Forest for the Trees

The woods did not announce themselves. One moment there was a street, concrete, a bus stop with an advertisement about roofing, and the next there was only green, an immediate and soft silence that folded around Jerry as if he had always been part of it and simply forgotten.

He put a hand to his head as if to press the memory back inside. The pulse under his thumb was steady, younger than it felt. He was sixty. He looked fifty, people said, or younger, that odd kindness used to buoy him in grocery lines and classroom doors. The face in the mirror didn’t fit the weather in his brain.

“Jerry,” he said, to give the name weight, to make the syllables familiar in his mouth. “Hold the name. Grip it like bark.”

Bark was convenient. He reached out and found a trunk, thick, ridged, fit for a column in the classroom he used to command. He could see them: rows of students, the chalk smudged on his fingers, the slow satisfaction when someone finally connected a sentence to a civilization. He had taught the Greeks, the fatalism of their plays, how the word anagnorisis, recognition, was less a moment than a sandpapering of truth until it bled into sight.

The trees seemed to mock him, or perhaps to tutor him. Leaves whispered like a chorus in a play he had once loved. “This is a stage,” his mouth offered, then the mouth turned to the forest itself and questioned whether he was the actor or the audience. He tried to name the tragedians, their names wobbled like moths: Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and each summoned a memory of a different life. One voice called for Oedipus who, when he finally understood, ripped his eyes from their sockets and saw farther than any man should.

Time unspooled without a seam. He walked because posture told him to, because legs remembered streets and steps. The light fell in shafts, then in patchwork, then in a green dusk that made everything the color of old coins. He tried to follow the light, always following the place where the canopy thinned as if the world beyond might be visible through a slit, but the slit closed and reknit itself like skin.

He thought of Marie, honey brown eyed and serious, who had folded him into the pragmatic sentences of a child turned into her father’s caretaker. She had caught him once at three in the morning standing in the yard, barefoot, whispering to a maple.

“Dad, you were looking for your classroom,” she had said then, a small sentence heavy with the weight of worry. He had told her, truthfully and without grandness, that he was.

In the forest he tried to instruct the trees the way he had instructed freshmen, gestures, definitions, theater terms like lifelines.

“Listen,” he said to the trees, because saying a lecture aloud might make it last. “Everyone becomes their story.” He wanted to tell the forest that fate was not merely imposed but also earned, the small, culpable betrayals that shaped a life. He wanted to confess, and a confession needs an audience.

From a dark corner of his memories adultery rose in him like summer heat. He remembered a back seat, a perfume that felt too sweet and smelled like guilt. The detail condensed and stretched until it became a badge of shame he couldn’t take off. He had hurt people he loved.

In the classroom he had once argued moral quandaries with clarity and distance; here, under leaves, the problems were immediate and raw. “I hurt people I loved,” he said aloud to a sapling that appeared to be paying attention. The sapling did not absolve. It only pressed its small green shoulder closer to the wind.

Sometimes his thoughts crisped with absurd clarity. He would stand in a shaft of sun and the world would pierce him, each leaf an example, each insect an argument. In those moments he could name dates: Marie’s first cry in the birthing room at Whittier Hospital, the year he published an article on masks, ritual dance, and chorus.

But the names of colleagues would slough off and leave a blank like a missing tooth. He clung to certain words, anagnorisis, recognition, and repeated them almost as a talisman: when the hero sees the truth. He had lectured that recognition often arrived too late. He understood that now as doctrine and as threat.

Other times the fog crept in like laughter at the back of his throat. Sentences lost their endings. He would try to whistle and fail; the sound would catch like a very old key. He sat on a log and found himself crying over a child’s drawing of a crooked house with three windows, and he could not say why the drawing mattered except that it must have been love shaped, whatever that meant.

The loss of a single ordinary detail, how his wife always smelled like Japanese cherry blossoms, felt like an insult the world had made on purpose.

The path, if there was ever one, had the habits of memory: selective, traitorous, partial. Sometimes he found a beaten strip of earth and thought, yes, I found a path. Other times the undergrowth swallowed his route and he doubled back as if the forest had decided to rearrange its bookshelves and hide certain volumes.

He tried to map himself by recollection. He encountered a bend that smelled of sap. The scent made him think this might have been the place he first kissed someone not his wife. A rock that fit his palm could be the one he had once held while a student read an essay that moved him until heart raced.

He was not old enough for this, his body insisted. The world had given him the lie of youth, a face that caused acquaintances to remark, kindly, “You look great for your age.”

It was a small selfish mercy, until the mercy curdled and he realized youth on the outside was not a guarantee of inside coherence. He feared vanishing more than death: not the end but the erasure, the lectures unread, the name a stray citation with no author attached. He had always worried about leaving no mark. In this wood that worry felt literal, like someone might come along and pull the nails out of the floorboards and walk away grinning, knowing they had set him up to fail.

He began to talk of himself in lessons, as if his voice could stake meaning to the earth. “I taught tragedy,” he said. “Tragedy is recognition happening when the path is already closed.” He thought of Oedipus and of Antigone and of the chorus that speaks for the city. The forest served as chorus, the collection of elders here, the leaves made small repetitive sounds that could have been words. It felt like a classroom in which the students had left and the blackboard slowly bled the lesson anyway.

Memory had moods. Some images returned with brutal fidelity: Marie asleep in her young smallness, her breath uneven. His wife’s delicate and hard working hands, the way she carried the weight of a family and did not complain aloud. Others refused to be reconstructed.

