Jamey Bradbury

I left the cubicle at 7:30 on Christmas Eve. Twelve years ago, on my second day with the firm of Huffner, Blake, Huffner and Warshaski, I pulled a green permanent marker from my jacket pocket and drew a small misshapen dot just above the doorway of my cubicle. There are fifty-two identical four-by-three-foot, gray-walled cubicles on the fourteenth floor of Huffner, etc.; a man could spend most of the work day searching for his place in the crowd without a green dot to guide him.

I left the office building and plodded to the bus stop at 35th and Main. Three weeks ago my Geo Metro disappeared, and I became one of the hundred thousand city-dwellers who never seem to have correct change for bus fare, and whose soles have worn thin from running to catch missed rides. There is something liberating about owning your own car when you live in the city. Impractical, yes; but the wheels of a bus do not roll beyond the city limits.

Inside my shoes, my toes huddled together uncomfortably, wailing as I stepped in a puddle and water seeped through my socks. I passed the bus stop on Barringer Street and kept walking. Although the bus stop at 35th and Main is four blocks out of my way, it is the one I prefer. The bench at the stop on Barringer is entombed in a mottled gray plastic dome meant to keep the rain off of those waiting for the bus. This shell looks like a close cousin of the cubicle in which I spend most of my day-the similarity is enough to propel me four extra city blocks.

It began to snow just as I reached my stop. Giant wet flakes that looked like small doilies soaked in milk smacked the lenses of my bifocals and slipped down the back of my neck-and I gave a longing thought to my umbrella, locked safely in the glove compartment of my stolen car. Small drifts of snow began to form on my shoulders and I imagined sitting at the bus stop for days, still as marble, as a tiny mountain of snow grew around me. (They would find me in the spring, perfectly preserved: duct-taped briefcase handle frozen to my hand, my mustache encapsulated in ice.) I was brushing the first hills of precipitation from my shoulders when he sat down, his knee bumping mine.

He was far from being attractive. He had a large, hang-dog face, with jowls that flapped like duck wings in the icy breeze, and one blue eye had the milky look of a young cataract. He wore no hat.

"You're looking quite frosty, chap," he said, his thin whiskered lips moving around the pipe in his mouth.

I started to shoot him a city-bred annoyed look when, with a quick snap of the wrist, he fired his umbrella. It was massive, a portable navy-blue shadow, and he raised it over our heads. "Better, eh?" he asked.

I nodded, and wiped my damp neck with my glove, shivering miserably.

The street was eerily empty. Even on Christmas Eve, this city pulses with claustrophobic pandemonium-sidewalks brimming street-to-street with bodies that all look painfully alike, on their way to work, to the bar, to their rent-controlled apartments. Tonight, though, even the balding hot dog vendor who peddled on the corner of 35th with the regularity of a postal worker was absent. A balled-up newspaper rolled across his empty corner like a tumbleweed--as if the vendor's ghost had kicked it.

The wind was like standing naked before an open refrigerator. It slipped under the large man's umbrella and brought with it the scent of cherry tobacco. The pipe in his mouth was made of rough dark wood. Unsanded and untreated, it looked as though someone had carved it with an unsteady, amateurish hand.

"Made it myself," he said. His words were whistled through stained teeth that clenched the stem of the pipe. "Always bring it with me when I visit the city. I like a nice smoke, but the tobacco's difficult to come by where I live."

"Where's that?" I asked, indifferently polite.

He waved at the question with a large, careless paw. "Upstate. You live here--in the city."

It was not a question; it did not need to be. I had looked at myself in the bathroom mirror that morning, and had seen the evidence of this tired city in every nuance of my body. My face was a roadmap of bus routes and wrinkles, my shoulders stooped under the weight of apartment buildings and smog. My mouth was almost undetectable-a puckered raisin above my chin, as if I had swallowed bus fumes and could not rid myself of the taste. Twelve years inside my four-room apartment, my gray-on-gray cubicle, my cheaply made suits-these long years can be seen in the dull gleam of my eyes. I am a thirty-five year old man who looks fifty, and feels dead.

The man was still talking. "Oh, I've visited your city several times. I must say-except for the opportunity to smoke a nice pipeful of tobacco, I really don't care for the place. The buildings devour you here. There are walls everywhere you turn."

He sighed heavily, as if he could feel the city pressing against him, and beneath the scent of cherries and smoke I could smell something else on his breath-a vaguely fishy scent that I could not place.

He leaned forward, peering at the sky with his strangely expressionless eyes. "It looks as though the precipitation has ceased." He shook the melting snow from the umbrella, then folded it and regarded it with a fond smile. "Portable tree," he said to me and laughed-the sound of an amused growl.

