Bill was walking down the sidewalk. There was ivy everywhere – he was in Switzerland on a business visit. He had a cheese factory to film. He was in the village of Kerzers and there was just one cheese factory, which made sense because Kerzers was tiny, just a couple thousand people but you never could tell with the Swiss. Bill was tired, tired in that he was sleepy deprived and tired in his body, it hurt, airplane sore – Sherry – that was his wife – kept nagging him about these airplane muscle exercises, stretches – she modeled them every time they were about to get in the car to drive to the airport, every time and he was always felt irritated and said okay, okay, okay, impatient noises to get her to stop – but now he missed Sherry and he was sore. Bill stopped at a chain link fence – there was a little pond inside the chain link fence and a bunch of ducks inside, a little plank half-submerged, ducks sitting on it and a couple swimming – Bill put a hand on the fence and stretched his legs. He held his shoe to his back and leaned back – stretching his thigh. Watching the ducks.
He forgot about the stretch and forgot he was holding his foot – he watched the duck on the plank. It was walking, on the plank, toward the water – there were two ducks in its way and the walking duck and each of the sitting ducks snapped at each other; the walking duck bobbed back and forth, head shooting forward, beak open to snap – Bill watched the walking duck wade and then fling itself into the water – swimming, snapped. Bill watched the ripples, he couldn’t help it; it was second-nature now – physics demonstrations were everywhere. He wondered for a second if they should film the ducks. Stupid – just a tiny grimy duck pond in a Swiss village. Bill looked at the ducks again. The walking-now-swimming duck was quacking still and the two sitting ducks on the ramp twitched their wings, fluffling out little patches of feathers along their sides – Bill watched them through the chain link and wished for the thousandth time (not really the thousandth, Bill thought, and that thought frustrated him too) – he wished that he could look at something cool or pretty and not think about how to capture it on film. He wished he could just enjoy it. Bill always got this anxiety, thinking about how to film something – how to film a duck – which way was right? Which way? Was it worth it? Options! No!
Bill didn’t actually think those words but he felt an approximation of them, all at once, overwhelming, and then he breathed out and remembered he was stretching, he realized how tight his fingers held the chain link and relaxed them and it hurt, and then, awkwardly, because his balance was lost in his tense muscles, he released his leg – put his loafer on the sidewalk. Grabbed the fence again, loose fingers, getting his balance back.
Bill had a dinner appointment that night with a family in the village – an American aerospace engineer and his family, a wife, two small kids. Bill was tired, and thought about how difficult it would be to stay polite, to do the kind of conscious, normal conversation expected at dinner tables, that would be expected by the wife – but no, Bill thought: she was married to the engineer, she was probably used to it. Science talk. But then he remembered how eager the engineer had been, on the phone – he remembered the edge to his enthusiasm – ha, Bill thought, not really seeing the ducks this time, thinking of the word: desperation. Bill saw the ducks now, and then turned his head and looked around, the very narrow streets, the very old, very neat, immaculately kept white double-layer ivy-covered houses – he remembered the outdoor market he’d seen that morning, the image coming to him, the bucktoothed boy selling him bacon-covered flatbreads… He remembered how his loafer was still covered in horse droppings from the street. He remembered the carriage, two horses, carrying cases of bunny cages, little boxes with several bunnies in them each, ahead of them that morning as he and his producer and their Swiss contact walked away from the market – Where are they going, Bill had asked, and the Swiss contact had told him that the bunnies were going to be eaten. Meat. And Bill remembered that this family, the engineer and his wife and children, had been here in the village for two years.
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