By cover of night she gets psychopathic, my wife. Nocturnally exhibited, diurnally regulated, the episodes occur with increasing regularity, unravelling in the sanctuary of our home like undergraduate case studies. I love her carelessly, instinctively, but I feel the pressure of her mania like turbulence in our exchanges. Her daytime tenderness is manifest in conversations, in domesticity and romantic gesture. The pain of the world is transported through her broadband connection, and with charitable donations and proposed direct action she purges herself of a dying need to make good with personal ethics. But when the sun sets and the psychopathy encroaches its episodic unreason upon her brain, her breasts, her hands, the goodness of the world falls prey to her screeches, to an untamed madness channelled through networks of unsuspecting synapses.
I dared mention it to a Hungarian psychiatrist friend of mine, this transformation, but only in the safety of daylight, with spatial isolation on my side. I tried to convey to her the horror, but she just smiled and rested her aging fingers reassuringly across my thigh, the tendons tightly strung and visible like thick guitar strings or the complex part of a sophisticated prosthesis. Behind her slightly upturned nose and her fine thin spectacles she smiled, no doubt a beauty in youth, and she comforted me in a voice changed pitch by cigarettes. Her therapeutic sensibilities left me swooning in the strength of her perfume, and her hand cupped my balls and my flaccid penis and we sat there in her office. “The evidence you cite is all inconclusive at best,” she said, artfully massaging her handful. I tried to imagine the contents of her tapered brown slacks, but I pictured nothing beyond the zip, beyond the meticulous stitchwork. “All these examples”, she went on, “they could be resultant of any number of factors physical, psychological, geographical, astrological, meteorological.” She slipped out of her tan leather loafers, her tired feet thinly coated in near-fleshy hued pop socks. Her pitch black bob framed her face in a way some would call alluring. I imagined it falling around me in coitus, in soft pieces. “Hysteria, for example, was for centuries considered a uterine disorder, particular to the feminine. Hippocrates maintained that manias would arise in those women whose uterus had become physically light from a lack of sexual practice, the result of which was a uterus that – unmoored by the power of the thrusting, erect penis – literally wandered up the interior body and compressed lungs, heart and diaphragm, leaving a concurrent madness”. She unbuttoned her slacks and edged them to the coarse carpet, stepping gently out of them one foot at a time. Her legs were streaked with deep blue veins and her pubic hair was very thick and dark, half covered by her now un-tucked shirttails. She stood with her arms folded, something very grave about the expression on her face. “Menstruation, too,” she said, “has in rare cases been known to cause full psychosis of brief duration, limited only to the cyclical rhythms of the menstrual cycle. Much like your wife’s condition, it is a psychosis of a short-lived, recurrent, cyclical nature against a backdrop of regular normality. It comes”, she said, “and it goes”. She spat a large pool of saliva into her right hand and rubbed it into the cunt which I couldn’t see. She looked apologetic while she did it, but maintained the air of clinical professionalism which I used to find so attractive about her. With a practised gesture she opened my fly and silently lowered her weight onto me. Inside she felt different, but I’m not sure how. She sat very still. “Or lycanthropy”, she said with her Hungarian inflection, “often now rationalized as a cutaneous porphyria, it nonetheless depicts this sense of a cyclical propensity to mania, or rather what can often be a overwhelming sense of self-belief of one’s own routine insanity. In short your wife may well have made herself susceptible to psychopathy through some massive sense of her own self-importance, in the sense that she considers the night to be in some way selecting her, requiring her madness, inciting her figurative howling at the very moon it so consistently reveals in its darkness; or she may, on an unconscious level, have a deep rooted traumatic psychiatric relationship with the very essence of what we would consider to be an essence of ‘night’, about the expectations associated therewith.” Eventually she moved herself on top of me. I felt the pressure of her buttocks on my denim thighs. I don’t know if she came but she convulsed once and she seemed satisfied, and I had already come inside her, almost immediately. She went back to her seat and sat in front of me, her legs open enough for me to see a bit of her cunt, red against the black of her hair. She said “don’t ever change” in a very matter-of-fact, diagnostic way. I thought it was a strange thing for a psychiatrist to say, demanding this impossible stasis of personality, because I would change, that much seemed inevitable. I thanked her all the same.
