Sea Devils

By Trevor Dallas

Had a drink with H.P. McGreevey at Parkway Pharmacy a while ago. He was exercised, as he often is, by the report he had heard of a fish that after mating becomes completely absorbed by the female. It was a metaphor, he ranted, for all that is wrong with society today: Feckless males, willing to allow themselves to be absorbed wholly by the feminine for one “Fuck!” he yelled. He smashed the bar and spilled his drink.

“Never a tale suffers in the telling,” McGreevey’s own father says of him. Imagine, then, my surprise when, while reading through a stack of old New York Reviews, I came across the following in a review by Tim Flannery:

"The first time that a male black sea devil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate's blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male sea devil simply vanishes."

McGreevey’s a bear when it comes to sex. For him it’s purely transactional interaction, usually achieved by means of naked shorting. His complex mind is tortured by the idea of Finnish stewardesses, shorn. Of course the black sea devil would appeal to him as metaphor. No matter the fish: Isn’t even the proud chub just a flexy sea devil, waiting to be emasculated? Aren’t all men, on the penetration of darkness, prone to be absorbed?

When I read the description, I wondered. What if the black sea devil, inhabitant of the benthic abyss, has it figured out? He glides slowly through the dark, under the weight of all time, until he comes upon a spheric attraction. What draws him? The spangle-flash of her luminescence? A scent like plain gelatin? The crackle of ice in a cocktail? Whatever, he goes to her, he bites, attaches, penetrates. And therein follows a protracted lovemaking, glacially slow and deeply profound. Beneath the pressure of a hundred worlds, he becomes the complete object of her affection. She feeds him, shelters him. In time, she comes to breathe for him. Slowly he feels himself falling into her, his arms, his legs disappearing. They are lip to lip, chest to chest, in an ethereal embrace that does not end. A superhuman glow envelops him. He begins to effervesce into a swoon of complete passion. He is manhood only: pure, focused, singular. His last sensation is a powerful stirring and a heat such as he has never encountered. It is the last thing he feels, and then he is gone.

Mary-Beth Thielhelm, Black Sage Sea, 2007, Courtesy of Sears- Peyton Gallery, New York