And our song may very well be the knife, she answered darkly. Is it any wonder that she stepped in front of a truck? Did she tremble when the ground shook with its coming? I think not. Did she scream? What was her song?
He said nothing. He knew, though, that heavy in or on the ground that she might be, she was heavier aloft and about and that, at the end, she had laughed.
You’re drunk on fictions, and her grin was wicked, I was born on the plain—on the sea of the plain. You speak of coming here—to save a dead woman, a woman you somehow thought was me, who is far from dead, who you could care whittler’s spit about, wooden man! Scarecrow! The one who plants himself wherever he feels like it, but never changes, never grows old, content to scare the birds away from prey that he didn’t plant, that he just happened upon with his faded face painted on. Field to field to field, reaping and never planting, seedless king of the isle of whites. Come to save her? She’s not here. I am here. Do you know what I am? I am a vengeful fire, a great burning criss-crossing the lands of the plain as far as your drawn-on eyes can see, I move through the fields as a giant blazing hex.
But the music—Maggie—
She laughed and laughed, dancing maenad around the tree of a machine she’d built, taking up hammers and sledges and anvils and thick-formed maladies and smashing the thing to pieces. I heard this music, your scarlet symphony—
No, it was ours—
She wouldn’t hear him. It was yours, all yours. All I heard was hatred, froth, and fury. An unmanned thing who kept the plain-as-day hidden right in front of his drawn-on face. And then you come here, scarecrow, with your face painted black—do they not make gunpowders out of color? Ask your friend—pretender to the heart of the ruler of Weatherhead and whine your wines and sing your songs. Let me ask you this. She loomed over him where he crouched. He shrank back. Why not be the brigand of Love when she was alive? Why not summon them to help you then? Why wait until it was too late for belated banditry? When the spoils were all scattered and strewn? Oh, yes, I know, she said she’d send you the way back, maps and poems and such. Pah! She spat on him. Did it ever occur to you that she didn’t because she didn’t want you to follow her? If anything, death was her great escape. She paused in her vandalism of machine and him alike and squinted down at where he clung wretchedly to a diseased lyric in red.
But she did leave the way, he whispered, I just can’t remember—you can’t remember—you heard her—in the machine-music—our scarlet symphony—I heard—
Her brow uncreased. What did you hear, then? Say it! Say the words! Her lips flecked with froth. Sing it! Spit it! Whatever you have left in your exhausted husk, say it! Spill it! What do you hear? She shook him by the front of his shirt. What did you hear? She smashed her fist across his face.
He went limp in her talons and said, Her alive again. Because you were there, filling in all the spaces with the song in your blood. Can’t we run—just fucking leave this place—He was begging now, pleading. She was wrong, right? Maggie would’ve wanted him to follow her to the plain. She asked him—she asked him to do it—
Leave Weatherhead? It’s mine. She let him fall from her grasp. Only this makes a shadow. She gestured to the space between them and there indeed it was. They were no longer in the place of long shadows, but here he still cast one, faint, grey, but a shadow all the same.
“Afterlife,” she belched and her belch was a squeak, a tipsy-pip, one of his hirsute aunts called it, “afterdeath sounds better. Like we keep going on? What do you think you’ll remember about me?” Maggie asked. “What do I look like when I’m happy? Sad? Angry? Rain? Snow?”
She was speaking in weathers again. “I don’t want to do this again,” was his reply.
“You’ve always treated me like I was something hidden and secret. It’s right out here in the open, even if you think it’s a prison. I ain’t alone.”
She snorted and let him fall to the floor. You speak in pasts and fictions. Love is thieves, an act of violence. This is what you wanted. This is what you wrought. Love steals away everything and it does this because it can be a sneaky thing, a secret roar. It stole a scarecrow out of a burning field and put it up right again where it’d once been, working for pennies watching over a single cloud-as-flower. He gasped when she said this. Pennies—she stole away to the door. Do you know how many pennies I drowned for you? Drowned? Tossed over the side of my boat as I drifted downriver to the sea?
You froze though, stretched out over the snow because of a curse that everyone lives by but that everyone forgets. There might be some spare change loose in your pockets. He climbed to his feet, suddenly bold, surly, victorious. He’d mastered the tongue of Weatherhead. As they had in the music, they spoke with one tongue now. Thawed by now. Why not check? He pointed at her coat.
And waste them tossing them down what hole? She berated him. Wishfool thinking. Tomorrow it will be autumn. The Autumn Fete had been decided by her. She’d had enough of winter already. She’d been born there, she told him once, fallen and woken up on the underside of a frozen sea, on the edge of sullen devastations. In winter, what did you do with her body? Did you steal her body home? Wellingwish is full of grave-robbers, too, and all the graves there have no names. Not yet. It is no wonder that Hate is here.
A chill poured up and over him, a devil-edged axe. But before he could trap-song her right there in her boots, show her a map back the other way, she had disappeared.
The center of Weatherhead had been razed for the coming of Autumn. Under a heavier, deadly sky, now thunder-dark and inglorious, entire city blocks had been cored out and pushed by some monstrous, unseen force into rough berms on the periphery of the celebration, making a rough circle. People of Weatherhead, full of murmur and tumult at this event, clambered dune-see up to the false ridge formed by the detritus and then slid down the other side to join the festivities. With the winter light gone, an odd, aching, and incomplete twilight had scored the bank of grey nothing lingering over the city. It was tinged ever so hesitantly with the faintest of reds and oranges, but he could note the difference on the way the light fell downsaway, as she’d say, on the newborn commons below. Yes, he saw, even the ground seemed tinted with abscission’s hues, the soothing conjurer’s welt of fall.
He was sitting on the top of one of the debris slopes, watching the conjuring of the citizenry below. He’d spent the day in a daze, wandering Weatherhead amidst the murmurs and wish-tics of its people, people whose hearts had begun to murmur and whisper with the promise of the shift in pitches, the end of a dead, stolen season and the beginning of a new one.
He’d seen Love earlier, from afar. Frank and the Colored Girl were roughing up some young toughs near the diner where the ruler of Weatherhead pretended to be a waitress, but he was afraid to approach them. How could he? He’d failed in bringing her into the scarlet symphony. All he’d shown her was his hatred and spite towards his dead-wife, who hadn’t been barren winter at all, but delectable harvests and a bounty of a wind, eager for seed, a storm over fallow furrow. Cursing himself, he avoided Love, for even if they had come at his beckoning, so had Hate and she knew, the ruler of Weatherhead, that Hate had as much a stake in his being here as Love did.
He looked down at the sweet-knife he’d been fingering. Mr. Moustache had said to wound her with it else she will shatter again and Hate will put her back together again. And what had Love told him? In the apiary, in the sweetness, was strength, evil, and passion. Autumn is the way to all things. Hate would try to pit them against each other, Mr. Moustache had told him.
He fell into Autumn. There the people of Weatherhead were laughing.
There were quite a number of them on the red field. Their jollity stunned him for smiles were freak storms in Weatherhead, but here and there he saw flashing grins, smirks, and scornless turns-o’-the-mouth. The ground had been covered with fall, reds, oranges, and yellows, leaves from lands long ago swallowed up by her armies and held captive in what one woman described to him as vast, underg
round halls, hundreds of feet square full of millions of falls. People occasionally stopped and marveled at these, and not a few began sweeping them up in bunches in their hands. An old woman with dead hair and a twinge of decay in her step, cried out with a laugh and, taking stems between her thumbs and forefingers, deftly wove a string of leaves into a dangle and wrapped it around her neck like a scarf. At first aghast and impotent at this defiance, a few others swallowed and dared and gathered up leaves of their own, decorating each other’s hair, arms, sleeves, legs of their trousers, the hems of their skirts, all-in arrow of the season, until the milling crowds took on the outward appearance of a shifting, swaying forest in fall bloom.
Darker hands, though, somewhere nearby, crushed the leaves into dust. He turned at the sound and sought out these hands, thinking it was her, but it wasn’t, it was something more wicked, something more loved. He ducked and dodged his way through the crowds, brushing against leaves restored, pinned to shirts and tunics, leaves returning to festoon hair and shoulders, everything was a swirl and wolf-driven cacophony of the hunted and joyous, oranges, reds, and yellows smeared across his vision.
There were servants waiting on the partygoers, servants who had clocks instead of faces and the people of Weatherhead regarded them timidly, some shyly backing away from their offerings, some gawking in half-terror, for clocks hadn’t been seen in Weatherhead for centuries. What use could they possibly have in a city where it was always dead-of-winter and where night and day are delineated solely by the high voice?
A band had struck up nearby. Was it Love, he wondered? He hadn’t seen them here yet but knew they’d be close by, ever mindful. Dooms were about. He scooted, ass-to-periphery around the edge of the dancers. He bumped backsides with a waiter, which turned to regard him with a friendly tilt of the head. He looked at the clockface. It smiled at him and turned away to a server bearing drinks. Across the way some brash folks had moistened their tongues with drink and poetry and were collecting kindling. He paused in his meandering to watch them for a moment. At first he thought they were making a fire, but, no, they were reassembling trees like upright jigsaws and within minutes, a tiny forest had emerged in the center of Weatherhead and, true, there was, as yet, no weather or breeze to tickle the things, but, despite that, a mob gathered around to help, pinning leaves back to its branches and they blew, blew, blew with their newfound breaths, setting the leaves a’spinning and spinning to the ground, where they bounced back up and returned to their perches in the trees. Autumn, they cried, she’d brought back autumn! And no matter how much they cast down the colors, they’d go back up.
Suddenly someone seized him by the arm. It was pasty-faced and pasty-hearted Sir Burn. Before he could protest, the scion of Hate, still foam and scum with a fever whose only sign was a recurring scab over his words, wheeled him through the crowd. All he made by way of greeting was a curt nod. Fell in to either side of them came more Hate (for, he marveled, there was a lot of it about) a small, moody, petulant woman, flanked by two identical, pus-governed lanky fellows, adolescents all, pock and poxy, water that washes cuts, the three of them the product of the same unwealthy long-shadow sperm that’d given fission to ember-tongued war, leering barbarity, and the hell-bled, throat-wave of the pundit, the priest. Everything they said was unsubstantiated unfact—they spoke like poseur-lovers, weary from masturbating, dazed with the obsolescence of their genes and they still so young. They had black mirrors for eyes instead of sunglasses. The young woman, O’Doll-I-Am, insisted on picking at a sore on the side of her tongue. Sir Burn introduced the twins as Mack Hulatem and Rhus Lancia, newly poured into Weatherhead. These three siblings were addicted to a smarting shift in the age, a kind of spongy suicide that grew on the east banks of the foothills below the black mountains, which they put between their teeth and cheek and chewed, hence the open festers. When any one of the three blinked, and they did so in unison, the black orbs of their eyes vanished for a moment, and lethargy settled over their faces for a moment, almost as if they’d fall asleep whilst walking and stumble forward.
Sir Burn rushed the usual words of imminent revolution and she-must-die at him as they headed into the thick center of the fete. Oh, ah. Of course Hate was there, their temptation was there. He listened but said nothing to them for a long while. He watched the rebirth of a retrospective season unfold before him on a stage, clenching and unclenching his fists, waiting for the weather to break, for the day to break, for her, the beast that was once Maggie Mechaine to give him a sign, anything, a sly sigh or sough of seduction, anything.
Sir Burn was whispering to him as they watched Weatherhead decorate itself with fallen things, taking them back up, watched from a great distance as the ash trees in autumn cavorted about while the wind still sat still as could be. Why no weather, still, he pondered as Hate poured poison into his ear: the city would never turn flunky to her, not as she was, thus, she had to be destroyed, unpolluted, shattered—look at her skin for god’s sake!—she was destroying herself, anyway, wasn’t she? Just like before? Now was the time to strike, when she returned the stolen season: Weatherhead would be taut, tense and for whose art was it intended? Hers only?
But still he remained silent.
Unlike you, I was born out of an insult my father gave my mother. And unlike you, I can have children. Still not gonna speak? So much for drowning her in the sounds of your sharesblood. I could’ve told you that wouldn’t work. False pretenses to Love—
Shut up.
Sir Burn looked up at his newest sister and grinned. Oh, we were there, weren’t we, Eve? Sorry, O’Doll? When she left? When she let that snowstorm almost drown this poor fellow? He looked back at him. And then you did the same for her, didn’t you? Come, he cuffed the other man’s shoulder, I want you to meet my motherfather. It’s time you met the motherfather.
He shrugged and followed them across the carpet of leaves, so inarticulate the crush of them beneath his boots that he welcomed the spasm-less lyricism of their crink and crumple. He caught the scent of a perfumed coffin. It was more Hate. They were all there, standing about with their stiff-backed supremacy, their untimid masculine manifestos tucked into their pockets, the dye of isms and philosophies tinged their coats and shirts and blouses. Their mob parted. His eye was drawn towards a woman at the center of Hate. She stood with her back to him at the center of a circle into which none of Hate dared intrude. She was speaking in a low voice to some of her acolytes, for her bearing and the deference borne her made it clear she was their Matron. She was completely naked save for the stark white armor she wore which clung to her buttocks and loins like iron snow. A cheap, Cleopatra-type, dusky with a bob-black hair. She was older, maybe in her forties, maybe 50. A glittering thread snaked down from up under her hair and dangled down the center of her back to her waist. She was their mother, sometimes their father. Today, she was called Lux Vomika.
When didn’t I and why didn’t I never, she exclaimed with a crack of laughter to her assembled children, I truck in absolutes ever on my way to someplace else. And why now here? Where won’t I? Someone indicated him standing there behind her. Oh! Gone are her fountains of dust, she said without turning. She spread her hands out and her brood turned as one to her. When things are put into graves, she purr-cursed by way of pleasantry, they are forgotten. She drew him into the circle. A rough kind of dew or sweat beaded on her skin. She smelled like gnawed meat. Even just standing beside her felt like a rape, a violation of every religion ever. No weather had ever touched her face, he saw, for she retained hints and quotations of her once-raw youth. She hooked her arm through his and told him her name and how she died. Oh, fie, sire, see I was killed by a river. Swollen and alone without a single ancestor to claim my corpse. But, oh, no! Not forgotten, for I am on the tip of every man and woman’s tongue. Lux Vomika.
He twisted in disgust at her touch. You all have names—I made up names for Love—
Her head bent to one side but she still wouldn’t look at him. Hate has its own
names, oh, yes, sire. We are not afraid to have you know them. Not like Love. Why do you think Love won’t tell you their real names?
I—I dunno.
I can tell you: the peril of possession. They fear falling into your trap if you learn them.
But even if I don’t know their names I know who they are. I don’t have a name either.
Yet we freely give you ours. Give you everything? She kept out of his shadow, he observed, her bare feet executing trim pirouettes to stay out of his darkcasting. And where had his shadow come from? That meant she was near. His heart leapt. Lux heard this and smiled thinly. They moved away from the rest of Hate. The absent circle had moved with them. Inside it they were sacrosanct, inviolable, and invisible. The secrets of human frailty are our armor, our answer. You already wonder, sire, why is Lux here? Why now, and she’ll tell you for if there is one thing I am not, sire, it is a liar. Eka desh ma—she cleared her throat humbly, eka desh ma, he watched her paint her lips red in the mirror while all there was for the long shadows to use was a single, bare light-bulb up above their heads. He sat on the toilet for a thousand years studying the cracks between the boards of wood that made up the place before he turned his gaze upon her. She’d arrived, out of breath. What’d it been—cards he’d won her at? No one was sure anymore. Dice? The back of her dress was open. Scars looked like mice running down her back away from the moonlight at her nape. That’s a path the tattooed thieves use, down to the crack of her ass, you see, the mice weren’t in the habit, they came later, after the ink. He’d brought a transistor to coffin the hub-bub of their confession there in the outhouse but the plug wouldn’t reach, so they had to whisper which neither of them were capable of doing. They both had strong, smoker’s voices. Just to the left of her left foot was a hole shaped like a heart in the wood there. He dropped his cigarette down this hole and lit another. Cherry-red her lips and the end of the cigarette and the ink on the clipboard that banged on the door whenever you opened it. That was where people wrote who did what to the outhouse, cleaning-wise. Oh! I remember the last date on it: the third of June, 1934.
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