PseudoPod 1029: Feeding the Choke-Tree
Feeding the Choke-Tree
by R.J. Gerard
“Straws,” I said. “Why straws?”
“Because they’re cute, obviously,” said Foreman. “Don’t you think?”
I squinted at them. Nearly a dozen were inching around his feet. As I watched, one flopped onto his boot, looking like a second shoelace.
I guessed you could have called them cute—if you happened to be an overeducated, underemployed geneticist like Foreman. Really, they looked like worms: thin, whiplike creatures that were nearly featureless except for a light coat of fuzz and a hole at each end. The mouth and … butt, I supposed. A rust-colored sac sat on the floor: the pod they had hatched from.
“Tell me about them,” I said, hoping Foreman wouldn’t notice I hadn’t answered his question. He stooped and picked up the worm on his boot. It drooped, like it was playing dead.
“They go limp when you handle them, like Ragdoll cats,” he said. “That wasn’t easy to engineer. It’s hard to get that gene expression in an invertebrate. Hand me that Coke?”
There was a bottle of soda on the table. I passed it to him. He unscrewed the cap and dropped the worm in, half-submerging it. When he took his hand away, it came back to life. Its head, or possibly butt—I couldn’t tell which end was poking out—flailed around blindly.
“It’s searching for my mouth,” Foreman explained. “They’re attracted to warmth.”
Foreman held the bottle closer to his face. With a frantic twitch, the worm found its way between his lips. Foreman’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked. The soda’s level dropped. I could hear something—a faint, keening whine, just on the edge of my hearing. It was the worm.
I drummed my fingers against the arm of my chair. Foreman slurped the last drop of soda and set down the bottle. The worm had gone stiff and rigid. Its muscles had seized up.
“You invented biological straws,” I said.
Maybe Foreman saw the doubt in my face, because his own fell. “Drawing liquid through them doesn’t hurt them,” he said. “I engineered them to find the sensation pleasurable. If you don’t use one for a few days, it actually gets sick. It stops eating, it—”
“What do they eat?” I noticed that a few of them had teeth ringing the round holes of their mouths. Those reminded me of lampreys.
“They derive some nutrition from what you drink through them, but I’ve been supplementing that with sugar water.”
“Foreman,” I said, “I love you, man, but … this is weird. I hate that this exists.” I noticed another straw trying to inch its way onto the cuff of my jeans and kicked it away. Foreman scooped it up, eyes hurt, and let it scoot across his knuckles. It blended in with the barbed-wire tattoos that wound their way down his arms, which had always seemed so charmingly incongruous with his otherwise quiet and geeky vibe.
“Why don’t you like them?” he said.
“I just don’t see what was wrong with plastic straws.”
“They aren’t very environmental.”
“That’s why I have a metal straw. It gets me a discount at Starbucks.”
Foreman shrugged. “I just want to live in a livelier world.”
On the way out of Foreman’s house, I stopped by his choke-tree, which he kept in his garage. Properly speaking, I should be writing CC-HoK, but I’m allergic to inscrutable, committee-designed acronyms, and do you have any idea what that stands for? No, really, be honest. The second C stands for chromosomal, that’s all anyone ever remembers.
Foreman’s latest obsession stood under an array of UV lights, rooted in a tub of jelly. The letters on the side said Vin3, the company that he’d bought the thing from. The tree was half as tall as I was, which seemed like rapid growth. I’d been there when Foreman had unboxed it three months earlier, and it’d barely reached my knees.
Most of its branches were heavy with pods, like swollen grapefruit. I assumed that the largest held more straws. The pods on its lower branches, which were smaller, were presumably incubating some other project.
I flicked one of them. My phone buzzed. It was Foreman.
Please don’t do that, his text said. He was watching me via security cam.
Sorry, I sent back.
The pod I’d flicked was trembling. I wondered what was inside. I wondered what Foreman was feeding his tree for it to grow so fast.
Foreman invited me over again two weeks later and I got one of my questions answered. The straws were still there, off in a terrarium in the corner. There was also a headless dog curled on the carpet. Except for the glaring omission at the end of its neck, which ended in a puckered, thoroughly upsetting orifice, it looked like a Pomeranian.
I met Foreman’s eyes. “What the hell is this?”
“No, you’ll like this one. See my bag?”
He had a satchel—a purse, really—slung over his shoulder. “Yes.”
Foreman fished inside and extracted a dog’s head, which blinked at me. It was alive. He stooped and pressed it against the body, and with a sucking sound, the two fused. The now-whole dog picked itself up and thumped its tail.
“Dude,” I said. “No.”
“I think this has real commercial potential,” Foreman said. “If you have a large pet, it’s hard to travel, right? But what if you could have a body grown at your destination, pop off your dog’s head, and reattach it when you touched down?”
“Isn’t that … cruel?”
“Of course not.” Foreman’s voice had a familiar wounded tone. “I would never engineer a trait if it hurt the animal. When you remove the head, it just goes to sleep. It’s less stressful than being stowed in the cargo hold of a jet.”
