by Jim Krusoe
Even from Raymond, this is a strange question. But then, what strikes Jeffery as even more bizarre is that Raymond must have been lurking by the front door for God knows how long, like the Ancient Mariner, waiting for him. And, what is even stranger, it is clear to Jeffery that Raymond must have gone to the door directly from his bed, because he is still wearing his red-and-white-striped pajamas, which could use a wash. Truly.
Also, there are three or four fresh wood shavings in his hair, as usual.
Raymond, being the Burrow’s longest resident, is the one who remembers Louis best, and when Louis left suddenly, in the middle of the night, without an explanation, it made Raymond nervous. How could someone be there one moment and then in the next disappear? When Raymond tries to picture Louis now, he can only recall a tall, coffee-colored man with gray, curly hair who was fond of sweaters, and always polite, and who never failed to clean up after himself when he used the kitchen. But what else? He used to like to talk to Louis, he knows this, but what did the two of them ever talk about? What were Louis’s features? What happened to him? The man seems to have been washed away somehow, and the thing that sticks most in Raymond’s mind is, of all things, the sound of his name, Louis, which, curiously, was the same sound made by Louis’s worn brown leather slippers as he shuffled down the hall on his way to the kitchen. At any rate, with Heather in her room most of the time and Viktor being with Madeline these days, that pretty much leaves only Jeffery for Raymond to talk to.
No wonder he misses Louis.
Viktor’s favorite word is rectum. There are others that come close—rector, correct, erect, even rectitude—but for all-round satisfaction and simple purity of sound, rectum wins, hands down. Rectum, that great two-stroke gong of a word, beginning with the crispness of the rec, and then, just as the listener is brought to attention by the rec, comes the hollow tum of doom at the end: rec-tum, the whole journey of life in two syllables, and the end of life, too, if you think about it. And just guess where that exit point is? Garbage in/garbage out. People write all the time they something, so why isn’t there an equivalent for the rectum? It is literally amazing that here we have one of the most important organs in the whole human body, and yet most people refuse to give it the recognition it deserves, have failed to embrace the power of this simple word. But Viktor has embraced it. That’s his secret.
Meanwhile, Jeffery still has his hand on the knob of the Burrow’s dark front door, getting ready to leave. “Why do you ask?” he asks Raymond.
“Because,” Raymond answers, “I’ve been having the same bad dream lately, and I can’t seem to stop it.”
“Maybe you should write it down so you can remember it,” Jeffery says, and gestures toward the exit.
“I already remember it,” Raymond replies. Somewhat disconcertingly, he begins to tug harder on the sleeve of Jeffery’s jacket. It’s one Jeffery was given several years ago by an old girlfriend, and for that reason it is his favorite article of clothing. It still smells of her patchouli and, at least in his mind, of her spit, which would sweetly leak from her mouth like a child’s when she fell asleep on long rides, her head on his shoulder as he drove carefully homeward so as not to wake her. Her name was Pam, he thinks, or Jan.
“Okay,” Jeffery surrenders. “Let’s go to my apartment. You can talk about it there. ”
And what kind of town is it where people are so backward that they refuse to learn the names of the trees that are in their own neighborhood?
Cypress or pine—these careless people answer if you should ask them—what difference does it make, as long as they are there?
But aren’t the names of things important?
The Burrow, for one.
“Twilight souls” is the name the Captain gives to the uncomplicated and unaware primitive races he came into contact with during his days on the high seas, caught, as they were, somewhere between animals and a higher being. But caught where exactly, the Captain refuses to specify.
And where are we now?
How did we come to be here?
Where we going?
And anyway, do we even need to know?
