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The Ivania Bush Curled like a fetus, the Ivania bush pressed against the mud just enough for me to hear the twigs screeching their hopeless prayer for fortitude. It had been two months to the day since I had sculpted the bush in her image: a magnificent memorial to my Ivania. Two months. Two months and I was still wearing her yellow sun dress and her pale stockings, which I knew was not normal. It was not normal for a man in my position to powder his cheeks and forehead and suck the leaves around the neck of a remarkably anthropomorphic plant, but that was how I grieved. In another life I was a research librarian, and so was Ivania, and it was during this life that I read the French pseudo-psychologist Roland Beauchamp's rare 1892 treatise “Loss and Desire,” which proposes that a widower yearns not only for his wife, but also for the cultivation of a new self to “fend against the bite of his loneliness,” in the wake of so much empty space. Over the course of my old life, the text meant nothing to me, but two months after Ivania's death, I was yearning for myself almost as much as Ivania, and I did everything I could to fulfill both desires: her skirt around my waist, her mascara around my eyes, my tongue over her lips under my imagination. But someone had chopped down my Ivania bush, and I could already see its leaves coiling up and browning like salted slugs. In my old life I tinkered with the idea of a thought machine, a device that could track all the people who thought of me and how often and in what light I crossed their minds. Nothing ever came of it, like most of my youthful ideas, but on the morning that I listened to the dirt fall over Ivania's coffin, I knew that if I had brought that odd dream to fruition, it would have been of no use to me then, because the only person I had loved was underground, and thought machines cannot communicate with the dead. Meanwhile, Ivania's thought machine was running rampant, thanks to my heart and that imaginary machine. In the evening, I decided to move one of the hedges over to Ivania's burial site in the backyard. The hedge's roots I pictured as telephone wire, sending my desires like sound waves to Ivania's corpse, and then on to wherever her soul had evaporated. With the hedge rooted firmly in front of me, my hands went wild with memory. I clawed at the bush, tearing everything away that was not Ivania. Full of rage, I choked fistfuls of leaves like chicken heads, but slowly my creation took form. It came to resemble Ivania's figure so precisely that every leaf I had to debate whether it belonged. Was this how it used to feel to hold her by the waist? Trim, trim. And what of her chin, round and wide, that I once tickled? Trim, trim. On the seventh day, I was certain I had sculpted my wife's photosynthesizing doppleganger. Ivania, of the woods. Ivania, of the trees. The bush was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in two months. I wrapped my arms around her and dug my hands into her buttocks. I nibbled at the leaves around her ears and rubbed my face against hers until I bled from all the scratches. “I miss you,” I told her. Plantfucker, I thought I heard her say. “Come, now,” I said, and she said nothing, and I felt like a plantfucker. But in time she blossomed. We talked about all the things we did before the architect arrived — what our meals first tasted like, why the dust in Montana is so chalky, how we brushed by one another at the librarian conferences in Monterey. I refused to go inside the house, so we never ceased talking. We would have continued on until our every moment was reconstructed and preserved like a garden sculpture. But then, two months later, someone chopped down the Ivania bush. I stumbled around the backyard in Ivania's yellow sun dress, our yellow sun dress, and I wondered if I could handle another loss, even if it was of plant life. A rose bush stood a few paces away from the fallen Ivania bush — maybe this time I'll use clippers, I thought. But I cannot go inside, because I cannot go inside. Memories are magnets. My first bite into the rose bush was long and stinging. I clenched down on a thorn, let it peel through my tongue, and remembered. Ivania on the back of a motorcycle. Ivania eating raspberries off the tips of her fingers. Ivania under the La Paz waterfall. Ivania and the architect. The architect. The architect. The architect. I tore through leaves and stems. I swallowed one petal, vomited up a dozen more, but all the while Ivania hung from the balcony of my mind, swinging and groping for the banister. Within hours I had constructed an Ivania bush more life-like and more beautiful than even my previous attempt had accomplished. As morning light spat onto the leaves, I was so stricken with desire that I ran my tongue up and down the insides of her thighs. Blood painted its way down to the dirt as my serrated lips touched hers, pink rose petals, soft and fleshy. Those lips were too real. My body sucked inward, my vision blurred, and I collapsed. I awoke in the yard with a heavy taste of blood and dirt bubbling up from underneath my tongue. I couldn't have guessed what day it was. Beside me were the two Ivania bushes, lying prostrate to one another like lovers. I checked to see where the second Ivania bush had been severed from the base. The same spot, just below the ankles. It was then that I wondered who else Ivania's thought machine had been registering, or whether mine was as inactive as I'd assumed. I hadn't the slightest idea who'd have it in for my Ivania plants. We'd fired the gardener years ago. The neighbors had long stopped bothering me. I had no friends, few enemies. Enough – I need to set a trap . There was another tall bush close by. That will do. I bit into the bush, but my tongue recoiled, so instead I plucked at the leaves relentlessly. I was tired and I missed Ivania in any and all of her forms. The third Ivania could have been anyone. The shape was hardly distinguishable from any other woman, but I reasoned it would do the job just as well. I hid behind the old wooden bench and waited. A man arrived at dusk. He moved without hesitation toward the sleeping Ivania bushes, favoring his left leg as he walked. Familiar, I thought, his walk. He drove his shovel into the ground and cradled a pillow of dirt over the two leafy corpses. That was when I caught his face. Those eyes are my eyes. Those hands are my hands. I glanced back and forth, first to his granite fists and then to my own, slender and frail. I ran my fingertips down the inside of my thighs, and then around my neck for a second too long. I am not who I think I am. The man took out the long, moonlit machete and slit the base of the third Ivania bush. That was when my memory started raining — the knife, the shovel, the dirt, the terror, and all the misunderstandings of desire.
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