Pillow

by Andrew Battershill

  Emily sat up, pretty much over the whole laughing thing. Pillow felt slighted – the moth bit was funny, especially for on-the-spot like that.

  ‘What are we going to do, man? Maybe I should just ditch this thing. Feel like throwing me down the stairs? Give me some of that home-cooking.’

  Pillow patted his pocketless shirt. ‘You know what? I forgot my coat hanger. I’ll scratch you later.’

  He could tell that Emily was trying really hard not to cry. Pillow wondered abstractly for a second if he really wanted a kid. If he should just let her run this thought through to the end. Pillow knew he shouldn’t make another amateur-abortion joke. He knew that for sure.

  Emily twisted her lip a bit too violently, then she sucked on it for a second.

  ‘It’s just the worst. Like, because I didn’t make a budget. And because I didn’t buy shit on sale, and because I didn’t want to be counting all the time. Because of that … It’s not fair to the kid, I think. I wouldn’t want to be as poor as me now if I was twelve.’

  Pillow kept thinking it through as Emily successfully failed to cry. Eventually he came to the conclusion that his life was not going well. And one thing he’d always been good at was knowing when to mix things up. He tilted her chin up.

  ‘Hey, I have, it’s not very legal, but I could get a line on some money.’ Pillow told her the story of the coins. He slightly exaggerated their value, omitted all the violence, excluded the cops, pretended Louise had never existed and told the rest of the story faithfully. Emily listened skeptically and took a minute to think. ‘So what makes you think you can get these coins before everybody else?’

  ‘Well, first off I can take them to someone else after I find them. Fence them through Gwynn Apollinaire. She used to sponsor me while I was fighting. And she can move them. I’ll get more money that way. If I can find Artaud … I’ll see if he’ll talk to me. I can get these coins, and that money’ll sort us out for a while. Long enough to think things over, at least.’

  ‘That’s all fine, but nobody is going to get hurt? I don’t get how they just took the money without –’

  ‘I’ll say what I used to say before my fights: nobody is gonna get a scratch, guaranteed.’

  Emily reached over and grabbed his hand. ‘This scares me, and you need to take it seriously. Nobody is going to get hurt.’

  Pillow thought he could promise to try it that way, and he could be sure she wouldn’t find out who he had to hurt anyway, so he didn’t even feel bad saying it. ‘I promise nobody is going to get hurt.’

  They kept talking until the last of the summer light went out of the sky, and sometimes she would rub her palm down the whole length of her jaw and make this elegant motion with her wrist, as if flinging one drop of water off the tip of her finger.

  It had started and stopped raining, and what earlier had been the whole sky was just one big pink cloud by the time they got outside. Pillow finished propping the building’s side exit open, and Emily was already walking along the curb, pretending it was a tightrope. She saw him and lost balance slightly, regaining it without stopping her wave.

  ‘I have one more serious question for you. You talk about the zoo a lot, a kind of strange amount actually, so what animal would be the best animal to be if you had to be an animal who wasn’t human? Now, I’m growing fond of you and I don’t want you to screw this up too badly, so I’ll tell you the thing first. See, the thing is you can’t be any of the ones whose whole, whose whole life, is just toil. Like penguins, or those elephants who walk for like six months just to get water and show up looking like balloons that died in your room. No, you have to pick one that plays. Those are the only right answers. Like a monkey, or a dolphin, or a kitty.’

  ‘I think I’d be a giraffe. They clean their eyes with their tongues and they neck all day. I watch them at the zoo.’

  ‘You’re saying that giraffes just make out all day? Do giraffes know what making out even is?’

  ‘No, they think necking is just banging their necks together a bunch of times to impress girls. Plus they’re so tall and weird-looking.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s cool. I mean it’s not as giggly and swimmy and whimsical as a dolphin but, y’know, whatever floats. Now, friend, you are going to watch me smoke my very last cigarette.’ She sat down on the curb and pulled a pack of smokes out of her purse. ‘The very last one.’

  The air was wet and that little bit cold you have to have no imagination to resent. Pillow watched her smoke, how she’d hold it and blow it through her nose, he watched the trails rise and dissipate. Her lips would purse just a little and release, and he was trying to time it.

  ‘Do you want to date each other?’

  She reeled back laughing and covered one eye with a flat palm. ‘Who is in 1952 now, buddy boy? So old-fashioned. Put a seed in my belly and then ask me out for a malted, huh, Bareback Buddy Holly?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Rocking back and forth, cigarette waving above her head, snowing ash. ‘If you do, Peggy Sue, then you know why I feel blue … My Peheggy Suh-uh-ooo. Breaky breaky breaky Peggy Sue.’ She settled down and leaned over and they kissed for a short time. She smelled like smoke and clean, human skin.

  ‘I actually do, Pete, believe it or not.’ Her eyes rolled like rocks falling down a cliff.

  He pointed abruptly at her bag. ‘Gimme some cigarette.’

  Emily let her smile spread slowly and stretched her legs to their full length into the street. ‘Okey-dokey, Smoky.’ She turned at the waist and waved a cigarette in a repetitive motion in front of his face until he took it. ‘Here, I’ll butt-fuck you.’ Emily used her cigarette to light his.

  Pillow didn’t cough and dropped his head to his chest; he didn’t move as he exhaled. ‘Holy shit, that is awful. How do you do that? Every day?’ He took another drag.

  ‘Oh my god, is that your first cigarette ever?’

  ‘I used to be a professional athlete, you know.’

  ‘You’re adorable! Oh man, I haven’t given anyone their first cigarette since I was like fourteen. And you hate it! You’re adorable!’

  Pillow flicked his cigarette into the air. ‘Adorable like a fox.’ Sometime since the last time he’d looked closely, a small, perfectly round flush had appeared between her collarbones. ‘Like a fox you just butt-fucked.’

  ‘Nobody said you weren’t generous.’

  They were much closer to the same height sitting down, with Pillow’s feet splayed casually into the street, far enough that a student driver would worry about hitting them. Emily reached over and put her arm around his shoulder. She brought a hand out in front of them. With the lit cigarette still poking out from between her knuckles, she raised her hand steadily while rotating it from side to side, to give the impression of flight.

  Pillow tended to do a whole lot of driving that didn’t quite feel like driving. He wasn’t sure how other people felt behind the wheel, but there was a strong, swirling aimlessness to his control of the vehicle that didn’t read as universal. It should definitely seem like real life is happening when you’re driving a car. For one thing, going far too fast and far too slow felt exactly the same to Pillow. When he looked at the speedometer, he was usually surprised by the number he saw there.

  He was three hours late to meet Don at the Bureau and so he gunned it over, cars and pedestrians and buildings passing casually through the glass in a way that should have been alarming.

  Pillow pulled up in front of the Bureau and saw Don leaning on the front wall, staring absently into the air, his index finger tucked securely into the deep, rounded scar that ran the length of his cheek, listening to Bobby Desnos (one of Breton’s muscle-and-meth guys) telling another one of his stories. Pillow watched them through the mirrors for a second. That was another disorienting thing about cars: how much of the world behind you could be visible without you turning your head.

  By the time Pillow reached them Don was laughing his ass off, and Desnos was looking a little bit offended.
r />   ‘Why would you do that, Costes? I told you about this because I wanted help with my feelings.’

  At a very early point in his boxing life Pillow had figured out a way to call up his fighting state of mind whenever he needed it. It had made his career, probably, and it was still helping now. Pillow wasn’t one of those guys who needed to get mean to fight, he just needed to take it lightly. Making jokes, not thinking of punches as punches but as spilled drinks, party fouls. Like he was only paying attention because it was fun to get over on someone, not because that person could kill him. Pillow’s recipe for success was relaxed but ready. He knew exactly how to relax, and he could fake ready no problem.

  Pillow wrapped his arm all the way around Desnos’s neck and kissed him behind the meth bubble behind his ear. ‘Is he being mean to you, bubs?’

  Don wiped a tear out of his eye and tugged on Pillow’s elbow. ‘You have to hear this story. Oh, my sweet lord Jesus Christ dying and shitting himself on the cross, it’s good!’

