Onion Songs

by Tem, Steve Rasnic

  The man who was the green dog before there even was a green dog became so ill he slept most of the time, and when he could get up he managed only to sit without moving in the large brown chair. The green dog didn’t like the large brown chair because it faced a mirror. A snippet of leftover man-thought flitted through the dog-consciousness: mirrors pretended to show everything, but in fact showed very little.

  How strange to think another thing’s thoughts, thoughts it had no hope of understanding.

  Even though the man himself seemed to have no liking for mirrors he sat watching the man in the mirror for days at a time. Eventually he did not return to his bed at all but sat in the brown chair day after day, watching the man in the mirror carefully, as if waiting for something sad or awful to happen.

  When the awful thing happened, the green dog howled. Then it went into the kitchen to relieve itself and look for more food.

  *

  How strange to wake up as someone else then wake up as someone else again.

  The man in the brown chair who had become a green dog had no strength left for walking or lifting or even eating, but he did have strength enough to recognize the man in the mirror for what he was: dust and reflection, lost skin cells and idle fantasy molded by shadow, a compendium of every person he’d had any stray urge to be.

  And as the man in the brown chair declined, becoming less like a man and more like a piece of badly worn furniture, he came to understand that the man in the mirror was far more than he had ever been. He came to understand that he had given the man in the mirror the best he had dreamed and hoped for, and consequently the man in the mirror—although completely imaginary and not much heavier than a dying breath—was far more alive than the man in his sagging saddle of furniture, in fact was far more alive than this man had been at the best of times.

  This is not to say that the man was overcome with any kind of sadness or regret. He had led what he considered an interesting life. He’d had a family who cared what happened to him and he’d had a career better than some. And a wife who had loved him so much that each day it was yet another surprise for this man who had grown up without the expectation of love.

  The fact that the man in the mirror was so much more was undeniable, and unchangeable. The man could accept this because he felt he had no choice in the matter. Certainly none of us could ever be as fully realized, as complete, as our imaginary selves. And now at the end of his life he could think of nothing better to do than to gaze at his better self as first breath, then imagination, left his body.

  *

  The man in the mirror felt only the vaguest connection with the old man slumped over in his ratty brown chair. He gazed at the dead man much as he might have looked at a somber photograph, one he had seen perhaps too many times.

  In fact, the only interesting thing to happen in this particular view was when an ancient green dog occasionally wandered over to the dead man to lick his fingers and howl. For some reason, this vaguely amused the man in the mirror but he suppressed his chuckles, not wanting to startle the dog from the room. Eventually his patience was rewarded and the dog stared through the mirror into the mirror man’s eyes. Which froze the dog in terror. Which made the man in the mirror smile.

  But even without the green dog and the dead man in his sorry chair, there were still things the man in the mirror could do to entertain himself. He might follow the trail of a ray of light as it made its way from that other world of more limited possibilities, through the silvered glass and into the unlimited realm he called home. He might stay with that ray for a time as it distorted against the furniture of his world and made itself into colors as fragile as the last thoughts before sleep. He might step in front of that light and grin as it distorted his carefully formed image, turning it into water and cloud and dark. He might paint the sky of his world with the fragments of his own brittle image.

  He might step through the silvered glass and take the place of a dead man.

  *

  How strange, thought the man in the mirror, to see the man you were and feel nothing but embarrassment and shame.

  Without breathing, the man from the mirror watched the man he might have been sleep, feeling curiously empty, even of humor. He attempted a grin but could not maintain it in the coarser atmosphere of this more mundane world. In frustration he kicked at the dead man’s leg, which swung swiftly away from the blow. The man from the mirror was surprised by the quickness of the dog, only just hearing its growl before it clamped its jaws around the mirror man’s own leg. The mirror man felt no pain, of course, or irritation. He observed the dog with vague interest until it released his leg and slunk into its corner by the old brown chair and its dead master, watching the mirror man with fear and anger. The mirror man did not fear the dog but still decided he would not strike his dead counterpart again.

  How strange to see yourself yet not see yourself at all, the man from the mirror thought, watching the version of himself, which ironically was far more real than himself, collapse into decay inside the ancient brown chair. The mirror man could not bring himself to feel sorry for the man he’d actually been, because that man had already felt far too sorry for himself. The man from the mirror understood all too well that life was in large part image and reflection: you create an image of yourself out of light, dust, and air, and you send that image out into the world while you sit home alone in your rotting brown chair counting flies. If because of that image you achieve some sort of success or someone loves you, then it’s all for the good. If the image fails, it’s all just dust and light anyway, so what do you have to complain about? Real people whined endlessly—in the abstract realms of the imagination you could hear their distant voices scraping at the gates, so much so that the dwellers in dream could hardly hear themselves sing sometimes.

  The mirror man looked down. The green dog was at his feet, gazing up with eyes veined in yellow and red. Shoo, the mirror man said to the dog. Go away.

  The green dog urinated on the mirror man’s imaginary leg.

