Onion Songs (5 page)

And it was important to understand.
He didn’t know why, but his life depended on it.

*

“Sometimes you say some pretty hurtful things.”

Sometimes the doodles appeared like mutilations of the pure white, expressionless page.
They appeared to be angry, even though he didn’t think he was an angry man. They appeared to be hateful, even though he could think of no one he hated.

And sometimes they appeared as the worst sorts of obscenity: children being mutilated and destroyed, children burning to death.

*

“
We’ve lived here so long. Maybe what you need is a change of scenery.”

Sometimes what began as a cityscape broke off into other directions
that better expressed what the city had become for him. No matter how convoluted the network of lines of this urban representation became, he always seemed able to pick particular houses out of the complexity, important landmarks of his life there.

There was the house where he was born.
There was the third-floor apartment in which he had first made love to the woman who would become first his wife, and then his ex-wife. There was the hospital where his daughter and son had been born.

There was the house on fire
; the child within burning, her screams breaking up the lines he frantically drew and redrew, attempting repair, striving to make them permanent.

*

“Are you hearing me? Do you see what you’re doing to our marriage?”

Ears and eyes appeared frequently, most often together, evidence of a certain paranoia on his part.
Everywhere he went, people were watching him, listening to him, and talking among themselves. They’d comment on the look of his face, its shifting expressions of sadness. They’d talk about how he cried, things he’d said when he’d had too much to drink.

Everywhere he went people knew he had lost a child.

*

“
What’s that smell? Do you smell something?”

Misshapen noses were less frequent, but were more likely on hot, muggy days in August.
Strong smells seemed to increase his need to doodle. Cooking smells, especially. Roasting meat, in particular.

Sometimes the smells so filled him it seemed as if he were all nose, and yet with no capacity to breathe.

*

“
You’re always so nervous! What do you have to be nervous about?”

Overlays of squares always increased his anxiety.
Like boxes, or cells. Or the scales of an artificial fish.

It was impossible to escape the box of one
’s own nature. And in the end, when they boxed you, you couldn’t even imagine escaping.

*

“There are no secret messages here! What are you looking for?”

Sometimes scribbles resembled an exotic handwriting, and he would spend hours trying to decode them.
The problems in his marriage had grown quite severe, but when he sought out the spiritualist in order to make contact with his dead daughter the rift between him and his wife became decidedly more pronounced.

One day he began examining every piece of handwriting that originated from or came into their house.
He spent hours, in fact, studying his wife’s handwritten grocery lists. He’d become convinced that his daughter was trying to contact him in this manner, embedding her own childish scrawl within the handwriting of others.

He started saving all his own doodles and re-examined them, and found unmistakable proof that at times his dead daughter was guiding his hand.
Many of the doodles had taken on her whimsical, sensitive nature.

He stopped going to work.
He spent all day of every day doodling. His wife left him after one last appeal to reason. He was barely able to remember their conversation ten minutes after she’d slammed the front door.

*

“You talk in circles. You make me dizzy.”

He never knew quite what to make of spirals.
Were they eyes, the insides of wombs, tornadoes as seen from outer space?

Their significance was certainly ambiguous, and even when he believed them to be something recognizable and concrete, they maintained a certain abstract quality above and beyond what he could interpret, a spiritual dimension.

He could remember a time when they resembled eyes, and these spiraled eyes were the most threatening thing he could draw. More recently they had become eyes again, but somehow these comforted him. He imagined the blue at their distant bottoms, drawing him into the depths of them, his daughter’s endless stare.

*

“Words, you keep using all these words. When are you going to do something?”

Mouths, he decided these were.
They started out as eyes, and then grew teeth. People talked too much, when they should be listening. They talked about how things used to be, when they should be seeing how things really are now.

Eventually the memory of his daughter
’s endless eyes grew teeth, and all the words in the world would not keep that vision away.

*

After his wife left him, there were no more voices to distract him from his doodling.

Sometimes they were faces turned inside out.

Or the internal organs of dream-selves and friends.

Sometimes they were the face your lover takes when she doesn
’t believe you can see her.

Some might be the broken bodies of insects, or insects unknown to humankind: the flying brain zipper, the centipede of pain, the butterfly-roach of loss.

He created them at an ever-increasing frenzy, drawing them on the bathroom tiles and mirrors using lipsticks his wife had left behind, spray-painting them on the living room and kitchen ceilings, painting them with a broad brush on the outside walls of his house, using the leftover paint in his garage. Neighbors would gather and watch him, but out of anger or embarrassment they’d stopped trying to talk to him some time ago.

Once, after a week-long drunk, he
’d used his own bodily fluids to smear the doodles across his clean white bed sheets.

*

He began to write a catalog of the ones he had neglected, or found impossible to save, hoping for some new understanding. He wrote captions at the bottoms of the originals, hoping his labels might crystallize and clarify:

Topographies of nowhere.

The worms of remembrance.

The absence of love.

