The Deadheart Shelters

by Forrest Armstrong

  The money we made eased the memory of death, as it does all things. I’ve learned this already and it’s one of the things I know most now. The money put cushions underneath me and Dirt and let me soundproof my walls, so I could pretend I was still in the place I left. We worked up the money for our own place. Once alone in a room just mine, I started talking myself to sleep at night, because these were the sorts of things I missed.

  But the money was warm milk in my pocket that didn’t soak through; I kept my hands dipped in it. One morning we were in the mines, working on getting more.

  “You shoulda seen the guy last night,” Felt said. All of us were hammering along the wall, letting the dust powder our shoes. The kid who’d taken Pablo’s place came by sometimes to shovel up what he could. “He begged.”

  “Don’t tell us,” Dirt said.

  “No, you wouldn’t want to hear about it, would you?”

  “It’s wrong what you do.”

  Felt’s grip slipped and he hit himself on the fingers. He tried to shake the pain out, leaning back and biting his bottom lip, then turned on Dirt with the hammer. I stood in between, and soon he enlightened.

  “I won’t kill him” Felt said. “I’m working now. But remember you would have died that day if not for my word. You’d be dead.”

  “It’s wrong.”

  “Dirt, be quiet,” I said.

  “Listen to your friend. You ought to pretend you aren’t what you are. You’d prefer it.”

  Both of us made believe we were different things. The scars on my cheeks got soft enough to be unseen; I was just an ordinary man. Dirt never spoke up about the newborns again. If asked about his family he’d say, “They’re dead. I don’t like to think about it.”

  “Shit’s fucked up in the city,” one man said on the block that smells like brewer’s yeast. “Don’t look down.”

  I liked being ordinary. I took to simple things. When we didn’t have to work we sat in the park watching the kids fly kites, and the plump pink birds laid eggs on the water. Their eggs bobbed on the surface, clicking together like bocce balls, and the sound made us tired and relaxed our jaws. It was easy not to think of things and if you closed your eyes you’d half-dream of the clicks, pebble-dotting the blankness of the mind. I liked to watch and listen to these things and not think about them.

  My work seemed to me a tongue that dissolved time placed onto it. I forgot it was there, usually. I stopped minding most things and got tired a lot, which made it easier to go into the place where things didn’t matter. Sometimes I’d think of Lilly but stopped thinking before it could hurt. For the absence of despair I’d give the absence of all else. I did this.

  In the park with our eyes closed, Dirt said to me, “You know how I used to get so worked up about how weird things were? The way my mind is always fooling me, what it means. I stopped. I don’t care anymore.”

  “Good.”

  “We don’t have time to care, do we? Or at least it’s not important to.”

  “I can’t imagine what good it does. Where I came from, we never had anything to do but care, and it never got us anywhere. We wondered and suffered. Now I don’t wonder and everything’s here.”

  “I just want to be like everybody else.”

  “You are.” I opened my eyes to see him smiling. Both of us felt good. I found that it was easy to feel this good and let nothing bother you. We went to the mines when we went to the mines and the money kept happening. Soon I bought a television set.

  The city felt like a moving elevator again. All I could hear was the woosh of unicyclists passing me and in the road they were marching, slapping the ground with hairbrushes. Four of them, all covered in vinegar and charcoal, dragging a cradle made of dislocated plumbing by ropes behind them.

  “Make noise!” one of the men dragging shouted, fighting for breath as he spoke. “Make noise!” The people around me got loud in one syllable uproars of lazy sound. Like they just opened their mouths and pushed. I did it too, and then they pulled the cradle closer.

  In the cradle was our king, wearing a rhinoceros head with stems of grape bunches in the eye sockets. You could see his eyes multiplied through them like mosquitoes but each one seemed focused on a different one of us and looking directly into. He pounded the railing twice, so you could hear it only barely like bats on telephone poles, and everyone stopped.

  “Today the sun told me he will float to a different planet if we don’t feed him. He is hungry,” the king said. “Who would like to feed the sun?” Then I could feel it in all the people, something strange like when you try to touch two magnets together that don’t attract. He looked over us like we were a grocery market. “Why don’t you want to feed the sun when he is hungry? Would you rather it be dark forever?”

  “Don’t worry,” the man beside me whispered, hardly moving his lips. “The sun never leaves. It can never leave. He’s lying.”

  “You!” The king pointed at him with the tip of a machete. “Come here.”

  The man pretended not to hear him.

  “You! You in the sunglasses and soiled shirt, come here!”

  He acted like he was surprised and walked up to the cradle. “Yes, my king?”

  “Why do you say things like that?”

  “I didn’t say anything, my lord.”

  “I heard you. I hear everything— ” he said, looking up at the rest of us, “—when you turn in your sleep, I hear your bedsprings creak. I know which block you’re walking on when you pause to tie your shoes—I know how long it takes you to tie them. There’s nothing in this city I don’t hear. What cannot be heard, the sun tells me.”

  “I believe you heard it, but it wasn’t me who spoke.”

