Onion Songs (30 page)

It was then he knew he could never marry again.

43.
 
philosophies

Only recently had John realized that people did not fully appreciate the importance of individual moments. A stumble over a stone, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman, and your life was changed forever. And what is that glint in the passing automobile’s bumper—the reflection of your long dead son, his heart stopped by a fall, now singing into the last sharp reflection of the day?

44.
 
behaviors

Most of his adult life John had worked in an office. Originally it had been the best he could get right out of college with a good education but no special skills. In the years that followed it was the thing he knew, and when a company had to plug someone into a position his was the plug that fit.

Primarily he moved papers around, office to office, company to client, company to government, and back again. He now has very few memories of that period of his work life.

For paper destroys time. That can be wonderful in a novel, but not so wonderful when you’re trying to recall, and store away, the best part of your day.

45.
 
behaviors

There were very few things John felt ashamed of. But all of them had to do with women. Things he’d done when he was much younger, of course. They’d tease him on and then they’d try to turn him off.

No one knew himself less than a young man in his early twenties. Unable to see past his own need. So many shameful incidents, so many explosions of bad behavior: he
’d take them back if he could. He spent many a late night worrying over the sins of a younger self.

If his son had lived, he would have told him. He would have replayed every ill-behaved moment.
And his boy, he would have had to listen.

46.
 
events

John saw the man three times in as many months. A hard face, collar pulled up as high as it would go. Oily eyes. He never knew such eyes were possible, as if the tear ducts issued a yellow oil that glazed the eyes. The first time he saw him the man was watching some small boys play ball at the edge of the park, examining every move as if he were a major league scout. The second time John had brushed against him as he came out of the hardware store. Metallic things jangled under the coat—John checked his body for injury—he could have sworn he felt his skin tear. The third time the man had appeared on a distant corner, bent to pet a cat, and snapped its neck with a blur of motion. John had run to the corner but there was no sign of the man or the cat.

He searched the papers for months for news of missing children and found nothing. He always believed it was the wrong papers, or the wrong time.

47.
 
dreams

John was hardly suicidal, but sometimes in the dentist’s chair he imagined himself succumbing to some medication mishap and discovered he didn’t feel badly about that. He felt such vulnerability leaning back with his mouth open, metal instruments protruding like utensils from a serving bowl. Halfway to death already, or so it seemed: the only thing between him and death now an allergy or a sensitivity or some accidental lethal combination. That’s what death frequently was, anyway, an accidentally lethal combination of moments. You could worry about it all your life or you could accept it, even welcome this universe of accidental possibility.

In fact, he was frequently so relaxed in the dentist
’s chair he slept through the most uncomfortable procedures. The best moment was when he first closed his eyes, waiting for the drill.

48.
 
dreams

They try so hard to be heard, John thinks: the ghosts, the ones who have passed from day to night to when and wherever. They need what we all need: contact, a body that will listen. But at least they know true contact is impossible. We still cling to our illusions.

Sometimes looking at the world is like gazing through an oil-smeared lens: their passage dirties the glass, preventing him from seeing anything with absolute clarity.

But that is their mission—that is all they have left since their lives went away. To obscure. To cloud. To hinder our view of the next day.

49.
 
philosophies

He’d reached the age when the body chooses to rebel. Arms had shortened themselves, and hands could not hold anything reliably except another hand.

More difficult still was the unusual shape his ears had taken, and the wart he noticed on the side of his nose one day, apparently which appeared overnight.

He supposed it might be a reaction to the longevity of modern man. The body knows it was never meant to last past forty, and does its damnedest to convince the mind.

One moment he is racing to catch the train, a movie, or a plane. The next moment he dodders like a film slipping its sprockets to display the same image again and again: an old man with a surprised look, shouting at his feet to move.

50.
  
dreams

We drown in a sea of the dead, he thinks. Everywhere are the things they have made, touched, hated, loved. The oils from their bodies, the stench of their humanity, the electric charge of their passions, linger—he is sure of it—long after their physical bodies are gone. In the heavy air that chokes the world their vanished lives move.

