Pillow

by Andrew Battershill

  Pillow closed his eyes and, because these things aren’t quite anchored to skulls, his brain started spinning, but not in straight-line sort of way, more the way something spins as it’s falling off a table. He rubbed his hand and slid down flat on the floor. He felt liquid on the back of his neck and heard the sea.

  His hands and toes tingled. Pillow didn’t really care. He relaxed into the sounds of the sea, watched the moonlight behind his eyelids catch the dips and swirls in the water. For a second he was in charge of the waves. Not the whole sea, just the waves, and not totally in control of them either. He was in charge of them like a trainer is in charge of a fighter, getting them ready, watching them peak and break. Not a lot of control, but knowing every ripple, seeing every fold, seeing them happen from close enough to feel far away.

  The thing about waves is there are millions of tiny waves in each one.

  Pillow didn’t notice Julio waiting by his car. He dropped his keys when he saw him. Julio had come out of nowhere.

  ‘Fuck you, Pillow.’

  Pillow was very confused.

  ‘What? We’re going to fight, son. You’ve got time later.’ Julio moved in closer, went nose to nose with Pillow, jabbing his chest with his finger. ‘I tell you, I tell you specially that I can’t have trouble. I’m trying to cut your broken-down ass a break and you do me like this. You bully some fucking kid, you leave the room I loaned you with blood on the floor, piss, shit, used needles … I don’t even want to know what you did to this girl. You don’t call me again. I cut you a break.’

  Pillow ducked his head back and slapped Julio across the face. He smiled wide and waved his finger in front of him. ‘Don’t touch me, son. You don’t get to touch me now, and you won’t be able to touch me on Saturday night. Do your level best.’

  Julio flinched as if to hit him, then he took a closer look and stepped back. ‘Shit, what happened to you? Are you okay?’

  ‘Fuck your mother if you can find her, you’ll know how good I am this weekend. I’m going to take you apart, run a paint job on you, kid. This is the fight for me, this is it, this is my last march and I’m going to goose-step right on your chubby little face. You’re not even on weight, look at you. You’ve got a nicer rack than the ring girls.’

  ‘Pillow, listen, I think you need to go to the doctor. We already had that fight, man. That was years ago.’

  ‘We already had it? It’s not even gonna happen, fatty. You can’t make 154. You and your big, silly right hand, like that’s talent. Like that’s fuckin’ art. Give me a break, I’ve tricked every fighter who ever tried me. I’ve got as much punch as a hummingbird, and I beat the best. And I’m gonna beat you too. Pure paint job, kid. Easy work.’

  Julio was backing away now. ‘Listen, I’m done. You need a doctor. You need a doctor and that’s … I’m done, brother.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah you’re done. I float like a butterfly and that’s it; stinging is for dumbfucks who can’t wait to die.’

  Julio walked away shaking his head, and Pillow bounced on the balls of his feet and reeled a quick, loose combination into the air. Then he laughed at something that wasn’t funny. He got his car open and sat down, coming back to himself a little. It seemed important to leave, so he left.

  Pillow was careful to consciously plot a simple and exact route to Gwynn Apollinaire’s house. He went through the route several times in the car before he started to drive. As he moved through the city, consistently failing to shoulder-check when changing lanes and ignoring his mirrors because they were disorienting, Pillow reflected on how strange it was to have been praised for his ‘survival instincts’ since he was thirteen years old. As a boxer he had always been easily stunned (which probably just had to do with the way his skull and jaw were shaped), but he’d reacted very well to getting rocked. He was able to stay calm and collected and usually even managed to stick to his strategy. He thought there should be no difference this time, and he felt pretty sure he could pull the coin thing off.

  Then Pillow came within a second of blowing through a crosswalk and running over a woman pushing a twin-stroller, but he managed to stop in time. The woman froze, then touched the cloth flap that covered the place where the babies were. She kept looking at Pillow, as if expecting something from him. He apologized to the woman with his eyes and the angle of his head.