  The king looked down at him, the man trembling and trying to hold his breath to stop but shaking even more every time he relapsed. “Do you promise?”

  “I promise you, my king.”

  “Okay, good man. Give me your hand.” The man reached up with a euphoric look on his face.

  The look quickly dissolved.

  One quick hack of the king’s machete and the bones erupted from the back of the man’s hand like cigarette butts. The king walked him up into the cradle like that, then swung the machete north through the man’s eyes to his temples and kicked him off the back.

  We still stood like wrong magnets.

  We still stood like wrong magnets.

  “Now the sun is fed. Tomorrow we will have brightness.” He pounded the railing twice more and the parade moved onward.

  Behind streamed a procession of music or what they must have thought was music but music to me was always the music in the mobiles above our beds, with the slaves. They dragged a net filled with vacuum cleaners and computer keyboards, smashing them with baseball bats like it was music. And the broken machines they left behind them were like footprints and the broken man like a glove you take off of your hand.

  The blackness I carried home with me every night became a comfortable shadow to drag beside my own shadow. It was who I was. Soon I stopped missing anything because it was easier. In two months I was no longer an escaped slave but a regular person; I was this way forever. I’d already paid rent twice, and I liked paying it. The money was always there as long as I gave myself to it.

  There was a night back in my old life when the conversation ended and I was the last to stop talking. Sleep came gently, so I thought it was there when it’s not, and the sound of a screw being turned loose somewhere happened in my head as a bucket being drawn to the top of a well. When it got close enough to lift out, the bucket was full of breathing. I turned it upside-down to drink the water I thought was there and the breaths passed into my mouth. They became mine, I started breathing like that. I woke up from discomfort and tried to get calm, and nothing changed. Then I realized the breaths didn’t belong to me.

  Clyde was sitting like a monk with his head bowed and his arms upturned over his legs, holding the loose screw. It looked like he was writing on himself, pausing to dip t
he screw into the ink of quick breaths becoming unhidden moans. Soft, like the skin of a peach cut into. And the juice dripping out.

  “Clyde?” His suppressed sounds cracked into a high-pitched gasp, then he couldn’t stop making the tortured whine like an unfed dog. He’d clear his throat as if to talk and get louder. I didn’t understand then, but I know now. “Clyde?”

  “Shut up!” he whispered shakily. You could hear him swallow this far away. “Shut up” (and his voice was steadier and not a whisper) “You’ll wake up the rest of them.”

  “They never wake up. Nobody wakes up once they’re asleep.”

  “You did. Now shut up. Shut up.”

  “What are you doing over there?”

  “Shut up!”

  “What’sa matter?” Abe asked, in the kind of voice that says I’ve only returned for a moment.

  “Nothin’, Abe, hit the sack again.”

  “You okay, Clyde? You havin’ one of them nights?”

  “Yeah, a little, but it’s nothin’. Go back to sleep.”

  Abe propped up on his elbows and tried to get used to the dark so he could see. “Boy, why you sittin’ up like that? You get back under the covers.”

  In the dark we could see him shuddering because it made the dark shudder too. Then he was sobbing and nothing was hidden. “I’m sorry, Abe. This isn’t for you. This isn’t for any of you.”

  “What isn’t, Clyde?”

  He was crying so loud it seemed to make a new candle in the middle of the room. All of us woke up. Mark turned in the bed beside him and said “Shit, kid, keep it down! Why do you think pillows were invented?” Then a moment later, “Let me see your arms! Give me your fucking arms!”

  Clyde turned quickly facedown so his cries became something the bed drank. He had folded his arms up underneath him.

  “What’s going on?” Lilly asked in that way she has of asking. “What’d he do, Mark?”

  “Clyde, you’re never going to do this again. You’re never going to do this. Don’t you think all of us sometimes wish we could?”

  The next morning we could see the rust-color that his arms left on his chest, and we knew what happened.

  One of them was sitting at the mouth of the mines when Dirt and I arrived. He was propped up by two others. His face was swollen to be unrecognizable and he kept coughing out small bursts of throw-up. The men were pressing dislocated rhino horns into the flesh that broke like warm potatoes and all you could see inside was meat and grayness leaking out. Like rain in an ashtray. He kept sighing and looking less.

  “What happened?” I asked Felt.

  “Sometimes when we get to the place that stops being coal in a wall, where the coal stops and it’s just wall, we tap a hive of flying slugs. You know, those things you saw your first night here?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think he’s allergic. This rarely happens.” He motioned for me to step aside with him and said, “He’d be very lucky not to die. We can drain him of what we can drain him, and if it’s not enough, it’ll take him. He was swarmed badly.”

  “I didn’t know those bugs could do things like that.”

  “Only in large doses. We all ran and it’s like the joke about the two men running from the bear—ever heard it?”

  “No.”

  He looked down and shook his head. “Sorry. This is no time for jokes.”

  We all stood around him as if he were a performer. His face puffed less by the time they said “Well we can’t stand around him all day. Let’s go back in.”

  But he wasn’t okay, and we didn’t think he’d be okay.

