10. dreams
A woman John was dating disappeared one night never to be seen again. Her family and friends were frantic—he helped with the search. Now and again he would return to where she had last been seen—a gray street with glass- and steel-fronted shops. Like an operating theater. A mail carrier, said to have been the last to see her, stated she had stood in front of an empty display window for an unusually long time. When John came here he thought of surgery, that she had been surgically removed.
11. philosophies
He supposed the conventional wisdom was that one’s birth was the first event of a lifetime, the beginning of the story. But now John wasn’t so sure. What about the courtship, the circumstances of his parents’ first meeting, their attitudes and expectations? There was also the fact that he had not learned the details of his own birth—the blood, fractures, extended trauma—until he was in his thirties. So did that trauma affect him more before or after he learned the facts of it? There was also his conviction that, for some, birth marked the beginning of possibility, but for others, it marked the end.
12. dreams
A man in a crisp white suit followed John as he made his way from his house to the grocery store. On his way back he noticed the man in the white suit again, waiting on a bench, then following him again. John picked up the pace, and so did the man. John began to run, the man began to run. John dropped several apples out of his bag. The man picked them up and began eating them. John tripped over a curb and went sprawling, the man did several somersaults and a cartwheel. John picked himself up. The man bowed, smiled, and went on his way.
“Why?” John called.
But the man had become interested in someone else. John followed the man following this someone else. He had no idea what he was doing, but it filled the rest of his day.
13. events
The quality of John’s work had fallen off sharply in recent months. “I may have to let you go,” his boss told him.
“I’ll do better. I can do this,” John declared.
“No third chances,” the boss said.
“Of course not,” John replied. “I wouldn’t expect it.”
John stared at the papers on his desk. They made no sense to him. Why was he doing this? He got up and left the office, walked down the street, watched birds flying overhead. He watched people walking, some of them laughing, some of them holding hands. Why can’t I get paid for doing this? he asked.
He stayed away for two days. Of course they fired him. He checked the want ads every day, finally answering one.
The ad was for his old job. His interview went very well. His former boss said he thought John had initiative, not like that last fellow.
John got his old job back. He had a lot to do—the fellow who had formerly held this position had gotten woefully behind.
14. philosophies
It always amazed John, the power and influence of popular song. The aesthetic qualities of the tunes were seemingly irrelevant—even the stupidest composition might remain in your ear and force the rhythm for the day. Many songs seemed to acquire an added life in commercials and movies, often years after their initial release. Despite a certain tendency toward anarchy, he secretly hoped the government kept a close eye on these composers of our daily soundtracks. A musician with a dark motivation could conceivably do harm, guiding the unaware listener through a spectrum of emotional changes in a relatively short period of time. For his part, he would make himself more aware of his semi-conscious foot tappings and hummings, and put a stop to them now.
15. dreams
When John separated from people he often wrote them a brief letter a week, until they moved or he grew tired of the occasional response. The fact that he lied in his letters may have been a factor. His lies consisted of narrations of events he was afraid might happen or hoped might turn out a different way.
Billie,
My mother is dead. I’m not sure how, but I’ll manage to get through this. Love, John.
An ungenerous observer might have said he secretly hated his mother as he killed her off frequently, in a variety of ways.
Jack,
The house burned down, and with it all my accumulations. More later, John.
16. behaviors
John had long believed that if you wanted to get a feel for the consciousness of a place, the air of ideas, hopes, fears and traumas that gathered there, you need only read a few months’ worth of its daily newspaper, especially the small stories, the crimes, the domestic incidents. “Wife kills husband and dog” “Local funeral home defaced” “Methodist minister and three women missing.” A newspaper was like the diary of a city, the city revealing itself almost unawares. For a time he tried rewriting his own life in terms of local news headlines: “Man breaks up with wife, again” “Man changes jobs for the sixth time in a year” “Man prowls grocery store aisles seeking company.” The attempt quickly grew depressing. He felt like a criminal reading the newspaper for word of his own crimes, following the trail that must inevitably lead to his incarceration.
17. behaviors
John once spent a slow weekend taking close-up photographs of the things of his life, then the following weekend distant shots of his house, his neighborhood, a long shot of his town from the hill on the outskirts. He papered the walls of his bedroom with the photos and felt no compulsion to leave that room for more than the few moments required to raid the refrigerator. Eventually he tore the photographs down, sold the house, and moved to a new town where he again began accumulating photographs.
