Onion Songs (23 page)

That came early this morning, from a short, bespectacled, blond youth.
He had struck me from the first as an unusually sensitive type. Some of the students nodded slightly, as if they had been waiting for someone to express that opinion. Others focused their attention immediately on Dr. Zachary.

It is odd how every year this one issue is construed by the students, and worried over, as a direct challenge to Zachary
’s theories and methods. Even if it were so, he never seems to take it as a serious rebuff.

“
Does intelligence make one immune to mental illness? Does penetrating insight? Does warmth? Think on this proposition: some might say that those qualities actually make imbalance a more likely occurrence.”

I find myself siding with Dr. Zachary, even when it
’s my own condition we are discussing. Without stating his propositions as his own, he proposes quite clearly. And it is hard to believe that what he proposes could be wrong.

At the end of the conference he turned, and smiled his smile my way.
“You’re a difficult case, Lippmann. We’ll discover the nature of your illness yet. Even if it requires another forty years.”

As the patient care conference breaks up I head back to my room on the tenth floor, riding the elevator that should have been a merry
-go-round. It is visitation day. There are children in the halls, wives, husbands, relatives. But it is the children who are most noticeable, racing into open elevators and pushing buttons at random, squealing as the elevator that should have been a merry-go-round makes its many unnecessary stops.

By the time we reach the fifth floor my breathing is ragged.
By the time we reach the tenth the tears are leaking out of my eyes. As I struggle to open my door with the worn-out key the sobs fill my throat and spill out over my palsied hands. Embarrassed, I push the door open jerkily, ushering my sobs inside.

You would think Roger Ellison would have had some relatives with small children.
They form my only pool of potential visitors, and yet none of them has ever come. But I feel sure they must have been informed of my existence, by the police if not by Dr. Zachary himself.

Ellison
’s death had a profound effect on me. I was stirred by such compassion for this crawling, pitiful suicide. I could not have refused a last request.

Dr. Zachary must have been quite upset at losing a patient.

I cry for a very long time in the darkening room, terrified that someone might overhear me. When the doorknob rattles and the lock clicks I am not surprised to see Dr. Zachary standing in my entranceway.

“
Why are you so unhappy, Mr. Lippmann?”

“
What’s there to be happy about, Dr. Zachary? I have no family, no friends.”

“
I am your friend, Mr. Lippmann. Even if I’m your only one.”

I turn and gaze at him, suddenly feeling sorry, for him, for Dr. Zachary.
“I know, Dr. Zachary. And
I
am
your
only friend.”

“
You’re depressed, Mr. Lippmann. You have delusions of grandeur.”

“
I am
unhappy
, Dr. Zachary. Wouldn’t you be?”

“
You could have left a long time ago, at the first, when it all started.”

“
Perhaps. Perhaps.” But he has already left. I can hear him walking down the corridor. To the elevator.

Which should have been
… a
Ferris wheel
. A Ferris wheel. Not a merry-go-round. Is that why he has kept me here all these years? A glitch in my thoughts. A misfired neuron. A palsy that made me say “merry-go-round” when all the time I was envisioning a Ferris wheel. One foul piece demonstrating that the entire mind was souring. So here is Dr. Zachary’s secret evidence of my insanity.

When patient care conferences begin in the morning I will have the answers to all of Dr. Zachary
’s elliptical questions. The other students will be quite impressed. At last we have concrete verification of Lippmann’s illness. Now a course of treatment can begin.

THE GREEN DOG

How strange it is to stare into the mirror and find that the one staring back at you is not at all whom you expected.

Sometimes I think that toward the end of my life I will become an old green dog.

Not that the dog would ever understand he was green.
Like most dogs, he had a difficult time distinguishing among yellow and orange and green, or even red, not to mention the difficulty a dog has finding a reasonable mirror. A dog will find its mirror in his master’s eyes, we hear—but all too often what he finds there is small and miserable.

*

The dog didn’t remember that, as a boy in high school, it had known a girl whose peroxide-bleached hair had turned this same shade of green in the swimming pool. The girl’s hair had eventually gone back to auburn, but this was the dog’s natural color.

Canine greenness being a rarity, the dog was regarded with delight and distaste, wariness and incredulity.
Other animals didn’t pay much attention to his color, for he smelled like a dog, made dog sounds, marked his territory like a dog, fought like a dog over scraps of food and places in the sun. But people noticed. A few took his pigmentation as an excuse to throw things at him, some of which hurt, some of which he caught in his mouth and determined to be edible. A few others tried to entice him closer, and once in a while the prospect of having his ears scratched outweighed both his street-wise caution and his dislike of being inspected. Most, though, kept their distance, thinking him an aberration of nature or their own minds, or his color a symptom of some dreaded and contagious disease.

