He said nothing. He disguised his defiance as starvation. Through the fabric of his trousers, he could sense the heat of her murderer’s sob down there between her legs as she straddled him. The bulge of the barometer in his pocket alarmed his blood more than Lux Vomika’s wrigglings and writhings for what if she discovered it—
She wouldn’t: she had no head for weathers. She went on: And as for this so-called story of Weatherhead. Pah! Words weep not—it is the eyes, sire. Would that you understood the nature of love and hate. Oh, fie, sire, what if her whole life was given over to the question? Love or hate? Do you truly not see why you remember? It is because of Me. For I am Hate, the Hate That is Love. I am the architectonics of memory. I am the anti-architecture of memory. I am the fault. I am the chasm. I am the third thing besides.
His throat constricted. How grotesque, faithless, and futureless this creature was! Half-dead watering eyes pleading for alms for the inconsolable cheapness of a cold meal. It needed to feed. It wanted an unanswerable world, an easy world of uncut puzzles, of cross words that spelled themselves backwards: sexes, live evil, never odd or even, draw, o coward!, Evil did I dwell, lewd did I live—
Won’t lovers revolt now?
Lux tore her black gaze from his and searched the filthy room’s corners. Who said that?
It was a low, lowing voice. He knew it. Hate had never heard Maggie Mechaine speak, had it? or the ruler of Weatherhead? Hate was deaf to her as she was blind to It.
Hate hurled its glare back at him. It was blunt: You put a knife in her, you could put a child in me.
I can’t. Isn’t that your half-axis grandstanding that you try to orbit me on? I can’t. You know that. It is, he lied, the sweet source of You in Me. I can’t put a child in you.
Oh no, sire, but you could. Now. Take me. Her panting increased. His wired lies to her had broadened the sigh below. We have an infinitely expanding chemistry that floats on needles, that disguises the names of beasts, that can cure you. Your milky eye can weep inside me and I will laugh and laugh and laugh, but not at you as she did, but because the puncture of my darkness is always a ticklish affair. You’ve seen all my children. Give me another. We are destroyer. We are the eaten. We could pick fruit in the fields around Weatherhead. Come right or wrong.
The newspaper rustled around them; for a moment he saw half-columnar and headline distant, the naked story of two policemen injured in the line of duty, one almost fatally. Folly disguised as heroism. He confessed to the half-lie of its legitimate temptation, but forgetfulness had already crumbled, it had propelled him here. He taunted it in secret by exclaiming innocently, But Love showed me the scarlet symphony, two bodies together—
Mine is better, she purred with plastic, parasitic cunning, unbroken and all its long lines drift and rent in the unsung and impatient sweats of the black hour. What else would you need if you had whatever you wanted? She was a cocoon lit by torch, he could see through her delicate finery via fire and rage, see that what lay within was whatever he wanted, man or woman, but for now she was mere petrified music, hangdog breasts and a black recital for a pubis around which stared strange, beautiful lines where her leg met her sex. His own sex starved, she knew. He pictured to himself her contortions and distortions beneath him, his sink into that meat, the last, dejected spurt. Didn’t it fail, sire, this scarlet symphony? Didn’t it? She bleeds by your hand. We all saw it. The city saw it. How hymn the distant gunfire! How dirge the slap, apple-red rape! She unfurled herself out to either side, her arms and shoulders formed a pasty horizon, her smecking, leering fangs the sun, her unanimal and tangled breasts the rise and fall of the filthearth. She was terrible and powerful, not primal, not like Maggie, minus her forever butchery Lux Vomika was chaste decomposition, a bottomless slaughter, a fossilized sodomy, barely a ruin, more the rot and ash and the waxen-eyed wandering through what was already dead. A long thin cord of drool hung demented from her tongue and he rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. Finding the string on her back he did the same with it, grinding it in a slow circle. Lux was nothing red and southern, no fire in the woods, though. She wasn’t even torture. She was something abyssal and even-throated. She was everyone that he’d ever mistaken for Maggie Mechaine in one body. He took his hands away from her spit and shine.
She sat up with a frown, absent-mindedly fingering her glittering string which had fallen over her shoulder as she loomed over him. He studied the sadness in her muzzle and believed her for a moment. All it would be, he found himself thinking, would be one dark kiss, a tricktease or a shy flicker of his wanting lengths into her plunge and she wasn’t so bad-looking, in fact—
No. How many times had he convinced himself of the futility of his once-wife? What with all her highs and systems of pressures and her puzzles and her empty frames, it’d been easy to find her wanting, sullen, disparate, and empty instead of finding her wanton, silly, desperate, and imperial. He’d tried to disguise his lusts as foolishness when he refused to hear the strike of the song of the tics and tocsins of Maggie Mechaine, a hick-shaped danger in the autumn of the world. She’d bade him be foolish, cruel-fisted, and strange-hearted. She couldn’t speak, but she could fable and folly with the best of them and what could they do, these others? Cling to him, so much fog and sound, blights he could dislodge with the simplest of ease, with an almost-grace, while Maggie Mechaine, the dark measure of a thousand weathers, the crush of the pitch, the lady afraid of ladders, leapt from her tower with such feverish grace that one wanted to rush up, gather up her scattered red and white harmonies, embody her in a form cut-to-size and make love to her legend. These other creatures were mere sins become jests, as all religions must, in the end, become: terrible jokes played on martyrs and the celibate. Oh, don’t err, he had hated Maggie Mechaine and her vertigos, her eye in the center of everything, that staked place of calm she dwelt in while beneath her roiled her roar and her tumult, the brow of the sleepy maenad, the jawline of the red tornado—nothing could disturb her surface, not even him and for this, for this upended, harp-breaking love, this country mile’s walk, for her quiet, naked and restless season, for her dead red, for her taciturn drawl, for her heavy-lidded lips Buddhist with smoke, for her untiring poetries, and for the hidden helplessness of her 51 faces—for all this and more he had hated her.
There is no respite in love. This was a truth Weatherhead had taught him. He was wrong. He had never hated her. He had never loved her enough. More, he had never known her. No one ever knows anyone, she once said. Her words were no concession, but a mid-poem challenge, a shift in the alphabet one uses to compose, a change in the color of ink, a switch-hitter.
His eyes met Lux’s. She’d lost her peaceful, serpentine calm. She faltered. He smiled. You’re working off the assumption that I didn’t love my wife. You’re just fuel to the fire. She was alright in my arms.
Lux hissed and recoiled. Oh, ah, be careful, you, he thought. She cried, Her poisonous autumn kills our poisons. We are beasts of spring and summer. She thinks she’ll get her autumn back, does she? No, no, no, no. You must hate, hate, hate, hate. Why else would you have come here?
The temptation to challenge her was too great. Love brought me here.
Her eyelids ground together. Tell me flat: will you kill the beast of Weatherhead or no? I have fleshes to sate and enter. My time is my most important element for I must grow, fester, bleed into you. Will Hate be collar-martyred like you pretend to be, prisoner of Weatherhead? Pff! You could leave whenever you wanted. I know why you stay. You love—
No, he snapped, and though the curling of his bowels nearly forced up vomit, he traced invisible scars over her sickly breasts, I have another blade for the beast. Long knives from the long shadows. More, I am the dark cumulus hanging over Weatherhead. But can she even die? She’s already dead!
His lie worked, his false hate. Satisfied, her ochre humidity returned, tattooed, wet infinities swollen on the lips of the priestless mien of her sex. Lux put her sick lips on his wrist. It is s
imple: she must be destroyed. We will put her back together. Haven’t we spent this entire story doing just that? But we beat the shatter to the chase, almost lost Break. Now you must finish it: she must shatter before we’re finished reassembling all her pieces. We need the glue of her death, the frame of her death. She rolled off of him and drew herself up to her full height. I’m robbing the hood, I see. She crossed her arms back behind her head and yawned. I’ll tell you, sometime, long shadow, a fairy tale adventure, my fairy tale adventure, for I have many. I have a grove, too, west of forever. In my grove I grow towers for petty little princesses that I steal out of stories. I teach them how to forget all that they know and how to see out of half-gutter slits, how to collapse the spread of their immensity down to a white hum, make them immobile, virgins again—which is the only injunction of the plain that accompanies me and my children wherever we wander. And it is Lux, not them, that invents new seasons for them to be obscured by. And this woman of Weatherhead—faugh! She spat to one side. It was full of blood. She coughed. Autumns on parade as if she’s already won. She slid over him again. You won’t let it be so? I spit on the shore she washed up on, Lux did, Lux found the place of her shipwreck and I pissed and spit my sunrose wine—all my children did, all of Lux’s children—oh, all this talk of morality has undone my tongue! I need something to drink.
On her hands and knees she searched around the hovel for poisons. Finding none, she returned back to crouch on her heels, dangerous near the bed. She sank a finger into his calf. There is a name on a grave that we seek and for some ungodly reason, she rolled her eyes, Love has it.
Because, he thought, if you have her name, then you win.
Lux gored him with her black eye fire. Why did you pick up the pieces? Why do you do that? Why do you all insist on doing that?
You’re talking about remembering.
She ignored this. All Lux needs is for you to kill her name. I know what you wish: to put her back together. And you are. You know that. Oh, fie, sire! But what if you get it all wrong? Turn her into something worse than you think you’re remembering? She did that to herself already. We can do it better together.
No, she didn’t. She didn’t know—she died—I came after her—to help—
Yes, you came. You had a map from the book of faces. We all know that part of the story.
Faces, he mumbled, what was she talking about? Faces he had never known. How could he shatter her and put her back together again if he didn’t even recognize these faces?
She was hidden, you fool.
No. He refused to believe that. Everything that she was, was part of Weatherhead now, retold. She’d been forgotten by the storms, that’s all. It’s all written in a book of faces.
Lux Vomika bit into his cheek. You are a great and grand fool.
No, she hasn’t been forgotten by all the storms.
Could she hear him? She hissed, withdrew, reared up and bared her teeth. Forget this cant for the foolish! What would her faces matter? Pah! Lux sees art as something reduced to shadow only. What purpose would a book of faces serve? The only way to rebuild her is to break her again and again. That is Lux’s power, Hate’s power. It gives impetus to the simplicity of this necessity. Love is hollow, it hurts but won’t break. Do you like the way Love rebuilt her?
He lied and it felt wonderful. Of course not. What if, though, that’s who she was? The eternal riddle of Weatherhead? A bandit. A varmint. A storm on the plain. He craved her roar turned inside out. He wanted to be tangled and Ulysses and useless in the masts and cables of whatever shipwreck Lux had spoken of, whatever wreck Maggie Mechaine bred, he’d surrender to it. But Love isn’t mere echo or dried-up secret of the ancients. I can see an autumn lane a thousand years ago where they reived and plundered and raped and it seems good and true.
She screwed up her face. Hate is the only truth, sire. Why did you cheat on your wife, then? How many times? Can we guess? Fifteen? Twenty? And several who disabused themselves of love? Yes? Her white armor appeared in her hand, the sleek ivory that’d been molded to her loins and buttocks, her only dress. She clasped and cupped her crotch with it and turned away from him to refasten it.
There was something uncertain in her rejection of him, he saw, weakness. He sprung up and dagger-whispered his hands down over her buttocks, blocking the armor. The silvery string tickled his chest. I don’t know how many, he lied again, for it was all random, a wheeling fuck-mockery of her. He bit into her shoulder. She hummed. She tasted like over-ripe fruit, like the end of sainthood.
Do you remember how she laughed at the ghosts in your come? You could put impossible here, she stroked her throat, and coat my voice with it and I won’t hate you for it like she did. Can’t you see the filthy stripe running down my face? I painted it there for you. Lux looked back over her shoulder at him. She gently removed his hands from her backside. Her armor anviled back into place. Her strange necklace was exclamation point to the cleft of her buttocks. Again he fingered it, the pearly strand that was attached to the back of the Mother of Hate. What is it, asked his fingerprints.
She shrugged without turning. Stars? Fairies? Lights for making the effigy?
What happens if I pull it out?
I die, she said simply. How it ends is up to you, sire. What’s that poet say? With a whimper? Whimpering on your knees before me?