18. behaviors
Like many people, John supposed, he did not have a particularly discriminating sense of smell. Aromas blended like the ingredients of a porridge, so that he could not distinguish a lover from a dead dog, sugar from decay. This seemed a terrible disadvantage. He’d had a dream in college he was about to kiss his girlfriend—had thought her perfume to be unusually strong that evening—when he found himself kissing her dead lips, crying not in deep emotion but from the smell. The odor of fear, the secret smells of the body, the smell of the air before some great disturbance, all having meaning if you simply knew how to parse them.
Sometimes in his anxiety he would smell his own body seeking signs of illness, but it appeared to smell no better or no worse than any other.
Sometimes the air grew stale from the perfume of too many people, desperately trying too many things, seeking to put together a bouquet, succeeding only in stinking.
19. philosophies
John was always surprised at how difficult it was to know his own mind about things. But how could he, when each part of him, each object in his everyday life, had its own point of view? What the stomach wants is not always what the intellect wants, and truly, the left hand does not always tell the right hand what it is doing. The eyes might dream of blues and yet it is reds and pinks that the fingertips crave. Your life story was a completely different narration depending on which piece of you was listened to. The healthy ones, he thought, were those who quickly achieved some sort of coordinated consensus. The unhealthy ones were constantly at war with themselves, and unable to choose a restaurant for dinner. The brain might be Catholic, the feet agnostic, the fingers Republican, and the ears Democrat. And, perhaps, that was the way it was supposed to be—listen to your voices, for they contain the world.
20. behaviors
It came to John how randomly, and all-too-infrequently, silences occurred in his life. When he made himself too busy with the striving of the now, others’ silences seemed like that awkwardness that happens when the tape runs out or the conversation dries up. But now and again when he remembered that it pays to listen to oneself, he heard himself breathing in the silence, and the unsteady emotion that was that breathing, and the anticipation of new beginnings, and the anxiety that there would be no new beginnings, ever again.
During one such silence he realized he loved the woman who became his wife. During another he decided to change careers. All at random, all
unplanned. Some days he waits for the silence, and yet another opportunity to breathe.
21. behaviors
John had discovered One Hundred Twenty-five ways of hiding himself from others. Thirty-eight of these involved various ways of holding his nose. If he felt he had to say something critical to someone he adjusted his glasses. If he had to ask for something he scratched either his left or right eyebrow, depending on how badly he wanted it. If he said hello to someone he had to manage, somehow, to touch one eye. If he had to say goodbye it was both eyes, accompanied by a little dance of the feet. If someone he knew died he’d scratch away at a certain point on his neck all day until it was torn and bloodied. If he lost his hands, he realized, he would be quite unable to venture out in the world. Sometimes when he didn’t know what to do he simply closed his eyes. People could not tell, but there were tears beneath the lids. Sometimes a woman would hold both his hands, and he would close his eyes, and blink, blink again, open his eyes and blush. He liked it most when they grabbed his hands by surprise, when he least expected it. It was a thrill like no other, an ecstasy he could barely tolerate.
22. philosophies
John had long resented the influence the news had on day-to-day life. His father had had the right idea—he never watched it on television, but listened to it on the radio, or read newspapers. Of course, if it was something that had gone on for days, and everybody talked about it, he might check in with it a few minutes one night just to see what was going on. That’s how the old man knew about World War II.
John knew all too well how learning the daily news could ruin a day or week, a lifetime, change the way you looked at the world and how you saw yourself in it, what you strived to be. Better to let the decline of civilization happen without you, better to let destruction occur without warning, better to let unhappiness be a surprise and not what happens to everybody, every day.
23. dreams
People lie about the strangest things. What they did last evening, the importance of their jobs, even what they had for lunch that day. So much of their own memory, in fact, has been filled with self-manufactured moments.
It is not because I want to deceive people, John thought, having caught himself in the fourth deception of the day, but because this isn’t the life I wish to live.
In the long night before his next day he lunges recklessly in pursuit of the events that will define him: things that never happened, but should have.
24. behaviors
John wondered when food had become such a toy, a miniature landscape for dolls, a diorama concerning the landscapes of other countries. Meals at the best restaurants felt more like museum exhibits. Anyone who could afford a lunch might travel to a place where he was guaranteed misunderstanding. A fork, a knife, a spoon was a ticket out of the head and into a dream.
If he could have afforded it every day, he might have eaten the world. As it was he had a taste enough to staunch a craving through sleep and into another day.
