Weatherhead Read online

  Good, good, he praised them, all basically the same build. He walked down the line, touching one on the shoulder, another on the hair. All red hair. Perfect. Perfect replicas of her, of Maggie Mechaine. Usher, he swept his hands graciously towards the lip of the roof. Please, ladies. The first one made her way up. She blushed with a titter as he stepped behind her, hands on her hips and positioned her just so. Like this, okay? Using the toe of his boot, he put her feet in the proper position. He stepped back, tapping his chin. Then, without warning, he pushed her off the roof. Limply she fell as the dinosaurs scattered back with yelps and gasps and her face kissed the concrete, the cult of her blood fanning out in streams of pilgrims through the ruts and grooves of the unbelieving street. He scrutinized this murder, shouting questions down to extinction’s agents, making bold theories as to her killer, motives and the like, before waving up the next girl.

  One after the other they fell. After rounding up another dozen or so women, he switched places with one of the dinosaurs so he could study the murders from below. They fell flesh-hail about them, one after the other pushed and pushed and pushed. In the end, he was reduced to uncontrollable laughter, sides and face quaking as Maggie after Maggie went to her death.

  Finally, he felt a hand curl around his wrist. Stop, she said softly.

  I knew from the get-go.

  I thought you’d enjoy killing me.

  He looked at the dead sky. No.

  You’re a good—what is it?

  Detective.

  Hmm. They watched the last of the girls fall.

  I was killed in error. Is that what I love you means? It meant nothing before when I had it haunting about my ears!

  No, you wanted to die, he cried on a sudden. That’s what you were telling me. Wasn’t it?

  She pursed her lips and brooded for a long season. Finally, she said, My parents lived long enough to pick daisies off of their own graves. Or were those snakes? She frowned, chin on her chest. Yes, snakes. I never had parents. I was found as an orphan. She looked over at the pile of corpses. Sometimes, she began, they flee their murder, three—maybe four steps at a time only to come up against the fires at whose foot they die. She looked over at him. That means me.

  Everyone is condemned here, is that it? Even you? He indicated the deadfall of hers.

  She brightened at this question, even smiled a little. Of course not. None of those girls are me. You know that. I didn’t fall, I drowned, she exclaimed, throwing up her hands against the memory of a sea that’d never bested her.

  You didn’t drown. You committed suicide. By standing in the middle of the road.

  Why were you there then?

  He looked down at his hands. What are you talking about?

  We’re barbarians from the beginning, she replied, don’t you see? If I were to be married off to the hetman of a neighboring village they won’t check the bed for blood. They’ll check it for gates. It’s all a siege. All of life is a siege.

  I don’t know how you can say that when you know well and good that everyone here is already dead as far as you’re concerned. War should be the last thing on your mind. You should think of the feast that follows.

  We take the heartbeats away to prevent the measuring of time. This is forbidden in my city.

  I once knew a man who measured time with his teeth, though. Before the long-knife nights—

  He scooted over in front of her. A dentist?

  She looked at him. She hadn’t heard him, or didn’t want to. Suddenly she spelled out his name.

  He went reeling. She did this with both her mouth and her thin, white fingers, plucking out cobblestones from the street which, like all streets in Weatherhead, had been inscribed with various alphabets, and setting them precariously atop one another. He clutched at his chest. My god, he thought, she knows? She remembers?

  She looked up from her crouch and stared curiously into his face for a moment or two, after which she stood and strode a short distance away from him. She didn’t so much sway her hips as tilt the rest of the world from side-to-side. Silly, it seemed to him, Maggie Mechaine calling out his name and then strutting away like that, but later, he thought maybe those hips had been the only content part of her, was that it? The rest of her—

  Did she walk like this, your wife?

  What? Why was she—but he heard himself responding, I don’t know—it’s like I can’t imagine her swinging—

  From the gallows! She said this with a devourer’s tone, clapping her hands together once.

  No! She never moved like that, like she was swinging on a swingset that was shaped like the place she filled. She clapped her hands again. How Weatherhead darkened his speech! This always delighted her, when he sank into dialect. He shook the buzzing out of his head. Why are we talking about this? Why are you walking like that? And the name, the rest of him screamed at the stupid parts, she knows your name!

