Onion Songs

THE FIGURE IN MOTION

The majority of his days he had nothing useful to do. At one time he imagined that was what he’d always wanted. In fact, they had planned their mutual retirement around that simple idea. They would read books. They would go to movies. The staffs of the local parks and museums would know them by their first names. He’d had this vivid image of himself strolling the sidewalks arm-in-arm with the love of his life, making but the slightest, almost immeasurable, ripple of forward motion as they walked together through their remaining days. No one would notice the nearly invisible wake of their passage, but that’s what he thought they’d wanted. At some point all motion would stop, and even the memory of them would fade from the world forever. There was a simple dignity in the idea to which he was fully committed.

But then his wife was dying, a terrible disruption so unexpected at first but then gradually inevitable as her illness progressed. During her last few months on the planet he’d attempted to fill himself only with good memories of their life together, a cushion against the crushing loss to come, but he was quickly overpowered by events, and instead was forced to retain a series of images of her passing: her head bowed in burdensome fatigue, sitting shakily upright for a long stare out the window, her face at last too sad for tears, and then that final full day when she insisted on walking by herself across the field of powdered snow.

He’d watched her struggle across that brilliant emptiness, a lone figure changing shape, her shadow altering as sun and clouds moved, lines broken and ragged as she pushed forward into her future, her body so thin and her old dress so tattered she looked as if her skin were shedding while she prowled nervously through the whiteness of that late afternoon.

She left clear marks in the snow, gray holes descending into darkness and a wide scraping across the crystalline surface, making a pattern like angels’ wings, which gradually melted, filled and blended, until that world below his window was clean, untroubled, and unoccupied again.

It had surprised him that he wasn’t tempted to go help her. But that’s not what she wanted—this journey was completely hers to do.

And so through the long years of his retirement without her, it had been these images that had occupied his time. He did manage to read the newspaper and the occasional magazine, to skim volumes of non-fiction, to catch the odd movie, now and then to attend a lecture or museum exhibit, but the main focus of his final years had become memories of her decline, or—when he forced himself to think generously—her radical transformation.

Certainly it must have been some sort of fantastic rationalization that began to let him think of this collection of memories as art.

“I’m too late, aren’t I? I knew I would be—traffic was so bad, and I drive so poorly in bad traffic.” He knew he was saying too much, but he’d lost the ability to edit his speech some time ago.

“Sorry? Too late for what?” The young woman looked pretty, and amused. Young enough to be his daughter.

He imagined the heat in his face might be presenting itself as a blush. “The tour? The Postmodern Figure?”

“Well, yes. But they just started a tour for one of the local college art classes. You could follow right along. If you stay close I’m sure you could still hear. No one would care, really. I promise I won’t turn you in.”

He laughed, but only because he thought he was supposed to. He had no idea why some people thought such dialogs humorous—he just recognized that they did. He hurried along, his long winter coat flapping around his knees. He’d be too hot pretty soon, he knew, and then he’d have to decide whether to be uncomfortable wearing it, or awkward carrying it around. His wife had always had a good suggestion or two for such dilemmas, but he’d found that the further he traveled away from her, the tinier his ability to make a simple decision. It was a kind of perspective he’d never heard of, and could find no mention of in the volumes of art history he’d bought since her death.

“After the war the human figure was trivialized in modern art. It was made to appear insignificant, unreliable, and pitiable. Eventually it all but disappeared from the work of serious artists, as if they thought it beneath their notice, that it had nothing significant to say anymore. Art became dehumanized, less emblematic. As the prime emblem of our daily experience, the figure had to go.”

He wanted to protest, to argue with the young guide, but of course she was only doing her job, and, as far as he knew, was completely correct. But he still found it humbling to hear, and was it just his imagination or did some of these students shrink back a bit from her words, become smaller, a bit self-conscious? He himself became more aware of the size of these canvases, many times human size, so that they seemed architectural, part of the walls, which he now realized were of varying heights, many several stories high, making triangles with the sloped ceilings, which swooped down overhead at times, threatening the heads of the patrons with sharp corners and unfriendly windows. He thought those windows were the kinds of windows an angel might use, or some other holy and invisible creature, and considered this an alarmingly odd perception, although perhaps one not so surprising to have in an art museum.

It was at this point, or so he would conclude later, that he first became aware of the figures in the next room of the gallery, beginning to emerge from hiding, just their outlines peeking from the corridor, but when he turned and tried to take their measure, they were gone, and although he stood and waited, they did not reappear.

