Pillow Read online

  With all the excitement, Pillow had totally forgotten to give Artaud his stick back. Usually, forgetting things upset Pillow, but he was in a good mood. The whole afternoon evaporated when he entered the empty room. He more saw himself go through the motions of checking under the bed, kicking a hole in a wall and pretending that Artaud would ever have been there when he got back than he felt them. His smile set a personal record for insincerity as he realized that this was the first time he’d left Artaud unchained. The lunatic had plastered a note to the door with bloody snot and some pus.

  Dear Pillow,

  Although I suspect you empathize with me on some level, I also suspect that your kind looks are contingent on your ascribing a ‘gentleness’ to my soul that does not, in fact, exist. You, sir, have one foot sunk in the grave of kindness and the other nestled in the wondrous incubation chamber of cruelty. I know for a fact that you do not have as clear an understanding of cruelty as a person so violent should. So I am leaving your care.

  I once thought you my friend, but the fact that you pried the only object of any meaning from my arms shows you to be a monster of custom and shallowness who thirsts for the sweet, heated milk of my pain.

  You know as well as I do that the walking stick belongs, coincidentally, to St. Patrick, and was once the property of Satan himself.

  You must be aware of how true and trenchant my love for that walking stick is.

  I am obliged to return my beloved to its homeland, Ireland. I have singlehandedly cured all my many ailments, and I have done it with the power of my conviction, and with the ferocity of my energy. I need your feeble caretaking as much as I shall need a stiff breeze across my back when I emerge from the water, having swum across the entire Atlantic Ocean.

  I have a mission on this earth, a mission simply to love as only milky blood can love corruption.

  A.A.

  Pillow folded the note and put it in his pocket. He counted the ways he hadn’t fucked up on one hand.

  Getting back in the car, Pillow paused to look at the walking stick. He reached over and pulled it into his lap. It had a nice texture to it, you had to say that, but it really wasn’t much to look at. The stick was carved out of deeply knotted wood, it had all sorts of weird knobs and bumps along the side, and it was stained a putrid yellowish brown. The handle was weirdly big, a bit larger than could comfortably fit in Pillow’s palm. It had grotesque mini-knots curving all the way back into it and was sort of fractured, the splits in the wood palpable as he held it, that chunk of Artaud’s lip still stuck fast.

  Pillow sighed. He spoke to the cane.

  ‘Well, sweetheart, seems like you made an impression.’

  The walking stick stayed silent.

  Pillow didn’t call ahead before he went to Gwynn’s. She tsked three times over the intercom and buzzed him up. As Gwynn opened her door she reached up and pulled Pillow’s lips forcefully together. ‘Shut your mouth before you open it. It’s always an important thing to do.’

  ‘I’ll give you the good news first.’

  Gwynn waited. ‘Before somebody starts to smell my dead body, Pillow.’

  Pillow dropped to one knee and whipped out the coins. ‘I found them.’

  Gwynn clapped once and opened the box. She looked at it for a few seconds, then handed the box back and tented her hands. ‘Well, you certainly do know how to make even the most jaded old lady’s heart skip the odd beat, don’t you, Pillow? But I’ve been around long enough to know that good news first means bad news to come.’

  ‘I’m in big fucking trouble with Breton and Don. I was supposed to kill Artaud, but he knew where the coins were, so …’

  ‘So you stashed him and he got away.’

  ‘So I stashed him and he ran away because he fell in love with that fucking walking stick.’

  ‘Story checks out. I maybe should have seen that coming.’

  ‘Should you?’

  ‘What’s your plan?’

  ‘Find him.’

  ‘That’s not a plan, my friend, that’s a goal.’

  Pillow bounced the coin box between his hands. The reality of the coins hadn’t really hit him until he saw Gwynn react to them. It was a trick Pillow had been relying on for most of his life: pick a person you trust and watch them take it in. He’d watch their body react to it, see their eyes twitch this way or that, and that would tell him most of what he should think of the situation. Gwynn pinched a strand of his hair and pulled it straight.

  ‘If you want my advice, just remember what I’ve always said: one can’t just keep carrying one’s father’s corpse around everywhere.’

