by Dean Koontz
Many learned analyses have followed the first. The scimitar, for example, might not be a scimitar at all; it might be a crescent moon. The dice-like forms might be sugar cubes. The blue sphere might not be our nurturing planet—merely a bowling ball. What the various forms symbolize can be interpreted in a virtually infinite number of ways, although it is impossible to conceive of the bronze casting as anything but dog poop.
Seen as a moon, sugar cubes, and a bowling ball, this masterwork may be warning that our highest aspirations (reaching for the moon) cannot be achieved if we punish our bodies and agitate our minds by eating too many sweets or if we sustain lower-back injury by trying too hard to torque the ball when we’re desperate to pick up a seven-ten split. The bronze dog poop, therefore, reveals to us the ultimate consequences of a bad diet combined with obsessive bowling: Life is shit.
Four benches are placed around the broad walkway that encircles the fountain in which the sculpture stands. We have viewed the piece from every perspective.
The park lamps are on a timer, and they are all extinguished at midnight to conserve city funds. The fountain stops bubbling as well. The gently splashing water is conducive to meditation, and we wish that it spritzed all night; although even if I were not an XPer, we would prefer no lamplight. Ambient light is not only sufficient but ideal for the study of this sculpture, and a good thick fog can add immeasurably to your appreciation of the artist’s vision.
Prior to the erection of this monument, a simple bronze statue of Junipero Serra stood on the plinth at the center of the fountain for over a hundred years. He was a Spanish missionary to the Indians of California, two and a half centuries ago: the man who established the network of missions that are now landmark buildings, public treasures, and magnets for history-minded tourists.
Bobby’s parents and a group of like-minded citizens had formed a committee to press for the banishment of the Junipero Serra statue on the grounds that a monument to a religious figure did not belong in a park created and maintained with public funds. Separation of Church and State. The United States Constitution, they said, was clear on this issue.
Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow—“Wissy” to her friends, “Mom” to me—in spite of being a scientist and rationalist, led the opposing committee that wished to preserve the statue of Serra. “When a society erases its past, for whatever reason,” she said, “it cannot have a future.”
Mom lost the debate. Bobby’s folks won.
The night the decision came down, Bobby and I met in the most solemn circumstances of our long friendship, to determine if family honor and the sacred obligations of bloodline required us to conduct a vicious, unrelenting feud—in the manner of the legendary Hatfields and McCoys—until even the most distant cousins had been sent to sleep with the worms and until one or both of us was dead. After consuming enough beer to clear our heads, we decided that it was impossible to conduct a proper feud and still find the time to ride every set of glassy, pumping monoliths that the good sea sent to shore. To say nothing of all the time spent on murder and mayhem that might have been spent ogling girls in bun-floss bikinis.
Now I entered Bobby’s number in the keypad on my phone and pressed send.
I turned the volume up a little so Orson might be able to hear both sides of the conversation. When I realized what I had done, I knew that unconsciously I had accepted the most fantastic possibility of the Wyvern project as proven fact—even though I was still pretending to have my doubts.
Bobby answered on the second ring: “Go away.”
“You asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sitting here in Life Is Shit Park.”
“Do I care?”
“Some really bad stuff has gone down since I saw you.”
“It’s the salsa on those chicken tacos,” he said.
“I can’t talk about it on the phone.”
“Good.”
“I’m worried about you,” I said.
“That’s sweet.”
“You’re in real danger, Bobby.”
“I swear I flossed, Mom.”
Orson chuffed with amusement. The hell he didn’t.
“Are you awake now?” I asked Bobby.
“No.”
“I don’t think you were asleep in the first place.”
He was silent. Then: “Well, there’s been a way spooky movie on all night since you left.”
“Planet of the Apes?” I guessed.
“On a three-hundred-sixty-degree, wraparound screen.”
“What’re they doing?”
“Oh, you know, the usual monkeyshines.”
“Nothing more threatening?”
“They think they’re cute. One of them’s at the window right now, mooning me.”
“Yeah, but did you start it?”
“I get the feeling they’re trying to irritate me until I come outside again.”
Alarmed, I said, “Don’t go.”
“I’m not a moron,” he said sourly.
“Sorry.”
“I’m an asshole.”
“That’s right.”
“There’s a critical difference between a moron and an asshole.”
“I’m clear on that.”
“I wonder.”
“Do you have the shotgun with you?”
“Jesus, Snow, didn’t I just say I’m not a moron?”
“If we can ride this barrel until dawn, then I think we’re safe until sundown tomorrow.”
“They’re on the roof now.”
“Doing what?”
“Don’t know.” He paused, listening. “At least two of them. Running back and forth. Maybe looking for a way in.”
Orson jumped off the bench and stood tensely, one ear pricked toward the phone, a worried air about him. He seemed to be willing to shed some doggy pretenses if that didn’t disturb me.
“Is there a way in from the roof?” I asked Bobby.
“The bathroom and kitchen vent ducts aren’t large enough for these bastards.”
