Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  That day in the gynecologist’s office, they’d lost the keys to the truck in the waiting room. On all fours, they found them under a table.

  When they stood, “Ah guess we should go home and have sex,” he drawled like she.

  “Ah guess you’ll have to be cut down to size, then, so you can fit inside.” Then she was husky-huffing break break break and saw veins like stained glass.

  Couldn’t find the angle for a while, they fretted, can’t find the right angle, the way which doesn’t hurt. She, a circus on his lap, became the queen of renegade position, all this way and that way and over time, he sank further and further into her and her gasps and lip-bites turned outwards into pleasurable expressions and not pained ones and eventually mirth. It was the latter that paid in landmarks, for, try as he might, he couldn’t stake out the first time they made love, because there were so many first times. What he could remember, though, was the first time he made her come himself, hoof-and-mouth free, on the end of him and she was wearing one of his shirts but it was unbuttoned and he swore when she slunk around his ankles when he came home from his beat at dawn, but she put storms over his homeland with that way she had about her, her distance, furthest from history, her sleepy blue eyes, and she cautioned him, “Autumn is the striptease season,” and he wore her and at the end, triumphant, she burst into laughter as they burst.

  Later, she said, it was like batting, orgasms: that odd vibration through the wood that, time after time after time, starts to tickle the palms and fans out through the fingers and hand until the whole affair is shaking with tremulous, buzzing hilarity for a good while after. He was, she firmly assured him, tickling her soul.

  That was how he learned that there was nothing impenetrable, even souls.

  Neither of them had ever been walkers or wanderers or hikers. They’d never retained the character of a place, never felt that they were in a place, not even together, they never discussed the spirit of a place, the feel or ilk of a place. Quite unlike Weatherhead, which was built out of her and his position to her, their movements together were not ones of passing and forthing and fording and crossing. The only unity of space they ever shared was when they made love: touched, huddled, and skinned each other. That was the one space that they ever could compare the features of: that which they created themselves and between them, even the long shadows shrank down to the penumbra under her protruding navel, the ducking of light under his chin, the spidery shape her outstretched fingers made, blocking out the light as she dug her fingers into him. Darling-broken lovers, they were unfashionable collision and blistering chemistry all at once, the crash of storm fronts, both occluding and both not, tongue-hail and loin-gale, sky was prey to storm and they could crawl and growl over each other like the best thunder ever. They made their own places. This was what Lux Vomika and all of Hate could never ever understand: this placelessness, this timelessness of sex was not something fickle, wanton, and vagabond. It was the entirety, the body of what they were together. As poems, songs, and tattoos are for the mind and soul of lovers, so sex is for the body. All conspire together in the thick of words and sweat to create something called Them. He could not destroy her again because, in Weatherhead, they were virgins all over again.

  (47 Down) I am the Worst Thought Wrong.

  He woke well before the last penultimate dawn of Weatherhead and thought he was penniless but a stumble-hunch search of his pockets fetched him up a copper ticket to the dark wood. He fingered the coin and thought of thinking of everything that had happened to him in this place, but he could no longer do so. Aroused to revolt, his fitful sleep had been full of visions of Maggie Mechaine with her clever sex-eye and her savage stab hilarity-hysteria. He rose and prepared to seek her at the sources of the wind and the bitter heat that wells up from under the earth, freed from its sleep by the torturous stomps of incessant wars and weddings. The streets of Weatherhead were lulled by both.

  An army slept outside, awaiting his orders to march, an army of Weatherhead, an army made out of her that sickened this stony, concrete body of a city. They wanted her in ribbons and tatters, confetti for the secret parade of the plain where death just wasn’t enough. All he wanted was to bury his face between her breasts and cry, tired of betraying truth for secrets. Hate had left him once-and-for-all and the metal in the sky had fled. He stood on a roof and watched the weather-torn sky strain and moan to let through the teasing, hesitant light beyond it, but it just couldn’t. The city smoldered in a thousand places. Here and there, there were still concussive explosives blasting up like a young woman’s gaze and the occasional screams, but most of Weatherhead had camped around his hovel.

  What sort of war was this that she wanted? Maggie had never fought a war against herself. If she had, she’d always won. It was everything else that was fairless and stray. She was just fine in her tower, until she saw him that day in the frame shop. This thought made his recovered pitch balk and bunt and doubt. What if—god, was he a conspiracy against her? Was this why she persecuted him here, punished him, teased and tormented him? She wanted him to leave, was it because he’d torn her to pieces once before and could do so again if he had wanted?

  But he’d come to Weatherhead, face turned into a freezing wind, featureless and sharp and been a slap to her face as he tried to piece her back together out of what she once was. But the world of the ancestry of dusts and decencies had no power here on the plain where riddles solved themselves and faces, moved by invisible fingers and envied by the storms, drew themselves into the margins of new versions of old stories.

  Oh, fear.

  Above there was elastic, ecstatic lightning as her storms tore apart the sky. At the entrance to the tunnel leading into the heart of the plains he paused and listened to the fell thrum of ominous things—life, death, all things meaningless in the face of Love.

  The Free Army of Weatherhead led him underground, deep, led him down, so deep that he was at first startled to hear the High Voice. It was Her Word, he warned the people of Weatherhead, one best heeded. They nodded silently, faceless and terrified. They couldn’t hear it, he could see, merely obeyed him blindly. Slivers of Hate crept around the mob’s edge, he saw. Sir Burn and all his brothers and sisters were there, carrying truncheons and broken bottles and torches.

  They led him underground, deep, led him down, through one of the sallow swallow-throats that toasted the underbelly of Weatherhead with savage tastes, dark, dark spaces that one associates with vampires, skin-wearers, and jackets held out for you to slip on, sleeve tucked down the front of khaki pants, too deep for her dresses: this was black country, the opposite of a sun at midnight, far from her splattering lightning and the red rain and the sky blossoming with petals that trembled under a perpetual coriolis her ferality had started spinning far above.

  Deep, they led him, underground because Maggie was down there somewhere. He was a barefoot heretic and could no longer use any other name for her. Oh, how he didn’t want to lead them to her, wanted to disobey her. Could he protect her? Maybe she’d cry, Alert the worms! and it’d all turn out to be one of those morbid pranks of Weatherhead and they’d turn on him. He missed her oppression and terror. He’d eat her fists every day in the punch-circle if he could end this all now. He’d hold onto her thighs like prison bars, add hours to the day through herculean labors versus Time just to spend longer with her, he’d cup his ear to her roar, make it coda to their scarlet symphony, laugh in the dark with her, darken in the laugh with her, inherit a wealth of crime with her, link knives with her, vein to vein, all if he could end this now.

  To speak of promises is to speak of the flower becoming root or the police becoming crime or the poem becoming unterrified love. He would do all these things and more. Love is there in the body, but love is there in the act, in the cracks between lies, and at the threshold of unforeseen thoughts and tears. Dew huddles under petal, bullets huddle under chests, and saliva huddles under verse.

  As he descended there formed around him enfold
ing and unfolding everything the inescapable web of associations that tied every brick, every wad of spit, every strand of torn-out hair of Weatherhead to her. There was no escape from her in this place. Was there even a distance from Weatherhead he could go to escape from these inextricable, inexplicable emanations—the prime mover of this place—the First Person—Maggie Mechaine, dead wife and despot? Would he even try? Why was she everything? He pressed his knuckles into his temples, waved off the rebellious horde whose hands reached out to ask after him. Everyone had forgotten how to speak in the dark except for him.

  Maybe, he thought or said aloud, he couldn’t tell, maybe when the truck hit her it’d knocked all the bad out of her and with no weather on the plain, it’d all blown about under the power of its own breath and swirled and gotten all mixed up. Maybe—maybe he should kill her—maybe Hate was right—had that been what had driven him to do it before? Perhaps to speak of anythings-doing was to speak of this? No. No. He wanted her roar, he wanted it to rise and become the anthem of the plain.

  This thought made him pause and check the barometer that Love had given him. It was falling falling falling to zero. In anguish, he ran on to her. Time tottered like a drunkard and the last scraps of winter, gelid and cold, fondled the edges of his last memories:

  He came to a familiar staircase that led further into the depths. He paused and looked up. Something familiar stood and there were unfamiliar teeth. Once just after, a torrent of red had been a glissando choking his hair at the roots. That was her up there, laughing down the butcher’s stripes, down at him. Note the shadow under the eye ridge and chin. Note the red-stained teeth. She’d worshipped at the caul of this crimson:

  “Slurpee love,” she quacked, “sounds so much better than icee love, yeah?” So he’d bought her one, not as a hat. She’d hung back, poured it over his head as he descended to the lower level. It ran red down his back. It ran red down his front, too. He paused now in the dark and shook with consumptive, all-consuming laughter. The revolution thought him mad, paused with hands over mouths. He could still feel it, the Slurpee, not the coup, and when he wiped his hand through his hair, it still came away red.

  He pretended he didn’t know her, that she was a complete, bestial stranger and she played along, disguising herself as someone else to him, backing away from him screeching as he threw her over his shoulder and raced around hijacker to the horror of all in the mall until he found a fountain and set her in it and kissed her roughly red to the horror of all in the mall.

  “My wife,” he explained to security, “we were just—ah—goofin’ around. I’m a—ah—cop.”

  “That’s a shirt you owe me, crackerjack,” he explained to her.

  She peered between him and the driver’s seat of their truck. “It looks like one of those—whadda they call them? The ink spots for crazy people?”

  “Rorschachs,” he supplied. He leaned forward over the steering wheel. “Yeah? What do you see?” Within a week, she’d have a puzzle called “Rorschach’s at Midnight” shattered before her, her first purchase of anything on a computer.

  He stared down into the darkness. The others were still crouched by him, waiting for him to move. What had she seen there? What had she said?

  We need to move, someone hissed. He let them lead him on. Craggy eagle beaks of ruin rock spine loomed out of their collective midnight. They trudged on for what seemed like days. Were they even under the city anymore?

  What city? someone shot back. They had forgotten the city and they had forgotten her blood that fed it. He tried to make out their shapes in the dark but all he could make out was the hammer-steam pump and pitch of their pulses and grunts and then they stepped into a dim circle of light, a crumbling circular chamber, shaft bottom, it seemed, judging from the rain and detritus. Maggie Mechaine was standing in the center of the room, leaning on her flying mirror like a bar. Its border was dull, faded gold. She had her knife in her other hand. She’d been staring into it when he appeared above her.

  Oh. Now he remembered what she had seen on his Rorschach back:

  “A big red stain.”

  They stood like that, him and her for forever. She seemed surprised to see him, almost meek, embarrassed, like the time he’d walked in on her smoking pot out of a baseball.

  “Seriously?” He did have to give her credit for consistency in her hobbies.

  “I’m juiced, now” she whined, “all along the inseam.”

  She shifted her feet from time to time and then, peering around him to either side, she put her knife away. You’re alone? This wasn’t meant for his sound-meat. But, louder, for the benefit of others she believed hidden: Why are you wandering under Weatherhead alone?

  He was alone, he saw in alarm after a sharp, backwards glance. The mob of strife and surge against her steely rule were gone. They must’ve seen her? Or known she was here? They had led him straight to her, a goddamn trap, he fumed. Or she set him up? It’d be like Hate to play them thus, play them off of each other, suspicions and hates and promises, have them rip each other apart. I was—they were bringing me here—like you asked—

  She nodded, but, Who, though? She looked past him.

