Through the trailer’s kitchenette window, a child holds a balloon beneath the willow’s weeping canopy. Of the child, the thick weave of thin leaves rustling in the wind renders them ghost-like. The balloon cannot contain its color; its shades shift with each gust of memory. To survey such a recollection implies a passage of time. The memory is now; it always is. There is no time here.
//
You sign away your autonomy and a smiling woman leads you to the acute unit, says you’ll be in good hands and she hopes you get better soon. You will never see this administrator again nor placidly endure her Hallmark dialect; she merely processes the arrivals, leads them into the haunting. You say nothing.
//
A ghost appears in the doorway, watches you piss into an unclean toilet. The door was closed; you closed the door. I’m in here, you say. He just floats and stares. You’ve experienced more sordid bathroom voyeurism than this; finer living things have watched you piss, and perhaps they’re here, too, a cloud of narrowed eyes in this haunting. It all passed in a bar named Rain. Remember the stolen glances along the trough-like urinal. Imagine golden showers. Even now, the weather haunts. But you’ve never made it rain like that; you prefer a more precious metal—the riches of the earth pummeling you like a stranger’s fist. Perhaps if you were richer, you wouldn’t be here, you’d have less to fear.
You turn to approach the bowl from another angle, positioning your back to the doorway, to the cloud of man who floats there. An orderly yells and you turn your head to watch him usher the ghost away, out of the doorway, out of the room. The condensation of a ghosted body stains the toilet’s rim, or your aim has simply failed you given the audience. You mop up this fear with a few sheets of single-ply toilet paper. You will never see the ghost again, but he will never stop watching you. The damp paper falls into the bowl, and the water evacuates the ghost’s stain soon after.
//
They do not call them orderlies here; they are mental health technicians. This is a modern ghost story. It loves the rhetoric of late-stage capitalism, how syllables pop on a resumé. The mental health technician carries a toolkit. It looks a lot like a nail technician’s toolkit because it is a nail technician’s toolkit. At night, he slips the peeling knife beneath your scalp and pulls back a large flap of skin budding with your long brown hair. With the eyebrow scissors and tweezers, he cuts through your skull, he opens your head. He wants to see your brain; he cares about your mental health. You are awake for all of this and ask for a glass of wine, for a dark purple base coat, but all he does is scrape your brain with an exfoliating fork. The dead cells in the brain are ghosts, he says. I’m your ghostbuster. He’s invented another title for himself, and this is too much for you. You fall asleep to a gentle scraping.
//
A ghost is not the dead thing itself: a skin cell, a brain cell, a mother, a friend. Some ghosts here are memories: the fist that belonged to the stranger who struck you in the back of your head, the man you asked to stop who did not stop. These men are dead to you, but they are still alive. This is how living things haunt; their ghosts remain wherever they touched you.
Some ghosts are memories of things now dead, like a single breath made staccato by the fluids accumulating in your mother’s throat, or the way you pressed your lips to a cold, lifeless forehead.
Now you say stop and feel a sharp penetration. You say I love you and hear death rattle. When you kiss a man, your mother says More lips, less tongue. The ghosts do not observe boundaries; their instruction is eternal, so, too, their longing for an undead intimacy. Exfoliation fails to exorcise these traumas, so the ghostbuster bathes you in nail polish remover. You float through the unit a cloud of acetone. You’ve never known a sterile place so devoid of cleanliness.
//
When they realize your violence is reserved for your own body and right now your body is safe from itself, they move your cloud to a less severe unit. There, a nurse asks what your children will think when they see your arms someday. Sometimes a ghost is a thing that has never lived, or the future. The nurse does not carry a toolkit; her higher level of patient care allows for more cerebral treatments. In this case, shame. This is still a modern ghost story. Your never-children explore the unnatural ridges of your flesh.
The nurse appears unbothered by phantom toddlers. When you hold yourself, when you cover the wounds, you hear their morbid and curious questions, you see their sad eyes. They have your eyes; you know sadness, and now your never-children share your diagnosis in their cloudy hazel irises. You miss the ghostbuster and ask the nurse for a bottle of lacquer top coat so you can seal these wounds, or perhaps just make your ridges shine. The state of her cuticles as she pinches for your pulse near your wrist suggests the answer: No.
A cloud of man passes over you, leaves the final moments of this encounter in shadow. You feel his eyes upon you. The wounds unfurl like crimson petals thirsty for rain. Your never-children follow you back to your room so full of questions—like Where does weather come from? Like Daddy, what’s a golden shower?
