Timothy Day

Crux

 
​      ​I thought maybe a Christmas tree would make Milly feel better. She never had one growing up. They had always been a thing for happy people, with happy lives. At the start of it she had seen me like that too; something nice that implied a change in her life’s
direction. But after getting to know me in a more complete way, she said, this feeling had faded.

​        We’d just started dating a few weeks ago, but Milly said that was all it took; she could tell I wasn’t the one. I had never been sure of anything in my life, but I thought maybe Milly and I still had a chance, if only she could go back to seeing me as part of that better life, that life with things like Christmas trees. I thought maybe if I brought her one, maybe that would put us back on course. Maybe she would look at me holding the tree and think: these two go together.

                                                                                                               ​~

        Milly was passed out from the drugs that afternoon and I took the opportunity to sneak away. There was a tree farm a few miles down the road that I’d passed on my way over, right in the middle of the nowhere fields. First time I’d noticed it, actually. Lived here all my life. Must’ve been new.
        It was snowing pretty heavy and there weren’t many cars on the road. I could barely make out the ones that were; just pairs of headlights trailed by half-thoughts of the cars themselves. I probably should have had chains on the tires. The sky was that darkened blue color of a quickly fading winter afternoon. I was worried the tree farm might be closed for the day, but when I got out into the nowhere fields I could see its pink neon sign–Roake’s tree farm–blinking at me in the fog.

                                                                                                               ~

​        To be honest Milly wasn’t the first person to cut things off with me after a few weeks. You might even call it a pattern in my life, being dumped. Milly seemed to think that was just who I was: someone not made to go the distance with. Like, we’d been nodding in and out the other day, floating on the murmur of the television, when she told me that I was a roadside attraction, not a destination. She rested her head on my shoulder as if she had said something tender.
        “Roadside attraction,” she murmured. “Not a destination.”
        I wasn’t sure if she had said it twice or if I had just heard the words echo off the walls. I told her okay, I get that, but secretly I thought that maybe I could be a special kind of roadside attraction, one that you stop at and then realize you’ve never felt more at home.

                                                                                                               ~

        I passed the gate into Roake’s tree farm and drove down a long, flat road towards a large house that was probably the visitor’s center or whatever. Christmas trees dotted the landscape, but they all seemed to be on the scrawny side. I wanted to get the most beautiful tree they had, one that said we can make it as much as a Christmas tree could.
        The house was farther back from the highway than it looked; each time I thought I was approaching, it would seem to be a little further out than before. Soon I came to a chain-link fence blocking off the road. There was a small shed beside it with a signpost that read simply: Roake. The shed was haphazardly constructed, planks of wood nailed together unevenly so that there were several gaps in the walls and roof. I cut the engine and got out of the car. In my haste to carry out this tree plan I’d forgotten to bring a jacket, and the cold gripped me instantly. I plodded through the snow and knocked on the door of the shed. After a minute a man smoking a cigarette stepped out and looked at me skeptically.
        “I’m here for a tree,” I said.
        “No shit,” the man said. His skin was pale and greasy, his hair grown into a mullet. “You cut one down and then pay me, is how it works.”
        “Could I get a saw?” I asked.
        The man pointed to a barrel full of saws around the side of the shed. “Take your pick, just put it back when you’re done,” he said. “I’m not in the business of giving away free saws.”

                                                                                                               ~

        After the first time we had sex, Milly said that the burn marks on my chest (the source of which I couldn’t remember) kind of made the outline of a Christmas tree, if you were to connect them like dots. She said that was a sign. She said the two of us had
potential to be normal people.
        We lay naked on her mangled purple couch, dirty and ripped all over by whatever vicious animal had lived with it before.
        “A new relationship is like a new life,” Milly said, tracing the tree on my chest with her finger. “We can become new people together.”
        The room didn’t have any windows and it felt like we were in our own world right then, a space made only of together and happy. Streaks of rust ran down the walls, a single light bulb hanging over us on a string, its buzzing like a cat’s purr when you were high.
        “That sounds good,” I said.
        Milly bit my shoulder. “Understatement of the year.”
        I smiled. “Of the decade.”
        “Century,” Milly whispered.
        “All time.”

