Arborescent

By Marc Herman Lynch

• This debut novel was recommended to us by Joshua Whitehead, author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel Jonny Appleseed. Arborescent is Marc Herman Lynch’s debut novel; he is the president of the Calgary literary magazine filling station and a literary organizer. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary currently works at Mount Royal College as a writing and learning strategist. He identifies as mixed-race (Chinese/French).
• Arborescent is a striking novel both in content and form. Divided in three sections, the book focuses on three individuals whose stories interconnect with one another: a cis-gender, white male named Nohlan Buckles who turns into a tree after his father inexplicably explodes; a first-generation immigrant named Hachiko Yoshitoshi, whose staging of Yotsuya Kaidan causes the ghost of this kabuki to manifest; and a second-generation immigrant teenager named Zadie Chan, who unwittingly begins to produce doppelgangers as she tries to reconcile family divisions. Their startling stories delve deep into the concept of “otherness” and its physical and psychological manifestations in racialized bodies.
• In his own words: “I wrote this book to explore the reality of immigrant characters, those who were born within Canada and are disconnected from their culture. My parents escaped their respective cultures, and tried to reframe themselves within Canada but were always being singled out, whether due to their accents, skin colour, or both. My reframing now originates from a lack: a space of uncertainty, an absence. I am both identifiable and non-identifiable: called white when it suits one and BIPOC when it suits another. It seems I can make no claim for space, and I can neither see myself as identifiable nor invisible (something that my parents probably hoped for me, which is why they refused to give me a Chinese name or one that would be, at face value, too identifiably French). This thought process has led me to realize that there are very few representations of us alienated immigrants, especially those that record the everyday realities of our lived experience: how do we negotiate these waters? Our story is so much more than just just reconciling identity or the conflict between host and home countries!”
• Blurbs by Lambda Literary Award winners Joshua Whitehead and Larissa Lai, among others.
• As an absurdist, highly contemporary novel that speaks to the immigrant experience, Arborescent will attract a great deal of attention.
• This book will appeal to those interested in BIPOC literature and fantastical fiction. The age range will likely skew younger than older (i.e., under 50).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781551528328

Book preview

PROLOGUE

JEB BUCKLES

In short, Jeb Buckles could hand-hew timber but couldn’t check his email to save his life: electronic devices being the work of the Devil. In his old age, surely he had become humbled, self-deprecating even, but that never kept him from testing the sturdiness of limbs, always being out on one, that is.

In his seventy-second year, he built a trebuchet on the valley ridge a good fifty metres from his country manor. At one and a half stories high and with two human-sized hamster wheels, the pretty little chorus resembled a gristmill, its sentimental nature almost pastoral. He imagined naysayers asking, How could an old fart, barely able to reach his own dick, manage to construct such an enormous bleached-wood siege engine?

Well, I’m not your typical geriatric bugger, after all, would be his response.

He launched everything from typewriters to dumbbells to dishwashers into the valley floor. Once, he launched a hollowed-out Oldsmobile thirty feet into the air. Once, he landed a forty-pound filing cabinet squarely in the heart of a herd of deer, killing a doe and wounding two others. He told the story like a miracle: Like hitting a pebble on a beach. Like tagging a moth in the woods at night.

Sometimes, when thinking of his son, Jeb wished he could launch the dumbshit into space. He’d loved the boy as a tyke, but there was something to be desired about the slacker, goodfor-nothing bloom. Parasitic in essence, children needed rigid forbearance: Give me a month alone with the boy, he would tell Marchella. A month in the woods would turn that bent rod into a Corinthian column. Believe you me.

As Jeb Buckles’s eyesight deteriorated, he staked guidewires across his land. Jeb often walked down the valley to the river, two kilometres out, pinky hooked under wire, to stand in windswept snow. The expletives he delivered intensified with the wind: he told both the alpacas in their shelter and the yellow-beaked pilgrims under the trailer to fuck off. The wind tortured him until he threw down. But, rather than resembling a proper pugilist, he looked, Marchella said, more like a lady with a June bug down her dress.

His cataracts worsened, but no doctor was gonna fudge with his eyes. Better to have an eye, Jeb would say when the goose sausage came out like the offal from a freshly field-dressed deer.

His blindness worsened in the winter, when the light off the snow was biting, and there were only eight hours of sunlight. But the intricate lattice of guidewire did more than compensate for his disorientation. It amplified his touch, such that his reach stretched across the valley. He could feel the nose of a deer nudging the line on the opposite side of the estate, the light touch of a gopher’s tail, the sway of a copse, the roots wending through the matted earth.

Stepping outside his back door, Jeb reached for the hip-high stake hammered into the ground, the thread practically invisible against the hard-packed snow. He curled his pinky around the wire.

