Do you remember your life?
Life is that in which I died, that’s all. This is—something else. All things are outside us, don’t you see now?
If you don’t remember—if you can’t remember, he whispered, I remember for you.
Don’t you think I know that, her eyes flared at him, blue suns, you’ve been putting her back together the whole time you’ve been here, scarecrow. She warned him off with a quick glance. We’re thunder and silence, we two, she snorted, what we need is wind to blow us back. Because of wind there is faith for what is faith without breath and breadth? Ice is an obsolete anxiety. She touched his leg with the toe of her boot. Tell me of your death in the snow and I’ll tell you of mine, she said.
So he did.
⧜
It wasn’t that Maggie Mechaine had turned inward, he now knew. It was that the rest of the world, including him, especially him, had turned outward. It was this beauty of her singular nature that he had failed to see.
Shadows fell across him—someone was coming down the stairs. He sat up. It could only be Maggie. He claimed unders, always did. He liked being underground, especially these days. Quiet as a cloud, she sat down on the bench next to him.
She usually never asked him about war the way she did that morning, but war was the new breathing and so she pressed him for his own experiences. War has no witnesses, just victims, he told her, and leaves no sign of its passing save for the occasional scar and orphaned shadow whose caster got emptied out of the light. He didn’t like talking about wars with Maggie—not for reasons of trauma (his) or depression (hers) because, to him, the former simply didn’t exist and the latter was insurmountable—because of the ancient isolation of the beholder of death. He didn’t, simply, want to give her any funny ideas. Unfortunately, the rest of the world didn’t see death that way. It was a consumable, a product, a marketable function of existence.
She’d cry, “Alert the worms! War’s on!” She’d fuss over the remote, trying to find attractive footage, but war was kind of plodding and dull, he told her, more Apocalypse Now than Saving Private Ryan. The souls dealt with were much more banal and, thus, more horrific.
She wouldn’t stop watching, though. It was the individual experience of horror that consumed her. “Why do they call it a unit? In the army? Does the unit get scared and want to run? Did you want to run?”
She couldn’t stop watching, though. “Those people falling like snow—like fleshflakes—they, the other people who talk about it, want us all to feel their fear? Shit. We can’t. They were alone, those people, the other people. I am alone. No one can feel my fear. I hate this ‘let’s all feel together how fucking horrible it all is’. People can’t do that. Not anymore. Not units. No one can feel my fear. No one hears me speak in fears.”
He wanted to now, he said to himself. Seeing her fear was disarming yet empowering somehow—she was giving him emotion, raw stuff of We. Why did she even feel this way? He wanted to tear an answer out of her, she who loathed all by mere omission—why these people leaping out of towers? Where were the wolves?
She stared at the television savagely and thrust her fingers into her hair. “Ohmigod, why do they keep going on and on and on about it?” That might have been the day that Maggie Mechaine decided that the rest of the world was too terrified of death for her tastes anymore.
“Could I have jumped?” He found this in one of her crosswords, the ones that Silver decoded. She was afraid of heights, of the Up, back then.
It wasn’t the earth that wanted to rush to meet her. It was the sky.
⧜
She listened quietly to all of this. When he finished speaking, she stood and wandered off again with her arms crossed. Cloud-quiet, she strode across the lands. The air felt suddenly different, like ruins, sullen, heavy, but expectant—autumnal.
He knew how hard it was for her to understand death and the grace of Maggie Mechaine who leapt towards it like a lover. There is no easy way to describe being born, especially for the second time around when there’s no one there to teach you who you are.
Who, then, he heard her wonder.
She heard him tell, I might be a scarecrow, an empty bag tossed in the wind—but who is the wind, the one that spun me round and round on my pole and turned my face to the black mountains and made me a refugee in my own skin? It was you. Who did I love to death? It was you?
Something touched their faces, she made something touch their faces, a sermon returning out of the desert to wash the faces of these hostages-of-each-other. Storms shake the shoulders and ransoms are tornadoes.
