Weatherhead Read online

  I’ve been in wars he cut her off, there is nothing actually in it to trick the spirit into thinking it is something noble.

  Then you must be, she scoffed, the supreme husband who has never told a lie to his wife. All wars are lies. You can never exchange a whore’s tongue for an angel’s, can you? Is that what you’re saying? All men lie and go to war for lies. All whores lie and go to bed for lies. All wives lie and listen for lies. Even the dead lie. They lie twice.

  And which one are you?

  She laughed gaily. See how full of fight you are! I think how much you must want to die—

  I don’t want to die. I want to leave.

  Well, then, why come here in the first place where the tyrant hangs her words on the ruby red chimneys, or what you call lips in your country, I believe, of her city? Don’t think I don’t know the thoughts of these people here. All their crimes are mine, too, a blight on Weatherhead’s ruler! This is why we have abandoned seasons. You, stranger, are the only one whose crimes I can’t stow under my pillow and tease out with my tongue’s tricks. Why come here if you don’t want to lie? I ask you again?

  I didn’t want to come here. I was forced to come here.

  Were you, then? Poor cuss! Here’s a gate. Leave, then. She strode out of the lane and gestured.

  There was indeed a door set into an immense slab of stone. It was, he observed, the former front door of their house. Someone had drilled a hole in it about waist level and desecrated it with white graffiti.

  No, he smiled uneasily at her, I’ll make my own way out. It could never be so easy.

  She tugged her scarf down under her chin and exposed her teeth again by way of her bright, seraphic laughter. Now you see: even my gates are lies. There are no walls around Weatherhead, my downcast giant. The same fate binds everyone here as bound the apple and the snake. A bite out of one equals a bite from the other! Come find me when your infinite pity runs out for us poor folk in Weatherhead and I’ll rouse both your pleasure and pain. Evil is mere reflex for man. It is the good that takes sharpening.

  She turned to leave, but he halted her with a question. Why do the people flee the paper?

  Paper is forbidden in Weatherhead. Anyone caught with paper fights me in the circles and anyone who fights me in the circles—she caught herself and curled her lip at him—almost always dies. You’ve seen this, the day you came? That man—about your size and build? Executed for paper crimes.

  Just for having the paper?

  No. He was writing a story about me.

  All that was colossal brimmed with evil here, he readily decided. He ran. Sure. She lived and breathed panic and chaos, but there was still nothing formless here. LI. Li. Lie.

  She was right, or lying, or both. There were no walls around Weatherhead. Under an accidental arch formed by the collapse of a shopping arcade down over itself, he spotted the out lands. A hemisphere of grey, dusty ground some 100 yards away. He looked about and saw no sign of her. She was the only law in Weatherhead. Outside the lines or outside the lies, it didn’t matter, either sin would suffice. Take away the eights and leave the lies. He looked up. She was standing on the ruin above, her brown, dusty coast billowing in the wind, her kerchief pulled up over her mouth only not hiding the two curling corners of her smile, the way it pushed her eyes up and open when she—

  Memories were lies, too. Or so he thought, but here he was wrong, victim of his own string of zeroes denoting impossibilities. They are the only truths, he’d learn before the end of his story. He turned away from the way out and ran in the opposite direction. Fine. He’d play by her rule. No one leaves Weatherhead. He wasn’t about to toe the line of escape she’d laid out for him. That was just what she wanted. He smashed through the morning crowds. People cursed at him, scolded him, laughed.

  She was flying above now, crouching on a mirror, chasing him through the labyrinthine streets of Weatherhead just at the height of the buildings. She was shouting something at him that he couldn’t make out. As he ran away from the empty, framed world outside Weatherhead, he shouted at the stones around him that he never loved her, snatching up bits of those meditating, lined papers, he then proceeded to tear with his teeth at his wrist—blood he needed, blood to oil the engine of his escape, blood to write down a thousand lies about that woman. People gawked at him as he passed, their eyes glittering like gold scattered on the bottom of the sea during a storm, wondering at his malfeasance, his revolt.

