The Memories of Trees Ch. 01-03

In the following minutes, Collin found himself sidetracked by others coming to greet him, people he least expected as much warmth and joviality from, people who he remembered in high school more in passing, faces that were fixtures in his memory of the halls and of various classrooms and in his year book, but little else. Suddenly the room felt warmer, friendlier toward him.

Melissa disappeared in the burgeoning crowd filling the hall, and he tried to find her, silently chastising himself for his emerging obsessiveness over her. He would be cool toward her, friendly certainly, would love to listen to her. But nothing else, no expectations and certainly not allowing the thought that Melissa herself would acknowledge what happened between them in Vegas.

For some time, it didn't matter. Melissa was there, so perhaps at some point he'd run into her and talk briefly, these thoughts and plottings idle in his mind because for the first time all evening – for the first time since before the plague – Collin felt lighthearted. No doubt the alcohol was aiding a surge of endorphin in his brain to lull his nerves, as much as it was helping everyone else in the room. Collin's story became easier to recite as well, truths escaping by the slip of the tongue easier to control. The bald fat man outside sitting sentinel for Collin would be proud. Tonight, he was a Cambridge professor who, by luck, by chance, escaped the virus that swept the world. And for the moment, he hadn't created it either. It was a product of happenstance, one of those devastating periodic plagues that swept the globe throughout history, the reaper come again to cull the population, thin the herd in its ambiguous way, taking other to be with God.

Collin was absorbed in a conversation that he'd never be able to recall when he remembered this moment with Brody and a collection of other Gannis Fall alumni he probably never spoke to a decade ago. But the touch, the hands that grasped his shoulders gently, was rife with a familiar intimacy. The fingers, the exact pressure against his shoulders, funneled his mind back to Las Vegas many years earlier. It was a touch he would never forget, not even through the many nights since with other girlfriends and even flippant flings. It was a touch he missed since.

Collin turned, his back tingling, his cheeks perked with a cold rush of blood. Melissa released his shoulders and let her hands slide tenderly to his chest, his sports coat rumpling beneath her palms. Her eyes dampened as she gazed in his stunned face, her mouth a smile of reminiscence and regret, perhaps.

"Collin. I wondered if you were still alive," she said, barely above the voices, music and bad acoustics of the lodge hall. In a move that shocked him still further, and caused an eruption of curious rumblings from those around the couple, Melissa embraced him with a veracious desperation that even made Collin a little uncomfortable.

"Melissa, how are you?"

In hindsight, his response would rank among the all-time most insensitive and anticlimactic responses in his life. She remained in his arms. He could hear a sniffle or two from her. Collin's world turned strange and druggy and bright and purple-hued. At once, he felt cold and uncomfortable, the center of the very attention he attempted to escape just moments ago. But this disquiet came in a package so wrapped in years of fantasies about he and Melissa that it was suddenly hard to believe.

She released him gently, her hands still heavy on his forearms. Her green eyes sparkled with the residue of tears. He noticed her face, how nearly unchanged it seemed after 10 years. Her skin seemed a little more dull, perhaps more earth-worn than before. And a softness around her eyes was lost, but that could be said of every survivor of the plague.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to embarrass you," she said, her eyes still bright from wetness.

"Hardly." It was simple, raw, certainly not eloquent. But it was the closet word he could say to sum up everything he felt at that moment. Melissa hugged him again, planting a quick kiss on his cheek. He smelled a lingering odor of wine and for a moment decided her gushing greeting was nothing more than a slip of inhibitions. A quick sting slipped through his thin veil of self-confidence he managed to exude that night.

He quickly erased those thoughts when she mingled her arm into his and began to pull him away from the crowd. Melissa greeted a couple of more people, and drew Collin back toward the exit.

"I hope you don't mind, but I'd love to talk to you a few minutes outside," she said glancing at him and then pulling her eyes away with a blush.

Collin could barely compute everything since Melissa arrived. Their big secret, the one he so painstakingly shielded from the world for her benefit, seemed now to be insignificant to her. Melissa had not held back her emotions. Perhaps had she just enthusiastically hugged him at first glance and went about her way through the party, her friends would not suspect anything more, and the status quo would remain between them. But Melissa gushed upon him like a lost love. No. Not like a lost love. He was a lost love. A secret love consummated in a physical experience during one long, hot summer week in Las Vegas, a week he obsessed about in the confines of his mind, a memory that seeped to the surface repeatedly during the past 11 years despite everything else he was consumed with – virus propagation, cell division, milligrams, antidotes, dry runs, and tests. Countless Goddamned tests.

But still that week-long memory. And the fact that she never acknowledged it, or really him, during their final year in school.

