And, for that matter, what would you call Jeffery for thinking all of this?
And yet there is something troubling about the Burrow, something hard to name, maybe something about the low shadow it casts on the vacant lot around sunset, or maybe the smell of its walls after a November rain, so maybe the children — bless them— are right to keep their distance.
Because Raymond is a big guy, and gentle, and his head is big and gentle, too, with dark brown hair like burnt whole-wheat toast, and frizzy, the kind of hair a person might want to lean their own head against if he or she were tired, but if they did they would be disappointed because what they would be leaning on would be Raymond’s skull, which is very hard. As hard as a wooden decoy, a person who leaned his or her head against it might be thinking.
Meanwhile: outside the Burrow, new shoots of trees, new wood, reach out of the ground, toward air, toward sun, toward something they can’t actually see, something they have no way to be sure is even there.
What was Raymond’s reaction to Jeffery’s explanation of the dust cloud and the person making it? It was to settle deeper into his recliner and shut his eyes. Finally, after about five minutes, Raymond spoke. “Like jets,” he said, and proceeded to peel a Band-Aid from his finger and stare at the cut underneath, which Jeffery thought probably came from making decoys — a sliver or a slip of the knife. The skin beneath the Band-Aid was pale and puckered, not like skin at all, but more like those Styrofoam pellets people use for packing.
“Are you okay?” Jeffery asked. “And what do you mean, ‘like jets’?”
Raymond stuck the Band-Aid back where it was. “Like once upon a time,” he said, “there must have been some crazy old aeronautical engineer somewhere who spent his whole life thinking as hard as he could about how to get propeller planes to speed up, maybe by making bigger propellers, or shorter wings, or both, or whatever it would take, and let’s say that in the end he figured out exactly the way to do it; let’s say that he increased the speed by fifty or a hundred miles an hour, which nobody ever imagined could be done by anybody, so the guy was a genius. But in the meantime, somebody else had invented jets.”
“Oh,” Jeffery said, because he had to give Raymond credit: the man, no matter what else he was, was full of surprises, and even after Madeline left him to be with Viktor, Raymond stayed friends with Jeffery.
Because it was also true that before Madeline left Raymond to be with Viktor, she left Jeffery to be with Raymond.
Which made the two of them buddies in a way. Losers.
The winner being Viktor, of course.
Though terms such as “winner” and “loser” are pretty much irrelevant in the Burrow.
Madeline also lives in the Burrow, as well as Heather and Viktor. There used to be another guy — Louis, his name was — but he moved out in the middle of the night awhile ago, and now his room is empty.
Maybe if they put a big sign out in front, Jeffery thinks, and officially called the building “The Burrow,” then the place would be overrun with Middle Earth-o-philes, and the landlord, or whatever faceless real estate holding company actually owns this place, wouldn’t be having this vacancy problem. On the other hand, is it his problem, or even a problem?
Does Jeffery really want to have to get to know a new tenant and then have to set boundaries with him or her?
On the other hand: Who was it among the Burrow’s current crop of residents who called her fellow renters “a lonely, fucked-up group of individuals”?
That would be Madeline. She has red hair and once Viktor described her, correctly, as “a hot tamale.”
Tocar: to touch.
Meaning the fur beneath and between the fingers, meaning the warmth of skin beneath the fur, the pulse of blood, the sleeping house of muscle, its patient throb against the hand, the hand connected to that which is the other, meaning the self outside the self, the self mysterious in the way we cannot ever be a mystery to ourselves, the self known through touching others in the way we ourselves can never be known, the self outside the self, of it being touched, of our being connected, for once not alone but a part, for once no different, for once at home in a world where we are never at home, for once ourselves, remembering, wherever we may be.
To the St. Nils Eagle
Dear Editors,
I have been noticing for quite a while various problems associated with the use of firearms in this country. At the same time I cannot ignore the fact that, with crime rates being what they are, home protection is also an issue. Today I am writing because I believe there is a way to solve both problems at the same time. Namely, people should give serious thought to requiring every household in the land to have at least one crossbow on its premises, both for sport and as a deterrent factor. Here are the reasons I believe such legislation, if enacted, might reverse the trends of death by firearms and also the increasing dangers of home intrusions: 1) To load a crossbow requires a fair amount of physical strength, thus cutting down on any possibility of misuse by children, old people, or invalids. 2) Crossbows, being made of wood, are ecologically superior, and certainly do not carry with them the stigmata of cop-killer bullets and the discharge of poisonous gases or lead into the atmosphere. 3) The time it takes to pull back the string, and then to put an arrow (or bolt) in place, while not long, can provide a much-needed “cooling off” period in cases of a disagreement or domestic violence situations. 4) When necessary, they are deadly.
Yours truly,
A Sportsman
Many residents of the neighborhood say the Burrow has its origin in the Cold War, or even earlier, during the Second World War. Purportedly, the government built it back then as a secret place to hide officials if the fighting got too close. But to counter that theory: Why would the government build a place like that for only six people? And which six could they have been?
Others say that the Burrow has its origin in some sort of geological formation, a swelling in the earth that the builders simply used to make their job easier, digging down, in the natural direction of gravity, instead of building unnaturally upward. Then they installed plumbing, ran electrical lines, and plastered over walls of dirt. It is cool in summer, people say, and warm in winter, and they are right.
But there are still others who contend that the Burrow is not that old at all. They posit that its origin was as the entrance of a tunnel dug to smuggle drugs, or possibly humans — though from where to where is never specified. In any case, this faction claims that someone, probably a relative of one of the agents who exposed the operation, bought the vacant lot cheap, then took advantage of the considerable improvements that had already been made by the crime lords, and turned it into its present configuration of underground apartments, renting them out at an exceedingly reasonable rate.
Clearly, this is a lot of speculation by a group of people who can’t even bother to learn the names of their own trees. At the same time however, everyone agrees that one benefit to living there is that, possibly because the presence of the Burrow does not exactly announce itself to any criminal type, there has never been a break-in or a burglary in all the years of its existence. In other words, the Burrow is safe, and no matter what individual complaints its residents may have, they report feeling protected from the kind of harm they have felt in the places they lived before they arrived at the Burrow.