Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  Death via war, he knew, was a staccato, punch-drunk affair where the physics of the body, where the central tenets that bound things together and held them close at an imperfect and lonely center, where the sluice of biology poured life—where all these things became myth at best, for war is highly skilled and highly paid for its job: separating men and women from their lives and joining them to something else. What he had never thought would come to haunt him was the specter of this something else coming to his periphery, then to his waking fraydreams, joined to nothing, but everywhere. And he could hear its swell, pump and scour. His army-appointed shrink had declared it mild synesthesia with an alluring, lucky-fuck hook-up with the modern equivalent of shell shock. So he came to know, death is a figment not only of the body, but the mind and senses as well.

  This device, then, caused a kind of synesthesia in both of them. But it didn’t just switch the senses. It confused them between him and her. Fed by their blood, the music machine made them bleed over onto each other; it demanded a single listener for the scarlet symphony they had wrought was of one blood now inside the core of the thing. Time, slur, breath, breadth, width, wit—all these things melted together. They became indistinct: separate, alternating notes, tones, and pitches wound together in a polyphony of red, one chasing the other, not hunting, around and around the staff and distaff of lilts and lulls they carved out of each other.

  I confess I fancy myself an inventor of sorts, she said through gritted teeth. He could smell the white of her bite. He could hear the ash in her choke. I have so many extinctions here—

  He smelled and tasted the press and grind of her jaw, bent forward with his ear to the hearth of the string section: bow was hammer, strings were anvil. The chords binding the bone of her smile to the angular tenderlies of her hearing-holes were as taut-as-tuned. I have so many kinds of way-outs, deaths. I have, too, way-backs. For you. God, you smell like home, her voice drifted over his skin like a pleasant, feathery burn. I felt a frozen lake under my feet. I didn’t dare move. Did I drown? Did I?

  That was snow.

  Their shadows, their long shadows, the ones he’d kept alive and revived all this time in Weatherhead, now danced before them. In horror she pressed her hands to her eyes, for these silhouettes for which she was mere outline, mockery, and misplaced emphasis was too much for her to bear. But she’d wanted to hear what their blood co-mingled could wring out of this machine.

  He tightened his grip around her waist, face bent against the hurricane. I won’t let go. Eyes that see only the living lines, the frames—

  She didn’t just fall. She came crashing down like a storm. Yes. A storm is a crash. Other times calm. The edge of it—the borders—

  A thing with edges is of two minds, like a knife, he replied, the lemonade of the blade. Both a sweet song and a bitter song. He curled his hand around the stolen knife and sweetness.

  She shot a poisonous look back at him as they hurtled through the maelstrom of sounds. What would you hear, then? That I knew your face the first day when Love threw you to the ground at the end of my spar-kill? I didn’t. I didn’t know we’d die.

  For days you ignored me, didn’t even acknowledge me—every time it’s the same, just like the beginning/Don’t use that word, time, stranger, it stinks of prison sinks heavy with come and blood and brickdust—and there is no beginning—there’s no end either, if that’s any consolation/Then what’s on the other other side of the long shadows/Nothing—what I mean is, hold up your hand and see that it’s mine. That’s not blood in your hair, that’s mine. We speak with the same voice in the same verse. The scarlet symphony is the body. Your body is far away from here. Together we have created, in our blood, in my machine that separates the blood from the song in the blood, the single song that no throat could ever, ever hum. Know why? There are so many poems in a person—as much as there is blood. Always there is always one to read, to hear. You and I, stranger, did one better: we refused the other.

  Letter-high I rove. My nine months question was: what had I lost in her? Once I knew—I came to find you. He bent the bite of his words into her ear in a desperate whisper-shout: We will be visited by three musicks.

  And because there was no longer any distinction between them—they were alone, outside Love and Hate both, they were, for a moment, at peace, at rest, their own third creature. Drowned in the musicks, they were the chant of a religion so profane that it had a single adherent.

