The Deadheart Shelters

by Forrest Armstrong

It shook its head and kept closing. “No,” I said. “Let me in.” It pressed its cold metal hand against my face and pushed me back, slipping down each ladder rung sloppily so I spilt backwards and had to just watch the door close.

  I was alone. I could see them looking at me through the airplane windows. The sheep started to moan on the hay, kicking their hooves in it. Then I heard a crack and squeak like mouse-trapped mice and a sheep’s head blew out in baseball-sized circles of red. The apes were shooting at the airplane.

  The airplane tried to take off with missing parts and exploded. Like a stumbling horse made of stovetop flame. It was beautiful in a way, until my head banged off the blacktop and the apes were on top of me. Then I don’t remember things in the actual motion of their occurrence, but parts disorganized in reverse and fast-forward. They knocked stray shots all near me but never hit. They weren’t interested in hitting, only getting rid of obstacles. They held me down and outturned my pockets and I remember them half in and out of the night behind them, sometimes just stars like sugar cubes on a black seal with no faces standing in front of them or gunshots making me deaf. I couldn’t hear until the next day. On my walk home, I could see the spotlights on my shoes from the gunmen, but they couldn’t protect me now. I came to understand I was broke.

  I lay in bed, staring at the paint gooped on the ceiling like Braille and pretending my pillow was a fish in a boat, with a heartbeat unwinding into mouse footsteps and then that un-stuttering buzz that doesn’t beat. Something else suffering I could burden myself to without being afraid of blemishing. The covers were over me like I was going to fall asleep, but I spoke to the fish until I believed in it. I said, “Nobody would know how hard it is until they have it; I never woulda guessed it would be so hard. It makes everything be there. Then the things stay because you think you’ll always be able to give to them, and then a bunch of monkeys break out of their cages with guns and take it all away from you and who will believe it! I have nothing!”

  The fish wasn’t listening. I blinked, and opened my eyes in an aquarium, levitating with an oxygen tank and knots of computer mesh in the water. Bullets were pinging off my helmet, like when a nickel drops in the sink. An octopus burst from the engine of a drowned car and pushed over to the gunmen, strangling them snowfrost-blue, one at a time, and then the roof opened up and it felt like putting eye drops in—

  “Come up!” a voice said, distorted by its travel underwater to sound like a tremolo pedal. “That thing will eat you all!”

  “Throw a rope down!” I said, my voice I imagine equally obscured.

  “There is no rope, there is no time. You must make your own way up.”

  “I’m too far down!”

  “Turn your money into boxes, and make them a staircase.”

  “What?”

  “Your money. Your money will free you.”

  “I have no money!”

  “No money?”

  “The apes took it!”

  The voice stopped talking. I looked up at the face, formless like an amoeba on a microscope slide. Then the roof closed and it was dark again.

  I remember I was throwing up into my pillowcase. I didn’t think it was a fish anymore. From then on, I started to keep my money in the bank, where nobody would touch it but the tellers in surgical gloves.

  They told Dirt and me to go alone into a new part of the mines. This area was empty, so we walked disappearing through the frictionless gloom.

  The black was what we all took home from the mines, but in one of those coal rooms with six men wearing head-flashlights it happens that we make white in between the black. Here, alone with Dirt, that white was anorexic.

  The dark folds over you and you dissolve.

  “You notice how mechanical this is?” Dirt said.

  “What is?”

  “All things.”

  “I bet I notice it less than you.”

  “Why don’t you ever talk about the slaves? You never talk about the slaves.”

  “I don’t like to.”

  “But it’s just us today.”

  “It’s always just us. Don’t you think I’d talk about it if I wanted to?”

  “I want to know about them. Do you think you’ll see them again?”

  “I don’t want to.” I was surprised at myself saying it; not because I thought it wasn’t true, but because of the ease of saying it. I mouthed the words again and smiled, then realized I should be ashamed at smiling and didn’t feel shame. “I used to think I would.”

  Dirt shrugged. “They’re suffering.”

  “I suffered too. Do you know how good it feels to be able to forget that? Is that one of your false memories?”

  “Don’t talk about those. I told you I don’t think about them anymore. I’m normal.”

  “I’m normal too. Why do you want to remind me about the slaves?”

  Dirt rubbed his hand along the wall and clapped and black dust fogged out the white momentarily. When the dust fell we heard a bang and much more black rushed the white lightless. We couldn’t see and when we could we saw there was no way out.

  The first thing we did was take our hammers and start hitting at the mound made by the ceiling falling. We were calm, then. It took saying “We’ll be okay” many times to understand we wouldn’t be okay.

  “They must have blasted the wrong wall,” I said.

  “How stupid do you get?” He sat down. “Sorry.”

  “We’re lucky it didn’t crush us.”

  “Plenty die from being trapped, too. Think how long it takes to empty a wall; think about it.”

  I leaned back against the wall and breathed out black dust. “Oh well.”

  “Oh well?”

  “If we die at least we lived.”

  Dirt moaned. “You think that way! Me, I was just born! I knew it was a mistake to go with you—O…” His sobs made the words like hills, with up-walks and down-walks and a constant unsteady. It was the kind of thing that bothered you to hear, not because it made you realize something deep, but it was uncomfortable just to have happening.

