Pillow Read online

  Pillow tried to keep smiling as he gripped the handle of the razor in his sock. He was close enough to get there with one swipe – if he got the neck it would work. ‘Motherfucker, say what you want, but I am too old a bird to get fed an egg.’

  Breton ran a hand an inch over his slicked-back hair. ‘I am in love with a woman right now. A beautiful, insane, disgraced woman. And last night she endeavoured to bake me a pie. It was supposed to be an apple pie, but her crust was made from the fat of some obscure animal, and there were very few apples. It was a lard-crust pie, basically. When I slept last night I dreamt that giant grapes were falling from the sky, and they were bouncing all about, and bouncing against me. They were hurting me.’ Breton pursed his lips and twisted the skin of his hand hard, then he let it go and watched the skin regain its shape. ‘I used to think I was a masochist. My analyst said so. But now I know I am not. The best discovery of my life was that my face is actually on the other side of that coin. Minted.’

  Pillow tensed up, readied himself.

  Breton looked at Pillow’s ankle, and then right in his eyes.

  ‘One final question, since I don’t care whether you kill Artaud or whether Artaud kills you: when was the last time you were at your apartment? Actually, two final questions: do you think your child-laden girlfriend might have decided to return there? Might she still?’

  Pillow let go of the razor. He sprinted through the doors, the blood rushing so fast through his ears that he almost couldn’t hear the whole building laughing hysterically at him.

  Pillow roughly shouldered his door open before remembering that he almost certainly hadn’t locked it.

  Emily was sitting on his couch for maybe the first time. She drained the rest of what seemed like a once-big whisky. Then they both listened to the sound rooms with bad light bulbs make when nothing is happening.

  Emily did one of those smiles that is actually just resisting a smile. ‘The first time I fucked you was here, for some reason. And I woke up and looked at your empty room, and your goddamn statue, and I was so hungover. Your place was so weird and sad. But I convinced myself you were sweet. And for breakfast you tried to serve me a piece of spelt toast with margarine on it. Because that was all the food you had. You didn’t think to go out, to take me out. You just slapped margarine on a piece of carbon-fibre toast and gave it me. And you ate nothing. When I left I saw this hanging fruit stand with flies all over it, smelling across the room. I still thought you were a sweetie-pie.’

  She ran the glass along the length of her thigh, then she dropped it on the ground where a table should have been.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I really don’t. Because I came back, champ, just like you always assumed. I’m here. Well, I have things to work on, I guess. Real-person things.’

  ‘Listen, I can explain …’

  ‘No. Dude. No. I don’t want to hear you explain anything else, ever in my life. You told me no one would get hurt. Promised it. You haven’t even been to the doctor with me, you’ve barely asked. When my parents ask me what happened between us I’m going to say that I told you I was pregnant and you instantly went completely bug-fuck insane and lost all sight of fairness and responsibility. Have you been beating people up for money? The whole time I knew you?’

  Pillow slumped down onto the couch and dug his palm a little bit too deeply into his eye. ‘What did you think I was doing?’

  ‘I thought you were bouncing at underground clubs and dealing steroids, because that’s what you told me. And now you’re acting like I’m stupid for believing you. I didn’t think it was right, but I didn’t think it was all that wrong and I thought you would figure it out. Because you said you would, you had it handled. You kept saying you were fine, and you’re not.’

  ‘I know. I know. I got really confused and I messed up. But I’ll … Whatever you want, whatever you want I’ll do.’

  ‘Whatever I want is nothing. I want nothing from you. I say no. I choose not to be a part of this anymore. Not even a little. This is wrong, Pete. You’re hurting yourself, and you’re hurting other people, and I don’t want anything to do with it.’

  Pillow stood again. He walked into the kitchen and looked at his plant. He came back into the living room desperate. ‘I’m really sorry. And I’ll go, but I just want you to know that I’m sorry for everything. Everything.’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ She used the back of her hand to wipe her eye. ‘When you were here, when we were in the exact same room together, it was great. We had fun. You’re fun. But the second I wasn’t around, you just instantly turned into a huge bag of shit, apparently. Fuck, man. I thought you were a good break. I’ve been jerked around so many times, and when I met you I was so lonely in a way I don’t think you’ve ever understood, and I thought you’d be nice. Just nice. You specifically promised me that, it was your idea.’

