Onion Songs

SHUFFLE

Read The Rules of the Game. You don’t have to follow them, but you should at least know what they are. And everybody should learn How to Play.

The Rules of the Game

1) Lives are understood to be finite, but we’re always surprised when they end. Stories are discrete and self-contained and we look forward to the appropriate finale. Pick ten cards. Or pick twelve. This is your story. Accept the order of your deal or determine for yourself what comes first, what comes last, in this narrative of John.

2) We seek balance in our lives. Sometimes we achieve it, sometimes not. But at least in our fiction we can tamper with the scales. Pick three cards from each of the four suits to tell John’s tale.

3) Or perhaps you don’t want the responsibility of the story; you want to surrender to the lack of control you know you don’t have any way. So for you we’ve numbered the cards, 1-54, to make it easier for you to reach some kind of order. We’ve tried to oblige you, tried to find some arrangement that at least makes some sense to us. Pure illusion, of course, for out of the collection and recollection of moments we’ve learned that you can conclude anything about a life. But, still, we’re willing to humor you this conceit of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

4) You will notice that each card bears a different design, as if assembled from dozens of different decks. This is because uniformity is some comforting illusion, and not a natural order at all. We’ve provided numbers and names for suits, but honor if you will the differences in each moment. It will make your game last.

The Cards

A strange thing, John thought, that we appear to live our lives in a line, moment by moment, and yet our memory of its significance is all a shuffle, key moments taken from here and there, and not necessarily chronologically. Hard to say what card might find its way to the top—it might well be a matter of chance or temporary circumstance. Only a few people seemed to have the ability to order the deck the way they wanted. You could not change the actual cards themselves, the specific events; but to change how you felt about them? Perhaps all that was required was another shuffle, a new deal.

Before John’s uncle lost his life, he lost the names of things. His car became a comb, his bed a guitar. “I have to get into my guitar now,” he would say. “I am suddenly very tired.” The next morning he might tell anyone who would listen, “I had an interesting sing last night. Many windows happened. Where is my flowerbed? I miss it so much!” And then he would cry. His children were upset when he lost their names and referred to them as cups and spoons and rabbits. His daughter wanted to know if her father still loved her if he did not know her name. John worried the same would happen to him. Perhaps that was why John told her, “He tells me he loves you all the time, it’s just that as he nears the end of his life everything reminds him of you.”

It had become terribly important to John that he track down every lover and friend from his past. It was not simply a matter of tying up loose ends, but of establishing those ends in the first place. “Do you remember who I am?” he might begin a conversation, and wait anxiously for the answer. The comings and goings of people through one another’s lives, possibilities taken and opportunities denied—these were the things that obsessed him. If memory could not be verified and anchored, how could he be sure he’d lived the life he’d thought he had?

John read that one theory of the brain was that a single memory might be stored in multiple parts, much like a hologram. So parts of a brain could be reshuffled without destroying the integrity of that memory. Every card in the deck might vary slightly from every other card, while still containing the essentials of every other card. The variations might be extremely slight—differences in lighting, tone, or mood, but essential for all that. All together, the deck represented all the complex feelings and attitudes attached to a particular memory. But if you somehow managed to draw one card at a time, you could feel positive or hopeful or angry or depressed about a particular memory. Perhaps good mental health was simply knowing how to draw and play the best card.

When John was eleven years old, a far less auspicious age than ten, he was beaten up almost daily by a slightly older boy named Frankie Williams. It was the last great encounter of his life with personal violence, and although his exasperated mother called it “fighting,” there was no fight to it. It was a beating, pure and simple, ending only when sufficient blood had greased Frankie’s fist.

It was the blood that Frankie wanted to see, the only potion capable of releasing him from the violence he endured at home, and John unaccountably realized this almost immediately, and so allowed this to happen, even looked forward to it, because it was the strongest, most fantastic thing he could imagine, becoming, in fact, the most imaginative thing he was ever to do with his physical self.

Adolescence was pain, the first hint that disappointment lay beyond the brilliant fields of childhood. When he reached his teen years John developed an odd walk. The doctors didn’t know why—they suspected it was “emotional.” All he knew was that suddenly his body did not care for gravity, and the surfaces of the world seemed to demand some gait or stance other than his own. Even the furniture went wrong—beds and chairs seemed made for different spines. It was such a disappointment. He had come so close to normalcy only to see it slip away.