We cannot avoid them.
They brush against us, rub their lost memories into our flesh so often they become a part of us we cannot scrub, medicate, or cut out.

It is impossible, sometimes, to think, because the noise of what they had and what they miss fills our heads.

It is impossible to breathe without breathing them in.

The world, he thinks, is made not so much of atoms and electrons as of moments.

51.
   
dreams

If he let himself be open to it John knew the world to be a work of art. The textures of it, the infinite shadings of color, the shapes that resonated in the oldest part of the brain. To move through the world was to live inside a work of art, down to the individual brushstrokes and pixels. Moments of time were merely dabs of color, spontaneous decisions, which altered the entire portrait.

All one had to do was pick up the brush and add one
’s own little bit. A simple line or color fill would do, but so few made the effort.

52.
  
behaviors

At least once a month John would travel to an isolated rocky beach, to sit, to stand, to observe the world as one alone just as he imagined other humans to have done from the beginning of their times.

Over the years he never saw another person there.
It wasn’t the friendliest sort of beach—no place to wade, no comfortable sand to lay a beach towel on. It was a place of sharp edges and hard surfaces, a reminder of the smallness of our bodies, the delicacy of our flesh. But for him there was a comfort in knowing he could have been anyone in time here, standing alone on the rocks, the massive presence of the world ready to tilt and crush him at any moment. Here he grieved endings, thankful that at least for the moment he could breathe the ocean air, feel the chill breeze against his too-exposed skin, and stand.

53.

JOKER

But in every deck there is at least one Joker, the card that’s the spoiler or the treat, depending on the game. Someone calls with a job offer or a profession of love, someone else delivers the news that what you care for most is gone and irretrievable. You try to keep this moment at the bottom of the deck, as far from you as possible, but still it shows up when you least expect it. Then again, what if it’s good news, and only your fear prevents you from holding it? There is no easy answer. There is only the anxiety, which could just as easily turn into elation or devastation.

Thoughts like these had kept John out of the game for years. But eventually there had to come a time when the winning and the losing mattered very little anymore. He just had to play the game. He just had to play.

54. philosophies

There comes a time when there are more years behind you than ahead of you. There comes a time when it’s the last day on the job, the final European vacation, the last woman you’ll have in your bed. There comes a time when the caregiver becomes the one cared for. There comes a time when a twenty-year guarantee on the house’s new roof has no more meaning. There comes a time when the math seems irrelevant. There comes a time when you wonder if you have, in fact, reached that time, or if you’re just feeling old, like your father, and his father before him.

TWELVE
MINUTES OF DARKNESS

1.

Since only darkness inspired him, he was always waiting for the light to burn out. Although he might switch the light off by hand (and most evenings this is what he did), there was something special about spontaneous, accidental darkness, and to encourage its visitations he would shake the lamp for a few minutes each day so as to weaken its filament. Once enveloped in such darkness, however it might have been achieved, he would scrawl across the pages his stories of lost children, maddened fathers, and vengeful women, ignoring lines and sometimes even the edge of the page, so that after a few years the outer stretches of his desk were tangled and layered with the missing phrases and ends of lines and stories he had written long into his middle age, then long into his old age. So many such bits and pieces had been irretrievably lost that he never had enough for a complete submission to whatever pulp journal might be popular at the time, but that did not matter to him. What mattered was the very act of writing through the dark, and in this, his last minute of living, he thought about the journey of it, mounting a carriage in the middle of the night, an umbrella poised above his head to keep off the inky drops, the driver quiet and sullen, the smoky horse blind and swollen, the great narrow carriage wheels turning toward the end of his story.

2.

Every night in her dreams the moon fell.
Some nights it descended slow as a kiss, but on others it plummeted rapid as failure. She could not decide which was the worse nightmare. She could not bear the absence of even this vague light, and once when her soon to be ex-husband refused to pay the utilities she spent a night huddled before the fireplace like some earlier sort of human, pondering the required ritual to insure the sun’s eventual emergence from the black cave of night. Tonight she woke from the dream screaming, for in this new variation her father had swallowed the moon whole, then turned and looked at her with that old smile of complete control. She counted one by one the minutes of darkness, waiting for the moon to appear from behind the clouds. Finally the minute arrived when she realized the moon had left her forever, had fallen into the ocean or into the midst of men who had torn it to pieces, each desiring the whole of it, so she painted her face silver then, and sat in an upstairs window, and turned her head gradually as her dreams went through phases.

