And Ballerina Mouse does work hard — even harder than she did before, which was already indisputably hard — so bit by bit her old skills return and she learns new skills as well. She gets a small role, and then a larger one, and then a larger one, and, at last, she becomes a star.
Well, no.
Who would believe that?
Among insects — the Captain thinks — among fish, among rats, iguanas, reindeer, dogs, lions, and tigers, there are no celebrities, nor are there celebrities among orangutans, or chimps, or bonobos, or apes. No, among none of these is there a need to raise one of their own above the rest, except to lead, or breed, or teach. No raccoon will ever choose another raccoon and set it off as an object of desire and envy. No snake ever said: I wish I could be you, to another snake. No toad ever fantasized about being a toad different than itself.
So what is this desire, the Captain wonders, we humans have to live out an alternate story to our own lives? Is there an entirely different life out there for him, one he never lived or has still to live or a whole series of possible lives heading off into infinity, like seeing a mirror reflected in another mirror? He looks around. On one hand there is the coffeepot, the microwave, and, in the next room, the giant TV screen — himself reflected on the surfaces of each in a way — and on the other hand, there is the leather couch with its feet resting on little rubber cups so as to keep it from digging holes into the Persian carpet, the coffee table, and, lying on the table, the Walther, right where he left it after having given it a thorough cleaning. And there he is too, standing amid all of it, a celebrity. But what would his life be like if he were just an ordinary seaman?
Madeline thinks: Has anyone down here in the Burrow ever taken a minute to recognize how important cooking is? I mean, what else does a person do three times a day, every day? Not sex, that’s for sure. But here, even with the limited facilities, it’s still possible for a stong-minded person with a talent for combining odd ingredients to carve out a gracious meal from the groceries that come, more or less in the middle of the night, several times a week when no one’s there to witness their arrival. Let’s see — kale, eggs, and breadcrumbs. How about a kale omelet with cheese covered with golden breadcrumbs? That sounds good, I think I’ll try it, but will my fellow renters even notice, or will they just take it for granted as they have so many, many other things? Will Viktor care? Jeffery? Even Raymond? Who am I kidding? And what about that twit Heather, who walks around in pretty much a daze, making faces to herself and jumping to one side whenever I pass her in the hall, like she’s afraid I’ll give her a smack? Honestly, I’m afraid the girl is headed for a breakdown, and I just hope I’m not around to see it when it comes; I have the feeling it could be messy.
I should charge people for my services, but then, if they said they didn’t need them, the truth is that I’d be bored without cooking, so I’ll just keep on doing what I do. Iron Chef Madeline. On-the-job training for some future career. No. Not just a career, but for being the queen of all celebrity chefs.
The fact is, Raymond’s head is small for his body, a trait that Madeline used to poke fun at in the days when she and Jeffery were, as Jeffery used to say, “an item.” Back then, the two of them would speculate on the man’s strange affinity for ducks and Madeline would say, “I can’t imagine any woman finding him attractive, can you?” then give Jeffery a little squeeze.
But toward the end of their relationship, just before she was about to leave Jeffery for Raymond, she once said, “You know, if you look at any of these decoys around Raymond’s room, you’ll see their heads are small too, at least compared to their bodies, and they are beautiful.”
So Madeline, Jeffery tells himself, is now onto this string of two guys in a row: the first with a small head, and the second with overlarge hands. What does this say about her? Does Madeline have some kind of thing for freaks? And more important, is it possible there is something weird about him too that Madeline can see but he can’t?
All right. Say Ballerina Mouse never has an operation on her foot because she can’t afford it, and because nobody is willing to do something that takes so much skill gratis. Skill, after all, takes time and money to acquire. It can’t be given away for free, and even if Ballerina Mouse could find just one benevolent and kind old mouse doctor who would agree to help her out, such a complicated operation takes not just one generous individual, but a whole team of other mouse doctors, and nurses, and anesthesiologists, to say nothing of the costs involved in keeping a hospital operating room up, running, and free from harmful bacteria, not even counting the whole time spent afterward on the recovery ward, post-op, dressings to be changed, meals in bed, vital signs, and later, still further down the line, all the time that’s needed in the rehab facility. Don’t forget to add that.
But then, just as the other mice are laughing at her once again for her so-called hopeless dreams, and just as she’s about to call it quits, almost by accident she discovers tap dancing and it turns out she’s a natural.
Nope.
Twilight souls, who neither exist nor do not exist, the Captain thinks, but who reside in a moment that is inseparable from memory, who live in hope that is a kind of hopelessness, a dream identical to their lives, whose lives pass but never change, are neither spoken nor unspoken, are only here, are only gone, are only able to look back and say: There, that’s where I was, but never where I will be, never where I am. That is: caught in a place between a name and no name and without a future.
He can honestly say that he does not hate them, because he does not. But come on, when one of them — those others, as he likes to think of them — is gone, will it truly be missed? Can one ever be?
Madeline dreams she has her own cooking show, called Cooking with Madeline, and in her dream, she’s at the television studio where the show is filmed, on a set called “Madeline’s Kitchen,” the only set, in fact, for the entire show. It’s a place she loves because in Madeline’s Kitchen the plates are always clean, the utensils sparkle, the knives are always sharp. In fact, it is this same set in which all her dishes are prepared for the television audience — several dishes, actually, each one at a different point of completion, so as to create the illusion of progress without having to pay a full crew to stand around and wait.
And with her on the set today is her director, Herb, whose name she jokes about and with whom she’s slept a few times just in order to have something on him in case he gives her any trouble, because he’s married to someone named Loraine, or Lurine — something like that — and he wouldn’t want news of an affair to get out.
Her cameraman, Ned, is there, too. She’s still deciding whether or not to sleep with Ned, the negatives being his bald head and his being overweight, while the positives are that he calls her Honeybunch, something her dad used to call her back before the cancer brought him down — six terrible months, each one worse than the last.