Psyche in a Dress (3 page)

T
he maenad’s father told her she was stupid, a slut. She took off her clothes and danced in the snow, hoping it would make her skin that perfect, white and untouched. But as soon as she stepped into it, the frost became dirty sludge. Her lips were red bitten blood. The roots of her hair were black like the branches that scratched her arms. She wrote poetry and played her guitar so she wouldn’t have to cut herself with something sharper than wood, the fingers of trees. Her guitar spoke and lay in her arms but was not warm. She was only looking for someone to love her.

The maenad went to the big faraway city and formed a band. She threw herself around the stage, whipping her neck, flashing her breasts, bruising her hipbones, spinning until the world whirled away. Oh, obliterating ecstasy. When she opened her eyes she spit into the audience, thinking the boys with the beefy faces were her father.

After the shows she was starving, bloodless. She devoured meat, imagining she was ingesting the flesh of the god of pleasure and pain, becoming one with him, divine. She drank wine, imagining it was that same god’s blood, the god of the beautiful and the cruel.

And Orpheus, he was like a limb of that god. When she heard him sing she felt herself changing. When she touched him she felt herself becoming powerful, beautiful, pure. They ate wild narcotic poppies in his cavern while the bees and lovesick birch trees clamored outside; they wanted him as much as she did.

“Don’t close your eyes,” she wailed.

She didn’t want him to leave her, even for a moment. Even in his dreams.

She asked him, “Do you still love that girl?”

He said it was over.

The maenad knew the only way she could be sure was to do something irreversible, terrible, mythic.

A
nd you came

hell god

At a concert downtown

Somewhere dark, I don’t remember

The air hissed with sound

The chandeliers were shattering

Black smoke swirled around the stage

I sat on the ground

in the pool

of my mother’s old aqua blue taffeta dress

I wore rhinestones on my breasts and on my ears

I wore black gloves with the fingers cut out

black satin pointy-toed stilettos like a wicked bird

Bees swarmed around me, buzzing in my ears

I had a forked tongue and horns and a tail

I saw you and I said, that is the one for me

My hair caught fire

You took me home

It was an old Victorian building

wooden floor painted black—

so shiny, a lake—

no furniture except the low black lacquer bed and table

You kissed me until I passed over

The corpse of my body

was stuffed with black lilies and buzzing bees

I forgot Orpheus, my song

I even forgot my first lover, Love

I stopped wanting anything else in the world

We ran through the city

The air smelled of smoke

Pieces of ash rained down

Some headless mannequins

were lined up on the sidewalk by the trash

You put them in your hearse and took them home

In Chinatown the cloisonné vases

were covered with dust

The animals hung dead in the windows

We ate sticky noodles and pork buns with plum sauce

There was a sign next to a cage of chickens

THESE BIRDS TO EAT NOT FOR PETS

No one looked at us as we ran up and down the hills

The air smelled of burning meat

We were invisible

We were demons

I wanted my mother

I am not a goddess, I said

But you are a god

The god of chaos

The god of hell

Hades, my love

You are a businessman

You own a tattoo parlor

and a clothing store that sells leather clothes, masks

whips and handcuffs

sex toys and porn

You are a club promoter

We went to some kind of old mansion you had found

at the edge of the park

I was wearing my mother’s white smoking jacket over her

tight black cocktail dress

and black satin shoes with sharp points

People were standing

around a pool

that you had filled with dry ice

Their drinks were a strange, smoky green

I wondered how absinthe tasted

as I ate my poisonous maraschino cherries

The band was playing in what had once been a ballroom

You had discovered them

They looked like birds of prey

and their music beat past me on dark wings

You had the room filled with chandeliers, broken

like crystallized tears

Thousands and thousands of dried leaves

blew through the corridors

Black hounds guarded the doors

Everyone said you were brilliant

Everyone said you were some kind of genius

We went to a small glass café overlooking the dark water

and drank something I didn’t recognize

in the red leather booth

“You are corrupting me, my darling,” I said

having another bittersweet sip

I felt my body melting under the table

The waves crashed against the rocks

What if I couldn’t get up and leave?

Would you desert me here?

No, you took me home again

You bit me gently, not drawing blood

You fed me pomegranate seeds

I sucked the clear red coating off the sharp white pith

The taste was sweet at first

and then dry as dirt, as bone

“I love you so much that I don’t care if I die,” I told you

So what if you didn’t say it back?

Your hair was always cold against my burning skin, cold

and smelled of smoke

Your skin was always cool and sleek

Hades, my love

Are you just one more task

to bring back the lover I burned with my candle wax?

with the flame of my doubt?

One day after we had eaten oranges in the rare sunlight

I remembered him

the pressure of his lips on my forehead

and at my throat—

making my hot skin feel icy with their burn

The calluses and soft places on his hands

The vibration of his voice in his chest

as he gave me the myths again

I told you the story then, and you said

“He was a monster to do that to you

Did he think he was so much better than you

that you couldn’t see him?”

