the cloud the sea

A BRIEF BACKGROUND

I did not set out to record what you are about to read. I only wanted peace, and a quiet place to rest, somewhere peaceful to finish my novel. I had not yet begun writing, but I liked that phrase, that I was looking to ‘finish my novel’, and so that’s how I referred to the whole project. I had a good idea, I thought; there would be a spy, and some sort of betrayal, and a balanced mix of comedy and dark introspection. My designated notebook was the proud owner of nearly one hundred and fifty words, neatly divided across a dozen sentences. Needless to say, it was coming along nicely, and I felt the whispers of destiny about me. I don’t feel the need to admit to you that those one hundred and fifty words were no more than a handful of ideas as to what the ’tagline’ of the book would be, when the jacket art was splashed on the front of some lifestyle magazine; that is not relevant to the story at hand.

If I’m honest with you, I never was much of a writer; I liked the idea of it far more than the actual stringing together of ideas on paper. The nice thing about being a writer, I felt, is that all I had to do was say that’s who I was, and I got all the points. Once people start to ask about your output, your work, your novels, all you have to do is wax poetic about writer’s block, and the artist’s struggle, and the deification of production, and there you have it, your points going off the charts all over again, the whole business of actually staining paper with ink avoided once more! After all, I’m sustainable. Why ruin innocent paper? Oh, well, write on a computer, you say. But I take my sustainability to the next level. I don’t even waste e-paper. That doesn’t make sense, you say, puzzled. I shake my head condescendingly. Not to you, nope. Not to you, nope, it wouldn’t. I patronize you by going to look for a recycle bin for my glass bottle, which I toss surreptitiously into the garbage when you aren’t looking, because there aren’t glass bottle recycle bins in Hong Kong. But you don’t know that.

Sorry. I must snap myself out of my thoughts. I get lost in all that weaving. You can see now, that’s who I was, and that’s who I would have remained – had it not been for the Guardian-King. For his warrior. For their misguided attempt to retake what was once their domain. I was a fool, and of the worst vein – I was a fool who didn’t realize his foolishness. All sorts of precautions must be taken to protect yourself from such people. There is nothing that can shake them in the ordinary sense, and so it is sometimes granted that they are to experience something extraordinary. Sometimes they are visited by the ghosts of cheery holidays; sometimes they are verbally mocked by a donkey; some are swallowed by a fish. It is best not to go on being a fool, as the aforementioned ‘extraordinary’ moment is anything but pleasant to the protagonist (so called in a purely technical sense); it is best to sort things out before one gets to that point. But get to that point, some do, and I was the next in an unhappy, unbroken chain of fools.

The setting. There is a tree which rests in Wanchai, slumped above a staircase which scales up the wall of a park. This tree is proud, lonely, and amiable, and he is the last of a mighty race, the only remaining subject of an eccentric Guardian-King. Bear with me, and things will become clear. First, I must recount to you my interviews with them both. I’ll be as faithful a carrier of the words given me as I can be; however, a journalist I am not, and I pray you forgive my amateurism.

Now. Let’s begin.

MY INTERVIEW WITH THE GUARDIAN-KING

We sat together in the tree for our first meeting.To call this an ‘interview’ is somewhat misleading… I ask no questions, and he leaves me no room to do so. I record this exactly as he spoke it. If you are confused, welcome to the club. Things will make more sense in time, as they did for me…somewhat. Unsolicited, he begins to speak. 

ENDURE, ENDURE, ever endure. Of course, it is exhausting. Of course, there are other things I’d like to be doing. Other things I’d like to see. I have dreams of other things. I believe I may have been somewhere else, once.

Why the delay in retrieving Memories? Am I faulty through some rebellion, like the men and women who surround me?

I have you now, you FLIGHTY WISP!

Ah! This Memory I have now caught squirms in my hand. I REMEMBER!!! I remember eating an orange. What an Orange it was! What buzz! What revelation of Fruit! What a day of Knowledge – for, truly, such is as all Fruit was intended to be – GLORIOUS! The embodiment of the COLOR ITSELF!

Once I have remembered my fill, I taste it once more, and then let the Sprite go, petulant little rat.

(My Memories, once common to us all, now have only me to keep company. They exist to torment, to tease, to deceive. Once they deceived me into remembering a false youth – they had me convinced I had grown up a pigeon. I lived in my only Tree for days. Who knows what I shouted at tourists?)

I get back at them, you know. It is admittedly difficult to catch them off guard, but sometimes, I’ll abruptly summon a Memory, white it isn’t looking, and I’ll catch it in my hand – O! How I enjoy it. How I savour it. I revel in it as long as I can before I let it free, or it wrests itself from my grip. Whichever unlucky one I’ve caught always scrambles into the aether, angry, embarrassed, slighting, plotting revenge. That scoundrel who gave me the pigeon-past is out there somewhere. He must be a little ringleader, a prince of mischievous orphans.

