The Tree in Harvey Park
Abigail Ham
Hannah
The tree in Harvey Park is so tall now that even the lowest branches are too high for the children leaping up at it, their hands grasping at the air as their elastic legs drop and bounce like silverware on the kitchen floor into the piles of leaves. It’s evening already--frothy snow clouds pushing the sun down toward the Adirondacks--and the autumn tilt of the earth turns the light a hesitant gold, licking at the undersides of the red maple leaves as if teasing them into the air.
I slide my hands under my thighs, trying to bring some feeling back, but the metal bench is cold, pressing up against my knuckles. The little bones in my hands, cracking, miss the big, warm hollows of Cyrus’s pockets. I shimmy one hand free and tuck it in under my shirt, trying to remember how, when he held our hands to his body, I could feel his diaphragm filling with breath and his stomach swirling and his lower vena cava pulsing, as if my touch was part of his body. I would lay my head on his shoulder, eyes closed, as our words spilled over the brim of the world, filling the freezing sky with constellations no one else had ever seen. Our voices--the shuttering of air like fire where it blends into the night--and the tongues they carried wrapped around each other and hung on, fluttering in intertwined fringes toward their own echoes, until there was just one voice coming back to us. We were one mind, separate from both of our heads--our thoughts so clear and loud (mine in words and his in pictures) that they seemed to hang in the air in front of us like tinsel and Christmas lights.
There aren’t any pockets in the green coat I’m wearing now, and my thoughts remain jumbled in my head as I watch a woman buried in scarves try to pull the children from the tree. They have wrapped their arms and legs around it, becoming it, becoming bulging pockets of amber sap like benign tumors, still below the lowest, spindly branches and seeming still despite their squirming. Their voices crack in the cold and their knit hats--one a pumpkin, the other a grape--collect bits of bark and tilt sideways, reaching for more.
Scarfwoman turns away, making as if to leave. Pumpkin leaps after her, tripping over roots as he flees the shadow of the tree, and leaves Grape clinging there, bright purple and green like an unfortunate inkblot on a clean shirt.
Finally, when the others have almost disappeared into the darkness settling on the parking lot, she lets go, too, and runs.
Ron Cade
I got the call at 5:15, just as I was packing up for the day: 19-year-old male. Organ donor. No traceable family.
I grunted, remembering the last organ donor my students tried to examine. Heart out, lungs out, even the skin torn off--the whole body patched back together so poorly it looked like Frankenstein turned inside out. I almost said we’ve had quite enough of that, thank you, but then I thought at least the plastic surgery students could do some work on him, or maybe the paramedics-in-training could use him for intubation practice.
So I said alright, we’ll take him.
Hector Cade
I keep the truck idling a minute, long enough to warm my hands one last time in front of the heat vents before I plunge out into the morning. It’s 5am and the ground is covered in frost so thick it looks like each blade of manicured grass has been individually wrapped in plastic, though sharper--like glass, maybe. Like each smidge of green and silver has been cut out to fit a stained-glass window but the artist has been so careless that he let the whole pile fall off his workbench and shatter. He was more cautious with the leaves, though they’re dyed as if he forgot the edges were glass, punctured his own skin, and bled all over them.
The circle of gravel around the base of the tree is scattered unevenly on the hard dirt. Someone has stacked a tower over one of the roots, and there are similar piles here and there around the gazebo, the pond, and the edge of the parking lot. I don’t know what it is about rocks, but children seem to have an irresistible urge to move them. I don’t mind, though--this urge keeps me in business.
I hop up on one of my back tires and start loosening the ratchet straps. The white plastic buckets, full of pent-up energy absorbed from the bumpy road, set to rattling as I work. When the straps are off, I pop the back of the bed and swing the first two of the buckets down to the curb. It’s only a few yards from the road to the tree, but it feels longer and I stop to stretch under the branches, my fingertips, above my head, almost close enough to be sliced open by the glittering edges of the leaves.
I go back to the truck to get my rake, then get to work dumping and raking. The sun’s up fully now, and the ice melting out of the tree slides down my back like spring run-off on the blasted rock faces all along the interstate. This morning is a tiny spring, holding off deep winter for another spin.
Hugin turns up first, as she usually does--a big mottled boxer lumbering toward me with her nose up in the air like she thinks she’s king of something. King of big shits, maybe. I am thankful for the gravel giving me a day off from cleaning up dog shit.
