Crime together, then. He smiled. This story—it’s about when I asked my wife to marry me.
⧜
He had a friend in his precinct who moonlighted as a security guard at the stadium for the local minor league team so he snuck her in one night and with an empty stadium listening, rapt, he proposed to her there somewhere in the outfield.
That was the idea anyway. The instant they’d pulled up she knew. She paled. “I think there ain’t any games going on—“ She made a show of looking at his watch. He’d stolen her out of her batting cage exile. She cursed the League, for there’d be no World Series that year. But she—she refused to cave and she kept swinging anyway. He’d coerced her into the truck with a Kyuss. “Yeah, it’s almost midnight?” She cleared her throat.
He dove across the truck, opened her door, took her hand, ushered her out. She put her bat in the bed. His friend had left one of the side gates open and they slipped through. Her pocket caught on the latch. Hand in hand, they walked out through the empty plain, the empty playing field, their shoes scuffing in the dust, leaving innocent signs of their passing until she came to a rest, moved on a bit further ahead of him at the edge where the dirt met the grass just beyond second base. She knew that she was no longer the author of her own divergence and that one step further into where the color began, she’d find another kind of love. She faced out into the deeper, darker darkness where the edge of the outfield vanished into the all-consuming shadow of night. They’d moved from one dark into another. She fumbled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.
Oh. Ah. She knew. How knife she was! Sharp! “I should’ve maybe dressed better—“ He studied her jean shorts and hoodie and refused anything else. Her thin white legs were the only thing visible in the dark’s river. He took her to him. She couldn’t not sink into him. They danced together in the dirt, kicking up dust like a runaway carriage, and shared her smoke.
“I wasn’t sure where—what’s your favorite position?”
“Shortstop—missionary. What are you asking me? Don’t people usually do this during the game?” She darted her eyes around the dark, faceless stadium. She was frightened.
“Not this part.”
She insisted on staying on all fours, facing away from him, ‘cause, she reminded him, even the doctor, Doctor Rover he called him, said this was the best position, facing home, 102 feet away, in the chalk box she’d drawn around them. She carried a piece of chalk in her pocket for spells, he wagered, ‘cause she was all witch and whip-frenzy before him now—she’d always dreamed of making love on the edges of diamonds and, strike or no, she’d play this game out, his knees in the grass, hers in the dirt.
“Jesus,” he exclaimed afterwards when they huddled apart, “it’s like you’re angry or something? What’s the problem? Maybe I just shouldn’t have asked—“
She drew her knees up to her chin. “Don’t talk to me like that.” Her gaze moved over the darkened plain. “Maybe some people just—express themselves diff’rently. Not everybody’s like you, wearin’ their heart on their face.”
“You mean sleeve.”
“No,” she let her shoulders slump, “I mean face.” She half-turned back to look at him, profile and one breast lighter dark in the dark. “F’you ever got that thing shot off, what would you use to cry?”
He scooted in front of her, ignoring the dust scraping against his spent loins. “You, I hope, even if I can’t see you. Marry me.” And then there was a ring and his knees were already dirty and she swore at him under her breath.
She said no. Six months later they were married.
‘Til death do us part. Wrong. He laughed.
Life alone, death inseparable. I’d like that to be true. She ducked her eyes down. The plain is full of promise—and lies. She studied the horizons and he studied hers and came to understand in that holy moment that it was Maggie Mechaine’s tenacious will to live and to love that had brought her to her death, because there just had to be another way. Her arms crossed her heart. Soon you’ll have to leave Weatherhead. He shook his head violently but it was futile. Tomorrow, maybe, she wasn’t sure. She shrugged at his vehemence. He didn’t understand the plain—but he would. Why did she—why did I say no?
Maggie Mechaine replied for him, “Before I met you I always felt you there—but once I had you, you were gone—like a sad idea.”
“Look at you sittin’ there all brooding. You didn’t have to say yes,” he snapped. He stood over her, she with her hands folded in her lap and framed by all the soon-to-be detritus of dress, lace, and untrustworthy fate.
