She leapt leaf on him, drove her fist into his jaw, her other hand grabbed the lower hinge of his speaking hole, his saying mouth as they say in Weatherhead, and pulled it down, another punch couple to his temple. He was three times her, easily, could break her in half like a twig, but he didn’t fight back. He gacked and fell, scooted backwards and recovered his footing, fetched back into the darkness of the tunnel. Had they really left him here with her? No, wait, he panted, he could hear a long, low whistle—he dove into black waters. She was right behind him, reaching out—her fist was out, said her black outline framed against the distant light of the chamber.
Then he felt them, he gasped, felt Hate swarm out of the sides of the tunnel, out of their sharp, dark scrutiny along the walls and they fell upon her and she spat and cursed, stabbing her knife here and there and he heard glass shatter and shatter as she flailed about against those restraining her. An inhuman, beastly sound awoke in her throat. He backed away from where this sound came. He could see little. She fed sick, civilized fear into him with this barbarous ululation. They had her surrounded but she refused to give in, lashing out at them again and again until they forced her down onto all fours and were tearing at her jacket and shirt. His eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness but all he heard of the noose at firs was the soft rustle of its filaments underpinning her screams and her profaning of their genealogies. They slipped this noose around her neck, he could hear the rasp of hemp over skin like a seduction down the hall a spell, and her cries were cut off, her head pulled up and back. Hands scrabbled at her buttocks and hair, rending her trousers and shirt as she was yanked back, dragged down the tunnel.
He crouched there for a long moment listening to their cheery laughter—christ, they sounded like summer-giddy children—and the ack! ack! choke-off of Maggie Mechaine fading down as the mob moved towards the lower chamber. No. Not again. He threw himself up and at for her, made for her. In the dim, he could see the milk of her nape at the endly end of the noose-stick that held her.
He could see her eyes rolled up at him. No—she yackled, —don’t do this—not again— Her attempts at inhalation were curt, rattling opposites of hiccoughs.
No, he heard himself roar. He punched out at her assailants at the same time as he curved three fingers under the rope and pulled it away from her skin, dropping the stick. A doom-filled rush of wind went into her. He kicked and punched one-handed as they now turned on him. The rope pulled tight around her throat again and she fell writhing to the floor of the tunnel. He struck out with both fists, standing over her, kicking out at those falling upon her again. He could see so much nothing that he couldn’t make contact with these grave-robbing bastards.
The walls—she croaked up at him, fingers scrabbling at the noose, break the walls—the tunnel—it’s you—
He surged forward, fists at the ready and laid into the walls, smashing them, smashing them, his shouts and cries spider-webbing and fracture, glass jaws and faces crumbling into wishing dust that dotted his sleeves and trousers. Savage he felled this army. His punches and lunges and blood-froth, his blood-thirst kicks and strikes and curses and profane baptisms of knuckle, elbow, and boot-toe raining down on the shatterpoints of each and every face of his pathetic, traitorous army. There would be no revolution in Weatherhead. No one would break this red woman except him—he could erode her down for months and months before she was truly his, he could stop and smear at her passings-by and stare his spit all the way across the gulf between his mouth and hers, he could confuse verb and adjective and violent her wages doll-punch—he could poem and song and never dictate anything to anyone else save his virulent violent vehemence against all the world for her. Mirrors or no, no adversary stood between him and her, not light and its bend, not dark and its mutter-muddle flinch in the corner of the eye. So he smashed, smashed them down, knuckles bleeding, glass splinters in his hair, his face, jutting from the backs of his hands and the fronts of his eyes.
It was over as quickly as it had begun. Except now the tunnel was collapsing. With the weight of reflection freed from its moorings and made graceful flight out of the borders of their prisons, these supports made the earth sag, not in sulk, but in liberation. Shit, he thought, as he heard the burden of the world above begin to shift.
Get up, goddammit! He yanked her to her feet, grabbing her under her arms.