This dog was lucky enough to have neither master nor mirror.
If he’d had a mirror, and if mirrors made any sense to dogs, he’d have more or less expected to see an older man going to fat and gray, going to invisibility as his eyes faded and his voice grew weaker, and even though he had gained weight steadily through his middle years, he’d have seemed less substantial, as expansive as a cloud and no more significant in the great span of eternity. Then had come that too warm, too humid morning when he woke up as a dog.

The green dog howled then, in that mournful way of dogs and men.
Some would say it was a sadness without much legitimacy, since no tragedy had occurred, no painful injury. It was the sadness of the human being living his human life. It was the sadness of the shape-changer.

The dog was lucky in another way: he wasn
’t plagued by a man’s ambition. His flanks and belly were crusted with scars, including the vague crease from a human appendectomy. He’d sacrificed a testicle in a losing battle with a garbage truck. And now he was content to roll around on his back with his diminished genitals in the air, inordinately proud of what others considered a warped and sorry bit of punctuation. The man still in him identified it as a semi-colon. Used to join two main clauses, and between coordinate elements containing commas, to indicate a subtle variation of voice; the semi-colon was by far the man’s favorite punctuation mark. The fact that the man had a favorite punctuation mark spoke volumes about who he had become.

*

Sometimes the green dog saw the man it had been out in the street, or wading through the tall grass staring at his feet, as if having lost something very important, as if having lost his mind to the green dog. The man was lost, or puzzled, and these were things the green dog understood because it had often been lost or puzzled. How the green dog could still see the man it used to be did not puzzle it, because this was a man and the green dog was a dog who had left the concerns of a man behind.

The green dog sensed it should probably stay away from the man, but it could not.
It was drawn to the man by forces as basic and compelling as its need to eat and get rid of what it had eaten, both as pleasurable as they were necessary. So one night it showed up at the man’s back door after the day went dark, and sang the universal sadness that even the man could understand. The man brought a bowl of something to the back door and laid it down for the green dog to eat, and the green dog ate what was in the bowl without bothering to smell it first, because it trusted the man it used to be.

And so the green dog came to feed each night at the house of the man it had been when it moved upright through the world.
Although the food the man served was edible, something was not quite right about it. Sometimes the man cooked the food with the paper still wrapped around it; the dog ate the burned paper, too, which tasted quite good. Sometimes the man didn’t cook the food at all, which was fine with the green dog, even though it somehow knew this wasn’t so fine as far as the man was concerned.

*

Finally one night the dog came for supper and the man came to the back door without a bowl in his hand. The man opened the screen door and held it as the green dog readily trotted inside. “Here,” the man said, gesturing around the kitchen. For a moment the dog was confused, thinking it must be daylight again and this a garbage heap—it had that very smell, that very appearance. The dog looked up at the man. “Don’t look so stupid!” the man shouted. “Help yourself!” And after a brief, sad and nervous time, the dog did what the man said.

The man himself ate very little in the days that followed.
Sometimes he would sit down on the floor with the dog and put a plate no cleaner than the dog’s bowl on the floor in front of him. Sometimes he would stick his fingers into the food, bring them into his mouth and suck on them loudly. The dog was hungry even though all it really wanted to do was watch the man.

But most of the time the man did not eat.
Most of the time the man stared at the food, and spoke words at the food, but did not eat the food. Out of respect the dog held back from its own food as long as it could, but eventually of course it ate because it had the honesty of a dog, which compels it to eat when it is hungry, to rest when it is tired, to bark and to howl and to make any noise possible with its particular vocal chords when it feels whatever it is destined to feel. And to ignore what it sees in the mirror.

The man, on the other hand, had lied so long to himself and to others he could no longer tell if he was tired or hungry or in some sad and lonely state with the best part of him residing in this ugly green dog of the solitary testicle.

*

Eventually the man fell ill. The green dog had been expecting this, because even a dog understands that everything must eat in order to live, just as it must breathe and drink and move through the world with others of its kind. These are things that even a green dog knows.

The man who was the green dog before there even was a green dog became so ill he slept most of the time, and when he could get up he managed only to sit without moving in the large brown chair. The green dog didn
’t like the large brown chair because it faced a mirror. A snippet of leftover man-thought flitted through the dog-consciousness: mirrors pretended to show everything, but in fact showed very little.