“I didn’t,” she gently reminded him without looking up. He studied the crease in her brow. It looked like one of her fronts—weather fronts.
“Mags,” he knelt down again in front of her and took her cold leaf hands, “you’ve got a thousand things you want to say or shout or scream or something and you never fucking do it.” She didn’t speak. “I wish you’d just tell me—what’s going on in that thunderhead of yours?” He put his mouth on her brow.
“Ha,” she murmured. She looked down at her hands. She had a cardboard cut on the edge of her right middle finger, from a jigsaw puzzle, she loved those. Cardboard cuts were worse, she swore. Her brow furrowed further as if trying to bleed darkness. “Thunderhead.” Then she looked in his eyes. “S’like you never look up. You can miss all kinds of weather that way, not lookin’ up. You,” she pulled her hands out of his, “you just think I’m frozen up or somethin’, you like to think I don’t feel nothin’. Maybe,” the pitch of her voice become shaken and violent, “maybe I feel too much? Didja ever fuckin’ think of that? You wonder why I said no—I been tellin’ you. Everything you think you want, you get it and then it just ain’t there anymore, the wantin’ it. It just fades away. It’s why we don’t see shadows at night. One gets lost in the other, even though they’re the same thing not havin’ somethin’. Light. I dunno what I’m sayin’—I’m not good at talkin’. Love gets lost in love, it becomes somethin’ else, what people say it is, not what it is. Same with us. ‘Cept it’s love.”
He’d never heard her speak this way. He couldn’t speak. She’d put winter on his tongue as part of her magicks. Had he listened, he’d know the secret of framing: to protect beautiful things. So with love. Was there a third something, then, that she spoke of? Did she know what it was?
“I just want you to love me,” she told him gently.
She pointed out over Weatherhead. See that sign that say ‘rib tip’?
He smiled without looking and squinted into the distance where a row of neon follicles rose above the city. Yes.
Maggie took over her tongue again, “I feel like I’m the only one who isn’t just along for the ride. Like I’m the only one who wants to be on this trip. Like Clark.”
Oh. Ah. What was, was now. “That’s funny,” he laughed, though it was obvious from the leap of the dark onto her face that she didn’t intend it to be funny at all, “that sounds like God.”
She looked thoughtful for a time. “Do you think,” she finally asked, “my tyranny internal?”
“I—I did. Now you have Weatherhead. And he swept his hand across the horizon.
“A fool for chasing, then. I could be anything: the wind that blows where it wants, thunder, to speak of the color of autumn would be to speak of my hair—“
“You’re already all those things. You always were.”
Then why can’t I remember any of them? Life can crash into death all it wants—our tongues can bend to the long shadows as they want—something—
He let light weep out of her. The scrap of his shadow twitched and fitzed. Maps and faces, he thought. He patted his coat where the sketchbook was hidden. She pretended not to notice. Soon the story’d be hers, see?
My answers are questions, too. I up-end. She waved for him to follow. I want to show you something. Hand in hand, they jumped off the UnTower together, autumn and her lover. They ran from roof to roof with their coats flapping gotham behind th
em. On top of a low, brooding office building was a large tent, like those reserved for weddings, save its color, a deep brown. It was tattered and worn, victim of the elements and caravans. It was woven in a wind-whipped place and he guessed it had never looked new, like everything in Weatherhead except for her. The building itself was a shell, he saw as they ascended the rotting staircase inside, poking his head into one floor after another. All he saw was degeneration and strewn emptiness, peelings of some kind of rotting vegetables covering the floors in some rooms. Other rooms cluttered and crammed with upturned tables and strange apparatuses.
She was fussing about with a large mechanical apparatus under the tent. The machine consisted of a large horseshoe-shaped bank of consoles with various knobs and switches set into it at irregular intervals. Smithereens of wires hung down like vines from the central bank of levers and such where perched an enormous funnel that reminded him of those early record players, the crank ones from long ago. She flipped one last arcane switch and perched herself on a cranky, ratchet stool. On a stand before this was a smaller funnel haloed with wire on a boom extending just to the right of her head. It looked for all the world like some brass copper steam-driven amplifier.