I told you about Orpheus and you said

“Maybe he didn’t kill himself

Maybe his girlfriend shot him in the head”

You had different ways to bite

I wondered how much more pressure it would take

to make the blood come

Once we drove all the way back to the city I’m from

We passed the cattle waiting for slaughter

by the side of the highway

The air reeked with fear

You said you grew up on a farm

You saw cows killed

When I asked you to tell me more

about your childhood you just laughed

cranked up

the music and rammed

your foot against the pedal

We didn’t stop in the city

but drove all the way through to the border

There were signs along the highway

of silhouetted, running people

holding the hands of their children

like animals, like targets

At the border you turned off the music

smoothed your hair with some water

from the bottle you had gripped between your thighs

You took off your sunglasses and spoke politely

“Yes, Officer, no sir”

No one would have suspected you

No one would have thought, This is Hades himself

In the border town the light was harsh

Dust motes looked as if they were catching on fire

You took my hand and we ran

through the unpaved streets, past the little shops

We bought loads of black leather belts

and cuffs studded with sharp silver

You pulled me down some stairs

into a dark bar where you made me drink tequila

I marveled at the worm saturated with poison

My head was pounding as we emerged

back up into the sun

A lovely girl had a huge tumor in her neck

A man was missing his hand

We found a punk band playing in the dust

The lead singer was a Mexican albino

with tattoos all over his body and shaved head

The band was good, really fast

You gave them your card and spoke to them in Spanish

I was so thirsty

We ate some greasy food and you ordered beers

There was a tiny building that said
CASAMIENTOS

and you said we should get married

You laughed

and I felt like the worm in the tequila bottle—

bloated, sick, greenish-white, trapped, in love

That night there were fireworks

You grabbed my hand and we ran through the streets

as the sky exploded

There was panic in your eyes I didn’t understand

Maybe I had imagined it

I was wearing my mother’s green satin cocktail dress

hemmed short, above my knees

and dusty black cowboy boots

We headed back that night

and slept by the sea in your truck

I vomited on the sand

You carried me into the ocean as the sun rose

“Good for hangovers,” you said

I was so cold

I didn’t stop shivering for hours after I got out

The sun turned the water to aluminum foil

I was afraid it would all just burn up

anyway

Then suddenly you stopped wanting me

You turned away

You wouldn’t touch me

I lay staring at your cold, muscular white back

your blue-black shiny hair

I wondered what I had done wrong—

I had lost weight, so my belly was concave again

I was seeing a dermatologist—

Or maybe I was being selfish

Maybe you had been wounded when you were younger

Maybe you had been damaged and this wasn’t about me

at all

I tried to ask you if you had been hurt

“Do you know Philomela?” I asked

“Who?”

“The myth

She was raped by her sister’s husband

When she threatened to tell, he cut out her tongue

She turned into a nightingale

She sang her story”

“Do you want to know why we don’t have sex?”

you asked

I started to cry and you said

“Not everyone has been molested, okay?

Maybe I just don’t want to fuck you anymore.

Have you ever thought of that?”

“Is there something I could do differently?” I asked

“We could try it different ways,” I said

You smiled at me

Your incisors sharp

Your eyes were two dark bandages

“I thought you’d never ask, baby,” you said

The more punishment, the sooner I will be redeemed?

You had finally earned your name.

H
ades grew up on a farm in an old red house next to a dilapidated barn. There were cornfields stretching to the horizon; maybe they went on forever. Hades believed they were haunted. The wind in the corn sang strange whispers. Sometimes he’d catch glimpses of emaciated people, thin as scarecrows, with corncob pipes, straw hats, missing teeth, wading shoulder deep through the cornfields. Sometimes he imagined he heard children screaming.

Once at baseball practice he was almost struck by lightning. It hit a tree beside him instead, charred and gnarled it, and he kept imagining his own body ruined like that.

In the winter it was so cold that Hades got frostbite. He had stayed out too late in the snow making angels, not wanting to return home. His father told him he might lose his fingers. He lay in bed trying not to cry, imagining the stumps on his hands.

In the summer Hades was always bathed in sweat from the humidity. His mother screamed at him to bathe. “You stink!” At night he ran through the meadows catching fireflies in jars. Then he took them home and watched them die, the lights snuffed out.

He saw animals born and he saw them slaughtered. Blood was just something that was on your hands all the time. Blood was just another bodily fluid. There were more interesting ones.

When Hades wet his bed at the age of five his mother put him back in diapers. She stuck the pins into him. She kept diapering him until he was twelve years old.

When Hades had an erection his mother locked him in the closet. Sometimes she even beat him. This didn’t stop Hades from getting hard. It made him harder in every way.

Hades’s father waited for him when he came out of the shower. He commented on the size of Hades’s penis. He showed his son his own. There was something odd about the way Hades’s father taught him to slaughter a cow. There was some kind of
pleasure in it. Sometimes Hades’s father would set off fireworks from behind the barn and watch to see his son jump at the noise.

Hades’s mother did not like how her husband looked at their son. Because of this she beat Hades even harder. She beat him and locked him in the closet and finally Hades left home.

He had been born an unscarred, sweet-smelling baby with pale down on his head that soon fell out and blue eyes that turned pupil-less black. He had been born loving animals and tractors, getting lost in the lightning bug meadows, lost in the angel-making snow. He had become something else entirely. So he decided to become something else again. He changed his name, he changed the color of his hair, he wore eyeliner and grew his fingernails, changed his skin with ink tattoos of devil girls. He went alone into the desert to set off fireworks to immunize himself to loud sounds. He developed an insatiable appetite for meat, any food that bled, that had once had eyes. He became rich, a businessman. He listened to the loudest music, sought it out, to further immunize himself.

Hades saw Eurydice and plucked her like a flower. He became for her the god of chaos, the god of hell. This was why he wanted her. She was proof of his success, his change.