Weatherhead Read online

  The first lady said, I lost my eye in the war against the ladyweb. One eye and one husband. Weddings were strictly controlled in Weatherhead, according to her whim, so this poor creature had remained a widow. She smiled at him. You too have been in a war, I think. Mothers know these things. She put a finger to the side of her nose.

  She looked remarkably like his own mother, he realized with a start. Too much, in fact. You have kids?

  She said nothing, just turned away. She was with a group of women, all about the same age, maybe fifty, sixty, hard to tell. He tagged along with them when they finished at the milk line and they all squatted together by a barrel fire and ate their cereal.

  Ak, he spat, this tastes like cardboard. They all exchanged a wary glance.

  It’s made here in our city, one of them said drily. There could, he thought, never be pride in saying that, or of anything in Weatherhead, but all the same he felt like he’d said something rude.

  The milk is foreign, though, said another, from the country around the ladyweb.

  They all cursed as one at this name or title or whatever it was.

  He wiped his mouth off with his sleeve. What’s the ladyweb? Some kind of spider witch or something?

  They all look baffled at his speech. Spi-der? He dismissed his own question with a fling of his hand. Several of them, besides Cyclopia had been in recent campaigns against the ladyweb. The town there was rich and was now, as booty, one of the main conduits provisioning Weatherhead and its ruler.

  Our fields—they were—flattened. All we have left is what we make here in the city. And what with winter always bein’ on—it’s difficult enough as it is.

  He sat forward. Destroyed by her, right? Silence. He switched tact and put down his bowl as he gestured at the awful food. Made here, huh?

  Oh yes! Weatherhead was famous for its devices. They all began talking at once. He raised his hands against this tumult of words, begged them to speak one at a time. They laughed and of-coursed and one by one they spoke to him about the devices of Weatherhead. As they did, each one took on the face of the previous speaker who up and disappeared when finished until, by the end, he was sitting alone with his first friend, the one-eyed old woman.

  In Weatherhead, the first face said, there is a fine machine, several stories tall but sunk down into the earth that is responsible for all the world’s miscarriages! It achieves this by means of a wind-powered hand-crank that is minded by a solemn fellow who cannot speak so he cannot protest. When the wind turns the crank, a storm of rocks strikes the selected wombs at once, crippling the enemy war effort.

  The war effort, he mumbled. The first face had never been.

  In Weatherhead, the second face said, is an even more miraculous device: the one that makes unelectric the sources of all things so that power can only be derived from her writ but how long has it been since she’s called down lightning on the city? Maybe not since she took it? Some say she forget her weathers. In any case, this device steals reactions that lead to the motions inherent in constructions and the makings-of-man. It is a device of the savage imagination! And then she had never been.

  In Weatherhead, the third face said with ratchet, clackety indentured jaws, is a device so vast it is split into four parts. Inside each is a season, all four trapped in impenetrable prisons. We used to think she’d built it and that’s where all the seasons went, caught in her yearbox—that’s what the younger folk call it—but some people say, because they’ve seen it written on her arms or on the bottoms of tables where she feasts and easts—

  Maps, they’re called, someone interjected. But the speaking face had never been and he was left alone with the first woman, the cyclopean widow. Disturbed by the talk of maps-on-bottoms and weathers kept prisoner, he bade her farewell and headed away from the center of the city. He still had no sense of its scope and size and the wall eluded him. He was beginning to wonder if there was one. Hadn’t he seen one when the bandits brought him in? Or—he felt that’d he’d encountered the wall—been shown it, maybe? The days were all hellter and skeleter.

  He wondered after the machines of Weatherhead. He’d seen no such things since he had arrived. Save for the trucks and the rumors of the trains, the place as a whole seemed like it’d been bombed back into an earlier time, unburdened by technology.

  Maggie Mechaine herself had always been quite the technological loafer. She didn’t care much for computers. Up until they moved away, her sole use of the thing was to be the faceless goddess of her fantasy baseball league, the occasional online order for bowls or bongs surreptitiously recategorized as neo-retro plant holders.

