Weatherhead Read online

  Love obeys you?

  She tossed her eyes to the ceiling. Love obeys everyone!

  You like things in pieces, he retorted darkly, and lost. Accusation sleeted his words.

  No. I like to put things back where they belong. I like to put them in their proper places. Should I tell you the story of how I conquered this town? She didn’t wait for him to respond, but told the following story:

  One day I came to the place that you saw with Love, the place that Love calls the Headwaters. This is the site of an ancient battle. That stone head, she is the loser’s head. Her name, whichever you give her is perfect, familiar, and pregnant. I walked up that stream for almost a day so I could touch those two rough cheeks. It felt like entering the sea barefoot or like god drying your hair. But under her cruel brow was a broken line of time. I was fortunate that I was born in so many different places because my origins are obscured and all evils are only scenic to one, that is, me, witness to the worst of them. I sometimes wonder if I was a war with all its technical whistles and its curtsies with gravity and that, one day, instead of a field of desperate children clawing their way through snow to kill one another, I became a singular battle waged on all fronts, but contained in one, flesh-bound blood-bath!

  Under this brow I found one of these wooden sticks, these—bats? I took it. Part of the nature of being a carnivore is being a predator. Part of the nature of being in love is being a predator. Both use teeth, claws, and they tear. Some say it is part of the goodness of existence that we hurt and that, doubly so, we hurt ourselves. I have no self-love. I did not climb down through the blisters of this country to find Weatherhead there so I could lord-and-lady over it. Don’t be fooled. I wanted nothing. I wanted to love in Weatherhead. But in Weatherhead I found resistance and revulsion against me. They were not ready for me yet. In my loneliness, I seethed. And pain in the chest to a lover is worse than a pain in the belly for a carnivore. So I wandered through these blasted, empty landscapes, making long, slow love with my eyes at the city and its walls. Oh, yes, it had walls back then. Love must’ve heard me, for they came and told me that the people of Weatherhead were vertical in their humor and this only further infuriated me for I have, as you know, numerous misgivings as to Up and the upward movements of things. I knew now that my eye must be seen and my skin brushed and with 300 lightnings in what they call the hour of nails and female sounds and I swept through the streets with my red rain and they fell perpendicular to me, their ridiculous births were now quite serious to suffer as they came under my sway. I must have killed thousands of them that day alone, I was joyous up to my knees in blood. The next day I began crucifying their food supply on the sides of buildings and the city itself, weeping dust, let go of the hands of its children and shrugged off its buildings and left me my frames. My empty windows. No one will ever fall out of them, see? It is in this way that I keep them all safe. Down. She ended her story with bared teeth.

  He had remained silent this whole time, afraid to interrupt, but, he did see. Now, he did.

  He asked, What about before that?

  She said nothing and keened at him a knowing eye that made him wish to weep so terrifying, grey, and awful was this peer. Another story. She turned her back to him and the artist. The latter pored over her buttocks with his eyes, chewed a brush, and went to work. We barter tales here. She coughed expectantly.

  Atrocity, he thought. He nodded. I will tell you the story of another war, he began in his best Weatherhead,

  He looked for her for a good quarter hour and finally found her in the cemetery just down the hill from the church where the wedding was to be, a bucket of baseballs at her feet. One by one, as he watched from behind a tree, she lazily tossed them into the up and with a deft, expert, and deadly swing chocked each ball, one by one out of the narrow lanes of graves and out into the field beyond.

  At least she’d had the good sense to roll her wedding dress up, cinching it around her thighs. He wondered what counted as not seeing her. He’d found himself suddenly superstitious. Maybe it was all the graves. Maybe it was Maggie Mechaine looking all ghostly in her wedding dress out here in the dogwoods. She heard him close his eyes and she didn’t turn, she sent out a pretty, gay laugh unto the silence.

  “Home runs, not run homes,” she called, still a’gale with her laughter—he’d never heard it sound so beautiful. Was the dress amplifying it—

  “I wasn’t—I didn’t think—well, it’s almost time.” He had, actually, thought she’d left. She had not wanted to marry him. This was his desperate fear. Because she hadn’t: she’d said ‘no’. He put his forehead to the tree, felt the runnels of bark indent his forehead.