//
Sometimes the difference between a memory and a dream is the pharmaceutical the unit doctor prescribes to you. When you learn to burrow the pills between your lower gum and your cheek, to lift your tongue and smile, you remember, you dream:
Through the window, a child holds a balloon beneath a willow. When you dream, the balloon burns red in the light that pierces the weave of leaves shimmying all around the child. When you remember, the child lets go of the yellow balloon which floats gently against leaves feathered like a drag queen’s soft boa until it rises and rises above the child and bursts against a branch in the willow’s crown. Golden honey rains within the canopy, and the child looks at you through the window, opens their mouth. All you hear is rain.
//
You meet your brother’s future wife for the first time on visitation day. Her futurity is heartwarming, but she is not a ghost. Your never-children ask her if she knows what a golden shower is, but she does not hear them. Someday she carries a child. She only hears what is hers, what is. She brings you a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. Anthony Bourdain is not-yet-a-ghost. The journey a not-yet-ghost must undertake to reach ghosthood is the distance between you and I. How you still do not believe these words belong to you, too. How you read them into memory of a thing that never is for you.
//
The distance between you and I is us. All of this space is ours. You look through the trailer window. I stand glistening, honey-soaked beneath the willow asking you—
//
When is the last time you heard a collection of leaves rustle? I’m curious. Leaves can be ghosted, too. Sometimes the wind never texts back. Go outside before you read on. Count the moments until you hear a tree shimmy. Time is a distance between the ghost and the tree. How long do you wait there until they dance for you? That’s us.
If the ghost never comes to the tree, if you don’t hear the rustle of leaves, you and I are done.
No, I’m kidding. Please don’t leave me here. I still see you in the window, and I have so many questions. I have one question, but I cannot stop asking you.
//
The mental health technician scrapes and scrapes while you gaze through the window. As he exfoliates your occipital lobe one careful stroke at a time, the child burrows themself in the willow, becomes the tree. The willow pulls their leaves back into a messy, organic bun. They root themselves deeper in the honey-kissed marsh before rustling their feathery tresses. A deeper stroke with the exfoliation fork and the ghostbuster reaches your temporal lobe. A man approaches the willow, begins hacking the leaves from the loosely-pulled bun.
The leaves thrash against one another before they fall quietly into the marsh. You stare out the window while the ghostbuster continues to scrape. I keep asking. The man walks toward the trunk of the willow, raises his axe. The blade reflects a scarlet dusk over marsh before the man plunges it into the willow. You hear the sharp thud of the blade sinking into the trunk. You say nothing.
//
Through the window, a child walks through the lush, marsh-bound canopy of green leaves. The child frolics between each braid, wraps one around their neck and strikes a pose toward the trunk. Through the window, I watch as the child swathes themself in every braid of feathered leaves, tightening them around their neck, striking a pose or pretending to hang themself. I have so many questions.
The mental health technician presses the exfoliating fork into your temporal lobe and the weave is gone. Not a leaf remains on the willow. The child stands between the window and the tree, looking up at the trunk. They wrap their arms around the willow’s trunk, press their lips in the bark. They cover the willow’s wound. You call this winter.
//
Your never-children climb you like the willow, they press their never-lips to your chest, to your still-tender temple from exfoliation after exfoliation. They never see the marsh nor the willow, though they mount you in the window. I stand beneath the canopy of leaves and look toward you and your never-children. One balances on one never-foot atop your head, while the other two sit on each of your shoulders. I keep asking. I am so curious. You look straight through the window as I embrace the willow.
It is winter, but all I hear is rain. The weather haunts.
