Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Yes, actually. Once.

  She clapped her hands in glee. At what? God? Clouds-as-flowers? Surely not the sun—there’s no such thing anymore. She didn’t sound very sure of herself, though.

  He brushed her words away. No, ha, nothing like that. I shot it out over a bridge.

  It was the day they’d found out they’d never be able to have a baby.

  “I hope those were blanks,” Maggie pointed out, looking out over the bridge, after the bullets. “Get it? Cuz of—“

  “If you’re trying to be funny—“

  “Trying, yes. Failing, yes?”

  He blinked that day away. You heard the high voice? She said nothing but he knew the true meaning of her silence so he just asked, What is the scarlet symphony?

  She nodded without looking at him. I know why you ask. You want the song back in your blood. You want to bleed the song. I understand. The wind is creasing your coat, beckoning you back, but the journey over the black mountains is not an easy one. You’ll need to be prepared, the same way a priest in-gathers all his laughter before he climbs to the pulpit. Come on. I want to show you something. It might help. She crooked a finger at him, he followed, and as they walked through the bustling city where, as she went, eyes of the citizenry raised and lowered and here and there he caught glimpses of slight sneers and seashore curses on their faces and he knew the end was approaching, she asked, What is muse-ick?

  Music, you mean?

  She repeated the word after him. Mew-sick. What is it? She said symphony, that voice. In Weatherhead, symphony means the press-close, the bone-grab, the putting-in. It can be used two ways. She paused in the street and stepped in front of him, facing him. The roil and fuss of the mobs came to a phantasmal halt as she did this and, tongues untied by the prospect of a new murder by her, grey-headed bookies wound through the crowd taking wagers. It can mean this. She took out her knife, reached high, high up and cupped the back of his neck as she prodded the tip of the blade into his belly, leaning into the mock stab. Or this. She pocketed the knife and held him as she was, but now she turned her face up to his and for a moment he thought she’d kiss him, but she released him and as quiet as betrayals they resumed their walk. The city fell from its blood-lap pause, worthless and sickly, weaklings only given strength now by the whispered rumors of the coming revolution.

  I’ve been building something, she told him. When she spoke now she spun the heads of those cloistered nearby. Infrequent youths made fists in their pockets. Someone spat into the street. One of the devices of Weatherhead. I showed you some once?

  He nodded. He’d heard rumor of most but yes— the penal guillotine—the young couple born in stocks eye-to-eye—how could he forget?

  She led him to her garage where she slept in the bed of the truck that’d killed her. Behind this structure was one of the tallest buildings he’d seen in Weatherhead that hadn’t been stripped of all its build and architectures. There was something odd-a’-tilt about it. The shape was all wrong. Several story buildings shouldn’t bend and curve like that and why had symmetry been seduced off somewhere else by the lazy stretches of the structure’s odd roundings. It did look familiar, though.

  As they trudged through empty wires and abandoned windows, now shattered about, having fallen off the building they now approached, judging by the open sores on its faces, she poked a look back at him. This building is shaped like a butterfly. Do you know what that is?

  It was indeed, he now saw. Colors with wings, I think, he frowned. Words from Alaska were extincting and excusing themselves from his tongue. Flying colors?

  She shrugged. Perhaps. Your tongue is spiny with fogs of the city. This is a sign. My first war was shaped like this, like a butterfly. Or was it a flutterball?

  He started. That word. What no one else knew, he knew.

  The door was a tall rectangular affair but rounded in the center, its top portion a slender, vertical tube not unlike a thermometer that met a circular midsection. Set into the later was an enormous dial with two readings possible: Fair or Rain. Between these two dualities rested the word Change. His fingertips ignited into anxious fires. It was a barometer—an old school type. He’d almost gotten one for Maggie Mechaine when they were first married. This one was different, though, for from the base of the thing a thin metal arm protruded up across its face, an arm that moved back and forth across the portal. There was a slide on this metal windshield wiper that she now slid down, kneeling to get it to its furthest point. Its motion stopped.

