Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Mr. Moustache tucked a finger inside his waistcoat and exhaled mightily. “You are not alone to suffer the memories of the past, son—to puzzle over them—some find bliss in the jigsaw—others bruises.”

  “We’re—back—“ He nearly lost his gloves, clutched as they were in his quaking hand.

  “No. You asked after our stories, Love’s. Mine has many parts. This is merely one.”

  “How can we be here—where are we—“

  “Poets, my boy, are much finer magicians than I, so forgive my lack of language. All I can offer as a mark of faith is that this is a vision of what-has-been-and-gone masquerading as a what-will-be.”

  A voice cried, “Baron!”

  The two men turned. A third fellow, a tall, anemic man, pale and reaper, swooped up the central aisle towards them, hands outstretched as wide as his sickly smile, “Baron,” he said again in a gentler, scolding tone, “shouldn’t you be dusting off your pedestal?”

  “Ah, no, Konstantin—you know, of course, that I never conduct. Don’t have the wrists for it.”

  The two men laughed, but Mr. Moustache bent to him and whispered, “And keep it close to you,” he warned, “—I’m not really supposed to do this sort of thing. Work of hooligans, muckin’ about with time.”

  Mr. Moustache inclined his head and made introductions, “My son, Nikolai. The violinist Konstantin Abramovich Sladkynozh." The two younger men shook hands. “The one with designs on your sister, Kolya,” he made a feint at humor behind his hand to he, his son, and the musician laughed out loud, drawing confused stares from the rows nearby. Oh! Eyes told one another: it’s them!

  “I’m afraid,” he found himself saying, “Konstantin Abramovich, that my sister will be most deaf to even the legendary tensions and attentions of your bow. She’s not a musical girl at all.”

  “Business, Nikolai Isaakovich,” bent the crooked smile, inclined the vulture’s head, “could only be but the loveliest tune in her hands—but railroads, really, Baron?”

  The Baron was barely listening to his son and his former student. His eyes were fixed on the stage while he’d been noticed so all eyes were fixed on him. He flapped a hand at them dismissively. “The future—“ he muttered ambiguously. Rot, it was.

  The lights fell and Sladkynozh slunk off with a handshake and his card.

  “What are we,” wondered the son, “ghosts?”

  “Ghosts weren’t just something Dickens ate that upset his stomach,” he chuckled. No, they weren’t ghosts. There was no such thing as ghosts.

  He took him arm-in-arm and they stood and listened. “This is—was,” Mr. Moustache spoke gently-softly into his charge’s ear, “the first time this was performed.” He stared into this other face, this son’s face. “I’m so happy that you are here with me to hear this, son.” He turned back to the stage sadly. “My son was never really here that night.”

  He wasn’t musical, never had been. Neither had Maggie. She knew only one kind of pitch and she made Weatherhead all the more confounding for it. His own predilections were banal, rural—he certainly never listened to anything remotely like what he heard now. And what was it? Something not quite the rhythm of bloods—something falling though, not a careen or a collapse—more like the gentle gravity of the fall and drift of the soul as it dove, free, from a window, out over a meadow of voices all hush-gentle whisper-at-once and as-one, as if the skin were a chorus and pores the singers and the wind blew over it and the eruption of gooseflesh was the tune, the pitch. Yes, that was it, an autumn about the body—the imperishable substance behind him was the only part not moving as the rest of what he was tickled the air as it moved against time at a right angle, pushing it in another, contrary direction—not an autumn of rot, but an autumn of slaughtering sighs, of multiplying ways of falling. Nothing ever fell to die. Vertical thresholds in the season of undarkness are not death’s doors: they are death’s ear-cup whispers to life. Call it what you will, a season of hell, if you must, fill a poem with all the poison you can muster—you can never change the essential tenet of all loves: it never ends.

  He was surprised to find himself shedding two symmetrical, little tears.

  His father spoke before he could. “I always stood at the back, see? Your mother—no, my wife—forgive me, you’re not really my son—she sat up front alone, see? I wrote it all for her.”

  No. Not his father. His father had a bushier, greyer moustache,

  “I’ve heard this before—“

  Mr. Moustache shrugged and fiddled with his glass. “It became many different things. It’s all still out there somewhere. Pieces. But different, changed, re-remembered. There are things, brother, that are summations of all we are, like my little piece of doggerel, but they depend on what is outside. At their core, it’s the same music, my music, but place it somewhere else, it changes, it gets reborn, re-envisioned, reinterpreted. Music, my friend, is the autumn of the arts. Do you understand?”

  He nodded. Weatherhead was the same. Memories cast like bones in darkness. Sick memories.

  “Taken apart and reassembled. What I once wrote, diffused and scattered, found and remade into something else.

  “Does that bother you?”

  He shrugged. “It serves a noble purpose, as all things born of love do. It’s the undercurrents of things, see? Ever-shifting, ever-changing. We’re never just one thing only. Nothing is. You remember her angry? Joyous? Storm? Calm?