  “Come here,” she commanded and when she tasted him hesitant on the wind, she half-laughed again and told him to walk backwards, then, if that made him feel better, so he did. Creeping heel-first amongst the graves, he navigated his way down to her and they sank together, backside to backside. He felt the telltale rustling of her cloud formation. He, in turn, fetched out a cigarette. She didn’t know how to be nervous and thus never was.

  Back to back, they smoked in silence, slow-dancing in fog with lilting, blind movements. She leaned on her bat like a crutch, all postwar after-trench. Their eyes were all ears today because after ten minutes or so, he could hear her squint into the distance with both eyes, not one, and he was laughing before she even pointed with her bat and asked, “See that sign that say ‘rib tip’?”

  “No,” he half-growled. He heard the bat creak as she leaned on it heavily-lightly. “Want me to pitch to you?” he shot back.

  No, she still insisted. This was already an old argument. Didn’t he get it by now? Oh, sure he did. His little modern, independent woman—“You’re the one who wanted to marry me,” she pointed out. He could feel her against him, felt her lift up her bat and study it. Had she ever wanted to hit him with it?

  “We’re about to be married,” she said softly, “but I feel like you’ve never really seen me.”

  He laughed. “You picked a helluva time to push an existential guilt-trip on me. I’m not supposed to see you, that’s why we’re standing here cheek to cheek while you get high and I try not to throw up on my cummerbund.”

  He could feel her smile through her shoulder blades, the way they lifted slightly when she felt joy. She hated words like existential, though. “No—no. I didn’t pick the wrong time. This is exactly the right time.”

  She made a trim sidestep around him and came face to face. As he saw that her eyes were shut, he realigned his to this new, unanimous darkness and now, recounting this simple, meaningless story to the ruler of Weatherhead, he came to know a small truth: in little stories of little tragic import, there may come times, maybe once a century or so, when they are able to break free of their bonds of mediocrity and become something more. These stories step out of our mouths and become something less soft when these little stories duck into the hollows off the high road, driven into hiding as soon as they appear by something worse than a monk but something diviner than stones with names and no faces, and we stand there, pleading at the tree line for the stories to return back to the road—heaven feels like it’s about to burst at the seams from all the angels struggling to get out and help us hunt—will the angels come as rain? Snow? Hail? Who can know the form that the dream of the sky will take when it deigns to aid the lover trap his or her stories?

  “It’s not our wedding day,” her coarse tongue told his lips, for their senses now and only were confused and commingled, “it’s our birthday.”

  “One by one,” he told her mouth. Far away they heard the impatient, cardboard bodies ranged in the pews—like a train whistle you hear at midnight in mid-nightmare from your window—but she was always there—there was never a night unless of his own choosing that she wasn’t, was there?

  The ruler of Weatherhead frowned and the shadows it pulled down over her cheeks made her look bearded with soot for a moment. She did not like this story, he could see, did not see
the point in it. She tried to make light of it, A covenant of blindness for the great devils who think themselves acting with Love? And what is the punishment for seeing the soon-to-be stillborn? For all life stops the moment a priest enters the room. Even the artist laughed at this.

  He scrambled for words, There—th-there’s no punishment. It’s just a superstition, a play.

  She said you had never seen her. Was it a marriage of alliance? Strategy? I tried to effect this once with one of the hunters who wander between Weatherhead and the sea but they shot at me from a distance and cursed me. Why did you marry her then? Does she know you’re here now?

  I’m not sure anymore. What was he answering?

  The artist had finished coloring in her cracked, patchwork skin. She shrugged on a filthy robe. It looked as if it had rested atop an engine block for a good century or so. She—died, am I right? This wife? She stepped in front of him. You killed her.

  No. That’s another story. A trade is a trade.

