Carmen Dog

by Carol Emshwiller

  * * * *

  Through all this confusion the three vice presidents are safely encased in their Early-Life pens and are being powdered, air-dried, rocked, and sung to. They have given up struggling with the machinery and now lie exhausted, letting themselves be tickled and petted. The explosions reach them only as dull thunks. They don't even wonder about them, having their own problems with this overzealous mothering.

  All three men are beginning to feel that mothering itself may be a more powerful weapon than they had thought. It seems to them now more violent than bombs. They are overwhelmed by it. Each one decides that, when they are let out, they will launch a great campaign to be sure to keep motherhood in the hands of men who can deal with it. (They are sorry now that they gave first prize in mothering to the man who invented this pen.) They have come to believe that motherhood should be dealt out, even to infants, in small, insignificant doses so that it can always be held within reasonable bounds. It's sexy, too. They see that now, and they do not want to sink into that kind of softness, either. They will steel themselves against it and help other men to do the same. The inclination to sink into loving arms must be carefully modulated so that it doesn't get out of hand. How can there be any peace with such a force as this in the world? But if men can stick together, they will prevail against the softness. Meanwhile the vice presidents have no choice but to sink into the great pink breasts and be done to as the machine-mother wishes. It is hoped they will be let out in time.

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  Chapter 21: Rescued

  The fourth [priest] carried the model of a left hand with the fingers stretched out, which is an emblem of justice because the left hand, with its natural slowness and lack of any craft or subtlety, seems more impartial than the right.

  —Robert Graves

  While the three vice presidents remain in their pens, the members of the Academy who had been restrained in harnesses, leashes, toddler straitjackets, or facsimiles have been freed by their comrades from across the street, with the help of the Rosemarys from the police department. Now they have made their way up the stairs so that at last all the creatures of every sort have made their way to the temporary safety of the roof. There is Pooch, the doctor, and Rosemary, Phillip, Cucumber, Valdoviccini, and even Isabel (who is growling and pacing and snapping out at mothers and Academy members alike—in her nervousness she seems to have reverted to her old “human” disposition). Fire engine sirens are heard in the distance, but they're not getting any closer. They are stuck somewhere out at the edge of the crowd. For the time being, however, all the creatures are safe.

  It is a political moment, for here are the Academy of Motherhood members facing the mothers-to-be and quite outnumbered by them and their friends. The Academy members are wondering, now, if they shouldn't have been a bit less brusque in their treatment of the mothers—if they shouldn't have, for instance, warmed the specula, patted hands or paws now and then, been reassuring. Suddenly they understand the importance of small gestures and that indulging in them would certainly not have wasted significant amounts of time.

  Beneath them, and above the street at the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-story levels, the acrobats wait, relaxed, sitting sideways on their swings. They are dressed alike in brilliant blue with sequins of silver. The females among them (dressed similarly but with silver tiaras) are all halfway between human and chimpanzee, or gibbon, or orangutan. (The orange fur of these last contrasts beautifully with the blue of their costumes.) But ape or not, they all have such nice smiles, one feels sure that one can put one's life in their hands. Of course these acrobats were set up for an entirely different purpose: a daring rescue, yes—just as this will be—only now they will be rescuing everyone, friend and foe alike.

  Up on the roof in the flesh—or rather in the fur—stands the leader of the opposition, the largest and most abominable of all females. This is motherhood gone wrong! Rosemary has shed her policeman suit and stands there in all her terrible splendor. This is motherhood just as they've always suspected it was. Great and Terrible World-Mother. Big Mama. Venus of Willendorf no longer fitting in the palm of one's hand, but as she probably really was, maybe seven feet tall, and in this case with little beady eyes peering out from beneath furry brows.