  “No. Yes. I have to put her back together—the same way you did—“

  “You already are. You know that. That’s why we remember, but you struggle with the memories, you struggle to remember remembering, remembering why you remember. S’the key, man.”

  “I think I understand. I came after her. A chase, not a hunt.”

  “Yes. You had a map in the book of faces, the faces you had never known.”

  “She was hidden under the table.”

  “No. Not hidden. You just never looked.” He stood up, nodding to a stout, angry fellow festooned and bedeckled with medals and outright fantasies, “we should go now. Best to not dwell here for too long—“

  Then they were then again. Mr. Moustache was oddly serene and disturbed at once. He stood with his hands folded before his chest, looking up. Then, he remembered himself and together they stole back out into the street.

  They ran to the corner where they slowed into a lazy, drawling trawl, pretending innocence. He turned to the infinite composer, You never said: what was the name of that music, originally?

  He smiled sadly. It was my last symphony, after a poem—

  It was the closing of the day:

  She loos'd the chain, and down she lay;

  The broad stream bore her far away—

  He fell silent. I named it—it doesn’t matter. Others after me called it the Scarlet Symphony.

  Why?

  Because there is an infinitely patient and beautiful correspondence between life and death. Death is just an interruption.

  All of you—Love—are you the third creature between Life and Death?

  But Mr. Moustache would say nothing, merely stood in the dusty street with his lonesome hands thrust into victim pockets.

  He didn’t do it, Rapey, I mean, did he? In his story—rape that woman? They were in love, weren’t they?

  They were in love, aye. Love in the long shadows. That was a time when the world had yet to yawn and stretch and open its eyes from the dream of the How It’d Been, but the time was close. He was a priest and only fourteen.

  You’re kidding.

  And she a wrecker, as I said, a goddess, and the world didn’t take kindly to a love like that and they called it rape, violation. Best not to trouble yerself with these matters, son. Now, go, friend. Go and put your sins and crimes back together, too, for these need some mindin’. Hate is waitin’. You’ll be visited by three ghosts soon, son, made out of music.

  And then he was left alone there in the wilds of the streets of Weatherhead and there was something new i
n the breeze that tickled his palms, something lovely and home. He looked down at his hand. It still clutched something.

  It was nothing more than sweetness on the edge of the knife.

  ⧜

  “I remember the first time I saw a photograph of myself. When I was just a little kid, right?”

  “Please, don’t.” She knew he hated these sorts of conversations. He hated discussing childhoods and dreams with Maggie Mechaine. How dare she think she’d ever be more than the napkin he wiped his mouth with after the feast of Summer?

  “Just listen,” she insisted, pointing a finger at him.

  Not this time. She talked about this a coupla times. Truth told, the past’s alliteration was broken by the broken tongue of his reluctance to acknowledge Summer. Weatherhead seemed to mock him. What—had he fallen in Love with Autumn all over again? In the city, fall started from the highest point where he’d dallyvanted with the Colored Girl who could be any face she liked, except her own. He’d traded his whites for her blacks and the world was no worse off for it, was it?

  A thousand black birds riot around a detective. What color is your guilt, then?

  That’s not fair. Don’t see it for the act, see it for what I made of her—

  You could never just go straight home, could you? Wake up that song that’d gone to sleep inside you?

  He fled, fleet of foot and seed, to another moment where he took shelter, but

  “I remember,” she said one day when he picked her up from her batting cages, “the first time I ever saw a picture of myself. Isn’t that weird?”

  “I dunno. Was it a weird picture of you?” He looked over at her. She was clutching a basket of baseballs. A few here and there were decorated with faded red and pink hearts, refugees from a long-past Valentine’s Day that she’d made up for herself since no one else would.

  She ignored him. “I just remember bein’ afraid I was gonna fall out of the picture and what was worse was what’d be left there—a little blank outline or something? Kids think of dumb stuff, don’t they? But I wasn’t worried about the fallin’ out, just what’s there behind it.” Her features softened. “I keep thinkin’ about all those people fallin’ out of those windows that day and how I didn’t feel nothin’ except, why jump? Why not stay inside and die? Did jumpin’ feel more free or something? I guess in the end they got to choose how to die, not by what someone else decided for them, so maybe they won—“

  “Won what?” He snorted. “They died. They were murdered—gone forever—“

  She rapped a rhythm on the window with her knuckles. “No. I don’t think of the past as something that happened. It happens. Rememberin’ is like tellin’ a story. It’s always there. They ain’t really gone.”

  “Yeah? Where’d they go? Heaven? You’re as religious as my shoe, Mags, so don’t gimme that bullshit. So what is it? Where are they?”

  She leaned her head on the glass, breathed, and drew a square. “Where does a leaf go after Fall? We don’t call it Fell afterwards, do we?”

