Onion Songs (4 page)

Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming.
But most, I think, are punished.

In a few days they will come to take another of us.
Rabbits, perhaps, or snakes, or shiny emerald-green beetles, or an old dog that so resembles one from our childhood we will be convinced it is the very same one. Soon only Jacob or I will be left.

But that is the worst kind of wish-
fulfilment. How do I know I will be a survivor? At some things the imagination fails.

I know I should not whine about it.
It is a natural process that happens to everyone. You can wait for it or you can play with it, you can roll your ball at it or you can run headlong into the cars that seem to be everywhere. But what you cannot do is stop it from coming.

Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable.
Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come.

PICNIC

Each day of fair weather they gather along the edge of the park: to eat and talk, heat their sluggish bodies under the sun, watch animals creeping through the woods beyond, exclamations of pleasure with each new sighting, holding up the kids, making them look.
“Kitty!” his youngest cries. At two, every animal is kitty. “Kitty!” patting the iron squirrel holding up one of the many barbecue grills the park provides. “Kitty!”

“
When I was a kid we ate squirrels my daddy shot: two, three times a month. But he still thought they were beautiful, and never killed when we could afford better. I don’t know, maybe that made it okay.”

“
Bob...” his wife warned, looking at the kids, but only Julie was listening, eyes big above her clutched hamburger.

“
No, it’s true. It didn’t taste bad, a little strong. Dark meat, heavy with blood. An honest taste, I think.”

“
I don’t think the kids...”

“
I think about the kids all the time, these past few weeks. They should get out and see more animals, get to know them. Everything isn’t a kitty. Now when they see one it’s this big surprise—shouldn’t be like that. Animals are invisible to us—when they appear it’s this big magic trick. Then at night, their eyes shining in the dark, and in our dreams.”

“
We take the kids to the zoo.”

“
That’s not what I mean. Julie? That hamburger you’re eating was made in a slaughterhouse, honey.”

“
Bob!”

“
They’ve got this gun, and it shoots a steel bolt into the cow’s brain, and almost before it falls there’s a hook and a knife in it, oh, and sometimes they use a hammer to finish it, but not always. I don’t think the animal’s always dead.”

“
Bob, that’s enough!” His wife had Julie up in her arms, and Julie was sobbing, and their little boy too. Their eldest, Richie, the sullen teenager, sat at another table, a look of entertained surprise on his face. Bob stared at the half-chewed hamburger that had dropped out of Julie’s little mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“
I’m not saying she shouldn’t eat meat. I’m not saying any of us shouldn’t. I just don’t think we should be blind to the suffering is all, turning our heads all the time. And not just the suffering—we just don’t see them, we make them so goddamn invisible. We don’t want to be touched, we don’t want their eyes on us, we don’t want to look into their eyes.”

“
Bob, you’re scaring them.” Not completely true, he thought, because although he couldn’t look at Richie right now, he could still hear him laughing over there, so hard his voice was cracking. “Could we just go home,
please
?”

He gazed at both of his youngest in her arms, crying.
“I don’t want them to be scared,” he said softly. “I get scared. Each day I get scared. The doctor doesn’t know when, sweetheart. I see him twice a week and still he doesn’t know. Maybe I’m lucky—at least my
when
has a range. Three months, a year. I feel bad for you with no idea when your time’s going to be up. Like all those animals. They never know.”

She looked away, her crying sparking another round of tears in their children.
Richie had stopped laughing, had sullenly turned his back.

“
The main thing is... we look away. All of us. We won’t see. We pretend it doesn’t touch us, this messy thing. Our kids
need
to know about that, how life is this messy thing, but okay because that’s the way it is for all of us, we’re all in this messy thing. Don’t turn away. Look into our eyes.”

After a time the air cools and families leave the park.
Few words are said in the car. In their fatigue they settle on takeout in front of the TV and an early bedtime.

In the park
, small animals come out of the woods for abandoned scraps. They forage around the grill with no apparent recognition of the figure sculpted in metal. Other animals stay back in their lairs, alone, quietly licking at miscellaneous wounds.

DOODLES

“
Her drawings know more about the world than she does.”

This thing his ex-wife used to say about their daughter eventually led him to take his seemingly compulsive, absent-minded doodles more seriously.
He did them all the time: at work—on the papers due on his boss’s desk by the end of the afternoon, at dinner—on napkins, tablecloths, even credit card slips, even in his sleep, on the graying walls of his dreams. A nervous habit, or an addiction—he simply could not stop himself.

