“So I should feel so lucky, blessed, even.”
“Maybe I give you benediction so that I can laugh and die knowin’ that you’ll get to a place I never will when you die.”
“No, benediction isn’t—“ He looked at her and stopped. His cruelty to her now was one of willful abandon. She’d given up her heart to him while, he, making her a mockery of a wife, could think of nothing except doing it all over again. Again and again.
Nightmares, he lashed out in anger, that’s all this is.
These aren’t dreams. They’re memories, all along.
I know that. Don’t you think I know that, you fucking stupid city?
Pretending they’re out of your control, that it is somehow the doing of someone else—these are crimes in the cities of the plain. In the cities of the plain, we tell the same stories over and over—
So, what you’re telling me is, basically, that I’m part of a neverending story.
What’s so funny?
Why had he waited so long to seek out the outflesh? Maggie and he, they’d had their share of marital issues, physically-speaking the first couple of years, but he saw it more as a challenge than anything else. She’d been of a collapsed virginity—what did the doctor call it? Incapacious?
This was the first time he’d ever been unfaithful to her, but not the first time he’d been unfaithful. Frankly, he felt that it was his due. He became angry at her encroachment on his desires, his lusts with her warnings against herself. At the same time, he acceded to a slight prick of alarm. This was the first time he’d ever thought of Maggie Mechaine as a skinny, askance little desolation all her own. Why, it could have nothing to do with him! He was just there. But in the night, when sleep pulls down our false faces and the ropes holding down the corners of our mouths and eyes have been cut by the sandman’s scythe, he’d stare at her as she slept her sleep of anger and he felt frightened to be walking the same earth with this woman, this imploding woman, who could just bare her heart and leave him standing staring at it pulsing on the floor. That was all he could do, stare and wonder, Is she forever? Immortal? He’d know one day.
“No. She was never like that at all. What you have is a fundamental misunderstanding of your own wife, I don’t care how long you knew her. She was the most complete person—the happiest person I’ve ever known. Tortured? By what? By you? Ha! Dream on. If she was tortured, it was in spite of you. All she ever needed was someone to open up to. You. Do you know how much she loved you? I don’t think you do. You can go on and on and talk about how she was at war with herself or whatever, but you’re wrong. You’re so wrong. She was war. And you’re out there sticking your cock in whatever you can, too afraid to get in the ring with her—” And then what could he do but hang up?
That was the one of the last times he’d talked to his silver sister, mere months before he was stolen away by Weatherhead. Who stole home? He’d hung up on her. Tortured. Was that why he did it? But who was torturing who? And why, why every woman he slept with, the first thing they asked after was his wife, goading him, drawing him out. Were they all Maggie Mechaine’s spies? Were they all Maggie Mechaines? Tell me something about myself that I don’t already know, she asked him once.
In the midst of all these horrors you conjure up for yourself and she through Weatherhead, an amazing, clear voice speaks out.
I get it. It’s a puzzle. A Maggie puzzle.
Yes. You put her back together once. Now you must do it again. Once in life. Once in—
But I’m not dead!
Other than dresses, what else can you build a bridge out of?
What? Why the hell—concrete, steel, brick, wood—ha! And witches!
Exactly.
Are you saying that Margaret Mechaine was a witch? Should I build a bridge out of her?
She wasn’t a witch. Her dresses were.
She never wore dresses. Oh god— But she did. Every day.
There is a saying in one of the countries surrounding the cities on the plain: “The only good witch is the one with a straight answer and the only good dress is the one with a curving question.”
Seams to be.
Hand it to hem.
It was the everyday unremarkable miracle that he’d denied. With what eyes had he been looking at his wife? Petty eyes, petting eyes. Why did he treat her as something hidden? Something difficult? Something he couldn’t see? Was that what Weatherhead meant with the bridges and witches and dresses and all? Had he broken open all three with his hands only not to let their dusts sift through his fingers, but instead to cup them in his palm, stir them around, let them mingle?
