Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  She didn’t answer, just asked, So—you never put a child in your dead-wife?

  Through a crack in the wall he could hear the screaming voice again, shit-hearted, monstrous and bland, threatening to beat someone right out of their habits. No, he answered coldly. He went over and pressed his eyes, scanning the debris field for the combatants. He saw none.

  She shrugged. Children are forbidden in Weatherhead, so I wouldn’t know what might devil-mark the excuse for making them.

  That wasn’t true, he almost blurted out. He’d seen children—he’d seen the theory of their daughter: in the market when the flowers returned—in the queue of refugees outside the apiary seeking the alms of sweetness. A hypothetical girl, his hair, her eyes, dressed in the ragged, raggedy pajamas of an assassin’s child. But—how could he report this sighting—the ruler of Weatherhead was as likely to hunt down and slay the orphan as not. What would she do with a child anyway? Maggie Mechaine, at least, had milks of her own to bless the creature with, an unforgiving but willing womb to emerge from—oh, and most of all!—and she was fool enough to borrow his traitor’s seed for the recipe.

  When he said nothing, she returned to the previous subject. Why summon me, then? I’m consumed with obligations on this day: the fete tonight—someone piracied and thieved in my beehives—where I keep all the sting Weatherhead can muster—

  What do bees do in autumn and winter, he wondered aloud. He could no longer do anything without passion in this place. He grabbed her and spun her around. A look of amazement shaped her jaw and brows anew. Her wrists in his hands and the spanner drooped. Lovely and black was the filth on her bang-dancing knuckles.

  Let me— Her breath hitched and he interrupted her protest (or was it a plea?).

  The high voice. You ignore it but I know you can hear it.

  It doesn’t—

  He shook her. What does it mean to you? It spoke of something today. Something that Maggie—and here she recoiled with a poisoned tongue—knew about. Something she wrote about once, I think. Something that Love showed me yesterday.

  Don’t say that word, she shouted at him, throwing him off her with surprising strength, yesterday—Maggie— She had turned white. She’d never uttered her name before.

  I’ll say them all, he cried, yesterday when I wasn’t looking, Maggie went and cut all her hair off. She kind of looked like a boy—but really she was beautiful. She’d slept all winter and when she woke up we’d skipped over spring and summer and—

  Stop it, she said in the not.

  What is the scarlet symphony? Love showed me something called the Scarlet Symphony—

  Love, she spat, is nothing more than a band of thieves, brigands, false-hoods, and rapists. I keep them near me so they can lie to me—I love it when they lie.

  No. I keep them near me, he roared in her face. She recoiled in wonder from him, arms thrown up. And Hate? What about Hate? You keep them near you, too?

  Hate? What? She drew her knife. What is that?

  He let go of her shirt and slumped forward in despair. So she didn’t know Hate? Did she simply see them as traitorous youth? Love they’d, he or her whichever, summoned, he was sure of that—he had, at least, and they were her mercenaries in the bargain. Hate had been invited to Weatherhead as well, under the guise of her sycophants. They wanted to destroy her—or did they want to remake her, too?

  There is a certain correspondence between life and death, he whispered. Incredibly, he wept, but hid it from her.

  Who told you that? Troubled further, she went refugee right then and there and passed quickly to the corner where the machine met the wall.

  Love did. Do you know what that means?

  Yes, she answered quietly. She leaned terrible and heavy on the machine. The two of them, with their knives, kill-love, and tears were ascendant, singular. After a few minutes of nothing but breath and spit, she asked, What musicks did the dead-wife love? If she knew of the scarlet symphony—what musicks did she love? For the first time she became something both more and less than her, something terrible and wonderful all at once.

  He wiped his face on his sleeve. Terrible musicks. Engine musicks. It was even called metal music. And why was she, in Weatherhead, so troubled by music? Maggie Mechaine had been as musical as his shoe. A Christmas she stood, neck bent under the weight of the black guitar he’d bought her, her fingers uselessly tickling the strings, her right hand seized upon the neck, uncertain which direction to sing in. It’d been gently retired to the corner of a closet in her room of puzzles, right next to the baseball bat-shaped bong he’d erroneously got her—she preferred bowls— My wife never sang to me either. She read to me, yeah, sometimes, when I lay dying.