He eventually recovered from this condition, developing a kind of amnesia, the knowledge of his ailment briefly recovered here and there when the world went bad.

When he was twenty years old John stopped dating for more than three years. The precipitant was the last in a string of breakups, this with a young woman who said she could not stand that he could not tell her exactly why he loved her so much. “I just do,” he said. After the breakup he was driving his car down a darkened lane, glanced away for a second, then back again, to see the rear end of a truck suddenly filling his windshield. He jerked the wheel to the left, narrowly avoiding a terrible and no-doubt fatal collision. But part of him had continued straight on through the truck and out the other side. It was a mental accident, a psychic crash, and he felt sure it would happen again and again the rest of his life.

Odd how in any life one event might come to the top and color and transform all others: an unexpected death, a windfall, a chance meeting, an injury, a song sung with a particular kind of feeling. Accident and happenstance, but once it occurred you could never look at the total accumulation of your life in exactly the same way again.

After a night of bar hopping and late-night driving through anonymous housing developments, John parked on a side street to walk and puke and clear his head. After an hour of this he discovered he could not find his car. He wandered the dark streets searching, but after a time he became more fascinated by the subtle differences among the houses in the development, how each family created its individual look. A different porch light fixture, a differently colored door, lawn furniture in front of one, bright curtains in a window. “We’re all the same here, but different,” they seemed to declare. He never found his car, opting to take the bus home instead. He never returned to retrieve it.

A woman John was dating disappeared one night never to be seen again. Her family and friends were frantic—he helped with the search. Now and again he would return to where she had last been seen—a gray street with glass- and steel-fronted shops. Like an operating theater. A mail carrier, said to have been the last to see her, stated she had stood in front of an empty display window for an unusually long time. When John came here he thought of surgery, that she had been surgically removed.

He supposed the conventional wisdom was that one’s birth was the first event of a lifetime, the beginning of the story. But now John wasn’t so sure. What about the courtship, the circumstances of his parents’ first meeting, their attitudes and expectations? There was also the fact that he had not learned the details of his own birth—the blood, fractures, extended trauma—until he was in his thirties. So did that trauma affect him more before or after he learned the facts of it? There was also his conviction that, for some, birth marked the beginning of possibility, but for others, it marked the end.

A man in a crisp white suit followed John as he made his way from his house to the grocery store. On his way back he noticed the man in the white suit again, waiting on a bench, then following him again. John picked up the pace, and so did the man. John began to run, the man began to run. John dropped several apples out of his bag. The man picked them up and began eating them. John tripped over a curb and went sprawling, the man did several somersaults and a cartwheel. John picked himself up. The man bowed, smiled, and went on his way.

“Why?” John called.

But the man had become interested in someone else. John followed the man following this someone else. He had no idea what he was doing, but it filled the rest of his day.

The quality of John’s work had fallen off sharply in recent months. “I may have to let you go,” his boss told him.

“I’ll do better. I can do this,” John declared.

“No third chances,” the boss said.

“Of course not,” John replied. “I wouldn’t expect it.”

John stared at the papers on his desk. They made no sense to him. Why was he doing this? He got up and left the office, walked down the street, watched birds flying overhead. He watched people walking, some of them laughing, some of them holding hands. Why can’t I get paid for doing this? he asked.

He stayed away for two days. Of course they fired him. He checked the want ads every day, finally answering one.

The ad was for his old job. His interview went very well. His former boss said he thought John had initiative, not like that last fellow.

John got his old job back. He had a lot to do—the fellow who had formerly held this position had gotten woefully behind.

It always amazed John, the power and influence of popular song. The aesthetic qualities of the tunes were seemingly irrelevant—even the stupidest composition might remain in your ear and force the rhythm for the day. Many songs seemed to acquire an added life in commercials and movies, often years after their initial release. Despite a certain tendency toward anarchy, he secretly hoped the government kept a close eye on these composers of our daily soundtracks. A musician with a dark motivation could conceivably do harm, guiding the unaware listener through a spectrum of emotional changes in a relatively short period of time. For his part, he would make himself more aware of his semi-conscious foot tappings and hummings, and put a stop to them now.

When John separated from people he often wrote them a brief letter a week, until they moved or he grew tired of the occasional response. The fact that he lied in his letters may have been a factor. His lies consisted of narrations of events he was afraid might happen or hoped might turn out a different way.

