Pillow

by Andrew Battershill

  Don laughed again. He shifted his weight around a little, favouring his right side. ‘You know what’d happen if you did that, Pillow?’

  ‘I just told you.’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing would happen.’

  Pillow looked over Don’s shoulder at a cloud between cement pillars. A sheep with no legs. ‘You’re wrong. The answer is: just about. It’s just about nothing.’

  ‘We really have to go now.’

  Pillow grabbed Don’s arm, stopped him from turning. ‘I’ve got a joke for you.’ He waited in silence until Don looked him in the eyes again. ‘You’ve probably heard it before, but that’s okay. So a moth walks into a dermatologist’s office, and he says, “Doc, I have seventeen seizures a day. Every day.” And Doc says, “That sounds horrible, but I’m a dermatologist, you need a neurologist. Why did you come to me?” Moth says: “I don’t remember.”’

  Pillow winked.

  ‘He’s telling the truth. He’s a moth. His memory ain’t shit.’

  Don reached for the back of his waistband but Pillow lunged forward in time and knocked the gun across the concrete. Don tried to dig his key into Pillow’s eye, tearing a patchy, serrated run across his forehead. Blood dripping numbly down his face, Pillow slipped under Don’s arm, got behind him and grabbed his friend’s neck. They fell to the ground as Costes flailed and kicked. Pillow kept the choke and cranked harder; Don had lost the keys in the fall but he kept punching the same spot on Pillow’s temple. Black dots started creeping in around the edges of his vision, but Pillow held on and kept squeezing until the punches lost their steam, and eventually Don’s arm fell limply to the side, and a few seconds later Pillow felt Don’s bowels release. He kept holding on after that, hyper-ventilating the smell through his flat, twisted nose, until his arms failed from the bicep down. Pillow pushed Costes off, got standing and swayed across the parking lot, trying to fling the blood out of his eyes by shaking his head and scooping at it with his hands. He felt his shoulder hit a pillar and he dropped to his knees and started vomiting; he kept at it until he was stringing small bits of bile toward the ground, and eventually he was just belching out half-swallowed air.

  His arms were pretty much dead, so he had to roll Don’s body along the ground and hoist it up into the trunk with his shoulder. He closed the trunk and spent a while in the front seat of the car, trying to staunch the bleeding from his head with some of the spare pocket squares Don kept in the glove compartment.

  Pillow’d finally figured it out: the trunk wasn’t being prepared for Artaud. Don was going to lure him out to a secluded spot, and then the boys were going to jump him. Don had probably known the whole time; he’d just been setting him up. They’d dangled Pillow out there for Bataille, and now that he’d killed Bataille and lost Artaud, he wasn’t useful anymore.

  Pillow squeezed the blood-soaked pocket square into a ball and wished, once again, that horrible people weren’t his favourite people. He thought about it another minute and corrected himself. Not horrible people – they were usually bummers – but pleasant people who did horrible things, that was who he liked. He went to tuck the square into his shirt pocket, and then because he didn’t have one he dropped it into his lap.

  By the time Pillow hit the street, the ground under his feet felt like a huge unfolded newspaper. A woman bounced off his chest and said ‘Excuse me,’ like he’d just run over her dog or son. He didn’t stop walking, but he did a sad, slow circle as he moved, the hot swell of tears crowding around the edges of his eyes.

  Seeing an entirely silver man standing on a silver box in the middle of the sidewalk was not something Pillow had been specifically hoping for, but it was something for which he was truly grateful. He stopped and watched the silver arms move stiffly around, and his jaw didn’t drop, but he felt his eyeballs relax around the outside.

  ‘Hey, d’you ever find it kind of weird and cool and sad that people pay to look at you? Like you’re the Grand Canyon, or all the paintings in a museum.’

  The silver man stayed looking straight ahead; he twisted his torso robotically away from Pillow, canted over at the waist and then pulled himself back up straight, like he was being turned by a crank.

