Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  And they did, they ran faster than all their prisons could, left her standing there in front of the sabotaged machine, she peeling away from her first shade which left her white and vibrant just ahead of him. Black is the sum of all things, she cried out to him as they dodged through the before-dawn. Her waitress’s hat tipped off her hair trying to follow the blacks back to where she stood suddenly alone and livid in the diner, but he caught it deftly. They cut across a wide square full of sleeping or just-waking citizens who groggily wondered where all the grey had gone. Looking up with them, for the first time since arriving in Weatherhead, he saw a naked sky.

  Red, she called and her locks consented to the prohibition of bloods and pulses in the city, the last blood remaining, and stripped off of her, flapping in the winds of their wake back to where she was roundly cursing and kicking the fog-maker. Red is the color of the hand and the blush and the long dawn that the sun cuts through morning! He followed her ivory gesture and indeed, some of her reds had poisoned the agonized heavens. Would there be a sunrise in Weatherhead? Oh, but, the flash of her thin blue eyes back at him told him that the reds were the caress of her agitation’s bite, her rage, and the inside of her mouth and sex, all of her secret places that he’d been in were red, all the places that hid graffiti for him, and with demonic purpose she threw herself against the machine in the diner, soldering wires with her teeth, welding sheets of metal back into place with her snarls and renewed hatreds—there was little time left. With a leap she threw her shallow remaining shades onto an abused fire escape and tore, hand over hand, up, up, up. Her greens nearly knocked him loose from his own climb mere yards below her as they screamed past. Green, she called down with a snigger, is where we hide. It is also sickness and growth. It is the trickster color, the color of greed and envy, plant and rot, spring and corpse. Green had no chance in solemn old Weatherhead which had sickness to the brim and no roots for the growings of things. It spiraled away from her onion-skin spectrum and she caught it without a thought, slamming the front panel of the fog-maker shut, switching it on, and tearing out the door after herself.

  They spilled out over the roof. All she had left was blue and white. The former she peeled off her eyes and threw out over the city, With blue I summon sky— Her voice cracked, an albino tongue, a sickly worm, it could hardly bear the scorch of her words.

  But now you’re blind, he clutched at her as she sank to her knees.

  Her white lips quivered, Yes, but blue is also the youngest color, the color of gods, Cleopatra’s eyeshadow—there are many blue snakes, too many, maybe—one I feel biting at my breast—blue is water—

  Sadness, he added.

  Policeman, she touched his chin with her bleached bone fingertip, blue eats red the deeper you go. He’d never seen a rainbow die. I didn’t drown, no, no, I didn’t. And as he cradled her head and stared down into her empty eyes, she appeared over the brick edge of the building, herald to the true dawn of Weatherhead that erupted all smoke and smog behind her and she reclaimed all her colors, declared them and not he irreducible and pushed him away and herself out of his grasp.

  She strode toward the edge of the roof and surveyed the fog’s announcement of morning, the violent throttling of dawn all but complete as the clots embittered the overcast sky. He clenched his fists at her triumph/failure, but she beat him to the punch by addressing him thus,

  I’ve heard prey tell of a city far from Weatherhead where color is injected into the blind and sound injected into the deaf. She rearranged her shades all about her and, all plucky, put her waitress’s hat back on. A tendril of fog curled up around her bare shin. She smiled down at it. I have never visited the place, name of Donedragon. It is a place of cures and assassins, for many have been the Seasons sent out from that place to slit my throat in the name of loftier kingdoms than mine. She chuckled and looked back at where he sat, sobbing on his knees, holding an empty palette, an empty frame. Can you imagine? A winter or a spring trying to come upon me in my sleep and cut me? Me? Spring even tried to rape me before I took all His Green out of him and smothered him with it. Donedragon, though, as I said, is a place of cures and they do—they do miraculous things. They take the colors, the ones you just tried to steal from me, the ones you used to make the false idol up in your tower, your wavelong princess you kept up there that night—

  Ah, he thought, lifting his tear-streaked face. She was jealous. Ever since that night with the Colored Girl she’d shifted here and there depending on the light that happened to fall on her and this last desperate effort to escape herself had failed miserably because of this anger consuming her.