  She turned away from him and ducked her chin coquettishly. Part of Love has made me curious about you. She told me—

  Oh no.

  —she told me in violets that you watched the way that I walk.

  Diplomatic, he thought. How much had the Colored Girl told her about their last encounter? Maybe she didn’t know—

  And I couldn’t help but wonder, was it how your wife—your wife, right, not the others? How she walked?

  He started. She’d done it again. The others who?

  Love spoke of several shades of woman. But one in particular, she said, moved as I do and I wonder, was it like this? She let her hips kiss the dust.

  No, not like that at all. I don’t know what she’s talking about.

  Love does lie, it’s part of its nature. Still, she made me curious.

  She’s toying with me, he thought. Love had revealed all, how he’d made the Colored Girl into Maggie, and in her evil redolent of desperation, the ruler of Weatherhead had given herself over to him to kill again and again and again. Not to love, he told himself, but to kill.

  ⧜

  What about perspective and geometry? The spaces of Maggie Mechaine? Her recedings and lines? Places that weren’t what they were without her, like wine without grapes? He remembered her room. It only ever offered any kind of perspective or perpetual motion within existence when she was in it. Otherwise it was a sort of enfolded, outwardly imploding tirade of pillows and blankets and card tables. It had a pleasant odor, honey and the smell of the inside of her thighs after she had just shaved her legs. It was a peaceful place, he found. When she wasn’t home, he’d often go tuck himself in a corner, afraid to disturb the mess, and nap.

  The furniture in her room was always broken. Their harms to each other, however, were minimal, mostly.

  “Whatcha battin’, crackerjack?” Her eyes had gone all long, tucked up like her shiny, skinny little legs. She was a shorts and sweatshirt gal. Her sweatshirt had a hole in it, a tear where its collar met, well, met the rest of the thing. She had one finger hooked through this hole. She was staring out the window. Her other hand lay in her lap. She was covered in blood. “Fuck—what happened—“ He burst in.

  Her eyes shifted to him standing over her. She had only just noticed him there, he’d returned home afresh from having sex with another woman, had expected Maggie awake being it morning and all, never thought, though, to find her like this, all blood—

  “Oh, jeez, hey, it’s okay,” she blinked, seeing him for the first time, roused herself and smiled up at him.

  Suicide, his face meant.

  Predictions, her mouth helled. She’d cut her hand on her barometer. “Leaned on it. Stupid,” she exhaled, “so, sorry, I couldn’t do breakfast one-handed.” She winced. He looked over and saw a bloody handprint on the wall and the shattered glass front of her future-sky device. She always pressed on the thing too hard, he’d warned her before.

  He sat down beside her and turned over her hand. There was a rag tied around the cut. It was deep. He stared through her eyelashes. She read his thoughts, “No—christ�
��stop! It was an accident! Tired. I didn’t sleep. I was waitin’ for you. I watched wunna those cannibal movies. There was a plane wreck on a mountain and, well, perfect storm, see?” She’d been taking her morning measurements when she broke the damn thing.

  “I’m beginning to see a pattern here: no breakfast, blood, stayed up for me.”

  She nodded. “I got tired of waiting, was hungry. I don’t like how I taste though.” The pure animal desire to live. Could she eat someone else to survive? Sure, she could.

  “That’s what kept you up?”

  “No, I was more worried about what if you came home hungry and I hadn’t cooked?”

  “The blood is a lure.”

  She’d poisoned her system, she hinted. Watch out. But did she want him to eat her, or vice versa? He couldn’t tell. He wanted to make love to her then, cut and clever Maggie Mechaine but he couldn’t. He already poisoned someone else that a.m.

  Maggie suddenly asked, “Can she sew?”

  He stopped banging dishes around. He swallowed. “Who?”

  “Me, dumbass. I think I need stitches. Fallin’ to pieces over here. The bleeding ain’t stopped.” She poked her head around the corner. She looked paler than she should’ve and there was a telltale drip-drip plinking off her rag. She splurged on doughnuts on the way home from the walk-in clinic. “It hurts worse now,” she whined, “gemme home. I need to breathe the air I keep there.”