He had to have the pen firmly in his hand, and the pen had to be moving.

This habit underlined, circled, boxed, and generally ornamented his days. If he forced himself not to doodle, the days flowed on without form or direction.

“
Her drawings are smart drawings.” He had no idea what this really meant, but he agreed completely.

His daughter had drawn pictures of houses mostly: huge, elaborate structures heavy with character.
But however wonderful her depictions, she always seemed more careless in her execution than most children. Sometimes she didn’t even look down at the page. She just drew, sight unseen. She drew her world, and the houses that were in it, and the creatures who lived in those houses. This ceremony of drawing that she performed every day centered her, and seemed to make her happy.

But he scribbled and doodled, late into the night sometimes, and found no peace in it.
He wondered if it was because of his age, or because of a long-standing pessimism about all forms of self-help. Whatever the reason, for him it was like worrying an infected wound. And yet he could not stop himself.

*

“Sometimes there’s magic in doing the same thing again and again.”

A series of vertical lines running up and down the page.
Walls and borders that were not to be crossed. Some weeks he built these walls before and after everything he wrote: letters, reports, grocery lists. He’d write his name and construct the walls that were intended to hold it in, keep it from expanding so much that it became unrecognizable. Ego expansion could be a problem—it left one open to attack. A few individual walls scattered here and there emulated grass, or the spikes at the bottom of a pit to trap uninvited guests.

Sometimes it was a comfort to go over these vertical lines again and again to make them thicker.
The act made his fortifications stronger.

Some days he filled the page with his walls, his borders, his spikes.
After hours his wrist would begin to ache, but there was still relief in the repetition.

*

“You repeat the same old patterns—it’s as if you can’t help yourself.”

Some mornings he would get stuck on a pattern, find himself compelled to repeat it over and over and over again until he broke for lunch.
Circles, triangles, squares, the same patterns made by the same muscular movements repeated endlessly. Then after lunch, the pattern broken, variety would suddenly be available to him again. And yet sometimes the pattern had been so worn in to the muscles of his arm, wrist, hand, fingers, that the old pattern would simply reassert itself (phantom circles appearing within a complex network of lines, for example), and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

*

“There are some things you just
have
to do, no matter how harmful. It’s as if you can’t help yourself.”

Daggers and other blades were a compulsion at times.
As were primitive depictions of murder. They arrived at the most inopportune times: once, after his divorce, he was having a romantic dinner with a beautiful young woman, a young woman he someday wished to marry, when she suddenly stopped speaking, stopped smiling, and glared at him with a peculiar expression on her face. He looked down at his place setting then, discovering that he had taken the red ink pen from his vest pocket and used it to sketch the particularly grisly stabbing death of the young woman on his cream-colored linen napkin.

Some days it felt as if his doodles wanted him all to themselves.

*

“
It made no sense. But it was compelling, irresistible, all the same.”

He couldn
’t make heads or tails of some of his more unconscious scribblings. They resembled the webs of hallucinating spiders, he thought, or a cheaply made house after an explosion had leveled it. After years, however, he came to recognize these works as maps. All he had to do was find the starting point, and his current position relative to it.

*

“You feel if you do it often enough, the very structures of your brain will be altered.”

Hours of drawing lines as precisely as possible would sometimes be an aid to linear thinking.
Too many nested circles brought a sensation of great fullness, and enormous headaches. Ten thousand sharp edges on a page might lead to a ripping and tearing, and then a brain hemorrhage would begin.

*

“The more I want
not
to feel these things, the more I feel them.”

Some days he would try
not
to draw certain things. The effort proved to be self-defeating, of course. The more he thought about the image, the stronger the compulsion to bring it to light, capture it in pencil on a napkin, pen on a flap of cereal box. Try not drawing a circle. Try not drawing a square. Try not drawing a small child trapped in a burning window, the window fragmented, blotted out by a furious, pen-wielding hand.

*

“My father used to say, ‘Find the one thing you do well, and do it often.’”

But this was not what his father had imagined,
of that he was sure. If he could be paid for his doodles, of course, he would be quite the wealthy man. But who paid for obsession? Obsession was mostly a matter of self-gratification, a private thing, and powerful in that it belonged to the individual alone. He could take his doodles anywhere, whatever his “regular” job might be. There was power in that.

Drawings of strong, squarish hands that covered page after page after page.
Sometimes without thinking he would draw these hands on a business report, and have to do the report all over again before an important presentation.

But no one ever found out.
His bosses praised him for his neatness, his calm, his organizational abilities.

