Wake, Siren

by Nina MacLaughlin

  “You don’t deserve to be loved,” he’d tell me. “You know your parents don’t love you, right?”

  Jealousy isn’t quite the word for what he felt, though there was that. He was afraid that if I was too talented, or had too much success, or realized my potential, or felt good about myself, I would disappear from him, I would leave him. So he did his best to undercut me in a perverse variety of ways.

  I’d slink inward, disappear behind my eyes, go cold. He couldn’t stand it. I threw mugs, ground my fingernails into my flesh, and one time drove a knife into the wood of the kitchen island, over and over, stabbing it so it scarred, and I was scared because it wasn’t the wood I wanted to stab. But my power was silence. While he roared, I absented myself, took the heat of myself away, emptied myself out of my eyes. I became a statue. Made of cool, smooth marble, with robes draped like liquid over my body, with a smile that telegraphed pride and disdain, satisfaction and ridicule. A stillness saturated me, and my eyes were blank like eyes on the busts on the pedestals in the palatial, skylit rooms in hushed museums where footfalls echo and crowds of statues stand fixed across millennia. In those statues, humanity is sculpted into every muscle, every swollen vein, every tendon stretched and showing weight and movement, but not into the eyes, no humanity in the eyes. Not a deadness, just a lack, an absence, blind and vacant, a milky depthlessness. Elsewhere, the eyes say. Body there, in every curve and swell of flesh and fingertip, body very much there, but to look at the face, something living gone from it. And like that, my eyes were a whiteness, unseeing, and deadly cold. And with my small smile, I could humiliate. I learned it young, and wielded it irresponsibly, that cruel and wicked smile, those lightless eyes. That smile brought blood to his face, a guaranteed right-hand turn on his volume knob. He couldn’t stand me not being present for him every second. “You have no idea how ugly you look when you’re like this,” he’d say. “Thank you for letting me know,” I’d say.

  The first time he shoved me, we’d been drinking. He wept for three hours, begging forgiveness. I should’ve known then, too.

  The storms would pass. The ice casing around the heart would melt and we’d go back to remembering we loved each other. What bliss that was, to come out of a fight. The first time we’d play music together after a battle, when warmth and closeness were returning. Entering into infinity together again. Tension and the release. Fear and the cessation of fear. Anger and the relief of anger. This was my drug. This was my ultimate intoxicant. I can handle anything, I thought. I was so in love.

  We were playing one afternoon, just fucking around singing and playing. You’ve heard O.’s voice, you’ve heard the way he plays. He got a lot of attention. I liked the slow songs best, the sad ones. Sometimes I wondered why he got so much more attention than anyone else. He was good. He was so good. But I wondered, privately and never out loud, if he was as good as everyone thought he was.

  “You could be really good,” he said.

  Didn’t he know that I already was? That I was maybe actually better than him?

  “If what?” I said.

  “If you gave it the time, if you really committed yourself to it.”

  He knew how much I practiced. He knew the hours I put in.

  We were nearing a fight, we both knew it. It came, cinched us like a too tight belt.

  “You know that when people say they like your music, they’re lying, right?” he said. “You know that when people say nice things to you, they’re not telling the truth, right?”

  Oaken had just put out an album. It was good. We, the band, were proud. I was proud. I was getting compared in the press to my favorite singers. Critics were writing that I was bringing to mind Lila and the Night Forests, and the early work of B.D. Char. My own and actual heroes. My name and their names in the same sentence. People were saying they liked my music. A lot of people. I’m not bragging. These were facts.

  “They’re lying. You know that, right?”

  Every compliment I got, every kind thing someone said, that’s what I heard.

  “I fucking loved ‘Alligator Tooth.’” “I listened to that first Oaken album on repeat for two years straight.” “Your music saved me. I honestly would not be alive.” I’d thank them all, feel grateful, and from the back of my brain, in a stage whisper, in his voice: they’re lying.

