Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  She couldn’t stop laughing. Not all the way home in the car, where she pulled a Rorschach out of her jacket pocket, folded neatly in half. Not in line at the pharmacy for her new chemical brother. Not through the dinner he bought her to beg forgiveness for the ordeal. Not in her sleep. She never did tell him what happened. All she’d say was “Five hundred” amidst her laughter.

  What was, he desperately wanted to know but refused to accede to her temptation, so goddamn funny? He wasn’t laughing.

  The next day was the day she tried to shoot him with his own gun, though, so that was pretty funny.

  ⧜

  He found her big book of crossword puzzles when he’d packed up her things. It had been laid on her pillow for him the morning she’d gone to Weatherhead. She had neatly cut out the ones from the newspaper and preserved them under sheets of laminate in a large binder. Who knew why? Like old family photos mounted for posterity. Why keep them? She was too careless with the shape of her world to be obsessive-compulsive or anything like that. The day he first went to Weatherhead he’d gotten them down out of the wall of drawers where he’d put them. Was there a clue in here? Stupid. There were lots of clues. Running his finger down the punchy, curt signifiers, he could elicit little to no meaning out of them. They were just random scattered facts. His eye was drawn to the grid where the answers were entered. She actually hadn’t finished it, some squares were empty. Then he saw his name. It is easier to recognize disease than it is love she had written just before it. He looked at the date of the clipping. It was—it must’ve been—the day after the therapist.

  There’d been a secret Maggie Mechaine. The crosswords said so. I know that.

  Do you? To see the inks at midnight is difficult if all is too dark, too dark—

  But, see, that’s why she tried to give me the sun at midnight. Like you did in the grove last night—

  She turned away.

  She—you wanted me to see—but see what?

  That all the answers were wrong. All 51 of them. Or was it the questions, the clues that were wrong? “Never a cross word,” he said to himself on his grim perch.

  That was the day he’d tried to shoot himself with his own gun, though, so that was pretty funny.

  ⧜

  It was their last year in their city. His questing about in their kingless, queenless empire of souls crowned by bruises only, took him to many places that day.

  “Think of the lie that today tells tomorrow,” she said. Oh, he had. He had lied to Maggie Mechaine with a great, pious fervor, conducting a rude religion of indignant petulance whose prime rite was the mixing of his complexion and its drippings with those of other women, torrid roundabouts for his column of siege in those foreign parts, invocations to the goddess-to-be-betrayed, Maggie Mechaine. And what had he to show for his crusades? Not even a single tear. He couldn’t stand that his admitted affairs had been taken in such a cavalier way. He wanted her to rage, be angry, leave even, get even even. But she wouldn’t. The only thing that got to her, he mused in a fury, was she, not him. Beat and bruise her as he might, by the assumed redemptive power of the hammer of flesh on the anvil of traitors, she would be neither torrid nor timid—she would neither fight nor leave.

  There were other woes, though, too. Her store was not doing well. They were living paycheck to paycheck off his job and she periodically made muted sounds about selling the place. Maybe they could move—

  But neither of them could move in any direction except straight ahead, heads down. They lacked the proper map, maybe, or knowledge of the roads on the other side of the colossal black mountains where the rest of the world was. In the last few years before she died, she’d developed an odd habit: drawing in the air. Oh. Ah. He remembered this again: he’d searched for these invisible brushes when he’d sifted through her corpse’s bits on that snowfield but never found them. What did he find? A body greater than her body, a body inside her body? Was its name Weatherhead?

  She drew in the air. He treated her as a symbol once and bore his senses into her as she did this: a square or rectangle—the frame, obviously—and—what in the middle? Asymmetries and convolutions and revolutions—was she drawing up that map, the one on the bottom of the table? The way to Weatherhead? There was only one way to know, she seemed to whisper in her sleep: die softly in my red, red hair, but this he refused with spit to do—only she would be forced to die and not for the secret of an invisible art, but because she already knew all those secrets.

  For example, Maggie Mechaine loved stained-glass windows, marveled at the trap of the color in the glass and the shatter. The glass people were her favorite images—how they told stories, solidified and codified in something as brittle as a window. She spoke of glass chewed by those trapped in perpetuity in the windows.

