Pillow

by Andrew Battershill

  ‘Have you met Matt? From my work.’

  Pillow briefly paused in molesting her shoulder blades and thought. ‘Oh yeah, he was nice.’ He figured that was probably true.

  ‘Did Matt tell you about his puberty thing?’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘He didn’t start hitting puberty until he was eighteen.’

  ‘That’s fucked up.’

  ‘That’s what I said, except I’m less coarse than you so I just made a sympathetic sound. But yeah, I made my sympathetic sound and he said: “It’s cool. It just means I’ll live longer.”’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘That’s what I said! Yeah, so I go, “Really?” and he shrugs and goes, “I dunno, but that would seem fair.”’

  Pillow considered this. ‘A guy whose balls didn’t drop until he was eighteen who still believes in fairness. That’s special. That’s fuckin’ … that’s Komodo dragon rare.’

  She nodded in a way that made him imagine her drawing a checkmark. ‘Wooooo. Okay.’ She touched her eyebrows. ‘We have one last issue to deal with. Then that’s it. The rest of life. Whoosh.’

  ‘Whoosh?’

  ‘That’s the sound the rest of life makes. Whoosh. Yes. The issue: I know you think you’re sort of hot shit at intimacy, but you’re a very humpy cuddler.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d think that was more of a gentle rocking.’

  ‘You can’t pull the wool over these eyes. I know a thorough humping when I feel it against my bum.’

  ‘Understood. No more cuddle-humping.’

  She rolled back onto the couch and pulled his hands around her.

  ‘That’s not what I said. It’s like anything, just cut back by about a third and it’ll be copacetic.’

  Pillow closed his eyes tight and tried to level out his breathing. Life was starting to feel like a pair of pants four sizes too big, sliding further down his hips with every step.

  Pillow ran over to the Bureau at a good enough clip that it pushed most thoughts past breathing out of his mind. He hit the front door hard with his shoulder, grinning into the pain and pirouetting into the main room.

  As he righted himself he saw Don and Bobby Desnos. Bobby was clapping with his hands raised above his head. Don threw his cigarette into a corner of the room blind, giving him a disgusted once-over.

  Pillow sidled up to Don, pulled his bow tie askew. Don didn’t even look at him. ‘Why thanks, fellas, that was encouraging. You ever thought about personal training?’

  Bobby stopped clapping and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. ‘Training isn’t training unless it’s personal. And learning isn’t learning unless you’re already mostly dead.’ Desnos seemed to get distracted by something above him. ‘Good day, Sadness, you are inscribed on the ceiling.’

  Pillow was still trying to figure out a whole lot of things more important than whatever Desnos was saying. ‘So what’s shaking?’

  Bobby Desnos cast a sweeping, druggy stare around the room. ‘Everything.’

  Don jumped in. ‘Breton needs to see you.’

  ‘Okay.’ Pillow pinched Desnos’s cheek. ‘I’ll catch you later, Bobby.’

  Bobby looked six feet past Pillow’s eyes.

  ‘Yeah, good to see you too, Robert.’

  Pillow and Don walked down the hallway in silence. They entered the room as Breton was polishing a large stick-man candelabrum.

  Don peeled off and stood beside the door. Pillow wouldn’t have said Don was careful about hiding the gun bulge in his waistband, but he wouldn’t have said Don was showing it off on purpose.

  Breton stuck his finger up in the air and lowered it. ‘Sit.’

  Pillow moved to the chair on the left and Breton tsked through his teeth.

  ‘No. Your chair is over there. Sit down.’

  Pillow couldn’t help laughing at that one. He sat down. ‘Subtle. So, I found Bataille. I was buying food and I saw him in the parking lot, and I followed him back there. I figured if I brought him to you, I could make things right after everything with Louise and all. It was an accident. But I was going to bring him to you.’

  Breton allowed a pause so long some species would have called it a hibernation; some others would have called it their whole lives. Don’s dry swallow was audible from a couple oceans away. Finally Breton uncrossed his legs and he moved his head, sunset slow, down to meet Pillow’s eye line.