  In horror, legs weakening, he looked down at the gash he’d mad sever severe where his hand kissed his wrist. There was no blood. Damn, he thought. They’d taken his pulse. Maybe if—if I can get my heart beating again, he thought wildly. She was somewhere above, buzzing about on her mirror. The clouds were nooses to her.

  He began pounding on his chest, crumpling up the papers in his fists as he did so, trying to spark a fire of life there, searching for his dislocated life’s will. He did this for several black minutes and then he gave up. The guise of death with which they’d warned him to cower was not mere undertaker’s pretties. He would write no lies about her today. He slumped to the ground, clutching the balled-up graph paper to his eyes, and he wept. He no longer had any wills or absolutes of any kind. Weatherhead had beaten him. He couldn’t leave. He couldn’t stay. He was trapped somewhere, wandering on the border between his heart and hers.

  He shook with sorrow, guilt, desolation. What ran through that heart above? Sleepysweet lies, as she suggested? She wanted him to try to escape so she could punish him. She wanted him to stay so she could punish him. He’d set out that morning to best her by remembering what Maggie Mechaine hated, in the belief that somehow giving lie to her life would be the undoing of the creature drifting above, angel-on-glass. He couldn’t write, couldn’t beat her that way—couldn’t beat her with lies. They prayed in a language of lies in Weatherhead.

  He had never felt so alone. He was afraid of the grey earth, the grey sky. Nothing could give him solace—nothing but—

  He stood up. He walked out from the overhang where he’d fallen. There she was, crouched down on one knee on the mirror bobbing above, arms folded across it, staring at him with a bored expression, queen of the black guitars and the fleet ships of dark wood. He walked right up to her mirror. If he couldn’t write, then he’d press himself between the pages of her horror story. He stared into the underside of her glass-bottomed broom.

  But what he saw reflected in this mirror was not the city behind him, nor the ground. What was it? His face? It was something hollow and nameless, a bit before void, a bit before the end of a sentence handed down from above, just before the period. A space for thick emptiness was bared to him, a light minus light. And those lines connecting together as he turned this way and that—

  He took a step back in terror. His fatal miscalculation was that he still believed that there were no constellations visible during the day. But hadn’t Maggie traced them out on the side of that skyscraper for him, her finger drawing lines here to here to here to here. The moles on his chest hid another night’s gallery. You didn’t need stars to make straight lines, she told him once, even then their depth relative to her varied greatly.

  Lies connected lies.

  And there, staring up at her mirror as it came crashing down upon his head and shoulders, just before the moment of impact, he looked up and caught a glimpse of a network of fevers and lines and couldn’t help but draw them all together and what he saw was not just his lined palms protecting his face from the shatterpeace descendant, he saw that he’d been wrong: Maggie Mechaine and whoever this woman was—they were only afraid of one thing.

  Look, you bitch— His fingers scrabbled in the dust, dragging out diagonal grooves, an anarchy of shapes, grit leapt into the lacerations on his palms and face as he groaned and spat into the dust where he laid face-down. Feverish and furious, he drew madness, curves and curls, scudding the edge of his palm in senseless vortices, formless butchery of the line and form—he closed his eyes—Mags—his hands and fin
gertips traced familiar paths of her anarchy—there was no logic or line to her as she had been. He’d been wrong.

  She stood over him, a boot planted on either side and then sat down heavily on his back. He grunted and submitted. She lowered her head down next to his and studied his chaotic runes.

  Magics in this day and age, stranger? Where were you born? Inside a storytime? Is that supposed to be me?

  He opened his eyes and coughed. He held his face up on his chin. Her weight on him was fairy but heavy was her darkness. He had. He had drawn her, not ruined rows, foiled geometries—he’d drawn Maggie Mechaine there in the dust. What he lacked was the power to draw her up out of the dust, break off the end of his rib, and bring her back to the world as she had been. All he’d done was make her as she was now.

  I love—

  She plucked him up easily and dragged him over to her mirror. Her bat to the back of his knees sent him crashing down onto it. It suddenly seemed bigger—before there was no way he could’ve stretched out on it like this.

