Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  What does this have to do with me?

  She straightened a little and adjusted her little hat. You’ve accepted Weatherhead. You’ve become a citizen. You bristle and chafe and hate me. But you stay for some reason. They think you’ve come to kill me again.

  I didn’t kill you ever.

  Did I hang myself? I couldn’t help overhear them saying that. I’ve never heard that before. And you, she massaged her throat with a slender white hand, it’s always necks and napes and throats with you. Did you hang me? I keep thinking I drowned. Never mind. I know what you’re going to say. Here’s what I want from you: I want you to help those people. I want you to be the lie I never wanted you to be. He started at these words, for this was another moment when he couldn’t help but feel the rough outlines of the truth of Maggie Mechaine struggling against the words of this beast. We’ll fight their lies with lies. Remember this morning in my mouth? She had produced a tube of lipstick except it was full of blood and she was daubing it on her lips. He dug his fingernails into the countertop. The graffiti? When I let you into my mouth? And then I uttered you out? I command you to be my speech, my words and wonders. I baptized you in my spit and showed you the hidden words on the backs of things. I am a shifting math, mister. If there’s no alphabets and numbers, then stories and solutions are impossible.

  B-but—he faltered, hesitant to wrestle with the logic of her madness, there was an alphabet there—on the back of your bite.

  Then mind what it said. She relaxed and stretched herself back out over the linoleum countertop. She perched the sliver of bone between her teeth, a macabre toothpick, and went back to etching for a moment until she jumped a little as if oh-you’re-still-here! and her eyes roamed over him. I get off at Dead, if you wanna meet me back here, her voice was half-taunt, half-coo.

  He went back outside and collapsed into the chair next to Machine Eel, the girl-boy whose birth was a stolid untruth. The roar of them was half-want, half-coup, but he listened anyway.

  Sir Burn assured him rewards: I can get you out, past the mountains. There’s an airship—

  Spindle warned him: Where it’s kept is a dangerous and hollow place. The place for growing memories.

  He had had it up to here with these jokers, so he pointed out: Those aren’t memories. They’re ash trees. Have you written down your agenda? He was making fun of them now, arguing with each of them in turn.

  Paper is forbidden in Weatherhead.

  Yes, but—

  Writing is forbidden in Weatherhead.

  Could I just finish a—

  You hear her every morning, don’t you?

  I dunno. Is that her voice? Sometimes it isn’t.

  What did her teeth tell you?

  They said: How many are we? Look behind you.

  And then what?

  I came out—out of her mouth. He didn’t like the way this sounded at all.

  You mean, Sir Burn gasped, she spoke you? You became Her Word?

  No! No!

  She spoke you in a moment. She’s trying to create a moment of you. A present of you.

  You are now her lie. Her Word. A walking—a living gospel of death. He was supremely pleased with himself, smug. They had him right where they wanted him: the lie, the true last lie of Weatherhead. Sir Burn mocked back, What did you think? That pasts have a meaning here? Histories in Weatherhead are forbidden. What is it she said when she conquered us?

  In unison, they whispered: The a go is gone. It has went.

  That old woman in the hospital? She was Weatherhead’s last librarian and do you know what she did to her? Pulled her apart in the square and rebuilt her out of the only histories she didn’t destroy.

  No, that can’t be. She told me she was the last law in Weatherhead.

  Aye. And this law says the past is a puzzle so badly rebuilt.

  Vomiting tears, he crept home.

  ⧜

  She’d crawl and crawl, encountering her panties, her lighter, books of crosswords with spines split just like hers, her giggles were her wake.

  When he and Mal both made detective, Mal threw them a party. Maggie Mechaine was there, in a dress and all—jesus, he couldn’t ever remember seeing her in a dress before. She looked almost pretty in her lavenders and violets. Her face was flushed, he bet her nape was, too. She’d endured sun and ceremony all afternoon. Jammed down on her head was—

  “That’s my hat,” he pointed out. He had been drinking for several hours already. He picked her up with the fleetest of ease and crushed her to him. This singular action had only one analogue in his mind: forgetting in the night how many steps there are and there’s that hesitant moment—have you reached the top or not? Will your sole hit air or solid? Forgetting the customary and no matter that you might miss, lose your balance and fall backwards—you put your foot out anyway.

  He and Maggie were still weeks away from discovering they would never be able to have children but he remembered now how far away she seemed to be. He and Summer were a few months away from beginning their doomed and stupid affair but he remembered now how close he wanted to draw Maggie Mechaine. So he did. They were on a downward trajectory, he knew. Somehow he had to arrest it—

  She laid her hands across his chest. Everyone was staring at them, surrounding them, bedside gawkers at the miracle coma couple—how many years have they been sleeping?

  “Mind the wound,” he faked a wince. He bumped his forehead against the edge of his erstwhile beret. “You stole my hat, Mags.”

