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.
PICNIC
Each day of fair weather they gather along the edge of the park: to eat and talk, heat their sluggish bodies under the sun, watch animals creeping through the woods beyond, exclamations of pleasure with each new sighting, holding up the kids, making them look. “Kitty!” his youngest cries. At two, every animal is kitty. “Kitty!” patting the iron squirrel holding up one of the many barbecue grills the park provides. “Kitty!”
“When I was a kid we ate squirrels my daddy shot: two, three times a month. But he still thought they were beautiful, and never killed when we could afford better. I don’t know, maybe that made it okay.”
“Bob...” his wife warned, looking at the kids, but only Julie was listening, eyes big above her clutched hamburger.
“No, it’s true. It didn’t taste bad, a little strong. Dark meat, heavy with blood. An honest taste, I think.”
“I don’t think the kids...”
“I think about the kids all the time, these past few weeks. They should get out and see more animals, get to know them. Everything isn’t a kitty. Now when they see one it’s this big surprise—shouldn’t be like that. Animals are invisible to us—when they appear it’s this big magic trick. Then at night, their eyes shining in the dark, and in our dreams.”
“We take the kids to the zoo.”
“That’s not what I mean. Julie? That hamburger you’re eating was made in a slaughterhouse, honey.”
“Bob!”
> “They’ve got this gun, and it shoots a steel bolt into the cow’s brain, and almost before it falls there’s a hook and a knife in it, oh, and sometimes they use a hammer to finish it, but not always. I don’t think the animal’s always dead.”
“Bob, that’s enough!” His wife had Julie up in her arms, and Julie was sobbing, and their little boy too. Their eldest, Richie, the sullen teenager, sat at another table, a look of entertained surprise on his face. Bob stared at the half-chewed hamburger that had dropped out of Julie’s little mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“I’m not saying she shouldn’t eat meat. I’m not saying any of us shouldn’t. I just don’t think we should be blind to the suffering is all, turning our heads all the time. And not just the suffering—we just don’t see them, we make them so goddamn invisible. We don’t want to be touched, we don’t want their eyes on us, we don’t want to look into their eyes.”
“Bob, you’re scaring them.” Not completely true, he thought, because although he couldn’t look at Richie right now, he could still hear him laughing over there, so hard his voice was cracking. “Could we just go home, please?”
He gazed at both of his youngest in her arms, crying. “I don’t want them to be scared,” he said softly. “I get scared. Each day I get scared. The doctor doesn’t know when, sweetheart. I see him twice a week and still he doesn’t know. Maybe I’m lucky—at least my when has a range. Three months, a year. I feel bad for you with no idea when your time’s going to be up. Like all those animals. They never know.”
She looked away, her crying sparking another round of tears in their children. Richie had stopped laughing, had sullenly turned his back.
“The main thing is... we look away. All of us. We won’t see. We pretend it doesn’t touch us, this messy thing. Our kids need to know about that, how life is this messy thing, but okay because that’s the way it is for all of us, we’re all in this messy thing. Don’t turn away. Look into our eyes.”
After a time the air cools and families leave the park. Few words are said in the car. In their fatigue they settle on takeout in front of the TV and an early bedtime.
In the park, small animals come out of the woods for abandoned scraps. They forage around the grill with no apparent recognition of the figure sculpted in metal. Other animals stay back in their lairs, alone, quietly licking at miscellaneous wounds.
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 cou
ld 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.
Onion Songs Page 3