  I stole some sky, she explained when she saw his confused glance at the surface under him, all it is is petrified music. I have the gift—maybe that is magic—of peeling it off the underside of the Up and pinning it to all my impatient hunts. She planted a foot on the nape of his neck and the other near the back of the mirror and they rose. Yesterday today was tomorrow. Yesterday a truth was a lie. Do you understand?

  No, he spat back up at her. You killed that fellow—Rapey.

  And you’re not listening. Who did I kill? Rapey? What sort of name is that to give part of Love? She clucked her tongue and ground the heel of her boot into his back. Lies are the Eighth Sea. Stop trying to leave! Have you ever drowned in milk? They were suddenly standing in the ruins of the church she had had pulled down. The roof had been left in place, but the rest of the structure was vandalized and destroyed beyond recognition. Someone had placed an out-sized bucket of baseballs where the altar used to be. She shoved him roughly towards it.

  He remembered the baptisms she conducted here. Lung to league. N-no—

  She hooked her arm through his and wheeled him over to the fount. They stood over it. It was brimming over with a foul, white foam. She indicated this froth. These milks come from a man who lives in a village near Weatherhead. I’m not sure where it comes from, but the milks are born with mousetraps already inside them, so that when the cheese is made—you understand.

  He nodded. The traps are already inside. He had sudden, poetic revelation. This man—he turned on her, this man says he is your father, am I right?

  She recoiled.

  Answer me! He spoke slowly, a trudge over truths, He says—he is—your father. Doesn’t he?

  A mob of shelter-eyed, haunt-backed citizens appeared in an instant, pinning his arms to his sides. She stood there, eyes wide, glaring into his face. The townsfolk held him down while one of the them gently tipped over the bucket. Baseballs in various stages of use and misuse tumbled down the tiny steps and rolled out into the splintered pews. Where they came to rest, if joined by lines, he saw, they made a constellation.

  The citizens dragged him over and held his head over the bucket. She drew close, eying him warily and then she slit her wrist without a wince. Out of the mouth of her wrist poured a thick viscous fluid and the rattle of wood and metal gave truth to her words, for the traps were indeed there.

  You venerate her. Your wife. Is she dead?

  Yes! Yes!

  She looked at the others. Put him in. He retched as someone brought his face down to the surface of the liquid. It wasn’t milk. His head was forced under. Her foot was stamped down on the nape of his neck.

  You must never leave this city, he heard through the rush in his ears. His voice.

  ⧜

  The first time he asked her out, she had replied, without looking up, “No. Fuck you.”

  But he had pursued her. The third time she acquiesced and finally darted a glance up at him. He thought this was the first time she had ever actually looked at him. Before, Maggie Mechaine never really seemed to look at anyone, but now, as the memory of that day pluckily settled itself down in its place, he knew he had been wrong.

  She owned and ran a small framing store in a strip mall back then. She was the only employee. He had four sisters, a strange and bewildering tribe. One of them lived in Baltimore and loved other women, which only heightened the confusion. This particular sister was silver before silver was cool and he felt consoled by her hearty bones and the showcase of her soul that she called art, an alien concept to him, so he’d sometimes find for her little windows filled with paint that he thought she’d like. In truth, she did, startled that this odd brawn brother had such an eye for those second marriage creations that the true artist typically disdains. She ranged her apartment with them. She would always favor Maggie Mechaine. She held his hand while they buried her and never again after that.

  This particular sister was what led him to this framing store he had noticed on the way home from work.

  The first time he saw Maggie Mechaine she was being swore at. A reptilian Frenchman was espousing the most venomous condemnations upon her, but the man’s bitterness seemed official so he wrapped his orbit in stellar foam and wandered around the shop until the guy left. The girl behind the counter hadn’t looked up once, had actually had the gall to yawn, and didn’t acknowledge the assmouth’s presence once.

  “Hi,” he peered down at the place where her red sea hair parted, he stared at the wake of assmouth, “boy, that guy was a dick.”

