Wake, Siren

by Nina MacLaughlin

  So Pentheus listens to this tale, which I hope I got right, and was like, “Well, that’s the longest, boringest story I’ve ever heard and you’re a fool and you’re going to jail.” This fucking idiot, man, I’m telling you. So his guys take the priest down into a cell, but then the word is, his chains broke off and the lock came unlocked, but Pentheus has no idea about this, and he decides he’s gonna go see Bacchus for himself.

  So he makes the journey to Cithaeron and he arrives on the shore where we were all starting to party and celebrate and get ritual some nights ago. And this shit’s secret, you know? And this shit is most definitely not for men. And so apparently he’s creeping around, can hear all the pounding and wailing and chanting and howling, and he gets spotted by one of the revelers, who, in her state of frenzy and wildness, sees him as a boar. And fuck me, get this, it’s his fucking mom, Agave. So Agave spots him, and is like, Sisters, sisters, let’s get this bristled beast, let’s get this boar. And can you imagine a more perfect animal for him to be? And so he senses he’s in trouble, like the energy shifts in the air, and in an animal way he knows that things are about to be bad. His very own aunt comes up to him first, stalks up to him, and she fucking rips off his right arm. And then his other aunt comes up to him, and she rips off his left arm. And he’s standing there, screaming, begging, waving his stumps—I guess that makes three now, heh—and then his mom comes over. And you’ve seen Agave, she’s tall, broad shoulders, long wavy dark hair, looks kind of like Anjelica Huston. Like, formidable. And she looks at him with disgust, and she grabs his jaw with both hands and she rips his fucking head off. Spine, tendons, skull, throat, veins, ripped, smashed. Blood spurting, he slumps, feet twitching at the ankle. Agave screaming. And then the other maenads fall in and tear him to fucking pieces. Like, they turn him to fucking pulp.

  Can you fucking believe this?

  And like, I don’t know, I have this weird sense, now that I’m saying it, it’s like, was I there? Did I see this? Like all of a sudden I feel like I can remember tearing at something, and the feel of hot blood, and like this spread of body parts, and did I hold an organ in my hand? Some slick liver? Laughing? Laughing? Like, I can hear laughter. I can hear laughter in my mind. All the women laughing. Just like the most righteous, untamed, victorious laughter.

  TIRESIAS

  Two things about the blindness. One: it’s a blindness with the sight of dreams. I cannot see how many fingers you hold up, but I can see the whirlpool spin of time, the then-this that follows the if-this. I know the specific ends as much as we all know that anyone who lives will die. I was blindsighted.

  Two: blindness now and then allows me to feel like a traveler in a foreign country, the way walking down a street in a city where you don’t speak the language allows you to dissolve. You become a shimmer of senses. You forget your self. You forget what you understand yourself to be and what other people understand you to be. A feeling of extraordinary freedom, to be lifted temporarily from the encumbrance of self-consciousness! You are gone and there is only the dark rich scent of coffee from the café, the flap of a light blue curtain blown from a window left open on the fourth floor, the sweet singe of exhaust from the scooters, syllables tumbling from mouths like pure music—instrumental, the stray dog by the curb covered in sores snapping weakly at flies, the nervous flutter of clucking from chickens in pens, the man with the cart on the corner with his warm chestnuts which smell like biscuits with butter and honey, the dark eyebrows on that woman, the small boy holding a tattered stuffed animal pig, the gold-and-blue tile on the wall, like colors you’ve never seen before, somehow deeper and richer than the ones you know from home, the barges sliding down the river leaving slicks of oil in their wake, the clatter, blang, and pulse of traffic, something warm from the oven, golden loaves, that nourishing yeasty smell, and a woman emerging from the bakery in a stylish red coat with bread in her bag, two teenagers with backpacks shoving each other and by accident bumping a man in fancy shoes who looks startled then smiles, a child screaming at his brother and kicking the air. You’re gone except for what washes over you, and you are wholly there and not there at all. No one can see you! You don’t exist in this place! It’s uncomfortable in some ways—the experience of your own absence—and it’s exhilarating because you are unburdened of the weight of people’s wondering about you and you wondering about yourself.