Alas! Not orphans yet. They still have me to poke, their codgy old father. Truly, I suppose, I gave them life. That is not true. They were begotten through my living. I had no hand in it. Well, I may have – I did choose one or the other way. But then – it doesn’t matter. You see how this happens? A roll of thread which watches itself unspool, not orderly, a thread at a time, spinning out into some purpose – the roll is full of threads disconnected, all chomping at the bit to be free, to be king. But… that makes no sense. A roll of thread is a roll, a unit, because it is the one thread, looped many times. Perhaps it was cut. Perhaps… perhaps the Memory-Sprites, these fiends, those devils.. Perhaps they…

They leave me no peace! Excepting, of course, the rememberings of peace I snatch from them. They! They love to shatter my peaceful present spent pondering a piece of the past with something jarring. Dissonant. How they snicker!!

They’ve distracted me! Do you see! Do you see what I’ve come to? I was a King. That’s what I was getting at, the memory about being other places. I was everywhere, and here. Guardian of the forest, at peace with the mighty; my beauties, the bauhinias, lighting the pathways with pink fire; my sunshine trees, giving medicine to the bodies of men, and cheer to their hearts; proud cotton-trees, with their red, musical bells; path-winding banyans my sentinels, perched on the hills, exposing their veins, intimidating strings of world-worn muscle. There were dozens more, with flower-fire of every color; mine was a resplendent kingdom, and after them all I looked; we were everywhere, and from everywhere, gave life, and shade. There were few men, and the ones who passed through were friendly enough.

But now it is just me! Me and my only Tree! I, the wandering spirit, a gypsy who was once a Guardian King. I am trapped. They’ve kept only a handful of the old community, interspersed in the raucous din of concrete, and foreign odors. Why not take us all? I ask, and I am understandably frustrated! May I be reassigned? Give me a new forest, a forest far away, with mighty nobles, beautiful blossoms, hopeful saplings, the chirpings of a thousand bards! No, the Gardener responds. Your forest remains, and Guard it you will.

I do not dismay. I love my calling. I love my job! So they say, the absurd humans around me. They drink wine, that sparkling Ruby which cheers the heart of God and men. Most believe themselves to be God, or doubt that they are gods; egregious blasphemers in every sense, they are.

My dominion stretched far north, to the place where the land juts from the earth like the fingers of fallen, buried titans. The River weaves between them, among them, and carries their songs downstream. The cities along the river made the most beautiful music, music which even I could hear, and in which I could exult. Those humans discerned not from whence their words came, and could not understand the true words beneath their words. They knew not their muse, but o! how their songs could cheer us. The trees themselves stretched out to join the sweeping flow of sound.

When our mother dreamt, she wrapped herself with the rolling clouds, a starless sea. The jutting mountains were softened in the haze, and they slept, still. They looked in those moments like the tombstones of the ages and epochs, the resting place of civilizations, forgotten by all but her. Her lullaby is silence. It is broken only by the rustle of the wind – this is her calming whisper – and by the murmur of the waves – the sleep-talk of her water as it rolls.

No! NO! Scoundrel! He’s off! I let go of it for just a moment! Hang it all! Sideways!

Where were we? My apologies for leaving it off, and being quiet for a time. It is never easy to settle back into the coherent style of companionship when those little demon-faeries jar one so.

I was telling you of my Plan! Yes! How we came to be here. How we came to having this chat. All pleasant. I will recount my Speech to you!

Here it is! I said:

“It is Time to Advance – and Advance we will! I’m tired of the flitting and the fleeing. The forest will return! My dominion will be restored!”

He made the noise again, something of a cross between a quiet shout and a loud chuckle-groan. There was an exultance in it.

“It happens tonight! We meet under the Tree!”

He turned to me to explain, his gaze briefly returning from some imaginary place to lock with my own.

There is only the one left now, and if nothing else, it makes it easy to pick a meeting point. Ah! I was trying to remember our rallying cry! This is what I said, I think, I struggle to remember, (drown those sprites!):

“There is something to say here, Tree! I tell him. The Valiant Are Salient! …No. No. Yes, let’s have another.”

Don’t write that one down – I’ve forgotten what that means.

“We Hear the Voices of our Fallen Comrades, and Are Dismayed!”

Sorry. Again. No. That wasn’t it, it’s far too long, and lacks specificity. Apologies. I am not as connected as I once was to Coherence.

Ah! FOR COHERENCE! Yes! That was it! That was the gist of my speech, anyway, though I threw in a few more rousing lines. When the sun had nearly gone, that is when I arrived. The Tree had agreed – sullenly, I might add, he was never an enthusiastic one; I suppose he’s taken it hard, watching all his companions destroyed. But he would Advance at my command! And YES! I’ve remembered! FOR COHERENCE!