*

In the masses of doodles he discovered pointillist portraits of children he
’d never had, and that made him feel like a traitor to his daughter’s memory.

And here were the feathers from birds
that were now extinct or that had never existed.

And here were mazes
that would forever frustrate him because they had no solutions.

And here were the wriggling walls and strange vegetation
that had grown up around him, completely isolating him from the outside world.

*

The fire had started in the bedroom. That’s what they had said the other time. It had been piled almost to the ceiling with “drawings,” as someone had called them, although most were no better than hen-scratchings, crudely repeated patterns like those a very young child might make. The drawings had been set on fire, but the rising heat had permitted a few to escape the open window. Several of these were unlike the others, were not crude at all, but were small, obsessive, precisely rendered portraits of a young girl’s face, dozens of them covering the page in a somewhat spiral pattern.

All the neighbors said he had been a nervous man, a smoker.
They’d said that the other time as well.

STRANDS

He came to believe that there were knives far sharper than any made by human beings. Manufactured of materials we could not even imagine. And that there were vague, formless surgeons skilled at manipulating those knives, capable of separating nerve from tissue, nerve from nerve, and
, deeper still, spreading apart the strands of thought, severing perception from conclusion, scattering the chains of continuity, turning all the moments of a life into short lengths of string, gathered into a box for casual selection and arrangement.

Dream:
His brother, Michael, is late again. He keeps calling the apartment, but there is no answer. Suddenly Michael bursts through the door, his hair wild, his shirt unbuttoned—no,
torn.
Michael is grinning.
Fooled you
again! he cries. But Michael’s mouth does not move. It remains open and rigid like the bell of a horn. As if frozen in time.

Memory:
The main staircase of his parents’ home had always been carpeted in plush, bright red, as far back as he could remember. On that particular day he had paid close attention to that carpet as he climbed the stairs. For some reason he had known how important it was to notice, and record, every detail of the twenty-year-old carpeting: how it pressed neatly into the bottom edge of each riser, flowed softly over the nosing, then stretched thinly across the tread, where the wear was greatest, where the blood-red of the fibers had worn and discolored to a dull rust. From all those steps: his and his brother’s, his drunken parents shuffling each other off to bed. The areas on the edge of the tread were also unevenly colored, from too little vacuuming or too frequent vacuuming with an ill machine. Where the carpet ended on each side the fibers were ragged, untrimmed. The oak edging looked sticky, and probably hadn’t been dusted or wiped in years. He wondered if his mother still had a cleaning lady come in, or if the drinks had become too costly for that.

The door to his brother
’s old bedroom was cracked open. About two inches. Maybe three. Maybe he should measure it. The silliness of the thought bothered him, increasing his
anxiety. In a rush to escape the next such thought, he pushed open the door.

The mural with Peter Rabbit and friends was still up on the wall. Their mother had never bothered to repaint. But it confused him for a moment, and even seeing Michael on the bed he wondered why his brother wasn
’t getting up for school, if maybe he was sick, or pretending to be sick; and then he remembered that Michael was twenty-three, and neither of them had lived in their parents’ house in years.

Peter Rabbit was holding a bright red flower in his right paw. The dripping flower seemed to come closer, as if Peter were going to hand it to him. Maybe Michael was whispering to Peter, telling him what to do. He had a hard time focusing. On the bed, Michael
’s head was covered with the melting red flower. Peter had been digging in the flower garden again. The rabbit had completely ruined Michael’s head with the digging and hadn’t even bothered to wash off the evidence: his fur was all spotted brown and red and gray. Mr. McGregor was going to know what had happened for sure.

But Mr. McGregor had already been here, he could see. For Michael was holding Mr. McGregor
’s rifle.

And now:
He was going to be late for his appointment again. On the bus an elderly woman thought she knew him. She called him “Joe” and told him all about her daughter, whom he used to date, and how she was doing—married, three kids in Chicago. He tried to remember if the story she was telling might be true.

“
She was always a good dancer,” he said.

“
Oh, the best! The very best! She won awards!”

“
I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ginger Rogers,” he said.

“
Oh, you were much too young to remember Ginger Rogers.” The old lady looked worried.

“
I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ann-Margret,” he said.

The old lady smiled.
“She’s as beautiful as ever,” she said. “She hasn’t changed at all. A good marriage will do that for you. Are you married?”

He stared at her, trying to remember if he had ever been close to marriage, because he wanted to say yes, even though he knew it couldn
’t be true. But after all these years, how could he not even have come close to marriage? Could he be that
different from everyone else in the world? “No,” he finally said. “I’m afraid not.”

The old lady pursed her lips, patted his knee.
“Well, you really should consider it, young man. It would do you a world of good.” And then she sat up straight and looked away from him, out the window at all the stores and people they were passing, as if she were through with him, as if she had immediately forgotten he’d ever existed.

For the rest of the bus ride he tried to imagine what he might have been like if his name had been Joe. He tried to imagine himself married to this old lady
’s daughter, having this old woman as a mother-in-law. It all seemed perfectly plausible.

