The Deadheart Shelters (4 page)

Many days passed doing different things; I almost forgot. It happened one night when the man was downstairs locking us into the beds. I was lying there, waiting like I always do, looking at the ceiling as he took my leg in his hands and touched me with the cuff but hadn’t yet clasped it. I jerked and kicked him, hard enough to put him on the floor, and he looked up at me. He had this funny way of changing his face then, as if I’d made him happier. I jumped on him dragging the blanket because I knew I couldn’t let him talk, and wrapped his head like it was an egg I didn’t want to break. He was shouting but the shouts got soaked into the cloth and stayed there. Then I slid my hand to where his mouth would be and kept pressure on it, on it, on it, until there were no more vibrations.

I stood up suddenly and felt ice cubes smooth down my back. “What do I do now? What do I do now?”

Lilly started to cry. “You’re a murderer, Pete.”

Mark leaned back on the bed and put his own chain on. “I was already locked in. Okay? I was already here.”

Abe stood over the body now lifeless, watching as if expecting it’ll jerk. He kept looking up at me, opening his mouth and muttering one syllable then shutting it. Shaking his head a lot. “Well we can’t stand here forever.”

“I thought it’d help, Abe, I thought it’d help me leave—”

“Well sure. It does. What’re you gonna do now?”

I walked a circle around the body. “Can you hide me somewhere?”

Abe nodded. They put me under the beds tucked back against the walls so I could hear all night the creaking when they turned. Then Abe broke the glass in one of the windows and ran upstairs to tell them that I’d fled. I listened as they came down to see the body. The men we never see save for times like this. They shouted at nobody and struck Abe over and over and I almost crawled out to stop them, but I didn’t. I listened. I never slept.

And the next day I was free. I crawled out of the window already broken and ran, pumped with the adrenaline of unable-to-sleep. I reached a valley of amateur gravestones, made out of rotted wood or cardboard or less, when the immensity of what I was doing hit me. Every morning I’d woken up to the same violent alarm, walked among the same dreary faces and fell asleep to the same kneejerk conversations, but now I could wake up when the eyes un-lidded themselves. I could be like a kid again, listening to the geese.

There was nobody here. I thought of Lilly. It felt like she was a drain plug you pulled out of a bathtub, and the cold air lowering itself on top of you. Something suddenly gone, irretrievably gone. I don’t think of it now. But I remember how long my heart felt like a draining bathtub I couldn’t plug to stop from draining and I carried it around like you’d carry a dislocated shoulder, just trying to keep it undisturbed.

Miles far away, sleep held me. I must have still been on my feet because I don’t remember lying down but it was mid-afternoon once and then the sun had not yet risen.

I woke to moans that sounded like low-pitched on sped-up tape, so the high of them was unnatural. Beside my head was a nest of hippopotamus babies I could fit in my hand. The trees beeped like heart monitors. The clouds were made of steel wool and kept dipping like fish lines. For my hunger (because my mouth had been denied the usual wheat in boiled water, today) I grabbed one of the hippos and made him brainless under a rock, but then felt too strange to eat him raw.

“No!” said a voice. “No! How could you?” A man with goat horns (maybe falsely-attached to his head) came out from between trees.

“Are you talking about this?” I said, holding up the hippo with the pulped head. The ones below, still in the nest, started to squeal unbearably loud. The clouds as if noticing this scratched themselves across the blue-stained glass of the sky and you could see where it left marks, transparent outwards to galaxies.

“Yes, that! They haven’t even grown yet.” He clenched his teeth. “The tears their mother will make. Give him to me.”

He took the limp thing in his hands (it looked more like a toy), and dabbed at the guts spilled on the rock with his fingertips. His hand glistened when he held it up. “Don’t eat anything. It’s okay, you didn’t understand. I understand everything; I even know why you’re here and I understand that. I was waiting for you to wake up.” He got to his feet. “Excuse me.”

I sat there listening to the hippos still squealing. Soon he came back to put the fixed hippo in the nest with the others and all their moans got softer as they started nuzzling each other. “You’re very lucky,” he said. “Their mother is alone by the water, now, but if she had returned before I did you would have been dead.”

I nodded. “You know why I’m here?”

“You ran away from enslavement. I understand. Feel your cheeks.” I did, and the corks inside them were gone, and a strange tissue that felt like earthworms was there instead. “There’s more to do, of course. Smooth out those scars, adjust your features. I bet your masters hardly recognized you before; they definitely won’t now.”

