He turned back to Frank. Where’d you learn to sing like that? Were you a singer before?
Nah, Frank shrugged modestly, well, yeah, I was kind of an alchemist, too. I measured the distances between things and ideas and brought ‘em together, changed ‘em, calculated all the harmonies you mighta heard of and some you haven’t. Here, he tucked the coin into his palm, you’ll be needin’ dis.
He took the coin without comment and put it inside the cuff of his coat. He knew better than to question matters such as these. They stood and smoked in silence as the train began to whorf and chuttle away. They watched it go and when the caboose’s red-barn affair ended, and the facing platform was exposed, he saw milling there the rebels redux. After a moment they saw him and Sir Burn called out to him, waving him over.
Before he could respond, Frank took him by the arm. Stay away from that lot. She’s all tits and eyes with that bunch, milk and watchful.
Yeah, but they want me to help them kill her.
Frank sniffed and said nothing, guided him back into the city streets. They walked together arm-in-arm, like lovers, a notion that would’ve cost anyone who pointed this out to him their head, for in the world-view of the racist, a man who loved men was the worst kind of color. But, no, Frank made him feel so content, such a friend, that he didn’t even notice.
Where you from, Frank?
Frank thought for a moment. If you gotta put arrows in the answer, I’d say I hailed from the Eastsides of all things.
Like China or something?
If ya like. I was born somewhere between the Rhine and the Orkhon gol by your maps. My family—they were alchemists by wish, conquerors by necessity. Me, I was born outta both so I sang. Music was a transmutation of throat into gold, he explained, and the seduction of a thousand thrones was more quickly achieved through words than sword. That was what my pops never got.
Sensing that Frank was not comfortable discussing these matters, he switched to a subject closer to home, So, I was wondering, maybe you could tell me, how long have I been here?
His response was immediate: 3,324 days. Same as you and the missus had together. Harmonies, baby, harmonies.
Doesn’t seem like that long.
It hasn’t been. Yet. Time’s funny in Weatherhead. It resists. See, it ain’t really needed, it has nuttin’ to do here. It gets bored, chases its tail in circles. He lit a pair of cigarettes and handed him one.
Time after time?
Frank snorted, Yeah, somethin’ like that. Keep goin’. He lit a pair of cigarettes and handed him one.
So you must know why I’m here. What do I do? Kill her? Save Weatherhead?
Nah. More like you ain’t gonna—until you set her straight, it ain’t gonna be like it was anymore, anyway. You gotta find what she loves, find what she loves here in Weatherhead.
You’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you?
Cute. He drew them up short amidst a market where half the stalls were closed, sutlers chasing her war out onto the plain. Frank bought something from an obvious madman whose eyes and tongue lolled about in step with a song of madness. Frank held out his purchase. Put this on your skin, this glue, n’ all eyes’ll be unable to bend away from you, hew-hearthed the man over there, who’d have been dick-deep in old magics, as the last witches of the world used to say, were they real.
He took the proferred tube and put it under his nose. It smelled like a demolition. What for?
It’s one way to woo her, but one way only, the easy way. I wouldn’t recommend it, your face won’t put up with much more abuse n’ all. Ain’t no easy solution, pal.
So you’re saying, find out what she loves, here in Weatherhead? Where she hates everything?
Ya never noticed how you don’t learn nothin’ at night here in the city? You don’t remember anything when you sleep, cuz you don’t sleep. Do you know what she said to me the first time I met her? We was—well, never-you-mind, cuz our business ain’t minded by anyone but us, but she’s all drawn up, taller than ya’d think cuz she’s a short bird, you know? An’ she’s beatin’ down on a feller there, on a hill outside the city, an’ his face—goddamn mess of a face, like she was tryin’ to carve it out with her punches, like a pumpkin, and she’s furious, ‘cause the bone gets in the way, an’ one of us, maybe it was me, sez, Your hand ain’t no bullet, little miss an’ she throws all that red back and laughs and laughs an’ she sez, All you hunted of the world! she calls us an’ she climbs off the poor fucker, hits us up for cigarettes. She’d arrived in this country then, from whoknowswhere. I think—she was lookin’ for you even then. She was tryin’ ta make you outta that man there on that hillside. That’s what she’s always doin’, get my drift?