III
Madeline is looking in the mirror trying to decide whether she should pluck her eyebrows or just leave them alone. On the pro side it would give her something to do, and she’s pretty bored, but on the con side she likes them the way they are. And there she is: red hair, full eyebrows, nice features though a little large, not like those mousey ones of Heather, which is good. So why doesn’t she get more respect? She gets men following after her, sure, but respect—that’s another matter entirely. On the other hand, who in the Burrow is capable of providing it? Raymond is, well . . . Raymond, and the word would never even cross his mind. Jeffery is old news and Viktor is intense—she’ll give him that—but the only thing he comes close to respecting is money.
One of these days she’s going to have to take her act on the road and get out of here before it kills her, but first she’d better figure out exactly what her act is going to be. Singing? No, though she has a nice enough voice. Dancing? Unfortunately not. Painting? Sculpture? Poetry? Nope, nope, and nope. The only thing she’s at all good at is cooking, so maybe that will be it, she thinks. Stranger things have happened, that’s for sure.
“In my dream,” Raymond announces to Jeffery when they finally arrive at Jeffery’s apartment, “I’m a duck, and my arms—or wings, I guess—are getting tired because I’ve been flying for days. Don’t ask me how I know this. And not only have I been flying nearly forever, but the weather is incredibly bad—snow, sleet, hail, and fog, too—so I can barely see the ground below. Anyway, I ask the leader of the ducks—we have a leader—‘Please, can we stop here?’ but he says no.
“Then I say, ‘How much longer?’ but the leader, who’s another duck, naturally, says I have to hang on. ‘We’re almost there,’ he yells over the wind to me, but at the same time, Jeffery, I’m telling you, my arms really, really hurt. I mean, I can barely move them, and it feels like I’m starting to lose altitude.”
Jeffery looks at him. The man is a little out of breath and his forehead is sweating. “That’s some dream,” he answers. “I can see why you’d remember it. But the fact is, Raymond, I was just on my way outside when you insisted on stopping me.”
“But wait,” Raymond goes on. “Just as I’m positive I’m going to drop into the ocean or into whatever it is that’s below me—did I mention there are a lot of clouds, so it’s impossible to see the ground at all?—the clouds separate, and there is the most beautiful pond I can imagine—cattails, and duckweed, and frogs—it’s sort of like the one outside this place, and perfect for landing. And it turns out, in my dream anyway, that somehow I knew this exact place would be here all along; don’t ask me how—instinct or something. Then, even better, guess who is flying right next to me? It’s Madeline—who is also a duck, but still the same Madeline you and I both know, the one who left you for me (sorry) and then me for Viktor—and I tell her, ‘Madeline, look. Other ducks are already down there; it will be great. We’ll get a bite to eat, and maybe exchange some information about weather conditions and so on and so forth. We can make new friends, but don’t you go getting too friendly, if you know what I mean, and Madeline kind of nods because her arms are busy flapping.
“So there we are, all of us gliding down to join the other ducks and, just as I’m thinking how great it feels not to have to move my arms—which are so tired—anymore, what do I hear but loud noises? (Well, I can’t be positive how loud the noises are, scientifically speaking, because, as you know, a duck’s ears aren’t designed for picking up sounds—but I can tell you they are loud to me.) And then I can’t move my arms at all; I’m falling, and everything gets dark.”
Raymond’s face suddenly goes flat and spongy, but like a sponge that isn’t filled with water but with something else, something alien and scary. “Do you think this means I died?”
“I have no idea,” Jeffery answers, because right in the
middle of listening to Raymond talk about his dream, he found himself wishing for about the thousandth time that he had taped those episodes of his favorite old television sitcom, Mellow Valley. There were only seven of them, and he promised himself he’d do it before moving to the Burrow, but then other things got in his way.
Jeffery’s apartment, like every apartment in the Burrow, consists of a study, a bedroom, and a bath. There is no kitchen, not even a hot plate, because down the hall is a real kitchen that everyone shares with surprisingly few complications of a territorial nature. Food arrives, is put away, is consumed. That’s about it.