  Pillow gestured with his hand, as if he was about to speak. He moved his head forward as if he was speaking. ‘I just need you to know that it wasn’t … I didn’t decide. I was confused and I fucked up really bad. Worse than I ever thought I would. And I won’t bother you anymore.’

  She waved a hand at him like he was a wasp who’d been buzzing around so long she couldn’t be bothered to care if she got stung. ‘Yes. Okay.’

  ‘You should also know that I love you, and I totally believe that you made a shooting star appear with your mind.’

  Emily laughed at the ceiling and then the floor. ‘Actually, I didn’t make that star.’

  ‘Right. You just sensed it.’

  ‘That happened. It was magic.’

  ‘I know. I know it did.’

  Emily stood, rifled around in her purse. Pillow stayed still and breathed. The room was canting hard to one side, but in the calm, temporary way he was used to. She flipped the coin box out of her purse, letting it fall to the ground. ‘Your coins. I stole them and felt like I’d done a terrible thing. You might want to look in your bathroom.’ She shook him off before he could talk. ‘Time wounds all heels, Pillow. That’s a thing cobblers say.’

  Emily walked briskly past Pillow out of the apartment. Nobody turned to look at anybody.

  Pillow tried to breathe for a minute, then he moved over to the sink and vomited a small amount of stomach acid. Looking up into the fractured, more-white-than-usual sunlight coming through the glowing leaves of his plant.

  Pillow could not strictly account for how correct it felt to push the door to his bathroom open with his toe instead of turning the knob. All he really needed to see was the leg. Not many men’s ankles were as skinny and riddled with track marks as Artaud’s. Pillow went the rest of the way into the room anyway.

  Artaud was lying across the tiles, the needle still in his arm. There was a little bit of white froth foaming out the slack, double-hinged corner of his mouth. His skinny wrist was bent back, wedged under the toilet. He’d popped his abscess with a hatpin. There was a thin puddle of dark brown urine underneath him. Artaud had left a note propped up against the faucet. Pillow picked it up.

  Dear Pillow,

  First I think it important to tell you that I still wish nothing but despair, loneliness and deep pain upon you. That walking stick was my final chance, my first and final chance at happiness; you knew it and you stole it from me anyway. Even if I were the sort of person to ever forgive another, this sin would be beyond my imagined and hypothetical benevolence.

  I have not been one to think much about tragedy. But I have in the last few quiet minutes of my horrific shouted lifetime, this hoarse, exhausted denouement, come to realize that my whole world of thought has been dominated by one central tragedy. That I wish for the only impossible thing: to be understood in thought. Unmediated, unheard, unseen. Merely understood, nothing else.

  Insomuch as life is humorous, cruelty and error have taken its place.

  &c,

  Antonin Artaud

  Pillow didn’t spend as long as he usually did reading Artaud’s notes. He got the gist. Pill
ow looked in the mirror and recognized himself. The cut on his forehead sectioned off into descending drops of dark red scab, his hand scraped and puffy, a swelling as big as a baby’s head on the side of his. This was a version of himself he knew well. He pinched his nose, tried to remember a time before it was flat.

  Pillow stopped out on the hallway balcony, leaning heavily into the railing. He looked out at the dingy apartment courtyard. It was that time just before morning when the yellows that used to be bright, and the greens that used to be neon, took on a muted pre-emptive glow. He rubbed his eyes and let them come back into focus slowly, allowing water to collect. Pillow took the coins out of his pocket. He opened the case and shook them one by one into his hand. He bounced them around in his palm, letting them touch each other for a while, and then he put the coins back in the case and the case back in his pocket.

  Pillow took off running in what he guessed was the vague direction of the water. He kept his head up, distantly observing the line of the horizon bumping up and down with his steps. His legs were sluggish, and he had to stop several times because he felt dizzy. He arrived at the far edge of the waterfront and stopped to look out over the water. Pillow looked at the water for a long time, then got down on his knees and plunged his head straight under, keeping his eyes open.

