The Deadheart Shelters (8 page)

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 silkworm in my brain! I pretend I don’t love you and my head starts whistling like a train horn with the chain pulled down forever until I stop pretending and the pond face gets calm again. It’s like putting your head underwater in a hot tub.

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.

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.