Ask the Big Tree

Ask the Big Tree, Part 1

He doesn't read minds, of course. How could he? Then please tell me, how come he seems to know what I'm thinking every time we meet?

Last night I stumbled upon him at the park. I was going to ask you, Big Tree, a few questions, but of course I didn't tell him that. I told him I was just doing some exercise and he looked at me like and said "Oh really?". He knew, damn it. So I ran around the park for a while and then I went back home.

But now I came back because I really want to know.

The Big Tree knows what Ana Witt wants to know. She stands in front of the Big Tree, saying nothing. She thinks it's too late for her. She's fifty-two, a bit overweight, and has a frizzy hair that has been scientifically proven impossible to tame. Every morning she runs into a police officer on her way to work. This has been happening for the last six months or so. Sometimes they have some small talk, but none of them know much about the other. Or that's what she thought at first.

She doesn't remember how they started talking. At first, she didn't notice, but after a few weeks, Ana began to see a sparkle in the officer's grey eyes. "I'm Ed, by the way", he said once. In the fraction of a second that took the officer pronounce the two letters of his fake name, Ana saw herself come up from the blackness of his pupils.

What she saw wasn't the Ana the mirror showed her every morning. It wasn't even her young self. In Ed's eyes, she was beautiful, but not "Cosmopolitan Cover Girl" beautiful. She was beautiful without makeup, beautiful with her impossibly frizzy hair and her crow's feet because, like in a dream, she saw the blurred image of reality at the same time she saw the shiny, clean shapes of the Truth That Lies Behind Everything.

Since that day she felt that Ed, Ed the cop, Ed just Ed, Ed the man who's twenty years younger than herself, Ed the man she knows nothing about, knew her like no one has ever known her. Since that day, every time they talked about the weather or the traffic, she felt that he knew everything about her, from her favorite pianist to her recurrent dream of being a white cat who walks the rooftops of New Orleans.

But how can it be?

The Big Tree is the biggest tree in the city, and it's also the center of the city. It's thirty meters high and it's as old as the country itself, or so they say. Through the years, many people have said they have had long conversations with the Big Tree, or that it has granted them wishes. Ana's grandmother, a Ukranian immigrant who was stabbed in the belly in a bar fight, asked the Big Tree to heal her wound because she really wanted to have another child, and the next year Ana's mother was born.

But most of the people who claimed to have some kind of experience with the Big Tree passed away long ago, and no one goes to the park in the middle of the night to ask anything. Nobody except Ana, lonely and gloomy Ana, the woman whose neighbors think is crazy and whose co-workers think is okay but maybe a bit too shy. Ana, the woman whose grandmother asked for a miracle that would lead to the miracle of her standing under the new moon, in front of the Big Tree, afraid to move her lips. Afraid to ask.

How can it be?

I'm not crazy. I know that man cannot know anything about me as much as I know I can't get an answer from you. But when I talk to him, I feel I'm tied to him somehow. I feel he knows me better than myself, but it's not just that. We... I don't tell him much about myself because, you know, maybe I'm a bit scared, but somehow I feel he chooses me. He knows almost nothing about me, I'm sure about that. God, maybe I'm going mad or something.

The park navigates an absolute darkness. Ana stands alone in front of the Big Tree, who dances at the rhythm of the wind. There is a question that wants to come out of Ana's lips, but the night remains silent.

Maybe I'm going mad and the poor guy doesn't even suspect what I... I've been alone so much time, it must be that. It's just small chat. There's no reason to think he knows me. Shit. Look, if you were there you would agree. He knows everything about me, and not only that, he chooses me every morning. He could be talking to any other cute or young girl over there, but he prefers me, and it's because he knows me better than anybody. I want to ask you, Big Tree...

Ana wants to ask, but part of her doesn't want to hear an answer, and another part of her doesn't want to see herself as a crazy old witch talking to an Alamo, so she bites her lip and starts walking away very slowly. Suddenly, though, she stops as she hears a voice inside her head.

The Big Tree has heard the question Ana didn't have the nerve to ask.

And now it wants to answer.