Harvey Park is massive--big enough to warrant paying a full time groundskeeper--and there’s no fences or gates, so the strays come and go at will until, usually, they turn up one day in pieces on the side of the road.
The cats that slink around terrorizing the squirrels are evening creatures that don’t come out of their hiding places until after I leave and most of the dogs ignore me as they sniff out into the town in the morning, looking for scraps and sun-warmed doorsteps. They know I don’t have anything for them.
Only Hugin and Munin, the two strangest dogs in the world, acknowledge my presence like some kind of dawn-hour ritual.
Hugin turns up first, like I said, and sits for awhile with her head cocked, stumpy tail twitching to the rhythm of a song too distant for human ears. She follows me to the truck as I go to grab another two buckets, and follows me back, nosing around in the new gravel, disturbing the patterns of my rake. I ask her nicely to go find a butt to Then Munin comes, a black pharaoh hound melting out of the melting frost, bounding toward us on narrow, bow-kneed legs. She stops when she sees me working, and turns her red eyes up to the red leaves. In a trance, she walks in a slow circle around the tree, peering down at the four-pronged roads I’ve drawn in the gravel, then up again at the leaves like red hands leaping for the sky and falling short. One shivers in the wind and sweeps down toward her. She watches as if she knew it was coming--as if she’d seen the whole scene before.
Hugin welcomes her with a rumbling ruff. Munin nods her long face in response, ears tilting like a low bow. They lift their noses together and drink in the dawn.
I suspect this greeting passes between them every morning--I’ve seen it dozens of times--but now it seems eerie, as if they know something I don’t. Superstitiously--stupidly--I feel as if I’ve broken something, putting these rocks here--like I’ve changed the speed of the planet.
Ron Cade
I got the call at 6, when I was driving home, pulled over by the side of the road.
“Hello?” I had my thumb on the red button, waiting for a robotic voice to tempt me, but the voice is a living one: female, young and trembling. No caller ID.
“Is this Professor Cade?”
“Speaking.”
And then she asked about Cyrus, which was how I learned his name.
I looked down at the empty coaster on my desk where my son used to leave his Yankees mug. I still haven’t been able to put anything else there.
Lem
In the hospital, all they would tell me was “John Doe” this and “John Doe” that. They said he was nineteen or twenty (like me), physically fit (not at all like me), and probably died in a car accident.
Probably died.
Died.
There is a pair of lungs in my body that once breathed for a guy who lived--a guy who must have read books and eaten food, like I do, who probably went to parties and probably played on a basketball team, like I will never be able to do, who sang in the shower sometimes and cut himself the first time he tried to shave and danced with a girl at prom and counted the days to Christmas or his birthday and had a goldfish once and plans and a garden, maybe--a guy who had nightmares and wet dreams and used to wake up every morning just like anyone else. A guy who died.
Then for a minute our lungs were just lungs. His body just body.
And then my body was breathing and his body was burning, and he was buried under this tree and I was waking up, just like anyone else.
There’s always a risk with transplants that the body will notice that the organ doesn’t belong and sic the whole immune system on it, even though it’s a completely innocent intruder who is just trying to keep you alive. It’s called transplant rejection.
My body didn’t do that, though. My body pumped those new lungs like they were flesh of my flesh. Right now they’re filling up with afternoon-sunset air. Shadow-of-a-red-maple air. I settle in sort of awkwardly on the curb, jamming my hands into my jacket pockets. It’s cold and I drove a long way pretty groggily, thinking about everything and nothing all at once.
Last month when I saw the picture in the paper, I knew today would be my best chance to come see the tree alone.
Mom has calmed down a bit since the surgery--before, she always acted like finding me a new beautiful set of lungs was her personal mission--but she still hesitates to leave me alone, even for an afternoon, making this weekend unprecedented.
It took her forever to get out of the house, reminding me where all the food is--as if I don’t know--and making me promise again not to have anyone over. As if I know anyone. I wonder what most parents of teenagers would be worried about, leaving them alone in the house for two days. A party? Sex?
I left an hour after Mom did, driving north in a daze with google maps directing until “your destination is on the right.” There’s something weird about driving alone, especially when you are not legally licensed to do so and especially especially when you are thinking but also not thinking about the picture of that tree in the paper that is watching over the ashes of a body, maybe even feeding on the calcium or potassium or whatever that a body becomes when it stops being a body.
