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The Sleep Garden

Page 14

by Jim Krusoe


  Yes, all this and more flooded back into the ocean that was the Captain’s mind even as he stood, blending the sight of the one cataract with the other: the falls and the water cascading down the two beauties—especially Heather—rubbing and scrubbing the sweat of that final day’s shoot from their bodies, seemingly oblivious to his presence until the very moment their shouts of “Help!” and “Pervert!” drew him back from his reverie, during which he had apparently forgotten he was still holding up to his eye the video camera he had brought along on his search for the overly sensitive, sulking teenager just in case he came upon some native wildlife—a snake or billy goat, to name but two examples—in the process.

  And even worse, it turned out that in his ignorance of modern media technology he was not just holding the video camera, as he had thought, but in his excitement his finger must somehow have been pressed against RECORD the entire time, so that it might have easily appeared to those who came running at the girls’ frantic cries—as indeed it would have to himself had he not been on the other end of the lens, so to speak—that the whole scene had been somehow premeditated by him instead of being merely the grotesque accident it was, an accident made even more ironic because until that moment the Captain’s sole moral compass had been the Code of the Sea.

  The result? More screaming. People running from everywhere. A headlock, a punch, a badly aimed kick or two, and then, shouts—“Get Him!” and “Captain Perv!”—followed by four days in the local jail and charges, later mercifully dropped.

  And then, to make matters even worse, for some reason the show was canceled before the episode even got a chance to air.

  NOTE: CONCERNING THE APPAREL OF THE TECHNICAL STAFF

  Actually the much-complained-about “special hat” referred to earlier is called a Phrygian cap and has a soft conical dome with the top pulled forward. It is associated in antiquity with the inhabitants of Phrygia, a region of central Anatolia thought by many to be the birthplace of Western civilization. In the western provinces of the Roman Empire this cap came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty, perhaps through confusion with the pileus, the felt cap of emancipated slaves of ancient Rome. Accordingly, the Phrygian cap is sometimes called a liberty cap; in artistic representations it signifies freedom and the pursuit of liberty.

  Oh, and the Captain forgot to mention: the sexual offender label was dropped on the condition that he be banned for his entire life from getting anywhere near the production set of any television show whatsoever, including nature programs.

  In Raymond’s dream there is a knock on the door of his room and, when he opens it, there is Louis, just standing there, wearing a blue cardigan sweater and still in his slippers. Louis looks sad, as if the sadness is coming not from anything that happened, but from deep inside. He shifts his weight from side to side.

  “Come in,” Raymond says. “Would you care to have a seat?”

  Louis stays where he is, framed in the doorway, the dark hall behind him. “No thanks,” he says. “I just came to say good-bye.”

  And before Raymond can answer, Louis turns and walks down the hall, in the direction of the Burrow’s door, but when Raymond rushes after him there is no one there. He’s simply gone, as if the hall has swallowed him.

  Or: Ballerina Mouse wakes to realize in the end that she has only been dreaming, and she has no bad foot, nor does she have the slightest interest in being a ballerina. She can’t imagine where that came from. What she likes is cheese, and not much else, truth be told, because, after all, she’s only a mouse.

  Definitely not.

  Do I have any children in this world? The Captain asks this question from time to time, not urgently, but more as speculation. Certainly, it’s possible, maybe even likely, given the number of ports he’s visited and the number of women with whom he has had intimate relations. But if he did have unaccounted-for children, a person would think that, sooner or later, one of them would have shown up at the front door of his mansion, being as he is a celebrity now, and easy to track down. “Hello,” such a hypothetical boy would say. “My name is Captain Junior.”

  But how would such a boy find him?

  And how could such a child afford the ticket?

  Tennyson, former poet laureate of the British Empire, called the products of such unions “a dusty race,” and deemed them superior to either parent considered separately.

  The Captain takes serious issue with Lord Alfred in that regard, however. Twilight souls is what the Captain calls them. And that name, Junior, brings back everything he had been trying to forget about that embarrassing scene at the shower. That was the kid’s name, of course.

  Could he possibly have been the Plaidman?

  Though that was years ago, and no one knows better than he that people change.

  The fact is that Madeline has been feeling a little down lately. Well, very down. The Burrow was good enough when she first arrived, a welcome respite from all the ex-boyfriends and bill collectors of her former life, a life that seems so distant now she can hardly remember it, and she does appreciate the Burrow’s privacy and quiet, even though most nights recently, with the sounds of machinery grinding somewhere outside the Burrow’s walls, the “quiet” part of that equation is gone. Back when she first moved in, she was also happy to have a whole set of new faces (now old ones) to look at, and also the chance to do some cooking, maybe develop a repertoire, as they say in the business, so she could move on one day. But here she still is, and how much serious cooking can anyone do in this dump of a kitchen anyway, with an oven door that barely shuts, the temperature knob missing so that she has to use the cheap tin thermometer hanging from the baking rack, and even that keeps falling off every time she slides in a sheet of biscuits? Not to mention that she has to use the food provided, which at the start was fun, like a game, or being on one of those cooking shows where they hand you a piece of celery, a donut, and a clove of garlic, and you’re supposed to create some fabulous new dish. But now it’s just annoying, plus, one of the top burners in front of the stove’s grease-spattered mirror (whose idea was that?) is totally dead, and if people think it’s easy to cook for five people using only three burners, they have another thing coming. What thing, she’s not sure.

