Weatherhead Read online

  Leave your enemy alive to live in endless shame. Her voice was on a sudden at his shoulder. When he turned at the sound of it, they bumped noses. Her smile was illicit and theoretical. Love led me here. They said you were in some distress. They sold me something poisonous—that you—she stuck out her tongue—needed me. It was clear this idea delighted her, but for all the wrong reasons.

  He stood up, stumbled. She was today dressed in plays and wintry earths. The acts of the former made shameful the stare at the exposed fragmented mosaics of her stomach where an intermission bisected neatly tunic from skirts. The dovely-browns of the latter lay in the virtue of her boots and vest.

  He spoke up, stumbled. She looked lovely in white.

  White? I try on ashes in the rain, she said gaily, and it sticks to me. That is all.

  I was—where—had he a hat he would’ve fumbled with it nervously between his hands just then—I was afraid you were angry with me?

  The wager of war was her laughter. Do you think saving the life of a monster such as I am rumored to be hereabouts is a commendable act? Ask the desperate hearts of the people of Weatherhead to find it in them to thank you and then so shall I! She scoffed at him.

  He became angry then. If without her, he faded, then so be it! What did Love know anyway? All this did was prolong his torments. He fled.

  ⧜

  Red-cheeked, she had cut her red hair short like a boy just before she had died, like she knew. Shorn for the axeman. It was all napes that winter. Another time she sat in a coat made of darkness. He could see her through the half-closed door. It was Sunday and she had closed her shop. She was nearly finished with ‘Accident at the Marble Factory’ or ‘Oil Spill’ or one of her goddamn impossible puzzles, which he wasn’t sure, couldn’t see it for the lack of light. She drug into her smoke and he watched the slow curve of her falling energies. He could see this fall in the upwards drip of her hand holding a piece up as if there were light enough somewhere just above the plane of her head, study the thing, and then neatly find its place in the scheme laid out before her. How she did it, he never knew.

  “Parts’re parts,” she told him quietly.

  (23 Down) I am a Palimpsest for Blind People.

  She liked this word, he knew. She used to unfurl with laughter at her private interpretations of the thing. It was one of those words that could have a thousand different meanings based on its sonance only. The only ones he could recall was something about fucking zeppelins, “blimpcest” she insisted.

  “Does anyone like my poetry? Our whole lives are poems.”

  He ducked down and stared into the rearview mirror. She’d never written a poem in her life to save her life. He knew this to be true, but she was stoned to shit and pontificating so he had to play along. “Yeah? Tell me how?”

  She looked out the window at the passing fuzz of the stuff of the world. “Buncha big words and fancy pants nonsense, half the time it doesn’t mean a thing. Every once in a while, though, you get that little bit, like this big of a little bit,” she held up her thumb and forefinger pinched together, “and it’s really just the nicest thing, like a most beautiful thing.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a fan of poetry.”

  “I ain’t. I’m not. I’m talkin’ about life.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a fan of life.” He regretted saying this the instant it passed over his lips, couldn’t look at her. Maggie Mechaine had come into her own before the year of disease, that time when the mind was still tricking everyone out of thinking it was mappable. To her, the entire world was bipolar and that was a good thing.

  “Santa on the top and he equals blood because of his red coat,” she coughed, “penguins on the bottom—those guys equal black and white a.k.a confusions. See? What if this were gone, where’d we be, huh?” She looked out the window. “I don’t need anyone to teach me how to be happy.” She balled up the prescription and threw it out the window.

  “Well—that went swimmingly,” he muttered.

  ⧜

  What is that song in rubble’s sorcery that calls ruin to ruin?

  She came floating over the smashed face of Weatherhead to him. He always knew when she was drawing near because of the inexpressible, indescribable whimperings and wincings that preceded her—the fall in pressure before the storm.

  She didn’t know who he was again, she’d half-forgotten him once more as she did every few days, he saw, but she took his arm. I wrote this in the tower, here she looked anxiously back over her white shoulder at the distant white spire, before my execution. He’d never noticed this tower before. It was gone as soon as he’d spotted it on the skyline.

