Song of the Siren

Like most rock singers, Rhea Rosalia Rainy had baggage. Some of it was anatomical: her genetics contained a mutation that allowed her accessory vocal cords--the false vocal folds, rudimentary in everyone else--to be functional apart from her primary ones. She could harmonize with herself, which was not a coincidence in this universe.

The other baggage was just tragic and ugly. Locked up tight in that baggage was the memory of her Uncle Randy. He was a devil. All of the lap-sitting, the suspicious tuck-ins, and the avuncular affection (defined by a debaucher's sense of affection and not a child's) were zipped up tight in her luggage she was saddled with.

One allowed her to sing like no other; the other kept her quiet most other times. Rhea hated Uncle Randy. Thank God Uncle Randy was out of her life! Thank God for music.

She didn't hate men, exactly, but she was wary of them. Even to this day, her entire pelvic floor would spasm when she thought about Uncle Randy. Was that even his real name?

Did she hate people? Doesn't hate get all mashed together over time? Then why the hell did she choose a career that entertained people--men, included?

She had her song, however. Unknown to the secular world; only known on the divine level. It was a song that needed to be sung. By her. For her. It had been inherited through thousands of generations. It was the song Odysseus bolted himself to a mast to survive; the song Opheus co-sang for the swooning Sirens; a song fragile people could never survive.

***

It was supposed to be a three-minute, three-chord song with a simple hook, like what could be heard churning the thick, tropical New Orleans gumbo of humidity in any of dozens of venues that evening. The words fit the measures of the song tightly as Rhea Rosalia Rainey sang them over and over. She posed her petite body stiffly, an inert chameleon, the fitful lights changing her camouflage from instant to instant. She had turned her back on her keyboard to face the audience. Only her lips moved, and it was impossible to imagine the power that came from such limited animation unless one were there to hear her. The decibels were not good for anyone’s ears and her vibrato mated with the din.

Then came the familiar rest, when she stopped singing so that the instrumental hook could go around and around. It was a private annoyance among the band members as to when she might jump back in, the circular hook building momentum with each pass, the crowd getting more frenzied with each cycle. Their stomping became her metronome. Her bandmates marveled at the power she seemed to have over her audience but wondered whether it was a good thing. At this point she ran the show, and this tease was one of the two things that had gotten her kicked out of the band before.

She stood on the raised stage and slyly waited, her inanimate stance in contrast to the audience mania below.

The guitars churned out another cycle; still, she didn’t jump in. This was the longest she had ever waited and her fellow musicians strummed and plucked and drummed with ever-increasing intensity. Then she did what she had promised them she would never do again—the second of the two things that had gotten her kicked out of the band before. The concentration of heads in front of her was solid enough, she calculated, and she dove backward onto the carpet of hair and hands. The undulating support for her bobbed her this way and that until, like the supernatural properties of a Ouija, she felt she was willing them to send her back to the stage.

By this time there were only a few more octaves to jump within the known limitations of the instruments, so the saxophone player began a pair of rising cords an octave lower than the finishing chords of the guitarist, and the guitarist repeated the trick, creating the sonic illusion that the rise up the frets was never-ending.

It was a necessity, an emergency: Rhea forced such trickery out of them.

Additionally, the bass and drums began to slow down the rhythm to give them more time for their singer who seemed unconcerned. The stomping metronome agreed. The trip up the frets and the sax’s progression up the scale raised the tension of the song, awaiting the hammer blow of Rhea’s voice only her stage presence would provide. The rough mob had a gentle touch in placing her back on the stage—a hive of killer bees beneath the placid illusion of a colony’s singularity. The band, the crowd, the whole world waited for her to join the chant of strings, winds, and skins and the trickery of the never-ending cascade of octaves.

Rhea sang at last.

