Mal was my good friend. Is my good friend. You don’t remember him?
Her eyes flashed evil. She had her knife out and was prying tones off her neck, leaning her head far to the side. Their ears were bleeding now. How could I have? I don’t know this story. And why not tell this fellow, whose name means the tip-top, of the fallow assassins congregant in the gravity between your thighs?
You told him anyway, even though I asked you not to.
The first concert was earthen and was his.
Ever a devotee of the unruffled yet troubled sounds of the south and west, the austral of the land for which he’d killed and nearly been killed, and met by winces all around, he’d chosen a local country-and-bluegrass concert to take his refulgent wife and his stony-eyed best friend to. But a pact was a pact. It was a weekly affair he’d read about but never bothered about attending, that spanned April through October, various local musicians gathered in one of the immense city parks that blistered green, now orange, in all that civilization-grey. He preferred country to bluegrass, but the latter was the night’s dominant tone anyhow, so.
The band sat on risers and plucked, fiddled, and sang. Spread out before them was a commons restless and speckled with seats and tables, where people ate, drank, and, most of all, listened. Some more enterprising fans struck up dances, others sang, others clapped. The late afternoon sun fucked with Maggie Mechaine’s hair in the most beautiful way ever. And this he saw as he stood, slightly apart from her and Mal. They took turns tilting back beers. There was the way, when she smoked, that she’d drop her hand down to her side whenever she inhaled and then it’d bounce back up to pluck the thing out from between her lips, a perpetual harvest of smoke. She was wearing a fine short dress made out of black-muscle and good-noise. Her reds were piled fashionably anarchic atop her head exposing the nape of her neck, source of his religion. Petite as she was, she seemed hardly a woman, but lying somewhere between the apprehension of adolescence and the resignation of the adult. She was such a slight affront to the world that it was hard to call her pretty—no one would waste their awe on her—but that afternoon, as she stood between him and the rousing rendition of “Fox on the Run” stabbed forth into the day, he, who felt decidedly unsexed, found the stinging, delicious grit she kicked up with her careless, expanding wind, right in his eyes, impetus to a new sense of fierce possession for, tyrant over life as she now was (and he laid low), who was to say where this little gale might blow?
What sort of man are you who tricks himself into sore lord or shaman to another’s senses? A half-man.
I was—I was angry. I wanted it to be her fault again. What else could I be? He already knew the answer.
“’Love grows best in autumn’,” Maggie read off the bottom of her pie plate when she’d finished eating. She looked around for whoever had written that there. She craned her head and stared around the soothing sky. Were they there, trapped somewhere even beyond the most wildest sound that a storm could make in the worst of fever’s nightmares? He pointed out it was printed there on the plate, not the sky, but when he looked down to show her he discovered the plate was blank. Mal secretly shook his head and pointed at Maggie’s back with his beer. There’d been no symbol there then, not yet.
The man and his dead-wife took a turn about and stood alone and apart watching the band harmonize,
For I found her when the snow was on the ground
“I like this song, actually,” she told him. She hooked a finger through his. “Please don’t be—mad. I feel like you’re mad at me.”
“No,” he lied. His hatred, like this music, was born somewhere below their feet, where stone trembled under plow as if compelled to rise to the surface as champion of the seed versus the rape of the autumn harvest, for stone to smash against blade and weathered hand, for stone to spread across the earth, turn it fallow and wan—an eternal war against the terrible pluck of man at the fruits of the wasteland—all smash and bit and piece, a low and distant revenge against the sowing hand, against the hand of man that wrote writ and spoke spit, dirt mingled with word and water—how dare the story?
Unpeaceful and superfluous, he watched the bluegrass ensemble play and his eyes were drawn to the terrible glare of a pretty young blonde woman in the band, only a teenager, the only woman in the band, plucking at a sinister banjo, this glare levelled directly at him. He couldn’t help but be drawn towards her swollen evils. The girl seemed framed in blood as a breeze sent leaves tumbling down around her like red, red rain. And still she stared after them, fingers patiently plucking. Had there always been such troubling stories about the world and he’d just never noticed?
