"The Last Tree on Earth" by Ramón Isao
This is a selection from our Summer 2023 issue, “Stay,” currently available in print and digital versions.
I was seven when my father took me to see it. Back then it was nearly a grove. You could stand in the center of those trees and imagine what it must have been like. Damp earth, ancient roots. Sunlight piercing the canopy in beams I kept trying to cup in my hands.
Ranger Ronny was our tour guide. He told all of us to close our eyes and take a big whiff. What’d we smell?
We told him sweat. We told him wet soil. Kids with enough money for lawns shouted out grass, mushrooms.
Ranger Ronny said that was the smell of a tree breathing. And when he asked us to close our eyes and breathe along with the tree for a full minute, I stole my chance. I reached over the ropes to run my fingers over the pale bark of the eldest tree and I’m telling you: it communicated. Straight into my body came the weight of everything that tree and I had gone through to be there, together.
Well, Ronny caught me stroking bark and yelled at me. Dad got a notice from the Parks Department, demanding a fine. He smiled as he paid for it over his phone: “Best money I ever spent, Alejandro,” he told me.
I’d like my son Tomio to have a shot at a memory like that. I think he needs it. It could cure him of that constant anxiety all the kids have now. I don’t want to blame the Neuro-chips, or my ex-wife for convincing me to install Tomio’s. I fought her on it but in the end—I get it—you have to stay competitive. All of us have one. But these new versions anticipate what you want before you want it, and what the human animal most wants is to know what to fear, and who to hate. So they constantly top us off with the latest, looming dangers of the world: Articles, videos, memes of all the things you could be called upon to survive, from earthquakes to shootings to cruel acts of legislature. Plus, he speaks and thinks like an older kid sometimes. He’s basically part-AI.
And think of the advancements to come. The latest model has a behavioral chip all the parents swore we’d never install. And then last week during drop-off, in came Tran, normally a sullen slump of a boy, now dressed and primped and standing straight. His father couldn’t look a single one of us in the eye.
I call us both in sick and rent a car. It’ll cost me, but I can always cut back when he’s at his Mom’s next month. At the eastern edge of the oxygen dome is the checkpoint. The guard gives me the spiel: You’re now about to leave Dome C, through unpatrolled deserts, keep your storm correction setting on, did we have water, did we have dustsuits, did we have flares? Check, check, check, and she waves me through the airlock, out onto that two-lane highway through a perennial storm of swirling reds and tans. Tomio looks up only once from that video game he’s programming.
But then he pauses, and I know he’s checking our location. That telltale flick of the eyes to the left periphery.
“The tree’s in Dome D?” he says.
“It is.”
“That’s where Whites live.”
“So?”
“Whites hate us.”
“No, they don’t,” I say, but I know he’s already searching up articles and videos to refute me. “Or at least it’s more complicated than that.”
He reads my face. With all that time flicking around on his Neuro, I wasn’t sure he still could.
“I don’t want to see the stupid tree. I heard it’s a big stick.”
“Hey,” I say, surprised at my own tone. All steel and paternity. It’s the only way to talk over the internet. “If a white dad and his son drove down a highway, in our sector, would you hurt them?”
A promising silence.
“Tomio. It’s 30 minutes.”
“Dad, it’s a stick.”
That’s when the car interrupts us; there’s an obstruction ahead. We slow to an idle. At first there’s nothing but the same unending bloom of red and brown clouds. And then from those dust clouds emerge the flashing hazards of another car, on its side.
I slow the car by half as we pass. It’s the same make and model as ours, crumpled like an old beer can. Freshly abandoned. It’s hard not to read it as an omen out here in the bright red wastes. The car routes us around it. Not a living thing stirs.
And then the wrecked door opens. A thin figure in a bright white dustsuit crawls out and comes running. I tell the car to pull over and my son completely changes. His joints lock, and he stops breathing. His mouth moves but I can’t hear a sound.
“Louder,” I say.
This time I hear him: “Don’t.”
The word, the thing he wants me to do, sits there in the car with us. The wind rocks us to one side, then lets up.
“We have to.”
“That’s not true.”
“People barely use this road. There’re no aid stations. We’re needed.”
I can see it rising out of Tomio, that fear. That fear will make mistakes for him. He’ll open the door. He’ll run to the storm. I know he will, and then he says it outright: “I’ll run.”