  “Shut up. What will that do?”

  “Oh nothing, obviously,” but that made him cry more. And I realized how much like a child Dirt is, and I remembered when I thought to myself that I am like a child. It changed without me realizing it and then couldn’t come back.

  Dirt thrust his hands into the coal and all the loose pieces turned to powder. Floating like pollen in springtime open air but there was no open air and our lungs were hour glasses. I knew it was happening. None breathe it long enough without it happening. But Dirt was still crying, so I didn’t say it.

  At one point we heard the soft ping of hammers unburying us from the other side, but then it stopped. Dirt sank his head lower.

  “Did they give up so fast?”

  “Who knows? I wonder what time it is.”

  “We gave up too. We can’t be angry at them.”

  “There’s nothing to be angry at.”

  His face got that weird kind of tense before crying so I quickly said, “They’re just getting different tools.”

  Meanwhile, I imagined we were in one of the soap operas I watch when I want to simplify things.

  There was a checkers table like there always was, but we were in a white-painted room with windows that took up whole walls. The platform the board sat on was made of bones from an elephant leg, because in soap operas you can buy anything. I’ve always noticed this. It’s as if the money’s always there without anybody getting it and in America we all accidentally dream this might be true. Today it was me and Mark’s turn to play. He was being like he always is and not much fun to play with but we were in a soap opera.

  “The problem with the youth is they got no respect,” Mark said. “They just want to do. But I watched checkers for years before I ever touched one.”

  “What you know about that?” Abe called. “You half as old as me. I could say things about you folks, too.”

  “Well shoot, old man.”r />
  We said these things because we had nothing else to worry about. In real life, where we did, we might have said them too, but they would have meant different things. Abe held a glass of red wine above his head, looking at it, and shook it too hard so some got out on the floor.

  Lilly walked in heavily-makeup’d. “Hello, boys.”

  “Hello, Lilly,” we all answered in unison. Mark muttered something that wasn’t meant to be understood. She sat on a stool and held her face like it would break if dropped, then stood up and opened the oven even though it was off.

  “What is it?” I asked. My voice was much fuller in the soap opera, because I knew what to say in advance.

  “Oh, I’m just worried about Clyde, that’s all.’

  “Always worried about somethin’. Pete, quit lookin’ away, it’s your turn.”

  “What’s wrong with Clyde?”

  “Oh, you know what he does. I’m worried that it won’t stop.”

  “Your turn, Pete.”

  I looked down and arbitrarily moved a checker from one spot to another. “It’ll stop, Lilly.”

  I got bored of thinking this. There’s a reason I just watch television, and that’s enough for me.

  The starkness of the collapsed coal mine came back to me. Dirt was having a nap on the floor, getting black.

  Eventually he woke up, turning his head and blinking a lot then letting out a long sigh when he remembered where he’d fallen asleep. “It’s one of those things you think you might’ve dreamt,” he said. Sitting, he refused to look in the direction of the collapsed wall. He hummed tunelessly, stood up very briefly and sat.

  “Tell me about the slaves.”

  “Stop asking me that.”

  “We’re here for a while. Listen—there’s no sounds of them trying to rescue us. Like you said we could die. Just tell me.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Well then please talk. Say something.”

  I thought back but each day seemed coated with blurred plastic, so I could see nothing particular in them. Imagine if I told him, “The story of the day is always the same—I wake up and then I am here. Here, I get in a way of doing things that I don’t notice time elapsing. It’s like someone shaking me awake, how it ends.” It might have made it easier to leave. But instead I told him the only story I could remember.

  “I saw a man get hit by a car the other day. He had a phone pressed up against his ear with his shoulder and in his right hand he held a cigarette. I think that’s why it happened. One of those taxis was going too fast and he was just going too fast and suddenly he flew up and over the whole thing and right after he hit the ground, already, blood was rolling into the gutters.”

  “Did he die?”

  “I don’t know. He must have. He didn’t even twitch.”

  Dirt groaned. “That makes me feel better.”

  In the soap opera we walked out on the back porch, me and Abe and some red wine. The afternoon poured into our glasses and poured out of them singing like trumpets faintly, as if the afternoon was separate from us by acres. Almost like memory. It was one of those moments I always wished I had and when I watch the kids fly kites it feels like I’m almost having it.

  “I’m going to pass soon,” Abe said. “You know that I’m going to pass soon?”

  “Die?”

  He laughed into his red wine. “Yes. Die. For good.”

  “Why are you saying that?”

  “Well I’m old, Pete. A man can only get so old before time shouts Enough!”

  I shook my head. “Let’s think of simpler things.”

  “That’s why I love you, Pete. You don’t let the rest get you. Look out, look at all of this,” he said, motioning to the land. The sun was laying its head upon the pillow of the mountains tiredly. The hills rolled like my hand rolled over Lilly’s undressed body (stop). In the heliotrope water the ostriches were waiting for the trout, and on the shore the pyramid was made out of dehydrated bones. The bulls stood with nothing to run at. There was more, much more; peach trees and the missions that animal go on, unbound to time, and creeks like our wine glasses; but in soap operas who notices these things? “It all belongs to you when I pass. You, not Mark—know why? Mark’s always thinking how bad things can get, and you never do. You just let things happen.” He finished his wine and put the glass down, turning away from the land. “I ain’t afraid. Life’s been too good to me.”