He stared up into this for a time. He took to her. What do you call this weather, Maggie of Weatherhead? Fool’s bliss? Harpy’s sweat?
She sighed as he stroked her back. Just rain. We call it rain. You and I. We shall call it rain.
How far have I already died?
She looked away. Tears in the rain are like laughter during thunder.
Wellingwish is my Weatherhead. That’s why you keep destroying it, right? That’s why it keeps rebuilding itself?
There had once been a paste he’d put on his skin, in front of a former door to a former house to a former life, an unguent used by thieves to avoid detection by bankers, treasurers, and heart-holders. This rain shook it off him and turned him native. It must’ve been another good ten or twenty years, maybe, that they stood there and watched the flood-rains chase away the wastes. The sea filled. Even the shipwreck, half a mile distant found itself in enough water to right itself somewhat, to creak, groan and tilt. She glanced at it half-expectantly, but it did nothing more.
She turned to him. Give me a bath, she commanded.
He carried her down to the edge of the fledgling, virgin sea and stood her up. He carefully undressed her and laid her out in the rain-dappled surf. Gently he washed away her shatter. It was just ink, drawn on, he saw. He had always known that. He looked down at his black-smeared fingertips. His fingerprints were gone, replaced by coin-haunts, roundels on the ends of his fingers.
I’m not afraid to die if we go back. She used the word, but didn’t understand it. She’d learned it from him.
He turned her over and scrubbed her back and buttocks. You can’t die. Not ever again. You see—what if I never told you that I loved you—before you died? All I wanted was another chance to do that.
Her fists clenched in the sand and she turned her head and half-bared her teeth. She was, he told her, the brutal expression of a silent side of love. He wanted her to remain this way, the roar. There was nothing more that he wanted just then then to make love to her, fury, fever, and forever.
Did you hate me? Because, see, I can’t figger on those people I can’t see so well. Not my Love, but the others—
They weren’t there for her. They were there for him.
See, the plain turned you inside out—
And you, she bitter-snapped back, cutting off his love, what about you? Was all this really inside you there in the long shadows?
At the first dawn in centuries, he watched her brush her body free of sand with the edges of her hands. She stood barefoot in the tide and dressed in silence, boots at the last.
The way back was easy. To the west, where he swore there had once been a range of dizzying, terrible black mountains there was only a middling-sized range of lilting ridges capped with pine over which streamed the most harmonious, long-throated light, singing down over the ascents and descents like fever poured over thrill.
This light they followed back to Weatherhead.
(49 Down) I am the Dopethrone.
The storms-in-autumn-blossoms of the ruler of Weatherhead drew back across the plain like curtains, leaving great floods in its wake. When he’d first crossed the plain to Weatherhead, the rain had begun and ended between sky and ground, now its journey was complete. It sank and drowned and poured over the chalky dust. They chased its verga at some distance, keeping the fit and pitch of its violence always just ahead. The rejected prayers of lightning
stabbed at the ground as the Great War between the sky and ground came to a sweeping end. The plain hadn’t had a bride for millennia, but now it became swollen and blue and green as the storms proposed to the earth and shed their waters murderous and almost-spring about the rock-strewn hills, the thunder pointing at the shadowless wounds on the earth as drunken priests point at the devil climbing through their windows, giddy and child-like.
Wild were these weathers, he thought. He would have to teach her.
She walked ahead and to one side—no, not walked, she flowed with her stride across the muddy, bruised lover-plain and the far-off storms they chased made a frame around her. Her mud-caked boots, her mud-spattered duster. He was curious about this woman. He felt as if he’d reached the end of a dream. Something still resisted waking up, though, something about her. For as they crossed the plain, crossing through the lands that ringed Weatherhead for miles and miles, he had somehow forgotten who he was and what he had to do with her.
When he dared approach her diluvian rage and her feral lust, the former evident in the rains in her angry eyes, the latter in the way her hips shouted at paradise beneath the weight of her revolver and knife slung across them, and disclose his uninfinite panic at being the tablecloth pulled out from under her centerpiece, that is, his forgetting, she just nodded and motioned that they continue on.
