Fruit, Continued...

“Look in my bag,” says Ash. “There are two x-rays.” I fish through her knapsack and take out two glossy sheets, both of which show the teenager’s skull in cross-section. “The first one” Ash says, “was from two and a half months ago.” Holding it up to the sunlight, I see in Ash’s parietal lobe a lesion the size of a nickel, with a sperm-like tail.

“It’s like a baby-crocodile,” she says. “Cute when you get it, but soon enough it grows up”. The second one is from two weeks later. “Kinda cool, hey?” she says. It’s the size and shape of a gourd, compressing everything else, with tendrils spread out lovingly throughout her grey matter, roots in rich soil.“Were you expecting the face of the Virgin Mary?” she says. “It got way bigger, and stronger, and the doctors have no idea what to do. It’ll be able to work on its own, without me.”

It will start by shutting down her motor functions, she tells me. She’ll go blind, and then she’ll go into a coma, during which it will shut her organs off. That is what the doctors told her, and while they could predict this, they were unable to do a thing. No amount of radiotherapy or chemotherapy could reverse this, nor does she want it to. Her body is an offering. This thing is taking a great risk, because the stronger it gets, the more it needs Ash to survive, she says.

“And what happens when it takes over completely?”

For a moment Ash’s eyes shine with a benevolent madness and her skin seems gnarled and sinewy. She shrugs, but she is smiling. Ash claims it’s the reason she’s able to do what she does. People come to her with their problems--the maritally challenged, the depressed, compulsive overeaters, alcoholics, even junkies--and she solves them. No, saves them. There was even one case where someone came and demanded something as audacious as resurrection: a kid with his dead rabbit. He dug it out of the backyard and gave her a shoebox with the animal half-decomposed inside. Ash took the rabbit, put it to her lips, and kissed it. The corpse started to twitch. But only twitch. That was enough to make the boy scream and run away crying, leaving the mother to put the remains back in the shoebox and slink away. Ash insists that if the boy came today, when the growth was bigger, the animal would have been “hopping around like the Easter Bunny.” Pet carcasses notwithstanding, her success rate seems high. A touch, a nod, a whisper in their ear, and that’s it. The patients walk away feeling like Jesus just rubbed mud and spittle in their eyes. Who knows how long the effect lasts, but it provides some sort of comfort. Otherwise the fifty odd people in the park wouldn’t still be here. And it’s all thanks to the gourd-shaped growth in her brain.

There was something that Ash told me last week:“I call it ‘Tree’ on a good day, when I can breathe easy and my head doesn’t feel like it’s gonna explode.” She added: “On a bad day, I call it Thing.” Besides that one time, I haven’t heard her call it “Tree” yet.