The stranded guy’s close enough now that I can make out two words he’s shouting, even through his helmet: thank you, thank you, over and over again, just like that. Thank you.
But there is an animal in Tomio now. It stretches his face into impossible feats of anguish and loss. He is a sorrow I can’t sit next to. I’m weak that way. My dad was too. My mind begins to see what the kid sees. I see all the things this bigger person could do to me. And then I see a few of the things that they could do to Tomio and that’s when I decide to keep driving.
It feels like something I can’t help, but that’s an excuse. I love my son far too much; that’s a truer excuse. It’s probably because I feel so guilty that I convinced my ex-wife to have him, and now the stranded motorist I should be saving is close enough to touch the bumper. I tell the car to move onward, and I’m almost shocked when it does. As if somehow the car would know better.
Tomio comes back to himself and breathes. His fist around the handle of the passenger door expands. I figure the worst part of the whole encounter is how long the guy runs after us before the dust swallows him up. But I’m wrong. The worst part is that, within sixty seconds, Tomio’s back to his video game.
My mother was the tough one. Still is. A compliment from her equaled a hundred of my father’s. She kept the closer watch over my words, my gestures, my grades. She was Yuko Perez, the last concert pianist famous enough to fill theaters. She played that thing more often than she spoke. You can’t blame her for wedging that piano under my fingers too, though I won no awards worth winning.
This is what it took to crack my mother: the first AI program to write songs that made people cry. You know them. “Only Hours” and “Heart Obeys.” You know them better than you know the name Yuko Perez. My mother and I are part of only a handful of folks who didn’t cry at all that robo-schlock. Tomio too. Call it snobbery, but those songs have the same chemical tang that all the food has now. We lobbied, we picketed. We made videos begging to Keep Music Human.
But after “Velvet State” came out, music as a human endeavor ended. I remember bringing her the song while she was running arpeggios with a group of grad students. I knew it was rude, but she had to hear it from me. I set my phone in front of her and hit play.
“Which opus is this from?” she said to me after a dozen measures.
“It’s not Chopin.”
These graduate students lugged keyboards all the way out to our house to get special instruction from Yuko Perez. They took it hard. One winced. Another put her fingers under her eyes. Only one spoke—“it’s beautiful,” she said—and then punched her keyboard four times.
Mom rode out a few more years of dwindling crowds and students, and then stopped playing entirely. I tried keeping it up, but it was wrong not having her notes over in the parlor intermingle with mine from the living room. It seemed pointless. Like talking on the phone to someone who’d already switched off. She became a consultant for Tunemakers like me and every other musician and now we all spend our days applying slight tweaks to essentially perfect music. Tomio listens to “Velvet State” all the time. It’s a beautiful song.
The visitor center has changed. The tree now is housed under a translucent dome at the end of a long, outdoor corridor where visitors line up. Ceiling screens project footage of an overhead canopy; it’s like looking up at a real forest. White students on field trips stare up with a wonder that borders on mourning. Ragged pilgrims raise their arms up at the false canopy and sing “Be the Tree.” I wonder if they know it’s an AI song. Their voices are so hoarse, it hurts my throat to hear them. Loudspeakers announce the safety rules: stay in line, don’t touch anything, and also thank you because all of this has been funded by donations from visitors like you.
The “thank you” is noticeably louder than the rest of the message. They must be having financial troubles. They’ve even started renting space out for other events; a sign back at the entrance directs patrons to go left for the Last Tree exhibit, and right for the “Rhonda Johns Memorial Service.”
So far most of the Whites seem fine. Some of them stare a little, others smile sadly to let you know they’re okay. Nothing like the stories you hear online. Despite his freakout earlier, Tomio isn’t a bit afraid, eyes flitting as he checks his Neuro. Probably he hears other kids talk about the same video games he likes. They’ve probably all murdered one another online many times prior. Still, I keep my hands clamped on Tomio’s shoulders, head low.
“What game are you playing?” I say.
“I’m working on my own.”
I let the silence between us linger, and use it to silently beg him to please switch off and say more. Complain. Anything.
And then he does. He switches off and goes “I’m making a game that’s… there’s this biiiiig spaceship, right? As big as a village or a town. And… these animals live on it but it’s being sucked into the sun because of an error the kangaroo made. They’re gonna burn up.”
“Oh, Tomio.”
“They’re all there—the crew of this ship—and they’ve decided not to freak out but to crash into the sun real calm.”
“That’s… wow.”
