Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  You don’t understand the nature of the plain. There is no leaving the plain. Not even for you now.

  This last thing disturbed her, he could see, because what she meant was Weatherhead, but he didn’t question her about this. Perhaps they could dwell in these tunnels beneath the weather, beneath the plain, then, here where questions had been dropped down wells and only the answers remained, pulled apart one by one and made paths through the Deep Down. If they tried, perhaps they could find the places dug in the world where all the wells end and there they could bathe in copper together, the wealthiest worms under the world!

  But all she’d say was, You don’t understand the nature of the plain. Her disdain for his eros and genius was clear so why repeat words like a madman?

  From the underground they emerged out onto a dusty plain far from the country where Weatherhead lay. There were no flowers in the sky here, just a low, cast-off and overcast sky barren of sky and words. His shadow was nearly gone, imperceptible, he saw in the wan light. She led him far from everything. He could no longer see the black mountains. There were in a strange, yellow, sandy country. Light fled before them. They chased the day. It would not be a bad place to die. They passed a sorrowful wooden shack, half-collapsed, half-cursed. From inside rose a low wail and a white, skeletal hand appeared between two rotting pieces of wood, flapping senselessly at the air. They fled. At the top of a worn hill, she stood with her eyes closed and faced their would-be exile. He smoothed down her hair, tucked it along the edge of her forehead. She batted his hand away. She was to no longer be buried in white snow. She was Empress of Septembers now and forever with her red-shock stares and her uncongested heart. Write, poets, of her silken cancers! Of her desperate enemies who break her pencils in half! Of impotent fits and fires!

  He shook away these thoughts, this poetry disguised as flattery, Those people back there, they were made of glass?

  She gave him a look of disgust at his ignorance. Everything in Weatherhead is, in a way.

  Is what?

  Is. Glass don’t enter innit. I gave the fools their fall. We—you shouldn’t be here now. I thought if the city fell, if I fell, you’d be—safe. You could go back. I thought there was a black dagger pointing at my heart. But—it was you, instead. She half-laughed out over the dust. When you turned up alone I thought I could never wean you off of Hate—you have too many bad memories for the forge. She regarded him with sadness.

  He felt black sneaking over him. They’d been battling themselves on the outside of mirrors against the insides and she’d been trying to save his life, get him off the plain, eyes wide alive as he took back his own shape and his own alphabet.

  She turned and held out her palms to him. I don’t have blood anymore—

  Oh god, he thought in horror, I remember this. She said this once, just before she died. She’d cut all her hair off like a boy and she refused to argue anymore, she just hummed and smoked and never said goodbye, this was how she tricked me onto the plain.

  When he didn’t touch her hands, she drew them away. I have explosions, though. She knelt and tore at the sand with her clawed fingers, flinging clods to the sides. Explosions in the sky which are sometimes called weather. She looked away at forever. Why does passion have to be so much ejecta, ejaculation, and external emptiness? Why not leave the sinner to be content and leave me be?

  I wasn’t, he wanted to confess.

  She didn’t have blood anymore. She could never die. What did she say next? “I was fine alone. But I wanted you.” And here: I have explosions, she repeated and she began drawing a square and a map of Weatherhead within it, the most horrible map he’d ever seen because with its serials and lines and quarters and alleys and pits it was a crossword puzzle and she began describing how she could tear the city apart, bring the junkyard heavens crashing down, smash and lash the skyline with her weathers and then, maybe then, like all the winds of the compass she could sweep back into the center of Weatherhead with pennies tucked behind her ears and save Love and send him back past—

  She frowned, stood, shielded her eyes against the darkness and scanned the empty horizon. What were there once on the plain?

  Mountains, I think. He felt cold suddenly. Black mountains. You used to call me ‘black mountain refugee’.

  And now?

  He couldn’t tell.

  She pointed at his feet. What was there once at your feet?

  He felt a hurtle behind his heart, a fell wind that pitched down into his innards, his loins. A shadow. The sun at midnight makes it look like it’s gone away.

  And now?

