And Heather? What kind of name is that? Heather is kind of a cute name, true, but a spooky chick, Jeffery concludes. Should he try to get something going with her? He can’t make up his mind.
Like sponges? Sponges?
Oh Heather, Heather thinks, when you first agreed to live in the Burrow, why, why, why didn’t you spend a little more time considering the potential toxic effects of living in conditions of no sunlight plus communal food?
In other words, Heather is beginning to question the wisdom of her move, because, sure, the Burrow is cheap rent, quiet, and free from all those grabby guys in the last five singles complexes where she could afford only the tiniest of apartments, but, at the same time, it’s just so. . dank. . and, speaking of time, when was the last time she got out?
But in her defense (and on the other hand), it sure is easy for a person to stay once she’s there. It’s easy to fall into a routine. Morning arrives: you wake; food appears and you eat it because after all it’s coming out of your rent — you paid for it. And even though other people have poured from the milk carton before you (maybe even drunk straight from the carton), and sometimes you wind up getting the bottom part of what’s left in the cereal box — broken flakes and all — and if, say, you left a half plate of lasagna in the fridge, then two nights later you have a craving for a little pasta before bedtime, when you go to look for it, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance it will be there (so in the end, you wind up helping yourself to somebody else’s cold chicken), still, it’s not exactly slave conditions.
But. . but what? Because even though all this trading food back and forth doesn’t seem right, Heather can’t pinpoint what’s wrong about it, exactly, and what’s very weird is that nobody around here ever complains about the missing chicken or accuses her of taking it, even though she did. So what’s the problem? Well, nothing, though she does have to admit this place makes her nervous. On the other hand, she must be at least a little happy, otherwise why would she still be here? And did she mention that the rent is a bargain? She did. It is. It is a huge bargain. Which makes everything that much more confusing.
Or—possibly it’s worse. Maybe it’s not the Burrow at all, but that her job has left some sort of mark on her, a bum’s mark, meaning: Here walks a loser, a person not worthy of your full respect, a person only to be passed by and despised.
Or—on the other hand (are we on the third or fourth hand by now?), she also has to admit that it feels as if her fellow renters — Jeffery and Viktor (not Raymond, thank goodness), but particularly Madeline — are somehow judging her. Does it have to do with her job? She can’t remember ever mentioning to anyone what it is, but maybe they’ve listened at her door, because no one ever seems to have anything better to do with their time anyway, except Viktor.
A life made mostly of air, Heather thinks.
Viktor remembers that once someone — maybe his mother before he was dropped off at the orphanage, maybe nuns — cut green sticks from a tree, covered them in mud, and then wiped the mud all over his body, from the hair on his head to the soles of his feet. After he was completely covered (except for his eyes), they used the same sticks to smooth the mud out. “Don’t move,” they — whoever did this — had said, and so he hadn’t. He’d waited, watching the boring clouds and boring leaves until the mud had thoroughly dried. Eventually he was left alone, and when he finally moved, a very long time afterward, the mud cracked and fell off and left him dirty.
Why had this been done? To this day, Viktor has no idea. Was this some folk remedy for having been bitten by a swarm of insects? Could he have rolled in a bed of stinging nettles? Was this a treatment for a rash? A punishment? And what happened after? The only thing he can be sure of is that one day there he was, covered in mud and not allowed to move, and then a long time after that he was moving again, as if nothing at all had happened.
Viktor has never spoken about this to anyone. Why would he?
But also — and this is the most secret part — there was something Viktor found deeply satisfying about being covered in mud, about mud in general.
And as for Junior: Is he a psychopath?
Well, it depends on what you mean by psychopath. If by psychopath you mean: a person with a severe personality disorder, especially one that manifests itself through aggressive and antisocial behavior, and then, in addition, you can also come up with a satisfactory definition for that nebulous phrase “personality disorder,” to say nothing of “severe,” you may well be right. But — and speaking only for himself — Junior says he has a hard time when it comes to pinning that “personality disorder” label down. It sounds like a load of crap to him, he says. Just like the word killer, because the very same dictionary that came up with that “personality disorder” definition (the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language) defines killer as “one that kills,” meaning that absolutely everyone — men, women, children, vegetarians (if you include plants), animals, even some plants — is included. Plus, even if you narrow the definition down to “one that kills people,” what with wars, and famine, and economic oppression, you still have a group far too large, in any effective way, to eliminate most of the human race. And even then, if you go the extra mile and narrow it further, to “one who takes a human life illegally,” that raises, for Junior, at least, one shitload of red flags: For one thing, under whose laws? And are those laws just or unjust? And what do you mean by takes, exactly?
So really, when we toss around the words killer, or personality disorder, or even psychopath, as people so often casually do, who is it we think we’re excluding?
Hardly anyone, it seems to Junior.
Heather listens from behind the door to her apartment until she’s sure no one is out there. Then, as quiet as a mouse, she opens the door and tiptoes to the shared kitchen of the Burrow to put on a pot of water for tea. This is no way to live, she thinks. If I had a hot plate or even an electric teakettle in my room I wouldn’t have to be doing this. But the rules of the Burrow specifically forbid these appliances because of old wiring or some such. Back when she first arrived she thought about whether she wanted to put up with that rule or not, and at the time it seemed a decent trade-off for the extremely low rent. Now she wonders how anyone would even know. It’s not as if they inspect her room or anything like that, at least not that she is aware of.
Whoever they are.
Tonight in the kitchen there’s a package of arrowroot crackers — her favorite — in a cupboard, and one of the good things about arrowroot crackers is that no one else in the Burrow much eats them because they’re so bland, but that’s exactly what Heather likes: they’re baby food, the kind of thing a mouse would nibble on. They’re forgettable, like her. But was she always forgettable? Wasn’t there a time when her name, Heather, meant the out-of-doors and springtime and a fresh scent? Yes, indeed.