The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  33.

  Theo was waiting by the rocks, hanging on to the side of them. I ran across the beach and climbed up, feeling like Catherine running to Heathcliff across the moors, in my long skirt. I imagined that I looked like a child. I knew that I wasn’t, but I felt time to be slowing as I ran—or at least, I wasn’t getting any older anymore. I was alive and that was it.

  “Hi,” I said, and crouched down to kiss him.

  “I’m coming up,” he said, and twisted himself up onto the rock. For a second I was shocked to see his black tail, the sash still around his pelvis. He kissed me hard and laid me down onto the rock. Then he pulled himself on top of me and I could feel his cock, my skirt and his sash between us. It was all so natural. My legs spread and his pelvis and tail were between them, just where his legs would be if he were a regular man.

  As we kissed I imagined eating his tail with garlic butter. I wanted to suck his cock and also to see it. I rolled us over and sat up on top of him, kissing my way down his torso, my skirt fanned out around both of us, covered in ocean water and seaweed and black slime from his tail. I felt like an octopus or an anemone. I sucked on his neck, his nipples, the insides of his arms. I licked his meaty rib cage, kissed my way down his belly, sucked on his belly button.

  My head hovered over his sash. I teased him, kissing the outside of it, licking it. Like a salt lick, the sash had accreted so much salt. I wondered how many sashes he had, if he ever changed them.

  I unfastened the knot on the side. His cock rested on a nest of beautiful dark pubic hair. He wasn’t totally hard anymore. I felt self-conscious and wondered if I had turned him off somehow. But he had an ample, beautiful cock, uncircumcised, white and pink, with two round pink balls.

  I kissed his cock, rubbed it against my face and cheek, so soft. I looked up and he was smiling at me. I began to lick it, to make out with it. My mouth was very dry from the salt and I felt like I had a fur tongue. I put his whole cock in my mouth and aimed it toward the back of my throat, gagging, making some more saliva. He moaned and softly tousled my hair with his hands. He got a little firmer but not totally hard yet and so I had to hold it in my fist. I sucked and jerked gently, but he would not get fully hard. I began to lick his balls. I put them in my mouth. My chin rested on the place where his tail met his skin. The scales were slimy and hard at the same time. But his balls were delicious, like raw oysters.

  “Oh my God,” he whispered.

  He reached down and began to jerk himself as I licked his balls.

  “Don’t stop licking,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

  It wasn’t the romantic jerking I would have liked to have seen, his beautiful body in a slow search of pleasure. This was the second time in one summer that a boy jerking off wasn’t what I would have wanted it to be. He was more frantic and urgent, like he was trying to get it done, like he wanted to prove to me that he could get it up and stay up. Maybe he just needed a lot of friction in order to feel pleasure. I wondered if his cock being exposed to saltwater had made it numb. Maybe this was just how men jerked themselves when no one was watching. Maybe he was comfortable around me.

  “It feels so good,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I feel you so much. I’m going to, oh my God—”

  My pussy surged. I took my mouth off his balls and put it on the head of his cock, grabbing his balls with my hand and rubbing them in a circle. They were tight. His come in my mouth didn’t taste bitter, like some men, but it wasn’t exactly sweet either. It was a feminine taste. It tasted like the smell of his tail, oceanic, a little fishy. I felt as though I had eaten his pussy, that I was yang or yin, or whichever the male was, and he was female for a moment.

  I thought of the god of the sea, Poseidon, the father of Triton. Was Aphrodite his lover? No, Demeter was his lover—the earth goddess—they were siblings but also lovers. What did that make Aphrodite on her clamshell, then? To Sappho, Aphrodite was the ultimate sex deity. In Hesiod, Kronos, the king of Titans, castrated Uranus, the sky god, and Aphrodite rose out of the water from his spilled seed—transformed into a woman out of sparkling seafoam. Perhaps they were all one person. The gods were always switching identities, changing genders, inhabiting new bodies as though they were clothes. So Poseidon, with his long beard and muscular chest, was in a way also a woman. A woman, a man, what was the difference between the two anyway? It seemed in that moment very little.

  I felt that we were twins—two strands of the same DNA or one egg split in two—sibling lovers, like Poseidon and Demeter. At the very least we were two eggs sharing one womb. He was both the womb and not the womb. And I was both the womb and not the womb. We were the womb for each other and made of the same material, but also contained together in a larger womb. I felt so good, and for a moment I wondered, Maybe it is not him who makes me feel this way? Maybe I already contain him, as the gods contain one another. Perhaps I do not even need him, to feel like this?

  No, I needed him and maybe it was okay to need him. This is how love was spiritual, when it felt like this: unity with each other, the self, and all. And if this wasn’t love, then this was how lust could be a thing of value: a peak experience, something worth the pain of coming down. Was this true or was it a lie? So many things were both true and a lie, depending on how you felt in the moment. In this moment it felt like love.

  I was bold and ready to ask him.

  “I was wondering if you would ever possibly come to my house?” I asked. “I mean, it is my sister’s house but I live there alone.”