  He stared blearily out the windshield of their truck and nodded. This made sense actually for once, pain and all. Except in her huge haze of red, she’d bled all over her bag of weed. “Oh. Oh. Oh no. Oh no.” He’d never seen her so pale. She’d been trying to roll a joint one-handed? He couldn’t help laughing. He was beyond tired now. “These doughnuts are meaningless, now,” she shoved the bag at him. They had to go out again.

  “C’mon, I’m so tired.” His eyes buzzed bee. He sagged against the door jamb and reached out to straighten a frame knocked askew. “You can’t be serious. It’s Sunday morning.” Her eyes had widened. He’d never seen them so white.

  “But I’m in pain,” she said softly. She held up her swaddled, sewed hand.

  Fifteen minutes later they pulled into a non-descript parking lot next to one of those old turn-of-the-century squat buildings that the city lets survive as a reminder of how low our expectations once were, one of those places that houses the near-extinct, typewriter repair shops, watch shops, and so on, all repair shops for nostalgia, nothing more. There was really nothing left of these to repair. Nothing practical left.

  He peered out. “Here?” She shook with sobriety, but she pitied him nonetheless. She turned to him and knuckled his eyes for him, sleepy, she called him out with a coo that burred with desperation and false, patronizing sympathy. Wait, she commanded. No, he’d go, otherwise—

  “Otherwise what? They can’t know you’re a cop. That’d be bad.”

  “Otherwise I’ll never know who the fairy was.”

  They called him Distant Stan. “Distant from what?” He slumped into a chair.

  “Pretty much everything,” she whispered, “please don’t bust him.”

  “I won’t bust him, Christ, just calm the hell down.”

  There was even a waiting room. He stared at the framed pictures covering every spare space on the walls. From her shop, yes, she replied. She held her injured hand out to one side like she was caressing water.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he moaned.

  She mopped her brow. “It’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “Stanley will maintain a healthy distance from the two of you now,” a severe-looking woman with pale green skin informed them. He was having a hard time distinguishing realities from sleep. He clutched at Maggie’s good hand and called her summer. She gave him a strange look.

  Distant Stan was an enormous fat man. He looked a lot like Chris Farley, actually. As far as he could tell, anyway: Distant Stan’s face was mostly hidden by a poorly, perhaps hastily arranged, ninja mask. This nicely completed his ninja outfit. So did his habit of constantly looking behind him and up, ever conscious of the entire compass of his surroundings, a bloated star assaying its orbits.

  He stared at Maggie for a minute. “Oh, hey,” he nodded. His eyes were all that were visible through his ninja mask. “Haven’t seen you in a while.” Stan studied him for a good, long moment, staring up at his face.

  “This is my husband,” Maggie assured him. The word sounded weird coming from her. He wasn’t so sure just then that he’d ever heard her describe him thus. He looked at his watch. At midnight just past, he’d been disguised as someone else’s husband, slapped her backside, mounted her like a frame-up. He felt supremely awful, like teeth in the sand.

  “He okay?” Stan narrowed his eyes, “he doesn’t look so good.”

  “He works nights. He’s just tired,” Maggie assured him.

  Distant Stan shrugged. “Whatdja do to your hand there, love?” Stan bent into a fake-sounding English accent from time to time. She told him. “Oh, damn,” he said, “blood,” he added, and that was that. He led them into the adjacent room. The room was huge. It’d survived an incarnation as a ballet studio, he explained. All the mirrors had been taken down though the bars remained. The entire, enormous span of the walls were all covered with hundreds upon hundreds of framed pictures, all of what seemed to him to be the exact same picture, a pastoral photography of a pleasant little green valley with the sun perched above. As he made a slow circuit of the room, though, over the course of their conversation, he noticed slight variations, as if the room were a clock and time were this one single scene, a low sun bobbing and pitching above a horizon, becoming lighter halfway around and then slowly, but increasingly dimmer.

  Along one end someone had assembled a lengthy plastic toy kitchen. There were all sorts of plastic foods and pots and pans arranged about just so, as if they’d interrupted Distant Stan making dinner. Indeed, he waved them further into the room and took up station by this false kitchen, twiddling knobs, adjusting a skillet, stirring a bowl of plastic vegetables. He held out a wooden spoon full of air and nodded to him, “Needs salt, I bet, yeah?”

