Deer-Shaped
by Adam Haiun
Everywhere there are holes and bad fathers. Last year a woman stepped into her pantry and fell into the canopy of a pine forest. Just a few weeks ago a garden shed opened to the sea and a new kind of squid spilled out onto the lawn. Each room is an opportunity for a hole and each father is an opportunity for a bad father.
There’s a word missing from the dictionary, and it means being told that you don’t care about something when you actually do, the feeling of being told that, over and over until it breaks. I dropped a coffee cup that same night when I heard about the woman in the pantry. When I felt the cup leave my hand I felt also the missing word, and then my father asked me what had made the noise.
My boss came around to my workstation to tell me about the special task of transporting a box of her things to a certain building and stashing it behind the reception desk, because she assumed I had a working car. Then she laid down two cards. The first was the key to the building and the second was The Tower, inverted, with the address penned across it.
“Take the day,” she said, shouldering her coat, and she left for the executive retreat and six hours later struck something like a deer and died at the side of the road in the dark. I looked inside the box and found it was full of hard drives.
Carrying the box I came finally from the mouth of the metro stop like a concrete bunker and out into a wet industrial place where big trucks were crowded at the bellies of the warehouses. The building was totally featureless except for a ceramic owl dripping rain and looking down from the lip of the roof, and I put the key to the plastic sensor on the doorframe.
At the reception there was a desk with no chair and a disconnected handset and a cheap monitor with no computer and the dust. Behind the desk was the door to the rest of the office. I put the box of things under the desk on the plum carpet where the millipedes lay curled and went out again.
In the summer I was at the tennis courts and a bus went by in the evening. It passed like a lantern along Ben’s shoulders where he stood poised and waiting for the serve. Now riding the bus home in the autumn I had the sense of being inside that lantern. It felt good not to be home yet and to be moving in the lantern through the blue world.
“Do you listen to the radio man Carlito Respect?” asked the woman sitting beside me from within the hood of her immense plastic cape, and I shook my head. “This week he did a whole show on holes.”
“I didn’t know they were still broadcasting anything over the radio,” I said.
“Carlito Respect is really very good. With the research he does, he’s like a real journalist. But they’re saying now that he abused his daughters.”
“Oh.”
“Emotionally,” she added, making a gesture with her hand.
My mother’s white Honda in the alley was like an aesthetic lesson. It faced a wall of stones covered in moss and it had no motor. It sat with the bins and the bicycles. The Honda had suffered so that it was no longer a vehicle, and I treated it as a living space and an object for appreciation.
Inside the house there was nothing that I owned. Ben wanted to talk on the computer but I couldn’t bring myself to answer him because I was busy convulsing, and after all the computer wasn’t really mine either. The quiet had put the obligation inside me, and again I felt the feeling of the missing word. Downstairs in the kitchen my father was tossing the cutlery around. In a dresser drawer I found a bag with three candy fish gone hard and chewed them each and kept some filling the caps of the molars so that they were smooth and flush like lakes of red gelatine.
Around the time of night when my boss would have been bleeding out in the wreck of her Porsche I went down and took things from the fridge and put on the television to hear the pleasant voices.
“—in the guest bedroom which led onto a mountainous expanse, which her husband insisted on exploring, equipped with basic sporting gear and carrying only minimal supplies, but when he did not return after nearly three days, she decided it was finally time to notify the police. The Xian residence has since been designated a lockdown zone by the Federal Hole Authority. Public pleas by Mrs. Xian to mount a search and rescue operation have been officially denied, leaving her and her young son to fend for themselves. Now Janice, as a father myself—”
I fell asleep with the image of a child in a chef’s coat, her small hand punctured by the quill of a sea urchin, and the crew member with her face blurred out by production sucking at the venom, and when I woke up I was in my mother’s car.
“Tell me about the fear,” Ben whispered to me, his breath across my throat.
“The fear of the person who lives at another person’s convenience. The fear of the withholding, and the withholding being justifiable. The fear of always being pulled around. The fear of the missing word. The fear of insanity.”
“Boy oh boy. Go to therapy.”
At work they made my boss’s death into a big deal. An assembly was called and they told us that the company was like a family and that meant that we had lost our mother, and that we should mourn her as a family would. Leaving the conference room Maria from Human Resources put her hand on my arm and told me that I looked shaken and sick, which was disconcerting because I thought that I was feeling better and acting normally.
“I think you should take the day,” she said. She had one of those dangling necklaces of enamel shapes.
I took the rumpled carpenter pants out from under my bed and in the side pocket found the two cards. I held them one in each hand and thought to myself for a while. Then I slipped them into the jacket of a book about urban planning and put my legs through the pants.
“Did you hear about the new hole? The back room in a strip club leaking the pure primordial soup,” I said to Ben at the canal.
“Shit. That’s something.”
“But now the debate is all about whether it’s our primordial soup or not. They can’t assume that it’s ours or else they risk confirming all kinds of incorrect theories.”
“I’d eat it. I’d eat the soup.”
“God, you’re so stupid.”
“I’d slurp it right up and then horses would never fucking exist.”
“If that happened the way you planned I don’t think any mammals would end up existing. Maybe no eukaryotic life at all.”
“Yeah, you’re welcome.”
