Weatherhead Page 21

  He fiddled with his bottom lip a tune most gruesome and he tried to dance to the city’s beck. She seemed little disturbed at her own nudity. Ha! She never named it lazarus. She called it Nigh for it was always thus! He was disturbed at the threat of his sudden arousal. It was that sort of half-mast promise that banter with a woman always drew out of him, how every word was a taunt, a challenge, and the mouth forming the shapes of air around each syllable was a crimson-limned nest for his tongue or better. This had always been his supreme and woeful flaw, this piracy of the mouth that broadsided his fealty, mostly to Maggie Mechaine. But she’d been made out of smoke and mirrors and had conveniently placed herself in front of an oncoming truck. She had always been the empress of her skin, he had just never known this, even when he cheated on her repeatedly because the war of mouths was one he simply couldn’t win. Not then, anyhow. But, here—

  You speak Weatherhead well when you turn your throat up to me and give it a chance. She and he, they both stood side by side and stared up at the heavy sky, heavy as sleep. Did you know, she spoke softly now, that heaven is full of wreckage?

  He could’ve guessed that in this place. Everything she says, he thought, sounds like a song. A poem. He watched her dress. What were you doing up there?

  She had knelt down and was relacing the cord that bound boot to foot. She looked up at him. She seemed as far away as she had when she was Up. I keep it all up there. I should show you, I think, she said. She said this as if permission was something assumed yet uncertain. He looked back up to where the cloudy skies hung like sleep.

  She launched herself back up to the highest frame left standing on the ghost of the neighboring building. Looking back, arms out to her sides to steady herself, she motioned for him to follow her into the sky’s forgotten morgues. What he saw there was horror.

  Sky was sea here. Pushing off from the frame, they swam through the air all wireless. He saw immediately why she disrobed: clothed it was nigh impossible what with their heavy coats and boots, would-be gunslingers in a street of trespasses and detritus washed up onto heaven. Through the dense cloud they moved, the humidity clinging to them until they emerged onto the surface of the sky, turning their shirts and trousers into doused gasoline rags to their lymphy skin. Before them and behind the false-bottomed sky, spread firmament on an incalculable scale—the largest sky he had ever imagined, a hissing, creaking graveyard, a monster-ruin of buildings and wombs, tangled masts, skeins, cauls, cold, twisted metal, scaffolding ripped from tombs—as far as the eye could see was upended devastation, dead heaps of buildings shaved and scattered in diasporas of demolition—a dump strewn to the horizon’s horizon were the accumulated corpses of cities and fleets, birds and tall things, jutting up out of the cloud-sea. The sheer scale of it all, its colossal nature, was what was horrifying, for here, Above, everything seemed magnified beyond its true scale, turned gargantuan and terrible not only by its guttering and disemboweling of the cities, but by how small the wreckage made him feel—how insignificant his own ruin when faced with this.

  Who did this? was all he could splutter. Turning, he took in the true vastness of this inverted hell for a thousand miles distant he could just espy with a squint the terrible black bullets-for-mountains that he and Love had descended. Worse, as his stubble watched, the black monoliths began to turn as if they were mere parts of a gigantic form, lost in the upper reaches of everything and felt the sweep of some ancient, old, terrible gaze chopping down from above. He quickly turned away, so great was his horror at seeing these mountains move. She smiled thinly, but didn’t look back herself, he noticed. Oh my god, he cried out. He turned back with a pale shudder to the more soothing ruinscape before him.

  This, she said in a hushed voice, is as far as we’re allow—as high as we can go. She told him that it was she who did this. She had peeled away the idols of mankind’s idiocy, its pretentions to height and buried them in the graveyards of the sky. Towers, spires, skyscrapers, ships—she’d torn them all down, flown into them with her mirror and sent them plunging downwards into the cloud.

  Why do we climb towards death? Shouldn’t it be a clawing-down? A dirt-filled thing? But we insist on putting heaven up—adrift—I wanted to remind everyone under my rule that—and how I hate the Up—how hell can be balloons, kites, birds—up.