  Maggie pulled a face at him, so he took the proferred spoon and made a show of sipping the air off of it. “Yeah,” he replied, handing it back, “maybe just a pinch.”

  They watched Distant Stan not-cook for a while, then he half-turned and gestured to Maggie. “Fucking Orioles, right? Yeah?” Stan’d become suddenly animated. He took in with half an ear their odd, coded banter. “Still, Big Unit’s best season, right? Yeah?”

  “In Seattle, yes,” she replied uneasily. She leaned over a pot and made a show of sniffing the nothing boiling there. She made a patently false yummy sound.

  Stan addressed him now, “Whaddya make of those Back to the Future rumors, eh?”

  “I don’t follow baseball,” he excused himself, “or Michael J. Fox.” Maggie shot him a black look of stop.

  “Fictions tellin’ the future, what’ll they think of next!” His enormous ass filled the room as he bent over, rummaging around inside the plastic toy kitchen set-up along one wall. “Didja know? Urimancy. Don’t know that one? People tellin’ the future outta piss. Like tea leaves, ‘cept it’s piss? Ever hear of such a thing?”

  Neither of them had.

  Distant Stan shrugged again. He clucked his tongue and pulled on an oven mitt. “You guys hungry?”

  He couldn’t help countering with, “Would it matter if we were?” Maggie pinched his forearm. But Distant Stan must’ve been too far away to register mockery, for he said nothing.

  Woozy he wondered, “What’s with the same picture?”

  Distant Stan looked up from the casserole dish. “I’m collecting moments. The same fixed point at every single moment of time. If that’s the case, does that mean we are there? Are we in that place? If I surround myself with every single existence of the thing, then I’m there, right?”

  Maggie shrank against him
suddenly. She did not like this conversation; he sniffed her hair to confirm this. Yep, fear. For his part, he wasn’t sure what to say. He’d say he was dreaming, God love it, and was only half-convinced he wasn’t as Distant Stan took up station in the center of the room with his fat arms spread out and slowly turned, a fat man pirouetting, now the pictures the time and he the clock.

  “Here’s your shit, love,” from out of nowhere he handed Maggie a brown paper bag full of more weed than her husband the policeman could’ve imagined.

  As made to leave, without so much as a farewell, he leaned over and whispered, “You didn’t pay him.”

  She shook her head. “We trade in kind. I frame for him, he keeps me in leaf.” The pictures, then, she’d framed them for her dealer.

  He leaned back through the door. Maggie clutched at his chest, suddenly fearful, but all he asked was, “Why’re you dressed like a ninja?”

  Distant Stan spread his hands out. “It’s Halloween, friend?”

  She had to drive.

  He clapped his knee. “Shoot, that explains it. Halloween.”

  She darted a glance over at him. “Explains what?” He was nodding off. “The secretary with green skin?”

  “Why the glass broke.” The last thing he heard before he drifted off to sleep was her mispronouncing the names of dinosaurs.

  (33 Down) I am Going Out for a Walk.

  Simple. These were the last words she said to him. Before Weatherhead, anyway. She didn’t say goodbye. Didn’t say anything else. The last thing he saw before her upturned face was her back.

  Why these words now? Because now he knew why he was here and somewhere, deep down in that blank mantle surrounding the iron heart of this woman, he was almost certain, so did she. Why these words now? Because he’d found them—a second time he now recalled—the time between death and Weatherhead—written in her spindly hand and now he was here encountering them again for the third time. He ignored her at the door, curled up on the edge of his puzzle-piece strewn mattress and kneaded his temples. This was a family trait. As an experiment, he tried to remember how many sisters he had. One—no, no, he cast this off. He had had no sisters. Think of the words, let the limits of their wandering decrease to zero, draw them in—Maggie hadn’t left a note, had she? No, this would’ve meant it’d been a suicide, staged, premeditated and it hadn’t been. If not testament to the final hours of Maggie Mechaine, circus ditty to the tune of tumbling graveyards, postscript to the separation of her bones from their cage of slosh—what was it?