Weatherhead stole the half-lights only, he could see. He had the other half under his coat. He stared down at his hands. She had the wound but he—he had all the blood. It was his hands that had been bleeding, his that had been breaking.
⧜
He’d known his wife for almost a decade. Over this time, most of which they’d spent living together, her routine changed little and was of fixed boundaries. Spatially, Maggie moved inside a rough-hewn yet deceptive triangle whose corners were formed by their home, her frame shop, and her batting cage. Rough-hewn because the lines between each were tentative and whittled, making destinations not linked by any process of logic or purpose but by the mere movement from one to the other: home/shop had an inert shared lyric, her frames and a few tools, but barely ever intruded on the other—Maggie rarely hung frames at home and when she did they were empty; shop/cage were of such a clever, strange asymmetry that the only thing that bound them together was the use of wood; cage/home shared similar outward features but only a handful of internal ones: bats leaned against things, surfaces were touched by knees tying the same shoes, and spitting. In fact, if Maggie Mechaine were a ship and you climbed into her crimson rigging and looked out over her decks, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were surveying from your greasy heights three very different ships. Indeed, the only thing binding them all together were Maggie herself and her degenerate smoke, for the ship’d have to be a steamship, he thought, with Maggie and her jerky orgasms providing the smoke and that bat dragging behind her the rudder, maybe.
Shop, baseball, home: hers was a tripartite life that ignored holiday, comedy, and tragedy. Of course there were ephemeral detours, as he remembered, but these tended to be either holidays, tragically funny, or humorous disasters. Deviations were slight. Why? Because Maggie never danced in a street in the snow, prostituted herself on a lark during college, never went to college, and never ate a banana out of its peel. Because Maggie never celebrated Christmas except with him, inherited anything, planted anything, or had sex of any kind until she met him. Because Maggie never missed a pitch, never wore a bathing suit or bikini, never learned a musical instrument, or pointed a gun at a cop until she met him. Because Maggie had never told anyone of her barometer until she met him, had never slept in the same bed with a man until she met him, had never not finished a jigsaw puzzle until she met him, had never felt like an animal after the revolt of sodomy until she met him, and had never killed herself until she met him.
Maggie Mechaine was a fixed point. Except when it came to him. Maybe he was wrong, though. Maybe he was part of that fixed point. He was coming to recognize this all too late, though: her season had ended and here he was caught in a place between winter and summer.
He had broken Maggie Mechaine in more ways than one, he wagered. But what of those defiant times when he hadn’t? He cursed and grew old without her for a moment, lambasting his memory for all its expiration dates and unceasing cannibalism of itself, sought out the Maggie that Maggie had made.
Her days went like this:
The first few years they were together, when he worked graveyard, she’d haunt the house in a distant, more dangerous reflection of his beat, staying up all night doing who-knew-what, giving herself black-smudged fingers. He’d come home, they’d eat together and she’d sleep for a few hours before going off to open her shop in its mall. She’d come home around dusk/dinner, nap, and take up station somewhere about him after he woke up until he left. But after his promotion and his re-surrender to Circadia’s teachings, she still kept one foot in the graveyard, staying up well past midnight even without him, alone, doing who-knew-what, making crowns out of words maybe—he often heard her talking to herself, doing her crosswords, never a cross word, but reds bowed before the demented crucifixions splayed out into grids, their shapes lost, but not the martyrs to her meaning. But he only learned this well after she was gone.
A typical day for Maggie Mechaine, he now recalled, rarely interrupted by unforeseen circumstances like vacations and bullet wounds to the chest, went something like this:
1-2 a.m. Fall asleep. 9 a.m. Wake. 9:15 a.m. Joint. 9:30 a.m. Breakfast. 9:45- 10:45 a.m. Morning. 11:00 a.m. Work. Joint (usually around 12:00p.m. followed by lunch and another at around 4:00 p.m. (designated THC-Time)) 11:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Work. 6:15 p.m. Return home. 7:00 p.m. Eat. 7:30 p.m.-1-2 a.m. and here he wasn’t sure what to remember. He thought and thought and thought. Sometimes, yes, they spent the evenings together. She wasn’t one for movies and what-not but she indulged him from time-to-time. There was, at least, in the early years, a decent amount of sexual activity. There was a lot of leaf: he’d once tried to keep track of how many times she’d get high during the day and had, dizzy from her slow gait and apostate’s bosom that took communion off of wisps, given up. (Since he’d always known her this way, it didn’t seem to strange to him but others, angels of prohibition, perhaps, amused, perhaps, often commented on the miracle of her sleek functionality given the uncountable autumns she tyranted over that poor plant. She must’ve fired more marijuana plants than the DEA, Mal wagered.)