You can’t help me?
I did, chum, I did. He tapped the cuff where the penny lay. Now, ask me the next question.
And what if I help them? He indicated the rebels following a hundred yards or so behind them.
She dies. You’ve fallen in love with her death. Ah, he clucked his tongue and shook his dreadlocks, nostalgia’s just not what it used to be, eh?
He stopped and grabbed Frank by the shoulders. Frank smiled as if, yes? Is that Maggie Mechaine? That—thing.
Frank’s smile broadened. I can’t remember who it was—a painter or a mechanic or something—anyway, someone once said, Man makes all the things that God can’t be bothered with anymore.
You didn’t answer my question. Is that my wife? What is this place? You know, I know it.
Frank threw his arm around his shoulders. What do you think Weatherhead is, pal?
I dunno. A jumble. A bunch of crashings-together, like the field under a minefield in heaven, and all the angels keep flying into the mines, like those great big World War 2 mines, the spiked balls—
Well put. It is her city. She took it. It is hers because she fills it with what is familiar.
Familiar? No. No. See, that isn’t Maggie, that’s what you’re afraid to tell me. Maggie—no—no Maggie would never have done that. Maggie wasn’t interested in filling things in. She wants outsides, not insides.
There’s only one Maggie Mechaine. Where are we when we are of two worlds? Just because you showed up at the party without a face doesn’t mean the rest of Weatherhead has to take theirs off. This is hers, not yours. Don’t forget that.
Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?
I told ya already. Find what she loves.
Here?
No. Not here.
Alright, alright, he waved his hand dismissively, weary of these lyrics. He eyed Frank with a sad smile, and asked, So does that paint or chalk or whatever—your fake beard and hair—doesn’t it ever wash off?
What paint? He touched his cheek.
Never mind. He suddenly felt bestial, inadequate, hungry. All this talk of the impossible monster and placating her had made him false-blooded. Are there whores in Weatherhead?
Frank shot him a warning look. Before I was who I am, I moved through a valley of stormy pixies—there was only one road, see? I used to think every darkness was my due, every bloodied nose my joy. And I hated, I hated just like you did when you were who you were. But I came upon this valley, it was a faded place, the girls and boys there were all fire-hipped and filer, game ones, the laws there were naked, not like this place. And you get used to it. Even the stones in the road are oh! and ah! and the fucks and fights multiply because, see, the lusts of men when preserved, they petrify and putrefy and then they turn against one another. I saw a lot of men die in that valley, dyin’, a hundred stretches hence, each thinkin’ he’d cut a beard-splitter, but it was all a trap, see? Canary birds, all of ‘em, those absinthe-breathed harridan harriers o’ the valley. There was no glidin’ away at dusk because once you’d sank yourself into one o’ those hell-born bha-fata, that was it. They made sport out of men, sometimes women, the ones who went egg-headed to the place. He fell silent and distant. Then I knew I couldn’t hate the way I had once. Not after seein’ a place like that.
&n
bsp; He had nothing with which to engage Frank’s reminiscence. That’s great. But you didn’t answer my question: are there whores in Weatherhead?
Frank burned his eyes into his. Nope. Not in the city, maybe out. And don’t go looking. You wanna hand out green-gowns, keep cully with my lady spectrum and keep safe away from the diabolical swive that passes and pollutes in this awful place, especially those for-cock-tas. He jerked a thumb back at Sir Burn and his coven.
Frank shook his head and clucked his tongue, for he understood. He wanted to sully the same dark enigma of the ruler of Weatherhead the same way he’d been unfaithful to Maggie Mechaine, wasn’t that right? Sheepish, he nodded. Frank sighed. Ask me one more thing. Ask about the wood.