"The trees in this city are crippled," he said. "They've no room to grow with these glass-and-steel towers blocking the sun. These are not real trees; they're casualties. Outside the city, there are real trees." He paused. "Have you ever seen a real tree, sir?"

Real trees: Like sentinels surrounding my grandfather's house, bare branches intertwined, forming a natural ceiling. It was Christmas then, too-the year my parents took me, a city-suckled child, to my grandfather's farm. The blade of the axe in the old man's hand caught the waning sunlight and glowed against the snow. My toes thawed slowly in thermal socks that were four sizes too big as I followed him on the quest: A perfect spruce before dinner.

And after turkey and potatoes, and rum-laced nog slipped to me when my mother wasn't looking: The smell of trees in my nose as I sat beside my first real fireplace, numb hands hot, and wet gloves drying on the hearth. My grandfather smoked a pipe, too, and he told me about the farm animals-how on Christmas Eve they abandoned their charade for one night and went into the city. His cows would leave the barn on the arms of horses, he said, and they would go dancing until morning. The ducks would find themselves on barstools, philosophizing over martinis while listening to the solemn falsetto of the goat, seated at the corner piano.

I was six. I had not believed in Santa Claus for two years-in the city, every bell-ringer on every street corner is proof that the man does not exist. And so, I regarded my grandfather not with a skeptical eye, but with the intense need to believe in something.

"If you wake up tonight, don't look at the sky for flying reindeer," he advised, and I nodded, knowing better. "Instead, look at the woods. The bears come out for a smoke, dressed in topcoats and spats. The deer dress for the opera, with strings of pearls on their antlers. They spend the night in restaurants and theatres, in hotels and bars. And some of them stay."

"What?" I said.

"Most of them come back before morning," said my grandfather. "But every year I count the cows and the chickens on Christmas morning, and once in a while there are one or two missing." He drew deeply from his pipe, then sent the smoke across the room. "I think they must stay in the city. I think some of them must have been meant for city life." He paused again, his eyes drifting to the window. The woods were growing darker. "Maybe some of us were meant for life out there."

He looked at me again. "So if you wake up tonight...Keep an eye out."

That night I held my sleep-heavy eyes open and focused on the woods for as long as I could manage--anticipating the appearance of a moose in an evening gown, a bear in a tux. But the night of childhood is interminable. Sleep overtook me, and when I did finally wake, it was at the gentle urging of my grandfather's weather-roughened hands, and the sun had been up for hours.

Salmon. The smell on the gentleman's breath was salmon.

I thought of the aluminum shrub that passed for a Christmas tree sitting on the kitchen table in my apartment. Its branches were the color of fluorescent mold, half-heartedly swathed in a garish garland, and I hated it. I bought a real tree the first day of December-a small one, barely more than a houseplant. It came in a clay pot painted red and green. It had pined for the sunlight at my tiny kitchen window and thirstily guzzled water for three days, until one morning I woke up and found its needles blanketing the linoleum floor like brown snow.

I barely heard the man speak when he asked, "You've lived in the city all your life?"

He took the pipe from his mouth, and his hand was covered in thick, black-brown hair. It looked soft and coarse, like the pelt of an animal.

"Yes," I said. "How did you know?"

"You have the look of a trapped man."

Was it the way the glow of the streetlamp touched his face?--for his mustache seemed thicker and blacker, seemed to have crept across his cheeks in a spreading beard.

"I think," he said deliberately, "that I will cut short my stay this year. I'm getting too old to come to the city, even for good tobacco." He rose from the bench unsteadily, like a circus unicyclist, and I was overcome by the urge to hold his coattail in my hand, as if he could save me from the bus I saw trundling to my stop. I clutched my briefcase.

He waddled away on short legs, a trail of smoke marking his path. With a wheeze, the bus pulled to the curb. In the lamplight, its panels were the same gray as the cubicle I worked in, and the passengers inside were packed together shoulder-to-shoulder, motionless.

My freezing neck was sheathed in sweat; my temples pulsated almost audibly. A scream suddenly rose in my throat and was trapped there. The door of the bus opened.

Across the street, he turned around and called to me, his words indecipherable.

"What?" I wailed hoarsely.

He was smiling. "Come back with me."

And I knew; I did not need to ask where. Outside the city, there are real trees. If I left my briefcase on the corner, if I put my hand into his huge paw, if I let him lead me out of this claustrophobia-what would happen to me?

"If I go with you--can I--" I licked chapped lips. "Can I stay?"

"Come find out." He turned, and walked away.

The woman behind the wheel of the bus hissed tiredly, "Are you getting on, or what?"

As I watched him near the end of the street, he hesitated, as if waiting for me. It began to snow.