Steve Tem - Onion Songs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 horse 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.

3.

Insomniacs both hate and love the night, he thought, waiting for that minute when the darkness would begin to fray, the torn edges of it scraping across the brightly colored roofs of the town, the smoke of its passage turning into bright morning fog, the great breadth and bulk of it dwindling into black, rotted threads as it made its frantic escape back into the caves and sleeping heads from whence it came. Finally the minute did come, and he could almost hear the raw edges of the grass and trees screaming from the abrupt departure of darkness, and his eyes began to water from the stench of the corpses rising from their beds all over town, brushing their teeth, grabbing that last cup of coffee before climbing into their cars for work.