Collin's eyes experienced a sharp ache once outside even though the sun barely bled above the treeline across the shadowed street. He craned his neck momentarily to see if he could spot his oak from the porch of the lodge. Some people still milled about on the outside, but began to meld into the growing darkness and wander into the lodge, and its makeshift pulsing color chaos of amateur disco lighting.

"I'm sorry if I embarrassed you," Melissa began, leaning against the wooden frame of the rail. "You just don't know how relieved I am that you're here. Alive."

Collin studied Melissa for a moment, but looked away at an overwhelming sense of insecurity. She smiled, and even in the darkness, her cheeks blushed noticeably.

"You still are beautiful, you know that?" Collin said a little uncertainly. She chuckled. "You too. I was sort of worried I built you up in my mind more than what you looked like in reality."

"Oh really?" Collin smiled.

A single experiment flashed in his mind. One from his early career in graduate school. Virus A needed protein B to grow its receptors and become rampant. So he theorized a way to make the protein repel the virus. A chancy theory. But his experiments clicked, one of those serendipitous rare occasions when things just seem to work out.

Collin had worked up many possible scenarios to his meeting with Melissa. This was one of those experiments that seemed to click.

Their conversation flowed from one seamless topic to another, much like the chit-chat they shared during math class when Melissa, puppy-eyed and mocking the damsel in distress, huddled with him for help. He learned a lot in a short span. She married Trey after they reunited from a breakup in college. That reunion led to a unexpected blessing, as she called her daughter Karen.

Melissa looked pained as she gazed beyond the encroaching darkness, staved off only by the burn of the porch lights of the lodge. Collin eyed her compassionately, but inside was an insidious burning, an confused ache that for the briefest of moments, spurred anger in him. Trey was not the boy she left him for. Or more precisely, the boy who became the reason she never acknowledged what they shared that brief, hot summer week in Las Vegas. That was Michael. And he was convinced Melissa and he would marry soon after graduation.

'Trey and I were separated when the outbreak occurred. He was living in New York," she said, and suddenly Collin's face flushed with shame. New York, millions packed onto Manhattan Island. The crowded conditions were ideal for Collin's creation to propagate the easiest, like electricity from one circuit to another, the virus killed more in the major cities of the world than anywhere else.

"He didn't make it?" Collin asked, avoiding her eyes and staring at the weathered planks of the entrance ramp of the hall. Melissa shook her head. "Neither did Michael."

Collin shot a look. Melissa smiled gently, easing off the railing and closing the gap between them, her hand leading itself toward his hand in an almost secretive gesture of understanding. She touched him wrist, his arm pinned in a silent, rigid form of panic, to the railing.

"Collin. There are a thousand possibilities. You know, I read somewhere that for every decision we make there's another reality in existence parallel to ours where we live out our lives having made the decision we didn't make in this life."

It took him a moment to realize what she was saying, to connect her words to that fringe science in physics about parallel universes and string theory. Many of his colleagues professed the same belief, fascinated as they were with the idea of matter existing on strings through many different dimensions. His face broke into a grin; she was reaching out to him in a way she believed he would appreciate, through his intellect.

"I made a mistake with you once," she continued, meeting his grin with a blushing one of her own. "And there wasn't a day since I hadn't thought about what my life could have been like had a chose differently. And that maybe in some other world, I'm living with you in Cambridge, trying hard to understand your lectures and making sure your eyes don't stray to those cute coeds."

Collin laughed for the first time all night, unable to say anything. Instead his hand moved to her cheek and brushed it, not caring that the rest of his high school could see this one intimate moment between two former secret lovers, a moment that was sure to be stirring a buzz inside with wonder. Melissa pushed her creamy cheek against his palm, her eyes closed and her face angelically serene for that one moment. She raised her face, her body against his, her lips parting wetly, and without looking, kissed him deeply.

It was a perfect moment. One of those few that Collin wanted bottled up and kept forever so he could harness it whenever his life became overly complicated. A moment he wanted to wear around his neck like a medallion of honor.

But like all perfect moments, this one too was brief. Although when he looked back upon it, Collin would always fail to pin the exact time when that moment ended. He failed to remember the guy, another face from his high school, another name lost to his dusty yearbooks, who moved down the plank ramp, onto the gravel and toward the sea of cars, coughing into a balled fist, and sniffling back throaty mucus.

CH.3

The night flew by in the blurred alteration of his mentality. From fumbled confusion and uncertainty, Collin felt himself become a ball of electricity, his tendrils feeding and being fed in an unbroken circuit with Melissa's own energy. The two together, openly and publically, even when apart in the room. Even if their sudden coupling was clouded beyond the night of the reunion.

