“It’s a yew,” says the mouth that speaks beneath my body, “a sacred tree because it’s immortal, and before dying, when it’s rotting, one of its branches is given space in the already hollow trunk, and the branch grows downward, cleaning the rot away like one of those little fishes that clean the walls of an aquarium.”
“The little branch eats the rot?” I ask.
“Yes,” the mouth answers, “it’s how the branch gets nourishment so that it can continue growing until it reaches the ground and takes hold there, but by then it’s no longer only a branch but a healthy root that will sustain the tree for a thousand years more.”
“And what did you say the tree was called?” I ask again.
“It’s called Aurora.” Aurora? All right then, Aurora. That’s the name your father gave you when he saw me. Den lilla Aurora were his first words, and his hands touch me in the subway. (“Hey, lady! What are you looking at? This car isn’t made of steel, it’s organic like the wisteria branches climbing the trellis in the park where the raccoons play. And the families walking beneath it praise the scent of the flowers. They don’t realize that the fragrance is a blend of the heat of animal pelts, urine, chewed seeds, and the sweat of the rings around the raccoons’ eyes and tails. Lady, don’t get uptight, the ambergris in the perfume you want to buy is whale vomit.”) And he said Den lilla Aurora again, giving you a name before knowing mine, a name with a Swedish adjective because Swedish is the language of the birds, he said, and it’s pronounced this way: Dein lilya Aurora. He said it very slowly—Dein (my ear), lilya (my groin), Aurora—the strain in his trousers, a vapor, a gasp in the space between skin and fabric, reduced, in excitement, to the taut cotton, rained-on, wet fuzz of the flower still on the branch. And in these unhurried words I had time to tell myself that I’m allergic to plastic but what does it matter, there’s no pharmacy in this train, and what’s more I don’t want the time to buy anything; in these three words there was only time enough to say that this man must be healthy and I don’t admit condoms in my body and let’s go to my place without justifying anything to him or to me even though we’d met only five minutes ago. And after we met we watched a movie, and you were newly born into his big hands on the screen, and he kept saying Den lilla Aurora as he looked at you and I said that if I have a daughter I wouldn’t give her a name because when I was born my father called me S without ever knowing my real name. And he expected me to respond every time I heard S. And I didn’t respond, but it was his fault, not mine, for daring to give me a name without knowing me, when I was only seven pounds of bloody flesh. And the yew leaves graze my face, but I find a clearing inside the tree and perch a little solider on the shoulders that sustain me. The distance between my two thighs measures the exact width of your father’s neck, which is in the middle of them. I’m so tall. And I’m surrounded by greenery.
And sometimes I feel afraid. So much fear. Afraid that everything will hush up, as spiteful people do, everything will refuse to speak to me or start talking only to the innards, and I’ll fall into an aquarium full of mouths opening without language. So I float like a sea bream searching out the eyes of another sea bream in the aquarium’s murky waters. The dread is so great that when I see a sea bream I no longer see a fish, but a person mute with fear. That’s how I recognize them at the fishmonger’s stand, on their bed of ice, the startled look in their eyes before the vision of what was exuded as a word only to emerge as a bubble of air in the water. And how it hurts, so much so that I can’t give a name to it without bubbles bursting and emptying out the nothing inside. Only then the people who love me will give me up for lost. They’ll file a report, gather the neighbors to search the fields with flashlights in the middle of the night, not knowing that missing people who die mute abandon their human form, change their skin for scales; their bones become the wobbly spines of a dead fish that was never a fish. “Mom, friends,” I’d say to them, “the missing who are mute are not underground, but in that common grave of startled eyes and scales that a fishmonger threw into the black bucket of garbage.”
But I don’t want to talk about that today, den lilla Aurora, or whatever your name is, because I’m not in a garbage bucket or in an aquarium, but on the shoulders of a man, in a treetop. And did you know that nightingales are so gutsy they’ll attack a cat? And Tyrannus is a genus of small birds that will challenge an airplane. They throw themselves against the motors. Those airplanes laden with pesticides flying over fields so low as to clip the grass deserve it. Let the pilots be charred with the flammable poison and the earless insects hear the pop and singe unknowing, or maybe aware that nobody will be fumigating again at least for a week; they have a whole week (which is a long life) for themselves. And would you just look at that. Here comes a nuthatch. The climbing nuthatch is a neckless bird. He told me why. They don’t need a neck because they look for insects while climbing up and down the tree trunk, so they have no reason to look beyond the bark in front of them.
Look over there. One is coming. Crawling up the trunk like a lizard. I take off my shoe and move my foot closer to the scuttling bird. It has an insectivore’s long sharp beak. I move my foot closer, gingerly, so as not to startle it, and swing it more or less at the height of your father’s belly. I stare at that skinny elongated hummingbird’s beak. My foot is right there now. I close my eyes. I hear the bird pecking at the bark and want it to do the same between my toenail and flesh. Get rid of parasites or dead skin cells. But the crawler continues on up the tree, now at eye level. I wonder if it might wash my face like your father does some mornings, his tongue cleaning my eyes, removing the film that dried in the corners at night. But the nuthatch gets lost in one of the branches, and I clean the sandy granules myself. I suck them from my finger, imagining them still in my eyes and the whole of me is the other one’s tongue. They dissolve.
And now the fear returns crawling up like a bird, rising with its nose stuck to my legs. The fear that all things shall fall silent. The fear that your father—or anyone else’s father, or the father who is nobody’s father—will never again hoist me on his shoulders. The fear of going from laughter in the heights to slinking on the ground, to begging for attention like a puppy nipping the pant legs of a hunter who cares only to gaze off at the horizon. But why does it have to be like this? I have nothing to fear right now because your father’s hand takes hold of my skirt and hangs it from a little branch, as if setting out damp clothes to air. It’s true, I’m not very large, but I sing like a wren. That’s what he said: “You gasp like a wren.”