His silver sister, the one who read to him every night as a child, the one who even now read to him out of the Gospel of Mechaine, though he pretended to not know this, was afraid to know this, actually, It was his silver sister who asked him what Maggie was—this was after she died—during that last strange summer alone, that summer he tried to finish all of Maggie’s puzzles and all he could say was that Maggie—she was somehow, somehow everything.
I have a sister made out of silver, I don’t think I’ve ever told you that—
She shook her head in confusion. A sis-ter? Is that a knife of a kind? Or a knife-hand?
In a way. He nodded. She used to read to me every night when I was a little boy. She’s full of stories that she builds out of what she finds left behind by other people. She looked at mine once after y—my wife died and she asked me, What was Maggie? Maggie was my wife’s name, see.
Her eyes shifted to one side making hiroshima shadows on her lower eyelids. Name.
And I told my sister—I said, Somehow, somehow—she was everything.
She snorted at that. Your problem is is that you’re always speaking in ghosts. Ghosts of what was left. Some people call those memories, she called up to him in bewilderment, holding up her lacerated palms. There is nothing you can do to help her, whoever-she-was. She’s gone ghost, gone past. She winced.
There are no such things as ghosts. He hunkered down and gently took her by her wrists, turning her cut-hands this way and that, pressing the faces of his thumbs into her veins with a slight pressure as he did to his once-wife. Maggie had loved to be stroked there where the secret undergrounds that carried her life flowed just below the soft, diaphanous caul-to-arms that manacled her bloods. This witching thing, though, who watched him dress her wounds with strips torn off his shirt, had no such reaction. She did not tease back on the balls of her feet, draw a sharp breath inward, run away. She just crouched there, fingering a shard of yellow with her untended hand.
Maggie, though, she’d erupted with pulses and palpitations: her wrists, her neck, the left corner of her left eye, her majora, the back of her heel. Maggie loved to be touched where she was alive.
Where are you alive? He tied a simple knot over the back of her hand. Her skin felt like a disagreeable harp, all plucked the wrong way and cold the way words are cold between lovers who trip over things at midnight, usually each other, on their way down, down, and down, out of their stories, out of their names, out of their melodies—codas to bitterness. How could he have ever loved anything remotely resembling this beast? In an instant, he realized he had asked her the wrong kind of question: the last question that should be asked. Start with death and wound and work your way back for this is how memories go—they run backwards. Where are you hurt most?
She rose and turned her hand this way and that, admiring his dressing of her wound. Nowhere. Blood is a trick of the I. Oh! Her fingertips brushed her lips, chin, throat. It feels as if I just discovered that my eyes were painted on, that my mouth was a line of string sewn onto something. I feel—false. A slit throated at dawn, she purred, or a dawn slit at throat.
He bridled at this moment of her innate chaos. Used to her carrion speech as he was, he was never sure as to her intentions. Of late, she’d alternated between wanting to make love to him and wanting to smash his face in. Both were impossible. He needed to get inside her out-of-flesh. He had only phantom desires to lay with the beast. No. He needed to know her. Instead of your colors, what about your hatreds? Can’t you strip them off? Show me their sequence. Remember the ‘movie’?
She inhaled and puffed her cheeks up. Then she nodded slowly. Those moments woven together.
He tried to catch her eye. Listen, he struggled with Weatherhead’s tongue, you can wonder, why did I make that woman my wife? I know now—it’s because of the way she was just at that one moment. She always was. Just that one moment. He paused for a somber moment. He looked down at her as he’d once looked down at Maggie Mechaine for the very first time ever. I’ve never known anyone else who just was the way that she was then. He fretted. It’s like—you could take every instance of her, every piece of her and rearrange it however you wanted, cut new edges to every piece of her but no matter how much you changed her shape, it’d always be her, just in that moment—in all moments. Had he proper eyes, there would’ve been proper tears. As it was, his broken speech betrayed weeping’s brink.