  Keeping his eyes open had always been one of Pillow’s more natural skills. Even when he’d first started, all the other kids would close their eyes and flail, and Pillow flailed with them, but he always paid attention, kept his eyes open and looked for spots. He didn’t remember Solis, but he must have closed his eyes; the only way to get knocked out that badly is to have no idea it’s coming. He casually recognized that his air was running out, pulled up, curled into the fetal position and gasped for a long time. He rocked back and forth, listening to the sound of the water kissing the shore, and he hoped that they loved each other. That the shore knew how badly the water wanted to stay in one place, that the water knew how badly rocks wanted ripples. He stayed like that a long time, a good rest period. Then he stood up. He was still good at catching his breath.

  Pillow spat and took another look at the thin films of water pushed off the tops of the waves by wind, and then he started up running again, firing telephone-pole jabs into his flickering shadow.

  As he ran, Pillow took stock and started to make a plan. What he needed to do felt clear. He had to kill Breton. Pillow thought that once it’s decided that you’ll never see your child because you’re a murderer, all bets are off. He thought that was a decent general rule. He spent the rest of the day poking around houses near the Bureau, circling the surrounding blocks on foot, trying to pick a good angle of attack. Nobody really seemed to notice him.

  Pillow kept almost fainting and falling down, and his legs felt a little bit foreign and too long to control properly. He’d gone through a whole series of plans to kill Breton that kept getting derailed by losing his bearings, or forgetting the second phase of his plan once he’d done the first. So he thought he should hole up somewhere and try to sleep again. See if he could string together four good thoughts in a row. He made few vague guesses about where he’d left his car, got disoriented, then remembered that he’d come on foot, so he decided to just steal a new one.

  Pillow waited through several stop lights, supporting himself against the street-light pole, dozing off and rousing every few minutes. Finally a huge, old, maroon car pulled up, driven by the exact median of twenty-five-year-old men at the wheel. Pillow looked both ways, and the street was clear and dark now, full of calm quiet air, the car just sitting there waiting at the empty red light. He staggered across the street. The average face was sitting in his car like a racehorse, staring straight out in front at the stop light, waiting to get the signal and trusting the straight line as if it were the only direction.

  The guy didn’t seem to notice Pillow until he’d already gripped the door handle. He threw it open, and the man shouted something. Pillow grabbed him by the average-length off-brown hair and threw him to the ground. Pillow dropped heavily into the seat with his legs still out in the street. He rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his eyes, trying to focus them up for driving. The car hummed hollow under him.

  Pillow looked down at the young man again. The guy was sitting up a bit, bracing himself on one arm, the other plastered to his forehead, blood leaking thickly through his fingers. Pillow raised one hand, acknowledging a foul. ‘I’m so sorry. Had to do it. I’m not here to make excuses.’

  The man started inching himself backwards toward open road using his three-sets-of-twelve-reps forearms.

  Pillow continued: ‘I don’t feel bad anymore, I just feel things. Call ’em what you want. And sorry, I’ve always thought that, y’know, sorry’s not a thing you feel. It’s a thing you are. And I am sorry. You take enough shots and you lose the thread a bit. Like, there’s people who have been punched in the head once, and it’s the biggest deal of their lives. Y’know? This is … Shit, I probably did the worst thing that ever happened to you just now. I’m getting that idea. Hair pulled, head bonked on the sidewalk, that’s, like, a Wednesday for me these days. But everyone’s take is important, y’know? I know how bad that was for you, and I’m sorry. I can’t make it right, but I am sorry. I’m a sorry thing.’ Pillow tapped his head. ‘It’s a couple stitches, max. They freeze it up. Like they glued a tiny piece of somebody else to you. It’s cool. You’ll like it.’ Pillow sighed and looked up at the sky for a second. ‘I liked it, you might not. I’ve been having trouble keeping track of that lately.’

