The Second Council of the Lateran under Pope Innocent II in 1139 banned the use of crossbows against Christians. Today, however, the crossbow has a complicated status. While some jurisdictions treat crossbows as firearms, others do not require any sort of license at all to own a crossbow — even for felons. In yet other places, the crossbow is regarded as a useful substitute for firearms, much in the same way that methadone is prescribed for former heroin addicts.
Or: Being an intelligent mouse, Ballerina Mouse comes home from practice one day, her ears still ringing from the falsely encouraging shouts from Mme. Suzette of “Beau travail,” “Bon tour,” and “Ne quittez pas.” Sitting in a chair on her back porch, a glass of iced tea in her tiny paw, Ballerina Mouse starts for the very first time to assess the situation as best she can. As hard as you try, which is very hard, she thinks, by no stretch of the imagination are you making the kind of progress you need to make to become a star. Ballerina Mouse looks out at her backyard and sees the wading pool, and the sandbox, and the swing on the tree, barely moving in the breeze. The garden is wilting beneath the heat of summer, as are the azalea bushes. You are nearly a grown mouse, she tells herself. It’s time for you to learn to be flexible. It’s time to give up this crazy dream you’ve had since you were a child of being a ballerina who just happens to have a hurt foot, and to try something else, something that will help others. You could go to medical school, for example, Ballerina Mouse thinks.
So Ballerina Mouse applies to several medical schools and is actually admitted to two of them — not the best, but not the worst, either — choosing the less expensive of the two and finishing with honors. Then, after graduation, she turns down the possibility of a comfortable practice in favor of traveling all over the world to help poor mice who cannot afford primary care, and in the process she helps thousands. At last one day after several years of doing good for others, she decides, what the fuck: she’s not getting any younger and, using the skill set she’s acquired in all her years of practice, plus a few new ideas she has come up with herself, in a groundbreaking operation Ballerina Mouse operates on her own foot, without anesthesia. And although it’s too late for her to go back to being a ballerina, in part because she’s still packing several extra pounds from lack of regular ballet practice, this self-performed surgery, combined with her past history of indefatigable good deeds, earns her some big humanitarian award, like the Nobel Prize or something.
No.
“In my dream,” Raymond is saying, “all I could see were the shapes of dancers dancing in a darkened room, so dark that faces couldn’t be seen, only the forms of bodies, and even those were so uncertain in shape it was impossible to tell which were male, and which female.”
“You know,” Jeffery tells Raymond late one morning in the kitchen over a breakfast of cold cereal and juice, “I don’t believe Louis is coming back.”
XIII
It’s been a long day, what with one thing and another, but now at last it’s bedtime, practically the Captain’s favorite time of the day. His bed, king-size, and for himself alone, makes up for all those years at sea when — even as a captain — he had only a narrow bunk. Now here it is, silk sheets and his secret vice, a lavender-scented pillow for sweet dreams. There’s also a CD player on the table next to the bed, ready to repeat his favorite disc, La Mer, of course, through the night. Blinds shut. Lights off and everything should be restful, but still the Captain can’t get out of his mind what that young guy in the plaid shirt was shouting. Despite his best efforts he’s transported back in time to the set of that stupid television show where he’d been asked to be a sort of celebrity technical advisor to some actor or another — who can keep actors straight? — playing the role of a captain who couldn’t tell land from sea, or something like that. If only he had just said, “No, I’ll pass,” the whole nasty business might have been avoided.
To this day, why they needed him remains a mystery — he supposed that thanks to that pirate incident on the Valhalla Queen he was virtually the only captain they had ever heard of, or at least the only one with an agent. But why he had accepted the offer, against his better judgment, he did know: namely, the pay he got for the brief trip to Kansas, where the show was being filmed, was far more than he ever received for piloting even the largest ships. The trick, Paul, the director, had told him was that, while the captain character was meant to be authentic, he couldn’t be so authentic that he made the commune members seem inauthentic. “Don’t forget,” Paul had said, “it’s a comedy.”
Maybe — but the truth is that the Captain found the whole episode, involving a washed-up member of his own profession, to have a sad and tragic undertone, even despite the presence of that cute actress, Heather Something. And because he knew from his experience at sea that it was important to keep these negative feelings from the crew lest they let the vessel of the show drift off its course and end up on the rocks, he’d kept things lively by making small jokes at the gentle expense of some touchy teenage wise-ass in the cast, jokes that Heather, in particular, had appreciated. In the end, however, it hadn’t worked. Maybe the exact opposite, in fact.
Fortunately, no one else at the lecture seemed to notice anything was seriously wrong, and his bearded, plaid-shirted accuser had been shuffled off almost as soon as the man finished shouting his completely unfair and accusatory message.
The Captain thinks about writing a note to his hosts thanking them for the sturdy ushers of the Masonic Hall, but decides, in the end, that would only call attention to the whole ridiculous incident.