  You have a penny in your pocket, she said matter-of-factly. Give it to me.

  He did? He patted his coat. The only wish-coin he’d had since he’d been here had been the one Frank had given him, the one he’d nearly passed to the house-blush Lararia meandering—he’d thrown that down a well.

  She divined the meaning of his confusion. All wells have bottoms. I never carry coin. She stepped to him again, stuffed her hand down in his pocket and pulled out the tithey-penny. She winced as she did so.

  What’s wrong, he fought the urge to grab her hand and see. The coin was burning her fingers.

  Quick before I wither, she retorted, dancing the coin like a bullet across her knuckles. She indicated the face of the barometer-gate.

  Uhhh—fair, he blurted. With two fingers she gently pressed the chosen word. With a click and a flick a slot appeared out of the i in Fair and accepted the coin. The door opened.

  How’d you do it before if you didn’t have a penny, he couldn’t help asking.

  She gave him a black look. I didn’t have to, was all she’d say.

  The interior deceived the eyes of all men. It was vaunted, vaulted hall sized, baseball-field volume with a ceiling lost in the dark above. There was a gentle slope to the floor and in perfect fossil form were arrayed bolts and tiny strips of metal joined to the floor in pairs, sweeping along the expanse of the room in rows upon rows. They had once held seats, he guessed, some sort of performance hall long gutted and left melancholy, maternal only to whatever dark classics she authored here in the half-shadow. At the far end, where the gentle descent ended, where the stage or risers would’ve been, was an enormous, monstrous form cloaked in grey folds, colorless, sickly dresses he saw, sewn together into the largest tarpaulin he’d ever seen. From the top of the thing trundled and cabled numerous ductworks, splines, and cords of varying thickness, spilling out across the ceiling like a lover’s hair across the floor.

  She led him down into the vast hall to the foot of the device. She laid her longcoat over a bend of duct, shrugged off her vest and rolled up the sleeves of her filthy white shirt. There on her arms he saw the swaying break of her, she the illustrated woman etched with false-fronted fracture—but, was it just the play of the light on her skin or were the breaks less—

  Think of the red of man, came the involuntary rough-thought again.

  There was an ancient metal ladder-staircase that extended up the length of the thing. She ascended this with a dash. He poked around while she began unfastening the all-enveloping tarpaulin. There was little else furnishing the hall, just a row of old, wooden lockers just to the left of the device. One cupboard fell open at his touch, and a cluster of bodies tumbled out on top of him. It was full of the false-fucked mannequins from that long ago tournament in the arena. The clatter of plastic, Pleistocene figures drew her attention and her laughter. She’d forgotten about those, she said. Her attempt to use soft-core, fur-silent shadow plays to assuage the savage temperaments of Weatherhead had proved useless, she explained, for the people had no interest in such things save as sport and she wasn’t inclined to provide them the luxury of the small assassination of herself beneath the tumble-thrust of a pantheon of conquered spar-men with the regularity their lusts required. So she’d given each man and woman a dummy of their desiring, to keep them quiet, keep them low. Sex, she spat, was no sport.

  Yet our Love here is violent, he pointed out before he realized what he was saying. She took no notice, it seemed, his confession n
othing more than a coat-shape draped on a half-closed door in the middle of the last night on earth. He quickly buried his words. Fearful he told her of how the people of Weatherhead talked of her legendary lovers—taken at her whim. She drew up angry from her perch. Rape is a common charge against me, but I’m a virgin, pure and simple. I’ve never taken a lover. She paused. You did, though, I think?

  She uses the word as if doing so would’ve been being unfaithful, he thought. He said nothing.

  And you told her, your dead-wife? About these other women?

  He nodded. She threw back her head and laughed. It meant about as much, he protested, as that. He pointed at the pile of falsehoods piled around his feet.

