Onion Songs

AN ENDING

There is nothing more he can say. Perhaps he’s told too much already. His daughter used to complain he had an answer for everything, and now he knows she felt bad about saying that for some time, and now he answers to no one, no matter how much they ask. But there is nothing more he can say about that.

Now that he cannot speak, his thoughts are loose in time. No matter how much she asks, he thinks, as if she could ask, as if she were not gone. Just like him, unable to bear witness to the world. Just like him. So does this mean he, too, is dead?

Of course not. Of course not. Not so long as the neurons fire, illuminating the brain, filling the sky with light. Broadcasting the voices.

The songs they sing are measured in broken air and shattered bone. The power of them lies in the stray wind in the high mountains felt and heard by no one. When they cry the earth cries, and the earth cries often. The darkness that is their subject knows no bounds real or imaginary, rubbing at us all.

But she was correct just the same. Once upon a time he did think he had the answers for everything. Now he understands how little he knew. But he cannot tell her.

And if he could speak, what might he say? What would he talk to her about? What message would he bring to the dead to show he understood even a bit of their plight?

He might say no. He might say yes. He might yadda yadda yadda.

He might say there is a new flower growing in the window box. A yellow tulip, his wife’s favorite. He might tell his wife he still loves her. He might tell her that he loved her and he loves her and he always will. What better thing might a person say?

The strangest thing about his immobility, he thinks, is how much he moves inside it. His chest rises and falls, ever so slightly, not much more palpable than his thoughts, but still discernable. Sweat traces his face like the fingertips of blind angels. Fluids and gasses move deep inside him, down in the hidden chambers of the self.

And his eyes move, even though he is rarely aware of it. He sees, but what he sees could be the dream he’s having, he has no way of telling. He has no way of telling anyone. His eyes might even be cameras, replacements for the eyes he used to have. Click and click again. Can they do such things? They can do so many things he does not understand. He does not understand.

And the world moves, changes and spins because of something he has done. He is done. The world changes colors and brings forth strange and wonderful creatures who dance and lick and scream, and he knows he is the cause, but he does not know how.

In the other bed his wife stares at him. She may have died but he cannot be sure. Sometimes he thinks a look can last longer than a life. She has stared at him so intently for a very long time. She does not miss a thing. He understands that for a very long time she stared at him with a love beyond anything he had ever experienced before, beyond anything he might imagine, but he suspects the intention of that gray-eyed gaze has changed over the time of their imprisonment to become of another kind of focus and intensity, but he was never quite sure what words might best describe this new state. In his more fanciful speculations, in fact, he imagined that his wife invented a brand new emotion: one that goes beyond love, one that factors the despair of knowing, the knowledge that comes from living with death so close at hand.

He prefers to look not into those hazy gray eyes but at her hairline, at that place where the hair parts above the middle of her forehead, where the combined scents of shampoo and brain heat so often gather, where she smells clean and vital, where her smell is like a taste of the entire of her, where he would live forever if he could.

The phone rings again, a physical tearing of the sour air in the bedroom. His daughter’s answering machine picks it up. A loud click followed by another loud click, as if something is snapping. As if the bones of this sorry animal, this answering animal, are breaking, and soon it will answer no more, its sad carcass draped over the nightstand.

Once upon a time it did answer, and so efficiently recorded the details of their daughter’s death, which he would not believe at first, because she only went out for some milk, she promised them both (although neither of them could answer) that she’d be right back, and who could die in such a way, on such a small errand?

The voice on the machine had been so crisp, so professionally sympathetic as it delivered the terrible news, who could not believe it?

Now the male voice on the machine asks, “Are you there? Pick up. Pick up. Are you there?” with an urgency that surprises him. Some boyfriend he does not know about? Was that where she was really going when she left here? Did she tell him about her parents, so that maybe he’ll think to call the police and send them to her house?

There’s always a chance. He used to tell her, from the time she was a little girl, there’s always a chance, sweetheart.

“Are you there?” Even if he could answer, he does not know what he could say.

His daughter left on her little errand eight days ago. He knows because of the calendar on the wall just above his daughter’s desk. He can barely see it, tucked around the corner there, but it is still clear enough. Kittens above the black, dated squares. He cursed her sweet name for her arrogance, so convinced with her nursing degree that she could take care of them both. No nursing home, no nursing home, Dad. Damn her carelessness. And her driving has always lacked caution, no matter how much he tries to teach her. She thought she knew. She thought she knew. Her father’s daughter, she took after him.

No one knows he is here. And no one knows her mother is here. Now the eighth day is passing, slipping like ooze from broken hydraulics, dripping off the edge of the table and out of sight.

And damn her for being dead. She’s broken his heart. And now nothing can be right. There is nothing he can say. Even when there is so much to say.

