The Deadheart Shelters (10 page)

What I meant about how love inflates by itself:

It’s easy to explain and there’s nothing harder. It’s because it’s the things you know but don’t want to say.

When I’m in love with Lilly it’s my own love I’m in love with— No. It’s that she loves me. Or it’s that we love each other but then Are we in love? Her mind to me was always the feeling of scooping mud up in your hands. Her skin was bathwater I could fall asleep in. Her smell made me forget and her voice as a wordless sound was a boat I could float away in. What does that mean?

Sometimes I could tell her everything, everything, the few things I thought (they were few— I am a simple person and always getting simpler) and she would listen wordlessly and nod and say, “I know.” Then motion up to a bird that just landed on a branch and say “Look at that.” I don’t know which is better. Sometimes I loved it and sometimes it choked me.

Oxygenless, but that’s how love feels either way.

Let me just say that I never had a mother and I always wondered what that would be like; to have one.

Do these things make sense together?

I never found her much but I still think I do.

Which me is the one saying this?

I take it back. I love her. I’ve always loved her and I always will. It feels good to love something.

Or

Sometimes I think I only think what’s convenient. I’m too lazy to learn things and all I want is to be comfortable.

One night I woke up with that feeling like your bed is tilting forward and you’re about to fall off, then you’re not moving. To the heart it’s as if fallen. It made me so uncomfortable I couldn’t sleep and started sweating through the pillowcase, turning from side to side then on my back, turning again… until I could see the sky slacken, in that way that preludes the next day. I got up and put on a shirt, which dampened immediately against me. Then I undid the locks and went outside.

At night you can see the searchlights from the gunmen on the roof. They follow your sneakers no matter where you go as if to say It is never dark. Then I went to the harbor, where their lights don’t reach. I saw the boats coming in to the left like bright rabbits and heard steam whistles. Packages exploded into the pattern of ladybugs on the dock.

It seemed you could go nowhere to be alone, not even at night when things should sleep, not even in the mind when outdoors is banging against it.

I wandered until I got to the place we sit to skip rocks. I sat on the cubed granite and tried to skip rocks again, but they just went to the bottom. A moth-sized fire turned on and off underneath the bridge, and I remembered the old man from before.

The fire turned on again. It stayed, burning into dark pebbles and making them bright, then dissolved through them. I heard coughing and it looked like gunpowder in the air, against the dark. I walked up the staircase with the broken railing and crossed the bridge.

I walked down the staircase with the fixed railing and he shouted, knocking over the milk crate he was sitting on. I could see him this close. His skin was tinted like elephants by the night but his eyes were daytime-colored, the white as if windows with lamps inside them. “What the hell?” He was stuffing a pipe in his pocket and backing up.

“I won’t hurt you,” I said, advancing.

“What do you want?”

“You might know me. I come to skip rocks sometimes.”

He paused, looking at the water as if rocks were bouncing off it now. “Yeah, of course I know you. You know how many times I get woke up by you idiots? A rock bounces off my forehead and kaput… there goes my dream.”

“Oh. I had no idea—”

“You know how important dreaming is to me?”

“I like it too.”

“It’s all I have.” I didn’t say anything. He took the pipe out of his pocket and the moth-sized flame turned on and off, draining into the pebbles.

“Those are the black rocks, huh.”

“The black rocks?” He laughed. “Guess so…”

“They make crazy things happen.”

He laughed again, harder this time. “You bet. Now get the fuck outta here, kid.”

I walked up the staircase with the fixed railing and down the stairs with the broken one. I got to the part of the city where the mechanical gnomes build airplanes and the sheep lay on the haystacks to watch. I sat on the haystacks beside them; our ears drowned by drills and jackhammers. Blue sparks shot from machinery like blood-drained thumbs and then another sound chewed through the construction, breath through a hollowed antler exasperated and coming near.

“Stop!” the man shouted when he got to us. “You have to hide. Go inside the airplane. The apes got loose. They’re running loose with guns and shooting through windshields and storefronts! Hide!”

The gnomes filed into the airplane and I ran up to the man, grabbing his sleeves. “What will you do? Where should I go?”

“Run home, kid!”

“My home’s too far!”

