Trees

CW: Mental health, suicide.

It was late September as Finn was nearing his fortieth year that he moved to live on the street where all the trees would kill themselves.

His apartment was under an Irish couple who seemed to spend half their time having sex and the other half trying to murder each other.

These activities were so frequent, and so loud, that even casual visitors to his home would hear them.

Wednesday night and it starts again. Finn and his girlfriend are drinking with another couple in his front room.

“Seriously?” one of his friends says.

“It never fucking ends,” his girlfriend replies.

“Come on, that’s not real. She’s faking.”

Finn’s girlfriend turns her head a little to the side, raises one ear towards the ceiling, and listens.

“Mmmmm. Not today,” she says.

Week after week the sounds come down through the floor and Finn has no choice but to listen. Footsteps stomp up and down.

He tries not to pay too much attention.

But he thinks it's funny the details he comes to hear in nothing at all. The way he can follow the couple's argument in its thrust and counter thrust. No sentences, no specifics, only swollen fragments of noise suggesting an outline.

It’s a typical night and the wind is kicking the trees outside. Finn can hear it starting above his head, an argument this time.

A woman’s muffled shouting accusation to get things going. There is a rise in pitch at the end that sounds incredulous. Some variant of “you can’t be serious about … ” or “are you really serious about …”.

We’ve only just begun and already the muffles sound like sarcasm.

A man shouts back and it’s as hard and flat as a dropped stone. A venomous little curl at the end.

To Finn it sounds like “your point has been dismissed … and you’re a fucking idiot.”

A long drawn out muffle and a buckshot of small dancing words. You don’t need to hear them to know it’s something like “ohhhhhhhhh, fuck you, you always say that”.

This is not a real conversation, it has more in common with falling dominos, or a chemical reaction.

Soon there will be slamming doors and miscellaneous banging. Maybe they’ll make up and fuck later. Finn is glad that he can’t tell if the woman is faking, like his girlfriend can. Because if he could, and she did, after this, he thinks it would be heartbreaking.

Finn knows these two better than some of his friends.

The man who flies into rages and smashes things. Who is cheerful, funny, and well liked, Who is quick to take offence and hit back.

All ego and no self esteem.

Finn sees the couple sometimes when they buy coffee in the cafe next to the apartment block. The woman looks intelligent. Finn doesn’t know how you look intelligent. But she does. Her eyes do not look considerate, but they consider the world. Sitting in the corner and drinking his coffee he watches as she is rude and cruel to the waitresses, more than once.

Under the cafe’s tasteful and artisan lights the pair seem happy.

It’s hard to believe they are the same people whose passion penetrates into his life as he waits for the kettle to boil or folds his washing. But when he looks the shadows are there.

Her eyes probes the man, alert to small changes, but not in a way that reaches outwards - in a way that is ready to recoil. The man watches her too, with a need that is both formless and acute.

There are moments when she says something and the man deflates so much behind his eyes that to Finn he looks like an old air mattress washed up on the beach. Verging on inanimate.

During the fights there is something she says, it has a sound and a shape, but no form to Finn.

But whatever that thing she says is, it hits the target, every time. He hears them yelling, then this thing, whatever it is, comes out in three syllables - bum bum … bummm. It’s shaped like a question, but he knows it’s a statement.

“Bum, bum, bummm.”

And the man explodes.

He hears doors slammed, opened, slammed again. Something is smashed. Something else joins it. One night it gets so bad Finn considers calling the police out of fear someone might be hurt.

He goes upstairs instead, knocks on the door.

“Guys, I’m freaking out down here. It’s ... I’m sorry ... I can hear you. Can you stop. Please. I’m ... sorry.”

They look at him like two actors in a scene where the director has called cut. Confused, smiling, and shaking their heads.

It’s all just a misunderstanding.

It was in this same apartment where Finn thinks he started to really lose his mind. But like the trees it took years to make itself known.

He remembers feeling whatever it is in his head begin to coagulate into form. Like the muffled voices above there are no words, only substance.

But the shapes and the intent are there, in his head. This makes it worse. He is tormented by something real that is absolutely, positively, not there, completely, and specifically, not specific.

He gets by. He’s functional. Jobs, friends, hobbies, in time a girlfriend.

“I tick all the boxes,” he writes on his dating profile, making sure to put something ironic afterwards. Which is in itself, another box to tick.

