The Infinite Onion

by Alice Archer

  Grant kept his eyes on me until the crunch of tires down the driveway faded to silence. Under the livid red of the thorn scratch, his face settled into sadness. Bye, he mouthed, then slid out of sight around the corner.

  I went inside and closed the door.

  On automatic pilot, I gathered a few art supplies—charcoal sticks, acrylic paint, butcher paper, sketch pads—and arranged them on the high work table in the art supplies corner. Sat on a stool with my hands in my lap and stared at them. The silence grew and grew.

  It wasn’t a decision or a thought that moved my hand to pick up a charcoal stick. Something else, something more, moved through me and I responded. That was how it always was. Under an umbrella of hushed solitude, I drew and painted and drew some more. The shadow of the memories I didn’t want morphed into a shade of gray one dollop of cerulean blue away from the color of a cloudless evening sky.

  When I felt done, I lay on the couch in my sleeping bag in the moonlight and deconstructed the grays around the room until all the shadows became friends and I couldn’t stay awake.

  Chapter 64

  Grant

  After a final shower, a sullen affair that sluiced away all traces of Oliver’s cum and the lingering smell of his sweat, I packed my stuff from the courtyard, abandoned the frozen meals in the chest freezer with my name on them, and plodded through the forest to the treehouse.

  My compulsion to replay my molten tryst with Oliver—his toned body’s sinuous wriggle, the heft of his hair, the things he’d said, the… everything—distracted me so much I stood inside the treehouse in a daze until my arm muscles yelled at me and I snapped out of it.

  I dropped the stuff I’d lugged over onto the bed and went out again to clean up the campsite. I jammed the damp tent into its stuff sack and crammed it and everything else into my backpack. I’d spread it all out to dry at the treehouse.

  On my way past Oliver’s through the cover of the woods, I snuck out to the carport and nabbed the loaner bike to borrow for a little while longer. As perfect as the treehouse was, I knew it wasn’t my ultimate solution. The bike would get me to town for food and to Clementine’s. Her cottage wasn’t big enough for me to stay over, but I thought she might let me use her shower before I headed back to Seattle.

  I didn’t own much, yet my belongings filled the treehouse. I dropped the pack in the last empty corner and typed out a text to Oliver, grateful I was high enough to get a signal on my shit phone. I left the key for the panels on the picnic table.

  I could have said more. I could have typed out, Any chance you still want to review my workshop proposal? Or I loved kissing you. Instead, I tossed the phone onto a shelf and collapsed on the bed to eat my way through the perishables from the courtyard fridge.

  Over a bowl of cereal, I mused on our thorny sex wreck. I was dying to know how Oliver was doing in the aftermath. Did he feel bereft without his hands on me? Did he treasure his scrapes? Did he get hard again when he remembered?

  I’d never had sex like that—primal and thoughtless and reckless. Not even close. It hurt to think I’d never have it again, or if I did, it wouldn’t be with Oliver.

  What a pair Oliver and Freddie were—the creative liar and the clueless tramp. My huff into the bowl I held under my chin splashed milk onto my hands.

  I mooned over Oliver through a pint of generic yogurt, then shook myself back to reality and typed out a message to Clementine. Oliver needs his space. Can I impose on you for shower and laundry sometime next week before I return to Seattle?

  Of course, Clementine texted back.

  Thanks!

  Where are you staying? she asked.

  The red power bar on my phone gave me an easy out. Gotta go. Low phone charge.

  I spent the next twenty minutes lost in a meditation on digestion, then got up and rigged makeshift curtains so I could read in bed at night and not worry about someone seeing the light.

  I fell asleep before I found my headlamp.

  The next day began with a double helping of celery and carrots for breakfast and a bold entry in my journal: NEW RULE #3: DON’T LIE TO MYSELF. I scratched it out and wrote a revision on the next page. NEW RULE #3: TELL MYSELF THE TRUTH.

  I chewed on a mouthful as I pried a nail out of the wall with my multitool and hammered it back in over my infinite onion drawing so I could hang up my new rule. The truth was that I knew my action plan wouldn’t work without an upgrade to my self-image.