  She confirmed this by calling out to him across the expanse of their mutual ruin, We’re both hymns now—hymns to a little blasphemy all our own. Hunched forward over the controls, he took her to the memory. Diffuse they fell together.

  He led her back to one of her pieces; the way that Love had showed him for memory is a mirror for the poems of the long shadows. Broken down and reconstituted into a single melody and line of verse, he could see now the darker angles of her nature and how they’d won out after her fall onto the plain. So he forced her eyes to the past, off the plain, for he knew well and good, that a puzzle can only be recreated and reassembled best if one has the original image to go by.

  He seized her amidst the sound slamming into, out, and from them. He’d simply show her.

  He tore at her shirt. On her back he saw this symbol:

  ⧜

  She had never had any health insurance, she was self-employed and she simply never had the money, and she’d scraped and saved for months to pay for this final round of tests. She cried a little in the truck as they sat in the parking lot without speaking. With that martyr’s charm that makes them victors always she turned her blinkered eyes to him and said that she was just glad, she wept, that her mom and dad weren’t alive—they’d be so sad that their little girl wouldn’t ever be a mother herself. She tried to smile up at him—she had that mouth like her mother’s, he fetched up the memory, that mouth that no longer laughed—

  Was this why she slept with her hand clawing at her heart the way she did? Was she in pain? Would her infertility mark the end to all things Maggie Mechaine? He hated thinking in these terms about her but it was part of his nature to reduce the people around him down to mere functions and the robbing of these functions. So, Maggie wanted a child and would never have one, hence.

  The whole long drive down the bridge near their voice, she’d held up her hands and stared at their outlines, extensions of a barren field. Did she feel like a desert? How does a wasteland feel, he wondered, as he drove. Is there solace on the plain? A series of preliminary interviews and tests had led here. Her blood had been stolen out of her, hormones pored over, and today a final round of peeks into her wasteland would confirm things once and for all, according to her doctor.

  When they arrived, she didn’t want him to come inside. “No,” she sighed, “of the doctor’s office. I think you’re missing the point here. Coming inside doesn’t seem to be making any difference,” she tried to joke. Neither of them laughed. He managed to squeeze out of the bottom of his face a queasy attempt at a commiserating smile. In that maverick male lunacy that puts a pittance in the stock of grand-standing emotions, he made a wan attempt to soothe her, but it is difficult to assuage the end of anything: all one can do is pat it on the back, admire the innings played, as Maggie might say, and fuck off back to the dugout with your head hung down.

  She walked out as meek as could be, spat to one side and rubbed her palms together in a gesture he long knew to be one of anxiety cum horror. She folded these hands in front of her charmless obsolescence. His heart actually dropped down an inch or two, just like he’d always heard it could. She came right up to him and stood there waiting to be folded up and returned. No receipt? No problem!

  “Goddammit,” he said as soothing as he could, but was, he realized with a wince, merely positing a truth. God had damned it. He wanted her to put her cheek against his chest just like he’d imagined she would, so he could comfort this springless autumn, so he could whisper, “Hey, it’s okay. It’s not your fault.” But of course it a
lways would be and—why was she just standing there like that—

  “I ain’t barren.” She stared up at him sideways. “It’s you.”

  Tiny spots danced across his vision. “But—“ Everything pinwheeled. Him? How could it be him? Was he triton and trident of a seedless sea? He felt suddenly like the tooth just behind the fang, the one left out of all the fun of the hunt, the bite. Who drives the clown car, he found himself wondering in a daze. He felt like a fool for his assumptions. It was him? Him, a vessel for empty milk?

  She stood there, watching him. As he stared back, voiceless, she seemed to draw up several feet taller, triumphal matriarchy, a mother she could be while he useless to wolf and pack alike would always and forever be empty, an empty howl.

