Pillow Page 9

  Don looked worried, not corralling-a-kidnapped-brain-injured-maniac worried, more bathroom-sink-flooding-the-kitchen worried, but he still swung around to cut off Artaud’s path. ‘Easy, we’ll get you some of your medicine. Huh?’

  Artaud stopped immediately. Then he sat propped up on his knees, his limp, emaciated wrist hanging shakily in the air between them.

  ‘Quesso a suavide.’

  Don hitched his pants at the knees, and Artaud grabbed his arm, the lunatic’s jagged, bleeding nail digging visibly into his wrist.

  ‘Sempre odei, odei, odei!’

  Don firmly peeled back Artaud’s fingers, then he stood up and rolled his eyes at Pillow. ‘Chin up there, Arty. We’ll help you, won’t we, Pillow?’

  Pillow did a quick shoulder check. About five Bureau boys had gathered behind him to gawk. Bobby Desnos kissed the tips of his gathered fingers. Pillow turned around; Artaud and Don were still looking at him. Pillow was still nodding blankly as he helped Artaud to his feet. He saw Don take out his pocket square and wipe off his hands.

  Pillow gently cupped Artaud’s swollen cheek. The Bureau boys burst into applause, some hooting.

  Breton peered around the doorway. ‘Ah, Pillow, adding that touch of kindness to sweeten the scene. You are a man of the living theatre. An idiot savant of pathos.’

  Artaud hacked out a thick knot of blood, which landed with a slap on the floor.

  Breton looped his arm under Pillow’s elbow, bringing his hand up in front of them, and snapped his fingers once. Breton wasn’t great at snapping his fingers. He didn’t have quite enough traction and they sort of slid off each other, but that didn’t really matter. Pillow felt Artaud sagging toward the ground on one side, and Breton pulling his arm back on the other.

  Pillow hadn’t felt so completely disconnected from what was going on around him in at least, say, ten minutes.

  They drove smoothly through the abandoned lots and fields, and Pillow watched the trees float past, most of them dead and sticklike even in the summer. The fields were all scrabbled with rocks and loose soil, and the few clumps of grass that remained clung hard and stubborn and yellow. They looked to have stayed more out of spite than anything. The dusk light was leaving the sky and the liveliest things around were shadows, flickering in the headlights. To Pillow everything seemed as if it were rolling helplessly past the window of a boat or a train. As if he were seeing it all from far away.

  What Pillow really wanted was to be home, but home felt about as far away to him as reincarnation does to the dead. They’d shot Artaud up with enough morphine to make an elephant constipated, and he was nodding off on Pillow’s shoulder, periodically drooling blood. He’d ruined Pillow’s sixteenth-best white T-shirt.

  Don was on a bit of a roll.

  ‘See –’ Don looked Pillow in the eyes through the mirror ‘– that’s the problem with casual sex. It had a really good chance to be my favourite thing in the world. Because, y’know, with how I see things, when you make a great thing casual it gets better, calmer, more relaxed. But it just didn’t pan out like that. You try it and you realize there’s a reason why it’s called “casual sex,” and not, say, “expressing your very darkest urges in a fun, caring and judgment-free environment.”’

  Pillow roused himself and cut in. ‘Yeah, man, they could have called it “casual accidentally hurting people’s feelings,” or “casual not being able to ejaculate because you’re a bit nervous or whatever” – those would have been fair. If they called it those things it would seem less like something you wanted to do.’ Pillow flexed his foot upward, trying to get blood back into it. ‘Yeah, totally, Donny, you make a decent point there. I agree with you enough that that might actually just be what I think now.’

  Don reached back and patted Pillow on the thigh. ‘It’s really nice to have friends you like talking to at work.’

  Pillow stopped the joke he was about to make somewhere in the upper half of his throat. ‘Yeah. I like talking to you too, Don.’

  They nodded at almost the same time and drove on in silence. Pillow looked at the moonlight reflecting in flashes off the slick, greasy skin of Artaud’s widow’s peak as they moved.

  Don stopped the car in front of the slaughterhouse, slapped the wheel happily and turned around beaming. ‘Let’s get this show on the road!’