  “I would love to be in a house with you,” he said. “I would love to make love to you without having to look over our shoulders for anyone coming. To be totally alone.”

  “You would?” I giggled.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Have you ever been in a home on land?”

  “Yes,” he said. “A few times, many years ago.”

  I didn’t press him.

  “But this was a home very close to the water,” he said. “It wasn’t really a home. It was a deserted boathouse right on the ocean. An old fishermen’s boathouse. I just don’t see how I could possibly come to your sister’s home. I think it is too far. First of all, I can’t be seen. How would I get across the sand?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” I said.

  He seemed so excited by the idea that I didn’t feel weird letting him know that this was something I had spent a lot of time thinking about. It was like I had let go now and decided to trust him. Something in me had suddenly decided that it didn’t really matter what would happen. Either I was going to scare him off or I wasn’t, but if it was going to happen, it would happen. I didn’t have to stifle my fears and desires. Just being around him, inside his supernatural aura, gave me the confidence to speak, like the way wine gives you confidence. I was languid and casual. Later I would likely replay everything and pick apart what I had said. Had I been too forward? And God forbid it ended that night when we said goodbye. If he disappeared and I never saw him again, I would blame myself for pushing him away with my omnivorous need. But for now I didn’t feel at risk of losing him, since he was very much here with me.

  “What if I took a shopping cart and brought it to the ocean?” I asked. “It’s Venice and there are so many people with shopping carts. We could hoist you into it and cover you up with a blanket. I could wheel you across the beach and you would be my secret. To everyone else I would look like any of the other bums who live here.”

  “But are the street people allowed on the beach at night?” he asked. “The boardwalk people? It’s one thing when you come to me alone at night, looking as you do. You’re one body, a woman in a dress. Coast Guard, the police, none of them are looking for you. And even if they were to come over, when we are on the rocks I can go right back into the water. I can go under the water and they would never see me again! But if I was in a shopping cart, far from the water, and they found
us, how could I get free? They would lock me up or make me into some kind of terrible show. Remember that on land I am helpless.”

  “What if it wasn’t a shopping cart?” I asked. “What about…a child’s wagon? And what if it wasn’t at night but at dawn? It’s legal to be on the beach then, but no one is around except maybe a few surfers. What if we loaded you onto the wagon and covered your bottom half in a blanket? People would just think you were my child. Only grown.”

  “I feel that there would still be a danger if I was seen getting into the wagon.”

  “They might just think you were wearing a wet suit. Haven’t others thought it was a wet suit? I did at first.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Others have.”

  “See!” I said.

  “I want to do it,” he said. “But I’m scared.”

  “Okay, I understand.”

  “But I really want to.”

  “Well, then listen to my plan. Just hypothetically, this is how we would do it. I would go to the hardware store, or maybe the toy store. And buy a wagon. Something big enough that we could get most of you in there without too much dangling. I could come tomorrow morning at dawn with the wagon. Or not tomorrow, this dawn, but the next day. You could come up onto the rock as usual. And then just slide right down, right into the wagon. I would bring a blanket, maybe even a couple of them. We would make sure that you would be totally and completely covered. We wouldn’t even have to go anywhere. We could just see how you felt. See how it worked. It would be like practice.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I think I could possibly do that. Just practice.”

  “That’s all it would be.”

  34.

  Buying the wagon wasn’t sexy like shopping for makeup and clothes. I wondered if real love always devolved into this: moments of non-sexiness. Maybe the moments of non-sexiness gradually moved together to become one solid thing, like the way that Theo’s scales started as almost freckles or moles and eventually raised and congealed. I went to three hardware stores before I found a wagon that was big enough. It was tin and red and looked like an antique child’s wagon. I pretended for a moment that I had a child, and was buying the wagon as a gift for him or her. Was the child’s name Theo? I imagined myself hand-in-hand with a little brunette boy and wondered what it would be like. Would I feel as deeply for him as I did for my Theo? Maybe I was only fooling myself with my romantic adventures, looking to fill a hole that could only truly be satisfied by the love that women said they felt for their kids. If you didn’t have children, they liked to remind you that you were missing out—and that there was no greater love. No, fuck all those childbearers and their “fulfilling” lives, never getting to have adventures like mine. I was glad that this wagon wasn’t for some snot-nosed kid that I felt I had to pretend to be all excited about but secretly loathed for destroying my body, my freedom. It seemed depressing.

  My romantic adventures were something to really be excited about—something that could really keep the nothingness away. As I walked home tugging the wagon, I decided not to think about anything that would happen after. I wasn’t going to think about my languishing thesis again. I wouldn’t think about Claire or her phone calls. Certainly not Jamie or Phoenix. I would think about Dominic enough to make sure that he stayed alive. But I didn’t have it in me anymore to really spend quality time, snuggling and imbibing his warmth. I had begun to feel differently about him now, not as a delight or a gift, but just another responsibility.

  I decided also that I wasn’t even going to think about what would happen if Theo got frightened and refused to come with me. Instead I busied myself, cleaning the house, playing with the lighting, picking out music. Everything on Annika’s iPod seemed primed for a spontaneous bout of triangle pose, but not really for sex. I needed to get the moment just right if it was going to remain eternal, stretch over the face of the time-space continuum, and suck up all of the nothingness everywhere.