  He thought for a moment. He wasn’t sure that anyone had actually been with him at all. He couldn’t see their faces anymore. Weren’t there hands and voices? Or were they just black echoes? Did sound have color? His head felt stormy like the sky over Weatherhead. He’d met someone once who had a colored voice—

  Where are the others? She was coming towards him. Why did she look drawn onto the world today? There was something beautiful and petal-edge like that fuzzed her periphery and mocked portraiture as it had been. He knew her to have this monstrous periphery, but that it was vertical, too, beneath the plane of the plain, extending downwards into the soft stuff of the rock-bound hide of the world—

  These people—they brought me down here. They were looking for—for—

  Me. She squinted into the tunnel behind him. No one knows this place. This is where I buy upland hesitance and balm for the holes in my shirts. Here in the cold dark hole of the world I can fix things instead of destroy them. I make jokes with my mirror, kick up dust with my dances and fight on all fours the seven metals that express history. I will confess to conspiracy, though that the mirror does not laugh nor does the dust have music nor do the seven metals that express history bear a sign of our struggles. She scratched with her toe in the dust. This is where no truck could come.

  This gave him pause. The dialect of Weatherhead was a rough one, whittled out of a poetry of memory subject to the lash, but he’d been here long enough to understand one thing:

  You wanted me to come here. Only the truly desperate seek to comfort the hearts of their tormentors. Let me dance with you in the dirt—

  You came here with no one, she said darkly. You were to bring them, bring them to me and you didn’t. You came alone.

  Look—they were here, I swear to god—I didn’t come alone—they want to—

  I know what they want. They are all standing right before me. She shook off her coat the same way he’d seen autumn shake off summer. She’d never been more alluring as she prepared one last time to destroy him, send him back. And it’d been her Word that he should’ve heeded, because the last, worst thing one could think was almost always completely and terribly wrong. This wasn’t about him destroying her, despite Hate’s mad freedoms and vulturine prophecies and promises of a new dead-wife. This was about destroying him. Did you know, she said again, stranger, that when you first came, faceless but copper-eyed, to Weatherhead, to my dominion, that I thought you were the sought-after Hate because it was all I felt towards you? That you were up to your old tricks again, at me with promises of comings and goings and names?

  Copper-eyed—he fingered the coin in his pocket. No, it’s not me—I brought them like you asked—He took a step towards her. She took a step away. Was this a trap for him?

  Yes, I thought you were Hate come again selling me ideas off the
back of his hands, but I’m half-oracle and I knew there couldn’t be a grave in my future, nor could I return to the long shadows, not like you can. I had my own ideas, see? I found this city here. She’d been alone, was what she meant, he realized with a shudder, seduced by the dying light, the lack of shadows, nothing thrown behind one, despot in a country steeped in the savage, a plain lacking debtors and questions. At high noon, they vanish, vanish into one, the shadows do, she sang as she read his thoughts. She’d been alone, she’d never been otherwise, and then she’d conquered a city, full of empty people who, through her alchemy became her scarecrows, robbed of pitch and pulse. I’ve slept my whole life without identities, without weather, she unbuckled her holster and knife and revolver both slipped to the ground, but then I remembered you—somehow you were beyond Hate, even beyond Love, who brought you here, no second self, no stolen season. Just what you are.

  But not what you were, she didn’t say out loud, but he saw it in her eyes and couldn’t retreat from her. “A big red stain.” Maggie never sought and soughed over hidden meanings in things: it was plain as rain. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on th’ plain,” she giggled from behind her matador’s cape. She waved it at him from life but his eye wasn’t drawn to the movement, but to the red. “It’s just a cape,” she laughed harder. She never hid in decline or became a fell thing. No, she was an unsevered gush of the world that ignored knocks at doors and the downturned smells of her beloved, who finished all her crosswords with the scattered lines of a poem that was her life and that now underscored her on the plain. Empires were not abysses. She’d smudged blood from the sea to Weatherhead, barefoot and ravenous, her game kept afoot only by feeding off her blameless and voiceless poetries.