It’s a terrible thing to watch a body eat itself, particularly when the whole job’s in on it, not just the mouth. The liver overrunning the kidneys; the small intestine trading jobs with the large; the brain beating an angry poem into the lining of the skull as the blood vessels swell and sputter like indignant old men.
Regina was breathing her last. It was just that, thanks to the complicated series of tubes jammed through her larynx, her last had been in process for over six months already.
“Tell me,” she asked her relative (lord knows she couldn’t keep track of them all by now, four generations deep as they were), “what kind of day is it out there right now?”
Her relative looked out the window. “Sunny,” they said, after a while. “Very blue. A good day for throwing Frisbees, swimming in ponds, catching frogs, and admiring birds. The plants love it.”
Regina rested her gaze on the only plant representative available, a tiny long-ago-potted specimen that, regardless of former species allegiance, by now resembled some sort of diminutive dwarf strangling vine. “Selfish little bastards, hogging it all to themselves,” she muttered.
“Grandma?”
“Oh, nothing. But I tell you what, there’s nothing worse than to sit indoors on a day like this without so much as a fresh leaf to brighten the space.”
“We could take you outside.”
“Not since they installed that last tube. It goes, I go.”
“We could take it outside.”
“It’s connected to this machine which is connected to this pump which is connected to this valve which is connected to this generator which is connected to this wall.”
“Oh dear.”
“It happened last week, dear, don’t worry about it too much. I don’t think you were on shift then.”
Regina’s relative looked apologetic. “Still…”
“Oh, don’t be that way. Look, if you want to make it up for me, I’ve got one thing I want. One wish. I want you to get me a tree.”
Regina’s relative paced the doorway’s width three times, squinted and tilted their head, moved their lips a lot, and made a sort of aimless buzzing sound deep in their throat. “Well, maybe a sapling’d do it…”
“No deal,” said Regina firmly. “I want a tree, not a potted planter. Now hop to it and let me have some rest.”
So Regina’s relative hopped over to another of Regina’s relatives who phoned up another of Regina’s relatives who sent an email to yet another of Regina’s relatives who knew one of Regina’s relatives who knew a guy who wasn’t related to Regina at all but who seemed to recall seeing something like what they were talking about in the bottom of the back of an old, old, old, old mail-order catalogue from the early 1980s, buried under a heap of advertisements for long-dead home computer systems.
They sent the cheque in anyways, because inflation had rendered the sum nominal by now and they figured it was worth a shot. And indeed, two to three mailing weeks later, Regina’s relative opened their door to find a box the size of a car wedged onto their porch.
“Sign here please” said a very faraway and irritated voice.
“Where?”
A clipboard was launched over the box’s top, with pinpoint accuracy.
“Ow.”
“On the dotted line, the dashed line, the solid line marked with an X, the solid line NOT marked with an X, the three perforated portions, and the supplementary signature section, boxes Q through Z-B.”
“Right. Isn’t this a bit much?”
“Oh god no. You have no idea how much paperwork it takes to get a tree built around here.”
The first step of the matter was to get the tree to Regina’s hospital. This presented difficulties until one of Regina’s relatives mentioned that they knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a girl who knew someone who had a trucker buddy who was awfully free with company property, at which point all transportational difficulties were solved with eighteen wheels and a few thousand horsepower.
The second step was to unload it, piece by piece. Each portion of the tree had to be lifted up three stories, and the hospital refused the use of their cargo elevator.
“The insurance doesn’t cover trees,” the director pointed out. “Even if you don’t so much as chip the paint – which I very much doubt you’ll manage, I mean, is that a conifer?”
“White pine,” said Regina’s relative.
“A nightmare of scraping,” the director murmured. “The needles alone could peel a wall to the bare bone, the sap, the sap, the awful, awful sap…” She shuddered and shook herself vigorously. “Anyways! Even if there’s no damage whatsoever from the rough rough bark ANYWAYS I’d be in trouble for permitting that sort of risk to take place on the premises.”
“What if we winch it up?”