“Hide!”

I ran to the airplane and tried to stand in line. The gnomes kept going robotically and calm and finally when it was my turn, one started to close the door.

“Let me in!”

It shook its head and kept closing. “No,” I said. “Let me in.” It pressed its cold metal hand against my face and pushed me back, slipping down each ladder rung sloppily so I spilt backwards and had to just watch the door close.

I was alone. I could see them looking at me through the airplane windows. The sheep started to moan on the hay, kicking their hooves in it. Then I heard a crack and squeak like mouse-trapped mice and a sheep’s head blew out in baseball-sized circles of red. The apes were shooting at the airplane.

The airplane tried to take off with missing parts and exploded. Like a stumbling horse made of stovetop flame. It was beautiful in a way, until my head banged off the blacktop and the apes were on top of me. Then I don’t remember things in the actual motion of their occurrence, but parts disorganized in reverse and fast-forward. They knocked stray shots all near me but never hit. They weren’t interested in hitting, only getting rid of obstacles. They held me down and outturned my pockets and I remember them half in and out of the night behind them, sometimes just stars like sugar cubes on a black seal with no faces standing in front of them or gunshots making me deaf. I couldn’t hear until the next day. On my walk home, I could see the spotlights on my shoes from the gunmen, but they couldn’t protect me now. I came to understand I was broke.

I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn’t beat. Something else suffering I could burden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it. I said, “Nobody would know how hard it is until they have it; I never woulda guessed it would be so hard. It makes everything be there. Then the things stay because you think you’ll always be able to give to them, and then a bunch of monkeys break out of their cages with guns and take it all away from you and who will believe it! I have nothing!”

The fish wasn’t listening. I blinked, and opened my eyes in an aquarium, levitating with an oxygen tank and knots of computer mesh in the water. Bullets were pinging off my helmet, like when a nickel drops in the sink. An octopus burst from the engine of a drowned car and pushed over to the gunmen, strangling them snowfrost-blue, one at a time, and then the roof opened up and it felt like putting eye drops in—

“Come up!” a voice said, distorted by its travel underwater to sound like a tremolo pedal. “That thing will eat you all!”

“Throw a rope down!” I said, my voice I imagine equally obscured.

“There is no rope, there is no time. You must make your own way up.”

“I’m too far down!”

“Turn your money into boxes, and make them a staircase.”

“What?”

“Your money. Your money will free you.”

“I have no money!”

“No money?”

“The apes took it!”

The voice stopped talking. I looked up at the face, formless like an amoeba on a microscope slide. Then the roof closed and it was dark again.

I remember I was throwing up into my pillowcase. I didn’t think it was a fish anymore. From then on, I started to keep my money in the bank, where nobody would touch it but the tellers in surgical gloves.

They told Dirt and me to go alone into a new part of the mines. This area was empty, so we walked disappearing through the frictionless gloom.

The black was what we all took home from the mines, but in one of those coal rooms with six men wearing head-flashlights it happens that we make white in between the black. Here, alone with Dirt, that white was anorexic.

The dark folds over you and you dissolve.

“You notice how mechanical this is?” Dirt said.

“What is?”

“All things.”

“I bet I notice it less than you.”

“Why don’t you ever talk about the slaves? You never talk about the slaves.”

“I don’t like to.”

“But it’s just us today.”

“It’s always just us. Don’t you think I’d talk about it if I wanted to?”

“I want to know about them. Do you think you’ll see them again?”

“I don’t want to.” I was surprised at myself saying it; not because I thought it wasn’t true, but because of the ease of saying it. I mouthed the words again and smiled, then realized I should be ashamed at smiling and didn’t feel shame. “I used to think I would.”

Dirt shrugged. “They’re suffering.”

“I suffered too. Do you know how good it feels to be able to forget that? Is that one of your false memories?”

“Don’t talk about those. I told you I don’t think about them anymore. I’m normal.”

“I’m normal too. Why do you want to remind me about the slaves?”

Dirt rubbed his hand along the wall and clapped and black dust fogged out the white momentarily. When the dust fell we heard a bang and much more black rushed the white lightless. We couldn’t see and when we could we saw there was no way out.