My sister said, “You’re an artist, nobody’s going to love you but a paingod.”
There’s an old saying that some girls grow wild like the azaleas, and if you pluck them out of their soil and try to plant them in your garden, they will wither and die. Azalea girls do not bear flowers in the garden of men.
I could hear music coming out of the black throbbing wall whenever a woman crossed over. There’s another old saying (We have plenty of those, because we are an old people and we die in stolid ignorance) that the only good wife is the one who does not close her eyes when she passes through the black wall.
Paingods do not live on the other side of the black wall, they live out in the encrusted desert, ground zero, where the bomb once went off and soldered metal with flesh. Not even azalea girls could grow in ground zero, not even artists with their charcoal brushes painting on the underside flesh of sick men. “Give me something abstract today.” and suffocating flies in white paint. I used to climb the roof to watch for signs of life in ground zero, imagining worms wriggling when the heat got too much, or little boys rising up out of the crust, something that was not metal-winged, something that was not eternally screaming.
There was nothing out in ground zero except gray earth and toxic debris and radiation poisoning and birth defects that come to us every midwinter with the staid air.
There was no paingods. That's supposed to be the joke.
We were once a people that did not need to cross over the black wall, that didn't wake up gasping in the middle of the night with an urge to reach over and check our husband or wife's pulse, check to see if our children are still breathing. We once lived out in ground zero before the bomb, in houses with roofs like lemon-frosting and blue grass that people ran their hands over, playing music on it like theremins. We were once a people without artists or azaleas. We did not enslave ourselves to the gods and giants that sprung out of the interdimensional tear and demanded our food and water and our bodies and our love.
HIS NAME WAS STORMCLOUD AND HIS NAME WAS HELLFIRE AND HIS NAME WAS ELDERFLOWER AND HIS NAME WAS "NEVER SPEAK MY NAME."
And when he came to the end of the lane, in view of our kitchen through the open mesh screen, he spread his hands, the blue-webbed, lightning struck hands, so that I could see the gorge in his chest and his muscles pulsed with fire. And he spoke to our household in words not words, while my family sat around the dinner table with their eyes closed.
I HAVE COME FOR WHAT YOU OWE ME I HAVE COME FOR YOUR DAUGHTER I HAVE COME FOR HER LOVE. SHE WILL COME WITH ME TO THE HOUSE I HAVE PREPARED FOR HER. SHE WILL COME TO ME ON HER KNEES SHE WILL ADORE ME.
And I wondered if my mother wept for me, but I could never tell with the mourning veil over her face, the way her hands were always scratching at the linen cloths and the couch. She was always destroying our furniture. And I wondered if my father felt sad for me, or my sister, but they weren't really people anymore - they'd sold the sort of thing that made them weep inside, long ago. So when HE called for me, in his shattering, screeching, electric storm, standing in view of the mesh screen on the end of the lane, my father turned to my sister and said:
"Will you pass the carrots?"
There are multiple ways to accept an uncomfortable reality, and these are only a few: Sublimation of the self, addiction to narcotics, blatant denial of said uncomfortable reality, a suit of bees to sting your lips, becoming an artist, a dark tunnel that leads from your basement to the throbbing heart of a ghost pepper garden, collecting invisible miniature horses in meticulously maintained terrariums, I HAVE COME FOR WHAT YOU OWE ME GIVE HER TO ME OR I SHALL DESTROY YOUR MINDS I WILL MAKE YOU BEG TO SEE SUNLIGHT I WILL-
My mother cut her chicken into noticeably smaller pieces, forming a grid on her plate. My sister poured herself a glass of bourbon, and father didn't yell at her. My sister took long, slow satisfied sips, trying not to grimace. The lace curtains rustled, blowing soft against my cheek.
I stood up, cleared my place at the table, washed my plate, and then walked out to meet HIM.
At the end of the lane he took me into his embrace and his lips were chilled and his fingers were warm and I was no longer human but only all the ways he wanted to touch me. He picked me up, effortless, and he cradled me in his arms like we were both frictionless surfaces, hovering, touching only in magnetic pulses.
YOU WERE THE CREATURE THAT WAS BORN FOR ME SO YOU WILL LOVE ME.
He took me through the black pulsing wall. And I must admit, I closed my eyes.
And as we passed through the black wall I expected to feel a resistance, like elastics, or a membranous sieve. But passing through the wall was like walking through a fine mist, that cooled on my limbs and cheeks. When I inhaled, I breathed it in. I could not remember air cool like this, quiet like this.
He took me into his home in the black swamp, underneath the ridged mountains, coiling and oily like fingerprints, and in his bedroom swathed in red the floor a pile of rust and bones and silk.
"Will it hurt?" I asked, as I undressed.
And he rubbed his fingers against my temples until I relaxed and dropped my dress into the pile of bones and-
WE FUCKED LIKE STORMCLOUDS HE WAS RIDGED LIKE THE MOUNTAINSTOOK MY HAIR IN HIS HANDS AND I GAVE HIM THE BEST BLOWJOB OF MY LIFE I CAN SUCK COCK LIKE A GENTLE EARTHQUAKE MY INSIDES ARE ON FIRE I'M RUPTURING THIS MUST BE WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE A NATURAL DISASTER-
Then it was over, and he wrapped me in his arms and legs and rubbed the burnt places on my back, my belly. He did not speak for the longest time, only projected with his mind a low satisfied hum. I thought of my mother, cutting chicken into geometric shapes like it was her part time job. I thought of the old legend she used to tell me about the paingod, whenever I spent too long painting on canvases in the backroom, trying to paint back what we had before ground zero.
But you can't paint a negative space, the absence of something. You can't create a painting that says "Remember what it was like when we did not have the black wall, the giants demanding love?"
The paingod lives at ground zero, but he was not easy to find. You had to travel there alone at night, when the dogs were not howling at your back, sneaking out of an open window. Nobody could see you go to ground zero. And when you were there you must get on your knees and grope until the dirt touched you, and you must form him out of the mud. Since you are an artist, an azalea girl, you will create him like you've created your own world.
And when he is finished, you will kiss him on the forehead and he will burst to live- heaving and screaming out of the ashes of our ancestors. He will whisper into your ear, caressing your neck:
"Destruction is its own kind of creation, darling."
And he will tear you apart.
I KNEW YOU WOULD LOVE ME.
And I managed to whisper. "I will die in this garden."
YOU WILL NOT DIE IN THIS GARDEN. I DO NOT HAVE A GARDEN. DO YOU WANT A GARDEN? I WILL PLANT YOU A HUNDRED GARDENS I WILL PLANT YOU BLACK CHERRIES I PLUCKED FROM THE INFINITY OF BLACK SPACE.
I wanted to cry, but I could not.
And he will tear you apart.
Paingod or not, it was all the same.
Nobody leaves the azalea girls alone. The artists do not get to go to a special place where they find a particular combination of suitors for them. There are not canvases for wives in back rooms, in empty spaces. They cannot see the girl for what she is, the creature that dies in acidic soil. They will come to us, for our beauty, the velvet-lipped mouths, dig us up, over and over again, plant us in acidic soil, and wonder why we die.
And he will tear you apart.
[NOTE: This was written as part of a Bizarro workshop - a stream of consciousness produced in one sitting to a Miles Davis album. This was the result. The concept of a "Paingod" was taken from a Harlan Ellison short story, but in name only. His paingod differs much from mine.]
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