  The mines were empty, the bugs had all left for the open air beyond them, but if you pretended you could still hear the buzzing it became really there. The hammer I touched seemed electric with buzzing. I looked up at Dirt, but didn’t think he heard anything.

  “Sure is sad, though,” he said, “all the way humans can be so easily made and unmade. I was born excited for life but soon life left me.”

  “You’ve got nothing to complain about. How about that guy out there, really dying?”

  He turned his hammer over and pursed his lips. “It’s more about the excitement.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t mean to play it down.”

  “I think it was a mistake that you came along. I think I was supposed to wait for someone else.”

  And I couldn’t help remembering Lilly, though lately I’d tried not to.

  What I meant about how love inflates by itself:

  It’s easy to explain and there’s nothing harder. It’s because it’s the things you know but don’t want to say.

  When I’m in love with Lilly it’s my own love I’m in love with— No. It’s that she loves me. Or it’s that we love each other but then Are we in love? Her mind to me was always the feeling of scooping mud up in your hands. Her skin was bathwater I could fall asleep in. Her smell made me forget and her voice as a wordless sound was a boat I could float away in. What does that mean?

  Sometimes I could tell her everything, everything, the few things I thought (they were few— I am a simple person and always getting simpler) and she would listen wordlessly and nod and say, “I know.” Then motion up to a bird that just landed on a branch and say “Look at that.” I don’t know which is better. Sometimes I loved it and sometimes it choked me.

  Oxygenless, but that’s how love feels either way.

  Let me just say that I never had a mother and I always wondered what that would be like; to have one.

  Do these things make sense together?

  I never found her much but I still think I do.

  Which me is the one saying this?

  I take it back. I love her. I’ve always loved her and I always will. It feels good to love something.

  Or

  Sometimes I think I only think what’s convenient. I’m too lazy to learn things and all I want is to be comfortable.

  One night I woke up with that feeling like your bed is tilting forward and you’re about to fall off, then you’re not moving. To the heart it’s as if fallen. It made me so uncomfortable I couldn’t sleep and started sweating through the pillowcase, turning from side to side then on my back, turning again… until I could see the sky slacken, in that way that preludes the next day. I got up and put on a shirt, which dampened immediately against me. Then I undid the locks and went outside.

  At night you can see the searchlights from the gunmen on the roof. They follow your sneakers no matter where you go as if to say It is never dark. Then I went to the harbor, where their lights don’t reach. I saw the boats coming in to the left like bright rabbits and heard steam whistles. Packages exploded into the pattern of ladybugs on the dock.

  It seemed you could go nowhere to be alone, not even at night when things should sleep, not even in the mind when outdoors is banging against it.

  I wandered until I got to the place we sit to skip rocks. I sat on the cubed granite and tried to skip rocks again, but they just went to the bottom. A moth-sized fire turned on and off underneath the bridge, and I remembered the old man from before.

  The fire turned on again. It stayed, burning into dark pebbles and making them bright, then dissolved through them. I heard coughing and it looked like gunpowder in the air, against the dark. I walked up the staircase with the broken railing and crossed the bridge.

  I walked down the staircase with the fixed railing and he shouted, knocking over the milk crate he was sitting on. I could see him this close. His skin was tinted like elephants by the night but his eyes were daytime-colored, the white as if windows with lamps inside them. “What the hell?” He was stuffing a pipe in his pocket and backing up.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said, advancing.

  “What do you want?”

  “You might know me. I come to skip rocks sometimes.”

  He paused, looking at the water as if rocks were bouncing off it now. “Yeah, of course I know you. You know how many times I get woke up by you idiots? A rock bounces
off my forehead and kaput… there goes my dream.”

  “Oh. I had no idea—”

  “You know how important dreaming is to me?”

  “I like it too.”

  “It’s all I have.” I didn’t say anything. He took the pipe out of his pocket and the moth-sized flame turned on and off, draining into the pebbles.

  “Those are the black rocks, huh.”

  “The black rocks?” He laughed. “Guess so…”

  “They make crazy things happen.”

  He laughed again, harder this time. “You bet. Now get the fuck outta here, kid.”

  I walked up the staircase with the fixed railing and down the stairs with the broken one. I got to the part of the city where the mechanical gnomes build airplanes and the sheep lay on the haystacks to watch. I sat on the haystacks beside them; our ears drowned by drills and jackhammers. Blue sparks shot from machinery like blood-drained thumbs and then another sound chewed through the construction, breath through a hollowed antler exasperated and coming near.

  “Stop!” the man shouted when he got to us. “You have to hide. Go inside the airplane. The apes got loose. They’re running loose with guns and shooting through windshields and storefronts! Hide!”

  The gnomes filed into the airplane and I ran up to the man, grabbing his sleeves. “What will you do? Where should I go?”

  “Run home, kid!”

  “My home’s too far!”

  “Hide!”

  I ran to the airplane and tried to stand in line. The gnomes kept going robotically and calm and finally when it was my turn, one started to close the door.

  “Let me in!”