Fiction
Tree Spirit / Lucy Zhang
Image by 白士李 via https///flic.kr/p/D6VenG
When I am twelve, father takes me to visit the spirit in the tree for the first time. We carry a basket of our largest, ripest oranges and tomatoes to place under the tree’s crown as an offering. Father says this is how we honor her efforts. It seems like a waste to me, though, since I don’t think the tree spirit eats or tastes. To me, she is a ghost tucked behind bark, between pith and cortex. She lives on nature’s energy, father says, which only supports my belief that she wouldn’t need food, but I say nothing back. We can’t see spirit energy in the same way we can’t see sound or each other’s dreams, but it exists because that’s how we’re alive or feel hunger as we hike up on empty stomachs. Having spirit energy means our bodies are free of toxins, father describes it. More like light-headed and half dead.
As we hike, father points to the murky, grey ocean on the other side of the mountain. My eyes follow his finger over the crowns of trees, across the abrupt boundary where grass shifts from green to yellow, wildflowers and shrubs shrivel to what looks like rotting umbilical cords. I scratch my elbow, skin dry and cracked because I forgot to apply oil. I’m aware of the burn every time my arm rubs against my shirt, but taking care of myself is not a high priority compared to harvesting crops and exploring with father. Since we are born, we are taught that our bodies come second to the spirits. As I watch the ocean waves crash into the shore, I strain my eyes, trying to see beyond the black. I ask father if there are living things in those opaque waters. He tilts his head and says not likely, the water is poisoned there. Don’t touch it.
Apparently, the dark side wasn’t always the dark side. I hear from the adults that the sky used to be the same blue everywhere, decorated by white clouds wisping like paint streaks, and the ocean used to be a dark turquoise full of salt and sea creatures who could travel anywhere the ocean reached. Not just by the ocean, but also through the air and through wires, a place people could inhabit without physically taking up space. I find it disturbing: how do you exist if you’re not physical? Isn’t that the definition of existence? How do you exist if your feet aren’t planted on earth, the wind not blowing your hair and dust granules into your eyes, the sun not scorching off thin layers of skin from above your ear? I don’t understand, I tell father. He laughs and says he doesn’t really understand either.
What happened then? I ask. I want to get to the good part. How the earth suddenly cleaved into two, how we were blessed with the living half, how the dead half lingered only a mountain range away.
The spirits saved us, father claims. They moved all the toxins that had spread to one side, concentrated the miasma you can see from here, and purified the remaining area for us to live.
I think this sounds implausible, after all, it’s too precise. I could never fold a sheet of paper in half, draw a perfect circle, cut a straight line. Beauty in the imperfection, father would say to comfort me, even though he’s always looking for perfection: in the crops, the weather, the way leaves scatter to one heap like he commands the wind. If the spirits could fill exactly half of the world with toxins and make the other half habitable, I secretly think father is trying to become a spirit, if only for their capacity to do things evenly. I do too, all actions in twos: a right brushstroke must accompany a left brushstroke; my arms must alternate lifting the basket for equal amounts of time. I like the balance.
We walk in the direction father had pointed. The girl spirit and her tree are situated right at the border. Father is already several strides ahead of me. When I look up, I glimpse his calf muscles flexing with each step. My legs feel like straw. I ask for water but father insists even water will taint me and dishonor the spirit. The first drop of water must be saved for the tree. I stagger forward, vision starry, and wonder if I can stumble to the end, if forward is the only direction, if I’m straying.
Before I was born, father was a Maker. Makers created objects from nothing. Like a farmer? I had asked. You don’t get crops from nothing, father laughed. Just like you growing taller doesn’t come from nothing. But the villagers tell me father truly could conjure something from nothing, a man unbound by earth’s rules. He is just father to me: somehow who plucks out my splinters with a needle, coaxing me as I cry, someone who eats the tomato peels that I discard because wasting is no good, someone who lectures me for trampling over chives I mistake for grass. A wizard, the others call him. The lady who always needs help picking bitter gourds calls him Handsome Man. She calls me over every week because my limbs are supple and long, getting longer, and her body has begun to curl inward like a pill bug, her arms withdrawing into their sockets, her skin wrinkling like paper crumpled to pulp. A reverse human, I described her to father and he whacked me on the head saying there was no such thing. The lady always rambled about how much work she had to do as she sat in the backyard and I wiped sweat from my brow while reaching for another bitter gourd. We used to get by sitting indoors all day, she claimed. Doing what? I asked. Digging for secrets, trying to get a bunch of individual parts working together in a Rube Goldberg mutant, manufacturing parts of the world, she said. I couldn’t see how doing any of that could make a living or put food on her table. Sometimes, if I finished early, she would slice a bitter gourd and sprinkle on salt for us to share. The best ones were the ones that turned pink on the inside, overripe by her standard but perfect for me since I loathed the bitterness. I’d snack on them as she regaled me with tales about the lies she used to tell. I listened while chewing, imagining a world where there were that many people to lie to. Now you can only lie to me and father, I remarked. Your father doesn’t create something from nothing, she told me. He’s just a very good liar.
I feel like throwing up. I feel sorry for the bitter gourd lady: she’ll have a hard time finding a replacement for me. I’m tall for my age, a bean sprout amassing cells with only a sliver of sunlight, a drop of water. Father is still trekking, not slowed by the uphill segments or loose rocks. A jagged boulder catches my toe. I fall forward, hands preparing to blunt the impact against the rocks and twigs, but at the last moment, I am able to regain my balance, unwedge my toe, shush my heartbeat, wonder if father would’ve magically appeared by my side to catch me. But his figure, his silhouette, his caricature-esque shadow stretches ahead of me, and I continue to trail, further than ever.
Most of what I know about father is from the bitter gourd lady. Since I worked at her place until sunset, I enjoyed watching the sky burn red-orange. Rayleigh scattering, the lady said. Scatters out the blues and purples. According to her, there used to be sporadic heat waves and katabatic winds fueling wildfires across forest ranges. I envisioned a vibrant ember spreading throughout the clouds, but she laughed, more like coal and ash. Father experienced it too. But he was always indoors clicking and typing and indulging that big brain of his, bet he didn’t notice, she said. I picture father sitting inside, looking up from whatever he was doing, coughing on smoke slipping through the window he forgot to close the previous night, watching fumes grow upward until they leave the atmosphere—or perhaps they never leave, they just dissipate and linger forever. I can’t envision father ignoring trees burning, all the girl spirits shrieking deep inside those trunks as heat licks their faces, but when I told this to the lady, she said I’ve known your father for longer than you have. And then she’d grow nostalgic about her “young” days. She was a city girl who could walk next door for freshly fried youtiao and steaming hot congee every morning before joining her friends on the train to school. Youtiao were magic: crispy outside, spongy soft inside, an airy breadstick. I’ve never had youtiao before, or bread. The folks who make bread live too far away, and it’s too consuming of a task to do on our own. Plus deep-fried things will kill me, father claims. We are children of nature, we have to keep ourselves clean. But the lady’s stories grew on me, and as long as no one heard us, I figured it was ok to dream.
Father arrives at the border first. I heave weight onto each foot, every step heavier than the previous. My foot swells, the nail from my big toe chipped and wedged in my sock, the sock crusty from dried blood. He waits for me to catch up.
The tree’s crown ascends with whip-like curved shoots. The bark is dark and cracks into raised plates. It’s the kind of brokenness you see with age—scraggly, subtle, unthreatening, like you can gently coax someone into death. Father stands just outside of the tree’s shade, sidestepping a leaf that blows toward him. He stares my way, but he isn’t actually looking. He used to make that facial expression a lot: when he carried me over swamps because my legs were too short, and I’d stare at his side profile while he concentrated on crossing, when he watched me return home carrying a bag of bitter gourds, when he monitored the first few times I picked snow peas—not too ripe, not too young. Always out of his frame of vision, despite being the center of it.
He hands me a few of the oranges and tomatoes after I get close enough to smell the maple. Can I eat one? I ask. Soon, he says. He waters the tree with one of the bottles we brought up. It’s not enough water to percolate down to the roots, and surely he knows that. Father nods at me. I bite into a tomato, juice and seeds squirting onto my shoes and hands. Father has always been particular about order: our thirst should never be first to quench, he says, even though it doesn’t make sense to me—if I have water, I will drink it. I lie down on the grass and suck on the tomato’s mesocarp. Father doesn’t eat anything, just stands, looking beyond the tree. I swear he’s already half-spirit. He hardly eats or rests, and though I used to think all fathers were like this, the bitter gourd lady told me he was fueled by something else. Not food? I asked. She shook her head, regret.
I sit up. Father is looking at the dark side. There’s no barrier to entering, just a clear border where plants suddenly shrivel, where leaves lose all chlorophyll. I don’t understand why he continues to stare because being so close sends goosebumps over my arms. Another maple tree stands over there. Maybe it once had the potential to be as tall as our spirit’s tree. Instead, it bends and contorts, and a single continuous crack has begun to cleave the trunk. Fungi and mushrooms cover its surface. I am reminded of ants swarming over a fallen chunk of apple.
