33. events
Beginning a year after his son’s death he saw a therapist for nine or ten months. This man was quiet and thoughtfully sad, and John thought to ask him what had ever happened to him to make him this way, but it would have meant crossing too many boundaries to do so.
Instead he went week after week and counted memories with the man: 1) the birth photograph, 2) the boy lying before the birthday record player, wagging a socked foot through the air in time with tunes too old for him, 3) the boy standing on his father’s feet as they danced as if some dream of princess and instructor.
John was thankful for the brevity of these appointments, reassured that there would be no time to reach the end of his pitifully small count.
34. dreams
The world was always in motion. This wasn’t easy to recognize, as one’s own unsteadiness tended to cancel out the roll and wave of the world. But John knew that if you were quiet enough, and held yourself steady, and tried to think of nothing, it made itself obvious to you: the up and down of streets and ground, how the houses moved in and out of focus, the hesitant outlines of other people’s faces, the way colors wandered out of lines.
Choosing one single moment to remain steady was an impossibility. You could not hold the world. At best, you might resist the dizziness resulting from all this shaking.
But these are things perhaps only the dead lie still enough to know.
35. events
John did not date for two years after his wife died. She’d been taken in a car accident, and John felt he no longer had enough pieces to play with. Then, gradually, he built up enough confidence to at least speak to one of the women at work, to share a confidence or two, to offer help, to trade phone numbers. On their first date she spent the entire evening talking about people he did not know and their various adventures with cars, pets, and home repairs. On their second date she wanted to have sex immediately, then acted as if they had been dating for years. He concluded from this experience that the norm now was a streamlined and truncated courtship—people lived their lives with too many missing cards. He would not date again for almost a year.
36. behaviors
After she was gone John let things go. Dirty dishes gathered in the sink, half-eaten food waited on the table, garbage stood in the corner, all murmuring their condolences.
It was an attempt, he realized, to stay in the moment: if he kept the remnants of their last meal on the table perhaps the next—the cleaning her out of his life—might not occur.
But the flies came and the stench, for stalled time eventually rots, and cannot be kept.
37. dreams
After John’s wife died he often found himself looking at very young women. Other people might find this perverse but he himself did not think it was. He supposed it did not embarrass him because he and his wife had never had a daughter.
In any case, he wasn’t sure if there was anything sexual in his interest. His appeared to be more of an aesthetic concern. There was a freshness in them, a lack of cynicism, or so he thought. He was self-aware enough to know this was an idealistic view, but no matter. It made him feel better just to see all these beautiful young women about in the world.
38. behaviors
For two years after his wife died John was but sporadically employed, taking odd jobs for odd money. Stocking shelves, inventory, yard work, but in the spring it was painting, which he enjoyed. So time consuming to make it right, but he always felt the world had been renewed with a reservoir of completely fresh moments.
Despite his advancing years he was always the new guy on these jobs. And, after an initial display of deference, his co-workers must have decided he knew nothing, and treated him like a kid.
That was how he wanted it. If he could still take advice from a 20-year-old the world might still be a well of possibility.
39. events
John had managed to avoid crime most of his life, until he was forty, when a series of break-ins left him without a TV or stereo. He replaced them immediately, left the new boxes out in his trash, a signal to the thief that he was ripe for the picking again.
This relationship lasted off and on for over a year, with the usual swings of attention and inattention, disappointment and anticipation that pester most relationships. Not a lover exactly, but John’s own private Santa Claus, a treat always left out to please and bring an unexpected chuckle.
40. dreams
When looking through old photo albums he’d accumulated during his lifetime, John was annoyed by how many photographs displayed people he did not recognize, places he was sure he’d never been, or even images that appeared to make no sense whatsoever. He knew it was possible to take an unrecognizable photograph—his photography skills had always been less than average—but what would possess him to display such photographs? Obviously they had had some meaning for him at some time, but that meaning was long gone.
Which was the most distressing thing, he supposed. How meaning could just slip away, seemingly at random, almost as fast as you might acquire it.
Perhaps his dead wife had taken the photos. But why hadn’t he noticed them before? He hadn’t been paying attention. He had lost his memory of these photos. Little by little he had lost meaning. He had lost his wife.
41. philosophies
He’d discovered that when life grew dull he could experiment with being his opposite. A teetotaller, he became a heavy drinker. Quiet around women, he became the ultimate charmer. Passive and reticent, he became forceful and brave. He might maintain the transformation only for a few days, sometimes only for a few hours. But each time he managed to retain at least a ghost of the person he’d pretended to be. For certainly these were all people he could have been, given the right circumstances. Chance could make you dull and fearful, or interested and competent. He believed we should have more control than that over our personalities, but so often we did not. Luck of the draw. Sometimes late at night he could hear the faint sound of the world shuffling, reshuffling, riffling the deck.