  He’d refused the tests and she’d never questioned this. They’d both assumed it was her. Wasn’t it always like that in stories like this, they argued? Now he’d have to be tested, too, but they already knew the answer. The doctor had said that Maggie Mechaine’s womb was as thick with gifts as all Christmases bound up as one, trussed, and thrown on one’s back. Tribes of primitive life drew foxes and hunts and faces on the hardy, stone walls of her innards as they waited patiently for their deliverance unto the earth. Chthonic, she fed the earth, fed the wasteland from beneath. She was the root of all things. You could populate a city with her grace-full fallopii. So said science. She was as fecund as the shadows of the fall carnivals where young love lurked like wolves and the autumn people hid their hearths and hearts and muskets. A nor’easter blew over her features. She seemed almost content.

  She walked over to the truck and peered through the window. “Huh. What’re all the flowers for?”

  “I guess—I guess they’re for me,” he exploded and he threw his hands up.

  It was on the bridge on the way home that he pulled over with such violence that her head was thrown against the window. Out of the truck he shot and there it was that he fired several pointless rounds into heaven as he had been, they now knew, all along.

  Hand pressed vexed to the bruise prostrating on her temple, she stood next to him and made her bad joke. It was obvious she had no idea what to say. There had been an unspoken, resigned assumption that it was her undoing, because it was always the woman’s fault in stories. But, no, medicine assured them, it was his empty, hangman’s dangle that wrought futility. She had been a little sad, he thought, tried to, there on that bridge between her fault and his, blame herself anyway. Too late he realized she did this because she saw how great his anger had been in that moment, that for the very first time ever she had been both frightened of and nakedly sorry for him.

  “I love you,” she yelled over the honking horns put between their ears and the other cars. She took his gun and stuck it down inside her pants. She forgot it was there and when they got home she stuck a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, stuck her thumbs in the waistband of her underwear and struck a gun-moll’s pose and drawled something like I love you and wouldn’t I make a good bad guy in a story?

  She would. “If you’re trying to make me feel better, it’s not gonna work,” he said from his place in the corner where right met wrong. Her half-stowed happiness was spilling out onto the deck of their shipwreck too much. He could fathom her relief, sympathized even for such an undreary end to her five-year long bemusement and horror at her reproductive failure. But how could she stand there and make jokes to make him smile when it was he, he, that’d been reduced down to a mere half-hunter, banished even from the cull of the pack. His own vertical condition had been suddenly rendered moot and alertless. Was this all it was then? He and Maggie Mechaine alone forever with an infinitely replicating series of fish-tailed wastelands the only thing bridging the abyss between them? His whiteblood was now the milk of dreams.

  “There’s tests you can do. Maybe it ain’t over yet.” She knelt down like a knight before him. Never had he more felt the urge to clock her in the head. She was pluck-worthy, the finest autumn harvest ever, science had said. He, tasting low human deceit—his own—on his tongue, hung his head and forced the thought of her away: she had become gust and gale blowing against him with her right angles and natures, with all those weathers playing about her face which moved quietly from rapturous ablation of infertility to a pressure gradient measured by his half-measure against the drip-drip-dripping of her mercurial reds across the hardwood floor as she, gun now abandoned on the kitchen table behind her, crawled towards him.

  He wanted nothing of her weather. She was something that fell from the sky and something more: that leaping up to meet it. This was itself. He was, he mused, a superfluous man.

  He stared down at her threads of cruelty and what was that saying? Red sky at morning—

  Sailor’s warning, she finished for him. Trapped in her eye in Weatherhead, he tasted salt, wound, and rope in these words. She’d been born on a ship. From the musicks, she scoffed at him, You hated her most then? For your own arrogance, you blamed her? Unmanned! You people of the long shadows take smothering and stupid comfort from your domesticity. What wonders a little crime would’ve made and she already had the gun! Anger and tears are nothing more than wasted thievery.

