Onion Songs

STRANDS

He came to believe that there were knives far sharper than any made by human beings. Manufactured of materials we could not even imagine. And that there were vague, formless surgeons skilled at manipulating those knives, capable of separating nerve from tissue, nerve from nerve, and, deeper still, spreading apart the strands of thought, severing perception from conclusion, scattering the chains of continuity, turning all the moments of a life into short lengths of string, gathered into a box for casual selection and arrangement.

Dream: His brother, Michael, is late again. He keeps calling the apartment, but there is no answer. Suddenly Michael bursts through the door, his hair wild, his shirt unbuttoned—no, torn. Michael is grinning. Fooled you again! he cries. But Michael’s mouth does not move. It remains open and rigid like the bell of a horn. As if frozen in time.

Memory: The main staircase of his parents’ home had always been carpeted in plush, bright red, as far back as he could remember. On that particular day he had paid close attention to that carpet as he climbed the stairs. For some reason he had known how important it was to notice, and record, every detail of the twenty-year-old carpeting: how it pressed neatly into the bottom edge of each riser, flowed softly over the nosing, then stretched thinly across the tread, where the wear was greatest, where the blood-red of the fibers had worn and discolored to a dull rust. From all those steps: his and his brother’s, his drunken parents shuffling each other off to bed. The areas on the edge of the tread were also unevenly colored, from too little vacuuming or too frequent vacuuming with an ill machine. Where the carpet ended on each side the fibers were ragged, untrimmed. The oak edging looked sticky, and probably hadn’t been dusted or wiped in years. He wondered if his mother still had a cleaning lady come in, or if the drinks had become too costly for that.

The door to his brother’s old bedroom was cracked open. About two inches. Maybe three. Maybe he should measure it. The silliness of the thought bothered him, increasing his anxiety. In a rush to escape the next such thought, he pushed open the door.

The mural with Peter Rabbit and friends was still up on the wall. Their mother had never bothered to repaint. But it confused him for a moment, and even seeing Michael on the bed he wondered why his brother wasn’t getting up for school, if maybe he was sick, or pretending to be sick; and then he remembered that Michael was twenty-three, and neither of them had lived in their parents’ house in years.

Peter Rabbit was holding a bright red flower in his right paw. The dripping flower seemed to come closer, as if Peter were going to hand it to him. Maybe Michael was whispering to Peter, telling him what to do. He had a hard time focusing. On the bed, Michael’s head was covered with the melting red flower. Peter had been digging in the flower garden again. The rabbit had completely ruined Michael’s head with the digging and hadn’t even bothered to wash off the evidence: his fur was all spotted brown and red and gray. Mr. McGregor was going to know what had happened for sure.

But Mr. McGregor had already been here, he could see. For Michael was holding Mr. McGregor’s rifle.

And now: He was going to be late for his appointment again. On the bus an elderly woman thought she knew him. She called him “Joe” and told him all about her daughter, whom he used to date, and how she was doing—married, three kids in Chicago. He tried to remember if the story she was telling might be true.

“She was always a good dancer,” he said.

“Oh, the best! The very best! She won awards!”

“I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ginger Rogers,” he said.

“Oh, you were much too young to remember Ginger Rogers.” The old lady looked worried.

“I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ann-Margret,” he said.

The old lady smiled. “She’s as beautiful as ever,” she said. “She hasn’t changed at all. A good marriage will do that for you. Are you married?”

He stared at her, trying to remember if he had ever been close to marriage, because he wanted to say yes, even though he knew it couldn’t be true. But after all these years, how could he not even have come close to marriage? Could he be that different from everyone else in the world? “No,” he finally said. “I’m afraid not.”

The old lady pursed her lips, patted his knee. “Well, you really should consider it, young man. It would do you a world of good.” And then she sat up straight and looked away from him, out the window at all the stores and people they were passing, as if she were through with him, as if she had immediately forgotten he’d ever existed.

For the rest of the bus ride he tried to imagine what he might have been like if his name had been Joe. He tried to imagine himself married to this old lady’s daughter, having this old woman as a mother-in-law. It all seemed perfectly plausible.

He closed his eyes and could see the daughter dancing, kicking her feet high up into the air, twirling, a bright red flower pinned to her breast.

