Onion Songs

by Tem, Steve Rasnic

  The young doctors quietly shift their attention to Dr. Zachary for the final word on the subject. He smiles that famous smile of his—a slight tensing of the lips that might be construed as illness in another man—and says, “Mr. Lippmann has a point, as usual. I suggest you think about what he has said.” And, again this year, the new doctors subtly change their attitudes toward me, because the great Dr. Zachary has certified my thoughts as worthy of contemplation.

  We have this same interchange concerning the diagnosis of schizophrenia sometime during the first week every year. There is always a patient on the ward to use as an example, schizophrenic symptoms always being in good supply. I know that Dr. Zachary agrees with me on the subject, although he will never admit to it outright. That isn’t his strategy.

  I originally came to the hospital because of another patient of Dr. Zachary’s. Forty years ago, Dr. Zachary was just beginning his rise to fame. His patient, Roger Ellison, was a friend of a friend. I seem to recall that my friend was distantly related to Roger in some way, but my memory of that bit of conversation may be an imagined one, although I would never use that word “imagined” in describing it to Dr. Zachary.

  The three of us lived in a small hotel down by the waterfront. My friend and I were roommates. Roger lived on an upper floor. He would drop down and visit us occasionally, but I never knew him well. He was mainly interested in talking to my roommate, my friend.

  Roger was a very sick individual; I would no doubt agree with any diagnosis the young doctors cared to make concerning him. The specific symptoms are irrelevant; as human beings, most of us have some knowledge as to what it truly means when a human mind is in serious trouble, regardless of the jargon brought to bear by those who are trained and paid to do so. Roger possessed a superior talent for making himself unhappy. That unhappiness took many forms, but it was remarkably stubborn in its ability to circumvent the most careful safeguards. Nothing brought joy or even satisfaction to his existence.

  The night Roger poisoned himself my friend was away for the weekend. He pulled himself through my doorway—I’d left it open because of the heat—and called to me from the living room floor. I’d been in the kitchen preparing iced tea. By the time I got to him, his limbs were nearly paralyzed. He had an envelope in his hand—a will, I later discovered. He insisted I “take care of things.” He made me promise I wouldn’t turn the envelope over to the police. I’d never seen anyone die before. It was powerful, irresistible. This person whom I’d met, talked to briefly, yet scarcely known, had died on my living room floor. I could not refuse whatever he asked.

  Later I found Dr. Zachary’s card in his wallet. The next day I called his office and made an appointment; I thought he could help me locate the family. I left a note for my roommate, my friend, telling him what had happened and where I was going to be. I’m sure I did. I haven’t seen him since.

  Dr. Zachary’s office was smaller then, but just as quiet, as reverential, as it is now. I told him of the will. I handed it to him. He examined it. That was the first time I was to see his famous smile.

  “And Roger left this with you,” Dr. Zachary began, “whom he hardly knew.”

  “I was there when he died, the only one around. He died on my living room floor. It was a—profound is the word, I suppose—a profound experience.”

  “I see. A profound experience.” He paused, looking at the will as if he were reading it, but I didn’t think he was, in fact, reading it. He had already read it several times. “I had not seen Roger in several weeks; he had broken numerous appointments. I assumed he had decided to give up on therapy.” He turned and gazed at me with what I thought might be mock-seriousness, but which probably wasn’t from him. “Therapy can be quite demanding, and a client will feel progress isn’t being made. But I assure you there is usually some progress, however invisible it might be to the client. Sometimes it takes years before you realize how much progress you have, in fact, made.”

  His use of the second person pronoun bothered me. It sounded like a sales pitch. “Roger appeared to be a pretty disturbed individual,” I said.

  “Oh? And what makes you say that?”

  I hadn’t expected the question; I’d thought it was obvious. “He was terribly unhappy. At least, he acted unhappy, and agitated all the time, nervous.”

  “Hmmm. Yes, Roger was unhappy. And yourself? Are you happy?”

  “I—well, yes, I’m happy. Reasonably content.”

  “Reasonably content. I see.” He glanced down at the will. “It says here that Roger wanted to leave most of his belongings to his mother and father. And yet, I know that his mother and father have been dead for years. How do you explain that?”

  Dr. Zachary was frightening me. I suddenly realized that I might be in a very dangerous situation. “I don’t know. Roger was pretty disturbed.”

  “Disturbed, you say? And yet you also say you hardly knew him.”

  “Well, yes. But it didn’t take an expert to see...” Dr. Zachary smiled, and I halted my sentence.

  “This will is typewritten,” he stated simply.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Roger’s signature is also typewritten.” He smiled again. “Roger never signed this.”

  “Well, talk to my roommate. He and Roger were related somehow. He’ll probably know more about it; he knew Roger well. They talked a great deal.”

  “Yes,” he said, getting up. “I’m sure they did.” The interview was over.

  Dr. Zachary informed me that they needed me to be available for further questioning, that matters of estate were quite serious affairs. He asked me if I would stay over as their guest while the authorities completed their investigation. I said yes.

