mike zamzow

A Treehouse Built for One

On the north side of downtown Philadelphia, there is an impound lot surrounded by barbed wire with a single oak tree at its center. Improbably high, on slender limbs, someone has constructed a treehouse or, perhaps, more of a deer blind, accessed by a series of tires nailed to the trunk. It is only big enough for one person and I imagine the owner uses it to shoot scavengers, or at least scare them, if they manage to evade the dogs. The treehouse is softly lit from below by the inefficiency of archaic streetlights and reminds me of Arturo’s apartment, where I would much rather be.

“Kids these days don’t smoke enough cigarettes,” my boyfriend says as he lights up outside the downtown post office in a neighborhood by the river that is both rundown, unappealing, and unobtainably expensive. The post office has been closed for many hours, but he is still able to access his PO Box. It contained a rejection.

“You have all these twenty somethings watching what they eat, exercising, and making a face if they so much as smell smoke from across the street.” I nod. Of course, I have heard all this before, on repeat, every couple of months. And I understand, on some level of abstraction, that one needs to rant and rave when something you care deeply about is reduced to nothing in the eyes of a stranger, inspiring not even revulsion, only indifference. Still, he is tiresome.

“Where are the pseudo-intellects? Where is the posturing? Where is the rebellion? Where is the heart? All we have these days is an anxious slouching toward mediocrity.” He lets this phrase hang in the air. He lights another cigarette, taking a drag as if someone is taking his picture. I smile because I know he will quit one day. They say if you quit before you’re thirty, it’s like you never smoked at all. They say just breathing the city air is like smoking half a pack a day. I light one quietly, exhale, and it’s like none of it escapes me. I used to think I would quit eventually, but now I don’t believe myself.

“Everyone’s too professional these days, too polished, like they were born wearing a suit. No one believes in the future or progress. They just scrimp and scrabble for their little lot and try to extend their life as long as possible.” He crumples the rejection letter and tries to rip it in half, fumbling the resilient wad into a puddle. He stares at it a moment before saying, “You know how much paper I had to send just to receive this physical rejection? Shipped halfway across the country? What an anachronistic waste.” He smiles and we start walking, presumably back to the bar, where the drinks are too expensive and don’t tempt me. It isn’t any business of mine what he does with his money.

My boyfriend laughs. “But it’s all for the best, isn’t it? I was talking to Jack the other day. He had some customer come in and sit down and read a book, and he asks her what it is and she shows him the cover and it’s some romance or comedy or some shit and she says, ‘It’s visionary! I just couldn’t stop laughing!’ Jack’s taking it all seriously now, saying he’s going to write something sexy and funny and finally make it. He even thinks he’s quit smoking.”

Arturo’s apartment is small, with many soft things hung on the wall and many bookshelves and quiet neighbors so that when you’re inside on the couch you forget you’re in the city. His lights are all orange and gentle like the light upon the treehouse, and you can read and fall asleep or read all night long and  feel just as good either way.

“I told him to cut it out with that shit, that you better have integrity. Because literature is too important for frivolity or women’s magazines or hilarity. These are desperate times. The world is shaped by stories. We need to write stories that are vital, stories that confront power and injustice, stories that can transform the modern consciousness and extricate us from the post-capitalist sludge.” He lights a third cigarette, which is notable because I don’t think he is drunk and he never smokes this fast if he isn’t drunk, even if he is spun up about literature, and I wonder if perhaps he took a shot or two while I was in the bathroom texting Arturo, asking if he is home this weekend.

“There is something soothing about being unpublished, about toiling away in obscurity, because at least it means I haven’t sold out. It means there is hope. It means one day, maybe even after I die, there is still a chance for my work to really mean something, to, I don’t know, take the world by the throat and shake it around a little bit. Because who could argue the world doesn’t need it?”

I never expected myself to have an affair. I despise confrontation and have never been overcome with lust, so I always figured I would avoid entanglements. My life is easy. Growing up, I never knew want, my parents aren’t even divorced, though they are cold and distant. I have always been well provided for. I would rather not have to work, but I don’t find it stressful and I live within my means. Lots of people don’t have friends in high school, are ostracized in middle school, and become awkward and distrustful young adults. I would never claim I am special. I know what love is, even if I’ve never really felt it or given it, but I know it because I know there is something more than this, something big and overwhelming at the far edge of the frame, never captured, and I know that I want it and that I haven’t had it.

I am very fond of Arturo’s apartment.

“It’s a fucked up world,” my boyfriend says as he smokes, “real fucked up.”

“Maybe you should join a church or volunteer or something.”

He chokes, “What the hell are you talking about?” His fingers trace a grin in his scraggly beard.

“You mentioned courage a minute ago, and it made me realize I have no idea what that is.” I throw my long dead cigarette into a trash bin. “I am having an affair.”

“What?” He spasms.

“His name is Arturo. I go to his apartment now and again.” Why do I mention his name?

“Are you joking?”

“No, I am a coward and I am telling you because it’s easier for me this way.” I think of Arturo and I think of his bed and something weak in me melts at the thought I might be able to go there tonight, will not have to spend one more night out on the town bullshitting.

“Is it a sex thing?”

I shake my head and say nothing.

“Tell me, is it a sex thing?!” Tears run down his cheeks.

I close my eyes. “Yes, he fucks like a jackhammer, just goes and goes, comes whenever he wants to or whenever I want him to.”

My boyfriend is drained of what little color he ever had. He is openly weeping. When it’s obvious I have nothing more to say, he mumbles something and disappears down a side street, maybe toward a park, eventually toward a bar.

The night is cold and I am in a hurry now, so I take a taxi to the far side of town. I have a key to Arturo’s apartment that I will no longer have to hide in my wallet. I enter. I inhale. Just as he promised, Arturo is away for the week. He is often away. He is a very important man. I take an Archimboldi novel down from the shelf and I read it front to back, into the late morning of the second day. I cry briefly and then I fall asleep and I never, ever tell anyone about it.