  Like the high voice.

  Yes.

  Neither one of them spoke for a long time. Finally, she stared up at her monstrous device and nodded. This machine seems to do everything to music but hear it, I think. Taste, feel, smell, see. I thought—I thought why should my ears be the only part to get drunk off of it? Problem is I can’t get it to work All of the parts of the thing fell out of the sky onto the plain and I brought them back and repaired it. She sounded more like Maggie just then. She had put away her knife and was rolling her spanner from one hand to the other thoughtfully.

  So what does it do?

  She looked up at the engine in question. You want me to tell you what the scarlet symphony is or how I know it. He nodded. From somewhere under the machine she produced a dented and weal-wealthy metal bucket filled with baseballs. These baseballs had red hearts blotted onto them, drawn on them with grovesblood, he guessed. Clutching his chest, he backpedaled away from these. He recognized these: not only were they the pitches of all the citizens of Weatherhead, these were the Valentine’s gift a lowly livid Maggie Mechaine had given herself, one of their biggest fights ever.

  As he gasped for breath and clawed at his face and neck in mock-froth, milk-eye insanity, she tossed him a curious look and began pouring the spheres into a rounded, gramophone-type funnel on the front of the machine. As she did this, she explained the basic principle of the device. Since the pieces had neatly conforming breaks, splinters, and shatters, it’d been fairly easy to rebuild the thing. But form and structure doesn’t always dictate function, she pointed out wisely, indicating her empty loins, his chest, and, with a chop of her hand, Weatherhead. Why would this be any different on the plain of shifting meanings and poetics? Once assembled, she’d experimented fueling the thing with various fluids, marking the behavior of each one, mostly minimal, until the day she decided to bleed into the thing herself, for if her blood fed Weatherhead via the grove, why not the devices that fell on Weatherhead as well?

  The blood needed vessels so when she was wandering menstrual, she collected the spare blood from the grove, sure that the ink was spare for, as she indicated to him, Weatherhead must never face an empty page, and marked the principle of the pitches with it, reasoning that her grovesblood would provide the score for the baseball prisons of the souls of Weatherhead and that both together would work the machine, score for the story. It takes each note, each pitch, each cell of the blood of the tune and shakes its blood all up and lets it fall where it may to become something new, but something not. It’s all splashed against a blank white page but I can’t hear it right. She fussed about with a row of levers. This is why Love measures the pitches. It’s why they took your pulse. I’m constantly recomposing the workings of the machine so it’s necessary that I record and measure all the falls and fluctuations of my city on the plain.

  They said they took my pulse so I could pretend—

  Pretend you were dead, she finished for him, and so to hide your nature from me. But I know all the natures abundant on the plain. It’s the way of the place. And don’t you think I couldn’t help but hum along to your silent song, no matter how much it pained me to see you here, halfway to where I am—tyrant of the cities of the plain? Is this what you call Hate? I have your pulse here and I will return it to you, but I
need it and you to do one last thing.

  He watched her. Before he could stop her she had her knife out again and was slicing a gentle, shallow wound on the back of her hand, the same wound that a barometer had once given her.

  You’re bleeding, he gasped. He wanted nothing more than to lap it up for Love can even drive one to vampirism and the basest sorts of lust. Her blood fueled a fire in him and made him greedy for her, so greedy it’d cause havoc with his sleep for weeks. The blood welled up and in her squint he suckled the smokelight eye when she regarded the fermented calculation and measurement of his longflesh.

  She disbelieved his debelief. Of all the ways to want to kill her and he’s shocked at a mere cut! Of course I do. I bleed for Weatherhead. I bleed ink for its stories.

  Why?

