The Infinite Onion

by Alice Archer

  “The scene begins at the door of the gallery,” I said. “Show me what happens. You’ll play both parts, yours and Aza’s, so grab Aza’s hat for when you need to switch roles.”

  Silence fell as Clementine stared into the wardrobe. The dress she chose—a classy wrap dress cut for an hourglass figure—didn’t surprise me. She put the dress on over her slacks and blouse, toed off her flat sandals, and stepped into a pair of stylish heels from the bottom of the wardrobe.

  I could feel Clementine trying to get up the nerve to touch Aza’s hat on the top shelf. She stared at it for a motionless minute, until I cleared my throat.

  Clementine snatched the hat.

  “You’re stronger than you think you are,” I told her. “You come here and do this because you know I know the whole story, because you trust me to hold this safe space for you. I won’t judge you, no matter what happens, and I won’t stop you, not unless you say your safeword. Tell me what it is.”

  “Do-over.”

  “If you say your safeword, if you even whisper it, I’ll be on stage to help you.”

  Her nod was barely perceptible.

  “Please say out loud that you understand.”

  “I understand.” Her voice was quiet, but I heard her determination.

  “Good.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Our focus is on the change that’s possible, on you. We can’t change your past or Aza’s past, but you can change you. Are you okay with those parameters?” I gave Clementine a variation on the same speech every time.

  “I am.”

  “Action,” I said, even though it wasn’t a movie.

  Clementine blinked, rolled her shoulders, and entered the gallery. I’d used my contacts to help Aza land that show. I’d walked him through the preparations, helped him hang his eerie paintings. In my mind, as I watched Clementine on the stage, I added her to my memory, wove her actions and the words she spoke into the events I’d experienced that evening.

  The most painful moments of her performance were when she took on the role of Aza, straightened to mimic his taller frame, pretended to sweep his long hair over her shoulders, bounced on her feet.

  Clementine peered at every painting and made thoughtful comments to Aza, who kept a hand on her arm as he told her about his work. Aza smiled with his whole body to have her there with him. When Clementine spoke to Aza about his paintings, she borrowed my words, words remembered from when I’d told her about the show she’d missed.

  Throughout her performance, Clementine cried. By the time she left the gallery and waved goodbye to Aza, who smiled from the doorway, her tears seemed cleansing.

  When she’d finished, she sat on the edge of the stage.

  I got up to sit next to her and pass her tissues until she’d gathered herself enough to reach up and remove Aza’s hat from her head and hand it to me. More than once, I’d tried to give it to her. She always refused. I knew it was because she didn’t believe she deserved it. Someday I hoped she would. Until then, I would keep it for her.

  On a protracted exhale, Clementine said, “You’re really going to make me do another one?”

  “No. I can’t make you do anything. But I hope you’ll try. It’s a matched set.”

  Her sigh was heavy, but her steady gaze told me the grief had retracted its claws, so she was willing.

  “You can safeword out,” I said.

  “No. I’m tired, but I’ll do it.” She stood to take off the dress and shoes.

  “You’ll only need one prop,” I said. “This scene is cleaning up after Aza’s eleventh birthday party, the one here with only the four of us. Remember what Dad gave Aza that year?” I handed her the prop.

  Clementine took what I handed to her and shook it out. When she realized what it was, she laughed. “You’re an ass, Oliver.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” I went back to sit on my towel on the couch. “You’ll play the role of Aza. This scene is not a what-if, but a reenactment of what happened that night.”

  Clementine set the whoopee cushion I’d handed her on the stage and bent to roll up her slacks. With a practiced movement, she unclipped the barrette to let her hair fall free, and mussed it with both hands to imitate Aza’s wild mop. Her final adjustment was to tuck in her blouse and button it all the way up to her chin, a nod to Aza’s hippie-artist-engineer style, which he’d settled into by age eleven, God help him.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how Clemmy did it. If I hadn’t seen her performance with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed she could evoke Aza’s spirit as he’d been that night with such accuracy. The stage wasn’t big enough for Aza’s energy or the way he’d tricked us to get us to sit on the inflated whoopee cushion. Clementine-as-Aza roamed the room, embodied a boy with a wicked sense of humor and a desperate need to be liked.

