Weatherhead Page 14

  He pressed his lips shut tight. How can he stand here and attribute power to himself that derived from this place—from this woman.This abomination was nothing more than a mockery of Maggie Mechaine. More, this display was nothing more than a mockery of him. Act out your games without me. You corrupt the memory—

  She filled the morning with her gay, gay laughter. She put slay about her still. Memory? What memory? You make all the signs and shibboleths of a kind of Love, but it feels more like charity to the envious. Think of the world-flower, think of how many times you’ve crushed it. Does the color of the petals matter, man? Of course not. This is why you’re not at home in Al-Askar or wherever your mother’s cunt deposited you reading aloud to squalls in swaddle.

  I don’t even know if this is me myself here, his voice fell into hush. He didn’t have the energy to be offended at her words. In her own pestilent logic—and here again, was he informing her?—she was right, though he’d never admit it. He’d cheated on Maggie Mechaine enough to know that it wasn’t the color of portraits or even the grain of the frames that mattered—just the rending of the canvas. This was why, he murmured to her and her only, that portrait-making died out. It had nothing to do with the camera. It had everything to do with the rape of intimacy.

  Hm, she said after a moment, All sex is stagecraft, yes? And, judging from your face, though, yours must’ve been mostly tragedy. Go join them if you must, sculpture—mannequin man. At the end of the day I’ll store you away for the winter in a wooden box lined with my scorn.

  He looked down at her, fought off the urge to reach out and crush her throat. God knew what’d spew out of it if he did: a poisonous smoke? Locusts? A dress made out of knives? Instead, he turned his attention back to the dark, static caresses flesh-clad before them. He waved his hand at the riot around them, they’d even forgotten she was there among them. Why do you raise them up so? You feed them ferocious, but none of it is true. Tomorrow you’ll be eating their hearts out of their chests. This shade of his wife abraded him, turned him acrid. He was losing his grip on his even keel. It’s like you raise them up like a kite and then, holding the string in your teeth you—

  Sever? she playfully suggested.

  No, cut, he shot back, cut the string and send them crashing to the ground.

  This sentiment pleased her. She tapped her chin with a crooked finger. Almost wise ways, friend, but you know I use a rifle. I like the baldness of the bullet. Oh, how the winds hate me in Weatherhead, keeping them at bay, off the convergence of bullet, barrelmouth, and space. Have you ever stared into the corpse-strewn wreckage of a train crash? No? I have several times. Once fairly recently. Someone had stolen all my dresses and tried to save it, the train, that is, not beauty, but in the night I snuck back and undid the work of fashionable foolery and I waited at the bottom of the ditch I’d dug there, blame the earth when it suits—insulting, I say—and as the roofs and bodies piled high around me, twisted metal and shredded paper skins like leaves lost in the worst autumn ever, I felt the same rush—perhaps this is the only way we can feel it, we gods—that the bullet must feel leaving the gun—that the entire set-up, the ploy, the play, the scripts, the words, the cock of the hammer, the severing of the tracks, are something more than nothing real. She pointed out to the field. The people get no such luxury. The lords and ladies of the cities on the plain—and then she looked up at him with a long dark look of assizing as if she begrudgingly included him in the last sentiment—the lords and ladies know the severed head there at your feet is the remnants of last night’s pleasant dream—know that all cities are haunted and the shifting pitches of the dark music are not melody but curse. We—she thumped her chest, we know what is real and what is not.

  But everything you described—none of that is real.

  Her eyes twinkled like a little rill in a wood. I’d wager my shadow that if I asked you, stranger, how Love smelled, you could tell me. Or, at least, you will know. Yet how can something like that have a scent, walk about, rob the long-toothed, stab one in the ribs? It does, though, see?

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that she was trying to tell him something, something crucial, even if unintentional. But their odd conversation was ended by a meteor shower lobbed onto the field by another perverse sky. This made her double over with laughter and so, as she clutched at her ribs, aiming random kicks with her mighty boots at spectators around her, he made his escape, fearful of the earth now lobbing itself at itself.

