Weatherhead Read online

  The young bandit, insensate to these invocations and herald of that intimate collapse that brings low all sufferers of a particular brand of passion’s apraxia, interjected suddenly: You was speakin’ of the sandstorm’s hazards to one’s ass in the air. Let us get back to the rape talk.

  The leader shook his head solemnly and answered, Kisses should never be limited to the shoulders in those cases. Never.

  Red not purple, black not pink, snarled the Colored Girl. She had half-risen and was directing her wrath at her young, rape-tastic comrade.

  Now, now, Mr. Moustache said out of two faces. He patted her hand.

  Frank nodded with a solemnity betraying his antiquity. Then they clapped shut their wallets of tobacco and patted down their holsters and scabbards until, satisfied that they had not been shorn of a single iota of their lethality, they gathered in a circle and sang several bars of song in a pleasant mingling of a quadripartite vocal range, wavering here and there until finally their sonance was fixed and con.

  E flat, Mr. Moustache shook his head with a chuckle.

  Grey, mocked the Colored Girl.

  They moved on.

  ⧜

  The country they were moving through gradually warmed and here and there he could see vegetation showing through the snow. After a while, the white became thin and then wasn’t white at all. It was a sour sort of greenish-white, the sort of color one associates with frustrated digestion. It was dastard this green and frustrated focus by being always slightly off-center and fuzzy around the edges but as time went on, or rather didn’t, it resolved itself out into a kind of albino brass. By then it could hardly be called snow or the grass be called grass. The Colored Girl had long ago fallen silent as if the ambiguity of shades around them robbed her semantics of cohesion. What was happening was this: their descent onto the tablelands of the foothills was surrounded on all sides by a similar descent of the color of the land. The potent yet wan brassy hue to all things began to milk out into a suspicious and shifty grey once they made their way onto the flatlands that lapped at those final hillocks.

  Once the little band had reached the plain, he looked back in retrograde dread from whence they had descended, dread for they had come down out of a towering, terrifying range of mountains the likes of which he could never have imagined, blasts of black, twisted geological up-thrust fuck-yous that lost their heads in heights not obscured by cloud but by the sheer weakness of the human eye in apprehending such mammoth distances. They simply faded up through the cloudbanks, reappeared above them and gradually became mere outline…outline…than nothing. For all he knew, they reached into space. Mountains that blocked out all the other nightmares in a climber’s or geologist’s sleep. Death and all the horrors of it enfolded out and preserved in rock.

  How had they ever. No one deigned to answer him. They moved on.

  The land seemed bigger, somehow, as if the eye had expanded, not the world, taking in what was of and around landform, drawing out hitherto unknown dimensions into a fleshier, fuller panorama. The effect was disconcerting and filled him with trepidation, as seeing the mountains had. These were lands that no human eye was intended to look upon. Never had the world seemed so careless, vast, and indifferent.

  (3 Down) I am the History of Inventions.

  Who is that? They poked their eyes out around their hoods, at each other and then at him. Who keeps speaking out of everything? No one would answer him. It was raining. All was slosh and mud. He was sopping wet. Outside he was. Inside, his quiet production, the slosh no one minded was still in silent stand-by. That crimson metronome that beat time for one had been stilled by the wicked mechanism of these robbers. He thought he knew why. It was partly so he couldn’t tell time. He had no idea how long they had walked since the stream, but it might have been more than a day. Whenever he asked one of them whence flung time’s arrow they’d only grunt in their noncommittal way or their necks would raise angrily out of their bent and fusty collars and mange their teeth at him.

  He’d seen strange things in this land as they walked. A stone head of a forgotten goddess or mother of gods, even, perhaps half a mile across, weeping a river from its mouth that flowed off into the wilds at their backs. Frank told him this was the source of the stream they had crossed. Another time they saw a group of silent silhouettes moving against the sky on a ridge high above them, tall, impossibly tall to be anything remotely human. But his captors, especially the Colored Girl who clutched his head from behind and forced it forward, warned him to avert his eyes from these distant fellow travelers.