With black horror, he saw on a small lectern before her Maggie Mechaine’s book of crossword puzzles. The book. The one he had found on her bed after she died.
Wh-where did you get that?
She started as if she had forgotten he was there. She picked up the book and flipped through it. This helped me conquer this city. I’ve always had it. These are the prayers and curses for Weatherhead, Weatherhead’s Bible, so to speak. The high voice reads them to the people here to remind them, tho’ it didn’t start until the day you came into town. Before that, it was me that’d read ‘em. Wherever the high voice comes from, it goes through this machine and out across the city. S’like a recording without a source playing on a gramophone made outta devils.” She put a rosy hand to his brow. Are you sick? Why do you seem so deliberately unhandsome on a sudden? You look as if you chose the cold cunt? Frail as a cloud.
He wanted nothing more than to flee this place, pitch himself off the edge. Remind them of what? How did you get this book?
“Why,” and she laughed as she never had, like lightning had just given her a joke, ”I wrote it!”
I know—I know, but how did it come here? It was in Alaska. He’d read this on the day he came to Weatherhead, but it was in a different book, the book of faces, the book of weathers.
Like rain, my words fall where they will when they must. Why find it so strange that, mis-translated or not, I bring out of me what might be unworthy or unknown to serve as lyric to my song? Put your ear hear, she pulled open her dress, exposing her heart, and you might hear the sweet, soft whisper of our scarlet symphony, but put your ear here, she put her forefinger to her lips, and you might hear the rapturous curiosities of my art. She studied his fallen face. “You never knew this.” It wasn’t a question. A fact. A sin. Lightning had its roots in her face just then.
He ignored her as he always had, though this time out of fear, rather than indifference. Does it reach Alaska? He dug his nails into his palms and wagged his chin at the device. He already knew the answer. He’d read the answers to these clues in Alaska, first heard the high voice in Alaska. Everything was Alaska.
There might be a separate attachment for that. She rummaged around in a box of scrap metal and tubing by her feet. Personally, I don’t know the country where I lived so well anymore.
Love knew it, his voice was barely audible, Love took me from there.
How did she know it? She—me? Wasn’t there a cage?
She loved batting cages. A contained fight. No one else needs be hurt. Just her and the machine. It was one of the few desirous things that she would ever express to him in detail. After they moved to Alaska, even, he built her one in their backyard, the first yard they’d ever had. But by then, she’d lost her steam and could be beaten by the machine. No-hitters in the all-day of summer night. “Randy can kiss my ass,” she’d say.
“Happy lights,” she read. She held the box up in front of his face. “Is this real?”
He put a pill bottle on top of this box. “And Vitamin D.”
“Seriously? Is this for real?” She asked that way more then she should’ve.
“Dunno. I guess. That’s what they say.” Maybe she’d fare better in eternal darkness?
“Don’t tempt me,” was her cold reply, “or maybe I’ll just make my own light.” She could, too, she swore. She was cleverer than he thought, with her tricksy, hidden words.
She motioned him to approach with a flick of her wrist. She wet the tip of her finger and flipped through a few pages. Maybe you can help. What does this mean 23 Down or Five Across?
Th-they’re clues, he stammered, the clues have numbers that show you where to enter them on the grid.
Ha! She looked out over the town. Why not just make up your own?
You did. That’s what these are.
Me? I’ve never seen this book of ups and acrosses before in my life! It’s the last sort of book I’d read. Too many answers
She was a questions gal. That was Maggie Mechaine speaking and a lie. She re-wrote all the questions and turned them into poetries. She saw he was stricken. She curled her fingers through his. I know—I can no longer use the word remember since I’m not that woman anymore—I know the high voice, though, lover. It was someone sinister silver—a sister? Did I have a sister?
He nodded, but said nothing.
She slapped his knee. I wanna take you somewhere. We’ll take the truck.
Truck? I thought we were going to loot the city.