He closed his eyes and could see the daughter dancing, kicking her feet high up into the air, twirling, a bright red flower pinned to her breast.

The Therapist:
“Sometimes it’s as if I’ve lost track,” he told the therapist, a woman who always wore dark glasses during their sessions. “As if the events in my life have become subtly disordered. It becomes too easy to believe that something that’s past, that’s over, hasn’t occurred yet, or maybe won’t even occur at all. My relationships don’t end—they just go on and on. The time frame seems too irrelevant. Michael tells me things every day. Tomorrow my mother will send me to school for the first time. Next week I’ll meet a woman I last dated over a year ago, but I’ll be meeting her for the first time.”

“
We all want to know where we came from and where we’re going,” the therapist said.

“
Maybe if you took something out, or manipulated a muscle or a bone or two,” he said. “Maybe then all these aimless... connections, these resonances... wouldn’t
bother me so much.”

“
We all want to know how long we have in this world,” the therapist said. “That makes you no different than the rest of us.”

“
I think I may have already died,” he said. “Once or twice. Maybe more.”

Sometimes, if the conditions
were right, he could feel the edges of the blades as they touched his thoughts. They entered cleanly most of the time, but occasionally there would be the slightest vibration, so that events might jar, one against the other, and the faces of the people in his memories would show their anxiety.

Dream:
It has been a long kiss, a very long kiss. He thinks he may even have slept through parts of it, only to awaken again and continue his participation. The lips against his are bare, loose, almost impossibly mobile. They make him feel hard and unyielding by comparison, like metal or brick.

When he finally pulls away he sees it is Michael he has been kissing. But Michael
’s lips are wider than he remembers them. Michael’s head lolls, his eyes still and fixed as a doll’s. Michael’s smile spreads loosely to both sides of his face, wide as a shark’s mouth. Michael’s smile flows to the edges of the sheets and drips off the sides of the bed.

Memory:
Allison was walking down the sidewalk with the last of her packed suitcases. He imagined himself stopping her, using physical strength, or argument, or simple expressions of bereavement. He’d seen countless movies, read numerous books and short stories, and he could imagine various scenarios in which any of these techniques might or might not work. He tried to store up images of various lives he might have had with Allison, all for his future use. He imagined the faces of their children. He visualized the photographs in their albums. He experienced all her possible deaths.

All this before she got into her car, looked sadly out the window.
“I’m sorry,” was what he thought she said, before she drove off for what was (maybe) the last time.

And now:
He spent much of his weekend talking to the homeless, the derelicts, the bums (he didn’t know what he should be calling them). Whoever they were, they were good at acting. They could sound like his mother, his father, Michael, his lover, even his therapist—whoever they wanted to be.

“
I’ve seen those blades you’re talking about,” one old man said. “They come mostly early in the evening, about the time the fireflies first come out. Sometimes you’ll see one outlined against the moon, or maybe a streetlight if the angle’s just right. They’re sharp and scary
,
oh, I know
that.
But they keep things from dying. They cut out the part where you know somebody died, or where you realized something was over—like it was on a tape or something. That way nothing
ever
dies, or ever ends. That ain’t so bad, is it?”

He
thought, in fact, that’s horrible,
but didn’t say anything.

“
Leave the boy alone!” The old lady in the broken hat just seemed to climb out of the shadows around the base of the tree. “He don’t need to know about them blades!”

“
You my wife or something?”

“
I don’t know—I can’t rightly remember.”

“
Well, I don’t remember neither, and until I
do
remember you just butt out, okay?”

“
I need to prepare myself. Something’s going to happen,” he said to the old man and the old woman. “I’ve already figured out that things aren’t what they seem to be, they
never
are, and there seems to be no way to tell
what
they are.”

“
There’s no such thing as preparation,” the old woman said. “I’m sorry, son.”

He wondered briefly if she could, indeed, be his mother, but it was too dark where she stood beneath the tree.
“It’s being
alone,
you know? That’s what it’s all about, why it’s so bad, being alone,” he said to them.

But the blades had come down during their conversation, and severed the old man and old woman from the dark pool of shadows beneath the tree, so that they were in some other weekend of his life, involved in some other conversation.

The Therapist:
“What are you most afraid of?” the therapist asked. Today he was lying on the table in the middle of the room and the therapist stood over him, most of her head in the shadows, only the heavy outline of her dark glasses showing. “That is always a good place to start.”

“
I’m afraid of
what is
,”
he replied. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“
Perhaps you simply can’t accept.” The therapist made rustling noises as she removed various objects from the drawers beneath the table.

“
I simply can’t
forget
,” he said. “That’s a lot of it. What I
remember
,
is. And that’s become too much, far too much, to bear. One thing becomes just as real, just as important, as every other thing. I don’t know what I should ignore anymore in order to keep on functioning, living. I don’t know what I should forget.”