Billie,

My mother is dead. I’m not sure how, but I’ll manage to get through this. Love, John.

An ungenerous observer might have said he secretly hated his mother as he killed her off frequently, in a variety of ways.

Jack,

The house burned down, and with it all my accumulations. More later, John.

John had long believed that if you wanted to get a feel for the consciousness of a place, the air of ideas, hopes, fears and traumas that gathered there, you need only read a few months’ worth of its daily newspaper, especially the small stories, the crimes, the domestic incidents. “Wife kills husband and dog” “Local funeral home defaced” “Methodist minister and three women missing.” A newspaper was like the diary of a city, the city revealing itself almost unawares. For a time he tried rewriting his own life in terms of local news headlines: “Man breaks up with wife, again” “Man changes jobs for the sixth time in a year” “Man prowls grocery store aisles seeking company.” The attempt quickly grew depressing. He felt like a criminal reading the newspaper for word of his own crimes, following the trail that must inevitably lead to his incarceration.

John once spent a slow weekend taking close-up photographs of the things of his life, then the following weekend distant shots of his house, his neighborhood, a long shot of his town from the hill on the outskirts. He papered the walls of his bedroom with the photos and felt no compulsion to leave that room for more than the few moments required to raid the refrigerator. Eventually he tore the photographs down, sold the house, and moved to a new town where he again began accumulating photographs.

Like many people, John supposed, he did not have a particularly discriminating sense of smell. Aromas blended like the ingredients of a porridge, so that he could not distinguish a lover from a dead dog, sugar from decay. This seemed a terrible disadvantage. He’d had a dream in college he was about to kiss his girlfriend—had thought her perfume to be unusually strong that evening—when he found himself kissing her dead lips, crying not in deep emotion but from the smell. The odor of fear, the secret smells of the body, the smell of the air before some great disturbance, all having meaning if you simply knew how to parse them.

Sometimes in his anxiety he would smell his own body seeking signs of illness, but it appeared to smell no better or no worse than any other.

Sometimes the air grew stale from the perfume of too many people, desperately trying too many things, seeking to put together a bouquet, succeeding only in stinking.

John was always surprised at how difficult it was to know his own mind about things. But how could he, when each part of him, each object in his everyday life, had its own point of view? What the stomach wants is not always what the intellect wants, and truly, the left hand does not always tell the right hand what it is doing. The eyes might dream of blues and yet it is reds and pinks that the fingertips crave. Your life story was a completely different narration depending on which piece of you was listened to. The healthy ones, he thought, were those who quickly achieved some sort of coordinated consensus. The unhealthy ones were constantly at war with themselves, and unable to choose a restaurant for dinner. The brain might be Catholic, the feet agnostic, the fingers Republican, and the ears Democrat. And, perhaps, that was the way it was supposed to be—listen to your voices, for they contain the world.

It came to John how randomly, and all-too-infrequently, silences occurred in his life. When he made himself too busy with the striving of the now, others’ silences seemed like that awkwardness that happens when the tape runs out or the conversation dries up. But now and again when he remembered that it pays to listen to oneself, he heard himself breathing in the silence, and the unsteady emotion that was that breathing, and the anticipation of new beginnings, and the anxiety that there would be no new beginnings, ever again.

During one such silence he realized he loved the woman who became his wife. During another he decided to change careers. All at random, all unplanned. Some days he waits for the silence, and yet another opportunity to breathe.

John had discovered One Hundred Twenty-five ways of hiding himself from others. Thirty-eight of these involved various ways of holding his nose. If he felt he had to say something critical to someone he adjusted his glasses. If he had to ask for something he scratched either his left or right eyebrow, depending on how badly he wanted it. If he said hello to someone he had to manage, somehow, to touch one eye. If he had to say goodbye it was both eyes, accompanied by a little dance of the feet. If someone he knew died he’d scratch away at a certain point on his neck all day until it was torn and bloodied. If he lost his hands, he realized, he would be quite unable to venture out in the world. Sometimes when he didn’t know what to do he simply closed his eyes. People could not tell, but there were tears beneath the lids. Sometimes a woman would hold both his hands, and he would close his eyes, and blink, blink again, open his eyes and blush. He liked it most when they grabbed his hands by surprise, when he least expected it. It was a thrill like no other, an ecstasy he could barely tolerate.