Alert the worms! she cried in a hoarse voice. Her bleeding fingers freed her speech, tugging the noose out and away. She blacked out. He pulled her back into the safety of the chamber below. There was a great quake and chorus of roars and bellows as the tunnel of the coup smashed down into itself. An enormous black and brown puff of dirt and debris was exhaled by the earth’s collapsing lung into the room where they crouched together, he bloody and dusty, she without a sign of life. They’d come to rest before her mirror which had been blow over onto its side by the inrush of fall. There he saw them clutched together for the last first time. Shattered glass sparkled on his tattered brown coat, jutted out of the ruins of his knuckles. Her neck was chafed, purple. He massaged it gently. They had nearly strangled her themselves. She wasn’t breathing. Neither was he.
God, breathe, would you? He rubbed her neck harder, patted her cheek. Please? Minding the shards of mirror poking out of his hands, he laid her out. There was glass everywhere, the bones of the coup. Goddammit, he’d broken every mirror in that tunnel. That last one lying there on its side, though, eyed him with malevolence. He looked away, blameful, ashamed. What had he done?
He tugged open her shirt and stared down between her breasts. Maggie Mechaine’s once-upon-a-time beat under there somewhere. Or had. He put his mouth to hers and sang into her throat. Remember that the pitch and tune are the same. He taught it to her again. He threatened her. He stretched himself out across her, pulse to once-pulse. There was nothing more he had ever loved in life or death as this woman. His will, at last, had become something entirely his own. This is Love’s greatest strength, what makes it outlaw, outside of everything, because when one is in it, it lends one the strength to bend and shape the world as one wishes, as she wishes, as she had done. There was nothing accidental to their criminal quality; they had simply never recognized it before.
When she started giggling as if in a dream with her eyes still clenched shut, he knew he’d won.
She inhaled with violence. She clawed at his coat, cast herself onto his chest. Did I do it all wrong? Was there ever—was there ever a ship?
He touched her eyelids. Never had he been alone with just the past of her. Yes.
⧜
It was that Christmas again, time of the red gifts, of hostage altruisms freed by northern, capped, whorish capitalisms. It was that Christmas again, when Maggie had met all his sisters, home with his mother. There were pictures of all five children, he and his four sisters, a progressive chain of individual evolution over 12 years, the school pictures, their childhoods barred from ever escaping them in the frames of their mother-tormentor.
Maggie stared at these, moving from one to the next, studying the frames. She saw him seeing her. “These are nice,” she offered. She meant the frames.
“That’s me. That’s my childhood,” he replied, “I wasn’t sure if you knew that.”
She wouldn’t say. But this wasn’t what interested her. She only cared about the time before and after what was framed. He would never understand this until it was too late: Maggie never lived in a moment. She was the moment. Where she lived was in its wake or she was the squall line for its upheaval.
“’Draw near to the summit and your eyes can knock against heaven.’ Don’t you get it?” He stared thousands of miles at Silver. No. He never had. What was she reading to him over the phone? It was a different Christmas now, the last one, he was buried in a heart of a winter that would last until Weatherhead. Silver had called him, anxious and scattered. What was she reading to him in her high voice?
He missed her beloved smell, the smell of Maggie, wood and pot and shaved legs. H
e stared down at his hand while Silver echoed at him through the receiver. He rubbed his fingertips against his palms. Why were they smudged black? What was the book he’d just been holding—just now, just before those four policemen were going to bang on the door—
He looked about in a panic. But it was there next to the gun. Maggie’s sketchbook.
“’You live in my country, but you have never seen it’,” Silver quoth. He hung up. How had she stolen Maggie’s words? Oh, ah. Silver had known. Silver had loved Maggie more than any other sister could ever be loved. If Maggie were all the winds, Silver was all the windows they blew through. Silver made art and Maggie framed it. Silver loved that her brother loved this woman even if he didn’t know it.
He was unfixed in Christmases, moving back and forth between them. Now Maggie stared hard at the painting. Silver had it propped against his old bed. She wanted to give it to Maggie. Maggie ignored the frame. “She looks,” Maggie smiled secrets into the world in her haphazard way, the way of making love on deck during a storm at sea, “like she just got robbed by thieves.”