  Desnos rolled his eyes, the edge of his lips jerking up a little bit. ‘Okay, so, I was holed up at this hotel room. And I had this new shipment that this gaping asshole over here’d hooked me up with so I figured I had to try it out, for quality control. And it was really pure. So I’m in this hotel room just tweaking my balls off. And I finish explaining this really good idea I have for how to make roulette more fun to the chest of drawers, and I hear this woman having sex or possibly masturbating herself next door. So I go up to the wall, and I listen, and she’s really gettin’ it, right? It seemed so private and … and I was so gakked up that I started just absolutely viciously jerking off. It was a fucking travesty how hard and uselessly I was slamming my meat. And she finishes a long time before I do. There’s this one big thump and then she quiets down, and I’m just pulling ropes on an empty flagpole all night. Finally, hours later, I come and get a few minutes’ sleep. So I wake up, and I look out my window, and I see they’re wheeling a body, you know, covered in a sheet. They’re wheeling it out of the room next door. Do you get it? She wasn’t masturbating, she was dying! I mean … I’ve done some … Oof. That’s a … that’s a doozer.’

  Pillow squeezed Desnos’s shoulder. ‘You’re a bit of a weird guy, Bobby, has anyone ever told you that?’

  ‘Not in a while actually.’

  The best thing Pillow could say about the Bureau boys was that they weren’t boring. There was always some sort of orgy or fight about to happen, someone always had a new random obsession they were talking about. Pillow realized it wasn’t the sort of fun everyone was into, but he figured that as long as he was the one watching and laughing, and not the one sending love letters to female serial killers or paying prostitutes so he could cry in their laps, then he’d probably be okay.

  Desnos reached out with both hands and awkwardly patted Pillow and Don on their chests, and backed into the Bureau, letting the loose-hinged door flail weightlessly open behind him.

  ‘He’s a complicated guy.’

  ‘So, Pillow, I’ll start by telling you my assumptions, then we’ll move on to my plans, then we’ll move on to what we’re doing today.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘We are assuming Artaud is in town, and that he will not have the means nor the wherewithal to leave town. Yesterday I searched his apartment, and I’ve left a man there; we have his passport, and we don’t think he has much money on him.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘I’ve put some feelers out with various narcotics suppliers, some of whom, doubtless, I will hear back from soon. Our duty, good sir, is to wait for word, and to do so in the way that is most comfortable to us. Any questions?’

  ‘Do you have any shorts with you?’

  ‘No.’

  Pillow pursed his lips. ‘That’s fine, you can borrow some from me. I say we swing by my place, pick up some gear, then we can go to that creepy abandoned dock you like, run some hills, bring some Greek salads, y’know? How long are we going to wait?’

  Costes nodded, then laid a hand flat out toward Pillow’s car. ‘Until we don’t feel like it anymore.’

  The creepy dock Costes liked was only actually creepy in one way, and that wasn’t so much creepy as it was vaguely magical in a profound, ineffable way. The dock overlooked a nice, quiet mini-lake. On the opposite side of the lake there was a loosely spaced piteousness of cottages. What was creepy about the dock was that it seemed abandoned and unmaintained, except for three large light bulbs on top of the pillars out over the water. The lights looked like streetlamps from the rich part of a city that was also an allegory about capitalism. Smooth polished metal, the glass somehow frosted but letting the light through bright and clear, all resting on wood that was halfway rotted, rusty nails sticking out, the boards of the dock groaning and straining just from the breeze.

  Having just run a pretty good set of hills, first with Don and then with Don watching while nipping at a flask of brandy, Pillow was feeling flush and calm, sitting in the driver’s seat, watching the dock and waiting for the lights to flick on as the sky darkened. ‘Y’know, Don, I remembered this dock differently.’

  Don already looking sleepy, a little droopy and uncoordinated in the neck. ‘I know, you remembered it with moral judgment in your heart. You remembered it wrongly.’

  Pillow reached over and whacked Don with a hard, flush flick to the cheek. ‘And what sort of a thing to say is wrongly?’

  Don, having straightened up, smiled and drooped back down. ‘A word.’

  ‘So why are we here, Don?’

