The half-man, half-tree speaks:

The man in Plug’s narrative above is me, Cormac Quinn.

As the old woman and I emerge from the elevator, a busybody neighbor opens her door and issues, as if it were a silent degree of banishment, a long, disapproving stare at my singed condition.

“He has a rare skin disease,” says the little old woman leading me.

“The resident manager will hear about –“

“Stay back,” the little woman leading me snarls in a surprisingly commanding voice. “It’s extremely contagious.”

The neighbor quickly backs into her apartment and slams the door shut.

We enter my rescuer’s unit.

Within, the decor and contents of the little old woman’s penthouse apartment elegantly render 1930s Art Deco — but not antique; everything is shining new. It has a sweeping view of Runyon Canyon. Shadows are deepening. The paths are still full of hikers and dogs, but most are coming down the hills as the sun sets. The burned pathway taken by the flames is a black, sooty scar on the otherwise green and brown hills.

She takes me to the kitchen and motions to the kitchen table.

She barks, “Sit.”

I obey her order, shuffling, creaking, and clenching my teeth in the pain of someone who hasn’t walked in a long time and has gone arthritic in the interim. I dump myself stiffly into a chair.

She crosses to the stove and begins cooking up a strange brew. Unimaginably vile odors waft my way. After a while, she brings a tea caddy with a pot of the brew from the stove and pours a cup for me. The lumpy, gray-green liquid looks as if someone has vomited half-digested broccoli.

If only. It smells much worse.

She nods at it – wordlessly, but making it plain that I am to drink whatever it is.

I reach for it hesitantly and very slowly, like a man who is still half wood, and even more like one who is in no great hurry to ingest someone else’s broccoli vomit. A whiff causes my nose to wrinkle involuntarily and gives rise to a gagging, choking cough.

“Drink,” she says. Her voice is monotone, but it is clearly an order.

“Surely,” I say, in a voice like a truck engine attempting to start after a winter of disuse, seeking a way to avoid having to swallow this noisome brew, “you’ll join me. I couldn’t impose and drink alone.”

“I’d sooner lick under a dead skunk’s tail,” she says. “Now, drink!”

I consider putting up an argument, but I feel weak, and her sharp tone and her glare make that course of action seem seriously unwise. I start to raise the cup, hesitate as the odor wafts stronger, and then, hearing the slightest of growls in her throat, I submit to her command.

The first sip causes me to gag and cough violently. A few lumps spew out onto my beard, my discolored robe, and the tile floor.

She gives me the foulest of dirty looks. “I could mix more,” she says.

I continue to drink with great difficulty, gagging repeatedly. The brew tastes even worse than it smells. I sip, forcing it down while repeatedly glancing her way in the hope that she might stop watching.

No such luck; she is staring me down. I continue to drink and manage to get it all down. Then, I have to fight back nausea with great effort.

“Look at you!” Her voice now turns shrill and nagging, and she accompanies it with a sharp rap of the baseball bat against my leg.

The collision of bat and leg gives off the sound of wood hitting wood and causes me no sensation. I am surprised that I can’t feel it.

“You were her warrior? Her rock? Sorry, I just don’t see it! I see nothing but a worm! No, a Bugboy Pete larva!”

A what? I’m wondering, having had no experience to date with such a creature.

The woman whacks my leg with the bat again, harder. The sound has changed; it’s a bit hollow now. “She was the wisest of women,” the old woman continues.

She must be referring to Suzanne, but Suzanne never mentioned anyone like this nasty old crone to me.

“In all ways but her choice of men.”

Again–whack! The sound is even more hollow, but it still doesn’t hurt.

Then, all of a sudden, my left side, most of my right side, and my feet begin to metamorphose back into normal flesh. And now, I can feel sharp pains where she has just whacked me.

She starts in on me again: “What happened to you?”

She aims another blow with the bat, harder this time, at my legs.

Suddenly, lightning-fast, my left arm shoots out. My hand opens, and in mid-strike, the baseball bat changes course and rushes to my hand. I catch it. If this surprises the old woman, her facial expression doesn’t register it. I feel strength: this arm is now the strong, wiry arm of a man in his prime – stronger than I can remember having ever been.

