Yellow Mama E zine

The Origin Story of a Psychopomp

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By Sophia Wiseman-Rose

                                                                               

 

 

1. The Prologue

          You cannot pass down wisdom. You cannot spare people the pain of learning for themselves, not with people who know you. “The only place people don’t respect a prophet is in his home town, among his own relatives, and in his own house”.*

         If you are a parent there is a window for wising up your children.  But, they will rebel when they get older so be careful what truths you lay on them as it may inadvertently make their contrary nature take them down a much worse path than total ignorance.

          People only heed the words of strangers. I mean, you could climb straight out of hell, pitchfork marks on your arse, and say “do-not-go-in-there” and people who you thought respected you will rush right into the Inferno.

        People are stupid.

        Max Morgan was well aware of this.  he felt the disappointment ringing in his chest so many times before that he was nearly numbed to it now.

        He learned that you have to let people die sometimes. You tell them not to walk off the cliff, you tell them not to walk into a fire. But don’t stress yourself out too much. Modern science has meant that enough idiots continue to survive and bulk out the species with more idiots. It doesn’t need any help. Meanwhile, Mother nature trembles under the weight of these somnolent, disgusting fools. Ugly, twisted, rancid with ignorance and cocksureness; multiplying indiscriminately like a new inferior species overwhelming the planet. 

        2. Better to Have Loved and Lost….

        Max did not consider himself to be one of the great rancid masses, although he felt much of that was due to luck. He possessed a clear, quick mind, a good education, prodigious recall, and an uncanny capacity for pattern-recognition. He was observant to the point of cruelty; it was easier to observe failings than to feel them.

 

        As for his looks—Max might have been the most beautiful man in England. His hair was the colour of midnight just before the moon slips in; dark but not quite black, a fringe that framed his forehead in dramatic shadow. His skin was fair, porcelain rather than flushed with pink; full lips, high cheekbones, and a diamond sharp jaw that suggested sculpture. His grey-indigo eyes were weapons: hard and critical, soft and coaxing, depending on the utility required. He had been a male model for years, and while the world had once seemed glamorous, he found it mostly boring. People bored him.

        Tattoos marked him like a compendium of tastes and offences: a black raven coiling down his right arm; on his back an ornate Rococo heart painted with the colours of the bisexual flag; on his left arm the names of lovers crossed out, lines through them like tally marks. His fickleness was worn proudly; he was a serial monogamist, the sort who loved as a habit.

        But the caprices of humanity disgusted him. Love was theatrical in its beginnings—people drown in your gaze, swore to die for you—and then they tired, vanished, lied.

Friends and family flushed away their lives in front of him; when he tried to stop them, to warn them, they tore away.

        He had begged his father to take his medication. He had begged his boyfriend Steven to stop the pills. They had taken pills together for a time; when Max grew bored, Steven doubled down instead of pulling back. Max prayed on his knees—angels, God, whatever bureaucratic celestial presence might be listening. He pleaded. But only Silence answered, no divine intervention appeared and the irony continued: Steven refused to stop taking pills and his father refused to take his pills. First Steven, and then his father, succumbed to their stubborn natures.

      Then Isabel came like a fever. She was the new receptionist at his agency: young, lovely, and a bright wave of vulnerability. Their affair was sudden, blazing and short—hot flame on dry tinder, it died quickly. Right as Max was about to finish with her, she became pregnant. Max, who was not as cold as he sometimes claimed, was excited at the notion of fatherhood.           He wanted to provide and protect; he wanted, briefly, to be tender.

        But Isabel wanted love, and where he could furnish money and space he could not furnish the particular hunger of a woman who acted as though she had been betrayed by the world.    Though they bought baby clothes and attended antenatal classes together, they never lived as a family. Max rented a spacious sixth-floor flat in a Victorian mansion block with park views for Isabel and the child. He visited often—more than a father might be obliged to—and then less, and then not at all. Isabel began to see a new man. A big brick shit house of a man, as dumb as he was big. But she found the commitment she wanted in him.  He was a drinker, not an angry drinker, a jovial one, but a drinker nonetheless. And Isabel often took baby Andrew into bed with them in the middle of the night. She informed Max of this, possibly to make him jealous, but it worried Max.