  Sometimes I feel that. And sometimes the blindness is a wearisome blank, not white or black, but gray-gold like the dawn. I wrap a tattered bandage around my eyes. Sight then sightlessness then an in-between, a seeing without seeing, the same color as my sex. Male then female then male again, and now a shambling rover with bandaged eyes who can never say it all. The things I say are true. I cannot—I did not? I would not?—say all the things that are true.

  There are things I wish I said.

  I have not always been a man. And I have not always been blind.

  * * *

  Juno is a woman of passion, appetite, and force. One late afternoon, violet light approaching, she lay in bed with her husband, and it’s safe to guess that each was in that softened place that comes after knowing another’s body, when still-damp limbs are strewn, when muscles moments ago tensed and clenched, release and dissolve, minds washed in postcoital ease, nursing tenderness and intimacy. They were in the state of closeness born out of the feeling—rare, fleeting—of being known, of granting entry, of gaining entry. (How easy to mistake these feelings for love.) Voices get softer, touches gentle and no slave to pace, a gratitude, a relief (I am not alone, I am for a brief time joined). A collapse of the hard edges that divide us most of the time.

  Side note: you know as well as I do, this does not happen with everyone, and it does not happen every time. Sometimes you feel so separate you exit your body and it’s as though you’re watching as it performs its fleshy, earthy acts. And sometimes it can make you the most aware of where you end and the other person begins. And in that separation is one of the deepest sorts of loneliness.

  But Juno and Jove had delighted in each other in their wide bed as light faded on Mount Olympus and they sprawled languid and grateful. And maybe Juno said something about how amazing it was, how she felt her orgasm in her shoulders, how she turned into electricity itself, which is, as she’s told Jove before, the strongest kind of coming. And maybe that prompted Jove to describe his own experience of climax, and then, perhaps with her fingers running through his curls, he mused—such is the intimate, idle chatter in this state of closeness and glow—who do you think enjoys it more, men or women?

  In their carnality, the gods are not so far removed from human states. Their lusts and longings, the wide spectrum of their proclivities. They take interest in mortal acts of love and they descend to our bodies and our beds to taste what we taste, trying to understand their own pleasure better. I cannot say for sure—I am not a god—but I’d wager mortal pleasure outdoes the pleasure of the gods. Our pleasure is not an option for eternity, and sweeter for it, I suspect.

  “What do you think, Juno? Women or men?” And after Jove posed the question, maybe Juno removed her hand from caressing his head and looked a thousand miles into the distance.

  “Men,” she said. Of this there is no doubt.

  And maybe Jove laughed. “My moon, you’re wrong. It is women for sure.”

  And maybe Juno was silent. And maybe Jove didn’t register her hand out of his hair, or the tension stiffening her body. “Let’s ask Tiresias,” perhaps he said. Such are the whims of a god. “He’ll know.”

  And perhaps Juno said, “Woman or man, he has only ever been human.”

  I lived seven years of my life as a woman. I’d been walking through the woods on a warm afternoon and came upon two snakes mating on the path in the sun. I don’t like snakes and I didn’t want there to be more of them, so I rustled them apart with my staff and they slithered away. But I’d disrupted something I shouldn’t have, a pairing natural as flushed cheeks after wine, and I went all at once f
rom man to woman, a transformation total and abrupt.

  A body doesn’t have an opposite. Black and white, colors both. Dog and cat, creatures both. Man and woman, people both. A destabilizing transformation nonetheless, not just new form but new ways of moving through the world. But the mind adapts to all but agony, and it did not take long to feel at home in this new shape. I spent seven years in dresses, with breasts. I spent seven years coming to know an experience similar to mine as a man before, and wholly different. In the eighth year, I came upon two large snakes, tan with red diamonds, twisting again around each other obscenely, and I reasoned, if splitting the snakes changed me once, perhaps it will change me again. I ran one hand over my left breast, and inserted my stick between the two huge snakes, and back to man I went.

