Onion Songs (6 page)

“
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, the
y 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.