*

“You can live where you dream.”

The argument in his head, the ongoing argument with his ex-wife, continued as obsessively as his doodling.

Many of his doodles resembled floor plans of unknown structures rendered in a multitude of dimensions and perspectives unavailable to his normal, everyday senses.

They appeared to vibrate on the page
—he imagined he could hear the music they made. In dreams, he
did
hear, and the music helped him fall asleep. Never mind that he had to be asleep already to be dreaming these songs—the songs led him off into deeper sleeping.

In daydreams he would speculate whether it was possible to visit such structures, such estranged, vibratory spaces.
He had his doubts—what caused their vibrations would tear a normal, three-dimensional human body apart.

So why did his desire to visit such places still persist?
Because he knew he would feel at home there, even if the peculiar geometries destroyed him. What was architecture but an endless and futile quest to recreate the “home” that existed only in the dream of your body, the dream of your cells? Doubly futile since the architecture can only create the home from within his body—and the client who must dwell there is immediately trapped within the architect’s own body. Primitive peoples had it best—they were their own architects. At least their mistakes in execution in attempting “home” were in service of their own dream, however distorted.

He started renting cheap apartments and trashed-out homes he could redo to his heart
’s content, destroying if need be. Expensive furnishings were unnecessary—since the attempt at creating home was destined to failure anyway, cardboard and cheap lumber, even paper mache would do. It was the
shape
of the space that mattered, the way it fitted around his sleeping form. He made himself cocoons and nests and narrow coffins and sacks that hung from the uterine plaster walls. Yet home always remained out of reach, the terror of its vibrations singing across the darkness to him, tearing at his nerves.

*

“That drawing looks as if it hurts.”

Some days there were nothing but claws on the page
—hooks and barbed triangles, jagged lines of lightning (
God’s claws
, he now realized). And even when they didn’t resolutely fill the page they were a major motif most days (especially in the late afternoon, when his muscles began to stiffen, and the air seemed heated). Sometimes they appeared to move in currents, to form patterns. At times they resembled graphics he’d seen representing electromagnetic currents, or the auras that supposedly radiated from the insane. He knew that visions in ancient times were sometimes described in terms of an eagle’s talons clawing through the scalp. So it wasn’t as if all these invisible razor claws were necessarily a terrible thing. He imagined they must somehow serve to also energize and inspire. On the other hand perhaps they were the source of migraines in those who relied on them too much.

But whatever the use, they filled the air
—we breathed and drank of their arbitrary movements. Thank God they were invisible, he thought, else we would all be horrified in their presence.

*

“Sometimes it seems everything is falling apart.”

There were a number of scribblings
, which might only be described as representations of “generalized corruption.” Lines that broke and ran dribbling down the page, patches of shadowing which bubbled and disintegrated, narrow scratchings chipped and faded away into a dead-skin paleness. It was a game, finding all the ways in which the doodles illustrated death.

Yet even though it might be a game, he thought these doodles were of particular importance.
Corruption itself was a kind of ritual, a kind of obsession, which we ignored at our peril.

*

“That looks like a naked woman. Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”

Some of the doodles appeared vaguely pornographic.
But a pornography of an elevated sort, as he could detect softnesses here which seemed to go far beyond that of normal flesh, certainly beyond that of any sort of flesh he had ever encountered: the softness of old women losing their hair, of young women in the fullness of life, of his own pale young son, and of his even paler daughter, of the pelts of animals, of silks, of swelling breads.

*

“You want to leave me, I can tell.”

His ex-wife accused him daily of wanting to escape her, until escape her he did.
Occasionally a page filled with wings. This happened often during times of great stress. Sometimes he drew them all day, and on surfaces he would never think to scribble on, like walls and floors. Once his ex-wife discovered them drawn on their bedroom wall and he’d been a coward, blamed the doodles on one of the kids and was ashamed of himself for months afterward.

Later he realized he
’d blamed
both
of their children. But that was impossible; that was crazy. What had he been thinking of?

It was strange that he never thought consciously of escaping, or felt consciously trapped, for that matter.
He felt like a normal human being. But perhaps part of being a normal human being was to be trapped, unable to escape the confines of one’s own life and body.

*

“Sometimes you just talk and talk, but you really have nothing to say.”

One day his pen stopped writing, out of ink, then started again in fits and sputters.
This disturbed him greatly, because although he imagined he could detect the patterns that the pressure of the pen nib had made, he could never be sure he had understood all of it.