Jim Krusoe - The Sleep Garden

“The bottom line for you television and movie buffs out there,” he said, “is that this has nothing to do with what is popularly known as a zombie. This is real.”

Tocar .

“Hello. Hello. Who’s there? Old Stag Killer — is that you?”

“. . ”

“Well, of course I’m startled. I never in a million years would have thought an inanimate object, let alone a crossbow such as yourself, would have the power of speech, but, hey, I’m open to ideas.”

“. . ”

“Okay, so what’s that you’re saying? That the taste for blood has somehow been awakened in you after all these years, and now that you are awake, that you crave more?”

“. . ”

“Kill? And if I get caught, then I’m supposed to say that my crossbow made me do it?”

“. . ”

“All right, so I don’t plan to be caught, but even if I entertained your crazy idea, who would you like me to take out?”

“. . ”

“Well, I have to admit, that does make a kind of sense.”

Dear Members of the Cast of Mellow Valley ,

You don’t know me. I realize that your excellent show has been over for many years now, but still I am writing in the hopes that someone at this studio or maybe the station or the person in the mailroom will know how to find you, and pass this letter on so you can accept my sincere thanks for everything you did in putting on your show, because watching your show changed my life.

Do you remember (of course you must) the episode where Sergeant Moody finds the duck egg that has been abandoned because the coyote ate its parents so he takes it inside and keeps it warm? And then, when the egg hatches, how it thinks that Sergeant Moody is its mother, and follows him around, including trailing him into town, where bad people try to harm the baby duck and how the Sergeant uses the skills he learned in the Special Forces to save it, putting twelve of the townspeople, including a boy who was the same age as I was when I first saw this episode, which was eight, into the hospital?

So one of the reasons I am writing is to let you know I would never have tried to hurt that baby duck, either then or now. But even more than that, it was the selfless courage of Sergeant Moody that inspired me to spend my life making statues of ducks so people can take their time to admire them by keeping them in their living rooms or dens in order to truly realize how beautiful they are. Therefore, as a token of my gratitude, if you will send me your address, or PO Box, I would like to send each of you one of my duck statues, or decoys as some prefer to call them, to keep in your own homes, or maybe your star trailers. My name is Raymond, and my business is called Raymond’s Decoys, so if you get this letter and would like to have such a statue, you can contact me c/o the Burrow in St. Nils.

Very truly yours, your friend,

Raymond

P.S. Every day I pray they bring your show back in reruns.

Somewhere in a city a man in a beret slowly shuffles forward. He wears a blue cardigan sweater and brown bedroom slippers, and his name, a thought that only occurs to him those times he least expects it — as when ascending a curb or catching his reflection in the window of a pet shop or a bakery — is Louis.

Louis is neither hungry nor not hungry. If he stares at the window of a bakery it is not so much with longing for the cakes and pies behind the glass, for the plates of cookies and trays of sweet rolls on display, as with the memory, long buried, of longing. If he pauses before the window of a pet shop to smile at the winsome kittens or to admire the determined hamsters on their wheels, it is not so much out of a longing for companionship as his half-remembering some distant time he cannot define precisely, when he must have been lonely, and back then — whenever it was — wouldn’t it have been a comfort to have a hamster or some other small rodent he could carry in his pocket as a friend? Yes.

And so he trudges on. At times his eyes fill with dust and particles of abrasive grit, and without thinking, he’ll reach up and rub them until they feel better. At other times almost miraculously he is able to see objects far in the distance, to describe them as if they were only an arm’s length away. Then that passes too before he has the chance to remember if this ever happened before, or if this is the first time and it only seems as if it happened earlier.

But the fact is, at this point he has no idea where he’s going, and he has no idea how he came to be here. When he is thirsty, he finds a public fountain and bends down to drink. When he is sleepy he finds a bench and lies on it, or spots a relatively flat area beneath a bush and stretches out to nap, and when he wakes again he is curiously unrefreshed, his thoughts as hazy as ever. When it is hot, he unbuttons his cardigan. When it is cold, he buttons it — that’s the nice thing about a cardigan, he thinks — but beyond that thought he does not care about the weather or the clothes he wears or anything that is not present at that moment. Whenever that moment actually is. Wherever.

Actually, Ballerina Mouse takes dance lessons only for a short time — maybe two, three lessons at most — then quits because she’s no dummy. It doesn’t take her long to figure out that a mouse with one foot turned practically in the opposite direction of the other is never going to be a prima anything. So, okay, she thinks. It’s not in the cards, no matter what my name is, just like the fact that every boy who happens to be named Roy or Rex isn’t going to grow up to be a king, either. As a result she spends the rest of her life pursuing something not very interesting, some sitting-down job, a clerk at a government office or reading to blind mice, and every year her foot twists a bit more, almost as if it has a life of its own, until by the time she’s fifty in mouse years, she needs one of those aluminum platforms on wheels to roll in front of her to keep her from toppling into a gutter. Anyway, things go on that way for a while, and then, because getting back and forth to work is just too tough, she takes early retirement. Ballerina Mouse — a name she has almost forgotten by now, it having been replaced by her original one, Wendy — doesn’t have family or any real friends, and the years — mouse years — pass: sixty, sixty-five, seventy.

Then one morning in her bed she doesn’t move at all, not her good foot, not her bad one, which by then is truly, horribly bad, and has turned completely in the other direction and is actually on its way to coming back around the other side if she could only live another seventy years, which she can’t because she’s dead. But in heaven, to her surprise — and she finds this out almost immediately — guess what! Her crippled foot is perfect, and she can dance and dance and dance straight through eternity, without ever missing a day, and so she does.

Oh, Ballerina Mouse, you were named correctly after all!

Yes.

Maybe.

Suppose, just suppose , the Captain thinks, one day there is a knock on the door of my luxurious home and when I get up to answer it, whom should I see there but my son — or at least one of them — who somehow managed to scrape up the money for an economy ticket, or maybe stowed away in the wheel well of a jetliner, or worked his way on a cattle boat, to track me down. And there he is, this young adult, wearing his cheap suit or inexpensive loincloth, and carrying a cardboard suitcase, or a backpack. What will I do? Will I invite him in and offer him a cup of coffee before I send him on his way again? Will he want to tell me the story of his life? Of course he will, and I’ll listen. But after it’s over, after he has finally finished, and he has picked up his suitcase or backpack to go back to wherever it was he came from in the first place, what exactly will his story have to do with me? How will his story be different than the story of any stranger, any random visitor to town who just happens to be passing through, or an actor, mindlessly reciting a part written for him by someone else? And, for that matter, come to think of it, what do the stories I tell have to do with all the reverential dolts who hear them and believe that, having made them a part of their memories, they will become better people for having heard them?