Wake, Siren

by Nina MacLaughlin

  A mother’s nightmare. Ceres’s mind cracked open. Some would say: the earth grieved with the goddess. More true: a mother’s grief is powerful enough to change the world. Color slunk away as though it had been shamed. Our long summer ended. Ceres wanted to find her daughter. We wanted to find our friend.

  So we three girls set out in search. We looked all over the land. On our feet, we looked high and low. On craggy peaks, in darkened caves, in wooded hollows, behind the waterfalls, between the trees. At the edges of the farms, in the cellars of the temples, in ditches and gardens and bogs. The rain soaked us. The snow made us cold. We looked and looked. We sang as we went. Maybe she would hear us. Maybe she would hear us and call out.

  On feet, we could look only so far. “Help us look wider,” we said to Ceres. “We haven’t explored the seas. Let us look there.” Ceres agreed, and that’s when we were turned into bird girls. On our golden wings we soared above the waves. We sounded shores with song. We tried to find our friend.

  * * *

  O void, O void, O swallowing abyss, O void who holds the whole vast shadow cast by time, sing in us, O void, deliver us our friend.

  * * *

  We never found her. We flew above the sea not knowing that we should’ve dived into the underground, lower and lower, into Pluto’s realm of gloom and dim. That morning in the meadow, he fractured the earth, put his arm around the waist of Proserpina, and took her down below. Below, she sat on a throne of black marble, cool against the skin of her arms, kidnapped, captive, a hostage to the wants of Underworld’s tall and too-thin king. She was torn from the aboveground life she knew and loved, and torn another way as well. Our stolen friend. When she made her annual return, we were happy to see her back, but she was not the same, oh no, she was not the same at all.

  We turned to bird girls to find our friend. We soar and perch on rocks and sing. We sing for our lost friend. We sing for ourselves. We sing because we love the song. But our simple song got twisted. The men in ships they heard us sing and they could not resist the sound. And so they called us dangerous. When it’s they who lack control. And so we’re known as monsters. When what we are is bird girls, our voices like the sounds you hear from the womb.

  * * *

  O void, O void, O swallowing abyss, O void who holds the whole vast shadow cast by time. Sing in us and deliver us new notes to sing this song.

  * * *

  We’re golden-feathered bird girls. We sing because we always sing. And O sister, do the men get lost? Do the sailors, in a frenzy, in a trance, sometimes aim their ships at rocks? Do our harmonies haunt and vise the mind, pressing out all sense? Do the men sometimes leap from their boats and try to swim to where our voices are? O sister, yes they do. Is it our fault, or our intention? O sister, it is not. We sing a song of consequence. We sing a song of cost. They know it’s so and call us monstrous. Sing. Put your eyes in the eyes of a seagull. See the ships at sway. Listen for our voices. Soar above the waves. Sing. Watch those men lose themselves. Watch them rot. Everything is movement. Everything is song.

  Now sing. O sister, sing and sing and sing. Let the sound fly from your mouth. Let it land and light the dark. We three bird girls, we’ll sing out with you, we’ll join our voices in the chorus, and the sound will rise like bells, like wind, like strings, like prayer, the song that’s yours to sing. Louder, louder. You’ll see. And if the song doesn’t land and light the dark, sister, keep singing. Your song! Holy! Consequential! True!

  EURYDICE

  I went through phases. I started, like most kids I guess, with my parents’ records. The music they liked. Banana Rabbit. The Volcanoes. Death on Mars. Lulu Allellel. Psychedelic folk rock from when they were young. I hated the stupid pop my friends listened to. It was like sucking on a stalk of celery versus digging into a steaming bowl of ramen, pork bone broth, scallions, egg, noodles, the whole deal. I’d tell them, “The shit you’re listening to is garbage,” but they hated the shit I was into, so it was fine.