Or you before me. This was an old game of hates. So many times had his wits been overtaken by it. He confessed to wanting the creature then and there, but that, then, was the point, wasn’t it? He gripped her by her wrists and forced her to step into him. She threw back her head and laughed. Her tongue was black, too, he saw. He rapped his knuckles on her pubis. I bet Lux and me could cough up a good wad of sodomy together, eh? She laughed even louder and he spat in her hand and forced her to shine her armor with it. Keep that sheen alive on there. It won’t keep like that down in the mud, I can tell you. He spun her and pushed her roughly toward the door. What a good bandit he made, he smiled to himself. We’ll divvy her up at the reckoning, whatsay?
Hate left the room with a flash of eyelashes, satisfied.
⧜
He couldn’t sleep. Hate was placated. But he missed Maggie Mechaine and that silent shout of hers. He thought he had lost that shout, the roar his mother told him about. Even in his memories, he’d lost it. Now—she was that shout, turned inside out. She could never not be it. He didn’t want her to change, he thought again. He didn’t want her to shatter again. This was the way she’d chosen to find herself on the plain. He’d never her deny her herself again. Let her roar.
She did something unusual one day and brought home a job she was struck with. It was a photograph of two skeletons, childish sorts of chalky-looking sketches drawn on a wall in New Orleans. A customer had gone there for business and seen this wall, taken the picture and wanted it framed for her husband.
“Gay-days,” Maggie attempted to repeat the word, “I forget. Voodoo stuff. Cool?”
Yes, he agreed. They felt a sudden fever, dry mouths and all, confronted with forces of impenetrable darkness, top-hatted dustmen and witches with tongues that froze, skeletons in dresses and men with snakes for ears, all the friezes of half-shadow box-lights and carnivals and weird erotica that the word voodoo invoked. As a result, they got all occulty for a day—but they were both terrible at it.
“Fuck,” she swore around her joint as she shuffled the deck, “woulda been 17 games in a row, you know what I mean?” Pot, contrary to its nature, made her blather and bother.
“Yes. No.” He was watching her thin white hands manhandling the deck. When she pushed up the sleeve of her hoodie, puzzle pieces rained out onto the table. He fiddled with them absent-mindedly, taking the occasional tug on his beer. To Randy, he sluggishly thought.
“Birds! Birds!” she cursed. Maggie hated birds, orioles, especially, that day. But, she told him, she knew how to handle those fuckers. She pointed across the kitchen. “See all those scarecrows sitting on the barstools? I put them
there. They’re the only ones I can get to listen to me. I stuffed them full of wrists and—“
“Try the cards,” he yelled for the fourth time and banged his can on the table. She yelped and jumped. She ducked her head down mock-cowed and counted them one more time. “51-1-2. Shit. There’s two extra cards.” She flipped them over and sifted through them and looked at them. “The Fool and the—“
“What?”
“The Fool again. Another Fool. This deck is broken.” She sighed. Neither one of them knew how to use it properly, so they’d decided to try blackjack with tarot, a noble idea, but a foolhardy one.
His eyebrows shot up, “If we had some bones, we could use ‘em as dice—“
“Don’t be a dick,” she singed a hair on the end of her pot.
He pointed out that he’d once read that walruses have bones in their dicks.
“Well,” she said, and she pronounced it “whale” which he both loved and hated all at once, because it had a delicate, plantation’s charm to it while making her sound like, well, a fool, “the best place to hide bones is where?”
Where? There was some strange, bedevilin’ powder in her choke-voice and he’d done gone and mixed her murmurs up with the wind catchin’ up outside the window and he lost his righteous voice when he sucked on her tongue like he did, got all that chalky what-not all over his teeth—
“In the body. If you keep kissing me like that I ain’t never gonna be done.”
“Deal. The. Cards.” he barked as if innocent. She did. They puzzled over their hands for a while. Hesitant, they each laid down some a card. Without values meaningful to them assigned to the tarot, they decided to play it conceptual.
She chewed on her lip and studied the card he’d turned over on the table. “I’ll see your Death and raise.” She clapped a penny onto the table, which wasn’t a well at all, but she made a wish anyway.
Death peeled its tires. “You miss,” his question came out a croak, “your mom?”
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