  She had looked up when she’d been struck by the truck. This was an unassailable truth. He didn’t know what to say. All he could do was put his hands to the sides of his eyes, block out everything else except for her, the opposite of what he’d always done.

  His voice a fearful whisper, he whimpered, Where’s the sun?

  She screwed up her face. The who?

  The sun. Star. The star?

  She didn’t understand or deigned to pretend not to understand. He asked her if she ever got tangled in the wreckage up here. Was this how she’d torn her body to pieces?

  Nah. I steer clear of other people’s shipwrecks, stranger. She led him back down to the roof and its second sky. There, out of sight of the million miraculous miles of waste land, he felt infinitely better.

  You leave the frames below, though. How come?

  The frames give me the illusion of not being up. There is nothing supporting them, nothing holding them. We must thus be on the ground, for there is no building.

  But we are up, he gently pointed out, eye on her fist. She crunched glass there, fist on his eye.

  Maybe we’re down and that’s up, she leaned dangerously far over the edge. His Maggie—his?—would never have done that. Are those dots black stars? She frowned and looked over at him.

  We are zero, he thought. Out loud, he said, They’re people. Did she secretly covet up? Her chin had told the truck’s grille yes. Sometimes I think, his voice was quiet, sleepy, you brought me here just to fuck with me.

  Love brought you here, she repeated, that’s all I know. Or was it Hate? She’s here, too, somewhere, I think. She stared at him sidelong. An edge crept onto her lips, a dagger clenched there between her teeth: Be mindful of the Up. What part of you is made of string, kite, or cloud—I’ll tear it to shreds with my teeth, she slew, and there’ll be no pulling you back to the ground this time, I promise.

  He had nothing to say. He was sure the barometers of Weatherhead were all set to zero.

  ⧜

  If there was one thing you could say about Maggie Mechaine, it was that she always had her head in the clouds: “You know the word meteorology? Like for weather? It doesn’t have anything to do with meteors.”

  He stirred his cereal. “I figured.”

  “How long have we been married?” She squinted at the calendar on the wall.

  He looked at his watch. “Three weeks?”

  “Ha! Okay, look.” She tripped around the table and squeezed onto his chair. She spread out what she’d been looking at. “This is a chart of the weather for the entire time we’ve been married—starting here.”

  “What about the meteors?” He smelled her hair.

  “There haven’t been any,” she frowned. “They call it that because anything in the sky is called something something meteor. Snow and rain and all that shit, that’s hydrometeors. Meteor,” she looked up, “it means like ‘something up’. Lightning is electricometeor or whatever.”

  “How do you know all this shit?”

  “I never trusted the weatherman when I was a kid, they’re always wrong. I read about it. You can just do it yourself. There’s books. Look—this is a barometer. It measures pressure—“ He moved his hand down. She smiled without looking at him. “Okay. Right. Pressure in the air.”

  The last time he’d found Maggie Mechaine getting high, eight years and some and thousands of miles away, was only noteworthy because it was a good few months before she died and, afterwards, she did it outside only, staring up at the sky, as if she knew and was already getting his senses used to her sluggy, hazy atmospheres being absent from the House of Smoke and Snow—the last time he found her, she’d been sitting in the bac
k room that looked out onto their backyard and the abandoned shell of her batting cage. Randy had been transplanted inside and she, with a joint clutched between her front teeth, was covering it with Band-Aids and gauze.

  He had nearly died of exposure, such a funny idea, the week before and hadn’t left the house since. He was due to return to work the next day. Eager, he felt a red swarm through his extremities that bespoke his conquest of ice.

  She admired his cane, found it an allure, a lure, she admitted with her alien dampness, for all it signified for her: that this giant husband could turn himself light enough to not break this wood; that this giant husband with his liar’s mouth could be weakened and brought low; that this giant husband was where it ended and began but even he could be crippled. With her weighty movements, like a hung-over god, she leaned forward and checked his ankle brace.