When he moved into the Burrow, his apartment came furnished: a bed, a brown leather couch, two lamps, a dresser, and two mismatched but comfortable chairs. Someone said the Burrow had been outfitted when a used furniture store caught fire, and most of the furniture was put outside for an impromptu sale even as the firemen were still shooting water on the blaze, trying (and failing) to save the building. Sometimes, if he’s lying on the couch, his head pushed deep into one of its cushions, Jeffery believes he can detect the faintest tang of smoke and imagines he can hear the hiss of steam.
Above his couch Jeffery has tacked a photo from a sports magazine he found in the Burrow kitchen one day, piled on top of the trash. The picture is of a woman on her back on a straw mat. Her arms are at her sides, palms facing up, and her reddish-brown hair is spread out behind her. Her eyes are shut, and although she wears a light-blue two-piece bathing suit that allows the viewer to appreciate the gentle, but not ostentatious, swelling of her breasts, the breathtaking curve of her waist, the discreet in-scoop of her navel, there is nothing base or prurient about her. Instead, she is chaste and self-contained. She could be a wandering goddess taking a little time out to soak up some rays.
Meanwhile, the woman in the poster’s shut eyes are saying—and not only to the person who snapped this photo in the first place, but now to Jeffery as well—“I don’t recognize you. I could open my eyes right now, and still you wouldn’t exist for me any more than if you never had been born. So move, asshole, because you are blocking my sunlight.” And weirdly, it was this very poster Jeffery had been staring at when it occurred to him to take a stroll outside and check things out and maybe catch a little sun for a change, that is, before Raymond stopped him at the door.
It probably is no coincidence that the woman in the poster resembles Madeline.
Who was it that said: “The entire course of human history can basically be reduced to the acts of one total psychopath after another”?
So picture a boy, an average-looking boy, who has the usual childhood diseases—croup, flu, strep—and takes them all in stride or even better because he’s a healthy kid, and what keeps his schoolmates in bed a week Junior will get over in a day. His mind, though, is another matter, because for one thing, he likes to cut up worms—lots of worms—in order to watch them writhe even though they lack faces to express their pain. He likes burning bugs, too, burning them with magnifying lenses so it takes awhile, and even though it’s true they do have faces, small ones, still they can’t change their expressions. Thank God for gasoline and rats. For the first time this boy can finally see what pain feels like outside of himself, which is the point, because this boy is not cruel; Junior is not a sadist, no. All Junior is looking for is someone—okay, something—he can share, compare notes with, to validate—though he would never use such a fancy word—his feelings. Anyway, there is a chance this boy, Junior, will grow out of this in time.
And it isn’t until a whole day passes, or maybe two days, that Jeffery realizes he hasn’t actually been outside at all since Raymond interrupted him with his stupid dream.
But then that’s not so unusual, because Jeffery is always meaning to do things he never gets around to actually doing. Taping those episodes of Mellow Valley, for one thing.
Figuring out a way to be successful, for another.
Back in the days when he was in command of the Valhalla Queen, on some afternoons the Captain would walk out on deck in between buffets, carrying his favorite pistol, the Walther that had been a present from his father, Klaus Senior. Once a crowd had gathered, he would take a little target practice at whatever happened to be bobbing near the ship that day: birds, kelp, fishing-net floats, baby seals—whatever. His ritual was this: six rounds, no more, no fewer, never missing once. When he finally lowered his pistol after his last bullet blew to pieces some hapless arctic tern or plain-old seagull, his first mate would shout, “Hooray for the Captain. Another perfect score.” And so the passengers would cheer as well, in the mistaken belief that there might somehow be a correlation between having a captain who was an excellent marksman and their own sense of personal safety.
Viktor’s room is just down the hall from Jeffery’s. Louis’s former room, now empty, is between them. Viktor had already been there for some time before Jeffery moved in—Jeffery doesn’t know for how long—but Jeffery remembers that his first day at the Burrow, Viktor just stood in the hallway and watched him carry his boxes of books, toiletries, clothes, and his computer through the front doorway and down the hall to his new room, without offering to help. The whole time, nearly an hour, Viktor’s huge hands rested at his sides. Jeffery later described them to Raymond as “two slumbering mastiffs.”