But usually she spent this time of the day, the time of a bodice’s geometry as night cinched itself around the waistland forsaken by the abyss of the sun, this time of slinking calm, invisible ballets and courtships, away in her room. What was she doing in there? Crimes? Miracles? Puzzles and crosswords that were the former and latter, respectively? Was she building something? A city? Was Weatherhead mere dream but underway? Had she already fashioned an empire of herself behind that door to her room? His way was not barred, he wasn’t forbidden from this place—but why were her fingers, sometimes her cheeks smudged black? Why did she write all over her arms the way she did? Why did she laugh that way she did when he made her orgasm?
It was often said that most crimes are committed between the hours of 1.am. and 3 a.m. He never believed this statistic. In his personal experience, most crimes were committed when the victim least expected it, which could be any time, for all are innocent. For instance, all the times he’d cheated on Maggie Mechaine would fill a clock several times over, crowding out the hands, even the numbers until nothing would be left except for the sin itself. Time would have no dominion any longer. Only the sin. Not only did Maggie not expect it, but she had a poor sense of time anyway.
What was she doing in there? He listened at the door. Sometimes he heard her misleading voice, off-pitch, the only time ever, singing along quietly with her sheet metal, sometimes she laughed without air, sometimes she’d hear him and wave him in with her tongue. He’d never find anything nefarious, but he never stopped wondering. Was she voting for her favorite poisonous plant? Mapping how fury spreads like blood over specific geographic areas? Building a weapon out of jigsaw puzzle pieces, a weapon that could crack open the world? Was she feigning epilepsy on a planet made out of earthquakes in an attempt to save her people by contrary tectonics? Was she masturbating with a skull?
Oh, Weatherhead was polluting his poetics! But he had to begin somewhere if he wanted to find the cracks in Maggie Mechaine, the ones that led her to a snowy road by the sea where her Break could maximize its potential, because wasn’t that what life was about, he asked himself?
No. His forced imprisonment within the walls of Weatherhead had made him wiser than that. She had herself once told him that no one ever knew anyone and he knew now that this was as false as could be. And if he had stored up so much Maggie Mechaine in him, decking each story of the UnTower of his memory with her, no matter how banal, what had she been stacking up inside herself? He knew her, but not completely, and a memory came to him now that warned him of this:
It was Maggie’s birthday. She was 28 that day. It had been several weeks since that rusty I-hate-you in the basement and the world had changed a lot since then. Because in three months, they’d be in Alaska. They had only just recently decided to flee, flee all this weird weather, flee all this Up that suddenly seemed to be Down, blocking up everyone’s ears with smoke and asbe
stos, a systemic breakdown because the world’s immune system had begun to fail and illusions dispelled by gravity’s failures and Maggie had had enough. There was enough crumble in her. She didn’t need more. She didn’t need names for the color of her hair, either.
She’d barely passed a word to him for those several weeks and when she did, her tear ducts and her constant fever lactated tears and the shapes of head-tucked bird corpses. She could no longer play the game of the millennium. She’d had enough. She didn’t need more. She needed less.
But then came her birthday. She liked her birthday, more so than you’d think if you knew her the way he did. The first one they spent together, and as much out of his obsession with trivia as her secret love of the secret webs that bound secret people together, he’d given her one of those “This is What Happened on the Day You Were Born…” sort of books and she’d delighted in learning that she shared a birthday with Johnny Mathis, Jose Lima, and some guy named ‘Rummy’.
“I think it’s pronounced roo-mee,” he had corrected her.