Silver nodded approvingly. “They own the bullets, she owns the prize. It’s a story about a curse and love from far away.”
Maggie blinked which meant she didn’t know something. “I don’t gettit. Love comes from far away—“
“She was,” he put in from under his floppy red holiday hat, “trapped in a tower and cursed. She can’t look out at the world, she has to sit and sew or whatever without ever looking right at anything.” He forked two fingers and poked them in Maggie’s direction. “But one day, a knight—“
“Just fucking Sir Lancelot,” Silver injected. Maggie didn’t remember who that was.
“—right, rides by and she falls in love with him so she says ‘fuck the curse’, gets in a boat and goes to find the knight.” He gestured to the painting. Silver was right. It looked like Maggie. Everyone agreed this was pretty cool. Maggie took no truck with such notions. She could never be fan; she had to be storm. She could never be spit; she had to be downpour. All the same though, the painting was a presence to her.
Silver saw Maggie’s questioning frown. “We used to read this all the time when we were kids, that’s why I thought you guys might like it—‘cuz—make—kid—one day—kids—er—“
Maggie smiled then. Her modesty, that of the trained sweat of the virgin with hunched shoulders, was from a place that would never exist. Her savagery, that of the parting words that rend banners of surrender, was from a place called Weatherhead.
Silver told Shalott through Maggie, “People are always telling you how to be a person. She knew. She refused. She loved. She died.”
“Did she drown,” Maggie asked.
“Shalott didn’t drown, she froze. You’re thinking of Ophelia.”
“Who?”
Silver and Maggie came back inside laughing. They’d been whispering in their secret language of women and smoke, translated out of colors hidden behind hands. Everyone else was scattered about the tree’s periphery talking banalities and yawning. Those two young women, one small and thin, the other tall and round, impossibly different but a damned sorority of chaos’ indifference, reeked of weed and fatally unpacked luggage abandoned for the week, this friendship, unlike most, could last longer than a massacre, could make curtains in a horror film stop fluttering because these two’d steal all the wind and fear and whatnot.
Silver stapled mistletoe to her brother’s hair and thrust Maggie at him. “My brother, you know, he believes in love more than all of us pigs put together!” and it was Silver that mailed her all the crossword books, because Silver, he learned later knew the crossword trick, knew all the Maggie Mechaines and knew the sting and thrill of all his wife’s weathers and this was how the high voice came to be, not out of gods or goddesses, legends or legerdemain, but out of the loving need to tell her dying brother the forecast, the penned ultimate magicks, the beautiful, undefeated glooms and graces of his late wife.
Silver knew love, she knew how to unmuffle blood. Her heart stretched out to the horizon as lucid as a road in winter’s half-morning. She invented religions. Bare-legged and unthin, she was to spend the rest of her life humbled and wide-eyed as the tender shield of another woman, queens of the unsad walk, queens of an utter lack of ideology, queens without castles.
His oldest sister despised Maggie Mechaine. “Nice Slayer t-shirt,” she scoffed from her throne made out of children.
They raced along atop the fog. There was bridge under the wheels of their truck but they had a hard time seeing it. Silver sat in the back, where both he and Maggie attested to the fact that no one had ever, in fact, sat before, and sighed through her epileptic grin that leapt back and forth under winds. “You can think the just goddamnedest most terrible thing ever about someone but when you love them—“
She meant them. He confessed to himself then that he didn’t feel as tall when he laid next to Maggie, that he didn’t feel as poor, either, as if she both drew him in and out of different aspects of the world the way drunkenness both lends one the bravest of hearts and the fall to one’s knees.
“What’s your favorite book,” Silver tapped Maggie’s shoulder. Maggie didn’t read.
“Books don’t tell me wonderful stories,” and but goddamn hadn’t she looked at him just then? She could never be at peace, this he saw now, yes, this was easy to see from Weatherhead.