I arrived on the wrong side of the park and had to walk through the soggy ground between the pond and the gazebo before I could even see the tree, but then there it was--brilliant against the sky.
I circled it, peering up at the leaves, then down at the earth--at the perfect lines traced into the gravel around the base--once or twice, before sitting down to wait.
The road on this side of the park is dirt and rugged, like the one we used to drive out to my grandparents’ house in Vermont. The concrete curb seems out of place, sort of like me, filling in this gap between dewy grass and bumpy road, this gap where nothing really belongs.
The sun has started to go down when a black flicker on my periphery stirs me out of frozen contemplation. I straighten my legs, the stiff denim of my jeans resisting motion in the cold, and wring my hands, trying to warm them. My eyes go to the empty park bench first, as if expecting someone unseen to rise from it and stretch, then they trace the flicker:
a dog--if you can call the creature that--passes ghost-like through the shrubs around the gazebo. She’s the height of a doorknob easily, and her legs bow out and back like they can’t quite decide which way to propel her. Her waist is round and narrow like a greyhound’s and her rib cage is huge. I can imagine her lungs pumping like crazy.
As she runs toward the tree, her spine stays flat, almost as if she’s rolling more than running--rolling like clouds when the first snow’s coming.
Then, behind her, there’s this stocky boxer, not sleek and phantom like the first, but beautiful like that bronze cast of Aurelius on the capitoline hill: dark and even and totally assured, looking out at the world with still eyes as if he already knows how it all ends.
When Mom was still in finding-me-new-lungs mode and I was still probably going to die pretty soon, we got one of those charity trips for sick kids. I let my Mom take me to Rome, because it’s where she met my dad and she hadn’t been back since and she loves Rome, anyway, and turns out I kind of love it, too, even though I would have been a terrible Roman; from what I can tell, they were all pretty desperate to leave behind a giant arch with their name on it, or a thousand sculptures of their lovers, or a hundred of themselves. I cannot think of a legacy more futile than sculpture.
I don’t know exactly what I believe, but I know that even Galatea--that sculpture who came to life--was just a body until some god breathed on her. I wonder what she thought when she woke up.
The ashes under this tree are the opposite of all that useless Roman preservation; all the marble has been burned away and what remains is what the emperors couldn’t capture with force or with art: the space our brains make over the dead when we remember them with our breath--with every breath.
I clap my hands as the dogs get closer--I know there’s not a body down there, but the thought of animals sniffing around makes my skin crawl anyway.
I wish suddenly that Cyrus’ ashes had something to protect them. Maybe one of those porphyry sarcophagi like Helena’s--the mother of Constantine. The black dog wanders closer, abandoning her circuit of the tree to stop and stare at me.
I can feel my eyes glazing over as I remember looking at the sarcophagus of Helena with my mother, its purple surface gleaming under the museum lights, the relief horsemen frozen in the moment of their rearing and crashing, the stone so thick and sure I could almost imagine a body lying there for quiet 1600 years. She didn’t, of course--Helena, I mean. Someone took her out, so long ago that nobody knows where she went or how she got there. I don’t think I believe that the world is one big loop of energy, but I like the idea that Helena maybe became part of the earth somewhere--earth that feeds all sorts of living things now.
I wonder if the earth gets tired like I do--like I am.
The tour guide at the museum told us the sarcophagus was empty now, but he was wrong. Those porphyry walls held space for a dead woman.
The boxer slinks back toward the gazebo. It will be fully dark soon. The black dog comes so close her nose is almost touching my feet, which are stretched out toward the tree.
I remember the newspaper clipping, still folded in my pocket.
Cyrus. I’ve been saying his name since I learned it. Cyrus’ body. Cyrus’ lung. Cyrus’ death.
I’m so tired.
Hector Cade
The ceremony is short. Through the misty rain rinsing my windshield, I watch the little knot of medical students retreat under brightly colored umbrellas, disrupting the otherwise-somber scene. It’s been a year since I was one of them, trying to find closure after seven weeks of dissecting a body. A body. Someone’s body.
Mine was a guy. Nineteen years old. Fracture in his cervical spine from some kind of car accident. He was an organ donor and his lungs had been taken. The scars already etched into his body didn’t make the first cut any easier.
