by Curtis White
Percy got a sudden look of enlightenment on his face and said, “You’re right. Those are my thoughts, though I never thought them. Thank you.”
So saying, he raised to his face again his black Zorro mask. Then, from behind the mask, emerging as if from the prophetic catacombs of Thebes, came his voice, transformed, saying, “But what you do not understand, dear Queen Mother, is that I am no longer your shiny creature to make or unmake. I have stepped into the path of fate, and I am the overseer of the inner life of the little people of N—. They come to me and I lead them either to self-understanding or to the eccentric sphere of the dead. In either case, it is a good thing that I provide, because at least now there is no uncertainty regarding their destinies.
“Still, just like you, I have wondered about whether what I do is good. Whether I am good. So I asked God.”
The Queen raised her arm as if it were God’s true instrument, his thunderbolt. “Blasphemy!”
“Don’t get all upset! I described for Him what I did, in simple terms, omitting nothing, and all He did was laugh. Do you know why He laughed? He laughed because God enjoys a good joke. Because in the end if God can’t laugh, who can laugh? So, laugh, Mother!”
* * *
—
Apparently the Queen Mother wasn’t in the mood for laughter because that is the end of the discarded scene. Personally, I’d like to think that she did laugh. Talking to God! Come on!
In any case, it’s interesting to see that even puppets can have their little anagnorises. And, in the end, admit it, who isn’t a puppet? Who isn’t in a play? It’s enough to give one hope.
I can, however, tell you this, for what it’s worth: I suspect that while Felicité and her Thing were talking, directly below their feet, sedimentary rock was compressed from the side through a shrinking of the crust of the Earth. The effect of this compression was that layers of rock were thrown suddenly into folds, sending waves of energy through the rock. This explains the “shaking” they reported.
Now, this was all Nature’s doing and none of my own. The problem is that by intruding in this way Nature threatened the scene with a rigid and lifeless academicism. Nature puts the inner vitality of the scene in jeopardy with a fusty old theatrical device: an earthquake. Another fucking deus ex machina. What next? Flashing lights and the shaking of foil in the wings? No wonder this scene found its way to the cutting room floor.
I would not bring this up if it were just this one instance. Unhappily, as the history of art has shown time and again, Nature makes a habit of ruining the artist’s best effort in just this way. Which leads me to wonder, is it your impression that Nature itself is merely an example of the imitative fallacy?*
* There is one other possibility. After I left the room to allow the reader to experience the scene’s full silliness, I passed the time hitting tennis balls against the wall in the next room. Perhaps that was it, and not an earthquake. If so, my apologies.
26.
“With us, the tender, imaginative power of mothers appears to express itself only in monsters.”
—LESSING
There have been some changes. As you will recall, Percy left the room to take a phone call from Mrs. Yeasty and didn’t return. In dog vernacular, he ran away. Well, he was soon enough dragged back to Fanni’s by the Queen of Spells. She knew that he wasn’t intending to come back on his own. She suspected that he would try to hide down the street at Gerald’s, and that’s where he was, in the backyard, curled up in a large concrete culvert for storm water. Gerald offered no physical objections to the Queen because he understood the need for discipline, especially a mother’s. In fact, he claimed that he himself had been naughty recently and wondered if she had the time to discipline him or at least tell him how she might discipline him if she had the time. She rewarded him with a look. You can imagine this murderous look, which is a good thing because I can’t do it justice.
As for Gerald, speaking of this “look,” he said, “Oooooh, that’s right, isn’t it? Pretty, very pretty.”
Unfortunately, once found, Percy thrashed around some, a little fish on a big hook, did some very special pleading and so forth, and Felicité was forced to take frankly damaging countermeasures.
At any rate, there he sat again, across from her, back at Fanni’s. His left arm dangled lifelessly at his side (but you knew about that), his right eye was swollen shut. Most alarmingly, his jaw was unhinged. To tell you the truth, he looked a little like one of those Middle Eastern tyrants after they’ve been caught and treated to some rough justice by the peasantry. Stranger still, behind him was good Fanni, hanging in the air in mid-leap, like that Air Jordan silhouette, only she’s got a baseball bat, not a basketball. The Queen of Spells was apparently forced to put the air-fix on her, so there she hung, witless and butterflied.
The Queen had made herself some herbal tea, and she sat quietly while Percy considered the wreckage.
At last, she said, “Now, Percy, what was all that about?”
“I’m shorry. I panked.” He didn’t speak well, what with the flapping jaw.
“And you were so convincingly stoic just minutes before. Even though I didn’t like what you were saying, I was impressed.”
“I tink da shayink is: I losht my nooiv.”
“You sound like the mayor of Chicago!” She looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled. “And you know, with a few more pranks like that you might just become a real boy yet.”
“…”
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“No, of coursh nop. I’m nop weal.”
She mocked him. “Oh, would you like to feel the pain, too?”