John had long resented the influence the news had on day-to-day life. His father had had the right idea—he never watched it on television, but listened to it on the radio, or read newspapers. Of course, if it was something that had gone on for days, and everybody talked about it, he might check in with it a few minutes one night just to see what was going on. That’s how the old man knew about World War II.

John knew all too well how learning the daily news could ruin a day or week, a lifetime, change the way you looked at the world and how you saw yourself in it, what you strived to be. Better to let the decline of civilization happen without you, better to let destruction occur without warning, better to let unhappiness be a surprise and not what happens to everybody, every day.

People lie about the strangest things. What they did last evening, the importance of their jobs, even what they had for lunch that day. So much of their own memory, in fact, has been filled with self-manufactured moments.

It is not because I want to deceive people, John thought, having caught himself in the fourth deception of the day, but because this isn’t the life I wish to live.

In the long night before his next day he lunges recklessly in pursuit of the events that will define him: things that never happened, but should have.

John wondered when food had become such a toy, a miniature landscape for dolls, a diorama concerning the landscapes of other countries. Meals at the best restaurants felt more like museum exhibits. Anyone who could afford a lunch might travel to a place where he was guaranteed misunderstanding. A fork, a knife, a spoon was a ticket out of the head and into a dream.

If he could have afforded it every day, he might have eaten the world. As it was he had a taste enough to staunch a craving through sleep and into another day.

John went through long periods unable to speak to anyone but his wife and son and a few co-workers. This was not unfriendliness. It was simply his way of reducing the burden of complications in the world. He had discovered other people to be infinitely distracting. They walked around in their clouds of moments, wearing their lives on their sleeves, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they were happy, if they had some tragic secret or unfulfilled dream, if they made their families feel good about themselves, or if they were a drag on the progress of western civilization.

And if he got too close or stared too long, he risked having their moments mingle with his own, and the messiness, the tears and the regrets and the recriminations, would be much too much to bear.

You think it’s going to be perfect. Both of you do. You laugh at the same things, appreciate the same movies, agree on the same two or three political issues you’re aware of. For the first time in your lives, everything fits.

That time of close fitting is woefully short, John thinks, but most things are. We are not made to fit, for any length of time, but those brief moments are precious to us. They give us good mileage.

John always loved his wife, even when things seemed to have been bad for years: for a moment taken there, an hour here, scattered minutes pulled out of time and held close when the lights dim.

John’s wife had had one affair that he knew of. He understood that it had been going on for some time, but he never let that knowledge reach him. Finally one evening he drank enough to drive down to her office. He saw nothing, yet knew everything.

He didn’t even know she owned the kinds of underwear she gathered together, cursing. He didn’t know she drank, and the smell of whisky on her was almost too much to bear. Her boss was unflappable, offering up a sheepish grin while pumping his arms daring John’s no-doubt feeble attack.

John did not attack, of course, and he and his wife never spoke of it again, not even when a month after the event she was quietly fired. The embarrassment made her bitter.

John’s own shame became a worm that spread itself through nerve and muscle until he could barely speak of anything, or move his arms above his shoulders, or recognize more than the most basic of colors other than the hues illustrating that one defeating moment.

One of the things John remembers most about parenting is weekend trips to the emergency room. Illnesses and mishaps occurred almost invariably on weekends, and there quickly grew an atmosphere of desperation about it. His son panicked so he and his wife panicked as well.

He saw his neighbors visit the emergency room with their young daughter regularly for months.

Then one day they returned without her. The couple was quiet and had few friends in the area, so he never found out what really happened during those crucial moments of their last trip. Eventually they had another child: dark-haired, beautiful, and they never let her out of their sight.

Every year or so there would be reports of a rabid dog on the edge of town. No one could specify the location or witnesses. A friend of a friend (for enemies keep their peace). Children were said to have been killed. No surprise there, John thought—children are always said to have been killed.

During these periods the whole town complains of a lack of sleep. Mothers and fathers scream over small tardies. Out on the lawns the dogs slink behind bushes and will not come out.

“This is the year of the monster,” is the oft-repeated whisper. “There is nothing we can do. It’s the worst we can imagine.”

There are always new babies the next spring as the town provides more food for its fear.