By the time he gave up looking for them the tour had moved on without him, and he had to hurry to catch up, feeling hot and uncomfortable as he did so, and wishing he had made the decision simply to carry his coat. He was always conscious of perspiring heavily inside his clothing, and, although he bathed regularly, worried about smelling.

“Eventually traces of the human figure began to appear in these huge, near-empty canvases. Perhaps not the figure itself, not at first, but the effects of its presence. It was coming out of hiding, it seems, but you might say it was being very cautious about the entire endeavor. The figure became tool and material, and eventually it became battleground.”

At the guide’s invitation the students spent some time with these images. Some nodded agreeably with what she had to say, and some had a skeptical air about them, but appeared careful to keep their own figures neutral, betraying no opinion. He dutifully traveled from painting to painting, and sometimes it felt like a journey of years. He had not heard of most of these artists’ names, but tried to memorize them so he could look them up later, find out what else they had done, read what they had to say for themselves.

Still, he felt an urge to leave the tour and seek out a Chagall, or a Soutine, one of the Jewish painters he liked so much, or even an expressionist like Robert Beauchamp, whose figures, with their nervousness and agitation, had become almost cartoonish in their attempts to recede and hide inside the paint. As for his own shy figures, he could still feel them lurking nearby, but thought it non-strategic to seek them out.

“There’s still some jokiness about the figure’s re-emergence, don’t you think? A kind of coyness that invites us in. I find that refreshing, don’t you? Art needn’t be so stuffy. It can look at itself with good humor.”

Perhaps he had no sense of humor when it came to art. Perhaps he was too serious about most things and that was his problem. His wife used to complain about his inappropriate joking, but she also understood that impulse of his came out of a belief that the world was a grim and serious place.

He felt a bit of palsy now in his right hand, and stared at it with eyes that did not focus well anymore. Between the two tendencies he was presented with an image of his hand with no clear lines, nothing firm to hold his flesh in. He felt his tears approaching, and stopped them by grabbing the hand firmly with its left partner, which held it decisively but tenderly in check.

He distracted himself from this localized drama by looking at the largest painting in the room. He didn’t recognize this part of the gallery and wasn’t aware of when the tour might have advanced here. At first he could see no figures in the painting, but then he found the one wavering line suggestive of a hesitant forward motion.

“For years the figure practically vanished from contemporary art.”

He continued to stare at the wavering line in the right third of the painting. He didn’t care for this kind of scraggly, wiggly art. He never had, except where someone like Beauchamp was concerned, who had this indefinable knack. For the most part, he could never find the emotion in this kind of work. But for some reason he felt this particular painting—in fact he found himself almost moved to tears. He saw more motion in that wavering line in the canvas than in his entire life, as it left its trace in the chaos, as it made its mark.

He looked at the artist’s name. Daniel Richter. A German. The name wasn’t completely unfamiliar, but it was still one that hadn’t been on his radar. As he walked among the other Richter paintings, most of them larger-than-life size, he was impressed by their colors, explosive and alive with blood and neon, living now, and not in some memory of days before, and as more and more of the figures began to appear, coagulating out of the aggressive paint, but still hiding, or attempting to hide, it struck him that so many of the figures weren’t much more than outlines, really, and inside those recognizably human outlines floated pools and bursts of color. But it wasn’t a portrayal of exterior resemblance on these canvases, but of a peculiar sort of interior, the interior a medical technician might see in an MRI, or the auras of variously colored heat observable by means of some sort of specialized surveillance equipment, or from the cold and inhuman sensory apparatus of a heat-seeking missile now rapidly advancing on its all-too-vulnerable human targets.

For now he did not sense the shy figures he had encountered earlier—perhaps they were wandering the other galleries, reluctant to enter this one, as if worried they might dissolve within the intense colors and the brilliant lights.

But he had no time for this kind of fantastical speculation in any case. He was too busy examining the figures trapped within these paintings, or if not “figures,” the evidence that figures had once been there, and now these were the prints their bodies had left behind upon impact with the world, or, looked at another way, their medical records, and the documentation of their trauma.

Of course no one had asked him what he was doing here in the art museum. No one had spoken to him at all. But he had been formulating an answer. He really had no idea where his wife had gone. All too quickly the traces of her outside their small home had been erased. He had no idea where to find her, so he was looking here, examining these paintings for clues. It made no sense, but he was convinced it was the right thing to do.