I actually saw the logic … but. But but. “I don’t want you to take the wrong way, but no one is going to adopt a dog like this, Foreman. Ever. Why are you using your choke-tree to make such weird things?” I thought of one of our other former classmates, Ashley H., who’d used one to create bees that made hyper-fragrant honey. I’d heard she was making a fortune on Etsy.
“I just wish we lived in—”
“A livelier world,” I interrupted. “Right?”
Foreman nodded. His eyes were radiant, like he was thrilled I understood, which I didn’t.
I stopped by his choke-tree again on the way out. He accompanied me this time, probably to make sure I didn’t flick any more pods. The tree was clearly thriving. It had grown by at least three feet, and its emerald leaves were resplendent under the growth lights. There was new fruit on its lowest ring of branches.
I frowned at Foreman. As healthy as his tree was, he looked rather the opposite. There were dark splotches under his eyes, and the coils of his tattoos stood out starkly against his arms.
“How much time have you been spending in here?” I said.
“It’s just a hobby.”
“Your tree’s so productive. How much are you spending on feeding it?” Vin3 priced their saplings surprisingly low, but their fertilizer prices were exorbitant. That was how they got you.
“Not as much as you’d think,” said Foreman. “I haven’t had to buy feed since I got it.”
After that, Foreman’s invitations got more and more frequent. I visited him once, twice, and sometimes even three times a week. I was tempted to demur—unlike him, I actually had a job and some semblance of a social life—but I never did. Being his friend was exhausting, but we had a history; without our weekly tutoring sessions, I never would have made it through grad school.
Every time I visited, Foreman’s garage was littered with more ruptured choke-pods. Every time, he had a new breed of critter to show off. Once, his house was full of squat arthropods that reminded me of horseshoe crabs. They trundled around, catching dust in the bristles that rimmed their shells. Biological Roombas.
The next visit, he showed me guppy-like fish, which lived in a new tank that sat next to the straws’ terrarium. They periodically came to the surface and took heaving gulps, then dove and belched clouds of silvery bubbles from their gills.
“Carbonation,” he said. “For making soda water.”
“Is that sanitary?” I said. He just beamed at me.
This went on for weeks. After a while, arguably too long, I got concerned. Whatever Foreman said, he must have been spending a fortune on fertilizer—and cash aside, what about his investment of time? He had no job, no girlfriend, and a master’s from a very competitive program. This was what he was spending his days on?
Every time I stopped by, Foreman was a little thinner and more haggard, his skin paler and his tattoos darker. As for his creations … they were certainly unique, but I noticed that they were growing steadily less practical. When he showed me living scarves (reptiles with long, diaphanous frills that they instinctively draped around your neck when you perched them on your shoulder), he wasn’t able to tell me a single advantage they had over real scarves.
“Foreman …” I said.
“I know. No one’s going to buy them. That’s okay. I just want to live in a livelier world.”
“So you’ve said.”
The grin that spread between Foreman’s hollow cheeks didn’t look healthy. I left, disconcerted. Halfway home, I pulled over, turned the car around, and drove back, determined to put my foot down. Foreman’s door was unlocked, but he wasn’t in the house. I headed through his kitchen to his garage, twisted the knob, and pulled the door open.
Foreman was squatting by his choke-tree with his arm extended. Three of his straw-things were hanging from the back of his hand, making their soft keening noise, and two were inside his wrist. They’d latched onto his skin—they were the ones that had teeth—and I could see the muscles that ringed their bodies rippling as they drank. Threads of deep red trickled from their ends. Foreman’s blood was pooling in the jelly that the choke-tree grew from, seeping down to its roots.
“Foreman!” I yelled.
He jumped, twisting his hand behind his back. More blood spattered on the floor.
“You’re back,” he said. “I didn’t expect—”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
I grabbed his shoulders and walked him backward, away from the tree. “Don’t lie. I can see what’s happening. Why?”
He pulled away. “I’m helping my choke-tree grow.”
“By feeding it your blood?”
“It helps them thrive,” he said. “If you do it before putting in a new design. Nobody knows why, but it’s an open secret online.”
“I don’t believe you. That’s made up.”
“There’s a Telegram chat, if you want to read about it,” he said miserably. “I’m not cutting myself. I spliced a sequence of DNA from medicinal leeches into the straws.”
I grabbed Foreman’s arm and pulled the straws off his skin with a series of wet pops. “No. I was worried already, but this is too far.” I dropped one of the straws and crushed it with my heel.
Foreman looked down, aghast. “Stop it!”
“Enough is enough.”
Foreman pushed me. Although he was gaunt—and now I knew why, didn’t I?—there was surprising strength in his arms. I lost my balance and fell on my rear.
“I’m trying to help you,” I said.
“Get out!” he yelled. It was, I realized, the first time I’d ever heard him raise his voice.