  Pillow stood up and walked over to the window. Gwynn’s condo was at that height where people look the size of really big dogs. ‘How long until you can get your buyer in line?’

  ‘A few days. Should you get out of town?’

  Pillow reached up and ran his fingers down the glass, leaving distinct smudges trailing down the freshly clean glass. ‘I can look after myself. Just talk to your buyer. I want this all to be over.’

  Pillow heard Gwynn stand and shuffle over, stop a couple feet behind him.

  ‘I thought that too. That I wanted the action to stop, that if I could only rest I would be happy. I thought I would be kind, calm. And then I rested for a few years. I entertained myself with a whole wild life full of memories. But no matter how much you did, if you sit around long enough anyone will realize that memories are just hunting horns whose sound dies in the wind.’

  ‘Who hunts with horns? That shit’s crazy wrong anyway. Say, Gwynn, just say, you were looking for a crazed priest on a love-quest for a cane, where would you start?’

  She tapped him on the back, took his arm and led him to the door. They hugged. Pillow closed his eyes and craned his head down to rest on her shoulder.

  ‘When people wanted to make a machine that could walk they used hard circles as the legs.’

  Pillow snorted and grabbed Gwynn in a gentle headlock, tousled her hair, sending it out in wide, spraying wisps. ‘Thanks for the help there, Advice Column McRiddlebook.’

  She pushed her way out of Pillow’s arm and kicked him hard in the shin. ‘How did you know my maiden name?’

  Pillow didn’t put the coins away when he first got home. The only sure way he knew not to lose things was to keep them in his pocket forever. He went to wash his hands and he ended up, basically, playing in the sink for a long time. Pillow was watching the water run pleasantly over his hands and down the drain, feeling the cold slide across his skin, when he remembered Emily’s storage key. He hid the coins in the red-model-train box at the bottom of the giant model pile. He looked at the box for a long time, repeated the words ‘bottom box’ three times, then he left.

  Pillow knew for a moral certainty that each minute passing without telling Emily about what he was doing was another minute of fucking up so badly he might not be able to fix it. But he kept not telling her, for hours and days on end. It was a sensation Pillow was familiar with, knowing that he’d made a horrible initial mistake and then just letting it keep going. In fact, Pillow had been sporadically feeling that way since that day when he was sixteen and his coach had frankly and clearly explained the long-term consequences of a career in boxing. It had faded in and out for years, and had disappeared pretty much completely when he’d been making a lot of money and Mike Tyson had been telling him how fun it was to watch him, and the girls he’d been staring at all his life had started propositioning him in hotel lobbies and at signing events. After Solis, that feeling had been so present that Pillow would not have called it a discrete feeling so much as he would have called it the way living his whole life seemed.

  Mistakes. It all came down to mistakes, and he’d made so many that he could never fix. Artaud was loose and dangerous, Pillow had no idea how long moving the coins would take, the cops were on him and he was sure he’d been playing that wrong. Somehow he knew he needed to think really hard now. To make a game plan, but he was thinking too slowly,
and the faster he tried to think, the more confused he got, and the more confused he got, the more he went back to thinking about Bataille. It took him a really long time to adjust to the light when he re-opened his eyes, and his vision stayed blurry even after he’d gotten used to it.

  Pillow still had some of the coke from Gwynn, and an emergency OxyContin he’d been keeping for Artaud. He crushed up the pill and mixed the powder up with the coke. He leaned right into it and came up smiling, one hand plastered over his eye. His dreary, off-white apartment took on a vague bioluminescence. He stood up and moved around to do some thinking.

  After a couple minutes he grabbed a pencil and started a chart on his wall. The coins were in the middle, the people were on the outside. All the people had shaky lines pointing to the coins, and haphazardly to each other. Pillow was trying to keep track of who knew what and when, who did what to whom and when. He got all the information down, but he didn’t have the order, and soon the wall became a confused mess of lines and scratches.

  When he stepped back from the flow chart, he still had his sense of humour, so he laughed awhile, rubbed his eye and wiped the wetness off on his pants. Then he started shadow boxing.