  They set out again. Faces turned into a maggot-wind not of her making, one of those shrill winds that burrow between the buttons of your coat and shirt, the best wind for graveyards. When she began nodding off and sliding instead of walking, he shook her roughly by the arm. She was becoming weaker the further from her city she got. It was the source, said the plain, of her brutality and thievery.

  At some point, she collapsed and despite the groans in his knees and ankles, he took her up in his arms and bit the land with his step. Months it seemed he trudged thus. Who would be these two strangers dead in these wastes? Once, in the far distance, framed against the horizon he saw a line of strange figures marching in a line back towards the interior of the plains. They were monstrously tall and spindly, like wretched easels wrenched into life and set on preys somewhere in the ever. She turned her gaze away from these figures and turned her face ghastly white. Run, she whispered, please—

  The lands sloped gentle downwards, which made his carriage easier. She did not stir, but slept rusty-chambered and edge-dulled. The guilty earth had turned sandier and here and there he spotted the sort of set-to jetsam that betrayed the presence of seas would not the water or surf do so. He found himself thinking of starving sisters and needles-in-necks, needles to be plucked out and revenges. Feverish and dust-tongued, he began to stumble and tilt. She was small but her burden was more than weight. He shifted her around and held her close, peasant to penny. In the thick of delusion, he imagined something on the horizon. Having come late to the plain, he didn’t know better: there are no such things as mirages on the plain.

  He squinted at the wavering shape. Was it a city? A structure of some kind? A wooden god?

  And then there on the desolate plain they came to the end of their journey, they came to the enormous hulk of a shipwreck orphaned from the sea. He decided they would spend the night that would never come there. They were too far from the plain proper to gain darknesses to hide in. He laid her out and took off his coat, balling it up as prop and pillow. He gathered spit in his palm for her to drink, the wine of lies. He watched her eyes from long ago. They said,

  “Did you ever notice that everything big that happens in my life is totally out of my control? You. Getting’ that shop. Not havin’ babies. For once, it’d be real nice to actually have a fucking grasp on any goddamn thing around fucking me!” She’d risen, storming against the walls and ceilings of the place. They’d been asleep in bed. Or so he thought. He shot up, awake.

  She kicked a row of frames and sent them clattering. “Fuck!” she shrieked. She’d finally lost her pretty sphinx voice and its demi-drawl, the only really pretty thing about her. “This is a disgusting country! As long as the bird falls, dies, there must be height. As long as the neck gets it from the rope, there’s gotta be weight or fall. For me—to fall, for me to die, there has to be a lofty place, high up there somewhere—“ she raised up on her tiptoes and made a swat at the ceiling, “—a lovely, lofty place for me to throw myself down from. This is what you don’t get: that place is you. You have never wanted it. You have never wanted to know it.” Her eyes and teeth were as red as her hair. Her hair gnashed about her face. “All I ever wanted was for you to know it and to be it, some place I could fall from! The fall and the catch. You ain’t shit!”

  The hull of this ship was the tallest, most blackly looming thing he’d ever seen. Worse than the black mountains
. This he knew for certain when she opened her eyes drunkenly, lips wet with his spit and, when she saw where they were, she began whispering and muttering, until:

  This ship, she screamed now, eyes whites rise, it brought me here. She clawed at his arms so she could flee. This was how I came to this place—I drowned, they found me—that ship—She noticed him for the first time. You! You helped them before, I think. Always against me—always—She rubbed her throat with a sort of desirous, desperate clutch of her fingernails. It brought rud up to his face. You want to destroy me.

  I did, he said. He wiped his hand on his trousers and wondered at her horror. She spoke of the past. It wasn’t mist-driven terror and there were no shadows to speak of in this place so, he guessed, she was afraid of what had come before, something forbidden in Weatherhead until now. She’d drawn her knife and gun and thrust them both forward from where she laid. Gently he put his hands over hers and dwarfed her kill. Tell me about this boat, he said, thinking of another boat, but she must be made to speak. He, on a sudden, felt a great and terrible sadness banjax whatever shelter he might’ve found here with her, huddled under with her, for she was, he now knew, the loneliest demoness all the world over. Wind turned up his collar like a mother. He remembered another terrible boat. She was advancing backwards and white handed towards her death. Mortality’s charter of her had long ceased, of this he was almost certain. But what of the ache of reminder? Was that why he was here? She’d set out from him—to die. He’d set out for her, followed her, to remind her.