Surprisingly, considering all its other amenities, the cottage had no fireplace. Corky Collins—formerly Toshiro Tagawa—had most likely decided against a fireplace because, unlike the warm waters of a spa, the stone hearth and hard bricks of a firebox didn’t provide an ideal spot to get it on with a couple of naked beach girls. Thanks to his single-minded lasciviousness, there was now no convenient chimney to admit the monkeys.
I said, “I’ve got some more Nancy work to squeeze in before dawn.”
“How’s that panning out?” Bobby asked.
“I’m awesomely good at it. Come morning, I’ll spend the day at Sasha’s, and we’ll both be at your place first thing tomorrow evening.”
“You mean I’ve got to make dinner again?”
“We’ll bring pizza. Listen, we’re gonna get slammed, I think. One of us, anyway. And the only way to prevent it is hang together. Better get what sleep you can during the day. Tomorrow night might be radically hairy out there on the point.”
“So you’ve got a handle on this?” Bobby said.
“There isn’t a handle on it.”
“You’re not as cheerful as Nancy Drew.”
I wasn’t going to lie to him, not to him any more than to Orson or Sasha. “There’s no solution. There’s no way to zip it shut or put a button on it. Whatever’s going down here—we’ll have to live with it the rest of our lives. But maybe we can find a way to ride the wave, even though it’s a huge spooky slab.”
After a silence, Bobby said, “What’s wrong, bro?”
“Didn’t I just say?”
“Not everything.”
“I told you, some of it’s not for the phone.”
“I’m not talking about details. I’m talking about you.”
Orson put his head in my lap, as if he thought I would take some consolation from petting him and scratching behind his ears. In fact, I did. It always works. A good dog is a medicine for melancholy and a better stress reliever than Valium
.
“You’re doing cool,” Bobby said, “but you’re not being cool.”
“Bob Freud, bastard grandson of Sigmund.”
“Lie down on my couch.”
Smoothing Orson’s coat in an attempt to smooth my nerves, I sighed and said, “Well, what it boils down to is, I think maybe my mom destroyed the world.”
“Solemn.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“This science thing of hers?”
“Genetics.”
“Remember how I warned you against trying to leave your mark.”
“I think it’s worse than that. I think maybe, at the start, she was trying to find a way to help me.”
“End of the world, huh?”
“End of the world as we know it,” I said, remembering Roosevelt Frost’s qualification.
“Beaver Cleaver’s mom never did much more than bake a cake.”
I laughed. “How would I make it without you, bro?”
“There’s only one important thing I ever did for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Taught you perspective.”
I nodded. “What’s important and what isn’t.”
“Most isn’t,” he reminded me.
“Even this?”
“Make love to Sasha. Get some solid sleep. We’ll have a bitchin’ dinner tomorrow night. We’ll kick some monkey ass. Ride some epic waves. A week from now, in your heart, your mom is just your mom again—if you want to let it be that way.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.
“Attitude, bro. It’s everything.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“One thing surprises me, though.”
“What?”
“Your mom must’ve been really pissed about losing the fight to keep that statue in the park.”
Bobby broke the connection. I switched off my phone.
Is this really a wise strategy for living? Insisting that most of life isn’t to be taken seriously. Relentlessly viewing it as a cosmic joke. Having only four guiding principles: one, do as little harm to others as possible; two, be there always for your friends; three, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; four, grab all the fun you can. Put no stock in the opinions of anyone but those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on the world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don’t dwell in the past. Don’t worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch, roll with it—but roll with laughter. Catch the wave, dude.
This is how Bobby lives, and he is the happiest and most well-balanced person I have ever known.
I try to live as Bobby Halloway does, but I’m not as successful at it as he is. Sometimes I thrash when I should float. I spend too much time anticipating and too little time letting life surprise me. Maybe I don’t try hard enough to live like Bobby. Or maybe I try too hard.
Orson went to the pool that surrounded the sculpture. He lapped noisily at the clear water, obviously savoring the taste and the coolness of it.
I remembered that July night in our backyard when he had stared at the stars and fallen into blackest despair. I had no accurate way to determine how much smarter Orson was than an ordinary dog. Because his intelligence had somehow been enhanced by the project at Wyvern, however, he understood vastly more than nature ever intended a dog to understand. That July night, recognizing his revolutionary potential yet—perhaps for the first time—grasping the terrible limitations placed on him by his physical nature, he’d sunk into a slough of despondency that almost claimed him permanently. To be intelligent but without the complex larynx and other physical equipment to make speech possible, to be intelligent but without the hands to write or make tools, to be intelligent but trapped in a physical package that will forever prevent the full expression of your intelligence: This would be akin to a person being born deaf, mute, and limbless.
I watched Orson now with astonishment, with a new appreciation for his courage, and with a tenderness I had never felt before for anyone on this earth.
He turned from the pool, licking at the water that dripped from his chops, grinning with pleasure. When he saw me looking at him, he wagged his tail, happy to have my attention or just happy to be with me on this strange night.
For all his limitations and in spite of all the good reasons why he should be perpetually anguished, my dog, for God’s sake, was better at being Bobby Halloway than I was.