  Pillow checked Artaud’s pulse. It was more like half a pulse. ‘It’s your turn to carry him.’

  The slaughterhouse had been abandoned since meat production went factory-line. It was one of those old stone buildings that makes you understand how people used to be able to stand going to work. On either side of the gates there was a metal statue of a bull. The gates themselves were tall and iron-heavy. When Pillow pushed them open, they made a long, plaintive groan, like somebody was stealing the just-okay desserts off their plates.

  Pillow had, at first, been a vegan only while he was training for fights. But after seeing how his body reacted, he had decided it was best to do it year-round, to always be in fighting shape. And after he retired, Pillow still ate vegan, now looking animals in the eye and forming some opinions. Seals, for instance, definitely have souls. Pillow could tell from the way they looked at him or the cameras filming them.

  There was a thought that wouldn’t stop occurring to him about how people had always treated chickens. He would imagine he was a chicken and he was able – as in his chicken brain was physically big and complicated enough – to understand the whole history of chickens. Pillow was not someone to just throw a concept like this around, but if you were a chicken and somebody told you all about it … the word that shot through his mind was holocaust. And it had been going on for thousands of years. They were bred just to be killed.

  Once Pillow had started thinking like that it was sort of hard to stop. What about balloons? Water balloons are made to be broken, their skin specifically cast thinner, and more easily wrecked, their destruction planned as they are built. Helium balloons seemed to want something, they seemed to have a goal. They wanted the sky more than anything, and what did they get when they were finally let free? A few minutes, a few thousand feet of climb maybe, and then that wide blue thing they couldn’t help craving would kill them, make them into a few pathetic scraps and then let the scraps fall.

  There is so much in the world to be sorry about, to feel sorry for, and once you start you have to draw a line somewhere. Pillow’s was eating. He’d promised himself that he’d never eat a cow, or drink its milk, without permission, or eat a person, or drink its milk, without permission. And because it was an easy one to make, Pillow had also promised that he’d never eat a balloon, water or otherwise.

  Don carried Artaud across his arms. Pillow opened some more slow doors for him. The killing floor was wide, and there were drains caked with blood rust in the floor. The ceiling was high, like a cathedral. Along the sides, flat metal killing tables were lined up like pews. A supervisor’s office sat high at the front overlooking the floor, the windows jutting out the same distance as, and looking a little less ugly than, a carving of somebody on a cross.

  Don spun around, and Artaud’s head flopped like a bowling ball glued to a bungee cord. He walked over to one of the tables, kicked a leg and listened to the echo before continuing.

  ‘These are bolted to the ground. I say we just handcuff him here. And you can take a few minutes …’

  Don put Artaud down next to the table gently, as if he were a toddler who’d fallen asleep in the car. Don stood, placed a flat hand over Pillow’s chest and waited for Pillow to focus on him.

  ‘Are you ready for this?’

  Pillow hooked Artaud up to the table and tested the bolts. He stood up his flashlight to light the slaughterhouse in a small vague circle, then he nodded six times too many.

  Don moved into the outside orbit of light. He grabbed the side of Pillow’s neck and started massaging it. Pillow pulled away. The two men looked at each other. Don ran a finger along the edge of his scar. ‘You don’t look
like you’re going to kill anyone today.’

  Pillow looked back over to Artaud, the half-lit shape of the priest’s body, long and thin and limp, laid out across the floor.

  ‘Listen. Pillow. Pay attention. I brought you into this, and, fuck. I’ll do it. This is on me. We’ll tell Breton you did it and that’ll be that.’

  Pillow dug a finger into either temple and started two short, tight circles. ‘Just, just give me a minute.’

  ‘Take your time.’

  Pillow felt behind him for the wall, then he leaned back and sank to the ground. He dipped his head, then squeezed it between his knees as he thought the whole thing over. The safest option was to let Don kill Artaud and be done with it, keep his head down and chill out. But the coins were still up for grabs, and Pillow had some other ideas. He just had to be sure to think it through. Adjust the game plan. Pillow knew it in the best and the only way he knew things: instantly and instinctively. He knew them for a second, to be used in a millisecond. He knew balance shifts and sagging heads. He counted blinks and forgot birthdays. Pillow looked for one thing he could use and was smart enough to keep using it. Pillow knew where everyone’s toes were.