“No one ever knows anyone,” she said once, numerous times maybe. Did she say that out of resignation? Or was it frustration? Surrender or lament? Apathy or desire to smash? Assertion or protest? With a firm need or a sigh? All along he’d taken that as a sign of her isolation, her loneliness, but old/new words of Maggie Mechaine came to him now, “I am at the whim of the universe.” This was no caul for help, no skein of her teeth, a web-drool catch-all for some imagined slight fate had dealt her. It was what she wanted. Her words were a challenge to him, as much as the quirk of her pubic bone was a challenge to his making love to her.
If the witch was a dress, than what wore it but magicks? At the whim—
It was the everyday unremarkable miracle that he’d denied. With what eyes had he been looking at his wife? Not his, but some borrowed sight and it’d taken him blasting those loaner eyes out and finding new ones to see that Maggie Mechaine was nothing hidden.
There’s little point in dwelling on all these silly—
The last time he’d been unfaithful to her, there really was a last time, too, though many times in between, barely a week after Maggie Mechaine got ink on her chin and punched him in the face, had been with a college student he’d met by chance. He’d been strolling by on duty when a guitar string had plakked up and beaned the young daisy right in the eye. Later, he couldn’t help but feel, with her predator’s stare and her unblinking slit spying on the end of his tongue, that this demoness had planned the whole thing. It was all so formalized, schematized, and fast that it was like a trap laid because before he knew it, she was in his cruiser and by evening she was all death stretch out beneath him. She had a bed made out of something other than mattress that had upturned faces molded out of it. Here is where she smiled up at him and gobstop swabbed her tongue white with him up and down the smooth, almost plastic surface they laid upon. Spent, he made to leave, but there was no escape. Relentless, she uppertucked him and made for his fables with her searching tongue. Kickstarter, she called it with a titter and despite his protests she dug in like an anteater and resuscitated him fully and then some.
He hoped he would never see her again for as long as he lived.
All was veteran night when he finally came home. There was Maggie. She picked up a puzzle piece and stared at it through her cloud-veined eyes, peered at him through its curly-cue turns. He stood at the head of the table and looked down at her. He suddenly felt angry with her, wanted to lash out at her. She knew, he thought, she must. Or she should. Why wouldn’t she know? He wanted to shout at her. Long shift, she asked so slyly—long, indeed, her half-moon half-grin djinned up at him. Why doesn’t she say something? Get angry? Does she really not know?
“I don’t care,” she said on a sudden as if reading his thoughts.
“About what?”
“If you see me cheating.” She coughed and tried to giggle. She’d never been any good at giggling.
She knew. “What—“ he set his jaw against her and moved to—
She plucked at the laminate on the puzzle piece and very slowly peeled off the iota of the image she was constructing and dropped it on the table with about a thousand others. He looked at what she was doing: she’d stripped every piece of its necessary component of the picture and had pieced them together, a vast network of singular, brown cardboard irregularities. “There.” She put it in its proper place withou
t even a second glance.
“How do you do it?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you when we’re dead ‘cause that’s when we teach each other about all the beautiful things that we can’t now.”
He wanted to tell her then that the dead have only the voices we appoint to them, the voices that memory appoints to them, but he didn’t have the gumption, nor did he have the right words to bleed the necessary orchestra out that’d saw this tune until well past midnight into the midnight of all trees and woods.
Two days later, that was when she disappeared. The night before, he remembered now, she’d been wrapping her wrists, crisscross apple-sauce gauze over and across her palms, exes against stigmata, as if about to go into the ring and fight and fight and fight, white ropes holding in suicides, he knew now. And what was the last thing she said to him?
“Is it living less when we know where we’re supposed to be?”
(40 Across) I am Blood-Land’s Method of Doing Things.
Voices on high, he mused, voices out of oblivions that were not hers. Someone was reading to him and it was not her. No, she was away at war. The high voice was mortal, livid. It was like a hand on the head while one slept, someone sitting beside his bed. Her voice, on the other hand, was almost sphinx-pretty but what had happened to the south of it, that part on the bottom of her tongue that made all men sound just and made her the natural daughter of an earthly lineage which lived without vanity up dirt roads, without driveways, with caps to remove to scratch? In Weatherhead she spoke off. Her feral drawl had fled.
