Onion Songs

OUT LATE IN THE PARK

Once again, Clarence Senior has let the ball get away from him. The other men gasp when it rolls out of the shadowed circle formed by our beloved trees and into the brilliant sunlight baking the sand paths where the beautiful young people stroll. Jacob, one of our oldest, scowls bitterly. I raise an eyebrow in warning—or I believe I do. Facial control has been more difficult these past few months. Often I’m not sure whether my thin line of mouth is smiling or twisted into some shape less agreeable.

As has been typical for him, Jacob ignores me. “He’ll spoil it!” he growls through a swallow of phlegm. “He’ll spoil it for all of us!”

I raise my hand to stop him, but too late because I can feel the stirrings of the angled things that dwell at the edges of the sun-lit path. It’s terrible, worrying that every spat of anger might cause your heart to seize, and then the whole of your body comes tumbling down and there’s no more light in you than a dark stone at the bottom of a pond. Finally Jacob recognizes my warning and stops, takes a deep, savored breath as if it’s to be his last one. Which it might be, of course. In this park of the world, suddenness is the business of the day.

Clarence Senior, as usual, appears to be somewhat lacking in orientation. He trots playfully after the volleyball. I envy the looseness of his stride, something my own arthritis denies me. But I am pleased that one of our own can still play with such reckless abandon.

“He’ll get hit by a car!” George cries nonsensically. “We’ll all get hit by cars!” This has been George’s signature warning since he first started coming to the park. I assume his family has some tragic history related to the automobile, but of course I do not inquire. Men of our age trust each other well enough not to ask. We all assume tragedy and imagine disaster. Perhaps this makes us less sympathetic—certainly it makes us impatient. And burying the curiosity of our youth has become a measure of the respect we have for one another.

Although, if truth be told, I would say we respect nothing more than the dark, and the half-remembered things that move there.

Now the others are yelling. Of course I have seen this phenomenon before—all of us are quick to panic. It is something that happens to the nerves, I suppose, as the nervous system constantly monitors to determine if the flesh is still alive. Men my age understand the process. There is nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night to discover that a favorite extremity has died.

“Get him back!” Joseph sobs. He is a weepy thing, old Joseph, more so than the rest of us, even though as a group we are a weepy bunch indeed. “Get him back!” Again, with that disturbing flail of movement-limited arms. Some sort of stroke, I believe. Strokes are as common among our kind as flies on newly harvested meat.

“Just stop it! Stop it!” I complain, unable to bear their old guy whining a second longer. “Can’t you just let him play? We have plenty of extra balls—grab a couple and toss them around! Nothing’s going to happen to him, or any one of us because of him!”

I do not believe any of this, of course, but it gets their minds off Clarence. He retrieves the ball from a beautiful young woman who has been watching us from the edge of one of those sunny paths. I stare at her for some time, even after Clarence Senior has jogged happily back into our little circle. The other men quickly close around him in case he’s been followed.

The young woman is unusual in that she has noticed us. We are not used to being noticed at all, especially by beautiful young women. I wonder if those of us with daughters—Jacob, Samuel, perhaps one or two others—feel the same confused anticipation when a young woman looks at them. I wonder if they suffer from the same temporal dislocation of desire the rest of us experience.

She looks quite familiar. But then all the young women look familiar to me. By the time a man reaches my age he has stockpiled the blueprints of a thousand young women in the caves of his memory, ready for somber perusal during the long, lonely hours before dawn.

The young woman’s eyes lock with mine and she slips in a quick smile. My heart speeds as a long stem of black insect leg darts from one corner of her mouth and scratches futilely at her chin before her dark red tongue can usher the leg back inside her mouth.

I look away as if with mere embarrassment, as if some part of her garment had slipped away and revealed more than might be decent. When I look back she is gone, but the ground where she stood appears blackened and torn.

Joseph injures himself again. His eyes are always filling with tears and then he can’t see more than a few inches in front of him. He runs into things and then he falls down hard. Clarence Senior is always trying to help by convincing him that he isn’t really hurt. “See, no blood!” Clarence Senior shouts with no small measure of delirium. He says this every time, even when there’s blood gushing from the wound. Everything is A-OK in Clarence Senior’s world, even though Clarence Junior hates him, even though he has the worst nightmares of us all.

“Throw me the ball! Me me me!” George cries, his belly moving independently of his leap. Benjamin, the retired carpenter—perhaps the best coordinated of us all—throws the ball and George drops it. No one laughs or complains—it has always been George’s job to drop the ball. He staggers back and forth as he attempts to pick it up, frustrated to tears because his knees will not bend properly. If someday he were to magically acquire competence there would be considerable tension generated in the group, for only by comparison do the rest of us remain competent.

Benjamin shuffles after the ball like some huge, shaggy toy run by remote control. No one knows very much about Benjamin—he started playing with us one day as if he’d always been here. He has never spoken. I get the impression that he simply has nothing to say and will not pretend. A far better way of being in the world, I think. The rest of us speak constantly, fueled more by anxiety than idea.

We toss the ball and drop the ball, we run around things called bases, worshipping at each one briefly before being urged on by the impatient cries of our companions. The bases are old schoolbooks, interestingly shaped stones, and stakes ripped from the hard hearts of trees and driven almost flush into the ground. Who among us would have the power to execute such a pounding? It has always been here, driven ages ago by some comic book hero or other. It would be nice to linger, but our fear is that to stop even briefly, to stop at all, would be to invite the fragments of black into our mouths, into our ears and eyes and anuses, until all motion is stopped forever.

