Wake, Siren

by Nina MacLaughlin

  I cannot say.

  The last bit of late afternoon light entered the window and the massive mirror flung it onto the ceiling in a bolt of white. The mirror was framed with crude scenes carved into the gilt, a man and a horse, a woman on her knees, dozens of lean little Cupids with menacing grins. On the wall on Juno’s side of the bed, one of her moon-phase paintings. Against the indigo, the crescents and swells had a white-gold radiance. The paints of a goddess glow. In a heap on the floor, Jove’s robe. Juno had kicked her sandals off as she’d walked in the bedroom door. These immortals, these two who will not know end, what do they know of pleasure?

  For us, earthbound, finite, for we who will die, to dissolve with another body is to brush against immortality, it is to be absorbed into an endlessness. We pursue these moments with so much of ourselves. Joined with another body, in whole surrender, in total pleasure, we transcend temporarily our own eventual ends, we enter a place unbound by future or past, we enter into oblivion. We enter the infinity that death is, and we are alive to know it and exist within it for moments. One could argue, and perhaps I would, as a human on this earth, it is the profoundest of experiences offered up to us, woman or man or both or neither.

  The gods chase this same oblivion, but what breaks over us as a vast rush of eternity, they experience as the closest thing they can to knowing what it is to die. It is the moment they come closest to mortality. And it explains their fascination with our mortal desire. They taste our ends; we taste their endlessness. In that, we are offered more. Our pleasure harder won, we pay for it with our lives. In all our bodies, in all our states of being, we seek what does and does not bend to time.

  If only they’d asked me instead: who takes more pleasure, humans or gods. That I could have answered.

  But this was not the question posed to me. What I could not realize quickly enough as I stood in their bedroom is that their question was not trivial at all, that the asking and its answer would yield ramifications. Though I could not know it then, I know it now: the question and its answer are about the order of things, the way power propels itself across people and time. Between chaos and order lies a porous border, patrolled by grasping, flawed, and fragile guards loath to hand over what they have. Jove, all-mightiest, wanted his sense of things confirmed, wanted his understanding of order to be underlined. He said louder and with more force, “Which is it already?”

  I squirmed and bluffed. “It’s an honor to be before you. But I wonder, with all the respect that’s due, why concern yourself with the pleasures of us lowly human forms—we can’t compare to you in any sphere.”

  “Of course you can’t,” Jove said, “but what exists in your world is echo and shadow of what exists up here. Dimmer, fainter, but no less true.”

  “It’s a stupid question,” Juno said.

  “Juno, sweets, you, a beautiful female form, goddess beyond compare, you have no idea what a man feels like, and I have no idea what a woman feels like. Don’t you want to know?”

  “That’s not what this is about and you know it. You just want Tiresias to tell you that all the nymphs you fuck like it more than you do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Tell me what you said.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  It did though. I let the pair continue their squabble. Jove looked at me again.

  “Men or women?”

  “I would be so curious to know what pleasure is like for the gods,” I said.

  “There aren’t words for that,” said Juno. “Just answer. We both know what you’ll say.”

  I looked again at the floor.

  “At its best, at its rightest and fullest and most powerful, the answer is women. Women take more pleasure than men.” So I said.

  * * *

  The last thing I remember seeing is a storm in Juno’s eyes and two feathers drifting toward the floor as she pressed herself up from her pillow. In her disappointment, in her understanding of the limits of my answer, she stripped me of my sight. She punished my male-mindedness with blindness. She punished my dismissal of the complexity, the discomfort, the fear. She was right. In the simplicity of my answer, I confirmed the perception of the most powerful god, his worldview and his wishful thinking. What I said without saying: women with their ten-times-better pleasure, how can they resist, they’ll open themselves to any option, they need to be controlled because they cannot control themselves. And so goes a man’s thinking: women love sex so much, take more pleasure than I can imagine, and so, it stands to reason, of course she wants me, she can’t resist me—and how puffed it makes him, how proud and worthy-feeling. But then comes the question: but does that also mean that there’s no man she can resist? Is she being driven by her desire, galloping away from me? The thought terrifies, makes him fear what he might lose, and possessiveness takes hold, a need to exercise his power. The worst of our behavior rises out of the snarled nest of our fear.

