The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  And what of love? I felt certain that this could be nothing but love, and if this was only lust or infatuation or a simulation of love—well, then give me lust or infatuation. This was how I wanted love to feel. This was the love I wanted. I didn’t want the other kind of love, whatever that love was. I didn’t want the “conscious” kind. Had anyone ever tried to strip Cupid of his quiver? Had anyone tried to send the Sirens to group therapy or Sappho to the UCLA psych ward? Homer gave the Sirens a bad reputation. Falling in love with a Siren meant certain death, but perhaps this was the greatest love: to die in feeling. This was the greatest annihilation—the highest purpose—and the Sirens themselves were not evil. They were simply giving human beings the greatest gift they could possibly give them, to die intoxicated by love and lust. What better way to die?

  “I love you,” I said into his mouth and did not regret saying it.

  “I love you,” he said back into mine.

  “I love you I love you I love you I love you,” we said.

  In between our moans he looked at me with our noses almost touching, his dick going in and out of my pussy, and he said, “I’m going to let go, I’m going to let go.”

  It was such a funny way to say it. Maybe this was how they said it underneath the ocean. It was a testament to his differentness, the sense of an old soul I got from him in spite of the way he looked, and it made me love him more. As he began to come, his voice moved up an octave: a full scale that went through my whole body making me feel as though I was Sappho’s lyre. I gyrated against him too, making him come, helping him to let go. I was a vessel. I was gladly a vessel who was helping him so that he could abandon his own vessel: discard the wants of living in a body, the pain, the hard husk of it. He could discard his scales, which I still didn’t fully understand, and also his arms, which I knew well by now. I didn’t know what it felt like to be a man or what it felt like to have a tail, but I certainly understood the prison of the body. I knew, too, the desperation of not knowing exactly why we are here. I was proud to be a conduit for his escape.

  When he came he looked like he might cry. I felt him gush inside me and in that moment experienced the most maternal surge I have ever felt toward another human being. I felt both lusty and maternal. Then he lay there after with his bloody cheek pressed against my breasts, shaking. My breasts, which never were ample enough, suddenly seemed all I could need. Now I felt I understood that the heart was not the breast itself—it was the current underneath. You did not nurse from the breast itself, but from a place beyond it. The breast was only the bridge. Grown men needed nursing too. Perhaps he needed nursing most of all. So I nursed him and tried to sustain that gift I had given, which was to disappear in the nothingness and thus no longer have to be aware of it.

  43.

  Every other day at dawn it started again: me pulling up to the rock with my wagon, Theo dragging himself up and in, the return to my sister’s house, where he assumed I would continue to live long after the summer. He didn’t ask when my sister would be coming back and I stopped worrying if I would see him again. We now had just enough permanence for me to have faith—a sense of knowing that he would be there. Yet there was still a feeling of wonder and mystery brought on by the gaps in between visits and my knowledge that in a month I could be gone. It was the perfect balance of love and longing, or lust and longing, or lust and love: what I had always sought.

  I felt more at ease, because I knew that it could be me who would create the ending if I wanted. I would be the one returning to the desert if I chose. I would never be left. Only leaving. I already contained the answer. When I thought of the thing itself—the actual end—I felt a sense of impending dread. I didn’t want to go. But I made no plans to stay either. I lived in what was there—keeping the date of my supposed departure in a corner of my mind, like a little magic peach pit. It radiated just enough control as to the way our future could unfold that I no longer feared rejection or his retreat.

  On the days when I would be seeing Theo in the evening, I worked on my book. Its whole contention had changed. I no longer wrote about the blank spaces in any theoretical way or tried to convince anyone that the only way to understand Sappho was to perceive the spaces as though they were always there. I no longer argued with past scholars about their biographical projections on the texts. I wrote, instead, about Eros in the text itself and its relationship to the spaces. The verb eratai less closely meant “to love” than it did “to desire.” Yet despite the best attempts of history, time, weather, and churchmen, the desire in Sappho’s poems had survived as though it were love eternal. Perhaps desire was not so ephemeral after all. Was a feeling the only eternal thing, despite the fact that everyone said it would pass? Could you get away with academic discourse about a feeling? I was going to try. I informed the advisory committee by email of my changes. They asked me to send an outline of the project and a sample. I bullshitted an outline and sent it over to them. At the same time, it wasn’t bullshit at all, because I was already living it. The book was me.

  On the in-between days, after returning Theo to the ocean, I mostly hid from feeling. I stayed deep under the covers and slept. I tried to ignore the rest of the world. I was like a hungover person, biding time until she could have more alcohol. The hair of the dog alone would fix me. I was a drunk waiting only for her next drink.

