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Curfew

Chris Nylander

    The tree was like none he had ever seen, with massive menorah-like arms supporting its majestic canopy, and again he wondered what type it could be. It seemed to belong somewhere else, as though a wayward southern seed had grown into an exotic northern survivor surrounded by planned plantings and manmade ponds and the hideous hulking facades of half-empty suburban office buildings. He stood beneath it on the nature trail, peering upward in an attempt to discern its true breadth and height and how it managed to thrive so regally in such an unlikely spot, where no other tree was even half its size.
    It was one of the long days at the end of May, and the sun had yet to touch the rim of the ski hill when he circled back onto the lake trail. Just beyond where it merged with the bike path and split away again, he saw a husky middle-aged man with earbuds and a wheeled tote bag reclining on the grass, unusually close to the footpath as though to invite a conversation, and was curious. The tote signified homelessness, and yet he was clean and neatly dressed, and made no appeal and did not even bother to look up as he passed. He was about to forget him when he stopped, reversed course a few feet, and perched himself on a picnic table. He was a fair distance away and careful not to look back, thinking how long it had been since he’d done something like this, which was not really anything, and after several minutes noticed the path was strangely deserted for such a beautiful evening. He then saw the homeless man plodding off in the opposite direction, wheeling his tote behind him, and what had felt like anticipation sank inside him as he reasoned there was nothing lost. He slid off the picnic table and again wondered why there was no one around.
    With the weekend upon him, he had beer at home but no ice cream. The sun was about to set behind the ski hill and he chose the longer way back to his truck, following the lake to the bandshell and another footpath that ascended into the woods. Just where this path ended at the parking lot, the door on a portable toilet swung open and the homeless man emerged in front of him. The conversation that ensued moved quickly from the weather and where everyone could be to connections and coincidences and conspiracies. His name was Mark, and he claimed a distant relation to a former president, who had warned him that his life could be in danger if he ever “talked.” Through this whole paranoid confessional, which rolled out of him in bright chattering waves as though he just had to risk everything in exposing the non-gleanable truth, his confessor caught a few snippets of what he really wanted to know. He was in his early 50s, raised by a single mom in south Minneapolis, once a postal worker, once engaged to be married. There were no clues as to why he was clearly off his medication or where he was planning to spend the night, and any questions he managed to squeeze in edgewise were merely heard as receptive affirmations by someone too deep into the pleasure of justifying his insanity to consider anyone else’s pleasure. The questions soon became excuses to get away, all ignored, until finally he turned and walked to his vehicle as the chattering escalated into shouting and finally a cathartic rebel yell.
    Driving away, at first thinking it had been a while since he’d met anyone that crazy, his regrets shifted from not extending an invitation to spend a night indoors to not asking if he could collapse with him into that carefree madness under the early summer stars. The guy wouldn’t have stopped talking for anything but sleep, and he could have just lain there beside him until they both slept.
    He had to get ice cream. He knew the stores in Minneapolis and Richfield were closed, and so drove up France Avenue only to discover Byerly’s was closed and the nearby Cub also. He cursed to himself, thinking if Edina was closed then Bloomington would be too, and that he’d have to go south of the river, where they would never close because of what was happening north of the river, and cursed again for having to drive so far for a pint of ice cream. But it was Friday night.
    He exited the freeway a couple miles past the bridge, only to discover a closed convenience store at the top of the ramp and a closed grocery store on the opposite side.
    “Why would anything be closed out here?” he ranted through a U-turn. “I want my fucking ice cream!”
    Still fuming as he turned onto the northbound entrance to the freeway, a sobering distraction appeared in the distance. Pylons of black smoke rose through the dusk from several points along a horizontal line, with one of those points a flickering blip of orange visible from the top of the river bluff twelve miles away. The city was on fire again, now for the third night, and his anger shifted from unavailable ice cream to what those radicalized cop-hating idiots were doing to the cities he’d spent half his life in. This wasn’t about justice anymore. It was decades of ingratitude and contempt for institutions and agencies that showered opportunity and assistance on those who expected everything for nothing; it was thousands of corporate jobs filled by transplants who couldn’t properly account for the polite reserve of Minnesotans and countered that misinterpreted coldness with their own defensive coldness. In the course of his adult life, Minneapolis had gone from being a comfortably sedate northern city to one filled with attitude and arrogance, along with various reactions to how that attitude and arrogance reeked of shallow, self-congratulatory, rainbow-hued enlightenment. The city no longer had a soul. A white cop had knelt on the neck of an uncooperative black man for nine minutes and caused his death, which was shocking, but underneath all the shouting for justice and denunciation of law enforcement was a boiling cauldron of social frustration, never seriously addressed or even acknowledged, and this was what he saw rising in the smoke. Not simply rage for justice and equality, but their own verdict on the soullessness of their city and themselves.
    But what did he know. All he wanted was a pint of ice cream.