  I have never been able to say why I let them keep me that first night. Dr. Zachary brings the issue up from time to time in the morning conferences. “Just why do you suppose Mr. Lippmann allowed us to keep him that first night forty years ago?” he asks the group of young doctors. “No one forced him. The legal criteria had not been met.” But of course the legal criteria were met soon thereafter. Dr. Zachary has a talent for collecting all the required signatures. “So why did Mr. Lippmann acquiesce?”

  No one has ever given a satisfactory answer. Some students propose theories and other students shoot them down. They cannot imagine themselves doing the same. Why would any mentally competent person do such a thing? I certainly have no answer, and perhaps that ignorance is what keeps me here. That mystery. To contain mysteries is a dangerous thing. There are those who will lock you up for that alone.

  I’ve never been informed as to the final disposition of Roger Ellison’s belongings. Perhaps my former roommate and friend has them. Or had them; it has been forty years, after all. Or the authorities may have donated them to the poor.

  Or perhaps Dr. Zachary has had them in his possession all this time. Perhaps there was something in Roger’s room he needed, was afraid to have revealed, or required for his research. Perhaps my old roommate had a hand in this as well.

  All these theories are, of course, paranoid, whether true or not. So are best left unvoiced. They, too, can result in one’s confinement.

  Over the years I have had my supporters among the new class of doctors. They usually come forward around the fifth or sixth week. “It’s hard to believe that a man of Mr. Lippmann’s insight, warmth, and intelligence has a serious mental problem, particularly one that would require such a lengthy hospitalization. He’s much better adjusted than most of us would be in his situation, Dr. Zachary.”

  That came early this morning, from a short, bespectacled, blond youth. He had struck me from the first as an unusually sensitive type. Some of the students nodded slightly, as if they had been waiting for someone to express that opinion. Others focused their attention immediately on Dr. Zachary.

  It is odd how every year this one issue is construed by the students, and worried over, as a direct challenge to Zachary’s theories and methods. Even if it were so, he never seems to take it as
a serious rebuff.

  “Does intelligence make one immune to mental illness? Does penetrating insight? Does warmth? Think on this proposition: some might say that those qualities actually make imbalance a more likely occurrence.”

  I find myself siding with Dr. Zachary, even when it’s my own condition we are discussing. Without stating his propositions as his own, he proposes quite clearly. And it is hard to believe that what he proposes could be wrong.

  At the end of the conference he turned, and smiled his smile my way. “You’re a difficult case, Lippmann. We’ll discover the nature of your illness yet. Even if it requires another forty years.”

  As the patient care conference breaks up I head back to my room on the tenth floor, riding the elevator that should have been a merry-go-round. It is visitation day. There are children in the halls, wives, husbands, relatives. But it is the children who are most noticeable, racing into open elevators and pushing buttons at random, squealing as the elevator that should have been a merry-go-round makes its many unnecessary stops.

  By the time we reach the fifth floor my breathing is ragged. By the time we reach the tenth the tears are leaking out of my eyes. As I struggle to open my door with the worn-out key the sobs fill my throat and spill out over my palsied hands. Embarrassed, I push the door open jerkily, ushering my sobs inside.

  You would think Roger Ellison would have had some relatives with small children. They form my only pool of potential visitors, and yet none of them has ever come. But I feel sure they must have been informed of my existence, by the police if not by Dr. Zachary himself.

  Ellison’s death had a profound effect on me. I was stirred by such compassion for this crawling, pitiful suicide. I could not have refused a last request.

  Dr. Zachary must have been quite upset at losing a patient.

  I cry for a very long time in the darkening room, terrified that someone might overhear me. When the doorknob rattles and the lock clicks I am not surprised to see Dr. Zachary standing in my entranceway.

  “Why are you so unhappy, Mr. Lippmann?”

  “What’s there to be happy about, Dr. Zachary? I have no family, no friends.”

  “I am your friend, Mr. Lippmann. Even if I’m your only one.”

  I turn and gaze at him, suddenly feeling sorry, for him, for Dr. Zachary. “I know, Dr. Zachary. And I am your only friend.”

  “You’re depressed, Mr. Lippmann. You have delusions of grandeur.”

  “I am unhappy, Dr. Zachary. Wouldn’t you be?”

  “You could have left a long time ago, at the first, when it all started.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps.” But he has already left. I can hear him walking down the corridor. To the elevator.

  Which should have been … a Ferris wheel. A Ferris wheel. Not a merry-go-round. Is that why he has kept me here all these years? A glitch in my thoughts. A misfired neuron. A palsy that made me say “merry-go-round” when all the time I was envisioning a Ferris wheel. One foul piece demonstrating that the entire mind was souring. So here is Dr. Zachary’s secret evidence of my insanity.

  When patient care conferences begin in the morning I will have the answers to all of Dr. Zachary’s elliptical questions. The other students will be quite impressed. At last we have concrete verification of Lippmann’s illness. Now a course of treatment can begin.

  THE GREEN DOG

  How strange it is to stare into the mirror and find that the one staring back at you is not at all whom you expected.

  Sometimes I think that toward the end of my life I will become an old green dog.

