The Deadheart Shelters

by Forrest Armstrong

  Every man spends his entire life justifying himself, when it is much easier to understand that he is unjustifiable, and wash his hands.

  And then Dirt died before I could tell him I was sorry. Or at least have ignored what he said to offend me and told him any deathbed story he wanted me to tell. His last breath blew out until I imagine his lungs were pressed flat, and the black dust hung over him like a bell tolling some o’clock. When it fell, it was as the sheets that lay over the flat-lined hospital patients, until received naked by the frozen shelves.

  We were sitting in the soap opera kitchen, looking at the mobiles spin on the ceiling and the diminutive lullabies they make sounded of small steel drums. Because this had always comforted us. I held Lilly’s hand and when she’d grip mine tight for a second, as if to remind me she was there, it was like there was a blackberry between our hands she’d be breaking. Abe started to snore and Lilly turned her head to whisper “I love you.”

  I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you are just syllables.

  The front door opened up, two different footsteps coming in. We thought it must be Mark and Clyde, but then Mark pushed a young kid into the kitchen ahead of him and said “Look.” We could see the bones through his upper arms and knew he hadn’t been fed much. “I bought a slave,” Mark said. “I had all this money but nowhere to spend it, so I bought him. Look at him.”

  Mark struck him across the back and he fell forward, coughing up phlegm and saliva onto the counter, and Mark shouted “Aw you little bastard you’re making a mess already. Now I know why they keep slaves outside, you can’t help making a mess. I buy you to make my life easier, you can sleep outside. Under the stars. You’d like that right? Animal. No blankets and you’ll get used to it because all animals get used to it. Look at them, pretend you ain’t an animal long enough to say Hello.” The intensity of eye contact he gave, when asked to give it, and how it would break so soon after starting. “Hello,” he muttered softly.

  “Try again.”

  “Hell-oh,” the kid shouted, and started to cry a shaking cry like airplane turbulence. He was hyperventilating and trying to suppress it, which made him gasp harder.

  “He looks so sad,” Lilly said, letting go.

  “He ain’t sad. He’s scared ‘cause he knows he’s worthless but that’s how slaves should feel. Clean up your mess.” The kid started to wipe up his spit with his hands and Mark struck him again. “Not with your hands! Shit! That’s a whole new mess you think I want those inhuman germ-beds greasing up my eat spot? Hell no. Shit.”

  “You don’t get carried away now, Mark,” Abe said.

  “That’s why you buy these things, old man. Money never allowed for you?”

  “Money allowed. Had no desire.”

  Lilly got a towel for the kid to clean with. He washed carefully, calm returning to him; a fisherman unhooking a fish and releasing it. I sat there speechless, wondering about him. “What’s your name?” and he gave that same instant of eye contact that sank straight to the bottom of you like a baited line. Then drawn up and speechless.

  “He don’t got a name. Why give him one?”

  “Every man needs a name,” said Abe.

  “Not mine. Only reason to ever give a slave a name’s if you got more than one. Him you just call the first profanity that feels right at the moment.”

  “I don’t like that.”

  “Well then buy one and name it. You saint.”

  “He looks so hungry,” Lilly said.

  “He ain’t hungry.”

  “He is. I’m going to make us all something to eat.”

  “He don’t eat with us.”

  “Tonight he does, Mark. Let it be like that. Pete, come with me.”

  Outside I heard the cicada throats that sound so much like anxiety feels. If we didn’t speak of so many things they wouldn’t exist. Lilly’s footsteps beside mine, like being woken up. Sometimes I wished I was an ice cube melting, and the sky like a dead swordfish as the evening drew in and the moon being emboldened by the white ripped down around it was one blank, dead eye. Gasp as if fainting.

  “I’m thinking of other things,” I said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “What if I told people I was named something else? And that I grew up on a ship never anchored? I’d run around and shake them by the shoulders, shouting How are you not amazed by this? We’re standing on a ground that never shifts!”

