Jim Krusoe - The Sleep Garden

“Special,” Madeline says out loud in front of the mirror in the bedroom of her apartment, practicing for the interview she is sure she’ll give one day. “That’s what we all are, every last one of us, and just because I happen to be a celebrity, I hope you don’t think I’ve forgotten my roots and also all the people who helped me on my way up to where I am now.”

What can a person tell about another person simply by a look at his sock drawer? As it turns out, plenty. For one, are the socks just tossed in without regard to color or material, or is each pair rolled lightly at the tops so they stay together? For that matter, has each pair been rolled into a self-contained ball, like a sow bug, fearful of being separated from its mate — which, if you know anything about bugs — not even bugs, by the way, but crustaceans — doesn’t make sense because a sow bug is a single bug, and its mate would be somewhere next to it in a ball of its own, wouldn’t it? Do sow bugs even have mates? In any case, Viktor’s socks, as you might imagine, are sow bugs.

And what else is in Viktor’s drawer along with his socks? Eight silver dollars, four Indian head nickels, an extra calculator, a chrome nail clipper, a piece of coal, and an old cut-crystal doorknob that used to open the door of his bedroom in one of the foster homes he lived in. On his last day there he unscrewed it and hid it in his suitcase when he left.

Also, rolling around on the drawer’s bottom (or rolling as best they can among the balls of socks) are fourteen marbles that represent the total of Viktor’s marble collection, a project begun years earlier when one morning he found a blue-and-white swirled marble on the sidewalk in front of his old apartment and put it in his pocket, not thinking of it until that night, when, removing his trousers, he noticed it again and put it in his sock drawer. After that, the concept of having a collection of anything at all remained dormant in his brain for a long while. Then, one afternoon on his way to the hardware store to buy an extra deadbolt for his front door, he happened to look down to see another marble, this one a cat’s-eye, at his feet. So he picked it up and, upon returning home, decided it might be an interesting start to a collection. From that point on, all he had to do was to “fill the gap” between the two marbles he now owned. In this way, he thinks, it is possible for a person who has started from nothing to gain control over his universe, or at least a part of it.

You know that scene in cheap horror movies where the hero, the victim — whoever — starts to hear a sound, a siren, that grows louder and louder and louder and then he is covering his ears with both hands, pressing into them as hard as he can, and still he can’t make the sound go away, but it just keeps on getting louder?

It’s a scene that Raymond often thinks about.

He thinks about it most often when he lies in bed at night listening to the grinding sounds coming from somewhere outside the Burrow.

Should Jeffery get back with Madeline again? Should he go the extra mile to topple Viktor and push him aside? In some ways he thinks that Viktor would be less formidable an opponent than Raymond, and, besides, he likes Raymond. But honestly, he can’t decide. Sometimes Jeffery misses Madeline and sometimes he doesn’t all that much. Passing Madeline in the hall he sometimes wants to say, “Hey, babe, do you remember when you and I had a special thing going on?” Then Jeffery will look at her again and think, But did we? What if back then she was only on the rebound from Louis, something she denied, but how can he be sure? And suppose Madeline hadn’t been thinking that at all. He could ask her, certainly, but suppose Madeline started explaining all over again why she decided to leave him. Don’t go there, friend , he tells himself. Stay away from negativity. Think about solutions. Consider Heather.

Another time when Viktor and Madeline are together, Madeline suddenly wakes in the middle of the night and begins to speak in a voice Viktor has never heard before, deep and growly, almost scary. “Viktor,” she says, and it doesn’t sound as if Madeline is talking to him, but instead to some unknown third person, “to be a celebrity means to be celebrated, and so my interest in them is purely definitional. In other words, if myself and others didn’t care, then there wouldn’t be any celebrities at all. On the other hand, it is because we care that they exist, and in this respect celebrities are our creations. We are the creative ones, not them.”

Should he wake her, and if so, whom would he be waking, Madeline or the snarling and possibly dangerous person lying next to him? Let well enough alone , he thinks.

But wait, the voice has one more thing to add: “In other words, to be a celebrity, such as I soon plan to be, means that a person is not subject to the same laws as ordinary people. And you, Viktor, are as ordinary as, well. . mud.”

Is Madeline really asleep? She is asleep, although she may also be insane. To calm himself Viktor gets up and goes to the kitchen, where he drinks, straight from the carton, half of somebody’s quart of milk. Then he comes back to bed. Madeline is still sleeping, quiet. There are worse things in this world than mud , he thinks. A lot of them.

When Junior reflects upon his long-gone acting career, he decides that the only upside to the humiliation it brought him is — thank goodness for small favors — that no one has ever put that show he was in, Mellow Valley —which turned out to be the sum total of his show business experience — back on the air as reruns.

That would be much too much.

Jeffery imagines Louis trying on a hat, walking over to a mirror, shaking his head, tipping the brim down and squeezing the crown, then walking back to choose another one — maybe a porkpie or one with a wider brim. Did Louis even own a hat ? Jeffery wonders. It doesn’t matter; the man was made to wear them, and Jeffery can imagine a conversation they might have had, maybe in the kitchen, late at night, had Louis stayed.

“You were born to wear hats,” Jeffery would have said.

And Louis would have answered, “Is that so? Thank you, Jeffery. I genuinely appreciate your advice.”

As far as Madeline can tell from her research on the Internet and elsewhere, there has never been a celebrity who lived in the Burrow, even for a short period of time when they were younger, before they became a celebrity. And so, at her lowest moments, she wonders if the Burrow might be some sort of a jinx, some bad luck, such that even a short stay in the Burrow — sleeping on a couch overnight, for example — would have the power to mess a person up so badly that no matter what she does after she leaves, no matter how good she becomes at whatever it is she wants to do — even if she develops a cure for cancer — still no one will ever hear about it and she will never ever become a celebrity. And Madeline has spent far more time here than a single night on someone’s couch. When she thinks about it, she’s been in the Burrow longer than anyone except Raymond. Who, by the way, ought to be the subject of some story, or at least an article in the St. Nils Eagle Sunday Supplement, regarding his talent for making decoys. In it, he could credit his success to her.