Or maybe it hasn’t caught up yet, he thought. And hope convalesced in one of the empty chambers of his heart. Besides, she wasn’t beside his bed. He had none.
He took a walk alone. His conversation with Frank, his encounter with the grove and its demon, and the ache-without-farewell that his memory had reproached him with—this had all unsettled him, unsettled him more than he had been the entire time he’d been trapped in Weatherhead. It was like—what was it like? Like solving a crossword puzzle in another language or die? Maggie could’ve done it. Maggie had made up her own language again and again, time after time. 51 tongues for the lullabies, lays, and lance-songs. It was his failing that he never spoke them all, his failing that he never even knew the 51 languages that the questions were written in. And what had he done, after she killed herself? Stared at the pieces of her, the pieces of her on every page, pressed like flowers between the kiss-curse words of the great and secret show of their life.
Even in death, he knew, when he thought she would no longer exist, that her story, the one he could kill perfectly time and again, the story narrated by a voice beside a bed in a hospital, could never end again the way it had. What kind of love kissed but never healed? What kind of love bricked up the entrance to the tower? What kind of love stepped on the feet-in-glass while they danced and broke them outright?
Drunk and weeping with something between gushing joy and abject terror, he sat up in his proverbial coffin. He had come to know that flesh to flesh captures bones, keeps life in, and lets love out, all in the shapes of ancient skulls and white crescents. He prodded the tip of his rib. Woman did not derive from man. Chased, not caught; given, not earned. When she woke in the morning, she put on her own height and weight before his, took all the risk out of the clock for her before she did the same for him, and, staring in the bathroom mirror, drew all her fugitive visions over the reflection of her face in fog-smear. But, when she put to bed at night, she washed her face with his, started a riot in her hair that spread over his chest, and put her breath back into his, where it belonged. To the tune of their sing and sweat she swayed and waylaid. In this way, this perfect way, he only realized too late, she had been hers and she had been theirs and that, if anything, he derived from her. Where the ‘r’ went, no one could say.
Whichever comes first, no one ever knows anyone. He had made wagers on the distances between two bodies and the closing of this distance. He had lost. Maggie had made wagers on the distances between two hearts and the closing of this distance. She had lost. She had died for her pains. No, he corrected himself; she died in spite of her pains. Memory’s surety—it was the prey’s guarantee: one would always return to certain memories, certain places in the past, regular as clockwork—these were familiar, close somehow—for not all of the past is as easy to find—it was like a deer or a fox always returning to the same, familiar watering hole. The patient hunter visits these again and again until the moment when they meet. But what happens then?
Simple. The witness does not feel the crime. He’d learned this long ago. He had sifted through snow to find 51 pieces of Maggie Mechaine, 51 places that he went back to again and again. It was like solving a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded, feeling each edge, pressing your fingertip to them, tracing their shapes, finding their mates somewhere on the table. He’d been lucky to have found a black road straight to Weatherhead. Otherwise, without Love guiding him, where would he have ended up? And here now, with the past his only weapon—what could he do? She refused to know him—or couldn’t. And all remembering did was entrance him with his own bitterness and hatreds and betrayals.
You’re forgetting again: forgetting the cabin, the Lite-Brite, three musicks, the sea at midnight, the puddle, her presence, her drawl, her animal’s way of toying with the edge of her dress while sitting on the edge of your bed that first time, how you could maraud for sons and daughters up inside her heights—it was no empty time.
Maybe—maybe not empty, but Maggie had died untaught, untamed, he thought, the discord that a silent fever gives to fleshes in bed, muffled moans and the lineage of a martyr’s smile, she now embodied. Yet, this was how he loved her—this affirmation of her feral loveliness. He would have wanted her no other way. In life, she had been a whisper; in death, a roar. Somewhere in between was the Maggie Mechaine who laughed when she came, who hated her hair being stroked against its red grain, who hated gloves, who marched barefoot into batting cages and curled her toes into the tarmac with preternatural strength, who was scared of birds, who listened to the loudest music ever, who chewed cigarette filters until they shredded in her mouth, who. Who. Who.