  A rummage through my backpack unearthed my first self-portrait from Oliver’s interview. I offered the angry stick figure of my former self a smile and ran my fingers over the punch marks from Oliver’s darts.

  I wished I had bigger sheets of paper. Also, I needed more nails, and food that didn’t have to be refrigerated. And markers in colors besides black.

  It took me an hour and a half to bike to town. I could have done it faster if the whole damn island wasn’t so pretty. I’d hurry up, then have to slow again to take in the view.

  By the time I stashed the bike behind the grocery store, the sunny sky had devolved into clouds. Since I didn’t have a lock, I wedged the bike between a wall and a dumpster.

  At Swipe & Swivel, I bought a couple more journal books, a pad of eight-by-ten-inch art paper with a bit of heft, and a six-pack of colored markers. I fondled a small paint set, but it was too expensive and I didn’t have a sink at the treehouse. At the hardware store, I spent a dollar on a pack of brown paneling nails. After ten minutes in the grocery store to stock up on eighty-nine-cent cans of pinto beans, I was done.

  Oliver’s bicycle hadn’t been stolen, thank Christ. I took a look at the sky and decided to forego a visit to the library. I couldn’t risk getting caught in the rain with my art supplies.

  Yeah. The ironies kept coming.

  I promised myself I’d make another trip to town soon to use a computer at the library to focus on my job search.

  I spent most of the ride from town making a mental list of things to do on the library computer. Download resume template. Fill in online application for volunteer program. Browse Craigslist for roommate situations as close to Mitch’s neighborhood as I could afford.

  The sky waited to let loose until ten minutes after I’d returned to the treehouse. To celebrate, I used a forest green marker to draw a picture in the sketchpad of me waving and smiling from the treehouse porch.

  I hammered one of my new nails into the wall and hung my drawing, then stood there and grinned at it for a soppy few minutes.

  Rain pummeled the roof.

  I languished indoors, cozy and impressed with myself, aching to share my success with Oliver.

  Chapter 65

  Oliver

  After Grant left for good on Sunday, I spent that afternoon and the next two days sketching versions of Freddie as the man lying in the ditch in my painting. On Wednesday, I called Freddie and asked him to come over. I wanted to show him what I’d done, so he would believe I was serious about being with him.

  Freddie stood at my dining table and blinked. “You drew me?”

  “I did. More than once.”

  He picked up the first drawing on the stack, set it aside, and pulled out a chair to sit. I’d stacked them in the order I’d created them.

  I stood behind Freddie with my hands on his shoulders, felt his breath slow as he looked.

  “My God,” he blurted. “Babe, these are spectacular. You could make a mint with these. I’m talking full-on bidding wars.”

  “They’re only sketches.”

  When he neared the final drawing, I sat beside him, to watch him see it.

  Freddie left the paper on the table and leaned over it, brow furrowed. His fingers moved in the air over the face of the Japanese boy I’d drawn sleeping on Freddie’s chest.

  I leaned against Freddie’s shoulder. “I was thinking he could be… someone we adopt?”
<
br />   While Freddie bear-hugged me, I checked the clock on the kitchen wall. If he left soon, I could work on the mural a while before night settled around the house.

  I would make the man in the mural be Freddie, I decided, but I wouldn’t paint over the vignettes. I would only add vignettes, to turn the mural into a commemoration of the summer Freddie and I progressed from fuck buddies to family for the long-term.

  Freddie sensed my fixation with the clock. “Too bad,” he said as he pulled back. “I wish you didn’t have drawing lessons today.” He caressed my cheek, studied me with affection and desire.

  If Freddie had forgotten I didn’t do lessons in the summer, I wasn’t going to remind him.

  My nod took so little effort it made the lie feel small.

  Check out our cozy cottage on Whidbey, Freddie texted me the next day. He’d taken to sending me messages and photos about our weekend trip, to infect me with his excitement.