25. philosophies
John went through long periods unable to speak to anyone but his wife and son and a few co-workers. This was not unfriendliness. It was simply his way of reducing the burden of complications in the world. He had discovered other people to be infinitely distracting. They walked around in their clouds of moments, wearing their lives on their sleeves, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they were happy, if they had some tragic secret or unfulfilled dream, if they made their families feel good about themselves, or if they were a drag on the progress of western civilization.
And if he got too close or stared too long, he risked having their moments mingle with his own, and the messiness, the tears and the regrets and the recriminations, would be much too much to bear.
26. philosophies
You think it’s going to be perfect. Both of you do. You laugh at the same things, appreciate the same movies, agree on the same two or three political issues you’re aware of. For the first time in your lives, everything fits.
That time of close fitting is woefully short, John thinks, but most things are. We are not made to fit, for any length of time, but those brief moments are precious to us. They give us good mileage.
John always loved his wife, even when things seemed to have been bad for years: for a moment taken there, an hour here, scattered minutes pulled out of time and held close when the lights dim.
27. events
John’s wife had had one affair that he knew of. He understood that it had been going on for some time, but he never let that knowledge reach him. Finally one evening he drank enough to drive down to her office. He saw nothing, yet knew everything.
He didn’t even know she owned the kinds of underwear she gathered together, cursing. He didn’t know she drank, and the smell of whisky on her was almost too much to bear. Her boss was unflappable, offering up a sheepish grin while pumping his arms daring John’s no-doubt feeble attack.
John did not attack, of course, and he and his wife never spoke of it again, not even when a month after the event she was quietly fired. The embarrassment made her bitter.
John’s own shame became a worm that spread itself through nerve and muscle until he could barely speak of anything, or move his arms above his shoulders, or recognize more than the most basic of colors other than the hues illustrating that one defeating moment.
28. events
One of the things John remembers most about parenting is weekend trips to the emergency room. Illnesses and mishaps occurred almost invariably on weekends, and there quickly grew an atmosphere of desperation about it. His son panicked so he and his wife panicked as well.
He saw his neighbors visit the emergency room with their young daughter regularly for months.
Then one day they returned without her. The couple was quiet and had few friends in the area, so he never found out what really happened during those crucial moments of their last trip. Eventually they had another child: dark-haired, beautiful, and they never let her out of their sight.
29. events
Every year or so there would be reports of a rabid dog on the edge of town. No one could specify the location or witnesses. A friend of a friend (for enemies keep their peace). Children were said to have been killed. No surprise there, John thought—children are always said to have been killed.
During these periods the whole town complains of a lack of sleep. Mothers and fathers scream over small tardies. Out on the lawns the dogs slink behind bushes and will not come out.
“This is the year of the monster,” is the oft-repeated whisper. “There is nothing we can do. It’s the worst we can imagine.”
There are always new babies the next spring as the town provides more food for its fear.
30.
CHAOS CARD
You just never know. Random horror can occur at any time. One bad day and your life is changed forever. A brake goes out, a cable slips, an air bubble travels to the brain. Instant and irrevocable adventure happens. Disaster happens. Death happens. Weather is everywhere. The weather of high winds. The weather of torrential rain. The weather of a shower of bullets from scattered drive-bys. The virus secret in the heart. The resentment secret in a triggerman’s brain. It does not matter how good or bad the deal, how just or unjust, whether you say your prayers or deny the meaning in everything. It will come.
If you could only accept that, you might plan your life accordingly.
31. events
All the moments collected, remembered, photographed, written down, passed from family member to family member still couldn’t explain the death of his child. All these happy faces and games completed, movies watched and parties attended, say nothing, nothing, about why the child decides one day to erase it all, to make sure no more moments come, except those of his parents’ grief, sorrow, and baffled wonder. Moment by moment John peruses the few photographs of his son’s life, each made all the more precious because of their scarcity: limited editions.
Small numbers of anything, he had discovered, will
break the heart. Ask any grieving father in the final afternoons of his life.
32. events
The best moment of his life was the moment his son was born. It was more of a miracle than he could have imagined—one minute it is he and his wife, and the next minute they are a family of three. Almost immediately the baby showed signs of a distinct personality and all John could think was where did this child come from? It was as if fairies had spirited the child into their lives.
For every one of his son’s birthdays John tried to relive that miraculous moment. One of the worst aspects of his son’s death was the sense that he had been robbed of that special moment.
But as John grew older, he wondered if at the moment of his own death he would at last be able to recreate the miracle once again.
Onion Songs Page 23