I wanted to hold my ground, but I wasn’t sure what my endgame was, unless I was going to drag his choke-tree out of the garage and burn it on his lawn. I thought about doing just that, but it had grown too large for me to move. I picked myself up and retreated, contenting myself with punching one of the fleshy sacs hanging from its branches as I passed. It split and showered the floor with black ichor, some component of which had once been Foreman’s blood.
I didn’t hear from Foreman after that. At first, I decided I had to just let whatever was happening … happen. He was an adult, after all. But when the days stretched into weeks, I started to have second thoughts.
I called him, but he didn’t answer. I debated calling his family, but I knew they thought of me as one of his weird university friends and wouldn’t take me seriously. Instead, I drove to his house. Although it was a gloomy day, his windows were dark. I pounded on his door. No response, but at this hour, I was sure he was home. I put my shoulder against it and with a groan, the door swung open.
No sooner did I step in than I was rushed by one of the crab-like critters. I pushed it aside with my foot and blinked, letting my eyes adjust.
Foreman’s house had become a jungle. There were animals everywhere. Hundreds of straws had colonized the floor, and in each corner, the scarf-reptiles had constructed nests out of gutted sofa cushions. There were other creatures I didn’t recognize. Cucumber-sized caterpillars trundled in elliptical loops on the floor. Some kind of gasping bladder swung from the ceiling. On the table, there was a bowl of what I thought were blueberries, but when I approached, they hissed at me and squirted jets of fragrant lavender gas.
It was worse than I was expecting. I cupped my hand around my mouth. “Foreman?”
No response. I was sure he would be in the garage, but even though the door had no lock, it was stuck worse than the front door. After fifteen futile seconds of huffing and puffing, I took a step back and kicked it open.
I saw instantly why it had been so sticky. Foreman’s choke-tree had completely taken over the garage. Its roots had spilled out of its tub and spread across the floor like a carpet. Its trunk and branches had grown just as prodigiously, but they didn’t look right, by which I mean they didn’t even look real. They looked like a copy-and-paste error. Branches grew from branches that grew from branches, creating a fractal stretching from wall to wall. Hundreds of incubation sacs hung from them. As I watched, one burst open and something slithered out. It was covered with too much goo for me to see clearly, but it had two heads and at least three tails.
Foreman was nowhere to be seen.
Except—
No, he was there, suspended in the midst of a particularly dense array of vegetation. For a second, I thought he was just climbing, perhaps trying to get at a hard-to-reach pod, then I saw the branch emerging from his chest like a spit. It had ripped his shirt, but there was no blood anywhere, including, I thought, in his body. His face was pure white. Yet more straws hung from his neck and arms. They were quiet and limp; they’d already drained him dry. Their ends were stuck in deep grooves he’d carved in the smaller branches that encircled him like a halo.
Someone was screaming. It took me a moment to realize it was me. The choke-tree trembled, and for a surreal second, I thought it had joined me, that we were screaming together. The pods hanging from it thrashed, like the whatevers growing in them were disturbed by the sound.
From what I heard, there was a tussle in the coroner’s office about whether to record Foreman’s death as by misadventure or suicide. It came down to what he’d died of. I’d assumed blood loss, but another theory was that he’d gotten tangled in the tree and just hadn’t been able to get back down. Either way, the branch had grown through his body after it had started to decay.
There was a funeral, of course. I can’t tell you about it. I wasn’t even invited. His family blamed me for what happened. You know: you were his best friend, how did you let it get so bad?—that sort of thing. Like I said, they never liked me.
Foreman’s tree is still there. You can’t see it—they covered his whole house in a plastic tent—but if you drive by, you can still see the outline of its branches poking through the garage door. I’m sure it’s dead by now, with no one feeding it, but it’s there. Apparently, there’s another legal tussle between Vin3 and the bank over who’s responsible for removing it.
That’s probably what saved me from being sued, myself. Apparently, I left the door open and let some of Foreman’s creations escape, which, according to the letter I got from Vin3, was grossly negligent on my part. But they had their hands full with the bank, and I don’t think Foreman’s fruit were viable in the wild, anyway.
With one exception.
The last time it rained, something made me shrug on a coat and go outside. In the puddle that collects in the dip in my yard, I saw dozens of threadlike forms, winding in circles.
Foreman’s straws had made it out. And they could swim. Apparently.
I stood there for a while, watching them. In the puddle, they didn’t look as grotesque as they had in his house. They just looked like animals. I bent and fished one out. It stiffened as I handled it, like it was preparing to let me drink through it.
I didn’t. I tossed it back into the puddle, where it lashed its tail and resumed swimming.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and ducked inside. I was confident no one would ever use Foreman’s straws for their intended purpose. Probably, no one would ever even notice they were any different from the other crawlies that wiggle out of the ground when it rains, and if they were his legacy, I have to say I didn’t think much of it compared to what he could have accomplished over the course of a normal career.
But they were something. In a very small way, he’d made the world a livelier place.