  Fair enough. But why did you tell me this story? What of the wedding itself? The priest bleeding words off his stigmatic tongue? The feast and drink? She nudged his ribs with her elbow and this made him recoil. The bed shaking with her fits when you split her bleeding body open? Where did your white assassins gather? Web-fingered inside her?

  Stop, he snarled. He walked off to one side for a moment. He couldn’t stand the company of this mockery. It was no wonder that this atrocity could never reach for sunlight by standing under a day. Why had he given her this moment? He had completely forgotten about it. He was going to tell the tale of their wedding, the baseless vows, the obligatory bleat of the others who had never kissed someone in a graveyard, caught raw red faces withering up later out of photographs, that naked, dangling foot hanging out of a bathtub he could never fit in alongside her in a bathroom they could never fit in alongside together in a hotel that could barely contain the two of them on a road that panicked as night squeezed in amongst its buildings and he dropped his fire down into her—

  None of those things mattered just then for those angels, all with identical wombs and voices, had hunted down this other sad, little moment, a moment at the end of a black street where closed eyes stared into each other and saw something more than they had, something he had forgotten.

  ⧜

  The ball itself. She stood in stark relief to everyone else there for the simple reason that there was no one else there. The walls of the immense room, top story of a cylindrical structure near the center of Weatherhead, were all mirrored panels set at such angles that gave the illusion that the room was full of more people than it actually was, myriad hims and hers.

  In one corner, Love had formed a makeshift quartet, supplying the music, sawing away on ancient wooden instruments, making dust-sucking tunes with hem-haw, half-rotted oases of melody amongst the most impractical sounds he’d ever heard. The conflicting pitches and tones of Love, he guessed. He was only partially right: Love has no ear for music. It leaves that for others.

  He clung awkwardly to the looking-glass pressed to him, back-to-back, feeling out-of-sorts in his halfway house-washed rumpled shirt and trousers. He’d left his mud-caked coat on a cowering, violated coat rack at the door. Where the hell was everyone, he wondered. He waited for screams or other sounds of languish and wound. Oh, wait—

  He could see her faint outline. She was dancing alone, or dancing with a thousand of herselves. The painter had done a commendable job, masking her piecemeal, patchwork body with color. She looked as if spectrums had grown off of her and out of her dress and in a emberly autumn would peel away and make an ocean of color around her thin little feet. Her abundant pale-reds were pinned up over and around her thin-knuckled face. Hadn’t she cut her hair all off before she killed herself? She’d had a neat diamond drawn on the floor with chalk and she danced like a breeze, a stained-glass breeze up and down the lines while he watched. She never asked him to dance, only spoke to him when her mute gavotte came to a close.

  That was nice, he attempted.

  Said one shadow to the next, she replied, and pointed to the ground where there were no shadows, never would be. Mornings taken together means shadows get desperate. There’s no room in beds of lovers of any kind for them.

  So they say. You look beautiful, he choked. She did. Your face never broke? Never cracked? He wanted to point out that it had, that it’d been so much gush and liquid that he could only reassemble certain islands of it in the 51.

  She smiled. It could’ve, I suppose. I never thought of that. It’d make me difficult to look at though, I think. She bent forward and stared up into his face. Why, do you think these cracks are real? She stood back on one foot and extended her left leg straight out in front of him and, seizing the edge of her dress, pulled it up to the top of her thigh. Go ahead.

  He ran his hand gently around her taut thigh, feeling reds and greens and yellows. She was right. She wasn’t in pieces. The only edges were between the lights that made the colors real. Her skin as cool, smooth, and grooveless all at once. Then, why—

  Oh, I drew those on! I had a dream once that I was trapped in a puzzle—

  Me too, he muttered. He kept his hand pressed against her. Then she was off again into the crowd, for now the mirrored chamber was full of her, a crowd of blueglare, threadbare women whose bare feet kissed the floor like lies that fogs tell valleys while the sun stands above, hands on hips, tapping a toe. These were not the daughters of the hangmen, not tonight. Take the woman you have imagined you would love and dash her into pieces. Set them all a-dancing in the bowl of your hands and lift it to your face and breath them in like fumes. She was pretending to be everyone in the room: the ballad-heavy princess, the brash coquette, the fan-fluttering ash diva, the struggling actress, the consumptive daughter coveting the mother’s coughless and lithe swanlaking from duke’s bed to duke’s bed, the gloomy and gothic engine-lover with her goggles and pistol that leaked hormones—

