branches that reach for it. Baum watches them sway in the night breeze, dancing or beckoning, he doesn’t know which. Tall and without burden, they just exist, growing forever into one another’s embrace. They belong, so why doesn’t he? Tears fill his grooves, travel a long way down until their momentum dissipates. He remembers his life in the tall grass, remembers how it nourished him. Now he slowly drifts away inside a cheap room, unable to feel that grass or those woods beyond the highway. Baum runs his splitting vines on the glass to clean a blemish, but it doesn’t move, and he realizes the spot is something else. Something more, hidden among the trees. Baum leans forward, his trunk creaking, and witnesses the trees part like a curtain. From the void between steps Waechter. He is dressed in pink now—pink shirt, pink linen jacket and trousers, all dingy to the elbows and knees—and his legs strangely bend in the wrong direction like the legs of a goat. His toothful mouth emits no sound, but laughs all the same, his head bobbing along with it. He mouths a word Baum cannot make out but recognizes the sound. He has heard it before. It is the sound of the forest, and Waechter speaks for it as he beckons Baum onward while stepping back into the darkness between the trees, fading into the tall grass where the world is its softest and most malleable.

  Heike is thrown from bed and onto her feet before she is fully awake. Somehow, it’s mid-morning, and the late day and lingering grogginess induce a vertigo she can’t fully tamp down. Baum is no longer at the window, but he is not in the bed, either. Heike checks the bathroom, then opens the front door. Beyond it is the gravel lot, followed by a narrow asphalt strip of highway with cars that whizz too fast. On the opposite side, the world full of trees. A thunderstorm of panic swirls inside Heike, but it’s suppressed by an inchoate layer of something else—something cold that keeps it at a distance where it is unable to affect her. It is a form of shock designed to help her displace her terror and keep moving, though there’s a whisper that tells Heike that it’s all she will be able to feel from now on, forever and ever. It’s the feeling of leaving the world behind.

  The first place Heike goes to is the pond, but when she arrives there is no Baum, and there is no pond. It’s as dry as the one on the farm. She looks into it, but does not see the reflections of memories, does not see Reiter or Baum or anyone else. What Heike sees is nothing. Nothing but an empty vacant hole in the ground. No, not empty, she realizes. There’s something in the middle of the dry pond, something small and bulbous. She carefully gets to her knees, ignoring any pain, and throws her legs over the bank one at a time before sliding in. When she reaches the bottom, she realizes the dried mud belies the wet muck beneath, and her feet sink five slowly-filling inches. She trudges through the mud at the centre of the dried pond and finds the fibrous pod waiting for her there, small green vines clutched around it. She bends over, her back already sore from strain and picks it up.

  Baum is gone as though he was never there. Heike spends the day walking through the woods, calling his name, but he never appears and the coldness never dissipates. It stays, seeping into her flesh, pricking her skin. About an hour into the tangle of trees she finds a small Redbud covered in pink blooms. Its branches hang low, and dangling from them are strips of dingy cloth like a shirt Baum once owned—though they could just as easily be pieces of something else.

  When she emerges from the woods the sun’s orange has leaked acr
oss the sky. Heike’s throat is hoarse from calling for Baum, and mud has caked her arms and legs. She crosses the highway without a cautionary glance in either direction, and gets into her truck. She places the pod on the empty seat beside her, using the strips of torn shirt to form a nest. The truck’s engine starts with a hollow, distant cough, and it jerks when she puts it in gear and drags it onto the road. Heike leaves everything she had behind, heads back to where she came from. She doesn’t look at anything beyond the road, doesn’t do anything but drive. There’s no reason to.

  It’s only been three days since she was at the farm, but she barely recognizes it. It’s like entering an old photograph, familiar only at a distance. Heike parks the truck and turns off the engine, and stares at the culmination of her life. She wonders: if not here, then where? She exhales, deflates, and takes the pod she remembers being much lighter into her hand. The walk into the tall grass—the grass she has not looked at, or visited, or acknowledged in years—is long, and the blades have grown to her waist. But they reach higher, catching her with barbed ends, like fingers trying to pull her close for an embrace. Heike pushes them aside, unwilling to be slowed, as she searches through the overgrowth for what she knows is there.

  A lifetime has passed, but not long enough to hide where Reiter rests. She finds his marker not by sight but because she nearly trips over it. He is where she left him, beneath the small stone monument that announces his passing. Heike kneels and touches the stone with her gnarled wrinkled fingers, runs them over the carving, uses her nails to dig out those letters obscured. She cleans the stone as best as she’s able while her heart knocks on her chest and the sweat loosens her glasses from the bridge of her nose. She tells Reiter everything, what’s happened since he left, how Baum entered her life and how he left. She empties her heart of everything, and though she expects a number of times to cry, she does not. When she’s done unburdening herself, she lifts a divot of dirt from the ground and places the seed pod underneath. Then Heike does her best to stand and tap it with the flat of her shoe.

  Heike waits, looking at what lays at her feet, and somewhere inside her the clouds she did not think would break do, and a torrential thunderstorm rushes through her. It seems never-ending until it does, and when she wipes her face she finds the ground soaked and the divot of dirt has produced a small shoot that gingerly tests the sky. She sniffles, smiles, watches it as the tiny stalk reaches upward and catches the rough cotton weave of her trousers. Watches it cling, then wrap itself around her leg. She watches leaves slowly unfurl and open to the light while the shoots grow longer, thicker, stronger, intertwining with her limbs.