“It is good tea after all,” I say quietly, my voice smoother now.

She grabs the bat. However, with an effortless motion backed by increasing physical strength, I tug it gently from the woman’s grasp.

Again, she does not seem at all surprised; she merely nods, as if she expected this change in me.

As, of course, she did.

I look the baseball bat over. I recognize it, dimly at first, from a forgotten past.

“Where did you get this?”

“Where you abandoned it.”

“Abandoned it? It’s just a baseball bat.”

“It’s not ‘just’ a baseball bat. And you know that.”

That part of my past slowly re-emerges from memory.

How does she know that story of the supposed magical provenance of the baseball bat? I don’t care. Sure, there is Magic in the world, but regardless of what has just happened, none of it is to my benefit. Life has proved that to me. I didn’t want to be rescued, if that is what this is. It was a comfort, this dying of the human body, going back to Mother Earth. They could have just put out the fire and left me.

But I’m also thinking: In her mind, this isn’t a rescue. She has Plans for me, capital P. She pulled me out of the fire to use me.

And I want no part of it.

“I know the family bullshit about its origin, if that’s what you mean. ‘The Orphan’s Toothpick,’ Harry called it. Claimed his grandfather ran off with it when Sultan Prince lost it swinging … Why am I telling you this? Do you even know who Sultan Prince was?”

“Know who he was? Ya dumb shit. I taught him to hit,” the old crone says.

“You taught Sultan Prince to hit. Lady, you’re old, but you’re not that old. The bullshit must run even deeper in your family than mine.”

She looks away and up and begins speaking to someone else, someone not present. “He’s not the one.”

Or maybe she’s saying, “The One,” like some sort of…

“He can’t be. He was trying to kill himself. He’s nothing but a poltroon.”

She turns to me. “And a soulless cynic. How did she ever think you were … were …? What in the name of Lucifer’s playbook happened to you?”

I feel anger rising. But much more intensely, self-pity. I lean just a bit toward her.

“What happened? Grief. That’s what happened,” I say. “Grief so deep…” I look out the window as if the darkening evening holds an image of Suzanne. Other memories of deep loss come flooding back as well, but I push them away, for the loss of Suzanne alone is too much, all by itself, to bear. “The worst of it–“

”Nobody’s asking.”

“You did ask. The worst was the cruel joke I played on myself. All the three-plus years she was dying… I loved her so deeply. It was torture watching her lose to the cancer. A little at a time. The way I stood it – I’m not as strong as she seemed to think – I had this little voice in my head, wishing it would be over so I could get on with my life. But I was fooling myself. Afterward, the grief was worse. Much worse. I could no longer take the pain. I had to dull the heartache somehow. So, yes, I set out to die… I have no idea how I knew I could sit there and die as a human being by… becoming a tree.”

“Well,” says the old woman, her voice rich with all the sympathy she can muster, which is none at all, “it’s high time for you to feel the pain again.”

I pause, searching her eyes for understanding. And for the fleetest of moments, the old woman looks as if her return gaze might hold just a zephyr of sympathy. Whether it is real or an illusion, that look disappears as quickly as I noticed or imagined it.

She gathers the cup and the tea service. “So, if your pity party is over, we have work to do. Starting with you learning how to use the Orphan’s Toothpick.”

“How to use it? It’s a baseball bat. You swing it.”

She holds her palm up in my face, a demand for silence. “Fool. You know damn well that it is so much more. So for now, button your lip. I’m not going to miss my Daily Show reruns for the likes of you.”

She turns and walks to the living room. At the threshold, she nods her head slightly.

Her TV turns on, and there’s Jon Stewart on screen.

Later, in the dark, I’m up on the old woman’s rooftop deck, staring down at the lights of Los Celestiales.

I’m asking myself:

What is happening here? Who is this old woman? And how is it that I, or any human being, could have halfway metamorphosed into a tree? And if my grief has turned me into such a lugubrious, pity-party wuss – and even I have to agree that it has – then why did she bother to bring me back? Why didn’t she just let the fire have its way? The death I seem to have welcomed might have come a bit quicker and with less effort.