  They had come some distance. The land had broken off dramatically into a scabland of greys and bluish-greys and dust and stone were strewn about parched, cold hills. There was little green here, though from time to time he did spot the occasional hair-raising specter of a rumored tree that was more thorns thrown up by the earth than tree. The sky had gone through various stages of undress stretched out before them: first, the blue had been starched out by what he had first thought was an overcast sky; second, he observed that there were no clouds and that the colors had bled into each other for there rose up a great wind just prior to the rain coming and there was no shift around heaven’s thighs one could see; third, the rain began at a level far below whatever the ashen, empty sky had become for he could see this when they topped particular ridges and stared out over the sad lands. The rains emerged from a point far below that of the so-called sky. Nor did they reach the ground, ending somewhere about the level of their waists, for the dust and hack of their shambling was still kicked up. No mud.

  At the top of a gentle slope, they looked down onto the wind-swept plain. There was a low, grey city there, he could see, the first sign of civilization in this odd country.

  Weatherhead, one of them said with a nod. As one they turned on him and all he could see as he threw up his hands were snarling lips and quivering, yellow teeth. As one they seemed to embrace him, closing in on him from all sides, seizing him by his shirt and kicking at him wildly. The rain had let up, so he didn’t mind so much. He took it.

  The leader finally raised a hand and they stopped. He lurched forward, heaving, all livid shins and blasted knees. Mr. Moustache crouched down next to him and patted him on the back. Just apprehendin’ the sight of Weatherhead brings out the worst in a man, ‘pologies, friend. Judge us not by the heights and depths of our malice, but by these, and he tilted his charge’s chin up and made him look into his eyes. One was full of sorrow and kitten-traps. The other was full of delight and sermons on the virtues of pants.

  ⧜

  They picked their way down a rock-strewn slope and out onto the dusty chalk of the plain. The city lay before them unhealthy, a ward against itself. Having leagued himself involuntarily with the lowest sort of bandit, he decided he must also steal to survive, so he rubbed the grit out of his eyes and let them take in the city.

  What he had originally taken for a wall was actually a laid-low and razed ring of the town’s outermost buildings left as they were, leaning akimbo and dusty steel tilt atop each other. There were gaps here and there that served as gates, he guessed. He was confirmed in that suspicion as they led him through a crumbly concrete sort of passage between two disheveled, shattered edifices forming an inverted vee where they’d met, locked until demolished in a tender embrace. Or struggle.

  The city itself was as low as the dust on the plains outside. There was a striking dearth of stories in the space above the town. The bulk of the buildings were stunted, incomplete expressions with the lower parts merely prologue to loftier notions, glass, steel, line—but instead it looked as if the city had been mown in one sweep of a scythe and none of these uppers remained. Almost. He found himself in a city made out of windows because all the buildings had been forgotten. That was what made the city seem low. He’d seen cities like this before. The violent architecture of the place reminded him of war. Not the facades or designs themselves, but the placement of the buildings was war-like: the toppled several story
concrete structure crumbling over top of a grocer; the pocked face of a once-brickfaced bank had exploded outward, obvious victim of itself, for there were such things as suicidal buildings—but more than this, the place felt under siege, blanketed in murmurs and miscarriages and mutters and strange lights-in-the-sky at night.

  How do they stay up? The frames?

  There’s nowhere else for them to go, was the reply. Nothing falls here, not even autumn.

  He stared up again as they trudged on through the crowded streets, drawing barely a glance from the rumpled folk who lived in this god-awful place. From a distance, there had been an illusion that the city had been full. But here, in it, you could see it for what it was: robbed of the memory of what must have once been spires, towers, even skyscrapers judging from the bases of certain gargantuan structures—a place that forgot itself and gave voice to the falsehoods of its heights for these, dotting the bone sky were regular lines of rectangles, window frames suspended only by their own deception.