  Not that the dog would ever understand he was green. Like most dogs, he had a difficult time distinguishing among yellow and orange and green, or even red, not to mention the difficulty a dog has finding a reasonable mirror. A dog will find its mirror in his master’s eyes, we hear—but all too often what he finds there is small and miserable.

  *

  The dog didn’t remember that, as a boy in high school, it had known a girl whose peroxide-bleached hair had turned this same shade of green in the swimming pool. The girl’s hair had eventually gone back to auburn, but this was the dog’s natural color.

  Canine greenness being a rarity, the dog was regarded with delight and distaste, wariness and incredulity. Other animals didn’t pay much attention to his color, for he smelled like a dog, made dog sounds, marked his territory like a dog, fought like a dog over scraps of food and places in the sun. But people noticed. A few took his pigmentation as an excuse to throw things at him, some of which hurt, some of which he caught in his mouth and determined to be edible. A few others tried to entice him closer, and once in a while the prospect of having his ears scratched outweighed both his street-wise caution and his dislike of being inspected. Most, though, kept their distance, thinking him an aberration of nature or their own minds, or his color a symptom of some dreaded and contagious disease.

  This dog was lucky enough to have neither master nor mirror. If he’d had a mirror, and if mirrors made any sense to dogs, he’d have more or less expected to see an older man going to fat and gray, going to invisibility as his eyes faded and his voice grew weaker, and even though he had gained weight steadily through his middle years, he’d have seemed less substantial, as expansive as a cloud and no more significant in the great span of eternity. Then had come that too warm, too humid morning when he woke up as a dog.

  The green dog howled then, in that mournful way of dogs and men. Some would say it was a sadness without much legitimacy, since no tragedy had occurred, no painful injury. It was the sadness of the human being living his human life. It was the sadness of the shape-changer.

  The dog was lucky in another way: he wasn’t plagued by a man’s ambition. His flanks and belly were crusted with scars, including the vague crease from a human appendectomy. He’d sacrificed a testicle in a losing battle with a garbage truck. And now he was content to roll around on his back with his diminished genitals in the air, inordinately proud of what others considered a warped and sorry bit of punctuation. The man still in him identified it as a semi-colon. Used to join two main clauses, and between coordinate elements containing commas, to indicate a subtle variation of voice; the semi-colon was by far the man’s favorite punctuation mark. The fact that the man had a favorite punctuation mark spoke volumes about who he had become.

  *

  Sometimes the green dog saw the man it had been out in the street, or wading through the tall grass staring at his feet, as if having lost something very important, as if having lost his mind to the green dog. The man was lost, or puzzled, and these were things the green dog understood because it had often been lost or puzzled. How the green dog could still see the man it used to be did not puzzle it, because this was a man and the green dog was a dog who had left the concerns of a man behind.

  The green dog sensed it should probably stay away from the man, but it could not. It was drawn to the man by forces as basic and compelling as its need to eat and get rid of what it had eaten, both as pleasurable as they were necessary. So one night it showed up at the man’s back door after the day went dark, and sang the universal sadness that even the man could understand. The man brought a bowl of something to the back door and laid it down for the green dog to eat, and the green dog ate what was in the bowl without bothering to smell it first, because it trusted the man it used to be.

  And so the green dog came to feed each night at the house of the man it had been when it moved upright through the world. Although the food the man served was edible, something was not quite right about it. Sometimes the man cooked the food with the paper still wrapped around it; the dog ate the burned paper, too, which tasted quite good. Sometimes the man didn’t cook the food at all, which was fine with the green dog, even though it somehow knew this wasn’t so fine as far as the man was concerned.

  *

  Finally one night the dog came for supper and the man came to the back door without a bowl in his hand. The man opened the screen door and held it as the g
reen dog readily trotted inside. “Here,” the man said, gesturing around the kitchen. For a moment the dog was confused, thinking it must be daylight again and this a garbage heap—it had that very smell, that very appearance. The dog looked up at the man. “Don’t look so stupid!” the man shouted. “Help yourself!” And after a brief, sad and nervous time, the dog did what the man said.

  The man himself ate very little in the days that followed. Sometimes he would sit down on the floor with the dog and put a plate no cleaner than the dog’s bowl on the floor in front of him. Sometimes he would stick his fingers into the food, bring them into his mouth and suck on them loudly. The dog was hungry even though all it really wanted to do was watch the man.

  But most of the time the man did not eat. Most of the time the man stared at the food, and spoke words at the food, but did not eat the food. Out of respect the dog held back from its own food as long as it could, but eventually of course it ate because it had the honesty of a dog, which compels it to eat when it is hungry, to rest when it is tired, to bark and to howl and to make any noise possible with its particular vocal chords when it feels whatever it is destined to feel. And to ignore what it sees in the mirror.

  The man, on the other hand, had lied so long to himself and to others he could no longer tell if he was tired or hungry or in some sad and lonely state with the best part of him residing in this ugly green dog of the solitary testicle.

  *

  Eventually the man fell ill. The green dog had been expecting this, because even a dog understands that everything must eat in order to live, just as it must breathe and drink and move through the world with others of its kind. These are things that even a green dog knows.