  Listen!

  Listen!

  Listen! followed him all the way—

  ⧜

  How could there be anything holy in this story?

  Religion was something they never discussed. Born into a middling, conservative family smeared with orthodoxy, it’d always milled around in his background. Maggie did not seem to be religious at all, not that he could recall anyway. He remembered always having the strange foreboding that one day she’s succumb to Buddhism or even Satanism, but that was more a function of her constant, imperiling ascensions on her ladder of smoke, her clammy clamber up onto the dopethrone, her diabolical musical tastes, and maybe even the way she’d bare her teeth from time to time when she thought no one was looking. It had nothing to do with enlightenments or darknesses. Or maybe it had everything to do with that non-abstruse pairing. Obscene, he considered. She had a fickle piety, much like him. He might hit up a church if duty demanded, a wedding or funeral, his youngest sister, the only real devout one among the five siblings, reminding him of his duty to the deity, or if he simply needed a place to simmer or swim. A church was a sauna for the spirit, he told her once. More like a sauna for spit, she retorted.

  To Maggie Mechaine, god was someone to come to, take its name in vein, she said, or express pain to, nothing more. An invocation of pleasure and/or agony, nothing more.

  “Dragons, though,” she hiccupped, “dragons were real.”

  “They were real.” It was plain he wasn’t convinced.

  “Yep, they were. They’re still here. They reincarnated into us. See!” She poked herself in the chest and sent a smoke ring at his. She coughed, her thin little shoulders quaking. “I must be part Mongolian. What was that dude’s name?”

  “Genghis Khan? What—why? What does Genghis Khan have to do with anything?”

  “My brother and I, we went to church when we were young. Holy insincerity. Is that the right word? ‘Zzat what you called it? Words.” He had once been much stupider and linked her virginity to religion. That only lasted until, without a backwards glance of repentance, he’d seen her piss against a church one drunken night.”So’s the circumstances—they’re just circumstances—we had to go—“

  Maggie’s brother—he and his family had flown to Alaska for the funeral. They were devastated, especially the daughter slash niece. She was 10 or 11 and had already decided that the world didn’t make any sense without her.

  Maggie’s brother always shook his head when he spoke, even when he meant what he said. An odd tic of unceasing negation of everything the world put to play in front of him. “She always had,” this brother said, “this odd piety about her.”

  Didn’t he mean pity? This was the first time he’d remembered Alaska in a while. He and Maggie’s brother had stood out in his—not theirs, anymore—his backyard and smoked in the snow. What had been hers, anyhow?

  “When she was about—I dunno—15, maybe—I had already moved to the city—she told me that she was never sure how to take account of how much happiness she had or would ever give someone else. Those are my words, obviously, but the meaning was the same.” He shook his head. This brother and sister had shared that love born of proximity in space, but not of time. He was so much older and became distant and distal from those southern marches where she remained. They were so different these two, he thought: the brother was educated, a religious man of sorts, had clawed his way out of yesterday’s distrust and had become a moderately successful businessman; the sister was none of these things, all that came down up
on her was blind, fickle chance: she was the engine for nothing. “I hope,” the brother stammered, “that at least—the two of you—made something wonderful out of—out of your time together. I hope that you had a chance to give her—before she was gone—an accounting of this.”

  He said nothing. He recognized this for the formality that it was. Anyone who knew Maggie Mechaine saw the lie in the mechanics of happiness. When the brother asked if she had committed suicide, frank and direct, he’d been taken aback. What could one say to such a question? This was the first time that anyone had suggested this, at least to him. There were certainly grounds for it.

  Despite her mockery of the faithful angles, she did marry him in a church and had an irregular, often forgotten, fascination with stained glass. It was counter-intuitive to the monotonous contours of her white face, yes, irregular, yes, but there was something of a faith in her stroking of these broken, colored things and later, naturally, something sisterly and familiar.