The Therapist: “Sometimes it’s as if I’ve lost track,” he told the therapist, a woman who always wore dark glasses during their sessions. “As if the events in my life have become subtly disordered. It becomes too easy to believe that something that’s past, that’s over, hasn’t occurred yet, or maybe won’t even occur at all. My relationships don’t end—they just go on and on. The time frame seems too irrelevant. Michael tells me things every day. Tomorrow my mother will send me to school for the first time. Next week I’ll meet a woman I last dated over a year ago, but I’ll be meeting her for the first time.”

“We all want to know where we came from and where we’re going,” the therapist said.

“Maybe if you took something out, or manipulated a muscle or a bone or two,” he said. “Maybe then all these aimless… connections, these resonances… wouldn’t bother me so much.”

“We all want to know how long we have in this world,” the therapist said. “That makes you no different than the rest of us.”

“I think I may have already died,” he said. “Once or twice. Maybe more.”

Sometimes, if the conditions were right, he could feel the edges of the blades as they touched his thoughts. They entered cleanly most of the time, but occasionally there would be the slightest vibration, so that events might jar, one against the other, and the faces of the people in his memories would show their anxiety.

Dream: It has been a long kiss, a very long kiss. He thinks he may even have slept through parts of it, only to awaken again and continue his participation. The lips against his are bare, loose, almost impossibly mobile. They make him feel hard and unyielding by comparison, like metal or brick.

When he finally pulls away he sees it is Michael he has been kissing. But Michael’s lips are wider than he remembers them. Michael’s head lolls, his eyes still and fixed as a doll’s. Michael’s smile spreads loosely to both sides of his face, wide as a shark’s mouth. Michael’s smile flows to the edges of the sheets and drips off the sides of the bed.

Memory: Allison was walking down the sidewalk with the last of her packed suitcases. He imagined himself stopping her, using physical strength, or argument, or simple expressions of bereavement. He’d seen countless movies, read numerous books and short stories, and he could imagine various scenarios in which any of these techniques might or might not work. He tried to store up images of various lives he might have had with Allison, all for his future use. He imagined the faces of their children. He visualized the photographs in their albums. He experienced all her possible deaths.

All this before she got into her car, looked sadly out the window. “I’m sorry,” was what he thought she said, before she drove off for what was (maybe) the last time.

And now: He spent much of his weekend talking to the homeless, the derelicts, the bums (he didn’t know what he should be calling them). Whoever they were, they were good at acting. They could sound like his mother, his father, Michael, his lover, even his therapist—whoever they wanted to be.

“I’ve seen those blades you’re talking about,” one old man said. “They come mostly early in the evening, about the time the fireflies first come out. Sometimes you’ll see one outlined against the moon, or maybe a streetlight if the angle’s just right. They’re sharp and scary, oh, I know that. But they keep things from dying. They cut out the part where you know somebody died, or where you realized something was over—like it was on a tape or something. That way nothing ever dies, or ever ends. That ain’t so bad, is it?”

He thought, in fact, that’s horrible, but didn’t say anything.

“Leave the boy alone!” The old lady in the broken hat just seemed to climb out of the shadows around the base of the tree. “He don’t need to know about them blades!”

“You my wife or something?”

“I don’t know—I can’t rightly remember.”

“Well, I don’t remember neither, and until I do remember you just butt out, okay?”

“I need to prepare myself. Something’s going to happen,” he said to the old man and the old woman. “I’ve already figured out that things aren’t what they seem to be, they never are, and there seems to be no way to tell what they are.”

“There’s no such thing as preparation,” the old woman said. “I’m sorry, son.”

He wondered briefly if she could, indeed, be his mother, but it was too dark where she stood beneath the tree. “It’s being alone, you know? That’s what it’s all about, why it’s so bad, being alone,” he said to them.

But the blades had come down during their conversation, and severed the old man and old woman from the dark pool of shadows beneath the tree, so that they were in some other weekend of his life, involved in some other conversation.

The Therapist: “What are you most afraid of?” the therapist asked. Today he was lying on the table in the middle of the room and the therapist stood over him, most of her head in the shadows, only the heavy outline of her dark glasses showing. “That is always a good place to start.”

