In a Forest of Hollow Trees

Just off Times Square in a 5-foot cut-out tucked between a Chinese restaurant and a bodega sat a man. He was bearded and bedraggled and wholly unnoticed by the passersby. He spent most of his days tucked right there in the cut-out, watching and listening. He was fascinated by the sounds. His eyesight had started to fail, so he found himself relying on listening more and more.

Each morning he would sit there and close his eyes. He knew the neighborhood routines by their sounds. Miguel, as he pulled up in his truck, the one with the worn breaks that screeched like an owl each time he stopped, to make his delivery across the street. The heavy clank-clank as Le Wei rolled up the metal door to open the restaurant. The thunderous slap-slap of the newspapers as they came crashing down from the back of the truck that barely stopped on its way to deliver a thousand more bundles that morning. He always imagined that sound as the exact sound you would hear as you received a flurry of punches from a prizefighter.

The horns, sirens, and screeches as NYC came to life every day were his world. The dozen different languages he would hear throughout the day. The screams and curses and laughs that bounced off the buildings like a thousand Spaldeens, those pink rubber balls from his youth, all colliding at once. He knew them all; they were a chaotic comfort for him; they assured him that he was still here. That he still existed even if the world had forgotten him.

He had been a sound to someone once. He had cared for someone and had been cared for in return. He had all the trappings of life, a car, a big home, a family, and a place in the social structure of society. But that was all gone now. The loves, the friends, the material trappings of life, they were all gone. All he had left was himself.

He had dropped out of society for reasons he had since chosen to forget. All that he willingly remembered was that he had been less than a decent person and that it had all come crashing down around him. His undoing was entirely his fault, and he knew it. There was no one else to blame. He was the one who had allowed his vices to make the decisions. He had been the one who had surrendered to the darker thoughts that lurked in his mind. He had done it. He, alone, was responsible; he had hurt others with his words and actions. He had made choices, and he had accepted the results years ago. He was a different person now. Maybe not a better one but a different one.

But that life was in the past now and not relevant to him anymore. What was important to him was the here and now. What was important to him was if it would rain that day, the temperature, and how he would find his next meal. When he thought about it, his worries were still the worries of humanity. Food, shelter, and weather, none of it had changed; he had simply downsized his worries to the necessities.

So, he sat in his cut-out and watched life pass by him. He had seen so much change over the years. When he had first begun wandering the streets, people interacted; they spoke with one another, had conversations as they walked, they looked at their surroundings.

Things had changed in the years since he joined the ranks of the anonymous. People had become less engaged with the immediate world around them and more withdrawn into their technology.

He watched as they passed by. Each day the patterns grew stronger. Heads down with faces buried in their phones or heads straight, eyes glassy, headphones in, shutting themselves off from the world. They were always in a hurry to go somewhere else and never had the time to be present.

In the early days, he would often go for walks either in the wee hours of the morning or later in the evening when there were fewer people on the streets. He did this to avoid the larger crowds, not because he didn’t like people but because he felt they didn’t like seeing him. He reminded them of the dark side of society—the seedy underbelly of humanity. Or, maybe it was because he reminded them that what they had, their precious stuff, could be ripped from them much faster than it took them to acquire it and that scared them. He felt “the living,” as he liked to call them, judged him and his kind that they had disdain for those who, for whatever reason, had failed to maintain the social order.

To ward off the self-loathing that inevitably seeped in during his excursions, he made a game of walking the streets. “The living” were trees, and he was a hunter stalking his prey amongst them. He would spy a half-eaten sandwich and approach it as if it was rabbit season, and he was Elmer Fudd, except in his little world, he always got the rabbit. He enjoyed those times despite his circumstances. He felt connected to a society he was no longer a part of, and it gave him hope that one-day things might change.

But his circumstances didn’t change. Year in and year out, he hunted for food and shelter. There were good days, and there were bad days. As he got older, the bad days seemed to come more frequently. The food became scarcer and the shelterless inviting. The once vibrant trees that he danced around no longer held the life that they once did. The bark became sallow, the leaves took on a grayish hue, and the life that swept through his forest like a gale-force wind was now just a dying breeze. The vibrant forest that once ruled his existence was nothing more than a forest of hollow trees to him now.

The man no longer enjoyed the forest, so he retreated, mind and body, into his cut-out, only venturing out in the most desperate of times. He was no longer the hunter but a mere faceless, nameless ghost that haunted the grounds on those days where he did enter the forest. His voice was a mere echo. His world became smaller with each passing day until it was only the sounds of his block.

The screech clank-clank slap-slap pulsed through his veins.

Screech clank-clank slap-slap

The sounds that kept him tethered to a world in which he no longer felt that he belonged.

Screech clank-clank slap-slap

The sounds that kept him there watching and listening to the world.

Screech clank-clank slap-slap

The sounds that kept him wandering in his forest of hollow trees.

Screech clank-clank slap-slap

The sounds that kept him among the living.

Screech clank-clank slap-slap

Until they didn’t.

Screech clank-clank slap-slap

Screech clank-clank slap-slap