Does Bobby have a wise strategy for living? Does Orson? I hope one day to have matured enough to live as well by their philosophy as they do.
Getting up from the bench, I pointed to the sculpture. “Not a scimitar. Not a moon. It’s the smile of the invisible Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.”
Orson turned to gaze up at the masterwork.
“Not dice. Not sugar cubes,” I continued. “A pair of either the grow-small or grow-big pills that Alice took in the story.”
Orson considered this with interest. On video, he had seen Disney’s animated version of this classic tale.
“Not a symbol of the earth. Not a blue bowling ball. A big blue eye. Put it all together and what does it mean?”
Orson looked at me for elucidation.
“The Cheshire smile is the artist laughing at the gullible people who paid him so handsomely. The pair of pills represent the drugs he was high on when he created this junk. The blue eye is his eye, and the reason you can’t see his other eye is because he’s winking it. The bronze pile at the bottom is, of course, dog poop, which is intended to be a pungent critical comment on the work—because, as everyone knows, dogs are the most perceptive of all critics.”
If the vigor with which Orson wagged his tail was a reliable indication, he enjoyed this interpretation enormously.
He trotted around the entire fountain pool, reviewing the sculpture from all sides.
Perhaps the purpose for which I was born is not to write about my life in search of some universal meaning that may help others to better understand their own lives—which, in my more egomaniacal moments, is a mission I have embraced. Instead of striving to make even the tiniest mark on the world, perhaps I should consider that, possibly, the sole purpose for which I was born is to amuse Orson, to be not his master but his loving brother, to make his strange and difficult life as easy, as full of delight, and as rewarding as it can be. This would constitute a purpose as meaningful as most and more noble than some.
Pleased by Orson’s wagging tail at least as much as he seemed to be pleased by my latest riff on the sculpture, I consulted my wristwatch. Less than two hours remained until dawn.
I had two places I wanted to go before the sun chased me into hiding. The first was Fort Wyvern.
From the park at Palm Street and Grace Drive in the southeast quadrant of Moonlight Bay, the trip to Fort Wyvern takes less than ten minutes by bicycle, even allowing for a pace that will not tire your canine brother. I know a shortcut through a storm culvert that runs under Highway 1. Beyond the culvert is an open, ten-foot-wide, concrete drainage channel that continues deep into the grounds of the military base after being bisected by the chain-link fence—crowned with razor wire—that defines the perimeter of the facility.
Everywhere along the fence—and throughout the grounds of Fort Wyvern—large signs in red and black warn that trespassers will be prosecuted under federal statutes and that the minimum sentence upon conviction involves a fine of no less than ten thousand dollars and a prison sentence of no less than one year. I have always ignored these threats, largely because I know that because of my condition, no judge will sentence me to prison for this minor offense. And I can afford the ten thousand bucks if it comes to that.
One night, eighteen months ago, shortly after Wyvern officially closed forever, I used a bolt cutter to breach the chain-link where it descended into the drainage channel. The opportunity to explore this vast new
realm was too enticing to resist.
If my excitement seems strange to you—considering that I was not an adventuresome boy at the time but a twenty-six-year-old man—then you are probably someone who can catch a plane to London if you wish, sail off to Puerto Vallarta on a whim, or take the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. You probably have a driver’s license and a car. You probably have not spent your entire life within the confines of a town of twelve thousand people, ceaselessly traveling it by night until you know its every byway as intimately as you know your own bedroom, and you are probably, therefore, not just a little crazy for new places, new experiences. So cut me some slack.
Fort Wyvern, named for General Harrison Blair Wyvern, a highly decorated hero of the First World War, was commissioned in 1939, as a training and support facility. It covers 134,456 acres, which makes it neither the largest nor by far not the smallest military base in the state of California.
During the Second World War, Fort Wyvern established a school for tank warfare, offering training in the operation and maintenance of every tread-driven vehicle in use in the battlefields of Europe and in the Asian theater. Other schools under the Wyvern umbrella provided first-rate education in demolitions and bomb disposal, sabotage, field artillery, field medical service, military policing, and cryptography, as well as basic training to tens of thousands of infantrymen. Within its boundaries were an artillery range, a huge network of bunkers serving as an ammunition dump, an airfield, and more buildings than exist within the city limits of Moonlight Bay.
At the height of the Cold War, active-duty personnel assigned to Fort Wyvern numbered—officially—36,400. There were also 12,904 dependents and over four thousand civilian personnel associated with the base. The military payroll was well over seven hundred million dollars annually, and the contract expenditures exceeded one hundred and fifty million per annum.
When Wyvern was shut down at the recommendation of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, the sound of money being sucked out of the county economy was so loud that local merchants were unable to sleep because of the noise and their babies cried in the night for fear of having no college tuition when eventually they would need it. KBAY, which lost nearly a third of its potential county-wide audience and fully half of its late-night listeners, was forced to trim staff, which was why Sasha found herself serving as both the post-midnight jock and the general manager and why Doogie Sassman worked eight hours of overtime per week for regular wage and never flexed his tattooed biceps in protest.