His wife’s arm hangs limp off the side of the bed. She’s been strapped down, but in that last seizure the cloth tears, the arm flopping free, then limp. He’d wanted to be closer then, but all that moved were his desperate tears.

Eight days and some strong smells have faded, some gradually making their presence known. The smell the body makes as fluids give way. The smell of the orange on the sunny table. The stench as the body dies incrementally. The reek of time, wasted and misused, the days thrown away. The foulness of regret, accumulated until the very end.

His wife was always fussy about matters of toiletry. She had no more odor than a glossy magazine ad. She cared for no variety of incense or perfume, and found even cooking odors somehow rude. She could not be said even to smell fresh. She was cured. She was sealed. She was statuary. Her nose was an anchor for her eyes and nothing more.

Illness, as he would have told her had she just asked, brings indignity. He was the first to fall, robbed of speech and mobility by a blood clot, and he greatly admired the way she put aside her prejudices in order to take care of him. Even changing him when the aide was off duty. She didn’t complain, not even involuntarily. She simply did what needed to be done for someone she loved. Could he have done the same for her? He wasn’t so sure. At least not with such care, such equanimity.

She’d been bent over him, rearranging his pillow, making it so that it fit perfectly beneath his ears, and he was feeling absurdly grateful, because a crease in the case had been torturing him for hours. Then he detected an ever so faint aroma of urine, and he stared at her in surprise as her expression changed, as if some startling idea suddenly entered her consciousness, and almost immediately he knew it was a stroke—she’d been assaulted by the fairies, and she fell away from him and he couldn’t even shout his outrage at the terrible thing. The anger leaked out of him a bit at a time over the following hours, weeks, and months.

What is left of the woman he loved in the nearby bed he cannot know. There is so much he cannot know.

He does not know when the ringing in his ears first began. It seems a recent event but he cannot be sure. He suspects it’s the song the brain sings when it dies but of course there is no way for him to know if this is true. Sometimes it is loud and sometimes it is quite soft. Sometimes it is all he can do not to weep when he hears it.

One of the things his wife and he enjoyed most was listening to music together. Now those days are gone, he thinks, or are they? Perhaps even now they are listening to the same tune.

Suddenly there is quiet as if a door has been closed. This is the way. This is the way. When the view becomes unbearable, then shut the door.

He closes his eyes against her death and a loud voice grows, singing from somewhere far below him. It is his own voice he hears, even though his lips do not move.

He has heard, of course, that as the brain dies neurons fire indiscriminately, and what the mind perceives in such circumstances is not to be trusted, is fanciful in its last, desperate attempts to complete a train of notions, and all that is witnessed under these conditions is a product of an electrified imagination.

So what, he thinks. When you are reduced to brain, and the various senses that are accessories to the brain, what more could there be, and certainly, what could be more important than that first trip into insubstantiality where only the imagination can report back, strapped to a shuddering, unhesitant engine of unreason?

So he isn’t alarmed to see the great goat stroll through the door, like some new owner surveying the premises purchased for a hard price. The goat gazes at him only briefly, a polite but dismissive look at an eager would-be lover found wanting.

Instead the goat lingers at his wife’s side and he is suddenly overcome not only by a bare, numbing grief for her but also by the very reek of her, suddenly more powerful than ever before, like a focused sample of every undrained outhouse and waste pool, every foul abattoir avoided by so-called decent, civilized people. He is terrified, tries to turn away and when he knows the attempt useless, closes his eyes tight as his love for her.

But the goat’s huge laughter tears his eyelids open and he has to look at the thing, prancing and dancing over his wife’s disastrous bed, now her grave. The goat rises on its hind legs and pounds the ceiling with its split hooves, shaking down plaster and lath, wiring and insulation batts, jangling pipes and a steady and gorgeous fall of fine white powder, continuing long after the goat has settled back onto its haunches, long snout pushed heavenward, eyes closed in pleasure over the bath it is receiving.

He surprises himself thinking how oddly beautiful it all seems, the abstract patterns of debris framing the now snow-white animal fur, the blissful yard-long smile spread around the goat’s huge head.

Then quickly the goat mounts his dead wife’s bed, licks the disaster of her with its long red tongue, and lowers itself, and lowers itself, until it can begin its thrusts effectively, a great back and forth of ripping and damage as it enters his wife’s sad remnants of flesh, forcing a terrible gasping of air out of her mouth in a hideous parody of orgasm.

After the great goat has done whatever it can, it rises and walks off the bed, dragging remnants of the woman he loved most of his life still stuck to fur, to belly, to genitalia, most of it disintegrating as the goat strides to the door and out, her skin and hair shattering against the floor like bits of frozen twig and leaf.