“I liked that you didn’t take yourself too seriously,” his girlfriend tells him.

“Who would,” he replies, keeping the box ticked, but not knowing if he feels that way about it.

Not knowing, in fact, if he feels anything at all.

When they built these apartments they put the power lines next to the trees. There are a lot of them lining the street. Over time their branches started to grow into the power lines. In the wind they would whip back and forth striking them like guitar strings.

This couldn’t be allowed to continue, so now a man in a truck with a flashing light and a ladder comes to the street every six months. He saws off the branches that are growing too close. Clears the space around the lines. It’s like the street’s regular haircut.

This, of course, unbalances the trees. So they adapt. Finn thinks it’s quite beautiful, and about as unnatural as a natural thing can be.

The trunks thicken and twist, a little each time, to bear the lopsided weight.

Behind the trees there is a park. On weekends Finn sits in the sun and keeps track of the trees’ efforts to grow back on the side that’s cut away. Watches them stretch their severed fingers into the space around the power lines.

Stumps sprout twigs, twigs become branches, branches grow leaves. For a mere moment the leaves lay in a protected patch of sunshine.

Then six months roll around, the man in the truck returns, and the new fingers are cut off. One side growing, the other side not, the balance gets all weird and the trunk twists again. Adapts and strengthens in the right places, keeps on going.

Nature is brilliant at that.

The Irish couple like to picnic in the park, under young branches that don’t know they’ll never be old. Finn watches them the same way he watches the trees.

Their relaxed comfort with each other, the shadows of their arguments. The parts of them that are afraid to reach out too far, remembering the hidden barrier of a previous pain. Functional for now, ticking boxes, finding the light, growing in spite of themselves.

Over time the muffled voices, that are not voices, in Finn’s head become a little clearer in intent, if not in form. They become clear enough to hurt, most of the time. But not clear enough to look at. He doesn’t know if any parts of him are growing, or if anything has been cut away.

Most times what hurts is that he feels like he isn’t there at all. This doesn’t make sense of course, he must be there, things that aren’t there can’t hurt.

He keeps going towards his own light. Trying to grow. Pushing towards his own kind of symmetry.

One week the wind is so bad there are news reports about it. Stern faces on the television give solemn warnings. The lopsided trees on Finn’s street start falling one by one.

After the first tree falls Finn tells his girlfriend he heard it.

"There was this huge crash," he says. "I thought the world was ending."

He’s not sure why he says this because he didn't hear it. He simply woke up one morning and there was a huge tree slouched away from the road. Through his window he could see a swollen circle of roots and dirt wrenched from the ground. Something about it made him think of the bottom of a man’s shoes.

The tree stretches out across the park. The lighter side that was cut facing the sky, the side that was free to grow smashed to pieces against the ground.

News reports warn of “worsening conditions”. Helicopter footage shows lines of houses without roofs.

“They look naked don’t they?” Finn’s girlfriend asks him.

“What do?”

“The houses. It feels strange to look inside people’s houses like that, doesn’t it? I don’t think they should be broadcasting it.”

“Mmmmm.”

His girlfriend touches his arm and breathes in like she is going to say something, but doesn’t. Finn feels parts of her reaching for parts of him that are not there.

The next night another tree falls. Two more the night after that. The strength they built up over all those years finally meeting circumstances unsuitable for compensation.

The solemn faces on the television talk about a last night of danger before “conditions” change. Workers come to Finn’s street with straps and steel poles. They surround the trees and run long lines from them to the ground.

“Do you think it will work,” the cafe’s owner asks Finn. He’s worried about a tree falling through the front of his business.

“I’m sure it will,” he replies, without knowing if he believes it or not.

"I'm insured anyway I guess. Don't you worry about a tree falling into your house while you're there?"

"Not really."

"You're braver than I am."

That night the wind is screaming again. Outside the trees take punches. The muffled sounds continue, louder, upstairs things are falling apart.

One more comes to an end that night. Another little man comes in another little truck with flashing lights, gathers the pieces, and takes them away somewhere that only people who have to deal with things like that know anything about.

The wind stops and the poles and straps are removed from the trees. The faces on the television move on to more recent catastrophes. The sounds upstairs change, but don't stop right away.

The power lines keep humming right along.