He is swallowed by such a wave of exuberance that he skips away to… wherever-it-is that whatever-he-is goes. That first interview thus concluded, I turned to the afore-mentioned Tree, in whose branches I sat, and looked him in the center of his trunk, where I felt his attention toward me emanate, though I saw no countenance to speak of.

THE WARRIOR SPEAKS

I am weary of him. In his day, which was hundreds of your years ago, and many weeks in ours, it is true what he’s said, that he was a good and brave Guardian King. Brave, if a bit absent-minded. He always knew what to say, though, I must admit; he was never more than an inch away from an impassioned speech about something or other. He’d get worked up about something, call for all the nobles and able-bodied youthlings, and we’d assemble and march, sometimes for days. In the good times, before, we would join other groups, and work in some worthy cause: planting new swaths of forest; rebuilding after storm-damage; scolding con-trees who claimed to grant wishes; creating hidden places where the wise humans could contemplate; mapping out where the wind had carried our children.

Toward the end, as the men began to take us rapidly, his forces dwindled, and his mind followed suit; the passion was there, as always – it still is, of course – and he’d rouse us from our slumber or mourning or anger and we’d march with him for days, looking to him as the Prince of New Beginnings, awaiting our steady and slow transfer to a new home, only to find that the purpose of our traipsing was that he’d found the most beautiful of butterflies, and insisted we all see her. On that one, I’m certain he’d lost track of her and just wandered us about, covering nearly the entire kingdom by the end of it. Then, he’d found the Fountain of Life; a Cave of Wonder; a sunset; a beautiful rope-bridge that the men had built; a caterpillar; an old coin from some lost civilization; a curious breeze. The last journey I remember, he wanted us to ride in a stream. Being tree spirits and forest nymphs, our physical laws were different from the human children he had seen joyously rafting about; to set him at ease, we tried, lolling about on the surface of the water as if we were frolicking kids.

It was disheartening. Disconcerting. The rebellions began a few weeks after the dozenth or two-dozenth time we made one such fruitless exhibition. The Gardener never looked well on these mutinies, obviously, and their spark was soon extinguished by the advancing men. Still, however, it was not long before the only land counted as part of the Guardian’s kingdom was the tiny swath on this island, and soon hundreds dwindled to dozens, and dozens dwindled to us.

They do this from time to time, the men and women. They like to keep a few of us around. I don’t mind it, really – it’s the natural rhythm of things – but I do wish I could begin something new. It’s been many weeks here, long weeks, and I little enjoy the neighbourhood.

And that is why I agreed to the Advance. I’ll admit, it’s not a good side of Tree-Nature, to paraphrase a bit of Dickens. I hesitate to compare myself with those who’ve really gone, those who’ve really turned, but I think you know enough to judge fairly. (Though only the Gardener judges between men and trees!) I never was fruitless, you can be sure.

It was at sundown, last night. We were late, of course; the Guardian had spent hours, a full day of your time, trying to think of a fitting rallying cry. To add to the chaos, he’d become convinced by one of those capricious leprechaun spirits masquerading as his memories that I once had a bride named Coherence, and we were fighting to avenge her death. You laugh at this, but O! by my farthest leaf, by my deepest root, did it take some persuasion to disentangle him from that web. When he came out of it he chased the little fiend until he was exhausted – and it is not easy to exhaust a spirit, let alone a Forest Guardian. Needless to say, by the time we were ready, the bloodlust was thick about him.

The plan was rehearsed until, if you’ll forgive my pun, not’a one of my leaves was unturned, or looking away from its purpose.

The Target was a single man, on his way home from his office, or an errand; it matters little. He, as you know well, has no bearing in their hierarchy, no ranking or seniority, no designs for a station or even an ambition for power. We assumed, in our red-sight, that he was one of their top advisors, or at the least, a scout to bring our message to their Chiefs. If there was anywhere to begin the Advance, this was it.

At the proper time, the Guardian gave the shout, inaudible to the man, as per our nature. I unleashed my missiles, which took the form of every last leaf which could leap from my arms. They rained like yawning arrows; they hailed like tender rain; they crashed like a thousand clouds upon a downy hill. The Guardian and I were lost in the violence of it all.

To our dismay, the Enemy principally endured the rain of War with a bemused bashfulness, as if he had stumbled into a meeting of magnificent gods at a delightful brunch, and felt ashamedly underdressed. He then transitioned to (dare I say!) a look of cheery pleasure, as if he enjoyed the meteors falling about him. As if it were some sort of experience.

