Jim Krusoe - The Sleep Garden

All right. Say Ballerina Mouse never has an operation on her foot because she can’t afford it, and because nobody is willing to do something that takes so much skill gratis. Skill, after all, takes time and money to acquire. It can’t be given away for free, and even if Ballerina Mouse could find just one benevolent and kind old mouse doctor who would agree to help her out, such a complicated operation takes not just one generous individual, but a whole team of other mouse doctors, and nurses, and anesthesiologists, to say nothing of the costs involved in keeping a hospital operating room up, running, and free from harmful bacteria, not even counting the whole time spent afterward on the recovery ward, post-op, dressings to be changed, meals in bed, vital signs, and later, still further down the line, all the time that’s needed in the rehab facility. Don’t forget to add that.

But then, just as the other mice are laughing at her once again for her so-called hopeless dreams, and just as she’s about to call it quits, almost by accident she discovers tap dancing and it turns out she’s a natural.

Nope.

Twilight souls , who neither exist nor do not exist, the Captain thinks, but who reside in a moment that is inseparable from memory, who live in hope that is a kind of hopelessness, a dream identical to their lives, whose lives pass but never change, are neither spoken nor unspoken, are only here, are only gone, are only able to look back and say: There, that’s where I was , but never where I will be , never where I am . That is: caught in a place between a name and no name and without a future.

He can honestly say that he does not hate them, because he does not. But come on, when one of them — those others, as he likes to think of them — is gone, will it truly be missed? Can one ever be?

Madeline dreams she has her own cooking show, called Cooking with Madeline , and in her dream, she’s at the television studio where the show is filmed, on a set called “Madeline’s Kitchen,” the only set, in fact, for the entire show. It’s a place she loves because in Madeline’s Kitchen the plates are always clean, the utensils sparkle, the knives are always sharp. In fact, it is this same set in which all her dishes are prepared for the television audience — several dishes, actually, each one at a different point of completion, so as to create the illusion of progress without having to pay a full crew to stand around and wait.

And with her on the set today is her director, Herb, whose name she jokes about and with whom she’s slept a few times just in order to have something on him in case he gives her any trouble, because he’s married to someone named Loraine, or Lurine — something like that — and he wouldn’t want news of an affair to get out.

Her cameraman, Ned, is there, too. She’s still deciding whether or not to sleep with Ned, the negatives being his bald head and his being overweight, while the positives are that he calls her Honeybunch, something her dad used to call her back before the cancer brought him down — six terrible months, each one worse than the last.

Today, or maybe tonight (because she’s dreaming this), Madeline is wearing her no-nonsense full apron, the red one with pockets that people can order for themselves from cookingwithmadeline.com, and her hair is in a bun. Warm and classy is the vibe the show strives to project onto the viewing audience, and it succeeds.

“Ready?” Herb asks, but for some reason Madeline is nervous for the first time in years — surprising, actually, with her being a pro and all, knowing that through the magic of retakes it’s impossible for her to fuck up.

“Ready?” Ned asks.

So today’s show, of all things, is how to stuff a suckling pig, which they are filming ahead of time for the holidays, because the holidays are a time when things like killing babies, even baby cows, and pigs, and sheep, tend to seem okay as long as they are wrapped in the guise of tradition. “Hi, and welcome to Cooking with Madeline ,” says Madeline in that friendly tone that nonetheless suggests that people need to keep their distance, another trademark of her on-air persona. “Today’s show isn’t for the squeamish.” She hates this phrase, and didn’t want to use it at all until the network’s legal team promised if she didn’t she’d get her ass sued off. And then she walks over to the counter where the pig is waiting, but to her surprise: it’s alive. Madeline looks at Herb. Is this the way things are supposed to be? He nods, Yes it is. Go ahead.

Madeline looks around for a butcher knife. Okay, she thinks, if that’s what you want. But today, for the first time ever, there is no butcher’s knife, or chef’s knife, or even a paring or a fruit knife. There are no knives at all. There are vegetable peelers, a garlic press, a set of measuring spoons, metric and regular, a meat thermometer, a whisk, a stainless-steel shrimp deveiner, an apple corer, salt and pepper grinders, basting brushes, wooden spoons, spatulas, measuring cups, pasta scoops, fat skimmers, and an egg slicer, but no knives.

Again she looks at Herb, giving him a what-happened-to-the-knives? kind of look, but he just nods happily. Go ahead , he signals again. Madeline looks at Ned, but she can’t see anything behind the camera except for one beefy shoulder, so there’s no help from him at all. Forget sleeping with Ned, she thinks.