3.

Insomniacs both hate and love the night, he thought, waiting for that minute when the darkness would begin to fray, the torn edges of it scraping across the brightly colored roofs of the town, the smoke of its passage turning into bright morning fog, the great breadth and bulk of it dwindling into black, rotted threads as it made its frantic escape back into the caves and sleeping heads from whence it came.
Finally the minute did come, and he could almost hear the raw edges of the grass and trees screaming from the abrupt departure of darkness, and his eyes began to water from the stench of the corpses rising from their beds all over town, brushing their teeth, grabbing that last cup of coffee before climbing into their cars for work.

4.

For just a minute the coming night had taken on the dark purple of a bruise, and she wondered what it would be like if all darkness were to remain this color, the color of her cheeks the minute before she left him, the color, that first minute, of the baby she had borne without him.
Each day after he beat her she would go out and try to find some member of his family, some mutual friend she could show this darkness to. They would nod, and smile, and offer her tea, gazing at her as if admiring some remarkable sunset.

5.

During that minute when he misjudged the curve of the road, just before he slammed into the damp wall of night, he recalled as a child how he had set out open jars on the lawn in order to capture the darkness.
He’d supposed the dark was so heavy that he would have plenty of time to screw the lids on before it could slither out and escape. Each morning before dawn he would slide out of bed and run downstairs only to be disappointed by the bright transparency of the cool glass containers. He considered lining the insides of the jars with double-sided tape or glue to at least give the darkness pause, but such measures felt somehow unnatural to him. Finally one morning something dark and viscous and frighteningly opaque had settled into one of his traps and did not stir when he twisted on the lid. He kept it upstairs under his bed for years, through fire and floods, his parents’ deaths and his first bouts with a black depression. Now as his car exploded from the force of dark he wondered whatever had happened to it.

6.

The dark we begin with ends, but the ending dark goes on forever
. As the baby fought its way out of her that’s the lesson she would have wanted to teach it, if she hadn’t been in so much pain, if there hadn’t been just this one initial minute of its birth, and there were suddenly so many things she wanted to tell it.
We all think life is going to be different from the way it turns out
, she would have said, if the meanings of things hadn’t become so blurred for her. How would she explain both the pleasure and the terror in the anticipation of each new day?
Household chores will become almost a religion. There will be days when the fact that one thing follows another will comfort you
. When the baby was free and held up to her, at first she could only see the initial night reflected in its eyes, the black shadow cast by the duty she owed this helpless creature.
Sometimes the time becomes a sooty blur, all the inefficient hours and wasted days accumulating so that you start wondering what happened to it all. Sometimes even the minutes seem sad and filled with a dark anxiety
. And yet still, the baby smiled at her.
Just try to keep busy, sweetheart
.

7.

The minute after she left him, he did not believe the house had ever been darker.
Shadows were stiller, and therefore more intense. Even seconds later, dust and cobwebs seemed more evident, as if the house had been without tenant for months. She had taken with her all their son’s clothes and toys, leaving only one small mateless brown sock on the polished oak of the second floor landing, and a plastic wheel from some lopsided car which would now and forever run in circles. He knew his son would not mind, for to a child a small dark circle can be forever. Only an adult sees the breaks, the terrible possibilities in even one misspent minute. The refrigerator hummed to itself and the air conditioner chattered. He opened the refrigerator door but found nothing inside but a light. The light turned the linoleum a mournful shade of yellow. He went from cabinet to cabinet, finding only shadows and dust, searched the attic and closets for pictures, mementoes, stray scents of their life together. He found nothing. The terrible minute arrived when he realized she was never there in the first place, his son a figment, his life a brief tale and badly told. His abandoned house was in fact his own shabby head, where no one ever enters, no one ever leaves.

8.