  “What do you think that story is?” She pointed up with her nose. Her eyes were dipped in smoke. No one at his work had recognized her when she showed up, higher then Christ on the Cross, shipwrecked, scuttle-butt under her hoodie, asking for him. She asked him on a date to church.

  He squinted up. “What? Story? That’s Jesus, Mags.”

  She stared at the execution with wider eyes, taking in the sunlight pouring through it from without, martyr backlit by the father’s lumen. “A man gets hung for loving,” she softly said. “isn’t that what you’d call the whole thing?” He said nothing. “Do people ever get punished for not loving?”

  He wouldn’t answer. He was afraid to answer now for hell was already too close to everything as it was. It was raining outside and streams ran down the red and blue glass. She watched this for a long time, the course of the weather’s veins, the barefoot rains running in rivulets over the broken colors, before whispering, “S’too bad they don’t let it rain in churches. I’d come and look at that every day, that water runnin’ down those pieces of glass like that. I could make my own little church, a little religion just for me. Like you did.”

  Intemperate scowls of a clergy at its limits sent them scattering out into the diamond-fall steady putting water under everyone’s feet. That day the world wanted to drown everything in it. He took her home. The next day he bought her a kit for making stained-glass. But all she could do was sit at the table, looking down at it for a good hour. Occasionally, she’d hold up a pane, stare through it and mark down in her tiny notebook reserved for barometer readings how it made the world change:

  “Red made the world all crimson crime-scene.”

  “Blue made the world all high tide hog-tied.”

  “Yellow made the world all heaven scent.”

  And so on.

  Finally, with a squint and an unburied demi-smile she pushed the kit away. “You better do it. I’m afraid I’ll break—I’ll break it. I don’t wanna break it.” He was a giant of a man, with giant hands. He could never, he tried to laugh. He was still blinking at the color weal she’d made on the skin of the page with the whip of her words. How had she written that?

  No. Not how. Why.

  ⧜

  He’d found another murder smeared across the dew and don’t. A woman had fallen, beasts of Weatherhead hissed about her while the other animals stayed back, mumbling amongst themselves. They probably hadn’t eaten for weeks and bloodsmear meant morsel. There were even some dinosaurs thrown in for good measure, for his pleasure, he guessed, milling around the peripheries of the crime of isolated extinction.

  A saurian jostled him, then stared down at him in friendly alarm. Hadn’t he been a policeman or something once? That’s what she said. He shot a look down at his hands. Yes. Yes! I am so taken with evidences and histories and stories that I’m failing to see the why in the middle of the road, the why that splits the path—Y—

  A grim-jawed tyrannosaur waggled its worthless limbs. Left hand or right hand?

  He ignored the sorry saurian. He studied the body. Cause of death? He prodded the corpse’s ribs. It giggled. It was her again.

  She shielded her eyes and looked up at him. I propose a waterfall m
ade out of suicides so we can reenact the murder—

  That won’t be necessary, he sighed, turned tale and fled from her once more, full-to-sick with an old world.

  The smoke in her blood was suffocating him. He sought succor in rumors of her coming death. So he found Sir Burn plotting over a bowl of Weatherhead’s famous cardboard cereal and together they took a drink in one of Weatherhead’s shabby ruin-side cafes. The drinks were called “runaways”, chipped glasses tied to bindles that one had to hold out from one’s face to tip into one’s mouth. It was like a weird maternity begun by sperm tied to a stick and hoboed into a fallopian gasp an embrace’s-length wide. The drinks themselves were terrible. But he needed answers. The rebel refused to discuss the grove, though, said he could never endure the punishment for transgressing, being a mere mote in the eye of the goddess of chastisement and vulture’s worth, so he chased other stories.

  Army? Sir Burn tossed his head back and laughed, No, it was her and her alone that took Wellingwish. She has no need for engine-propelled stupidities. Army! Pah!

