But wait! Is there something there? He thinks there could be, so he gets Old Stag Killer ready. It was no problem at all getting over the wall, and then finding the perfect place to hide was easy too. He laughs — ha, ha — because now he is no more than thirty yards from the house. Does the man have dogs? He could take them out, but it seems there are no dogs. Excellent. Better yet.
Then there is a movement at the window, and is it? Yes. . it’s his father. . no, the Captain. . no, his father. . no, the Captain. . but who cares, really? This is who he came for, and anyway, father or not, this is the man who has come to assume the role of father, or close enough, in Junior’s tortured and confused mind, the same man who used to call him Junior on the set of Mellow Valley as if it wasn’t his real name but a joke, so that even as far back as the days of Mellow Valley this strange ironic vibe had been set in place, and anytime anybody anywhere said “Junior” they were referring not only to him, Junior, but at the same time making a sinister inference about his television character as well, and also to the Captain’s being Senior, which could not help but make a complete mockery of his position in the hierarchy of the production so after that there was no way in a thousand years he could have asked Heather for a date, which was what he had been planning to do before the old shithead snuck up on her and Judy and got some kind of eyeful. It made him glad that he had switched those signs around.
“I hate you,” Junior says under his breath. He raises Old Stag Killer to his shoulder and looks through the crossbow’s sight.
Now the man is outside, and holding something, possibly a cup of coffee in a grayish mug, peering out at his lawn, not seeing Junior at all, not having the remotest idea of what’s in store for him, but admiring, no doubt, the perfection of his stupid perfect grass. My fucking father, he thinks, lost in admiration for his lawn and not for his son, who deserves it. It isn’t fair at all. He cocks Old Stag Killer, but wait — the man has turned away and — Junior’s sight line is blocked by a bush — seems to be heading back inside, maybe to get something he’s forgotten.
Come back, Junior thinks. And soon.
To touch.
And so they know this much: that there is a tunnel, and that they are in it, but nothing more than that: not what will become of them, nor where they are headed — only that in the distance there is — what? — a light, and then perhaps a dark, and then possibly a light, and so on, but still they are there, wherever there is, and possessing a being that is theirs nonetheless, a being with no name and that has no reason, nor can it make any clear distinction between what is and what is not — a being, if it can even be called such, that sees only chance and dimness and regret, a something that hears only the muffled sounds of wave after wave, the grinding sounds of pebbles on a beach; an unnameable sound; an unnameable taste; a soul — well, who knows, and who can say? — but if there is one, it is — whatever it is — half-formed, unshapely, half-light, half-dark— as if, it thinks, if I only had the chance to learn a little more, to study a little more, had time enough to prepare, to brace myself, then—each of these things, whatever we may call them, thinks—if only just a little — then I would have understood whatever it was I needed to know, the part that was to be found in me, the part that I could never quite encompass, before the light goes completely out.
It’s totally amazing, Madeline thinks as she’s standing there waiting her turn to crawl into the hole that will take them out of there, or somewhere: all this time she’s been considering Jeffery pretty much a loser (and he is a loser), and yet he’s the one who came up with this plan to get them out of there. And even though earlier she hadn’t been so sure she really wanted to go outdoors — because what is out there except the clouds and a lot of nameless trees? — now that it’s so close, so nearly happening, she’s excited.
And Madeline can just about taste it: first a little restaurant with cheap rent because it’s off the beaten path somewhere, then a couple of excellent reviews from food critics, one, two, three stars, long lines, guest appearances on television, her own show, a book — or maybe the book will come earlier, when she still will have the time in her schedule to write one and every spare minute isn’t taken up by the demands of celebrity because who needs Viktor?
She gets up on the stove, scraping her knee on one of the burners, and crawls into the dark. Cooking with Madeline. Here she comes.
Raymond is still holding his decoy, which is impossible to see in the dark, but feels safe and friendly, like a real duck, almost.
But come to think of it, Jeffery thinks, this Burrow script doesn’t sound like a first episode at all. It sounds like a last one.
Heather, sensing the dark shape of Raymond behind her, relaxes.
And between having touched without knowing it, and thinking you have touched but having not touched at all, what is the difference?
It’s twilight and the Captain hears outside his window the slow grinding of machinery, but when he looks it’s impossible to see a thing. Still he hears it. Something must be there, he thinks — so he steps outside the house onto his beautiful lawn, where he still sees nothing, but now that he’s outdoors he can feel the low vibration of the earth beneath his feet. And then all at once, it becomes clear to him; he puts two and two together. He knows exactly what’s about to happen. He returns to the house, picks up his old pistol, the faithful, blue-black Walther, right where he left it, and, pulling a chair up to his window, rests the pistol’s butt on the windowsill to steady it and waits for the first movement on the surface of his yet unbroken lawn. He remembers something an old Malaysian hunter once told him: “When you take aim, you must not see the tiger you are shooting, or the deer, or the bear, because to take the life of a living thing is difficult. Instead you must imagine that the tiger, or the deer, or whatever” (the hunter didn’t say “whatever,” of course) “does not exist at all, but in its place is only a single burning candle, and it is your task, and yours alone, to direct your bullet safely through its flame to the other side.”
The hunter’s name was Old Robert, or something that sounded like that. It will come back to him, he’s sure, but all at once and out of nowhere he’s suddenly become very sleepy.
He yawns and touches the anchor-shaped birthmark above his left eye for good luck. That’s better. A Quotient of eighty-five, maybe ninety. The Captain is all together ready for whatever is going to pop out of his lawn — a gopher, bear, or who-knows-what.
And everything does come back.
Now at the far end of the lawn, over by the wall that Junior found so easy to climb over, patient tendrils of plants push out of the soil like fingers, each searching for a grasp, a hold, a thing to cling to, to pull themselves up, for the hundredth, for the thousandth, for the millionth time, toward the light.