The exact last words of a decades old argument, the name of his sabbatical town in Prague. Holes opened like holes in a worn sweater and every now and then a fungus of other sensation would grow there to fill the vacuum with something new, perhaps something truer than the fact it replaced.

He rehearsed apologies the way he had once rehearsed lectures, phrases to fit the moment. “Marie, I’m sorry I left the food out to get cold. I’m sorry I said I was fine when I was not. I’m sorry I was not there for you the way you needed me to be.” He repeated the sentences until the words were like the bottoms of old shoes, worn flat with no tread. He told the stones his name then, built small piles of stones like footnotes, each rock a pebble of proof he had been here and that he might be remembered, even if only as a tiny mound.

Night braided itself through the canopy of the trees. It took its time, shifting its colors as it went along.

A moth rested on his sleeve and he felt an odd protectiveness toward it. Small loyalties afforded him comfort. The insect’s life was short and exact and somehow simpler than his. He thought of the chorus of elders speaking to Oedipus and himself again. Maybe he was chorus and hero at once, the private and the public collapsing, the lecturer now both pronouncing the text and living the drama.

Recognition came and came again like a slow weather system. He saw the pattern of his life like a script that had been rearranged by small compromises. There were times he had chosen safety because it was softer than risk. There were times he had done decent things and selfish things in the same breath.

He had wanted to be remembered by monuments, by carefuly documented details, published essays, invitations to video recordings of symposiums. He had not expected to be made of quieter stuff: ordinary meals, precise gestures, the way a family accumulates proofs of affection like buttons in a jar.

He lay on his back in a hollow where the grass flattened to form a bed of acceptance for him. The moonlit sky leaked through branches, starlight in small interrupted pins peered through the cracks. He tried to count them and lost the numbers as fast as he found them, like a class roll call list read from a list no one had printed yet.

The earth smelled of dampness and compost and the attic smell of his boyhood home. Everything he had once called solid softened under the pressure of silence.

“I won’t be saved,” he said aloud somewhere between a prophecy and a recognition. The idea did not frighten him so much as settle over him like a soft peacoat. He had been taught that tragedies did not require contrived resolutions, their dignity lay in refusal of the tidy. He had often said that to students who wanted endings.

Perhaps this was the theatre’s final lesson, that some stories must simply end on their terms, not on a stage lowered by the desires and whims of an audience's emotions.

Even so, acceptance was not a surrender so much as an inventory. He counted out his blessings, Marie’s laughter and love, the essays he had written whose sentences had once stopped his breath, his mother’s quiet, undying devotion. He cataloged his faults with a strange tenderness. “I was cowardly,” he thought. “I took comfort too quickly.”

He did not want to reconstruct his life as a spectacle of villainy, rather, he wanted to see it as a topology of choices, demonstrating the many sides of every human.

When he spoke to the forest it was not only for absolution. He wanted to leave testimony. Not a paper in a journal but a footprint in a living world. He stacked more tiny stones, each one like a sentence to the wind.

“Jerry was here. Jerry taught. Jerry loved. Jerry fucked up. Jerry always tried to do better.” The wind took the words and played like piano keys into other trees. The chorus of the forest knew no copyright law and there was no need to indemnify.

The sounds around him narrowed to a hymn of insects. He pictured in a sudden, crystalline flash his father’s outline in a doorway, the kind of thing that does not need speaking. He could not summon the exact timbre of his father’s voice, but the silhouette held and conveyed a lineage.

Memory, fickle as weather, returned certain things as if those were the ones that mattered. The feel of a hand clasping his in a deep moment of crisis, the single student who had come to him crying and whose life later bent like a reed into something better. He would take the reed if that was all life offered. He did take it, because it was his life, and it was all he had to hold on to.

Pain and clarity braided together. He saw his life in negative and positive lights. The absences sharpened the presences. He liked a phrase he recalled from the plays, it went something like, “recognition was not merely the seeing of fact but the seeing of meaning.” He had seen now that his small failings shaped as much of him as the triumphs. They were not tidy, they were true.

He felt something loosen in his chest, an easing, but not an easing into death. It was more like a permission for the body to rest from the struggle of holding onto everything. The last fears receded like an audience leaving a theater, chairs scraping and lights dim. He did not leave on a swell of music. His last motion was a breathing that lost its rhythm and fell into a pattern that needed no counting. His thoughts behaved the same way.

He did not get out of the woods. He was not found by a neighbor or led out by a search party with flashlights and relief. There was no divine intervention to sweep him back into an ordinary life. The script of his end was quiet and exact and, in its own way, merciful. In the dark under the trees he touched on a kind of knowledge he had always felt but never faced. The small truth that memory is not merely storage but the way one arranges a life into something that resembles a story. The story is what would carry you into the next life, whatever it would be.

His final sentence, if such a thing can exist, was not an oration but a recognition. He had been, and in being he had done both harm and love. That was enough to tilt the balance into something like grace. The forest, patient and indifferent, kept the sound of his voice in the hollows of trunks and the spaces between roots.

They did not find him. Whether morning would bring a search or not was outside what he could bear to care for. The world beyond the trees might be bureaucratic and neat in its concern, or it might smoke him out with emotional pleas and plates of food. He knew that was a future he could not have. He had the now. The now that remembered. He had, finally, the recognition he had taught from the lectern and had feared would never come to his own life.

The leaves continued their slow, indifferent hymn. His name, Jerry, settled into the hush like a leaf landing in a pool. The pool held him, and the pool was not rescuing him so much as receiving him. He did not step out of the woods, but in them he found the long, rude honesty of himself. Recognition had come, late as always. It was not loud.

It was, perversely, merciful.