  But the others with her—

  Beggar’s blood. Eaters of holidays just like all of us. They hold the edges of her coat so it doesn’t drag in the blood. I say again. Against Wellingwish there was her and her alone. Don’t be fooled by her parade talk. Anyone limping away from that battle was maimed by her grace and her grace alone. Oh, and they carry away all the glass. Glass will not grow in Weatherhead. They say the climate is just not right yet.

  Glass.

  Ayup. Sir Burn ducked and lifted his head in the slowest nod ever. He went on. She laid waste to that other city. It was still being built. It was a half-city, only. It was easy for her.

  They were both silent for a while. Then, Sir Burn sighed. I’ve lost my moors.

  For a moment he thought the fellow meant Machine Eel, his harem of one, but caught another desperate pitch behind his words. You mean moorings. Are there seas near Weatherhead? She had a fear of drowning and ships were never far from her, he explained, disguising his detectivity with options for her murder.

  Sir Burn just grunted and slung his drink out as if fishing. He caught a dash-splash on an outstretched tongue. Don’t speak of seas. And I mean moors. The lands around this place are broken fast.

  Nothing grows there?

  Not yet. Moors keep a murderer an honest man. The ground is soft and pliable, fine for both the Rape Upon and the Body Under After. Don’t get me wrong, he hastened to add, the rape is consensual. He failed to mention the death part.

  Consensual. Against the sensual, he thought, eying Sir Burn’s rude features. If the hunters were he, than who was Sir Burn?

  Then, of a sudden came a stream of screams of horror, a cascade of terrible shrieks and squalls, chokings and red-facings, eye-tearings and fleeings. The rebel took this in with a grave face.

  She comes, he said with a rough jangle of a cough. He stood up, snapped the bindle in two, tossed it aside, and stretched, yawned. You’re looking too hard without seeing a damn thing and this damn thing is that she damn well must die. We are waiting for you to make your move. Poison your knife, your tongue, your cock—you are well-practiced in all three—and cut her, sing to her, fuck her. After all, wasn’t it you that dispatched her curse to the plain in the first place? His grin was wry and dry. Which of the three did it?

  None, he wanted to cry. He struck the table with his palm. Where’re you going—

  There are many reasons to never come to this place, my odd, opposite friend who lets the gun speak through him. May you never know them all. For the drink. He tossed a filthy penny on the table, tossed a lazy salute to him, and shrugged off through the screaming, fleshly mob.

  She strode with a bestial elegance through the streets, lackadaises still running from her shouting invocations for deliverance from this worst-of-all-things. For she wore a dress made out of faces.

  A parade of one watched by the backsides of disease, the flow of her attire eternally watchful and unconcluded: she’d managed to capture the final emotive, strangled fixture of each face in its last moment. She came to this place surrounded by a cloud of fixed expressions not a gunpowder misery as he had—a barbarous slash against hell, the poem of the scum on the pond, she flashed her terrible collage, the profundity of it not in the gore and vivisection but in the heavenstashed loveliness that she comported herself with as she glided, clotted with emotions cinching her waist and traveling mudflap down her thin white legs.

  It was, it now dawned on him with horror, a poor translation. The faces should all be hers.

  She paused before him with a look of frustration. She put her hands on her hips and frowned. It was clear she was annoyed and offended with her subjects’ lack of enthusiasm for her fashionable endeavor. She seemed to notice him for the first time, though he was certain this was all for his benefit.

  You, for one, I thought would appreciate it. You gave me the idea. See? Chin on her chest, she smoothed out the irregular lumps on her costume. I had the Needlemen fix their faces at just the particular register to make a sequence of expression. Can you see? She gingerly pointed one-two-three and so on and so on, starting at her bosom, around her back in a spiral down until it reached the still-bleeding rip-off at the hem at her ankle. The stations of a scream. For authenticity, I even started slicing at that exact fixation of their scream. Later the Needlemen were able to make the expression permanent under my direction. All the expressions of horror! Do you like it? Like your muhvy—movie you told me about. All the moments lined up in One. She modeled it in the street, turning this way and that. I shall wear it to the autumn fete!