How strange to think another thing
’s thoughts, thoughts it had no hope of understanding.

Even though the man himself seemed to have no liking for mirrors he sat watching the man in the mirror for days at a time.
Eventually he did not return to his bed at all but sat in the brown chair day after day, watching the man in the mirror carefully, as if waiting for something sad or awful to happen.

When the awful thing happened, the green dog howled.
Then it went into the kitchen to relieve itself and look for more food.

*

How strange to wake up as someone else then wake up as someone else again.

The man in the brown chair who had become a green dog had no strength left for walking or lifting or even eating, but he did have strength enough to recognize the man in the mirror for what he was: dust and reflection, lost skin cells and idle fantasy molded by shadow, a compendium of every person he
’d had any stray urge to be.

And as the man in the brown chair declined, becoming less like a man and more like a piece of badly worn furniture, he came to understand that the man in the mirror was far more than he had ever been.
He came to understand that he had given the man in the mirror the best he had dreamed and hoped for, and consequently the man in the mirror—although completely imaginary and not much heavier than a dying breath—was far more alive than the man in his sagging saddle of furniture, in fact was far more alive than this man had been at the best of times.

This is not to say that the man was overcome with any kind of sadness or regret.
He had led what he considered an interesting life. He’d had a family who cared what happened to him and he’d had a career better than some. And a wife who had loved him so much that each day it was yet another surprise for this man who had grown up without the expectation of love.

The fact that the man in the mirror was so much more was undeniable, and unchangeable.
The man could accept this because he felt he had no choice in the matter. Certainly none of us could ever be as fully realized, as complete, as our imaginary selves. And now at the end of his life he could think of nothing better to do than to gaze at his better self as first breath, then imagination, left his body.

*

The man in the mirror felt only the vaguest connection with the old man slumped over in his ratty brown chair. He gazed at the dead man much as he might have looked at a somber photograph, one he had seen perhaps too many times.

In fact
, the only interesting thing to happen in this particular view was when an ancient green dog occasionally wandered over to the dead man to lick his fingers and howl. For some reason, this vaguely amused the man in the mirror but he suppressed his chuckles, not wanting to startle the dog from the room. Eventually his patience was rewarded and the dog stared through the mirror into the mirror man’s eyes. Which froze the dog in terror. Which made the man in the mirror smile.

But even without the green dog and the dead man in his sorry chair, there were still things the man in the mirror could do to entertain himself.
He might follow the trail of a ray of light as it made its way from that other world of more limited possibilities, through the silvered glass and into the unlimited realm he called home. He might stay with that ray for a time as it distorted against the furniture of his world and made itself into colors as fragile as the last thoughts before sleep. He might step in front of that light and grin as it distorted his carefully formed image, turning it into water and cloud and dark. He might paint the sky of his world with the fragments of his own brittle image.

He might step through the silvered glass and take the place of a dead man.

*

How strange, thought the man in the mirror, to see the man you were and feel nothing but embarrassment and shame.

Without breathing, the man from the mirror watched the man he might have been sleep, feeling curiously empty, even of humor. He attempted a grin but could not maintain it in the coarser atmosphere of this more mundane world. In frustration he kicked at the dead man’s leg, which swung swiftly away from the blow. The man from the mirror was surprised by the quickness of the dog, only just hearing its growl before it clamped its jaws around the mirror man’s own leg. The mirror man felt no pain, of course, or irritation. He observed the dog with vague interest until it released his leg and slunk into its corner by the old brown chair and its dead master, watching the mirror man with fear and anger. The mirror man did not fear the dog but still decided he would not strike his dead counterpart again.

How strange to see yourself yet not see yourself at all, the man from the mirror thought, watching the version of himself, which ironically was far more real than himself, collapse into decay inside the ancient brown chair.
The mirror man could not bring himself to feel sorry for the man he’d actually been, because that man had already felt far too sorry for himself. The man from the mirror understood all too well that life was in large part image and reflection: you create an image of yourself out of light, dust, and air, and you send that image out into the world while you sit home alone in your rotting brown chair counting flies. If because of that image you achieve some sort of success or someone loves you, then it’s all for the good. If the image fails, it’s all just dust and light anyway, so what do you have to complain about? Real people whined endlessly—in the abstract realms of the imagination you could hear their distant voices scraping at the gates, so much so that the dwellers in dream could hardly hear themselves sing sometimes.