I wake up before I’m supposed to. The endotrachael tube presses against the base of my tongue and disappears into the empty space past my tonsils. The texture feels rough against my throat, ridged like the bark of a tulip tree. I don’t know what it means that I’m awake—this could be bad, I think, and yet I can’t seem to talk myself into panicking. It must be the sedatives.
There are two doctors standing over me. They look the way people look in distant memories—hazy at the center, sharp and bright at the edges. They have auras. I know they are cutting into me; there is nothing else for them to be doing. The scalpel is curving along the skin of my chest, slowly, like a pencil in the hands of someone just learning cursive. I suppose there is blood. That is what happens when you break the skin.
(Several weeks from now, when I remove the bandage and see the stitches and scar for the first time, my face will go pale and I’ll have to sit down. “I look like Franken-nipple,” I’ll say.)
I keep pushing my tongue against the tube. I think of trees with rough bark: tulip, green ash, cottonwood, wild pear. I don’t know if I am breathing or if a machine is breathing for me. It’s hard to remember how old I am. I remember I had put the hospital gown on the wrong way, with the clasps at the front. The nurse laughed at me—not meanly—and told me what to do. But it still makes no sense that the clasps go in the back. Why make everything so hard to reach?
I know that I was eight years old when my grandmother died. My parents bought me khakis for the funeral, and a button-down. I was accustomed to jeans and oversized t-shirts, and so the finer clothes felt alien against my body, like the first night sleeping with new sheets. The funeral was a strange place for a child. Everyone seemed capable of such greater depths of sadness than I was, and I wondered if I was too young to understand or if I just wasn’t a very good person, if there was a piece of me missing. I remember my parents saying my grandmother would live on in our memories; they said the same thing about Susie, our Russian wolfhound who had to be put down after she turned violent and bit my cousin. But I could hardly remember Susie anymore.
I think of trees like I’m quizzing myself for a test. Basswood, sugar maple, black walnut, butternut—all with rough bark, good for climbing, good for getting purchase.
When I was a boy, gypsy moths infested the forests around my neighborhood. When we’d see the larvae climbing low on the pines and oaks, we’d kick at them until their little heads went squish. But there were so many of them shitting from up high in the branches that it sounded like rain twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes fisher cats would wander in from the deeper woods and hunt for a few days in our backyard. At night they made a sound like a child screaming.
It’s taking too long. I don’t know what they’re doing, but if I’m waking up it must be taking too long. I listen for the beep of a heart monitor—I watched the first five seasons of ER, and that’s how I’ll know if I’m living. They are leaning over my chest, squinting with their faces close like they’ve lost a contact lens. They must be cutting into me. Or perhaps they’re peeling back the skin and rooting around in there for whatever it is they’ve lost. OK, I want to say, time out. Let’s close up and finish tomorrow. It can’t be this important.
I was in a doctor’s office once. It was a few months ago, but I was a little boy. They’re cutting into my chest, so I had to go to a breast doctor. The waiting room was filled with old women with huge, sagging breasts and huge, sagging purses. Some had their old husbands with them. It was all dry skin and wrinkles. They were a million years older than me. Two million. Three.
And that’s when I realize that all saplings have smooth bark. Norway maple, chestnut oak, sassafras—all start smooth. The rough stuff comes later, if they survive the gypsy moths.
About the author:
Jake Wolff is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared or is upcoming in Redivider, Fiction Weekly, Sou’Wester, and elsewhere.
