Jim Krusoe - The Sleep Garden

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.

And it does come back, doesn’t it?

That is: Not the thing, but the representation of the thing. Not the passion, but passion’s show; not emotion, but the memory of once having experienced the emotion; not life, but a half-life, a representation of a life, one set out by someone or something, possibly higher, probably not, but certainly other , though for what purpose it’s not possible to name, not possible to summarize — only that intention does not count, or desire, or tragedy, or comedy, but instead some unnameable other, some word still unspoken, unthought of by anyone since the very beginning of words, the most important word of all, which is, at the same time, perfectly and totally irrelevant to anything that ever was thought, or could be thought, no matter when.

And why, if the dead only dream that they are living, should they want to wake? Why should they want to come back, to spread out once again, like a stain?

To rerun .

Which is not the correct word at all, by the way.

To touch.

To participate.

But in what?

Not that it matters.

Thanks to the early readers of this book: Lee Montgomery, Janice Shapiro, Dylan Landis, Monona Wali, and also to my wife, Jenny, and our son, Henry, all of whose responses were invaluable. I am amazingly fortunate to have Meg Storey as my editor; her care and thoughtful annotations to each draft are reflected on every page. Special gratitude to Julie Starrett for her permission to use Michael Woodcock’s painting St. Joseph’s Day for this book’s cover.

“ The Sleep Garden is Jim Krusoe’s looniest and most satisfying book. Inane and trivial questions are given close consideration, while questions of life and death (and the differences between life and death) are intimated and then suspended.

Only a special kind of genius (or an idiot savant, as the book suggests) could dream this stuff up. I have no idea how he does it, but do it he does, and no one else can blur stupidity and significance with such sublime, funny, and human results.”

— MICHAEL SILVERBLATT, Bookworm KCRW

PRAISE FOR JIM KRUSOE

“Krusoe’s sure and subtle imaginings of such characters — yearning, isolated and finally enigmatic — place him among the foremost creators of surreal Americana.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“Krusoe’s latest is a self-reflective coming-of-age story wrapped in a fable and sprinkled with wry observations. . Parsifal becomes a piquant commentary on tensions between nostalgia and reality, the past and the present, and humanity’s need for myths.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Jim Krusoe is the mad scientist, the man behind the curtain. . Krusoe does something magical with regular words and regular life. His adjectives glow with possibility. . like an alien presence with a new language that sounds enough like our own to make us strain to uncover its meaning.”

— Los Angeles Times

“Jim Krusoe’s work is full of the most curious urgency: I love to keep reading, and I don’t know what I’m waiting for, exactly, but I know whatever I find will hover in my peripheral vision for a while after I’m done.”

— AIMEE BENDER, author of The Color Master

JIM KRUSOE is the author of the novels Parsifal, Toward You, Erased, Girl Factory , and Iceland ; two collections of stories; and five books of poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. He teaches at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles.