Suddenly Maggie gasped and hissed, “That’s your girlfriend!”
Mal leaned forward so they could both see him and he nodded. “Mhm.”
Maggie lost control of her jaw. “Playing the piano!”
“Mhm.”
There was a floating bestiary called an intermission that drew into a mob the listeners and turned them back into speakers, gushers, and idolaters. They three had to fight their way through the heavy concentration of fawnee to get to Mal’s girlfriend, source of awe and the cricks in necks and ears alike. He, for one, could never seem to get a really good look at her: his eyes seemed to slide off of her, as if she didn’t want to really be seen, as she stepped aside behind the world-behind-the-world so’s not to be truly trapped, pinned down by scrutiny. All he remembered of her was her voice, white, even teeth and her long, gorgeous hands, the only continuity in her disguise. And this was the third or fourth time he’d met her, wasn’t it? How did they meet, he wondered when she offered him her hand. When he shook it, he noticed a callus on her index finger. She a shooter? Hardly.
She and the flute guy were fielding questions about the second piece they’d perform following the intermission, by another Russian guy with an impossible name. Someone said ‘wasteland’ and his head whipped around.
An obdurate, erudite head bobbing up and down in glasses, savoring the pianist, asked “Eliot?”
“Ell-ee-ut,” Mal said behind his drink. His girlfriend caught his eye and inclined her head to one side. The three of them retreated, hastily noosed ties were loosened and another round of drinks was stolen with monies.
Mal threw his arm around his shoulder. “Why am I the only black guy everywhere we go?”
He observed, “You shifty nigga! Man, they said you was hung!”
“They was right!” Mal winked at Maggie.
“Whale,” she meant well, “I dunno anything about classical music, but I know I liked that. Why didn’t you tell us your girlfriend played the piano? Like really played the piano? That’s so cool!”
“I met her inside a piano,” he grinned, “Like—literally. I never told you that story?”
He had, so he wandered away from the two of them and found himself again at the edge of the rite of the divine death of the black sun. “The composer was considered an outlaw,” Mal’s girlfriend was saying. Was that the first time he’d ever heard her speak? Her voice was steely and cuss-worthy and her words came in muzzle-blast bursts. What did she remind him of? Why, despite the ivory bite she took out of the world, was he so unopposedly unattracted to her? He leaned in to listen. “His intention was to make the listener listen to him or herself. The motif of color was important here as well. Anticipating Scriabin by several decades, Smertvertsky framed his music in color tones, where even the very pitch dictated in the polyphony of the different orchestral movements were mere fragments of a larger scarlet truth.” She sounded like a hidden empress forced to speak, land and sea a dream, her empire was loftier than these low places. Aloof, she considered the sex of sea and shores a half-blasphemy for there were greater distances to cross in the name of desire or even Love. He drifted away to find Maggie and Mal again.
Maggie was talking baseball with a feverish older man. Randy’d been banished to Texas for the season but had fared well there until a poor showing by the rest of his team at the end of the season cost them the playoffs. Maggie, with all her grand southern optimism, felt that this was due more to the black complement of the punishment meted out to the team itself for ignored sins than anything that Johnson had done. She raised herself up on her tiptoes—where were her shoes?—and pointed out the window with her drink. Out across the harbor, the bay, opposite the facing horizon where the sun was translating day into night with its shrinking absence, the same sun had limned the omniscient dark cumulus that the gods hid behind to watch her from with backdrop colors of pink, purple, and bled-blue, all the colors of bruises.
Her companion indicated the bruise on her forehead. “The sun did that, too,” she said with a smile in her periphery. The sun was an articulator of pain what with all that light illuminating everything and all. Nothing could hide from it, not even the injurious sway of Maggie Mechaine.
“Are you sad?” he asked when the old man faded off into a murmur by the wall.
“Yeah, but,” she said, “a baby was something I wish I could’ve given you.” She looked down at her feet, hands clasped in front of her. What else was there for her to give him, he wondered?
“The guy’d written it for his dead wife. The wane at the end represented the slowing of her pulse. He was at her side the whole time she died,” a snaggle-toothed, frenzied dwarf was poaching words out of litanies for disasters. They side-stepped this madness and dove into the evening.
Between the second and third concert came a fog, gently conquering the world, god’s sigh of relief his grandmother had called it. It was a cloud near the ground, Maggie explained, since her head was all weathers anyhow, whose watery parts got cold and began to huddle together like refugees near the ground. It was all about the collision of warm and cold things, like pieces of suicide and snow.
Maggie, who hated concrete, stepped into the grass with her boots slung over her shoulder and walked alongside the two men, smoking quietly and listening to them discuss the merits of the classical genre and its conveyors, namely, Mal’s girlfriend.
When he looked down at his Weatherhead hand, his fingers seemed rows of convenient assassinations, all in a row, asleep. It took him a moment before he realized that she’d laid hers over his unconsciously and was stroking the back of his hand with a lazy, careless killing stroke. Love showed me this music. Part of it—or what part of it was once—wrote that music. It’s called “The Scarlet Symphony”. Perhaps they could turn off her machine now—bound together by tones, pitches, and a torrent of glissandi making their edges blur and run into each other, he had reached his limit. The beautiful threat of her stealing more of his memories home, as much as he had once wanted to show her the life beyond Weatherhead, to remind her of who she once was, drove him to plead for the concert’s ending. His—or were they hers?—ears were bleeding. So we can go now, spirit.
She turned on his lap and stared at him like hell peeking back at heaven. I’ve told you once there were no such things as ghosts. There are, though, such things as clouds-as-flowers because I seeded the earth above with them. There are also songs in the blood that need to be set free. Is that the scarlet symphony I’ve been seeking? Not your literal one. Not a song, a paean to something called Love. I speak of the letting, the rending, the beautiful trait of men and women that turns kiss into tear, tear into growl—a quaint destruction of each other—
Hate.
She looked thoughtful for a moment and watched Maggie Mechaine leave wet-night footprints on the sidewalk. No. I don’t think so.
Then why is Hate here? Did she know?
No. The scarlet symphony is the body, the blood—but why? And what do we gain by stripping away beautiful things? The ugly things. Your memories are ugly things. It is no wonder, then, that you killed your wife.
The third concert was a drowning thing, sea, storm, and pitch. To its front, there was literally a sea of people, washing up against the building, flotsam smoke and jetsam cries. At the door was a long table filled with skin-scribblers. On the spur, they all three get fake tattoos.
“What the fuck is that?” He jabbed a finger at Mal’s forearm where three circles overlapped each other.
“A syzygy? A conjunction.”
The guy ran out of ink on Maggie, who’d gone last, but she didn’t want to wait for him to refill it, so she got a mostly-finished lemniscate which was fine, for, she reasoned, “Nothing is really forever.” But the way she said it—she wasn’t negating eternity, the infinite. No, he thought—
When we say nothing what we really mean is forever, she said.
We—
Beware of the land of the black sun, came the cautioning scream of the singe
r of Wedjat, as they three entered the surge of the club. Weatherhead could warn one, always beware of what you hear, but one should always be wary of the tremor that can be put into the bones, for it incites terror and flight in those with weaker wills. The music was the loudest but one sound he’d ever heard. Pounding, relentless waves of distortion, b flat and e, down-tuned a step or two, pitches to make the world-skeleton shatter into 51 pieces, a black-blooded symphony reigned here, an extension of some sort of marianas necrophilia between surging, icy sea and the death of light, gods and goddesses disguised as primeval froth and wave beating the earth senseless with the thunder-punch of their wills and weals.
Hell was strung on the guitar. He felt a poke in his ribs. He followed Mal’s finger. Wedjat’s guitarist was female. Maggie nodded. They were local, on the rise.
He blinked. “Huh.” It was a girl. Her knuckles were bleeding and she was the war in everything. The singer was anemic, though, hooded, thin, and brooded as he chanted cultic things into the microphone. The music was a rite, someone explained over the din, music to invoke the dark, serpentine things that leapt out of our sight long ago. Rise! hissed the crowd. People had their faces painted black.
Maggie drifted down the river of people, her stare as frozen as the rest of her wasn’t. He followed her and they ordered beers. Mal was nowhere to be seen.
Maggie had a weird, throaty way of singing along to her musicks, not quite a hum or a guttural sound. It came from somewhere in her neck, a place below her voice, a place he’d never been able to find. And you could never really hear it, but you knew it was there.
Her lips beat her voice to his ear, but all he heard were hang-jangle crosswords like “chaos mythos”, dark spaces, Tiamat, and Illuyanka.
He had a headache so he left her there swaying and smoking so he could splash cold water on his face. In the empty back corridors of the place, he spotted the restroom and made for it. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught an odd movement before he collided into someone.
She collided back. It was the guitarist from Wedjat, except instead of holding her guitar she was holding her hair. She quickly tugged her hair back on. It was a wig. He blinked. “Hey, big guy,” she shot at him. She winked up at him as she slipped by him, guitar there now held out like a poisonous snake, which it very well might have been once and will be again.
He swallowed. There was something terrible, old here. “Hi. Why is your music so loud,” he heard himself asking, he only now something lost in the hills above a still-smoldering ruin.
She paused as she passed, almost pressed against him, but not in that predatory, sexual way one might expect, but in the way a razor might press close to the skin, at the wrist or the beard, your choice. She smiled up at him and this smile said, “So all the old gods and goddesses can hear our invocations.”
He found Maggie getting stoned with someone from one of the bands. “In the thick of the trick,” she hacked blissfully when she saw him come around the corner.
He told her of the rite, the rise, and the words of the false prophetess of Wedjat.
“Ain’t we become so careless with god?” And she looked at him with a puzzled look in her sad, blue eyes.
He was unsure what to say. Nature had never worried or harried him so as she did now with all her winds, so he returned to the irresponsible pagans outside catching airs and searched skirts with his best friend.
“Let her be,” Mal cautioned, “she’s upset.”
She’d told him? “Upset?”
“Well, yeah,” Mal looked at him strangely, “she told me you guys found out today that she couldn’t have kids. I didn’t wanna mention it, but—“
She took the fall. “What?! That’s not true.” And it wasn’t. But Maggie lied, ever so gently a lie. And nobody believed him, but his protestations made him seem ever so gallant and caring, all manipulated by Maggie Mechaine.
He rejoined her in the black mass.
“Gimme a holler, then,” Maggie called out to someone. He saw tartan and pigtails disappearing with a backwards eye-toss. She drew close to him and puffed out her cheeks in relief. “That girl—“
“What—“
“Wanted to sleep with us.”
He looked at her, incredulous and couldn’t but, “And you said no?”
Her only answer was a sick, sly grin. She raised one shoulder. They stood together listening for a while, watching the cultic, meta-orphic shenanigans unfold around them. The girl guitar player was lording over the crowd, thick chords, bereft of accompaniment, that underscored the litanies of the screaming, writhing fervor of evils born at the beginning of everything.
She caught him out flatly, “You think it’s unfair—‘cause it’s you? About the baby? How fair is that? How fair was it when we thought it was because of me? I hope you’ll be a little more realistic about it all—“
Poor little redneck, his thoughts flashed in rage again. “You want to be a professional baseball player, Mags. How practical is that? How realistic is that? You’ve never made a dime. Your store doesn’t make a dime. You had it handed to you and it’s never made a dime. We’re in the hole because of it.”
“Trade one emptiness for another, that’s right. Story of my life.” But what now would he attribute her melancholy to? “Only this makes a shadow,” she whispered, gesturing at life.
“Let’s just listen to the music,” he decided, ignoring her madness.
“I don’t,” she whispered, “think you can.”
And Maggie Mechaine never really laughed after that day again.
Memory is farcical as testimonial since it is premonition of what has already come to pass.
It is little wonder, then, the ruler of Weatherhead rasped in a subdued voice, that Hate is here.
(44 Across) I Lost Something Up There in the Hills.
How long have we been music? He looked at the door in alarm. The light outside seemed the same. That’s the high voice again. That meant another day, didn’t it? They had undrowned out of each other, separated into opposite corners of the hall, shaking off, wet-dog hang-dog head, the newest schism to rend them into two. But was it another day that they resettled into, in which they recolonized their unshared selves, unsure for alarming moments just who and what and why they were apart? Had it lasted through the night, their performance together, his entrapment of her in his memories of Maggie Mechaine, a last-ditch effort to show her who-she-was? Now, peeled apart, bitter and exhausted, they lay where the coda had thrown them, Hate’s coda, for it was Hate that had torn them out and apart and left them on their hands and knees on the cold, cold ground, panting and coughing.
Here, she rasped, we have a saying—to do something ‘for a song’. Do you have this? She shot him a severe look. Yes? In Weatherhead, it’s used to mean having someone you want against their will because of the song that burns down under your navel, the song that won’t end.
He wiped saliva off of chin. In the long shadows, it means ‘cheaply’.
She grunted. A common theme, for rape is love done on the cheap. Love is an expensive endeavor, an injurious endeavor, a violent one. And there we have it: I solved the mystery of my foundling device and you saw that this scarlet symphony of yours is nothing more than the pathetic trembling of hearts that can’t separate soul from meat. And what did you think it would be? Essences and unions forever? A chimerical wedding, at best, stranger, not a chemical one. I could see why you confuse me with this dead-wife of yours, for she refused to swallow the habits of the age and pour her alphabets over cliffs. She made prisoners out of alphabets and wanted nothing more than a blood-filled séance erupting from her womb—all for you. I pity her. The entrances to your skull, your eyes, if you like, were sealed, gated, conspired against by your petty lusts and desires. Would that she had been a tyrant, like me, who takes the sharpness out of autumn’s air and makes her knives out of it! And to discover that you were the seedless scarecrow? What more poison to the song can there be? And yet you blamed her, you filthy, incom
plete bastard. And for what did you exile your face? Bound for the black country, what did you think you’d find in the chalky corpse of the plain? Love was with you, but Hate was waiting for you.
But she is a tyrant, he wanted to scream in her face. She is You and You are She. But, alchemy, he grasped, is one of the great and ancient sciences of Weatherhead. She had turned blood into music at an unforeseen cost because the duality inherent in both Love and Hate is not something insurmountable but is, rather, something soluble, it dissolves as it moves from cataract to cataract down the torrent of memory. What other fixations and provinces of nature, human and otherwise, did she tinker with? Untombed or unashed as she was, she’d turned entropy on its head, as the Street of Spit had shown; her war against the kites and her junkyard heaven illumined her conquest of the Up; pain had been transmutated into glorious and fecund pleasure; Love into Hate; Hate into Love; herself into something-other. What was next: clouds-as-flowers?
I want to leave this place, he whispered, the last frail lineages of the scarlet symphony still bound his eyes and made his tongue all fuzzy. Each day it smells more and more like fall somewhere else.
She massaged the back of her neck and frowned. She looked as if she had expected to find something there. She stared down at her empty palm, disoriented. The days are losing their borders and momentum what with me summoning autumn and all. Weather is coming. But you’re right. You must go back. Once I thought out of pity I’d spare you another fight with me, let you live and leave. Too true you are mad and see dead-wives in any number of places, cunt-hunter as you are. There is no place for such fickle natures on the plain. Here we truck in blacks and whites. But now I see that to punish you by returning you to your tomb of a life would be the grandest punishment of all.
The sweet-knife was still in his coat pocket. Why did murder have to be an act of Hate? Why couldn’t it be just as much one of Love? Hadn’t it once? Hadn’t she just said as much? Love told me that there is a song behind everything, it ties things together. I don’t think I can leave. We’re past that point now.
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