He brightened, shot up straight. Where does the wood come from? He asked with excitement. I know you can know with the tugging sleep of your singing that you pretend is homeless.
Frank laughed at this, looked this way, then that, hesitant. He led him over to one of the hewers of the market hawking bats, leaned in and spoke gold into the fellow’s ear. There’s a grove, said the chopper mechanically, outside the city walls. She brings it to us from there.
The grove was outside the city a ways, on the opposite side from—well, from everything. He’d tried to draw a mental map and put a compass to Weatherhead, but the city seemed to turn on an axis all its own. If he thought of the black mountains and Alaska, whatever that was, as West, and the direction of Wellingwish as East, then he thought the grove would be to the South. North and East were the direction she’d taken him that day when he met the No-Faced Hunter and seen the excavation.
The two men left the city and walked a mile or so. At one point, Frank drew his attention to a furious vision uprooting the plain on the horizon, her column of war.
Why, he screamed suddenly at the distant army, why do you follow her?
Anxious, Frank bade him continue on until Frank stopped and refused to go further. Ain’t no place for my ilk. Mind your wallet, though, since the thieves are thickest in places where roads and pilgrims meet. And the whores. But I’ll see ya in another chapter or two? Go thattaway.
He nodded and set out into the chalky plain. The rain, he remembered, ended before it hit the ground, so he kicked up dust as he trudged on, following his boots to where he knew this grove to be and then, a few miles out from Weatherhead, coming over a small ridge, he saw it, saw the grove.
It was their house again. The house that he’d left on the other side of the terrible mountains, across the river, by the sea in ice. And not the cardboard fakery that he’d been put up in in Weatherhead—no, this was the house, their wooden house, their craftsman house, the only one built in their town, the impractical house, they called it thereabouts, for its too-thin wood, its low-pitched gables and those eaves that stuck out like torture chamber eyelids stretched out, the house Love had stolen him out of. He and Maggie had picked it out together, found it after a single day of combing realty options. For a prick-o’-the-finger moment, he thought she’d be happy there. She loved its blue, the red door which puckered out, she said, to eat the visitor, its pathetic yard with her cage, where she built snowman to behead during the long, long winters—
And here it was all over again. He was afraid to approach it, for many reasons, but the most immediate reason was that it had kansased on top of a wicked-witch rise and was leaning on this mound at a rough, 45-degree angle. Not quite 51, he thought. He walked around its ruin. It had landed on its back, shattering on the porch where Maggie’d sit and solve things, things cruciform to her. The roof had split from the impact as well. It’d been dropped from somewhere on high, he guessed. He finished his circuit of the corpse. No feet stuck out, no singing—but he could see that it’d been tethered once to the ground with ropes lashed about it. In some places it looked as if it had been torn or even punched.
There’d never been a well, though. This one had sunken down below the surface behind the dropped house, only the slightest trace of its once-lip stones jutting out of the earth. He peered down inside, surprised he could see the bottom. There was the skeleton of a pirate down there in a sitting position, surrounded by pieces-of-eight, one last failed expedition, he wagered. He moved away from the edge. Someone else was there, behind him. He spun around, expecting to see Frank or even her.
It was an indeterminate, not-quite creature, something out of a dream that no matter how hard you squint at it, approach it, study it, you can never really see it, that, yes, the closer you try to discern a quality, the further that quality recedes from your perception. It was as if he were approaching a portrait and trying to apprehend whilst it was being wheeled away from him at great speed. While sitting on a rock. Whether it be man or woman, he couldn’t tell. It made the air thick around itself. It was draped, not dressed, in beautiful rivers of white and black cloth that billowed with its movements, pulled tightly only around its hairless face and head, for he could see that it was bald. But that meant little: it was of an unfixed gender. It seemed to have a long, noble nose, full lips of great promise, and a long-swallow neck. It wasn’t unattractive by any means, it was just so intangible and unknowable, though this made it all the more seductive, that you wanted to run away from it as much as you wanted to slip under the drift of its voluminous garments. Was it even human? seemed, at the moment, not a far-fetched question.