  (18 Across) I’m the Governess of Troughs,

  the high voice intoned.

  He heard the sound of someone swallowing spit. Someone was sitting across his shins. He didn’t need to slit open his eyes and pour out sight onto the dirt to know that it was her black outline there above him. Waking in Weatherhead was difficult enough without her being there.

  He awoke shaking violently, felt as light as victim. It was her, that woman of the nowhere and nowhen—she wasn’t sleeping or dreaming, though he wasn’t entirely sure about the latter, despite her discordant breathing. Maggie Mechaine had breathed this way in her sleep. It had lulled him into a festering, insomniac state of doom for their first few years living together. Her brother told him once that she’d had severe respiratory problems as a small child which were precipitated during sleep. She insisted that these chronic, chesticular inundations were put paid to by her taking up of smoking her scrufulous smoke. She started smoking weed when she was 11.

  He twisted the top half of his body to one side, coughing up the rough. He spat a wad of brown and black to one side. To his utter horror, he watched as the spit flounced deadfish on the grubby floor of his former house and then swanlaked back up in a neat parabola and disappeared into the black up near the rafters. The ground had lost its down.

  Having assumed the posture of one pensive, poetic, and pretty, she sat boring her stare into him from her perch across his shins, watching this display of salivalism. He looked back at her quietly. She was counting on her fingers. There was a considerable amount of grime and blood under them, he could even espy slivers of wood here and there jutting out wincily. Her face was a haunted house today, tighter as if yoked at the corners of her mouth, her smile was cheap and false, sugar in her sweat, her knees drawn up almost to her chest, her coat splayed out over him in what he now saw as sheer desperation limning the corners and contours of her face. She counted.

  Finally, he asked, What’re you counting?

  My wits, she said simply. I’ll need all of them I can muster today. She was making capsizing motions with her forefinger, flicking each finger on her other hand one by one and watching them fall back lazily. Gravity wasn’t working too well for her either, today, he noticed.

  He wondered aloud, How much do we weigh?

  She nodded darkly and didn’t answer this. Yes, you feel it, too. Time does funny things to one in Weatherhead, they say. So does pull.

  Love told me something like that when I came here.

  She ignored him once more. It starts with the fluids. That’s why we take your pulse.

  Could you—he gestured to his legs. He could have easily tipped her off. He outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, but he didn’t want to unsettle her. She shook her head, anyway.

  I’m playing empress today, beyond good and evil, down amongst the upcast. Being angelic is nothing but a reflex. Sure, everyone’s got wings and you could starve out infinity arguing about love and Love—well, we could, anyway—his throat clutched at his voice: she was near-lucid!—had she remembered? Finally? She dug in her heels, punching holes in the cardboard floor. Something was terribly wrong, he saw by the reflexive horror beading on the ends of her smile and dripping off down onto his legs. On the day Love brought you to Weatherhead, I was up there, in the tall place I took you. The place of frames.

  He leaned on his elbows. In olden times, in theatres, they called that sitting ‘in the gods’.

  Her smile became sly, suspicious. Yes. On that day I received a warning. We get warnings here, did you know that? Fores are always boding in Weatherhead. Dooms for you all glide like plucked angel’s wings. I received this warning and then you came and I thought, who amongst all these hearts that I have petrified is this stranger coat-tail to?

  You were wrong. It’s you, he managed to rasp. He felt unafraid, impatient with her on a sudden.

  She ignored him. This morning I received another warning. She held up her hand and he gasped. It looked like someone had drawn a needle through the center of her palm several times over, weaving through the flesh an almost translucent, thin, oh so thin, cord. Buried in the palm was the note, she told him.

  What did it say?

  We need to go. Now. Yet she didn’t move.

  Her buried distress was even more troubling than her. The devil’s nightmares—or seeing a constellation during the day and what has become of the sun that night has devoured? Fine—whatever, let’s go, but you need to get off of me.