  Even shadow boxing, Pillow threw more feints than he did punches, and he spent about twice as much time flashing tricky footwork as he did settling down and throwing. So he moved around his living room, eyes on his shadow, ignoring the tentative knocking on the front door until it went away as he kept faking out the wall. He did that until he’d soaked his clothes with sweat, and then he took the clothes off and went into his bedroom. He got under the covers and twitched slowly toward sleep.

  Pillow thought about the time when things had been simple, when the whole world had just been waking, working and sleeping. Pillow thought about whales and thumbs and oil lamps. Pillow thought about balloons leaking air. Pillow thought about running in sand. Pillow thought about rental properties and tiny trust funds and owning a corner store. Pillow thought about a lot of things he should have done when he’d had a million dollars lying around. Pillow thought about baskets and benches and getting away clean. Pillow thought about claws and coffee cups and monkeys holding hands.

  Pillow thought about choking on water.

  Pillow didn’t so much wake up very late the next day as he woke up at a normal hour and stared at one spot on the floor for a very long time. By the time he got over to Emily’s she had already eaten breakfast (and a small second breakfast).

  Before he managed to say anything she put one flat hand on his chest and said, ‘First off, fuck you. Secondly, I work, and this is my day off. And if I start with you I’m going to be mad and stressed out all day. I want to have fun, and I don’t want to fight with you, I don’t want to nag you, and I don’t want to pressure you. I want to chill out. But you listen to me, son, and I will give you this space. Way more than is, honestly, reasonable. So you handle your stuff, and you get no excuses. Just deal with it. I’m going to get a lot more pregnant, and then you’re going to be around a normal amount and you’re not going to randomly disappear, or you’re not going to be around at all. I’m fine on my own, and I don’t need anything, I just want you to care and show it. That’s it.’ She took a long, uneven breath and reset her face into a smile. ‘Now, you need to hit this instep. You take that thumb and you dig it the fuck in. I’m no bed of roses, you’re not going to crush my petals, just hit it hard.’

  She moved backward into the bedroom and flopped on the bed with her foot straight up in the air. Pillow grabbed the foot.

  ‘Ooooohhk. Oooooohhhk. Yeah, you can stay.’

  After what was, objectively, a pretty great foot massage, Pillow put his hand up to give her a high five, and Emily just rested her head softly in his palm.

  Pillow attempted to shape Emily’s pubic hair into a primitive faux-hawk (the attempt actually made the hair look less like a faux-hawk than it had in the first place).

  ‘You should be a pubic-hair model.’

  Emily was scanning the ceiling with her eyes, for nothing in particular. ‘You should be a pubic-hair stylist.’

  Pillow moved his head back and examined his work with a stylist’s discerning eye. ‘Uhh, maybe not.’

  Pillow smeared his eyes across her belly. ‘What a nice stomach you have.’

  ‘Yeah, well enjoy it now, ’cause I’m going to get soooooo fat, and it’s all your dick’s fault! I already have you sucked in, you can’t get out now, so I’m going to get extra fat, unreasonably fat, to punish you. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you have some pretty serious body-image issues.’

  ‘You’re not going to follow through on this.’

  ‘What? You think it’s hard to do? Look outside, buddy. In some cultures it’s a sign of prestige. I’m going to get wealthy fat. Corpulent.’ She stuck her belly out as far as she could.

  ‘I love you. And I would love you if you were a cow.’

  ‘A cow like how my grandma calls other mean old ladies a cow, or a cow with spots and like twelve teets?’

  ‘The one with all the tits.’

  ‘Moooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.’

  ‘I love you.’

  She looked him in the eyes and nodded soulfully. ‘Moooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.’

  Artaud was a man with very serious needs, so Pillow figured the way to find him was to put the word out to heroin dealers and hospitals. He spent the last of the afternoon dropping in on dealers and some receptionists at the sketchier hospitals, carefully avoiding mentioning Artaud’s name.

  A person less reliant on physical intimacy than Pillow probably would have spent the whole day looking for Artaud instead of starting the search in the late afternoon with his muscles pleasantly tired and relaxed and his outlook on life warmed and softened with affection.

