Wake, Siren Read online

  Galatea started crying and I put the brush down and used both hands over her head, petting her, soothing her with my hands on her head and her back.

  “It cracked his skull,” she said. “His blood was all on the ground. But I turned his blood to water, and the rock that Polyphemus threw split in half and first a reed grew from it, then the form of man, it was Acis again, but larger, and his skin was blue-green, and now he was a god of the river. I changed him.”

  “You saved him,” I said.

  “I saved him. It’s never felt so good to use my power. You just kind of take it for granted a lot of the time, but then something happens where it’s there when you need it and you use it and it fucking works.”

  But she was afraid still, and she shook beneath my hands. I put my arms around her. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re okay.”

  “I don’t feel okay,” she said. “I feel scared all the time.”

  “I know, I know.” Her hair shined. It smelled like mint and grass and bread. “It’s so scary.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She sniffed. “He was so awful. So disgusting. You should’ve seen all of his hair.”

  “I bet you could make a really warm sweater.”

  Galatea laughed. “God, that would be the most disgusting sweater. There’d be fleas.”

  “Also, what the fuck, he wanted to eat Acis’s dick like a hot dog?” I said.

  Galatea almost fell off the bed.

  “I’m the only one who gets to eat his hot dog.” When she stopped laughing she said, “I think part of why I wanted to do this stupid cleanse was to empty all this out of myself, get all this poison out. Like scrape out the insides of me.”

  “Sure, that makes sense. Probably talking is another way to get the poison out, too,” I said. “You don’t have to starve yourself.”

  “He didn’t touch me.”

  “He didn’t touch you.”

  “I’m okay. Acis is okay.”

  “Both of you are safe.”

  “In some ways I feel like I shouldn’t even be complaining,” she said. “We’re fine. It could’ve been so much worse.”

  She stopped here and I brushed and we sat in her room in the quiet.

  “But I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t get him out of my head. It wasn’t that bad. It could’ve been so much worse. But it’s like he’s moved into my brain and occupies like eighty percent of it. He takes up so much of my attention. I can’t concentrate. No matter what I’m doing. Baking bread, sitting at the bar down the street with Acis, swimming laps. It’s like I cannot escape him in my mind. All the time. Him. His stupid hair. The fear.”

  She shook her head. “Why did I give him my stupid e-mail address?”

  “No, no, no, no.”

  “But if I hadn’t—”

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t that bad. It could’ve been so much worse.”

  “Also, it was really bad. What happened was extremely scary.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was really scary.”

  We talked for a little while longer. Galatea ate more nuts. I thought about how maybe the worst violence isn’t the physical part, but what it does to the mind, hijacking the attention centers, recircuiting what the brain wires itself around. The ongoing fuckery of not being able to aim attention where you want. A violence greater than that to the body. “I can stay with you,” I told her. She told me she wanted to sleep. She thanked me for listening.

  “Thank you for brushing my hair.”

  “I will do that any time.”

  She walked me out and we embraced and maybe I was imagining it, but she seemed fuller than when I embraced her when I arrived.

  “I love you,” I told her. I had not said it to her before. She was my friend.

  “I love you, too,” she told me. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  I walked home. The late afternoon was warm and I didn’t want to ride the bus. I wanted to shake the feeling I had, clear it out.

  I walked along the canal, the damp tang of mulch and daffodils in the air, and Glaucus appeared out of the water. Ours was not a large city, and once you live in a place long enough you start to recognize certain people, and you hear things. I didn’t know Glaucus, didn’t know much about him, but I’d seen him around. Seaweed hair that wrapped all the way down and around his torso. Man from the waist up. Fish from the waist down. I wasn’t in the mood to talk.

  “Hey, Scylla.”

  I walked a little faster. Maybe he wasn’t a monster, but Galatea’s story was coating my mind and it was making me wary, impatient, and mad.

  “Hey, Scylla!”