If he was the son of a gun, what was she? Daughter to chrome? Then why was there no chrome in Weatherhead—dresses, storefronts, skeletons? They were their own children, inheritors of a legacy of scripture that forbade ‘know thyself’ and ‘know others’ and that would never tolerate the degree of perfection one could reach by unmeasuring flesh, slapping each other silly in the bathtub, and begging for birth, not out of habit, but because more always brings wealth.
He stared up as he walked. Grey. It was always so grey in Weatherhead. Had death’s ministry turned even the sun grey? Smeared it across the heavens like a smudge of ash? Or maybe there was no sun in this place, no weather—how could these be simultaneous or conscious when she was here? This thought brought a snarl of hope to twist in his innards and he resumed biped, walked a little straighter. He knew now that between hunter and prey, between hope and happiness there was an always immeasurable distance filled with a third kind of creature: the bullet, arrow, or knife to which the sudden meaning of forever is tied, tying one to the other. It could even be something as simple as a poem, a sketch of the face, for like guns and blades these are all tools of the animal innocence that comes from possession of one thing by the other. It’s only a matter of finding the nature of this third creature and letting it into your blood to bridge hunter and prey or hope and happiness or lover and lover.
Too, she had replaced the weathers with herself. In this exact, absolute moment he, beast, knew why he was here. No. He remembered why he was here: he had made himself this third creature in death just as she had done in life, for who says that the hunter can’t tuck him- or herself up in a ball, chin to chest and roll his- or herself down the barrel of the rifle and who says that hope can’t lash itself to the mast of the ship of wishes and who says the lover, armed with all that makes one heelless and hellish, can’
t be written or drawn latent and charged down onto page after page—whether story or self-portrait?
He must remember, no matter how he remembered, he must remember. Piece by piece until he had rebuilt the sky, the weathers, and her. He had Weatherhead in his blood now, in his spit and semen, in his speech and in his thoughts. And with it he could find her again. But would he have to destroy her once more?
Perhaps, by all indications Hate as well as Love stalked and haunted the countryside at war with one another. What side was he on?
There may have been no chrome, but there were chrome accusations everywhere, he saw, especially by Weatherhead’s pathetic river, a wan trickle that ducked amongst the buildings in the city center before it disappeared underground near the diner she worked at. They call it Tearbreak, she had told him once, a name from before I came. He wondered if this was the same river he’d crossed with Love so long before as they journeyed to Weatherhead.
On the opposite bank were a pile of cars smashed and destroyed and demolished, stacked five or six high upon one another. He’d never seen these before. The only vehicle he’d ever seen in Weatherhead was the empty truck that served as her bedchamber and the rumors of trains. What had happened to these? He stood and squinted at them. There was no ready bridge and he’d have to wander down the road a stretch before he’d find a place to cross so he just stood and stared. What he initially took as the movement of birds or vermin of some kind, playing about the interiors of the abandoned wrecks turned out to be a number of people, at least a dozen or more, moving about inside each level of smash, hunched over and tuck but still managing to move across and between the seats he could glimpse through the shattered windshields.
He continued walking, thus runs the face through the face through the page, he thought. In his mind, he made a flip-book of Maggie Mechaine, all the stations of her cross, punishments named after weathers, maybe.
He encountered few citizens. The city had been emptied of people for the war against the other city on the plain. The scattered crowds took the opportunity of her absence to have a sale of decays in a market just off the eastern periphery of town and when he saw the hesitant millings-about, he strode towards them, eager for company to ward off his convulsive, troubled smiles. Those abandoned by her campaign were a violent, rough lot, the type that made him turn up the coat of his collar against the chill they engendered with their drooling stares and jokeless smiles. There were an abundance of knives out that day. Flesh fluttered like kites in winds made out of the velocities of wrists.
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