by Jim Krusoe
He takes out a piece of paper and a pen and starts to write. His first investment was something like $2,662.00, and he made ten percent right from the start.
That means something like this:
Month 1: $2662 X .10 = 226
Month 2: $2662 + 226 = 2888 X .10 = 288
Month 3: $2888 + 288 = 3176 X .10 = 317
Month 4: $3176 + 317 = 3493 X .10 = 349
Month 5: $3493 + 349 = 3842 X .10 = 384
Month 6: $3842 + 384 = 4226 X .10 = 422
Month 7: $4226 + 422 = 4648 X .10 = 464
Month 8: $4648 + 464 = 5112 X .10 = 511
Month 9: $5112 + 511 = 5623 X .10 = 562
Month 10: $5623 + 562 = 6185 X .10 = 618
Month 11: $6185 + 618 = 6803 X .10 = 680
Month 12: $6803 + 680 = 7483 X .10 = 748
Month 13: $7483 + 748 = 8231 X .10 = 823
Month 14: $8231 + 823 = 9054 X .10 = 905
Month 15: $9054 + 905 = 9959 X .10 = 995
Month 16: $9959 + 995 = 10954 X .10 = 1095
Month 17: $10954 + 1095 = 12049 X .10 = 1204
Month 18: $12049 + 1204 = 13253 X .10 = 1325
Month 19: $13253 + 1325 = 14578 X .10 = 1457
Month 20: $14578 + 1457 = 16035 X. 10 = 1603
Month 21: $16035 + 1603 = 17638 X .10 = 1763
Month 22: $17638 + 1763 = 19401 X .10 = 1940
Month 23: $19401 + 1940 = 21341 X .10 = 2134
Month 24: $21341 + 2134 = 23475 X .10 = 2347
Month 25: $23475 + 2347 = 25822 X .10 = 2582
Month 26: $25822 + 2582 = 28404 X .10 = 2840
Month 27: $28404 + 2840 = 31244 X .10 = 3124
Month 28: $31244 + 3124 = 34368 X .10 = 3436
Month 29: $34368 + 3436 = 37804 X .10 = 3780
Month 30: $37804 + 3780 = 41584 X .10 = 4158
Month 31: $41584 + 4158 = 45742 X .10 = 4572
Month 32: $45742 + 4572 = 50314 X .10 = 5031
Month 33: $50314 + 5031 = 55345 X .10 = 5534
Month 34: $55314 + 5531 = 60879 X .10 = 6087
Month 35: $60879 + 6087 = 66966 X .10 = 6696
Month 36: $66966 + 6696 = $73662
Viktor’s favorite months are Month 8, when the interest begins to move forward for the first time at amounts greater than five hundred dollars; Month 23, when he breaks the two-thousand-dollar-per-month mark; and also Month 34, when the total moves from the fifties to the sixties, and at the same time his monthly profits move from five thousand a month to six thousand.
In any case, he calculates that three years from whenever it was he started, he’ll have enough to leave the Burrow for good, and maybe rent an office in a skyscraper where, in addition to the ever-increasing profits from his own investments, he can also offer to invest the money of others, taking a small percentage of the return he obtains for them to reward himself. Then, he thinks, the money will start to roll in big time, and if Madeline wants to go back to the Duck Man at that point, well, she’s welcome. Even if she wants to stay in the Burrow, Viktor’s sure he’ll have no trouble finding some other woman who will be happy enough to live with a person who, although he may not have Raymond’s ways—whatever those are supposed to be—just happens to be rolling in wealth. There’s Heather, for one, he thinks. There’s something about Heather that Viktor finds interesting, though a little standoffish. He can’t put his finger on what it is, but there’s something going on beneath that demure surface, and if people care to place a bet to see who the real winner is here—Viktor or the Duck Man—he’ll cover that bet. Speaking for himself, Viktor has no doubt at all who will come out on top. Mano a mano, so to speak.