“Don’p tumble youshelf.”
“So, are we done, then?”
He looked up at her imploringly. “I gnow I don’p desherve it, but do you fink I coo finish my shtory?”
Another indulgent smile. The Queen knew how all of this had to end, but what difference would another few minutes make?
“Sure, Percy. Proceed. But first let me fix your jaw. It’s all smashed over by your ear and you’re not speaking very clearly. I probably didn’t need to thrash you quite that hard, but I was trying to make a point. There.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Seeing him whole again, she recalled just how fond she had once been of her Thing.
“Well, where was I? I was on a country road looking nearly as bloody and abused as I do now.”
A queenly scowl.
“I met a man who thinks he should help, but he also has reservations. He has just said something about waiting till his lunch break, to which I replied, ‘No, that won’t help. I won’t have a drop of ichor in my body by then.’
“The man looked puzzled when I said that. ‘Ichor?’ he asked.
“‘Mmmm, hydraulic fluid?’
“‘You have hydraulic fluid?’
“‘It doesn’t make much difference, so let’s call it blood. It is reddish. Or would you say magenta?’
“‘Look, I don’t care. The only thing I have to say is that I can see my way clear to helping you here if you can compensate me for my time. After all, I may miss an opportunity for profit if I’m late for my meeting.’
“‘You mean money, don’t you?’
“‘Are you from another planet? Of course I mean money.’
“‘It so happens that I don’t have any. That’s part of my problem. If I had money I wouldn’t be out here bleeding to death on this country road.’
“‘Nothing? No checking, savings, bonds, or credit? No family or friends to hit up?’
“‘Nothing.’
“‘Have you tried knocking off a convenience store?’
“I sighed. ‘I’ve tried that, but I’m not good at it.’
“‘Well, hell, no one’s good at it the first time.’
“He sat down and studied me.
“At last he said, ‘Look, I gotta go. But I wanna wish you the very best.’”
Percy stopped. Suddenly, he looked
old, tired, and discouraged.
“Is that it?” asked the Queen. “Did he really leave you bleeding on the road? And by the way, I don’t know where you dreamed up this ichor/hydraulic fluid thing. That is honest-to-God real blood I gave you. It is red and it carries oxygen. There’s some of it drying on your chin if you want proof.”
Percy smiled a forlorn smile. “I’m nearly done. So, just as the man was about to walk away, he gave me a kick that sent me down an embankment. He came over, looked down at me, and said, ‘In case you don’t die down there, remember, this conversation never happened. Anyway, I am what we call “leaving you for dead.” That’s not something I ever thought I’d actually do, but for some reason it doesn’t feel all that unfamiliar. It feels like something I’ve intended a million times before. It’s always been there, hasn’t it? In me. Waiting for its chance. Huh! What do you know! This little encounter has been very enlightening. Thanks for that!’”
Percy looked up at the Queen, a sad puppy. He looked as if he really had been kicked down into some ditch to die.
“Well, go on.”
“I’m done.”
“That’s your story?”
“I know it’s anticlimactic, but I give up.”
“So, is there a moral to your story?”
“Are you kidding? What do I know about morals? I can only tell this story at all because Benji, Alpha storyteller as well as Alpha, liked to tell it while sitting around a fire at night. His ending was always, ‘And then wild dogs came and ate him!’ No preparation, no plausibility, no effort to explain. It was just how they wanted the story to end, so it did. Dogs come and eat everybody.
“And, oh, how they howled! That was the whole point of the story, not some moral. They got to imagine being wild beasts and eating humans. That really rocked their little world. It was like dog porn. Some of the Enforcers would always get carried away and start banging at the bitches, making Benji smile in amusement. Me? I’d sneak away from the fire before they got to that part, because it was scary.”
“So none of that happened to you?”
“Of course not. I was just trying to make you feel sorry for me. I was buying time, and it’s the only story I know.”
“Percy, I know you’re upset. I know you may even feel a little desperate just now. But did you really live with dogs?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And they talked to you and told stories?”
“Sure they did.”
“Percy…”
“What?”
Felicité was more convinced than ever that there was something defective in her Thing.
“All I was hoping was that I could tell a story that would persuade you not to do what you’re going to do. That’s really all I was thinking, but I give up. Whether I tell a good story or a bad, it doesn’t matter. I will never prove to you that I am not what I think you think I am.”
The Queen of Spells looked long at her creature. Her eyes began to tear up. “Oh, Percy! That’s very sad and sweet! In spite of it all, I am fond of you!”
She stood to her full majestic height, like Athena towering over the fields of Troy. She reached both hands toward him, and…gently rolled him up inside a glass ball.
As she walked out of the room, smiling and peering into the ball as if it were a Christmas snow globe, with her trailing hand she released Fanni from her spell with a graceful flip of her wrist, and the poor woman fell to the floor, banging her chin and knees with an audible “Oof!” and “Ouch!”