Too bad for him.

So then all the other mouse ballerinas laugh at Ballerina Mouse for even trying, because it’s apparent to everybody she isn’t making any progress at all, and that the ballet school, and especially the teacher, Mme. Suzette, is just taking her money. At last, even Mme. Suzette, who until then had been using Ballerina Mouse’s tuition to make the payments on her car, a Toyota Corolla, pays the loan off, and finds herself embarrassed pretending there is any chance at all, no matter how slim, for Ballerina Mouse. The upshot is that Mme. Suzette takes Ballerina Mouse into her office after class one warm afternoon and, after telling her to sit down for a minute — during which time Ballerina Mouse thinks her mom has died or something — Mme. Suzette tells her that while she truly admires the stupendous effort Ballerina Mouse has put into this whole enterprise, Ballerina Mouse, in Mme. Suzette’s opinion, would be pushing the borders of sanity if she continued trying to be a ballet star.

So the little mouse, her heart frankly broken, gives up and settles down to a sedentary life. She works in her garden from time to time, but mostly she watches television, and in the process gains a considerable amount of weight, making any reconsideration of her exit from the world of dance even more impossible, until one day, while watching a nature program about dolphins, there is a news flash in which the commentator announces that a terrible tragedy has taken place: the town’s only ballet theater has caught fire right in the middle of a performance, and every single ballerina, from the most inexperienced to the star, including the beloved teacher, Mme. Suzette, has burned to death.

No.

Then in her dream Madeline says: Okay. You want this; you’ll get it. After all, that’s how she became a star, a celebrity, as opposed to all those other people in the world who without a doubt are better cooks than she, either as hobbyists or actual professionals who work in restaurants, but none of them ever got their own network celebrity cooking show, let alone a whole line of celebrity-endorsed products. Okay, she thinks — no knives — this will be one for the books, or at least for the Internet, and, grabbing the meat thermometer, she tries to guess where the squirming baby pig’s heart must be. She knows that in humans it’s slightly to the left of center, but honestly, she can’t remember where it is in pigs, so she decides to aim for the middle and hopes that she’ll get lucky. She brings the thermometer down hard, but whether the heart is to the left or the right turns out to be entirely unimportant because at the last minute the pig turns, and all she gets is something that results in a spray of blood coming out of its mouth together with the most god-awful noise, and the sound of its tiny hooves scraping the counter as it tries to get away — who can blame it? — but luckily she catches its back foot just in time and holds it even though it’s nearly pulling her arm off, because don’t let anyone ever tell you that a pig isn’t strong even as a baby, and if this one were twenty pounds heavier there’d be no way at all that she could keep it on the countertop, but so far she’s got it — she’s got ahold of it even though it’s moving so much she flat gives up on any possibility of aiming at anything at all, so she just starts stabbing. Stab, stab, stab , blood everywhere as out of a corner of her eye she sees Ned smile and give her a thumbs-up while, next to him, Herb’s nodding like one of those goddamn wooden drinking birds her dad used to buy her at the State Fair when she was little, the kind you can hook to the side of a glass or a cup and watch bob back and forth, but it doesn’t seem like this baby pig is even tiring, and meanwhile, all the time she’s doing this, a part of her — out of self-protection, she guesses — is far away, the place she sometimes goes when she’s having sex with Viktor — trees, a quiet stream, blue skies, green grass — and certainly he (or is it a she-pig?) ought to be tiring by now, what with the loss of blood and fluids in general, these last mentioned spraying in every direction at once, so she’s glad that, on the one hand she chose to wear this particular apron, but on the other she also knows her dress is ruined on those parts the apron doesn’t cover, which are many, and her hair is coming loose from its bun as well. Meanwhile, if anything, the pig is getting stronger, more desperate, something that she, stab , finds she can relate to, stab , even as it occurs to her that her show, Cooking with Madeline , may well be canceled because, even if this particular episode is never aired, there’s no way somebody, probably that bastard Ned, is going to miss making a bundle on a pirate video, so she keeps on stabbing even though her arm is becoming tired, and thank God, she thinks, that she still works out at the gym three times a week, triceps and biceps, because otherwise that pig, stab , would be long gone, stab , probably racing around the floor of Madeline’s Kitchen, leaving a trail of blood, of course, and what kind of a career will she be able to have after this whole sorry episode is viewed a few million times online?