  What if they did fall, he wondered.

  Sheeeeeit, mused Frank, there’d be feral days ahead—everyone for himself once she cuts the sky loose. All sorts of madnesses in those windows. Mr. Moustache motioned for him to be silent.

  Ain’t it funny, Rapey asked, also craning his neck to look up, how they classicfy clouds the way they do animals?

  It looks like the negative of a city from the waist up, he put in thoughtfully. Like the rain on the plain, part negative, part not. They all stared at him.

  Pah, Mr. Moustache said, you ain’t far off.

  ⧜

  When they came into the thick of the city proper, they made pretensions to show he was, in fact, their captive and dragged him head hung down along the concretes to a central square slammed full of citizens. They let him drop to his knees in the dust. He looked up. In the center of a circle of flesh some sort of brawl was occurring, two people, one slim and slight, one terrible and towering, locked in a struggle against each other, with a crowd of contractions and clenches ringing them and shouting inwards. From the top edge of this mass of crowd hands thrust upwards and outwards, exchanging bets and curses as the two fighters danced around each other. The slighter one, a thin-shouldered, ruddy-haired fellow dressed in a simple grey shirt and rolled-up brown trousers, was driving his fist into the face of his opponent, a giant brute built out of the hard advantage of brick-thick arms and such, bald and silver, with drooping moustaches. The smaller fellow was driving his fist into the other’s pulp-frothy face repeatedly, so that each time he brought back his hand an arc of blood was flung up and out. As they approached he noted that the two combatants were chained together at the wrists and ankles so that when one drew back to punch, this movement caused a painful constriction, precursor to punch, for the punchee. Thus, striking first was key. And the speed with which the smaller fellow smashed into the loom of his much larger foe put paid to wagers of logic.

  As they approached he also noted with pleading, incredulous horror, that the obvious, imminent victor, this skinny fellow, landing smash after smash into the blood-pulped face of her opponent, was Maggie Mechaine.

  Run, run, run, his alphabet screamed at him. He slipped to the ground, burying his fists into his throat. She had noticed their approach and had met, for a moment, the gaze of Mr. Moustache but had not answered his nod. Her eyes flitted back to the crush of her triumph. Looping the chain linking wrist to wrist around the neck of the titan she faced, she brought him low down and, teeth clenched and bared, stood over him raining blow after blow onto his already shattered face. The crowd exulted and crowed until, at last, she broke the symmetry of the titan’s face in more places than one and he, her husband, heard the crack of bones made idle and the giant body slid to the ground where it lay unmoving.

  She stood embroiled in the cries and atrocious wolfen calls of the crowd, panting, looking down at the corpse she had given to the world. Every move or expression she made elicited bloody, faustian clamor from the onlookers. When she held out her hand flat before her and studied the lacerations on her knuckles there was an oooh. When she plucked out splinters of bone that were jut and prick on these same knuckles there was an aaah. When she stood, suddenly absent and lifted up her shirt, exposing a white-grey strip of flesh, to wipe off her face there was an ohhh. Then at a gesture, the crowd dispersed with great speed, sinking back and away from her before receding off in hasty backpedalings down the streets leading off this square. No one dared turn their back on her. She fetched out a set of keys and unlocked the chains at her wrist and ankle. She let them fall on the body of the defeated. Their clink was an ice-cube drop against glass.

  It was Maggie Mechaine. She stood there all rumpled and sweaty, rubbing spit into her bloodied knuckles, but it was her. Stoop-shouldered, red-headed, tired-eyed Maggie Mechaine. She was even wearing her plain grey jersey with the ell and the eye on it. He remembered this shirt.

  Randy Johnson, he croaked. She made no sign of having heard him. Instead, rubbing her wrist, she glided over to his four robbers and exchanged a few silent words with Mr. Moustache.

  It’s late, he heard her say. She studied the sky and spat to one side. You’re late.