  I turned and looked at him again. Just stared. Broad shoulders. A cut middle. Definition in all the places you want it to be. Fish scales shimmering in the light, little oil slicks, rainbows on the pavement. He smiled and his teeth were straight and white. He was magnificent to look at. No one would deny it. I turned and kept moving.

  “What good is being a god if I can’t get your attention?” he shouted.

  You had my attention, I thought, I just stared at you for half a minute. You had all of it. I don’t feel like giving you any more right now. It’s a choice I have, it’s a choice we all have all the time—we are able to decide where to place our attention. You want to focus it on skateboarding? On watching TV? On drifting through the Internet? On examining the patterns of your emotional weather? On boys? On girls? On framing the photograph just right? On all those things on a single day? It’s your choice. And we’ll always have a thousand things that clamor for it. Me, me, me, look here, give me time, give me space, give me the most important thing you have to give. But we get to choose. And it is the project of a life to remember how valuable one’s attention is, and the effort it can take to steer it where you want. Today, by the canal, I just wanted to walk off the feeling of monsters and fear. Bad timing, Glaucus, I thought. Shitty timing.

  This was a problem for him. To solve this problem, he swam to Circe. He said, “Circe, I want Scylla, she isn’t into me, you’ve got to help.” Circe had an instant crush on Glaucus. “Why don’t you stay with me?” she said and she touched his scales. “Forget her.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “She’s all I want.”

  “I’m telling you from experience, it’s a lot better to be with someone who wants you,” Circe said. “It’s a lot better when you don’t have to beg. Be with someone who can appreciate your beauty.” She slid her hand down his scales. “I appreciate your beauty.”

  “I only want Scylla.”

  Circe didn’t like this at all but she told him she’d help. She mashed up herbs, she pounded poisons together.

  She took her tincture to the small bay where I liked to swim and poured them in. I headed to the water before going home.

  It wasn’t full summer but the sun beat down and I stepped into the water because the water can pull the poisons from you, like talking, like walking. I didn’t know that Circe had contaminated the water. I went waist-deep, could feel the edges of Galatea’s story smoothing out of me. I reached the line on my body where Glaucus becomes a fish. I stopped there, water to my hips.

  Because that’s when the dogs appeared. Dark barking shapes all around my waist. Dark snarling gnashing dogs. I tried to chase them away but they were on me, they were attached to me. Huge dark barking dogs. A belt of dark and barking dogs with fire in their eyes. I bent and found that my legs were all dogs. A woman’s body from the waist up. Waist down wild dogs. They growled and strained and thrashed. I stood on the backs of these beasts except I had no legs to stand on. A belt of black dogs. A snarling skirt of dogs.

  I stayed where I was. I stayed for a long time. I trained my dogs. My dogs ate boats and all the sailors on them. You want more men, Circe? That’s what you want? Tough luck, bitch. Glaucus cried, because of what I’d become, and maybe for the guilt of causing it. You lose, too, fish man.

  It’s the most important choice of a life, where you aim your attention. Sometimes th
e choice is taken away from us, our ability to choose compromised. Over time, I hardened. I became a rock. I crush ships and drown the men so Circe does not get what she wants. Galatea visits. She sits on the sun-warmed surface of me. We talk. She scrapes the barnacles and washes the bird shit off of me just the way I brushed her hair.

  I try to focus on this. On absorbing the warmth of the sun. On the rise and fall of the tides. On the children who climb on me and the waves that splash. I try to focus on the way the rain tastes, the damp caress of the fog. I try to ignore the ships and the men. I try to ignore the memory of what put me in this place. I try to ignore the sense of loss and anger. I try so hard. But ignoring does not mean gone. And the men and memories return like an army on the march and I find sometimes that I’m surrounded. Sometimes I win the battle—my attention on the seagull cries, the light along the horizon, the sound of a ship splintering against my edge—and sometimes I surrender.

  SIBYL

  In any life there are regrets and they accumulate like unpaired socks, taking up space in the drawer, doing no good.

  When I was young, Phoebus wanted me. It’s impossible to believe, I know; all that’s worth desiring has long since seeped from this form. But it was true. And no, this is no glory-days rehashing, no sad longing for bygone time, no snare-drum bragging. You might think: the only direction she has to look is backward, all the good is behind. Yes and no.