42. behaviors
John had a sister who would forever define the best and worst of the female sex for him. A year younger, she had always been more mature. When they were teenagers she let him watch her get dressed so that “He would know the order that a woman’s clothes went on.” It was another year before he fully understood what she had been talking about.
They drew apart in their middle years. He never forgave her for taking up smoking. She drank too much, dressed immodestly. The last time he saw her was after his wife died and following the end of her third marriage, and it shocked him how much she looked like their mother.
It was then he knew he could never marry again.
43. philosophies
Only recently had John realized that people did not fully appreciate the importance of individual moments. A stumble over a stone, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman, and your life was changed forever. And what is that glint in the passing automobile’s bumper—the reflection of your long dead son, his heart stopped by a fall, now singing into the last sharp reflection of the day?
44. behaviors
Most of his adult life John had worked in an office. Originally it had been the best he could get right out of college with a good education but no special skills. In the years that followed it was the thing he knew, and when a company had to plug someone into a position his was the plug that fit.
Primarily he moved papers around, office to office, company to client, company to government, and back again. He now has very few memories of that period of his work life.
For paper destroys time. That can be wonderful in a novel, but not so wonderful when you’re trying to recall, and store away, the best part of your day.
45. behaviors
There were very few things John felt ashamed of. But all of them had to do with women. Things he’d done when he was much younger, of course. They’d tease him on and then they’d try to turn him off.
No one knew himself l
ess than a young man in his early twenties. Unable to see past his own need. So many shameful incidents, so many explosions of bad behavior: he’d take them back if he could. He spent many a late night worrying over the sins of a younger self.
If his son had lived, he would have told him. He would have replayed every ill-behaved moment. And his boy, he would have had to listen.
46. events
John saw the man three times in as many months. A hard face, collar pulled up as high as it would go. Oily eyes. He never knew such eyes were possible, as if the tear ducts issued a yellow oil that glazed the eyes. The first time he saw him the man was watching some small boys play ball at the edge of the park, examining every move as if he were a major league scout. The second time John had brushed against him as he came out of the hardware store. Metallic things jangled under the coat—John checked his body for injury—he could have sworn he felt his skin tear. The third time the man had appeared on a distant corner, bent to pet a cat, and snapped its neck with a blur of motion. John had run to the corner but there was no sign of the man or the cat.
He searched the papers for months for news of missing children and found nothing. He always believed it was the wrong papers, or the wrong time.
47. dreams
John was hardly suicidal, but sometimes in the dentist’s chair he imagined himself succumbing to some medication mishap and discovered he didn’t feel badly about that. He felt such vulnerability leaning back with his mouth open, metal instruments protruding like utensils from a serving bowl. Halfway to death already, or so it seemed: the only thing between him and death now an allergy or a sensitivity or some accidental lethal combination. That’s what death frequently was, anyway, an accidentally lethal combination of moments. You could worry about it all your life or you could accept it, even welcome this universe of accidental possibility.
In fact, he was frequently so relaxed in the dentist’s chair he slept through the most uncomfortable procedures. The best moment was when he first closed his eyes, waiting for the drill.
48. dreams
They try so hard to be heard, John thinks: the ghosts, the ones who have passed from day to night to when and wherever. They need what we all need: contact, a body that will listen. But at least they know true contact is impossible. We still cling to our illusions.
Sometimes looking at the world is like gazing through an oil-smeared lens: their passage dirties the glass, preventing him from seeing anything with absolute clarity.
But that is their mission—that is all they have left since their lives went away. To obscure. To cloud. To hinder our view of the next day.
49. philosophies
He’d reached the age when the body chooses to rebel. Arms had shortened themselves, and hands could not hold anything reliably except another hand.
More difficult still was the unusual shape his ears had taken, and the wart he noticed on the side of his nose one day, apparently which appeared overnight.
He supposed it might be a reaction to the longevity of modern man. The body knows it was never meant to last past forty, and does its damnedest to convince the mind.
One moment he is racing to catch the train, a movie, or a plane. The next moment he dodders like a film slipping its sprockets to display the same image again and again: an old man with a surprised look, shouting at his feet to move.
50. dreams
We drown in a sea of the dead, he thinks. Everywhere are the things they have made, touched, hated, loved. The oils from their bodies, the stench of their humanity, the electric charge of their passions, linger—he is sure of it—long after their physical bodies are gone. In the heavy air that chokes the world their vanished lives move.