  My first concert, I was probably eight or nine years old. My parents took me to a festival and we slept in a tent. I was scared at first. Definitely the most people I’d seen in one place. And they were adults to me, but they weren’t acting like I understood adults to act. Flailing, dancing, arms out spinning, staring up at the stars. Lots of colors. Bonfires. Drums all night. But people were friendly, and amazed to see a kid around, so I got a lot of good attention. My dad was a musician. A famous one. Like one of the most famous ones. Like people used the words rock god. People would say, You’re the child of rock royalty. If I told you his name, you’d be like, holy shit, that’s your dad? And then you’d look at me and say, Oh yeah, I can see it. You guys have the same mouth. But when you’re growing up, you have no idea what normal is, so it was just normal life to have a dad who was gone for months in a row on tour, whose face I’d see on posters wheat-pasted on walls along the sidewalk, sneering that sneer, all those necklaces. That was my life. I didn’t know that most kids didn’t have rock god dads, that most parents were things like mechanics or librarians or biology teachers.

  It wasn’t that first concert that convinced me. Maybe I was a little too young. It was the first concert I went to alone. My dad was away, as usual, and I pretended to go to bed, and then snuck out to G.G. the Hare’s, which was this tiny little rock club in the good part of the city, to see Womb play. Don’t know it? It was a band fronted by this woman who was six-two, and she had a voice like no one had a voice. Like it was coming out of some ancient fountain. Like it held in it every story, every folktale, every epic poem, the entire oral tradition, all the whole history of song. She sang with her eyes closed the whole time, sort of disappeared into herself, wearing this long black robe. And I stood there, I was probably fourteen, and I was just like, This is what I want my life to be. It was like her voice was a living creature that crawled inside me and made its home in my body, moving all around it. It felt like she was singing for me, and at the same time, I could feel the whole room against me, all the other bodies there to listen, and I knew that everyone’s body was feeling the music like mine, like it was vibrating in their lungs and intestines and hips and shoulders like it was in mine, like all of us were swept up and united in this one moment. The next morning I told my mom I wanted a guitar. She let out a long sigh. Like she knew this day would come.

  After the sort of hippie folk phase, I got into heavier stuff. Louder. November’s Lament, Toad Migration, Jenny’s Back, Lunch. Stuff like that. I’d go to shows and it’d be walls of sound. Sound so thick it felt like you could lie down on it. My hair was already dark, and I copied what I saw, lining my eyes in black. My friends were still listening to their stupid pop, and I derived maybe more pride than I should’ve from knowing and loving bands that not that many people knew or loved. I went to school and I practiced guitar and my dad was mostly gone and when he was home my mom and him would just shout at each other all night and in the morning there’d be tumblers and bottles around and sometimes spills that no one had cleaned up. I heard him say things like “You’re a worthless cunt. Everything that came out of your mother’s stretched-out pussy was ugly and worthless.” I don’t even like repeating that and I wish I’d never heard it. She was pissed in her quiet way because he was either gone or drunk and “humped a hell of a lot of twenty-year-olds,” as she put it. He was pissed because she was doing just fine without him. He hated that. But instead of saying, “I need you and I want you to need me,” he’d tell her she was unfuckable and that she looked like a heap of rags.

  Creative people have different sorts of temperaments and different sorts of tempers. If you’re worshipped by a stadium full of screaming people and come home and the mother of your child can take you or leave you, it’s jarring for the ego. I wasn’t sure why my mom put up with it. I’m not sure how anyone really learns what normal is supposed to be.

  I practiced guitar. I sang. I was in a band. I wasn’t a great singer but I was earnest and committed and sometimes that’s better
than having a quote-unquote good voice. Most of my favorite singers couldn’t sing either so I felt like I was doing something right. I practiced and practiced. And played shows to four people and got hit on by bartenders and sweaty club owners who looked like ogres. I kept practicing and kept playing and played shows for thirty people and kept practicing and kept playing and played shows for two hundred people and got recognized once on the sidewalk. Quick eye contact with a dude and he says “Oaken?” as we passed each other. That was the name of my band. I turned. “You’re the singer in Oaken, yeah?” “That’s me,” I said. “My girlfriend and me were listening to ‘Shadowland’ last night. I love that song.” “That’s really nice to hear. Thank you.” “Thank you!” he said. “We love your music.” And I smiled for the rest of the day and maybe into the next day, and kept it in a pocket in my brain to take out when I felt low.