  ‘The important thing to know is that we are lost in time, in the second before us – in all senses of before, a word that may be cast forward or back with equal ease. You underestimate me to think I am so invested in either planning or perfection. Truth is only and always found in the unrehearsed moment. Accidents are the engine that help this world spin. What I object to is your planning. You have three things to answer for. The first is that you did not call for the help of a person more blessed with good judgment. The second is that you have cost us our best avenue to find the coins, reducing an artful, lived detective novel to another spoiled child’s birthday-party treasure hunt. The third is that you wasted my and Don’s fucking time. Time is beyond price.’

  ‘Okay, you’re right. I thought he had the coins and I wanted to get them, but I was going to bring them in. I don’t know shit about coins. I just … Fuck, man, you know how much money I make. I’m almost forty, I’m a brain-damaged high school dropout, and I need to make it happen. That’s why. I knew you’d make me pass it off and I wanted a real share of that money. What else could I do?’

  Breton leaned back smiling. ‘I know I might seem, at times, severe. I know that I have often been curt with you, and I will continue to be, because I am curt with idiots, even useful ones. All my life I have tried not to allow utility to limit my behaviour. I am a callous man, but not without some understanding. One chance. I am giving you one chance to, if there is anything else going on, unburden yourself. All will be forgiven, and our arrangement can continue. If there is nothing to reveal, reveal nothing. If there is something and you keep it from me … then you will have ceased to be a part of my community. One’s community is the group of people one wishes to keep alive.’

  Pillow didn’t really have time to wonder if Breton was telling him the truth, and he didn’t have time to wonder if Breton already knew about Apollinaire. Fortunately, none of that mattered: his answer was going to be the same either way. He looked Breton in the eyes. ‘I’m telling the truth.’

  Don piped in from the corner. ‘And you really killed Artaud? He’s dead?’

  Pillow turned to look at him. He nodded.

  Breton looked at Pillow with his head tilted to one side. ‘You were correct, Mr. Costes. Pillow, you will now follow instructions, and should you have another brainstorm, you will talk to Don about it. I sincerely hope this is the last time we speak of anything so tediously unpleasant.’

  Breton stood and Pillow stood with him. Breton didn’t bother raising his head to look at Pillow’s face as he continued.

  ‘You are in debt, again. And your debt this time may be paid by someone else ending this matter completely. You are to do nothing. If Don somehow finds the coins, your slate shall be cleaner than, and just as empty as, your mind.’

  Pillow nodded. ‘Okay.’

  Breton paused a minute, and finally looked up at Pillow’s face. ‘Tell me, Pillow, are you able to visualize a horse galloping on top of a tomato?’

  Pillow closed his eyes. ‘Yup.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Really big tomato or really small horse.’

  Breton laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Then I owe you an apology. You are not an idiot, you are something else. What is admirable about the fantastic is that it is so similar to the basest aspects of reality, too true to do anything but exist. You would do well to remember that.’

  ‘I’d do well to remember to lock my fucking front door, but we all know how that turns out every day.’

  Breton was still laughing as Pillow left the office. Don followed Pillow to the door. He pointed to his
own eye, then his heart, and then at Pillow, then he stopped, straightened his bow tie and closed the door behind him.

  Pillow could hear Breton laughing the whole way down the hall.

  After a lot of very long hours trying to sleep, Pillow finally accepted that he needed help. The only person he really had left to trust about the coins was Gwynn. Crossing the street to her apartment, Pillow’s attention was arrested by a long, thick stream of steam coming out of a vent. He stopped in the middle of the road and watched it rise and dissipate. Placing his hand over it, feeling the heat and the moisture gather, he felt no curiosity about where it came from or why nobody else was watching. Pillow felt that a car should have come by now, and he wondered why he never seemed to be in anyone’s way. Nobody ever asked him to move, or bumped him, or pushed him. He thought about all the people he’d grabbed around the waist and moved, and only just then did it occur to him that most people asked first. They didn’t just put hands on someone. Steam was pushing out of the ground so hard in such a tight bundle, disappearing a few feet off the ground. People say that steam doesn’t disappear, it just dissolves into the air, becomes a part of it. Pillow knew it couldn’t be true. Things are usually just gone, and people will do anything to deny that fact.