“I’m afraid of what is,” he replied. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Perhaps you simply can’t accept.” The therapist made rustling noises as she removed various objects from the drawers beneath the table.

“I simply can’t forget,” he said. “That’s a lot of it. What I remember, is. And that’s become too much, far too much, to bear. One thing becomes just as real, just as important, as every other thing. I don’t know what I should ignore anymore in order to keep on functioning, living. I don’t know what I should forget.”

“Pay attention to me now,” the therapist said, slipping on her gloves.

“It’s a lot less simple than everyone thinks,” he said. “A lot less simple than I was prepared to believe.”

“And if you let it happen to you? If you let your wishes drive you, and suddenly Michael is still alive and ready to talk to you every day?” The therapist placed her instruments up on the table. He could sense their hard, sharp edges.

He shuddered. “I don’t understand, but it would be horrible. Horrible.”

“So you’d actually feel far more comfortable if Michael truly was dead, if you never had to talk to him again, if you weren’t so compelled to remember him?” The therapist hovered closer.

“Oh yes, yes.” He found himself squirming, wanting to avoid her hands.

“But how can you justify such a betrayal?” the therapist asked coldly. Her lips glowed in the dim light.

“I don’t… don’t…”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked softly.

“Yes!”

“And werewolves, and vampires?” The therapist reached across him.

“Yes!”

“And demons and beasties and hidden things without names?” She stroked his hair, played with the lines creasing his forehead.

“Yes, yes!” He felt the heat in his head flowing out through his hair to warm the surrounding air.

The therapist was quick with the blade, sending all the separate bits of life swirling, flowers and rabbits and brothers and stairs and buses and suitcases and derelicts and Allison, tumbling into oblivion.

He used to wonder what it took to wield those blades, if the surgeons were gods or demons, or if mortals might aspire. He wondered if Christ or Buddha might have been such surgeons. Or Jack the Ripper.

Whatever the case, for the patients, the most important thing was to try to classify all the severed bits and pieces as accurately as possible, so as to avoid confusion. Some sort of order was desperately required.

Dream: Every Sunday he and his wife take their children to the cemetery, where they place flowers on the graves of his parents, and on the grave of his brother Michael. The children love the bright red flowers they carry. He makes sure they wrap the flowers in tissue, so that the red color does not rub off, or drip onto the children’s brand new clothes.

The cemetery does not bother him. He loves one woman; the children are happy and satisfied. He does not dream. He had parents and a brother at one time, but no more. He is content to live and work like everyone else he knows.

Memory: In a large empty room the surgeons whisper. Their invisible blades flash through the air, leaving no trace. He lies in the street and watches a truck smash into his father, tossing his father up onto the hood, turning his father’s head into a bright red flower to match his brother’s. A crowd gathers. His mother jumps into her grave. His brother pulls the red flower out of his face and becomes Peter Rabbit. All his children climb back into the womb and die.

And now: He holds Peter Rabbit in his arms. They dance around the room. Suddenly Mr. McGregor shoots Peter in the face. Peter’s lips turn into Michael’s loose-lipped, bright red smile. They kiss for a very long time. An enormous red flower grows in the rabbit’s face, fertilized by all of Michael’s memories lying dormant in the rabbit’s brain. He buries his face in the bright red flower, the rabbit’s flower, Michael’s ruined face. He takes as much of the sickly sweet smell into his lungs as he can.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, crying. “It’s beautiful,” he says, amazed. He knows that in at least one sense what he says is true; but in another, it is the worst lie of all.

The Therapist: “Is it better now, this life of yours? Does it feel good?” the therapist asks, running her lips down the side of his face, leaving kisses on his breastbone.

“No! It’s horrible!” he cries. “You have to stop it!”

“But you didn’t like the way things were. You hated your dreams, your memories of the past.” She rubs her lips around his navel.

“But now all the moments are the same! It’s all the same! There’s no past anymore. No memory, or dream. Michael dies now! The rabbit kisses me now! Their images devour me!”

“We all are dying. I’ve tried to tell you that,” the therapist whispers.

“It’s a horror, a horror!” he cries.

“No,” she says. “It’s your life: your thoughts, your soft, bleeding brain. You must learn to appreciate it.” She puts her cold lips on his ear. “I tried to tell you. You are the horror.”