He stayed up all night excited to be sleeping under his own roof for the first time.  After years of working overtime, living in cheap rentals with noisy roommates, driving a rusty car that  limped from repair to repair and taking no vacations, he saved enough to put a down payment on a house.  He got out of bed before sunrise and could not wait to start working on the yard.  Unfamiliar with the rules of American suburbia, he did not want to awaken his neighbors and waited until he saw the first signs of activity on his quiet street.    Emboldened, he went outside in the summer morning and was greeted by the rising din of neighborhood lawnmowers, leaf blowers and weed whackers.  His neighbors waved from across the street and he felt for the first time that he had finally arrived.

He decided to start with the most neglected section of the yard, where the vines grew woody and stubborn, neglected by the previous owner.  Having lived in an apartment for all these years, he had no familiarity with American plants.  He started pulling out the overgrown vines and it took a combination of muscle and surgical tact to remove the undesirable plants without damaging the ones that appeared to be of ornamental value.   All he wanted was a clear and unobstructed view of the wooded forest preserve that abutted his property.  Battling the vines, he encountered poison ivy for the first time.

It first felt like a bug bite.  Soon there were blobs of red on his face and his eyes were nearly shut with swelling.  His fingers turned into turgid, stubby cigars.  He had never felt such discomfort before and rushed to the emergency room.  They gave him medication to keep things under control and he was put under overnight observation at the hospital because the doctors were concerned that he had a particularly adverse reaction.  Lying on the sterile hospital bed that muggy night, he wondered what he was doing alone on a hospital bed on one of the most eventful days of his life.  He had just bought his first house in his adopted country and was planning to add his own touch to the property to remind him of the tropical home of his birth.

The summer holidays were the best time of his childhood.  He remembered leaving home after breakfast to play with his friends, only returning for lunch and dinner.  He remembered the hours spent picking ripe mangoes from trees, the sticky sap staining his clothes.  He remembered playing soccer in the dusty field with the hot sun beating down on his head, a horde of boys chasing a semi-inflated ball towards the makeshift goalposts marked by fieldstones.  To quench his parched throat, he remembered buying bright red popsicles on skewers of bamboo peddled by a vendor on a bicycle.  But most of all, he remembered the lush forest behind his boyhood home.  His parents told him to stay away from the forest, but he went there often.  He remembered the rampant sound of birdsong and chirping insects, the prickliness of wild shrubbery, the syrupy green color of the trees and the constant damp of the monsoons.  It was in the forest that he found solace and comfort, lying on a flat boulder and staring at the canopy of leaves above him, the sunlight darting through an occasional windblown opening.  Here, he escaped from the arguments at home, the punishments at school, the assaults from the local bully and the many challenges of boyhood.

The forest which brought him so much comfort was also where he almost lost his life from a snakebite.  He and a friend were looking at insects under the leaves that carpeted the forest floor when a snake bit him on his finger and slithered away.   He collapsed and his world started to change; the canopy of leaves above him spun like a merry go around in a village fair, his friend’s screams of panic sounded like cats fighting in the night.   He felt he was slipping away into a strange place.  His friend had the presence of mind to run home and bring his father to the forest.  His father sucked the poison out from the open wound, spitting the poisoned blood on the forest floor.  The father tied a tourniquet and prevented the venom from ripping through his son’s ten-year old body like a speeding train.  “There’s poison in the forest”, his father said firmly as he carried him to a nearby hospital for treatment.  Many years later, he moved overseas.  Upset that he had abandoned his family and his country, his father stopped talking to him after he moved.  He called home every week and wrote often, but his father refused to talk to him and did not respond to any of his letters.

The steady beep of the medical equipment, the fluorescence of the hospital hallway and the discomfort of poison ivy keeps him awake that night.  Staring at the square tiles on the ceiling, he thinks about the beloved forest of his childhood.  He thinks about his father who died just a few months before he bought his home.  They never talked after he went abroad.   He remembers his father’s words.  “There’s poison in the forest”.  He feels a strange poison invading his body as he lies alone on a strange bed in a strange land.  With tears streaming down his face, he wishes he could talk to his father just once and ask him to suck the poison out so he can live again.

– Chris Pais