Cadaver lab was always in the mornings, so I fled to the music school practice rooms in the afternoon. I would sit at a piano and watch my fingers work until I couldn’t take it any longer and gave in, letting myself play. Of all things to be squeamish about, hands aren’t a very popular choice; one of my classmates hated the way skin comes apart, another couldn’t get over the quantity of fluid that bodies produce, and another nearly cried every time he saw the face.
But for me it was the hands. All the anatomy textbooks in the world couldn’t help me explain why my hands could still make music when his--whoever he was, whatever they once had done--couldn’t do a single thing but lie there limp for me to examine.
I drive back to Harvey Park slowly, telling myself it's because the road could be wet. My hands on the steering wheel, my hands on the door handle, my hands holding the plastic bag and the little shovel as I pick up dog shit by the gazebo.
My hands rubbing each other, trying to stay warm. My hands climbing into my armpits when that doesn’t work.
My hand reaching out to shake the shoulder of the boy asleep under the tree, Munin asleep like a blanket on top of him.
Ron Cade
I get the call as I’m leaving my office. The medical students have just finished their first cadaver lab. They have a funeral (of sorts) to attend, and I have the day off. But anyway, the call: male. early teens. breathing but unresponsive. Possible hypothermia.
The call is from my son. My son who I haven’t seen in almost a year, since he walked out of my lab and out of the university and out of the future we’d both been planning since he could talk. He told me he had to do something with his hands--something that did not involve a scalpel.
I tell him to call 911. Then I tell him I will be there before the ambulance. I tell him I will be there as I slam my car door and as I back out of the university parking lot and as I swing onto the freeway.
I tell him I’ll be right there when I can see him from across the park holding this boy in his arms. And there is a beautiful, beautiful dog curled around both of them, and a woman is kneeling there, too, whose voice I know at once as the one who asked for the ashes when Hector was finished with the body--the one who asked for this tree.
Hannah
I come back in the morning, early. It’s Cyrus’ birthday and absolutely no one remembers. His dad left before he was born. His mom died while he was in high school. His uncle moved to another country and never came back.
But he was born today--born a tiny, slimy body gasping its first independent breaths in the same country hospital where he would die--grown and broken and not gasping at the air anymore, not even sipping at it.
He used to run all the way to the lake every morning. He used to wake and lace up worn sneakers and run in his sweatpants and cotton t-shirt to the lakefront to watch the first ferry leave.
The first night I spent in his bed, I woke up alone. The imprint of his body on the mattress and the smell of his sweat in the sheets held space for him--anchoring his presence to the room--until he came back. And he did come back. He ran back from the ferry dock and stepped into that space carved out of air and when he spoke I don’t know if it came out in words or if his breath was whispered directly to mine, like sugaring smoke joining a march night.
I walk the long way through the park, watching the groundskeeper cleaning near the gazebo as I hike across the swampy ground between the parking lot and the pond. He’s gone by the time I get there, but a brown-and-gold dog (some kind of bulldog, I think, but taller) is standing guard at the gazebo steps.
He gets up as I walk by, as if he’d been waiting for this chance, and I follow him around the gazebo. From the other side, I can see the tree.
And I can see the groundskeeper, speaking into his phone, which is sitting on the ground, between the front paws of another dog--this one tall and black.
Draped over the groundskeeper’s lap there’s a boy whose lips part as he breathes and whose eyelids flutter in time with his heartbeat.
The brown dog and I move closer, until the groundskeeper looks up. Then he is beckoning to us and I am joining him on the ground, taking the phone from the black dog to text our location to the speaker on the end who is saying, again and again, that he will be there--that he will be right there--his staticy voice carving out a place for him long before he arrives.
I feel for the boy’s pulse as if I know what I’m doing and find it almost by accident. The black dog stands by my shoulder while I listen to the easy rhythm. I remember the woman who found Cyrus on the riverbank. I wonder if she felt his heartbeat under her fingertips as it flickered out.
The groundskeeper puts his hand over mine, trying to feel what I feel, and we both seem to know at the same moment that this boy is going to be okay. The boy’s breath hangs in the air, hot against the cold like sugaring steam, and settles like frost on the groundskeeper’s hand which, for a moment, numb in the cold, is my hand, too.
He opens his eyes and wakes up into the space the shadow of the tree makes over the earth--the space between our hands.