“Oh that’d be fine, go nuts. I think one of the old dialysis machines we’ve got in the basement can be repurposed to do that, if you ask one of the technicians.”
It could and did, because nothing gets something done faster than a bored techie, and soon, ring by ring, a disassembled heap of tree was growing on the floor of Regina’s bedroom as she dozed the afternoon away.
“I can’t let you do this if there’s going to be any hammering,” the head nurse told them. “This is a palliative ward. People need their sleep.”
“Don’t worry,” reassured Regina’s relative. “The manual says this thing assembles without so much as a screwdriver. It’s all dowels.”
“Dowels?”
“Yes.”
The head nurse opened his mouth and shut it again and repeated that a few times, then settled for a friendly pat on the shoulder. “I’m sure it’ll all be fine in the end,” he managed through a three-tooth smile. Then he departed, slumping.
The basic principles of tree assembly were simple.
Each ring was attached to the next largest ring with three dowels every four inches.
The outmost ring was attached to a slab of bark with four completely different dowels every five inches.
Pasted between each layer was 4 fluid oz. of sap mixed from four separate plastic pouches, none of which were labelled.
All needles were labelled A through Z and 1 through 1,000, in reverse alphabetical order, and each had its own corresponding dowel, all of which looked to be of equivalent size and none of which were.
The roots were in a separate bag hidden somewhere in the bottom of the box which had to be retrieved from the hospital’s recycling dumpster. Each root was composed of eighteen or more interlocking and wholly unique dowels, like a jigsaw puzzle.
You see? Simple.
“This is not at all simple,” said Regina’s relative, buried somewhere in needle clumps Q010, R592, and S008.
“Simple or not, it’s got to be done,” said another of Regina’s relatives, who was trying to sort the (unlabelled) dowel packages into the comfortable illusion of control provided by orderly rows and columns. “And I don’t want to hear one more thing about it.”
“Um…. One thing.”
Another of Regina’s relatives dropped the package she was holding, which bounced off six others and sent them spraying across the floor with a noise like a cat pissing on a tin roof. “Yes?” they said.
“What do we do about the ceiling?”
The next problem was the ceiling.
“We could cut a hole through it?”
“No,” said the director.
“We could separate it into portions, and just sort of stack them up floor by floor, each above the other but separated by the floorboards, if we just moved some of the beds around.”
“No,” said the head nurse.
“We could cut a SMALL hole through it…”
“No,” said the director.
“What if we planted it outside the window and just moved her over to look at it through that?”
“No,” said Regina’s relative.
“What if we used a drill instea-”
“NO,” said the director.
“What if,” said Regina’s relative, “we just assembled it sideways?”
They all looked at each other, carefully assessing reactions, cataloguing acceptance, measuring sanity.
“Fine,” said the director. “But run it through the south door. East is the children’s ward, and they’ll try and climb it.”
Regina’s eyes opened. It was a bigger accomplishment than it looked on paper.
“Surprised, grandma?” asked Regina’s relative.
She looked up. Not terribly far up; six inches past her nose it was nothing but needles.
“We had to stick the roots out the window,” said another of Regina’s relatives. “But it seems to be doing all right.”
Regina turned her head, with some difficulty. “Wow,” she said. “How big’s that thing?”
“One hundred and forty-two feet,” said another of Regina’s relatives promptly. “We ordered size L; XL said ‘limited stock’ and since the ad was thirty-four years old we figured that-”
“Wow,” repeated Regina. “That’s some tree all right. That’s really nice, you know that? Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” said Regina’s relatives.
Her lips pursed. “Still… did it have to be a pine? I really WOULD have liked to see a fresh leaf in here; it’d really brighten the space.”
And Regina laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed at their expressions, a long, full cackle that sent four miles of plastic tubes buzzing with glee.
“Oh man,” she choked out, “you’re REALLY easy to get! Oh my! It’s lovely, thanks, I’ve never been happi” and then she died, but very cheerfully.
They brought the tree to the funeral.
It seemed right.