I’ve warned you of all the hells about many times, my black mountain refugee. Hells and the lords and ladies of the borders of everything.
Maggie’s puzzled blue eyes caught him. They told him about the corpse they’d found in her kitchen earlier, a man killed by a man who looked like him except emptier. She squeezed his two fingers because they were the only ones left to his slowly and slightly decreasing self. All was earthen, too, because, in that moment as she swelled up before him, expanded out of the roots of her fecundity, he saw how unjustified is the notion that hate is a perfect intuition. Rather, hate is merely one of many low and distant sounds to thicken the scarlet symphony but by no means the only for the score against which we move, ekman and right-angled and has answers both vertical and horizontal and where hate might stab staccato dagger-down through the very dirge that serves as backdrop to every life since there is death, there will always, always be to it an axis of effulgent, throat-choking and eye-burning love that drives the dark and unlearned to violence, that drives the light and inconstant to grasp at raised batons, seize them for their own, leave nothing to chance or unarticulated.
Though by this time the sky was lullaby to itself, there was still a light that played about the two of them there, for they were something to gather but not admire. Though by this time he imagined an impenetrable chasm separating them, a rent in the earth whose split was hastened by the deep truth of his heterodox jism (for anywhere his milks fell, the earth turned sour and grey, the rocks jagged and rumor-mongers), there came a sudden illiterate truth—
He heard it then as they convulsed all grand mal in the maelstrom of the excess of the elements of sound and memory. He heard the scarlet symphony. It was not as Love had shown him, not as salient and apparent, buried in the music of the band but born in that image of he and Maggie Mechaine standing there and with a ballerina’s step she leapt across the abyss separating them, her dress had a spell called kick that made men literate by spanning chasm with the word-rungs she’d wrought out of a secretly devilish crossword for in that moment, as the trench flooded with the fabric of her witch-wear, he could see the heretic in her neck, that one that’d led him into her so long ago, the little trick of her pulse there thrumming like an animal’s fear. She was a local mystery only, not double-faced or vengeant, an emergent and fleshly evil. No, she was more than this, more than a line of song. There were rivers of red inside her, coursing choruses—he had never seen anyone so alive before, never seen anyone so willing to salt the dirt and dust of another, that is, him, with the sweetness of her suicide spilled up and down his wasteland.
This is why I bleed for Weatherhead, she cried, pulling away from him and slashing at his eyes with her fingernails.
He gripped her by the throat and forced her sights and sounds back into the diluvian tune. We have to listen—the scarlet symphony—you know it. You remember, don’t you?
Maggie’s whole flesh rang out, slightly off-key from the bluegrass, but still. There was once and only, she was telling him, a landfill on the hill up above the hollow where she grew up, a flat tableland of table-leavings and ruffian roughage, a place to stone neglected dogs, a place for children’s wars. She hated the place from earliest memory. She thought it was a terrible place, a foundering place, a shoal for wrecks that didn’t belong there, there in the mud and shit so far from where they�
��d been born. But on earth as in heaven, man had made its places to dump its sloughings: below the detritus and ruin of man himself; above the soul. They were, she said, indistinguishable. She hated the place for its being a graveyard for deaths that didn’t warrant it. There were better places to dump one’s remains.
“I never wanted to be like that to you. A place to dump things. And don’ get mad, please, but I think heaven is just everybody’s great big junkyard. We all think up all this fancy nonsense. It’s all shipwrecked, anyhow. I don’t want you to be like that either—a place to dump things, to bury them in the ground and forget about them.”
Is this what love is? What hate is? Which of them shouted that in Weatherhead? Neither of them knew, but this was because they were no longer traces, frames and outlines of each other, but line had joined line, slurs had joined differing pitches and they were drowning and the memory cracked:
“They’re both here—with us all the time,” she was crying out to him now, “love is just movin’ back and forth between love and hate—the whole gamut. We ain’t—aren’t complete without it. Sometimes we hate—there’s no love without it. Hate is temporal, transient—in the end: empty. Love, though, it lives. Where we meet—it’s somethin’ else—a little of both. There’s no word for it.”
He ignored the people staring at them, she, feet planted apart shaking a cigarette at him; he, arms crossed, aloofly regarding her half-poems. “Not just love?”
With fury, she shook her head. “Naw. Something more. All we are are infinite expressions of a distance between two things.” She pointed to him, then to herself. “Don’t make it any more far than it already is.”
Incredulous he stared down at her, she who had healed the wound in the earth. She looked away, stared at the band who told her,
Now march me down to the station,
With my suitcase in my hand.
I’m goin' away for to leave you, little girl,
I’m goin' to some far distant land.
The weather was brisk and so was their walk. They ducked into a bar to unthirst and unsober. Mal did his best to unthrone the salient tension between his two friends.
“That wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be,” he observed, “at least I didn’t get lynched or anything.”
Maggie laughed. She emptied the pocket of her jacket out onto the table looking for matches. She’d found three puzzle pieces and was trying to decide what they went with. She ended up giving each of them one by way of her surrender to memory. “I liked some of those songs, actually. That didn’t sound anything like the stuff you usually listen to.”
He shrugged. “It always sounds different when you’re there, hearing it live.”
Mal winked at her. “They don’t listen to shit like that down home, southern for-whom-the-belle-tolls?”
“Naw, they do,” she said around beer and she had to catch some with her palm, “I jus’ never liked it. Too plicky-plick buh-dow-dow.” She strummed her hand over her bosom. “Not big enough for my ears, I guess.”
Autumn’s quick dusks are like buckshot. So night fell, coda to the day. Maggie walked ahead of them with her arms straight down, her wrists at right angles to the rest of her. When she looked back at them, she said, “No sun, no shadow.” She pointed down at the sidewalk. Piles of leaves were falling around her feet. “The best stories begin and end in autumn.”
They stood in pools of expanding night. There was no reason not to let her hold his hand.
How is love the summation of all that is feral and violent in human nature? How is hate? Maybe neither is. Maybe, he thought as they walked, this is the third thing that Maggie always mumbled about. Love and hate were external forces that our natures plucked at to draw off of—mere notes for the score, options for the pitch—she’d once professed puzzlement over her inability to decode catchers’ signals to pitchers in baseball games, the esoteric and biblical dark side to batting, she thought it, something that required an exegesis beyond her powers—she had no trouble now for she was both signal and nod, love and hate, a desolation and an orchard caught on the cusp of autumn spreading its thighs wide for its waning lover.
All we are are infinite expressions of the distance between two things. She’d crafted a bridge with her blood and dresses between her fertility and his wasteland. She watered it with the song of her blood. She could make the world never so powerful as she was now, that would have to wait until she found Weatherhead. And yet all she could do was insist on loving him and this drove him mad, for when it was she who was the wasteland, he thought nothing of betraying her
The wind kicked up leaves around her. He was glad she’d die one day.
You’re right, said the ruler of Weatherhead with a solemn nod, she died justly. She massaged the chords of her throat with fingertips made out of rich and fantastic color. She, too, he smelled with delight the rancor wafting off of the ruler of Weatherhead. She, too, hated Maggie Mechaine for a moment.
Then there on the plains of prescient, preternatural dusk, they came to a great hall, one of the esteemed and shadow-bound principalities of the waning arts. The circumstance of the sky above the great building was, she told them, one dominated by the caul of the stratocumulus stratiformis translucidus which meant they’d soon see the autumn moon through and through.