She built a huge machine for manufacturing night.
Her father was greatly displeased. “All that money I gave you for college, is
this
what it’s come to?” She shrugged helplessly, a gesture that always infuriated him. She’d always wanted to be a mad scientist, but the role models were all male. She had a girlfriend once who’d owned a butterfly net—that was the closest she had to a mentor. The girlfriend used to run down the street with the net, chasing bugs, leaves, bits of trash, anything airborne, hairpins and curlers falling out of the back of her head like paratroopers jumping out of a plane. So bugs and bits of trash went into the basic design of her machine, curlers and hairpins and her father’s painful frowns. When she turned on her machine one jet-black nugget representing a pure minute of unadulterated night dropped out of the chute and landed at her feet. Her machine never worked again. She puts the nugget under her pillow now, on evenings when her thoughts are too light for sleep, needing its density to bring her back down to earth.

9.

Every night the house breathed, and he listened for his son
’s breathing in the house. His son was scared of the dark house. His son was scared of the dark house breathing. And sometimes late at night when the house breathed its fullest, he too wondered where it all might lead. Every night he counted the breaths from his resting son, timing inhalations and exhalations, estimating volume displacements, listening for rattles, for organs damaged or organs suffering a secret weakness. The son did not know of his father’s countings, for the son was far too busy tracking the thunderous breathing of the house. One and two and breathe. Three and four. Five and six. Finally the night came when the father kept on counting, counting a full dark minute, but there was no answering breath from the small form of his son. Nor from the quiet house itself, satisfied at last, and stealing away with all the air.

10.

It was her ignorance
that made her what she was. Strangers she did not know directed everything she did. She was always imagining what they must think of her. Everywhere there were people with secrets—it had always been so—they knew things she did not, and they refused to tell her. She did not understand, and yet she loved what she did not understand. There were strangers she was meant to meet and love. There were strangers she kept missing, although she tried her best to be everywhere. People died and because she did not understand death she was afraid they must hate her. When she accidentally stepped on a bug she feared reprisals from its family. When friends went on vacations she thought that, instead of their announced destinations, they traveled to secret places known to everyone but her. When she tried to remember her childhood a dark place appeared in the middle of her head and spread. Minutes passed slowly inside this dark place. A woman in a red dress lived here, with long knives for fingernails. When she asked what time it was, the woman took her hand and pointed with one of the long nails at the watch that had been attached to her wrist all this time. But the watch face bore only a single, black digit. Removing the watch from her arm she discovered a hole in her skin leading down to the dark clockworks inside.

11.

Finally came that minute of true darkness when he realized that there was authentic evil in the world, something beyond the ordinary occurrence of bad things.
Famine, murder, genocide were as elemental as gravity. The man down the street set fire to his son for the insurance money. The mother on the next block had drowned her own baby in the bathtub. Five minutes’ drive brought him to the park where a gang of young men raped a young coed. Under the bright lights at the corner, next to the modern convenience store, an old man was stabbed thirty-seven times. He had a powerful urge to label such things
accident
. It was a much more manageable label than
divine mystery
. He could not comprehend his own goodness, so how might he understand his own evil? Suddenly he experienced the urge to kill; he didn’t care who the victim might be. He wondered how it might feel. He wondered if it might make him feel better. He thought he might be capable of killing a young child if he could think of that child as a doll and if he knew that no one would ever find out. He stared for a minute into the dark mirror, and found there the beast.

12.

The man and the woman rested in their basement laboratory, volumes of data stacked to the ceiling: measurements of evening, experiments in night, anecdotal narratives concerning adventures in darkness.
One man trapped it
, she said.
One woman mocked it
, he said.
One man breathed and ate it. One woman made it her lover
. The darkness crouched and wrapped its arms around them. The darkness kissed them with cool lips and a probing, livid tongue.
It’s elemental!
she cried.
It’s alive
, he cooed. The darkness wormed its way down their throats and into hearts, lungs, bowels. But their lives seemed no different.
Put water into more water
,
you still have water
, they cried, and felt the darkness fill their bellies. The darkness crept through their thoughts, and there was no noticeable change.