“So, you have to keep your crew calm, well fed, and happy but it gets harder every year cuz they’re more closer to the sun. Especially the kangaroo who messed up the calculations, because he’s super suicidal. And if you make it all the way together, you win. It’s called Keep Calm and Burn. Dad, are you crying?”
“No. What’s this ‘Dad’ business? Is Daddy over?”
“I see tears.”
“Hey. If the whole crew makes it to the end, you should have a thing where at the last minute, they avoid the sun, you know? Like a secret final measure that saves everyone.”
Tomio’s face evacuates itself of anything but wonder at my idiocy.
“Dry your eyes,” he says. “Whites are watching.”
The front of the line reveals another big change – where once we trudged across dirt, rocks, and pine needles, now you circle the tree on a round conveyor belt. It’s exactly like a baggage carousel from back when airports were still in use, except there’s a great mound of soil in the center, covered by a thick glass dome to keep people from touching anything.
Under the far end of the dome stands the Last Tree. Even from here, I can see it’s a black, shrunken stick about ten feet high, stripped of the bark I once ran my fingers over. Fungal clumps take hold of its few branches, weighing them down like fattened birds. On top of that, the piped-in fragrance of tree-breath is cloying, plus Ranger Ronny turns out to not be a real person, but a kind of mascot for the whole joint; every tour guide here is named Ranger Ronny.
Ours is called Ranger Ronny Tanya, a grandmother of four with a perpetually stern smile. She tells us “You get three revolutions, no touching,” and we start circling. Tomio manually presses the air in front of him to put the Neuro to sleep. Hell, we all do.
The loudspeaker starts up a cowboy drawl: “This is Raaaaanger Ronny here! One day, I went ahead and stepped this a-here clodhopper into a hole and right fell down a dadburn cliff! It were a long fall but when I stood on these wobbly dogs o’ mine, I saw this a-here tree…”
That’s when I notice that where the belt passes the tree, there is an opening at the base of the dome, so that you and the tree can be in each other’s immediate presence. Every child’s mouth is open as they pass. Some sniff. Pilgrims collapse in joy or sorrow, I can’t tell. Teachers close their mouths and smile. It’s quieter at this end, except for the nature soundtrack chirping and breezing from unseen speakers. It almost feels like being in a forest, but it also feels like taking a conveyor belt to see a mushroom, and Tomio knows it:
“I told you. A stick.”
We drift closer to the open portion of the dome. I start to smell its mossy, dying breaths.
“Tomio,” I say, “on the next revolution, I want you to poke it once.”
“They’ll arrest us,” he says.
“They won’t.”
“They’ll separate us.”
“They won’t.”
We pass the tree a second time, and he keeps his hands at his sides. So I grab him by the wrists.
“Listen. You are weak, Tomio. Your whole generation. But you can’t be. What’s coming will cull you all, the weak from the strong. Your fucking video game won’t save you.”
I know. These are horrible things I’m saying to an 8-year-old. In my defense, all he has to do is reach out one little finger. No one will see. But that fear is inside of him. I can smell it more clearly than I smell my own son. The tree approaches for the third time. He’s in tears now. I’ve driven my son to tears.
“You’re hurting me,” he says, less in protest than shock, and that shock explodes when I pick him up. The animal comes back into him; instead of a boy, there is a great flailing in my arms, but I manage to extract his right hand from the storm of limbs, and steady it. I am steadying my boy.
We near the tree, its final exhalations making syrup of the air around us and my kid is screaming into my cupped hand as I worm his fingers out of his fists and offer them up like a sacrifice, with no concern for his safety or even his ability to breathe. But the fear is stronger than me, and the kid wriggles out of my hold and then Ranger Ronny Tanya is there. Not a hint of confusion; she knows exactly what I tried to do. Probably she’s seen it before.
She tells me touching the tree is now a misdemeanor, 3-6 months minimum, and on and on, her voice rising like a tide until she gets racist. My income, my melanin, my features, all take hits, but she doesn’t even know my race so she’s just casting blanket statements against the color brown. I’d argue back but her smugness is an undefeated counterargument. It’s a stalemate even older than the nation, so I turn back to Tomio only to find that he’s gone.