  Artaud would tell him where those coins were – he just had to give him a little rope. Be a tiny bit nice to him, and let him think it was his own idea. Breton believed you had to be in control to matter, always be the one making him tell you. It was his weakness. Pillow knew he could make a play for the coins.

  Pillow stood and composed himself. He walked over to Don, who was looking at the flashlight and fiddling with something heavy in his pocket. Pillow knew when people were ready to fuck other people up. Don didn’t want to kill Artaud.

  Don took one look over and let his head drop to his chest. ‘Go ahead, Pillow. Talk me out of it.’

  Pillow smiled and dipped in, tapped Don’s belly with a quick, pulled one-two, then pivoted and backed up into the dark, sticking out his tongue as Don sluggishly swung back at air. Pillow didn’t even fight his slur. ‘I talk all day, punk, I talk when I sleep. You know what I want and you know why I want it. You talk.’

  ‘You want to, what? Neuter the guy and keep him as a pet?’

  Pillow pulled his head back, appalled. ‘That’s fucked-up, man. Dogs are all instinct. Eating and fucking. To take their balls … Why? So they behave? Put a collar on me, see what happens. I’d do more than bark, son, I’ll start dropping –’

  Don surrendered with his hands. ‘Sorry, I forgot. We’ll … Shit, okay, we won’t kill him.’ Don sighed, then looked back at Pillow, who shot him a quick, corny thumbs-up. ‘You are the weirdest pacifist in the world, you know that, Pillow?’

  Pillow sidled back into the light and tousled Don’s hair, then he hopped up to sit on the metal table. Realizing his feet still touched the ground, he moved into more of a lean. ‘I feel you on that. I’d be a really strange thing to put in a crying baby’s mouth.’

  Don laughed and looked over at Artaud, shaking his head. ‘This is no joke, Pillow. All right? Breton is taking this shit seriously. So I need to know you have a plan.’

  Pillow threw his arms loosely over his head. ‘Fire away. Gimme all the questions.’

  ‘What’s the point? You going for the coins?’

  ‘Not that one. Fire away with more if you want, though.’

  Don paced away cursing. Pillow followed him, tugged on his arm to stop him.

  ‘Listen, Don. I know the deal, I know what you’re risking and I’ll tell you what happened here. I asked to be left alone to snuff Artaud, you waited outside. I promised you down the line he was dead, I shot the gun, I faked the whole thing. I faked it because I’m an unreliable idiot, and I got it in my pulpy, punched-out head that it was, y’know, maybe sort of wrong to kill this poor guy for no fucking reason. Breton’ll buy that.’

  Pillow guessed that Don was smiling. ‘No he won’t. But that’s fine. It’s … You’re a sweet boy, Pillow.’ Pillow nodded in sincere agreement. Don continued. ‘You best take care of this, though. Artaud is officially your problem. I’m not involved in this after tonight. You let him recover a couple days, and then …’

  ‘I drop him at the front door of a hospital nowhere near here, and nobody hears from him again.’

  ‘Sure, sure. And nobody shows up with those coins. If they sell, Breton will kill us both. But really, is dropping this lunatic off in the middle of nowhere so much better than just punching his ticket now?’

  Pillow made himself look confused. ‘Yup. It is. Why wouldn’t it be?’

  They both stayed silent for a long, comfortable stretch of time. Pillow eventually broke in. ‘Now what do we do? Like tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, Breton still wants me to help him find Bataille. We’re talking to Bataille’s people, trying to smoke him out. You –’

  ‘Stick my thumb up and sit on it until he tells me to do something. I know.’

  Artaud groaned thickly and rolled over, a long trickle of piss flowing slowly away from him, gathering dirt as it moved.

  Pillow shuddered and turned back to Don. ‘Seriously, though, what now?’

  ‘I just told you.’

  ‘Now I’m talking about what we do three seconds from now.’

  ‘Of course! You’re an in-the-moment kind of guy. I say we hang out in this gross and amazing building.’