Abigail Ham
Hannah
The tree in Harvey Park is so tall now that even the lowest branches are too high for the children leaping up at it, their hands grasping at the air as their elastic legs drop and bounce like silverware on the kitchen floor into the piles of leaves. It’s evening already--frothy snow clouds pushing the sun down toward the Adirondacks--and the autumn tilt of the earth turns the light a hesitant gold, licking at the undersides of the red maple leaves as if teasing them into the air.
I slide my hands under my thighs, trying to bring some feeling back, but the metal bench is cold, pressing up against my knuckles. The little bones in my hands, cracking, miss the big, warm hollows of Cyrus’s pockets. I shimmy one hand free and tuck it in under my shirt, trying to remember how, when he held our hands to his body, I could feel his diaphragm filling with breath and his stomach swirling and his lower vena cava pulsing, as if my touch was part of his body. I would lay my head on his shoulder, eyes closed, as our words spilled over the brim of the world, filling the freezing sky with constellations no one else had ever seen. Our voices--the shuttering of air like fire where it blends into the night--and the tongues they carried wrapped around each other and hung on, fluttering in intertwined fringes toward their own echoes, until there was just one voice coming back to us. We were one mind, separate from both of our heads--our thoughts so clear and loud (mine in words and his in pictures) that they seemed to hang in the air in front of us like tinsel and Christmas lights.
There aren’t any pockets in the green coat I’m wearing now, and my thoughts remain jumbled in my head as I watch a woman buried in scarves try to pull the children from the tree. They have wrapped their arms and legs around it, becoming it, becoming bulging pockets of amber sap like benign tumors, still below the lowest, spindly branches and seeming still despite their squirming. Their voices crack in the cold and their knit hats--one a pumpkin, the other a grape--collect bits of bark and tilt sideways, reaching for more.
Scarfwoman turns away, making as if to leave. Pumpkin leaps after her, tripping over roots as he flees the shadow of the tree, and leaves Grape clinging there, bright purple and green like an unfortunate inkblot on a clean shirt.
Finally, when the others have almost disappeared into the darkness settling on the parking lot, she lets go, too, and runs.
Ron Cade
I got the call at 5:15, just as I was packing up for the day: 19-year-old male. Organ donor. No traceable family.
I grunted, remembering the last organ donor my students tried to examine. Heart out, lungs out, even the skin torn off--the whole body patched back together so poorly it looked like Frankenstein turned inside out. I almost said we’ve had quite enough of that, thank you, but then I thought at least the plastic surgery students could do some work on him, or maybe the paramedics-in-training could use him for intubation practice.
So I said alright, we’ll take him.
Hector Cade
I keep the truck idling a minute, long enough to warm my hands one last time in front of the heat vents before I plunge out into the morning. It’s 5am and the ground is covered in frost so thick it looks like each blade of manicured grass has been individually wrapped in plastic, though sharper--like glass, maybe. Like each smidge of green and silver has been cut out to fit a stained-glass window but the artist has been so careless that he let the whole pile fall off his workbench and shatter. He was more cautious with the leaves, though they’re dyed as if he forgot the edges were glass, punctured his own skin, and bled all over them.
The circle of gravel around the base of the tree is scattered unevenly on the hard dirt. Someone has stacked a tower over one of the roots, and there are similar piles here and there around the gazebo, the pond, and the edge of the parking lot. I don’t know what it is about rocks, but children seem to have an irresistible urge to move them. I don’t mind, though--this urge keeps me in business.
I hop up on one of my back tires and start loosening the ratchet straps. The white plastic buckets, full of pent-up energy absorbed from the bumpy road, set to rattling as I work. When the straps are off, I pop the back of the bed and swing the first two of the buckets down to the curb. It’s only a few yards from the road to the tree, but it feels longer and I stop to stretch under the branches, my fingertips, above my head, almost close enough to be sliced open by the glittering edges of the leaves.
I go back to the truck to get my rake, then get to work dumping and raking. The sun’s up fully now, and the ice melting out of the tree slides down my back like spring run-off on the blasted rock faces all along the interstate. This morning is a tiny spring, holding off deep winter for another spin.
Hugin turns up first, as she usually does--a big mottled boxer lumbering toward me with her nose up in the air like she thinks she’s king of something. King of big shits, maybe. I am thankful for the gravel giving me a day off from cleaning up dog shit.