She mulled this over, her bound hand moved over the glass again. My hatreds. Absent, she held out her other hand for him to tend to. He bent over it obediently, his expression pinched and maddened. She kept talking, staring at the helix of broken shards stacked before them. I hate it when that door shuts but I love the breath it makes. I hate the glass, this glass, but I love the shatter. Her savagery was so precocious, so wild and snarl yet also delicious, avant-charred—the kind of fever-froth that made him want to pitch forward into her black anachronism. Was that the only way, then? Or could he just kill her again and again? There is a false-bottom to the past. Best to grind its pieces into dust beneath your boot than try and fit it back together.
There was no point in arguing with her. He surrendered. So, what are you building?
A staircase.
What for?
She eyed him with a curious smile. To go up? For you to go up. My colors betrayed me, so I hid them in the glass, broke them down under heel, ground them down. I want you to leave Weatherhead. I’ll not have my vices and violences sicked with some conjunctivitis that’ll slander the tears of this city. Without them without their tears, I’ll be so, so thirsty, my black mountain refugee.
A small victory, he thought with a tiny, random thrill. She was afraid of him. She wanted to banish him from Weatherhead. And what if he did leave? He watched her gingerly lodge another shatter-tear into the teetering edifice. It already reached up to his shoulders but she was so slight, like Maggie, that she’d reached the point of insurmountable distances. She leaned forward and plucked up a deliciously curved arc of stab and he, without a sound, stepped in behind her, seized her by the hips and Christmas-starred her straight up to where she could continue her rude stairing.
Height power. He laughed. She gasped as he swept her up. Several things then happened at the same time: she twisted in his grasp and drove her hand down in an attempt to drive the shard of broken glass between two of his ribs; he bent to one side with her, letting her slide down against him until he had her trapped between his massive arms; her cheek sank against his hollow-ringing chest; he kissed the top of her head; the arc of her kill went wild and her hand flew out; the shard of broken glass thunked into a predestined niche; he dropped her to the ground.
A’nimble, she landed on her feet and spun, driving her fist into his throat. A’cough, he staggered backwards. She hit him a second—a third time. A’maenad, her eyes searched the ground for an appropriate piece of glass but when she clawed it up into her grasp, she roared and spat in fierce rage.
You bastard! We’ve lost the idea of Break! Idiot fuckshake! She stood lord-and-lady both over him, kicking him in his ribs and arms and legs and faces and just everywhere.
Please—what—
And then he saw. The glass, the pile of blasphemy-stoned stained-glass, de-godded right out of its frames, churches, and beauties—the ways of breaking had been excised, forgotten, unmultiplied—
From me, she wailed and he had never heard her, nor Maggie Mechaine, so crucifixion-desperate. His stare at the facet-perfect, spectral spectrum of evenly-proportioned stairs ahammering itself back out of smash was suddenly unbroken, uninterrupted by the complete lack of motion and lash in her outstretched boot, hanging just before his skull’s clutter for she could break his face no longer—the very idea had been banished from existence and its unspeaking began to radiate out from them in concentric rings of dis-temper, un-raging—form became the coup against her ruin and she cried out with a thousand-crypts on her tongue. For all her dainty, she yanked him to his feet, You and all your stupid tell of
pasts and memories and moments!
He couldn’t help but laugh. All because he kissed her on the head! A small victory.
Stop it! Stop it! She spat on his jaw, horror-the-horrored to see all his parts of darkness kurtzying before her. She shook him violently, her hair epileptic, dashing his skull, her cheeks. This is all your fault, O root of oblivion! Naked heart assassin! She stumbled backwards. She suddenly looked less crimson, paler, a machete of sick had buried itself somewhere behind her bosom and the anarchy of her beautiful poisons and prisons, her heresies and hearsays, her fuck-drunk poetries and the orchards of her abysses limning her seesawing deprivations—all of these things, beautiful in Weatherhead in the days when Weatherhead was the only city on the plain complicit in her dominion, but sins all elsewhere—all of these things had been threatened by his tiny, little kiss. Was it so easy? He wished the foolish youths, the rebels, knew how easy it was. Would all they have to do is love her? Did he? He’d insulted her wilderness, her wildness. Others would bathe her in revolt, rape the pole they’d hang her from, whip the post they’d bind her to, tickle the rack and not the sole of her foot. Was he caught in their caroming fever now as well? False as he was, his wonder was not. Could he let her die again? All because of a kiss?