  Like the time itself, Maggie Mechaine began her own steady dissolution into something abstract, withdrawn, and piecemeal, but at the same time she became the paradox of how did we know before everything went all abstract? Back then, he thought, there were still spaces open and given over to enfolding and engulfing the entire rich experience of another person’s life. Now, as if Maggie Mechaine had been warning us all along, it’d been squeezed into frames, too small and too numerous to make sense of, puzzle pieces strewn in the snow.

  Her frames. “I like them empty like that, we can fill them with whatever we want. That probably sounds a little cheesy, right?” became, by the month of her death “I was never able to fill them with anything.” What he realized too late was that she didn’t mean she had nothing, it meant she had too much. Oh yeah, and everyone else was blind.

  He remembered the year they decided to move, that year of queer weather, birds and planes with feathers getting beaned by pitched buildings and balls.

  “Tell me, goddammit! Aren’t we all just pieces of something bigger? Spit some lies at me, again! C’mon! You’re so good at it! Spitting them in me! In me? I’m asking you a fucking question? Is there something bigger in me? Is it me? I’m breaking up!”

  “If that’s what makes you feel better, go ahead and think that,” he remarked with a barren tone. He was sick of her fickle rages. “I like to think it’s simpler than that. Fewer pieces.”

  She took a step towards him, shaking. “At once? All at once?”

  “Look, you’re higher than Christ, right now, you should go lay down—“

  “I’m not gonna die like that. Not lying down.” She punched him in the chest only half playful, mocking him with her other half. “C’mon, spit some white lies in me,” she mocked. “You piece of shit. I ain’t no Summer, huh?” But that was just it. Maggie Mechaine could be any season she wanted. Here, in Weatherhead, she’d even somehow managed to make prisoners of all four of them. Summer was no longer his preserve and this idea turned his stomach.

  He couldn’t process her death. When his father had died, and then his mother when he was much older, after he had met Maggie, those were different kinds of loss. He had never felt anything but alienated from her. Was it always like this? Was this what love was supposed to be? Why had he never tried to make it something more, before Maggie Mechaine got shattered into 51 pieces?

  He gritted his teeth, ground his fists into concrete wall. This fucking place, he thought, only death and bitterness and anger all around him. Stupid questions. Answers only. Questions that sounded like answers from on high. The feral savagery of whoever that woman was, be she Maggie Mechaine or not, polluted the place. It wasn’t the devices of Weatherhead, it was the town’s industry, an entire mobile, industrial district, a walking steel mill full of the slosh and hiss of molten slag, a peripatetic gasworks belching noxious anger and black words, mixing in the mouths and noses of everyone cursed to dwell here. She’d replaced the i-beam, the girder, the plant, the billowing smog with her ignominy and violence and her fraudulent rule. This place was deluged by evil. It was as if the dam that’d contained her during life had shattered with her death and all those hidden evils, love of atrocities, and bestial truculence which ended in the sick, ageless song of wood ringing against skull, had all spilled out of her, washed over her. She’d become a black island.

  Maggie M
echaine—she’d never been anything more than a muffled scream. When they fought or argued, and they most certainly did, it never turned brutal, despite his best efforts and her incitements. Hers had been the reedy, whispered hatreds. Never like this, never—

  There was a muffled scream nearby. With pinched face, he gently took his fists out of the wall he’d ground them down into. His knuckles were bleeding pretty badly, he saw. Wiping them on his trousers with a wince, he followed the shafts of these mysterious peals to a half-illuminated alley. The wall forming one side had partially collapsed, giving a kind of vaulted roof to the space. Down under this, someone in dusty, worn clothes was pressing himself atop someone else.

  Help me! He heard. Trying to rape me! It was a young woman’s voice. In Weatherhead, they never asked for help, the victims, he’d noticed over the days. Law in him leapt forward. Jesus—

  He dashed over, smashing a fist down onto the nape of the fellow’s neck and he crumpled with a strange mewling sound. Roughly, he seized the would-be assailant and flipped him over, raising another fist to strike. Oh. Ah.