But it was enough. For her friends, and for his. Enough to cause, at the very least, wondering glances at the two. Melissa was pulled aside by two of her cheerleader partners who stared with wide-eyed smirks as she confessed their past relationship. Collin, on the other hand, was more discreet. He didn't know why. Perhaps out of habit, perhaps because he wanted the confession from her mouth and not his.

Brody glanced at Melissa and then back to Collin, a drink clinking in his hand.

"So, did I miss something in high school?"

There was no real official end to the reunion other than a stale, used smell to the lodge. The music had long since silenced, the bar closed, and the harsh lights painting many ruddy, tired and drunk faces that thinned as the minutes wore on. By three in the morning, Collin exited the hall with Melissa and gaggle of other people, not really talking or sharing, but relishing in an enjoyment to pure and simple life that he hadn't felt in years.

He glanced at Melissa's gleaming smile, the color infused in her cheeks as she laughed at someone's off-color joke. Collin was feeling an enjoyment he hadn't felt since Las Vegas really.

Casually he moved toward his car, scanning the darkened gravel lot for his secretive entourage. Nothing but a few remaining cars of the late party stragglers, and most of his group were splitting to those vehicles. Collin turned to Melissa, who was plying apart a thin handbag for her key.

"You're okay to drive, right?"

She glanced up, smiled almost too sardonically for his taste, and snaked her tongue out at him.

"Yes, daddy. I'm good enough to drive through any garage door," she said. Melissa looked up at him, suddenly blushing, glancing around her again.

"Are you here for awhile?"

"Yes, I have a cot in the hall. I'll be here for the next day at least cleaning up." It got a chuckle out of her. But then her eyes glistened and focused; it was a subtle physical response Collin learned early on about Melissa. Evidence, pure physical response, to when she needed a moment of seriousness, of clarity. He was reminded in a fugue of lucidity the other times when he saw that look in her eyes: Moments before they made love, and the final time, when she secreted him to an empty classroom just days after the Vegas trip, pleading her case that what happened there could never be known to anyone.

At her look, Collin sobered up.

"I'm here for some time, Melissa. I don't know how long," he said.

She smiled, found her key, bracing it between her index and thumb like a delicate prize, perhaps a little over-exuberant from the five cocktails still trailing in her blood, coloring her face, lighting those eyes that melt him, even in Collin's memory.

"You know where I live, right?" she said as she turned away and moved to her car.

"I think so."

"Come see me sometime."

Collin felt like his tires rode on gum. He took the corners at the very edge, skimming those great shadowed elms – the honorary tombstones of Gannis Falls' feigned greatness – with a speed that bordered on suicidal. He glanced at his rearview mirror, saw the yellowed headlights trailing. His balding entourage fell quickly behind, struggling to keep up with the demonic grip Collin had on the road, hugging the corners and damning the night with a howling internal fever of pent up emotions long locked away like he had been for months during the plague.

Soon he was alone on the roads in Gannis Falls, open fields and homes, darkened and dead, the husks of extinguished families, passed on his shoulders. But the world was illuminated by the moon's crescent vibrant above among the star field, enough to cast a pale glow along the asphalt.

Collin took a couple of random turns, just to be sure his watcher wouldn't resume his tail. He stopped at the edge of town, the buildings asleep amid the glow of its row of traffic lights rowed along the main drag. Collin left the car running, but got out and scanned the town ahead. He knew where Melissa lived, or where her parents lived; the route from the exact spot he stopped was mapped out in his mind. How many times had he surreptitiously drove past Melissa's house following there affair in Las Vegas a decade ago? Too many such treks for him to even comfortably admit silently.

But tonight there was an invitation.

His car shuddered violently over lumped trestle that bordered the center of Gannis Falls. At a solitary red light, the now-familiar coffeehouse just off to his left, Collin stopped and jumped out of his car. He felt the burning, mischievous grin pasting his face, felt his heart race with an ancient excitement and from his car the Psychedelic Furs were warbling his cinematic moment into the night sky. "And the world don't stop every time that you fall. There's a heartbreak beat playing all night long down on my street..."

At once, Collin became the hunter and predator. He sniffed the air, his grin nearly turning maniacal and pointed down a solitary road to his right. He glanced over; it bled softly in the moonlight before disappearing into the shadowed groves of elm and cypress and oak and elder trees from his mythical youth. Tonight, he was the bard, King Arthur returning from Avalon. And his heart pumped adrenaline and crazy thoughts fueled by alcohol and elation.

"There's a heartbreak beat and it feels like love. There's a heartbreak beat and it feels like love."

The last strands of the Furs muffled with the metallic thud of Collin's car door; he pried the wheel right, accelerated sharply and headed along the road to Melissa's house.