  I turned to Dirt and said, “Don’t be afraid to die. To have lived at all is lucky.”

  Dirt shook his head. “Life hasn’t done anything for me. It just started and it’s just ending and all that happened in between was all this black. It’s all I ever see anymore. If I get out of here I’m quitting on the spot, I’m leaving, and trying to figure out what was really supposed to happen.” He was breathing heavily, now, as if the breaths were weighted down going in and out of the body. His skin, in spots where the black wasn’t, got paler. “What about you? You gonna quit?”

  I opened my eyes at him. “Why would I ever?”

  I tried to remember the spot I left off in my soap opera, but now when I looked at the fields all I could see was Clyde, tranced in melancholy under the hiding of an apple tree. I had ignored him before.

  Two days passed uninflected in that room. The mice crept in with their white fur they’d managed to keep from dirtying, and stayed with us, like they could sense our loneliness and stayed to say Everything is lonely. You are not alone only in that you are alone. We began to get hungry but I had gone long without eating before, it was only the thirst that bothered me, but Dirt couldn’t stop moaning about both and nothing would pacify him. “Don’t waste the air too—the air is limited.”

  Soap opera. It was me and Lilly and we were just kids so I had to pretend I knew what we looked like. Her hair by the time I met her was a wheat field, with the bronze and gold stranding together, darkened by the shadows wheat fields hold in them; but in my imagination’s counterfeit of her youth it was if you could trap sunlight in transparent strings. Drifting like a silk napkin in the windless. Her eyes were softer than her eyes now; the way bread innocently gets stale. She was beautiful then as she is beautiful now and O the desire is not the beauty but the beholding it.

  I was hiding in a tree disguised as a sparrow. The gray bark was warm and smooth and I was rubbing it, simulating it was her. But this is how things work. She stooped down in the overgrown grass and pulled up parts of a crashed airplane that must have rained like clouds rain as it fell, for the bulk of the plane was nowhere. Only fragments that escaped the smoke’s swallow. When I thought of flying to her I held the branches tighter, reminding myself I am wingless.

  (I must be losing my fucking mind for love) (None of this could be a soap opera Nobody would watch this)

  (It only matters to me. It’s sad when you realize things like that but it shouldn’t be. You always know these kinds of things, unspoken.)

  Clyde tried to hang himself and each time the rope broke and he couldn’t stand up for an hour. He didn’t sob; if you saw him you might mistake it for boredom.

  This hasn’t happened yet. Let’s pray for never.

  Lilly put everything she found in a funnel and let it spill back onto the floor. Then she stepped over it, like she forgot it was there.

  I watched her do this repeatedly and fell deeper in love. The drowning man who doesn’t try to swim—“It is what God would will it.”

  When she saw me, I fell out of the tree, and she knew I wasn’t a sparrow.

  “Tell me about the slaves,” Dirt said. He had been looking progressively worse; growing so thin the pressure of constant shrinking alone could kill him without the hunger. Every breath or word that left his mouth wore the black dust over it like a dress. So, this time, I obliged.

  “What do you want to know?”

  He leaned back and thought awhile, for we had the luxury of time. It meant he did not have to say what first came to mind. “Did they realize their burden?”

&nb
sp; “I’ve been away from them long now and I still hardly realize it.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Okay, no, I realize it. But I hardly pity it.”

  “Then you’re cold. I’ve always known you were cold.”

  “Maybe our burden is that we were forced to get cold. Or at least to be unquestioning. The truth is it doesn’t help. I did the only thing you do. I ran.”

  “And didn’t go back?”

  “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

  “I bet that’s a lie. I bet you thought you were gonna do it. Now you don’t wanna lose it for yourself—”

  “Stop.” I hit the ground when I said it and the black dust curled like kettle steam through my fingers. “Stop. That’s plenty.”

  It was as if the sun escaped its airtight plastic and rushed out into the sky like laundry-water, the way I saw things then. Lilly’s face above mine like a black thumbprint; her un-featured girlishness. “You poor bird,” she said cupping me in her hands. Warm milk that did not soak into, and slept. As she neared me to her mouth I couldn’t see the light tissueing in the sky anymore, just the blurred shape of her head getting bigger, and soon it was all.

  If time were the thing dragging you behind it. The hungrier I got the more things I thought like this. Lilly with her legs open and the wetness, but no moans. I never heard her moan, I never made her moan. If I did could I put it on a cassette tape forever? I thought If Dirt were an animal and the meat bullfrog-soft. Why think of it?

  It can be a relief to realize you’re imperfect, but not if you hadn’t wondered about it before. Myself with no lips and hers when pressed against mine breaking like glass water bottles, making a hole in my face that all the white moths of ecstasy could rush into, and the termites that crawled out—(this never happened, but could’ve). O (because we believe our love is for the privileged only).