And where are we now?
How did we come to be here?
Where we going?
And anyway, do we even need to know?
III
Madeline is looking in the mirror trying to decide whether she should pluck her eyebrows or just leave them alone. On the pro side it would give her something to do, and she’s pretty bored, but on the con side she likes them the way they are. And there she is: red hair, full eyebrows, nice features though a little large, not like those mousey ones of Heather, which is good. So why doesn’t she get more respect? She gets men following after her, sure, but respect — that’s another matter entirely. On the other hand, who in the Burrow is capable of providing it? Raymond is, well. . Raymond, and the word would never even cross his mind. Jeffery is old news and Viktor is intense — she’ll give him that — but the only thing he comes close to respecting is money.
One of these days she’s going to have to take her act on the road and get out of here before it kills her, but first she’d better figure out exactly what her act is going to be. Singing? No, though she has a nice enough voice. Dancing? Unfortunately not. Painting? Sculpture? Poetry? Nope, nope, and nope. The only thing she’s at all good at is cooking, so maybe that will be it, she thinks. Stranger things have happened, that’s for sure.
“In my dream,” Raymond announces to Jeffery when they finally arrive at Jeffery’s apartment, “I’m a duck, and my arms — or wings, I guess — are getting tired because I’ve been flying for days. Don’t ask me how I know this. And not only have I been flying nearly forever, but the weather is incredibly bad — snow, sleet, hail, and fog, too — so I can barely see the ground below. Anyway, I ask the leader of the ducks — we have a leader—‘Please, can we stop here?’ but he says no.
“Then I say, ‘How much longer?’ but the leader, who’s another duck, naturally, says I have to hang on. ‘We’re almost there,’ he yells over the wind to me, but at the same time, Jeffery, I’m telling you, my arms really, really hurt. I mean, I can barely move them, and it feels like I’m starting to lose altitude.”
Jeffery looks at him. The man is a little out of breath and his forehead is sweating. “That’s some dream,” he answers. “I can see why you’d remember it. But the fact is, Raymond, I was just on my way outside when you insisted on stopping me.”
“But wait,” Raymond goes on. “Just as I’m positive I’m going to drop into the ocean or into whatever it is that’s below me — did I mention there are a lot of clouds, so it’s impossible to see the ground at all? — the clouds separate, and there is the most beautiful pond I can imagine — cattails, and duckweed, and frogs — it’s sort of like the one outside this place, and perfect for landing. And it turns out, in my dream anyway, that somehow I knew this exact place would be here all along; don’t ask me how — instinct or something. Then, even better, guess who is flying right next to me? It’s Madeline — who is also a duck, but still the same Madeline you and I both know, the one who left you for me (sorry) and then me for Viktor — and I tell her, ‘Madeline, look. Other ducks are already down there; it will be great. We’ll get a bite to eat, and maybe exchange some information about weather conditions and so on and so forth. We can make new friends, but don’t you go getting too friendly, if you know what I mean, and Madeline kind of nods because her arms are busy flapping.
“So there we are, all of us gliding down to join the other ducks and, just as I’m thinking how great it feels not to have to move my arms — which are so tired — anymore, what do I hear but loud noises? (Well, I can’t be positive how loud the noises are, scientifically speaking, because, as you know, a duck’s ears aren’t designed for picking up sounds — but I can tell you they are loud to me.) And then I can’t move my arms at all; I’m falling, and everything gets dark.”
Raymond’s face suddenly goes flat and spongy, but like a sponge that isn’t filled with water but with something else, something alien and scary. “Do you think this means I died?”
“I have no idea,” Jeffery answers, because right in the middle of listening to Raymond talk about his dream, he found himself wishing for about the thousandth time that he had taped those episodes of his favorite old television sitcom, Mellow Valley. There were only seven of them, and he promised himself he’d do it before moving to the Burrow, but then other things got in his way.
Jeffery’s apartment, like every apartment in the Burrow, consists of a study, a bedroom, and a bath. There is no kitchen, not even a hot plate, because down the hall is a real kitchen that everyone shares with surprisingly few complications of a territorial nature. Food arrives, is put away, is consumed. That’s about it.
When he moved into the Burrow, his apartment came furnished: a bed, a brown leather couch, two lamps, a dresser, and two mismatched but comfortable chairs. Someone said the Burrow had been outfitted when a used furniture store caught fire, and most of the furniture was put outside for an impromptu sale even as the firemen were still shooting water on the blaze, trying (and failing) to save the building. Sometimes, if he’s lying on the couch, his head pushed deep into one of its cushions, Jeffery believes he can detect the faintest tang of smoke and imagines he can hear the hiss of steam.
Above his couch Jeffery has tacked a photo from a sports magazine he found in the Burrow kitchen one day, piled on top of the trash. The picture is of a woman on her back on a straw mat. Her arms are at her sides, palms facing up, and her reddish-brown hair is spread out behind her. Her eyes are shut, and although she wears a light-blue two-piece bathing suit that allows the viewer to appreciate the gentle, but not ostentatious, swelling of her breasts, the breathtaking curve of her waist, the discreet in-scoop of her navel, there is nothing base or prurient about her. Instead, she is chaste and self-contained. She could be a wandering goddess taking a little time out to soak up some rays.
Meanwhile, the woman in the poster’s shut eyes are saying — and not only to the person who snapped this photo in the first place, but now to Jeffery as well—“I don’t recognize you. I could open my eyes right now, and still you wouldn’t exist for me any more than if you never had been born. So move, asshole, because you are blocking my sunlight.” And weirdly, it was this very poster Jeffery had been staring at when it occurred to him to take a stroll outside and check things out and maybe catch a little sun for a change, that is, before Raymond stopped him at the door.
It probably is no coincidence that the woman in the poster resembles Madeline.
Who was it that said: “The entire course of human history can basically be reduced to the acts of one total psychopath after another”?
So picture a boy, an average-looking boy, who has the usual childhood diseases — croup, flu, strep — and takes them all in stride or even better because he’s a healthy kid, and what keeps his schoolmates in bed a week Junior will get over in a day. His mind, though, is another matter, because for one thing, he likes to cut up worms — lots of worms — in order to watch them writhe even though they lack faces to express their pain. He likes burning bugs, too, burning them with magnifying lenses so it takes awhile, and even though it’s true they do have faces, small ones, still they can’t change their expressions. Thank God for gasoline and rats. For the first time this boy can finally see what pain feels like outside of himself, which is the point, because this boy is not cruel; Junior is not a sadist, no. All Junior is looking for is someone — okay, something—he can share, compare notes with, to validate — though he would never use such a fancy word — his feelings. Anyway, there is a chance this boy, Junior, will grow out of this in time.