After another hour or so, she stopped. There was a road-post on the track. She approached it with suspicion, her fingers curled around the handle of her knife. Things word-born off strange tongues were not to be trusted in this country. She knelt and read it. It said, she said, All eyes are blinking off the sleep of the past.
He shuddered when she read this. What had her name been? Maggie. Right.
Maggie, he rasped. She turned and darted toward him like an avalanche of autumns. He studied her fretting mouth of autumn, the delve of open tunic that betrayed the milky bitterness between her breasts, the bottoms of her eyes which always seemed bluer somehow; he wanted to lick her fur clean. She, in turn, touched his crooked nose and tilted his face downwards, staring, searching furiously into his eyes.
You heard the silver words this morning? Yes?
He nodded. Above them the post-storm sky was reptilian and scattered, fall’s blossoms still would not break and part, but there was light and warmth behind their ever-shifting, ever-waltzing petals. The rains were dews dripping off of them, weren’t they?
She put murmurs into his heart: The plain will trick you into thinking you were an orphan all your life. For us, born in war, doubly so. She playfully scratched his chin for him. He needed to shave, she said in rainbows. His beard was growing in for the first time. It is important that we keep our stories at our hips and in our knives, lest we forget. The heart of autumn choked and wept, even, when she—me, I mean—fell to the plain. It is the idea that we have nothing left to remember with except language because I think I lost my drawing pad somewhere—
His once-reluctant heart soared with madness. He patted his pockets. He had that, didn’t he?
She stared at him strangely. So we keep our stories. I had no one to do this for me, not until you came and told me all the poems about your red-headed, red-necked, red-wombed wife who spoke in smokes and swings. I didn’t have that.
She did, he wanted to say, it was just poorly translated. It wasn’t, though, was the thing, she argued.
On the rise above the road-post they sat because she declared that her tongue and its lightning could spare him. Behind them, they could see the sexing of the sea and land, the fuck and thrum of the wet slaps of a tumescent tide against the submissive sand. Before them ranged the plain proper. Far, far across the world there were—what was that? Waterfalls?—not mountains—
She sat, cross-legged, across from him and rolled them each a cigarette which she produced from a kit stitched inside of her coat. He had never seen the inside of this half-pretty little creature’s coat—
Maggie, he reminded himself again. Her name is Maggie.
She smiled. She had a story to help, she said, a story about her husband. Did he know she’d been promised to another once? A knight-of-sorts? He’d taught her how to fight. She saw how profoundly disturbed was his face. She patted his knee. In life, she spoke to him and the clouds-as-flowers, too, in life we remember one way. Here another. As he had told her, so she would tell him.
Tell, he pled. His mouth was dry.
This is the fable that Maggie of Weatherhead told her long shadow lover on the plain that day before he died:
The Scarecrow Knight was a legendary lover of both war and women. It was said that if there were a way to combine the two, in-sexing armor or bullets maybe, or lining breasts and thighs with jingoistic slogans, maybe, or flags-as-panties, then the fellow’d have more free time.
When he wasn’t purging the land of law-abiders and confessionals, the Scarecrow Knight collected towers grown for princesses and holding princesses and what he’d do was, and here she illustrated in the dirt between them, instead of setting the imprisoned loose on the world, he’d have these towers lowered into holes dug in the earth and turn them into wells. The princesses’ presence there was only ever betrayed by the scything and koing and coming of crows drawn by the caged notion and the refuse tossed out of the top of the once-tower. O, to be sure, they fared well in their being rescued by whatever cursed witch-dresses had ensnared them: the Scarecrow Knight was generous with his coin and he’d pour bags of spoils from his campaigns down-as-showers over these women before descending himself, shedding armor as he went, boots crunching in the coin, to have his way with them. He kept the crows away, ignorant that the princesses, whispering to each other in their secret language through the dirt and bricks separating them, had concocted the idea to draw the birds there and perhaps draw notice of a passing traveler or errant or ronin. But the Scarecrow Knight, being a scarecrow, kept the birds away, thinking that by doing this, keeping away the black thoughts by merely waving his arms and shouting, that all’d be well for his women. By all of this, the Knight convinced himself that he was saving every single one of these women from a fate worse than him.
