Pillow

by Andrew Battershill

  All the way to the back of the field these bales with legs coming out of the top. Pillow couldn’t count how many there were and didn’t really want to. All of a sudden it felt like something was crowding into his eyeball again and it was hard to see. He kept trying to look at the field but all he kept catching were fractured, blackening pictures, disappearing. His own legs were weak, and there wasn’t a cloud anywhere, and sometimes unadulterated sky crept into his vision. The leg farmer eased Pillow into one of the chairs and asked if he could bring a water. The farmer came back with two mugs, his full of coffee, Pillow’s water. He put the cup down next to Pillow. Pillow said thanks.

  The farmer leaned forward in a way that let Pillow know his back had been hurting for a decade or two. ‘Now, son, I hope you don’t mind me calling you that. I don’t mean much by the word; it’s just an advice-giving sort of thing to call another man. But, son, you look to be mixed up in the sort of fun I resolved to give up after meeting a lovely red-headed woman with legs taller than your …well, my head. So I can’t say I’m going to help you out much. But I’ll let you stay out here, hell, I’ll even leave you alone a minute with your thoughts, let you get sorted. Does that sound about okay to you?’

  Pillow didn’t say anything. He tried to look at the legs, losing them even as he did it.

  And Pillow sat there quietly with him, as the farmer chewed on what was either his lip or just air for a while. Then the farmer rocked forward in his chair and said one perfect piece of nothing.

  The zoo. The zoo. The zoo. He said it to himself as he left the farm. The zoo. The zoo. The zoo. The zoo. The zoo.

  Pillow figured, finally, that there was no point dying if you were going to do it without at least seeing a giraffe in person one last time.

  Life had, for many years, been a wonderful and familiar routine for Pillow. Every day he would wake up and run, and every day he would run enough that he felt a little bit joyful and loose and prone to laughing by the time he stopped. Then he’d eat and drink a pre-measured meal, and then he’d go to the boxing gym. And the gym never changed, sometimes he’d go to other gyms, to spar new guys, to see new trainers, but the activities would all be the same. Chin down, hands up, quick feet, moving that head. And in the evening he would go out and have a bit of light fun and socializing that took place in one of a few familiar places and always ended in time for him to get his rest. So, if it could be said that Pillow enjoyed anything in his post-fighting years, what he enjoyed was just the whole world. How big it was, how little of it smelled like sweat and leather, how grey and loose the air was sometimes. All the weird things he’d never seen before in addition to all the weird things he’d only seen a couple of times.

  Once, on the way out to the zoo, he’d seen a tiny old man dragging two full-grown, bleeding elk carcasses into the woods, one on each shoulder. The little guy was just zipping along, no problem. Pillow had pulled over to talk to him, and the man, who must have been eighty, had a hunch the size and shape of a basketball on his back. He was wearing a polyester shirt with a repeating print of someone carrying a yoke on it and no pants. Pillow ran up alongside him and didn’t say anything. He waved at the man, and the man saw him, looked him up and down (his eyes sunk halfway back into his skull), nodded once and kept walking, carrying the massive elk like they were nothing, and leaving thick, twin lines of half-congealed blood in the grass behind him.

  So it wasn’t just the zoo that was so amazing it seemed like no one would believe him if he told them about it (he had told a few people about the zoo, and they didn’t 100 percent believe or disbelieve him), it was the whole way to the zoo, the whole way home, the whole space in between. The world seemed so random and interesting that nothing felt impossible to him. It could all float away attached by giant strings to a huge balloon with tall, knotty trees growing out of it, and he’d be surprised, sure, but it wouldn’t exactly blow his mind. He wouldn’t say it was impossible.

  He pulled the car he’d jacked to the gates of the zoo. Then he got out, jumped the fence and remembered that he still had the coins when he saw the box fall out of his pocket as he dropped to the ground inside the zoo. He picked up the box, tossed it in a short tight spin in the air and put it back in his pocket. When he tried to whistle, it came out as a flat, tuneless flop of lips.