  There was no opportunity to wonder at this. She was staring into his face, expectant, so he asked, What were you executed for?

  What do you think? Boats at midnight! Her face shifted as she laughed brightly. March is my empire, no one else’s! She thrust her arm under his nose and shucked her sleeve up to her elbow. Amongst the cracks she had written in a chunky scrawl: The fox fares best when he is most cursed.

  “A palimpsest is a page of a book or something that something new has been written over top of.”

  “Recycling,” he grunted. Had the hippy turn come at last, he wondered aloud dangerously. Or was she too guttural and southern? This was earlier that same day, sitting in the therapist’s waiting room, their knees touching. Why were these seats so close together, he couldn’t help thinking—

  “I never want to be a palimpsest.” She pronounced the word slowly, carefully. “I want to run anyway somewhere where their pencils or pens won’t ever get me.” She started crying. “I don’t want to be rewritten. Please.”

  Yes, she had meant herself, he recognized later. This was why she refused the therapy. Her goosebumps at the least could’ve been braille to him. At the least. He had failed. But now—now he was beginning to understand the vernacular of Weatherhead. And there was purpose here. This was, he thought, why he’d rescued her and smuggled her away in the first place.

  ⧜

  Maggie’s obsessions were never disguised or hidden under lesser needs. They were always there, surface salient, naively exposed, he thought. But, no, it was more that she simply didn’t see the use in cloaking them under superfluous stupidities. No one knew her anyway, she repeated.

  “Don’t I?”

  “You tell me,” she quacked from inside her barbican ringed with pillows and blankets. She refused to come out. He rubbed his stubbly face and looked around her room, his offer to help her unpack spurned by her conspicuous absence. Lately, she couldn’t care a whit about his and hers or theirs. They hadn’t made love in something like a year, he thought. They’d just driven over four thousand miles together over several weeks and had spent every night in separate beds, barely speaking to each other. There was something deeply wrong with them. Or her, he hoped. Don’t let it be him again. He’d show her, though. He started flinging open boxes.

  “You think,” he grunted, shifting an enormous box of picture frames to one side, “I don’t know you, Maggie Mechaine? What, you got a secret identity now or something?”

  “That was you, shit-kicker,” came the muffled, snuggled reply. He couldn’t tell, was she toying with him?

  “Observe, ma’am. “ He surveyed the field of open boxes. “First, the pencil sharpener.” He took it out and held it up, rapped on its side. A tiny arrow-slit opened in the soft fortress and a narrowed eye appeared there. He began walking around the room, along the wall, pausing every few moments and holding the sharpener against the wall, first here, now there—no, maybe—

  He looked at the jumble of comfort and raised an eyebrow. “Here, right?”

  Her other eye appeared through the widened gap. She stared at where he held the pencil sharpener. “Well—that’s not a bad spot.” Ha! He’d found the spot. He knew: she’d plotted it all out as soon as she’d walked into the room, sight unseen, for the first time. Maggie was possessed of a crude kind of feng shui. His silver si
ster had explained this to him once when he’d wondered why her toilet was in her kitchen. It made breakfast awkward, he insisted. She denied this. The way he understood it, feng shui worked this way: invisible lines of energy crisscrossed the world and if you arranged your furniture in a certain way, you could orient them to these currents and somehow benefit from them.

  “Your furniture,” he stared at Silver. Silver was called Silver because, out of the five children she was quite the mutant, for she had the most slender, silver-blonde hair you’d ever seen. No one was sure what it came from. It made the father shudder, but there was nothing to fear. Silver was indeed the father’s daughter, she had his honest eyes, his thin lips—she even loved women the way the father had in his peripatetic youth. Of them all, they were the most alike. “Neo-chink hippy fag trash,” he pronounced upon feng shui.