  35.

  Claire called, but I didn’t pick up. Then she texted:

  What’s your favorite suicide method?

  Where are you what are you doing?

  I hate to be needy so I’m going to pretend I don’t need you but seriously where are you?

  Lucy, I am so on edge and hate everything namely me

  I couldn’t get out of bed to drive my kids to school do you think I am an awful person?

  Don’t have children they destroy everything

  Do you want to go shopping?

  I didn’t mean to be cold, but something about her really scared me now. She’d passed over to the darkness, the edge of nothingness, and she’d done it by trying to access the light, the glitter. Those highs, even if they were fake and we knew that they wouldn’t last forever, felt so real when we were in them. That’s where I was now. I just couldn’t discern the ephemeral nature of what I was experiencing, and didn’t want to. Perhaps what I had with Theo was as synthetic as what Claire had with her men, but it felt so good—how could we ever even care when we were in it?

  Craving the fake light was a completely real feeling, even if those around you could see that you were just another junkie. I think this is what was most frightening: me and my Theo haze and Claire and her druglike need were the same thing. I didn’t want to look at it; I didn’t want to look at her. To look at her would be to see the danger that I was facing on the other side of Theo’s visit, the darkness that inevitably fell when you spent too much time basking in the sun of a man. To look at her was to know that I was inevitably the cause of my own darkness, my own nothingness. The more you went for the ephemeral light, the more the void opened on the other side. It was waiting for me right there.

  I set my alarm for five. I wanted time to try to look beautiful, even though the wind and salt air always washed away anything I did to my hair or face. Dominic, never an early riser, was still asleep—sprawled in the bed where I had been, one ear above the sheets. I picked him up, carried him to the little white loveseat in the bedroom, and covered him with a blanket. He didn’t stir. Then I changed the sheets on the bed so they would smell clean and not like wet dog. I got in the deep tub and soaked. It was cold out and the hot water felt good to my bones.

  I brushed my teeth, then drenched myself in one of my sister’s expensive body oils: something called Exotic Seduction made with jasmine, ylang-ylang, vanilla, and lavender oils. I dabbed two extra drops on my nipples and one in my belly button. I applied spearmint lip gloss and rubbed some honey wax in my hair. Then I put on a knee-length gray cotton sundress and a wool sweater. I brought two large blankets outside and placed them in the wagon, unlocked the gate, and started dragging it across the sand. It was quiet. No one was out. If anyone saw me they would have thought I was using the wagon to carry my beach stuff out for the day. I was simply having a beach day.

  I got to the rocks and saw the rosy dawn, the sun rising over the mountains. The rocks were cold and wet, and each wave that came in slapped against them—making its own little crash for a moment, then vanishing. I hadn’t slept much and felt giddy. What the hell was going on? I was out here looking for a merman. Was I crazy? Was I becoming just another Venice lost soul, belongings in a wagon, having insane visions by the ocean? I laughed aloud to myself. I imagined moving onto the beach at the end of the summer when Annika returned. I could sleep under the stars, meeting Theo every night. Then I could go eat breakfast and shower in their multimillion-dollar home. The thought of moving to the water’s edge seemed romantic in that moment. Sappho had always lived by the ocean, imagining love as a luminous divinity rising from the waves. This would be my living thesis.

  Then I saw Theo’s head surface, his thick wet hair draped over his left eye.

  “Hey!” he said, spitting out water.

  “Can you see when you’re underwater?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I live there.”

  “Well,
I’m here to kidnap you,” I said.

  “No, I’m willfully coming,” he said. “I’m coming up. Land ho.”

  He looked around to see if anyone was coming.

  “Wow, you weren’t kidding about a wagon. You are really committed to doing this, I see.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I think we should at least try, anyway. I will protect you. I just want to be safe with you, no elements, just a soft place to land together, by ourselves.”

  “I really want to be with you,” he said.

  I shuddered.

  He climbed up onto the rocks belly first, then flipped himself over, grunting.

  “Need help?” I asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  I rolled the wagon over to the edge of the rocks and held it steady. As he dragged himself on board, he looked like a paraplegic pulling himself onto a seat. He rolled over just using his arms to rearrange himself and tucked where his knees would be up to his chest. I draped the blanket around his shoulders and let it collect in front of him, covering the bulk of his tail. We were good, it seemed. But hoisting the wagon off the rocks proved more difficult than I thought. I pulled left and right, and the tin axles ground. He tried to push off the rock with his arms, like a man in a wheelchair, face straining. With him pushing, I gave a final tug and the wagon fell onto the beach, toppling over and dumping Theo in the sand.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. But I noticed he was shaking.

  “Would you cover me up with the blanket quickly? Please?”

  The wagon and blanket were only a few feet from where he had fallen, but I realized how hard it would be for him to even crawl that far. I wondered if his tail was heavy, what was inside it. Was it human flesh or fish flesh? I covered up his bottom half and he just lay there for a second.