You just never know. Random horror can occur at any time. One bad day and your life is changed forever. A brake goes out, a cable slips, an air bubble travels to the brain. Instant and irrevocable adventure happens. Disaster happens. Death happens. Weather is everywhere. The weather of high winds. The weather of torrential rain. The weather of a shower of bullets from scattered drive-bys. The virus secret in the heart. The resentment secret in a triggerman’s brain. It does not matter how good or bad the deal, how just or unjust, whether you say your prayers or deny the meaning in everything. It will come.

If you could only accept that, you might plan your life accordingly.

All the moments collected, remembered, photographed, written down, passed from family member to family member still couldn’t explain the death of his child. All these happy faces and games completed, movies watched and parties attended, say nothing, nothing, about why the child decides one day to erase it all, to make sure no more moments come, except those of his parents’ grief, sorrow, and baffled wonder. Moment by moment John peruses the few photographs of his son’s life, each made all the more precious because of their scarcity: limited editions.

Small numbers of anything, he had discovered, will break the heart. Ask any grieving father in the final afternoons of his life.

The best moment of his life was the moment his son was born. It was more of a miracle than he could have imagined—one minute it is he and his wife, and the next minute they are a family of three. Almost immediately the baby showed signs of a distinct personality and all John could think was where did this child come from? It was as if fairies had spirited the child into their lives.

For every one of his son’s birthdays John tried to relive that miraculous moment. One of the worst aspects of his son’s death was the sense that he had been robbed of that special moment.

But as John grew older, he wondered if at the moment of his own death he would at last be able to recreate the miracle once again.

Beginning a year after his son’s death he saw a therapist for nine or ten months. This man was quiet and thoughtfully sad, and John thought to ask him what had ever happened to him to make him this way, but it would have meant crossing too many boundaries to do so.

Instead he went week after week and counted memories with the man: 1) the birth photograph, 2) the boy lying before the birthday record player, wagging a socked foot through the air in time with tunes too old for him, 3) the boy standing on his father’s feet as they danced as if some dream of princess and instructor.

John was thankful for the brevity of these appointments, reassured that there would be no time to reach the end of his pitifully small count.

The world was always in motion. This wasn’t easy to recognize, as one’s own unsteadiness tended to cancel out the roll and wave of the world. But John knew that if you were quiet enough, and held yourself steady, and tried to think of nothing, it made itself obvious to you: the up and down of streets and ground, how the houses moved in and out of focus, the hesitant outlines of other people’s faces, the way colors wandered out of lines.

Choosing one single moment to remain steady was an impossibility. You could not hold the world. At best, you might resist the dizziness resulting from all this shaking.

But these are things perhaps only the dead lie still enough to know.

John did not date for two years after his wife died. She’d been taken in a car accident, and John felt he no longer had enough pieces to play with. Then, gradually, he built up enough confidence to at least speak to one of the women at work, to share a confidence or two, to offer help, to trade phone numbers. On their first date she spent the entire evening talking about people he did not know and their various adventures with cars, pets, and home repairs. On their second date she wanted to have sex immediately, then acted as if they had been dating for years. He concluded from this experience that the norm now was a streamlined and truncated courtship—people lived their lives with too many missing cards. He would not date again for almost a year.

After she was gone John let things go. Dirty dishes gathered in the sink, half-eaten food waited on the table, garbage stood in the corner, all murmuring their condolences.

It was an attempt, he realized, to stay in the moment: if he kept the remnants of their last meal on the table perhaps the next—the cleaning her out of his life—might not occur.

But the flies came and the stench, for stalled time eventually rots, and cannot be kept.

After John’s wife died he often found himself looking at very young women. Other people might find this perverse but he himself did not think it was. He supposed it did not embarrass him because he and his wife had never had a daughter.

In any case, he wasn’t sure if there was anything sexual in his interest. His appeared to be more of an aesthetic concern. There was a freshness in them, a lack of cynicism, or so he thought. He was self-aware enough to know this was an idealistic view, but no matter. It made him feel better just to see all these beautiful young women about in the world.

For two years after his wife died John was but sporadically employed, taking odd jobs for odd money. Stocking shelves, inventory, yard work, but in the spring it was painting, which he enjoyed. So time consuming to make it right, but he always felt the world had been renewed with a reservoir of completely fresh moments.