  She calmed at his words, teased the hair out of her face and mouth and threw it behind her. She stood, tossed her weapons aside, and walked ahead of him and the ship both, unminding of the meaningless, unerring bulk suspended above her. She trailed her hand over the rotting wood, just as she’d done, he clenched the memories, with a lacerated hand—or on another boat, one that had the audacity to comport itself on water, she pressed her hand there to the wood, trying to feel its pulse. Wood feels alive no matter the length of its separation from dirt, she told him without turning. We were pirates since we were born, they told us—they found us all—orphans—on the edge of the most violent sermons anyone had ever heard in those animal lands. She pointed out past everything with a trembling hand. Some of us cried out in terror—families are deserted curses, you see, the peoples of the sea taught us the womb is nothing more than a tomb with legs. On this ship, we were taught disrespect, profanity, and all our feminine lines (we were all just little girls) filled with rough, functionless parallels—what you call blood in your country, I think.

  He waited. She spoke in nightmares. She’d turned her head to one side, listening. The fields behind us on the plain were hail-flattened long before I came, I’ll tell you. That wasn’t my doing. When he didn’t respond she limped a bit further off, out of the shadow of the wreck.

  After a piece, he asked her, Who were the others?

  She snorted without looking back. Guiltless criminals all. But not slaves to any man or woman. Dignity is such a fleeting, mortal thing, anyway. What would’ve mattered had we been centipedal slaves? But, no, it was our ship. Ours. We mended its sails with our hair and needles. We protected its timbers with our spit. We kept its hull clean with our nails and knives-in-teeth. We brushed the winds we made and summoned with the combs of our fingers. She hugged herself. I was the deck-fox for in the storms I could clamber and kite in the mast-works in ways the other girls couldn’t. Yet eventually the cunts of the crew, oars and all, deserted—

  Why? What happened?

  The fools all fell in love. One by one they vanished from the decks. You see, we were constantly pursued by the laws of things, half-smokes and kisses limned with an odd kind of ferocious silence—promises, they called them between their smiles, they’d steal onto deck and steal away the crew one by one. She held out her arms. I refused the grace that wings would give me and I stayed until the sea forsook me and my empty ship and I was dashed to pieces here. Against these rocks. Alone. She indicated vaguely an outcropping nearby. She’d been orphaned since deathbirth, he reflected with sullen horror. I wandered for the rest of my youth and didn’t speak, sing, or curse for many years. I’ve told you of how I came to the defeated head, the bats, how I came to Weatherhead—

  He started from where he stood. You told me once you came to Weatherhead to find someone to love you.

  Yes, and that was all she’d say.

  They stood like this for a long time, she with her hands clasped at the small of her back, staring out at an empty, sealess sea, the sea that had brought her to the country where Weatherhead lay, the only sound for miles the drone tic of the shift of the wreck in the wind, he, chin on his chest, crying softly. If she heard this, she made no sign. In the end, all she said, without turning, was, We should go back now. I can’t be long without Weatherhead. I need its fury, the knife of its air between my teeth. It’ll need some rebuilding. Like all cities of the plain, it has no shadows to trace, but its form and poetry and violence and peace come from—and she touched her chest.

  Without thinking, he leapt forward, grabbing her hands. What if we didn’t go back? he exclaimed.

  She chided him with a lowered eyelid or two. It’s mine. I took the city. I let it fall. Why would I give it up? Do you think because you will it the sea will return, is that it? With her chin, she indicated the empty sea. I fell out of the long shadows, I thought I’d drowned. I know what happened now, she put a curious smile in the space between them, was that you saved me once and tried to do it again here.