  I never talked about my dad. I didn’t admit he was my dad. Because I didn’t want any attention or shows or deals just because I was his daughter. I had practiced until my fingers bled and rehearsed until I had claws in my throat. I didn’t want to worry that none of that mattered, that my success might have nothing to do with how good I was or wasn’t and only because I had a mouth that looked like his mouth. And every time someone found out who he was, the fear came, a twofold bad fluttery feeling that the person was only hanging out with me because of that, to brush up against fame, like I was a one-way ticket into people’s dreams come true. And that what meager success I had I hadn’t earned myself. I had a hard time keeping people close. What I had was the music. Whenever I was lonely or alone, there was always the music to be my company. So I practiced and I played and the crowds got bigger and the tours got longer. The songs I wrote were getting better and stranger and I felt braver, like I could really tilt for the cliff. No one to talk to on a Friday night: there was always a song to work out, the guitar to pick up and translate the sound in my head through my fingers into the instrument and out into the room. I got good because I was bad at other things, namely being with other people.

  I was bad at picking boyfriends. I think it was hard for boys to see me be good onstage. To get the kind of attention I did. To see me doing well at the one thing I wanted to do. I dated a writer who hadn’t published anything who compared his novel-eleven-years-in-progress to “modern-day James Joyce.” When he’d said that on our first date, I’d laughed because I thought he was joking, because who can, with full-body seriousness, compare an unpublished work to one of the best writers of the twentieth century? A young man writer who had not published a single word. That’s who. I laughed, thinking, Oh, maybe he’s funny, that would be nice. And he got this look like he’d just swallowed a bee and said, “Must be sweet having a dad get you a record deal.” And I realized he was not trying to be funny at all, that he was quite serious about writing the next Portrait of the Artist as a Young Asshole. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t spoken to my dad in three years at that point and that as far as I knew he had no idea I was even in a band. “It is sweet,” I said. “I don’t have to do anything! I don’t even know how to play guitar!” I said. “Art is really about putting in the hours,” he said. “I guess I should try that,” I said. I dated him for over a year. Spent nights on his mattress on the floor. Gave him sensitive feedback when he’d send me his shitty poems. Why? No idea.

  I dated a painter who liked me because I wouldn’t let him paint me. His day job was at the art supply store and he’d ask the hot art students who came in there buying mat board and Ilford paper if they’d be willing to model for him. “I don’t really like painting,” he told me. “But I love looking at naked girls.” Another time he said, “Can you believe this is my life? These chicks come to my house and they take off their clothes and they let me stare at their tits for an hour.” He was one of those people who was obsessed with being clean and would shower twice or three times a day and wash his hands every fifteen minutes it seemed like. One time after we fucked, in the thirty seconds he’d let himself lie there before he showered the sex off him, he told me that he sometimes pictured my face on the bodies of the girls he painted. “It makes me hard. Then I tell them I’m hard.” “Then they walk over to you and give you a beej and let you fuck them?” I joked. “Basically,” he did not joke back.

  In his paintings, none of the girls had faces, and the canvases were dark reds and black and slashy and an energy of violence and anger came off of them like loud radio static. “It seems like what you’re painting is hate,” I said. “You’re the only person who’s been able to see that,” he said, and it was the only moment he ever looked like he actually loved me. Two years with him. And I can’t remember him asking me a single question about myself.