Despite his advancing years he was always the new guy on these jobs. And, after an initial display of deference, his co-workers must have decided he knew nothing, and treated him like a kid.

That was how he wanted it. If he could still take advice from a 20-year-old the world might still be a well of possibility.

John had managed to avoid crime most of his life, until he was forty, when a series of break-ins left him without a TV or stereo. He replaced them immediately, left the new boxes out in his trash, a signal to the thief that he was ripe for the picking again.

This relationship lasted off and on for over a year, with the usual swings of attention and inattention, disappointment and anticipation that pester most relationships. Not a lover exactly, but John’s own private Santa Claus, a treat always left out to please and bring an unexpected chuckle.

When looking through old photo albums he’d accumulated during his lifetime, John was annoyed by how many photographs displayed people he did not recognize, places he was sure he’d never been, or even images that appeared to make no sense whatsoever. He knew it was possible to take an unrecognizable photograph—his photography skills had always been less than average—but what would possess him to display such photographs? Obviously they had had some meaning for him at some time, but that meaning was long gone.

Which was the most distressing thing, he supposed. How meaning could just slip away, seemingly at random, almost as fast as you might acquire it.

Perhaps his dead wife had taken the photos. But why hadn’t he noticed them before? He hadn’t been paying attention. He had lost his memory of these photos. Little by little he had lost meaning. He had lost his wife.

He’d discovered that when life grew dull he could experiment with being his opposite. A teetotaller, he became a heavy drinker. Quiet around women, he became the ultimate charmer. Passive and reticent, he became forceful and brave. He might maintain the transformation only for a few days, sometimes only for a few hours. But each time he managed to retain at least a ghost of the person he’d pretended to be. For certainly these were all people he could have been, given the right circumstances. Chance could make you dull and fearful, or interested and competent. He believed we should have more control than that over our personalities, but so often we did not. Luck of the draw. Sometimes late at night he could hear the faint sound of the world shuffling, reshuffling, riffling the deck.

John had a sister who would forever define the best and worst of the female sex for him. A year younger, she had always been more mature. When they were teenagers she let him watch her get dressed so that “He would know the order that a woman’s clothes went on.” It was another year before he fully understood what she had been talking about.

They drew apart in their middle years. He never forgave her for taking up smoking. She drank too much, dressed immodestly. The last time he saw her was after his wife died and following the end of her third marriage, and it shocked him how much she looked like their mother.

It was then he knew he could never marry again.

Only recently had John realized that people did not fully appreciate the importance of individual moments. A stumble over a stone, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman, and your life was changed forever. And what is that glint in the passing automobile’s bumper—the reflection of your long dead son, his heart stopped by a fall, now singing into the last sharp reflection of the day?

Most of his adult life John had worked in an office. Originally it had been the best he could get right out of college with a good education but no special skills. In the years that followed it was the thing he knew, and when a company had to plug someone into a position his was the plug that fit.

Primarily he moved papers around, office to office, company to client, company to government, and back again. He now has very few memories of that period of his work life.

For paper destroys time. That can be wonderful in a novel, but not so wonderful when you’re trying to recall, and store away, the best part of your day.

There were very few things John felt ashamed of. But all of them had to do with women. Things he’d done when he was much younger, of course. They’d tease him on and then they’d try to turn him off.

No one knew himself less than a young man in his early twenties. Unable to see past his own need. So many shameful incidents, so many explosions of bad behavior: he’d take them back if he could. He spent many a late night worrying over the sins of a younger self.

If his son had lived, he would have told him. He would have replayed every ill-behaved moment. And his boy, he would have had to listen.

John saw the man three times in as many months. A hard face, collar pulled up as high as it would go. Oily eyes. He never knew such eyes were possible, as if the tear ducts issued a yellow oil that glazed the eyes. The first time he saw him the man was watching some small boys play ball at the edge of the park, examining every move as if he were a major league scout. The second time John had brushed against him as he came out of the hardware store. Metallic things jangled under the coat—John checked his body for injury—he could have sworn he felt his skin tear. The third time the man had appeared on a distant corner, bent to pet a cat, and snapped its neck with a blur of motion. John had run to the corner but there was no sign of the man or the cat.

He searched the papers for months for news of missing children and found nothing. He always believed it was the wrong papers, or the wrong time.

