The Deadheart Shelters
Page 4
“I wasn’t usually outside at night. Sometimes I’d get lucky.”
He nodded. “Well now you’re here. You can stay outside until inside seems better and you can learn to ignore the bugs. But what are you going to do?”
I shrugged, and on the ground Dirt stopped whimpering and looked up. “What do people usually do?”
“They work, make kids, pay for things… stuff like that. Things cost money, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’ll need something to do.”
“Well what do you do?”
“We are the sort that works all day and when we get home the true work begins. That is this; killing the synthetically born. There are other things but mostly it’s just this, now.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?” Dirt asked. “Don’t you get ashamed?”
The old man looked down at him and his eyes got suddenly lifeless and uncaring. “It would be better for you not to say things like that.”
I helped Dirt to his feet and then we were standing there. The man started to say “It was good to meet you” but I spoke rapidly over him.
“What will we do?”
The man looked down. “Ours is an ugly work. Many of us are sick from it.”
“I’m used to ugly work.”
“We lose friends too frequently. The roof collapses on them or else they’ve just breathed too much of it in. Soon their bodies become useless, and it’s only luck that prevents this.”
“What is your work?”
“Coal mining. Would you like to do that?”
It was not long before we began. We spent the night in the old man’s apartment complex. He told us his name by then; it was Felt, because that was what his mother made; his brother was named Bluestone for his father’s work and he always wished it was the other way around.
“Or at least a name like Chris. How about a normal name?”
“Should I be named Chris?” Dirt asked.
“No, because you are not normal.”
We slept together on the floor, for already every cushion was taken by the men on the stairs or others like them. I missed my mattress however thin, and all night through the window I heard people still talking and hums from electric throats. Like vocal cords perpetually plucked and gongs bashed reckless, unstopped. The noise kept me unsleeping. I missed the conversations in the dark where I’m from, which softened gradually as we all sank to its lullaby.
In the first morning an airplane exploded outside our window and left a dandelion stain on the sky. Inside, you couldn’t hear it. Like vanishing into a shower drain in blue, then a dandelion. Accordions of ash fell out of the wings and powdered the fire escape.
I went to the window; everyone else was still asleep. On the sidewalks you could see the tops of their heads still moving. I climbed down the fire escape on ladders that could slide out like trombone valves. So I was on the floor faster. Then I could see the front of their heads, like pale melons with spilt wine for the lips.
I looked down. It made me nervous to look up, where they were looking back. I followed my feet on the sidewalk and listened to the sounds, imagining where they came from: dumpsters rolled into each other, elephants getting shot. Knives. Dice inside the megaphone, the conversations you hear in sleep. Upon the layers of silence from before it seemed like crashing boats. Then I heard a sound like an underwater drum shaking out and stretching so that it soaked into your head and sat there, staying.
I looked up. There was a man made of metal twice as tall as regular men, coming towards me. He came and sat down, legs crossed, in an empty parking space. Then his forehead opened up like an orange peel coming off and four men came out, dressed in black uniforms with disembodied teeth stenciled white on the chests.
They went into a corner store, and the machine stayed put, nodding its head back and forth like someone half-asleep at a bus stop. Dozing. I crossed the street to look at it, then the uniformed men came out. They had an old man fighting to get out of their arms, screaming into a sock in his mouth, his eyes wild like chicken eyes when we held them down against the tree stump. A ladder came down from the machine’s vertebrae and they walked up, dragging him.
Then the machine was walking away. Someone else walked past and I grabbed her by the arm. “Was he a slave?”
“A slave?”
“Who ran away? Is that why they got him?”
“Let go of me.” She shook away. “Don’t talk like that.”
So I kept walking. Each block has a different smell. On the block that smelled like shoe polish I saw two apes in a large cage shooting at each other with pistols. Three people nearby burst open with stray bullets.
I had never seen things like these before.
Inside the coal mine I immediately lost my breath. We got there through a tunnel descending underground and the walls and ceilings were a black that nothing could lighten, and each rock that broke plumed out more dust than I knew rocks could hold to black the air too. It was something you got used to, Felt said. And sometimes when a piece of coal came off a bluebird flew out from behind it, but by the time it left the mines its wings were also black.
It took me half an hour every day to wash the black from my face. Often I’d think it was all gone but when I’d wake up my pillow had black on it.
And my fingers, too, would leave prints in black on everything. I began to dream in black. The dreams are hard to think of much because they were formless; different spots of dampness, pressure applied.
The men all began different colors, moon-pale or dark like new mulch, but came up black.
When we came out of the mines, coal dust was blooming into the sky like an airbag, obscuring the day’s relaxation into evening. When the sun is sugar spun into cotton candy and the jellyfish float beside the lampshade. Dirt and I were coughing more than the others, sitting on overturned milk crates to catch our breath in the oxygenless field.
“It’s harder to do this than I expected,” he said, leaning over to spit black saliva on the ground.