  —they take those colors and put them into a needle say, yea long, and stab it into the eyes of the blind people of Donedragon.

  It’s called light, bitch, he managed to retch. Stop making impossible games for my ears.

  She ignored him, And sounds, too, they bring sound to a boil and then pour it into the useless ear-holes of the deaf ones who dwell there, mostly young men and old ones, too, also a kind of wave, so my spies tell me. I wonder, she turned around and looked down at him, what sounds did she make? What were Love’s sounds when you penetrated her color? Was it a false music?

  He leapt to his feet and stormed to her, seizing her wrist on a sudden and pinning her right arm behind her back. Her eyes went wide, blue renewed there, snatched back from the thief herself. He pressed his palm over her heart. His was a roar into/over her voice, Hear that?

  No, she gasped, music? She didn’t struggle, didn’t detach her greys from his, slid her free hand around his wrist and moved his hand to the right or left, he couldn’t tell because there was absolutely no sense of space around her anymore was he in front of her or behind her there’s no music or question marks because she has now savaged language, savaged principles, and savaged the hue of everything everything and she spat right in his face her saliva was filled with rainbows oil-slick-on-water engine mouth hit in the face with a truck the size of the world and indistinct they both coiled around death he swooned she laughed all the way down to the ground where he’d thrown them both

  She got up, dusted off her skirt, smoothed down her mussed-up hair. They were standing in the street. She raised her fists. I was never blue to a bird. I was never red to a lust. I was never green to a seed.

  Please, he begged, stop this—please—Maggie—

  She drove her fist into his face and 51 spatters of blood were un-nosed. She looked down at her knuckles. Crimson, little crimson—Who gave you red? Was it blood? Tell me who! She shook him by the throat.

  It was only ever you, he croaked, stumbling backwards, that’s what you want to hear?

  She’d caught up to herself now. The rainbow had been lost, a drop of ghost in an ocean of death. I found my why—the why between gray and grave, the why of you and out, pit and pity, the why that takes I out of die and turns it whatever color I want, the why that makes war wary of me.

  Her black consumed her. Black is all. Black is the sum of all things. Black is the thing from which all color comes. To fall into blackness is to fall into Me.

  But I found you, he sobbed, scattered over white—

  And now, her fugitive hues resurfaced for a moment, her cheeks and eyes flashing red, do it over black, my black. All-consuming black.

  It was simple, she told him. Just as the word comes from the thing, so the color comes from the thing, not vice versa. Running down a row of pictures doesn’t make the pictures move. It makes you move. Stand still, she mocked him now, with a thousand dead faces and you’ll know death better than merely running alongside it.

  He yawned and stared down at his bill. 33.24 in her loopy scrawl. Her pen’d been empty, though, but here was red, thick-eyed red. Where did she keep the color, then?

  She slid a cup and saucer across the counter. He trapped it between his hands. There was a little storm in there, it was all black. Black eats all. The refills are free, she yawned, too.

  Together they stared out at gray ol’ We
atherhead. Slow morning.

  Yep.

  ⧜

  He once thought that giving her a child might change things.

  Had she heard him approach? Who was she talking to? Not him, he realized. She hadn’t heard him approach. She was wearing headphones, yelped when he pinched her knee the way he always used to.

  “What are you listening to?” Why was she in the basement? His basement? He found her there zoning out on his weight bench. It was the closest she could get to his sweat just then.

  “My new favorite band. Did you just ask me if I want to have kids again? We went over this before, didn’t we? We can’t. I’m pretty sure the love doctor said we were shit outta.”

  “If you can’t be serious for a minute—could you please shut that off?” She did. He explained that there were other options, expensive ones, but now with his promotion, better insurance—they could try it.

  As for the music, he found this disc amongst her things. “Electric Wizard”. As if magic needed amplification in Maggie Mechaine’s world. Who was it that pronounced the word in such a way that made you think they were discussing pasta? Pasta-humous, not post-humous. Post-human.