  “I don’t know why you’d want to do that.”

  “Who says I do? But maybe I might.”

  “Don’t go doing things like that. Okay?”

  I didn’t answer. We got to the place where the tomatoes grew and found two elk eating them already. “We need meat for the supper. Kill one,” Lilly said, but I couldn’t do it. I had the biggest rock I could hold in one hand held above one’s head and he watched, as if saying I understand You have to do this.

  But I couldn’t. They walked away from the tomatoes soundlessly.

  “No meat, then,” Lilly said with a sigh.

  When we plucked the tomatoes they too would sigh from the stem, like they had been holding their breath. Sometimes one of our hands would graze the other’s warmly, but when Lilly put her fingers around my wrist and slid up to my fingers I could feel her temperature dropping. The pale in her face was made of the pale in the sky ripped down and bruised now in the injured night. And I thought It’s sad how each day happens like this, born an ignorant child too fast becoming bed-sick.

  Even as a slave I was excited in the morning, though I knew it came without the freedom of preceding an unwritten day. It was the feeling of being unprepared. Or that each day could be the day you do the thing you haven’t done yet.

  Thinking of the fertility of life, I walked to the apple trees with Lilly. That you could impregnate every moment with something different and wondering if I had lost that. Allowed it to be so. The elk had stopped ahead of us and were crying over what I thought was a colorless puddle, until it spun. Then we both looked up.

  Clyde was hung from the thickest branch, his head tilted in perpetual confusion and his face the unregistering blankness of daydreams. I shouted as if losing balance. Lilly flung herself into me, and I let her stay there, and we both watched him spin and listened to the tenseness of the rope much longer than we should have.

  “No,” Lilly said. “He really…”

  “It worked.”

  When we told them inside, Abe held his head and went away. Mark stared at us for a while, unresponsive, then turned to his new slave and said “Go cut him down, boy. Cut him down and bury him.”

  The lump of black dust that Dirt was underneath got thinner as he wasted in the hunger of death, so that when I brushed it back to see what he looked like I couldn’t recognize him. The white mice dozed in the skinny of his ribcage, yawning. Then one day it’s like they remembered us. I heard the ping of hammers again from the other side, and as the wall diminished between us I heard them speak without alarm. I beat the wall with my own hammer, shouting “Faster!” At once they stopped talking and the ping happened quicker. I paced the room feverishly for what must have been half a day, until a hammer broke through and I could smell the fresh air like undressed branches. The coal fell into me.

  “You…” said the man who had pushed the hammer through. “You are alive.”

  “Just me. Did you forget us?”

  “No. We mourned you.”

  The rest of the men came into the room and stared at me wordlessly, but their mouths moved as if chewing and I got angry. “How could this happen? How did you do it? How did you leave us? Is this how things work? Is this how things work?”

  “This is often how things work. It’s something we all know.”

  We walked out of the mines and the brightness of the sun wounded me, so I turned back and kept my head in the black it couldn’t reach. As if pruned in bathwater and surfacing. I counted backwards from ten which is a habit I used to have that I thought I lost with the
corks in my cheeks; it was like things in a factory shrink-wrapped. I reached zero and everything was dimmer.

  “Pete!” said Felt, coming to me with a half-wrapped sandwich in one hand held out. “Eat this. You must be starving.”

  I nodded and took it but the meat inside was tasteless. Then I noticed the goats who decorated the empty field with their stomachs cut open and their heads bent unnaturally, staring through eyes the color of worn leather at the sky of their accidental tomb. Surrounded by red-spot shadows unblinking.

  “What happened here?” Windmills turned at the bottom of the hills lazily; these too were made since I left.

  “A lot has happened. You don’t think the world stops happening without you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “No, you don’t. That’s the first thing a coal miner learns.”

  He sat down beside me and we watched the air fill with the black specks of flies as they took what they could from the goats. Felt wiped the coal dust on his pants uselessly. “I’m glad your friend died in there.”

