“Sir,” she went on firmly, “we’re closing so I’m gonna have to ask you to leave the store.” She pointed at the door without looking, one hand drawn letter-high across her slight bosom.
“What? It’s noon—“
Hands clasped behind her back, she cleared her throat and again asked that he leave. The store, she said, was no longer safe for customers and she had to close early. His total was, she said, $33.24. With a sinking stomach, he paid and made for the door. Tossing a last, lost look at his gift, she shut down her register and the lights. He broke out into atomic protests as she herded him outside. Was she mad? What the hell was her problem? But she ignored him, locking the door, pressed something into his palm, and walked away quickly without a word.
He looked down in his palm. It was a row of squares—what?—no, it was an answer line from a crossword puzzle. Something was written there. He squinted at it. ”We hunt by spit and scent alone today,” he read out loud. If drunkenness obeyed gravity, than it’d pool in the toes, wouldn’t it? His feet vomited speed and he dashed off after her.
She led him on a merry chase and, as she promised, she left little bits of her behind for him. He kept a little ways behind her weave in and out of the midday crowds window-shopping and mobbing about, trying to discern the purpose in her flight. He watched her closely. She kept touching her tongue to things, a brick on a storefront, the strap of a mailman’s satchel, the underside of the fountain in the center of the mall, a penny she plucked out of the fountain, the top of an old man’s hat (she stopped here to help him with a crossword clue; she touched her tongue to the clip of his pen when he wasn’t staring into her foggy blue eyes), the stubborn summer that made the air as heavy as blood that day, the curb at the head of a handicapped space, the back of a red car’s rearview mirror, the fourth spoke on a passing wheelchair. He came in her wake, each daub of her salty spit a bread-crumb for their escape from the wilds, births, and dawns walking around them. When he could, he rubbed her tongue’s wet scars into smudges, into shapes, sometimes crosses, other times diamonds. He found one of her shoes on the bottom rack of a bread tray outside the bakery; the other shoe was handed to him by a confused, middle-aged Asian woman: the ends of the laces were wet, too, and a wad of cash had been stuffed inside.
She pretended to not know him. At first when he drew close enough to cry out to her, before the game became irresistible, when he still believed she could be angry, she’d look back furtively, fearfully, and walk faster. Once or twice she ducked around a passer-by, pointed out her not-husband and muttered darkly. Eyebrows knotted over him and he, whistling, walked past with a faulty air of seismic innocence.
There was no map to her. She was the lay of the land—she was the map.
Scooping up her wallet, her keys, and her pack of cigarettes full of pot from, respectively, the hood of a demented pink Miata, the end of a blind woman’s walking stick as its owner stood there wondering what that sudden jingling was outta nowhere, and the downturned hood of a breast-feeding young mother, he found her finally sitting in a lawn chair in the bed of his truck, legs drawn up to her chin.
“We’re closed,” she repeated when he, panting, caught up to her. He was leaning over the tailgate. Where’d the chair come from—
One by one she touched her tongue to her fingertips and casually drummed on her throat. He couldn’t see the leavings of saliva there for she was facing away from the sun, but he could smell the punch-drunk lust of a Maggie Mechaine that he’d long given up for lost, the she of showers and long games. When he climbed up into the truck and knelt before her, ignoring the bemused looks of shoppers galore, he asked her why she was acting this way.
Fair question, said her half-frown. “Lots of things,” she had discovered the pores on his skin again, “were made for you. First: being wrong—“
“Never.”
“Point proven.” 2700 pores per square inch meant a lot of ground her tongue could cover, but she swore to his neck it would be so. “Second: the privilege of stealing home—“
“Mine or yours?” His fists had curled around her ankles. He was a gimmick to the mirror though: she was no bat.
A small smile tugged at her lips. “Third: my alphabet.” She sank her fingers into his hair. “Fourth: the fox-chase.” She gestured with her eyes to the ago of just-thens and her spits. “Now,” she cautioned, “this can’t be the part where we fall into each other’s arms and have sex. It can’t be when you say ‘we have the whole day ahead of us’ or ‘we have our whole life ahead of us’. Nothin’ like that.”