  I wish I’d said: Juno, Jove, almighties, not only am I not equipped, the question has no answer. Pleasure is as individual as our fingerprints, for every person on this earth. Desire, fear, and need press up against our chests, between our legs, in ways that shift through all our lives.

  I did not say that. And for what I said, I lost my sight, a punishment I’ve come to know that I deserved. In a new state of gold-gray midnight, trying to blink sight back into my eyes, I heard Jove say, “My moon, relax. We were joking around. You didn’t need to blind the man.” Once done, no god can undo what another god has done. Jove could not restore my sight, but he pitied me. “Tiresias, I’m sorry. My wife has gone too far. She has taken your sight, but I will grant you a different sort of seeing.” And so Jove gave me the power of prophecy.

  And such is how I wander the cracked and snake-strewn paths, burdened my whole life—first second sexed then second sighted—by knowing more than most. I could never say it all. The things I said were true. I could not say all the things that are true.

  There are things I wish I’d said.

  SYRINX

  We’re her sisters. You help your sisters. You see one of your sisters on the street in some trouble, you cross the street and say, “Everything cool, sis?” And if everything isn’t cool, you do the thing you can to help. There’s trouble in this world, and lucky you if you haven’t found any.

  So we helped Syrinx back then and we’re helping her now because she’d rather have us speak than her because she hates the way her voice sounds, the breathy foghorn ache of it. You know the sound. You’ve seen the dude in the wool tunic in the square leaning up against a building blowing into those pan pipes with a hat at his feet with some coins. Those pan pipes, their proper name is Syrinx.

  We river nymphs have each other’s backs and we say what’s real and we keep watch. We’d seen the way Pan was in the woods. Two-horned god of the pastures and flocks, of the goatherds, of all the lonely wilds, he spent his time lusting after nymphs. Squalid god. Waist-up manhood, pumpkin-colored curls and his bushy beard, who knows what all lived in there, orange eyes, and his waist-down goathood with thick furred legs, leaving hoofprints on the forest floor, his fat animal hard-on leading the way.

  He caught sight of Syrinx, total virgin who planned on staying so, and that’s her choice. She devoted herself to Diana, also her choice. She got mistook for Diana all the time, as a matter of fact. Main difference between them was the bow—Diana’s gold, Syrinx’s wood—but you know you’re gorgeous when you get second-glanced as a goddess.

  So Pan sees her and goes nuts and follows her through the woods saying the nasty shit he says and she ignores him and keeps walking, pretending she’s deaf the way we all have even though we hear it, and then hear it that night when we’re trying to fall asleep, and then hear it a week later when we’re angry at our socks being hard to put on or at the weather that day, like it’s a complete mind-boggle, a guy sitting on some steps can say, Better bundle up tonight, it’s gonna get cold, and somehow it m
akes you wonder if you’re going to make it safely to wherever it is you’re going. Like somehow, wear an extra sweater is all menace. Like you can’t take a walk without some guy inserting himself into your day. Into your mindspace or your spacespace. Like it’s theirs to own. And some days the deaf ears work, some days that smile for me, sugar can just dissolve into the static of the afternoon, along with the sound of a goat getting slaughtered or the chatter in the marketplace. But some days it doesn’t. Some days it’s not just noise and it sticks and echoes in the cave of your mind with all the other comments and gestures and moments, this wretched chorus of unwanted noise, that have made you wonder in a very real way: Am I about to be killed? Is this where my life ends? Sex and dread and threat. Fuck. It’s all too much sometimes. That’s why it’s good to have sisters. That’s why it’s good to have a team.

  Anyway, Pan is trying to get Syrinx’s attention and she doesn’t want to hear it, but she feels him getting closer and she knows what’s what and she knows when her body’s talking to her and what to do if her body says, Okay, splitting time.