And now it’s time to get back to work.
Sometimes Raymond wonders what it is like to be a duck: What is it like to have a facial expression so frozen that no one, not even another duck, can tell if you are in pain?
It must be safe in one way, but then sooner or later the hunters come along and say to each other: “Hey, look at those birds out there, bobbing on the pond. We can shoot them because they can’t feel emotion.”
But that’s not true, Raymond thinks. Not even a little bit.
Meanwhile, fresh shoots push up out of the ground like dead fingers. Step down on them, hard, lest they take hold.
Who is it that says the following:
“Junior, you put that chair down right now.”
“Now leave that two-by-four right where you found it.”
“Put down that iron bar immediately.”
“Put that cinder block down.”
“Put down that crossbow and leave.”
Why, many different people.
Crossbow?
Madeline and Viktor are in the kitchen one night. Madeline is making a bowl of cinnamon toast and milk for both of them and using not granulated sugar, but the natural unbleached and coarse-ground variety, which someone was kind enough to leave the other day, when Jeffery enters.
“Jeffery,” Madeline says, “would you like me to make a cinnamon toast for you? It’s not any trouble.”
Jeffery weighs the question. It’s late, and he’s planning to go to bed at any minute. Come to think of it, he’s not even sure what made him walk out of his room to the kitchen in the first place. Maybe he’s getting cabin fever. “No thanks. But actually, seeing the two of you here like this gives me an idea.”
Viktor looks at Jeffery as if for a moment he has materialized from outer space. Why would Madeline be offering to make him toast? Did Jeffery have his ways as well?
“So it’s like this,” Jeffery says. “Here we are all together in the Burrow and yet how often do we have a chance to sit down and talk? Not often, right? I mean we do have the chances, and a lot of them, but we never do it. What do you say we make a point of all of us getting together once a week, here in the kitchen, and we can have a meeting where we can discuss the ideas of the day, and how everybody is feeling, and other various concepts that might occur to us, you know—like life after death, and things like that? That is, if we all agree to do it. Or we could even have an agenda, so after we’ve finished one subject, at the end of the meeting we could vote on another one to talk about the next week, which would give us a whole week to prepare our thoughts and the like. Or, for that matter, we could do it in rotation, where people choose their own topics, and then when we’ve finished with those everyone chooses again.”
The toaster oven pings, and Madeline puts a couple of slices of hot toast into bowls and pours on a little warm milk. She gives one to Viktor and keeps the other for herself.
“So what do you think,” she asks Jeffery, “is Louis ever coming back?”
Strictly speaking, the ducks Raymond keeps in his room are not actual decoys at all, but only duck interpretations, or duck tributes, carved from wood, because it’s not the act of carving them that makes them decoys; it’s the humans who place them where they might attract ducks and lure them for a landing. You could do that with handkerchiefs, or painted rocks, for that matter, and people have done it with those, too. Decoys don’t kill ducks, Raymond thinks, people kill ducks, and Raymond would never kill anything.
Also, Raymond thinks, the reflection of a person in a mirror can never be the same as the actual person being reflected, because the speed of light has to be taken into consideration. No matter how close you stand in front of the mirror, it still takes just a tiny moment to go from there and back again. Everything takes time. Raymond knows this, and tells himself to be patient.
Something big is going to happen soon. He’s sure of it.
Exits are important. And just because the exit from the Burrow happens to be the same as the entrance, doesn’t mean it’s any less special: a door leading to a concrete walk that is cracked in a few places, and runs from the street to the front door. The grass on either side of it is tall, ankle high, full of dandelions and burdock, and even a few stalks of bamboo, which, come to think of it, is just another kind of grass. Nobody seems to know whose job it is to keep it cut.
>
Embedded into one part of the walk, near the street, is a series of bicycle tire tracks that must have been made by some kid years ago, a kid who had been passing by after the cement had been poured, before it hardened. So the kid ran right over it, and maybe the workmen had gone home for the day, or maybe their backs were turned, or they were around a corner, sitting in the shade, having lunch, sandwiches and coffee poured from metal thermoses, swapping stories, exchanging complaints, and didn’t see him. How old is that kid now? Does he have kids of his own? Is he still alive? Does he even remember that day?
Near the exit a weed of some unknown variety is poking up, but nobody knows its name.
And not just light, but the electric impulses traveling along neural tracks take time as well. So it always has to be the case, Raymond thinks, that, like the heads of those guillotined aristocrats back in the days of the French Revolution, we are always dead a micromillisecond before we realize it.
And by then of course it’s too late.
VII
How fucked up can one person be? Don’t answer that, thinks Junior, having, for one thing, spent his entire adult life monikered with that stupid kid-name, Junior, and not even a real kid-name, like Rusty or Chuck, but one laid on him by his stupid in-absentia dad, who only stayed around long enough to knock Junior’s mom up and then leave him with a name that is a constant reminder of his presence. Junior to what? To whom? As if he could ever find a Senior.
For God’s sake, Junior thinks, people take more care in picking out the names of their pet dogs or cats. Especially cats, whose owners seem to get some special thrill from bestowing a name that announces to the world how clever they, the owners, are: Cleopetra, or Drepuss, or Picatso, or Mister Snuggles. But even dogs get better names than he did: Pal, or Duke, or Brutus, or Mauler—names with something substantial about them. He could be a Mauler, for example. But Junior? What is Junior if not someone who is young, a person who will be forever second, will remain a permanent child, or, at best, a permanent young adult, a father’s heavy thumb atop him?
There has got to be a way to even things out.
Sometimes, late at night, Raymond shuts his eyes and pictures Madeline’s pubic hair, shy and silent as the red cellophane grass in the basket his mother would leave on the breakfast table on Easter mornings. Sure, there were chocolate bunnies, and colored eggs, and marshmallow ones, but it was that grass he liked the very best, shiny and fragile and mysterious all at once.
Oh, Madeline, he thinks.
Come back.
Also: Is there such a thing as an Easter duck?
Of course there is.
He had one once, a duckling, and it died.
It is late at night in the Burrow, and Madeline and Viktor lie awake listening to the sounds of grinding from outside, from deep beneath the earth. They notice that the sounds are getting louder, though not so loud they are unbearable, or anything even close to that. Unable to sleep, Madeline is trying to decide whether or not to go back to her own room and her own bed, but along the way she finds herself returning to a question that’s been on her mind for a while. Namely, this fan club business—she wonders whether she should get a leg up on becoming a celebrity herself by first joining a celebrity entourage, to see how the whole business works.
“It seems to me it’s a two-part problem,” she tells Viktor, who is just starting to doze. “The first part is simply whether to join or not to join. But then,” she continues, “assuming the answer to the first part is in the affirmative, the second question to ask is which entourage a person should join, because, predictably, as the number of celebrities grows, so do the number of possible entourages. Should a person become an early adopter, or wait to be sure the celebrity of their choice has real staying power?”
Viktor grunts.
“Here’s how I see it,” Madeline continues. “Regarding the first part, the part about whether to join or not, the obvious advantage of joining an entourage is that a person who is in an entourage always has somewhere to go and something to do, some personal appearance or new release to look forward to—some behavior of their celebrity to either praise or defend—at least as long as the celebrity is alive. And then, even after the celebrity dies, a person in an entourage can visit their particular celebrity’s grave, leave flowers, attend memorials, and collect souvenirs of their celebrity with other members of the entourage.
“But on the other hand,” she adds, “this has to be only a short-term solution, because, unless the celebrity one chooses is a megacelebrity, sooner or later the members of his or her entourage will drift away, siphoned off by the entourages of other, more popular and more alive celebrities.”
Viktor gets out of bed and walks over to his computer screen, where he studies rows of numbers. London, Tokyo, Berlin. Not much seems to be happening, money-wise. He says, “Is that grinding noise getting louder or is it only my imagination?”
Madeline listens to the grinding some more, happy that, for once, she and Viktor are on the same page.
Burrow: an underground passageway, enclosed except for openings for ingress and egress, usually one at either end. Often made by an animal.
From the Middle English borow, earlier burh, apparently gradational variant of late Middle English beri burrow, variant of earlier berg refuge, Old English gebeorg, derivative of beorgan to protect; akin to Old English burgen grave, i.e., place of protection for a body; see bury.
Viktor says, “So why do you have to decide this tonight?”
Madeline says, “The reason it is so important to make a decision is that you and I are running out of time, and any day now the world will be divided into three kinds of people: 1) celebrities; 2) those who are in an entourage; and 3) those who aren’t. And when that happens, you better believe I want to be either a celebrity who has her own entourage or at the very least a member of an entourage that is important and powerful.”
“But isn’t the world already divided into people who are in entourages and those who aren’t?” Viktor asks, and he thinks he must have struck a note of some kind because Madeline’s response is to jump straight out of bed without a stitch of clothing on and stand next to Viktor at his computer, her fluffy pubic hair glistening in the light of the screen.
“Viktor,” Madeline says, “you don’t understand. I said: Time is running out for both of us. We have to choose. We have to take a leap.”
Viktor opens one of his large hands and stares at the lines in his palm as if they are a massive artwork bulldozed into the desert floor. What he’s thinking she can’t tell. “Maybe, or maybe not,” he answers.
Raymond is in the kitchen, staring at the bowl full of Grape-Nuts and milk in front of him, as Jeffery rummages around in the refrigerator, mumbling something about having left a beer inside. Suddenly Jeffery closes the refrigerator door and joins Raymond at the table. Even though Jeffery is his best friend, there is something about him that Raymond doesn’t quite trust, though it might just be that Jeffery was with Madeline before him, and he can’t help wondering if Jeffery, too, is trying to get her back.
“Raymond,” Jeffery says, “do you remember that dream you told me about where you were a duck?”
“Yes,” Raymond says.
“Well, just suppose,” Jeffery says, “that you were a duck in a former life. Do you think that’s a possibility?
“A possibility,” says Raymond. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“Then,” Jeffery says, “maybe there’s a part of you that carried over to this life. Maybe that’s why you like making those decoys so much. And that although 99.9 percent of your former life is gone, there’s still a trace that remains, like your shadow on the wall of a building across the street.”
“Across what street?” Raymond asks.
“Any street. The street’s not important.”
“But if there are buildings on both sides of the street and the sun is at one end, how is your shadow going to hit the building?”
“Listen,” Jeffery says. “
It’s late in the day, and the sun is almost down and your shadow is stretching clear across the street and, if you have to know, there are only buildings on one side of this street. You are on the other side.”
“So what do you think your former life was?” Raymond asks.
“I’m not sure,” Jeffery says, “but I think I must have been highly successful, because I can almost taste it. For sure, though, I wasn’t an animal. No offense, but I just can’t see myself as a duck or a cat or a mouse.”
Ballerina Mouse regards her twisted foot. Being a rational creature, she understands that she’ll never be a ballerina—so why try? Instead, she uses her time to build a career as a telephone counselor on a suicide hotline and collects little porcelain statues of ballerinas, thus giving her the nickname “Ballerina Mouse” among the many friends she has made, and when she dies all these statues are heaped inside her coffin and buried along with her to keep her company in the next life.
Heather doesn’t think so.
Raymond remembers that in the dream he had where Madeline and Viktor were sitting on their giant thrones, Viktor’s hands seemed even larger than usual, so that they weren’t like hands at all, but more like two trash-can lids onto which someone had attached fingers.
Possibly, however, that was just due to the visual perspective that came from Raymond’s observing Viktor while Raymond was standing and Viktor was sitting down.