He nodded.
“I want you to lie to me now. I want you to make a buncha promises you’ll never, ever keep. I want you to cheat on me again, over and over and I want you to tell me another lie: tell me who you are,” she swallowed, “someone foolish? Like me?”
Then he knew: Love is the silent band of assassins stalking the land, nothing more, nothing less and no matter how many knives you have, no matter how many batteries, bullets, and fists you carry with you, it is best to surrender. Don’t despair.
(37 Down) I am Fist-Stroked Despair.
I know, I know, he said out of sleep. He looked around, suddenly wild. There was a fist sticking through his ruined door, leaving a second hole there for the wind to use. Another appeared. Then another. Fingers hooked through the holes and pulled the cardboard back in silly strips. He sat up, lunacy’s half-moon cracking the bottom of what had once been his face. There was a gush of shouts and cries exhaust-piping the room, a cacophony of shaking fists full of confetti and tickets-to-things thrusting through the perforations and then someone decided, quite simply, that the door had to just go.
It was no use hiding behind his eyelids. A new day had come, as they all had lately, in the form of a disturbance. He couldn’t stop his ears with his dirty fingers forever and now there were people streaming in with cans of glue, brushes, papers unrolling, streamers streaming, scream-holes umlauting their pitchy black uvulas—scores of them, torments in the shape of the pale men and women of the city, their pitchless, empty hearts ticked and tocked now with an arrhythmic arithmetic, the kind of maths that shaves off the harvest with a razor of frost, the kind of equations that force the train, under penalty of rape, or worse, at the hands of the tunnel, to carry the track. In other words, these pallid, frightful crowds of clowns who jostled him, bustled about, went to work slobbering adhesives on every flat surface and pasting notices there, were mere wounds given the knife that is a hand. Things had gotten venereal, crisscrossed, and fire-cold. They seemed—happy.
He raised himself up on his elbows, watching the cacophony pour into the room, grey ghosts perfuming the world with their violent wakes, wakes in the wake of wakes, he thought, drunk without drinking, high without leaf, low without the cattle. No, this was a different kind of stampede for these unmasted, emasculated citizens of Weatherhead. For one thing, she was nowhere to be seen with her wan sails to steer this galleon, bottom encrusted with curses instead of barnacles. He’d kept out of her way the last few days, there were rumors of war. But he could only ponder this discalm for so long, for a hammer blow of the memory of a memory seized him by the chin and forced his head down into his blanket. This seemed like a helluva time to remember dreams, or a dream about a dream, for what is memory but a dream now has from time to time? But he did. He was at a ballpark. Somebody’d turned his wife into graffiti under the bleachers. She was gesturing, beckoning him and here’s how: there were a series of flip-book illustrations of the graffiti Maggie Mechaine, especially the face—who’s flipping the metal like that—thumb at the edge of the bleacher-paper? Making her wave her hand at him the way she did, palm at a right-angle to the earth, ends of her fingers wiggling? Who? Maggie had a ferocious, medusa head-bang when she touched herself, her lips would move without making a sound, her shot-drunk futures, the imminence of the flare of her sex was almost something to fear and yet, here she was, under the bleachers, sheet metal Mechaine beckoning him with one hand while the o
ther, that had eyes in the tips of its fingers, turned her thunderbolt quivers into stone with a darting glance.
Someone was shaking him by the shoulders. Maggie. He opened his eyes.
Don’t just sit there, man! It was Spindle, the rebel, the bereft one. He pushed the foolish hands off him and rose a’creak, head tinny still from his feral half-dream of his dead wife. He spat to one side, barrow-narrowly missing the rebel’s foot. He hated this fellow more than he’d ever hated anyone, just then. How could anything pinched down into flesh, with primal eyes to see her dead reds, and with the daring of nostalgia turning the sacrificial bird on its spit hate the shade of Maggie Mechaine as these would-be revolutionaries did?
