As his voice grew unsteady and their clenched fists crowded closer, he asked himself the same question they did. It was a simple question. It’s one which a person must avoid asking too often in order to keep it sacred for the right time, for a time such as this. They asked him again, and he felt the shove to his chest, followed by the cold of the hard concrete.
“Just leave it—leave it alone,” he managed.
One of them laughed.
He looked back at it, a sapling, the height of his knee. It had a whopping two branches, one of which was cracked, broken near clean through but for a bit of the bark so that the arm swung, where the leaves were already dying. It was cracked because one of them had gone out of his way to kick it.
He would have recognized the sapling anywhere. It was an apple tree—well not yet—but it could be one day if he could save it now.
It had been five years since the grandfather he loved had died. It had been four years and eight months since his Aunt, the executor of his grandfather’s estate sold the orchard. It is one of those memories that refuse to leave him. It even grows clearer, somehow.
He was smaller then, not yet a teenager. His voice was high and nasally as he tried desperately to hold his ground.
“You are a child,” she had said, leaning over him, “You don’t know anything about owning land, running an orchard. You don’t know the cost of upkeep, let alone the taxes. Go wait in the car.”
She didn’t know what the place meant to him. She didn’t know about the walks in the warm light of autumn. Or the ones on winter mornings, where the ground crunched under their feet and the old man was stiff. She didn’t know all the things the old man had told the boy under those trees. She didn’t understand what an orchard could be to a boy, especially when a kind old man had taken the time there to shed light on the true workings of the world.
And so she said nothing when the deed was passed off and the bulldozer crashed through the fence and began to make carnage of the quiet little orchard. He watched steel topple tree in a cacophony of groaning force. He watched the men grind the bones of his sacred place. It meant nothing to them.
Just as this sapling meant nothing to these hoodlums. They ate plastic food and spoke three words. For the whole of their lives they’d known nothing but the asphalt and the sneaker game and what they had to do to be a hard man—to make it. So they reacted just so when a passing stranger, a boy their own age stopped them to defend a plant. What should he care where they step? Why doesn’t he keep his fucking mouth shut?
Now he asked them.
“Why can’t you just leave it alone?”
The same one laughed, picking his way through another bag of plastic. And then another, who didn’t laugh, who didn’t smile, stepped forward with cold eyes. The hoodlum gripped his shirt and swung for the fences. The hoodlum broke his jaw, so he rolled over to try to shield the little tree. But that was his mistake, because it reminded the brutal one what he was trying to save, and so they dragged him a foot over and stomped the little sapling flat.
The brutal one left him there. Soon, he was alone with the crushed little tree. He whispered, without moving his jaw.
“I’m sorry.”
And then he lay there, looking up at the blue sky, spotted with little wisps of cloud, and wondered where the old man was. He wondered if the trees were there with him, and then he hoped the old man would take care of this sapling and that maybe he’d get to walk under it one day.
The antennae shuddered in the dying light. It was an archaic thing, no longer necessary in the modern age. It had no purpose. It had been left there. No purpose, and yet, on this night, the noise of its rocking drove a creature from its hovel. The creature blinked its eyes at the formations in the light. The creature looked from the rocking antennae to waving branches of green falling to black. The creature closed its eyes and inhaled the air blowing in its face. It had forgotten what a breeze could be.
The creature did a peculiar thing then. It did not return indoors. It left a few of the same creatures before the flashing light inside. It watched them from the window before turning back to the waving branches, back to the formations in the sky.
The peculiar creature was struck with a peculiar feeling, one it had not known for some time. Long since it could remember, the creature had known everything. It had access to every bit of information at a moment’s glance. It took only the thought, a flick of the fingers, a bit of comprehension from the flashings on the screen and it knew. But this feeling, this feeling was from before, and somehow the creature knew no questions would be answered.
The creature left the little space. It cut its hand on the rotting fence, and took hold of the branches above. It stopped to observe the way the skin grew on these tall creatures with a hundred waving arms. The creature sucked the blood from its new little wound and marveled at the taste. The wind reminded the creature of its quest and it began to walk. It was different walking out here, with the world blowing against it. It was not a simple few steps from one room to another as the creature was used to. Instead, there was ever more to see, and the sky felt new every second, though the creature could not say what had changed.
It needed to know, so the creature left all it knew behind for the pain and the cold and the beauty ahead.
He confessed to the payphone booth every evening. Those around thought him mad. They ushered children around him, dogs too, despite their eagerness to smell the smells of the man. Having decided he was mad, no one listened to more than a word of his conversations, and so no one heard the private nature of his confessions. He told me it tickled him to watch them avert their gaze and shoulder on.
While the instinct to speak to a box might’ve been mad, I can assure you that he wasn’t. He was my friend, after all. Looking back, I would say that he needed someone to share his secrets with and he’d been betrayed too many times to trust those around him. You see I do not like those who dismiss him as mad, because to do that is to dismiss his brain, and he himself.
He was a musician devoted entirely to his music. He turned down two record deals merely for the fact that it felt wrong. He was there to play shows, to perform for the people. He lived to turn his amp on high and to feel the room. And the people he drew and those he lived with were similar folk with maybe less honor or less love of this life and eventually they cut him.
How many nights had he found himself alone? I wondered. On the street? In a jail cell? How many times had he needed a friend that lived across the country?
I do not wish, now that he is gone, to hear his phonebook conversations. To me, it is less crazy than telling all to some priest masked behind a screen. To me, it is less crazy than bottling it all up and staying beside someone you hate, someone who’s hurt you and who will continue to. To me, he is one who followed his heart.
They say he died as Poe did. I do not think it is sad until I remember his eyes and the way he smiled when an idea struck him. Such friends are rare. Such people are rare.
It is not crazy when one remembers that some are born into cities without grass where drink is presented as the answer, and the honest interpretation of life as short cannot be ignored. He told me once that he found immortality in little bits of light when his lungs were coarse in the dark clubs of downtowns up and down the coast. He told me that despite the rest of it, he was happy then.