  Cozy seemed an optimistic description of a shed with gingerbread trim. It looked cramped. Or maybe cramped was my new feeling about everything.

  My property had never felt so small.

  I left Freddie’s text unanswered, stowed my phone in my cargo shorts, and continued to circumnavigate my lawn in the rain.

  I paused on the strip of dirt behind the toolshed to revisit the mystery of Grant’s defacement of my property. He’d used blue chalk—probably from Dad’s forestry kit—to draw an infinity symbol on the siding beneath the window. The symbol stretched as wide as my spread arms. Like the other infinity symbols I’d found, it seemed purposefully shambolic, as if Grant’s intention was to deconstruct infinity into chaos.

  The confident trill of a song sparrow turned me toward the woods. My scan for the sparrow’s striped chest came to an abrupt halt when something blue in the foliage caught my eye. I squinted and made out a blue-chalked infinity symbol on a branch. The branch. My branch. Right at the spot where I’d perched to snoop on Grant and the tweens.

  He’d known.

  My face heated at the thought of him knowing I’d lurked there like a weirdo.

  Grant’s infinity symbols pulled on my thoughts like a fixation.

  I hurried back to the house, kicked off my wet boots, and padded to the computer. According to Wikipedia, a cryptographer named John Wallis had invented the infinity symbol. I diverted my attention from the words “eternal love.” I doubted that was Grant’s intended message. He and I had chemistry together, and I’d gotten off when I’d used sex to distract him, but that was only physiology and hormones.

  A sentence about the artist M.C. Escher caught my eye. I traipsed off to the library to find the Escher books, then spent a pleasant hour lost in clever drawings of endless turns and tricky perspectives, admiring all over again Escher’s mastery of Möbius strip infinity on a two-dimensional surface.

  Aza had loved perspective tricks. We’d often slouched together on the couch in the great room to study the Escher books. Aza squirmed and pointed and plied me with questions about how to manipulate perspective, sketchbook at the ready for demonstrations as we talked.

  Fifteen years later, alone on a couch in the library, I turned to the inside front cover of the book in my lap to revisit the words rebellious Aza had written—in pen, to get a rise out of me. He’d known Dad and I didn’t write in our books.

  Aza Andrew Abrams, he’d inscribed in ornate, mocking cursive. And then a short note, meant for me.

  I want this when you’re dead.

  Chapter 66

  Grant

  Monday’s downpour gave me an excuse to hibernate.

  Tuesday disappeared altogether. I woke, opened my eyes for two seconds, then zonked out all day and all night. I figured since I’d pigged out on all the food from the courtyard refrigerator instead of rationing it, I needed to digest. Plus, I felt safer in the treehouse than I’d felt anywhere, ever. The safety made me sleepy.

  Wednesday morning, armed with my new supplies from Swipe & Swivel, I took a break from sleeping and buckled down to do a life review. It was time to deconstruct myself and find a more promising trajectory.

  With the sketchpad on my raised knees, I peered at the old rules I’d nailed up beside my first self-portrait with Oliver’s dart holes in it. I didn’t feel like that anymore—scary and severe.

  I picked up the light blue marker, for sky and no limits, and made a few tentative marks on the paper. I dawdled, determined not to draw another stick figure.

  When I began to draw my arms, I discovered I was a tree. Blue leaves sprouted from my elbows. My branches extended to fill the page. I used the forest green marker to fill in the leaves: green leaves with sky blue outlines. Blue roots grew from my feet into the ground.

  I look amazing.

  I tore out the page and nailed it above the infinity symbol.

  Using the light green marker, I wrote out my new rules.

  New Rule #1: Ask for help.

  New Rule #2: Follow the fascination.

  New Rule #3: Tell myself the truth.

  I thought about all the jobs I’d worked since I was a child that required the flat line of The Zone to get me through the day, and how I’d assumed I wasn’t capable of more. Thought about forest and earth and my feet as roots.

  New Rule #4: Dig deeper.

  Noon came and went as I excavated and documented. The wall filled with turning points, mistakes, things I’d wished for as a kid. Pages fluttered in the cross-breeze from the open windows.