“It’s not the work that’s so hard,” I said.
“No, it’s not the work.”
Felt came over to us, undaunted by the dirty air, and flipped over another milk crate to sit down. “Can you do this?”
“We can do it,” I said.
“It’s easy. Most of us can do with our eyes closed, there’s little to it. You’ll find you could almost do it in your sleep.”
“I can imagine.”
“Well you two should get up before the submarine closes. You miss out on that you’ll be stiff as a bridge tomorrow; all of us know this.”
“The submarine?”
“It’s where we relax.” The miners were walking toward a distant lump, through the dust they looked like buzzards on a beached fish. We followed them. A hundred footsteps out the dust cleared and the air began to smell like cilantro again; then we could see it.
The submarine lay on a bed of dead grass and you could hear it, like the sound of a muted television I’ve come to know so well since, by the time you got close enough to see it. One after another the miners went in, watching those before us come out with orgiastic sighs and dazed walks limping away. The sky turned the color of blueberries and then it was time for Dirt, Felt and I to go in.
Inside, an old man took our pulse and put menthol on our foreheads with blush pads. Then he sat us down, walking across the room to a record player with its arm up. “I’ve never seen these two men before, Felt.” Piano with muffled bass and drums like hammered nails recorded on tin can microphones.
“They just started today. I found ‘em off to the side, trying to catch their breath— they didn’t even know about the submarine.”
“Oh, don’t skip the submarine.” I started getting that kind of restless that only happens when you know you need to keep still. It made me think of nights with the other slaves, when I would lie in bed and try to force sleep in anticipation of the soon-blooming dawn. “I catch your breath for you. I do it al
l for you just so you’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Dirt said. “I’ve never heard music before. I have never heard music before.”
“You haven’t?”
“But I know what it is.”
“A man as old as yourself never heard music before? How is that possible?”
“Don’t ask him that,” Felt said. “I don’t want him to talk about that. Less he talks about it less I’ll think about it.”
“I’m only a few days old.”
“There he goes,” Felt said, breaking the rigidity of the chairs. “Goddamn it, I said—”
“Shhh,” the old man said, holding up a single finger. “You are all coal miners, so you are all family. Let no one make you forget how much it means to be a coal miner.”
“I never do.”
The old man got three water buckets and started to wash our feet. I was still restless, and his hands were unfamiliar. It reminded me of a different time when we spent the whole day walking barefoot on pinecones to pull bird nests out of trees. By the afternoon my feet were bloody and by evening each step sent shocks like hornet stings up my body to ring in my skull. I sat down on a log to cradle them and the small dogs found me there.
No matter how much I pleaded or showed them my cuts, they kept barking. “But look,” I said, “I can’t stand up, I’m going to faint!” One of them bit into the new wounds and I could see my flesh quiver automatically around his teeth like a poked earthworm. Then I stood, and walked to the nearest nest.
That night most got in bed immediately to give their wounds as much sleep as possible to recover. But Lilly stayed up to wash my feet. And it was like all the hurt in them rinsed out into the bucket where we could see it on the surface like pond scum. I loved her then. I love her now, but have forgotten. The master came down and beat her for doing this and I just sat there, with my feet numbing in the bucket, and watched.
The old man led us into the next compartment of the submarine and told us to disrobe; there were already two men in there naked under the gas showers, leaning back and gripping the showerhead like breastfed infants. “Get out!” the old man shouted. “I told you to get out ten minutes ago!”
“I don’t wanna go…”
“That’s too much! Get out!” and I was still thinking about Lilly, how she tried to keep her shouts muffled so the ones that escaped hurt even more to hear, and all I did when I got in bed was sleep and pretend things happened differently.
Once he was able to get the others out we each had our own showerhead to be under. The gas on us felt like radiator steam and smelled like clean clothes and soon I forgot. Soon the tiles on the opposite wall resembled dislocated teeth and I dreamt of building a home inside a still-living polar bear so its heartbeat could rest over my head like headphones and I could see the colder world, where I was not, through the un-shuttered windows of its eyes.
It came to be that I got used to ending days like this.
The next day things repeated themselves; the dull thud of work building up like a migraine and released in the gas showers and the old man washing my feet. Like filling a glass box with pigeons and breaking the box before it gets so tight inside none of them can breathe. Then sitting down, and watching their wings silhouette in the sky. Each day it felt like this; there are many men who could explain to you who they are by recounting one day’s worth of events; because they repeat.
We walked away from the submarine and all of us were soundproofed to each other. The sun was like a lime in the distance as it began its hiding behind the mountains’ ice cubes; my teeth were chattering loud enough that I held my hand over my mouth to shut them up. I was fooled by the chemicals decompressing my mind—I believed I bit into my finger accidentally and felt all the pain rush through my body like an immediately growing seed and then it all retracted back, all the pain like a gone splinter and my finger newly healed or never injured. It took time to understand what I could believe and took less time to figure out it didn’t matter, that what you see is what you saw.