  Every time the wind changes, smoke is blown right onto the roof and some smoke is seeping up, here and there, through seams around the roof edges. So, amid coughing and wheezing, Rosemary asks both sides to make quick promises to love and honor, have and hold, in sickness and in health, till death do ... and so forth, but just at the last minute, when everyone is supposed to say “I do,” the Academy members say “I don't.” They have realized that things must be done in a hurry, but why in a hurry the female's way? They know there's no time to bicker. So everything is left unresolved as they go about the business of rescuing each other.

  The mounted heads, the bear and zebra rugs, and all the other disguises are piled up at the far edge of the roof to burn along with the building, a fitting funeral pyre for those poor, dear creatures whose skins and heads they are.

  Then a strange thing happens ... a kind of brilliance and a shaking, not just of the building because those on the ground feel it, too. Later the doctor will say that the explanation is quite simple, really, and has to do with star forces. It is merely a quake—a universe quake of some sort, a readjustment of galactic forces into a more stable equilibrium. And now, unless the earth should tip on its orbit or some such thing, all should be even better off than before.

  Everyone feels that lurch except the swinging acrobats. Everyone sees it as a streak across the sky. It is a moment in which everything might change back to the way it always has been. In Pooch there are a few seconds of utter dogness, frightening her so that she feels her heart somersault. No, no, no! Humanity! She wants to join the humans.

  She shuts her eyes, then opens them. All is as it just was. Only a few creatures out of place and those only by a yard or two. Perhaps one dwarf too many standing on the parapet. And there, the doctor is already kissing Phillip. Valdoviccini, holding hands with Chloe. One of the Academy members has his arms around Cucumber. A poem springs into Pooch's head.

  "Bert,” she says, for now she knows the pale young man's name is Bert. “Bert,” she says again, because it's already her favorite name, and she asks him to listen to the poem. It's her first attempt at a more contemporary form:

  —

  Let the sunflower cast its vote

  For rain. The cat for bird and tree.

  The spider vote by weaving webs.

  The bee by wax. Mouse by cheese.

  The fox by being foxy.

  Bats in clicks. The universe

  By all things universal.

  The moon by being in the sky.

  The sky by blue. And I look

  Into the eyes of someone I love,

  And vote by five fingers on each hand!

  Two legs! Ten toes!

  —

  "Well then, who will be the first to jump?"

  Has John been standing on the wall all this time ready to help anyone who's willing to jump down into the arms of the acrobats? But they are all hanging back. Even with the net and the acrobats, it's a long, dangerous drop.

  "Let's sing them down,” Pooch says. “Let's pick a courageous aria. All can join in and even those on the ground can sing and play along with us.” So they sing Ritorna Vincitor, and Gloria all’ Eggito, and even Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage Together? Then Bert does his Toreador song, still in his Papageno outfit. (Pooch falls in love with him all over again in that silly, romantic way she had promised herself never to do again. But why not, now that he seems to like her and to be so sweet? Besides it's too late. She is swept off her feet.)

  Chloe jumps first because, as she says, she knows how to land. She turns three somersaults on the way down, showing off. The acrobats catch her and flip her over and down from one to another until they drop her safely into the net ... on her feet, of course.


  Valdoviccini insists on being second, but just before he jumps he gets Pooch's signature that she will become a member of the opera company and be coached by the best coaches in the city. She signs, this time, simply Pooch. From now on she will be her simple self and forget about trying to be Pucci. Though she feels a pang, she knows it is only for the loss of illusions.

  Valdoviccini blinks at the name, then smiles and kisses her. She sees he understands. Then he jumps, a fat round ball, arms and legs out straight. Then comes Phillip. Again a graceful performance, utterly without fear. After her, the doctor. Just before he jumps he begins a quote from Marcus Aurelius, which, in order to save time, he finishes on the way down. It is rather muddled, but one can forgive him for not getting it quite right, considering the extenuating circumstances.

  "Even if what befalls is unpalatable, receive it gladly, for it makes for the health of the universe.... What happens concerns yourself as a string in the tapestry of primordial causation.... To break off a particle from the continuous concatenation, is to injure the whole...."

  It is here that he jumps. He falls stiffly, as though standing at attention, rotating end for end.

