by Jim Krusoe
“‘An interesting point,’ Ali Khan replied. ‘Let me discuss it with Piggy.’ And from somewhere beneath his papers he pulled out a black, old-fashioned dial telephone, dialed, spoke an incomprehensible dialect into the receiver, then listened, spoke, and listened again. At last, putting a hand over the mouthpiece, he turned to me and said, ‘Piggy says his anesthesiologist only charges one hundred an hour.’”
The Captain pauses and looks out over the crowd. They are mine, he thinks, my audience, with the possible exception of one agitated individual, a bearded throwback from another era wearing a kind of lumberjack shirt of black-and-red plaid who is pacing in the back of the room. Possibly some kind of psychopath? The man looks slightly familiar, but the Captain has no idea where he’s seen him—if he has. He stands up straighter, then delivers the one line that never fails to elicit applause, a line that has already made its way into the public discourse even though most of its users are unaware of the source: “‘Then you tell Piggy he should get a better anesthesiologist.’”
Laughter. Applause. Death Quotient: practically zero.
But never zero, because a thing can’t be zero, can it?
Can it?
At this very moment Jeffery is alone in his room at the Burrow, listening to the faint sounds of grinding and thinking about the deep sadness of all stories, including his own life’s narrative. A story is born—his own—a trajectory begun; and presto, in that instant a death foretold: the spot where the bullet of his existence will strike the earth is preordained. So every person’s story, he thinks, ends in the murder of its hero and his, alas, is no exception.
Far better for Jeffery on nights such as these, is the freedom of confusion, of incoherency, even outright dementia and Alzheimer’s, where, taking a seat on a train with one’s back to the locomotive, a person looks out on an endless expanse of receded time, stares at shabby neighborhoods, looks down on people picking their noses in cars beneath the window, or gazes overhead at the incomprehensible schedules, the public service announcements, but never, never can see forward to a final destination. No, best of all is the rider who dozes, perhaps waking for a moment to say a word or two to the passenger next to him or to nobody, then falls again to sleep until the station arrives, or rather the rider comes to the station, and is taken by surprise because here it is—as if by magic—the city, the house, the Burrow.
What a pretentious fuck you are, Jeffery thinks. But still, if a person knows he is pretentious, then maybe he’s not.
So the words have done their magic once again. The crowd comes to its feet with laughter and applause, and the Captain concludes his story by telling how he had to pay the so-called neurosurgeon only eight hundred dollars an hour, thus saving the shipping company a whole thousand dollars. His ship sailed that same afternoon and the cargo of precious tuna was saved.
After that, the usual Q & A follows without a hitch until the man wearing the lumberjack shirt, the same one the Captain noticed pacing in the back of the hall earlier, raises his hand and will not lower it until he is recognized to speak. “Yes?” the Captain finally asks. “What is it? Do you have a question?”
But instead of staying where he is, this man with beady blue eyes, who sports a beard that looks like a lemming has seized his lower jaw and is hanging on for dear life, walks straight to the front of the hall, not ten feet from the lectern where the Captain stands, and plants himself there, apparently struggling to say something that’s important. For a fleeting second the Captain regrets having left the Walther back at the house.
But no, this is no ordinary assassin. There is no homemade bomb, no bullet, no knife. Instead, the question turns out to be much more dangerous. The stranger waits a moment longer, opens his mouth: “Is it true that in the year 1994 you were arrested on the set of an obscure television situation comedy called Mellow Valley for acts unbecoming a sea captain?”
Another theory is that the Burrow is not at all unique, but one of many such places. That unbeknown to the general public, several “outside parties,” in some kind of a franchise operation, have quietly been purchasing any available small hill or mound of earth that might be easily turned into tenant housing, and then renting out apartments cheaply to occupants who are actually only “placeholders” until the actual intended tenants are moved in, a sort of Trojan horse, or series of Trojan horses that one night will open to reveal their true purpose.
But then, what is the true purpose of anything?
To the St. Nils Eagle
Dear Editors,
I wonder if your readers have an extra crossbow or two resting in a closet or stored on a shelf in their garage. If the answer is yes, here’s a chance to bring that old friend back to life!
As most people know, there are scores of former military personnel who, in the course of their service to this country, were injured either by an explosive device or maybe even friendly fire, and as a result have an understandable aversion to loud noises. Yet these brave men and women still possess the “killer instinct” and, finding nowhere to use it in a supportive environment, are often forced to resort to senseless violence and the like.
What better way to help satisfy the basic human needs of these gun-shy warriors than to put our old silent, deadly crossbows back to use? By doing so, you will not only help our veterans to “simmer down” but also provide a public service in the extermination of small rodents and other unwanted animals. Fight Quietly On (FQO.org) is now accepting donations of any crossbows (even slingshots) that you may be able to provide. Please give those weapons a new home by sending them to FQO, Apartment B, 111 Gonzales Ave., in St. Nils.
Thanking you in advance,
A Proud Fellow American
IX
Lately, at night, when Heather is lying alone in her bed, just before sleep, thinking about what she needs to do next in her life, she takes comfort in the faint sounds of the grinding in the earth outside the walls of the Burrow: dirt, rocks, stumps, roots, the dens of groundhogs, foxes, badgers, weasels, and rabbits, all being slowly chewed to nothingness between the teeth of some gigantic metal mouth while she is still safe, still special, beneath her covers, breathing. The total effect is far more peaceful than most people might guess.
Somewhere outside the Burrow, leaves from a tree that has no name are lying on the ground beneath it, ready to be tied back on.
Hurry, the leaves say, hurry.
“Special,” Madeline says out loud in front of the mirror in the bedroom of her apartment, practicing for the interview she is sure she’ll give one day. “That’s what we all are, every last one of us, and just because I happen to be a celebrity, I hope you don’t think I’ve forgotten my roots and also all the people who helped me on my way up to where I am now.”
What can a person tell about another person simply by a look at his sock drawer? As it turns out, plenty. For one, are the socks just tossed in without regard to color or material, or is each pair rolled lightly at the tops so they stay together? For that matter, has each pair been rolled into a self-contained ball, like a sow bug, fearful of being separated from its mate—which, if you know anything about bugs—not even bugs, by the way, but crustaceans—doesn’t make sense because a sow bug is a single bug, and its mate would be somewhere next to it in a ball of its own, wouldn’t it? Do sow bugs even have mates? In any case, Viktor’s socks, as you might imagine, are sow bugs.
And what else is in Viktor’s drawer along with his socks? Eight silver dollars, four Indian head nickels, an extra calculator, a chrome nail clipper, a piece of coal, and an old cut-crystal doorknob that used to open the door of his bedroom in one of the foster homes he lived in. On his last day there he unscrewed it and hid it in his suitcase when he left.
Also, rolling around on the drawer’s bottom (or rolling as best they can among the balls of socks) are fourteen marbles that represent the total of Viktor’s marble collection, a project begun years earlier when one morning he found a blue-and-white swirled marble on the sidewalk in fro
nt of his old apartment and put it in his pocket, not thinking of it until that night, when, removing his trousers, he noticed it again and put it in his sock drawer. After that, the concept of having a collection of anything at all remained dormant in his brain for a long while. Then, one afternoon on his way to the hardware store to buy an extra deadbolt for his front door, he happened to look down to see another marble, this one a cat’s-eye, at his feet. So he picked it up and, upon returning home, decided it might be an interesting start to a collection. From that point on, all he had to do was to “fill the gap” between the two marbles he now owned. In this way, he thinks, it is possible for a person who has started from nothing to gain control over his universe, or at least a part of it.
You know that scene in cheap horror movies where the hero, the victim—whoever—starts to hear a sound, a siren, that grows louder and louder and louder and then he is covering his ears with both hands, pressing into them as hard as he can, and still he can’t make the sound go away, but it just keeps on getting louder?
It’s a scene that Raymond often thinks about.
He thinks about it most often when he lies in bed at night listening to the grinding sounds coming from somewhere outside the Burrow.
Should Jeffery get back with Madeline again? Should he go the extra mile to topple Viktor and push him aside? In some ways he thinks that Viktor would be less formidable an opponent than Raymond, and, besides, he likes Raymond. But honestly, he can’t decide. Sometimes Jeffery misses Madeline and sometimes he doesn’t all that much. Passing Madeline in the hall he sometimes wants to say, “Hey, babe, do you remember when you and I had a special thing going on?” Then Jeffery will look at her again and think, But did we? What if back then she was only on the rebound from Louis, something she denied, but how can he be sure? And suppose Madeline hadn’t been thinking that at all. He could ask her, certainly, but suppose Madeline started explaining all over again why she decided to leave him. Don’t go there, friend, he tells himself. Stay away from negativity. Think about solutions. Consider Heather.
Another time when Viktor and Madeline are together, Madeline suddenly wakes in the middle of the night and begins to speak in a voice Viktor has never heard before, deep and growly, almost scary. “Viktor,” she says, and it doesn’t sound as if Madeline is talking to him, but instead to some unknown third person, “to be a celebrity means to be celebrated, and so my interest in them is purely definitional. In other words, if myself and others didn’t care, then there wouldn’t be any celebrities at all. On the other hand, it is because we care that they exist, and in this respect celebrities are our creations. We are the creative ones, not them.”
Should he wake her, and if so, whom would he be waking, Madeline or the snarling and possibly dangerous person lying next to him? Let well enough alone, he thinks.
But wait, the voice has one more thing to add: “In other words, to be a celebrity, such as I soon plan to be, means that a person is not subject to the same laws as ordinary people. And you, Viktor, are as ordinary as, well . . . mud.”
Is Madeline really asleep? She is asleep, although she may also be insane. To calm himself Viktor gets up and goes to the kitchen, where he drinks, straight from the carton, half of somebody’s quart of milk. Then he comes back to bed. Madeline is still sleeping, quiet. There are worse things in this world than mud, he thinks. A lot of them.
When Junior reflects upon his long-gone acting career, he decides that the only upside to the humiliation it brought him is—thank goodness for small favors—that no one has ever put that show he was in, Mellow Valley—which turned out to be the sum total of his show business experience—back on the air as reruns.
That would be much too much.
Jeffery imagines Louis trying on a hat, walking over to a mirror, shaking his head, tipping the brim down and squeezing the crown, then walking back to choose another one—maybe a porkpie or one with a wider brim. Did Louis even own a hat? Jeffery wonders. It doesn’t matter; the man was made to wear them, and Jeffery can imagine a conversation they might have had, maybe in the kitchen, late at night, had Louis stayed.
“You were born to wear hats,” Jeffery would have said.
And Louis would have answered, “Is that so? Thank you, Jeffery. I genuinely appreciate your advice.”
As far as Madeline can tell from her research on the Internet and elsewhere, there has never been a celebrity who lived in the Burrow, even for a short period of time when they were younger, before they became a celebrity. And so, at her lowest moments, she wonders if the Burrow might be some sort of a jinx, some bad luck, such that even a short stay in the Burrow—sleeping on a couch overnight, for example—would have the power to mess a person up so badly that no matter what she does after she leaves, no matter how good she becomes at whatever it is she wants to do—even if she develops a cure for cancer—still no one will ever hear about it and she will never ever become a celebrity. And Madeline has spent far more time here than a single night on someone’s couch. When she thinks about it, she’s been in the Burrow longer than anyone except Raymond. Who, by the way, ought to be the subject of some story, or at least an article in the St. Nils Eagle Sunday Supplement, regarding his talent for making decoys. In it, he could credit his success to her.
It’s stories, Jeffery thinks, that are the heroin, the horse, the H, the big H, the candy, the crap, the doojee, the dope, the flea powder, the hard stuff, the junk, the mojo, the scag, the antifreeze, the brown sugar, the smack, the train, the tar, the sweet dreams, the addiction that keeps the poor old nag of the human race running around the track again and again—the promise that no matter how confusing things are, no matter how completely messed up and hopeless, even doomed, someday, somehow, everything will eventually make sense.
That’s why people keep on going, Jeffery thinks: losers because of the promise of a dramatic turn in their fucked lives—some long-lost relative, an inheritance, a winning lottery ticket, some old girlfriend, some screenplay they’ve had in a drawer for years being sold for a million dollars—and meanwhile the winners persist because that same narrative keeps patting them on their backs. You are so right, that narrative says. You did all the right things. You deserve to be praised. Congratulations.
But how can he turn this whole narration business to his profit? That’s the million-dollar question.
Raymond thinks about how a dog will smell his owner’s shoe, remember the owner, and maybe track him down for miles. But without a shoe, or hat, or sock, what does that same dog think about his missing owner? Does the dog, while walking around his new owner’s house, doing the things dogs do, smelling the dirt and scratching his fleas, remember the good times he used to have together with his old owner, maybe at the dog park or chasing squirrels? Or are such moments only saved up in his dreams, like when you go into a house you have never seen before and suddenly there is something, some table or a chair or painting that you know, and you ask yourself: Where did that come from?
In other words how does Madeline remember him?
Is he in Madeline’s dreams?
To make matters worse, Heather thinks, what with all this talking on the phone—even wearing a headset so she can move when she wants to—she’s not getting all that much exercise. There’s a tiny ring of fat she can feel around her tummy, and though some guys might think it’s cute, she knows it’s best to start a new relationship without one. Once things get going, she figures, she can afford to add a pound or two, have a special dessert now and again.
First though, if she can ever get out of the Burrow, she’ll need to join a gym or health club, but until then, well, she needs to come up with a way to keep in shape while staying in her room. She pauses to think. Hmm. What kind of exercise can one do in a relatively limited space? She thinks some more, and the answer arrives.
Yes. She’ll take up yoga. In the future as she talks on the phone servicing her clients she can do all those different poses.
Namaste, motherfuckers.
&
nbsp; Every so often Madeline thinks about those stupid decoys, how even though they were what made Raymond special, they also used to drive her fucking absolutely crazy because there she and Raymond would be, making love or whatever, and all of a sudden she would notice their tiny eyes all around her, eyes that were unable to see forward, but only to each side of their heads, and without being able to help herself she would think: What would it be like to live like that?
Even now, it’s a thing she still wonders about.
Sometimes they come to her in dreams and, when they do, she wakes up screaming.
And also the intermittent touch, the one left and then returned to, the touch like notes from a piano coming from indoors and out into the air, already faded, fading.
DECOYS CELEBRITIES
Perform a service Perform a service
Always smile Always smile
Have no feelings Hide their feelings
Are designed to float Can float if necessary
Made of wood Made of flesh
Help hunters Help autograph hunters
Used for interior decoration Used for exterior decoration
Pretend to be alive Are usually alive