  Where had come this dangerous distance between them? It was as if her puzzles had started to infect her—first, her fingers, through the tips, over the whorls of her individuality—second, down the crisscross Nazca of her palms, they jigged and sawed their way over her wrists—third, through the strings of her veins, plucked by her heart only—all the way up to the territory of her redrum heart—

  Is this why she broke? She, too, fell into this place and shattered again, was it as simple as that? And he knew now what she’d become in Weatherhead: an unsuicided empress of the mad and murderous. Some people of Weatherhead said she was a punishment, others a scourge—

  There’s a bazaar town that she crossed through before she came to Weatherhead, a town made out of circuses. Each circus told a different version of the fall of the cities of the plain over the ages and people lived in each one. Some were silent, others were riots and banjaxings of colors, shouts, and banners. In one circus, they sold the dark and lovely collars that put on your neck the feverish sensation that marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.

  The straw in her mouth began to tremble. Something formless and poetic had taken up vigil around her neck because she raised her shoulders slightly. “Somethin’ outside us.”

  “Some people,” he snorted, “call it ‘god’.”

  “Naw, not like that. I call it our third creature.”

  “Our what?” How wise was her tongue, and the measure of this put anger in his teeth and knuckles, in bone’s vanguard. And it was that anger, that pre-sexual anger which obliviates convention, that moots all the faces , that reduces anger down to one single momentum: perilous possession. He both wanted her and hated her.

  She fiddled with the stereo. “Doesn’t it seem like they play the best music when they think no one is listening?” She found the pulpit of detuned religion on a late-night metal show.

  He stabbed a finger into the music and it stopped. “What?”

  “Exactly,” she sighed. “No one ever knows anyone. Throw open a window and throw yourself out of it and everyone’ll forget after a while, right? There ain’t no other place to go, right? Just another story two, maybe three, people read, make a face at it, and forget.” She watched the city slink by.

  He might have heard the voice of Weatherhead even then. He shot a glance at her neck, her nape. “Is this the story you’d’ve written?”

  She thought for a moment. “I would’ve made it a little more violent, maybe. A knife-fight or two.”

  So, city? I never listened to her. I never knew her pitch. I never knew her game. I should’ve been there, holding her hand. Her fall would’ve been easier—

  No. No! Think of Love’s words. First questions, not last.

  I should’ve been with her, he insisted, as ape as they come.

  You’re a fool! All your questions—have you ever wondered what Weatherhead was like before you came here? Her wars—all of it—is for you. You can’t—you shouldn’t be here. She doesn’t want you here.

  Why?

  Because she loves you. And then, as the voices of cities do, it sank into urban fade, no matter the ruin, ruin itself a measure of the immortal want of its builder.

  There’d been a secret Maggie Mechaine. The crosswords had told him so. But he’d been so illiterate, too deaf and not intrinsic enough to know it. He’d long ago characterized Maggie’s madness as the kind that makes one experience everyone and everything the exact same way. But he was confusing madness with freedom. She was how she wanted to be. She was content with that. Was it her fault that there were few people about who didn’t have poor eyesight and hearing, who lacked the crisp clarity that is autumn? Was this why she didn’t find her great privilege in leaving him after he confessed that he cheated on her by way of routine?

  She wasn’t a dying, dropping leaf: she was the season. He couldn’t see the picture for itself: only in terms of its individual elements upon which he leapt from one-to-the-other as he tried to avoid hitting the ground, for who knew what lurked there? Everything else was a fall against Maggie Mechaine—but not her. She was the constant, secret, and scarlet empress of the season.

  Don’t make her an excuse for yourself. You have an abnormally bad sense of guilt. Think of the clouds-as-flowers.

  Something seized his throat. Clouds-as-flowers. The baseball hearts had made him wonder for a moment, but she’d never cheat. He knew that.

  Something seized his throat. It was winter’s charms which’d nearly killed him once already—winter’s songs to summer—

  ⧜

  Oh, yes, there was one last thing. His greatest betrayal, the most salient out of many, had to be reckoned with first, as Mr. Moustache had warned him.

  She was a sister officer and her name was Summer Gruel and she was a fitting collision of these two themes: like summer, she was a fictional height, long-limbed and a kind of bronze pendant fastened to the year, with a nose too long, a chin too understated, and a chest too shallow to be th
e warrior she thought herself, for summer is always making pretensions to things that it can’t avoid, namely autumn or, to put it another way, Maggie Mechaine. But he didn’t know this then. Like gruel, she was churlish and unpleasant to the touch if not the taste, as if the fizzle of her bombastic feminine potential had been subsumed too much in a stern and angular mannishness and resulted in a bitterness that bespoke this longitudinal duality within her. She was too desperately independent. This golden initiative of hers left her less feminine somehow, haughty. She was a woman one might think loved women, an insulting assumption that belied their tryst. She loved him, she said. He knew her as a fellow officer separated by an uncertain distance that was a mix of professional and sexist aloofness. She was so much the opposite of Maggie Mechaine that it made him blink and sneeze. One night he leaned too close into her windmill-shaped body and they made secret assignations in out-of-the-way places that Maggie Mechaine’d never discover them in, namely, all places of the world. They were brazen and undisguised, they thought. Thing was, no one cared, even when he finally had her after weeks of dalliance and their unsecret and uninvisible flirtations and kisses came to hesitant fruition.