Harvey Park is massive--big enough to warrant paying a full time groundskeeper--and there’s no fences or gates, so the strays come and go at will until, usually, they turn up one day in pieces on the side of the road.
The cats that slink around terrorizing the squirrels are evening creatures that don’t come out of their hiding places until after I leave and most of the dogs ignore me as they sniff out into the town in the morning, looking for scraps and sun-warmed doorsteps. They know I don’t have anything for them.
Only Hugin and Munin, the two strangest dogs in the world, acknowledge my presence like some kind of dawn-hour ritual.
Hugin turns up first, like I said, and sits for awhile with her head cocked, stumpy tail twitching to the rhythm of a song too distant for human ears. She follows me to the truck as I go to grab another two buckets, and follows me back, nosing around in the new gravel, disturbing the patterns of my rake. I ask her nicely to go find a butt to Then Munin comes, a black pharaoh hound melting out of the melting frost, bounding toward us on narrow, bow-kneed legs. She stops when she sees me working, and turns her red eyes up to the red leaves. In a trance, she walks in a slow circle around the tree, peering down at the four-pronged roads I’ve drawn in the gravel, then up again at the leaves like red hands leaping for the sky and falling short. One shivers in the wind and sweeps down toward her. She watches as if she knew it was coming--as if she’d seen the whole scene before.
Hugin welcomes her with a rumbling ruff. Munin nods her long face in response, ears tilting like a low bow. They lift their noses together and drink in the dawn.
I suspect this greeting passes between them every morning--I’ve seen it dozens of times--but now it seems eerie, as if they know something I don’t. Superstitiously--stupidly--I feel as if I’ve broken something, putting these rocks here--like I’ve changed the speed of the planet.
Ron Cade
I got the call at 6, when I was driving home, pulled over by the side of the road.
“Hello?” I had my thumb on the red button, waiting for a robotic voice to tempt me, but the voice is a living one: female, young and trembling. No caller ID.
“Is this Professor Cade?”
“Speaking.”
And then she asked about Cyrus, which was how I learned his name.
I looked down at the empty coaster on my desk where my son used to leave his Yankees mug. I still haven’t been able to put anything else there.
Lem
In the hospital, all they would tell me was “John Doe” this and “John Doe” that. They said he was nineteen or twenty (like me), physically fit (not at all like me), and probably died in a car accident.
Probably died.
Died.
There is a pair of lungs in my body that once breathed for a guy who lived--a guy who must have read books and eaten food, like I do, who probably went to parties and probably played on a basketball team, like I will never be able to do, who sang in the shower sometimes and cut himself the first time he tried to shave and danced with a girl at prom and counted the days to Christmas or his birthday and had a goldfish once and plans and a garden, maybe--a guy who had nightmares and wet dreams and used to wake up every morning just like anyone else. A guy who died.
Then for a minute our lungs were just lungs. His body just body.
And then my body was breathing and his body was burning, and he was buried under this tree and I was waking up, just like anyone else.
There’s always a risk with transplants that the body will notice that the organ doesn’t belong and sic the whole immune system on it, even though it’s a completely innocent intruder who is just trying to keep you alive. It’s called transplant rejection.
My body didn’t do that, though. My body pumped those new lungs like they were flesh of my flesh. Right now they’re filling up with afternoon-sunset air. Shadow-of-a-red-maple air. I settle in sort of awkwardly on the curb, jamming my hands into my jacket pockets. It’s cold and I drove a long way pretty groggily, thinking about everything and nothing all at once.
Last month when I saw the picture in the paper, I knew today would be my best chance to come see the tree alone.
Mom has calmed down a bit since the surgery--before, she always acted like finding me a new beautiful set of lungs was her personal mission--but she still hesitates to leave me alone, even for an afternoon, making this weekend unprecedented.
It took her forever to get out of the house, reminding me where all the food is--as if I don’t know--and making me promise again not to have anyone over. As if I know anyone. I wonder what most parents of teenagers would be worried about, leaving them alone in the house for two days. A party? Sex?
I left an hour after Mom did, driving north in a daze with google maps directing until “your destination is on the right.” There’s something weird about driving alone, especially when you are not legally licensed to do so and especially especially when you are thinking but also not thinking about the picture of that tree in the paper that is watching over the ashes of a body, maybe even feeding on the calcium or potassium or whatever that a body becomes when it stops being a body.
