Steve Tem - Onion Songs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.