Outside, the day was clear and the afternoon light was splendid. It illuminated Percy prettily. Any child would have been delighted to put him high up in a Christmas tree. You may think I’m making this up, but as Felicité walked away, Percy dangling in cheerful sparkles from her hand, I saw his eye, round like the globe he was sunk in, brightly wink.
27.
“When a man is told ‘You are this kind of person because your skull-bone is constituted in such and such a way,’ this means nothing else than, ‘I regard a bone as your reality.’”
—HEGEL
Among the outtakes I earlier provided for you, there is one very, very different (if not contradictory) version of the story of Percy’s suffering on the road after having been mauled by the family dogs. Actually, it’s not entirely clear that it is Percy’s story. There are now many who believe that it is actually another of the dog stories. In short, Percy may have been telling the Queen the truth about dog narratives—like us, dogs enjoy a good yarn. And, hold on to your hat, the possibility that this version was told first by a dog or dogs has the ethnographic anthropology community buzzing about an imminent paradigm shift in their field.
It is not the crude sensationalism of talking dogs that excites scholars, nor is it the celebrity that captured a few of them after the glamorous articles in the Style section of The New York Times. Rather, they claim, it is the moral complexity and spiritual insight of the story itself that excites them, especially in the way that the moral complexity is colored by the idea that it is a dog that is telling the story.
One of these scholars, in private conversation with me, called this story a “game changer in our understanding of dog narratives.” While he spoke to me off the record and I will respect that commitment, I can fairly observe that he had a dubious backstory of his own. While doing research (“thick description”) in the open woodlands of southern Africa with a pack of lycaon pictus, the distinguished professor’s descriptions got a little too thick and he went native. This is not unusual among ethnographic anthropologists, but the present case went some way beyond what is common. Upon his return to the United States, the scholar in question greeted his student interns—both male and female—by sniffing their genitals. For those of his colleagues who came of age in the campus atmosphere of the ’60s and ’70s, this behavior was not unfamiliar, but for his PC colleagues of the present it was crucifixion time. In any event, I think you can see why this case, as told by Percy’s dog companions, was so important to him: he hoped to rehabilitate his reputation in this very small community of scholars.
For the moment, I think it’s best for me simply to pass this whatever-it-is, game changing evidence or insanity, along without further comment. (I have deleted the vague growling sounds and the occasional barking uttered by the canine “native informant” from the text as it appeared originally in Chats Partout: an Ethnographic Journal of Animal Cultures. I have never claimed to be a scholar, and so I do not feel bound by their rigorous professional ethics. For me, it was best to leave the translation of barking to the pros.) For what it’s worth, here it is.
* * *
—
After the business executive had kicked Percy into the culvert and gone off to make his 10 o’clock appointment, Percy dragged himself back up to the road. Sitting there, he came to Sudden Enlightenment; that is, he found himself unexpectedly Awake. In a moment, he had come to understand that all this business about being a real person was an illusion. So he resolved to give himself away.
Late in the morning, traffic picked up on the road. Residents came and went, among them farmers, merchants, and many ordinary people, colorfully clad, on bicycles and in cars. As they passed, Percy’s mind was electric with his happiness. So he shouted out, “Who wants a man? Free man here! First come, first served!”
Most of the passersby didn’t even notice him. The cyclists yelled, “On your left!” and moved on, attention fixed on their power meters. Others whizzed by in their cars because they had their own profitable appointments to keep. A few who did notice his condition merely scowled and threw pocket change in his direction. After many hours of persistently shouting out his strange offer, a man stopped. He looked into Percy’s face and asked, “Are you serious?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re not just a day laborer, are you? You don’t just want to cut my lawn?”
“No, no. I’m giving myself away, for what that’s worth. I’m not real, you know. I’m just a soap bubble on the fac
e of time. I’m the dream in a dreamer’s dream.”
He looked at Percy, all beaten and torn, yet still coming on with this mixed metaphor and teenage existentialism, and smirked.
“You know, actually, I could use a man. I make homeopathic medicines and I’ve been wanting to make this salve, but it requires human bone marrow. I’ve offered to buy some from people who have just lost family members, but they’ve all been scandalized by the suggestion. It’s frustrating. I have a great concept and a great website but no product. I’m a startup, but I have no capital. And until I have a product that I can put in a bottle, and until I have somebody else’s money for production, how am I supposed to have an IPO? And without an IPO, how am I supposed to sell the company and retire as a young billionaire?”
Percy bounced up and down with happiness. “If you want me, I am yours to do with as you like!”
“For free?”
“Absolutely free.”
“Well, there is the little problem that you’re not dead; you’re alive, and therefore your marrow is being used at the moment.”
“Oh, I’m dead all right.”
“You are fucking with me, aren’t you? I don’t usually allow people to fuck with me. I should kill you for that alone, then take your marrow.”
“That works for me. But if it helps I’ll say that I never existed at all.”