  “Between me and Randy there, you’re becoming quite the little nurse.”

  She sat up and handed him the paper-weed. “Isn’t there some saying that says something about keeping your enemies sound?”

  He took it. “I knew it. You’re still drinking my blood every night.”

  “They call it being co-dependent, remember? I had a dream last night that you were throwing up pennies all over the beach.”

  “Why pennies?” He checked the clock above the stove. It was 1:30 in the morning. “You mean just now? Or yesterday’s night?”

  She frowned. “Just now, I think. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Why pennies?”

  “Because of your well obsession thing. But in the dream there weren’t wells; I was using you as a slot machine. Your arm was all stiff and up, like a Nazi and I kept feeding pennies into a hole under your tongue and then—ker-ching!—pulling your arm down. I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  “On the beach?”

  “Huh?”

  “We were at the beach?”

  “Somethin’ like that,” she yawned and leaned on Randy, cheek to plastic.

  Light: now there was life beneath her hoodie. He studied the creases on her forehead. They made her look so tired, all beaten animal, though they were mere upheavals of her skin and skull caused by the squint against the dent in oxygen that her breathing made. Springs had seen her a strange woman in the past. Spring was the only time she ever looked guilty and he could never figure why.

  She’d only looked guilty with good reason once. That was the first time he’d caught Maggie Mechaine getting high, just a few months after they’d started dating. He was attempting to make her dinner when he heard the light voice of his shower being turned on. Maggie Mechaine had begged off to the bathroom. What the hell was she doing—

  At that point, he’d never seen her naked: her jagged hymen lay several months away. Their mouths were content to wander hesitantly over each other’s upper quarters and that’d been about it, which was uncustomary for him. His loins called foul while the rest of him—well, bred something else. In the past, he’d never have bothered wasting the effort. But this skinny little woman that he thought of every night before he went to sleep without her, who lacked that eye-draw wound-loom down there, though he didn’t know that just yet, this curious, puzzle-drawn redneck—she was something else entirely.

  Naked, she was doubled over in his bathtub. At first he thought she was ill—“I wasn’t very hungry—and I thought if I—appetite—“ she tried to say and he was alarmed to see fog puffing out of her cheeks. At first he thought she was on fire. His second thought was that she was a dragon. Then he saw the telltale white torpedo guitar-picked in her left hand and knew all.

  “Mags—for fuck’s sake—where are your clothes—“ She’d neatly folded them and stowed them under his sink where they wouldn’t be bescented. She coughed and hacked and stammered and stumbled over to get them, keeping her skinny arms crossed over her skinny breasts, one hand with leaf in it covering an elusive red triangle and, with great comic effect, seeming to trail smoke out of this dragon’s den.

  Since he’d never seen her naked he stood and stared as was his wont and obligation. He wasn’t sure later, but he was fairly certain he took a questioning step towards her, but she didn’t remember it this way. Bereft of good sense and culinary timing, he watched her dress as the ziti burned to a crisp in his oven.

  “Why—“ he fumbled.

  “’Cause you’re a cop?” The stupidest question ever, her eye-roll suggested. She returned to the little square window above the bathtub and tilted her head back. This seemed acceptable, suddenly, since he’d caught her off guard.

  “Whaddya think? I’m gonna bust you? The window is shut, by the way,” he pointed out with a laugh as she exhaled again. They both watched it billow against the glass. Oh, ah, they said as one.

  Later, she’d try to explain, “It ain’t that everything gets more far away—I don’t want that—it’s jus’ that everything gets less—“

  “Serious?”

  “No.” And her eyes got wider than he’d ever see them do so again and she held out her arm straight, pen pinched between her thumb and forefinger and she started drawing vortices, machine-like, on the crossword she was working on, “it makes everything get less—right here.”

  (25 Down) I am the Floor-Length War.