                                                                                                               ~

        I made my way along the perimeter of Roake’s tree farm, shivering intensely. It was so quiet out here in the nowhere fields. There were layers to the silence, mounds of snow on top of it.
        Every tree I passed had the same sad, weathered look, some of them browning as if already dead. After walking a while I came across a couple cutting one of them down, the first people I’d seen at the farm besides the man in the shed. They laughed as they worked the saw clumsily back and forth. They wore matching coats, matching mittens. They couldn’t seem to stop laughing. I nodded hello and they paused and stared at me, laughter dying down to a mild, intermittent chuckle. I nodded again, but they only continued to watch me, their eyes containing a sort of clinical curiosity, as if they were looking at a rare species of animal. I kept going and passed behind a row of trees. The sawing commenced. The laughter picked up.
        The snow was falling heavier now, the wind constant, a blizzard in the works. The last of the day’s light faded out and the trees became little more than gaunt shadows. I couldn’t feel my feet or hands. My shirt was soaked-through from all the snow that had fallen on it. How long had I been walking? How could the farm be so big? I didn’t think Christmas tree farms were supposed to be so big. Maybe the good trees were kept at the very back, though this seemed unlikely. There had to be one decent tree on the farm,
though, right? I couldn’t go back with nothing. I couldn’t be left alone again, no world to make with anyone, only objective space (mountains of silence, endless indifference, every escape temporary) to exist inside of.
        Finally I came to what seemed to be the last tree on the farm. It was bent over and skeletal, a nest of pine needles beneath it. Beyond there was only flat, snow-covered earth for miles. It made me think of how my father used to describe the world: a mouth of
nothingness that swallows what comes into it. I sighed and turned to make my way back. I would freeze if I stayed out here. I needed to go home and take a hit and when she woke up I would tell Milly what I had tried to do for her and maybe it would work like an A for effort kind of thing.

                                                                                                               ~

        The future I imagined with Milly, ever since she told me how she’d never had a Christmas tree, always centered around the holidays. The scene I played out in my head over and over was kind of like a commercial except not advertising anything. The two of
us would just be sitting beside a tree on Christmas morning, drinking coffee and looking out the window. In the fantasy we lived in the sort of place where we could look out the window and know that there were people in the other houses doing the same thing we were. This was pretty much all there was to it: the tree and the coffee and the feeling of implicit community. Sometimes we had kids, sometimes not, both of which seemed okay. There was a reigning simplicity to the scene, almost like Milly and I had both been lobotomized, but in a kind, humane way, a way that brought us closer to who we were at the crux of things.

        I hoped so badly that who I was at the crux of things was good, that after you scraped all the accumulated shit off the pit of me, you got to something good. That’s who the me in the fantasy was: a happily lobotomized crux.

                                                                                                               ~

        I lumbered back through the trees. My footprints from before had already been erased by the snow. I thought I was following the same path, but it was difficult to tell for sure. Trees seemed to cluster in places they hadn’t been earlier. Others had been knocked over by the blizzard and lay on the ground in a half-buried heap. I tried to continue in the general direction of the road, but my position to it grew increasingly unclear. I was relieved when I came upon the same couple from earlier, still laughing, still cutting down their tree. It sure was taking them a while to saw through that thing. Getting closer I saw that there was a stroller beside them now, the shadowed lump of a baby inside. Where had it come from? The couple’s laughter rose and fell, rose and fell. Their silhouettes shifted back and forth in the dark. They didn’t seem to notice me as I passed this time, and soon I was far enough away that the wind was all I could hear once more.
        I kept walking. The blizzard was getting worse and it was difficult to see too far ahead. It felt like I should have made it back to the road by now if I’d been going the right direction. My whole body had gone numb and my heart was beating in a slow, irregular rhythm. Christmas trees crowded my path, often forcing me to squeeze through a narrow opening between them that curved and zigzagged in several different directions. The trees were getting taller, too, their branches fuller. I had finally found the good ones, but my hands were too numb to grip the saw, which dangled from the frozen red tips of my fingers, about to slide off at any moment. I let it fall to the ground and kept going. The mullet man from the shed could just deal with it.
        The Christmas trees became bigger and bigger around me until it got so there wasn’t a single one that would have fit in Milly’s place. Their branches surrounded me, poking into my skin like a million nettled arms. I was completely lost. I’d left my phone in the car, but it wouldn’t have gotten service out here anyway. I thought maybe the laughing couple could help me, but when I tried to turn back, the trees seemed to have shifted again, and I couldn’t tell if I was going in the right direction. I shouted for help,
though I knew no one would hear. Voices didn’t carry in the nowhere fields; they were simply absorbed by the emptiness, swallowed by the nothing-mouth. I sat in the snow to rest for a minute. My breathing was slow and ragged, a borderline wheeze.
        Suddenly I saw lights up ahead and the outline of a large house took shape in the near distance. It looked much like the house that I had seen up the road driving into the farm. I stood and hurried towards it. The clutter of trees began to clear, organizing into neat rows on either side of my path. The house seemed to grow even brighter as I approached, windows blazing with light, as if the sun itself was inside. My fingers wouldn’t fold into a fist and so I when I got to the door I knocked by slamming my forearm into it three times. Wind howled in my ears as I waited. Glancing behind me, I saw that the trees had made a wall in front of the house, lined up neatly as if in observance of an event. The door clicked open.

