By Michael Carson
Featured Art: “Off Road” by Arlene Tribbia

We had a line of them on the right side of our property. When raking leaves, my dad would occasionally touch their sides as if bringing them closer for an embrace. I didn’t want to be out there in the cold and found his tenderness toward what I considered to be un-climbable trees, and therefore pointless trees, a little embarrassing. 

My best friend at the time didn’t. His dad would kill himself in a few years. He hadn’t yet, but he would, and the older I get the more I am convinced that time moves backward as well as forward, and what will happen can be felt in what hasn’t.  

This sounds mystical but I don’t think so. It’s bound to be true in creatures with something inside has survived so long after so many billion years. A quick look at the shape of stars, or tree rings, or an ocean, or any tidal pool, the way what goes out in all of them draws back in again, will prove my point.  

I’m not talking about fate here. That’s totally different, like believing in spontaneous combustion, or talking reindeer, or that the rich are looking out for our best interests. We still make choices. It’s only that choices we make haunt us before we make them. 

But my friend. He listened to my dad’s every word about the birch, why its unique coloring made it seem a melancholy ruin of long-ago winters even in the middle of a snowstorm, or how its bark could be smooth for a space than buckle quickly, just when you least expected it.  

Also, its tattoos, those black imprints, alien cattle brands, symbols that mocked our assumptions about the relationship between sign and signifier, proof somehow that if you give a monkey a typewriter and enough time, you’ll get mountains and tiny grains of sand and Juliet and Romeo refusing it all in the name of love.  

And then the branches, slender, good for nothing—in my opinion at 12—but holding leaves that I would eventually have to pick up in a ghoulish comedy of abject futility.  

“Bullet with Butterfly Wings” blared from my earphones as my friend and my dad marveled on about the birch. I had hooked the white portable CD player to my gym shorts, and they sagged in a way that made walking and bending difficult, but I have always been willing to look ridiculous if the alternative meant living in a world without music.  

We are all just rats in a cage. Exactly. Billy Corgan understood. I pressed the repeat button.  

More questions, offers from my friend to hold the other side of the large, black yard bag my dad held, its bottom half swollen and distended with dead leaves. 

I couldn’t understand. The friend never did work at school. He couldn’t even focus on a video game long enough to build a character to sub-optimal strength for later, more complex battle scenarios. And yet here he wanted to pick up some dumb leaves in the correct way, precisely, like learning how to paint in three dimensions from Michelangelo.  

Everyone ignored my point that whole forests existed where not anyone, not a single person came long to pick up a leaf. 

My dad showed no sign of special recognition of either of us, really, just continued his quiet education as he would those who did not listen, like me, with infinite patience, as if he believed everyone had it within them to understand such things but also appreciating that not everyone could all the time. 

I don’t think it annoyed me, actually. I was just elsewhere, imagining myself in the crow’s nest I had built in the oak that overlooked our back-neighbor’s pool and a little behind that between where the roofs gave out, sloped toward something I could hardly see or imagine, a street on the far side of the neighborhood we never took on the way to school or the grocery store. 

I tried explaining this space to my friend one day when we had climbed that oak and sat in the ripped office chair cushions I had hammered into the cradle created by the bough breaking away from the trunk. He stared at me blankly and then looked down and asked how long we would be staying up here for. He tried to be nice about it, to humor my weirdness, but I could sense when he looked down that we were not really that high up, and I would come back here as an adult one day and see that this attempt at achieving a new horizon as cute, but also kind of pathetic.  

A few years later we went to different schools. I saw him rarely but our moms remained friends and sometimes he would visit and we would sit in my basement and catch up. He told me about the parties he went to where the girls would play games and give him blue balls. I had never heard the phrase before and I thought about it for a long time after, trying to piece together what it meant exactly. 

“Fucking teases.” 

