Conversion

I moved south for college and began working part time at a nonprofit dedicated to forest preservation. My department was responsible for converting the field reports into numerical data. Aisha was one of the field workers. Her reports were thorough and well written, often containing poignant notes about the forest creatures. I was always sad to distill her narratives. She’d write: On four separate occasions, the camera observed a gnome hand-feeding acorns to a family of squirrels. The mother squirrel filled her cheeks with the nuts and brought them back to a hole in her tree. Two shining pairs of eyes peered out to watch her ascent and descent.

I’d write: Daily sightings: One gnome; three squirrels.

When I invited Aisha over for dinner one Friday night, I was surprised when she accepted. I made us spanakopita with parsley I’d grown in my flower boxes. She returned home with enough leftovers for lunch the following day. We began having dinner every week, sometimes twice a week.

One Saturday, Aisha texted asking to have dinner. When I picked her up (she didn’t have a car), I noticed she was vibrating in the seat next to me. Her thin frame blurred at the edges.

“Aisha,” I said.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said quickly. “It’s silly, really. Just a man. A guy.”

I kept my face forward. Aisha seemed too, well, young to be seeing anyone. “From work? How long’s it been going on?”

“A month.” She scratched the back of her right hand over and over with her thumb. “He’s not from work.”

I said nothing; I’ve always had the ability to call forth weighty silences. Once, arguing with a lover, she asked me how I kept my quietude so well hidden yet readily available, like a tightly folded blanket.

“I don’t like to tell people things until they’re serious,” she said. She was looking out the window, still scratching.

“Ok, well, where’d you meet?”

She hesitated. “In the woods.”

The tires thu-thunked over a crater in the asphalt. I asked, “How?”

Aisha proceeded to tell me she’d been in the woods last month to quantify an as-yet unidentified dropping, when she heard a sound like a woodpecker. But the pitch was too tinny, isolated. She followed the sound and found a naked man, standing in a hole in the ground. Rather than run away or call for help (as I surely would have), she asked what he was doing.

“I’m trying this out,” he answered. He had brown skin and black eyes with hardly any sclera exposed.

“Trying what out?” She asked, but he didn’t answer. He continued to stand upright in the hole, holding his back impossibly straight. He made no move to leave or say anything more.

Aisha left the woods and consulted her notes. A centuries-old live oak tree supposedly lived in the hole the man stood in. She’d heard legend of this on internet forums. Trees turning into people for a brief period.

Like Rumspringa for the Amish, treefreak444 had said.

The man was still there the next day. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t waste this opportunity.”

The man hesitated and then stepped out of the hole. The spines of dead leaves snapped under his feet. Aisha told him to follow, and he did.

She took him, first, to an ice cream parlor, where they shared a chocolate sundae with vanilla ice cream and two cherries. She shyly showed him how she could tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. Then they electric scootered to a soft-drink museum, where they tasted different syrup samples and watched metal machines crush cans into perfect, gleaming cylinders. Last she took him to a reimagined rendition of Waiting for Godot, where, in the end, Godot arrives. The reviews were mixed.

At the end of the day, she did not take him back to the forest. She took him to her apartment. She did not say explicitly, but I believe they were intimate.

He lived with her for a month, rarely saying a word, before informing her he’d be leaving for the woods that night.

“Just like that?” she’d asked, shocked.

“Yes,” he said.

She drove him back to the woods and followed him to his hole. He told her to turn around and she did. She heard that tinny, non-resonant sound again and when she turned back, a live oak tree stood, strong and dusty, in his place.

We sat at my kitchen counter. Aisha had stopped shaking. In fact, a thin sheen of calm had descended upon her.

“He told me,” she stopped to swallow, “that I could join him, if I wanted to.”

“Join him?” My face felt separate from the rest of me. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” she paused. We both knew what she would say next. “But I think I want to.”

I said nothing to deter her. I stirred the milk, parmesan, and garlic until it frothed into alfredo sauce. We ate our pasta from wide white bowls, traded the cheese grater back and forth. At the end of our meal, I rested the tips of my fingers on Aisha’s knee.

“If you don’t go,” I said, keeping my gaze above her hairline. “You’re an idiot.”

That night, when I dropped her off, she came around to the driver’s side and hugged me. I knew I would not see her again, nor would I read another of her lively reports.

But I was wrong. Four days after our final dinner, I received a report she’d written. It was dated a few weeks back, after the tree man would’ve been living with her for several days. Her words were confused, nearly unreadable. I will always remember how that report ended: the world’s wooden forever believes in our salvation. I copied this sentence down on a paper napkin leftover from my lunch (I’d eaten dry salad and hadn’t made a mess) and threw away the report. There’d been nothing easily convertible to numbers.