The Deadheart Shelters (9 page)

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 the 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.