  All right! the mirror man shouted. He loved things! He loved his wife, he loved his children, his grandchildren, the mirror man said, gazing over at the putrefying corpse, though he was a bit soft and dreamy at times. It would have been better for his children if he’d been firmer

  The mirror man felt the familiar warm liquid running down his oh-so-perfectly imagined leg, wetting the stiff, unwrinkled socks, staining the shiny-with-never-a-polish shoes. He glared down at the grinning, grinning green of the dog. Okay! He loved and was loved. He believed life was hard enough that no one has the right to make things more difficult for anyone else. He loved the beginning of the day when the spreading light awakened the light and color of everything it touched. He loved the end of the day and the smell the fading light and heat left behind. Sometimes he had trouble with the in-between times, mind you...

  The green dog growled and the mirror man stepped back. But he tried, that’s the important thing, he did his best, he made an effort. He loved making things, even if it was just another space with a light bulb hanging over it, and then he loved telling what people might do in this space, he loved clubhouses, libraries, and family rooms, he loved telling stories, he loved just having something to do, he tried to invent new occasions to celebrate with his offspring and theirs, he loved inventing holidays, he loved turning everything into play, he loved seeing, and smelling, and dreaming of everything, including all the things he would never be. He loved making the effort. He loved trying.

  The mirror man sank into himself then, spent and, much to his surprise, saddened by the longest speech he’d ever made in a life at least as long as that of the dead man in the brown chair.

  The green dog devoured him with one last long and lingering look, then departed the house he’d raised children and grandchildren in, mourned a wife and dreamed his less-than-practical dreams in, looking for what lay outside, and what lay beyond.

  A DREAM OF THE DEAD

  The dead dream all n
ight the life we have this morning. They love the way we, who know so little of sleep, try to drive it from our bodies with the day’s first yawn.

  Almost as much as they love the bright yellow of egg on plates they used to own.

  Almost as much as they love the sadness of cupboards, and the years tucked inside so carelessly, with no thought of meaning, or the eventual shape of it all, lying in the dust disarrayed.

  They watch us from the rough boles of forgotten trees, the ones left unnoticed between the buildings and on the edges of town, sharing the space with termites and fairies, and the carved-in promises, to names whose faces are now beyond the reach of even imagination, whose pronunciation is the arcane prayer we make as our eyes close, too soon, at the end of the day.

  But compared to the dead we are a quiet breed. We hold onto longings for decades without speaking their facts. We’ll strangle our children before speaking our minds. The dead recognize our problems with the truth, for they have seen us tremble so many times in the wake of their passing.

  How often have we seen that color, that pale color unlike any other, astray in the last moments of sunset, a thread of it tracing the slant of the spring rain, and just a touch around the eyes of the child we love past reason? It’s the color of a dead mother’s heart, but we cannot bring ourselves to say so.

  And this absence that swells the lungs with shadow, this despair that cannot be whispered or even shouted away, it is this spirit now which animates our days.

  The dead understand these things and more. The dead know the music of diminishment and the deceit that bolsters joy. The dead wrap themselves in garments of exhaustion so they might pass unnoticed from night into light. The dead are the rags and the mud, the lamp and the lungs, the stab and the limp and the vulture’s singing mouth of the world. The dead yawn even as we yawn but their throats are yellowed and poisoned by the souring energy of the world. The flowers they hold in their glowing hands have been stolen from the poor, blossoms turning to ash as the dead glide wearily through the world. Their eyes are bald of lashes, turning to glass and scabs as they spread like felons through the world, committing their crimes against crab and dove, child and falcon as they saturate every promising landscape of the world.

  For every quiet snowfall is a cold comfort pulled over the dead. Every wayward smile is food for their whispers, every shaded ravine a quarry for the hiss, the whistle, the endless complaint, and whine of the dead. Every butterfly swollen with dusk plays the priest for their hollow pleadings. Every shy and unknowing gesture becomes an invitation for their helmeted kiss.

  For this is the truth of it, the tribulation, and the detour: the armies of the dead have made a carnival of our small disasters. Within their hidden elevators they descend the grave height from reason into those secret places where even the best of us aspire to fool.

  I tell you we’d be better off killing them, if we only had the method, if we only had the time.

  SATURDAY

  You know you have misgivings but you cannot articulate them. Your mind is a flaming bird alighted on a sinking boat. Some days you can feel neither hands nor feet and it is your eyes and tongue desperately grabbing. This is what happens when the world finally changes, when it shakes off its hide, and everything invisible slides from its pores. You can barely catch your breath and you are so afraid if you breathe too deeply you will take in something living and then what will you do? You might attempt to blow it out of your lungs or vomit it out of your stomach but you know the aggressive desperation of the invisible, its need to hang on, so how might you expel it without it dragging some essential part of yourself along?