  A minor delay at the headwaters, was the reply.

  I don’t know what you mean, she replied, when you speak, invoke the mechanics of Weatherhead and Weatherhead only, do you understand?

  Of course, miss—

  I don’t give a shit how animals might find me, they’ll never find me with edges but the smell of this one—and here he assumed she meant him—you should have come sooner. She held up all five fingers, palm to her, and displayed the happy mess of her shattered hand. Leave, my asses. Come back tomorrow or whatever you call it.

  And off she strode, shaking her injured hand out to the side as if flinging water off of it. His four captors stood with their heads down in a sulk. Where the giant’s body lay was a pile of broken, multicolored glass.

  His world swam in the puddles of his eyes. Don’t forget that when you dream you need to think you were happy, was the last thing he heard.

  (4 Across) I am What Fills Black Sails .

  He’d slept leaden, a hand lazily jutting out from under the blanket tossed upon him in his corner. His eyes were rectors of ruined colleges and for his ignorance he felt the rest of his face to be the worst student ever.

  What was that he had seen? Not a ghost. Something more? An invocation? Was that all a ghost was, an invocation of the person it stands in for? If so, then this brutal shade was no refraction of any Maggie Mechaine he had ever known. He rose and shuffled into the center of the room. He looked about. Someone, the four robbers, he assumed, had stripped his house down bare, even to the color and shape of the thing. It no longer conformed to any conscious memory. The lines and spaces of the contours of the room, the corners, even, had lost any real sense of attachment to geometry. It had re-aligned towards the telluric, rather than the vertical, with a virtual sagging and slouching down that made it seem as if the whole structure had suddenly become a kind of cardboard and then been soaked with water. As he watched, the entire affair was accordioned downward by the weight of the sky above. He fetched his collegial stare about, trying to gain the bearings of his dementia. His foot brushed against his suddenly ancient couch and he found it to be a mockery of the thing fashioned out of rude colored paper. Examination of the rest of the furniture revealed the same: someone had stolen his house and replaced it with shabby, flimsy props. He kicked over a warped and wet cardboard chair and watched it limply dick over onto the dust strewn earth.

  The most fruitful premise he could engage was that he was, in fact, no longer in his own house. He was in a dangerous city where dwelt what made him unenviable: the spectral, bloodthirsty fetch of his late wife. No, he thought, how could that be. She’d never. Would she.

  He sat down and decided to write down everything he knew and remembered about Maggie Mechaine. In his scrappy hand, he sketched out several basic characteristics, but after
struggling over the paper, rocking back and forth on the stool for a space, he found that his memory had all dried up. He scrunched up his eyes and huddled over the paper trying to figure out just who he was writing about here. And why. He held out the pencil until its tip was parallel to paper and began rubbing smudges across the scritch-scratches he had written there that he could no longer read. The symbols that he took for letters seemed to recede further back into the paper.

  He went to the window. What was all that light? He shielded his eyes. Maggie, he mouthed. He ran back to the paper but the pencil had drawn itself—re-existed itself—onto the sheet itself and try as he might he couldn’t pry it out of its new nature. He quickly snatched it up and slowly tore the page across the pencil. If he could get some lead—but the few pieces that tumbled out quickly turned into tiny spitballs of paper. Pencil had become paper.

  Dammit, he hissed. He decided to try something else. He went back over to the window and reenacted his memory. Maggie Mechaine liked to stand in windows. He repeated this a few times since he had forgotten how to write, but there was a lot of wind where his face once lived and what came out was a bawdy limerick about sleet, wives after war, and the lie of frottage.

  LI. Li. Lie. Why did that burr stick in memory’s leg-hair? His computer had been exposed to some sort of intense heat, for the edges of the monitor were running down onto the table and the screen looked like the slow lava of old window glass. Thus, no way to look it up, but he had some ideas. An ell and an eye had various meanings: shorthand for lithium, a Chinese surname meaning ‘dark’, and—