  It was the bandit he’d nicknamed “Rapey”, the young, recently deceased violent faceless kid. Except when you were this close to him, you could see that he actually had the faint contours of a face. It looked like someone had wound his face in gauze or spider webs or something and pulled it so excruciatingly tight against his skin that it was all almost smooshed flat. He resisted the sudden urge to touch this material before he registered that the fellow was, by all appearances, quite not dead.

  What the hell are you doing? He grabbed Rapey by the collar of his duster and, holding him down, looked over at the struggling woman. Except it wasn’t a woman. And it wasn’t struggling. It was one of those old-fashioned coat racks, the ones with the curved feet and curved hooks at the top, looking for all the world like a dryad caught leaving her shift at dawn, arms upstretched and yawning.

  Rapey grinned like a wolf up at him. You couldn’t see the smile. It was more like you could feel it running over your eyes like a cheese grater. It’s all she lets me have here, the furniture, he explained wolfishly.

  The furniture. He released the psychotic teen. That’s—uh—wait—I thought you were dead.

  Rapey shook his shaggy head and climbed to his feet, unabashedly tucking away his mammoth erection which, he saw, was also tightly wound with the same white material. Naw. Huh? Oh you meen ‘cause a’ the other day n’ all, when she crack’d my skull but good! Naw, she jest likes ta get me all work’d up like that, leed me on and so forth, but she ain’t ever gonna gimme herself up, nosiree.

  So, in other words, you’re not dead. This seemed a logical assertion, though in Weatherhead

  Nosiree, he said again. He fingered the hole in his cheek, plainly visible beneath the bandage, absent-mindedly and stared down at the coat rack which didn’t stir. He must’ve knocked it out, he found himself thinking. Who’d been screaming, though?

  Aw, that wuz me. I throw voices n’ such. I’m kinda the mouth o’ tha outfit, see? Dealin’ with th’ sounds n’ such. And the fuckin’. ‘Course some’ll go so far as to call it rape. Heck, it ain’t rape if thair dead izzit? He guffawed and slapped his knee. Plus, ah lahk it when they call fer help n’ all, yellin’.

  A uniquely revolting beast, he thought.

  Rapey narrowed his smothered gaze at him. You ain’t been register’latin’ yer pitches, cuz.

  Should I be?

  Well, yeah. You ain’t gonna be configgerin’ correctily iffin you doan’t. People’re gonna start to wonder. No pitches in Weatherhead unless she’s knowin’.

  Thanks for the tip. He turned to go.

  Well, he tipped his hat, be seein’ you. Unless you wanna go—he indicated the coat rack with a grubby hand. He’d already unshackled his pants. His erection was covered in the same mummy gauze, he noticed for the second time for the first time.

  No, no, thanks though. That coat rack had once stood in his house, he suddenly remembered as he left it to its fate.

  Weatherhead does funny things to a man.

  ⧜

  Maggie Mechaine’s mother, god rest her soul, had once told him that her only daughter had a knack for catching moments. Other kids would catch fireflies; Maggie would catch them catching fireflies.

  He immediately pictured a colossal Maggie with cupped hands, running along, sweeping up a tiny gaggle of light-seeking children. But instead a blocky Polaroid camera was pressed into his hands.

  “She was always quite the shutterbug,” the mother smiled up at him from her chair as he turned the camera over. “Maggie, when she was just a young thing, she was always quite the artist.”

  “Is that right?”

  Instead of her characteristic modesty (or was it apathy), timidity (or was it depression), or shouting (or was it savagery), Maggie merely nodded and smiled at her mother’s words, validating them through her weird and enthusiastic lack of protest.

  “Shutterbug, Shuteye,” he handed the camera to his wife. She took it, turning it this way and that as he had, like the skull of an ancestor.

  “Oh, are you tired, dear?” The mother half-rose with a wince but he insisted no.

  “That’s—Shuteye is my nickname for Mags,” he explained, “’cause whenever we have se—“

  “—are both tired,” Maggie cut him off with a glare.