  ‘I don’t know how much time I spent being watched for money, like in minutes. But it might be actual years’ worth of minutes. In the gym, in the fights, people watched me, and they paid. If you put it all together, which, I’m finding out, always happens. It all gets put together, added up on you. And then you deal with it, and then that’s what real life is like. What I’m saying to you, man, is people pay to look at you, and the Grand Canyon’s a big hole in the middle of the desert, and there’s a river and a shit-ton of flowers at the bottom of it. There’s people who posed for paintings, but it’s different to be a hole in the desert, or a tower that’s keeled over a little, or a real person standing there sucking air. It’s just different. Y’know what I’m saying? You feel me? Y’know what I’m saying?’

  The silver man stopped robot dancing and stepped off his block like a real person. He bent over like a real person and grabbed a few coins out of his bucket, then he stepped over to talk. He touched Pillow’s arm, which Pillow didn’t like.

  ‘Hey, dude, I appreciate you taking an interest, but I’m doing a show here? It’s a show, and I can’t have you talking and distracting people.’ The silver man pressed coins into Pillow’s hand, which Pillow hated quite a lot. ‘Get yourself some food, bud. I think you’ve had enough tonight.’

  Pillow looked at the silver face and when the silver face looked back, he saw that the eyes were deep brown. Not silver. This man wasn’t silver. He was pretending. The busker stepped back onto his block and snapped immediately into an extended running-man dance.

  Pillow set himself and threw the coins into the air overhand, then shouted over at the busker. ‘Hey, I’m not drunk, man. It’s just how I talk sometimes. I’m not drunk. You hear me, I’m not drunk, and I ain’t no bum either. You need to look at where you’re at. Motherfucker begging for coins calling me a bum. I’ve never been a bum. Not for a second. You hear me? Where you at, motherfucker? Where you at?’

  The silver man dropped his arms like the skin-wearing pinkish thing he really was under the paint. ‘Listen, dude, I’m sorry. I don’t want any trouble, I didn’t mean to upset you. I just want to do my show.’

  Pillow nodded, waving his hand vaguely in apology, then looking at the ground. He sensed but didn’t see the busker breaking back into his silent robot bit. Pillow stayed looking at the ground a second, letting the scene settle down a bit.

  He didn’t hurry over to the change bucket, and he didn’t feel himself kick it, but both he and the robot-imposter watched it move in a tall spinning arc over the street before landing and getting skittered aside by the glancing blows of tires as it spit coins across the pavement.

  Pillow’s hands were already extended over his head, and his lips were already curled back by the time the busker was off his box and out of character again, his silver neck showing its tendons, his silver face twisted into a shout.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The mime got closer, and Pillow sensed the range and snapped a crisp jab into the busker’s face. ‘Do you think this is talent? You mother-raping panhandler. You think this is talent?’

  The busker was stumbling backward with his hands out behind him, anticipating concrete. The smudge of bare skin on the busker’s cheek only made Pillow angrier, and he walked forward with his hands at his sides.

  ‘Makeup cunt. Where you at?’ Pillow skipped forward and kicked the busker’s foot out from under him. The man fell to the pavement and jumped up three-quarters off balance. Pillow kept moving forward and shoved the mime down again. The mime tried to get up again, and Pillow pushed him down twice more. He couldn’t really tell what he was shouting and what was coming from the crowd anymore. He could hear the fake-robot saying Okay over and over, but he wasn’t sure what was being agreed to. The mime finally stayed down, and as Pillow pulle
d his foot back to kick him, someone from the crowd tried to grab Pillow around the shoulders. He spun away from the touch without his balance and tripped over the mime’s prone body, tumbling toward the street. Pillow was halfway toward righting himself, still pulling himself up to stand straight, when the mirror of a high-riding truck doing sixty hit him in the side of the head, and he slipped back down the long black hallway he was getting so used to.

  Pillow woke up in a white room he’d never seen before with Avida’s face an inch from his. It took him a few seconds to recognize her.

  ‘So, the mime isn’t pressing charges.’

  Michael Simon was standing in the corner aggressively digging some lint out of his belly button; he was not using a lot of very complicated mining equipment to reach it. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Avida stood back up and slapped his arm, she gave a few stage laughs. ‘Oh you kidder, you. Pretending you don’t remember bullying a lowly busker, pretending you don’t know where the coins are. Where is they, Pilla? Last call.’