  She hummed, he thought. She was bent over a crossword puzzle. He asked her something and her sensual desolation seemed to shift ever so slightly and, without looking up at him either, she replied, “He comes in every Thursday, same time, says the same thing. I wouldn’t really call him a customer, more like an enemy of decency. What do you want?”

  This framed. Could she recommend—

  A hand shot out and collected the proferred art. “Gimme a coupla days.” Her words were long and lazy plantations. He waited three days before going back. The painting was nothing special to him, nor its frame. But there was a brute trick in that skinny young woman’s airs, he found himself thinking. There were certain people that were born with a shout in their throats, his mother used to tell him, and some toss it up to the sky and the birds and others let it drop to the earth. If you don’t listen closely, she said, it’s easy to miss both. His oldest sister called their mother Socrates. He, for his part, called her oracle and flew into his pants and flew in his pants to stare through empty frames at this young woman, trying to decide which way to turn his ear because there was definitely some shouting going on behind that expressionless face.

  The first time he asked her out, she had replied, without looking up, “No. Fuck you.” She was simultaneously cutting board upon which she’d mount a picture, he’d later become intimately familiar with the process, and filling in a crossword puzzle.

  “I—“

  “$33.24,” she barked. Stunned, he paid without a word and left. Browbig, he pondered. Rejection was something alkaline behind the eyebrows. He was not used to it. That cold blaze summoned and summoned, though, and a week or so later, he went back, for when he had gotten home, he had noticed something. She had given him no picture.

  So again he went back, he watched her insubordination dart back and forth behind the counter for a while, he keeping his distance from her rust-capped enmity, wondered at her colossal curtness with everyone who dipped their toes into her pond. She wasn’t particularly pretty, or not pretty enough to suffer over, maybe. Too thin, maybe, or maybe not. She held herself in such a way that the shape of her was indeterminate except for her bony wrists which nothing can hide. He had the sudden urge to pick her up off the ground. The parts of her face were borrowed from various pretty girls. When placed in their current, awkward configuration at the top of Maggie Mechaine, though, they were not very pretty at all. Her mouth, for example was a tad too wide, the lips to
o thin, her nose too long, but her eyes, though drowsy, were too indeterminate a blue to be uninteresting.

  “I’m just gonna stand here and talk to myself, if that’s cool,” he told her. She didn’t acknowledge him one way or the other. There was, he noted with frustration, no way to judge the tilt of her shout. She definitely had it, that elusive emission that his mother had spoken of. Incognito he stood and watched her, incognito he left after a quarter of an hour, slipping another obscene admonishment and another receipt for $33.24 under his belt.

  “Why?” she finally asked the third time he came. Fairy tales work in triplicate, he remembered. She looked up at him for the first time, holding a frame out before her. She raised it up and made it a halo around him. “Why?” He took this as a ‘yes’, and indeed it was a ‘yes’.

  Oh, ah! Maggie Mechaine and her questions!

  (12 Across) I Seek a Comedy Filled with Punches.

  Then she can find it somewhere else, he told the woman next to him in the line he’d encountered after he finally ventured out. He felt a little better, better after his night dreaming of that first encounter. Too, it was as if these recollections of his had somehow emboldened Weatherhead’s subjects, endeared him to them, for this old woman he addressed, she turned her one good eye up to stare at his split and bruised face. She chuckled.

  You young people and your fists! She clucked her tongue. She was grey, like all the others. Her eye had been put out some years ago was the story told by her steady acceptance of the agony of being.

  What’s it feel like? It’s like always being half-asleep, she replied.

  Had she done it, he wondered?

  No, no. The wars of Weatherhead against the surrounding country and its towns had never really ended, she told him, there was a perpetual war on and at times the populace were press-ganged into motley siege mobs flung at the walls of Weatherhead’s more stubborn neighbors.

  He rubbed his rough beard. So there were other cities on the plain between the black mountains he and the bandits had descended from and the sea. Not so much anymore, another voice piped up. She’d laid waste to the entire region. Even the sky. Too, this violence came in regular cycles. Once the unbending will of the other towns reinvigorated itself, then the walls started coming up once again, and then she began the war anew.