  Her performance made me remember too.

  I remembered Dad’s booms of laughter that night. I remembered Aza finally running out of steam and coming to me where I lay on the couch. I’d been fifteen. The sharp ache of Granddad’s passing the year before had finally shifted into something bearable, into enough open space for the occasional return of joy.

  That was the night Aza told me he’d chosen me to be his big brother. He told me and then fell asleep half on top of me on the couch. I’d wrapped arms around him, worried he and his problems wouldn’t fare well in the world.

  Aza had draped over me that night the way Kai draped over Grant in the ditch—with enough trust to escape his problems for a while.

  I remembered how I’d held on, helpless and afraid.

  Chapter 17

  Grant

  Oliver disappeared through the back door. After I’d caught my breath, I got up off my knees and scurried through the woods until I could see the front of the house. A tall woman with brown hair and nice clothes stood beside a Volvo. She looked beaten down, like she might need a transfusion to get through the day.

  Oliver met her on the front porch with his shirt back on.

  “What have you been up to today?” the woman asked Oliver. “Something fun, by the looks of it.” Her voice held a note of false cheer.

  Oliver put his hands up. “Don’t hug me. I’m covered in shavings. I was in town early this morning and then lost track of—”

  “In that outfit?”

  “No, Miss Vogue. I got a new chisel at the hardware store. When I got home, I wanted to use it.” Oliver ushered her inside and closed the door.

  Their voices carried out through the open windows. I needed to be closer. I crossed the front of the house in a crouched run below the high porch, to keep out of their line of sight. Around the corner, a cluster of bushes provided cover for a peek into an open window.

  What I witnessed took me a while to decipher. With a few sentences of instruction, Oliver prompted the woman—Clemmy—through a process that transformed her from a sad caterpillar into a calm butterfly.

  By the time it was over and Clemmy had emerged from the bathroom smoothed and polished, I’d morphed too. Huddled there in the bushes, I admitted to myself—with a crash of internal cymbals—that I had a crush. An unwelcome crush on someone who awed and annoyed me.

  Damn it.

  I pushed farther into the shelter of untended bushes and pressed my back against the house. I heard Clemmy leave, heard Oliver putter around inside the house, heard the front door open and close. A long minute of silence, then the sound of bike tires on gravel.

  Oliver whistled as he rode away. The deep notes of his dirge faded into the distance.

  I saw the bounty of Oliver’s life, but I felt the dirge. Felt it inside the house against my back, in the neglected bushes, in the way Oliver had tossed his tools into the outbuilding without looking, in the sorrow he and Clemmy shared about Aza.

  I wanted to not care.

  I couldn’t afford the distraction
of someone else’s drama—private drama I hadn’t been invited to witness or comment on. I had no business mooning over glints in Oliver’s hair or the sexy fit of his overalls or his freckled skin and shapely arms. I didn’t want to wonder about the fate of Talia’s dog or Clemmy’s Aza or Oliver’s Freddie.

  None of that mattered as much as food.

  The seriousness of my situation found and seized me, gave me a wake-up shake that made my teeth chatter.

  Enough.

  I’d put off answering the big questions long enough.

  I crawled out of the bushes and slunk into the woods, resolved to refocus, to fade from Oliver’s life.

  That evening, under the disco light of the headlamp I’d hung from the ceiling of the tent, I sat with a notepad on my knees. My penance for spying on Oliver was a delay of my trip to town, to give myself more time to plan.

  A pall of canned-beans-induced gas spread over my little campground. Even if I decided I couldn’t afford an overnight at the motel, a menu revision and a trip to the grocery store were top priorities, or I was going to rupture something.