  Pillow tried to think. His lips were dry. ‘I don’t understand what … Just tell me what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You’re really quite a bummer. You know that, right?’

  Pillow went to hit her, but his arm felt like it had been crushed by a cinder block some years ago. She ducked back.

  ‘You’ve lost a step. Haven’t you? Well, keep us in what you’ve got left of a mind, Pillowslipping.’

  ‘Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out.’

  They were already gone. Pillow tried to get his bearings. He closed his eyes and felt the room spin in a tight, diagonal arc, as if his head were a globe in a stand and some asshole kid had slapped it hard into a rotation. He opened his eyes, and then he vomited across his chest and stomach. A couple of nurses came into the room. They spoke at a pace and pitch that Pillow couldn’t understand, and he relaxed into the ambient sound as they changed his gown and cleaned him.

  He imagined that this was how it felt to be a dog in a new home and that he had the same choice a dog always had: relax into it and appreciate the warm hands and free baths, or bite someone in a desperate shot to take some control over his life. When the nurses were finished, one of them put her hand on his shoulder. He snuggled in toward the hand and licked it with a short, quick stroke. The nurse pulled her hand back, then she rubbed the side of his head without a massive hematoma on it. She said something, and Pillow chose to think it was a nice thing.

  Pillow moved listlessly in and out of consciousness for a while. When his legs felt strong and coordinated enough, he slowly removed his IV (Pillow had once learned the hard way that it was the exact opposite of ripping off a Band-Aid) and stuck it into his pillow. Then he stood up and took a test walk around the room. He made it to the wall before he had to pause and steady himself, but then he did the rest of the circuit under his own power.

  He’d tried to take stock of the situation. And he felt like he knew some things: he was in the hospital, the coins were hidden, Don Costes was dead, Breton wanted to kill him, his head really hurt, he needed to get to Gwynn, his shirt and pants were folded under the side table, Emily was pregnant and he had to escape the hospital before they ran a brain scan or, if they’d already done that, before they told him the results. That last one felt the most vital and immediate to him.

  Pillow felt tired, but also relaxed somehow, ready to accept things gently, and as they came. He lay back down and slept some more. Waking up, he felt glad there was a clock in his room, and he felt confident that it was three in the morning, not the afternoon. Pillow slid out of bed, dressed gingerly, bit off his ID bracelet and walked out of the hospital in careful four-inch steps.

  The first thing Pillow did was head straight down to Emily’s storage locker to get the coins while he still remembered which model-train box he’d hidden them in. The bottom box. Pillow carefully set aside the rest of the old models, got on his knees and opened the box. It was empty. Totally empty. No model, no coins, no note, nothing. Pillow stood back up and walked around for a minute. He took the two deepest breaths of his life. They didn’t help.

  He started his search calmly and reasonably, carefully checking each model box before moving on to the bigger boxes. What set him off was sticking himself on a sewing needle. Pillow pulled his hand out and saw the thin metal reflecting the stark lights of the basement sticking straight out of his index finger. He pulled the needle out. Emily had specifically warned him about the box with all the sharp stuff in it, and he’d forgotten. He’d forgotten if the door was even locked when he got there. If he’d even remembered to lock it in the first place. He’d had the coins, and now he had empty boxes and used ski poles.

  If his initial goal, on entering the locker, had been to systematically destroy everything inside of it, Pillow would have done a really good job. He started with throwing the dioramas and scale reproductions against the wall, but he really got going when he’d found the cricket bat. Pillow had just put his foot through a decent-looking oil painting of a shoe when the wall and the floor and the ceiling all tilted sharply to the side. Pillow fell down. He stayed on the floor a long time, his foot in a picture frame, draped across a set of skis, waiting for the spell to pass. Then Pillow rehearsed the speech he would make to Emily, trying not to slur his words, and he got up and swayed down the long cement hallway, lights bouncing off the floor, and the sound of his shoes bouncing off the walls, in a small, empty-enough way that he’d have hardly called it an echo.