  He was beyond appalled. But she just laughed at his unabashed revulsion and indignation. Weren’t you just earlier this high voice, by your measure, lambasting my poor treatment of the people here? And what of your dead-wife? Were you as much tyrant as I am tyranness rexanne? You think I am her somehow? A malignant shade of your inexpressible and pathetic cold-woman. That is all. Well, I am something more. I am all these things. Her hands trickled down the faces covering her form. Every ill that befalls you in Weatherhead you lay at my feet. So, I give you your cold-wife and all the 51 stations of her at the moment of her death, eh?

  All she knows is that she died, he thought on a terrible sudden. This is the key—death is a thief of memory. I had nine months of empty plains as she rebuilt herself out of the debris of the War. I was just a wolf following in the wake of her army of one, picking up the scraps. I should’ve been leading her army, been her virtue, been of an infinite, untroubled fealty. Instead, what did I do? Tried to forget it all. And now it comes tumbling back in pieces, High Voice, and all I want now is to put her back together—but not like this—a badly translated version of the woman that—that—

  You told me: collect the moment, so I did. The moment of death. What do you think? She continued turning this way and that, holding up the dress, revealing her scabby, scarred heels.

  I think you’re a monster. I think you have nothing to do with my wife. I think you’re a fucking beast who took her face, too. You don’t get it. You never saw those faces. He stopped. What faces? Faces in a book—

  She pouted. These faces are yours if anyone’s. Not mine.

  This was not how it was.

  Then, prey tell, she put her hands on her hips, say how it should have been.

  But he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember the book of faces.

  She laughed in his face. Just try, she taunted, to dodge my cruelty.

  Beast, he screamed back. His fists implored him to hit. The caliber of the blow of the remembrance of the book of faces had unsettled him, unbalanced him. This deviation from Maggie Mechaine standing before him, tilting her head back with ebullience and exposing her beggar’s white throat, knew nothing of the book of faces.

  All hail armed suffering, Weatherhead cried. For the Autumn’s Fete you will be my adversary. Afterwards, we will fight, you and I! Search for me amongst the grove of knives this time, Iron Fool,
and we’ll see who remembers violent death best!

  With chains binding us, Lady Sickness? he called back.

  No, but bound by words of blood that I should never have shown you. And how did you find your lost lady-love in all that snow if she were as white as me?

  And in that instant, everything shifted and re-aligned. Because of the red, he said. The red she wrote in the snow with.

  But it was not the snow. It was not the windows, not the colors, it had been something else.

  (42 Across) I Know Autumn by Heart.

  She did and he knew how.

  Nine months in a cabinet of quiet furiousities—all these memories, these faces of hers had piled up after she died—backed up behind a dam of the past, for the nostalgias we both love and cause and loathe and curse are born and overpopulate as quickly as breaths. It had all built up into these crude tunings for her scarlet symphony whose coda might very well be her dying again by his hand in the wastes and ruin nation of the plain, here in Weatherhead.

  He had so distanced himself from the experience of her that she’d welled up, dammed up in two places: his throat and here beyond the black mountains. His throat? Yes. Had he not spoken for nine months or had he only spoken through his gun? And if he had, would he now only be heard with the same voice? Or a knife? Poison? How could he know how he’d bring about her fall?

  I know autumn by heart.

  She did and he knew how.

  Maggie Mechaine could memorize a season before it happened, armed with her barometer and sketchpad. Maggie Mechaine happened before she should’ve. Maggie Mechaine who’d been awestruck, thunder-hearted, hail-jawed, wind-wept when those planes moved against common sense and crashed into those buildings—those people jumping—she’d been the Ekman of the turn of the seasons, barometer, leaps in pressures, crashes in pressures, only she couldn’t turn anything away from their final destinations the way the wind could under the right and truthful Ekman. In life, she didn’t have the lungs to gust and gush like that, to push. In death, in Weatherhead, she did, though. Love said she had roar. And with it she’d worked worlds onto the world. Here she’d taken away the buildings and left only the frames of the windows—her frames. She said she did this to prevent further strayings of the Up into the extensions and tumors of the Down and he believed her.