The water in the canal ran black with the gold moving in it. The old lampposts lined the other bank and there was the squat green bridge. The spherical cockpits of the helicopters arced toward the city like gentle comets.
“Listen,” Ben began to say. He had his heavy eyelids.
“Yeah?”
“I really want you to make an effort to fix your brain.”
“Why’s that?”
“You know why. You know.”
In the Honda I examined the textures. I looked at the seatbelt webbing and the places where it tore and at the pebbled dash and the fingerprints on the lacquered inlays. I wondered whether any of the fingerprints still belonged to my mother. Seeing those things from up close I wondered if a car could ever become a hole.
A cop in a polyester suit was going around the office talking to everybody. He was being very casual with people and crossing his columnar legs, and I did not look at him. Eventually he came over and flicked the tails of his jacket like a pianist and sat just on the edge of my desk.
“Your colleagues tell me you were one of the last people in the building to speak with your late employer,” he said.
“I thought her death was accidental. Didn’t she hit a deer?” I asked.
“Something like a deer. They haven’t been able to piece together what it actually was. A deer-shaped and deer-sized organism. That said, yes, it was probably an accident.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“This is just a very informal visit to fill in some minor gaps in our file.”
“Okay.”
“Why don’t you start by telling me about that last conversation you had together.”
“She told me to get rid of a box on her desk. She told me I could take the day. Then she left the office.”
“Did you see the contents of the box?”
“It was full of computer parts. It was heavy.”
“Did she tell you why she wanted the box gotten rid of?”
“No. We didn’t have that kind of rapport. I assumed it was because the stuff was old maybe.”
“What did you do with the box?”
“I recycled the box and the stuff in it,” I lied.
The cop’s features were being drawn inward more and more toward the middle of his face.
“She gave you the day to put a box in the recycling bin?” He made a pinched smile when he said it so that it would seem like he was being comical.
“She told me to bring the box to an electronics recycling center. She wanted it done properly. She was always, like, big on environmentalism. That was something I really respected about her.”
A sigh escaped the cop. His features widened again to the breadth of his head.
“Last question. Did your employer ever bring up any personal construction projects, even in passing?”
“What, like home renovations?”
“Anything of that nature, yes.”
“No. Like I said, we weren’t close. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. When important people die their expenses become like an unsolved equation and we all flail around.” He waved his meaty hands.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“My daughter’s always doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“You know, flailing around. On the carpet. Kids like doing that.”
“I see.”
“Alright, well, thanks for your cooperation.”
“Sure.”
Coming home I saw the tow truck pulling the Honda out from the alley and I sat down on the curb. Standing in the doorway my father looked at me from across the street.
I printed out a fake loyalty card for a soap store and stuck it to the key and had it laminated. I committed the address to memory before burning up the tarot card, the real flames licking at the little illustrated ones. I went back again to the building.
I found that it was unchanged. The box of hard drives was stashed still under the desk in the skeletal reception area and there was nothing in the drawers except for a blue pen from a hotel which was chewed. I opened the door behind the desk where the hole waited and walked the illuminated path into the woods.
It was a monstrous stone house arrayed like dice strewn in the bed of the infinite forest. Little groundskeepers wheeled their automated trajectories, planting and weeding and inspecting the fruit. A dozen corridors of new rice stalks stood in an inch of silver water. In the sky there were strange and visible stars. In the house were the dark rooms.
We swam laps in the indoor pool and ate a kind of sashimi from the fridge and fucked in the horrible bed. Outside there was wind and the trees with their bluish leaves swayed insistent against the big windows in the night. Ben was perched like a gargoyle on the fat ornamental jug.
“You’ll have to go back at some point,” he said.
“Sure, for books or groceries or whatever.”
“I just don’t believe in running away from the world, ideologically I mean. Like this place smacks of bad politics for me.”
“You’re telling me you don’t see this as the best opportunity any individual person could ever hope for.”
“It’s definitely very cool.”
“It’s like living inside of a painting.”
“I think probably you should go and talk to your father. I think that retreating isn’t a good option for you.”
“I can see why you would think that but I promise you that you’re entirely wrong.”
“What if it isn’t safe here? What if the hole closes?”
“Has that ever happened?”
“I don’t know, nobody knows, except for the government.”
“If the hole closes, the hole closes.”
“I’m very sorry, but I’m not willing to abandon humanity for you,” and there was an unfamiliar movement in the corners of his mouth.
“Aren’t I a part of humanity?” I asked, as he climbed down from his place atop the jug.
In a dream my mother came to me and she was sick and what she said was inconsequential. I woke up and let myself fall naked into the swimming pool, and the golden bubbles cavorted and burst all around me. When I was dry again I passed through the house like a spirit. I pulled on a panel in the wall and a mahogany ladder slid soundlessly out.
On the roof there was a little garden of gnarled bushes, and the air blew fresh without season. In the corner a groundskeeper stood in his charging booth silent as an attendant. Padding barefoot down the stepping stones I came to the railing and saw at the border of the forest the slender animals where they stood watching me between the trees.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Adam Haiun is a writer and poet living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Malahat Review‘s Open Season Award for fiction, and for the Far Horizons Contest for poetry in 2020. His work can be found in Filling Station, Bad Nudes, The Headlight Anthology, and The Void. He has two chapbooks forthcoming with Collusion Books. He’s working on a book about computers. @ahaiuna on Instagram.