  So she bolts and of course Pan follows her. He doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Wouldn’t be able to take a hint if it was a garden snake slapped across his face. He goes from the usual disrespect, telling her where he’s going to put his dick, how he wants to feel her inside, how he wants to sink into that strong ass of hers, to the straight-up perverse, talking about how he wants to watch her lick a sheep’s balls, and how he wants to rope her to a honey locust tree and put his horn in every one of her holes and feed her all the flowers, how he wants to whip her flesh with nettles and when her skin is raised and red and peckled with bumps, he wants to jizz all over her and use it like massage oil, then lick it off her body. This fucking faun.

  She’s sprinting and crying and she starts screaming. And she arrives at a river she can’t cross, and that’s where we are, and we’re nymphs of the river and she’s a nymph of the woods, and we’re her sisters and we heard her and we know what’s up with Pan, and it was just like, We’ve got you, sis. We’ve got your back. And we think fast because once the change is made there’s no reversing it, so we do the calculating quick as we can, and we know the fate that she’d prefer. And like that, we turn her into reeds, just as Pan reaches out to grab her. And instead of grabbing hold of Syrinx, he wraps his arms around the reeds. She’s all just hollow stalks by the river’s edge. And he’s all friggin’ woebegone because he missed his chance, and he starts sighing, making a real show of it, and his hot breath, which smells like sheep pussy, passes over the hollows of the reeds and makes this sound of foggy lament, and Pan loves the sound, even in his sadness over not getting a chance to bone Syrinx. He blows and blows and his cheeks puff out and his face turns all red and he’s sweating and wild-eyed, tooting and wailing on the reeds. “Oh baby, this is how I’ll talk to you,” he says. “I’ll put my lips to you and blow and you’ll answer.”

  And we know we saved our sister, we know we did right by her, and that given the choice between being reeds and being forced to have Pan on top of her stripping her virginity from her, well, we know what she’d choose. But we think about it. Sometimes we wonder. Because the fact is, Pan still hooves around the forest and still gets handsy, or worse, with the nymphs and is drunk a lot of the time and his beard is longer and dirtier, disgusting old satyr. He hangs around doing what he does and Syrinx isn’t ever going to string her bow again. And the thing is, he loved the sound of her so much, he snipped reeds to different lengths—and we know Syrinx can’t feel it but we’re still like, shit, seeing our girl get cut like that—and he attaches them together with string and hot wax and there’s low notes and high, and we hear her voice, and that’s how the pan pipe came about, sounding like if sad ghosts had voices, which is maybe just exactly what it is.

  ECHO

  I know my power. I know the way I shift the energy of any room I enter. The heat and light that comes off of me. I know it. Look at me. The command of my height, the spread of my shoulders, I stand with strength. I am immortal. See the swell and lift of my breasts, nipples that press against the saffron robe that drapes my body like it was painted on my flesh. Do you see? Not just beautiful. Powerful. The sweeping rise of my throat, the warmth and ferocity of my mouth, the wide bones of my skull, the swell and lift of my cheeks, skin the color of coconut flesh. Blond-white hair that sweeps like a cresting wave above my forehead, my cheeks flushed, and my eyes hold every moonrise and the spark and current of every ounce of menstrual blood released from all the women who bleed.

  I am for the women. Don’t you see?

  But there are so many and they are so new and they are so tempting for my Jove, my beloved, who cannot resist young women, who cannot resist the nymphs. Like Semele, a child really, with her black hair that fell straight around her jaw, her big young sad-dumb eyes, her open trusting smile. She had no idea the bad-news situation she’d found herself in. And if it had just been some simple one-time lay, fine, forgive, forget, but she got pregnant, he made her pregnant, and to see her aglow, belly swelling, his immortal seed growing inside her mortal body, I could not have it. Her? Not me? Why? The answers my brain offers are a catalogue of my own failings. Have I gone stale? Is he no longer attracted to my body, tall and lean? Has familiarity fogged his ability to see me—am I invisible to him, across the breakfast table, in our shared bed? Have I disappeared? Am I not funny? Am I too powerful? Is my hair too blond? Too short? Would it be better if I had longer hair? Has the shared bone that is the marriage bond grown brittle over this long spread of time? Am I too much a given? What is wrong with me?

