Look like ducks
Don’t eat
Eat
Don’t fly
Fly
Float
Float
Can be worth a lot of money
Inexpensive
Silent
Very noisy
Take hours to make
Relatively easy to make
Painted feathers
Actual feathers
No feet
Feet
Wood
Flesh
No hands
No hands
What Madeline said to Viktor the first time she saw him was, “I really like your hands,” even though she was secretly thinking that his hands were kind of grotesque and much much too large for an average human being, so maybe the only reason she said it was to make Viktor feel comfortable, him being a newcomer to the Burrow, or to diffuse her own discomfort, like saying, “That’s a really great boil on your neck that you’ve got going.” At any rate, she had been dating Raymond back when Viktor arrived and she was starting to get bored again, being long finished with that pretentious ass, Jeffery, and even though Raymond was — still is — sweet, decoys aside, he was a little lacking in — what? — hotness.
Viktor, on the other hand, is Mister Intense, but only, she now knows, in two areas, fucking and making money, and when he finishes fucking, he more or less forgets about her. And even though she knows she could go back to Jeffery (ugh) in a second, or to Raymond, who at least is an artist and, she knows, still has a thing for her, the fact is it would just be too embarrassing, too awful to have to retrace those particular steps. It would make it seem as if she hasn’t made any progress at all during her time here in the Burrow.
Obviously, the simple solution is for Madeline to just get out, to meet people, attend a few concerts, join a fan club or two, hit up the singles bars, et cetera. And so she gets dressed up. She puts on some makeup, fixes her hair, looks nice, and tells Viktor, who is hardly paying attention, that she’s going to go out to get some fresh air. There, that wasn’t hard, she thinks. But no sooner does she reach the front door and put her hand on the knob, is about to give it a twist and walk out to a new, or at least newer, life, than it occurs to her to worry about the wind, of all things. If a wind comes up suddenly, it will blow her hair around, move the bushes and knock over trees. And even if it doesn’t do that, it will certainly blow around pollen — not good for her allergies — and force the clouds to streak by overhead only to be replaced by other, and of course newer, clouds, none of them keeping the same shape, and so on and so forth, in a terrifying and meaningless progression, and that’s just in the short run.
In the long run the leaves will barely have enough time to fall before their trees are back in bud again, full of squawking birds, which will race around, looking for things to make nests out of, and then, when they’ve finally stuck the nests together and their babies are born, they’ll be busy day in and day out stuffing the same regurgitated swill down the babies’ throats, and when they’re not doing that, they’ll be fighting over the same or similar territories, beneath the same or similar sky, next door to the same ocean, with the same or similar dogs barking at one thing or another that’s going by, and the same or similar people laughing or crying. Also there will be the same or similar guys who used to ask her out on dates using the same or similar tired pickup lines, the same meant-to-be-winning gestures, who took her out to the same or similar overspiced or underspiced meals (“Our special today is beef brochette”) in those same quaint cafés and similarly hip restaurants — the food not even close to being as good as the stuff that she makes — and then, when the guy, one guy or another, had sometimes paid the check at the end of the meal, him asking, as if this were an entirely new concept that had just then occurred to him, “So, what are you doing the rest of the night?” It reminds her of when she used to stand next to one of those automated traffic lights while waiting for it to change while it kept saying “Don’t walk,” out loud, as if she hadn’t heard it a million times already. She hates it when she starts thinking like this.
And then there is also the same or similar fucking, and the unfucking, and the planning-the-rest-of-our-lives-together sessions late into the night, and after them the breakups, and next analyzing the breakups, and starting over. And true, at first it was all sort of okay, all kind of a novelty, too, but now, with her hand on the knob, about to leave the Burrow, it suddenly occurs to her to ask: Are things that bad down here? Why go out when you know how it’s going to end anyway, which is exactly the same as it’s ending here? And the difference between her old life and this one, if she cares to measure it? Well, Madeline thinks, not much, with the advantage to the Burrow being that it is mostly quiet, mostly safe, smoke free, incredibly inexpensive, and mostly illusion free. And Viktor, when he remembers her, is actually decent in the sack.
So she takes her hand off the knob for the moment, goes back to her room, hangs that dress back up in the closet, and heads to the kitchen, where at least she’ll be able to whip up some new snack or another, depending on what’s in stock.
Maybe she should start small. That night, waiting for Viktor to leave the computer and join her between the sheets, she asks him, “If you were going to sign up for a fan club, whose would you pick?”
The better to touch you with, is what Viktor tells Madeline, but even so, he’d rather have a pair of normal hands. “You should play basketball with those palookas of yours,” the basketball coach had told him back when he was a kid, and so he did, Number 37, but the truth was that he was still short, so things evened out; he could hold the ball like a champ, but he never got a chance to shoot it because his opponents towered over him, and the only thing he got out of the experience was a new nickname — Los Manos.
“Ha, ha, Los Manos,” Viktor replied the first time someone called him that. “That’s funny.” And the following night he made sure to slash the tires of the bicycle of the kid who said it. But by then, Los Manos had stuck.
Not that anybody here in the Burrow ever calls him anything but his own name, Viktor, spelled with that K, and why it is a K, he does not know. Somebody, maybe a nun, once told him that his father-in-absentia was Scandinavian, or German, and possibly a sea captain, though how she would come to have this information he has no idea, so there’s plenty of room for doubt.
As a place to live the Burrow is okay enough — a guy can make a lot of money if he wants to, and Viktor does. In part it’s because the rent is cheap, but also it’s because there are no distractions other than Madeline, which, frankly, leaves plenty of time for a go-getting person to invest online. So he has to say that being here is good, and Madeline is a bonus, because even though when he first arrived she was with Raymond, anybody with eyes could see that she was too much for him to handle. Anyway Viktor knows her type: treat them bad, and they’ll come back for more, is his motto. Besides, the first time he ever saw the inside of Raymond’s apartment, which is basically wall-to-wall ducks for Christ’s sake, he knew it was only a matter of time before Madeline would be running screaming out of there. To him.
Plus, soon, if he can pull it off, he’ll have a larger room — Louis’s old one — so Madeline can live with him there if she wants to, and give him the money she saves in rent to invest for her. Is she that practical? He has his doubts. For example, just the other day she asked him what kind of fan club he would join, of all things. He told her, “I don’t know. Maybe one for that old Captain you see on TV selling fish.”