We cannot avoid them. They brush against us, rub their lost memories into our flesh so often they become a part of us we cannot scrub, medicate, or cut out.
It is impossible, sometimes, to think, because the noise of what they had and what they miss fills our heads.
It is impossible to breathe without breathing them in.
The world, he thinks, is made not so much of atoms and electrons as of moments.
51. dreams
If he let himself be open to it John knew the world to be a work of art. The textures of it, the infinite shadings of color, the shapes that resonated in the oldest part of the brain. To move through the world was to live inside a work of art, down to the individual brushstrokes and pixels. Moments of time were merely dabs of color, spontaneous decisions, which altered the entire portrait.
All one had to do was pick up the brush and add one’s own little bit. A simple line or color fill would do, but so few made the effort.
52. behaviors
At least once a month John would travel to an isolated rocky beach, to sit, to stand, to observe the world as one alone just as he imagined other humans to have done from the beginning of their times.
Over the years he never saw another person there. It wasn’t the friendliest sort of beach—no place to wade, no comfortable sand to lay a beach towel on. It was a place of sharp edges and hard surfaces, a reminder of the smallness of our bodies, the delicacy of our flesh. But for him there was a comfort in knowing he could have been anyone in time here, standing alone on the rocks, the massive presence of the world ready to tilt and crush him at any moment. Here he grieved endings, thankful that at least for the moment he could breathe the ocean air, feel the chill breeze against his too-exposed skin, and stand.
53.
JOKER
But in every deck there is at least one Joker, the card that’s the spoiler or the treat, depending on the game. Someone calls with a job offer or a profession of love, someone else delivers the news that what you care for most is gone and irretrievable. You try to keep this moment at the bottom of the deck, as far from you as possible, but still it shows up when you least expect it. Then again, what if it’s good news, and only your fear prevents you from holding it? There is no easy answer. There is only the anxiety, which could just as easily turn into elation or devastation.
Thoughts like these had kept John out of the game for years. But eventually there had to come a time when the winning and the losing mattered very little anymore. He just had to play the game. He just had to play.
54. philosophies
There comes a time when there are more years behind you than ahead of you. There comes a time when it’s the last day on the job, the final European vacation, the last woman you’ll have in your bed. There comes a time when the caregiver becomes the one cared for. There comes a time when a twenty-year guarantee on the house’s new roof has no more meaning. There comes a time when the math seems irrelevant. There comes a time when you wonder if you have, in fact, reached that time, or if you’re just feeling old, like your father, and his father before him.
TWELVE MINUTES OF DARKNESS
1.
Since only darkness inspired him, he was always waiting for the light to burn out. Although he might switch the light off by hand (and most evenings this is what he did), there was something special about spontaneous, accidental darkness, and to encourage its visitations he would shake the lamp for a few minutes each day so as to weaken its filament. Once enveloped in such darkness, however it might have been achieved, he would scrawl across the pages his stories of lost children, maddened fathers, and vengeful women, ignoring lines and sometimes even the edge of the page, so that after a few years the outer stretches of his desk were tangled and layered with the missing phrases and ends of lines and stories he had written long into his middle age, then long into his old age. So many such bits and pieces had been irretrievably lost that he never had enough for a complete submission to whatever pulp journal might be popular at the time, but that did not matter to him. What mattered was the very act of writing through the dark, and in this, his last minute of living, he thought about the journey of it, mounting a carriage in the middle of the night, an umbrella poised above his head to keep off the inky drops, the driver quiet and sullen, the smoky ho
rse blind and swollen, the great narrow carriage wheels turning toward the end of his story.
2.
Every night in her dreams the moon fell. Some nights it descended slow as a kiss, but on others it plummeted rapid as failure. She could not decide which was the worse nightmare. She could not bear the absence of even this vague light, and once when her soon to be ex-husband refused to pay the utilities she spent a night huddled before the fireplace like some earlier sort of human, pondering the required ritual to insure the sun’s eventual emergence from the black cave of night. Tonight she woke from the dream screaming, for in this new variation her father had swallowed the moon whole, then turned and looked at her with that old smile of complete control. She counted one by one the minutes of darkness, waiting for the moon to appear from behind the clouds. Finally the minute arrived when she realized the moon had left her forever, had fallen into the ocean or into the midst of men who had torn it to pieces, each desiring the whole of it, so she painted her face silver then, and sat in an upstairs window, and turned her head gradually as her dreams went through phases.
Onion Songs Page 24