  The parking lot was like any large parking lot at night: a bit creepy, like an open field but where the animals who might sneak up on you are people with knives and things like knives. Pillow made sure not to step on the white lines of paint marking the parking spaces. He wasn’t really sure why, but it seemed important.

  Climbing the fence into the zoo itself was a bit harder. Eventually Pillow found a way to scale the oversized wooden board with a map of the zoo on it, jump from that to the roof of the hut where they take your money and walk past the fence. As he climbed off the roof, Pillow took care to focus extra-hard on making his feet go to the exact places he wanted them to, knowing that he would have plenty of time to think about what to look at in the zoo, and what animals with which to hunker down and sleep, after he had not hurt himself on the large and surprisingly sharp-edged donations bin just below him.

  The zoo closed at five p.m every day, so Pillow was very excited to see it at night. He hoped that more of the animals would be awake, but he knew that they were probably all just sad enough to sleep for eighteen hours a day. Which was fair enough. A lot of animals and people felt that way.

  The big downside to entering the park through the front gate was that they displayed the saddest animal at the zoo first, right after you’d paid. It was the caged eagle. Pillow walked to the cage and peered in. He had to go pretty slowly because the zoo was very dark. The eagle was sitting quietly and coldly and sadly on its perch, its neck hunched straight down, wings tucked tight in to his sides. The bars were also cold, and touching them reminded Pillow once again of how insistently the two middle fingers on his right hand had been tingling for the last little while. Pillow had a sudden and complete change of heart.

  ‘Fuck this eagle. Fuck you, Eagle. Flap your wings a bit, make a thing of it if you hate it so much. We all know you do. You’ve made that clear, you killjoy. Don’t just sit there pouting. Fuck you, fuck your family. If I was an eagle, I’d just glide until … until there was no more … up-gusts?’

  Pillow laughed and dropped his head down to gently touch the bars, enjoying the feel of the cold metal rolling against the top of his head.

  ‘Sorry, Eagle. You’re not who I should be saying that stuff to. Pals?’

  Pillow held up his hand for a fist-bump (fewer germs). The eagle kept sleeping. Pillow shrugged and moved on.

  As he walked down a footpath lined with trees so tall he could easily have forgotten they had tops, Pillow wondered idly why no one had stopped him to talk, or kick him out of the zoo, or arrest him, or shoot him in the chest a few times. More actively, he hoped that he was heading for the giraffes.

  On the way, Pillow got distracted by the Southeast Asia pavilion and pushed the amazingly unlocked front door open and walked in. The humid air felt nice and close, intimate in relief from the dark, hollow early-morning air from outside. The moonlight filtered weakly through the window and the ceilings that were all glass like a greenhouse. Pillow quietly shuffled across the room, feeling his way along the wall.

  He came across a locked door with a yellow sign that was way too blurry and indistinct to bother reading. He leaned back and kicked the door, denting it beside the handle, then he waited out a head rush and kicked it seven more times until it opened.

  Orangutans are apparently very heavy sleepers, because six of the seven stayed slumped in their cages, their arms hanging through the bars, swaying and twitching with sleep. Pillow wondered if it was still making sounds when he hit things. It didn’t really seem like it. There was one small orangutan who was awake; he had pulled himself up on the bars, gripping them with his leathery hands. Pillow walked up to the cage and kneeled in front of it.

  ‘
Hey, pal.’ The little guy tilted his long, oval head to the side and flipped his lip inside out. ‘I know what you’re about. I’m about that too. You know what I’m saying. For people the time is four-thirty in the morning, maybe five o’clock. Nobody’s there, nobody wants anything. You can stay in your own apartment and feel how empty the street it is, or you can go running and feel how empty the rooms are. You can hear street lamps. They make this thunk. You beat the sun up. Sleep’s just something you need.’ The orangutan scratched his belly, then he brought the hand back up to pull on the bars some more. The metal made a barely audible groan from the pressure. ‘Why fuck around dreaming when you can just wake the fuck up and hear some street lights?’ Pillow reached forward and wrapped his hand around three of the scratchy black knuckles. They felt like a leather bag that had been buried for years and grown hair. The orangutan snapped his head forward and tried to bite off Pillow’s finger. He got the hand back fast enough and the orangutan drove his teeth straight into the bars, then he lurched back and curled against the back of his cage, sucking on his fingers.