When he returned home that evening he fixed himself a sandwich and carried it into the living room, and sat with it on the palm of his hand and did not eat it. He could feel it drying out on his weary, outstretched palm, but he could not bring himself to take it into his mouth. Eventually he laid the uneaten sandwich onto a side table alongside several books his wife was never able to finish reading, and sat some more, gazing around the room, trying to find additional traces of where she had been, what she had touched.

He remembered she sometimes sat in this chair and knitted at odd times during the day and night. Sometimes he would awaken in the middle of the night and her side of the bed would be empty. He would come downstairs and discover her sitting here knitting squares, putting together blankets and sweaters and various indecipherable soft objects. She said she just couldn’t sleep anymore. She said she had simply lost track of things and now had to figure things out.

After she died he had tried to learn how to knit without any success. He simply could not see how to create patterns, then recognizable objects, out of piles of seemingly limitless string. Instead he had sat here gingerly cupping a ball of yarn in each hand, as if he were holding eggs, as if showing some sort of reverence for the act would bring him understanding. But it never had.

He picked up one of the books she had left behind: Beloved, by Toni Morrison. He found the ornate metal bookmark she had inserted a third of the way through the book, a bookmark he had never seen before, but one so special he felt it must have been his wife’s way of honoring this particular volume. He remembered that she had talked about this novel, how much she had loved it, how anxious she had been to get to the next page. But he was sorry that he did not remember anything more specific than that about the book itself.

He’d never read much fiction—fiction made him feel uncomfortable. He assumed the main characters were more or less masks of the author. Otherwise, how could the author make the story seem real? Fiction, he thought, must be a very strange sort of autobiography, portraying what the author wanted to happen, dreaded might happen, would happen if the author were of another sex, lived in a different country, had different personality traits, took a different path, job, spouse, etc. How did authors feel when their books were misread? What if people liked the character in your book better than who you were on such and such a particular day? He found such layering disturbing, and all too close to the way most people viewed their own lives.

But she’d loved the book and had wanted to finish it, and so, over the next few days, he finished it for her, reading it aloud despite the weaknesses in his speaking voice. He didn’t think he needed to read it aloud so that she might hear it. He’d never believed in such things. Wherever she was he didn’t think she was in any position to physically hear anything. He read it aloud so that the words might live in this home they’d shared all their married life.

Across the street from the art museum there was a park where people came to preach, to give speeches, to perform, or to express themselves in any way desired, as long as they didn’t ask for money or offend common decency. The city government prided itself on its openness and the privilege was well used. Every day there were crowds.

One afternoon he brought a folding table and a battered old suitcase into the park, and out of the suitcase he retrieved a variety of records, which he laid out on the table for display. All of these records had to do with his wife’s life, her long illness, and her death. At one end of the table there were photo albums from her childhood, letters to her parents from camp, a lock of hair from her first haircut. Next to these were laid out their wedding pictures and a variety of snapshots from their marriage: a trip out west, a day at the beach, a picnic in their own front yard when the car wouldn’t start. He and his wife appeared together in all of the shots, and when he examined them he became obsessed with trying to remember what friend, neighbor, or stranger had been pressed into service as photographer. For most of the photographs a clear identification of the person taking the picture was impossible, as any normal person might expect. He understood this. But still it troubled him. Had these record makers been purely accidental, or was it possible that some had hung around hoping to be recruited for just such a purpose? Certainly, if these people hadn’t been there, there might be no record that his long marriage to this wonderful woman had occurred at all.

At the other end of the table he stacked medical records and some pictures from her final years. He had been the photographer for these, and had taken so many portraits of her during this time that choosing a few representative photos had been a difficult task.

Specific facts having to do with her height and weight, the amount of space she occupied, her exact age to the minute at time of death, were prominently displayed. “This is the space and time she occupied,” he repeated again and again when reciting these figures.

There were relatively few visitors to his table that first day, but for those that did come he provided a lengthy narrative concerning his wife, their time together, and her relatively recent death. He was undeterred by the lack of questions—he enjoyed talking about her so much, and it had been such a long time since he’d had the opportunity to talk about her, that the public’s lack of interest wasn’t about to dissuade him. He returned to the park every day that week and delivered essentially the same presentation.

The following week he decided to add a new element to the performance, not only to make it more interesting for himself, but to draw some of the larger crowds available during warmer weather. Despite his lack of formal dance training, despite his singular ineptitude with anything involving coordinated movement, he positioned himself behind the table and began a series of sweeping, yet precise, gestures, which might have been untrained yoga, untrained martial arts, untrained dance, or the unintentional movements of someone afflicted with a nervous disease. During these movements he delivered the same talk he had the week before, except this time there were more questions from the audience.