  Eyes closed, Don spoke as if letting bread crumbs drop out of his mouth. ‘We are waiting because we are limited, Pillow. Until Artaud pokes his head up, we might as well be looking for an echo from last year. We are here because one, one being me, grows tired of sitting in office space, waiting for phone calls.’ Don opened his eyes again. ‘You are, if nothing else, a change of pace, Pillow.’

  ‘Then what am I doing here? It’s one thing to need a change of pace, but the change of pace has a pace too, y’know what I’m saying? A pace that’s his own.’

  ‘I’ll try to get you some money on this. I’ll see if I can get you a little piece of the coins.’

  Pillow looked back to the dock. The lights had come on when he hadn’t been looking, and they were glowing silently and perfectly now, illuminating the rotting, mossy dock. ‘See, man, you’ll try. You’ll try to get me just a little, tiny taste. I’m not trying to work for free.’

  ‘You know how it is with Breton.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I know. I know how it is. How much are these coins worth?’

  Don opened his eyes again this time and tried to warn Pillow off with the way he pointed them. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Six figures?’

  ‘Maybe on a very good day.’

  Pillow laughed and gripped the steering wheel, which had, like so many other things, been really polished-looking a long time ago. ‘Donny, Donny, Donny. The shit I do now, for the kind of money I do it for, it’s, uh, it gets me down, a little bit. The scale gets out of whack, I think, y’know, when you’ve had and blown five and half, six million. It’s a thing.’

  ‘I imagine it is.’

  ‘One time, toward the end there, I was so broke that I needed to buy food for the week, like just actual food, and I had to look for change in my couch. So that’s how broke I was. D’you want to guess how much money I found, all the coins, bills, that fell out of my pocket?’

  Don flexed some of his neck tendons, sucked some air past his teeth. ‘I think it’ll be better if you just tell me.’

  ‘Twenty-eight hundred dollars. It was a big-ass leather couch. That’s how it used to be.’ Pillow clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘I owned a shark.’

  ‘I remember. Whatever happened to that thing?’

  ‘He was a shark, not a thing. Around the couch-change time I had him appraised by this super-sketchy Belgian dude who sold exotic animals, like, black-market overseas-type sh
it. And this Belgian comes in peering over his glasses, lookin’ all Hercule Poirot –’

  ‘I love Hercule Poirot.’

  ‘I’m more of a Matlock guy.’

  ‘Poirot and Matlock cannot be compared by any metric. They are not present on the same plane of existence.’

  ‘Anyfuckinghoo, third-world animal-kidnap Hercule Poirot comes to look and gives me a price, not a bad price either, my man, would have paid a few markers. But right after he leaves, within five hours, Rigoberto, that was my shark’s name, Rigoberto goes tits up. Stone dead. It was sad.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He just stopped swimming. As soon as Hercule left the scene, Rigoberto stopped moving. That’s super-bad for sharks, y’know what I’m saying? And I was banging on the glass, I threw some meat in there, nothing. That was a bummer. A bummer swimming in a sea of bummers. Or not swimming, I guess. Not swimming in a tank in a living room.’

  Costes let a reasonable pause fill the air. ‘How would you rate your experience as a shark owner, tragic ending aside?’

  ‘Y’know what, man? I had big dreams for being someone who owned a shark. I bought it way, way before I was making that real shark-level money too. But it was kind of a drag. I had to feed it meat all the time. I didn’t even like having it in the house and I needed a whole fridge for it. And really they just look at you with these dead, black shark eyes, they don’t even see you. Doing laps and waiting to taste some blood, and that’s pretty much it. I loved Rigoberto because he was around every day, I mean, he was my living room wall for a few years there, but I should have bought a kangaroo or something. Maybe a koala. Something with a gentle, like, essence. Feed it some grass, have a little wrassle, give him a cuddle, that would have been nice. Yeah, man, I wasted a lot of money on that shark.’

  ‘Why not just buy a dog? It sounds like you wanted a dog.’

  Pillow drummed a quick four-beat on his lips. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. That would’ve been good. I have regrets, but hey, if wishes were fishes the whole world would be squishy. At least you don’t put sharks up your nose, am I right?’