Dendrophobia

What I remember most clearly about Bradley was the way he laughed. It made his whole body shake, sent him into snorting convulsions that jangled his long arms. Bradley's laughter was contagious, hilarious. As kids we rode bikes all over town. We explored back roads, graveyards and the thickety woods at the edge of his subdivision. Every photo I have of myself before the age of 11, he's in. We used to be friends. We were inseparable. But that was before his brother's accident and before he became someone else.

Even though he changed, Bradley always looked the same. As a teenager he just looked like a taller version of his pre-adolescent self. He never shaved, never had zits. He had the same slight frame and big, pale head, with wispy blond hair like a halo. But even though he was probably the weirdest kid at my high school, all the hillbillies left him alone. No teasing, nothing. Everyone ignored him, including me. Bradley didn't seem to care. He carried a briefcase and he dressed like an old man. He was a ghost haunting the back of the class, sometimes seen, sometimes not. He rarely spoke, and when he did, he whispered and looked at the floor. The teachers never called on him. It seemed like he could leave the classroom whenever he wanted, and he often did, slowly rising in the middle of a lecture, closing the door behind him without a word. He also got to leave school early, and those that noticed made up stories as to why.

I found out the truth, or most of it anyways, through back-channel parental information that trumped the high school rumor mill. My dad was a teacher at my school, and one night I overheard him telling my mother that Bradley's parents had met with the school administration. Bradley was very sick, my dad said. He was leaving school early to attend therapy sessions, 3 times a week. He was heavily medicated. He had shown early signs of some sort of psychosis and there was no known cure. Bradley was hearing voices.

The opinion is generally held that Bradley's brother's accident somehow drove Bradley over the edge. I always felt his issues had to be deeper, more dense, more chemical than that. But when you consider what happened, the parallels with Bradley's pathology, and how the timing of the accident so closely coincided with the onset of his illness, it's understandable how so many have come to this conclusion.

I was away at camp that summer. This was before high school -- I was 11 and Bradley 12. I didn't hear about it until I got home, a month or so after it happened, and by then, Bradley had shut himself off from the world. I can't tell you who told me or what my immediate reaction was. The way I remember it, I got home and somehow I just knew.

The tree in Bradley's front yard was of some weed-like variety, scrawny, fast-growing, identical to all the others planted when the subdivision was built 5 years before. By the time they cut it down, it had shot up to nearly 30 feet. We'd climbed it a hundred times. The branches were low, easy to reach. The trunk was narrow so when you climbed to the top, the whole tree would sway.

Bradley and his younger brother, Aaron, climbed the tree together one July afternoon while I was gone. A hot, heavy wind was blowing across the prairie – it would storm later that night. No one noticed that the tree's branches had grown into the uninsulated power lines up above. The tree bent with the wind, a branch broke, and Aaron fell. He hit the power lines on the way down. He was killed instantly. Bradley saw the whole thing, right in front of him, up in the tree.

After I found out about the accident, my parents urged me to call his house. He needs his friends now more than ever, they said. I was scared to -– I didn't know what to say and so much time had passed since Aaron's death. Another week went by before I finally picked up the phone. By then it didn't matter, because Bradley didn't return my calls. So I rode over to his house. It was suddenly small and very white. The tree was gone from the front yard and all the shade with it. The drapes were all drawn, as though the house was blinded by the summer sun. In the yard, muddy tire tracks in the grass and a freshly cut stump still marked the spot where Aaron fell. I rang the bell. His mother, red-eyed, turned me away. And just like that, Bradley and I stopped being friends.

***

I don't think I heard about Bradley's phobia until years later, after he was hospitalized for schizophrenia. I was visiting home, on break from college. My mother made some offhand remark, almost a joke, like it was something I already knew. Bradley, along with the voices, the trances, and his many other problems, was widely known to be terrified of trees. It was worst in the winter and when he was by himself. Sometimes, but not always, the sight of trees could transform him into a jabbering, sobbing mess. There were days when he couldn't leave the house. This extreme, paralyzing fear had secretly tormented him for years, even while we were in high school. It was one of the main reasons for his hospitalization.

My block is lined with trees. Big trees, old trees, they crack the sidewalk, their branches form a canopy over the street. When I'm out walking, I sometimes think about Bradley. In my head, he's still a teenager, still part of the outside world, as he was when I last saw him. I picture him walking home after his therapy session, briefcase in hand, on his way from the bus stop to his parent's house. It's dusk, and maybe the whispers and the muffled shouts in his head have finally quieted. Walking through his subdivision, he's alone like me, and all along the winding street are the same scraggly trees that killed his brother, patiently waiting in evenly spaced rows. They wheeze when the wind blows. Above him, the dry leaves rattle and the thin, black branches scrape the sky.