  Raymond used to have a thing about food being sadness, which, she noticed, never stopped him from packing the stuff away. Now, however, and for the first time, she wonders if he could possibly be right: Cook food. Pour food into oral cavity. Grind up with teeth. Down hatch. Wait for stomach to turn it into a brownish slush. Wait for good parts of slush to be sucked into blood. And finally, everything not good, leftovers, she calls them, exits the body in not the most pleasant way possible. If only there were fireworks every time we shit, or music came out, she thinks—something to make it more enjoyable—but mostly there isn’t; the only person she’s ever known who seems to thoroughly get into every part of the digestive process is Viktor. And then, there’s the smell. Then, after all of that, what’s left but to get ready for the next meal, and so on and so forth, until one day the whole process stops, and whatever that last meal was will just sit there, a little potluck to bring to the party of eternity.

  She even finds herself missing Louis, whom she dated for a while, before he disappeared to wherever he went. One night he’s there and then, for no apparent reason, the next night Louis is gone.

  What is happening to me? Madeline asks. Maybe it’s just that she’s tired, and nothing else. Certainly that noise at night isn’t helping her sleep, and though she knows she can stay in bed as long as she wants to in the morning because, well, there’s nothing forcing her to get up, she’s always been one to wake with the dawn.

  Even though she can’t see the dawn because she’s in a burrow, which, practically by definition, means lacking windows.

  Would a skylight help her feel better? Possibly. Madeline wonders if it would be such a big deal for her to just find someone to stick a not-so-fancy piece of glass in between her ceiling and the sunlig
ht. If I can get the landlord to agree, Madeline thinks, I might even pay for it myself.

  How expensive could it be?

  And when was the last time she actually saw the landlord?

  Episode One, The Burrow, Scene Three

  VIKTOR and MADELINE are alone in the kitchen.

  Madeline: Fancy meeting you here.

  Viktor: It’s not fancy at all. I just happen to be feeling hungry.

  Madeline: When aren’t you?

  Viktor: Never.

  Madeline: I can never figure out how you can burn up so much energy when you spend all your time just sitting in front of a computer screen watching stock prices go up and down, with only an occasional break for a little love.

  Viktor: Hey, don’t underestimate yourself. You’re a lot of love.

  Madeline: Which actually brings me to something: Why don’t you ever take me anywhere?

  Viktor: Where exactly would you like to go?

  Madeline: I don’t know. Anywhere. I can’t remember the last time I was even out of here. Don’t you ever get tired of making money? Don’t answer that.

  Viktor: Well, I know one thing I don’t get tired of.

  Madeline: [flattered, despite herself] Really.

  Viktor: Your tandoori chicken. I don’t know how you do it, but it’s delicious, particularly when you serve it with that aromatic rice of yours and the cucumber and yogurt thing. Maybe in your next life you should be an Indian. Didn’t I see some fresh chicken in the refrigerator?

  Madeline: You did, but the chicken’s the easy part. You can’t make tandoori chicken without a jar of tandoori sauce, and I’m thinking that may be a little hard to come by. I don’t even know how we happened to have the last one. It must have been left behind by somebody. Maybe it was Louis’s.

  MADELINE opens one cabinet after another without finding any sauce.

  Madeline: You can’t say I didn’t try.

  Viktor: Are you sure you looked everywhere?

  As she opens the last door, what does she see but a jar of tandoori sauce!

  Madeline: Wow, a whole jar! We do have it.

  Viktor: I guess it’s my lucky day.

  Mornings are always the best for the Captain. There are the silences, the coffee, the fresh pastry (just one a day—he has to watch his waistline, grown a little since those calorie-burning days of pitching and yawing at sea). Also, there’s the special quality of eastern light, so like the light far out in the ocean where the salt spray tempers and refracts the fleshy tones of, well, flesh, but with none of the troubling grays of twilight. At twilight this evening, he’s scheduled for a talk in which he’ll use the mutiny story once again, always a hit—at least so far. But the last time he used it, he spotted a young couple making out in the back of the room, paying no attention at all to his words. Could that have been the beginning of the end, the hairline crack in the hull that will wind up sinking the whole vessel of his lecture career? And suppose that ridiculous guy shows up, the Plaidman who brought up the Mellow Valley thing. If the Captain spots him early on, he can have him ejected, maybe have him roughed up a little, but if he shows up again at the end, during the Q & A, and starts repeating the same things, sooner or later people are going to start asking questions.

  The Captain walks to the front window to look at the lawn and see how it’s fared after the mysterious-hole incident. The sight of the lawn usually calms him down, but not today, because it’s back—the hole—and exactly where it was before, so for a second he thinks maybe the patch job didn’t work; that everything just dropped straight down again, but then he sees a ring of dirt around the edge, just like the first one.

  He takes his cup and walks outside, though clearly at this point there is nothing new to see: just dirt and what might be the print of a shoe. The air is still cool. He’ll call up his gardener again and tell him: “We’ll just have to do better the next time.” Maybe have him dump a shitload of poison down the hole, stuff it with a few sacks of ready-mix cement, hose it down so it gets good and hard, and then replant the top. That should do it.

  He walks back inside and calls the man, who says he’ll be over as soon as he gets his pickup out of the shop. What’s wrong with vehicles these days, the Captain wonders, that they always need repair? It occurs to him he ought to inquire of someone whether this holes-in-people’s-front-lawns business is a citywide phenomenon, or if it’s directed specifically at him. He’s made a lot of enemies along the way—who hasn’t?—but this seems a strange and unnecessarily complicated way to get revenge. Could the guy in the beard and lumberjack shirt—Plaidman—be behind this attack on his lawn? And if so, why?

  Meanwhile, all over town, grass, flowers, weeds, nameless trees are pushing their way up through the soil, into the light and the air, into something they have no name for.

  On the other hand, if he just calls the police and asks them to investigate what the fuck is happening to his grass, sooner or later word is going to leak out to the press, who, for reasons of their own, will probably see it only as one in a long line of cheap publicity stunts. The Captain can picture the headline: “Aging Windbag Claims Mysterious Lawn Cavity.” And then, before the ink is even dry on that morning’s paper, everybody will be at the edge of his lawn—or on the lawn itself, for that matter—to take a look. And when they’re done, they’ll leave behind their soda cans and potato chip bags, gum wrappers, and those tiny plastic boxes breath mints come in. What is it with this modern obsession with the smell of your own breath, anyway? Many a time he has seen a complete stranger hold a hand out in front of his face and breathe into it. Never once, in all his years at sea, did he ever observe a sailor doing such a thing. And the result—his house, the one thing he loves these days, will become a sideshow. That would be all he needs, and, at the very least, he’d have to hire a security guard, which wouldn’t come cheap. Or even worse, expense-wise, he might have to raise the wall around the place. Neither of these prospects makes him happy.

  And so, like an unsteady midshipman climbing to the top of a swaying tall mast having been sent up there by the first mate on some made-up errand that is supposed to initiate him into the unstinting demands of a seafaring life, the Captain can feel his Death Quotient rising.

  Episode One, The Burrow, Scene Four

  JEFFERY and VIKTOR are sitting at the kitchen table. It is late at night.

  Jeffery: Viktor, I’m going to make myself another bagel. You want one?

  Viktor: What kind of bagels did we get this week?

  Jeffery: Onion and sesame.

  Viktor: That’s all?

  Jeffery: That’s it. If you want something else, I guess you’ll have to go out and get it. Do you want cream cheese?

  Viktor: I’ll take an onion with cream cheese.

  JEFFERY gets up, cuts two bagels in half, and puts them in the toaster oven.

  Jeffery: Listen, I have a question, and it may sound a little odd.

  Viktor: Shoot.

  Jeffery: How long has it been since you’ve been out?

  Viktor: What do you mean, “out”? I have investments to keep track of. I can’t be going in and out every time I want a breath of fresh air. I could lose real money here.

  Jeffery: No, I don’t mean that. I mean when was the last time you were even outside the Burrow?

  Viktor: I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago. Maybe more. Maybe a couple of months. [pauses] Actually, if you want to know the truth, I can’t remember.

  Jeffery: You find that odd?

  Viktor: Not particularly. I never thought about it.

  Jeffery: Neither had I, because I’ve been really busy working on this screenplay I’m writing. But then I got to thinking: Jeffery, when was the last time you were out of doors?

  Viktor: You call yourself by your own name when you talk to yourself?

  Jeffery: Of course. What else would I call me?

  Viktor: You must have been talking to Madeline; she talks to herself sometimes, too. So what did you answer? When was the last t
ime you were out?

  Jeffery: I couldn’t remember.

  Viktor: And this proves?

  Jeffery: So I said to myself, “Well, you should make it a point to go out right now, right this second, not that you need anything, because everything we need is here, but, you know, just to do it.”

  Viktor: And?

  Jeffery: And do you know what? Right then I started to make a list of all the times I’d tried to go outside before, including the last time, when I was about to leave and was standing right at the door and Raymond stopped me. Then, by the time I finished the list, it was too late. I never did go out.

  Viktor: The Duck Man! A nutcase, in my opinion. And anyway, I don’t see what’s so wrong with a person staying here and working. Maybe that screenplay will make you rich. Then you’ll be glad you didn’t waste your time walking around in the fresh air and leaves and stuff. You can get that anytime.

 

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