  “My justice is swift,” she teased. “Here. I got you a replacement.” In a box was one of those Sherlock Holmes hats. A deerstalker, Mal called it. He perched it on his hand and modelled it for everyone. Summer Gruel had been at this party, hadn’t she? Call on every soul in the land and they will be swift and just. Ah, yes, she was just there, surveying the lay of the land. He figured she was probably the one turning out the lights just before he got to the top. He walked over to say ‘hi’. Maggie, Mal, and one of their superiors were discussing the Season. Randy had been banished to Texas—but they were in the playoffs, apparently.

  Maggie appeared at his elbow. “Oops.” She picked up her beret and scratched her head. He watched her mouth. “I asked Mal’s girlfriend if she wanted to go smoke up.”

  “Did it not occur to you that we are at a party where at least—at least fifty percent of the people are officers of the law and my colleagues?” He hissed this into her ear, he was so darn close, she whispered back, his tongue got all clotted up with her hair.

  “S’alright,” she patted his chest again. “I love that she always wears blue. I’m gonna go tell her that.”

  “You didn’t tell me what she said?” But Maggie had sprung away. “Oops what?”

  Maggie had to drive him home, but after a midnight fist full of meat, he felt better. He was on nights so neither one of them were tired. She was standing in their den staring at him, surprised at his entrance, cigarette dangling off her lip, her arm up to the bicep littered with frames. They stood there in silence long enough for him to drunkenly count them. There were 26. Or 52, depending on how hard he squinted.

  He swayed in the doorway. “Oops what?”

  Maggie had driven long nails into the wall behind the couch. That was what that sound had been. Not head wounds. She hung the frames on these, one at a time. She said, “She explained the chemistry of pot to me. Isn’t that cool? She’s super smart so I traded her and explained why the smoke moves the way it moves, air currents and all that.”

  “You still didn’t answer my question.”

  She threw a spellcaster’s hand up at him. The ends of her fingers glowed, he imagined. “Shush, this is important. That girl has never said two words to me the whole time they’ve been dating. Whether we were high or not don’t matter.”

  “How does she know so much about science? Isn’t she a musician?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Same difference.” She shifted her cigarette to her other hand and hung up a frame. Holidays we
re coming, he understood the calendar enough at other times to know this truth, and she was taking stock. “You know what else she told me? She said to me, all music is set to the heart’s pitch.”

  “So you did get her high.”

  She threw a frame at him. It bounced off his forehead and broke in half. They both laughed. She was still wearing that dress. “Yeah, so? I wear dresses all the time, you just never notice.”

  “I don’t?” He thought of uppercase Summer then, and her high breasts. How different than lowercase maggie mechaine with her lowland drawls and her sleepy eyes. He laid his head back. “I had a dream the other night that you were a fox—“

  She looked at him sidelong, counting quietly, one-eye squint against her smoke, the other just squint. He sat up, “No—you turned into a fox. It was night—I dreamed it was night—well, it was night anyway, I guess—“ She sat down on the table in front of him. The wooden manacles on her arm clattered. The scarecrows were in for it now. He went on: “You jumped down off the bed and I tried to follow you—you were so—perfect and red—but I couldn’t get up. Like I was being held down by something—like being at the bottom of a pool, you know? There were all these hunters surrounding our bed watching us have sex—but that wasn’t in the dream. And you jumped down, fox, and slipped between their legs and they just all stood there—their faces were weird, too, like—they were like old tree roots but the edges were like postage stamps—punched out—“

  She listened, turning the frame nearest her wrist over and over again and he was silent for so long that she thought he’d fallen asleep under his deerstalker. “You were just rememberin’ that story I told you—about the fox and my first kiss,” she laughed. She plucked up the end of his tie and held it out horizontal and began sliding frames down it. They thumped into his chest one by one.

  He opened his eyes and pushed back his hat. “Naw—“ Sometimes her speech polluted him. “No—it wasn’t that. You turned into a fox.”

  She suggested they go for a walk and clear their heads. Clear night, lucid night with a moon up there buck naked. When he snapped awake, it was well past three in the morning. The door clattered. Frames piled there somehow spilled off his chest adding to the commotion. Where had she been? he wanted to know. She’d gone for a walk, she told him. He said he didn’t want to go—

  “In the middle of the goddamned night? Jesus, Maggie—“

  “Sometimes we kind of forget about the world around us. I don’t remember the last time I went outside at night. I’d go back out if you want—“ She cried out—he’d put his weight on the card table just inside the door and upended it, dispelling the puzzle she’d just begun.

  “Oh, shit, sorry—“ She fell to the floor and swept the jumbles up protectively with her forearms. She was swearing under her breath.

  “Do you know how long it took me to get this far?” The puzzle was called ‘Pile of 1000 Ladders’. She batted his hand away. “Git. Isn’t it bedtime for you? You better hope none of these are missing, asshole.”

  He grabbed her from behind. “Do you think I don’t love you?”

  “Tell me something true—one thing,” she wriggled out of his grasp and continued sweeping up pieces with her little white hands, “and then I’ll tell you. Stop.” His hands inched up her calves, sweeping up the edge of her dress before them. She kicked him away and stood up, smoothing out her dress. “You should have come with me, on the walk. I turned into a fox under the full moon just for you. You could’ve told me how pretty I looked in my dress and then without it and told me that you loved me. Did you know that? Did you know you could’ve done that?”

