The Deadheart Shelters (5 page)

When I woke up the bed sheets were greasy and smelled so strong of menthol my eyes watered upon opening, but my burns were gone. I could roll to my side without cringing and blink too. It felt like the first undisturbed sleep ever, the bed like a net full of swans and the blanket like wings spread over me. But then it came time for waking as it always does and we went to rub against the cold gravestones of morning.

On the hill we looked down into the pasture, enclosed in chain-link fence, where the bulls were poised in the sterile anxiety of waiting. Some started pacing when they saw us above them and bellowing like car horns, a bellowing which seemed to bring the rain clouds closer. They started charging the fence, pushing dents the size of mattresses into it.

“They’ll break out of there,” I said, hoping that we’d turn back before making them angrier. “They’re much stronger than that fence.”

“Well go down there before they do.”

“Down there?”

He handed me a brand and a bucket of bright coals. “Nobody will want to remember you. They won’t even listen once if they can help it and if they hear something else it will be as if you never spoke. Is this what you want?”

There was a loud rip like a dumpster lid slamming as one bull tore a hole in the fence. “I don’t care about that. We gotta leave.”

“First make yourself known.”

“What?”

“Go down there and make it so they won’t forget you.” He lifted up the brand I was holding and it read Pete in backwards letters. “Burn yourself into permanent memory.”

“I don’t want to fight the bulls.”

“Oh, no, don’t fight them. You’ll lose; you cannot fight a dozen bulls. You’re only a man. Just put your name on them.”

The bulls gathered at the edge of the fence like rats in a ditch when you’re throwing food in it. I put the brand in the coals to get hot. The coils at the end which spelled my name began beetle-colored and grew, in a minute, to the color of fire that’s close to white.

I pulled it out and we both admired it, and just as he was saying “Perfect” and gesturing to the restless bulls I stuck it in him, on the exposed part of his arm below the elbow, and held it there as long as I could.

The smell of barbershops and cooked pork. His screams were like a guitar string tuned too tight and the bulls below were moaning louder, with the deepness and volume of a full locomotive. All at once I dropped the brand and ran, blindly and awkwardly as if bound in a straightjacket and ten men behind me and the trees all had hands to catch me with. But no one stopped me; only the overexertion of myself. I collapsed with my lungs rasping aquatic.

Facedown in the fresh dirt warming up in the afternoon, I felt suddenly thankful. I laughed at the absurdity of what happened because the only things that were absurd where I’m from hurt you, were less absurd than perverse and if you laughed it was only to distract your mouth from crying out.

I spent the afternoon stretching into initial dimness of evening building a toy town out of the dirt. He found me like this, and I jerked up, toppling some of the toy buildings.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“You don’t?”

“No. You can sit back down.” He helped me reconstruct some of what fell and then pulled up his sleeves. “I will never forget you,” he said, showing me his arm newly-tattooed with my name.

That night we sat under the trees which grew bullets in gel pills and when they’d hatch prematurely they’d go off like a gunshot. I would jump when it happened, but he wouldn’t. “This is all you ever do, huh?”

“What is?”

“Make this little chemical universe all by yourself in here.”

“It keeps me company.” He had a glass pipe and was crumbling black rocks into it, smoking the dust. Each hit he’d cough for half a minute, the smoke coming out like furnace smoke and him doubled over as if his lungs were irreversibly deflating. Then he’d resume composure with a more unstrung smile. “This keeps you company, too,” he said, passing me the pipe. I didn’t know what to do at first because no substance had passed through my lips but things I could touch and the lighter was an abstract instrument to me, I didn’t understand it. Since then I’ve smoked enough cigarettes to prune my lungs.

The first cloud through my throat I retched and dropped the pipe. Watching it break like slow ballet on an ice rink stage. “Idiot!” he said, but I stopped understanding him, his voice like a slingshot that I only saw him let go of and then landed somewhere else. I was somewhere else. A lifetime in a sober head violently erased.

