Their twins emerged out of glass pools
to have sex with them on the tabletops
In the candlelight I wondered
if Narcissus might find me attractive
Not that I cared
Love had already left me
I had on makeup and a blue satin chinoiserie dress
my mother’s jewels—
a double strand of pearls and her sapphire ring
I imagined her teeth, her eyes
I asked Narcissus about himself
I didn’t expect him to say anything interesting
but when he started talking I fell
under his spell
Instead of touching parts of my mother
I watched Narcissus’s full lips move over his white teeth
His eyes were pools shattered by sunlight
and his lashes brushed his cheekbones
If he was looking at his reflection
I couldn’t see
Narcissus
Narcissus lived with his mother in an apartment on a street lined with other apartments that looked just like it—a cottage cheese stucco-and-glass building with a pool in the center.
Narcissus swam alone late at night with his reflection. The pool made everything blue, including Narcissus’s skin. The air always smelled of chlorine. When Narcissus swam it got into his hair so he washed carefully with his mother’s expensive shampoo before he went to sleep.
After school, Narcissus took the bus to the beach where he went surfing or perfected his tan. When he got home his mother was never there. He defrosted his dinner and went into the bathroom paneled with mirrors. He took off his clothes and admired his abdominal muscles, his skin, his cock.
Narcissus’s father had left before he could remember. His mother was not there. She said she was an actress but Narcissus suspected something else because there were never any roles he knew of but always enough money, heavy makeup, tight dresses, the stink of men. Narcissus never wanted to smell like that.
When he talked to her she looked right through him if she looked his way at all. But suddenly he had discovered, in those mirrors, someone even more beautiful. Someone completely devoted. Someone who would never look away.
A lot of people didn’t look away. There were women and men wanting sexual favors. But Narcissus stopped caring about them. It was easier to stand in front of the mirrors, caressing himself.
Sometimes his twin would materialize. Cold as glass and without a smell but so beautiful that it didn’t matter. They could fuck all night, tireless, insatiable, exactly the same.
One day on the boardwalk a tall, thin man with pale skin, a hat and dark glasses approached Narcissus. The man seemed out of place and spoke with a thick accent. He handed Narcissus his card and said, “Have you ever acted before?”
Narcissus smiled because in some ways that was all he had ever done. “Why?” he asked.
“I am making a film,” the man said. “I need someone to help make my daughter disappear.”
“Do you know what I like about you, Echo?”
Narcissus said
“You know how to listen
Most of these actresses I know
just want to go on and on about themselves”
Perhaps this, too, was a test
Narcissus did not taste of the spray
that spurts from the skin of ripe oranges
When we touched it was for the cameras
His pupils were blank
empty
My reflection was never there
The lights were bright, revealing the monsters
He watched himself the whole time
“Who are you?” Narcissus’s character asked
“You…you…you”
Those were my lines
I went home and looked in the giant tarnished mirror
with the frame of silver roses
I had not vanished
I had not faded
away to just a voice
Maybe I wish I had
It was my voice that had been stolen away
Eurydice
Stray dogs followed Orpheus through the streets
feral cats crawled onto his lap
wild parrots flew down to light
upon his shoulders
rolling their eyes in ecstasy
eucalyptus trees swooned when he passed them
jacarandas did a striptease of purple petals
Orpheus tapped the mike
and squinted out into the audience
shifting the weight of his narrow hips
He cleared his throat
but it still sounded like he’d just had a cigarette
He ran his hand through his hair, slicking it back
sang a cappella
with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans
leaning into the microphone as if he were going to go
then played his guitar
Music can make a man a demigod
especially to a girl who has seen Love
up close
and burned
and lost him
especially to a girl without a voice
I had never understood the expression
about your heart being in your mouth
It beat there, choking me with blood
After the last song he came off the stage
and someone introduced us
I could see the dark roots of his bleached hair
The insomniac circles under his eyes
He had the irises of a mystic
Pale, almost fanatical
His voice was gravelly
His hands were warm with large blue veins
I could hear incantations in his blood
“I’ve seen your films,” he said
“I’d like to talk with you more some time”
The next night we ate avocados, oranges and honey
in Orpheus’s candlelit cavern deep in the canyon
I wore strapless pale lace and tulle and lilies in my hair
“Tell me,” he said
“Tell me a story”
This in itself was an aphrodisiac
My throat opened like a flower
He listened to the myths
The ones my love once gave me
Orpheus liked their darkness and the violence
and the truth
For me it is the transformation
I was restless, sweating in my dress
“Let’s go,” I said “Let’s go, O”
We ran out into the canyon
Up the hillsides to the street
The sky was bright, hallucinatory, pink
We ran into the neighborhood of rotting mansions
When the sun set we roamed their damp lawns
kissed under the purple trees
There was a pink restaurant with a green awning
We broke inside and explored the shadowy booths
the cobwebs draping the bar
We waltzed on the dance floor with ghosts of dead stars
When the sun rose we ate waffles with whipped cream
in an all-night coffee shop
Sunshine burned through the glass
searing the night off our skins
Back in his cavern, Orpheus sang my myths to me
I imagined that I would stop telling stories
stop acting in my father’s films
I would give up my aspirations
I do not need to be an artist, I told myself
I do not need to be a goddess
I will be a woman, a wife, a muse
But this is what I could not give up:
I could not give up myself
And my self had become
the memory of the god who once visited me each night
I could not give up the chance to win him back
How could I win him back if I were happy with another?