  There was to be a ball in Weatherhead! The thin, wan numbers in the streets brightened at this news and their murmurs rose a pitch in anticipation. She rarely allowed festivity, the people said; such an affair was highly unusual. He mingled with the crowd for a while, milling about the crier’s podium, noting again that there seemed to be less people in the city than he’d observed in the previous weeks. There was a general pallor and thinness to their faces, as well, as if the population were in the grip of an epidemic or famine. The ball was occasioned by nothing, they told him, it simply would happen. But he knew better. He couldn’t help but feel he’d wound her up during their encounter the day before. This was a ball for him.

  He wondered if he should attend and was looking down with dismay for the first time in what felt like years at his shabby, mud-caked clothes when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Frank the Bandit. He flinched and made to flee, but Frank merely smiled and said, in a genial way, She’s askin’ for you. I’m pretty sure you’re gonna be her date to the ball. Dis is a high honor for the people of Weatherhead.

  Gimme a straight answer, Frank, he replied as they began walking arm in arm through the mob, what the hell is going on around here?

  First, let me say, I enjoy being called Frank. It is a sturdy, rocky name. An ocean would waste its time batterin’ against it. Second, I will tell you by way of sayin’ dat she has no intention of harmin’ youse dis night. As to which hell is going on here? I think you can only find the answer to that riddle inside your heart.

  You took away my heartbeat, you fu—

  But not da heart. A truck is a truck if the tank is empty, isn’t it? Dat reminds me, he shuffled around in his many pockets and produced a bright red rose which he pinned to his charge’s rumpled shirtfront, someone’s been slashin’ the fuel lines of the trucks of Weatherhead and you are suspect numero uno.

  Me? I didn’t do anything like that. For all I know, it was her.

  Frank smiled over at him. Dat dere is sound Weatherhead logic, cap’n.

  They found her in one of the squat ruins, perhaps once an office building that’d been gutted by her initial taking of the city. He tripped at the door, ghast-worthy, uncertain which direction to turn. She was standing, nude, on an upturned rusty old bucket. A besmocked, balding man was fussing about her legs. She waved for him to enter with a greedy gesture. He kept his eyes on hers, avoiding the smooth alabaster of her empty, shatter-crack skin, the pink tutelage of her freshman breasts, her thin, apoplectic frame given over to those curious blushes and ruddy mottles of the fair and uninordinate.

  She bade him sit, indicating another old bucket, and watch. She’d commissioned this old man, the town’s last remaining artist, to paint her for the ball. He was going along each sec
tion of her fissure-strewn skin, inking the borders silver-white and filling each isolated space in with various colors.

  A costume ball, naturally, she explained. When he asked what this painter was making her up as, she waved him closer. Scoot. Watch. There’re so many colors to me now besides this dull, boring white someone gave me once.

  She was talking about him, he acknowledged quietly. Instead, he sat near her feet watching the old fellow touch upon the irregular spaces on her skin which he’d then fill with gracious color off of the wooden palette he had his thumb hooked through.

  There’s no pattern, see? She nudged the painter away and turned her calf this way and that. No picture or story on me.

  Yes, he lied and he knew the lie inside out on a sudden. She was no random collection of thoughts and stale memories, a tumble jumble of clues and answers whose irregular edges meant they could never come together. He would know Maggie Mechaine if it killed him.

  The painter had gone to work on her left thigh, her leg held out at a right angle, toes perched on the floor. She posed, You were married, correct? Still?

  Yes, he said between his teeth. How many times had he tried to tell her she was dead? Memory here, he’d long known, had slaughter gushing over its engagement to it, could conjure up all sorts of hooligans and highwaymen to waylay it. Or was she pretending—

  Ah, but no ring, she pointed out. She pulled her hair up and stared into his face. What’s wrong? Even the painter, who until this point hadn’t acknowledged him, shot him a sidelong glance.

  I lost that ring. The thieves who kidnapped me and brought me here took everything—

  You mean Love? She raised an eyebrow and looked down her nose at him. Love takes things from you? How dare them! I can have it all returned at once!