The trebuchet creaked with windmill-like sluggishness. The cantilevered counterweight was a hefty load the size of a small yacht. Jeb hoisted his own weight onto the tie, momentarily leaving the ground to allow the pawl to catch on the ratchet’s next tooth; the machine strained with tension. Foot-tall dead sunflowers stood in the snow along the edge of the escarpment, their stalks bent and discs covered in icicles.

With mitted hands, Jeb yanked the thick, braided rope. With a clank and wobble, the contraption shuddered and the counterweight dropped, followed by a rush of air. And here the rush of siege, the mounting pressure toppling bodies that jostled over bloody fields. For Jeb, history was nothing more than men swinging from gibbets and skulls spiked on ramparts. This was progress as largesse, violence shorn down to evolutionary impulse. For him, an eight-pound trigger pull, the drop of the plunger, the whine of a drone—these were the products of men being men, a call of the wild as distinctive as a roar.

His oohs and aahs died in the wind as the bathtub twisted, an awkward porcelain projectile turning from blackish blur to whitish speck, until it disappeared from his sight entirely; he listened intently, then heard the muffled explosion as the tub bounded to a halt among the other snowy lumps on the valley floor.

That sure is something, a woman remarked from behind.

Jeb turned around but could only see the haze of a figure mired by the light refracting off the snow.

Marchella’s not here. She went into the city.

I was hoping to speak with you.

You know whose property this is? Jeb asked, taking off his mitt and reaching for the guidewire underneath his hand.

I don’t, actually.

The old saw ‘do me a kindness’ doesn’t roost here, friend. I’m sure you can find your own way home.

His sight must be the shits, Jeb thought. Normally, he could make out shapes (the shadows or impressions of features, the depressions of the eye sockets), but the woman seemed all but faceless. A strange course of electricity seemed to ripple through her body.

You a godly man?

You a nun?

No, she said matter-of-factly. I’m more like a debt collector.

That so?

To astronomers, the stars are nothing more than red shifts, distance, and chemical composition, she branched off. These people ask us to acknowledge our insignificance every time we look at them: ‘The sun is larger than a million Earths. The stars are billions of miles away.’ But for most of us, when we look at the stars, we don’t feel insignificant. In fact, we’re buoyed. The stars do more than ‘exist a long ways away.’ They connect us through history and through time: from the Blackfoot to the Greeks. There’s a spiritual dimension that is exempt from empirical measures. This is how I see humanity—to study the stars is to study the light of humanity.

That’s all well and good, but you’re in the Bible belt. We believe in the good Lord and saviour here, not your mumbo-jumbo.

"You’re absolutely right. And I’m here to collect that," she persisted.

Jeb just waved her off, becoming impatient. "I’m sorry if I wasn’t being direct before. Maybe you would prefer I told you to fuck off!"

Jeb began to make his way back home, but the woman stepped in front of him. Even this close, Jeb couldn’t make out distinguishing features. Like a roiling mist, she seemed to have no solidity. The figure reached out and touched the guidewire, and suddenly Jeb felt cut off from the world, as though the neuronal pathways between his brain and limbs had been severed. Panic began to well up in him—thinking about his rifle mounted on the boot-room wall.

You’re swimming in the dark, she said.

What do you want? Jeb said.

Like I said, I’ve come to collect on your debt.

PART 1

NOHLAN BUCKLES

Trees can ascend.

Nohlan Buckles’s high beams formed a truncated bridge in the darkness—a bare trace of road split by a white lane divider. He hunched over the steering wheel, accessing a deeper form of sight, peering through the icy, tar-packed surface. Sometimes his reality suffered from lag, such that this endless, narrow corridor seemed undifferentiable from skipped frames. On the median, three coyotes with slick fur stood side by side against the backdrop of snow-covered prairie.

Pulsing hazard lights forced him to slow the car, and he slid to a stop on a patch of black ice as solid and sheen as volcanic glass. Stepping from the vehicle, he tucked his chin into his chest as the icy wind struck like buckshot. It wasn’t Nohlan’s style to step from a vehicle to assist at a wreckage; he only trusted himself to drop something, to fail. And yet, here he was, stopping the car, providing a helping hand.

Nohlan catalogued the wintery ache: a muscular vibrato. His body seemed to strain inward, towards some central core of heat.

Footpaths of trampled snow surrounded the abandoned vehicle, which seemed to hang weightless as if harnessed to an unseen suspension system. The car throbbed in the ditch, rust around the wheel wells, a cerulean-blue parking pass hanging from the rearview mirror. There was an empty car seat and crumpled baby bag in the back. A single set of footprints led into adjacent farmland. Nohlan’s eyes ran along the trail until the tracks disappeared into the cracked crème brûlée surface above the long-shorn wheat. He thought he saw a naked figure in the windswept fields, covered in tattoos, wandering blindly. Up the road, the coyotes stalked forward in mirrored steps.