At some point, he had begun to think of her darkly as a minor sort of sociopath. She was, at times, borderline self-destructive, what with her drugs and poverty and broken furniture and slicings.
He’d ask, “All right?”
She’d return, “I’m alive, ain’t I?”
“Sorry, does that mean yes or no?”
“Try hitting me and see,” she dared, but he never did.
The past was less a hole in the ice as he cowered with her in the wastes far under Weatherhead.
“It is as much about how we die as it is how we live.”
How did Maggie die?
In love, Silver swore.
(48 Across) I Have the Weirdest Alphabet of All.
The high voice was different that day. It had become closer to him, as if someone were reading him the end of a story and had leant in closer to make sure he heard it, scooting their chair in and bending over his ear.
They had walked for what seemed like years through the carefully crafted tunnels that branched off from out under Weatherhead to all directions of the wandering and meandering of the plain. These tunnels, regular but rough, straight but grave were formed out of ever-receding and ever-preceding squares cut out of the living rock of the plain. Set into them at regular intervals were simple steels, a strip marking off some ancient boundary-point or other which gave the effect that one was stepping through frame after frame. It was, he came to know as his concept of Could fled distraught and mewling back into the country of long shadows, a crossword puzzle grid pulled apart and laid in a straight row where all the answers ran together. When pressed, she confessed ignorance as to their nature or purpose or who might have toiled for what must have been decades carving these spaces. In the darkness, where the only light was afforded by the drunkard’s arousal that their apposing lumens spat at each other, where the gloom and blue of her eyes were aimlessly evil, minus flutter and bat, as her bruised but rosy face cast him anxious looks of mingled anger and sadness, where the hardened strangeness of his brown, muddy eyes sought the fragrance of the vision of her back, her neck and had never bore glances of such loneliness before, for she would not speak to him, in the darkness, they came to a place choked and soiled with warped wood, mosquitoes, and sleepwalkers.
The former ruler of Weatherhead stood, hands on her hips, occasionally lifting one to rub at the bruises on her neck, and stared at this flotsam. They were, she told him gruffly, trying to block their flight out onto the plain. As much as I shake the blood off my knife, she determined with her seductive grimness, it fails to not smell more.
He
crept forward and studied the deadfall. Bats torn to splinters and gutbuckets full of rainwater and the impossible hemorrhages that had once been her generals were there. Her weapons, her storms, and her team. Rained out, she murmured, nudging her former arena-mate Randy with her boot. His corpse didn’t budge, torn to pieces by her own lightning. She’d inundated the city when she let it fall, unloosed the fetters of the weathers upon it, given them the indescribable hungers of the season of autumn and the belief-in-foxes to lash and purge and cleanse the city. The people of Weatherhead, she whispered in the past-black, were part of her weathers. But she’d failed. He’d failed.
Who is doing this? He shot to his feet and demanded that the black mountains vanish, that theirs would be an alphabet of whispers, sighs, and soughs the length and breadth of the wait for the universe.
You fool. It’s Hate. Only Love remains in Weatherhead, remaining immortal and ever as it does, keeping to the alleys and ruins, guerilla smoke and shot the length and breadth of the city.
But what are we if not—
We are outside of those two. We. She darkily darked at him. To speak of We is to speak of a pair of fools outside of sentences, who migrate through defeat to flee onto the plain. We are the tears of soldiers abandoned in the barbed wire. We are the tangle and gawk.
He’d fought Hate, back in the mirrors, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he saved her, defeated them?
You were only, she grunted as she began clambering over the deadfall, defeating yourself for me. I had to be sure. I had to be sure you could tell the difference between yourself and Hate.
Were it possible to collide real and solid with some sort of abyss, he was sure it felt as he did now: a vertigo of descent that made him grip the hilt of his pistol, a false dream of heroism and blood that had proven only to be the cheers of deserts widowers to rain. But he felt Bedouin lucky just by staring at her stance and not her rent body. He felt hopeful for he had saved her. Isn’t there another town we could go to?
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