         Max had warned her not to bring the baby into bed. He had showed her all of the studies he had read about sudden infant death syndrome. But Isabel had rolled her eyes and pushed him away telling him he’d had his chance to be a family with them.

         Then, one morning, Isabel woke up to find baby Andrew pressed beneath the body of her drunken sleeping gelatinous boyfriend. 

         Max screamed. He cried, “I bloody told you so.”  He had repeated it to himself throughout the funeral.  He sat in the big cold Church, but he would not pray.

         Max Morgan no longer believed. The universe had been insolent to him: his father gone, Steven gone, little Andrew gone. At the funeral Isabel pressed a note into his palm. It read: I cannot take this pain. I am so alone.

        So, Max came to her home. He stood beside Isabel on the balcony of her flat. Isabel was morose, broken, single again. Max had his arm gently around her but felt only disgust for her. 

         Max’s mother had been a sociologist and he had been named after the great Max Weber. Weber had maintained that religion was necessary in society because it shapes behaviour by instilling a specific worldview and values that guide individuals' actions. 

         It is often believed that religion provides a framework of values and the belief in accountability to a higher power, which discourages individuals from acting badly.

         In contrast, there are many people who argue that we do not need religion to behave well and to function as a peaceful society. However, as far as Max was concerned, without punishment or reward awaiting him as payment for his deeds in life, Max saw no reason whatsoever, to adhere to societies niceties. 

        With one movement, he reached his arm up to Isabel’s neck and threw her over the balcony. She was silent. The only noise she made was a sickening splashing thud on the pavement six floors below. Max closed his eyes and tilted his head up to the grey sky, which was beginning to rain down on him. He took a deep breath and smiled.  

        He walked back inside, laid her message (now her suicide note) on the kitchen table, preened briefly, and called the emergency services.

         With full drama in his voice, he explained that his ex, in her grieving, had just jumped. His lying, like his murder, was tidy.

         Max walked outside into the rain to kneel beside the corpse of his ex lover and wait for the ambulance. He felt, for once, a deliciously tranquillising blank relief.

 

1. Sugar

         After a photo shoot for a fragrance campaign Max was invited to Saffron’s for a nightcap. Saffron was in the midst of breakout stardom, but she was too high strung and self-deprecating to enjoy her success in any way. She was wafer thin and anorexic, with lanugo shadowing her cheeks. She was the fragile center of the campaign, the poster child for dangerous beauty. She perched on his lap in that brittle, coquettish way models do, her breath sour with perfume and the ghosts of dinners. She smiled at Max, her long red hair falling around his head. “ are you… Coming?” she stage whispered.

         “Yes,” Max replied. He had that appetite for drama and destruction that passes for curiosity.

          Her house was a bungalow painted angelic white, a child’s idea of purity. He stopped on the way and bought vanilla vodka. They sat on a faux polar-bear rug and drank porn-star martinis until Saffron swayed and vomited a little into the hem of her peignoir. She crawled across the carpet with childish feline theatricality and kissed the thigh of his trousers. He picked her up and took her into the bedroom like a man blistered by boredom.

Hours later she awoke,  still nauseated. Max sat rehearsed and immaculate on the edge of the bed, still in his clothes, the image of calm propriety.

          “How are you feeling?” he asked.

          “Not well,” she smiled wanly. “I feel like I’ve poisoned myself.”

          He smiled, fingers in his hair. “Well, you’ve been poisoned, but not with anything fun. Just your usual medicines—laxatives and diuretics. I slipped large portions of them into your martini.”

          Her confusion was delicious. “…..What?”