  Was it punishment, being turned into a woman? I don’t know. Is it punishing to be a woman? It is. It will continue to be.

  My experience living as a woman and a man was known, storied, and meant I was summoned up to Mount Olympus to settle their question. Still upon their bed, their hair wild, Jove smiling broadly and Juno sitting up, rigid, her eyes aimed at an absence. My heart thudded in my old chest and wings flew against the walls of my belly. I looked all around their chamber, saw the tangled sheets, massive mirror, curtains woven from morning light and strands from the tail and mane of Pegasus, a green violet spray of peacock feathers fanning out from a vase on a bureau, a bowl of acorns atop a dresser, and hung from the ceiling, a mobile in the form of an eagle made with feather and wire, a six-foot wingspan, glittering eyes, pushed by the caresses of a gentle breeze and moving in slow, slow circles above the bed. What now, I wondered. What am I in for now? I listened as Jove explained. “So,” he said, “who takes more pleasure in sex? Women or men?” He laughed as he said it and looked at Juno with a smile on his face. She met his eyes, but her smile back was forced and cold.

  My mind moved fast. I thought of being a boy and going to the shoe store with my mother and the woman who worked there kneeled at my feet and her shirt fell away from her chest and I couldn’t see much, but I could see a little, all that promised volume. I hardened as she slipped a shoe on my foot, for the first time that I can remember. I hardened that night again as I lay in my bed in the dark remembering, imagining, nothing so specific as an actual body, but swells, flesh swells and a pressing. The other boys had talked about it, about the stiffening and the pulling and what comes out. I touched myself tentatively and appreciated the firmness, the smoothness, its rise, and I gripped myself the way I’d seen the boys gesture in the grove of trees behind the butcher in town. I closed my fist tight then moved it up and down—and then the spasm and the spurting and I was afraid for a moment but the boys had told me and one had even done it in front of us, tugged, grunted, spurted, white stuff on the ground, so I knew what to expect. I touched it with my fingers and I smelled it (I would taste it someday, too, but not that time). It felt like snot, like melted wax. The smell was sharp and clean. So simple. An image, a hardening, a tug tug tug.

  And I remembered being a woman. The memories came fast, moving too quick to hold one. A slideshow of pressings and penetrations. It wasn’t the same. For one thing, there was no group of girls behind the butcher. No whispered laughing discussions between friends in bedrooms with closed doors. No one grabbed my hand and pressed their fingers into my palm and said Like this. The women friends I had weren’t saying, I use these fingers, I move my hand this way, I touch there, I press there, I put this much inside, I move this fast, this slow, backforthupdownroundroundround. Not even jokey gestures in the alleys to align ourselves in the pleasure of the act. Not a secret, exactly, but not discussed. No one leaned her back against a tree, put her hand between her legs and moved her hand against herself until her cheeks pinked and she flexed her quadriceps and ticked her hips just so, up, up, and made a small tight noise that came from the back of her throat that maybe would’ve been louder if she hadn’t had an audience. No woman ever, ever said to me, And then I got so wet.

  We didn’t talk about it. And at first I thought that I’d missed the clutchy gatherings with girls where they said, This is how I do it and this is how it feels, having landed as a woman full-fleshed and -fledged. But as I spoke with them, many women revealed there had been no such conversation. Private touchings, no discussion. Orgasms were not a given. If I were still a woman, I would say to the girls, Learn your body, know your pleasure, talk about it. It is not a shame. Wanting and enjoying does not make you dangerous and it does not make you bad. I wish I had said it then. Such a message can’t be heard coming from a hunched old man with bandaged eyes.

  As a woman, it took a man taking three fingers to me and rubbing until I squirmed and kicked to know, if he can do this to me, I can do it to myself. And so began my own exploring and I touched myself in all the ways I could, told the people who shared my bed how to touch me there, firmer, left, like that, perfect, yes. And I came to know well how I worked, and I was taken by the variety. Sometimes, a dense and concentrated heating. Sometimes, a flex and purr, or a round bursting throb. Sometimes, a crack against a wall of ocean, cracking, cracking, and the sudden break. Sometimes, a total everywhere whiteness.