  We have a name for this, she turned and hunkered down at the top of the ladder. She curled a finger at the space between her legs, We call it temptation’s wound. It’s an old phrase, used by old stupid men. With a single motion, she whipped off the immense tarpaulin of her dead dresses. She slid down the ladder and joined him as he gawked. As one the two of them stepped back to examine it.

  The device was not so much cobbled together with a sense of function, but more out of desperate necessity. It was an eruption of engineering, duct, wiring, wood and metal of all conceivable sizes and shapes threw themselves outwards from the core of its function, hidden behind thickets of protruding metal and plastic. Numerous bronze roundels were fixed to its surface here and there, and their gentle, shallow concavities immediately reminded him of speakers torn from their moorings and lashed to the prow of this sick-ship machine. Central shafts of technology could be seen in the internal vertical, coiled and strangled and drowned with wire and fitting. Metal housings and casings seemed bolted to each other at random, linked together only by the insanity of her design, a function derived from the indeterminate meanings that Weatherhead gave things, but meanings steeped in the poetics of the cities of the plain, so much so that he couldn’t rob himself of the notion that this machine had been, until they’d entered just then, pregnant, and was now an exploding birth, a mesmerizing big bang of technical potential, machine parts reborn with new names and uses, transistors and diodes retaining their outward manifestations, but now recast, reforged in the half-dark, man-made hairs and pastas now the wiring of a new, momentary tribe of unprincipled science, the science of Weatherhead, a science of corrupted sleep, of dreams that banish all philosophers to the keyhole, of dreams that put wrench and drill in the hands of thieves with the sole dictum, Build me a perfect crime—the machine had birthed itself and, she the mid-wife, it’d been reconfused and rerefused as a liar’s function and in the shuddering wake of its emergence into Form, it’d been blasted across the world for its sin of thinking its potential to be one thing, its destiny another, and she’d criss-crossed the plain 51 times finding the fucking thing no simple matter, but instead a puzzle of extreme danger and an almost erotic hazard that’d nearly driven her mad. How many people of Weatherhead had died dragging its constituent components into the city? A thousand? More? And for what? For the largest lie on the plain? For the downward crush of the 51, the broken machine that’d been half-buried for centuries, it seemed—cults had sprung up around many of them—cults in name only now, since she’d slain their adherents, for science is no god, and the machine is nothing more than a protrusion of woman’s fallopian genesis, a false child.

  He came to know all this as they stood there together not holding hands and staring up at it. The awe was all his. She hated the goddamned thing.

  I can’t get it to work, she finally growled. Slinging a nearby toolbox into its innards, she climbed halfway into an asylum of wire and diode.

  He hardly heard her. He was still studying the device. Things weren’t attached with any fixed science: conduits weren’t married to their female counterparts. No, either or both were broken right down the middle and had been fitted back together. It was an enormous, moving-part jigsaw puzzle. It was a stereo turned inside-out. He walked over to where she jutted out of the machinery. Where’d you get all these parts?

  She was half-buried in the innards of the thing and her voice drifted out, They fell from the wreckage up yonder. An ankle swung up to indicate the sky. The boot there was unlaced and bobbed about on her toes. Unkempt was the new sexy.

  Oh. Ah. The junkyard of heaven.

  She looked back out of the mess and maze of wires and such and her blue eyes blazed in the thick of the machine. Heaven—that’s a word of Wellingwish. Funny.

  Somehow he knew that already.

  She asked, What does it mean?

  This, he sighed and indicated their empty-all. He stared down at her sadly but didn’t budge, simply was.

  Yes, she turned away from him, that’s what they said, too, when I came and razed their city. She dove back into her work. She had a rip on the back of her shirt, a claw-tear or weather-rend, maybe. Through it he caught a glimpse of a rare and indecisive symbol tattooed between her shoulder blades. He leaned and loomed about her, trying to fetch a closer glance at it, make out what it was, but she shifted her stance, the rip closed, and she continued, The Autumn Fete, you remember? You will go as my consort to delay the end of the fictions one last time. I made my dress of faces for you especial.