She didn’t care a whit. “Roberto Clemente’s 3000th,” she had tapped the page. One’s birthday, she explained, was the one day one couldn’t fool oneself: she’d been born thus, she would die. She respected it for being one of the few dates beyond her control. Beyond anyone’s control. Birthdays, she maintained, were the days that gods and goddesses were also born out of, because people need reasons for things. Not her, though, she had reason enough.
For this particular birthday, he’d had an idea that day he’d followed her to the batting cages. To make it so, he’d have to break her routine and he wasn’t sure how this would go over. Being Sunday, she’d go in late to work anyway, but he needed her gone from her place where she named firewood and sold it into slavery, so, to make sure she’d be absent, he had her arrested.
“I don’t like this game, Mister Man,” she fumed as she exploded into her shop. She glared at him there, leaning over the counter in her shop. He’d taken the liberty of opening it for her, he beamed back. He dove over the counter and seized her hands. She pulled away from him and began cursing. He held his hands out and assuaged her, “I want to show you—I want to give you something. And I had to get it ready.”
“Why.” Her hands were out to her left and right, seeking, he realized, something to take up and smite him with.
He bent forward and looked in at her incandescent anger. “It’s your birthday, Mags.” And spoon-fed horror washed across her face and she went three arrow shades toward albino just then and for the first time, she didn’t recognize where she was, the confines of all her ferocious silence had suddenly been swept away by a silver clatter, a drawer pulled out too far. She’d forgotten her birthday.
“Why don’t you just fork off,” she croaked. He took her hands in his again, circled his thumbs over the bloodroads visible just beneath the surface.
“Your birthday,” he repeated. He frowned. “They didn’t take your weed, did they?”
She shook her head and sniffled. She smelled like lavender. “It was Bossko. He didn’t even look in my bag. That’s when I knew you were fuckin’ with me. Who gets arrested for jaywalkin’, anyway?” Her killer’s blues were rimmed with red and she wouldn’t look at him. She mouthed ‘birthday’ and her eyes began to wander from one side to the other.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. He kept watching her eyes, something he hadn’t done in a while. He’d forgotten the way they looked from the side, that blue that reminded one of pictures of the earth taken in profile from space, that thin caul or veil of blue, the air, the call it, between land and black. They narrowed, these eyes, and she began to dodge them this way and that around him, awareness dawning because something wasn’t just right in her shop because some things seemed a lot less empty just then. “What the fuck—“ her eyes got a little less small, “what’d you do to my—stuff—“ Her eyes widened and the squint died as she took a step backwards and forgot her eyelids. Ranged before her and hung on the wall behind her worktable, in the largest frames he could muster out of the thickets of her inventory were the preludes he’d stolen off her score that day at the cages.
He watched her closely, thief of her moment, lover of every peal he’d stripped away from her infinities. She stood for a long time staring at the succession of hers and their each, infinite movement until she was sure she knew what she was staring at. Her head swanned back in shock and she swayed back and forth for a good, real two minutes. Finally, she made a little ahem, slipped her shoes off, and padded softly behind the counter where she stopped before the first massive photograph. She leaned back slightly, her neck craned, her finger touching her lip. “I know this moment,” she softly sang. She stood still, staring down the ranks of her until she came to the end and she returned to the first. She began, and as she spoke to him, she placed two fingertips on the bottom of the frame in question:
“Here she is. Ninety miles an hour and it only gives her about a quarter second,” she turned her face to the side, addressing him, “but what you can’t see in this first picture is that she already knows how and where and why she’s going to hit it. It’s already a done deal.” She looked back up, her hand still on the frame. “100 milliseconds, I think, for her to see the ball and judge.” The woman in the photo stood knight, her bare legs jutting out of her black shorts forming a delicious A, the only tense part of her—the bat seems to intrude lazily into the gavotte of her arms. Remove the wood and she might be dancing. Her eyes are sleepy.
She walked down the row, past a few and stopped, fingers on the frame again. He walked with her, the counter separating them. He stared at her shoulders. She’d worn a dress to work—?