  1) Get better food, I wrote on the notepad. I had a small camp stove. A bag of rice only cost a few cents. More vegetables would be nice. Carrots would keep for a while in the ice chest, even without ice. I started a grocery list in the margin of the page.

  My biggest issue was income. I set the notepad aside and conducted a scrupulous search for assets. Ninety-seven dollars and fourteen cents. Once up on a time, I’d had bank accounts, though they’d never amounted to much. I’d relied on my parents and then on Laura to handle the finances. And look where that got you.

  I admitted that if I didn’t have a source of income, it didn’t make sense to prioritize a night at a motel over food. When I landed a job interview, I’d splurge on a motel for a shower.

  2) No motel. I tapped the notepad with the pen. I could manage camping. Probably. I enjoyed lying on the sleeping bag in the buzz-twitter-rustle of the forest where no one could find me. But I still needed a job.

  3) Get newspapers. When I hitched to town for groceries, I’d pick up the Seattle papers for the classified job listings. Online listings would be easier and cheaper to scan, but I doubted I’d be welcome in the library to use their computers before I’d had a shower. Maybe I could hike around to find a signal for my phone.

  4) Take cord to town and charge phone.

  5) Make stealth grocery list. If I planned ahead, I could speed shop to minimize customer complaints about the homeless guy stinking up the joint.

  6) Check bulletin boards. I’d noticed a big one near the grocery store, layered with local flyers and want ads.

  So far, I’d only listed the obvious stuff.

  I wanted to stretch beyond the obvious, to point myself in a new direction. I closed my eyes and tried to think.

  7) Ask Mitch and Sonya for suggestions.

  No. I couldn’t face Mitch from the bottom rung. It was too humiliating. I added a question mark to indicate I’d think about it.

  Cool air blew through the open tent windows. I leaned back and attempted to generate ideas for how to stretch in a new direction. An hour later, I’d come up with exactly nothing.

  The breeze shifted from cool to cold. I stuck my hands in my pants pockets to warm them, not ready to get in the sleeping bag. I’d be asleep in two seconds once I did that, and I wasn’t ready to give up on my list. My cold hand in my pocket closed around the zodiac scroll.

  I woke many hours later, frozen and bleary, and fumbled my way into the sleeping bag in the wan light of dawn.

  8) Buy headlamp batteries.

  Two days later, I roamed the small town of Vashon and resolutely ticked items off the lists I’d made. My first task in the grocery store was to locate an electrical outlet. When no one was looking, I plugged in the charger at the florist desk and tucked my phone behind a display of greeting cards. After I’d finished shopping, I went back to get it.

  Outside with my groceries, I watched people leave the store, to see who headed for the pickup trucks in the parking lot. I wanted to hitch a ride, but I didn’t want to gross anyone out.

  A city dude with an overkill truck and a full grocery cart trusted me enough to let me ride in the truck bed with his party supplies. My gratitude for a ride that didn’t include an awkward chat made it easier to resist the temptation to swipe a roll or twelve of smoked ham from the nearest plastic-covered deli platter. Contemplation of the box of lube packets I’d chucked into my cart provided a nice distraction. I might not have a wife, and I might have a crush on someone I’d probably never see again, but if I rationed the packets, I could get myself off in comfort once a week for a few months. Something to look forward to.

  I returned to my campsite with a small plastic ice chest, a pile of cheap food, lube, a charged phone, and newspapers—all for under twenty dollars. Operation Camping had begun.

  Over the next thirty-six hours, I accidently started two fires—inexcusable on an island with limited freshwater supply. Mold appeared on the inside roof of the tent, brought on by my body heat and the dampness of the constant light rain. I tried to be careful when I cleaned up after meals, and kept all the uncanned food in the ice chest, but mice found enough scraps to be a nuisance.