  Who is that dirty giant skulking about the Ten-Thousand? She passes him a note now from herself. He opens it with nervous fingers. She’d ask herself, she tells him in confidence, a hushed and hurried whisper behind her fan, to pass this note to him, but she’s in a timid state—her husband has been rushed to the frontier to avert a war and all eyes on the nape of her neck try to read war in her posture, so she must be wary—but this foreigner has consigned her so to a confusion of sea with sky that she’s not sure whether to drown or soar. She tells him this as she eats puzzle pieces alone at a table along the wall, she’s her servant, one of transparent lips it feels like because she’s constantly baring her teeth and what should she tell her mistress—will he deign to steal to the side of the fireplace or no? And there she is suddenly, leaning on the mantle with all her blood—the minister’s wife with her cane and affected limp (it was an old wound: she’d once fought a duel against herself for herself and shot herself in the shin, shattering the bone and all her pretensions to manhood)—

  He couldn’t confuse compass with barometer. There was no needle pointing him to her. Even when she appeared before him with the tips of her forefingers pinning down her eyelids and she whispered to him that he just imagine that the color she was shedding were graves and not pieces of the palette she’d wanted to be—stand here—she tossed the bat aside (it was no cane)—raised up on her toes—and what did the note say? It said Meet me beyond the wheel.

  He fled. The irreparable crept over him, everything had flown from him, gone. He no longer knew where he was or why. He spent the night wandering through Weatherhead as fatal things flashed through his mind. Had he ever been alive? Had she? Maggie Mechaine, for one, had always refused to cover her windows at night. Was this, the indifferent, slow-eyed prance of panty and t-shirt before the glass, the behavior of one living? And what about him? Who was he anymore? In this sick place, she could be all-at-once and he never -again. This was never how it had been before he’d crossed those terrifying, alive, black mountains. Before that, he had been colos
sal, not her, and now, here he was, reduced to a plaything of this intestament concussion-sucking demoness.

  Weatherhead at night was uncertain of itself. The lights and dash and fray of the ball illuminated the sky about it and was visible from all corners of the city but there was still a sunken, squashed-butt woe to the city, sullen-eyed crushed into the ashtray of the dead earth from whence it had spring. Her war against this city had never ended. It continued even now with the gaiety and refreshing horrors of her gala.

  The night before she died, she told him, “Feels like everything before, everything we did and said, leads up to now, to collapse. We were just speeding the collapse along.” Maggie Mechaine was a piece of something large and ill at heart. Ill at mind. Ill at heart.

  Towards dawn—

  (26 Across) I Lay Down in Whiteness.

  Get up, shouted the mob in response, and torches wove back and forth through the air. He watched, rapt, as a gaggle of brides climbed as one to their feet, their dresses spattered with mud, their cheer, however, unruffled. Then a stream of ruffians poured onto the field and moved down the line of them with knives, slashing the dresses away from them in long, white cirrus strips and when the women released them they took to the sky and suckled at the blue there.

  Next, as he watched, weaving weary at the edge of the pitch, the grooms were brought out and lined up before their respective prospectives and there was a grand curse against the universe that went up in a tongue he couldn’t understand, in words limned with a vastness confined to bitterness and the pair making up each nuptial, each man and woman the Pompeii-halves of old, rediscovered shit, the shit of assured, configured death, one and one make zero. And then they began dancing, a sort of gallowed gavotte to the tune of syncopated spittings as the brides’ cleared their throats and, perhaps fearful of their prospectives’ white assassins, launched red-and-black flecked gobs into the faces of the men. The men, on the other hand, one arm around the waist of their brides, used their free hands to smack their faces, then backhand, smack, then backhand—all in a dizzying locus of saliva and slap which came together into a bright melody.