    He learned the next morning that an 8 p.m. curfew had been placed the day before not only in Hennepin County but also all of Dakota County. The Cub on Nicollet was open again, with a couple of smashed-out windows boarded up, and he bought his ice cream and other needed groceries that afternoon. That evening he sat down at his computer and went to the Work Buddies website, where as a non-subscriber he was still allowed free previews. The low-grade videos were all shot by a sweet-talking old dirtbag with a talent for soliciting mostly straight men in the seedier areas of Houston. There were hundreds of models featured, mostly in their 30s and 40s, a good proportion of them hard-bitten types with unkempt facial hair and lots of tattoos. The pornographer wrote a description of each man underneath his picture, and the videos usually started with a brief interview. This evening he met Keith, 34 years old, 6-foot-4, 180 pounds, a construction worker and Louisiana native, whose ravaged hangdog face made him look sad even when he smiled. After spending some quality time with Keith, which involved viewing the two-minute preview over and over, he then scrolled forward until he met Brad. Brad was another lanky and strangely appealing guy, with glasses and a no-nonsense demeanor, who’d spent too many of his 42 years in prison but was now out again and determined to live a more productive life. The preview faded just as Brad announced his climactic moment, but he again refused to pay for a month’s subscription. He sat in front of his computer screen in a stupor of shame and disgust. He thought about what was happening in the city.
    His 11^th-floor unit was miles south of Lake Street and facing a different direction, but from his balcony he could see the distant glow of fires in Saint Paul. With the National Guard finally out in full force, he wondered how much longer the destruction would continue. Along with setting fire to two police precinct stations and destroying one of them, the rioters appeared to be targeting bank branches, pharmacies, pawn shops and dollar stores, while torching or trashing dozens of minority-owned businesses in the process. He’d watched a video earlier that day of a swarm of jubilant looters descending on a Target store, smashing self-checkout registers and pushing out cartloads of stolen merchandise, and shared it on his Facebook page. His comment read “Conscientious bargain-hunters seeking justice for George Floyd.”
    He looked down.
    The balcony had been a potential hazard and temptation from the moment he first stepped onto it with the realtor. Directly below was the canopy over the front entrance to the building, which might conceivably break a fall from a hundred feet up, but there was no chance of surviving a hard landing on the ground to either side of it. He propped his elbows on the railing and leaned over, studying the landscape below and then wondering how such an impact might be experienced. Would death be instantaneous and painless, or involve more than a split second of unimaginable agony? He then looked up, with an impetuous half-smile, and scanned the other balconies he could see from his own. There would be no witnesses, which was good.
    The smile faded. His thoughts were sidetracked.
    Not him.
    Not him. The computer. That fucking computer.
    With fresh resolve he returned to his desk in the bedroom and disconnected the laptop and walked back out into the living room and headed for the open sliding door, having determined the computer would be a substitutional sacrifice and experience the uncertain immediacy of fatal impact.
    Personal computers, and later smartphones: instruments of the Information Age, that now laughably heralded era which instead of informing people had brought them misinformation and lies and fat old men exposing themselves and Facebook emoticons and cat videos, and hastened the demise of the music industry and newspapers and department stores and bookstores and books, and transformed megalomaniac billionaire hucksters into the idols of furious minions with claims to Christian purity. From one end of the earth to the other at any given moment hundreds of millions of people stood or sat hunched over or in front of these diabolical devices, and he approached the railing, clutching each end of his device and drawing it back for the launch, but at the same moment freezing with the thought of damaging someone’s vehicle or injuring a neighbor emerging from under the canopy below. Something else then popped into his head and he decided he needed to get information on it.
    He returned to his bedroom. Sitting down, hunching over his computer, initiating multiple searches and scrolling through hundreds of pictures, he at last found what seemed to be the thing he was looking for.
    A beech.
    He posted pictures he had taken the previous summer on Facebook, explaining his fascination, asking if people agreed, and finding a couple who did. The tree in the office park was a beech. Primarily found in the eastern and southern United States, which explained it being the only one he’d seen in Minnesota. He drank a beer, closed the sliding door, and went to bed.
    The next morning he was about to succumb to the temptation of a deeper commitment with Keith when he saw a Facebook notification. Glenn Cederstrom had commented on his post about the beech, which was strange, because Glenn was a prominent member of a church he’d once attended and far too cultured and aloof to respond to anything he’d posted previously, despite surprising him with that friend request about three years ago.
    “Where is this?” he wrote. “Beech trees are rare in Minnesota. This looks like a huge green ash.”
    Chafing at the realization that Glenn had only responded as an opportunity to demonstrate his superior intellect, he did a search for pictures of green ash and their leaves and concluded, reluctantly and with a certain degree of disappointment, that the tree he’d studied Friday evening and on countless other occasions was only an ash, albeit the largest he’d ever seen.
    “Thanks,” was his response to Glenn’s comment. “I think you’re right.”
    That afternoon he ventured into Minneapolis on his bicycle for the first time since the riots started, although staying far to the south of Lake Street. After his ride and some Chinese takeout, he decided to drive back out to the lake. It was about the same time he’d arrived two nights earlier, but with no sign of Mark. He knew he’d be in violation of the continuing curfew if he returned to the now not-so-mystifying tree, but they could arrest him if that’s what they needed to do, which of course they wouldn’t, as he was not just white but close to invisible. He had to check it out, just to be sure.
    This time he stood under the tree and looked closer. He focused in from side to side, top to bottom, stung with each new discovery. Tips of branches, and even entire branches, dead: a living monument possibly predating the first white man’s arrival now a casualty of the emerald ash borer, along with thousands of lesser ash trees in the Twin Cities quickly dying or already cut down.
    He moved beside the great trunk and leaned against it, ignoring a couple of women briskly walking past. The spotty grass around the tree was mowed in concentric circles, and he lowered himself with his back against the trunk, wondering where Mark might be, and if the city was on fire again, and then dozing as night fell. A security guard roused him from a shady summer dream some time later, reminding him of the curfew. He wanted to talk about the tree, but was told to move on.

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