  “Whaddya thinkin’?” She winced through the smoke at him. “Charity balls?” She chewed on the end of the joint, a lithe patina of a cigar-chomp patton. ‘Charity balls’ was her jab at his infidelities. ‘Charity balls’ translated into common parlance as ‘you’re a bag of wind, and I get to sleep with some other chump to get right with nature’, as she put it. “Oh, wait. You’re the cheater.” She pointed just to make clear who she meant.

  ‘White lies’ was what she called his meek, tail-tucked sperm. “Gimme snowfall,” she replied. “I want to leave.” And so they would. They’d be banished to a place where white was alive and ever-falling. Not like here in Weatherhead where white meant death and immobility.

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke pot down here. This is my space.”

  “I like to keep underground,” was all she’d say by way of apology.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I didn’t hear a question. I heard wishful thinking. See,” she slid off the bench, “there’s white lies—“ She tapped her lighter against the bulge in the front of his shorts, “—and there’s black lies.” She tapped her lighter against his sternum. “Black lies come from outta here.” She put her palm over his heart. “We are nothing, don’t ya see? Nothing. Add up all of you and me and what do you get?” She tapped his sternum harder. “Nuh. Thing.”

  When they were a little younger and wondering after the unpronounced lack of any kind of womb-brooding life, Maggie had observed that her ovulations were becoming more and more violent, mute as they might be. She imagined her infertility as a kind of strangulation occurring, because she fought against the idea that the fount of life within her had gone out, blamed it on invisible hands sliding around her fallopian throats and squeezing them, cutting his seed off from her internal eternals. And she’d become rough, violent, as if struggling against these hands meant lashing out at the entire world, seeking their source. She’d break her furniture, tear frames apart and fling them about, sink her sex onto him with such black ferocity that his once-bane to her narrows wilted in terror under her fang-froth.

  When he grew alarmed, then angry at the devastation her birth-thirst wrought, she’d just half-laughed, half-sighed and hung her head to one side like she did and asked him, what was better? The devil you know? Or the devil you don’t?

  All his devils danced just beyond his reach.

  They stood there, she, chin out, staring up at his symmetry, her squinting eye made a fuss of hers. He wanted to hit her—hit her right in that eye. He always felt like that eye was laughing at him more and more. She’d vanished mysteriously for two weeks just before the beginning of summer and when she did finally come back this eye seemed to mock him all the more. His attempts to find out where she’d been had been fruitless.

  She had a long black smudge down her right cheek.

  She fetched around in her pockets looking for something, puzzle pieces spilled out of her shorts and bounced off her bare feet. “Oh, ship,” she twangled, “shit, I mean.” She shot down to the floor, sweeping them up with her hands. He looked down at the perfectly off-center part of her hair.

  He wondered what color her hair was called. It was September just then and her hair looked like all the world’s autumns poured into one.

  He tried to avoid the inevitable argument. “What’s the name for your hair? The color, I mean?”

  She murmured, “I dunno. Give it whatever fuckin’ color you want.” A crumpled up piece of paper had fallen out with the puzzles. She snatched it up with a sudden pluck and stuffed it back into her shorts. “I never,” she answered, “want you to feel like I didn’t give you everything I am. But, no, you can’t have it. No! Stop!” He thrust his hand between her wrists, seeking out this little piece of paper.

  She kicked and bit and egged herself on until finally he relented and unblocked the staircase. The bat bounced wood-on-wood as she dragged it along behind her, pinnochio’s tail and tale. She took his truck.

  The place she batted was called “Rage in the Cage”. They knew him by name there and nods were exchanged and they let him in without paying since he didn’t bat but his wife or girlfriend did, that weird chick with red hair, the headbanger girl? She totally aced the weed connection for all the boys in the office, too.