  All my clothing, except for the one set of clean clothes I’d double-bagged and stashed in my pack, smelled foul and looked like filthy rags. I tried to wash a T-shirt under the spigot at the unoccupied house. The experiment ended in failure. I hung the semi-clean T-shirt over the tarp line at my campsite, watched it mold in the damp air, gave up and shoved it into the trash bag.

  I spent a lot of time growing my biceps as I hauled stolen water from the spigot at the vacation house to my campsite.

  What I didn’t do was go back to spy on Oliver. But I thought about him. Mostly I thought about his contradictions: well-tended house by an untended hedge, beautiful hair in a messy bun.

  Who was I to talk about contradictions? I was an able-bodied man who resisted work, a guy who loved the woods but worked indoors, an uncle who wanted to spend time with his nephew but couldn’t manage to clean himself up enough or gather enough courage to attempt it.

  On the afternoon of my fifth day in the woods, I sat on one of the fallen tree limbs I’d hauled into the campsite, spaced out in the bright sunshine. My sleeping bag, unzipped and draped over a rope tied between two trees, wafted in the breeze. Spots of light danced across the fabric.

  In those quiet moments, I found what I’d been missing for so long—peace.

  I blinked and sat up.

  I didn’t need money. Not really. Not yet. What I needed was the way my mind unfurled beneath the forest canopy. If I could sink into the quiet for another week, I knew my mind would show me more options for the next stage of my life.

  My actual needs were so simple: food and drinking water, plus occasional use of a shower, a washing machine, and an electrical outlet.

  I needed amenities.

  Oliver’s yard needed help.

  Maybe I didn’t have to wait to find simple work in nature.

  Chapter 18

  Oliver

  After days at home without seeing anyone, even though I kept the green flag up, everyone visited at once. Clementine arrived with a carload of food as payment for our last session, Talia biked over with Edward, and Freddie finally appeared.

  Clementine helped me put away the groceries, hugged me, and left. Talia and I sat on the front porch steps and talked while Edward dug holes in the driveway. When Freddie pulled up in his mother’s minivan, Talia and I fell silent.

  Freddie got out of the van and winked at me.

  Talia snorted and said to me, “Take this however you like, but I’m going to go get a shovel.” She called Edward and they disappeared around the house.

  Freddie wore what I called his I have an important flight to c
atch outfit: dark blue blazer, lighter blue button-down shirt, khaki chinos. For the full look, he’d need a leather travel bag over his shoulder, a cell phone at his ear, and a backward glance. That was Freddie in a nutshell: thrilled to hurry off to somewhere else, preferably somewhere in Japan.

  His appearance at my place meant he’d recuperated from his most recent trip enough to begin writing, but hadn’t yet fallen down the rabbit hole of planning for his next long trip.

  Freddie set a shopping bag at my feet and sat beside me. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” he said with a wry grin.

  “Welcome back, you.” I let him kiss my cheek and stroke my beard for a moment before I pulled away to look at him. His clever face and close-cropped hair looked the same as always.

  “Brought your loot.” He nudged the shopping bag with his foot.

  I knew I wouldn’t want whatever he’d brought. Freddie persisted in thinking my sense of humor was cruder than it actually was. After he left for his next trip, I’d donate whatever was in the bag to a charity shop in Tacoma.

  Edward’s barks announced Talia’s return with the shovel. It felt nice to be around people after days of being alone, even though I’d spent the days enjoyably. I’d carved on the throne, taken a few bike rides, and sketched variations of a man and a boy asleep in a ditch.

  “I’m almost finished with the throne,” I said.

  “Show me.” Freddie stood and held out his hand.

  Talia paused in her repair work to salute us. “I’ll show myself out when I’m done.”

  As Freddie and I strolled across the lawn and through the woods, he told me about the articles he was working on—something about Japanese cultural perspectives around career development. He didn’t try to get handsy with me until we’d reached the throne. I gently fended him off. It sometimes took me a while to mesh my memory of Freddie with Freddie in real life. I tended to embellish while he was away.