  When I think of this now, how he ruined that sort of kindness for me, how I could never believe one good thing someone said, how I heard his voice like a jittery little demon hopping up and down on my shoulder reminding me that every nice thing anyone said was a lie, how I let him ruin it—I feel something I don’t have the words for.

  He smashed a lamp my grandmother had given me. He melted my favorite pick. He snapped in half the pen I’d been given at my first record release party to sign records with. He grabbed my shoulders and slammed me into the refrigerator. When I was trying to leave and he didn’t want me to, he swished my legs out from under me and broke my tailbone. When he asked me to marry him I said yes. How do I explain it? I was in love. I had a distorted sense of love. I liked to consider that I was the rare human who could handle more than most, that I was uniquely suited to handle the rages of a creative temperament, that I was meant for storms. I had anger of my own, after all. That I was able to withstand so much proved to me, wrongly, so wrongly, that I was strong. Coming out the other side of every fight, bruised sometimes, crushed, wounded in the tenderest parts, reinforced how strong I was. I liked to understand myself as strong.

  The day of the wedding I had to go to the pharmacy to try to find concealer for my arm because he’d pinched me so hard during an argument the week before and the bruise was as dark as a plum with green at the edges, like a little purple planet glowing green around the rim. I’d wanted to scream out in his face with pain when he did it. I pressed my molars together instead and stared at him as he pinched my flesh tighter and tighter between his fingers. I am buying makeup to conceal a bruise on my wedding day, I thought, standing in line under the fluorescent lights of the pharmacy, bins of discounted Cadbury Creme Eggs beside me.

  He came into the room as I was getting dressed. I was standing in front of the mirror in my bra and my jeans, putting moisturizer on my face.

  He came over to me, put his fingers tenderly on the bruise.

  “That looks bad,” he said, and for a second I thought I heard regret in his voice. “You bruise so easily.”

  I started to feel cold. He kissed my cheek and pressed his hand over my heart.

  “I love you,” he said. “And I know you’ll never love anyone like you love me.” He tried to make it sound affectionate, loving. It didn’t sound like that. It sounded like a threat.

  I stood in front of the mirror and I couldn’t look at myself. And I couldn’t look at him.

  “Does it still hurt?” he asked and pressed on the bruise. It did and I snatched my arm away. “Sorry. Sorry.” He took a step back. I was so far inside myself I barely existed. “I wrote you a song,” he said. “I’m going to sing it to you tonight.”

  I knew in that moment that I would not hear him sing it. That there would be no aisle, no wedding, no ring slipped on my finger. When he left the room, I slipped my dress over my head, over my jeans. I did not conceal the bruise on my arm. I did not put on lipstick, and I walked away. A wedding dress, my jeans, white sneakers. My hair was brushed and clean.

  I knew where to go. I knew exactly where I was going. My friend Simon and I had a way we used to say it when we felt the urge to go to the Cobra Club. “Got bit by the viper,” we’d say when we wanted to head down there. I got bit by the viper. I crossed the river to the other side of the city, and down I went.

  The Cobra Club didn’t have a sign. On a small side street near the mural, near the liquor store, around the corner from Mary Chang’s Szechuan and More, a black door with a dark red snake, not coiled, straight up and down bisecting the door like a spine.

  It’s a heavy door and it’s dark inside and cooler. The door clos
ed behind me and I stood at the top of the stairs as I had many times before and looked down. Shadows slinked across the floor. I’ve always loved the smell of clubs. That yeasty tang, that sour under-bridge smell, a little like piss, a little oniony, like a man who’s danced for two hours, who’s had music fill his body and is releasing it through his pores. At the edges, tires, wet wool, the curdled bleach of semen. It was comforting and thrilling at once. A smell of potential. Unchanging, altering. You knew: This is not fresh air. This is not the outside world. And down we go.

  I descended those stairs slowly. I let my eyes adjust to the dim. Down, down, down. Every time I was surprised by how deep underground you had to go, how many stairs there were. The smell intensified as you went lower. The shadows slinked on the walls. The stairs were damp, were always damp. Stalactites came to mind, stalagmites. Permanent drips. The walls were thick as though after night after night of sound, the noise had been absorbed into them. The walls held ten thousand different wails. Ten million.