  All I was doing was noticing myself.

  It felt so good.

  Before evening remodeled the treehouse into a cave, I took a break to brush my teeth, then snuggled into my sleeping bag with the art pad to make one more drawing before I slept.

  With the orange marker, I drew an O that filled a page from the sketch pad—for Oliver and for onion—then relaxed my arm and drew more circles over and around the first O, until I could squint and see Oliver’s infinite layers.

  Somehow, I wanted to capture Oliver, to remember him.

  With a pencil I’d found behind the novels on the shelf, I wrote Imperious in stretched letters to fill the narrow space between two layers.

  Slender, I wrote in the layer below.

  Breathtaking coppery hair and skin. That one I wrote in a long space near the outer edge of the onion. Words came fast after that. I hurried to keep up.

  Prisoner. Liar. Renaissance artist. Creative genius. Teaches perspective.

  I couldn’t find words for all the layers of Oliver I knew, but I tried. Mistaken about Freddie. Surrounded by ghosts. Funny. Sweet biceps. That ass in those overalls. Infuriating. Lost his mother.

  I wondered how many of his own layers Oliver knew, and how many layers he knew that I would never know.

  Ruled by secrets, I wrote. Kisses like a dream.

  Because I had the good sense to cap the orange marker, I didn’t write on my dick when my attention shifted to the memory of Oliver’s frantic kisses in his blackberry boudoir. I tried to drag out the pleasure, but Oliver’s agile hand around my dick didn’t want me to go slow.

  I came fast on an explosion of remembered joy, wiped up with a T-shirt, and sank into sleep to avoid the knowledge that I would leave Vashon without touching him again.

  On the fourth day of rain, I ran out of art paper.

  “It’s time,” I said to the bookshelf. I pulled out all the books and laid them on the bed, then added the two novels I’d brought from Seattle. They were all paperbacks. The most obscure one—Underground Art & Theater of the Weimar Republic—was also the largest. I shoved the other books back onto the shelves and sat with Underground Art & Theater on my lap to deliver the bad news.

  “I’m sorry,” I told it with a sympathetic pat, “but it’s for the greater good.” I had the decency to wince as I ripped off the front cover.

  I wrote and dre
w on the blank insides of the covers, nailed them to the wall, then started in on the pages. Printed words became background designs for memos, maps, memories, and yearnings—my long-hidden veins of gold.

  Chapter 67

  Oliver

  A persistent bout of cabin fever punted me out into the rain again. I ended up at the toolshed with my ass on the edge of the concrete floor and my phone in my hand.

  For courage, I fired off texts to Talia and Clementine—I’m off to Whidbey with Freddie next Saturday for a few days. Wanted you to know—before I scooted back another six inches into the toolshed, to practice moving out of my comfort zone.

  My heartbeats sped up. I stared down at my boots in the mud.

  That was where Penelope, Clover, and Abelino found me. They splashed over the lawn on their bikes.

  “Hey, guys.” I coughed to clear the gravel from my throat. “Sorry. Haven’t spoken in a while.”

  Clover let loose a chuckle that sounded as uneasy as I felt. I tried to remember the last time I’d brushed out my hair.

  “You all right?” Penelope, always the caretaker, got right to the point.

  “Yep. Come on in out of the rain.”

  The kids huddled in the shelter of the toolshed and told me things. I tried to listen but got sidetracked by how much tween Aza would have adored them. He’d been more trouble than any of the sweet kids in Grant’s tribe. I shuddered at the thought of Aza’s pushy personality inside a thorn bush. Grant and his tweens wouldn’t have minded. They would have adored Aza back—restless energy, wounded soul, and all.

  A pat on my shoulder brought me back to reality.

  “We’re going,” Abelino said in his smooth voice. “You take care.” His dark eyes told me he saw what I wasn’t saying, that I wasn’t okay. But he was a kid, so I faked a better smile and threw in a reassuring eye twinkle. That seemed to do the trick.