“Here she is. 75 milliseconds,” she drawled, “she’s already started to swing.” He couldn’t tell. Yeah, maybe she’d tucked in her gut and her ass was out a bit more—but, oh, there, that right foot had dug in where it could, left knee with that funny crescent-moon scar had bent in slightly. He hadn’t noticed that before. A Maggie Mechaine bigger than life and he still couldn’t.
She moved past the next frames. Here the swing was perceptible, her left leg was fixed and the bat had begun its indelicate arc downwards. Her eyes hadn’t moved. One could see the tip of a tongue appearing between her lips. “Here she is. She only has about 25 milliseconds to decide on a swing: high, low, inside, outside.” One hand on the frame, the other stroked her throat. “The swing can only be stopped within the first 50 milliseconds, after that she’s all in, and if she’s off by ten milliseconds or something like that, she’s gonna foul.” She moved on, 70 milliseconds, 90 milliseconds, her arc extending, one could see the hardening of her muscles, her legs taut, neither tremble nor tremor could move her now—he’d never seen her look so mighty, her thin white arms suddenly graced with power, rail-less engines with their boilers unhinging and then, she observed, came the moment of contact when a 32-oz bat moving at 80 miles per hour kissed a 3-inch, 90 mile per hour spinning orb. “Here she is, 150 milliseconds later,” she said. “All in less than a second.” The ball had appeared in frame now and her mortality had been completely suspended as her lithe frame bent and seethed into the crush. He loved this photo of her: she was smiling—and if one went back, you’d see, over the last dozen or so pictures of that arc’s descent to the moment of contact paralleled by the arc of fox-fang, a smile slowly spreading, teeth slowly baring, on this prodigious woman’s face. It was kind of frightening, he thought, like lifting up the executioner’s hood when he swings down (not out) and seeing a lustful grin.
Her fingers teased the bottoms of the next couple of frames as the bat descended, as her body crooked and confirmed that her red heart would triumph, that flesh was stronger than wood and velocity, that flesh turned velocity in on itself. Her cheeks and nape were red, he saw. She scratched her bicep. “Here she is. They call it the ‘sweet spot’.” She raised up on her toes and touched the bat. “It moves. Her hands, her grip all determines the sweetness. Her sugars temper the wood.”
He’d seen her test this before, she’d grip the wood tightly and tap it on either side, seeking out this ashen g-spot, this sacred place where the swing would be made optimal.
In the last picture, the wood kissed the seams of the white dress hurtling towards her. There was a mighty crush in Maggie: her teeth were bared, her hair, unknotted by half lashed around her face and her entire body was fixed, free of pollution, free of thought, free of everything except the poetry that she called gone, outta here, slugworth. She stared up at this one for a long time. She’d never seen herself this way, he guessed. The pinion she made against earth, gravity, and force, her tease of ballistics, all of this was undiscovered country for her. She was the diamond’s hewing.
“Do you like it?”
“Well, I ain’t no banjo hitter, that’s for sure,” came her quiet, “cleanup hitter, they reckoned.”
He was on the brink of asking Who reckoned? when Maggie turned and in one light slide she came to rest at home in front of him. She reached out her two fingers and touched his forehead, then his chin. “You are the stupidest man alive,” she said. He took her by the face but she ducked under his arm and backed away. Her dress, which in those moments could swish against the shins of any monarch she wanted, hid her feet. She looked cloud-bound. He bet he could tear those straps right through, right off her shoulder. She’d turned away again and was gazing up at the strange woman winning. Then her steps stuttered and stammered back down the row, eyes up, and, raising up on her tiptoes all ballerina so she could stare into her own faces, she strode with purpose back down the end again. She looked angry now—
Suddenly, there was a shift to her splinter and cuss: she whirled around. “You’ve been looking at my dr—my book.”
Book? “What book?” His mind whirled with her. What was she talking about? And then something strange happened, something he’d seen a number of times while on duty pursuing leads: simple misunderstandings arise which lead someone to believe that their crime has been caught out before they realize that you mean something else completely. It was a common psychological tact: draw out the suspect. She did this then. To him, there was no book and she softened her tone. Still,
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