  As boys, we went to the bathhouse and knew the notch in the wall that allowed us to see all the women naked. We took turns peeping through the hole, all of us pressing against our pants. It was an understanding. Nothing like this as a woman. And why? I bow my head in shame to know I am in part to blame.

  I stood in front of Jove and Juno and my mind raced. What did I know? What is absolute about bodies? A mental scan through my memories of life as a man showed so many satisfying thrust-and-grunts, atop, below, penetrated, penetrator, lost, ecstatic, joined, separate, exhilarated, jackrabbiting or slow and easy. Always the baseline animal pleasure. Then through my woman memories, much the same: the exhilaration, the dissolving, the blurred-vision frenzy, the back-forth give-take of feeling my own strength and muscle in tension with someone else’s, the wishing sometimes it was over for discomfort or for boredom or both, the hair-grabbing, the back-arched pant and press, teeth against a shoulder. The outer electricity and the tight heat of the inside accessed. It is the same and different.

  I am only one man. I was only one woman. How can I speak for all? And even within my hybrid existence, every kind of pleasure has not been revealed to me; I have not tried everything there is to try; I have, like everyone, been limited by fear and propelled toward certain pleasures, away from others. Have I missed the ultimate? Might one man or woman know a profounder pleasure than I myself have had? Of course, of course.

  I looked at the rug—magenta, lapis, gold—beneath my feet. They wanted an answer. They did not want to hear that it was an impossible question.

  Who likes it more?

  I thought of the transcendent times. The handful of mind-destroying fucks. I remembered the moments of the purest abandon and wildest pleasure, where it almost, almost felt out of control, where I slipped into ecstasy, became a field of sparks, and was also still real and true and whole. The greatest pleasure is loss—self, control—an act of surrender. As a woman, reaching that state of surrender surpassed the experiences I’d had as a man, a fuller and more total pleasure, a dissolving more complete. When I lost myself, I lost myself more fully, a wild charged electric thing, a cloud of pure color, fervent, breathless, wowed. When it was right, it surpassed the pleasure I’d had as a man ten to one.

  When it was right. Standing at the foot of Jove and Juno’s bed, rattled by the summoning, my mind failed me. When it was right. It was right so much less often for me as a woman. The surrender was greater, the release more powerful, in part exactly because it was harder won. When it came to women sharing their lives or bed or both with a man, there were steeper repercussions, graver consequences. There were things I learned as a woman that I had not known as a man. Use your second smallest finger to apply salve below your eyes—the skin is most delicate there, and that is the weakest finger. Don’t fight in the
kitchen because of the knives. The times you most want to press against another person are the times when your womb invites into its home the possibility of a guest who’ll stay nine months. If it’s with a man you share your bed, be careful then. As a woman, I only shared my bed with another woman a time or two. Again, my experience is limited; I am only one. But some of these kernels of knowledge, the things I came to know as a woman that I had no sense of as a man, all the risks and troubles, tip the pleasure scales toward men, who can enjoy themselves in a way unencumbered by some of the large and lasting consequences that can come from ten minutes tangled in a half-light trance. Unencumbered like a person in a foreign city. Unencumbered like the blind old man with bandaged eyes.

  The gods wanted an answer. Well, Jove wanted an answer. “Men or women?” he said, head cocked. I looked at Juno. Her expression telegraphed a searching skepticism, a disdain, and maybe fear, too, at my answer? Is that what I saw in the set of her jaw, in the upward tilt of her eyebrows? Did she foresee what I would say and know what it would mean? What I should’ve seen was her openness to a more blurred truth, her certainty that there was no way to make an answer to this question. But what punishment would’ve befallen me if I’d said to Jove, There is no answer to what you ask? No answer was the answer; Juno knew that to be true. But my answer was given shape by fear. I tell the truth. I can’t tell all the truth. It’s true I was afraid.

  Another question blazed across my brain: Would I have been invited up to settle their debate if I were still living as a woman? Would they have rated my perspective? Would I have been believed? And, the question pounds, unanswerable, would my answer have been the same?