  ‘I can spare you a couple minutes. But one other thing …’ Pillow paused long enough that Don leaned in, then he tagged him hard on the shoulder and took off at a sprint. ‘You’re it!’

  The two men played tag until Don quit, because games don’t stay fun when the skill level isn’t properly balanced.

  They walked over to the only window in the giant room, allowed themselves to be illuminated by the moon. Pillow pulled his arm over the top of his head, scratched his back and looked out the window. The arm dropped and settled around Don’s shoulder like an untethered curtain. They stood for a while in silent, sweaty community.

  Pillow could take only so much quiet. ‘I only know one thing, buddy. Whatever really happened that night, it’s not going to make any kind of sense.’

  Don turned into him and slapped Pillow in the middle of the chest.

  ‘We’re talking about the world, Pillow. Trying to have the world make sense is like trying to balance a battleship on a wineglass.’

  Don tucked his head into Pillow’s armpit, and the two men settled into the familiar companionship of uncertainty as they watched some stars die.

  Somewhere far away a whole packet of party balloons was being forgotten in a junk drawer, never to be animated with breath, and some other tragedies besides that.

  Pillow’s only non-athletic shoes were a pair of black boots, and three months prior, the zipper pull on the back of the left one had broken off in his hand. Since then he’d been carrying the small piece of metal around in his pocket, gingerly using it as a hook to get the zipper down, like a sardine key.

  Pillow and Emily had gone out for a drink, or more accurately two soda waters.

  It wasn’t as if Pillow usually gave a particularly detailed or lengthy description of his day, so he and Emily had talked about more interesting things. They’d talked a little bit about how tall people die younger, and also a little bit about how left-handed people die more often in accidents because handrails and things like handrails are made for people to fall in a certain right-handed sort of way.

  Pillow knew he was a good liar because so far none of his bigger lies had been found out. Emily didn’t seem to realize how dangerous and illegal the coin thing was, Don wouldn’t tell Breton about Artaud, and the cops didn’t have anything solid on him.

  Pillow’s record was holding true. Nobody had ever suspected him of cheating while he was fighting. He’d never failed a dope test, or been suspended, and he’d juiced for pretty much every fight, sometimes to get an advantage and other times just to get by. EPO, shooting lidocaine in his hands, diuretics to cut weight, anabolics for recovery, he’d done it all. It was about cycles.
If you cycle off early enough you can always fade the test. That was how he’d have to play it now: one big cycle and then jump before he was pushed.

  The key words were: very, very careful.

  Emily came out of the bathroom seeming puzzled. Pillow walked over and touched her stomach, which still felt the exact same.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I didn’t tell you about it and I don’t know why, but you can come if you want. Sorry for the short notice.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll be there.

  ‘That’s not really what was bothering me, though. I was just thinking about this nightmare I had last night that I was addicted to biting the caps off beer bottles. The really solid ones you have to pop off with the − ’ she made a levering motion to represent a bottle opener, ‘– and I knew it was super-bad for me, that my enamel was dying, but I just kept doing it. What do you think it means?’

  Pillow didn’t say anything, just nodded several thousand times.

  When they got outside the air was sudden and cool, and Emily skipped over a sidewalk crack on her last step out of the building and bounced on the balls of her feet. Pillow complimented her hair, and she told him that he was wrong, that, in fact, her hair was a colour most commonly referred to as ‘mousy brown.’ Pillow told her that it seemed to him more of a Disney mousy brown. A wearing-impossibly-puffy-glovesand-hanging-out-with-a-dog-and-stealing-steamboats-and-whistling-when-you-talk-and-building-a-life-for-yourself-in-a-magical-kingdom sort of brown.

  Emily stopped bouncing and tucked her head between her shoulders, and the very top of her cheek was reluctantly turning a bit red, from the air being so sudden and so cool.

  Pillow was aware that Mickey Mouse is actually black, but he figured that there were more important things than being totally right all the time.

  On the way home he couldn’t help thinking about coins, Artaud’s mouth and the thread on Jack Prevert’s face, and he worried the zipper pull so much against his leg that it drew blood through his pocket.