The Pisces
Page 45

“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.
“Theo,” I said.
He wouldn’t answer me and seemed to be in a trance. It was like he’d become a Siren. As Homer said, the Sirens had gorgeous, melodic voices, but they could also howl with pain and agony. It was not pain as I had romanticized it: him beautifully bereft with aching for me. It was not the Sirens as we humans imagined them, armed with divine power. This was vulnerability, a bit of madness even, and what it revealed was that he truly loved me, and that love could be grotesque.
Dominic woke up in the other room and began barking along with Theo’s moaning.
“Please calm down,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I told him that maybe I could work something out. Maybe I could stay after all. I hadn’t known how much he cared. But he said it was too late.
“You lied to me,” he said. “I was going to keep coming to see you on land. I had even wanted to ask you to come join me under the water, seriously. And here you have been set to abandon me all along.”
I didn’t know exactly what “under the water” meant. Was he more delusional than I was? Did he know I couldn’t live under there?
“Theo, no, it isn’t like that. I really am in love with you. I want to stay with you forever.”
“That you would think of leaving me,” he said. “That you would let me grow so close to you and never tell me it was finite. It breaks my heart. It’s humiliating too.”
“I was afraid that if I told you there was an end date you would see me differently. I liked the way you saw me. I didn’t want anything to change. And then it was too late, you knew me the way you knew me. I thought of finding a way to stay in Venice, but I was scared that you would reject me,” I said.
“Can you help load me back in the wagon?” he said. “I need to go back to the ocean.”
“Wait, can’t you just stay and we will talk it through?”
“Just help me. Take me back, please. I’m asking you, help me back to the water.”
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said.
“Didn’t know what? That I loved you? When you said ‘eternal love’ I thought you meant that you wouldn’t leave me ever.”
“So then I won’t. I won’t. If you don’t want me to, I won’t. I don’t want to either! When I said eternal love—when we talked about it—I didn’t know you meant in body. I didn’t know you would want me to stay here in body. I thought that it could mean in spirit or that it might be a game you were playing. I always thought that at some point you would swim away and I would never see you again.”
“Why would you think that?” he asked. “When did I ever give you that impression? Did I do anything but care about you?”
Explicitly this was true. But under my lens, my paranoiac, insecure vision, my endless anticipation of abandonment, even the slightest lack of attentiveness was interpreted as a fatal lapse in desire. I couldn’t tell him that I’d been looking for any sign that he was over me, or would never love me as much as he would love someone else. I couldn’t say that the fact that he had loved anyone before me meant I needed to keep an out. I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t sure if I was truly capable of love.
“You don’t believe in love,” he said, as though reading my mind.
“I do,” I said. “I believe in love more than anything. But I think I am very bad at it.”
It dawned on me then that he was more like me than I thought, his fear of abandonment so intense. Maybe we were identical, and because we were identical I had gotten to be someone else, without even really knowing it. I thought of my moon in Gemini, the twins, with their dual nature. I contained both man and woman. But Theo and I, we were two of the same. I thought of Pisces, the two fish, bound together by one string—one star—Alpha Piscium. In attempting to escape the monster Typhon, Aphrodite and her son Eros turned into fish and swam away. But who was Aphrodite and who was the monster here? I had threatened to swim away so I wouldn’t be the abandoned one. Now he was trying to punish me by leaving first.
You never think, in your fantasies, that the object of the fantasy can be hurt. I had known that he was sensitive. But I hadn’t trusted that it was real, or at least, that it was as real as my own sensitivity. I didn’t believe that he could actually feel betrayed. Was it because he was a man and I was a woman? I thought that only I could feel that kind of shame, need, and rejection. I thought that only a woman could feel that. It all seemed crazy now. I was crazy when I was the one begging for someone to stay and I was crazy when I was the one leaving.
“I feel ashamed,” he said. “I want to go. Would you help me go?”
I just stood there.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll do it myself.”
He pulled himself off the sofa and began to drag himself across the rug, naked, nothing covering his genitals or ass. I just stood there watching, shocked. I didn’t try to help him, but I didn’t stop him either. I wasn’t crying. I didn’t feel sad. I was just stunned that my fantasy of him had been so wrong—that he could live and feel so far beyond it. At first he had been just a hot young surfer boy who could only hurt me—never someone whom I could actually hurt.
I watched him crawl to the door and flop up and down until he got some momentum. Then he reached the handle, turned it, and dragged himself outside, naked, into the night. He looked like a dying fish. It was only then that I began to cry.
“Wait!” I said, and ran to him. “Stop, let me help you at least!”
“You’ve done enough,” he said.
I followed him out, down the cement pass to the boardwalk, where he was scraping his tail as he dragged himself. He was moving slowly. But he was moving, getting there. I felt so nervous I didn’t know what to do. Suddenly I felt like laughing, but not at him. Maybe I felt like laughing because the whole thing was so bizarre. Just when I thought that things couldn’t get any weirder than waking up covered in doughnuts in Phoenix, here I was in Venice with a half-man half-fish I had somehow fallen in love with, who was dragging himself away from me. Or maybe I felt like laughing because I was scared.