  I passed Sissy on the stairs. He climbed up holding a case of empty bottles. He’d climb down again with a full one. All day, all night, up and down, the bottles tingling together like wind chimes, Sissy’s shoulders hunched forever.

  “Hey, Siss,” I said.

  “Cool dress,” he said.

  There was HayDaze, who owned the club, standing by the stage, most hospitable human you’d ever met. Always room for one more. He had a winter smile. Storm cloud eyes, pale gray skin. The mustard-colored curtains sashed at the side of the stage gave him a jaundiced look. Long legs and a narrow chest. I’d see him around at shows. He looked gloomy, but I haven’t met many people as charming. He waved when he saw me. His wife, Penny, sat to the side on a throne by the bar looking wan in the gloom. She was much younger than him and the rumor was she wanted out. She’d tour for a couple months each summer, but was always back down here come fall. I’d see her out in July and August—she’d be tan, wearing tiny shorts, had a laugh that would make the flowers grow. Here, she was limp, and sullener every season. Moody, I guess you could say. Seasonally depressed maybe. Or maybe sick of being married to a club owner whose breath always smelled like burnt hair.

  I didn’t tell anyone about O. or the wedding or the leaving of the wedding. A few people eyed the bruise. I was glad to lose myself down here, to be dissolved into this world where the stars didn’t exist, where the planets didn’t spin, where there was always room for anyone.

  “Who’s playing?” I asked.

  “You know Standard Pantry?” HayDaze said. “From the west.”

  “Heard of them, I think.”

  “Nice dress. You getting married?”

  “Not today I’m not.”

  “Good choice.”

  “I’m not deaf,” Penny said from her throne.

  “Most people can’t handle it, Pen love. You know.” HD put a warm hand on my shoulder. He saw the bruise. “You’re always welcome here, you know. You stay as long as you want.” My throat got tight like a towel being wrung out which was my first step of tears which I did not want to come. It felt good to be welcome.

  The band started to set up. Four dudes who looked like they were bused in from a commune or a cult from the other side of the country. Something in the face bones. Something in the clothes, how loose they were, and so much fringe. They all wore sandals. All the boys had long hair and I remembered how much I love a boy with long hair. My mother never said to me, Now don’t let yourself be with a mean man. She never said, You deserve to be loved. She never said, You deserve to be treated with respect. Maybe those things are supposed to go without saying? Learn through suffering, she did say. Vita dura est.

  I liked watching bands set up. The focus, the fear, the feeling, each time, this is actually happening; in an hour or two, we will stand here in front of a room of people and give ourselves to them. It’s good to watch people who know what they’re doing. The precision of their movements, where they place the guitar stands, how high they raise the mics, where they tape the set list.

  Some people choose the wrong kind of love. Some people cannot help it. For some people, a mind-map is made, and what feels familiar about love is getting hurt, is getting reminded that you’re worthless, is the powerful feeling of someone else giving voice to a voice that lives in you that tells you that you are pathetic and stupid and bad. What a thing, to find the one person who tells you the same things your own brain tells you. It feels like you’ve found someone who connects with you deeply. Some people know that this is the sort of love they’re drawn to and they teach themselves new ways of feeling; they try to draw new lines on the mind-map. They learn about what it means to feel respect. Other people surrender to the way they understand love to be, and resign themselves to thinking, This is what I want, this is what feels right to me. Maybe they were spit on by their mothers when they were small, or ignored. Maybe their fathers threw them into a bureau when they were mad. And so when they’re thrown into bureaus again, it isn’t—What is this horror happening to me, it’s—Oh, this is familiar, this is love. It’s hard to learn what normal is. How are you ever supposed to know? Some people recognize that the love they’re drawn to isn’t love at all, and so they opt out of it. Some people who are alone are alone because they know it’s safer for them to be alone, they know they choose the wrong loves over and over.

