Plug speaks:

Inside this cave-like apartment, perfectly still but for his eyes, is a man. That is, the top of him is still a man. He is seated at a desk. Before him is a computer, which is on.

His left hand sits motionless on the desk. From his fingertips, many greenish-brown rootlet tendrils have sprouted. Some are growing into the wood of the desk; others reach toward, and some all the way to, the floor.

His right hand, also motionless, rests on the computer’s mouse. He neither types nor clicks, but screens flip far too rapidly for your eye to follow.

He is clothed in a loose, flowing, soiled-brown, once grayish-white robe with a hood hanging down his back; the garment hangs limply from his thin, bony shoulders.

But as one’s eyes travel down, the robe’s texture changes from that of cloth to what is distinctly tree bark. At floor level, the robe, and his legs and feet under him, are wooden. His feet have grown vestigial roots, which dig into a floor of moss-covered forest dirt. He has become half man, half tree.

His face is deeply lined, with a faint suggestion of gnarls, as if the transformation below were rising and would eventually, absent an intervention, completely take him over.

That is exactly the case; he is metamorphosing into a tree from the ground up.

His hair is long, a light gray ingrained with bark-brown gnarls, unkempt and not quite limp, reaching down as if the hair itself were seeking ground to root in. He sits perfectly still, as if comatose, but with his eyes wide open.

These eyes, set deep in their sockets, are the saddest of eyes, as if they are staring, unblinking, directly at all the wounds of the world.

And indeed they are. For this is a wizard who has lost both his faith and the belief – the illusion, self-anointed realists would say – that the world is a safe and sane place, where to love and be loved is possible.

Surely, you must wonder how a man could have the power to do this to himself. And why a tree – what meaning is there in this particular obliteration of the self?

Both will be answered in due course. As to the progression of this change in his state of being: 

Early in his metamorphosis, he began to have bouts of daytime stillness. To even the most observant eye, these would have appeared to be a kind of semiconscious catatonia; he seemed to be dreaming, eyes open but blank, staring not at but through the computer screen in front of him.

These episodes lengthened from a few seconds to minutes, hours, days, and finally, weeks at a time.

During these episodes, however, the computer screen began to do that which it is still doing: flipping pages and surfing from site to site on the WorldNet at a rate too fast for the human eye – the normal eye – to capture anything more than a quick impression.

It is as if the computer had been set up by someone with the expectation that in his ostensibly catatonic state, this man-turning-into-a-tree could speed-read faster, by orders of magnitude, and for longer without a break than any human being ever had.

That is indeed the case. He can and does. And it is I who set the computer to flip screens for him, for I believe… Well, never mind what I believe; I’ll just tell the story.

Before my electronic visit, in the ever-shorter intervals of awareness of his surroundings, he used to take notice of the metamorphosis of his dwelling and himself, but without a sense of alarm. It seemed quite normal and peaceful – a return to Mother Earth – and he felt no aversion to or fear of the idea of dying as a human being.

On the contrary, it was and remains a relief.

Why? Because certain memories have imposed too much agony for him to bear.

When he awakens, which is less and less often, the computer ceases its rapid surfing and displays his memories:

● In one, he sees a woman lying on her deathbed, bald under a colorful kerchief and withered with what one might diagnose as late-stage cancer, breathing with the help of an oxygen concentrator.

The room is a living room or sitting room, bathed in the low but warm Southern Goldensun coastal winter sunlight, with her bed placed so that she can view, through big windows, a lush garden of winter-blooming flowers.

She smiles and says something to a man, a younger version of him. We can’t hear it, but we know from her big, alert, and radiant eyes and the quiet, dignified beauty glowing through her chemo-wrinkled skin, that it is something wise and meant to be soothing.

He is not soothed. Staring at this image, he feels only unbearable heartache.

● It dissolves into another image. A boy stares sadly out a window of what is unmistakably an elegant townhouse in the posh, historic TheGeorges section of Federal City, Delineation of Columbia, while this same man, but several years younger, rolls duffel bags down the front walkway to his car, a recent-model hybrid.

The man sets the bags in the trunk, crosses to the driver’s door, and looks back. The boy, whom he can view from the window, does not look his way. A woman, whom we will come to know as Sarah Gash, stands at the door, arms folded, her expression a triumphant smirk.

The man steps into the car and departs. The boy never looks his way.

 ● A third image: the man is in a strange, shimmering land. A self-illuminating hourglass, with layers of sand in all colors of the rainbow, hangs over a checkerboard meadow of tall green elephant grass and blooming lavender. Next to the hourglass, a huge Crone’s Eye stares at him accusingly.

Suddenly, he is cast out, swept through the air as if by a powerful wind. The same boy, who is older now, perhaps sixteen, watches from a parapet, glaring.

● A fourth: a black hole opens in Mother Earth and begins to draw Los Celestiales slowly and inexorably into it; the image tracks backward into space as the planet breaks up into pieces, all imploding into the black hole at its core.

The black hole distorts and reaches toward the sun, which develops a similar black spot on its surface and begins to implode. In the sky, stars and galaxies begin to blink out.

This man’s metamorphosis had begun slowly and unintentionally, as most mental diseases progress: hardly noticed by the victim, and then, when he briefly did notice, it was with shrugging acceptance.

The small, rented condo unit and he had become, over time, what they are now: a sort of twisted work of art, decorated, as most of us would decorate our homes and choose our clothes, to reflect a state of mind and heart.

In his case, the state of mind is one of deep, paralyzing grief, from which he is retreating into a vegetative state in every sense of the word.

But this is more than personal despair. He’d thought he was on a mission to help save the world. Now, he has lost faith that there is a reason for not merely himself, but any of humanity, to continue on.