  Emily’s door had a small Post-It note in the middle of it. Pillow peeled it off. He read: Don’t knock.

  It wasn’t signed. Pillow was used to getting more formal notes.

  Pillow had already gone to the bathroom and swallowed several too many pills and fetched an ice pack from the kitchen by the time he noticed Breton and Bobby Desnos had been waiting in his apartment the whole time.

  Breton was standing behind the couch. He walked down a set of imagined stairs, waving. When he came out the end he stood back straight and offered Pillow the couch with his arm.

  ‘Why, hello.’

  Pillow laughed and croaked hello, as he sat down, let his head sink back, closed his eyes and set to icing his skull.

  Breton’s voice filled the bottom corner of Pillow’s eyes. A long, rhythmic throb filled the rest.

  ‘I suspect that your considerable mental handicaps will prevent you from fully comprehending my speech in real time, so I have left you detailed written instructions.’

  Breton was pretty much on the money. Pillow didn’t even really have the energy to worry about the coins, or the fact that someone was very likely to shoot him in the head within five minutes. He tried to relax into it, take it as it came, that real Buddha-type vibe.

  ‘I know everything that has happened and everything that will. I know that you have lost Artaud, and possibly found the coins; I know that my dear friend Don Costes was supposed to help me deal with you and that he has disappeared. I am aware that, in some reality somewhere, he is likely dead. But, knowing the future as I do, imagining as accurately as my genius allows, I have decided to give you a little chance, for the purposes of my amusement in these dark times of lost friendship. After all, humour is that which allows one to brush sadness aside, like so many pencil shavings, when it becomes too distressing. You and your severed-chicken-head mind have forty-eight hours to return both the coins and Don Costes’s living body or corpse to me. If you fail to deliver either one, then I will verify the balance sheet, and you will see just what kinds of moral virtues I feel comfortable laying claim to. And it will be amusing and educational for me to watch you. My little project.’

  Pillow had been trying to imagine the slow, thick waves of pain as colours, but he wasn’t succeeding. He opened his eyes and saw Breton walking out of the apartment, sliding as if on ice and moving his arms in a loose Charleston approximation.

  Pillow woke up when the cramp in his hip finally got deep enough that his whole leg spasme
d back against the bottom of the couch. He hopped up, fell and massaged himself. He stayed on the floor awhile, propped up on his other knee with his face pressed flatly and firmly into the carpet. His hip started to feel better, and Pillow remembered where he was. It was his own apartment. He felt desperately thirsty and for a minute thought he was hungover. Pillow realized that the problem was the head injury when he accidentally bumped his hematoma lightly against the side of the sink and his vision went a sudden, searing red and he sank to the ground and rolled around.

  After a while of that he pulled himself up against the kitchen counter and took to repeating the phrase Easy peasy, lemon squeezy over and over until he felt confident enough in his balance to stand. After he’d calmed down he managed to string a few, admittedly swirly and jagged at the same time but still probably accurate, memories together.

  Emily was done with him, at least for now. Artaud was gone and didn’t matter anymore anyway, so that was nice, one less headache and all that.

  He had the strong gut feeling that he’d killed Don Costes, but wasn’t strictly sure how, or where he’d left the body. All he remembered was throwing up on a cement pillar of some kind, sopping blood from his forehead in the front seat of Don’s car. He remembered those things in quite a lot of detail, though.

  So, it was time to go. He had to get to Apollinaire, ask her for some walking-around money, and then run as far away as he could as fast as he could, until such time as he had turned himself into the sort of genuinely caring and unselfish and not accidentally incredibly dangerous person that Emily would allow around her and their child.

  He knew that he should probably eat something and went to fridge. Most of the vegetables and fruit seemed rotten, so Pillow took out a box of tofu, an eggplant that was only half-bad and a jar of kimchee. He put the food on the counter and looked at it for a while, and then he felt a sudden overwhelming rage. He smashed the food with his hands, got a really bad head rush and then did a breathing exercise sitting on the floor of the kitchen, feeling the bottom of his pants soak with food and wondering vaguely if the red stuff dripping down his hands was blood or just kimchee juice.