//
You admit to your psychiatrist you are a tree. May I go back to the forest now, please? He shakes his head and tells you to keep your seat. I’m rooted you say. His laughter arouses your suspicion like a bark beetle or a mourning cloak. There’s a hunger for foliage in a brain doctor’s emphatic chortle. He’s no technician. One scrapes you clean; the other devours you leaf by leaf. Though I’m obviously more of an expert on what ails the mind he says, I’ve long had more than just a passing interest in dendrology. With every word your branches slouch. Your leaves spiral and pile in the space between the two of you, slowly rising feathery and green in his irises. My wife and I spend many a holiday pressing our ears to the trunks of giants hundreds of years old. You are so fucked. It’s really such a spiritual experience, listening to time like that. Being suspended in the history of a place. Touching it. You wouldn’t know anything about that. I don’t really know anything about that you say, I don’t like being touched. Your psychiatrist lifts a coil of foliage from his desk and opens your file where he can’t find any indication of your preference to not be touched. There’s nothing in your file about not wanting to be touched. You shrug your branches. But given your recent admission he says, this could certainly explain something about your condition. You’re pretty sure it’s because of the man with the ax, and you tell him I’m pretty sure it’s because of the man with the ax. He shakes his head. No, no. That’s a common misconception he says. Especially with trees, things are often far more complicated than they seem. You give out a long exhale as though wind breaks somewhere in the room, and your leaves momentarily rise and flail in the air like an inflatable tube man at a car dealership, except there is no car for sale here. The only thing for sale is insight and prescriptions and anecdotes from his arboreal travels with his wife, one of which he gives away for free. I know your insurance is paying me to address your ailing brain he says. Hopefully. Maybe. But my wife and I recently traveled to Malaysia. Here we go, you and I together. And I think I may have some insight into your condition from our trip. Where is a willow leaf beetle when you really need one? I’d be happy to share it with you for free:
In Malaysia, as you might imagine, they have forests. I hope someday you’ll get to see them for yourself. I think if you continue to be honest and tell us about your being a tree and your canopy shyness, you’ll get to leave here. Yes, your canopy shyness. See, in Kuala Lumpur my wife and I visited the Forest Research Institute Malaysia. It had been on our list for some time, but seeing as the redwoods are bigger and older and just a short flight away, we often chose to visit California and the Pacific Northwest en lieu of traveling halfway across the world. That, and my wife and I love wine, and I’m not trying to knock on Malaysian wine. If they have any there I’m sure it’s quite delicious, but if you’re going to get on a plane to go listen to a tree’s centuries-old tale, you might as well take a tour through Napa. Am I right? Anyway, there’s nothing like nearly a thousand years of concentric rings and an abundance of full-bodied pinot noirs to liven up a marriage like an organic, fruitful affair. Remember that when you’re out of here. Anyway, at the Forest Research Institute, they walked us through a grove of camphor trees, or dryobalanops aromatica. Those beasts rose over some 200 feet high, their trunks thick and branchless most of the way up. But near the top, the trunks burst into crowns like heads of broccoli. Each camphor tree’s canopy shaded its respective trunk, but not a single leaf or branch of one tree touched another. I remember looking up to the sky, how blue filled the fissures of that grove. It was almost like each canopy was a tenuously anchored continent on a map of mid-morning sky. At least that’s what my wife said, and I thought that was a beautiful way to describe it, and since there weren’t as many wineries I remember it, too, which is kind of nice. She asked our guide if there is a name for the phenomenon above us. He said there are many names for this distance. Some call it crown shyness or canopy disengagement. Others call it intercrown spacing or canopy shyness. I asked him if they knew what caused the phenomenon, as you might expect. He told us dendrologists aren’t really sure, that it could be any number of things. Maybe the trees responded to knocking into one another in heavy gales by not growing their branches out quite as far. Or they sense one another and their shared light, so they stop when approaching a neighbor because of induced shade. Still others say it’s to prevent the spread of hungry larvae. He finally dropped the primary diagnosis on us, explaining many scientists believe it’s an allelopathic response, basically caused by chemical releases trees share with one another. Then he pinched his nose with one hand and fanned his face with the other while saying pee-yew, as though a tree can really break wind as you did just moments ago here in my office. And so that is the diagnosis I have for you—canopy disengagement. For whatever reason, you’ve disengaged to the extent that you can no longer be touched. But you seem to smell fine to me, so I really doubt that’s the reason.
I am a willow you say. Did I mention a storm blew in? he asks. You straighten your trunk and shoulders, pull your leaves back to your side of his desk. The rain only fell through the fissures in the forest, and there we were, my wife and I, separated by a curved wall of water. Isn’t that something? he asks. You are a willow. You drag your saggy crown from his office. The weather still haunts like a man with an ax.
//
Anything that enters and chips away can be a blade: a memory, a beetle, a butterfly. A chrysalis cleaves us apart. Perhaps each of us is a wing—you and I. Sometimes we mirror and fold toward one another, but never for long. Perhaps you are the mourning cloak and I the transformation. You wrap yourself in a velvet shawl of grief or spread your mahogany wings wide. I can never only be as I am.
