The Deadheart Shelters

by Forrest Armstrong

  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.

  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 d
rying 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.”

  But I stopped calling him that quickly. Soon saying it while looking at his face left a bad taste in my mouth and got me homesick. It made me wish I could open his face like a cardboard box and find hers behind it; but no. I muttered, “Pick a new name. I don’t care what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter.” At that moment the wilderness ended and plains broke out. He bent down, scooped up a handful of the ground, and said “Dirt.”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “That’s not what I meant. But yeah, why not?”

  Turquoise clouds with mud burst inside staggered above the hill, and soon a man on a bicycle made a silhouette over them. We stood still and let him come to us. “Hello there!” he called, lifting one hand off the grip to wave. Both of us waved silently back. He was almost going to pass us and go into the woods when I called for him to stop.

  “Where are you coming from?” I asked.

  “The city right back there,” he said, pointing over the hill. He pushed the kickstand out on his bike and stood it. “Where you fellas from?”

  “Nowhere,” I said, while Dirt said, “Right there.”

  He tilted his head and smiled, then got back on his bike. “Well, have a good day.”

  We walked up the hill to where the city was promised us. A fog like powdered pills hung between us and it, but you could still see what was there. Two bookshelves facing each other, enlarged to much bigger than mountains. Antenna like uncombed hair. An apparatus of limbless hands between them constantly rearranging cubes, from one shelf to another. Some cubes were dropped to the land, broken forever, the shrapnel flung almost to our feet.

  The man on the bicycle came back now. “I just wanted to warn you fellas to be careful. There are some guys near the city and they look like they want trouble.”

  Dirt and I got closer to the city and then we saw them. Six men sitting on different steps of a moss-painted staircase. The stairs led up to the boughs of a cherry tree, where the grown fruit dangling made the branches dip. The tree seemed as if it were a home or something with doors. But none were inside it. And when the men saw us they descended and encircled us like vultures, watching the last twitches leave the living meat underneath.

  One abruptly stuck out his arms and grabbed my face. I tried not to change my expression, but I imagine my eyes widened. Another got behind us and the rest went back up the stairs, digging through a tan sack placed there. The man holding me rubbed the soft places on my cheeks that, the day before, were holes they put corks through. He smiled and said, “You are free, O, you are free.”

  “You understand?”

  He nodded. When he smiled his eyes bent like bananas downwards, and wrinkles spread from them calmly. He kept patting me on the cheek and smiling bigger. “You are very rare, you know.”

  “I am?”

  “I have met one other escaped slave in my life.” I was nervous when he said it because Dirt didn’t know. But he had said it and now it was known. I looked at my feet. “He came to the city with the corks still in his cheeks and began to beg. Do you know how long he lasted there?”

  “A month?”

  “Less.”

  “A week? A couple days?”

  “Twelve minutes. In twelve minutes they shot him in the forehead and left him there. Now guess how long it took them to clean him up.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “They never did. No human ever touched that corpse.”

  The man behind us stiffened and grabbed Dirt behind the neck. “This is one of the new ones!”

  From the tan sack on the steps they drew out stones smaller than the ones that drowned Thomas. “You were made in those forests? You were one of those that hatched into life?”

  “Yes, I was. Please let go of my neck.”

  The man threw him down face first and Dirt hit without bracing himself. Dirt lifted his head and I could see his nose was broken, but then he put it back down because they started throwing rocks at him. Each time one would hit him there’d be a damp thud, and a slight shiver from him. I said nothing as I am used to saying nothing.

  “Non-human!” someone on the stairs shouted, and another was screaming through clenched teeth, half-restrained, like the death-shouts of a man in an electric chair. “You are a product of the twisted future!”

  “The twisted now!”

  “The puke of the mechanical animal!”

  “I can kill him because he has no feelings.”

  While they were working on murdering him, the man who held my face said quietly to me, “Is he your friend?”

  “I only met him today.” To disassociate myself. I am bred of the mindset that we all will get punished eventually. It is best to keep quiet if something you might say could get you involved.

  “They will kill him unless you want him to live. But if you’ve only just met him, let him die.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  I looked back down at Dirt. He was speechless and shivering less, and I wondered if the cut they made in the side of his head was the reason for this, or if he got used to it. I felt a respect for him growing. Even the men throwing rocks seemed irritated to be throwing them so long without response.

  If a man is attacking you and knocks you down, get up. Each time, get up. He might kill you or he might let you live, but invariably he will respect you by the time he is finished.

  “Don’t kill him. A man can’t help what he’s born into.”

  The man nodded. “As you know too well yourself,” he said, though I hadn’t been th
inking like that. He held up his hands and the men stopped throwing rocks. Only then did Dirt lift his hands to protect the back of his head and moan.

  “Why do you spare him?” one of the men on the stairs asked. I opened my mouth to answer but the question was not for me.

  “Because the escaped man asks for it.”

  “He’s unnatural. If we let none of them in they’ll have to go back to the old ways.”

  Dirt got to his knees and I could see he’d been crying, probably the whole time. He’s just a newborn baby, I thought, and I was surprised at my own urge to cry thinking this, for usually non-emotion comes much easier to me. It’s not out of protection but comfort. He wasn’t hurt too bad and had not been afraid of death; he hadn’t lived long enough to develop a fear of death. It was only the fear of not-understanding and nowhere-to-go. “I don’t remember this,” he said.

  “Listen to him talk about his fake memories!” Then the man on the stairs stared directly at him and Dirt stared back defensively. “You remember nothing but the walk here! You’re manufactured!”

  “Calm down,” said the man beside me. The men on the stairs calmed down and then it started getting dark. The turquoise clouds dissolved like pepper from a shaker thrown sporadic, so the dust of them powdered the rooftops, still-turquoise. Between our heads flew the slugs that take wing at night, leaving itches on whatever they touch, and I held my hands up against them. They always find a way in. Soon I was scratching myself incessantly.

  “They’re bad here, huh?” I said.

  “Who?” asked the old man.

  “The pests. You have a lot of them here.”

  “Oh yes. They’re urban animals. But in the forests you find the mosquitoes and I prefer neither.” His eyes wandered over my cheeks. “You must be used to mosquitoes.”