  We could run run run. You don’t need it, Weatherhead. What you went there looking for—I have it—

  You’re as much a fool as anyone. She set off away from him, picking her way through the rocks and for a good while he stood, wondering where seas went in a world like this, where blood’s tide is hushed and the only crashes against the land where the bones of everyone about her. I’ll tell again, you don’t understand the nature of the plain. There ain’t no heavens or hells, rights or wrongs. Here, knives ain’t no better than guns for a crime and the amount stolen—it don’t matter. He was fascinated by the dirt on her cheeks and by the astounding wedding of ground to sky here at the sources of autumn. Far from the burning, winding alleys of Weatherhead there were no storms and no streets to reject his steps and spits.

  But—still. Fearful, she confessed, fearful that all Weatherhead would come crashing down around her where she stood. So she’d let it rip itself apart, free them, set them upon her, the chase not the hunt. This way she could draw out Hate, defeat it and him, and send him back. This was why she and Love had given him the sweetknife, let the city think he’d attacked her at last, the revolution—but even then he hadn’t known what he’d do. The scarlet symphony had been her trick to try and lash him to her so she could save him instead, send him back to the long shadows. She’d always known.

  He seized her arm. I’m not going back.

  This time she couldn’t pull away. You should. This is no place for someone, she faltered, someone alive.

  I’ll die, then, but I’m not leaving you here alone not like I did all of life.

  History was ash, that’s all there was to it, and they could sit with their fingerless gloves, vagabound, train-hearted, and sift through those ashes until the plain yawned and snorted and all their cities fell into disuse and disarray

  And goddammit, if he had to be, he’d be the worst and last lover in history. And what would Weatherhead be like without the stranger with no name and no face that appeared in their midst, challenged their ruler, put a delicious knife in her, saw the rib tip, almost struck her out?

  Who would, he gasped at last, teach her all the weathers all over again? He hid his face in his hands.

  Her eyes shone there in the wasteland. Theirs, she knew, was no cheap, fire-blackened ruin. Fox and fool, chase and hunt—what a din they could make in the wallets and coffers of the old town in Weatherhead! Rampant with Love—they were lovers who didn’t wait for the storm so t
hey could make love in its midst: they made the storms themselves. The last thieves in history. History has nothing to do with time, but everything to do with each other.

  She laid her knife in her lap and reached across to brush her fingertips against the back of his hand. She sang to him: Oh—come—come back—

  WhatWas was nothing more than a hesitant, rookie whore hovering at the door.

  You are not the horror you once were, she said. She touched his face, contemplated where it had once not been. They would never be alone again. Look! She cried and turned his chin upwards. Night!

  Contrary to a popular ballad of Weatherhead, the stars did not wilt and expire under her gaze. Instead, he watched her put winds about the clouds-as-flowers, ruffle their petals and push them off across the wastes, back towards Weatherhead, and all the stars were born again. There were more than in the long shadows and they danced.

  Neither of them spoke for a thousand years. Merely sat, weary at the end of their long journey. She was scarce, severe against the firelight. My children died in a blizzard in—oh, wait—did I tell you this lie already once?

  Let’s just call it a white lie. Did you know that once when I lived in Alaska, I almost froze to death outside? We call it exposure. In your city you probably call it—

  A white lie? She laughed.

  Ha, right, sure. Anyway, my wife, you, my wife was so upset—

  She snorted. Is that supposed to be surprising?

  —because—because, who was going to do the driving, she asked.

  And racism, she said ever so softly, we got that down, too, don’t we, Zorba? Her eyes burned blue in the neck of the night. Remember, do you remember, when you broke Break? That once?

  Yes, he whispered.

  I was—afraid—if you did it too soon—if you broke Break—I’d lose you— I couldn’t save you—you couldn’t save me.

  I did.

  I thought I needed unwitching—that I needed to tear off those dresses to free something underneath—whatever that thing is that makes the witch a witch. I built bridges with them, banners for the gone-buildings, I sent them haunting about. Now I know—you wouldn’t have wanted that.