  Phoebus loved me. He desired me. I’m his prophetess, a translator between present and future. I give voice to mystery. And I liked what I saw in his eyes when he looked at me. How easily flattered we are. He gave me gifts—a wooden spoon carved of blood wood, a necklace made of hummingbird beaks, a song he wrote about the way my pupils contracted and swelled in pleasure. My body was a bag full of ripe peaches, hard pit in the middle holding seed.

  Phoebus begged me. All those gifts to pry me, so I would hand him my virginity. “Please,” he said. “Please.” I considered it. I imagined offering it up to him on a platter, a membrane red and gold, taut, translucent, strong, round as a cow’s eye and thin as a leaf, held in a black velvet case. It’s yours, press through, come see what’s on the other side. Presumably, he already knew. But I didn’t. What’s it like when that wall comes down?

  “I will give you anything you want for it,” he said. It. This state, this condition, this prize, once gone, always gone. I am until I am not. “Make your wish,” he said.

  What do we know when we are young? I knew the heat I had, the glow, there, behind my eyes. The fire that brought people toward me. The other thing I knew is that I did not want any of it to end. It, all of this, life. I wanted it to go on and on, an endless stretch of possibility. I bent down and collected a small handful of sand, and I said to him, to a god that offered me infinity, grant me as many years as grains I hold.

  Why did I think a handful of sand was infinite?

  He put his hand on my cheek, he kissed my forehead gently. He exhaled and his breath smelled like laundry dried in the sun. But all at once there was sweat on my lower back, and breath moving faster for fear. A glittering image of offering something up on a platter is different from the raw fact of opening your legs.

  He placed his hand on the hard part of my chest, below my neck. His eyes were closed and he said my name. His hand slid to my left breast and he and I both exhaled, our breaths pushing against each other in the space between us. I said it quietly at first.

  No.

  I didn’t know what I was feeling. I didn’t like what I was feeling. Fear seeped into my limbs and turned them to cold-hot stone. No, no. He kissed my cheeks, my lips, gently. He was so, so gentle. Everything pulsed too fast and all the world was spinning and all I could think of was wanting to be in my bed in my room alone. I can’t, I said. He took a step away, his hands raised. “No?” No, I can’t, I said. My whole middle quivered. “Okay,” he said. And he looked me meanly in the eyes and touched my face once more and shook his head at me and then he was gone.

  Why did I deny him what I owed for what he granted? Why so wedded to my purity? I’ve had so long to think on it. I changed my mind. I could not hand him my virginity on a platter. I was on one side of the membrane, he, another. The thought of that wall giving way, of the distinction between self and other dissolving, I could not go through with it. Or rather, I could not let him go through it.

  He granted my wish, Phoebus with his gentle hands. He gave me all the years of those grains of sand. But I forgot one thing, I forgot the most important thing, I forgot to say, “And let me stay the age I am now, in my firm peach youth, for the whole span.” And he was no fool, he knew what I’d asked for, and what I hadn’t. So he granted me my wish, and he punished me for refusing what I owed him. Instead of letting me live out those grains of sand with my youth intact, he let me age. Instead of living out this existence with firm flesh and strong bones and full lips and full breasts and a laugh that came easily and joy that offered itself up to me readily, instead of sanguine strength, I embarked on an elongated withering. By the time I reached eighty-eight years old, for example, I’d aged at a human rate, was as brittle and decrepit as anyone who makes it to that advanced age. From there, the aging slowed, and I became more and more embrittled over hundreds and hundreds of years.

  To see me now is to see the way veins swell across the birdwing-bones of my hands, inky ropes that shift closer to the color black with each passing year. The discolorations on my flesh, the splotches on my forearms, there below my eye, freckles that won’t stop blooming. See the way my flesh hangs away from the bones in my arm? Flesh like pecked and sagging chicken skin. I make a person more aware of the concept of skeleton. And my chest? Forgive this slow unbuttoning (my fingers are not as deft), I’ll show you. See? I don’t know where my breasts went. I used to have them. Now, my chest, two empty pouches made of suede with a few grains of sand weighing down the bottom. Time enacts its wearing. It brittles and shrivels and drains. I am seven hundred years old.