  "...specific occurrences are ordered in the interests of our destiny,” he says.

  The acrobats pass him down in the businesslike way that he clearly prefers.

  And now come down, in the arms of Cucumber, two of the newborn piglets, and after them, in the arms of an Academy member, the colt.

  Now comes the mother of the four, holding the remaining piglet. Though she is quite large and pinkish and with thinning hair, one can see how she was mistakenly thought to be still completely human.

  Then Mary Ann (one never did know whether tending toward duck or swan), squawking and flapping about so erratically it is clear that the acrobats will never be able to catch her. But then, just at the last moment, when a great “Ohhhhhh” of fear has already gone up from the crowd below, suddenly the flapping comes together in a graceful and powerful coordination. She can fly! Stretches out her long neck and beats her wings, and now there can be no doubt that she who stumbled over her own big feet, who tripped and staggered and waddled, is, after all, a swan, and air her element. She circles, honking her joy and her farewell, then heads north. She will not be seen again until next fall, and then only passing through.

  So one by one they jump until they are all down except Pooch, Bert, John, Rosemary, and Isabel, who adamantly refuses to be lured into jumping even by the invigorating sounds of the music. Finally Pooch coaxes her to the edge with a gentle song instead. Yes, as wolverine she is more sensitive than ever she was before. Pooch is singing Micaela's song, “Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante.” Perhaps Isabel remembers some high-school French from long ago, for she looks as if she understands every word.

  But now there are big billows of smoke, some even coming up from the roof itself, right here where they stand. Rosemary is suddenly impatient and pushes Isabel over the side. Down she goes, twisting angrily and snapping at the air. She manages to bite the hands of two of the acrobats, and then tears holes in the net with her teeth before she can be chased out of it.

  Bert has said that Pooch must go first, then he, then Rosemary, and then John. Pooch sees the logic in it. They kiss. Pooch's first real sexual, loving kiss. The baby, screaming with rage and trying to pull Bert away, grabs the Papageno topknot and bends it so that Bert looks a bit rakish. But below the tilted, drooping crest, Bert's tan eyes look out, concerned and kind as always. He turns to kiss the baby, but of course it pushes him away.

  So Pooch stands upon the parapet, and, with refinement and grace, strikes a classical pose rather like an arabesque. She smiles, looking at Bert, and lets herself fall, the baby on her back crowing with delight.

  The acrobats, though tired by now and some in pain from the bites on their arms, cannot resist whirling Pooch up again and again, and each time she takes an even more graceful pose than the time before.

  But now more smoke than ever. Pooch can't even see the top of the building. Down comes another figure, a dim blob in the smoke. It's not a papageno but the clown, John. Where is Bert? As John drops into the net it tears in several places where Isabel had chewed it. This had not happened when Pooch fell into it because she, even with the baby, is so light. Pooch scrambles back up into the net with the idea of holding it together as well as she can or of breaking Bert's or even Rosemary's fall with her own body. But the circus clowns pull her away. “The baby!” they yell.

  "Don't forget the baby!” They know that will stop her, and of course it does.

  Can it be, she wonders, that just when life is looking so happy she will lose the best thing about it?

  But here he comes now. The acrobats are twirling him around, up and back. How can they do that at a serious moment like this, unless it is to keep him from death for another few seconds? Then one of them swings over to the little platform at the side and a moment later there is Bert, standing beside him, a bit off balance but safe, held tightly in the long arms of one of those gorgeous creatures, orange fur against the bright blue costume.

  (Pooch feels a little twinge of jealousy.) The orangutan woman helps Bert to the rope and he slides down it, landing safely, only the worse for a couple of rope burns.

  Of course Rosemary, up there with all this smoke, cannot see what has been happening below. Perhaps if she had waited, for the fire engines sound as though they're getting through at last.... But here she comes. She weighs far and away the most of any creature the acrobats have yet had to catch. Even the strongest of them cannot hold her. Down she goes, straight into the torn net and onto the street below almost as if there were nothing there at all to break her fall.