He grasped, he moved, he took a large inhalation of air. He faltered, he limped, he ached, he winced. He tried to exemplify how it was to be in the world for the number of years he had walked upon this planet. He tried to show the truth of his body and the solitary nature of his existence, and, without using the exact words, just how much he missed her.

He meditated on his hands as they moved through the air. He tried to make the movements of his performance as natural as possible. He attempted to imitate the everyday movements he made as he went through a normal day: cooking, washing hands, taking medications, holding his face as he wept. He imagined his movements as invisible brush strokes. He imagined himself as Clifford Stills, as Jackson Pollock. He imagined himself as some anonymous figure struggling through the wind and driving rain of his very worst day.

He rarely looked at the figures of his audience as he made his performances. It required too much focus just to imitate everyday natural movements for him to give his audience much more than a passing glance. But every so often he became aware of a slight blurring of the edges of the crowd. Now and then he became aware of the forgotten figures coming out of hiding, their vague outlines filling with heat and color to become targets for his eyes.

His wife had used a dressmaker to make alterations in her careful purchases, so it wasn’t too much trouble to ask the woman to make several colored bodysuits fitted to his measurements. The only difficult part of the process was standing before her in T-shirt and shorts so that she could take these exacting measurements. Like a small boy he kept his eyes tightly shut until it was over.

The next week he appeared in the park in a variegated green and brown bodysuit. He thought he looked like a hole in the fabric of the world. He noticed that if he moved his body in certain ways, and at certain speeds, it was difficult for him to find the edge of himself. His sense of a personal outline faded in and out with his every movement, as if made from radio signals from an unreliable transmitter.

He attempted to harness unconscious habits into his performance: nose pickings, butt scratching, spitting. He was aware that some people were repulsed, and left at the first appearance of some unpleasant bit of personal business. Although it meant the loss of some verisimilitude, he quickly returned to a semblance of politeness.

The following week he added photo manipulation to his performance. He had taken some of those precious photographs of him and his wife together, copied them, and made crude alterations in the copies. In some of the images he had altered her, or scratched her out, leaving a shapeless white defect in her place. In others he had simply folded over the photo in order to essentially erase her from the image entirely. He discovered that the altered photographs made him look ridiculous. He became a mad eccentric holding hands with nothing, speaking to nothing, kissing the nothing that is not there. The outlines in the crowd wavered as their faces began to drain of all color.

As he moved inside his empty body suit he thought he was beginning to resemble them: the figures that were not there. Some days his arms moved so quickly he lost track and could not find them. If he closed his eyes even once he forgot he was even there.

Sometimes people would try to touch him and that was when a museum guard posted near the edge of the crowd warned them away. He had seen the guard there for days but had thought that the man was merely a part of the audience, perhaps out there on his lunch break and wondering why everyone was watching the man who was not there dancing behind a table full of garbage: water-stained photographs and papers so dirty and damaged no one could read them anymore. Of course this put additional weight on his verbal performance to convey exactly who his wife had been. But his voice was failing. Some days he could barely whisper. The crowd sometimes had to edge quite close in order to hear him. “Please do not touch the exhibit,” the guard would warn.

Sometimes he would notice the hands of certain audience members: opening and closing as if desperate to hold something. It occurred to him then that perhaps he should add things his wife had held to the table display: knitting needles, books, cooking implements. For didn’t the objects she had handled tell an important part of her story? He thought then of adding his own hands to the table display, or at least a casting or a photograph.

On some days if he kept at his performance long enough he became unaware of anything else. His figure became a tangle of moments, lines of force, electrical energy, exhalations, and perspirations. His very presence appeared to fracture the air.

Some days his body became a tired whisper in his ear, which he attempted to ignore. Some days he stood in the audience surrounded by vague figures and shadows of figures, an echo of imitated movements through time, and watched his own performance.

One day he arrived to find the exhibit closed. His table was there, but all his carefully collected documentation was missing. But then he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen those documents, and wondered if they might have vanished months ago.

“I’m afraid the exhibit is closed,” the guard said.

When he started to reply he realized the guard wasn’t talking to him, but to all the figures gathered behind him. They began to shuffle away, the outlines of their forms distorting and flowing across the landscape.

“What am I supposed to do now?” he asked. The guard did not answer. He began to dance, and could not find his arms, his legs, or his next wandering thought. But even then, his movement did not stop.