John was hardly suicidal, but sometimes in the dentist’s chair he imagined himself succumbing to some medication mishap and discovered he didn’t feel badly about that. He felt such vulnerability leaning back with his mouth open, metal instruments protruding like utensils from a serving bowl. Halfway to death already, or so it seemed: the only thing between him and death now an allergy or a sensitivity or some accidental lethal combination. That’s what death frequently was, anyway, an accidentally lethal combination of moments. You could worry about it all your life or you could accept it, even welcome this universe of accidental possibility.

In fact, he was frequently so relaxed in the dentist’s chair he slept through the most uncomfortable procedures. The best moment was when he first closed his eyes, waiting for the drill.

They try so hard to be heard, John thinks: the ghosts, the ones who have passed from day to night to when and wherever. They need what we all need: contact, a body that will listen. But at least they know true contact is impossible. We still cling to our illusions.

Sometimes looking at the world is like gazing through an oil-smeared lens: their passage dirties the glass, preventing him from seeing anything with absolute clarity.

But that is their mission—that is all they have left since their lives went away. To obscure. To cloud. To hinder our view of the next day.

He’d reached the age when the body chooses to rebel. Arms had shortened themselves, and hands could not hold anything reliably except another hand.

More difficult still was the unusual shape his ears had taken, and the wart he noticed on the side of his nose one day, apparently which appeared overnight.

He supposed it might be a reaction to the longevity of modern man. The body knows it was never meant to last past forty, and does its damnedest to convince the mind.

One moment he is racing to catch the train, a movie, or a plane. The next moment he dodders like a film slipping its sprockets to display the same image again and again: an old man with a surprised look, shouting at his feet to move.

We drown in a sea of the dead, he thinks. Everywhere are the things they have made, touched, hated, loved. The oils from their bodies, the stench of their humanity, the electric charge of their passions, linger—he is sure of it—long after their physical bodies are gone. In the heavy air that chokes the world their vanished lives move.

We cannot avoid them. They brush against us, rub their lost memories into our flesh so often they become a part of us we cannot scrub, medicate, or cut out.

It is impossible, sometimes, to think, because the noise of what they had and what they miss fills our heads.

It is impossible to breathe without breathing them in.

The world, he thinks, is made not so much of atoms and electrons as of moments.

If he let himself be open to it John knew the world to be a work of art. The textures of it, the infinite shadings of color, the shapes that resonated in the oldest part of the brain. To move through the world was to live inside a work of art, down to the individual brushstrokes and pixels. Moments of time were merely dabs of color, spontaneous decisions, which altered the entire portrait.

All one had to do was pick up the brush and add one’s own little bit. A simple line or color fill would do, but so few made the effort.

At least once a month John would travel to an isolated rocky beach, to sit, to stand, to observe the world as one alone just as he imagined other humans to have done from the beginning of their times.

Over the years he never saw another person there. It wasn’t the friendliest sort of beach—no place to wade, no comfortable sand to lay a beach towel on. It was a place of sharp edges and hard surfaces, a reminder of the smallness of our bodies, the delicacy of our flesh. But for him there was a comfort in knowing he could have been anyone in time here, standing alone on the rocks, the massive presence of the world ready to tilt and crush him at any moment. Here he grieved endings, thankful that at least for the moment he could breathe the ocean air, feel the chill breeze against his too-exposed skin, and stand.

But in every deck there is at least one Joker, the card that’s the spoiler or the treat, depending on the game. Someone calls with a job offer or a profession of love, someone else delivers the news that what you care for most is gone and irretrievable. You try to keep this moment at the bottom of the deck, as far from you as possible, but still it shows up when you least expect it. Then again, what if it’s good news, and only your fear prevents you from holding it? There is no easy answer. There is only the anxiety, which could just as easily turn into elation or devastation.

Thoughts like these had kept John out of the game for years. But eventually there had to come a time when the winning and the losing mattered very little anymore. He just had to play the game. He just had to play.

There comes a time when there are more years behind you than ahead of you. There comes a time when it’s the last day on the job, the final European vacation, the last woman you’ll have in your bed. There comes a time when the caregiver becomes the one cared for. There comes a time when a twenty-year guarantee on the house’s new roof has no more meaning. There comes a time when the math seems irrelevant. There comes a time when you wonder if you have, in fact, reached that time, or if you’re just feeling old, like your father, and his father before him.