Onion Songs

DOODLES

“Her drawings know more about the world than she does.”

This thing his ex-wife used to say about their daughter eventually led him to take his seemingly compulsive, absent-minded doodles more seriously. He did them all the time: at work—on the papers due on his boss’s desk by the end of the afternoon, at dinner—on napkins, tablecloths, even credit card slips, even in his sleep, on the graying walls of his dreams. A nervous habit, or an addiction—he simply could not stop himself.

He had to have the pen firmly in his hand, and the pen had to be moving.

This habit underlined, circled, boxed, and generally ornamented his days. If he forced himself not to doodle, the days flowed on without form or direction.

“Her drawings are smart drawings.” He had no idea what this really meant, but he agreed completely.

His daughter had drawn pictures of houses mostly: huge, elaborate structures heavy with character. But however wonderful her depictions, she always seemed more careless in her execution than most children. Sometimes she didn’t even look down at the page. She just drew, sight unseen. She drew her world, and the houses that were in it, and the creatures who lived in those houses. This ceremony of drawing that she performed every day centered her, and seemed to make her happy.

But he scribbled and doodled, late into the night sometimes, and found no peace in it. He wondered if it was because of his age, or because of a long-standing pessimism about all forms of self-help. Whatever the reason, for him it was like worrying an infected wound. And yet he could not stop himself.

“Sometimes there’s magic in doing the same thing again and again.”

A series of vertical lines running up and down the page. Walls and borders that were not to be crossed. Some weeks he built these walls before and after everything he wrote: letters, reports, grocery lists. He’d write his name and construct the walls that were intended to hold it in, keep it from expanding so much that it became unrecognizable. Ego expansion could be a problem—it left one open to attack. A few individual walls scattered here and there emulated grass, or the spikes at the bottom of a pit to trap uninvited guests.

Sometimes it was a comfort to go over these vertical lines again and again to make them thicker. The act made his fortifications stronger.

Some days he filled the page with his walls, his borders, his spikes. After hours his wrist would begin to ache, but there was still relief in the repetition.

“You repeat the same old patterns—it’s as if you can’t help yourself.”

Some mornings he would get stuck on a pattern, find himself compelled to repeat it over and over and over again until he broke for lunch. Circles, triangles, squares, the same patterns made by the same muscular movements repeated endlessly. Then after lunch, the pattern broken, variety would suddenly be available to him again. And yet sometimes the pattern had been so worn in to the muscles of his arm, wrist, hand, fingers, that the old pattern would simply reassert itself (phantom circles appearing within a complex network of lines, for example), and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“There are some things you just have to do, no matter how harmful. It’s as if you can’t help yourself.”

Daggers and other blades were a compulsion at times. As were primitive depictions of murder. They arrived at the most inopportune times: once, after his divorce, he was having a romantic dinner with a beautiful young woman, a young woman he someday wished to marry, when she suddenly stopped speaking, stopped smiling, and glared at him with a peculiar expression on her face. He looked down at his place setting then, discovering that he had taken the red ink pen from his vest pocket and used it to sketch the particularly grisly stabbing death of the young woman on his cream-colored linen napkin.

Some days it felt as if his doodles wanted him all to themselves.

“It made no sense. But it was compelling, irresistible, all the same.”

He couldn’t make heads or tails of some of his more unconscious scribblings. They resembled the webs of hallucinating spiders, he thought, or a cheaply made house after an explosion had leveled it. After years, however, he came to recognize these works as maps. All he had to do was find the starting point, and his current position relative to it.

“You feel if you do it often enough, the very structures of your brain will be altered.”

Hours of drawing lines as precisely as possible would sometimes be an aid to linear thinking. Too many nested circles brought a sensation of great fullness, and enormous headaches. Ten thousand sharp edges on a page might lead to a ripping and tearing, and then a brain hemorrhage would begin.

“The more I want not to feel these things, the more I feel them.”

Some days he would try not to draw certain things. The effort proved to be self-defeating, of course. The more he thought about the image, the stronger the compulsion to bring it to light, capture it in pencil on a napkin, pen on a flap of cereal box. Try not drawing a circle. Try not drawing a square. Try not drawing a small child trapped in a burning window, the window fragmented, blotted out by a furious, pen-wielding hand.

“My father used to say, ‘Find the one thing you do well, and do it often.’”

But this was not what his father had imagined, of that he was sure. If he could be paid for his doodles, of course, he would be quite the wealthy man. But who paid for obsession? Obsession was mostly a matter of self-gratification, a private thing, and powerful in that it belonged to the individual alone. He could take his doodles anywhere, whatever his “regular” job might be. There was power in that.

Drawings of strong, squarish hands that covered page after page after page. Sometimes without thinking he would draw these hands on a business report, and have to do the report all over again before an important presentation.

But no one ever found out. His bosses praised him for his neatness, his calm, his organizational abilities.

“You can live where you dream.”

The argument in his head, the ongoing argument with his ex-wife, continued as obsessively as his doodling.