  I felt I loved him, yet I kept my secret from him. To contain the answer as to how this would all end—to withhold that knowledge, as well as the lie that I would continue to live here alone—felt strange. I was so close to him, it was odd that I could keep a secret that might upset him. It was as though we were one person who was able to completely compartmentalize different elements of themself in different parts of their mind, and the two parts never intersected. They were not allowed to meet. When living in the illusion of our eternality (which was perhaps not an illusion if the feeling rather than the facts were to be believed), I prevented the truth from entering. Actually, it was as though the truth didn’t even knock. But when I was alone, I would wake in a panic from my daytime naps and there it would be: my impending departure.

  44.

  One afternoon I received a call from Rochelle. I could tell right away that she had been sent by Jamie as a spy to suss me out and see where I was in my feelings for him. She played nice-nice with me, as though we were still seated across the table from each other at the Colombian restaurant—as though I had not seen the scared look in her eye, despite her feminist branding, when I went from safely-coupled-off confidante of inane relationship stories to single-and-psycho nosebreaker. While I knew Rochelle was not to be trusted, I enjoyed her sniffing around me again: that I was once again desirable enough to her to be allowed back into her fold of banality. It wasn’t that I liked this fold more than I liked being in Claire’s inner sanctum of sexual camaraderie or the group’s nest of pathos. I found her truly intolerable now, and vowed that when I returned to Phoenix she would never again be rewarded with my presence at another dinner. Let her pontificate to someone else about her husband’s farts. But it felt good to know that I was welcomed back into her fold if I wanted, that I was approved, as though I had once been sane, then gotten sick, then gotten well again.

  The truth, of course, was that I had done nothing to indicate to her I was in any different place than I was when I left town. It was all on Jamie’s end, this mirage of “health”—his renewed desire for me made me safe and appealing to her once again. After she lectured me on the differences between beach culture and a landlocked lifestyle from an anthropological perspective, she lowered her voice.

  “Do you want to know what?” she asked conspiratorially.

  “What?”

  “Jamie has been asking me about you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I keep telling him we haven’t spoken, but he keeps asking.”

  “Well, that’s fine, because I talk to him too. He texts me all
the time. Sometimes I text back,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, sounding dejected that she was not the sole liaison. “Well, I just figured I would tell you.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “You know, I think he really misses you.”

  “Yes, he tells me that too.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “But if he really missed me he’d break up with the scientist,” I said. “Then I’d know he’s serious.”

  But I knew why he hadn’t broken up with the scientist. Nobody broke up with anyone unless they had someone else locked down. Even Jamie, who—when we were together—seemingly only wanted to be free, had not initiated the breakup. In fact, that had been my fatal error: breaking up with him before I had anyone to trapeze onto. Of course, all of that had led me here, to Venice and Theo, so perhaps it hadn’t been such an error.

  “Well, we’ll just have to see what happens when you’re back in Phoenix,” she said knowingly.

  “If I come back,” I said.

  “Really? You might stay there?” she asked.

  She sounded impressed.

  “I don’t know, maybe. I just love being so free right now, not beholden to anyone or anything,” I said, lying completely.

  I was only trying to fool her, as I hadn’t really planned out the idea of staying. The truth was, I couldn’t fully admit to myself that I wanted to stay. To do this would mean putting an end to the peach pit, blasting it to smithereens. And though it was parked in the far corner of my mind, I needed it. I didn’t actively acknowledge that I needed it—this escape or safety valve—but on a primal level I knew. Perhaps this was what living in the moment was about: an active state of denial about the future. I also felt that somehow Theo just “knew” that not only would my sister be returning soon but that I would be leaving. Maybe this was what past men had assumed of me? That I simply knew everything was temporary between us.

  I felt as though it would be evident to anyone, even Theo, that Venice was not my natural habitat. As beachy as I looked in my long white dresses, which I wore solely now—never black anymore—there was something about me that didn’t belong. I was like a cactus, a storer of water, and not a creature who naturally immersed in the water. I didn’t take things lightly. I hoarded. And our differences were evident each morning when his tail would begin to go dry and crack, and we would rush him back to the ocean. I couldn’t hoard him. He did not ask to hoard me. And so I assumed that he never asked if my sister would be returning, or when I planned to leave, because on some level he already knew.

  But he didn’t know. And sometimes when we were fucking, despite the relegation of the peach pit to a far corner of my mind, I would begin to cry. There would be the eternality and then a sudden break in the eternality that brought tears. Before the doughnuts, I didn’t even know I wanted to die. Now, I attributed my crying to joy. I hadn’t known that I’d wanted joy either. I had not ever known that I could have it. Now I was crying because it felt like a miracle—not only that I would want to live at all but that I actually could.