                                                                                                               ~

​        I met Milly at a party. My friend was squatting in an abandoned church and had found a bunch of speakers in the basement. He strung a melon to the ceiling while we all poured in, spray-painting it silver to look like a disco ball. Electro-thumping music pulsed from the speakers and shook the walls. The basement was packed with enough bodies to fill the pews upstairs. We mostly just jumped around because there wasn’t room for much lateral movement. At some point in the haze of it all Milly and I made eye contact and held it, then shoved through the crowd to get closer. We shouted inaudibly to each other, understanding the words as friendly noises. The drugs made us lighter, killed the barriers created by living with a human mind. We brought our hands up together and jumped. We brought them down shoulder-level and kissed.
        I think right then we were at the crux of life.

                                                                                                               ~

        Standing at the door was Milly. Milly? She smiled like she’d been expecting me, somehow, here at this random house in the nowhere fields. She wore a nice green sweater and clean-looking jeans, not a tear on them.
        “There you are,” she said. “C’mon, it’s freezing out there.”
        I followed her inside, choked with confusion. Bells jingled from the wreath hanging on the door. A set of hooks on the wall held umbrellas, keys, brand-name coats. Milly led me to a modest living area with a couch and a coffee table. Daylight shone into the room, just as if the night had been fast-forwarded. Out the window, a row of identical cream-colored houses stood across a road that dead-ended on both sides. Towering Christmas trees formed a wall at each cutoff point, their trunks molded into one another.
        “You’re soaked,” Milly said. She undressed me, my body shaking terribly, then wrapped a towel around my shoulders and another around my waist. My skin began to prickle all over as it thawed. Milly sat on one side of the couch and pulled a throw blanket over her legs. “Want to make coffee?” She asked. I didn’t respond. I was staring at the Christmas tree in the corner of the room. I hadn’t noticed it at first. It stood on the only part of the floor that remained in shadow, the light just missing it. The branches had been decorated with a bunch of those green and red ball ornaments, nothing else. For some reason those ornaments made the room feel especially alien. Looking at them I had a sense that everything around me had been cutout from a catalogue and pasted onto reality.
        “What is this place?” I muttered.
        “This is our home,” Milly said. She looked calm and happy to the root, like there was nothing but sunsets in her head. I wondered if she was the real Milly, or just a strange imitation like the rest of the house, but the question was suffocated beneath the fact of her presence, right there in front of me: Milly. She pulled the blanket over her and lay down across the couch. “Come lie next to me,” she said.
        So I got onto the couch and snuggled behind her. I decided that I didn’t need to understand. Solace wasn’t born from mere existence; it wasn’t simply there to catch you at the end of the day. You just fell and fell forever until you found a way to it.
        I wrapped an arm around Milly, nestling my nose in her hair. Her breathing was warm and steady against my chest. I liked being the little spoon most, but this was nice too.

---

--
Timothy Day lives with his plants in Portland, Oregon. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University and his fiction has appeared in Booth, The Adroit Journal, The Hunger, and elsewhere.