  Sneaking a furtive glance at the warped, collapsible door, she, full of strangeness, blackmad, and animist fevers moved her straddle up his monolithic length, up his loins, groin, torso, shimmying up him until the crotch of her desperate trousers was almost to his mouth before she swung herself around his neck, dragged him up into a sitting position, and threw one leg over each of his shoulders. Stand now. You’ll have to carry me, though. I have to hold you down.

  He nodded. It was just better to avoid questions, just nails poking up obscenely out of the stuff of the day, awaiting a thousand hammer falls to deliver answers. He didn’t think he could stomach explanation. It was early yet.

  So this strange, shambling creature, he and the accurst doppelganger of his dead wife, stooped as one and slowly rose, she straddling his shoulders like the child they could never have had, he, hands out to steady himself, occasionally clutching out of sheer reflex at her ankle to hold her steady. She cursed at him with red teeth to unhand her. He just didn’t want her to fall, he defended himself. She wouldn’t, she growled.

  He’d found a shabby coat abandoned on a bench the previous evening. He shrugged it on now, possible only by her shifting up one thigh and then another. The mornings were cold here. She had settled into her new perch and needed no reminder of the state of Weatherhead’s arcticism.

  Walking in Weatherhead was difficult enough. Especially this day when his feet, stamping under their combined weight, kept undertaking involuntary higher ascents than normal, as if he were tricksy climbing staircases. His legs and knees felt lighter somehow and the drift of the darkly dark terrible that was the birthplace of every face in Weatherhead, their dirts and sweats, was now cloven neatly through by a new drift, one that promised height or at least a fossil of that thing—the bottomless had been turned on its head and the former abysses of the city were now entrances, openings, and inroads. The decay of Weatherhead had taken on a new hue this morning, a waxen kind of blue, the kind you associate with the back of a hand in illness, brokenly blues of ill-health, sick lips. A hand this color drooped limply down next to his face. The city was fetterless. He could leave whenever he wished, not even in a parade of blood-not-roses.

  You will have to hold my hand this hand, she murmured. He seized it and it was cold and her forefingers kept twitching. Despite all, he squeezed this hand and the overwhelming desire of the panacea of the blue subsided a bit and his legs got heavier. Then he felt her chin rest on the top of his head. She was so light, lightlessness in the mould of torture. Using this chin as rudder, she steered him
through the quiet, shellshocked streets. It was early yet and there were few people about and these were festooned with gawking gapes at their ruler, her thighs finally laid open, astride the giant man who came out of the black mountains a while back, the one she delighted in tormenting and there were whispers behind hands. She chased these onlookers off with spit and the venom of her rotted speech.

  They came to one of the square plazas that were scattered about Weatherhead, empty lots full of chunks of broken concrete and peeling advertisements—whatever flora had once beautied the place was long scourged. He heard a number of screams in the distance and the sound of rending fabric amplified a thousand-fold—a sound of someone tearing the hem of God’s robe—

  He felt her shudder. But then with a series of nimble moves, she tango-slid down around his frame until she came to stand before him. We need to move quickly, she hissed. The moment her slightness had been removed from him, he again felt the blissful notion that the blight of this place had spent itself at last and the stern foam of a sea he’d thought disregarded touched his lips, a sea that here could not be heard. Ah—that drift. The gravity of Weatherhead had tricked his feet, he confessed. He spread his arms out and closed his eyes. She watched this in alarm, then she hooked her skinny leg around his, fixing him to her for there was no way that she would ever fall into the Up. Nope. Not now, he realized.

  What are you doing? he cried. She had produced a large mallet and what looked like railroad spikes.

  Kneel down. Spread out the edge of your coat here, around you, like a fan. As he did as he was told she began hammering in the spikes through his coat into the ground. Satisfied with her work, she stood and tossed the mallet aside. She reached into her coat pocket and produced a palm-sized ivory roundel. He’d seen one of these before. Maggie Mechaine had had one. But this one was made out of bone.