  The time I cried the most was the day at dawn when he fucked me in the ass. The ass fucking did not hurt, or not in a way that made me wince. I did not cry from pain. This ass fucking was the tenderest fuck I could ever have imagined. Earlier on, when we were whispering to each other on the rocks, he had said, “I want to make you feel things you’ve never imagined and explore places you didn’t think could be explored.”

  “Oh yeah?” I had asked.

  “Yes,” he had said. “Like deep inside your asshole.”

  I’d laughed.

  But this was romantic. It felt like a loss of virginity in some way, and completely opposite what had happened in the hotel bathroom with Garrett. For one thing I was lying on my back, not doggy-style. Also, Theo licked my asshole a lot first. I was scared, of course, that it wouldn’t taste very good: as much as I washed before I saw him. I was afraid but he softly licked and sucked it, making me come with his finger gently rubbing my clit. I kept coming on his fingers, when he also put one in my asshole and kissed me from my belly to my neck to my face. Then he kissed my mouth and forehead. His cock was so hard it pushed all the way out of his foreskin, already glistening, straining for me. I grabbed him and it was warm and pulsing.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, and I nodded.

  He nudged my cheeks apart and opened my asshole slowly. First he put the tip of his dick inside me while continuing to rub my clit gently with the hand he hadn’t used to stroke my cheeks and crack. Maybe he knew about urinary tract infections? Could mermaids get them too? I loved his dick moving slowly in and out of my ass, a new intimacy. I never imagined that anal sex could be loving. I never thought of it as an intimate act, one of trust, only a pornographic and brutal one. So I cried a lot, but not because it hurt.

  45.

  I didn’t mention Dominic to Theo again. It was taking more and more pills per day to keep the dog relaxed and asleep, and I went to three different vets to get more prescriptions. In an odd way I had become a drug addict of sorts, like Claire after all—going from doctor to doctor to get the pills. Only I wasn’t getting high on the medication itself, but on the time and intimacy with Theo that it afforded me.

  “We travel a lot,” I heard myself say to the veterinarian. “I’m going to be touring through Europe and I can’t bear to leave him home with a sitter. He’s my child, basically. So I’ll need some for the plane ride and each of the train rides from city to city.”

  “How many cities?” she asked.

  “Ten?” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  I had heard of addicts going from doctor to doctor to get pills as their tolerance for the drugs deepened. Anything involving addiction always escalated, never the other way around. I felt this to be true within myself, and that when and if I returned to Phoenix I would need a thousand lovers to ever take the place of how good it felt to be with Theo.

  One night, when we were lying on the sofa tangled up together, after a day of lovemaking, I asked him how many other women who lived on land he had been with.

  “There have been a few,” he said.

  He told me about a woman named Alexis with long black hair who was a heroin addict. He had licked her menstrual blood too, the first he ever tasted, and watched her shoot dope. She would come to the rocky shore in Monterey every night, when he lived farther north, already slurring her words. He never knew whether she believed he was real, or a side effect of the drugs. But he stayed with her as she sat by the ocean and nodded in and out. Then she stopped coming to the ocean entirely. He feared she had died, until one night, he heard her singing in an old wooden boathouse some feet from the shore. He dragged himself into the boathouse and stayed with her that night. In the boathouse were a few old blankets on the ground and a suitcase full of clothes. He realized then that she was homeless. He wished he could walk on land and bring her food. He would bring her fish, but their raw, dead bodies only nauseated her and he didn’t know how to build a fire to cook them. So he gave her licks of seawater and bites of seaweed.

  “I began to understand,” he said. “The humans and I were not all that different. I didn’t know that people on land were filled with so much yearning. I thought you all had it figured out, were satisfied.”

  “Hardly,” I said.

  “It was a beautiful realization,” he said.

  “So what happened?”

  “One day she just disappeared.”

  “Did she die?”

  “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “All of her things remained in the boathouse. But she never came back.”

  I could not take hearing all of that. I didn’t like that it was she who had left him, even for death, and that he would always long for her. And perhaps as punishment or to regain control of the narrative—that I might be like her and have
a moment like that, the beloved vanisher—I confessed.

  “I suppose it won’t matter with me,” I said. “Now that you’ve been through it in such a sad way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I guess you will be okay when I leave here.”

  “What do you mean ‘leave’?”

  “I’ll be going away soon.”

  “For how long?”

  “Well, for good.”

  I told him everything: that I was from a place where there was no ocean and would be leaving in three weeks to return there, permanently. I asked him if he knew what the desert was. He only stared at me. Immediately I knew that I had hurt him.

  “Do you think—” I started to say.

  I was going to backtrack, to ask him what could be possible. Could I take him with me? Could he ever exist in a desert? But he put his hands over his face and began moaning.