  “Me too,” I said. I was surprised to have said it but soon dismissed the surprise; not as something expected but as something insignificant. When Felt said “He was impure” I also dismissed it for its insignificance. It seemed to me we don’t need reasons to feel things, to encounter them is enough and the kneejerk that follows. So I thought and at that moment everything grew freer. The world unburdened me.

  “But I’m happy you made it out. Do you still want to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be here tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  I walked home with that sleepy feeling like you’re in a cradle tied to wolves. Your head tilts forward and the asphalt looks like blacksmith anvils splashing into puddles but the feet keep moving without getting tangled up. The city choked me in all directions but couldn’t break through a single pore, didn’t push into my ears like mosquitoes nor my mouth when I yawned, but stayed there, letting nothing else in. Like a gas mask to the world it was absent to, making all the air I breathe into its own self, its own smell like cracked batteries and shot breaks, stale cigarettes and pavement. The way when I blow into a tissue, the snot’s black. Half from the mines, half from the way the gas mask makes it.

  I don’t know how long I was trapped. My soap opera happened with the clockworks of a dream, like a broken bone untreated and the bone gets all jumbled and then heals. Then it is in one place. When I saw the sky again it was like a pile of albino moles fighting over the peach-designed sun. I had to close my eyes.

  I walked through the city, feeling like I had layers of lamination plastic between me and it. Then I saw the police machine that looked like a human but twice as tall as us, walking into an empty parking space and sitting cross-legged. Its forehead opened like a cosmetic case and the uniformed men came out. They took their guns out, positioned themselves in a line, and aimed. Then I saw what they were looking at. On the sidewalk across the street, a man sat with corks plugged in his cheeks, holding a rudely-made sign that read “HELP ME—IT’S HEAVY HERE.” I watched them like they were in a zoo, like this was all happening behind glass. The man’s head got hit from four different bullet paths and at first it looked like a squirrel jumped out of his skull, but time disorganized it into what it was. His face was missing and his body banged against the wet floor.

  The police machine walked away, off to whatever came next. Something always came next here. My city is like a gas mask that turns the air into itself and if you are in it then it is you.

  I dreamed of words falling in an empty room to the rhythm of a greyhound’s pulse after running:

  the heart the heart the heart the heart

  the heart who’s a declawed crab and

  the heart in boiling water, lidded pot, blue-flamed stove

  I saw myself wrecked, the heart a demolition ball pendulum-moving in the chest and the ribs like potato chips broken outwards. In every city you find corpses on the sidewalks who died broken-hearted the heart too angry for the body and

  the mind becomes a blank channel, seafoam soft-touching the shore like drool, accidentally

  and upon waking you find the heart to be an unformed fetus buried breathless in barnacles.

  This dream kept me kicking in my sleep all night. When I woke up there were bite marks in the blanket and I said there are two ways I can sleep, restlessly or with calm, dreaming of flocks of sheep and stale summers. I took my dream with me to the hills.

  When I was a slave I’d leash my dream and take it with me too, but it was different then. If you thought about the dream long enough to understand it you’d have to suffocate it in the stomach before you started to envy its conditions. It was like ladders made of mud.

  I sat on the hill with my dream beside me like a handbag dog and the trees were frozen beetles across the valley. It felt good—the freedom to make each thought an exploding package and not hide it under the shirt. The branches were upside-down brooms.

  What this might be What this might be What this might be What this might be are just syllables. If we never talked about it, it would go away like the things outside my soundproof room do when I blink. Only the peel which time will mold and all things look the same like that, arbitrarily. And I thought The electrified water cannot hurt those who aren’t bathing.

  More leaves were falling stiffened and you could see the undressed branches.

  Then I saw the figures come into the valley from between the trees. My heart felt like when you try to touch the bottom of a lake, and the air turns into tar-black cold. By the time you get up your lungs are moving as fast as printer cartridges and you get that dazzled lightheaded that makes things look like snow.