  There were the mis-restraints of her ferocious blue eyes, eyes that lived again as the vanguard of some distant, offshore goddess. “Hey,” she slid her hand over his, “it’s okay. Let’s wait until we know somethin’ for sure before we get all down—

  “This is so fucking unfair—“

  She couldn’t suppress her black laugh. Her impatience fed her anger. “No, what’s fuckin’ unfair is you blamed me. You blamed me. We blamed me all along except we were wrong. An’ I had to live with that bullshit for years—wonderin’ ‘what was wrong with me?’—and thinkin’ I was just some kinda empty—“ she tossed a hand at the wall, “—frame.”

  “The world isn’t a bunch of frames, empty ones that you fill up for someone else, Maggie.”

  “Well, maybe it is now,” she said, “and maybe now you’ll listen and try to do it, too” She got up. She playfully eyed the gun, then him. “More ‘n religion or anything like that, or faith, even dawns, what we find in other people is a better sort of self. In people we love, they’re like mirrors, you know? We think they don’t do shit until we look at them. But they are and when we do, we’re seeing reflections of a better sort of self, ‘cause they show us—they are—“

  There were three concerts, three musicks, that night. Each one, he thought, for each of the ways he hated her that day. The three of them, he, Maggie, and Mal, had picked one music to force the other to go to, in the spirit of tolerance and broadening one’s horizons, but he hadn’t realized it would be that night. They’d planned this out with Mal weeks ago, though, after that argument over music. To accommodate each taste had required some flexibility. Mal insisted on making this particular afternoon and evening the cornerstone of their project; he had something of a surprise, he said. Maggie had pre-determined a local heavy metal show, featuring the three bands EtherOre, Sinisturd, and Wedjat. He, himself, had picked the closest thing to what he loved to put in his ears: a bluegrass concert, outdoors at a local park.

  Maybe we just should leave, he cursed into their polyphony.

  No. She was steadfast. Clutching the controls with one hand, she reached back and sank her grimy nails into his wrist. We must hear this scarlet symphony out.

  ”Maybe we just shouldn’t go out.” She stared at her forehead in the mirror. The bruise there marked the end of an old order for her.

  Yes, he thought, watching her. Never had she had the rot of the treachery of the loins about her, had she? How could they ever have thought it was her-not-him sitting on a wasteland? Her back rose and fell with a calm triumph. She’d leapt off the page, something more condition now than legend, something extant, not extinct, something that would not ever never-be. She looked astonished, just-awake there standing in front of the bathroom mirror pondering drawing on her eyelids with black-fine. Autumn’s lashes are fine, whether cu
rling out from her eyes or laying on one’s back. Astonished, he watched as she got out various unguents and make-up. Had she ever?

  “Are you kidding? Mal and me have been planning this for months. Then I got shot.” He frowned.

  “I thought maybe—you just might—might not feel like it.” She undressed, lit a cigarette and coughed as she held her free hand under the shower. She always smoked before she showered. He marveled at her there, forgetting for a moment his lost grip on the possession of himself, of futures, and instead thought of the lie that had once bridged the space between them, the lie that she carried the wasteland within her. There was the smooth flat boundary between her womb and the world—her skin they called it. And where behind there were her thirdlings? Behind the taunting curve of her navel, nearly flush with the rest of her? Or there between that and the red brambles, on that plain where time beat itself out in sweat? And further down, at the gates to the city, would his ware-less caravan be stopped and if you stood just right and caught it in profile, you’d see the city, like Weatherhead, had no gates at all, that it was not a city at all, but instead the effortless glide of crimson front over crimson front, fount of unpredictable weathers.

  Sadly, she gestured for him to replace his stare with trespass but he said no and walked out.

  The first concert was earthen and was his.

  Maggie, knowing better, even best now that she’d become oracular once more, giver-of-futures, had given in to his sullen protestations and agreed to go along with the evening as planned. Best, though, to not tell Mal—

  Mal? She beat back the kisses thunder-crushing her ears. The machine had slid its arms around her aura and aurality and was sweating sickly glissandi down her neck. He looked away to taste the jaundiced curves elsewhere.