We are just sitting here together, alone, she said. She yanked him to his feet despite him being so immense next to her and with a shove she pushed him off the edge of the building. And she leapt after, five stories all the way down, she yelling them down at him one by one until they met on the pavement. Oh! She’d never have to do that alone ever again! Lush with fever, they compared oxygens, tongues, and hammer-faces.
They ran back through Weatherhead, ignoring the thrilling, spilling mobs spreading out, fanning out through the streets, exalting the fall of Hate, ruminating on the hate of Fall, skipping through the alleys and demolishings with flapping crimson banners and ink and paper. The whole city had become one giant blueprint. Plans were unrolled, chins scratched. Devices were unearthed. The old hospital and library lurched to its feet to help.
She. She moved through the house of gods bending the bow as far as she could each time. She had always been young and loose-jointed and now she greeted her subjects with the same luscious fever that she’d suicided on top of him. He had her bootprints on his coat. The faces of the people of Weatherhead would have the same soon. Her rigor and politeness were false-bottomed, gossamer bottomed, for her lies were silken and impenetrable, but such, he knew, was the way of the despot. But for now, she was delighted to exchange pleasantries and murder-less nods with her people, all these same fairhouse-faces that’d mobbed her eyes during life. All were her familiars and to beat them was to beat herself. Black and blue is the throat of the dopethrone. I exhaled wind for their kites and kept winter fresh and close to keep them.
Her sanctum, her garage was unscathed, untouched by yesterday’s rebellion. She had, she explained, painted it with claws and white-dawns to keep the curious or vengeful away. No one else had ever entered this place save he forever ago, the day when he’d broken Break and everything had been threatened with being returned to its original state. On the door he saw ⧜, her royal sigil. She surprised him by kissing it and he heard a click as the taunts of the claws and the threats of the snow-fields, invisible to him, drew back to let them enter.
She lifted the hinged door. “Before you came, I’d been buildin’ an engine. A new kind of engine. You’ve seen, there are no cars in Weatherhead.
Just trucks, he whispered, disoriented by the shifts in their speech. She’d taken all the
fuel, he remembered. Now he knew why. He stared at the truck but didn’t see it. It was their truck. The same old truck they’d had for their life. She crossed over to it, shedding her coat and laying it across the hood.
Mhm. One truck. It runs off of politeness. Manners.
Manners, he said weakly, Miss Manners, he croaked. From the rudest woman he would ever know. His thoughts tumbled wild. They both needed baths, he found himself wandering. She threw the door open, threw herself into the driver’s seat where she looked little, and threw the truck into gear. It wouldn’t start, he saw.
It does, sir, she got out and made a trim curtsy to him and held out a dainty hand. The engine started. See? She motioned at him. It’ll stop if you don’t bow or something, you barbarian, c’mon!
He couldn’t help but bend to her. I bow to thee, he made hesitant.
She tilted her head to one side, hands on her hips, I never used a napkin when I ate, did I?
He laughed. “Nope.” He heard the engine sputter. She yelped and leapt towards the cab, but he seized her, conquered her waist, pulled her roughly to him and wiped off her mouth with his, the dirt and dust, leaving a pink swatch amongst the grey and the truck thundered and roared and kicked so hard that they both fell over backward. They were in love, which always bore the height of politeness in the beginning. He bade her good day and held the door for her. The engine roared.
She blushed over at him. It’s never done that before. But like the machine of the scarlet symphony, like the device that imprisoned the seasons, so too the miss-manners engine required they two.
They drove out of Weatherhead. No. They tore out of Weatherhead, past the rows upon rows of dresses fluttering in the ash trees. She drove with devils in her feet, pedal to the metal, she called it in her southern dirge. Dead, there was no danger to life. The wheels wrote biographies of disaster and recklessness and wrecklessness in the dust and dirt of the track that’d grown out of the plain for them, welling up like a slit, a brown, dusty blood on the skin of the plain. Maggie had never driven, she felt the consequences too manifold and multi-faceted for her to negotiate. Now the passenger, He, for once he watched the world pass by, leaning out the window, far-fetched out of what had been as they careened towards what would always be. “There’s much more always in death.” This was Maggie’s question to the answer, “wisecrack”.
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