  They were coming closer, the dogs distant behind them and everything in me wanted to pull a shelf out of the sky and hide inside it, but I was transfixed.

  When I saw Lilly I had to look down to keep all the bad things I’d dug a grave for from getting unburied. She passed so close I could smell the magnolias on her, and nostalgia wrapped my head like tinfoil. She didn’t recognize me.

  The other slaves came with their barnyard stink of manure-clotted stables and bed-sweat from sleep that they couldn’t rinse off. There were no showers on the farm; we showered in the rain, without soap. They kept passing, walking around me so I was in between all of them shaking like I was pushed hypothermic by the outdoors. But it was warm.

  Then Abe came. He walked thirty feet in front of the dogs with some others behind him I didn’t recognize. I looked up at him and made eye contact for too long.

  “Pete.” Abe was in front of me, whispering without turning his head. His eyes grew in the sockets like ping pong balls. “That you? Pete, it’s you, ain’t it?” I started shaking harder.

  “Pete!”

  “You’re crazy, old man,” I said, pretending to be one of the people we always used to pass as slaves, with their repulsion and their insults. Calling us chalkos. But the repulsion came naturally and I got a sudden rush of warmth realizing I am them. (Dirt always used to say “I wish I were normal” and I’d answer “You are.”)

  “Never mind. I won’t blow your cover but boy am I glad to see you! I knew you’d make it—”

  “I said you’re crazy, chalkos! Keep those diseased ideas out of your mouth!”

  “I know you! I know—”

  I hit him. First in the mouth and he fell and then I got on top of him. He coughed a lot and I got the phlegm on my hands but didn’t stop; nobody stopped me. And I smiled because I didn’t have to pretend I am this way; nobody stopped me.

  I got off of him only when I knew he’d realized I am this way.

  The black dog passed, trailing them after Abe got up and walked away without looking to my eyes. And then they were all tissues in the wind floating away, shrinking into white spots you could confuse with flakes of chalk or anything so inconsequential. Until they were gone and you could confuse them with nothing.

  There are no tricks to enjoyin
g Forrest Armstrong’s work. Just open up the book and plunge into the mad rush of beautiful images and bizarre occurrences. You can’t help but feel a sense of real human truth. Sure, he’s throwing tiny hippos and flying coal slugs at you, but beyond that each page seems ingrained with a rare kind of earnestness, a sense of genuine emotion and sympathy with the characters. And these characters, no matter how strange, emit a very human sense of striving for something.

  You can attach to them. You can get close to them, so close you can’t tell where they end and you begin, and then you can let them break your heart.

  Like I said, no tricks are needed to engage with this wonderful writer’s work.

  I do, however, have a tip—This is a book that grows even more enjoyable when read out loud. There are strange lines here and there, appearing at first as borderline non-sequiturs. It’s rewarding to take a moment and let your voice show you the sense in the structure. I have new favorite sentences in here, and I’m guessing you may find a few of your own.

  Many of those favorites involved descriptions of the sky. It appears Mr. Armstrong has an obsession with the atmosphere in its various states, and when I mentioned this to him he simply replied “It’s the biggest thing in the world” and left it at that. Some of the more abstract sky-scapes benefit from this oratory sounding. I tried reading the sentences aloud and then closing my eyes right after to see what image was created and in doing so discovered that what I read as abstract conjured something concrete and grand.

  Just a tip. If it sounds intriguing to you, give it a go.

  You could also just read the book straight through in one sitting and enjoy this beautiful Bizarro work as a strange parable. I saw it as a sort of Jodorowsky-helmed adaptation of The Great Gatsby, and found that recounting the story to others gave me a greater sense of sadness each time. And I think that with this work Forrest Armstrong has established himself as a uniquely lyrical Bizarro voice, one that I feel grateful to be publishing and sharing with others.