Meeting Nazir

Mr. Nazir was the most nervous man I'd ever known. He experienced vivid ad dreadful nightmares regularly, and any dreams he had that were not of a nightmarish quality always engendered in him a feeling of foreboding that would pervade both of our waking lives for days afterwards. Sleep and sleeplessness alike hounded him. His temperament was one of extremes; bouncing off the walls with excitement and agitation one day and crumpling himself into a black corner the next, rarely in a state of mind that would render him capable of discussing the weather or the sports section or the goings-on outside his apartment window on the detached level with which the rest of us are so accustomed. In fact, it was one such mundane topic (the cutting of the oak, you remember the one) that sent him to that old place on Pine Ave., I'm convinced of it. When I went to collect him there, he took both my hands in his and requested that I never again mention a thing about the oak tree, made me swear to God that I wouldn't. There were many taboo subjects between us, slinking like tigers, but none that I'd actually made an oath to completely avoid. By that time in our acquaintance I had learned better than to test Nazir's tolerance, and so I kept my oath and the old oak was never spoken of again. Whenever we passed the site where it once stood a pall fell over us; we would pitch ourselves forward and discreetly hurry past, Nazir fraught with a great tangle of emotions, indecipherable to me, and myself stirred by pity, irritation, and apprehension. The tree must have been a central figure in his nightmares, or else had some symbolic value for him--a poet, after all--that was turned completely on its head when the thing was felled. I suppose I'll never know. But there you have it, I hope this little letter of mine has in some way contributed to satisfying your inquiry into the whole affair.

-- D.M.