  Why do you? A whole face’s worth and then some, too, I bet, beyond the black mountains and here as well. What else would we write with? Why do you insist on driving me to making you hurt, making you bleed—a punishment a day almost? You persist in angering me and I think you do it all skull-lily—on purpose, I mean—

  Skull-lily?

  Have you never seen a flower painted on top of a skull? It’s the most intentional thing the gods ever thought up. That’s aside. Not only do you consort openly and untamily with Love in all manners and modes and conspire against me with others, but you go drown-reach—out of your way—to infuriate me on an intimate level day in and day out! And what’s worse—you are a most difficult man to hate and I can’t figure why? I save you every day—every day! When you first came here, when Love first brought you here, you were something remote, a dot on the horizon—an assassin? A lover?—something low and well-dropped at the end of the street, tumbling back towards me after the fall—whose? Yours or mine? Or did we both fall? Were you the wish or the coin or the well? And what was I?

  When he stood there foolish, she continued, You ask after Hate. Everyone in Weatherhead is hate—hate for me—hate for my rule. This is why I watch their pitches. This is why I rule as black as I can. This is why my blood. They all hate me. And I thought, is he part of that, too? Or part of something more? Why are you trying to kill me?

  I can—I can’t, he stammered.

  Leave. Her face had turned crimson and her faint eyebrows had turned down all vlad tepes and her nose the neck but suddenly she softened and he knew, it was all farce, a play performed on her face with her heart the actor. Please. Go. Please tell me why you must go.

  How could he? Choking back an eruption of useless emotion, he leant heavily on the machine and refused to meet the abscission of her banishment. My wife loved the weather, he said in a failing voice, I never knew her weathers. Not until she was dead. And now—and now—it’s like they’re all being released at once. I don’t know how—

  Did you see, she said softly, how the gigantic, gruesome shadows of the black mountains fall the other way—not onto the plain?

  He sniffled and scuffed the edge of his boot in the dust. I think I knew that before I even came to Weatherhead. The long shadows fell—I use to ring her with light—the same way I never let her do for me on that boat when she made miracles and suns-up at midnight and all the witches hid behind her dress. Before she died, maybe I told you once, or read you part of my story—I call it Weatherhead—but she’s in it and just before she died she cut all her hair off. She looked beautiful that way—not many girls can pull that off—but she could—and the shadows on her neck—back here—he touched his nape with two fingers—they were all gone, too, forever. Like she was already out here on the plain—like she was getting ready for your trip.

  She didn’t blink at your. Instead, she asked for some of his blood. First: his pulse. The return of his pulse was as simple as its theft: there under the skin of her palms slept the sleet of an inaccurate suicide and all she need do was press it to his chest the same way Rapey and Frank had stolen it all those decades ago. How they’d conveyed it from their bellows-machine to her, and how she’d stored it all this time—and why—was beyond him. The most unprodigal return of his scarlet symphony—for he understood now that this is what that was—was anti-climactic. He expected a rush, a jolt, a head-smash rise against the world, against the plain, against Weatherhead, the tumult of a single living man’s song against the cacophony of a land populated with the tormented, dead, and unashamed. Instead, she bade him open his shirt and, humming a quiet, lilting fox-hunting song, she pressed her hands to either side of his chest, thin, white defibrillators that shocked him with their warmth, with their tease of deadskin against deadskin. He thought there’d be a moment, a twinge of something electrocuting when his rhythm rekindled but all he felt was a new, rare kind of pigment spread over him like fall, something red and orange and yellow, something alight here where he’d alit, it was a pigment of both insulting departures and brews of love-and-fuck kept holy in the door-barred waiting rooms of train stations, it was made up of colors of hurricane, head-swept Maggie Mechaines all in a row inviting him to be kicked and licked and hounded, it was made up of a rush of blood to the dead, life’s laughing wager with love—

  She watched him pale, then rudden as she poured him back into himself. She didn’t remove her hands, though, and he saw something witch-right ruffle in the crumpled collar of her shirt that bruised his chest as she dug in her nails and he knew then that no gallows, bullet, or river could ever keep him away from her again. Finally, she took her hands off his body and turned back to the machine.