Many of his doodles resembled floor plans of unknown structures rendered in a multitude of dimensions and perspectives unavailable to his normal, everyday senses.

They appeared to vibrate on the page—he imagined he could hear the music they made. In dreams, he did hear, and the music helped him fall asleep. Never mind that he had to be asleep already to be dreaming these songs—the songs led him off into deeper sleeping.

In daydreams he would speculate whether it was possible to visit such structures, such estranged, vibratory spaces. He had his doubts—what caused their vibrations would tear a normal, three-dimensional human body apart.

So why did his desire to visit such places still persist? Because he knew he would feel at home there, even if the peculiar geometries destroyed him. What was architecture but an endless and futile quest to recreate the “home” that existed only in the dream of your body, the dream of your cells? Doubly futile since the architecture can only create the home from within his body—and the client who must dwell there is immediately trapped within the architect’s own body. Primitive peoples had it best—they were their own architects. At least their mistakes in execution in attempting “home” were in service of their own dream, however distorted.

He started renting cheap apartments and trashed-out homes he could redo to his heart’s content, destroying if need be. Expensive furnishings were unnecessary—since the attempt at creating home was destined to failure anyway, cardboard and cheap lumber, even paper mache would do. It was the shape of the space that mattered, the way it fitted around his sleeping form. He made himself cocoons and nests and narrow coffins and sacks that hung from the uterine plaster walls. Yet home always remained out of reach, the terror of its vibrations singing across the darkness to him, tearing at his nerves.

“That drawing looks as if it hurts.”

Some days there were nothing but claws on the page—hooks and barbed triangles, jagged lines of lightning (God’s claws, he now realized). And even when they didn’t resolutely fill the page they were a major motif most days (especially in the late afternoon, when his muscles began to stiffen, and the air seemed heated). Sometimes they appeared to move in currents, to form patterns. At times they resembled graphics he’d seen representing electromagnetic currents, or the auras that supposedly radiated from the insane. He knew that visions in ancient times were sometimes described in terms of an eagle’s talons clawing through the scalp. So it wasn’t as if all these invisible razor claws were necessarily a terrible thing. He imagined they must somehow serve to also energize and inspire. On the other hand perhaps they were the source of migraines in those who relied on them too much.

But whatever the use, they filled the air—we breathed and drank of their arbitrary movements. Thank God they were invisible, he thought, else we would all be horrified in their presence.

“Sometimes it seems everything is falling apart.”

There were a number of scribblings, which might only be described as representations of “generalized corruption.” Lines that broke and ran dribbling down the page, patches of shadowing which bubbled and disintegrated, narrow scratchings chipped and faded away into a dead-skin paleness. It was a game, finding all the ways in which the doodles illustrated death.

Yet even though it might be a game, he thought these doodles were of particular importance. Corruption itself was a kind of ritual, a kind of obsession, which we ignored at our peril.

“That looks like a naked woman. Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”

Some of the doodles appeared vaguely pornographic. But a pornography of an elevated sort, as he could detect softnesses here which seemed to go far beyond that of normal flesh, certainly beyond that of any sort of flesh he had ever encountered: the softness of old women losing their hair, of young women in the fullness of life, of his own pale young son, and of his even paler daughter, of the pelts of animals, of silks, of swelling breads.

“You want to leave me, I can tell.”

His ex-wife accused him daily of wanting to escape her, until escape her he did. Occasionally a page filled with wings. This happened often during times of great stress. Sometimes he drew them all day, and on surfaces he would never think to scribble on, like walls and floors. Once his ex-wife discovered them drawn on their bedroom wall and he’d been a coward, blamed the doodles on one of the kids and was ashamed of himself for months afterward.

Later he realized he’d blamed both of their children. But that was impossible; that was crazy. What had he been thinking of?

It was strange that he never thought consciously of escaping, or felt consciously trapped, for that matter. He felt like a normal human being. But perhaps part of being a normal human being was to be trapped, unable to escape the confines of one’s own life and body.

“Sometimes you just talk and talk, but you really have nothing to say.”

One day his pen stopped writing, out of ink, then started again in fits and sputters. This disturbed him greatly, because although he imagined he could detect the patterns that the pressure of the pen nib had made, he could never be sure he had understood all of it.

And it was important to understand. He didn’t know why, but his life depended on it.

“Sometimes you say some pretty hurtful things.”

Sometimes the doodles appeared like mutilations of the pure white, expressionless page. They appeared to be angry, even though he didn’t think he was an angry man. They appeared to be hateful, even though he could think of no one he hated.

And sometimes they appeared as the worst sorts of obscenity: children being mutilated and destroyed, children burning to death.

“We’ve lived here so long. Maybe what you need is a change of scenery.”

Sometimes what began as a cityscape broke off into other directions that better expressed what the city had become for him. No matter how convoluted the network of lines of this urban representation became, he always seemed able to pick particular houses out of the complexity, important landmarks of his life there.

