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The Siren
By
Jonathan Lyons
Fucking the Siren was the hottest thing Connor Hegarty could imagine: Hot because of what a big score she was, a metalcore rockstar in feared and revered local legends Meat Grinder; hot because everyone in every pit at every live show saw her on stage, in her element — hair a halogen explosion, make up all dark accents and alabaster highlights, like the gods of Technicolor had turned the contrast up, way up, on her and her alone — every single sexually female-oriented being stopped dead for a second, mesmerized, only the danger and unattainability pulling them back into the moment. Hot because of the real and present threat posed by her huge guitar-player husband. Hot, of course, because Connor and the Siren were fucking.
She was his windmill, Connor's quixotic quest, won in an acid-blurred failure to keep off one another one cold December night, their hair moving with an LSD-fueled life of its own, that gut feel of a chest-burster from "Alien" crouched between the stomach and the spine. They came to each other hungry with need, and as Connor fellated her, she clutched his proto-mohawk do with both hands and cried out, repeating his name as she came.
The doses gave their climax a warped metaphysical feel — like some Faustian trip that let them be right here, right now, on Connor's bare mattress on the dangerously warped floor of his miraculously not-condemned rental. Riding one another in an intense, insane alloy of love and hate, damn the consequences, their doppelgangers fucking right back at them from the cracked mirror he'd found in the room when he moved in.
Sooner or later — they both knew it; they both did — the big guitarist-husband would catch on, and it would all come to a violent collision conclusion.
The idea turned Connor Hegarty on: The ultimate end of the relationship, one where the couple would not split in a pointless dispute, or because lovers had gotten tired of each other, but because fate, thus shoved, would find a way to see things finished long before any of those sorts of complications could set in.
Connor hadn't always courted disaster. He had felt a genuine rush of love in the months before he and the Siren's clique had found one another: A pristine, astounding, slender Mariel, a girl who radiated such beauty and purity that he had always known, deep down, he didn't really deserve her. Always felt guilty for wanting her, irredeemable for attaining and soiling her with his sex.
And all that had ended in a mid-December form letter from a clinic in her hometown announcing that he had been exposed to a venereal disease. He'd wept into the phone for hours that he would forgive her before she finally told him that she would not forgive him. And he realized that what he'd feared was true: that he really hadn't been worthy of her at all — hadn't been worthy of any of it.
He did not return to his family for the holiday. A receipt told him he'd gotten the necessary eight-pill antibiotic cocktail, in case he had the disease. He stayed in the run-down dive on South Dodge, half-waking strung out and shaky on the living-room floor in a stream of falls into morning that marked his wipeout, the agonized chorus from Joy Division's anthemic "Day of the Lords" echoing in his skull:
Where will it eeeeeeennnnnnd? Where will it eeeeeeeennnnd?!
Where will it eeeeeeennnnnnd? Where will it eeeeeeeennnnd?!
A furtive February fuck, Siren crying out his name again, shadows undulating in the red-orange glow of a harvest moon, and, somehow, his name repeated, over and over again —
Connor, Connor, Connor — began to feel … he didn't know for sure: Overdone? Pushed? False.
Connor slowed, focusing his gaze on her — really on her, for once, not on his idealized fuck-fiend punk-rock version of her, but on her. He saw: lines of codeine cough-syrup-cocktail sluggishness around her eyes, the skin dark and translucent-thin beneath. He saw: roots dark peeking out from under the halogen blonde. He saw: needle-prick scab where she'd spiked in, the soft, vein-rich territory at the crease of her elbow. He saw: A person who seemed almost bored with him, with the sex and the repetition. Bored with the two of them.
And it wasn't hot. It wasn't at all. Even the slick muscle with which she enveloped him felt cool to the touch, flaccid.
Connor Hegarty's doppleganger stared out at the skinny, self-deluded original to find a shallow thrillseeker risking his life to bring down a marriage so he could proclaim himself, somehow,
winner. He was, he realized, nothing. No: less. He slipped out of her, cold, and caught a glimpse of her expression. She could read it all over him: heat gone tepid.
Connor muttered something callous, pointlessly abusive. Her voice phlegmy in its opiate-padded husk, she said: "It's over," her tone hovering somewhere between question and answer. He followed her glassy gaze to the window, a winter breeze whistling through taped-over cracks. He nodded to her; it was. He got up to look for his clothes, a faint Velcro sound as a leak from his own spike site left bloody, sticky, two-toed prints on the faded linoleum.
Out front, the band's van pulled up, and the guitarist-husband killed the engine.
No, Connor told himself: Not "guitarist-husband"; Klaus. The man has a name.
Connor had hated the guitarist. Hated him by default, a matter of competition. Now, all that was swept away, leaving behind only a mix of pity for the man and a curdling sensation in the pit of his stomach for what was next. But he knew it was too late. He could see no way to mend it all; no new, picket-fences-and-lemonade sunny-afternoon life would rise from the ashes of his disaster; he saw, plain as pain, that they all had a dangerous road before them — that the most insurmountable, most mortal part was only just beginning.
Copyright © 2004 Jonathan Lyons
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