         “You, Saffron, are something this world does not need more of. Even in this age where, finally, real women with real curves are appreciated again, there are still women like you starving yourself to the brink of death and encouraging others to do the same. You sell helplessness as something to be coveted.” he continued, “and plenty of men don’t have any self-awareness either. Many of the perverts actually want to interfere with children, at least subconsciously, so they want grown women to look like ailing children,  and you comply. You are what the sick world admires and what the world kills. You starve. Little girls see you and think—there is the ideal. You are not a person, you are a billboard for self-annihilation.”

       He was cruel and kind in the same sentence. She did not fight, she just cried. She clung to him and apologised. He let the laxatives run their course. Then he turned off the water to the bungalow, took her phone and barricaded Saffron in the bathroom.

        It only took 2 1/2 days for Saffron to die of dehydration. He had left her home in the small hours of the morning. He had returned later that day by getting an Uber to the town nearby and then walking a few miles to her bungalow.  He relaxed and drank from her bar and watched her vacuous romcom movies, checking on her from time to time.  Sometimes she asked him how long it would take.  Sometimes she just asked if anybody had called her. But he never answered her. By the end of the second day she was unresponsive. Max turned the water to the home back on, turned off the light, and went home. Her agent found her days later, half-remembered, half-rotting with neglect. The obituary read: Anorexia nervosa. The world mourned an image.

 

        4. A Rodin

         Embry had been Max’s fellow wunderkind at their first big agency—deep bronze-skinned, sculpted like Rodin’s “L'Age d'Airaina”. Embry was a maestro in the bedroom and he walked the runway like a fantasy African King.

         All were shocked when he threw it all away for a hypodermic needle and its close companion, Hepatitis C and the powerful beauty that had been his armour, became a husk.

          Max had ignored Embry’s messages for a long while. But birthdays have small mercies; when the alert bloomed on his phone he decided to drop by.

         Max arrived at Embry’s flat not long after sunset. He climbed the stairs of the old, council block to the flat where he was lodging with several other people. Max brought a gift. A necklace with a white gold crucifix on it;  he’d had it wrapped at Harrod’s.

Embry’s shared flat was full of faded carpets, faded people and too many smells. But, Embry was thrilled. There was tea and spacey melodic techno music and a kind of nostalgia tinctured with loss. Embry opened his gift and, with tears in his jaundice yellow stained eyes, he put it on, “come here man” he emotionally laughed embracing Max.  

        After a time, Embry, suggested they “fix” and offered Max a share. Max declined with a smile and sat to watch intently.

        Embry’s kit was humiliatingly ordinary: a lacquered box of paraphernalia. Spoon, large bag of powder, water, vitamin C, lighter, cotton wool. Embry tied the ribbon, from the wrapped gift Max had brought, around his arm and plunged the needle into his cephalic vein. He leaned on Max and sighed as the needle found its path and the room quieted into fevered relief. Max, watching the process, studied the ritual of decay as if it were a new language.

        Max waited, listened to the music for a while and then rose with a practiced tenderness. He recreated the procedure—only his proportions were theatrical. Spoon, powder (several measures), water, vitamin C—heat until it dissolved—draw into syringe through cotton— The ribbon was still loosely wrapped around Embry‘s upper arm, so he tightened the ribbon like a garrotte. Max used the light on his phone to try to find a viable vein to inject. Finding one, he began to inject Embry with his megadose. As he did so, his old friend smiled.  Max took back the crucifix from around Embry’s neck; then he waited until another person staggered up from their fetid junkie nest. Max politely thanked them for their hospitality and, patting Embry on the back, laughed that he wasn’t waking up anytime soon. They’d figure it out sooner or later. They would say he had been found slumped. They would say overdose. They would say tragedy. Max had learned how the language of the simple-minded was predictable. Embry perished, like an abandoned unfinished sculpture.