  A great Ohhhhhh goes up from the crowd and then silence. Rosemary lies, a glistening, broken lump, but not dead. Dying, but not dead. She is trying to say something. Pooch leans near to her. There's blood on her white fur, especially around her face. Just as she begins to get a word or two out, the fire engines do get through. Their racket is tremendous and there's utter chaos as they push away all the creatures and the clowns and insist on taking over in their own way. Rosemary goes on speaking. Even though Pooch has extraordinarily good hearing still, she can make out very little. Yet they are words she will always remember: “Wisdom of the wild things,” and, “You. You, yourself and especially"—Rosemary says it, “Especially not win, or lose all.” Pooch knows what Rosemary stands for, so it hardly matters that she can hear very little. “I will go on fighting,” she tells Rosemary. She is thinking that, besides this good fight for the sake of all creatures, she will write poems about these things, and maybe even an opera. Yes, with Rosemary as the heroine, ending with a dance of fire as this fire right now, though it will have a better ending than all this confusion, firemen pushing everyone away and shouting at them and the sirens hurting her ears. She leans close to tell Rosemary about the opera, but Rosemary's eyes are blank. It's too late.

  * * * *

  Now that the firemen are there, the fire is soon put out and the three vice presidents rise up from their pens like three phoenixes. But rescue has come, in a way, too late for them as well. One can see it in their eyes and the way they move. They are still hopelessly enmeshed in motherhood, as before, but now from the opposite point of view. If they continue as vice presidents, their influence on the Academy will be in an entirely different direction. However; Pooch feels that they will not be any less happy than they were before and maybe, with their newfound motherliness and sexuality, they will be even more so.

  Pooch is hoping that (if the building survives) the Academy might become a haven for unwed creatures regardless of their backgrounds. Perhaps the members’ room might be a room for both male and female regardless of funny noises or odd ways of lounging around. Pooch plans to have a memorial service for the mounted heads and the bear and zebra rugs with their friends and relatives attending, if such can be found. She herself will come to the ceremony to say good-bye even though she had not kn
own any of the creatures personally.

  But listen, now, to what those three vice presidents are announcing. They are saying that they will work hard on behalf of all females, and begin by bringing the measuring of time back to what it used to be—to a year of thirteen months and one day. They know that it was changed on purpose against women and adopted even though it is neither reasonable nor scientific. (They are ashamed that men instigated it.)

  Also they want that one extra day of the year to be known as All Creatures Day and to be celebrated with music, balloons, kites, ice cream, firecrackers, popcorn, circuses, poems, free rides, art works, dancing, jokes, and all the other wonderful things. Hearing this, Pooch is thinking that, if everyone works hard to achieve it, every day of the year can be made more like this one great day will surely be.

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  Epilogue

  El maintenant, parlez, mes belles, de l'avenir, donnez-nous des nouvelles ... dites-nous qui nous aimera!

  —Carmen

  Of course pooch and Bert marry and adopt the baby which, since its mother is in the aquarium and its father clearly unsuitable, is not hard to do. And of course they love it as though it were their own. Later they will have a litter of three: setters and all males, so there will be no hope that they might ever become human and artists in their own right, but Pooch will love them as much as anyone could love another creature, and she will give them every advantage to develop as fully as they possibly can. They will all three have wonderful, strong, vibrant voices, which she will delight in almost as much as she delights in her own. The baby will find them true brothers, and will never be jealous of them, but will delight in running with them in the woods and fields, baying now and then at the moon, and howling when Pooch vocalizes. Though the baby will never learn to sing, it will have a deep, abiding appreciation of music as well as of all arts, influenced by Pooch's example and teachings. It will grow up to write poems as good as or even better than Pooch's. Certainly more modern, strongly influenced by Kenneth Koch as well as Henri Michaux. (Of course it will grow out of biting other creatures except when absolutely warranted.)