Onion Songs

TWELVE MINUTES OF DARKNESS

1.

Since only darkness inspired him, he was always waiting for the light to burn out. Although he might switch the light off by hand (and most evenings this is what he did), there was something special about spontaneous, accidental darkness, and to encourage its visitations he would shake the lamp for a few minutes each day so as to weaken its filament. Once enveloped in such darkness, however it might have been achieved, he would scrawl across the pages his stories of lost children, maddened fathers, and vengeful women, ignoring lines and sometimes even the edge of the page, so that after a few years the outer stretches of his desk were tangled and layered with the missing phrases and ends of lines and stories he had written long into his middle age, then long into his old age. So many such bits and pieces had been irretrievably lost that he never had enough for a complete submission to whatever pulp journal might be popular at the time, but that did not matter to him. What mattered was the very act of writing through the dark, and in this, his last minute of living, he thought about the journey of it, mounting a carriage in the middle of the night, an umbrella poised above his head to keep off the inky drops, the driver quiet and sullen, the smoky horse blind and swollen, the great narrow carriage wheels turning toward the end of his story.

2.

Every night in her dreams the moon fell. Some nights it descended slow as a kiss, but on others it plummeted rapid as failure. She could not decide which was the worse nightmare. She could not bear the absence of even this vague light, and once when her soon to be ex-husband refused to pay the utilities she spent a night huddled before the fireplace like some earlier sort of human, pondering the required ritual to insure the sun’s eventual emergence from the black cave of night. Tonight she woke from the dream screaming, for in this new variation her father had swallowed the moon whole, then turned and looked at her with that old smile of complete control. She counted one by one the minutes of darkness, waiting for the moon to appear from behind the clouds. Finally the minute arrived when she realized the moon had left her forever, had fallen into the ocean or into the midst of men who had torn it to pieces, each desiring the whole of it, so she painted her face silver then, and sat in an upstairs window, and turned her head gradually as her dreams went through phases.

3.

Insomniacs both hate and love the night, he thought, waiting for that minute when the darkness would begin to fray, the torn edges of it scraping across the brightly colored roofs of the town, the smoke of its passage turning into bright morning fog, the great breadth and bulk of it dwindling into black, rotted threads as it made its frantic escape back into the caves and sleeping heads from whence it came. Finally the minute did come, and he could almost hear the raw edges of the grass and trees screaming from the abrupt departure of darkness, and his eyes began to water from the stench of the corpses rising from their beds all over town, brushing their teeth, grabbing that last cup of coffee before climbing into their cars for work.

4.

For just a minute the coming night had taken on the dark purple of a bruise, and she wondered what it would be like if all darkness were to remain this color, the color of her cheeks the minute before she left him, the color, that first minute, of the baby she had borne without him. Each day after he beat her she would go out and try to find some member of his family, some mutual friend she could show this darkness to. They would nod, and smile, and offer her tea, gazing at her as if admiring some remarkable sunset.

5.

During that minute when he misjudged the curve of the road, just before he slammed into the damp wall of night, he recalled as a child how he had set out open jars on the lawn in order to capture the darkness. He’d supposed the dark was so heavy that he would have plenty of time to screw the lids on before it could slither out and escape. Each morning before dawn he would slide out of bed and run downstairs only to be disappointed by the bright transparency of the cool glass containers. He considered lining the insides of the jars with double-sided tape or glue to at least give the darkness pause, but such measures felt somehow unnatural to him. Finally one morning something dark and viscous and frighteningly opaque had settled into one of his traps and did not stir when he twisted on the lid. He kept it upstairs under his bed for years, through fire and floods, his parents’ deaths and his first bouts with a black depression. Now as his car exploded from the force of dark he wondered whatever had happened to it.

6.

The dark we begin with ends, but the ending dark goes on forever. As the baby fought its way out of her that’s the lesson she would have wanted to teach it, if she hadn’t been in so much pain, if there hadn’t been just this one initial minute of its birth, and there were suddenly so many things she wanted to tell it. We all think life is going to be different from the way it turns out, she would have said, if the meanings of things hadn’t become so blurred for her. How would she explain both the pleasure and the terror in the anticipation of each new day? Household chores will become almost a religion. There will be days when the fact that one thing follows another will comfort you. When the baby was free and held up to her, at first she could only see the initial night reflected in its eyes, the black shadow cast by the duty she owed this helpless creature. Sometimes the time becomes a sooty blur, all the inefficient hours and wasted days accumulating so that you start wondering what happened to it all. Sometimes even the minutes seem sad and filled with a dark anxiety. And yet still, the baby smiled at her. Just try to keep busy, sweetheart.

7.