But all was not lost. He began to shout, to dance, and then he ran spasmodically, jumping, fleeing the scene as no man has ever fled from my shade (and especially not one in those terribly impractical shoes which are after their modern fashion). His shouts echoed through my cement neighbours, the glass and steel packaging the ruckus and sending it back to me. The Guardian made his noise – abrupt, brief shouts of exultation which are, as you know well, indistinguishable from his shouts of alarm, or dismay, or laughter – and he chased the man to watch the spectacle.

With a sinking in my trunk, however, I saw the truth – a truth bare as my naked arms; for the spider who’d called me her quiet home had been shaken loose with the mortal barrage, and had fallen on the unsuspecting man. He’d been driven away by an errant spider-missile, not by our provocation of leaves and band-wagon leaping twigs.

Of course, I’d not had the heart to tell the Guardian! The first step in his grand Plan, in his storied Advance, accomplished not by our might and wit, but by the help of a fallen spider, who was herself more upset than any other party in this debacle! How could I so crush his spirits, I wondered – and it was then that he marched back into my sight.

TREE! Tree! I have need of your assistance. We will change our approach. We must. A child of man approaches you now – he wishes to climb, to face the east wind, to roam wild and free. Welcome him in your unsightly, naked branches! Rid yourself of vermin to cause him to quake with fear and never return! Repent of your murderous ways – from today, we begin the Second Phase of the Plan. We must shed no more blood – that first man, an unfortunate casualty of war, Gardener rest his soul (and have mercy on us spirits). Now our war will be JOY! You will let that boy climb, let him feel the rush of the wind upon your battlements, the strength of your towers, the endurance of your warrior-spirit – your GENTLE warrior-spirit! He will become tied to you, and plant more of us for the next crop of human youthlings, and, so biding our time, we will yet restore the kingdom! Now OFF! He draws near!

AND SO IT BEGAN

And it was then that I arrived at the tree, a happy Jacob climbing a tree-ladder to my paradise. Free of any possible spiders, open arms devoid even of leaves, I made my way to the clouds. (These were imaginary, and approximately on level with the second story of the neighbour-building.) At twenty-five, I wasn’t quite the little boy the Guardian saw… but then again, I was giggling aloud as I climbed up the tree.

I noticed something strange in that moment – a splayed fan of near-invisible twigs, striding confidently, swishing in some faint wind. I believed it to be a trick of the eyes – a refraction of light – but disappear into normalcy it did not. Instead, it began to grow more solid, to take a defined form, and by the time the see-through sashaying gorgons settled themselves in a branch across from me, I was far too terrified to move or flee. For, seated across from me, gangly legs dangling like roots in a stream, was a form in the shape of a man. He resembled a tree more than anything, and the appendages I had first spotted were thrust out from the back of his shoulders like some sort of cape-and-crown combo. He exuded a sense of royalty, and though his overwhelming tinge was of green, the aura of light which revealed him was of purple. The question he asked me then changed the immediate course of my life.

‘Are you man or wom – ‘

Sorry – no – it was the second question he asked:

‘Child of man, will you join us?’

Unable to say anything else, and shocked past the point of surprise, I simply nodded my head.

‘You will tell our story to your people,’ the spirit said to me, with words that were not words. ‘We attempted to make contact with one of your people. We assaulted him in the foulest of brutal ways. For this we apologize, and would like to repent.’

He noted my confusion.

‘A man came before. We dropped our leaves on him. He ran away.’

I suddenly recalled brushing past my hysterical neighbour as he sprinted out of the alleyway from which I spotted the bare climbing-tree. The spirit seemed to be suppressing a giggle.

‘You must tell our story to your people, the spirit said to me again.’

I nodded again, and it was the daisy link which changed everything.

A HAPPY CONCLUSION

And thus their Agent I became. The first Interviews I have recorded here for you; subsequent adventures I will save for a later date. I was the Agent of the Guardian-King and his Tree, fomenting rebellion by encouraging tree-climbing, disseminating propaganda for the cause by extolling the benefits of befriending trees. From a drifting life lost in the grandeur of self-propping delusions, I had found purpose in planting the seeds of the Forest-to-Come. Nearly every day, I go to sit in the Tree. We three discuss plans, we joke, they tell me of their departed friends; I glean the stoic wisdom of the tree and the eccentric wisdom of the Guardian. We, the Tree and I, laugh as the Guardian swats at the leprechaun-memory phantoms. So majestic, the King is, and yet he is comically unable to combat them. You don’t engage monkeys, when they mock you. Once you do, you lose, they get you, it’s done, and they’re addicted to tormenting one whom they know will engage them back. Even as I sit here now, the Guardian looks to me –

‘YOU,’ the Guardian says. ‘Who are you?’

I am shocked by his lack of recognition, after everything we’ve –

‘You will go as well!! Go to CLIMB! We will ALL! GO! TO CLIMB! And next week – when our forests are restored – we will find the Queen of the forest again, her gossamer wings guiding us to the whispering River – GO! Go, I say, CLIMB!’