There are moments when I want to be covered in your winged beauty. Every inch of trunk, branch, and leaf a butterfly ready to take flight. I must remember that change is inevitable. When your kaleidoscope leaves, all that remains is the emptiness of a memory—caverns where roots uncoil like a fist in the dirt, nothing where a trunk rises. All that remains is the specter of a willow, their concentric rings a vacuum of time and space. Where did the swarm take off to like a porous cloud? A morning cloak becomes weather. And the years that reverberate within the now-gone trunk, where does that time go? Who climbs those decades without a branch to pull them up?
You look through the window and see nothing but a fertile plot to grow a tree shadowed by an indecisive cloud of wings. If you remember the willow, you might look out of the trailer and say before. In that memory your language might grow like something that was. A willow grew there once. It was. I am still a willow, though I no longer wait in the window. You might have to leave the trailer to watch me weep. If you cast a shadow, if light passes through your kaleidoscope, you have left the trailer in search of me. We share this curiosity. We both love to look for a thing that is gone. Would you ever look for a tree in here? I’d rather you find me in a place that dissociates. A grove of willows. That way, you might have a choice.
//
If you are a male mourning cloak, you’ll spend your life inside the willow. You can still become a part of me. When the ghostbuster scrapes one evening, I feel the wings of men open and close within me. He’s never flown before and tells me I’ve never flown before as we flutter a few inches above the bed. I tell him I can harbor a secret like a swarm of territorial butterflies, or men. You appreciate him, that he only enters us through our mind. You can shit and fuck without thinking, but intimacy is something different. It scrapes beneath the surface and asks you to consider time, or all we share in these moments.
If you are a female morning cloak, you leave the tree. You are an independent woman, and you bid the stubbornness of masculinity burrowed in the willow’s hollow adieu with your flight. With each flap of your wings the wind carries back to them a fuck you and you and you, so sometimes the wind knows language. It texts back. You may just not like the answer.
If you are neither, if you refuse, you hang midair in a chrysalis where the willow once stood, before a man said If I can’t have it, no one can. Before the woman flew away, perhaps your mother, and left you floating here, shaking in the wake of her wings, how she pushed the air back towards you and it said I love you in its final gale.
If you wear the cloak to your mother’s funeral, the cousins look suspicious. They ask Why is he draped in butterfly wings? You tell them she’s not dead, just gone. The same wings garner less suspicion on the unit. Everyone’s trying to be gone here, the patients at the very least, and you flutter down the corridor just over their heads. Sometimes it’s nice to be uprooted, to move from one space to another without soiling your leaves or wings. You float above the mess—a hollow of a tree filled with men who stayed. You feel a gentle scraping and spread your wings, wondering if there’s a way to map transformation in time. Is tonight another concentric ring within or beyond? Is tonight a chrysalis? You are always shedding something: a swathe of silken thread, thin green leaves, all these rings, time.
//
You admit to your psychiatrist you are a willow. You say I’m a willow. He tells you your symptoms might be better explained if you were a camphor tree. He implies you might, in fact, have roots in Kuala Lumpur. You disagree and shake your trunk. I disagree you say, and even if that were true, they are empty caverns by now. Perhaps I’m the ghost of a camphor there. He doesn’t understand how a ghost might be a thing that never is. To him, you are always a shy camphor disengaged from your grove. You are the specter of a never-tree for him that I could never be. I just sit here shrugging these leaves like what the fuck is a camphor tree and why do you care who I touch in this breeze?
//
I spread my wings and close them like the blinds to the window. Now we are stuck in this trailer, which is more spacious than a chrysalis, but less sprawling than the acute unit. I still feel pupal. A woman cooks bacon in the microwave. Preparing bacon in the microwave requires her to press buttons and have a modest understanding of time to keep the bacon from burning and to prevent the woman from getting cancer because she presses her forehead to the microwave’s glass door, watching intently as the strips turn counter-clockwise one ring at a time. The cooking of meat in this way is cyclical. The woman gets cancer anyway. There’s a mirror on the wall across the room from the pulled blinds. You can look at yourself in the mirror if you’re curious she says. To see who you are now. This moment reminds you of the sow who slowly trudged through the trailer park in search of her farrow. She rustled beneath each trailer methodically but with no luck before settling under the willow. A single, endless gust of wind moved the leaves over the sow’s resting body, and when it did, she was gone. She’s still here floating in the room like hickory smoke that radiates from the microwave. We are all pupal. Desire might render us animal, and in doing so, make of us meat. This is another kind of transformation. The woman asks Are you afraid of looking at yourself, really looking? and you are ready for her to die already. You thought radiation worked faster on the body, and it does, if you are meat. There’s nothing to be ashamed of she says, just look at yourself. I’m here, no matter what you are. No matter what you see.
