The Sleep Garden

by Jim Krusoe

  Nope.

  Twilight souls, who neither exist nor do not exist, the Captain thinks, but who reside in a moment that is inseparable from memory, who live in hope that is a kind of hopelessness, a dream identical to their lives, whose lives pass but never change, are neither spoken nor unspoken, are only here, are only gone, are only able to look back and say: There, that’s where I was, but never where I will be, never where I am. That is: caught in a place between a name and no name and without a future.

  He can honestly say that he does not hate them, because he does not. But come on, when one of them—those others, as he likes to think of them—is gone, will it truly be missed? Can one ever be?

  Madeline dreams she has her own cooking show, called Cooking with Madeline, and in her dream, she’s at the television studio where the show is filmed, on a set called “Madeline’s Kitchen,” the only set, in fact, for the entire show. It’s a place she loves because in Madeline’s Kitchen the plates are always clean, the utensils sparkle, the knives are always sharp. In fact, it is this same set in which all her dishes are prepared for the television audience—several dishes, actually, each one at a different point of completion, so as to create the illusion of progress without having to pay a full crew to stand around and wait.

  And with her on the set today is her director, Herb, whose name she jokes about and with whom she’s slept a few times just in order to have something on him in case he gives her any trouble, because he’s married to someone named Loraine, or Lurine—something like that—and he wouldn’t want news of an affair to get out.

  Her cameraman, Ned, is there, too. She’s still deciding whether or not to sleep with Ned, the negatives being his bald head and his being overweight, while the positives are that he calls her Honeybunch, something her dad used to call her back before the cancer brought him down—six terrible months, each one worse than the last.

  Today, or maybe tonight (because she’s dreaming this), Madeline is wearing her no-nonsense full apron, the red one with pockets that people can order for themselves from cookingwithmadeline.com, and her hair is in a bun. Warm and classy is the vibe the show strives to project onto the viewing audience, and it succeeds.

  “Ready?” Herb asks, but for some reason Madeline is nervous for the first time in years—surprising, actually, with her being a pro and all, knowing that through the magic of retakes it’s impossible for her to fuck up.

  “Ready?” Ned asks.

  So today’s show, of all things, is how to stuff a suckling pig, which they are filming ahead of time for the holidays, because the holidays are a time when things like killing babies, even baby cows, and pigs, and sheep, tend to seem okay as long as they are wrapped in the guise of tradition. “Hi, and welcome to Cooking with Madeline,” says Madeline in that friendly tone that nonetheless suggests that people need to keep their distance, another trademark of her on-air persona. “Today’s show isn’t for the squeamish.” She hates this phrase, and didn’t want to use it at all until the network’s legal team promised if she didn’t she’d get her ass sued off. And then she walks over to the counter where the pig is waiting, but to her surprise: it’s alive. Madeline looks at Herb. Is this the way things are supposed to be? He nods, Yes it is. Go ahead.

  Madeline looks around for a butcher knife. Okay, she thinks, if that’s what you want. But today, for the first time ever, there is no butcher’s knife, or chef’s knife, or even a paring or a fruit knife. There are no knives at all. There are vegetable peelers, a garlic press, a set of measuring spoons, metric and regular, a meat thermometer, a whisk, a stainless-steel shrimp deveiner, an apple corer, salt and pepper grinders, basting brushes, wooden spoons, spatulas, measuring cups, pasta scoops, fat skimmers, and an egg slicer, but no knives.

  Again she looks at Herb, giving him a what-happened-to-the-knives? kind of look, but he just nods happily. Go ahead, he signals again. Madeline looks at Ned, but she can’t see anything behind the camera except for one beefy shoulder, so there’s no help from him at all. Forget sleeping with Ned, she thinks.

  Too bad for him.

  So then all the other mouse ballerinas laugh at Ballerina Mouse for even trying, because it’s apparent to everybody she isn’t making any progress at all, and that the ballet school, and especially the teacher, Mme. Suzette, is just taking her money. At last, even Mme. Suzette, who until then had been using Ballerina Mouse’s tuition to make the payments on her car, a Toyota Corolla, pays the loan off, and finds herself embarrassed pretending there is any chance at all, no matter how slim, for Ballerina Mouse. The upshot is that Mme. Suzette takes Ballerina Mouse into her office after class one warm afternoon and, after telling her to sit down for a minute—during which time Ballerina Mouse thinks her mom has died or something—Mme. Suzette tells her that while she truly admires the stupendous effort Ballerina Mouse has put into this whole enterprise, Ballerina Mouse, in Mme. Suzette’s opinion, would be pushing the borders of sanity if she continued trying to be a ballet star.

  So the little mouse, her heart frankly broken, gives up and settles down to a sedentary life. She works in her garden from time to time, but mostly she watches television, and in the process gains a considerable amount of weight, making any reconsideration of her exit from the world of dance even more impossible, until one day, while watching a nature program about dolphins, there is a news flash in which the commentator announces that a terrible tragedy has taken place: the town’s only ballet theater has caught fire right in the middle of a performance, and every single ballerina, from the most inexperienced to the star, including the beloved teacher, Mme. Suzette, has burned to death.

  No.

  Then in her dream Madeline says: Okay. You want this; you’ll get it. After all, that’s how she became a star, a celebrity, as opposed to all those other people in the world who without a doubt are better cooks than she, either as hobbyists or actual professionals who work in restaurants, but none of them ever got their own network celebrity cooking show, let alone a whole line of celebrity-endorsed products. Okay, she thinks—no knives—this will be one for the books, or at least for the Internet, and, grabbing the meat thermometer, she tries to guess where the squirming baby pig’s heart must be. She knows that in humans it’s slightly to the left of center, but honestly, she can’t remember where it is in pigs, so she decides to aim for the middle and hopes that she’ll get lucky. She brings the thermometer down hard, but whether the heart is to the left or the right turns out to be entirely unimportant because at the last minute the pig turns, and all she gets is something that results in a spray of blood coming out of its mouth together with the most god-awful noise, and the sound of its tiny hooves scraping the counter as it tries to get away—who can blame it?—but luckily she catches its back foot just in time and holds it even though it’s nearly pulling her arm off, because don’t let anyone ever tell you that a pig isn’t strong even as a baby, and if this one were twenty pounds heavier there’d be no way at all that she could keep it on the countertop, but so far she’s got it—she’s got ahold of it even though it’s moving so much she flat gives up on any possibility of aiming at anything at all, so she just starts stabbing. Stab, stab, stab, blood everywhere as out of a corner of her eye she sees Ned smile and give her a thumbs-up while, next to him, Herb’s nodding like one of those goddamn wooden drinking birds her dad used to buy her at the State Fair when she was little, the kind you can hook to the side of a glass or a cup and watch bob back and forth, but it doesn’t seem like this baby pig is even tiring, and meanwhile, all the time she’s doing this, a part of her—out of self-protection, she guesses—is far away, the place she sometimes goes when she’s having sex with Viktor—trees, a quiet stream, blue skies, green grass—and certainly he (or is it a she-pig?) ought to be tiring by now, what with the loss of blood and fluids in general, these last mentioned spraying in every direction at once, so she’s glad that, on the one hand she chose to wear this particular apron, but on the other she also knows her dress is ruined on thos
e parts the apron doesn’t cover, which are many, and her hair is coming loose from its bun as well. Meanwhile, if anything, the pig is getting stronger, more desperate, something that she, stab, finds she can relate to, stab, even as it occurs to her that her show, Cooking with Madeline, may well be canceled because, even if this particular episode is never aired, there’s no way somebody, probably that bastard Ned, is going to miss making a bundle on a pirate video, so she keeps on stabbing even though her arm is becoming tired, and thank God, she thinks, that she still works out at the gym three times a week, triceps and biceps, because otherwise that pig, stab, would be long gone, stab, probably racing around the floor of Madeline’s Kitchen, leaving a trail of blood, of course, and what kind of a career will she be able to have after this whole sorry episode is viewed a few million times online?

  Well, the fact is, “after that” will probably mean the late-night talk shows, though she doubts that they’ll have her on as anything but an object of mockery to laugh at, stab, because the little bastard keeps on moving, stab, but maybe, stab, maybe, stab, this could be, stab, some kind of conversion moment, she thinks, still stabbing, her arm like the drinking bird itself, the same kind of moment she will later explain, stab—because people seem to like these moments—the kind, stab, that Saul—or was it Paul?—had on the road to Tarsus or, stab, maybe Damascus, stab—the Road to Nowhere for all she cares—but, stab, then she can do a TV spot for PETA, yes, stab—genius!—the kind where she explains how once—and the pig is finally slowing down—she was so wrong, she realizes this now, to have taken the life of a fellow traveler on our fragile planet Earth, particularly on a religious holiday, on television, where kids could see it, but now she’s learned, stab, to be, stab, a better, kinder individual, stab, because in the long run, stab, what people want to hear, stab, is how things, stab, always turn out for the best, and later, when she does the PETA spot, she’ll say she really really loves pigs more than anything, except maybe those cute kitties and puppies that you see for sale in so many pet-store windows during the holidays.

  The Second Council of the Lateran under Pope Innocent II in 1139 banned the use of crossbows against Christians. Today, however, the crossbow has a complicated status. While some jurisdictions treat crossbows as firearms, others do not require any sort of license at all to own a crossbow—even for felons. In yet other places, the crossbow is regarded as a useful substitute for firearms, much in the same way that methadone is prescribed for former heroin addicts.

  Or: Being an intelligent mouse, Ballerina Mouse comes home from practice one day, her ears still ringing from the falsely encouraging shouts from Mme. Suzette of “Beau travail,” “Bon tour,” and “Ne quittez pas.” Sitting in a chair on her back porch, a glass of iced tea in her tiny paw, Ballerina Mouse starts for the very first time to assess the situation as best she can. As hard as you try, which is very hard, she thinks, by no stretch of the imagination are you making the kind of progress you need to make to become a star. Ballerina Mouse looks out at her backyard and sees the wading pool, and the sandbox, and the swing on the tree, barely moving in the breeze. The garden is wilting beneath the heat of summer, as are the azalea bushes. You are nearly a grown mouse, she tells herself. It’s time for you to learn to be flexible. It’s time to give up this crazy dream you’ve had since you were a child of being a ballerina who just happens to have a hurt foot, and to try something else, something that will help others. You could go to medical school, for example, Ballerina Mouse thinks.

  So Ballerina Mouse applies to several medical schools and is actually admitted to two of them—not the best, but not the worst, either—choosing the less expensive of the two and finishing with honors. Then, after graduation, she turns down the possibility of a comfortable practice in favor of traveling all over the world to help poor mice who cannot afford primary care, and in the process she helps thousands. At last one day after several years of doing good for others, she decides, what the fuck: she’s not getting any younger and, using the skill set she’s acquired in all her years of practice, plus a few new ideas she has come up with herself, in a groundbreaking operation Ballerina Mouse operates on her own foot, without anesthesia. And although it’s too late for her to go back to being a ballerina, in part because she’s still packing several extra pounds from lack of regular ballet practice, this self-performed surgery, combined with her past history of indefatigable good deeds, earns her some big humanitarian award, like the Nobel Prize or something.

  No.

  “In my dream,” Raymond is saying, “all I could see were the shapes of dancers dancing in a darkened room, so dark that faces couldn’t be seen, only the forms of bodies, and even those were so uncertain in shape it was impossible to tell which were male, and which female.”

  “You know,” Jeffery tells Raymond late one morning in the kitchen over a breakfast of cold cereal and juice, “I don’t believe Louis is coming back.”

  XIII

  It’s been a long day, what with one thing and another, but now at last it’s bedtime, practically the Captain’s favorite time of the day. His bed, king-size, and for himself alone, makes up for all those years at sea when—even as a captain—he had only a narrow bunk. Now here it is, silk sheets and his secret vice, a lavender-scented pillow for sweet dreams. There’s also a CD player on the table next to the bed, ready to repeat his favorite disc, La Mer, of course, through the night. Blinds shut. Lights off and everything should be restful, but still the Captain can’t get out of his mind what that young guy in the plaid shirt was shouting. Despite his best efforts he’s transported back in time to the set of that stupid television show where he’d been asked to be a sort of celebrity technical advisor to some actor or another—who can keep actors straight?—playing the role of a captain who couldn’t tell land from sea, or something like that. If only he had just said, “No, I’ll pass,” the whole nasty business might have been avoided.

  To this day, why they needed him remains a mystery—he supposed that thanks to that pirate incident on the Valhalla Queen he was virtually the only captain they had ever heard of, or at least the only one with an agent. But why he had accepted the offer, against his better judgment, he did know: namely, the pay he got for the brief trip to Kansas, where the show was being filmed, was far more than he ever received for piloting even the largest ships. The trick, Paul, the director, had told him was that, while the captain character was meant to be authentic, he couldn’t be so authentic that he made the commune members seem inauthentic. “Don’t forget,” Paul had said, “it’s a comedy.”

  Maybe—but the truth is that the Captain found the whole episode, involving a washed-up member of his own profession, to have a sad and tragic undertone, even despite the presence of that cute actress, Heather Something. And because he knew from his experience at sea that it was important to keep these negative feelings from the crew lest they let the vessel of the show drift off its course and end up on the rocks, he’d kept things lively by making small jokes at the gentle expense of some touchy teenage wise-ass in the cast, jokes that Heather, in particular, had appreciated. In the end, however, it hadn’t worked. Maybe the exact opposite, in fact.

  Fortunately, no one else at the lecture seemed to notice anything was seriously wrong, and his bearded, plaid-shirted accuser had been shuffled off almost as soon as the man finished shouting his completely unfair and accusatory message.

  The Captain thinks about writing a note to his hosts thanking them for the sturdy ushers of the Masonic Hall, but decides, in the end, that would only call attention to the whole ridiculous incident.

  “Have you ever thought,” Jeffery says to Raymond, “that we could be some kind of an experiment?”

  They are hanging out in the kitchen, late, as usual. Raymond is drinking a diet cola. Jeffery is eating cheese balls and sipping coffee. “I mean,” Jeffery says, “that we get practically free rent, the food arrives on time and we don’t even have to ask. Plus the place is full of mirrors. Has it ever occurred
to you that maybe those mirrors are there so people can watch us through them?”

  Raymond looks into his can of soda. What is he looking for? Jeffery thinks.

  “I never thought of that,“ Raymond says, raising the can and taking a sip. “But what kind of person would want to spend his life watching someone else’s life? I don’t think it’s anyone either you or I would care to know.”

  The so-called trivial incident the madman (Plaidman, the Captain thinks) was referring to happened at the very end of the Captain’s consultancy at Mellow Valley, at which time the more or less tragic implication of that episode’s plot—the inability to sustain oneself through agriculture, and that, for all practical purposes, there was no real difference between being lost on land or at sea—had finally been revealed. They had finished shooting early for the day, and by that afternoon the Captain had had more than a few glasses of wine—out of boredom, he supposed. Then, after the teen (named Scooter? Junior?) stomped off to sulk over some mild remark the Captain had made, and the rest of the crew fell silent, the Captain got up from the table to find the wretched boy and coax him back.

  Thus it was that the Captain found himself outside. Once there, however, and slightly confused by more glasses of wine than he was used to imbibing, plus a misleading series of “Off Limits” signs, he had turned a corner to see the actresses who played Judy and Heather (!) in a state of complete undress, sharing a communal moment in “the women’s shower area,” beneath a powerful stream of water that poured in a delicious torrent onto their shoulders, backs, and breasts, and descended to their pubic deltas—in Heather’s case especially—in a drop that took him back to, of all things, his very first sight of Malabata Falls, a nearly inaccessible and barely known spot (except to a handful of travelers) that surely would have been one of the Wonders of the World if only it were more easily reached. And the spot was remarkable not only on account of its terrifying roar but also for the myriad colors of orchids and bromeliads, including rare hanging pineapple plants, their diamond patterns reflected in the crystal waters at the bottom of the falls like a necklace of many-colored jewels that, having momentarily become undone, eternally plunged between their owner’s luscious breasts, surrounded (the falls, not the breasts) by the screech of wild monkeys and the squawks of brightly colored parrots, some of which had been trained by the cunning natives to swoop out of practically nowhere and snatch away bills of any denomination from such visitors careless enough to be counting them out of doors.