My head felt like a filled aquarium, heavy and often unbalanced by things drifting from one side to the other; I could feel it tilting on the neck. I stared down at the reborn hippo. His head was unblemished. “I never thought to disguise myself.”

“You would have been recaptured in a day. You slaves are made to be recognizable. But I understand you.”

“I want to go back and free the rest.”

“You never will.”

He made us a breakfast of this stuff that looked like scrambled eggs, but was white and tasteless. Still, it fell into my stomach like other things do. I asked him what he was and he said “Free” and laughed. Then apologized.

“Shall we take care of the rest?” he asked.

Through the trees still beeping and beyond two coops filled with different permutations of chickens (one kind featherless, the other inside-out who wore their organs like necklaces), we came to a house he built out of cinder blocks. The windows were duct taped like the ones in my slave-home and I shivered involuntarily. “Why do you do this?”

“To keep the world out when I don’t want it. Go in, go in.”

I got on my back on a natural-made mattress stuffed with wilderness things. “This will hurt,” he said, “this first part. But you have to be awake to receive the pigment. What color do you want your eyes to be?”

I chose red, weightless red, because I always loved sunsets when I had the chance to see them. I wanted the sun to be setting forever in my eyes if it could. He put the syringe in and pushed the dropper, and I closed my eyes tight to ignore the sting but it just made me blink over the needle. It hurt more. And when it was done and the minutes of dimmed vision ended I looked in a mirror, and it looked nothing like a sunset.

“I’m going to put you to sleep now. Tomorrow, I will teach you about society.”

Then the anesthesia, or something that made me sleep when I inhaled it. When I looked in the mirror upon waking I felt unrecognizable, though I’d never had much of a sense of what I looked like to begin with; we hardly saw reflections where I came from.

But I no longer looked like a slave.

He brought me to a boiling pot as big as a lake with swollen seals floating in it and lobsters the color of blood blisters thumping the shore. The steam coming off it like the steam from dishwasher detergent that felt un-breathable but so thick between us we looked like smudged lead to each other. There were telephone poles driven into the bottom of it that rose two feet above the water and if you put plywood across them they might have been a bridge. He asked me to cross.

“I don’t think I can,” I said.

He grabbed both my hands and put them underneath the water where they burned, and when he let them up again my fingernails were coming loose. “You may be asked to do things that you don’t expect you can do. But your legs work, your feet are tied to them tightly at the ankles, and it is broad daylight. Nothing prevents you from doing this.”

I looked at the telephone poles like broken pieces of a dock and pretended they were nothing else. But the first one I jumped on paralyzed me, I couldn’t go forward or back, and soon I couldn’t stand still either and the water burnt me again.

“Time is also something you may be asked to relinquish. You know this about time already, that often the time you have belongs to somebody else. You should be thinking how to pickpocket its owners, not how to protect your own pasture of it, which the locusts will eat whether you are watching or not.”

I tried to run like a deer from footsteps or the glimpse of something’s movement, that blind kind of run with all nerves of your body in collaboration towards one idea, but that was also wrong. I fell three jumps in and hit my chest against a pole. My breath got knocked out and it was a longer swim back. On the shore, I rolled in anguish, my skin hyper-sensitive to the grains of sand impressing it. He squeezed my arm so there was a handprint in white within the hot pink. “And they will kick you when you’re down. You know so little; I’m trying to protect you, to make you un-hurtable. Smarter.”

A frog leapt from the shore and got halfway out before a blackbird caught it in its feet and we could see it still thrashing, like a limbed hole in the sun. And when they were both too small to see no piano strings were struck in the air nor cathedral bells in their memory but a resumed silence no more or less profound than before. I stood up and looked at the telephone poles and did that thing where you allow your mind no room for decision because your body’s already propelled and each pole under my feet was like putting on a shoe. Until the first moment I thought of falling and it was like untied laces—

Immediately under the water, I saw a dream in my head of matches lighting origami and a bathtub filled with blood. A man rose from the tub and when he toweled himself dry his skin was made of metal, two thick bolts dug into his eyes, a zipper half-undone running along his spine. In my delirium, ignoring the boiling water I was in, I reached to tug the zipper all the way down and so much mud poured out of him the bathroom filled to the ceiling.

I was pulled onshore with a fishhook through my lip. The steam which once smelled like cleaning fluid now stank of overdone scallops and microwaved plastic.