  Long ago, in my true youth, just before I turned forty, the gray came to my hair. At first, the strands stayed clustered in the territory above my right eyebrow, a gray-white sweep like water falling over rocks. And they told certain facts about time. With years, of course, more came. But it was that first little bit that was so baffling—I would look in the mirror and think, how could this be? This gray says something that my mind and body don’t believe; this hair is out of alignment with how I understand myself inside. I feel one way (young!); my body shows a different truth.

  For a time, the bafflement morphed into a low-grade pain. I noticed going unnoticed. On the street, others’ eyes no longer moved up and down me, or locked with mine in invitation. And I mourned that loss. But I still had my heat and wildness inside, the interest in what might come next, that certain wavelength that poured out of me. That did not go away, nor did I let it. Time moved me from the peach-flesh of youth and landed in me a deeper sort of smolder, one that had nothing at all to do with fruits and more to do with heat.

  As soon as you believe it’s all downhill, as soon as you close yourself off to curiosity about what each new age might bring you, and as long as you derive your sense of self from how much other eyes adore you, your light will go out, your heat, extinguished. The vital pulsing thing inside will dim and fade. Life’s much harder without it. A much more miserable thing indeed. I knew that misery, and I climbed out of it, knowing it would be no way to spend my thousand years on earth. Oh, your hip has disintegrated inside its socket? Bone grinds against bone in your knee? No desire is aimed your way? Your hands tremble when you hold the pencil or the spoon? The paths of memory seem buried under deeper and deeper snow that no shovel seems to clear? All manner of bodily indignities come tapping at your door? It’s terrible, all of it. Stay curious. You do not know what else there is to learn.

  This was how I managed to move through my years. Seven hundred down, with three hundred more to go. I have been so many people in this life. And of course I asked myself, again an
d again, why did I say no? What would have been if I’d let him enter me? Would it have been worse than this prolonged state of drain? There are certain questions that press against you but the answers do not arrive, like passengers on a train that never, never stops. Those questions no longer come, and a more important one has taken their place: how to continue to make sense of yourself as time changes you?

  Do I miss my firmer thigh, my fuller breast, my sharper mind? I do. What a wretched disappointment to lose these things initially. But the more important force lives on, I keep it burning, and people can feel that presence when they’re with me. That force, I finally understand it now, is the continued ability to experience the beauty of this world.

  To see me, from whatever state of youth you inhabit, is to confront a grotesque. It’s frightening at first. The cobwebs in my mouth, the mothy texture of my skin. It’s easier to look away from this hunched and wrinkled form, from my flapping loose-leaf flesh. But once you get past the initial horror, if you get close, ignore the smell, ignore the skull you can see below my almost hairless head, if you peer below the drooping flesh curtains of my eyelids, you’ll behold new beauty. A beauty born of curiosity, of openness. Remember it. Take it with you. Keep it for when you’ll need it in years to come.

  We all wait for the long silence. We are all transformed by time. I will continue to disappear, from body, to whispers, to sighs. It is better this way, I know it now. All these years and I have come to know this above all else:

  Immortality is the death of beauty. Beauty begins in endings.

  SEMELE

  “Fuck me like you fuck your wife.”

  * * *

  so bright it was a darkness, so bright it was sound.

  * * *

  I said the words to Jove. He who’d come to me before, he who’d been inside my body, he who’d had a wife forever. He who’d made me pregnant. I wanted to see who he was. I wanted to see what he was. (There are some things you should not see. There are some things you should not know.) I looked into the black wall of light and saw the nothings that were there, only absence all around me. “Let me feel the truth of you.” He thought he was so mighty. A light so bright it was emptiness. Oh, I realized, oh of course, you do not fuck your wife. And then, as fast as that, I was only ash.