  So, I disguised myself as Semele’s old nurse and we chatted about this and that, and I slipped in, “My dear, so young, perhaps you do not know the ways of men—so many of them deceive you! If you want to know if the man who visits your bed is Jove himself, you’ve got to ask him to prove it to you. Ask him to show himself to you the way he shows himself to Juno. It’s the only way you’ll know.”

  One cannot see the true face of a god and live. I knew this meant her death. And so it did. Is it fair that she’s a heap of ash, gritty with bits of her bones? Of course it’s not. But what am I supposed to do with the anger? I share my life with him. Are these women to blame? It’s not a question I can spend my time answering. Punishing them, watching them die, it’s one way to let out the anger. But it brings me no relief. One gone, he finds another. And it happens again, again, again. These poor women. But this poor me. Someone has to pay. I watched Semele burn. It brought me no relief.

  And Echo, too, you have to understand, one cannot deceive a goddess and expect life to go on as normal. I’d know Jove was down carousing, getting handsy with the nymphs, and I couldn’t help but follow, even though I knew I was following a path that led directly toward more pain. And Echo, who never lay with Jove, who had curly hair and a funny laugh, would come and talk with me. I admit: I enjoyed her conversation. She’d tell me about the gossip of the woods, the mischief of the satyrs, the parties, and she’d laugh her funny laugh and look around, and I thought maybe it was nerves, from talking to me. But it was not that.

  She was playing me for a fool, talking in my ear not because she liked me but so her nymphette friends would have time enough to scatter, to not get caught with my Jove’s wide palm groping at their breasts.

  There is no one on my team.

  So I took away her talk. All she can do is repeat the words that others say. And when I watched her fall for Narcissus, that self-loving twit, drowning in the depths of his own empty reflection, it did not make me happy. It brought me no relief. I watched her chase him, throw her voice his way every time he spoke. I watched her life force drain out of her as she retreated to a cave, rejected, alone, from body to bone to stone at the floor of a cave and her sad voice bouncing off the hills. This is one form the crushing of love can take. Mine takes another. I take revenge the way I can. I could no more murder my immortal husband than carve a hole into the sky. And I un
derstand him. He cannot resist fresh adoration, needs attention. I know he is weak and his weakness makes me tender and it makes me so angry I can barely see.

  My Jove. My love, my husband, my brother, my king, my thunderer, oh my lightning bolt, my wild mighty god, you own me, I am yours, my golden-shafted swan, my wooly bull, my broad-backed lamb (you know you are), I take your eagle in my mouth, I know you like it, oh my animal, you who share my blood, my bed, my life, eternally. Give me your thunderbolt, all of it, into every part of me, my Jove, my love, my horny fucking husband, my hungerer, my betrayer, my endless source of sorrow and rage, my bottomless well of pain, my pathetic useless liar.

  MYRRHA

  —This is really hard for me to talk about.

  —We can go as slowly as you want.

  —Really hard.

  —You can say as much or as little as you feel comfortable with.

  —Where do you want me to start?

  —Where would you like to start?

  —I don’t want to.

  —What brought you here today?

  —I can’t have all of this in my brain.

  —Have you ever been in analysis before?

  —No.

  —I’m really glad you’re here.

  —It was something about the grip.

  —The grip.

  —The hold. My hold. It’s been feeling like my hold on what’s real is—tenuous. There’s a clockface, and I’m the second hand and I’m spinning too fast, and the feeling is any second I might snap off from the rest of the clockface and go spinning out into—

  —Into where?

  —Chaos. Darkness. Someplace really bad. Broke off. Gone.

  —Mmmmm.

  —A bad clock. Unbound from reality. That feels like a possibility.

  —That sounds like a frightening place to be.