  Gwynn looked sort of like a ghost moving into the street from the alleyway. Her skin seemed looser, giving off a strong unused vibe. She stood up straight, her long, thin nightgown blowing in the breeze. ‘How slow a life is, how stunningly violent a little fiction called hope would be.’

  Pillow moved his hand out of the steam but stayed standing where he was. At night, Gwynn seemed smaller, quieter. He looked down at the seeping soak of steam creeping up the fibres of his sleeve.

  ‘Did you want to talk to me about something?’

  Pillow looked back at Gwynn. He remembered crowds, and cut men, and referees. He remembered having his face touched, his legs rubbed, he remembered ice on his spine. These were all things he had to remember, because he didn’t know them by heart. He knew his heartbeat and the way pavement looks when you’re running. He knew sunrises and canvas and the length of his own arm.

  ‘On second –’ Pillow closed his eyes and smiled. ‘On first thought, I don’t need to bother you. I’ll … Things you just have to get done you should probably do alone.’ He moved his hand back over the steam.

  A while later he opened his eyes, saw an empty street, and black where he knew an alley was.

  By the time he got home, Pillow felt strangely confident. He had the best line on the coins, and nobody knew it. His plan just might work. He felt so good that he forgot about the time and accidentally woke Emily up by knocking on her door at three a.m.

  She opened the door, turned around and set to pulling the large chunks of crust out of her eyes. ‘Are you okay?’

  Pillow was now feeling a little embarrassed but still quite good. ‘Yes! I’m perfect. I’m perfect.’

  Emily squinted over at him. ‘Well, then you’re a jerk. I was soooo asleep. I was literally bathing in a thick soup of melted chocolate. That’s what I was doing when you knocked on my door. Drinking it up.’ She closed her eyes and made an abstract sucking shape with her mouth, rolling her head around sleepily. ‘Do you have any chocolate? I ate mine. I ate all of it.’

  Pillow moved over to her and dropped to his knees. He looked up at her.

  ‘What’s the deal, baby?’

  ‘I had a thought, and it was one that I would keep to myself. That I’ve been keeping to myself, and this time I wanted to tell you. I used to have this idea that there are two types of people in the world: people who do great things, and people who are great things. And always, as long as I can remember, I thought if I worked hard enough, if I cheated enough, if I loved it enough, I could do great things. And then all of a sudden I couldn’t. Maybe I could have, but I didn’t. But it’s been, it’s been so fucking long since I lost it, and in that whole time I never once thought I could be a great thing. A person you like as a person, instead of a person who does things you like. You make me feel like a great thing. I don’t, I’m not all the way there yet, and I’m probably not done fucking up yet, but I can kinda see the shape of that now. And I might be stupid. I am stupid. But nobody is dumb enough to fuck something like this up.’

  Emily put her hands on his jaw, leaned down as if to kiss him and blew a full hard breath into his mouth.

  When Pillow entered the room, Artaud stood on the bed and started swinging the stick in a wide, uneven pattern. Pillow ducked down, waited out a circuit and then snatched the stick. Artaud feebly moved after him and Pillow set him back down with a shove. He was going to take the stick away. Not everyone can be trusted with sticks.

  ‘Hey, you get this back after you talk to me. Do you remember what I told you? About our deal? Okay. New deal, you don’t get your stick back until you talk to me.’

  Artaud had obviously snorted all the pills Pillow’d left for him; he held the pen rock-steady in one hand.

  I remember, Pillow.

  I remember well. And I appreciate everything you are doing for me. Seeing your blood at stake was all the guarantee I needed to share the tender of my soul with you, the coins of my being.