The second concert was windy in that there was a piano and a wind instrument that none of them could identify. He was stunned. At first, he’d been wary of Mal’s selection for the evening, assuming the worst. “This isn’t like a rap concert or something—“ Misinterpreting his friend’s intentions, he had assumed it’d be what he called “black music”.
Maggie pursed her lips as they sat down. “How does it feel to be always wrong?”
There was a lecture at the beginning by a fellow of outstanding height and stoop, several scarecrows stacked atop one another. He seemed like the only real person in the room so commanding was the crude error of his person, so accidental, that he must’ve been a prototype that later developments improved on before the mundane human was achieved. He looked half-drawn.
“We have chosen the deliberate juxtaposition of these two pieces which to the casual ear might seem irreconcilable, one being the height of Russian Romanticism in the middle of the19th century, the other the height of what was considered the then-decadent futurist period of the decades on either side of World War I. But through their iconoclasm and the surprising intimacy behind these works, both composers share a lineage in Russian musical history not readily apparent. Isaak Smertvertsky, one of the few Jews to be assimilated into the Russian nobility, was already a singular figure in Russian musical circles but he stood out for his unorthodox eschewing of the Russian Nationalist school, of the Mighty Five, to compose intimate, personal pieces for which he is often known as the ‘Russian Beethoven’.” And the fellow went on and on.
He surveyed the scene, the unchaos of the folding chairs, the largest piano he’d ever seen at the head of the crowd on a slightly raised platform—the formal wear, the unconscious ceremony of the lecture and the concomitant head-nods from the unknowing crowd. He had no taste for classical music: the aura of his age put a caul over his ears when it came to this kind of music. Maggie didn’t care for it either, but she was rapt by the lecturer, her face a bow echo in profile. There was a storm behind her somewhere.
“Cool title,” she whispered into him as she listened to the talk, “’The Scarlet Symphony’.”
Confused and too undrunk, he wondered where the rest of the orchestra was but Mal shushed him and tapped the program. They were to hear a chamber arrangement of the symphony itself. Oh. Ah.
“Smertvertsky wrote not only from the wound that the sudden death of his wife dealt him, but also from all the wounds that follow. Dedicated to her memory, the ‘Scarlet Symphony’ stands as a testament to the smirking triumph of Love over even death—“
Mal had brought them here. He wanted to show them something, he said. And while the lecturer used words like violent, er
otic, and considered-shocking, he puzzled over the name, the ‘Scarlet Symphony’. It was clear from what the lecturer was saying that this simply referred to the body of the composer’s dying wife, the moment of self-recognition that puts one and one’s love outside the confines of another, that strange migration of the senses into another person and then back out of them, as if a giant hand was gently plucking the two of you up, turning you both over and setting you back down facing in a different direction: both bodies facing out. He had a sudden image of two fighters bound together, back-to-back, facing their foe as one—but there was something more gothic, more feral in the lecturer’s words than this. The sounds of the lover’s body shoved into the steaming light submitted to being fed back through the other’s in a fugue to force the jaws apart, set fang to fang, two clashing beasts imitating each other’s themes until they collapse together, almost indistinguishable at the end, the two become something irreducible and primitive.
The eye is not needed; merely the ear pressed to the pulse of the other, breaths the alternating, imitating pitches, one a question, maybe, the other the answer. Inseparable, they triumph, even over death. Thus, the composer revived his dead-wife.
He heard all this stony-hearted as the duo performed the difficult, virtuosic piece. Nothing could exile the agony deep down inside him, for judgment obscures the world, and he had been found wanting. The indelicate yet idyllic music merely poisoned his soul further. He couldn’t help imagine himself inhaling the beautiful noises that the pianist, a severe young Asian woman who seemed source of all the sighs in the world and their gusts, and the flautist, a dignified, camera-eyed blonde man whose face looked like something one could never really discover, the way it pounced about as he played, poured out into the room, then exhaling them as a poison to usurp the saintly sinner sitting next to him, lady-lord of the petulant wasteland that’d once been her husband.
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