  I met O. at a show. We’d just finished playing and I was taking my guitar off my shoulder when I saw him in the crowd. I recognized him right away and my hands went cold and I remember thinking thank god I hadn’t seen him before. It was a good show, and I was buzzing the way I always buzzed right afterward, thrilled and spent and wanting a beer. He was four rows back, looking at me. And my body reacted; seeing him reversed the direction of my blood. I went backstage, hugged the rest of the band like always and we had a beer together like always and we agreed that the show was really, really good, not like always, and we beamed with it. “Did you guys see O. in the audience?” “Holy shit, really?” “I think it was him.” “I thought he was on tour in Sweden.” “That tour wrapped up a month ago, I think.”

  The crowd had mostly drifted out of the club when we came out to load our instruments into the van. But there was O., undeniably him, beautiful man, and famous by then. My height, not tall, not dumbly thin like so many musicians. He had heft. He looked like someone who could give a good hug. His curly hair was long then, tied back into a plum-size knot at the base of his skull, a few loose strands fell around his cheekbones, and the strange thing was that when I saw that, it was as though I could feel the strands on my own cheeks. He wore a leather bracelet around his left wrist. His beard wasn’t the big bread loaf made of hair like so many dudes who sang those sorts of songs had. A regular-length beard. Dark sad eyes. He stood by the merch table, seeming weirdly nervous, like someone who’s looking at something without seeing it because they need something to do with their eyes and need to seem like they’re not looking at or waiting for the one thing they really are.

  I got another beer and walked over toward him. We stood next to each other facing the splay of Oaken records, the T-shirts with the snake hatching out of the acorn that one of my artist ex-boyfriend’s friends had designed.

  A slim nerd came up to him. “Hey man, sorry to bug you, you must get this all the time, but could you sign this for me?”

  “Happy to.”

  “Your music means a lot to me,” he said.

  “Really pleased to hear that. Thanks, man. You know, hers is the autograph you oughta get. Pretty amazing show tonight, right?”

  “It was a really good show,” the slim nerd said to me.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “Have you listened to the new record?” O. asked him. “You should definitely get it if you haven’t.”

  The kid picked up the album and pulled some bills from his pocket and paid for it and thanked us and joined up with his friends.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said to O. We had never spoken before. We had never met.

  “The pleasure was mine,” he said, extending his hand.

  As we’d stood there, before saying a word to each other, I’d noticed, the way I’d noticed only a few other times in my life, that it felt different standing near him. That the air was charged in a different way. The way I picture it is that whatever little particles we blast out of ourselves, that come flying off us at all times without us really knowing or seeing, whatever bits of light or energy or pheromonally charged sparks of mystery matter, with most people, these currents just sort of swim around each other, or repel each other like magnets. But sometimes, with some peop
le, the currents collide, they heat up and speed up and the feel in the air changes, and you’re aware of your charge, and theirs, and the chemical blending of both. With O., it was immediate. Before we even shook hands, I knew.

  We walked out of the club and walked around the city for four hours under streetlights, past dark apartment buildings, past sudsy drunks spilling from bars. We did not stop talking. Finally I said I had to go to bed, though I felt as far away from sleep as I’d ever felt in my life.

  “It was a really good show,” he said.

  “You’re kind to say it.”

  “There was that one fuck-up during the third song when you lost the chords, but you recovered quickly, and I bet no one really noticed.”

  I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. “I was hoping no one noticed.”

  I should’ve known right then. He was someone who needed to make other people feel small for himself to feel okay. I didn’t realize it then. I didn’t realize it for a while. I went home and lay in bed awake as I knew I would, but I wasn’t thinking about him, or about the thrill of the conversation, the immediate connection, the way our particles collided. I was thinking about that one fuck-up. My fingers landing wrong. I’d forgotten it, it was lost in the success of the rest of the night, the gelling and good energy in the room. But then that’s all it was. Two wrong notes.

  It was already too late.

  We spent time. We played music together. We moved in together. We were inseparable. When we fucked it felt like we were an entire decade, not two people but an era in time. We laughed. We showed each other all of ourselves. Our fights were horrors. Days-long tornadoes of tears, silence, swearing, smashing. Two big personalities, I thought. I’m tough. I’m strong. Two passionate, stubborn people. This is how it is.