  Pillow pulled up to Apollinaire’s building feeling pretty decent. It came and went in waves, the brain stuff, and he felt like he was at the very top of one right now, looking arrogantly at the rest of the water from a couple of fluid feet above.

  For no particular reason, Pillow looked up at the roof before he entered Apollinaire’s building. He saw Gwynn swaying forward and back with her hands holding the fire escape on either side. There was a man in a suit with a giant head standing behind her. Gwynn looked down and opened her hand to wave at Pillow. Pillow waved back and let out a long, low whistle.

  ‘Well, if that doesn’t just fuck me right in the ear.’

  Gwynn Apollinaire seemed about to turn around and speak to Breton when he tipped her straight backward and she went over the side, glanced off the fire escape and fell to the concrete in a loose forward circle.

  Although he would never be sure of when he’d gone to bed, or how he’d gotten there, judging by the date on his watch and where the sun was, Pillow knew he’d slept for at least fifteen hours. He woke up feeling uncommonly refreshed. After looking at his watch and figuring out the sleep thing, he’d laughed once and then set to making a plan. Obviously he’d needed the Zs.

  He’d already decided that revenge was the thing to do now. Emily was a lost cause, they’d killed Gwynn, and while those things were both mostly his fault, they were also a lot of Breton’s fault. Pillow’d hurt people for a lot less. Plus he didn’t have the coins or any of his own money so Breton was going to be after him, and he might as well take the initiative.

  Sitting by the window, tapping his chin in a steady rhythm, occasionally wondering what the thin wooden lines in the middle of the window actually did (they couldn’t be weight-bearing) Pillow formulated a plan. There’d be at least five people at the Bureau with Breton, and even at the best of times Pillow had trouble keeping track of that many variables. He preferred more of a one-on-one type thing. To make matters worse, Pillow’s equilibrium was not in the ballpark of normal yet, plus he’d never actually fired a gun before, so he cut his odds of shooting his way in to slim. Pillow figured his big strategic advantage was that the Bureau boys were not a particularly organized bunch. They would just rush into the action, all clumped together, like six-year-olds crowding a soccer ball. So if he could distract them, get in around the back and find Breton alone, it might work. The wood bits in the window were probably there to keep the glass from thumping around too much in the wind, and to make people think a little bit about carpenters as they looked at trees.

  Pillow had come to understand variety pretty late in life. Early on it had been all about repetition. In boxing everything has to be second nature, there’s no chance to think things through, so for a long time Pillow considered repeating something to be the key to learning it, and he’d done that happily. Then he took his first loss in the pros. He’d gone through the amateurs and his first twelve pro fights doing it all by the book, executing perfectly drilled techniques, being fast with his hands, putting his feet in the right places and winning. Then he fought an old gamer from Philadelphia who’d whacked him on the hips, head-butted him, hand-trapped him at every opportunity. And Pillow had realized that the book would only get him so far. So he started learning the tricks, still repeating them, but switching up more, throwing the odd curveball. What he realized then was that he loved new things. If something was new, if it had that little bit of humour, a little touch of style, he could pick it faster. He learned all the flashy tricks twice as fast as he’d learned the basics. He kept on breaking his right hand, he kept on not finishing anyone, but he started dazzling them. Not just stuffing a jab in their face a
nd running, but showing some real style. Some class.

  When he retired, Pillow had realized that the whole time he’d been loving variety while only ever doing one thing. To have the whole, giant, wild world of things to choose from had initially been overwhelming to him, and he knew he hadn’t handled it well. But in the last couple years he’d been coming around, relaxing into the newness of everything else, and, he reminded himself in case he forgot later, that had been a good thing. That was something that had helped.

  As Pillow got to his car he stopped, bent over and rested his hands flat against the hood. He stayed like that for a long time.

  The only good thing about Julio Solis knocking him out and ruining his life had been that he’d learned a whole lot of things, or had at least clarified them. Pillow had learned exactly how different it was to casually wish you didn’t exist (which everyone does once in a while) than it was to really want to be dead right now. He’d learned that when street lights start looking like they’re shedding distinct lines of light, like the world is moving and you’re staying still, that it’s not either beautiful or a sign that you need to go to the neurologist, it’s both.