She belted out the blast that untied the knot that had bound the sound and crowd together. To the crowd it was worth the wait. She brought the acoustic tension crashing down to the home note that defined the song. A great weight lifted from the crowd and went somewhere unknown into the universe. It was less of a hammer blow than it was the uncocking of the hammer of the pistol, perhaps not gently enough to prevent firing. And although it had been worth the wait to the audience, it was a hard day at work for the band.

The walls of sound came crashing down and the crowd had fun. The band slipped back into an instrumental version of the refrain, which Rhea should have overridden with the home note, but instead she paused again. On the backbeat she belt out a vocal attack composed of a wavering, dissonant tritone.

Within Rhea's DNA sat--metered, divinely, and biochemically--the Sirens' song. When she sang from her heart, she waxed epigenetic and those ears hearing her became the notes themselves, come what may. Singers and listeners became the song.

She jumped back into the pit of hands and heads, but this time the crowd was different. These hands were choppy seas, tossing and jolting her, frenzied seafarers suffering the simultaneous ecstasy, terror, and urgency--each emotion--wafting from on of the three rocks on the shores of Sirenum Scopuli. The Furies circled their prey.

She was rolled face down and saw their eyes—she looked a singular mob right in the eye and became very frightened. This time her will was helpless to drive her back. Hands and elbows struck her in her face, throat, and mouth. At one point she bit to remove two hands at once. The fans slammed her the wrong way some distance before the bouncers ran to her rescue, making a circle of floor for her to alight. She was back on stage quickly and brought the song, the band’s signature finale, to a shorter end in a way the crowd would never notice. She was the first off the stage, having seen the best and worst that music can inspire. She was tattered, bruised, and reaffirming her promise not to do that again. The lead guitarist made it clear she wouldn’t, and again she was fired.

Nearly an hour later, the instruments had been packed into the van and the band paid, except for Rhea. The only thing anyone said to her was by the guitarist, who only looked at the blisters on his fingers her vocal delays had caused him.

“Goodbye,” he said. Its tone was final.

***

That night, humiliated, bruised, and battered, Rhea dreamed:

The curtains opened. Suddenly she was center stage with her spotlight. She could vaguely make out thousands of people beyond the orchestra. There was total silence. The orchestra leader shot her a wink and raised his baton. All of the players folded up their music books and put them away. They knew by heart what she would sing, even though they’d never heard it. They glowed. The conductor tapped his baton.

The introductory strain began lushly and perfectly. She recognized it from the countless dreams before tonight. Even though it wasn’t necessary this time, Rhea still let the conductor lead the orchestra on a repeat loop. When they did, they played louder. She let them do it again, feeling victorious in her command. The players played more loudly, and this time faster. She let the circular introduction build into a frenzy, and she just relaxed until she knew it would be the right time to jump in. She knew she wouldn’t even have to think about when; her song would be sucked right out of her; she would stop holding it in tightly when she was good and ready.

The audience went wild, rocking back and forth, ready to hear her throw her voice into the effect. Rhea saw the hunger in their eyes. There was the note—Quick! She wailed out the opening note, then blew her fans away with the quick succession of tones that followed, until each set of two merged into dyads, each the combination of two separate notes three full tones apart. Not many could sing this. She could. Then, spontaneously, without any thought, she did an inversion, raising the lower note an octave and lowering the higher note an octave.

The rush to the stage threatened her very life. It was all in hero-worship, tuxedos and evening gowns pushing their way toward her. Some people were certainly crushed right in front of her!

The first ones to get to her clawed at her—loving her, needing to take some of her clothing, needing to walk away with some of her skin under their nails. Hundreds of hands shoved and waved at her face, but that wasn’t good enough. She continued singing, looking right over the crowd, seeing the seats toward the back emptying in her direction, like a storm surge.

They shoved their fingers in her mouth. Unable to sing, she began swatting them away, but there were too many. Ten fingers times thousands were coming at her. She got knocked down, and they set upon her, sticking their fingers into her mouth until she began gagging. She fought off the urge to vomit, but it wouldn’t be long before all of the fingers would succeed in choking her.