From where I sat he seemed like a zoo animal, drooling and lurched forward without self-consciousness or agenda. And saliva from my own mouth was puddling on the front of my pants but I didn’t think of it. He said, “Oh well, I’m high enough” and the words whirled from ear to ear in my head.

“I feel like I’m dreaming.”

“It’s supposed to feel like that.” There were two men sitting with us now, one cooking his shoes in the fire and the other motionless, addressing me. Their jawbones shifted under the skin like cats under blankets and when he opened his mouth to talk I could see his tongue flapping like a black sail. “If it didn’t feel like that it would mean you’re always dreaming, and nobody wants that.”

“Nobody does?”

“Nobody. Look at your friend,” he said, gesturing. “He has been asleep behind the wheel of his body for years.”

“But he fixed me.”

“Fixed you? Nothing can fix you. You will always be the same.”

From far behind the trees a movie was playing that we couldn’t see, but the brightness reached us like a thousand caged moons and we could doze off to the soggy violins of its soundtrack. At one point I was bumped awake by the man who’d finished cooking his shoes and I chewed on rubber for a while then dozed off again. The violins like a hearse-carried casket we could sleep in.

We woke up on the roof of a barn and couldn’t figure out how to get down. “What happened?” I asked, and he said “This kind of thing is usual. Don’t be afraid.”

I left him the next day. When I first found him I thought my head was a drained pool I should offer in my palm, and I came to learn that his was too, that all heads are perforated heads. I’ve learned enough since then to know I already knew most of what I wondered about.

Headed for the direction I thought society must be, imagining myself a magnet to see where I get tugged, I walked through the woods beyond him, where pale infants yet un-blossomed hung from tree branches like the mobiles in the slave room. I was watching them spin, thinking how much like children we were (who ate what was fed and slept when commanded), when a full-grown man came out placenta-spattered. I might have shouted or in my mind it echoed. I alternated approaching and jerking away as his eyes resisted opening, but soon they became lighter, the sun drying the muck off them and making it less.

“Ah,” he said, turning to me and smiling, “my first friend in reality.”

Despite my alarm I was able to bring myself close to him, and soon I sat. “I don’t understand anything.”

“Are you freshly born?”

“No, freshly escaped.”

“From what?” He pulled himself up and crossed his legs. “Wait, I have to interrupt. I feel like I’ve been living so long. I forgot it but it’s still there. Lots of darkness that happened to make me.” He looks up at the cracked shell he left. “Sorry. From what?”

“I can’t tell you. You might turn me in.”

“Oh, one of those kind of things. I vaguely know what those kind of things are.”

“I don’t understand. You were just born?”

“Yeah. Think how much easier it is. So no womb need ever be occupied.” He stood up, so I did too. “Man, my head’s a strange-textured thing.”

“What do you do now?”

“I was just about to ask you that. I think I’m supposed to wait for someone here.”

“Maybe it was me. I’m here now.”

He concentrated on me, tensing his new forehead that hadn’t yet developed creases. “No, I don’t think it’s you.”

“Well here I am. And I’m trying to find the rest of the people, if you want to come.”

“What people?”

“Everybody except the ones I used to know. I want to go to the place where men choose how they live.”

“I’ll come. Gee, these memories. I can’t get over them. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. It’s as if I walked here from there and only fell asleep very briefly. I remember.”

He knew the way instinctually, and guided us from the birthplace of his pulse, where all the other child-seeds held motionless like headstones in a cemetery. In memoriam, not to be born. Yet inside all of them men like him were growing and developing minds that fool themselves into thinking birth is just another day beginning. Sometimes he would stop to sniff the air and tell me “I feel a warmer wind coming from there. It’s that way.”

I realized soon that I didn’t know his name. When I asked him he said “I don’t have one yet. I think the people I was supposed to wait for would have told me, but we left.”

“I was the person you were supposed to wait for. Can I name you?”

“Sure.”

“Your name is Lilly.”