Now, as obligated by the creed of the land, the Scarecrow Knight had taken a wife, though, this marriage had never been consummated. The reason was this: her tower, being cursed, was immovable. He could not budge it, not with all his strength and straw. He could not, in short, make it a well where he could dip his hand for wishes. He had never even seen his wife; she had shouted down, faintly on the winds that she so-named, her vows which the assembled took for granted as correct and sincere. All he knew was that she had long, straight red hair that hung in the wind like sunsets and spit in her mouth which he mistook for rain the first few times it’d spattered onto his armor from above. And, oh! how this vexed and tested the Scarecrow Knight! No matter how much he invoked and spoke through the voices of holy ghosts, nothing could crumble this wife-curse. How could it be that the one woman bedolled to him by the very Writ, the very Law, the very Word of the landsfaiths that he so ostensibly protected, was completely inaccessible to his lusts?
Remember that this was a barbarous age when men and women were still distinct enough to be at constant war with one another through the forbidden magicks of the day. The dark magicks of witches were not tongue-bound and giddy-written spells of cant and count, rite and recipe, oh no, their dark magicks were bound in their dresses and underworns. It was for this reason that the red-headed witch-wife was kept naked in the top of her tower. But, she had recourse to other powers, for men, who for their magicks relied on light, sources-of-things, and powers determined by measurement, were immune to nothing and were the outservants to the vexations stored in pillow-quivers. Thus, the red-headed witch-wife, scion and heir to the Marrow of the Falls, one of the richest harvest-fiefs, kept a wizard about her whose reliance on sources and powers was an electrical kind. Plugged into the solitary outlet afforded her in her captivity, this wizard powered the aloof curse that she’d deigned to put upon herself
as a duck and dodge against the matrimonies below. Thus, the curse, her confinement and the unbreakable tower, was of her own making. It was illusory. She wasn’t a prisoner. The only condition the electrical sorcerer made fiat was that though she wove dress after dress out of the smoke that the tower was summoned from, she was not allowed to wear them. This satisfied her. Her witchery was different, anyhow, it was drawn from elsewhere. She didn’t need clothes. In the tower, she procured from on the wing a foul-smelling leaf that she inhaled and often she’d drop these leaves from her window, watching them twist and turn lazily in the blue that sucked at this part of the domain, for the weather never changed, hoping against hope that they’d alight on the barred roofs of her fellow princesses and afford these sisters a delirious diversion from the attentions of the handsome, though bastardly, Knight.
The Scarecrow Knight, for his part, drowned in a liquid myth from the time of the worst of the saurians that might made right, and was determined to fetch down his wife. He turned to strange undercity racist rituals with his soul the centerpiece, offering up the prize of his soul to all the cherry-hipped goddesses he could invoke, breaking the yore and ago of every story he could find by punishing variation and color with nauseating, purifying foxfire. But the heavens’ eyes, level with the witch-wife’s and following her own invocations, turned away from this terrible Knight and she reigned all the lands about her from her tower.
Maggie of Weatherhead rolled back on her ass and laughed and laughed.
Although this bright sound made him feel super-imposed over, the most wonderful feeling ever, the story was disconcerting. What? That’s it? He doesn’t get her?
She laughed. Of course not! She’s the real ruler, don’t you see? She controls everything from her imprisoning. Oh, ah, my love! Know that there is something ancient in love, something half-forgotten but half-remembered that each thrust and throat and quiver and quaver drags up out of us! For some it draws out poems, others—it draws knives. Lemme put it this way: nothin’ ain’t never what we think it is. If there is one thing the plain should teach you it is that.
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