She now looked into their eyes. They wanted more than her; they wanted to be a part of her. Their eyes glistened with rabid desperation. She obliged them, finger by finger, making their flesh a part of her through ingestion.

She chomped away at each digit that introduced itself, tearing little parts off by the joints, her fans recoiling away in pained delight, waving their stumps proudly as their souvenirs. She spat out nails and knuckles, blood and spit, and the crowd loved it and kept coming all the more. Some were even shoving their shredded fingers at her for seconds.

Soon she could not get enough air. The mob continued assaulting her, spraying blood from their wounds over her. She became dizzy and feared she may pass out.

“Give her air!” shouted a man.

“Yes, lift her up,” shouted another.

“Quickly,” screamed a woman. They tried as best they could to lift her over the crowd, but no one had any functional fingers left, and she fell to the stage, pounding her head.

She bolted upright in her bed on planet Earth and screamed a scream that could be heard all the way back to the Creation Horizon. She slapped repeatedly at her face to feel for blood. She could taste it but didn’t feel it on her. She jumped out of bed and ran to her bathroom. She had bitten her tongue during her sleep. It didn't matter that it was her own--she had tasted blood.

***

The next time her former band played their customary venue, she came to watch as a spectator. She knew she had been replaced. The new singer was adequate, but the crowd knew better. Occasionally she was booed, and Rhea almost felt bad for her.

The lead guitarist saw Rhea in the crowd and frowned. When some of the audience grabbed her to shove her toward the stage she resisted, but this only sparked the chanting for her to take her rightful place. They began insisting forcefully.

Still she resisted.

The band realized they were having an existential emergency. There was no way the replacement singer could survive another song in front of this crowd. The five musicians looked at each other and had a telepathic conversation with only their facial expressions, until they agreed. The guitarist reached down to offer Rhea a tentative hand.

The replacement singer stormed off the stage, and the audience clapped cruelly. Rhea assumed her place, and the cruel clapping evolved into a meleé of approval with shouting, whistles, shoves, and chants.

The lightman seized the opportunity to augment the mania with spotlights crisscrossing the audience. This is when Rhea saw him.

Uncle Randy. By the bar.

He was older, but he looked the same to her. She was older, too, but Rhea wondered if he'd recognize her from the child he used to abuse.

A 12-bar blues riff began, innocently enough with three four-bar progressions. It was basically the band's jam-piece. Rhea began clapping her hands to the time, and the crowd answered with identically landed foot-stomps. The floor was wood, and the beat could be felt as well as heard.

She listened with more than her ears.

She watched Uncle Randy, one of the foot-stomping fools oblivious to her identity. She had waited a long time to sing her song. Uncle Randy deserved to hear it.

From her.

He deserved it. He had it coming.

Locked away in the amino acids of her DNA, she looked very hard to retrieve it—it was elusive, on the tip of her tongue—when it was kindly delivered to her by its messengers, Phobos and Deimos.

She looked at the crowd and began her vocal improvisation. The band knew her well, so they kept turning the musical phrase they played, over and over, providing a latticework for her to build upon. They were merely catatonic musicians at this point, obedient servants to her musical will. The crowd stopped stomping but just stood, staring at the low stage blankly. What was happening?

Rhea began adding more sophistication to her singing. The venue played perfect background voices for her as she conjured up the madness she now knew she could craft. In the background, the song that was New Orleans added a Voodoo counterpoint, and the drummer obediently added his backbeat. The crowd began to sway. She didn’t know how this was going to end, but in her mind she was fighting back—naturally, instinctively, and powerfully. She took the notes she heard from her genes and sang them, then inverted them, plucked them in some other world, and then fugued them, using her accessory vocal cords. Her syncopation built a canon.

The ambiance began to thicken and the roux materialized--ready.