  Pillow was aware of that, but he figured that the only way he would win was to do his unique best. There were always stronger, faster and smarter people, but none of them did things exactly the way he did. When he’d been doing camps that was what he’d always told the kids: the only thing you’re guaranteed to be better at than everyone else is being your own stupid, strange, probably inadequate little self. Somebody else is probably a little bit better at everything else. Even at the peak of his fame, Pillow had not been a particularly popular guest coach at youth camps.

  Pillow was confident he could find Artaud. After all, it was fairly easy to spot and remember a half-dead lunatic in a priest’s outfit with his jaw dangling off his face. The problem for Pillow was that he didn’t just need to find Artaud, he needed to find Artaud without word getting back to Breton that he was looking.

  After he’d finished his rounds, Pillow bought and threw out a large salad, sat in his car for a few minutes and decided to call it a day.

  By the time Pillow saw Don it was too late to turn around. Costes was leaning heavily against the gate of the apartment complex, lazily bouncing his left foot against the joint of the hinge. Pillow pulled up short, letting his hand float a bit above his head to block the sun.

  ‘Is that an autograph seeker?’

  Don shifted the large vaguely gun-shaped bulge in his coat pocket to point at Pillow. He used his other hand to play along the length of his scar. ‘Have I ever told you why I don’t like making out with guys?’

  Don kept his hand firmly in his bulging coat pocket. He stood up straight and continued. ‘The problem with making out with guys isn’t that I’m massively heterosexual or anything. As an idea, I like it. But once you get past the idea, and you’re actually doing the thing … it’s sort of nice. I mean, it’s kissing. But it’s a very alienating geography, a man’s body. With women, there’s a general terrain you’re navigating. Places to go, things to do. With a man it’s just torso, and these, like, these chest muscles. It feels really empty and barren, but there’s also this heft to a man’s torso. And then there’s a dick, and it just sticks right out at you. It points at you. Like it’s asking you a question that nee
ds to be answered right now. Right whenever.’

  The setting sun slipped through Pillow’s fingers and caught him in the eyes. He looked back to Don with black spots dancing around the edges of his vision. He knew it still wasn’t his turn to talk.

  ‘So that’s what I was thinking about today, Pillow. I was sitting at the Bureau, taking calls from every heroin dealer in town, and I was cursing my past self. I was thinking that if I hadn’t been an open-minded and generally game twenty-one-year-old boy I wouldn’t know for sure that I don’t enjoy foreplay with other men. And if I didn’t know that, maybe you and I could have made an honest go of it. A nice, smooth, erectionless kiss and grope before you fucked me.’ Don took his hand out of the scar and snapped his fingers crisply, the bulge bobbing as he adjusted to lean on the gate again. ‘But early discoveries are the black cloud floating over adulthood. Aren’t they, Pillow? They follow you around, raining, like in Charlie Brown.’

  Pillow dropped his hand, let his vision glow orange under his closed eyelids. ‘Does Breton know?’

  ‘If he did we’d both be dead. But the word about Artaud is getting out. You weren’t exactly subtle.’

  ‘I’m sorry I lied to you, Don. I was going to get him out of town, got kayo’d there, y’know, got a little scrambled, y’know, and Artaud got away from me, and I need to find him. You realize Breton will kill me, and then he’ll go out for lunch.’

  Don inched closer. ‘He doesn’t do that sort of thing on an empty stomach. Lunch first. And it’s not you, it’s us.’

  Pillow heard a slow metallic click in Don’s pocket. He raised his hands slowly, laced them behind his head. ‘What about transvestites? How’s that geography?’

  Don smiled and stopped. He finally looked Pillow in the face. ‘Well, I’m super picky with transvestites. So they’ve all been really pretty. But let’s see …’ Don looked at the ground for a second, gathering his reflections. ‘I mean I never really noticed. They tend to keep things sort of tucked and out of the way. They’re not huge on their own dicks, generally, in my experience. But yeah, they keep it chill. Not the same vibe.’