by Jim Krusoe
So everything reflects everything else, like living in a fun house, she thinks, but honestly, whether all these mirrors do any good at all is anyone’s guess, because while it’s true, they do reflect the light, they also multiply the dark. Even so, she’s mostly used to them by now. That is: Madeline hardly thinks of mirrors at all except when Jeffery, in one of his lame efforts to be funny, pretends the mirrors are two-way, and starts talking to whoever’s on the other side.
Ha ha.
In the second episode of Mellow Valley, the commune’s very first crop of marijuana is threatened by the same drought that is also killing the corn, alfalfa, and soybeans on the surrounding farms. “It looks as if your little experiment is going to come to an end as rapidly as it started,” Grandpa Stoner tells everyone, in a group meeting he calls after returning from an inspection of the dying plants one dusty afternoon.
And all does seem lost, until the newcomers pool their knowledge in an attempt to find a way to solve their problem. First, Sergeant Moody recalls an obscure method of rice irrigation used by South Vietnamese farmers, many of whom he killed for no reason at all. In places where there wasn’t sufficient water to make an actual rice paddy, he said, the wily farmers—no doubt sympathetic to the Viet Cong—used a system of interconnecting bamboo tubes to carry water to each individual plant. Then Junior sacrifices the tubing on his hookah to make a prototype of the system Sergeant Moody is describing to help them visualize the concept. Norm, with the help of the elderly town librarian, Mrs. Bachhaus, researches which varieties of cannabis use the least amount of water, and Judy, pretending that she is creating a piece of installation art, goes to the local hardware store and orders about a quarter mile of plastic tubing, pumps, and connectors. Working together, the members of the commune rip out most of the dying pot plants, save what few parched leaves they can find, and use them to get high as they wait for the equipment to arrive.
When everything is delivered, Heather, Judy, and Junior plant the new, drought-resistant plants, bought from a fellow peacenik in the dry, southwestern part of the United States, as Grandpa Stoner works alongside Sergeant Moody and Norm to assemble the new irrigation method. “You may be city slickers—no offense, Heather,” he says, “but I have to admit there’s a half chance that this crazy idea just might work.”
The new crop flourishes.
So in the way that sometimes very different cities, such as Lima, Ohio, and Lima, Peru, share the same name, we now have two Heathers here. One is the Heather who acted in Mellow Valley and the other is a different Heather, who by coincidence has the same name, Heather, but who now lives in the Burrow. And although they are not the same person, it is a little confusing because the Heather who is in the Burrow thought she would be an actress one day, that is, that she would be the world-famous Heather, and the Heather who acted in Mellow Valley would be, well . . . a nobody.
How could she believe this? Well, because of a single moment: After Heather-who-is-in-the-Burrow’s memory of that kindergarten specialness (thanks to Mrs. Charles, so her name, Heather = a fresh breeze) more or less evaporated with every ascending grade level, it was a sad and beaten-down Heather who one day walked into Mr. Kaminsky’s Theater Arts class in high school. And there, almost as if by magic, the minute she had to introduce herself (“Hello, my name is Heather”) she could start to feel that old specialness come back, as if she were important, and she found herself occupying a platform slightly higher than everyone else that she hadn’t even known she’d stepped onto.
Acting made her feel like Heather! again, and she was good, she was better than good, the only problem being that when she was up on the stage with everyone watching her and applauding her, one part of her always knew that people were watching and applauding her not because she was Heather, but because she was pretending to be someone else. The point being it was anybody other than the real Heather they were applauding; it was a complete stranger they were praising.
And now, waiting behind the door of her room in the Burrow, Heather hears a small noise in the hallway. She holds her breath for a few seconds—not that it makes any real difference—until whoever it is passes by her room and goes back to their own room. If only, she thinks, she could be an actress like the one on Mellow Valley who shared her name. She wouldn’t be here at all.
IN CASE YOU ARE CONFUSED:
The Cast of Mellow Valley Residents of the Burrow
Norm Jeffery
Judy Madeline
Sergeant Moody Viktor
Heather* Heather
Junior (a psychopath)** Raymond
The Captain***
*Heather, the character on Mellow Valley, was actually an actress named Angela Morrison, who, as coincidence would have it, was killed in a car accident at the exact moment the other Heather, the Heather of the Burrow, was saying her name to Mr. Kaminsky, so technically speaking there was a current vacancy in the realm of celebrities with the name of Heather.
**Junior, a member of the cast of Mellow Valley, whose character’s name, Junior, happens to be the same as his actual one, Junior (Lima, Ohio, et cetera), has become, in the years that followed his appearance on the show, a psychopath with a fascination for crossbows.
***While never an official member of the cast of Mellow Valley, the Captain was hired as a consultant for one episode, never aired.
Lives made of nothing but air, without even the layer most sponges have to separate the outer world from the inner one. Or possibly capturing the outer one and making it the inner one. It’s hard to explain.