That’s just the devourer speaking, Spindle laughed, mind your innocence and your excesses. He gestured with hilarity at the erection tent-poling below. Grim-faced, he closed his coat and bore his stare into the rebel. Another fellow appeared next to Spindle, by name of Hellclot. Hellclot was a large fellow with bewitching scars radiating out in concentric circles from his eyes and a thick black beard. He was an arrogant, petulant functionary, the kind that. You know. His judgment, one knew from the get-go, was pubic, that is, predetermined and carefully delineated, the hedge to the bet, periphery to a filthy center. He was, Spindle explained, one of her most devoted courtesans.
There’s no court. She sleeps in the bed of a truck. Then he squinted closer at this fellow, astonished to notice something. And an ape stares into the mirror and sees a banana, he muttered. The fellow bore a shocking resemblance to he himself.
The two men fumbled and agitated for a moment. It was clear that this man Hellclot was of little to no importance, a self-made man, this self-appointed chamberlain of city affairs, the sort of man who spent wolf-dusks prowling about middle age looking for half-grown girls, maybe even still white on the inside, even if sheared on the outside. He wanted nothing more than to drive his fist, Weatherhead-style, into this fellow’s throat again and again and again. Oh! How like her he had become!
What’s going on? Why are all these people in my hoouse? He caught himself before he asked where she was, for he was feigning apathy: he didn’t want implications of meat and slit, a homesickness for the vicious grit and night-locked stigmata that blossomed where his brand sank into her.
Spindle beamed wind-wide now and spread his hands. There was now, he told him, a museum dedicated to reminding them all about what made Weatherhead great. By her order, of course, Hellclot inclined his head with a twitch, and executed by moi. In his house.
A museum for Weatherhead? He couldn’t help smiling at all these idiots. They didn’t get it. The museum of Weatherhead was him. How many years had he been here now? He could tell them everything about Weatherhead; he even had some creation myths about puzzles, crosswords, and framing shops. About the ruin before the city, about howls and cries on their knees in white whiter than white, about the original kiss, about a deforested eden where all the trees had been turned into squares and rectangles and there was a right angle with a flaming sword standing just outside getting stoned after beard hit a rock with a snake— Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom, he reminded them.
F-foxes are f-forbaden in Weatherhead, Hellclot, apoplectic at this tirade against his project, spluttered, unsavage is disaster. She would never stand f-for such refinement.
Helly here, Spindle winked, is part of the Cause. He trucks in washing blood out of her gloves—
How she gets it inside them is beyond me! Hellclot interjected.
He waved this conversation away. Who needed revolts never witnessed? Curious, and wearying of these two sycophant-traitors, he wandered over to the bottom of the stairs leading up. He had never noticed this before, the lie of the second floor. Would there be a third? A fourth? He couldn’t recall. This was their house from Alaska, wasn’t it? Not anymore. The museum, yes, he could follow the way the others went: up, that is. He looked around. The room was empty of cavort and hullybaloo and only the blackwaters of their words sullied the calm.
A museum. He began by his ruined front door. Outside he could see the morning chalk and impotence of Weatherhead. What was stopping him from just setting out on his wanderings as usual? Curious to see the exhibits? Had he and Maggie ever visited a museum together? She must’ve, at the least, else her else who ruled this city wouldn’t have been ken to this otherwise. He never traded in pasts and preservations, save for his film hobby, but those were movable pasts, pitchful suicides with a thousand faces, never extinct but ever-living. The assumption that we are not immortal is ill-founded, he used to say, since to others all we are are outward protrusions of something no one else can see anyway.
He fidgeted with the ruin of his door. That sounded very Maggie, he thought. She’d always said: no one ever knows anyone. How different, he might’ve added, is a picture from me? To you, it is the same thing: an image.