A darkness begins to seep from scattered corners of the bedroom. It breaks into wings and the things that wear wings, insects and disasters spat out and eager to escape. Their flight soon fills the room, until he can see nothing else. When their edges fly too close he can feel his skin tearing, but not enough, sweet lord, to bring him release.

In the middle of the world a huge wind begins to turn. In the distance his life shimmers like a beautiful, barely noticed thing, and as he watches the dark shapes rush to surround it: the almost loves and the never agains, their narrow heads brightly plumed with the naive prayers of children.

So he has his release, his ending, his final day. And he’s ashamed to say he’s grateful not to have suffered what his wife had to suffer. He’s grateful to have had some peace at the end, deserved or not it matters little. He’s grateful.

What more is there to say at the end, even when he can say nothing? He said all he knew to say a long time ago. Some things can only be said in the language of angels.

Dad? Dad, are you awake? Did you sleep well? Time to get up now. Time for dinner.

He is awake, his eyes wide open, but only now beginning to see. He is so absurdly grateful he begins to weep. No ending here after all. He wasn’t ready, he wasn’t ready. And somehow the angels knew.

So kind of his daughter to wake him. She’s always been a good daughter, a wonderful daughter in fact, and he is grateful. So many fathers have not been as fortunate.

So many fathers have children who leave them, children who stay away even when they are home, children who pretend they have no fathers or mothers, children who have this other life, waiting for their fathers to die.

Dinner, Daddy. Don’t let it get cold.

He gazes around the bedroom and again it amazes him how clean she keeps it, how everything seems in its perfect place, how it had no perfect place until she put it there. The bed he lies on so carefully made, barely disturbed even as he eases from between its crisp white sheets. His wife’s bed, equally well made and laden with roses to honor her memory. When did she die? He’s not quite sure, because her passing was so peaceful—their daughter has taken such good care of them both he knows she passed with a minimum of fuss and pain.

He had so many fears about this time—how foolish it had been to worry and obsess about what must come to us all. How much better to ease into it without struggle, to see it as simply another stage, no better or worse than any other, just another adventure at the end of your days.

Daddy, please. I don’t want you to starve.

Eating always made him feel better, so why not do what made you feel better? Store enough up to last you through the lean times, was the way his father had always put it. The world had a way of eating at you, so what better way to survive than to have more of you against the world’s angry appetite.

“Smells good, sweetheart. Smells wonderful!” He almost laughs, because he’s so surprised to hear the sound of his own voice. It seems forever since he’s heard the sound of his own voice. But of course it was only this morning, or perhaps last night, certainly no further away than yesterday afternoon. He and his daughter speak every day, after all: long, serious talks about politics and morals and her many dreams. She’s always had so much ambition. She takes after him. She takes after him.

Even to the point of sounding like him: his voice, her voice, indistinguishable.

He’s just had so many bad dreams of late in which he wasn’t able to speak to her, he wasn’t allowed to speak to her, and he’d been so hungry for conversation. He is so hungry.

Dad, I’m not telling you again! Dinner!

He’s always been late for dinner. He’ll get so busy sometimes, there is always so much to do, and a person of ambition can go on and on without replenishment sometimes, building on what he has already done, using the same words, the same thoughts again and again, reusing the dreams he’s dreamed a thousand times before.

That line of thinking is making him vaguely uncomfortable. Better to get on to dinner, otherwise he might hurt her feelings. Nothing wrong here. Nothing is wrong.

She’s kept the kitchen as spotless as the rest of the house. Gleaming countertops, crystalline glass, shiny silver of the utensils. The finest linen. But where’s the food? He doesn’t see any food.

Not that he needs to eat, however hungry he may feel. He’s gotten so fat of late, he could lie in bed a year or more and live off all that he contains.

Better not to think of that. Better to keep a positive attitude. He has so many bad dreams. He has so many awful things in his head.

“Sweetheart,” he says. “Sweetheart. I don’t see the food.”

Look down, Daddy, she says from the other side of the wall.

He looks down at his plate but there is nothing. There is nothing to eat. “There’s nothing here, sweetheart.”

Don’t be so helpless, Daddy. Make yourself a meal. Make yourself a meal.

He can feel the sheets gathered around his head. He can hear his wife’s body torn asunder and carried out of the world. He can smell the reek and decay of everything he has ever loved. He tries to cover his ears against the screams of this world but he cannot move. He cannot move.

Make yourself a meal, her voice says with finality.

He gazes down at his ponderous belly and fumbles at all the utensils suddenly spilling off the edge of the table: all the sharp edges, all the knives of the world.

The telephone rings. The answering machine picks it up. “Are you there?” the male voice asks. “Pick up. Pick up.”

“I’m not here!” he says. “I’m not here!”

Make yourself a meal, she says, and, grabbing the sharpest knife, he does.