o no lo

I sat next to a dead body, once. It looked alive, except it wasn’t. All the colors were the same. It didn’t stink, yet. It was the thinnest body I had ever seen, thinner than any body I’d seen alive, with the possible exception of Maed Kake. I sat on a stool, next to the plain wood platform used as a bed on which the body lay, the man’s parents and brother there with me, in the small cinderblock room with thin linoleum sheeting, not much thicker than drawer liner paper, covering the cement floor.

Kaked had worked for me for almost three years. His brother was not more than 25 or 26 years old. I’d “loaned” him two and a half million rupiah (about $250) to help him and his parents bury the body. Just the week before I’d loaned him about one million rupiah to pay for hospital bills. If I’d provided all the money up front, would he still be alive? I don’t know.

There were no tears. The mood was no more mournful than cheerful. It was resigned. These people had already seen one brother, one son, die in childhood. It was not a new event. Besides, there were still lots of brothers left – three.

In my youth, as do so many, I loved to climb trees.

In our front yard we had a big Norfolk Island pine, sappy, scratchy, and full of ants. Its branches were perfectly placed, at exactly the right increments, making it easy. It was a rhythmic, even, purposeful climb, straight to the top. In the front yard of the house of the neighbor across the street, one house down the hill, was a standard variety pine, the kind of pine with bendy branches, curving in multiple directions, so unlike the tree in our front yard, in its conical geometricity. The neighbor’s pine had huge branches, and of course an even bigger trunk. So big I could barely get my small limbs around it. But I did. I could see the ocean from high up in either tree.

In a wide undeveloped stretch of land, a mile or two down the hill from where we lived, we had a favorite tree. It was something subtropical, suitable to southern California, but like almost everything else there, not native. Actually, we had two favorite trees. One sat immediately next to the road, one thick branch, nearly horizontal, stretching out over the middle of the road. This tree provided medium sized berries, hard, inedible, perfect projectiles to launch at passing cars. Most motorists would not notice, in their haste to return home, late afternoon, but some would stop, irate, and yell at us. We found it funny. The other tree sat back from the road, a bit further down the hill. Though not a willow, it had the same drooping sensibility, foliage which thoroughly enclosed it, creating a sense of encapsulation, from the perspective of small children. This tree was our refuge. Me, Andrew Suttcliff, his brother Tom, and my brother Jeremy. Occasionally the Suttcliff’s small sister, Janice, would join. And on occasion, friends of mine from school, visiting from their too distant to walk from neighborhoods in other parts of Pacific Palisades – Morgan Stanford, Alex Kimble, Bobby Beeks, or Jarret Bowser. The Suttoncliff’s father helped us build a tree-house in this tree capsule, high in the upper branches. But we did most all the work. In fact, I can only remember him being there once. Perhaps he carted the wood there in his pickup truck, from some construction site he worked at as a contractor.

We had another ‘fort’ as well, in a patch of scrub bushes, below the main road, down a steep hill, overlooking the ocean. There were trails all over those hills. We had cleared out all the underbrush, so as to be able to nestle and scramble about beneath the growth. We played at giving ‘shows,’ but only when Janice Suttcliff was there, and she gave us a ‘show’ too. We must have been all of about six or eight years old. It was around the time, or only shortly after, those days when I still enjoyed secretly peeing in my closet. That was when I lived in the room close to the garage, a dark, dank room. When I was still really, really little, when I shared that room with Jeremy.

We had a dog named Muffet, a German Schnauzer. She made a lot of noise. She was high strung, that was what my mother said. I had a nightmare about Muffet, dead, in the clothes dryer. She was dead, but she could still move, and she re-emerged from her skin, as if shedding it like a reptile.

I always loved climbing trees. I could do it with friends, and I could do it alone. I could always climb higher than anyone else, I thought. I continued to climb trees for a long time. I enjoyed heights. When I lived in Tokyo, after graduating university, I used to go climb a tree in Yoyogi Park after eating, during my lunch break. One gloomy day, at the top of the tree, crows started circling all around, cawing at me, circling closer. I climbed down quickly, scared at being in a tree, for the first time ever. It’s the last tree I remember climbing, although I am sure I must have climbed some since.