  Standard Pantry had started sound check when we heard it. From the stairs, a voice, a guitar. The club quieted. The shadows stopped slinking along the wall. Legs appeared coming down the stairs, and there was O. with his guitar, singing through tears. Everyone stopped.

  Sissy stopped with a case of beer bottles on the stairs. The three door guys who moved as one paused. They didn’t speak; they growled. Studded belts, leather pants, spiked collars around their necks. They decided who was in and who was out and they were stilled, one holding on to someone’s ID as the person waited to have a hand stamped. The light guy stood reaching for the spotlight at the back of the club; he was too short, and paused, arm raised, it seemed like it would always be out of reach. The crazy dude who went to every show and spent the whole time spinning—spinning and spinning like he was on fire, that insane-oh—even he stopped to listen, looking worn and dizzy. The grizzled drunk slouched at the bar with a liver that must’ve looked like vultures had beaked it and made it their meal, he stopped taking sips of his whiskey. I looked around, all the shadows crying.

  O. kept singing and kept playing. And no one moved and no one spoke and if you can imagine the most beautiful song, the saddest and most beautiful song, in the purest voice, and the vibrations of the guitar strings seeming to come not from the instrument but dropping down into the club from the night sky, and not from one instrument but from a thousand, that is what it sounded like. Beautiful enough to stop the planets from their orbits. To change nature. All other senses fell away. We were all only ears.

  He played the song, the one he wrote for our wedding day, and I did not want to be moved. But I was. The pocket behind my eyes that held my tears warmed and filled and one spilled and another. His voice. The hard part in my heart softened. A slideshow of all the times we’d laughed. All the times he’d made me plates of food. The swims and easy mornings and the music. My heart softened as it always did. I moved across the club toward him.

  “Please,” he said. “Please.”

  I couldn’t help it. “Okay,” I said. Tension and relief.

  He took my hand and started walking toward the stairs, pulling me after. I looked around at the club, at Penny on her throne, her hand over her heart, at HD by the curtains nodding, at the light guy still reaching for the spotlight with a smile on his face, at the boys in the band with their long hair whispering to each other “Was that O.?” one said. “Of course it fucking was, who else could it be?” said another. The grizzled drunk lowered his head onto his arm, the spinning man seemed about to start his spin again. The door guys grunted and moved out of our way. Sissy said, “Don’t go.”

 
But O. was pulling too hard. He was holding my hand too tight. I heard him muttering. And the muttering meant he was furious. A quiet stream of poison came from his mouth, quiet enough that only I could hear. “You proud walking away like that? Useless, worthless cunt. Talentless cunt. Got Daddy’s big mouth and think you can sing. Joke. Your life’s a joke. You’ve turned my life into a hell.”

  We neared the top of the stairs. I saw the door, the snake painted on the inside, too, upside down on this side, head at the bottom, tail at the top. I stopped on the stair. He did not turn. “What are you waiting for?”

  Run, I thought.

  “You haven’t delayed this enough?” He tugged at my arm.

  Run, I thought. I stood near the top of the stairs.

  He started to sing one of my songs. Except he twisted the words and mocked my voice. “That’s how you sound,” he said.

  And then he turned. And there in his eyes was the brutal thing that meant he was scared. I knew in my blood that scared made him dangerous.

  This is the way we burn from our mistakes. I pulled my hand away. I imagined I was made of a cloud and just let it slip from his grip. I turned around and I floated down the stairs, down down down, back into the embrace of the Cobra Club, where there was always room for one more. Even the sold-out shows. There’s always room. Everyone finds their way here eventually.

  I heard him shouting behind me, “You’re never going to love anyone the way you love me.”

  I laughed. I laughed and laughed. I laughed so hard the room shook, the plates of the Earth shifted, the tides changed. I laughed and laughed and laughed and then I bent over and I screamed.

  AFTER OVID

  We sit. You and I, my brother, my sister, my friend, my love. The food on the plates on the table is warm in front of us. The warmth of it rises. We are hungry. We sit across from each other and we glow at each other, my brother, my sister, my friend, my love. We glow at each other and we talk at the table.