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The sky was starless and blank. He supposed it wasn't the real sky, that they were underground or in some ephemeral plane apart from everything else. He supposed he was still free to imagine Jerome's flight to Titan.
All the same, he was nagged with regret; he wanted to know what happened next.
His bark was still healing from the vicious rip of the harpy's claws. His branches waved in the occasional wind. His roots tangled with the sweet girl to his right, the noisy man behind him, and the silent tree on his left with its back eternally turned to him.
Pushing the button had been simple enough, and the flames had been so quick and hot he hadn't had time to feel pain. It was much, much easier than crippling himself had been, much less painful and involved. A few seconds, then a floating confusion, and then he found himself--here. In Hell.
He wondered if trees were valid or invalid, if perhaps they had different ways of grading the sap. They all looked equally twisted and gnarled.
He wondered how much time had passed. It felt like a few days--perhaps it had been weeks instead. He'd had enough time to chat a bit with the girl planted next to him.
"I'd give anything for a good red wine," Eugene said. "I'd love to get drunk."
"My brothers and father loved to drink; I often wondered what they saw in it," Otomi said.
The tree behind them started wailing wordlessly again. Eugene spoke a bit louder to Otomi. "A man feels very free when he's drunk. It releases him from his cares and responsibilities for a little while."
"While women must always bear their burdens."
"Oh, women can drink now. It's bloody common. You could have tried it out if you'd lived in this century--but I guess it's too late to worry about that now."
"Far too late," Otomi said with a soft tinge of regret in her voice. "I have been here for a very long time, I think."
"Yes." Thinking about time was confusing here. There was no time in the woods, nothing measurable, at least nothing he could see. He wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.
He'd never given much thought to the afterlife when he was alive. He'd had some idea of gardens of infinite delight, fountains of wine, maybe some dancing girls, or maybe simple oblivion. He had been quite sure that it would be somehow easier and more carefree than living in the modern world.
He wondered if one could obtain early release from Hell for time served on Earth. He wondered where one went next.
Their leaves rustled in the wind. Their outer branches touched; a dull, muffled sensation, one of the very few he had. He felt the damp earth around his roots, the wind in his leaves, the rustle of his branches against Otomi's, the constant wails and moans on the wind. "Where does the wind come from?" Eugene asked.
Otomi looked up at her branches swaying in the eternal twilight. "Some say it is the stirring of newly fallen souls."
Eugene barked out a laugh. "Well, that makes sense. Explains why it's so constant, with nine billion souls living and dying in the world above."
"That is a lot of people, a great many more than they had in my time. How did it happen?"
"Fast population growth after we eliminated infectious disease," Eugene said bitterly. "We're very clever these days."
Otomi looked around. "How do you know which days these are, Eugene?"
Their branches swayed, concealing and revealing the featureless sky. The sighs of the other souls rose around them in the vast forest. "I don't know," he finally said. There was no way to know in Hell.
"It won't matter after a while. I've been here for a long time and I hardly feel the time pass any more."
"Does time actually pass here?"
"I think it does. Sometimes visitors come. The harpies fly over and tear at our branches. The forest as ever grows." And as she spoke, a seedling rose from the ground and grew before their eyes. Its roots twined with theirs beneath the ground and its slender branches pushed against the sky. The tree filled out and opened its eyes.
"Welcome to the wood of suicides," Eugene said.
"I never saw Paris," the newcomer said. "What was I thinking--I never saw Paris!" She sounded old and tired and afraid.
Eugene thought about Paris. "It's not all it's cracked up to be." Very little was.
Otomi looked at Eugene. "Where is Paris?"
"In the West. In France." Eugene had been there many times, drinking brandy after brandy and flirting crudely with women in the company of other young, hearty, valid men.
The new tree wept softly, tears of sap-thick blood trickling down her rough bark.
"I so often forget you're a westerner," Otomi said. "You seem like me. You died for love, as I did." She sighed, a gentle gust. "My father forbade my marriage to my lover because my family was Christian and his was not. When I raised my lover's sword to my throat it was the fulfillment of my life. I can dream of no better death. Do you not feel that way, Eugene? Does the sap of love still beat strongly in your veins?"
Jerome. Vincent. Vincent-Jerome. Vincent who was much better at being Jerome than he was. Eugene looked down at the bare earth. "I died because I thought I had nothing further to live for."
Vincent made his dreams into Jerome's dreams--and fulfilled them. Eugene had never had any dreams of his own to sustain him. He thought again about Vincent's flight to Titan, Vincent-Jerome leaving the earth behind. "You told me that you were in love."
"I was." He remembered Vincent asking him eagerly about his past, his upbringing, his history; they had something of a friendship during their long confinement as Vincent's legs healed. But the cruel, cold shell of Jerome closed around Vincent, until finally he could taunt Eugene about his injury without batting an eye. "I fell out of love," he said. "In the end, he was valid and I was invalid, and there was nothing more to be said."
"You understand!" the new tree cried. "You understand! I couldn't be invalid once I'd been valid, I couldn't be old and sick and tired. I don't deserve this! I deserve peace!"
Eugene looked over at the new tree. "You deserve nothing. No-one deserves *anything*! You only get what you make for yourself. "The new tree wept again.
He had made the perfect Jerome shell; he cast it off and Vincent picked it up and remade it in his image. Vincent and Eugene, with Jerome shared between them. Now Vincent was in the stars and he was in hell, and where was Jerome? Jerome was in the freezer by the incinerator, with Eugene's empty wheelchair standing guard for a long lonely year.
"I don't know what you mean by valid and invalid," Otomi said. "But you loved him, yes? You died for him?"
She didn't understand at all. "I died for myself. I died because I didn't want to live any more." There was nothing left but waiting--waiting for Vincent to return and waiting for Vincent to die.
"Still, I think you have a romantic soul." Otomi tried valiantly to smile with stiff bark lips.
Eugene thought about the dirt beneath his roots and the blank twilight sky over his head and Vincent flying to Titan and felt abruptly frantic. "What year is it?" he asked the new tree.
The new tree wept wordlessly.
His frustration boiled over and he shouted, "What year is it, you blithering fool!"
"2201. It's New Year's," she sobbed. "It's new and I've gotten old..."
Eugene had been dead for nearly seventy years, and it felt like only days. "Everything's gone, then."
Vincent was dead, so Jerome was too. Everyone was dead.
"It gets easier," Otomi said.
He didn't want it to be easier. He wanted it all to be over. But the wind blew over them and the new tree sobbed and Otomi smiled and the harpies flew over them, silhouetted against the featureless twilight sky.
"Tell me about wine," Otomi said eagerly.
end.