“Then,” and the end of her torch, the one that illuminated the recesses of her lungs, made a slow arc, rainbowed back and forth before his eyes, “what’s inside don’t matter?” And before he could answer she went on and she gave him the keys to the city of Weatherhead then, “I think,” and she giggled, “I think what’s all around us is what matters. That’s what makes us. Who we are inside depends on so much other shit. Everything comes from outside us, fills us in, and gives us what we need. And I ain’t sayin’, like, I don’t have any say or whatever, I’m just sayin’ that who I am is so much more’n just me. It’s not just me.” She stared at him for a long time before she continued, “you mean we live on ‘cause someone is always there to see what we were? Right? Yeah? But that’s just it, you can’t just go by that. That’s just a flat picture in a frame.” She leaned over and hooked a frame on her finger. “Put whatever you want inside—me, you, us—it don’t matter.” She tapped the wood. “What matters is what’s outside us. Or outside me.”
He was sleepy now. He fuzzed his eyes at her across the table. “What’s outside you?”
And she’d smiled because their love then had been new. There was still an umbilical fever binding them together in that first year or two when they had to learn how to make love all over again and at the height of her choking cries she’d remind him of her noble birth, born out of wood, the same wood she always carried with her, vampire-wary, maybe, or wanting to catch things in her frames so she could prove to him that prisons were made from the trees felled in paradise. What mattered most were the people-shaped flints and tinders.
And she’d smiled because their love then had been new and she’d answered, “You.”
He scraped a rectangle out of the cardboard flap and tapped a finger in it, savoring the perforation. Nauseated by memory’s vanguards disturbing the slumber in the trenches of his amnesia, he turned and moved to the bottom of the stairs.
He followed the trail of flyers and advertisements, pausing to wearily lean down, nose to paper and stare at the crude images there discussing the exhibitions and features of the museum, the faded colors, grey as the skies over Weatherhead, pitches crucified onto paper and inmates dragged along by their drool slavishly acted out the features of this unwelcome intrusion into his home. He hovered before one poster after the other. That there was no alphabet in the city made interpretation of their meanings difficult, so he made up his own for a while. It took him hours. He got distracted by the glue drooling down the walls. They’d used way too much, he decided. He daubed his finger in it and started drawing rectangles in neat rows. Then he dumped himself to the stairs under him and dozed off until someone shook his shoulder, breaking apart in effusions of butterflies his dream of a sobbing ship that had sails made out of dried blood.
It was Spindle again. Up! We need you alert, spry, catch-a-rabbit! Maybe something could entice—
Cue, Machine Eel rushed by with her head down, bashful, clutching a stool he recognized as one that once set in his and Maggie’s kitchen. There was only ever one. She always stood when
she ate breakfast. Machine Eel carried a noose as well and she seemed in quite the hurry. But at Spindle’s allusion, she drew herself up short and skidded to a halt, tongue out.
The last thing on my mind is fucking, he rasped, I’m clawing my way to the museum, thank you very much.
Spindle nodded, waved away Machine Eel, and grabbed him under the armpits to drag him to his feet.
The world got weirder: Frank and the Colored Girl appeared just then. They did not look happy. With a dancer’s sweep, the Colored Girl brought Spindle to the floor, planting a boot heel square on his chest. Frank frowned and, as Spindle squealed and protested, he and the Colored Girl upbraided him for his attitude of surrender. When Spindle, wrested free from her pinion, with his policeman’s gruff, tried to insert himself between demi-Love and his potential revolutionary figurehead, Frank stuck his arm out straight in the other man’s path. Clear out, chump. The edges of Frank’s shirt were trim and neat. He even had cufflinks, he saw.
Browns, snarled the Colored Girl. He’d never imagined her so angry: her teeth flashed scarlet.
Spindle backed away, a reservoir of unease. But before he disappeared down the curving, warped hallway, he held up his hands and told him, Eight Deaths. Eight deaths. eight deaths.
Frank touched his elbow. Friend, there ain’t nothing’ necessitating that you needs go in there, capice? You’re fillin’ in spaces wit your own unkindnesses. Move on. Shut dis place down.
It was so easy to love Frank. He was sonorous, that crooning part of Love, that poorly read future of Love, the one of persistence and beautiful old hands. I want to see it, Frank. Isn’t this part of the story?
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