He could not.
He tore away from her. Unsettling as it was, she had to remain broken. He had erred in appealing to the illusion of her good graces. Without Break, she was nothing and he’d not have that happen again.
Quickly he rounded up several able-bodied men of Weatherhead all alike in their ungroomed, hollow-cheeked, daguerreotype, unsmiling mugs. He needed men that could climb, he told them, and burrow, for Break, in its mad dash to unsunder the city, literally and spiritually, was sure to fan out in all directions, why, look! Even now that neon sign flashing ‘rib tip’ up to whatever opaque gods lived in the sun-snows of that slow unraping of the clouds for the clouds by the clouds up there—that sign’s ‘i’s have stopped winking at us! And, god, the frames! The buildings are sprouting back out of them!
Hidden looks were exchanged, but bows bend to the violin that bend to the baton, pitches or no, scores or no, and with a strike out at good sense and lacking the lymph of the self-preserving act, they deigned to join this wreckage-of-a-man in his senseless quest to save her dominion over them, for he was a man-of-war they knew at heart, like they all were, and any misgivings about the unmiracle of his desperate, two-bit, dreaming bark—all this talk of hearts and breaks—were waylaid by their simple admission amongst themselves that they were he and he were they.
As he cried out orders, Spindle and Gympie appeared at his elbows. Their libidos and logics steamed soundly out of them with a round and randy slither of a hiss as their former inadequacies, long trumped by their adherence to a forced celibacy as regarded both the flesh and philosophy, tit and temper of any good radical anywhere anyhow, gained the precipice of the scarlet and purple, so pure was the darling daring of their heady, stupid revirginity. They looked revived, reinvigorated.
How nimble your wit!
And how clever to turn her very curse against her, the curse in every rock and brick in Weatherhead, the curse she brought with her stillbirth into our uncrumbling facades—
He stumbled over his response, took a step back, and let terror dance its way over him. He hadn’t realized the true extent of what he’d wrought until now, with this pair of summary executions bobbing back and forth, gleefully rubbing their palms, spitting in them, too, their joy incredible and frantic. They swooned and moaned as all philosophers do, just before the onanistic moment when other-ear’s hear their idiocies. He had no time for this. Move! he cried to his posse.
And move they did, fanning out each of them across a city plagued by things fixing themselves. Hours they searched, as brick, mortar, and bone unsplintered, uncracked, and unfired until finally, he came upon a part of Weatherhead he’d never seen before, thick with felled trees sinking themselves back into the earth whence she’d torn them. There was a low building with sloping edges, almost a pyramid with the top half lopped-off, or a building whose corners had started melting down back into the earth whence they came. He was surprised to discover it was a garage, sliding door and all. It was unlocked.
Inside the garage there was a truck. He walked around the black of it not without a little curiosity, for it was the first seemingly functional vehicle he’d seen in Weatherhead since the day he’d run beast with her and someone tried to kiss her with their grille. That’d been a truck, too. He wasn’t so sure it wasn’t this one.
He looked back at the door. The other members of the search party were thick in the adjoining streets. It was only a matter of minutes before they found him here. An unsteady hand ran down the length of the edge of the truck’s bed. He peered inside. There was a bed in the bed and he knew at once that it was hers. He’d found her secret place, the place where she kept herself at night, where she tossed on whatever storms apostrophized her sleep. The bed was only half-made, the ratty-tatter sheets even now silently mending themselves thrown carelessly up over the engorging pillow—christ, would the bird come back to life trapped inside in the cell made for its feathers? Or would the fabric itself rejoin its motherground and go back to seed? Was the loss of Break the great undoing of all ends and creations? He’d never considered such things as consequences of a shattering but, yes, the more he thought about it, he saw the loom as a fist punching the cotton, the mill as a lunge at the throat of ore, the wrecking ball as a lozenge for the throat of that-to-be-demolished. And her? What would happen to her without her bed? Without her smithereens? He reached a hand in and stroked the pillow. A long, red hair curled around his finger, pled and bled its wisp into the center of his palm, a tress of stigmata.