I arrived on the wrong side of the park and had to walk through the soggy ground between the pond and the gazebo before I could even see the tree, but then there it was--brilliant against the sky.
I circled it, peering up at the leaves, then down at the earth--at the perfect lines traced into the gravel around the base--once or twice, before sitting down to wait.
The road on this side of the park is dirt and rugged, like the one we used to drive out to my grandparents’ house in Vermont. The concrete curb seems out of place, sort of like me, filling in this gap between dewy grass and bumpy road, this gap where nothing really belongs.
The sun has started to go down when a black flicker on my periphery stirs me out of frozen contemplation. I straighten my legs, the stiff denim of my jeans resisting motion in the cold, and wring my hands, trying to warm them. My eyes go to the empty park bench first, as if expecting someone unseen to rise from it and stretch, then they trace the flicker:
a dog--if you can call the creature that--passes ghost-like through the shrubs around the gazebo. She’s the height of a doorknob easily, and her legs bow out and back like they can’t quite decide which way to propel her. Her waist is round and narrow like a greyhound’s and her rib cage is huge. I can imagine her lungs pumping like crazy.
As she runs toward the tree, her spine stays flat, almost as if she’s rolling more than running--rolling like clouds when the first snow’s coming.
Then, behind her, there’s this stocky boxer, not sleek and phantom like the first, but beautiful like that bronze cast of Aurelius on the capitoline hill: dark and even and totally assured, looking out at the world with still eyes as if he already knows how it all ends.
When Mom was still in finding-me-new-lungs mode and I was still probably going to die pretty soon, we got one of those charity trips for sick kids. I let my Mom take me to Rome, because it’s where she met my dad and she hadn’t been back since and she loves Rome, anyway, and turns out I kind of love it, too, even though I would have been a terrible Roman; from what I can tell, they were all pretty desperate to leave behind a giant arch with their name on it, or a thousand sculptures of their lovers, or a hundred of themselves. I cannot think of a legacy more futile than sculpture.
I don’t know exactly what I believe, but I know that even Galatea--that sculpture who came to life--was just a body until some god breathed on her. I wonder what she thought when she woke up.
The ashes under this tree are the opposite of all that useless Roman preservation; all the marble has been burned away and what remains is what the emperors couldn’t capture with force or with art: the space our brains make over the dead when we remember them with our breath--with every breath.
I clap my hands as the dogs get closer--I know there’s not a body down there, but the thought of animals sniffing around makes my skin crawl anyway.
I wish suddenly that Cyrus’ ashes had something to protect them. Maybe one of those porphyry sarcophagi like Helena’s--the mother of Constantine. The black dog wanders closer, abandoning her circuit of the tree to stop and stare at me.
I can feel my eyes glazing over as I remember looking at the sarcophagus of Helena with my mother, its purple surface gleaming under the museum lights, the relief horsemen frozen in the moment of their rearing and crashing, the stone so thick and sure I could almost imagine a body lying there for quiet 1600 years. She didn’t, of course--Helena, I mean. Someone took her out, so long ago that nobody knows where she went or how she got there. I don’t think I believe that the world is one big loop of energy, but I like the idea that Helena maybe became part of the earth somewhere--earth that feeds all sorts of living things now.
I wonder if the earth gets tired like I do--like I am.
The tour guide at the museum told us the sarcophagus was empty now, but he was wrong. Those porphyry walls held space for a dead woman.
The boxer slinks back toward the gazebo. It will be fully dark soon. The black dog comes so close her nose is almost touching my feet, which are stretched out toward the tree.
I remember the newspaper clipping, still folded in my pocket.
Cyrus. I’ve been saying his name since I learned it. Cyrus’ body. Cyrus’ lung. Cyrus’ death.
I’m so tired.
Hector Cade
The ceremony is short. Through the misty rain rinsing my windshield, I watch the little knot of medical students retreat under brightly colored umbrellas, disrupting the otherwise-somber scene. It’s been a year since I was one of them, trying to find closure after seven weeks of dissecting a body. A body. Someone’s body.
Mine was a guy. Nineteen years old. Fracture in his cervical spine from some kind of car accident. He was an organ donor and his lungs had been taken. The scars already etched into his body didn’t make the first cut any easier.