  And she continues to watch as time splits the seams of her shoes and fibrous roots appear, then sink into the soil. Her skin hardens, her wrinkles deepen, become grooves. In her hair, shoots blossom, silky pink with yellow pistils. Soon, there is little difference between her and the tree that envelops her. Weather and sun rot her clothes while the two grow further enmeshed, and she utters a noise that sounds like the soft percussion of a hundred starlings taking flight at once. Heike’s final thought is of Reiter, of that time in the sunshine, their hands locked together by the edge of the pond, and she imagines Baum with them, the son they never had, flesh and blood and smiling. Before she can smile the thought is gone, and all that remains are two trees forever twisted and entwined, inseparably anchored by a grave buried beneath the tall grass at the edge of the farm.

  THE ERASED

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  SOME THINGS YOU REMEMBER CLEARLY, after but the merest glance: a spot passed on a journey to somewhere else, a woman who gazed long enough to make you wonder about a different life. Other things vanish for no reason, even though you hold them dear: a friend’s name, a favorite souvenir, a beloved’s life. Some days it feels as if none of these things ever existed at all, and you yourself, are no more tangible than smoke.

  These events recur with increasing rapidity until one day you realize: this is how the world goes away.

  On most days Roy could see all the way into downtown from his apartment window. Today there was a brownish haze as if some buildings might be burning. Downtown lay comatose, diminished, the taller buildings disintegrating into increasingly narrow threads until Roy could see ancient stretches of undeveloped land in between, while overhead the clouds dropped rapidly, chimneys and roofs and windows distributing into mist.

  He thought he heard screams. The air was loaded with too much conversation. He kept watching, anticipating but not hoping to see streams of refugees.

  He closed his eyes and did the exercise. The exercise consisted of recalling the world as it truly was: the clock-tower, that silver needle of an office building still under construction, the top of an amusement park’s giant Ferris wheel, and the upper reach of the water slide, the gleeful or terrified children momentarily trapped within. And all the buildings in between, some he could recollect now and then, and the others he invariably forgot.

  He was a committed realist, or tried to be. He did not get his hopes up. He did not look for the brighter side. His was a small life, easily countable, easily captured in a single photograph. He liked it that way, or at least he was acclimated to it. He’d never imagined more. He’d put himself out there early on as most people did, tried to do well in school, talked to women, applied to jobs and opportunities, and the things that came his way, came his way, and he had accepted that. He’d never married, but the jobs had been adequate, paying just enough for day to day, but not for what would come after. Unfortunately now he was living in what came after, and had to make do with what the government sent him until he, or the government, ran its course. But he was a realist, and so he managed.

  He finished his juice and looked around the room. Bed and table and chair, a refrigerator, hot plate, sink, a few things left out, everything else tidied away into closet and cupboard. He liked to keep the things he could count down to ten or so, never more than fifteen. More than fifteen he felt sloppy. More than twenty meant that chaos had descended, and you were well on your way to death or at least ruin.

  But where was his cereal box? It should have been by the bed to sate some middle of the night hunger. The dual use of breakfast food for snack satisfied Roy’s appetite for efficiency. He suddenly had the disturbing notion that someone had slipped into his room while he was sleeping and stolen his cereal. At least he could know for certain—it was one of the advantages of having a life that was countable.

  He looked into the trashcan beneath the sink and found the empty cereal box. He had no memory of having finished it—that memory had been erased. He would have to go out and buy another box, and somehow not think about how that memory had gotten away from him. It was one thing to get rid of some no longer useful recollection, yet another to have that memory stolen away.

  He found the piece of paper he kept as a shopping list, a “To Do” list, for whatever needed recording so that he didn’t have to count on his increasingly unreliable memory. Words had been scratched out, rewritten, and erased so many times the paper had achieved a level of transparency. When he held the paper up some words floated in the air as if stray thoughts. He could sense other things floating nearby: plans, memories, suggestions of people, hints of scenes, but he was hungry and had no time for this.

  Outside, the sun burned from a definite place, high above and slightly behind his left shoulder. It seemed unusual to apprehend the sun so specifically, as if it were a lightbulb fixed in an invisible fixture. He couldn’t remember having that perception before, certainly not with this much conviction. He had an impulse to weep. He wanted to raise his head and turn and look at the sun directly, but he’d always heard that was a very bad thing to do. Or was that an old wives’ tale? He was old enough he could probably risk some permanent damage, but he needed his box of cereal so being struck blind wasn’t part of the day’s plan.

  From here he had a broad view of this part of the city. Roy had seen this view almost every day since he’d turned fifty,
but he hadn’t always paid attention, and now it appeared broken, bits completely rubbed out or obscured by new bits. A missing building here and there, and other buildings discolored, polished, altered, the horizon line a damaged grin of aging and repaired teeth beneath a thick lip of smoky pollution. He started to reason it out, but hungry and impatient he made a dismissive wave and turned onto the next street toward the tiny local grocery.

  But he apparently made a wrong turn, and was lost a scant block or two from home. He looked left and right and slowly began to recognize individual bits and pieces of buildings, a certain tree, a certain green-painted lamppost leftover from an earlier era of electrification, but there was a blurriness where things rubbed up against each other, and right in front of him there was an enormous empty hole, enclosed by one of those floppy orange plastic fences meant more for warning than security. He walked slowly to the end of the block to get his bearings, and saw the grocery store on the next street over, and then he walked back again and stood before the gigantic missing piece. He was pretty sure he knew where he was now. The huge old Victorian which had been there all his life was gone.

  He peered over the edge of the pit. It was all raw dirt down there—every last bit of the house had been taken. An ancient drain pipe rose out of the center of the excavation like a severed root. There was a clanking of traffic sounds behind him, a certain metallic clatter that might have been a streetcar, but they hadn’t had streetcars in the city for years. He turned around. The street was empty.