Jim Krusoe - The Sleep Garden

Who was it that said: “The entire course of human history can basically be reduced to the acts of one total psychopath after another”?

So picture a boy, an average-looking boy, who has the usual childhood diseases — croup, flu, strep — and takes them all in stride or even better because he’s a healthy kid, and what keeps his schoolmates in bed a week Junior will get over in a day. His mind, though, is another matter, because for one thing, he likes to cut up worms — lots of worms — in order to watch them writhe even though they lack faces to express their pain. He likes burning bugs, too, burning them with magnifying lenses so it takes awhile, and even though it’s true they do have faces, small ones, still they can’t change their expressions. Thank God for gasoline and rats. For the first time this boy can finally see what pain feels like outside of himself, which is the point, because this boy is not cruel; Junior is not a sadist, no. All Junior is looking for is someone — okay, something —he can share, compare notes with, to validate — though he would never use such a fancy word — his feelings. Anyway, there is a chance this boy, Junior, will grow out of this in time.

And it isn’t until a whole day passes, or maybe two days, that Jeffery realizes he hasn’t actually been outside at all since Raymond interrupted him with his stupid dream.

But then that’s not so unusual, because Jeffery is always meaning to do things he never gets around to actually doing. Taping those episodes of Mellow Valley , for one thing.

Figuring out a way to be successful, for another.

Back in the days when he was in command of the Valhalla Queen , on some afternoons the Captain would walk out on deck in between buffets, carrying his favorite pistol, the Walther that had been a present from his father, Klaus Senior. Once a crowd had gathered, he would take a little target practice at whatever happened to be bobbing near the ship that day: birds, kelp, fishing-net floats, baby seals — whatever. His ritual was this: six rounds, no more, no fewer, never missing once. When he finally lowered his pistol after his last bullet blew to pieces some hapless arctic tern or plain-old seagull, his first mate would shout, “Hooray for the Captain. Another perfect score.” And so the passengers would cheer as well, in the mistaken belief that there might somehow be a correlation between having a captain who was an excellent marksman and their own sense of personal safety.

Viktor’s room is just down the hall from Jeffery’s. Louis’s former room, now empty, is between them. Viktor had already been there for some time before Jeffery moved in — Jeffery doesn’t know for how long — but Jeffery remembers that his first day at the Burrow, Viktor just stood in the hallway and watched him carry his boxes of books, toiletries, clothes, and his computer through the front doorway and down the hall to his new room, without offering to help. The whole time, nearly an hour, Viktor’s huge hands rested at his sides. Jeffery later described them to Raymond as “two slumbering mastiffs.”

Still, whenever Jeffery meets Viktor these days in the communal kitchen as Jeffery is putting away groceries someone has left out on the counter — a more regular occurrence than you might guess — Viktor will sometimes pick up a box of cereal or a can of evaporated milk and put it where it’s supposed to be. When Viktor says anything at all, it’s about his work, some arcane sentence about the rise or fall of credit somewhere in the world. It’s a subject, Jeffery guesses, that has to do with Viktor’s scheme of buying and selling stock online. Viktor’s hair is the color of mud.

The two men take care never to mention Madeline.

Louis’s room still hasn’t been rented, and Jeffery is not sure why. It has to be despite the cost, which is extremely low; everybody agrees about that. Maybe, Jeffery thinks, Louis will be coming back one day, and it’s being saved for him.

The next door to Madeline’s room is Heather’s.

And Heather? Who is Heather, really?

Well, for one thing, Heather is young and thin with long, straight blond hair and sort of cute freckles on the bridge of her nose.

HERE IS A CHART TO MAKE THINGS MORE CLEAR:

Inside the Burrow

Outside the Burrow

Jeffery

The Captain

Raymond

Louis

Madeline

Junior

Viktor

Heather

Lives like sponges: half sponge, half filled with something else.

The Captain stands in the living room of his house and stares out the picture window that has been especially modified to remind him of the view from the bridge of the Valhalla Queen , minus the icebergs, of course, as he holds a grayish mug filled with hearty seaman’s coffee in one hand and a bear claw, just out of the toaster oven, in the other, and gazes out onto his broad front lawn. He does this nearly every morning, but this particular morning he gasps because what does he see but a large hole surrounded by a ring of fresh dirt, as if some enormous gopher arrived from God knows where only to settle in the neighborhood and, specifically, beneath his front lawn. And no sooner does he imagine a gopher of the size it would take to make this hole, than he tries to put it out of his mind. It is a foolish thought, he thinks. But if it isn’t a gopher, what could it be? Is he somehow still dreaming?

Still carrying the bear claw, the Captain leaves his coffee mug behind and walks out onto his lawn. (It is curious, he thinks, that after all those years at sea, his lawn has turned out to be what he’s most proud of). And then, it is no dream (!), because right in front of him is the hole, eighteen to twenty inches in diameter, which, despite the relatively small amount of dirt that surrounds the opening, appears quite deep. This must mean, he reasons, that it was tunneled from beneath, so that the greater part of the dirt fell downward, back into the hole, where something or someone at the other end must have taken it away.

His appetite gone, the Captain goes back inside. He tosses what’s left of the pastry in the trash. The ways of land are still strange to him, and in truth he is not sure how ordinary or how extraordinary it is, from a landsman’s perspective, for a person to wake one day and find a giant hole in his front lawn.

Yet, it’s not that simple, because this hole reminds him of something — something that has a name, or had a name once — but whether out of his own past or some old story, he can’t be sure. For a moment he stands motionless, one hand on his marble mantelpiece, the other placed across his forehead, a tableaux: An Old Sea Dog Trying to Remember, as meanwhile his memory breaks like low waves upon a distant shore in search of an answer. Break, break, break. . nothing. Clearly, the waves have insufficient power to erode the shore deeply enough to reveal the answer hidden behind its rocky outcropping. It must be low tide or something.