He walked around to the front of the truck, stooped, caught up a chunk of softly healing cinderstone, soon to return to the womb of earth as all things would, and hefted it in his hand. Oh, yes, he knew where Break was now: it was hiding in his hand. With a kiss, the beast had fallen maiden unmade unmaddened for a moment and Break had slipped away from her. But it knew where it’d be safe, where it always had been—with him.
He pitched the stone, smashed the windshield. In an instant, she was there beside him, sweeping across the concrete, her worn, dark wings a flapping mud-colored coat behind her.
There it is! It was part coo, part coup that flowed over her bared teeth. With a light step, she leapt up onto the hood of the truck, draping herself and her ruined-again duster across the finery of the nova-eyed shatterview, the breakwater droste eyes that birthed her yet again. She was lapping the spider-web of Break. It did not cut her tongue. There it is!
Head down, he left. Yes, there it was.
⧜
The shower was her favorite room in their little apartment. It was abnormally outsized for their little bathroom, filling more than half the space. He understood the human propensity for sheeting and baptizing oneself with brutish, hot water. He didn’t understand her habit of napping standing up in there while water slapped her bone machine, her half-successful attempts at smoking just to the right or left of the spray, or her sitting cross-legged, ass-over-drain, for quarter-hours on end. Maybe the shower was a confessional or something? One day he saw it clearly, though: it was the closest analogue to her batting cage except here, in the froth and spit, there was no Randy, no machine, and she was defenseless. Wasn’t she? Or was it that she was the bat, a steam-sweat swat at the thousand-horded droplets pitched at her from above? Whatever the case, she loved this space. It even had plenty of room for the two of them as he came to know one odd day when he had her against one of its slick glass walls. Her cheek was pressed to this glass and she had one hand (it was nearly healed) flat against it and was drawing with the other on the handprint it had left there. The rest of her was held up by him at the hips. He was staring down at the off-color pucker he’d found. He flicked it with the tip of his index finger by way of seeing If. He heard a distant “mhm”.
He s
tared at the beads of water drip-webbing on her back, then at the drawing. He cleared his throat. “I don’t feel like I have your full attention.”
“You don’t,” she pointed out, “for I am turning my handprint into a turkey.”
“It is eleven in the morning, Shuteye,” he pointed out, “and you’re already roasted.” He let her fall to the floor of the shower. She yelped and, I hate you all, she roared at the drops of water.
He toweled himself off and left the room, a’wither and hate.
But wait. He stopped walking. The garage had become a riot behind him.
What had their life together been, then? Arguments? Lies? No—no, he couldn’t accept that—accept that she died out—fell out of a life rent by frailties. Maggie Mechaine would’ve never stood for that. She was stronger than that. He strode with purpose through Weatherhead, absent-mindedly wrapping and unwrapping his finger around that hair from the head of hell. Why was all he could remember like this—
No. Goddammit. He drew glances from passersby as he brought himself up short in the center of the square. He had the explosion—the bang—but not the smoke. He had the trigger-pull and not the bullet. He had the crack of the whip but not the moan. The ruler of Weatherhead was wrong. There was no false-bottom to memories. The past was a weapon.
Of course, goddammit. He stomped his foot. He’d gone right back into that shower, hadn’t he? Yes. She was still roaring in anger and he’d picked her right back up as he’d had her and she had both hands on the wrinkled glass then, hadn’t she? And she was laughing? Yes. She was laughing because she told him could make a pair of turkeys because she already had the stuffing and that was the rare day when he had her every which way and he drew all over her with his own ink. She used to say the shower was like the cages, fer sluggin’ whites, which made her laugh to no end. Yes, he remembered now. She’d swing, her grip sound and he’d outfielded white flecks all over her vacant bleachers. She always laughed when she came.
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