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.”
NIGHT, THE ENDLESS SNOWFALL
The old man has lived a long time in the ancient cliff house. Not a cliff by any sea, although this man had been a sailor most of his life. The house is a thousand miles from any ocean. It is a cliff overlooking a desolate canyon—red, brown and white rock and sand as far as an eye might see. But the old man is not much for gazing out the window toward the land below. Instead he observes the skies. He sits looking out the window, and up, for hours at a time, his rocker leaned back and braced on a stone. Here, the old man watches, and waits.
Night will come, and he would greet it with sleep.
He has known for a long time this night would finally come, and feared it as all men and women fear such things. He does not know, except from forgotten dreaming, what it would be like, but he imagines it to be something like the ocean, that it will fill him, and he will never be the same again.
It is like waiting for a monster, waiting for a demon, and as the sun’s rays at last begin to dim the old man grows afraid, and goes to bolt the doors, to secure the windows, and to wedge cloth and mud into the cracks beneath the door and into the space between the chimney and the roof. All this to keep night out of his cliff house.
Slowly the windows begin to darken and the old man looks out his window, and down, but can see nothing of the barren canyon below, as that has been first to fill with night.
He feels the daylight begin to leave his face. And for a moment he sleeps, just a moment, and when he awakens it is as if he has come back from a long distance, where he had spoken some other language, and had another appearance.
The house is groaning, the window panes rattling with the night wind, for night itself is at them, night is beating at his windows, beating at his door, trying to lift off the roof in order to get into the old man’s house. The old man tries to fill his house with sleeping, but cannot, cannot fall asleep—except in bits and pieces—he has been insomniac many months, and does not know how to keep night at bay, except with sleep.
Then night whispers to the old man’s darkened closets and cupboards, and soon all his misfortunes come out to torment him. His children and grandchildren drift past him, all those left in ports whose names he cannot remember. The old man leans forward out of his rocker and tries to grasp them, but they break and drift apart in his fingers.
So late the hour, too late, the old man thinks, as once again his wife’s hair is in flames. She runs around the cliff house screaming silently, her mouth contorted, her arms like tree limbs warped in the lightning. The old man forces himself out of his rocker and stumbles after her, trying to catch her, trying to put out the flames, but too late the hour, his legs will not hold the racing of his heart, his ragged breath, and she dissolves into dark, into night.
A gray rope drops against his cheek, and then another, another. Then the snakes twine rapidly up and down his arms. The old man begins to scream, but spiders have dropped into his mouth, and he is biting them, they taste bitter, their spiny legs pricking and tearing his pale, thin lips. The old man screams even as he bites through them, eats them, and then the snakes and spiders are gone.
Night beats against the old man’s window, hungry to get in.
The light dims within the cliff house, the darkness closing in around the old man’s form. He runs and stumbles, trying to escape the enclosure being made. The darkness pulls around him, and the old man sees nothing but black, and deeper black, his feet losing their position, and he is falling, falling from a tremendous height.
The old man falls into his rocker and trembles as he gazes out the window.
Night beats against the old man’s window, angry to get in.
A silver hook, silver of moonlight, rises out of the floor and rakes the old man’s face. He lifts himself up out of the chair again and flees across the room. The hook chases him and tears his face just a bit at a time, tears strips and gouges and hunks out of his face, until it leaves him weeping in his rocking chair by the window again.
Night beats against the old man’s window, desperate to get in.
Then the old man smiles, weakly, for night has tired him. And night trembles against the old man’s window. Unknown to night the old man has fallen asleep, lulled to sleep by the sleeping breath of the dead ones once dear to him.
The old man gazes up and out of his window as the skeletons begin to drift down.
First the birds, the first pets he had as a child, their tiny skulls shining like brilliant, irregular snow flakes in moonlight. Then the mice, his first kittens, the dogs and rabbits, tumbling end over end, their bones glowing whitely from within, all their skulls smiling. His grandmother, Mr. O’Keefe—the baker who always gave him a cookie, Mrs. Mallory, Rev. Johannsen, aunts and uncles and cousins and all their livestock, their bones white as ivory, white as the sheets on his bed, white as his mother’s skin in his dreams. All falling, falling like the shells and skeletons of sea creatures through the dark water, seeking their final rest on the bottom.
