Onion Songs

THE HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL

Joseph did nothing but dream, until the world gave him the gift of eyes.

The eyes had been the easiest to catch: they’d simply rolled out of the darkness into his waiting sockets and they’d been unable to budge after that. Trapped, they’d opened and blinked, and filled his mind with frantic pictures of the world, at least the pictures the world wanted Joseph to see.

At first he hadn’t realized it had happened. Since dreams were all he’d ever known he’d assumed that the incident of catching the eyes had been a dream as well. Any future encounters with the many beasts of the world, he knew, would not come as easily.

With his new eyes Joseph gave the world back the same gift it had given him: pictures of the world. The eyes turned the abstractions of vibration and motion into one still picture. In his head Joseph could feel the world pausing for relief. Joseph sat—he could do nothing else as he had no legs—and the world sat with him, and together they were in peace.

But gradually new things began to appear on the world’s horizon, or at least things Joseph had never seen before. And his desire to bring these things closer became so great that eventually Joseph grew arms and legs. He spent his days chasing after the other things of the world, reaching out to them, with a disturbing desire to embrace them and pull them back down inside himself, but he knew that somehow those were the world’s desires and not his own. He was just another thing of this world. At night when he hid from the darkness this perception brought him many troubling dreams. He dreamed of the time before he had arms or legs, or the world’s gift of eyes, the time when he did nothing else but dream the world. In that long ago time he had never anticipated darkness to be a problem.

Chasing the other things of the world created in Joseph an appetite he had never imagined possible. He realized this new hunger was akin to that desire of his—the world’s desire—for embrace and reabsorption. Before, his appetite had been a small thing, a casual taking in of leaves, fluids, and miscellaneous edible debris. But now the world had created such an emptiness within him that the thought of filling it with whole, living things—things which moved and watched and yammered just as he did—was his constant obsession. He began to dream of filling himself with all the things of the world, until he was as large and complete as the world itself.

After years of chasing the other things of the world, Joseph came to know their habits very well. They breathed, much like himself. He had always thought this breathing to be significant, one way, perhaps, in which the world passed around the essence of itself. Further study led him to conclude that this breath was a kind of message, and that all things, himself included, were messengers.

Joseph spent his life hunting down these animal messengers, consuming them, wearing them, using whatever he could of their bodies. And each time he caught or killed one he would meditate, seeking the particular message he knew the animal must be carrying from the world for him. He would think on the message when he skinned or consumed the animal, when he sharpened the animal’s bones, and when he used the tools he made from these bones.

And so it was, as an old man running into the end of his life as if into a fireless cave, that Joseph first encountered the dragon.

The dragon himself lived in a cave at the center of the world. Joseph had never seen this cave; his dreams simply told him of its existence. This cave was full of the dragon’s breath, and thus was full of light and fire. And Joseph had come to realize that the end of his life would, indeed, be this cave.

Joseph’s many years of hunting down all the things of this world had given him an instinct. All he had to do to find an animal was to think about it. But he had never really thought about the dragon before, and so he had never stumbled across it. Even when he dreamed about the dragon he didn’t dream of the dragon itself but of its cave full of fire.

But now at the end of his life Joseph thought about all the animals he had ever encountered and the messages they had brought from the world. And by thinking about them all, in total, he allowed his feet eventually to lead him to the mouth of the dragon’s cave. Joseph thought about hunting the dragon down, killing it, eating it, and then worshipping it.

He dreamed a creature the size of an elephant, with a roc’s head and giant eagle’s feathers, front legs of a rhinoceros and furry, lion-like hindquarters below its scaly back. But when Joseph walked into the mouth of the cave he walked into the mouth of the dragon as well. He never got a chance to actually see the dragon; the eyes given to him by the world were useless for this purpose.

Joseph walked for a very long time inside the dragon, blind, and eventually, with no useful purpose for his arms and legs, they fell off as quickly as he had formed this thought.

Joseph dreamed within the dragon within his cave in the heart of the world, dreaming of all the animals, all the things he had been and would be. Joseph dreamed that he was the world. And Joseph the world dreamed of the eyes it would one day create, to give to that one piece of itself that required them.