A Lesson in Mimicry

A story about a man climbing a tree.

Dusk. Purple, almost black. Two floodlights expose the tree. The floodlights sit on the ground on opposite sides and are pointed at it. One is pointed higher and one is pointed lower, and together, they light the whole front of the tree, save its roots, and its widest extremities. Moths shake around in the beams. Beetles crawl on the light pointed lower, and ants crawl on the light pointed higher. The brightness is all hot on them. The floodlights are hooked up to cables that lead off into peripheral space. There is a blank circle in the sky where the moon would have been.

The branches of the lower portion of the tree have all been chopped off. The limb stumps encompass small eruptions of fleshy pale wood. Black arteries clogged with gold. The forest floor is soft undergrowth and fallen things, greens and browns and yellows turning dim and desaturated over a surface that is perfectly flat and even and smeared with animal refuse and remainders, vague tracks. Above, in the light of the higher lamp, the branches are all still intact, untouched, dense and heavy with needles. An owl sits on one of the highest branches, talons wrapped, then flies away.

Our man in a loincloth steps out of the dusk and approaches the tree. He wears boots with sharpened blades embedded horizontally, facing inwards, towards each other. Furious lovers. Straddling the trunk, using the stumps of shorn branches as makeshift handholds, he drives the blades into the living wood with practiced motions. The blades stick, bend with his weight, hold. In this manner, he begins to slowly ascend. Each further step is a matter of wrenching the blades free, burying them once again. The floodlights gaze at him impassively. Every fold of his skin stands in sharp relief. The evening is not warm, but he’s quickly becoming slick with sweat.

The sky darkens, lowers itself. Our man’s hands have become sticky with sap. He clings to the trunk, arms wrapped together, catching his breath. The sap gets onto his legs, his chest. When he pulls away, he leaves some of his skin behind. He looks upwards. The first intact branches are closer now. A few more feet and they’ll be within reach. He doesn’t look down. The ground seems very far away.

He has to be careful when his hands first wrap around a branch. It takes three more footholds hacked with the blades in his boots before he has raised himself to a high enough position to safely climb onto it. It’s long and thin, and only right at its base is it sturdy enough to support him. He rests for a moment, arms comfortably slung over a branch just above him, then removes the blades from his boots. He stores them carefully in a pocket sewn into the collar, and resumes his climb.

In the glare of the floodlight, the branches cast hard shadows against one another. There seem to be limbs that aren’t really there. The needles confuse everything. This is the tree’s way, one of its defenses. He knows not to trust his eyes. Instead, he moves mostly by feel, and by brief glimpses of the stars up above. As he climbs, he stops noticing the marks the twigs and rough patches of bark are leaving on his skin. Their dull stinging becomes like a noise he’s tuned out.

Sometimes, from our position on the ground, he’s completely hidden from view. More often, a reaching arm, a bent leg, a section of pale torso can be discerned. Different of us catch sight of him at different moments. He is very distant now, very far away, a tiny, rising figure. The wind has begun to pick up, the tree sways, but it makes no difference to him. We wait patiently for his shape to emerge near the top of the tree, where the branches thin out and become short, simple things.

When his head finally breaks out into the open, now very high off the ground, the light is in his eyes. He blinks, he looks around. He sees the forest, spreading out to the horizon. At the horizon, he sees the planet curving away. There’s nothing to hear but the wind all around him. He clings to the trunk of the tree, legs wrapped around it like a mother’s leg. The distance left to the top exceeds the full extension of his body, just barely. He can’t reach it, but that’s not a problem, because that’s not where he needs to go.

He looks around again, more carefully now. He peers around the trunk, and realizes he’s come out on the wrong side. On the other, directly opposite him, is a kind of crook formed by two stubby branches, within which rests an empty bird’s nest. The nest, we already know, is a forgery, a mimic, made of a rigid material, the nature of which has not been determined. He signals to us that there’s something inside. Carefully, he reaches downwards, extending one arm towards it, keeping the other wrapped around the trunk for support. His fingers brush the edge of the nest. They reach deeper. They grab onto the thing that he’s seen. They wrap into a fist around it. He disappears.

The next instant, the floodlights go out. Clouds gather. The wind abruptly becomes a storm. Rain falls in punishing sheets. A bolt of lightning splits the tree in two. It all happens too quickly for us to comprehend. In the chaos, some of us are turned to stone. Others are struck dumb. I fall in the mud, paralyzed. The next morning, those of us still capable gather up our equipment. We move on, following the path of the sun.