  The guy wasn’t going to talk or look up or stop leaking anytime soon, so Pillow turned around in the seat and pulled his knees into his chest. He kissed both of his kneecaps, then he cranked the seat back, adjusted the mirrors and took off.

  Pillow sat still as the car floated absently and the city became small in the mirrors. He pulled over into a small clearing and parked and looked out the windshield at the grass swaying in the wind. The whole scene looked as if it was being crowded in along the edges, that little bit of forgetting creeping in even as he looked.

  Pillow hyperventilated. He started to cry a bit, but his eyes gave up on that pretty fast. His mouth was dry. His hands were tingling in long waves through his fingers.

  He took to slamming his head against the steering wheel and he didn’t stop until he passed out.

  Pillow woke up too out of it to notice the headache. He hadn’t even forgotten anything. He briefly entertained the notion that he’d just concussed his way through to the other side, that maybe he’d dug himself such a deep brain-damage hole he might pop out in China and be super-good at math. He laughed.

  Pillow got out of the car. He looked at the field again, and it wasn’t how he remembered it from a few minutes before. There was one tree in it, mostly bare but with three bushy little circles of leaves at the tips of its tallest branches. Underneath there was the frame of a bench, but there weren’t any slats to sit on. A hill sloped up gently on the other side of the tree and someone had carved a set of stairs into the hill, stairs that were just holes. Pillow walked over and climbed the stairs, hopped over the bush and kept walking.

  After a couple minutes he emerged on the edge of a farm. In the distance there was a farmhouse and a tractor shed, and Pillow followed the incredibly long driveway toward the house. It was a log-cabin-style place. Out front there was an old rotted-out sign that had some vague faded colours on it, but no clear writing. Behind the sign there was a huge, half-rusted metal mailbox that said Leg Farm on it. There was no address. As Pillow got up to the door he saw that the knocker was shaped like a woman’s leg, rounded and smooth with detailed toes. He pulled back the leg and let it kick the door. After a few seconds a man came to the door. He was wearing a flannel shirt with no pattern on it and jeans. The farmer had a deep tan; he was very thin and a lot shorter than Pillow.

  ‘Shit. Are you all right?’

  Pillow reached up and touched his head, and then he looked down at his
blood-soaked shirt and smiled. ‘Oh yeah, I’m fine. I had a run-in with a … with a steer.’

  The farmer angled his head to the side and smiled up at Pillow. ‘Steer, huh? Well, who in this wide world hasn’t run afoul of the oh-casional steer. You ain’t here to hurt me or rob me in some way, are you, fella?’

  ‘No sir.’

  The farmer nodded agreeably, considering all his words carefully. ‘Looks like you had your bell rung pretty good.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Did you come to see the legs? You must have heard of the legs.’

  Pillow decided to roll with it. ‘Yeah, uh, yes I have. Is that okay?’

  ‘Oh yes you may, not too many folks come to see those legs anymore.’ He made a sweeping gesture with his hand and then he put the hand in a pocket. ‘In the realm of agritourism, I am a bit of a one-hit wonder.’

  The house had high ceilings, an open kitchen and a huge window facing the driveway. The farmer walked toward the kitchen and asked Pillow if he wanted some coffee. Pillow said no. The farmer went to the coffee pot anyway.

  ‘This is a really nice house.’

  The farmer looked at the ceiling, then he poured some coffee into a mug that didn’t have a picture on it and didn’t say anything at all. ‘Well, we should get to the legs, that is the serious business.’

  They walked out the back of the house. He had a white plastic table on his porch and dirty white plastic chairs all around it. All Pillow had to do was lift his eyes a little bit and he could see the field. It was littered with hay bales. The rounded hay-bale parts were smaller because the farmer had used the rest of the hay to make legs coming out the top. They weren’t at all what Pillow had expected a leg coming out of a hay bale to look like. They looked smooth, more like rock than anything. The only inaccurate part about them was that the toes were further apart than a person’s toes. The feet were maybe a bit wider and longer than usual, but still feminine, volleyball-centre feet. Pillow could tell they were supposed to be a tall woman’s feet, and through their strange and painstaking details, he could tell that they were all supposed to be one specific tall woman’s left leg.