  My error was in measurement, she confessed, for there are numerous things beyond its ken and such beyond measure. She told him what it did. It threw music like a catapult. At the far end of the room, directly facing the device and attached to it via a network of ducts, hoses, and metal tubing, was a rounded sort of divan, made of cracked leather and grooved. That it half-resembled an inhumanly large baseball mitt did not escape him. He smiled weakly. The listener sat upon this and was bombarded by the pitches and tones.

  He heard her, light-headed. He couldn’t help but put his wheel-sized hand to his chest, to his mouth where he caught fast, heated breathing. His pulse had become a myth in his head’s empire. He could barely stand still while she explained the principle of the device, shifting the weight of his new being back and forth as if that made the burden of returning to life easier. Having acquired potency and engine, he felt alarm return: she meant to send him back to the long shadows—his status as a black mountain refugee had been revoked.

  The pulse alone is not enough. I need the bodily flesh to up the score.

  A little chin music, eh?

  She assumed him mad with her eyes. She needed him, she said, she needed someone alive. She bit into the back of his hand. Blood summoned came. He didn’t cry out. There was so much pain in Weatherhead radiating out from her that this almost erotic rend was more playful than anything else. He was so happy to bleed for her again, to bleed with her. On either side of the funnel where she’d dumped the baseball hearts, they dripped in their blood. Why did he need this sweet-knife then, if he had all the blood he could ever want from her right here in front of him?

  A knife is of two minds.

  Fine, she nodded, it’s all just as well first as last. We will do this together and separately at the same time. That’s part of the mechanism’s process. I think this is why I couldn’t get it to work right before. It is trying to listen to oneself—

  She’s been lonely from the very beginning of this story, he thought.

  —without any other ear to hear. The theory is that if you put your blood in with mine the score will balance out but the other mad thing is is that I need another body to listen.

  Mine, he thought. She led him to the seat at the back of the hall, opposite the device and its shout-holes. She looked it over with a fret. There might not be room for both of us, though—but with a gravedigger’s thoughtful grace he grabbed her under her armpits and drew her onto his lap. She didn’t resist, didn’t flinch, just nodded as if this were the most perfectly natural thing
to do ever. A control box hung-vine-down and she dragged it over in front of her to prepare the ignition.

  As she moved her narrow hands over the levers, so like little white birds that she loathed, he felt the sweetknife digging into his thigh and he considered, could he kill her right then and there? It’d be a simple matter to snake it out, slit her throat, free her pulse, too, end this nightmare, maybe start a brand-new one—a nightmare following her death on his terms, not one dictated by a Maggie Mechaine who’d been poorly put back together. He’d summon all his king’s horses and god and his sister and he’d right that long-promised eternity and leave out all other possibilities—

  Or would he? Village bells ring at midnight for all sorts of falsehoods: devils in the field; ghosts in the vein; witches about mischievous with their pond-black sex. His attempt, here in Weatherhead, to call up Maggie Mechaine, to remember her, to break her and remake her—what was the point?

  “I’d take a hurricane over this any day.”

  You’re right, Mags, he thought. He pressed her misquotation between his knees. He stared down into the quiet unreason of the part of her red, greasy hair.

  It’s ready. She threw a toggle.

  He’d once read about synesthesia. After his war he’d been affected with the strange malady—or was it a blessing—of being able to hear the sound of death. Not screaming rockets, wind-stinging bullets, the hurricane head-whip of the throat-slit—none of these, but something else, the actual sound of dying. It was a pillow’s sigh. It was the empty house when you’re a child alone in it. It was that strange sensation in the earlashes, half a shiver, half a phantom limb, that tickle-prick sensation you get when you know there’s a TV on somewhere. For months he was scourged by this moor-hush, convinced that the streets of the city had been turned into black rivers at night through which washed the muffled, protesting—and these streams all joined just outside the city and flowed backwards and up a waterfall and there, in the middle, where the black current was thickest—a river within a river within a river—flowed death.