When I looked at Felt and Dirt and my undamaged hands they were all made out of vaseline; this is what we were. For whether we were made of flesh or cement I saw us as I saw us, fooled by the chemicals decompressing my mind, or nudged into different belief. Our faces continued to be true. I saw Dirt as the newborn he was, a naked mollusk rasping for the womb we never forget in the computer of memory. And I saw Felt as a lump of vaseline dried in the sun, rasping for nothing but continued abstinence from evaporation.
I started hearing a ringing in my head like microphone feedback which meant the feelings we got from the showers were leaving. We didn’t miss them when they left; their departure left amnesia in its wake which meant to the fooled mind that the day had never happened, except to register on a paycheck. “Where are we walking?” I asked.
“Huh,” said Felt. “You’re right, we’re going the wrong way. I lost track. Look at that beautiful sunset; I think I was trying to walk into it.”
“It looks like turtles swimming,” said Dirt.
“You idiot. It looks nothing like that.”
“To me it does.”
“It looks like seaweed that floats,” I said.
“It doesn’t look like that either. When I was young we used to sit on the cliff, where you could see the tops of all the trees come together so tight you’d think you could walk right across them. It looks more like that.”
“It doesn’t look like that,” Dirt said.
“You wouldn’t know, you were born a week ago. You’ve never seen anything that beautiful.”
“I was born in a tree!”
“You were born in a laboratory. Now hang on, we’re still going the wrong way. Let’s turn around.”
When we got to the truck, Felt asked if we wanted to go where they go at night. I thought of returning home where I pull the covers up to my nose and pretend I’m talking to someone. “Where do you go?”
“There are two places we sometimes go. You know the first, and I know how Dirt would feel, watching that. I tell you he’s lucky he met you—”
“Where’s the second place?”
“We go to the pond, to splash rocks.”
“Okay. We’ll go there.”
The water was quiet but the city behind us never softens and if you are inside of it you are always tethered to it, hearing it. I thought of how even the dogs were quieter and spoke a language I understood. The men from the mines sat wrapped up in blankets, occasionally reaching an arm out to grab a rock and throw it in the water.
“Thank you for inviting us,” I said.
“Yes, yes.”
I picked up a rock and threw it in the water but couldn’t get it to bounce on top of it like they could. There was a bridge nearby that people never stopped crossing and an old man sleeping underneath. “You know, I always used to think a city would be different,” said Dirt. “I thought everybody was part of it, all thinking about it the same.”
“Look at him,” I said, pointing to the man under the bridge.
“I don’t even know who’s in charge,” said Dirt. “Is somebody in charge?”
“Of course,” Felt said. “Learn these things for yourself.”
“Is that man always there?” I asked.
“He’s always there. Stop talking, both of you.”
One of the miners lit a cigarette and all of them, seeing him, reached for their pockets and got their own. I asked if I could have one. “So this is what you do, huh? It must be nice to sit by the pond and splash rocks,” I said.
“It’s what you’re doing,” Felt said.
“It is nice.”
I don’t understand how the others do it; the heart is like a great and thrashing marlin between the lungs that refuses to die. The heart pollutes the head with tear gas and thrashes forever for the unfathomable relief of a cat tongue lapping up the mind’s milk. None of these dreams are mine, I only recite what I overhear my heart mumble. My heart who is indifferent to me.
Ah Lilly you are a cigarette burn in my brain! I pretend I love you and it’s like filling my mouth with cotton until there’s no opening for breath and my face turns purple. I am more demented than usual. I am the kind of person that buries himself under the debris of car wrecks just for the relief of being unearthed.
Lilly it could be that you are just more weight in a brain perpetually collecting weight and if I could I would go back to before I met you, so my head could still be a kite. You who anchor me to the daily revolution of the moon. Breathe and count down from ten until your problems diminish to zero. Orange peels.
Lately I have this repeating dream of a man falling in slow-motion and his skull cracking and gray matter rushing out in slow-motion and the walls becoming pleasant-colored. Which must be how so many people end up doing so little with themselves.
Then a young kid named Pablo collapsed in those cellars and it took almost a minute for the men to stop hammering. I watched the dust come up and float slowly back down. When they did drop their tools more dust rose and fell, and from their now-frantic footsteps, so we could hardly see each other. I followed the shapes for I had grown used to following shapes in my sleep. We emerged into the daylight dragging Pablo by the armpits and I thought of Thomas dragged, then we laid him on his back.
They realized he was deeply unconscious and wiped the black off his face and teeth, and turned his head sideways to wash out his mouth. Then there was nothing to do but listen to the oceanic rasp he made breathing (like a newspaper folded, unfolded, refolded) and see the streams of black leaking out. For three days he lay in a bed asleep, leaking the black and breathing like that and when he’d cough small clouds of black would puff out. Many went to visit him; I did not. Eventually his sleep decayed into the eternal, un-waking sleep, and no more black came out.