        5. A Monroe

        Autumn had the city slick with rain and Max walked the Thames path in a double-breasted black cashmere overcoat. He moved as if he was on the runway: coat unbuttoned to float dramatically, indifferent to the heads he turned. Tonight he was meeting someone new—Keres, whom he had finally deigned to look at online. She was a new struggling designer, she said, but then again, she was also a fan who wanted to worship him in fabric and, undoubtably, in the flesh.

          These silly women would meet a man online, they may think they know him but they don’t. They want equality, but men can be wild animals. Surely they know that a woman who seeks equality lacks ambition?

           She was waiting for him by the VIP bar; back lit by the setting sun on the river her hair a Monroe-ish halo of gold around her beautiful face. He slowed as he approached her, entranced. She pivoted playfully on her high barstool, her beautiful voluptuous figure wrapped snuggly in a deep red plunging neck line dress. Black heels, deep blackish red nails, her hand on her black alligator skin clutch. Sexy but not trashy. She smiled broadly as he approached her and kissed her cheeks with a gentleman’s practiced touch.

         “Keres,” he breathed trying to collect himself, “it’s wonderful to meet you in person, you look amazing.”

           They talked late into the evening, drinking only champagne and eating nothing but olives and roasted almonds. Keres was neither nervous and high strung nor empty-headed and confused, like most women. She was calm and self-possessed, intelligent and very, very, sexy. Max could not abide this trend of women fishing men off the Internet, but certainly he could make love to her, at least once. At least.

         Not much later Keres asked Max if he would like to come back to her house. He said he would. And he really meant it. They got in a black cab, the scent of her beside him made him almost swoon. He thought: this might be a thing. He might teach her. He might be the benevolent mentor. The cab pulled up in Knightsbridge to an impressive townhouse with a glossy black door and brass knob. Inside was the quiet of someone with money and taste; it unnerved him that she might be more than pretence. She giggled when he gasped at the townhouse, “I never said I was a struggling designer…that needed money.” she chuckled in a slightly patronising lilt, and his hands began to tremble with the pleasant feeling of being outmanoeuvred.

        He didn’t notice how sleep-thick his limbs had become, how the room tilted like a drunken stage, how the edge of consciousness softened and folded, until he felt the smooth mahogany floor boards against his cheek and then cold wrapped around him like a silk cocoon.

 

        7. Dark Entry:

        He came back to himself in blackness—absolute, hydraulic dark. Panic tasted metallic. His limbs refused cooperation; something had laced his wrists and ankles. The memory thinned like smoke: laughter, a champagne glass, conversation cut off. He tugged and found the cords did not yield. He tried to scream; silence, his mouth made no claim on air. Terror gleamed.

        Then a lamplight came—an old brass lamp, its shade a lurid red like bruises. The light sloughed across the room in a wash of blood and spilled velvet. Keres stood by it: the dress had become skin, the colour of pomegranate juice turned opaque. Black wings—enormous, feathered, absurd—arched from her shoulders like a baroque joke. She looked like a seductress drawn through a carnival mirror, allure swollen and distorted, gleaming faintly with rot.

          “Hello, Max,” she cooed, the voice of someone who knows your sin before you confess it. “I’m afraid you can’t yell, honey.” Her mouth twisted into something like mock pity. “You can speak. In low tones. Indoor voice only. The neighbours do not like to be disturbed.”

He mouthed, uselessly. She corrected him gently, “It’s Keres. Well… I am A Keres—you’ll see, the whole point is death.” She moved with slow, theatrical ease. Horns knotted out of her temples.

        “Demon!” Max whispered. She refused the word with a bored, aristocratic snort. “The demon is you,” she said. “You caused suffering to many innocent people. You will suffer now, and you will die.”

         Behind her a hallway opened and unfurled  like the throat of some enormous beast: a spiral of walls and punishing light. Voices—pained, agonised—rose and fell. The air smelled of copper and hot sugar.