  He hooked his fingers through the fence and watched her for a while. She hadn’t changed clothes and was even still barefoot. A cigarette was stuck in a knot of iron opposite him. Muscles were stuck between her skin and bone. A bat was stuck between her fists. He studied her form, her shape. He was struck by her ropey limbs. He’d never noticed, had he? It wasn’t like he saw the backs of her arms and legs much: Maggie Mechaine was never one for dresses or skirts or even shorts.

  He watched the sequence of her movements. How lovely she made the motions. She was a languid slugger, almost lazy, until that last millisecond when every single muscle in her body, in a sum of focused energy, went taut, flexed and slammed into the ball.

  She hadn’t seen him yet and as he stood there watching her silent war against the white, he was struck with a sudden, wild idea. He darted off to where she’d left the truck and raced home, images of her naked walking down a staircase made out of frames seared into the backs of his eyes. And when had Weatherhead been built to make him already see visions of it so long ago?

  (36 Across) I am the Storeroom of Variants.

  S’like someone’s reading aloud to me, beside me reading aloud to me. She looked up at him with a faustian sneer. I’ve thought all along it was you, like you did once. Now I’m not so sure who that high voice is. He knelt down beside her, his boots crinkle- crumping the broken glass she was sifting through on her hands and knees. It’s a feeling like—that sensation at door’s edge—

  She tilted her head but looked down. Yes, I know this door. The diner’d been closed. He had been directed by an old man with one hand to a small square near the slag pits. She was searching for something again. She had ordered all the stained glass from the desecrated churches brought to her and now she sank knee-and-elbow deep in a monstrous pile of it, stacking it up in a haphazard, irregular fashion. The back of her tunic was drenched with sweat. The front was patchy with bloody handprints where she kept wiping her hands. That whisper-rush—she tossed aside the red/blue pane she was studying, when you’re shutting it and all you can hear all the air rushing out of it like a—like a—

  Collapsing lung, he finished for her. He seized her hand. She yanked it away with a piano-string of a wince.

  She shook a fist at him. For a madman without a face you seem to have a fondness for doing things to bring injury to it.

  He ignored this and stood up, hands fumbling at his lackluster. But you know what I mean? About the door?

  She sighed and hung her head down between her outstretched arms. If you’d ever learned
to talk Weatherhead, you’d understand, stranger. She raked her fingers through a once-holy image, hissing as its remnants sliced through her fingertips. She stared down at her punctured palm, translucent blue nails pricking her malevolent crucifixion. Then she went on, the rush at the door is the last black whisper of inside to outside, no matter the fix of the room—of either room! Moored in pitch, darkman’s, what you call night, it is even more so, for the poverty of the eyes and the tongue is insurmountable and all that is left to you as you sever space from space, choke off all that preceded you as the place that you once were, coda or elegy ram-dashed off of closing’s tongue is that whisper at the edge that you speak of—the poem of the where-you’ve-been seducing the where-you-are and the rush, the breath of the first grows desperate as the door closes for the second and the door shuts with the smallest zephyr ever, a sandstorm of nothings, not even a whisper, now, not even a hiss now,, not an eve, not a not, not a now—ah!—there it goes—it goes—gasps—ffftt—it hitches like sex-breath—catch it—catch it before it—it’s gone—

  She’d raised herself up on her knees as she spoke, her hands held at a right angle joined at their edges by an invisible hinge. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, as she spoke, they’d closed bit by bit, palms folding together, she’d raised this to her lips, putting the fog of her cold-words lick-lack just above her skin. When she finished, she let her bloodied hands drop back into her lap.

  He looked down at her in awe. Goddess or beast, he wasn’t sure. There was hell’s beauty in both, he’d learned now. She stared blackly, blankly back. She was serial, approximations of a kind of lovely, bestial poetics. A punishment at best, a tongue-lash to the back. Of a sudden came a notion: why had he never considered reincarnation as an alternative to madness? Perhaps she’d been simply reborn this way. No, no, no. He shook his head drawing her dark stare again. Maggie Mechaine had been a sinless girl. She’d been born now after dying into something different, but not with reason, a visitation of suffering upon the sins of the world: she put the ‘mess’ in ‘messiah’.