You know that feeling of your children being gone? Not left, right, up, or down. Only air. Air in place of a kid. And then that air starts to waver like it’s over a hot road, and I’m saying his name out loud like a man who’s never heard it before. I’ve lost track of time entirely: how long has Tanya been ranting? Is the ride over? Have I offended the pilgrims? Are the children angry? Who at? There’s so much I haven’t been bothering to notice, and now Tomio is gone. But then an alarm sounds, and stops: A fire exit door slipping open and shut.
I follow emergency exit signs to the fire door, shoulder it open. Beige sunlight briefly blinds me. I take a few steps forward and right before I call out Tomio’s name, my eyes adjust. And there, in front of me, is a huge crowd of Ranger Ronnies in full Ronny regalia, seated on rows of folding chairs in the staff parking lot. Every one of them white. It takes a half-second to shake off the sensation of dreaming, and another half-second to notice the stage they’re crying at.
Owning every inch of that stage is a bone-thin woman, obviously about to die. A banner over her head reads “We’ll remember you always, Ranger Ronny Rhonda!” Only then do I remember the sign back at the entrance; I’m at the Rhonda Johns Memorial Service.
Hardly the place to bolt down the center aisle, whispering for Tomio, but I do. Rhonda Johns introduces a pianist. Her voice is all sugar and gravel, but the words curl off into the wind. The crowd cries and watches, watches and cries. I slip past them with apologetic smiles, do what I can to minimize my presence.
Luckily, most eyes are on the pianist. He’s got an actual, upright wooden piano up there but he’s crying too hard to play with coherency. Finally, he gives up, and weeps into his knees. Ronny puts an arm on his back, but he’s having a tough go. The shoulders, the shaking, and the sorries, so many sorries.
So, Ronny moves on: “Remembrances! Gimme some’n to take into the next world. I was a Ronny like y’all in life. I’m a Ronny after. Ranger Ronny Jason, you go first.”
And there’s Tomio up front, aisle seat. He must have run far enough for the panic to wear off, and now he’s stuck front row at a stranger’s demise. When I sit next to him he looks at me like I’m a YouTube celebrity, and hugs me, blubbering out apologies I shush with my own.
Meanwhile, Ranger Ronny Jason can barely pull it together, finally sits down. Next is Ronny Candace. Then, a civilian called Grace, and that’s around the time I realize that the remembrances are coming my way, like some somber wave at a basketball game. Only four seats away. Now, three.
“Son,” I whisper, “I don’t want to ruin these people’s ceremony. Head for the car.”
But it’s too late—they’ve found me. The last two must have just said “Thanks” or something and sat back down. I should do the same – thank you, Ranger Ronny Rhonda. Or at least let them know I’ve made an error I regret. That I tried to force my son to touch a tree and now I’m here at a pre-funeral for a person I’ve never known.
But sitting there with my son safe in my arms, I can’t leave. Gratitude is such a strange emotion. Look at Rhonda on that stage, fated for the needle, gesturing hopefully at me to share, to please share. Everyone is looking to me.
So I stand up. I head for the stage, Tomio’s hand in mine. I sit us both on the piano bench. When the grooves of my fingerprints touch the keys, I’m surprised to find them warm, and even more surprised when I start to play. It takes me a moment to recognize it as an older piece my mother pretended to detest but I’d catch her playing when she was down. One my father was always begging to hear.
I play it real nice. It’s filled with the years I haven’t performed, and it’s filled with how bad I feel for leaving the motoristbehind. It’s filled with my son, my ex, my father, and mother. I hope it’s exactly what Ronnie wanted. I can feel the crowd feeling it. The piano warbles in and out of tune, hitting several notes at the same time in a way that makes the music feel ancient, which it is and always will be.
And Tomio? He’s never seen me play. I guess I’ve always been too ashamed to show him this thing I wasted half my life trying to master. The instant my fingers coax music from those keys, his mouth shoots so far open I can hear his jaw crack. Little hands reach for mine, but he thinks better of it. Instead, he trawls his gaze from my fingers, up my arms, to my shoulders and my face, and back again, like he’s trying to figure out a magic trick. It’s as if I’m doing something impossible. As if I’ve brought some dead thing back to life.
Ramón Isao is a recipient of the Tim McGinnis Award for Fiction, as well as fellowships from Artist Trust and Jack Straw Cultural Center. His stories appear in The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Hobart, Moss, and elsewhere. His screenwriting credits include ZMD, Junk, and Dead Body, and he starred in the webseries Grow Op. He has an MFA from Columbia University and serves as Fiction Editor at New Orleans Review.