         Max fumbled for faith like a cloak. He found the Lord’s Prayer in his mouth, an old, greasy coin he’d thought spent, and recited it through to the end “… for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever….”.

        Keres listened and rolled her eyes as one might at bad theatre.

       “All right,” she said finally, annoyed and almost affectionate. “You whine like a little bitch. But, God hears you. I’ll make you an offer. Only one. You will become a psychopomp.”

Max’s mouth made the wrong shape. “Psychopath?” he managed.

         “No, my stupid Mr. Morgan.” Keres gave him a patient, brutal smile. “A psy-co-pomp. A soul-guide. A ferryman for the dead. Anubis. Charon. Your kind of job!”.                                                                                 

        “Like, the Grim Reaper!?” Max was incredulous.

       Her hands, which once might have smoothed a scarf, tightened into talons. “Yes, if you like. But first you will die. And not the longed for, quick sort of death. Beautiful, exquisite suffering. You’ll be made a masterpiece.”

        Then the room became a carnival of appetite. The first thing she did was small and intimate: nails slid beneath his skin and peeled. Not like a quick skinning in a slasher film, but a long, patient unmaking, as if she were stripping and un-stuffing a doll . He could not cry aloud; his throat had betrayed him with silence. Figures—dark, winged, beautifully anonymous—arrived like chorus members, each with an instrument of savagery. Needles like jewelled sewing tools found his eyes slowly pressing in towards the retinas until a bright whiteness lit his sight, turned to pure explosive colour and then nothing but total darkness.

         Pain came in waves composed of an artist’s imagination. Bones were folded into new geometries, joints twisted with an indifferent craft; his body became a beaten festival piñata from which all that had been inside—memories, soft jokes, the small petty loves—spilled across the floor like candy. They catalogued his pieces with surgical curiosity and an almost tender laughter. At one point his genitals were assaulted so that the line between cruelty and grotesque theatre blurred, and the room accepted this as an emblem: pain as sacrament.

         Music—low, delicious, throbbing, like something played on an organ tuned for the underworld—poured through the space. A hand pressed molten metal into his sinuses, and something hot moved through him like dislodged memories. He imagined his mother; he imagined the flat with the park view, the Harrod’s crucifix, Isabel’s letter. The images were flayed and then re-stitched.

       And then there was the strangling—rhythmic, teasing, a breath stolen struggle desperation, and then the breath returned until the breath itself lost meaning. He tasted rot and the stale sweetness of somebody else’s despair in his mouth, and for the first time in a very long time, he prayed not to save but to end.

         Then there was a final heat that was more mercy than God had offered him so far. Like lava cooled into a new shore, pain broke and gave way to stillness. It was over.

He was not dead in the way he had understood death before; he had been remade. The darkness did not hold him like a trap but like a curtain. His hearing came back sluggish and foreign, like a man returning from a dream in a foreign city.

          When he blinked, he was clean. His skin felt different—newly strong and smooth, as if someone had varnished him. He tasted the after of things: iron, rain, a faint dusting of perfume. Keres smiled warmly, as if she was his fairy godmother and had made him ready for the ball.

“You will guide the lost, Max,” she said. “You will teach them to trust. You will perform the kindnesses that you could not perform in life. It will be what you always wanted, when they listen, only to you.”

         Max thought of every person he had harmed and failed—Steven, his father, Andrew, Isabel, Saffron, Embry—and felt a small volcanic churn that could have been remorse. He had been given a task that fit his vanity and punished it at once. He had become a creature who would be seen and believed by strangers when the moment of crossing over demanded someone to be listened to.

        Keres bent, kissed his forehead with something cold and secret, and the world rearranged.

 

 

        Ending:

        The new life suited a man who had been trained in observation. Max learned the etiquettes of dying: how to appear when the breath faltered, how to take the hand of someone who had been alone for a long time and tell them, in voice soft and lightly amused, that “there is no need to be afraid.” Children who had wandered from parks, confused and small and already half-ghost, were coaxed as if by an indulgent older brother. He guided them to the pastel lights and sweet angelic faces their minds would accept.