It would never happen.
I would need to prove myself, suffer
I would need the god
of hell
Orpheus
Orpheus was a musical prodigy. What else, with a name like that? In another place and time his mother might have been a muse of epic poetry, but in this world of separation she was only a woman afraid of poverty and growing old. She took all the money her son made from his first album and bought a small mansion with etched-glass windows, gold columns and a spiked gate. She bought a car and furs and jewels for herself, new breasts. In another place and time, Orpheus’s father might have been the sun god, or at least a king, but instead he was a frightened, bankrupt man who never told Orpheus’s mother to stop what she was doing.
Orpheus refused to play music for anyone. He locked himself in his room and wrote silent poetry in his journals. He could hear the song of it, his secret. Orpheus’s mother knocked on the door, wanting another album, more money for new skin—on her face, another fur coat. That was when he left the fancy house that he had paid for with music. He never spoke to either of his parents again.
Orpheus went wandering through the canyons. He found secret underground passageways, crumbling caverns where he hid, got high, smoked packs of cigarettes. One night he ventured out and played his guitar for the birch trees. They danced in the moonlight, their many dark eyes watching, pale silver skin quivering. In the morning the avocado and citrus trees filled his open palms with fruit. Overblown orange poppies with opiate seeds grew out of the parched dirt. Bees let him reach his bare hands into their hives, scooping out gobs of honey, unstung. Rabbits, squirrels and doves gathered to listen to this new Orpheus, the magician, the mystic, realizing his truth, even in a time without muses, kings or sun gods.
It was hard to live on avocados and oranges, and when the tobacco and pot ran out Orpheus got a job as a bartender in a seedy strip club and sang onstage after hours. The strippers were like birch trees, he found—that silvery and wide-eyed, that susceptible to his charms. He slept with a lot of them. But when he met Eurydice he knew he wanted more. Alone in his cavern, with the insatiable dancing trees awaiting him, he wanted a wife.
When Eurydice left him the maenad came. She wanted more than a husband.
After Orpheus began to doubt
he could not reclaim me
If you are to love, never look back
I should have told him
But what do I know?
I am just as filled with doubt
I am only Eurydice
I am known as Orpheus’s
I was never a goddess
My father didn’t argue with me when I said I had to leave
He smiled to himself
“Whatever you want, princess
You’ll be back in time”
I went away to a new city
and half waited for Orpheus to come for me
To lead me back with his poetry
Dear Orpheus, why did you doubt?
You are an artist
When you sing your words
all the women want your child in their bellies
All the men want to stand where you stand
The god of hell should not intimidate you
Orpheus did not come
Days and days passed
I lived in the tall, cold building
I put on the stray pieces I had brought
from my mother’s wardrobe
and walked to school bent under the weight of my books
I sat in the echoing lecture halls
and listened for the poetry hidden
in the professors’ words
But I couldn’t hear it
I ate but the food had no taste
I drank the alcohol
that was given out every night at the parties
I watched my belly bloat and my face break out
Someone offered me acid
but when I looked out my window
eight flights to the ground below
I knew I couldn’t take it
It would have been too easy to jump
I wondered if Orpheus was writing about me
I wondered if I was getting closer to hell
My sister called me and said
“Did you hear? Are you okay?”
“Hear what?” I asked
but I knew it was bad
“You know he was dating that crazy singer?
They were doing heroin.
Something happened. Orpheus is dead.”
Love had left again
I had no doubts about hell now
I was all the way there
The Maenad
The 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.
And 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