There was the house where he was born. There was the third-floor apartment in which he had first made love to the woman who would become first his wife, and then his ex-wife. There was the hospital where his daughter and son had been born.

There was the house on fire; the child within burning, her screams breaking up the lines he frantically drew and redrew, attempting repair, striving to make them permanent.

“Are you hearing me? Do you see what you’re doing to our marriage?”

Ears and eyes appeared frequently, most often together, evidence of a certain paranoia on his part. Everywhere he went, people were watching him, listening to him, and talking among themselves. They’d comment on the look of his face, its shifting expressions of sadness. They’d talk about how he cried, things he’d said when he’d had too much to drink.

Everywhere he went people knew he had lost a child.

“What’s that smell? Do you smell something?”

Misshapen noses were less frequent, but were more likely on hot, muggy days in August. Strong smells seemed to increase his need to doodle. Cooking smells, especially. Roasting meat, in particular.

Sometimes the smells so filled him it seemed as if he were all nose, and yet with no capacity to breathe.

“You’re always so nervous! What do you have to be nervous about?”

Overlays of squares always increased his anxiety. Like boxes, or cells. Or the scales of an artificial fish.

It was impossible to escape the box of one’s own nature. And in the end, when they boxed you, you couldn’t even imagine escaping.

“There are no secret messages here! What are you looking for?”

Sometimes scribbles resembled an exotic handwriting, and he would spend hours trying to decode them. The problems in his marriage had grown quite severe, but when he sought out the spiritualist in order to make contact with his dead daughter the rift between him and his wife became decidedly more pronounced.

One day he began examining every piece of handwriting that originated from or came into their house. He spent hours, in fact, studying his wife’s handwritten grocery lists. He’d become convinced that his daughter was trying to contact him in this manner, embedding her own childish scrawl within the handwriting of others.

He started saving all his own doodles and re-examined them, and found unmistakable proof that at times his dead daughter was guiding his hand. Many of the doodles had taken on her whimsical, sensitive nature.

He stopped going to work. He spent all day of every day doodling. His wife left him after one last appeal to reason. He was barely able to remember their conversation ten minutes after she’d slammed the front door.

“You talk in circles. You make me dizzy.”

He never knew quite what to make of spirals. Were they eyes, the insides of wombs, tornadoes as seen from outer space?

Their significance was certainly ambiguous, and even when he believed them to be something recognizable and concrete, they maintained a certain abstract quality above and beyond what he could interpret, a spiritual dimension.

He could remember a time when they resembled eyes, and these spiraled eyes were the most threatening thing he could draw. More recently they had become eyes again, but somehow these comforted him. He imagined the blue at their distant bottoms, drawing him into the depths of them, his daughter’s endless stare.

“Words, you keep using all these words. When are you going to do something?”

Mouths, he decided these were. They started out as eyes, and then grew teeth. People talked too much, when they should be listening. They talked about how things used to be, when they should be seeing how things really are now.

Eventually the memory of his daughter’s endless eyes grew teeth, and all the words in the world would not keep that vision away.

After his wife left him, there were no more voices to distract him from his doodling.

Sometimes they were faces turned inside out.

Or the internal organs of dream-selves and friends.

Sometimes they were the face your lover takes when she doesn’t believe you can see her.

Some might be the broken bodies of insects, or insects unknown to humankind: the flying brain zipper, the centipede of pain, the butterfly-roach of loss.

He created them at an ever-increasing frenzy, drawing them on the bathroom tiles and mirrors using lipsticks his wife had left behind, spray-painting them on the living room and kitchen ceilings, painting them with a broad brush on the outside walls of his house, using the leftover paint in his garage. Neighbors would gather and watch him, but out of anger or embarrassment they’d stopped trying to talk to him some time ago.

Once, after a week-long drunk, he’d used his own bodily fluids to smear the doodles across his clean white bed sheets.

He began to write a catalog of the ones he had neglected, or found impossible to save, hoping for some new understanding. He wrote captions at the bottoms of the originals, hoping his labels might crystallize and clarify:

Topographies of nowhere.

The worms of remembrance.

The absence of love.

In the masses of doodles he discovered pointillist portraits of children he’d never had, and that made him feel like a traitor to his daughter’s memory.

And here were the feathers from birds that were now extinct or that had never existed.

And here were mazes that would forever frustrate him because they had no solutions.

And here were the wriggling walls and strange vegetation that had grown up around him, completely isolating him from the outside world.

The fire had started in the bedroom. That’s what they had said the other time. It had been piled almost to the ceiling with “drawings,” as someone had called them, although most were no better than hen-scratchings, crudely repeated patterns like those a very young child might make. The drawings had been set on fire, but the rising heat had permitted a few to escape the open window. Several of these were unlike the others, were not crude at all, but were small, obsessive, precisely rendered portraits of a young girl’s face, dozens of them covering the page in a somewhat spiral pattern.

All the neighbors said he had been a nervous man, a smoker. They’d said that the other time as well.