His mother, his father, the brother who died early, the sister who died five years ago, they all join the ghostly fall, the ghostly traffic, the drifting down. Night howls its outrage and the old man smiles. He looks down toward the barren canyon and sees the skeletons rising in a smooth pile, filling every crack and cranny, every depression, and soon the endless snowfall spills out over the canyon’s rim, and a hill grows, a mountain of pure white snow before his window. Covering everything, covering his earliest thoughts. Night cries out in pain as the glowing white skeletons fill up the dark and push it away.
The world is taken apart, never to be reassembled. The old man feels himself drifting into sleep, his skin turning to white, turning to pure white bone.
In his cliff house the old man pretends his wife still sleeps here. She is in the bed, under the covers. He imagines her, dreams her, and her smiling skull illuminates the gloom in the room’s corners. He imagines he knows the address for each one of his children.
He rises and opens the door for night, and laughs at the diminishing dark.
His cliff house fills with an endless snowfall.
ARCHETYPE
The Family had been contemplating reality. I was not sure if Mother, too, had considered committing reality—she had the best of it, the Archetype drug having expanded her to where she had always believed she should be: at the center of things, awaiting supplication from each of us.
After all, it was hardly an inconvenience for her. We spent all our time sitting or standing or kneeling in her parlor, our ids so expanded we could hardly move. This is, of course, the most dramatic of all the effects of Archetype, this sense that some poorly understood aspect of one’s consciousness has suddenly engorged itself, has swollen so that it is much like a physical presence in your body, crowding out all other aspects of your consciousness and pushing out the walls of your flesh until you feel like a giant, so tall that you fear the ceiling and peering down at your feet you experience vertigo. Not that this expansion is literal, at least I don’t think it is, even though if you were to look at yourself in a mirror during this experience you would see this great and bloated thing, or so I have heard.
Mother hadn’t even known the Family planned to experiment with Archetype—Father had insisted that this be kept from her. She was the reason th
e Family decided to try the drug in the first place: her terrible mood swings had grown worse, her paranoia, and her increasing conviction that none of us cared for her anymore. I realize now this was indeed our fault—we had been taking her for granted for years. Her presence had always loomed so large in all of our lives that we no longer thought to comment, as if she were a steady backdrop of mountains or sea.
Once we all took the drug, however, she had us. Little did we know she was the mountains and the sea, the whole world in fact in a hundred-and-ten pound package.
Father was most quickly and easily absorbed into the stage piece she intended to make of the Family. But he had never been a very strong man. His eyes moved restlessly in his immense head, and now and then he was startled by how high his head was above the floor. Then he would look around at all of us, his Family, as if he did not know where we had come from, or how to keep us and protect us, or who we were.
FATHER: Don’t make so much noise. Don’t look that way. Can’t you see that she’s tired? She always works so hard. She works harder than anyone could imagine. Just look at her. Just look at her. She is the Mother. Without her there would be no home. Without her there would be no Family. Just look at her. Don’t talk so loud. She’s always very tired. She works too hard. But she has it. Men don’t have it, but she has it. She is the Mother. She makes us all feel like we’re going to live forever. She has it. She’s dark and mysterious and she knows how to keep us alive. She knows how to keep us fed. Just look at her. Just look at her.
Sister looked bored and aloof, as she has always looked bored and aloof. She stared out the window as if looking for another life. She reached down the immense distance to the hem of her dress and adjusted it, made it longer, made it shorter. She did this several times as we stood, knelt, lay in Mother’s parlor. Self-consciousness must have been an overpowering aspect of Sister’s personality since to make such movements is quite difficult when under the influence of Archetype. Most people must stand and gaze forward or at one another’s swollen selves if they are not to experience the side effect of the terrible vertigo. (Although this is not the worst of the side effects of the drug.)
Onion Songs Page 5