  Pillow put three fingers in his own mouth. The orangutan had a blanket in the cage with him, which seemed wrong to Pillow, what with the hair and thick skin and stuff. He thought about it a second and realized it wasn’t a sleeping blanket, it was a playing blanket. The orangutan was having fun with how the world looks different when you put something over your head. He could see how that would seem pretty cool to a monkey. Pillow pulled the fingers out of his mouth.

  ‘I was super into doing that too, when I was five. Hey, are you like a five-year-old? No, fuck it, don’t answer that. It was wrong to ask you to compare yourself to stuff. I don’t actually know how old I was. I don’t know how old I was for anything. I just said five.’

  The kid wasn’t getting it. Pillow stood to leave, listening to the snorting rhythms of sleep for a bit. He turned around at the door and squinted for one last look. The orangutan was still pulling the blanket on and off his head, enjoying the sliding movement of darkness and air and cloth.

  In the bright light-blue glow of the fish tanks, Pillow watched a turtle have sex with another turtle twice its size. Mostly the couple just looked around blankly and spasmed in short, awkward jerks. Once in a while the big turtle would take a couple half-hearted steps forward and the tiny turtle would move with her, thrusting as he followed. He dropped to his knees and tried to catch the male turtle’s eye. The turtle seemed like somebody who got it, the kind of creature that inspired a little respect.

  ‘I’m glad I got to watch you in the saddle, my friend.’ He reached out and touched the glass in front of the turtle’s fully extended neck. ‘You’re a stamina machine. I know you’re not having sex for fun, just babies, which is a sad thing about your life. But you picked a hardy gal.’ His finger slid across the glass toward the female turtle’s shell. ‘Child-bearing hips, am I right?’ He cocked his head to the side, looking with deep and sudden sympathy at the larger turtle. ‘Hang in there, sweetheart. Kids can make your whole life feel right.’

  It didn’t seem like the turtles would be done anytime soon, so Pillow cracked his knees straight and walked over to peek at the Komodo dragon, which wasn’t having sex but was still interesting because it was a dinosaur. The dragon was awake and Pillow watched it move around, walking toward him in a weird zigzagging way, scattering wood chips aside with its long, dexterous-looking claws. Pillow watched the creature in satisfied silence until he heard some jaunty humming and footsteps not quite heavy enough to wake the dead.

  As had become common to him, Pillow felt smart and stupid at the same time. He laughed and spoke in a sidelong, jocular sort of way to the dragon.

  ‘Riiiiight. I totally forgot about them. Well, okey-dokey, Smoky, time to rumble, I guess.’

  The dragon didn’t move or blink. Its tongue went out and back in again quickly. Pillow reached into the back waistband of his pants and then remembered that he’d left his gun in his car and his car somewhere really far away a really long time ago. He took the razor blade out of his sock, moved slowly over to a dark spot by a tall metal pillar. He angled his body behind it, saw a flashlight beam moving and bouncing at the rhythm of walking down the other end of the pavilion. Pillow quietly cleared his throat.

  ‘How does anyone still care?’

  The beam stopped moving.

  Lieutenant Avida’s voice was surprisingly chipper, given the hour. ‘Why, hi there, Pillow. How are you this fine evening?’

  The Komodo dragon was stuck in a corner now. Pillow wondered where its asshole was in relation to the tail.

  ‘Oh, you know, pretty decent considering you stitched me up for a bunch of murders. That aside, I’m feeling daaannndy.’

  ‘You’re not sounding too good there, Pillow. Sounds like you could use a rest. You gave it a run, Pillow, you did. But it’s time for you to recognize that some of us are meant to be covered in linen, and some of us are real people who sleep on it.’

  Simon wasn’t talking. Pillow figured he’d probably snuck out to block the other exit while Avida covered the front and kept him talking.

  She continued. Pillow could easily imagine how big her hand gestures had gotten.