Still, whenever Jeffery meets Viktor these days in the communal kitchen as Jeffery is putting away groceries someone has left out on the counter—a more regular occurrence than you might guess—Viktor will sometimes pick up a box of cereal or a can of evaporated milk and put it where it’s supposed to be. When Viktor says anything at all, it’s about his work, some arcane sentence about the rise or fall of credit somewhere in the world. It’s a subject, Jeffery guesses, that has to do with Viktor’s scheme of buying and selling stock online. Viktor’s hair is the color of mud.
The two men take care never to mention Madeline.
Louis’s room still hasn’t been rented, and Jeffery is not sure why. It has to be despite the cost, which is extremely low; everybody agrees about that. Maybe, Jeffery thinks, Louis will be coming back one day, and it’s being saved for him.
The next door to Madeline’s room is Heather’s.
And Heather? Who is Heather, really?
Well, for one thing, Heather is young and thin with long, straight blond hair and sort of cute freckles on the bridge of her nose.
HERE IS A CHART TO MAKE THINGS MORE CLEAR:
Inside the Burrow Outside the Burrow
Jeffery The Captain
Raymond Louis
Madeline Junior
Viktor
Heather
Lives like sponges: half sponge, half filled with something else.
The Captain stands in the living room of his house and stares out the picture window that has been especially modified to remind him of the view from the bridge of the Valhalla Queen, minus the icebergs, of course, as he holds a grayish mug filled with hearty seaman’s coffee in one hand and a bear claw, just out of the toaster oven, in the other, and gazes out onto his broad front lawn. He does this nearly every morning, but this particular morning he gasps because what does he see but a large hole surrounded by a ring of fresh dirt, as if some enormous gopher arrived from God knows where only to settle in the neighborhood and, specifically, beneath his front lawn. And no sooner does he imagine a gopher of the size it would take to make this hole, than he tries to put it out of his mind. It is a foolish thought, he thinks. But if it isn’t a gopher, what could it be? Is he somehow still dreaming?
Still carrying the bear claw, the Captain leaves his coffee mug behind and walks out onto his lawn. (It is curious, he thinks, that after all those years at sea, his lawn has turned out to be what he’s most proud of). And then, it is no dream (!), because right in front of him is the hole, eighteen to twenty inches in diameter, which, despite the relatively small amount of dirt that surrounds the opening, appears quite deep. This must mean, he reasons, that it was tunneled from beneath, so that the g
reater part of the dirt fell downward, back into the hole, where something or someone at the other end must have taken it away.
His appetite gone, the Captain goes back inside. He tosses what’s left of the pastry in the trash. The ways of land are still strange to him, and in truth he is not sure how ordinary or how extraordinary it is, from a landsman’s perspective, for a person to wake one day and find a giant hole in his front lawn.
Yet, it’s not that simple, because this hole reminds him of something—something that has a name, or had a name once—but whether out of his own past or some old story, he can’t be sure. For a moment he stands motionless, one hand on his marble mantelpiece, the other placed across his forehead, a tableaux: An Old Sea Dog Trying to Remember, as meanwhile his memory breaks like low waves upon a distant shore in search of an answer. Break, break, break . . . nothing. Clearly, the waves have insufficient power to erode the shore deeply enough to reveal the answer hidden behind its rocky outcropping. It must be low tide or something.
But the Captain has no time to waste. He has another presentation to give that afternoon, so he calls his gardener and explains the situation as best he can. He tells the man to fill in the hole and cover the top with new turf so it blends into the rest of the lawn. “I’d like the place to look as seamless as the sea itself,” he says. “Just make sure that when anyone steps on it, it’s perfectly filled in. I don’t want any lawsuits from people breaking their legs.”