The Vertical Tree
It happened once every year, in the stark, cold light of an early January weekend, when the inhabitants of the city emerged from their homes carrying their spent Christmas trees to be disposed of. Often they are borne aloft by the men, or the women; the children tagging along behind. Others might be pulled by teenagers on small carts, or squeezed into wheeled shoppers and bumped along haphazardly by young couples.
The trees are carried towards the river, filtering in from the residential streets to the network of bridges in the centre of the town. There, in civilised and neighbourly turns, they are dropped horizontally into the water and they float in neat dotted lines, carried out by the river towards the sea.
Nobody quite knows where they end up. Of course, studies have been done; the trees have been tracked by scientists, their environmental impact monitored and catalogued — but this data is for the specialists and the interested. Most of the residents prefer simply to imagine.
But now one of the trees falls differently, rotating in mid-air and penetrating the surface of the water like a dart. Perhaps it was the wind, or perhaps one of the neighbours let go of his end too soon — the cause is immaterial. It disappears below the surface, bottom first, fading from view until the trunk makes contact with the silty river bed.
The residents on the bridge stand and watch for a moment, their rhythm dashed, the dotted line broken. But a queue is building up, there are many more trees to dispatch, and so the ritual resumes soon enough and the vertical tree is forgotten about.
But down on the river bed, amongst the brown light and bottle caps, the tree has laid roots. Tentacular shoots wind their fingers into the mud, gripping ever tighter, and the needles revive and turn up towards the sun. It is a few days — weeks, perhaps — before the tree has grown tall enough to breach the surface of the water, but soon enough its uppermost limb reappears, stripped of its former star or angel, reaching out of the river towards the undercarriage of the bridge.
The tree continues to grow. Now the new year has simply become this year, and the city moves and flows around the tree with its usual rhythm. Tourists stop on the bridge to take photographs, but in a city this size it is just one of a great many oddities to visit. Birds rest in its branches, disturbing the residents of the nearby apartment blocks with their morning song. One Friday night, on a bet from his mate, a drunk man leaps off the bridge to cling to the trunk. He hollers triumphantly before realising that reaching the tree was the easy part. The fire brigade are called to bring a ladder, and the rescued man spends the night in a cell before trudging home in the clothes he went out in.
By spring the tree has grown significantly taller than the bridge, and the authorities begin to wonder what, if anything, should be done. Merchants complain that it is disruptive to the boats heading for the docks upriver; environmentalists insist that the tree must remain undisturbed. There is talk of decorating it, come Christmas.
But in amongst this discussion and disagreement, the tree grows ever taller and ever broader, and the larger it grows the faster it grows. Soon, it is taller than the double decker buses that cross the bridge. Then it is taller than the riverside apartment blocks. Eventually it outgrows the city’s tallest skyscraper. By summer, the entire city has been engulfed in the shadow of the tree, the sun eclipsed by the towering branches, and it is now too late to deal with it by conventional means.
The inhabitants of the city adjust to the darkness by increments; the growth of the tree having occurred at such a pace that no one day was so dramatically different to the one before. The headlights on the cars have become ubiquitous, and one day when the streetlights came on they simply never went off again. Sales of sunglasses experience a downturn, and umbrellas too, now that the worst of the rainfall is caught by the tree’s enormous fir limbs and diverted away from the centre of the city.
The airport closes, and flight traffic is diverted. There is a significant undertaking to stud the tree with red warning lights, like those conventionally found on construction cranes and tall buildings, and resulting comparisons with the tree’s former life as a Christmas tree are of course widespread and repetitive. Dendrologists and arborists from across the world flock to see it, and a great many academic papers are filed, though no consensus emerges to explain the tree’s extraordinary growth.
In its shadow, the people of the city grow weary. What started as a curiosity, a point of pride even, has by now superseded inconvenience. The darkness, inevitably, has provided a useful cover for crime, and so people have grown more and more reticent to leave their houses. Use of the city’s roads and public transport halves and halves again, and the inhabitants become reclusive. Those who do venture outside leave a wide berth, eyeing each other suspiciously and tensing their shoulders as they pass. In the darkness it is difficult to make out people’s faces.
In a lot of ways, it is surprising that it takes as long as it does before somebody sets fire to it; which, of course, is a Pandora’s box that, once open, cannot be closed. Trapped beneath miles of densely burning branches, there can be only one outcome. The city is incinerated.
The horror of the fire captures the world’s imagination more than the growth of the tree itself. Images of burning skies, of flames towering up into infinity, of the inescapable wall of heat and the charred remains of buildings and bodies, permeate the paintings and literature for decades. Survivors, of which there are few, speak of life in the shadow of the tree. They speak of mismanagement and ill-preparedness, of deepening isolation and tribalism. They speak of quiet frustration spilling over into unimaginable devastation.
But they also speak of nature and birdsong. They speak of the stillness that came with darkness; and all of them recall the smell of pine which filled the air that year — closing their eyes and tilting their heads, just for a moment, to inhale its memory.
8.2.21