The third episode of Mellow Valley, subtitled “The Nature of Hope,” is the one in which all the characters on the show suddenly notice that, especially during certain hours of the afternoon, Grandpa Stoner is impossible to find, and when people ask him what he does during those hours, he refuses to answer. Naturally everyone becomes worried, but eventually Junior tracks him down at the local animal shelter. There, it turns out, Grandpa Stoner has been spending a part of every day playing with farm dogs who were left behind by owners who moved away to find work in the city. Sometimes their owners’ farms were foreclosed upon, or else their marriages fell apart under the disappointment of one bad harvest after another, or just from the pressures of balloon payments due on their homesteads as a result of taking out bad loans from unscrupulous lenders. At the shelter, Grandpa pets each of these dogs and talks to them, trying to make them feel better about their situation, which, he reassures the animals, is only temporary.
“But Grandpa,” Junior says, dismayed, “don’t you realize you are just raising the hopes of all these dogs, insofar as all of them—or at least ninety-nine percent of them—are doomed? What good does that do? Don’t you think you are only increasing their sense of betrayal at the end, when, expecting a pat and some kind words, instead they are dragged off to be gassed, thus making their last moments even worse than they would have been?”
“Not necessarily,” Grandpa Stoner answers. “Dogs can’t see into the future any more than you or I, and studies show possibly less. Ergo: we all know we’re going to perish in the end. Does that mean we should deny ourselves whatever pleasure we can find along the way? Consider that these animals’ hope might last for weeks, or at least days, while this sense of betrayal you speak of will last only a minute. Are you so afraid of dying that you can’t see anything else in the room? Please tell me it isn’t so, Junior.”
Junior doesn’t know what room the old man is talking about, let alone what he is supposed to be seeing in it—tables? lamps?—so he waits until everyone has sat down to the dinner table that evening before he returns to the question of pleasure versus truth that Grandpa raised at the shelter, and from that point on the rest of the show becomes more or less a debate along those lines. Grandpa Stoner, Norm, and Judy take the side that momentary distractions are necessary and, in fact, unavoidable. Heather, Junior, and Sergeant Moody—who provides several gruesome examples from prisoners-of-war he held captive for a time, generally a short time
—represent the case for unflinching pessimism.
In the end nothing is resolved, but at the time TV Week called it “A rare, if unsuccessful, example of a thoughtful situation comedy on a network that has become a byword for the total vapidity of its offerings.”
THE TECHNICAL SIDE OF THINGS
Meanwhile, outside the Burrow, in a room in a totally different part of the city, away from the tall buildings and the mom-and-pop grocery stores, far from the sheet-metal fabrication plants, the fabric shops and Internet start-up ventures, in a room lit by bad artificial light, filled with brass gauges, machinery, boilers, tubes, wires, and compressors, and also plenty of cranks, levers, and wheels, two men are working. At the moment, both are awake, but soon one of them will retire to another room, a small room right next to the one they currently share. And in that second room, the man, after removing his heavy boots and taking off what he calls his “funny hat,” will take a nap on the single cot.
While he sleeps, his partner, whose own hat remains on, will continue to operate the machinery in the larger of the two rooms.
Their names are not important, but their jobs are very important.
And every once in a while—say, every four or five years—some young executive full of self-importance will have the bright idea of releasing all the episodes of Mellow Valley, complete with outtakes, as a boxed set. Or he’ll even suggest they bundle up what they already have and send them out of the country to people still wearing loincloths and shooting arrows, to places where they are so starved to see anything at all that terrible acting and weird story lines aren’t negatives. In other words, he’ll say, let’s market the show in fourth- or fifth-world places and we can squeeze a couple more bucks out of the old film library. But then he’ll sit down and watch the series and understand what a disastrous idea that is. So that will take care of that until the next bright young executive comes along.
Are objects in the mirror more distant than they appear? Honestly, Raymond doesn’t know, since, despite the tremendous number of polished mirrors in the Burrow, the only time he looks at one is when he has to, which is hardly ever (though he did more often when Madeline was with him, in order to look nice and make her like him). But these days, when he looks at all, it’s only to imagine how he would appear to Madeline if she ever changed her mind and wanted him back, which, even to him, is an idea, based on his image in the mirror, that appears increasingly far-fetched.
But in any case, he can’t say that he himself seems distant, can he?
People always believe that words will save them, but they are wrong, Heather thinks. Likewise, all those people who write letters, from prison and elsewhere, from places of entrapment and incarceration, those who believe their words will get them out, are wrong. And also those who sing their words in stupid love songs, or scratch them on trees, or have them carved on tombstones wanting to have “the last word,” or print them in newspapers as letters to the editor, and in books; people who think that just because the words are printed they are somehow special, like the guys who call her on the sex line because they think their words have some kind of reality of their own, that because their words are the same as sex to them, then Heather repeating their words back to them must for them be the same as having sex with her, and though Heather does concede there may be some overlapping between words and the physical world from time to time—such as when you write words on a Post-it note, and you have the words and you have the Post-it note, which you can stick anywhere you want, moving it around your apartment so you can see it better and help yourself improve who you are—who you will be—she cannot convince herself that the neurons firing in those assholes’ pinheads when the sex words are said can possibly be identical to the ones firing when actual human contact is being made. Which is a point, come to think of it, that is largely in favor of the sex phone line, because the phone sex neurons are, at best, only in the neighborhood of those neurons involved in actual contact—maybe next-door neighbors—and being next door is not the same as being in the same house together, eating at the same kitchen table or having sex in the same bed, and sometimes things are better that way.
It’s like a dream: if the morning after having a dream a person wants to remember it, she can’t look for it in the same place where she keeps her actual stored-away experiences, because no matter how much a person may want to remember a specific dream she once had, even if she had an electrode and pushed a button to stimulate the part of her brain where actual experiences are stored, she wouldn’t get any dreams at all, but only get actual experiences. In other words, if a person wants to stimulate a dream, she has to go somewhere else entirely, somewhere next door to her house, though not her house at all. And maybe not even next door, but still down the street or on the next block, though in the same neighborhood—which is her brain, of course—a satisfying thought. So when those high school parents who came to see Oklahoma! were applauding “I’m just a girl who can’t say no,” who was it they were applauding? And why exactly is this an argument in favor of phone sex? She was going somewhere with this, she is sure, but just where eludes her.
Nonetheless, Heather wonders, aren’t all thoughts like Plato’s Cave (a place she imagines looks a lot like the Burrow) in that we are all chained and looking at the shadows cast by the fire on the wall of the cave, believing they are real when they’re not? Although come to think of it, didn’t Plato say that even if you did somehow manage to unlock your chains and take a stroll outside the cave, once you left the cave you couldn’t come back inside again because you would be attacked by all your ex-friends, those cave dwellers, for being crazy because you would be describing things they couldn’t understand. In this case, however, Heather can’t picture anyone who lives in the Burrow attacking anyone, except possibly Viktor, who strikes her as, well, as having some dark personal issues, and maybe that woman, Madeline. And wasn’t “Plato’s” also the name of some sex club that opened around the time that Mellow Valley, the show that feautured the other Heather actress, was on the air?
So Heather keeps listening to her callers pour their hearts out on the other end of her phone line (her cell phone), and sometimes she hears them use truly bad words accompanied by loud thuds and slippery sounds because they get excited when she says things like, “Wow, you are so big, I want your cock in me,” a phrase that Betty, her trainer, told her to say at least twice every conversation if Heather wants to have them coming back, and which phrase Heather now keeps on a Post-it by the phone to remind her to use it, except she wrote down only the initials (WYASBIWYCIM), just in case a Burrow inspector, as absurd as it sounds, did come into her apartment looking for a hot plate, or electric teakettle, and saw the initials. That way he would say—if he said anything at all—something like, “Wow! That looks Welsh.” Or maybe Polish.
Could Raymond be Polish?
“Viktor,” Jeffery says, “do you think there’s a life after we die?”
“I don’t know,” Viktor says. “Isn’t the important thing that we get what we want in this one?”
In Junior’s dream he is at a carnival, a small one, the kind that travels from neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the year, with smallish rides—nothing scary—and lots of small booths, like the ring toss and throwing baseballs at milk bottles. The booth he is at now is his favorite: the shooting gallery, the kind where patrons aim their BB guns at dented metal silhouettes of ducks that are drawn along by a conveyer belt that’s hidden behind fake waves, painted bright blue, but in his dream, instead of a BB gun, he’s got a crossbow. Bam, he hits one, and then Bam, another. In his dream he can’t miss.
And why doesn’t someone open up a shooting gallery for crossbows? It could be a big hit, Junior thinks. He’ll store that one away for the future.
V
For the record, right now the Captain’s Death Quotient is roughly forty-five.
Probably because he’s thinking about how something as simple as a birthmark in the shape of an anchor can turn your whole
life into one big joke.
To say nothing about the deep, invisible hurt that comes with it, the hurt that has no mark on it at all, but is there anyway, because it doesn’t seem fair when you know you are so much better than everyone else, objectively speaking. You are so much stronger and more intelligent, but then, any moment you happen to be away from your chauffeured limousine, maybe not wearing your uniform because it’s at the cleaners, right at that moment a stray breeze can come by, blow the hair off your forehead, and any complete moron walking by has permission to point at that anchor on your face and laugh.
Even twilight souls.
Polish! Heather could laugh in this so-called inspector visitor’s face about the Polish on her note because if he wanted to take the trouble to find out, one of her clients happens to be Polish—his name is Stan—but as far as she can determine no one has ever been in her room except for her and, of course, whoever lived there before her. And as for the pervs, which is what Heather calls what Betty calls her customers, they never want to know anything about Heather as a person either, because, just like those audiences back in the years of her high school plays, it’s not Heather they’re applauding; it’s not the real Heather they want, or even those selected parts of her anatomy she so lovingly describes for them: clit baby, pussy baby, nipple baby. They all want something else, an abstraction, a pure theory, that next-door-neighbor neuron, and like rich cowards who hunt wolves and polar bears from airplanes, all they want is a story to tell themselves, something safe. They want the experience of hunting, but not to meet anything that might fight back.