As he returned his car to the highway, he wondered what force had driven the vehicle’s occupants to abandon it. Some Pied Piper’s enchantment? Even the coyotes braced themselves against the winter.

Nohlan’s parents lived an hour and a half outside the city, off the Deerfoot and south of the Siksika Nation. They called their home Disney World which was apropos given its blue exterior, white trim, turrets, and spiral-shell roofs. Dropped into the semi-arid snow-covered hills, the country home had all the subtlety of a child’s playhouse on the moon. Around the driveway, valley ridge, and gardens, lines of twine glimmered in the sweep of Nohlan’s headlights, as though the building were caught in cosmic webbing.

For all its grandeur, the mansion was poorly built. Often, there wasn’t enough water pressure to accommodate the upper bathrooms, so no one used the imperial staircase or the upper floors. The lavish European-style château had the distortions of a film set. The bricks were as smooth as plywood, and parts of the exterior peeled away to reveal Styrofoam.

In her heavy full-length winter coat, nothing more than a quilt with arms, Nohlan’s mother shimmied out onto the drive. She had a flashlight in hand and clomped in her thick snow boots. Her face was sullen, and the skin around her eyes discoloured and bruised. Seeing her raw, cracked face, Nohlan suddenly felt a deep foreboding, as though he were standing on a seashore watching an oncoming tsunami engulf the breakwater.

Nohlan! Your father! she cried.

A low moan descended over the valley, and his mother twisted her head skyward. The sound resonated through the frozen earth like a sea of ice had cracked beneath them. Impossible to locate, the powerful moaning continued its lament, only to dull and resolve into the howling wind.

After returning his mother to the house, Nohlan descended into the valley. The moon and snow did more to enlarge his vision than the flashlight in his hand. A hunched mound in the distance, nothing more than frozen blue grama and dwarf shrubs furled by the snow. His breathing was hollow, and the snow crunched underfoot. The manor behind him had become a small array of lights. He felt adrift, like an astronaut untethered from the space station, each frosty breath hoarse.

Snowy bumps pockmarked the valley floor like burial mounds. At one point, Nohlan tripped over the remains of a shattered armoire. A single gold-rimmed bathtub rested on its clawed feet in the middle of the valley, as if ready for someone to climb inside. On the ridge above him, his father’s trebuchet stood like a chapel.

A herd of deer passed through this hinterland: elongated shadows turned into Dalì’s elephants. They stared with an unusual calm, predatory assuredness, so different from the flighty creatures he knew. This bluish-greige landscape bristled with flints of light, and there seemed to be endless space to hide in the imperceptible coulees.

Dad! Nohlan yelled into the night.

At the furthermost post, and the guidewire’s end, near the mostly frozen stream, Nohlan struck off from the path towards a narrowing in the valley. Here, tall frozen waves of fescue cracked as he pushed through, while the wind buffeted him. Nohlan called again and again, and his voice became a muted howl, so faint that it barely registered.

The narrowed valley steppes were mostly wind-shorn: a geological marbling, arid white waves, sedimentary layer upon layer, seeming to call to a history of the land far beyond reckoning.

Just when he was about to turn back, he noticed a shadow hunched against a hoarfrosted rock. Nohlan’s flashlight lit up the fluorescent reflectors. His father’s face was blue, his polyester jacket stiff, the outer layer bending and cracking in Nohlan’s gloves. His father seemed melded to the stone, like a wet rug frozen to the ground. Nohlan stowed the flashlight in his coat pocket, turning the bright globe cinder red in the fleece.

This man who had once seemed to Nohlan so gargantuan now lay thin-haired, balding, liver-spotted, blistered, and cracked. The deep creases of his forehead were lightly sprinkled with snow. The skin tag just below his right eye glowed white hot like a poker.

Nohlan degloved to palm his father’s cheeks, check his pulse, touch the frosted stubble of this once-irascible and impossible man who’d, despite all his flaws, raised him from infancy.

Like a person unstuck from a glacier, his father opened his eyes.

A low groan emitted from his sternum, a loud guttural noise, less reminiscent of bodily processes than of extraordinary natural forces: a glacier yawning apart, tectonic plates shifting, space-time cracking. Even though his father’s eyes were open, there was no life in those stellar clouds, no stare or gaze. The low groan from his abdomen continued to resonate around the valley, a thunder that caused pockets of snow to dislodge and tumble down the escarpment.

His father’s chest cracked open like a panel, and Nohlan fell backwards, pushed away from the sudden outpouring of oven-like heat. The cavity yawned wide, laying bare his father’s heart, a pulsing fist on a smoky stage, his ribs forming a proscenium arch. A flare-like blaze shot from the cavity, scorching Nohlan’s face as it passed.

Another star shot forth, and then another, some dying limply and sizzling into the snow, others rocketing upward, each with a golden cord that seared the bodily pocket from which they emerged. The narrowed valley