“Yeah,” I said, and pressed the button of a video game to start. I think right then I realized that I hated video games very much. They hollowed out all meaning by seriously believing time only moved in one direction, toward the goal of the game, but it took me another year or two to escape the empty digital hallways. It is possible their beeping never really went away.  

The next time I saw him he played football for his high school and I played ice hockey for mine. Somehow we got in a fight that might have been playful at first but then became not playful, which is another divide I feel is less definite than we pretend it to be. He was bigger than me, and I am mostly uncoordinated but I almost won. We pitched back and forth in a tiny sea of dead pine needles.  

His dad killed himself a year or two later. He did it with a gun on his boat. I knew the boat well. I had been in it one time, and I have found that I remember things I have done once much better than those I have done a thousand times. I’ve read many books on memory and still haven’t gotten a good answer as to why. Scientists seem to believe that repetition and / or pain creates long term memory, which feels obvious and likely didn’t necessitate the electrocution of all those caged rats.  

My friend’s dad took us without telling my friend’s mom, or any mom, which struck me at the time, and still strikes me, as the most dangerous thing you can do. In fact, my friend’s mom didn’t even know a boat had been purchased. This, I believe, had something to do with the later falling out, the adulteries, the divorce, the bankruptcies, and the suicide.  

Or I could be misremembering. I can think of six grown men who committed suicide in the aughts, three outside the army and three in, and I might be confusing the causes of one with the drastic, infinite truncation of possibility that all must have experienced before they made their choice.   

All I can say for sure is that my friend’s dad committed suicide on the boat in the Baltimore harbor. A loud bang then some clanking masts. Perhaps a seagull cry or the distant blare of an ambulance rushing to save someone else’s life. 

My friend didn’t react in any way the day I visited the boat. He lacked the later confidence that would allow him to dismiss girls in general as teases. Or maybe this is where that confidence started, in a fight between him and his dad that made these generalizations easy and necessary to psychological survival. 

I kept running my palm along the gleaming oak, staring off into the oily pink water then walking to the other side of the boat. It amazed me how a relatively small, limited space could feel like infinity if no one knew you were in it.  

We could take it anywhere. We didn’t, but we could. That meant a lot to me and still does.  

Afterward my friend’s dad took us to see a movie in downtown Baltimore, Major Payne.  

Major Payne, played by Damon Wayans with an exaggerated sneer, yelled at the spoiled little boys in glasses for being jacked up. The whole audience cheered. “Go, Payne! Go, Payne!” 

I loved it, every second of the movie and the experience of the water before the movie and the theater itself. I laughed until I almost cried. We high fived those around us. I decided to be a soldier right then, I think. To be all I could be.  

My dad died of a heart attack years later, in his garden, right when I got back from Iraq, and was in the process of getting out the Army, still somewhat lost as to why I had joined in the first place, not unlike Major Payne. It all jumbled together with a desperate feeling to get away, most of all from Maryland, that state caught between northern and southern histories, unclear about itself in some difficult, unknowable way, which has since, perhaps, spread to the rest of the country, or maybe has always been this entire country. 

My old friend came to the funeral and told my mom that my dad was like his real dad. He had taught him how to do things. How to be a man. 

When I come across birches now, I try to take the time to see them, how they sit against the blue distance. The leaves, somewhat gold, move like water in the sunlight. Unlike the oaks, they do not seem to be in communication with the sky, or their communication is a different kind that I am still struggling to understand insofar as a human being can apprehend how a tree perceives reality.  

A 12^th century anonymous Irish poet described birches as “smooth, blessed, proud, and melodious,” where the oak, he says, is “bushy, leafy, high above trees.” Both of these things are true. I’m not sure how to reconcile them or if we should. All I can say is that my dad loved those birches. Said their name like this poet dead for one thousand years, like he had invented it himself. 

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Michael Carson deployed to Mosul in 2006 with the U.S. Army and now teaches community college in Baytown, Texas. His recent essays and poetry have appeared at The Hudson Review, New Letters, The Threepenny Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere.