on
1/4/2003
Lilliam Carp was a thriving tree
Gnarled and windswept and old
Add seventy feet and this bonzai would be
A majesty to behold.
McGower and Hart was an old building left in the midst of newer skyscrapers, like the yellow stalks of last year's heartier annuals. She grew barely halfway to the canopy of the downtown, but had the good fortune of a park and the root of an avenue to keep her south face in the sun. It was on this south side, behind a row of windows old-fashioned enough to not only open, but open onto a moulded window ledge, that the home office of an architecture firm lived.
Fash (not his name, but what they called him) had been enthralled by the new girl at the office since, on her first day with the firm, he'd held the door downstairs for both her and a cloud of leaves that had followed her in on the tricky autumn wind. She had gnarled hair the color of wood, and skin so white it was translucent. Blue rivers ran behind the corners of her temples. Whether wearing a thick, baggy sweater because it was winter, or a small, fitted sweater because it was summer, she had the aura of a persistent sapling that kept getting plowed into a snowbank each year, only to come back just as strong in the summer.
Every day, for her, was a broken component in her computer, a fight with the photocopier, or a bump from an electric door that had pretended not to see her. The simple and unthreatening charm of her poor luck with machinery was what brought her down to Fash's level, and grew a simple friendship between them.
She had followed him back to his desk one day, as they tried to fix her lamp, and spotted his trees. Millions of trees. Redwoods in correction fluid and white pines in correction ink. Gardens moulded to houses, or perhaps houses moulded to gardens. Tree houses and house trees, and old olives snaking their roots down the margins of meeting agendas. Paperclips bent into birches. There was a forest under his drafting table. On top was an incomplete design for a building with a clever system of mirrors to feed a central arboretum with sunlight. She had loved it, all of it, and Fash had worked up the courage to ask her out.
Some nights later, two living things merged in the darkness of her apartment, on a rolling landscape of sheets. He'd remember her in images, rising off him, glowing in the twilight like a birch tree; her legs rooted firmly under, her hair silently waving above. Breasts that caused her to droop with every caress. Ultimately they had come down together like two felled trees, her hair tangled about them as if they had grown together.
The next day was Fash's birthday. His new lover brought him a small bonzai tree, for his office, complete with the poem above. On it were instructions to keep it clipped well back, and pictures of windswept, tiny trees. He promised to keep it as it was supposed to be, and they kissed.
There was a shooting in the office the next day. Some said it was a disgruntled co-worker. Some people thought the girl had interrupted a robbery attempt. The most romantic theory was that she had had connections to the Russian Mafia that she was trying to escape by changing her name and faking a US accent, but that there was a tracking device implanted in her leg. The reason was really unimportant.
Fash was devestated. He planted the tree in a crack of the window ledge outside his window, where it would be appropriately windswept and provided for with sun and rain, and flew off to Hong Trad, the island south of China, where he stayed for many years. The office on the south face of the McGower and Hart building was closed up, and became the firm's storage room. Fash's concept for the building languished. The Hong Trad office had enough work for him, and South Asia didn't care much for trees then.
Nostalgia or work or love or coincidence brought him back, and it was with much trepidation that he entered the storage room to pay his respects briefly before returning to Hong Trad. The windows were boarded, but thus untouched by the improvements that had sealed the other windows shut. The bulb died with a blue spark when he tried to twist it tighter to stop the flickering. Fash could see light around the boards on the windows, and wanted more.
When he pulled the plywood loose, he found her, his bonzai tree, grown almost to the top of the windows, in a roundabout sort of way, and spread horizontally across the crumbling window ledge with thick, woven roots. He sat there, for some time, and then called for all his old friends to get in there. Plans needed to be resewn, and dreams made tangible.
A flash of energy sparked through the old McGower and Hart building over the next several weeks. They were going to move back into the office. The interns and junior members were excited, and didn't know why. Oak furniture flew in from Laurasia, with wooden drafting tables from the last factory still building them on the Daphne Coast, while an overbooked airliner made its way back to Hong Trad with empty seats.
This all happened a long time ago, but try to think of Fash the next time you're in a city, and you see an old building rising out of the green hills. Fash is the one who did it. Fash started it all.
Touch the Toast