CLEAR
WOOD IS TIME captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record. This is why, Liam believes, carpenters like himself will never go out of business. Because people will always keep wood close: in our houses and on our floors, ceilings, and walls; in our trusted canes and our finest musical instruments; in our heirloom tables and old rocking chairs; and, most tellingly, in the very capsules that ease our journey into the ground.
When carpenters call a piece of wood clear, they mean it is free of knots and wanes and blemishes. And during his many years of fussing over wood, cutting it to exact lengths and lovingly fitting it together just right, all before buffing it to a soul-warming shine, Liam Greenwood has often thought that people like clear wood best because they need to see time stacked together. Years pressed against years, all orderly and clean. Free from obstruction or blemish. The way our own lives never are.
GROUND ZERO
WITH NEARLY FLESHLESS fingertips, he’s clawed his way back down into the sunken living room, back to the foot of the scaffolding that he and Alvarez put up what seems like a lifetime ago. Judging by the light, it’s already mid-morning, and Alvarez would be here by now if he were returning to work today. Though Liam hadn’t really expected he would, that spark of possibility is now extinguished for good.
If there must be a story told about this whole mess, he’d rather it be that Liam Greenwood died while working, and not frozen to death in his van like some vagrant. But he needs to put things in order first, before he’s incapable of doing so. Though his personal life has always been a constant chaos, he’s never once left a job site in such a sorry state, and he isn’t about to start now. He drags himself over to the tool belt he’d removed yesterday so he could crawl to his van, stuffs the brad nails that spilled out back into its pouch, then re-buckles it around his waist. Next, he goes to his air compressor, switches it off, and bleeds the tank of pressure with a deafening hiss. Then he puts his jig saw back in its case and goes about collecting the offcuts of reclaimed boards that came from Temple’s farm, the ones that Alvarez had been wasting. Next, Liam sets about arranging the boards themselves in a neat stack, while reflecting on the unfairness of how few pieces of wood get reclaimed, and how many end up rotting out in a field somewhere. He attempts to sweep as much sawdust as possible with his hands onto the drop cloth, which he then folds up neatly like a present. There’s no hope of taking down the scaffolding or packing up his mitre saw, so he comes to rest on the concrete floor, in the exact spot where he fell, marked by the chip his titanium hammer made when it struck the ground.
Chasing his breath, he examines the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows and the way they frame the seal-grey Atlantic like a painting, like it’s part of the decor itself—the owner’s own private ocean. He wonders how long death will take and how it will feel. And then whether it will feel like anything at all. Whether feel is a word that could possibly apply. Willow always believed that during our last moments, our spirit dissipates and we become part of the great Greenness. That we live on in some kind of chlorophyll energy field, at one with the trees, the soil, and the rain.
Yet in truth, death came to her cruel and quick.
His mind returns him to the day he was flown to Vancouver from Brooklyn, hired to do a touch-up job on an expensive installation he’d built for the University of British Columbia’s forestry department. Since he’s in town, he arranges to meet Willow later that day at the gates of Stanley Park. It’s been years since he visited, and when she first steps from her Westfalia, he worries that her environmental fervour has finally consumed her to the point that she’s stopped eating altogether for fear of harming plant life. Her once voluminous hair is now flat and thin, and her once relentlessly robust body is withered and frail.
“You’ve looked better, Willow,” Liam says. “You want me to drive?”
“It’s okay,” she says, her skull like a hard-edged sculpture that her skin can barely hide. “I can drive this old beast with my eyes closed.”
Willow steers her van, which Liam still knows with the intimacy of a childhood home, deep into the park, back to the site where it appears she’s been camping secretly for some time. The day is breezy with a grey sky, and the smaller trees that camouflage her campsite wave in small circles. To get some food in her, Liam insists on cooking her favourite chickpea and tahini dish, which she takes outside to eat in the company of the trees, because, she claims, the van’s persistent musty odour and close confines make it difficult for her to get the food down. When Liam comments on the dwindling state of her food supply, she remarks, “I wasn’t able to get any chanterelles this year. Just didn’t have the energy for it. So things have been a little tighter than usual.”
It isn’t until later that night that she tells him about her treatments: how she’s been driving herself to chemotherapy each day and then camping out in this downtown park, which is a relatively short drive from the hospital. Along with the crush of pity, he can’t help but feel a scorch of anger.
“When were you planning on telling me?” he says, his head lowered and his hands in his hair.
“Soon, I suppose,” she says weakly. “I didn’t want to bother you. You’re so busy. I know how well you’re doing out there.”
His mother has always tried to leave as light an imprint upon the ecosystem as she possibly could, and to his great annoyance, this has also included him. Despite her protestations for him to return to New York, he cancels his carpentry job at the university, buys a sleeping bag, and moves into her van. When he picks her up from her treatments each afternoon, there’s a strong toxicity to her breath, like she’s spent the entire morning huffing spar varnish, the thick, noxious finish he puts only on his outdoor wooden installations.
He stays with his mother for three weeks, camping like they used to, falling into their old harmony. He buys groceries at the food co-op she still belongs to, makes her tea, keeps track of her medications, and helps her remove the bits of fluff that accumulate in her eyes after her eyelashes fall out. He watches her wither and hears her moan and cough through the night up there in the rooftop tent that she loves so much. And soon she grows so feeble he has to break the childproofing off her lighter so she can light her menthols and her weed.
When she’s too sapped to talk, he plays for her the same records that she played for him when he was detoxing: the man reading poetry in a soothing Irish accent. While Liam still doesn’t really comprehend the antiquated words he recites, his mother coughs less frequently and with less discomfort whenever the records are spinning on the turntable. So he plays them constantly at a low volume, even though after the tenth time he’s flipped the record, the mere sound of the man’s voice has begun to rub against his nerves like 40-grit sandpaper.
SUPPLIES
1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Brown Rice
1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Chickpeas
1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Soybeans
200 ml Nystatin Solution
Dexamethasone 4 mg
Senokot 8.6 mg
Soflax 100 mg
Metoclopramide 10 mg
Diltiazem 180 mg