All of the women on the floor dropped their drinks, a collapse of shattering glass and the firefly-like cigarettes that fell to the ground, as well. To Rhea’s amazement, they all turned to Uncle Randy. He stood inert, paralyzed, as were the other men in the room. Rhea took a melodic interval and began tightening it into a perfect harmonic interval. And then she sang as two women, accompanying herself with her accessory ventricular folds.

Something in the women reached critical mass and they began moving slowly toward Uncle Randy. They didn’t like him, but Rhea’s song didn’t like him, either. In fact, Rhea’s song--like herself--hated him, so they hated him, too. He stood motionless, completely paralyzed, but completely entranced in the hypnotic suggestion from a song from the stage, and this song now ruled his life.

He suddenly was walking in another reality, in a forested area, and it was night. There was no moon. Something patchy on the trees fluoresced. He was barefoot and alone. There was a rustling beyond the trees that suggested a threatening pandemonium. Within that was a pipe playing. And carried by the pipe song was panic. He felt the moist fluorescent substance dripping on the trees. It was the blood of something, and it was still warm. The rustling beyond the trees became a bustling that seemed to be moving toward him. The panic swelled. He darted this way and that, the harsh brush debris scratching and splintering into his feet.

What is this? Where am I? he thought in horror. He stooped to pull a large thorn out of his left foot, and when he stood again, there was a sudden blow to his face, slamming his nose upward against its bridge. His eyes shot open and he beheld a naked woman wild-eyed with hate. She spat on him, and then he felt the razor-like pains streak his back by the nails of another. He put out both his arms and fluttered them ineffectively, trying to ward off the razor strikes. When he opened his eyes again, there were a dozen naked women who seemed possessed, and the object of their possession, inexplicably, was his destruction. He slapped this way, punched out that way, bit hands that scratched at his face. One of them kicked in his knee, everting the knee cap, and he fell to one side. On the ground, he assumed a fetal position, balling up in false protection. The onslaught continued unabated. His teeth were displaced at their roots, his eyes were now swollen shut, he tasted blood that was flowing briskly enough to choke him as it fell down his throat. He tried to cry out, but all that he produced was an agonal guttural glottal spasm.

His soul was already in Hell, arriving before his body, which stood in the back of the room at this music venue on Toulouse St., an ill-wind of a breeze blowing through the hole his soul used to occupy.

There, his body stood helpless as they crowded around him. Where the Furies had circled their prey before, they plunged for the kill. Uncle Randy was powerless to escape the blows and the thrashing, and there were too many of them. The women shrieked in madness, shredding him with their nails, and then they proceeded to tear him apart in a Bacchic orgy of retribution. Rhea continued singing.

She felt safe. She had brought her Maenads with her tonight, lusting in the brutal assault.

The performance, dedicated especially to Uncle Randy, was twenty-three minutes of Phrygian fury. By the time the women were finished with him, he was nothing more than a mushy pulp and was pushed out to the courtyard and then thrown as several pieces over the brick fence onto an adjacent property, where the New Orleans-famous cockroaches prepared to feed on him all night.

When all of the women had re-assembled, Rhea faded back into the 12-bar riff as the band began catching back up with the real song, the women and men slowly animating seamlessly into the previous dancing that preluded the visit of the Maenads. There was glass all over the floor, and that seemed a complete mystery to everyone. And even stranger, the women wore blood all over their blouses, halters, and dress fronts.

Rhea's had the most.

Whatever tension remained in the song was dissipated by Rhea’s return to the home note, again with the group’s telepathically choreographed multiphonic one-point crash landing.

For the first time in its history, the place closed before sunrise. No one knew why and no one cared. It just seemed like the right thing to do, like the path of least resistance was to just leave.

***

Rhea had sung her song, having saved it all of her life for a special debut. She didn't consciously know when that might happen--just that she would know. But at that point, it about sang itself. She had unpacked her baggage. She had carried that song in her black heart, which now finally began to blanch--even flush--with the rubor of a warm-blooded girl unwilling to let hubris slide.