  Her mother clucked her tongue. “Oh, I get it. Her and that marijuana,” she said with gravity. She pronounced it mare-ee-WANA. Maggie vanished with her brother whose head had appeared around the door. Her older brother. The other brother, younger than Maggie—well, no one mentioned him much.

  “He’s not coming,” he stated as they bumped over railroad tracks on the way here.

  “Nope. Why are you driving so slow?”

  “Need a cowcatcher on this thing out here. Where the hell am I going?”

  “See that sign that say ‘rib tip’?” She pointed out the window.

  “No,” he sighed, “I don’t.

  Maggie’s mother leaned on his arm for a minute, catching her breath. They were almost to the top of the stairs. “If you’d like,” he said, “I could probably just carry you the rest of the way.”

  She laughed the laugh of a dove trapped inside a clown car. She was terminally ill, they all were in those days it seemed, and thus had no fear of death or of life. He studied her face for truth. Neither Maggie nor her brother could’ve been even remotely related to her. She was tall, frail, willowy a bad poet might call her, slipper feeder a good poet might call her for her excelling at repose, a yellow-haired marat. There was something not quite right about her, he thought much later, as if she were all an act, as if this whole brash hick thing was a role she was playing, as if this tall, once lovely blonde creature had gotten trapped in a comedy or tragedy on a perpetual cycle of performances that only her death would end.

  “I always forget how just terrifically BIG you are!” She tilted back over the bannister, spreading her hands his span apart. But she eschewed the kind titan and pulled herself along the railing. “And I forget, too, you’ve never visited us—me here,” she corrected herself. Maggie’s father had finally up and passed. No one seemed to have noticed this much, despite it being the reason the house was full of Mechaines.

  “Really, you shouldn’t trouble yourself—“

  “Dyin’ don’t make me rude, dammit all,” she paused at the door, panting, “I ain’t no bedpannin’ lazy good fer nothin’! I’ll die on my feet.” No, that’d be Maggie seven years hence. Her mother would die in her sleep. “Here.”

  This was Maggie’s old room, she told him with a wink and a twinkle, making him feel like they were transgressing all robber into a nun’s cell. If there were any vows left here, they weren’t in evidence. He’d stolen that virginity out from under her daughter long ago, he didn’t tell her. Yet, there was an almost malicious delight to the mother throwing open the daughter’s sanctum to this brute. Maggie’s mother made everything she did feel like she was c
ommitting a crime.

  He peered inside. Some jigsaw puzzles glued into one and tacked to the walls around a few Iron Maiden posters. And Slayer. Slayer?

  “She always had such troublin’ taste in music,” the mother sighed as if reading his thoughts. Something in his periphery caught his eye, inch marks and years notched into the door frame. The last one, barely to the bottom of his chest read, “1990. Fuck you.” The mother followed his smile. Maggie’d hoped for the mother’s heights. She’d taken up with smoke to compensate, maybe?

  There were a few little pictures of Maggie here and there. The mother sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and tried not to cough up too much blood in front of him. A stack of crosswords knelt by the bed. She used to cut them out, when she was a child. She just loved those squares and filling them in. He nodded. He still hadn’t moved from the door. Maggie’s head appeared under his arm. Her niece’s head appeared under her arm, faces under faces. This niece was five. She was almost Maggie’s daughter, they both wished it, the aunt and the child.

  “Keep in mind,” Maggie said with a belch, “not how I left it, but how she made it look like I left it.” She handed the can of root beer back to her little version.

  The mother shrugged. “Can’t rightly leave it in the mess you did. Guests sleep in here.”

  “Right under the ‘South of Heaven’ poster,” he pointed out.

  “You’re big,” Goewin Mechaine squeaked. “A superman!”

  He looked at her distant little face. “Not so big as that.”

  The mother handed him a shoebox full of skeletons. “Maggie made this—when, you were eight?” Maggie shrugged and showed her niece a box full of tiny baseball helmets she’d collected as a child.