The minute after she left him, he did not believe the house had ever been darker. Shadows were stiller, and therefore more intense. Even seconds later, dust and cobwebs seemed more evident, as if the house had been without tenant for months. She had taken with her all their son’s clothes and toys, leaving only one small mateless brown sock on the polished oak of the second floor landing, and a plastic wheel from some lopsided car which would now and forever run in circles. He knew his son would not mind, for to a child a small dark circle can be forever. Only an adult sees the breaks, the terrible possibilities in even one misspent minute. The refrigerator hummed to itself and the air conditioner chattered. He opened the refrigerator door but found nothing inside but a light. The light turned the linoleum a mournful shade of yellow. He went from cabinet to cabinet, finding only shadows and dust, searched the attic and closets for pictures, mementoes, stray scents of their life together. He found nothing. The terrible minute arrived when he realized she was never there in the first place, his son a figment, his life a brief tale and badly told. His abandoned house was in fact his own shabby head, where no one ever enters, no one ever leaves.

8.

She built a huge machine for manufacturing night. Her father was greatly displeased. “All that money I gave you for college, is this what it’s come to?” She shrugged helplessly, a gesture that always infuriated him. She’d always wanted to be a mad scientist, but the role models were all male. She had a girlfriend once who’d owned a butterfly net—that was the closest she had to a mentor. The girlfriend used to run down the street with the net, chasing bugs, leaves, bits of trash, anything airborne, hairpins and curlers falling out of the back of her head like paratroopers jumping out of a plane. So bugs and bits of trash went into the basic design of her machine, curlers and hairpins and her father’s painful frowns. When she turned on her machine one jet-black nugget representing a pure minute of unadulterated night dropped out of the chute and landed at her feet. Her machine never worked again. She puts the nugget under her pillow now, on evenings when her thoughts are too light for sleep, needing its density to bring her back down to earth.

9.

Every night the house breathed, and he listened for his son’s breathing in the house. His son was scared of the dark house. His son was scared of the dark house breathing. And sometimes late at night when the house breathed its fullest, he too wondered where it all might lead. Every night he counted the breaths from his resting son, timing inhalations and exhalations, estimating volume displacements, listening for rattles, for organs damaged or organs suffering a secret weakness. The son did not know of his father’s countings, for the son was far too busy tracking the thunderous breathing of the house. One and two and breathe. Three and four. Five and six. Finally the night came when the father kept on counting, counting a full dark minute, but there was no answering breath from the small form of his son. Nor from the quiet house itself, satisfied at last, and stealing away with all the air.

10.

It was her ignorance that made her what she was. Strangers she did not know directed everything she did. She was always imagining what they must think of her. Everywhere there were people with secrets—it had always been so—they knew things she did not, and they refused to tell her. She did not understand, and yet she loved what she did not understand. There were strangers she was meant to meet and love. There were strangers she kept missing, although she tried her best to be everywhere. People died and because she did not understand death she was afraid they must hate her. When she accidentally stepped on a bug she feared reprisals from its family. When friends went on vacations she thought that, instead of their announced destinations, they traveled to secret places known to everyone but her. When she tried to remember her childhood a dark place appeared in the middle of her head and spread. Minutes passed slowly inside this dark place. A woman in a red dress lived here, with long knives for fingernails. When she asked what time it was, the woman took her hand and pointed with one of the long nails at the watch that had been attached to her wrist all this time. But the watch face bore only a single, black digit. Removing the watch from her arm she discovered a hole in her skin leading down to the dark clockworks inside.

11.

Finally came that minute of true darkness when he realized that there was authentic evil in the world, something beyond the ordinary occurrence of bad things. Famine, murder, genocide were as elemental as gravity. The man down the street set fire to his son for the insurance money. The mother on the next block had drowned her own baby in the bathtub. Five minutes’ drive brought him to the park where a gang of young men raped a young coed. Under the bright lights at the corner, next to the modern convenience store, an old man was stabbed thirty-seven times. He had a powerful urge to label such things accident. It was a much more manageable label than divine mystery. He could not comprehend his own goodness, so how might he understand his own evil? Suddenly he experienced the urge to kill; he didn’t care who the victim might be. He wondered how it might feel. He wondered if it might make him feel better. He thought he might be capable of killing a young child if he could think of that child as a doll and if he knew that no one would ever find out. He stared for a minute into the dark mirror, and found there the beast.

12.

The man and the woman rested in their basement laboratory, volumes of data stacked to the ceiling: measurements of evening, experiments in night, anecdotal narratives concerning adventures in darkness. One man trapped it, she said. One woman mocked it, he said. One man breathed and ate it. One woman made it her lover. The darkness crouched and wrapped its arms around them. The darkness kissed them with cool lips and a probing, livid tongue. It’s elemental! she cried. It’s alive, he cooed. The darkness wormed its way down their throats and into hearts, lungs, bowels. But their lives seemed no different. Put water into more water, you still have water, they cried, and felt the darkness fill their bellies. The darkness crept through their thoughts, and there was no noticeable change.