So this tired old group of us, we play and we play and we play, pretending to have fun until, like toddlers run amuck, we collapse into the arms of our mothers at the end of the day.

But, of course, our mothers are not there at the end of the day. Most of us cannot even remember how our mothers died, or how they’ve otherwise left us. But we think about our mothers often, during these last, long days of play in the park, for we are still the melancholy boys we always were, late for dinner and crying over the day’s small, misplaced treasures.

Late in the afternoon Samuel arrives from his job by bright yellow taxi, his favorite mode of transportation. He is the only one of us to continue in a state of gainful employment. He sits down on the graffiti bench (“Peggy loves Frank, but what about God?” “Sing and play all day, but whatever you do don’t go past the path at night.”) for his daily cry, the rest of us gathering around him for our daily pretense of comfort. “They act like I’m stupid!” he complains. “Like I’m too old to learn anything new!”

We all pat his back and his knee, more fiercely now, agreeing vigorously although we really have no idea what we’re agreeing to. We have never been to Samuel’s work and most of us haven’t worked a regular job in years. Still, we know how it can be out there. Any man knows, past a certain age. The world is something new every day, something you’ve never seen before, something you feel hopeless to understand. The colors of the world shift their spectrum with each rising of the sun. The mouths of the world mutate the words of the world even as they are formed. “Damn bosses… damn wireless whatevers… damn computers…” We all nod our understanding. Damn whatevers, indeed.

Then there is Willy, standing in his corner of the field waiting for the ball to come to him. He would wait all day if we let him, and more often than not we do, for we enjoy observing his profound patience.

“It’s not patience,” Jacob declares. “He’s just an idiot.”

If there is truth in what Jacob says we do not want to know about it. Willy does not appear to suffer the fears that bother the rest of us. Willy has no need for hand-holding. Willy does not appear to need at all. Willy simply stands, and waits, watching for whatever comes next, a ball, or a butterfly, or fragments broken off the shadows and stealing across the lawns.

We try to prevent the ball from coming Willy’s way. He would not know what to do with it. He is a watcher, you see.

“He has about a thimbleful of brain,” is the way Jacob so delicately puts it. Jacob thinks it is shameful the way I let Willy groom himself: unshaven, hair long and stringy, greasy. Jacob has even brought shampoos and razors to the park from time to time, “To take care of poor Willy. Shameful the way we’ve let him go like that.” As if Willy were an unkempt yard or a dog in need of a trim.

But I always wave Jacob away. Willy is not exactly happy, but he is stable the way he is, and some things should not be tampered with.

Again I see the pretty young woman at the edge of our area, watching. I cannot keep my eyes off her. The beauty of young women is something I truly miss, being able to touch them, to admire them openly. Not that there is no beauty in older women, or that the feelings I’m expressing are primarily sexual. But so much is recalled when I see the newness in them, the untutored look as their eyes open up to the world.

A sudden breeze lifts her hair revealing a sheen of brittle membranes close to the skull. Small nodules like eggs nestle around her ears and above her forehead. Tiny shapes pulse and jerk in the sacs. As one begins to erupt into a flowering of dark, segmented parts, the breeze mercifully drops her hair back over the assemblage.

We are all supposed to be having fun here. Even though sometimes we try a little too hard, laugh a little too hard for comfort. But what are you going to do? Far better than the alternative. That is what everyone says. That is what all the old people say.

At five o’clock we line up and the designated adult checks the pockets of the others. We stand at lazy attention with our hands stretching our pockets inside out and sideways so they resemble a pair of large ears. Clarence Senior always requires some encouragement, Willy has to have his pockets turned inside out for him, and nine times out of ten George will be hiding something, so we have to watch him especially carefully to make sure he does not do anything that is going to get him into trouble. More often than not I am the designated adult, a fact that I often resent and can be quite bitter about. In those instances I always have Jacob check my pockets—I never keep anything in there besides some hard candy for the others.

By eight o’clock we are well into drowsy, although most of us will fight sleep with our last breath. We sit up on our bedding and talk about the day’s games and share memories of our mothers, now and then twisting our heads around to make sure that a particular piece of night remains respectfully in its place.

Jacob and I are always the last to fall asleep. Sometimes I think it is because we feel a certain paternal responsibility for the others. Sometimes I think it is because we think our alertness will protect us from the inevitable.

In the middle of the night they come for Willy. I am somewhat comforted that he shows no signs of surprise. Surely, this is what he has always been waiting for. Tonight they come as eight or nine squirrels and a large black bird with a broken neck. The bird bothers me most: its head flops and stretches painfully on the narrow strand of neck flesh as it still manages to grab a bit of Willy’s pants in its beak and pull with the squirrels to drag Willy’s body off into the night. Now and again one of the squirrels will let go and turn its head, smiling at me so broadly I can see that all its teeth are missing.

Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming. But most, I think, are punished.

In a few days they will come to take another of us. Rabbits, perhaps, or snakes, or shiny emerald-green beetles, or an old dog that so resembles one from our childhood we will be convinced it is the very same one. Soon only Jacob or I will be left.

But that is the worst kind of wish-fulfilment. How do I know I will be a survivor? At some things the imagination fails.

I know I should not whine about it. It is a natural process that happens to everyone. You can wait for it or you can play with it, you can roll your ball at it or you can run headlong into the cars that seem to be everywhere. But what you cannot do is stop it from coming.

Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable. Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come.