My wife’s psychopathy started about three months ago. I originally put it down to an alcohol binge, but I don’t really know why because as far as I knew she hadn’t taken a drink for a long time before that. I came home from work and she was sitting on the sofa. She was naked and had basted herself head-to-toe in a savoury marinade. For some reason my first thought had been to quiz her on the ingredients, and she listed them for me without hesitation. Olive oil base, crushed garlic cloves, paprika, cumin, curry powder. She described it as Middle Eastern, and I thought it would be good with lamb, but the real issue remained the presence of the marinade on my wife’s naked skin. It pooled in her umbilicus and was garlicky around her nipples. I felt this to be a very odd experience, but as an isolated incident (as it then was) I couldn’t decide whether or not I should panic, whether it should be considered any more than the outcome of a bored day. After all, I was home late and it did smell delicious. I went to the kitchen to get myself a glass of water and when I came back in she was holding a lighter under the curve of her left breast. The oil was smoking and sizzling slightly as it cooked in the heat, and my wife’s face was contorted with the pain of the burning flesh. She screamed at me that she was going to cook herself. I didn’t know what to do. She leapt from the sofa and pushed me over, then started jabbing at her forearm with a fork, as though she were cuisine itself. After about two hours she lay down on the kitchen floor and went to sleep. I watched over her to make sure she didn’t wake up, and in the morning she was very confused as she showered off the sticky spices and the olive oil from her raw limbs.
The day following the marinade catastrophe she seemed so much like herself that I quietly dismissed the previous evening as a glitch. I thought that the pain of her cooking skin would make us stronger as a couple, that the breadth of aromatics contained within the self-marinating would well equip us against a multitude of lives. I drank coffee on the toilet while she ate soup in the bath. Back to the tangibles of our shared happy life.
But that night it happened again, an episode more complex than the marinade. She had been reading when the sun went down, but from upstairs I heard her screaming. Convinced of the best I went downstairs, where she had lined up all nine of our houseplants in the dining room and set fire to them. There was something intrinsically horrific about it, about the wanton destruction, about the formality of it, the geometric accuracy of the line the plants had been organised in, about the clarity of the flames. It was so perfectly orchestrated it was devastating. Behind the flames stood my wife, naked again, but she had written my name across her breasts in jagged smears of eyeliner. Through a fixed smile she told me she was the devil. I wanted to laugh and did, it sounded so ridiculous, but there was a gravity about her nudity that left us humourless. I took a step towards her and she backed away. “Why devil?” I asked. “I am the grandest of them all,” she replied, a voice of mirth. Her skewed egoism was strangely attractive. She opened a New International Bible – which we kept for useful quotations and party games – to the gospels and, holding her cunt open with the other hand, started to piss onto its pages, the rich yellow urine smelling nutty in the freshness of the dining room. Throwing the sodden bible onto the floor she lay down on top of it and said: “Devil says fuck me.” I felt exploited by this devil, tempted into action. She knew I always had a thing about piss, call it a fetish. A paraphilia. Something about piss past fingers gets me every time. I undressed clumsily, drunk on the vision of the piss-soaked scripture, and we fucked, copulating freely on the life of Christ. I came in a frenzy, she laughing and beating me with her fists as I throbbed out the sperm, my spent penis the serpent weapon of her evil plans, and I got up and extinguished the plants and looked down at her on the floor, her eyes at once manic and detached, glazed. She looked beautiful.
Since then things have deteriorated, every night a stage for her psychopathic episodes. With household concerns – so keen to separate her nights from her days – I have been drawn out of our living room and into her madness, an accomplice to her social disregards. We walk these streets, complacent in their marijuana odour, their olfactory narcotic, virulent kebabs dropped as vomit to the floor within an instant of ingestion. We find people together, like a silent asocial date, and then she can batter them while I watch on lovingly, feeling myself in the shadows, a voyeur to her violence, waiting for this phase of our lives to be over. I sometimes benefit from the aggressive sexual impulses that started with our Bible. She is my wife. I like to feel her nails in my perineum, and have her slap my face and leave me bruised for work, explained away by an idle pointless fantasy and never the truth. There have been times when I’ve considered suggesting that she get some help for her problems, when during the day she is so normal, staunchly upholding her own strong sense of ethical values, but I can’t bring myself to do it. The last thing I want is to make her feel as though she has a problem. As a man who understands the feminist literature I can clearly see how stiflingly phallocentric it would be of me to condemn her relishing of carefree coitus or reckless violence. Even a woman can delight in the guiltlessness of these primal urges. It’s not my place to try and stop these things. An intelligent woman must be free for psychopathy. The problem isn’t hers, isn’t even mine. It’s someone else’s, some faceless collection. It is for me to stand by her, and I will, and I will think of her cunt, her urethra, her anus, her kidneys, her soft green eyes and the tenderness of our daylight, husband to the last.