  But later, after he came to know Maggie Mechaine, took her virginity and began living with her, he noticed that she seemed to operate on her own version of this claptrap, though never ever voiced or described as such by she, for whatever others called these energies and their orientation across the world, they were all wrong. Every line and lie in the world ran through Maggie Mechaine. She was the focal point for everything related to her, every object she owned, its place was decided on the whim of her orientation to it. It was like she lived in a cardboard box at a railway crossing and was constantly smashed and buffeted, tipped and boxed about by passing engines, but engines whose schedules and trajectories into her she plotted. Everything around her had its place, an immobile series of spokes radiating out from a central axis of her. Sometimes he wondered if this centrality of hers, in the crosshairs of these lines, was what compounded her misery, her melancholia.

  “Next, this thing—“ He pulled out her barometer. She yelped, smashed down her walls. He held up a hand. “I’m not gonna break it.” He turned it over as he carefully unwrapped the newspaper wound around it. This one was easy. She watched him, now on her knees on her bed, arms folded, hair spazzing out to one side. By the door, eye level, right side. He looked back at her with a grin.

  “Hmph,” was her reply. “That’s just—natural.”

  “No, it’s not. By the door and not the window? By the window would be logical. But not if you’re you.” he took a pencil out of his back pocket and marked a tiny ‘x’ where this would go. He spent the next half an hour fetching frames and things out of her boxes, expertly placing them exactly where he knew she’d want them. She watched him without uttering a word, occasionally nodding or tilting her head from side to side in annoyance as he took her debris and refashioned her world around her just as it had been. Everything of Maggie Mechaine’s aligned perfectly with her. He knew this even then. Why had he forgotten it now, here in Weatherhead? Was it because Weatherhead was the opposite? Had her connections with things shattered with her body?

  That’s it, he murmured into the crook of his elbow, that’s why I’m here? To put all her shit back where it belongs? And why not, he wondered. Maggie snorted,

  “You know nothing—you’ll never catch me, copper.” She gasped from amidst the core of his ant-gravity crush, trying to peel his arms off of her while her ankles dug in. “Stop,” she lied. Then there was only one line piercing her: him.

  (24 Across) I am the Damage Done to a Storm During a Window.

  The rain in Weatherhead whispered hateful, baleful things to him. It had never rained in Weatherhead, though, so what were these malicious slipperings slashing down out at him, weaving in and out of the melancholies of the high voice?

  Had he come to think of her as a god in this place? He wondered this as he wandered. He typically sought out breakfast in one of the lines berating the concrete of the city streets, a shuffling confusion of scarves, grey faces, and churchlessness, where the citizens of Weatherhead, after recovering from the initial fog of the city’s morning and its obligatory curse brought down upon them, received small bowls of the cardboard cereals. Today he felt unwell so he kept to the centers of the avenues, hands thrust in the pockets of his shabby coat, one from time to time wandering over his chinless stubble, puzzling over the prickles suspended there in space over the ghost of his face.

  As plain a curse as hunger was, there were worse, he had come to know. Worse was his reliance on the red woman. His exile in Weatherhead had as its testament to its permanency, in his eyes, at least, his addiction, his dependency on her, whoever she really was (and she was the ghost of nothing, he swore up and down). This was an intolerable amount of Never and Always for him. He had lived his life piecemeal until he met Maggie Mechaine in the frame shop that autumn, a dreaming giant boy with a gun and the pursuit in fours and fives of those lithe-legged she-beasts—never a pretense to sentiment, but a mere fulfillment of burns. Why then had she dominated him so? Was it love? He had never considered it so. And it was no longer, in retrospect, a question of what he wanted, perhaps, but what he needed. But, he heard himself protesting, he didn’t need her. Especially not now that she’d gone and gotten herself killed. Why then, he countered, were there no wolves flooding the fallen gates? Had she taken all his beast out of him and gotten drunk on it for forever?

  No. This was impossible. She was dead, god love it! And yet still her banshee lighthouse screamed its song at him from the shore where he foundered on the waves, decks slicked with sweat, blood, and semen—intent on lands where the women traded birds for sex and lazy enchantments in lazy fingers were accompanied by the circling sounds of wingbeats—where if you closed your eyes, you could imagine yourself drowning in angels divesting you of seed and you could forget that tired blood-haired old song. No.