Cadaver lab was always in the mornings, so I fled to the music school practice rooms in the afternoon. I would sit at a piano and watch my fingers work until I couldn’t take it any longer and gave in, letting myself play. Of all things to be squeamish about, hands aren’t a very popular choice; one of my classmates hated the way skin comes apart, another couldn’t get over the quantity of fluid that bodies produce, and another nearly cried every time he saw the face.
But for me it was the hands. All the anatomy textbooks in the world couldn’t help me explain why my hands could still make music when his--whoever he was, whatever they once had done--couldn’t do a single thing but lie there limp for me to examine.
I drive back to Harvey Park slowly, telling myself it's because the road could be wet. My hands on the steering wheel, my hands on the door handle, my hands holding the plastic bag and the little shovel as I pick up dog shit by the gazebo.
My hands rubbing each other, trying to stay warm. My hands climbing into my armpits when that doesn’t work.
My hand reaching out to shake the shoulder of the boy asleep under the tree, Munin asleep like a blanket on top of him.
Ron Cade
I get the call as I’m leaving my office. The medical students have just finished their first cadaver lab. They have a funeral (of sorts) to attend, and I have the day off. But anyway, the call: male. early teens. breathing but unresponsive. Possible hypothermia.
The call is from my son. My son who I haven’t seen in almost a year, since he walked out of my lab and out of the university and out of the future we’d both been planning since he could talk. He told me he had to do something with his hands--something that did not involve a scalpel.
I tell him to call 911. Then I tell him I will be there before the ambulance. I tell him I will be there as I slam my car door and as I back out of the university parking lot and as I swing onto the freeway.
I tell him I’ll be right there when I can see him from across the park holding this boy in his arms. And there is a beautiful, beautiful dog curled around both of them, and a woman is kneeling there, too, whose voice I know at once as the one who asked for the ashes when Hector was finished with the body--the one who asked for this tree.
Hannah
I come back in the morning, early. It’s Cyrus’ birthday and absolutely no one remembers. His dad left before he was born. His mom died while he was in high school. His uncle moved to another country and never came back.
But he was born today--born a tiny, slimy body gasping its first independent breaths in the same country hospital where he would die--grown and broken and not gasping at the air anymore, not even sipping at it.
He used to run all the way to the lake every morning. He used to wake and lace up worn sneakers and run in his sweatpants and cotton t-shirt to the lakefront to watch the first ferry leave.
The first night I spent in his bed, I woke up alone. The imprint of his body on the mattress and the smell of his sweat in the sheets held space for him--anchoring his presence to the room--until he came back. And he did come back. He ran back from the ferry dock and stepped into that space carved out of air and when he spoke I don’t know if it came out in words or if his breath was whispered directly to mine, like sugaring smoke joining a march night.
I walk the long way through the park, watching the groundskeeper cleaning near the gazebo as I hike across the swampy ground between the parking lot and the pond. He’s gone by the time I get there, but a brown-and-gold dog (some kind of bulldog, I think, but taller) is standing guard at the gazebo steps.
He gets up as I walk by, as if he’d been waiting for this chance, and I follow him around the gazebo. From the other side, I can see the tree.
And I can see the groundskeeper, speaking into his phone, which is sitting on the ground, between the front paws of another dog--this one tall and black.
Draped over the groundskeeper’s lap there’s a boy whose lips part as he breathes and whose eyelids flutter in time with his heartbeat.
The brown dog and I move closer, until the groundskeeper looks up. Then he is beckoning to us and I am joining him on the ground, taking the phone from the black dog to text our location to the speaker on the end who is saying, again and again, that he will be there--that he will be right there--his staticy voice carving out a place for him long before he arrives.
I feel for the boy’s pulse as if I know what I’m doing and find it almost by accident. The black dog stands by my shoulder while I listen to the easy rhythm. I remember the woman who found Cyrus on the riverbank. I wonder if she felt his heartbeat under her fingertips as it flickered out.
The groundskeeper puts his hand over mine, trying to feel what I feel, and we both seem to know at the same moment that this boy is going to be okay. The boy’s breath hangs in the air, hot against the cold like sugaring steam, and settles like frost on the groundskeeper’s hand which, for a moment, numb in the cold, is my hand, too.
He opens his eyes and wakes up into the space the shadow of the tree makes over the earth--the space between our hands.