  Pillow dropped to his knees and pressed his head deeper into the front grille of his car, feeling the individual slats digging into his scalp. He kept his hands up on the hood, flat against the absorbed heat of the sun. He’d learned all those things once, and it had been hard and it had hurt and it had taken a really long time, but he’d learned them, and now he’d been taught them all again for good measure. Pillow pulled his head up and opened his eyes. He watched the tops of some sad, small trees move in the wind, their half-bare branches trembling like sheets of paper in his hand. Pillow stood up. He brushed the knees of his pants and got in the car.

  In a flash that faded almost as quickly, Pillow remembered where he’d left Don’s car and corpse. He drove over, fetched Don’s car and abandoned his own, and went to the Bureau. Because he hadn’t had his nose fixed the last time he’d broken it, he did not notice the full extent of the smell.

  Pillow knew that being alone limited his options. There was no way he could cover the angles he needed to by himself, so he’d have to time it properly. He got out of the car about a half block early, popped the trunk and left the car coasting. Then he sprinted ahead, peeled off into the alley and dove into the dumpster. He closed the lid and waited. He heard the Bureau boys come running out, flocking together like he knew they would, he heard someone take the car and drive off, he heard them realize he could have snuck in the back. Then he waited.

  Pillow didn’t wear a watch and couldn’t see the sky, so he couldn’t know how long he was in the dumpster. It felt like a long while. In his mind he knew the smell was strong, but he didn’t feel it in his face. Pillow wondered what exactly his septum had deviated from. Itself?

  Eventually he heard a whole gaggle of them leave out the back door, a few more out the front. He waited for a bit longer, then he pushed the lid open and peeked. He could see two guys standing guard out front, but they seemed alone. They looked like the sort of people who were alone. Carefully and quietly he snuck out of the dumpster and ambled down the alley. Pillow walked through the back door.

  Breton was slouching against the front of his desk with his back to the door, a pistol hanging limply from his hand. Pillow sprang forward, pressed his gun to Breton’s spine and fired. He didn’t watch the body drop. He just felt it slide down airily against his leg. It was only after he looked down at the body that he realized the head wasn’t quite big enough, and there was no blood.

  It wasn’t Breton. They’d just put those stupid cufflinks and glasses on a creepily realistic Japanese sex doll. Her circle mouth gaped at him neutrally. That was something Pillow had never understood about sex dolls: the best part of lips are the corners. Pillow sighed and did a slow spin, dropping the gun and waving to each of the armed, black-suited, black-haired men in turn.

  On the walls: seven madrigals breastfeeding from a cow standing on her hind legs; three melting clocks, one hanging from a tree branch, and in the background a yellow mousetrap just to the right of a marble slab and an empty, hopeless desk; a young boy eating a park bench raw and whole; a monk carrying a young girl in a bundle of sticks; a piano pulling a meat truck overflowing with lipstick cases; a burning bundle of sticks; a naked woman being spoon-fed Greek yogourt by a falcon with baby hands at the tips of its wings.

  Pillow relaxed into the arms yanking and pushing him toward the door. He let his feet go slack, let his big toes drag against the floor.

  On the door: a hot-air balloon made of clouds illuminated by a setting sun, floating to nowhere in particular.

  They shoved him into the closet, which was empty except for two chairs facing each other. Breton was holding a ship in a bottle to the light, looking up through the bottom. He saw Pillow and raised his eyebrows, put the bottle carefully back in its stand on the ground next to him.

  ‘Why, hello. I haven’t seen you since I killed that ancient cunt you called your friend. Oh, you really put on a show for me that day, didn’t you?’

  Pillow took a long, elaborate skip forward, hopping into the chair and crossing his legs in the same motion.

  ‘You have done nothing but betray me and betray the whole vision of this fraternity. Explain why I should not just take the coins.’