  Her head could bend lower than yours and her curtsies, which made her dress rustle against the stone beneath her bare feet, were sharper than god. He could take no measure of Maggie Mechaine only because he had pretended he had never known her. Where, then, came these memories? Was he addicted to the memory of her? Was the beast here, calling to him now from the black-grey outcroppings of clouds, mere nightmare, a cacophony of sighs and arguments rejigged and resawn back into a new shape? Or had she decided that being dead wasn’t enough and returned to dog him, revenge herself upon him in the form of a great storm against him?

  Why had he come to think of her as a god in this place? Was it because everything here was an invocation to her? Or was it just because she could sleep in the sky without drawing comment?

  For there she was. Her face anyway. A tiny, upended pool of white, tendrils of her crimsons girdling her face, the rest of her lost in cloud, swimming. She was looking up/down at him. She asked him, Why do you keep doing that to your face?

  It felt, he explained from the roof where he sat, like his face was composed of modular sections, four corresponding to sense and the rest mere bonding. Said face had been dismantled and set back into place with senses intact, but with the rest left lamenting in the snow somewhere in Alaska. Ah! He remembered the name of his country! The senses were afloat below an absent brow, above an invisible chin.

  She glowered down at him wickedly, pressing her face against the unsmooth underside of the thunderhead. She said nothing. He watched her above him. He found himself wondering whether she be clothed behind that thunderhead. He cleared his throat. How could I hear the rain and there is no rain? I’ve noticed—there’s no weather here ever?

  We don’t need it. My attack on this city ended it. She thought for a moment. Though it did rain thorns one night recently.

  He knew. I saw this. I was in the hills that night with Love on our way here. When she said nothing, he turned his gaze away from her. The tip of her nose and her mouth, pushed against the rough contours of the would-be and thus flattened and expanded slightly, gave a slightly comical ferality to her grim demeanor—almost doomsies. Doomsies for Tuesdays, he thought. What was that he’d drawn up in the mute circles of himself? Something about the snow white heathen Maggie Mechaine and her entrancing weatherings? Oh, yes, god love it, he thought, her frames—he’d warned her: t
here was no weather in frames. He said this now again to the beast.

  At that, she tripped down naked indeed out of the clouds, dancing down, down, and down until she landed with a thump on the dead roof they’d taken station up on upon. She did not like him to speak of the countries that he came from, beyond the reach of her talons—he knew this by now and she certainly did not take well to discussions of Maggie Mechaine and he thought he knew why. Thus, he’d ruined her swim-slumming amongst the overcast thick over Weatherhead for, like the hands of a practiced lover, she’d drawn the hollers of the local boys by making her cracked, patchwork skin ignorant of everything but being bare and climbed naked up into the sky where, clearwet and more prayer than worry to him just then, she cut languid paths through the puff and the of-earth-but-not-on by playing angel with his sensibilities. She would never allow other gods alongside her. Everyone in Weatherhead knew this. From above, she watched the cowards below and often spent the nights there where there was she instead of stars. He, for his part, strained his drooling skeletons of eyes, studying with his veinless blood the sweep of the ruin of her pale, pale body—white mud baked in the sun and cracked—

  She stared at him with the sickly blue ocean she held hostage with her eyes. Smiling, he dipped the hands of his eyes into these waters. They stood like this for longer than was considered polite in many—well, most—circles until at last he told her, My wife—she’s dead now—she once tamed the weather. She could control it, too. She could make prisons out of worlds and keep the weather well away from it. But I could make her storm. In the beginning, whenever we made love, she cried out in pain and it was a secret I had that I loved this sound. It was like thunder during an afternoon nap.

  Her face didn’t flinch a wink at the mention of her doppelganger. Why pain? Is there a strong song to your small-devil-tumble somewhere down there? She pointed at his crotch. This was, he recognized, her way of belittling him: the bigger they are, the more there is to grind to dust under your boot heel. Could she not tame whatever storm passes for fuck in your lazarus?