  ‘We fucked your life pretty darn hard, Pillow. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. But you have to admit your life was just begging for that dick. Your life was giving it away, like candy. Loose as all hell and dripping, was your life. We had to do it. We were so dirty on this coin thing, we couldn’t leave you out there with a credible story. But hey, we are not crusaders, we can do business. So how’s about you give us the coins, and you skate on the murders.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’re in charge of the thing, we fuck up on your rights, you get away clean on appeal. Never hear from us again.’

  Pillow chuckled and ran his hand along the smooth metal of the pillar, then he hustled quietly through the arch into the river-fish area and settled into another corner. He admired this new pillar for another second, then got back to the conversation.

  ‘Clean, huh? I dunno, that’s a too much delayed –’ Pillow fully intended to say gratification, but his brain and mouth caught just as the T met the I, and when he still couldn’t get over it after three restarts he quit. ‘The answer is no. I don’t want that. I’ll get away and fuck off and a while later I’ll die.’ Pillow was finding it easier to talk now that he was really leaning into the slur. Not trying to fight it, but using it to round off the edges of speech, give it some shape. ‘No, wait, I forgot. Actually I have to kill quite a few people first.’

  Avida paused a second. The flashlight beam wavered into his old corner. She continued.

  ‘You want to go right now? Give us the coins and we let you walk out of the park. We’ve been following you for two days. How hasn’t anyone recognized you yet, by the way?’

  Pillow switched razor hands, shook out his right fingers and then replaced the razor. ‘For once, I’m lucky nobody watches boxing anymore.’

  The footsteps of the beam stopped again. The turtles were still jerking half-willingly back and forth. Avida’s voice came out shaky with anticipation this time.

  ‘What was that, Punchy? You’re slurring like a motherfucker. I imagine motherfuckers to be a heavy-slurring demographic.’

  Pillow knew she’d figured out where he was by sound. He crouched low and moved around the corner. He took a pen out of his pocket and tossed it lightly toward the other side of the archway. Pillow heard Avida moving closer, shuffling and trying to keep her feet quiet. He heard the hum of the fish tanks. He imagined the little turtle coming. He imagined the dragon laying its giant, poisonous head down to sleep.

  Avida made the final lurch through the arch and she pivoted toward the wrong corner. Pillow jumped out and she turned and got off a shot blind. Pillow parried her arm and took her eye with the razor blade. Blood and clear viscous fluid flopped out, mixing dark, dark red and clear. Avida dropped her flashlight, screaming, and the room went black. Water and beautif
ul idiot fish flowed invisibly past her writhing body. Pillow turned and ran straight into the pillar. He reset and ignored the blood falling down his face and made it out the front door just as he heard Simon rumbling in.

  Pillow finished running when he got to the picnic area behind the giraffe enclosure. At the back edge there was a vending machine that Pillow had never seen before. He supposed it could have been there for years, and he could have missed it, once a month, for years. He hadn’t given vending machines a whole lot of thought before, so it seemed worth it to pause, and give it some attention.

  Pillow figured that there probably weren’t very many happy vending machines in the world. It was sort of a pathetic station in life to be a vending machine, but this was the worst he’d seen. The front of it was dirty and scratched up, and the candy inside looked dry somehow, dusty even. Pillow cupped the vending machine’s cheek.

  ‘What about you, buddy? What animal would you be if you had to be an animal who wasn’t human?’

  Pillow put his fingers against the glass. He thought about rain and dead eyeballs and trees. He thought about big toes and killed chickens and blood. The vending machine just sat there, picking up dust by the second.

  ‘Are you very old and sad?’

  Nobody had even told the vending machine that candy cost more than a dollar now. Pillow shrugged and pulled the case out of his pocket. He shook out the coins and put them, one by one, into the machine. He watched the springs uncoil and drop the chocolate bar heavily into the tray.

  Pillow had bought his first adult chocolate bar. He pushed back the sleeve and grabbed the candy bar. His hand felt almost numb now, so he more heard the wrapper crinkle than felt the thing in his right hand. Unwrapping it, he smelled the chocolate.