  ‘Oooh, I know this one. Two reasons: because I don’t have ’em, and because you already tried that once, sent your best guy at me too. And that didn’t turn out so good. Your boys are enthusiastic, but they’ve got other shit on their minds. Nobody frisked me on my way in. So you’ll kill me, for sure, but you don’t know what I’ll be able to do first.’

  Breton tented his hands in front of his mouth to cover his smile. ‘Who said I was taking the coins from you? Where you see sloppiness I see artful disorder in support of a clear, transcendental vision. You do not look your best. A bit past one’s prime, would not one say? In any event, I was never intending to kill you. That is another thing you are wrong about. It is, perhaps, easier and less of a waste of time to tell you of the things about which you are not mistaken.’

  Breton paused and took an insanely long and loud sip of tea. He lifted his pinky as he tipped the cup back. When he was done he tossed it straight backward. The cup shattered against the wall.

  ‘You were correct about one thing. One. You did surprise me. I really did not think you’d get past Costes. But the reason you are a punch-drunk idiot child is that you thought you had any way to win. You thought I would put you in a position where it was remotely possible for you to best me? You pulled some moves, you had a bit of style, but it is just not possible for you to win. How did you think it would work?’

  ‘I didn’t really. I met a girl, I went raw. You know the deal, I’m sure.’

  ‘Knowing me as the open sore of a romantic you do, you probably supposed I would understand and appreciate that motive. But that is the exact reason you are a complete dunce. Because if you had what you thought you had, the last thing you needed was money. You could have just left and been poor and happy together, and you could have slept and woken and laughed in each other’s arms for the rest of your lives, and it would have been beautiful. The only reason the proletariat does not revolt is that it is absolutely fine to be poor if you are madly in love. You have an interesting mind for violence, a cleverness and some charm to you, but I cannot sympathize with you because that mistake is too huge and sad and obvious for me to have ever made, in all the years, and with any of the brains, and from any of the childhoods. There is no possible variation of me that is so stupid. I have never had a thought so misguided, not even a single, fleeting, unexpressed thought. You ruined a true, catastrophic love, sir, and for that crime the only reasonable punishment is prolonged torture without the sweet release of death. I will not kill you. I will watch you move into early senility and wretchedness. I will watch you hate yourself to bits.’

  Pillow rolled his neck around. It felt a lot crunchie
r than was healthy. ‘Man, I know you and I know me. And I never took a dive for anyone. I never stayed down for anyone, and nobody stayed down for me. I’ll fight you ’til it’s done. You were going to kill me, that’s a fight. So I’m here until it’s done.’

  ‘Oh, you poor, sweet ape. You never took a dive, but you did go down, did you not? You even stayed down, you simply never got paid for it. I would never have killed you; that would have been so conventional. Ick.’ Breton pretended the idea was on his shirt cuff and flicked it off fussily with his thumb. ‘No, no, no. That day with Don we were going to give you an ultimatum, similar to the one you recently received, and then we were going to watch you run about, struggle in your uniquely humorous manner against the brutal tide of reality. Why would I kill you? Your whole being, right now, is my project. My masterpiece. I made you, lovingly, why would I just smash you to bits without first displaying you? That would be to betray the whole frame that has held up my genius. Over some nominally valuable trinkets? No, no, no. See, actually, it was Don’s idea. He realized that you were going to make your adorable and senseless little play for the coins. And he thought we could watch it. See you in beautiful, deranged action. Put you in some corners and watch you spasm into the walls. I did not believe him at first, but I was wrong. See, my mistake was that I thought you were a beaten man, and you were not by any stretch. You were just a doomed one, so much so that I will let you leave. And I will watch you try to survive, as the whole of society zeros in on you. Who do you think sent Bataille to you? Did you really think he just plucked you from the world? Appeared from the air? As if beauty were a gift with no giver. Do you remember Avida and Simon? Louise Aragon? Jack Prevert? The warrants are out. Mistakes are so easy and wonderful to make. Don’t you agree?’