The thing about the dark side is it has always been more concept than entity to me. Father always spoke of it as though he’d lived there, and maybe he had, back when it wasn’t the dark side. Back when it was a sprawling city of apartment complexes, horns tooting, smog sinking in the warm, dry air. Our chests were always tight, the bitter gourd lady had told me. I imagine my chest squeezed between clouds of nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide. But what’s there to squeeze out? Maybe they had used up too much oxygen, I speculate. The air was trying to get some back.
I hear familiar bird chirps, a sound I’d hear every morning when I walked to the bitter gourd lady’s home: the chirp came in stutters and I counted the seconds between songs. Father tried to teach me how to identify birds based on their songs, but I could never remember which sound corresponded to which bird. Father gave up, but at some point, I did begin to remember the distinct chirp of this particular morning bird, and I pointed it out to him every day, after which he told me your ears are like Fourier Transforms. Is that a good thing? I asked. Yes, if you don’t decompose signals so much they’ve lost all meaning, he said.
A scattering of leaves. The tiniest vibration of a branch. A bird springs out of the tree’s crown, wings beating so fast I wonder how this creature’s body could possibly be built for efficiency. But I believe father when he says nature is the best designer. The bird flies across. I expect it to drop dead as soon as it enters the dark side, its plume bled of color, its voice silenced, its wings twitching from those remaining bursts of electricity running down all the muscle nerves. Father says this is a “reflex action” and not to confuse it with actually being alive.
Instead of collapsing to the ground, the bird flies into the dull, turbid sky until I can no longer see it from behind layers of smog.
I don’t know if it will survive, and I don’t ask father. He knows too much. Father can’t seem to live with unanswered questions, but I can. It’s why I can ask questions so freely. I turn to look at father again. My face resembles his: wide, light eyebrows dust our faces like they’d fade away one day, our eyes are wide enough to fit the fat, jade pendant father keeps stashed away in his drawer, a stone confined too long without skin contact—its qi lost for good. I am not allowed to wear it. But my mouth is wider than his. It stretches when I smile, widening my face, scrunching up my cheeks, like my face is built to open and consume. Father claims I have a high capacity to take in life, but his mouth is small and delicate with a steep Cupid’s bow, and I think he values life much more than I do. I’m the one who devours fresh tomatoes before considering where it came from, what it could have been, how my body breaks it down. He’s the one who waits for an earthworm to squirm off a path before walking onward. His mouth is small. Like he’s afraid to take too much in, like he’d already eaten too much in a past life and has to spend this life repenting.
I stand up and stick the water bottle into my pocket. Father doesn’t move. I walk over to the border, wincing with each step as my blisters rub against my shoes. I stand where the bird had crossed. Close my eyes. Take in a gulp of air. Inch the toe of my shoe over: my heel pressing down vibrant strands of grass capable of standing upright as soon as I lift my weight, my toe covering a crack in the earth where several pieces of hay lie wilted. Relieved my foot hasn’t turned to stone and crumbled off, I move my other foot. Soon, my entire body has crossed over. It’s too easy. What are the spirits even protecting, if it’s this easy? From the dark side, I look back and make eye contact with father: it’s so colorful, where I stood moments ago. What are you doing? he asks, and for once, he looks panicked. I think this is the first time I’ve seen father look so fazed.
I point to the crippled tree and make my way over to it. Now that I’m closer, I see large chunks peeling, leaving behind gaping scab-like wounds. Cankers and decay pockets engulf the body, and as I rub a finger against a piece of wood, a dead limb crashes down next to me: a widowmaker—I’ve only ever heard of them—the broken bits hanging freely, subject to the wind. Father shouts, but I focus only on the blood pounding through my ears. I move closer to the trunk where it must be safer. No tree would try to harm itself, I reason.
While pressing my body close to the flaking bark, I peer into a canker. I can hear a quiet cry in there, in the dark behind the sapwood. Not the grating cries of an infant who has been left alone, trying to gain attention, but the quiet cries of a child who knows no one is listening. I pull the bottle out of my pocket. It’s only half full because I drank some of the water while resting under the spirit’s tree. The one who can afford to keep all its branches spry and flexible. I pour the water on the earth beside the deteriorating trunk. The cries fade. Father has stopped shouting too. When I press my ear to the trunk, I think I can hear it breathe.