  The end of the fictions? Fear knotted his throat, worse than the noose had.

  To think how familiar Weatherhead has become with you in it. But near the end of the Fete, I will ask you to leave the city—to go back over the black mountains into the place some call the place of long shadows.

  He jumped forward. What? Why?

  She would not remove herself from the device. You are dying faster than the rest of us, stranger, pulse or no.

  He wanted to tell her, you’re already dead, my Maggie mine. The true sign and source of autumn was her. But autumn didn’t mean death to Maggie Mechaine, he thought, it meant—

  In the murmur, he knew: Waking up. She was trying to save him. Oh god—

  I want then for your pulse to be returned to you, so you can leave. First is best as last, though, and I thought you could help me with this infernal machine. It requires blood and pitch.

  His mind raced. She was sending him back, back to half-remembered Alaska, back across the mountains, out of Weatherhead. She knew—somehow now she knew what he’d done to get here, how he’d come to find her, to save her—but the worm had turned and now she was trying to save him. By a bed, pages were turned desperately. There wasn’t much time left, said the silver clock.

  What would he do? He fumbled with the knife in his pocket. Kill her again? What would that even accomplish anymore? Hate had led him down that path of potentials but was it so far off as to be desperate? If he killed her, he could rebuild her again, couldn’t he? Rebuild her the right way, this time, rebuild her with all the memories that the story called Weatherhead had helped him remember, rebuild the Maggie Mechaine who’d made a book out of faces and a story in the long shadows that the high voice read, a story of wrong questions, all wrong for him.

  What was it to be? Love’s way of listening and brigandage and tied-hand duels in the center of town with sweet-knives and little deaths? Or Hate’s hilarious betrayal, the stab-in-the-back, the seductive great death, the song of the seedless wine?

  Either way, the knife was flavored by her, for her.

  No. He couldn’t go back. Whatever her fate, he couldn’t abandon her. It was what he had always done. He’d once thought that if he’d destroyed this mistranslation of his once-wife that he’d save Weatherhead. Maybe he’d been wrong all along. Maybe he needed to save her from Weatherhead. And maybe it wasn’t a matter of the partial duality of Love and Hate and their perpetual duel—maybe it was something else, something both—

  He stared at the back of her neck, the tear in her shirt, the cleaving of her dusty, worn trousers to her backside. What if he’d been born a man who could only speak with his eyes closed? Then nothing could muddle his choice of path save for the raw-shadow on his eyelids. As she tinkered around with the machine, he sto
od just behind her. Her fingers and arms were smudged with black and she had grown a perfect smear slash of black across her forehead.

  Why were her fingers always black at night? What was she building in there, in her brood-hooded room with its smoke and rent still-lives and still-borns? And always softly singing, singing her impossible odes. Only once did he dare contemplate barging in—but he saw the songs as wards, not as pleas. He hadn’t been foolish enough, he wagered—he’d lashed himself to the passing ships of his life with her and plugged his ears with the rush and thrush of the hailsong of other women—instead, instead, he thought in a feverish rout of his incapabilities as he stood there watching her tinker, he should’ve lashed himself to the song itself, crafted a cross out of the shipwreck he’d caused and stabbed it down like a moon-flag in the middle of her voice, bathed in her words, laughed at the smashed door, shown her his splinters—

  Why did you think you could find me that way, she broke him out of his prisoner’s-wishes and grunted as she struggled with an impossible lever, that I’d come and cut you down from yer hangin’?

  I know why now. Because you don’t want me to die. Right?

  The sound of her tinkering stopped on a sudden. Outside, in the far, far off, someone could be heard screaming, When didn’t I or haven’t I? and there was the mock wintry tinkle of bells that signaled that, inarticulate as that crack between the seasons was, winter had just ceded to autumn’s messengers.