  He looked down at his giant hands. “Yes,” he admitted.

  “You don’t need to be a detective,” she scoffed, that barometer behind her chest fell and her eyes called for rain, “to know that a whole pack o’ nothings don’t equal much, do they?”

  What was she talking about?

  “What is it with you? You’re mad ‘cause I can’t make a baby for us? Do you want to know what I saw on my walk? Do you? Everything is alive at night. It can all come out, play, and love without bein’ afraid, all it wants—everything.”

  Although it wasn’t the first night by far that they didn’t share a bed, it was the first time he could remember Maggie Mechaine sleeping outside. She curled up on their balcony in her pretty little purple dress and slept in the sun. There was a pad of paper trapped against her breasts.

  (35 Down) I am the Thing from Which Color Comes.

  So he asked, What would we call that thing? He was taking his breakfast at the diner where she’d taken up station as a false-hearted citizen and he’d been there since before dawn. Why? Maybe he wanted to see what poisons were opening their petals under her today, maybe he wanted to see if she was the high voice—but when it concussed the dark, concrete air of Weatherhead with its intonations, her mouth was away from him and she was half-buried in the guts and coils of a machine which, by all appearances, was an assemblage of plunder from various mechanisms, her fog machine she’d called it after he strolled in whistling and casually asked, pretending he didn’t know her. She loved this game of strangers: she’d been playing it since he arrived, he hoped. She’d looked genuinely surprised to see him, though she must’ve known he was coming—as she’d told him once, the whole city was a spy for all the stations of her body: if her hands were on her hips, then the pavements, cobblestones, and concretes became the sole-searching foundations of cults of incorrect disasters, be they seismic, tectonic, or earth-toned bedrockings and bedrollings. No earthquake or tremor escaped her. Her wrists bent at ninety degrees thus sucked up the unexploited bloods of secrets and wanderings. If she planted her feet far apart and crossed her arms, then the sagging, listless power lines became the arteries for new electricities and udder-kneading electric milkmaids that were once called Rumors. These wounds on the public mound made their way to her across desperate ions, unfurling octopus-like into white tracer fire that she gathered between her forearms. The day’s brawls and executions were largely based on these. His question though—What would we call that thing?—cut off her speech, and she withdrew from the machine’s innards, splotches of grease blotching her cheeks, her hands wiping themselves on her apron.

  She drummed her fingers on her throat as she considered a response, then, with a wave’s shrug she turned back to the fog machine. I didn’t hear anything. Was he, she asked innocently, going to the ruler’s brawls that day? They’d been rare as of late, as if she were distracted but there was a new giant in town she’d bought explicitly to beat down.

  He frowned, then switched tact, determined to pry her open. On his walk to the café, in the pre-dawn murk, this morn uncharacteristically thin, he’d heard a weird, buzzing, droning sound cacophonying the air above Weatherhead. It took him a long moment to ken that it was what he’d once known as the sound of an aeroplane—an aeroplane buzzing the city. Impossible, really, he thought, since science had no place here in this particular story. He asked her about this and, to his surprise, she explained,

  It’s a rainbow. She was still fiddling with the broken fog dispenser, from which the morning still trickled in thin wisps, looked over at him. Do you know what that is?

  A crash of color, he suggested. How would you know? Everything here is old-movie grey and black and white.

  She laughed. What a word! What’s a movie?

  A series of motions run in order to show the watcher a sequence of events, actions. It moves. He thought for a moment, and added: It’s a row of pictures that you run past, each one is a single moment, caught in a single frame. All the moments become movement then—

  She spat to one side and picked up a wrench. An unsettling bright was swelling outside. What a stupid idea! You prick the skin of the word moment and add a V-E? That’s it? And why would anyone run away from a picture? From pictures? She raised the ancient wrench above her head and brought it down in a trim arc, smashing the face of the fog machine. With a muffled cry that so
unded eerily human, its front crumpled and bent and with one last cough or hiccough or strangled sigh, a final puff of fog jetted out from the cracks in its surface and that was it. She turned to him, fumbling at her back, untying her apron as quickly as she could. What would we call that thing? she repeated his question back at him. Less alive than beautiful in that central moment of fire-spat clarity, she tossed her apron aside, spread her fingers out wide across the countertop, pushing his plate of cardboard pancakes aside. When they hit the floor they shattered, he saw without emotion, into an assortment of saw-hewn pieces, all black-and-white, impossible to solve.

  Several notions arose at once.

  Yesterday she had shown him the betrayal of language, of maths. Today she would invoke the fatal habit of color to show him—show him what? Her failures with him had made her curious, he guessed. She was sabotaging her own skies to win him over. Or was it the game of color he’d played with that one part of Love?

  We haven’t much time before I fix the machine that is dictator over the airs of Weatherhead so while I’m becoming angrier and angrier with you for your immortal, stupid questions we’re going to run away from this moment, flee from me, you and me, we’re going to run out of the gray, out of the grave—

  He smirked at her, still lamenting his ruined breakfast, A V and an E is all that keeps them apart, see?

  And yet you, as you always have, are forgetting the Y the why. Run.