It was sitting on a nearby rock, barefoot, picking at one of its toes. It glanced at him without lifting its head. Hello.
Hello, he managed to hoarse.
It cleared its throat and sat up a little straighter. Lararia Meandering, they say, by way of name. Or maybe it’s the name of a poem and thus it’d be ‘Lararia meandering’? I can’t keep track. Others guard the roads, I’m supposed to guard the houses, this one, but I tend to forget, I have such a short memory! And—whoop!—I just wander off. I guess, uh—it frowned at the wreckage of the scavenged house—I was gone for a bit too long this time?
No, he reassured it, no, I think this would’ve happened anyway even if you’d been there.
Oh! It brightened. Oops. It produced a small ledger and flipped through it, humming. Fizzy fucks. I’m not actually supposed to be here, according to this.
What is that? He peered over.
The rules. She held up the little booklet. The cover said The Rules.
Assignment limitations. Notice of forfeiture of contractual obligations whence and whereby, extra domum, pro domo, stet fortuna domus. Hrm.
Is that Latin?
Nooo. It clapped the booklet shut and tugged on one of the staples binding it. An oversight. I better go! Bye! It took a deep, deep breath and puffed its cheeks out.
He leapt forward. Wait!
It stood, squirrel-faced and a’swirl, arms outstretched and an eye rolled up at him. Its eyebrow raised. It exhaled mightily. What? It gathered up a swatch of its tentacling fabrics and fiddled with it.
I was sent out here. I was looking for a grove, for this. He indicated the house. The ruler of that city back there, she’s been stripping it for wood.
It put its hands on its invisible hips. Whatever for? She can’t do that! Oh wait—yes, she can. See, when is a house not a house?
I dunno. When?
When it’s a home. That’s not a home, it’s a house. Oh, dammit. I really should go. I’m not supposed to be here—I need the home not a house! Goodness me!
Love sent me out here, he gasped, and I can’t believe it wasn’t for a reason! Please!
It eyed him with suspicion, tucked a finger between its chin and its gown, and hemmed and hawed. I’m not sure what good I could be to you, but there is that one word unless.
He nodded and pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, held up the copper coin Frank had given him. It coughed. Pecunia non olet, it said, that’s for sure.
You know this house?
Hearth and all, big boy. But I can’t really say—
Why? How? Why is it here?
It blinked. Why, for the wood! See, I got
all mixed-up. I thought this was home, not house, but it isn’t, it’s just house plain and simple. I, ah, watch the home. I shouldn’t be here at all.
He felt decidedly unsettled. And where is home?
Er, somewhere else? Look, right here and how, I’m a whore, plain and simple, to be forthright and true. Houses and whores have much in common. People pay to spend their whole lives in them and much attention is devoted to their upkeep as they age.
It was trying to divert him. He let it. Sorry, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you a guy or a girl?
Either, suh! Doesn’t the coin have two sides? It shouldn’t matter, I will stay and fuck about with you! Money talks and, better, post coitum omne animal triste est sive gallus et mulier. Man or woman, I don’t care!
No—I mean, I’m the one paying—
Oooh. Yes. No. Wait. We can’t. It raised a finger and drew out a tiny little scroll from one of its immense wizard-sleeves. It popped and pipped its lips while it read. Ahem. Are you hearing voices from quote ‘On High’ unquote?
What? Yes?
Is your sleep foolish? Clown-shoed?
I—I guess, yeah. What was its game?
Aaaand—
What are you reading?
The Other Rules. It showed him the front of the scroll. It said Open daily!
I bet you don’t open this daily, do you? He stared into its eyes, close enough to see that they had no color whatsoever that he could pinpoint.
No, it sighed, I don’t. And, lessee, oh, right, you are able to see your—ah, home—over there, of course. Yes, hum. Ho. Sorry, we can’t, as they say, fuck.
I don’t want to have sex with you. You’re twisting my thoughts around. I just need some answers.
I’m not really allowed—
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