by Jim Krusoe
Is Madeline one of those women he has heard about who can’t be satisfied by any man, but keeps on trying? Or maybe she’s like a comet, and he’s due for another visit.
Sometimes, walking by Heather’s room late at night he can hear Heather talking on her phone to some distant boyfriend of hers, just a word here and a word there, but what she says makes Raymond blush.
What would it be like to have someone talk to him that way?
Or to touch him?
Episode One, The Burrow, Scene Six
The kitchen. EVERYONE is seated around the kitchen table and each person demonstrates different degrees of impatience. Some tap their fingers, others inspect their nails, yet others rub their thumbs against one another. The table is left unset, with its surface empty.
Jeffery: I suppose you are wondering why I wanted all of us to get together tonight. I promise, I wouldn’t take up your time if I didn’t think it was very important.
Madeline: Well, that makes me feel a lot better. So what do you have to tell us?
Viktor: And make it fast. Some of us have work to do, you know.
Jeffery: All right. Here it goes. I’ll make it fast and simple. When was the last time any of us went out of the Burrow?
[silence]
Heather: I remember the other day, I almost went out, but then something happened so I didn’t.
Madeline: The same thing happened to me. I was about to go out, I think to a place I know about that sells gourmet foods and spices, when somebody interrupted me just when I was about to turn the knob, so I wound up postponing it. Was it you, Jeffery?
Viktor: It certainly wasn’t me. Though I personally see no need to go out at all.
Jeffery: Fair enough, but has it ever occurred to you that far from being satisfied tenants, we may be prisoners?
[general dismay]
Jeffery: Think about it: Food arrives. Ray here gets chunks of wood and we have the Internet, but nobody goes anywhere. For all we know, we may as well be dead. And while we may not want to go out at the moment, someday we might, and I think it’s better to know the situation now than when it’s too late. Oh, and there’s one other possibility I thought of as well. Are any of you hiding as a part of some kind of federal program? You can tell me. It will go no further.
Madeline: Jeffery, nobody here is hiding out from anything, but why don’t you just walk yourself over to the door and try to open it. It can’t be that hard.
Jeffery: As a matter of fact, I did try, and more than once, and every time something came up to make me change my mind. I mean, I started with the full intention of walking out that door, and all of a sudden I was doing something else. It’s like I have no control over my actions at all when it comes to that door.
Viktor: So why did you ask us here? Was it just to tell us about your problem? What’s the point?
RAYMOND stands as if he’s going to leave, then sits back down again.
Jeffery: It’s simple. Here’s what I thought: Just to be sure I’m not making all this up, I thought that if we all walked to the door together, we could all go outside, and then, if anybody wanted to, they could turn around and go back inside again. I mean—we wouldn’t really have to leave the Burrow. It would just be a way to prove to ourselves that we can leave if we want to, and we would wind up feeling better.
Viktor: You mean you would wind up feeling better.
Heather: But suppose, if we are under some sort of spell or something, that once we left we couldn’t get back inside.
Raymond: Suppose I walked out, leaving all my decoys, and then I couldn’t get back to them again.
RAYMOND starts to stand, but JEFFERY pushes him gently down.
Madeline: Sit, Raymond. Actually, Jeffery, you have a point. If we are under some kind of spell—which I doubt—it would be better to know about it before it’s too late. Why don’t we try Jeffery’s idea, but when we go to the door, everyone should bring along the one thing they can’t do without. That way, if somehow we are locked out for some reason, we’ll be together, and at least we wouldn’t be starting everything over again from scratch.
Jeffery: That sounds fair enough. Heather, would that make you feel better?
Heather: I could do that. It wouldn’t have to be for long, would it?
Jeffery: Raymond?
Raymond: If everybody else is doing it, okay.
Jeffery: Viktor?
Viktor: I don’t know. Let me think about it. But maybe.
Jeffery: All right. Let’s go back to our rooms and get the one thing that’s most important to us. We’ll meet at the door in fifteen minutes.
From the St. Nils Eagle
“Dead May Not Be Completely Dead, Scientists Claim”
Researchers from the University of Applied Medicine announced today that the dead might well be taking longer to die than previously thought. Even after a person is buried, university scientists report, it may take a dead person weeks, possibly years, to complete a process that in the past was believed to take only minutes.
“This is a complicated area,” stated Dr. Carlton Bates, head of the university’s Mortality Project, “and one relatively new to science. It may have to do with certain preservatives in food, or even household chemicals in current use, or the effects of modern drugs, such as multispectrum antibiotics. On the other hand, it may be as simple as the vast advances we have made in devices to measure deadness, what we like to call Mortality Meters.”
Bates explained that though a person may well appear to be dead, and for all intents and purposes is “dead,” the only way to tell for certain would be to interview that person, something that is currently not within the range of our capabilities. It could well be, he added, that for them nothing has changed in their lives in the least. He elaborated, “It may be that it’s time to use words less absolute than either ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ to describe various states of existence.” Instead, Bates proposed what he called a “Living Quotient,” which would have a built-in range, say, of 1 to 100, with 100 standing for “most alive” and 1 for “least alive.” Anything lower than that, would, of course, be dead, he concluded.
In a related development, Dr. Rajish Chandrapanir, a researcher in the field of neuromnemonics at the university’s pioneering Electromagnetic Imaging Department, was quoted as saying, “We have long known that we can stimulate memories in living brains through the application of localized electric current. There is every reason to believe the same techniques will work on the dead as well. The problem is only in determining exactly which memories, out of all those available, are to be accessed.” He explained that researchers in this field are especially interested in what he called “Separation Issues,” that is, learning how to preserve the most important memories and, at the same time, to leave behind 99.9 percent of the others, which he called “essentially worthless.” Dr. Chandrapanir concluded that this whole reevaluation of what he described as “the old life/death conundrum” could seriously challenge our current measures of longevity and, in the long run, threaten the assumptions inherent in many social programs.
“The bottom line for you television and movie buffs out there,” he said, “is that this has nothing to do with what is popularly known as a zombie. This is real.”
Tocar.
“Hello. Hello. Who’s there? Old Stag Killer—is that you?”
“ . . . ”
“Well, of course I’m startled. I never in a million years would have thought an inanimate object, let alone a crossbow such as yourself, would have the power of speech, but, hey, I’m open to ideas.”
“ . . . ”
“Okay, so what’s that you’re saying? That the taste for blood has somehow been awakened in you after all these years, and now that you are awake, that you crave more?”
“ . . . ”
“Kill? And if I get caught, then I’m supposed to say that my crossbow made me do it?”
“ . . . ”
“All right, so I don’t plan to be caught, but even
if I entertained your crazy idea, who would you like me to take out?”
“ . . . ”
“Well, I have to admit, that does make a kind of sense.”
Dear Members of the Cast of Mellow Valley,
You don’t know me. I realize that your excellent show has been over for many years now, but still I am writing in the hopes that someone at this studio or maybe the station or the person in the mailroom will know how to find you, and pass this letter on so you can accept my sincere thanks for everything you did in putting on your show, because watching your show changed my life.
Do you remember (of course you must) the episode where Sergeant Moody finds the duck egg that has been abandoned because the coyote ate its parents so he takes it inside and keeps it warm? And then, when the egg hatches, how it thinks that Sergeant Moody is its mother, and follows him around, including trailing him into town, where bad people try to harm the baby duck and how the Sergeant uses the skills he learned in the Special Forces to save it, putting twelve of the townspeople, including a boy who was the same age as I was when I first saw this episode, which was eight, into the hospital?
So one of the reasons I am writing is to let you know I would never have tried to hurt that baby duck, either then or now. But even more than that, it was the selfless courage of Sergeant Moody that inspired me to spend my life making statues of ducks so people can take their time to admire them by keeping them in their living rooms or dens in order to truly realize how beautiful they are. Therefore, as a token of my gratitude, if you will send me your address, or PO Box, I would like to send each of you one of my duck statues, or decoys as some prefer to call them, to keep in your own homes, or maybe your star trailers. My name is Raymond, and my business is called Raymond’s Decoys, so if you get this letter and would like to have such a statue, you can contact me c/o the Burrow in St. Nils.
Very truly yours, your friend,
Raymond
P.S. Every day I pray they bring your show back in reruns.
Somewhere in a city a man in a beret slowly shuffles forward. He wears a blue cardigan sweater and brown bedroom slippers, and his name, a thought that only occurs to him those times he least expects it—as when ascending a curb or catching his reflection in the window of a pet shop or a bakery—is Louis.
Louis is neither hungry nor not hungry. If he stares at the window of a bakery it is not so much with longing for the cakes and pies behind the glass, for the plates of cookies and trays of sweet rolls on display, as with the memory, long buried, of longing. If he pauses before the window of a pet shop to smile at the winsome kittens or to admire the determined hamsters on their wheels, it is not so much out of a longing for companionship as his half-remembering some distant time he cannot define precisely, when he must have been lonely, and back then—whenever it was—wouldn’t it have been a comfort to have a hamster or some other small rodent he could carry in his pocket as a friend? Yes.
And so he trudges on. At times his eyes fill with dust and particles of abrasive grit, and without thinking, he’ll reach up and rub them until they feel better. At other times almost miraculously he is able to see objects far in the distance, to describe them as if they were only an arm’s length away. Then that passes too before he has the chance to remember if this ever happened before, or if this is the first time and it only seems as if it happened earlier.
But the fact is, at this point he has no idea where he’s going, and he has no idea how he came to be here. When he is thirsty, he finds a public fountain and bends down to drink. When he is sleepy he finds a bench and lies on it, or spots a relatively flat area beneath a bush and stretches out to nap, and when he wakes again he is curiously unrefreshed, his thoughts as hazy as ever. When it is hot, he unbuttons his cardigan. When it is cold, he buttons it—that’s the nice thing about a cardigan, he thinks—but beyond that thought he does not care about the weather or the clothes he wears or anything that is not present at that moment. Whenever that moment actually is. Wherever.
Actually, Ballerina Mouse takes dance lessons only for a short time—maybe two, three lessons at most—then quits because she’s no dummy. It doesn’t take her long to figure out that a mouse with one foot turned practically in the opposite direction of the other is never going to be a prima anything. So, okay, she thinks. It’s not in the cards, no matter what my name is, just like the fact that every boy who happens to be named Roy or Rex isn’t going to grow up to be a king, either. As a result she spends the rest of her life pursuing something not very interesting, some sitting-down job, a clerk at a government office or reading to blind mice, and every year her foot twists a bit more, almost as if it has a life of its own, until by the time she’s fifty in mouse years, she needs one of those aluminum platforms on wheels to roll in front of her to keep her from toppling into a gutter. Anyway, things go on that way for a while, and then, because getting back and forth to work is just too tough, she takes early retirement. Ballerina Mouse—a name she has almost forgotten by now, it having been replaced by her original one, Wendy—doesn’t have family or any real friends, and the years—mouse years—pass: sixty, sixty-five, seventy.
Then one morning in her bed she doesn’t move at all, not her good foot, not her bad one, which by then is truly, horribly bad, and has turned completely in the other direction and is actually on its way to coming back around the other side if she could only live another seventy years, which she can’t because she’s dead. But in heaven, to her surprise—and she finds this out almost immediately—guess what! Her crippled foot is perfect, and she can dance and dance and dance straight through eternity, without ever missing a day, and so she does.
Oh, Ballerina Mouse, you were named correctly after all!
Yes.
Maybe.
Suppose, just suppose, the Captain thinks, one day there is a knock on the door of my luxurious home and when I get up to answer it, whom should I see there but my son—or at least one of them—who somehow managed to scrape up the money for an economy ticket, or maybe stowed away in the wheel well of a jetliner, or worked his way on a cattle boat, to track me down. And there he is, this young adult, wearing his cheap suit or inexpensive loincloth, and carrying a cardboard suitcase, or a backpack. What will I do? Will I invite him in and offer him a cup of coffee before I send him on his way again? Will he want to tell me the story of his life? Of course he will, and I’ll listen. But after it’s over, after he has finally finished, and he has picked up his suitcase or backpack to go back to wherever it was he came from in the first place, what exactly will his story have to do with me? How will his story be different than the story of any stranger, any random visitor to town who just happens to be passing through, or an actor, mindlessly reciting a part written for him by someone else? And, for that matter, come to think of it, what do the stories I tell have to do with all the reverential dolts who hear them and believe that, having made them a part of their memories, they will become better people for having heard them?
Episode One, The Burrow, Scene Seven
All the residents of the Burrow stand at the front door, which is a heavy-looking brown slab with numerous bolts and a large brass handle. No one dares to make a move, but MADELINE holds a recipe file, and JEFFERY has a copy of his script, still in progress, tucked under his arm. RAYMOND cradles the decoy of a redhead duck, while VIKTOR clutches a CD that, according to MADELINE, contains a list of his bank accounts. He also has a sock filled with marbles. HEATHER holds a music box with a ballerina on top. It’s empty, but it’s the place she imagines one day she will hide her most precious object in, as soon as it comes along.
Jeffery: Is everyone ready? This shouldn’t take long, and then we’ll know.
Viktor: Come on! It’s taken too long already. Let’s get it over with. I don’t have all day. I have other things to do.
VIKTOR strides to the door and turns the knob. Then he stops, a look of puzzlement on his face.
Viktor: It looks like it’s stuck.
Je
ffery: Okay. So let’s see.
JEFFERY walks to the door, turns the knob, and pushes his shoulder against it. He pulls it toward him, just to be sure, but there is nothing happening in that direction, either.
Jeffery: It is stuck. Raymond, you want to come over and give us a hand here?
RAYMOND gives his decoy to MADELINE to hold and runs at the door, hitting it with his shoulder. It doesn’t move. All of them, even HEATHER, begin to push against it, but the door remains shut.
Madeline: My Lord. I didn’t think it was possible, but you may be right, Jeffery! I heard you, but, honestly, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that something like this could be happening. So what are we going to do now?
Jeffery: I wish I knew. Let me think. Wait. Whoever or whatever is keeping us here is also bringing us food, and dropping off those chunks of wood for Raymond to carve, right? So it must mean they don’t hate us. But it must also mean there has to be a way into the Burrow besides this door.