  It is of the utmost urgency that I leave this corner of the life. Just yesterday, looking out my window I saw a bird emerge, as if birthed from the trunk of a tree. It took off gloriously, and then fluttered clumsily. As if a large circle of its wing had been punched out, chewed on and then reconstituted into the overall structure of the wing.

  I am eager to go to Mexico, and to explore South and Central America in general!

  Ayahuasca is a most illuminating and therapeutic experience. Perhaps another such treatment is enough to cure my current psychic ailments, which I put down entirely to a case of bad nerves.

  I am eager! My soul feels already refreshed!

  I embrace you affectionately,

  Antonin Artaud.

  P.S. I must have my stick back. Her importance is vast enough to be obscure, even to herself. Love, ultimately, slobbers and weeps its hot, invigorating tears into the assholes of even the mightiest.

  Pillow put the letter aside. He grabbed Artaud behind the neck and pulled Artaud’s forehead to his. Artaud probably wouldn’t need the coke to get talking.

  ‘We’re going to figure the whole thing out.’

  Artaud jerked abortively toward the walking stick. Pillow held him rooted to the bed with one arm.

  ‘You tell me what I want, and I think about giving you the stick back, okay? After I have what I want.

  Pillow felt Artaud’s head nod against his and he slipped back over to his bag. He pulled the food out and started breaking it down as Artaud kept writing. When he was done he dropped the straw in from a height and it bobbed a little before it settled. Artaud couldn’t move his head too much, so he rolled onto his front to drink breakfast. Pillow read.

  The time has come to sober up, to drink some food and to sit in front of a window closed against the morning’s spinning rays, and to make myself fleetingly and imperfectly clear.

  All I ask is that you remember how deeply I sighed before doing so.

  There were no windows in the room. Artaud took the paper back and kept writing, but didn’t quite manage a sigh. Pillow waited for him to finish and slipped into half a sleep. He dreamed about caves. He dreamed about water running through the pitch black, about sounds echoing off walls he couldn’t see a foot in front of him.

  The address Artaud gave him was for a church. It was a really old one, and was now just used as a soup kitchen. There were tunnels running all underneath it, and apparently Artaud had found himself a little nook and taken to living there. There was a manhole in the church parking lot, and after a quick look around, Pillow climbed in. He had to crouch down to get through the drainpipe, but when the tunnel opened up the ceilings got very high and the passage was wide. Pillow shone his flashlight down the hallway and made out a room. Artaud had a whole set-up ready, oil lamps all the way
around the room, and Pillow went around lighting them one by one.

  The room glowed dimly in all its creepiness. There were random beakers half-full of liquids Pillow knew better than to guess at. A rope hammock was tied up across the room, and the whole place was lined with trunks. The coins were apparently stashed on a shelf, hidden in the bottom of a broken snow globe. Because it was broken, the thing now just looked like a tiny castle on a wooden stand. Pillow turned it over and found the box. He took the case in his hands and pressed it hard into his forehead. Finally. He had the coins. And nobody knew, not even Gwynn.

  Pillow walked over to the hammock, sat down and opened the thing. He could smell stale sweat mixed with the smell of rope, and something somewhere rotting. The coins; the whole thing. They just looked like quarters. Really, really old quarters.

  Pillow shrugged, not knowing what he’d been expecting these coins to look like. He took them each out of the box and flipped them, all four heads. Looking at them now, printed in metal, Pillow didn’t feel bad for the backward centaurs. Their arms weren’t great considering they were legs, but they looked great as arms. Well and evenly defined, like a discus thrower’s arms. And they all had great posture. The kind of posture that bought you a little respect when you entered a room. Pillow put them back and closed the box again, tucked it into his pocket. After all that, even with the coins right there, it was still all imaginary. Nobody else even knew he’d won.

  Pillow sat on the hammock, rocking gently back and forth, trying to feel like he’d accomplished something. He looked around the room, wondering how the trunks got so filthy. He did not consider himself to be a particularly accomplished interior designer, but at least he’d done better than this place. Pillow then considered how sad it was to congratulate himself on keeping his apartment tidier than a paranoid-schizophrenic priest’s underground hideout.