        Adults who raged or denied, clutching at the thread of life, he met with the polite, inexorable patience of someone who had all the time in the world for them.                       

         Often, he would appear at the bedside of a person who had suffered from a long illness. Lonely. Not sure if the end had finally actually come. Not sure if they were dreaming of death again, not sure if really there was only the disappointment of nothingness.

Smiling serenely, Max would assure them that they were liberated from their mortal coil and he would help them out of bed watching them stretch and jump for the first time in a long while. Sometimes they would go for a victory run around the garden first. Other times they would want to go directly to the light.

         Sometimes they called him an angel.

        His face, in death, had been refined—his cheekbones set like carved marble his sharpened, indigo eyes pierced or pleased. He wore his beauty like a lantern; for the first time, beauty performed charity. People followed and they listened.

        No, he was not an angel. He stood at thresholds while people were collected into the light by loved ones or by the kind guardians that some called angels. He would stand with a little thrill of proprietary satisfaction as the dead were reclaimed by dearly missed pets that had loved them on earth, women with sleepy hands who hummed a lullaby, or fathers who had been waiting at a gate. He took pride but tasted sorrow, the perpetual ache of someone who would never pass into the light himself.

       

 

Epilogue:

         Max Morgan learned patience like a craft. He learned to say the easy things that strangers can say in a way that the threatened and bereft will accept. He learned to be soft in the ways he had once refused. On rare nights when fog hung over the lamplight and the city blurred into pools of amber and sorrow, he imagined a different bargain: one in which he had saved Steven, or his father, or little Andrew, loved Isabel been a comfort to his friends and the price had never been exacted. The image never lasted. He would let the fog take it and the city would go back to its indifferent business.

        He continued to answer the small bells of the world: a door closed, a breath stilled, the last honest need. He would step between the living and the light and do the work he had been given—protocol and mercy braided into one. Sometimes, when the deceased asked if he was an angel, he would button his coat, tilt his head, and smile with the cold, soft affection he had learned in the dark. “Call me what you like,” he would say. “I’ll take you where you need to be.”

        There was, in the end, a certain justice. A man who had once watched the world with clinical indifference now shepherded its most human moment. The psychopomp is paid in confidences and in the small, grateful smiles of those finally unafraid. Max kept Embry’s Harrod’s cross wearing it around his neck. And, sometimes, when no one was watching, he pressed it to his chest as if to check if he was really there. It was a superstition. It was a talisman. It was, for him, an ironic joke.

        And the world kept on being itself—stupid, stupid, luminous and stubborn. Max did not try to teach it anymore. He learned that strangers listen; those you love seldom do. So he became the stranger, standing where the lamps make small islands in the fog, waiting with a voice that could be kind, with hands that could be gentle, and with a smile that had been paid for in a currency of suffering. He did not enter the light. He could not. But he could make the passage easier for those who did.

         So he waited. He answered. He escorted. Pride clung to him like a tailored coat, and style dripped from every movement, though the fabric of his being had been stitched with suffering. And—if truth insists on being told—he carried with him a shard of that old, amused vanity, now burnished into something stranger: a mirror of patience, cracked and glinting. For when one is unmade and remade in cruelty’s workshop, in a gallery where torment and art are one, a man does not keep much.

        He keeps what he can, and what he keeps is never innocent, dripping with the dark luxury of a jewel dredged from a wound.

 

 

 

 

 

Reference:

 Mark 6:4

Complete Jewish Bible

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        Sophia Wiseman-Rose is a Paramedic and an Anglican nun in the UK. These two vocations have shown her some of the best and the worst of humanity. Sophia is an avid painter and illustrator who is obsessed with poetry, both reading and writing it. She finds poetry cathartic, the best means of self- expression and the best way of making sense of what goes on inside of our heads.