But in any case, he can’t say that he himself seems distant, can he?
People always believe that words will save them, but they are wrong, Heather thinks. Likewise, all those people who write letters, from prison and elsewhere, from places of entrapment and incarceration, those who believe their words will get them out, are wrong. And also those who sing their words in stupid love songs, or scratch them on trees, or have them carved on tombstones wanting to have “the last word,” or print them in newspapers as letters to the editor, and in books; people who think that just because the words are printed they are somehow special, like the guys who call her on the sex line because they think their words have some kind of reality of their own, that because their words are the same as sex to them, then Heather repeating their words back to them must for them be the same as having sex with her, and though Heather does concede there may be some overlapping between words and the physical world from time to time — such as when you write words on a Post-it note, and you have the words and you have the Post-it note, which you can stick anywhere you want, moving it around your apartment so you can see it better and help yourself improve who you are — who you will be — she cannot convince herself that the neurons firing in those assholes’ pinheads when the sex words are said can possibly be identical to the ones firing when actual human contact is being made. Which is a point, come to think of it, that is largely in favor of the sex phone line, because the phone sex neurons are, at best, only in the neighborhood of those neurons involved in actual contact — maybe next-door neighbors — and being next door is not the same as being in the same house together, eating at the same kitchen table or having sex in the same bed, and sometimes things are better that way.
It’s like a dream: if the morning after having a dream a person wants to remember it, she can’t look for it in the same place where she keeps her actual stored-away experiences, because no matter how much a person may want to remember a specific dream she once had, even if she had an electrode and pushed a button to stimulate the part of her brain where actual experiences are stored, she wouldn’t get any dreams at all, but only get actual experiences. In other words, if a person wants to stimulate a dream, she has to go somewhere else entirely, somewhere next door to her house, though not her house at all. And maybe not even next door, but still down the street or on the next block, though in the same neighborhood — which is her brain, of course — a satisfying thought. So when those high school parents who came to see Oklahoma! were applauding “I’m just a girl who can’t say no,” who was it they were applauding? And why exactly is this an argument in favor of phone sex? She was going somewhere with this, she is sure, but just where eludes her.
Nonetheless, Heather wonders, aren’t all thoughts like Plato’s Cave (a place she imagines looks a lot like the Burrow) in that we are all chained and looking at the shadows cast by the fire on the wall of the cave, believing they are real when they’re not? Although come to think of it, didn’t Plato say that even if you did somehow manage to unlock your chains and take a stroll outside the cave, once you left the cave you couldn’t come back inside again because you would be attacked by all your ex-friends, those cave dwellers, for being crazy because you would be describing things they couldn’t understand. In this case, however, Heather can’t picture anyone who lives in the Burrow attacking anyone, except possibly Viktor, who strikes her as, well, as having some dark personal issues, and maybe that woman, Madeline. And wasn’t “Plato’s” also the name of some sex club that opened around the time that Mellow Valley, the show that feautured the other Heather actress, was on the air?
So Heather keeps listening to her callers pour their hearts out on the other end of her phone line (her cell phone), and sometimes she hears them use truly bad words accompanied by loud thuds and slippery sounds because they get excited when she says things like, “Wow, you are so big, I want your cock in me,” a phrase that Betty, her trainer, told her to say at least twice every conversation if Heather wants to have them coming back, and which phrase Heather now keeps on a Post-it by the phone to remind her to use it, except she wrote down only the initials (WYASBIWYCIM), just in case a Burrow inspector, as absurd as it sounds, did come into her apartment looking for a hot plate, or electric teakettle, and saw the initials. That way he would say — if he said anything at all — something like, “Wow! That looks Welsh.” Or maybe Polish.
Could Raymond be Polish?
“Viktor,” Jeffery says, “do you think there’s a life after we die?”
“I don’t know,” Viktor says. “Isn’t the important thing that we get what we want in this one?”
In Junior’s dream he is at a carnival, a small one, the kind that travels from neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the year, with smallish rides — nothing scary — and lots of small booths, like the ring toss and throwing baseballs at milk bottles. The booth he is at now is his favorite: the shooting gallery, the kind where patrons aim their BB guns at dented metal silhouettes of ducks that are drawn along by a conveyer belt that’s hidden behind fake waves, painted bright blue, but in his dream, instead of a BB gun, he’s got a crossbow. Bam, he hits one, and then Bam, another. In his dream he can’t miss.
And why doesn’t someone open up a shooting gallery for crossbows? It could be a big hit, Junior thinks. He’ll store that one away for the future.
V
For the record, right now the Captain’s Death Quotient is roughly forty-five.
Probably because he’s thinking about how something as simple as a birthmark in the shape of an anchor can turn your whole life into one big joke.
To say nothing about the deep, invisible hurt that comes with it, the hurt that has no mark on it at all, but is there anyway, because it doesn’t seem fair when you know you are so much better than everyone else, objectively speaking. You are so much stronger and more intelligent, but then, any moment you happen to be away from your chauffeured limousine, maybe not wearing your uniform because it’s at the cleaners, right at that moment a stray breeze can come by, blow the hair off your forehead, and any complete moron walking by has permission to point at that anchor on your face and laugh.
Even twilight souls.
Polish! Heather could laugh in this so-called inspector visitor’s face about the Polish on her note because if he wanted to take the trouble to find out, one of her clients happens to be Polish — his name is Stan — but as far as she can determine no one has ever been in her room except for her and, of course, whoever lived there before her. And as for the pervs, which is what Heather calls what Betty calls her customers, they never want to know anything about Heather as a person either, because, just like those audiences back in the years of her high school plays, it’s not Heather they’re applauding; it’s not the real Heather they want, or even those selected parts of her anatomy she so lovingly describes for them: clit baby, pussy baby, nipple baby. They all want something else, an abstraction, a pure theory, that next-door-neighbor neuron, and like rich cowards who hunt wolves and polar bears from airplanes, all they want is a story to tell themselves, something safe. They want the experience of hunting, but not to meet anything that might fight back.