  These are the cautionary thoughts of those living at the end of the world. These are the tales we tell ourselves as the lights begin to dim and the cold creeps down from the mountains. These are the preparations one must make when everything unseen, unheard, and once thought merely imagined finally make themselves completely known, descend from their attics, crawl out of their caves, smash their windows, transcend their closeted realms.

  All week you have felt deceptively clean, your skin scrubbed, your collars ironed, your socks fresh from their packaging, your rotting breath disguised by some cancer-causing sweetener. All week you have smiled and nodded and showed your appreciation. All week you have attended to your chores. But now at the end you can hear the whispers issuing from your cells. Here at the end you can see the face of all that was turned away from you. There at the end you can smell and taste the decay in your own spinal cord.

  Here is the place you have lived in most of your life, these walls this carpeting these horizontals these verticals your pants your shirt your cocoon your packaging. Here is where you huddle against the winds that scrape away everything. Here is the one warm spot derived from your own body heat. This is your pinpoint on the map of the universe.

  Your bed writhes with recovered memory until you can no longer stand it. Rising up on impaled feet you stagger across floorboards oozing the debris of lifetimes, every forgotten toy and lost dime, fevered notes to self and all, the infinite divisions of trash and discarded skin, every misplaced acquisition vibrating now with the power of wasted energies.

  In the rooms of your apartment, furniture floats through a porridge of dust and air before bursting into tired old flames. The photographs recording your life revolve into tunnels and doors as old lovers and family and friends whose dissolving flesh irritates your fingertips pass from the warehouses of desire into this small booth of regret where you have lived more years than you can remember. Here the phone rings day and night and either you ignore the summons or pick up the receiver on a thousand miles of empty air. Hello Hello your syllables break without releasing sound. The letters of your attempt make scratches in the jellied air, which fall to the floor where their segmented legs carry them away into the mysteries of the baseboard.

  So this is what it’s come to: dead hours waiting for an exterminator at the end of time, your furniture gone to fire and everywhere you step is a worry of vermin. This is everything your parents warned you about with their very lives. You wander your empty rooms railing and shouting speeches in some language even you do not understand. You beat on the sealed door of your life until, tired of your whining and complaining, it releases you to lobbies and corridors where your fellow inmates howl at the bars. Down flight after flight the stairs fold up behind you, the rooms close to nothing and the halls telescope one inside the next until the moment you step outside, everything that once protected you is a sloppy stack of cards in a trash-pasted lane.

  Despite the inexorable forces which threaten to pull you into rags and sticks, you take a moment for this glorious sun, this exquisite warmth you’ve never spared much time for, even though, finally, when memory and passion and your last hope for the attention of another human being fades away, it is this distant holy fire you will miss the most, and the unpresuming embrace it makes of everything you’re still able to see. All around you the air boils and brightly colored threads rise and fall through the texture of it as if attempting a repair. Here and in the distance the arbitrary plantings of grass and shrub, iron and concrete forms launch themselves into sky where they blast apart beneath the gaze of final perceptions. The crusty hardscape of the world withers under the countless, minute cracks of your awakening, becoming fine as powder then blowing away on the winds that raze generations.

  All that is left is everything that came before you, before all that you knew and all that they knew. All that is left is the rock and the fire and the loamy decay, the powder of stone and the powder of knowledge. All that is left is the space between there and the there you will never reach. All that is left is the space owned by the invisible.

  Now, at the end of your week in the world you have nothing left but the invisible to love you. You have nothing left but the sigh of the empty and this unknown world’s forgotten gaze. You have nothing left but the desperation under the tongue and the eagerness in the palm. You have nothing left but what you have
no voice for, however wide you open your mouth and work the exhausted muscles of your throat.

  For at last you have arrived at nothing, understand that nothing binds these threads of flesh together, that nothing holds nerve to bone or gives direction to your vanishing blood. Yours is a religion and a politics of nothing, and you find you have nothing left to say.

  APHASIC WORLD SYNDROME

  The cats had climbed onto the outside of the house again. Alex stopped to count them—he didn’t understand how he could know this, but he believed their numbers were a more precise indication of his condition than any of the multitude of tests his doctors had performed. He stopped at 127, too depressed to continue. They made an exact accounting difficult anyway—they were in constant movement, digging their claws into the weathered planks with each step, sending slivers and chunks of house raining down onto the lawn below. When they howled—usually singly or in pairs, but occasionally gathering together for a chorus of group complaint—they irritated his own fragile ductwork, so that he was forced to conduct his daily chores in tears.

  He made his way down the runway to mail the prayers he had gathered into his arms: sad, orphaned prayers he had sung during spare moments, now ready to sail into other households where they would torture the sleeping inhabitants with paper cuts. Sadness turned to anger quickly in this day and age, so who was he to tell his prayers their indiscriminate violence was wrong? At least he would soon have them safely out of the house.

  At the end of the runway waited the eager birdhouse. He rolled up each prayer tightly and stuffed it into the tiny round hole, increasingly excited as the displaced birds flew out and peeked into his ears. There the yellow candles burned, filling his head with smoke.