by Lydia Millet
The violinist, of course, could not be blamed in the least. He had insisted on walking Blackie himself when he was submitting to a barrage of chemotherapy that would have felled lesser men. The dogwalker respected the violinist, though it was unpleasant to see him in his wretchedness. A dog in his state would have been euthanized long ago.
In fact that was how he had met the violinist; the violinist had not gone through the usual channels. The dogwalker had come upon him struggling to keep up with Blackie on a path near Turtle Pond. Two kids on skateboards had almost run them over, and the old man had begun to tremble violently. His bones were like porcelain. Worse, one of the kids had called Blackie a “faggot dog” as he swooped away on his board. (At that time the poodle had sported an unfortunate Continental Clip with Hip Rosettes. Later, the dogwalker had persuaded the violinist to switch to a basic Lamb.)
But the skateboarder had infuriated him. Not the words, but what was behind them—malice directed at the dog. A senseless meanness of spirit. The poodle had never done anything to hurt the kid.
He had guided the frail old man to a ledge where he could sit, and from then on the poodle had been one of his charges.
He imagined telling the violinist he could not take Blackie. In his mind he went over the conversation as he stood with the dogs. They were waiting for a walk signal.
“I am sorry,” he would say. “But if I took in all the dogs, even all the dogs I like best, I would be a pet shelter, not a dogwalker.”
The violinist would gaze at him sadly with his watery blue eyes. In his youth, the attendant had said once, the violinist had been quite handsome, and she’d shown him a black-and-white photograph. The violinist had survived a death camp, Stalin. Now his skin was like paper, his teeth yellow.
“Can’t you make an exception?” the violinist might ask.
“I would like nothing more than to take Blackie in,” he could say. “But all I can do is help find a new family for him. Allow me to do that, at least.”
What bothered him was that the violinist had been so good to his dog. Such goodness should be rewarded.
If he did not take the poodle, chances were he would never see him again, once the violinist was out of the picture. The poodle would live out the rest of his days with someone who did not care for him as the violinist had. Blackie would be brokenhearted and Sir Henry would be bereft.
Of course even he, the dogwalker, could not promise to bestow upon the poodle the violinist’s brand of solitary, desperate cherishing. But with him at least the poodle would be assured of a dignified life, a steady stream of affection.
At his feet the poodle looked up at him.
“I should be talking to you about this,” said the dogwalker. “It’s not right, is it? You don’t have a say in the matter at all.”
No, he did not. Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.
The light turned and the three of them stepped into the crosswalk. Forward. The brightness of the day was upon them … he was lucky, he thought, with a sudden soar of hope. Here he was with his two favorite dogs, walking them at a perfect pace for all three. Neatly they jumped up onto the curb. They did not pull him and he did not pull them. Could you go forward forever, with your dogs at your side? What if he just kept going? Across the city, over the bridge, walking perfectly until darkness fell over the country. Sometimes he wished he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them.
When a dog was put to sleep its chin simply dropped softly onto its paws. It looked up at you with the same trusting eyes it had fixed on you since it was very young.
At the violinist’s building he nodded at the door-man. There was a noisy crowd in the elevator, a birthday party of children with conical hats and clownish face paint. He let them cluster and hug the dogs; the dogs licked them.
The attendant opened the penthouse door for him.
“You beat me here,” he told her. Usually he did not attempt these minor exchanges, but he was nervous and needed to fill the space.
“Poor Blackie,” she said, as he unclipped the leash and hung it. She knelt down and leaned her face against the dog’s curly flank. “My husband’s allergic to dogs. It’s really bad—I mean, he breaks out in rashes, he gets asthma attacks, nothing helps. Otherwise … I feel so bad I can’t keep Blackie in the family.”
The dogwalker stared at her, a realization dawning. It was almost two years now that he had worked for them, and it had never occurred to him that she was the violinist’s daughter.
He had assumed she was paid for her services.
“What’s wrong?” asked the daughter. “Is something the matter?”
“Oh no,” he said, and shook his head. “Nothing. I am going to sleep on it.”
This time the elevator was empty. It had mirrors on every wall and he watched the long line of reflections as they descended, he and Sir Henry. In the mirror he saw infinite dogs lie down.
Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov
IN DISCUSSING THE ABRUPTdismissal of longtime retainer I. Vasil Golakov from his service in the Edison ménage, a number of recent scholars—most notably J. Horslow and T. Rheims, in a paper titled “Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse: The Queer Undercurrents of Early Electricity”—have proposed that it was a homosexual advance upon Edison on the part of the Bulgarian valet that led to his sudden termination. Lesbian separatist theorist P. Valencia-Sven has taken this bold hypothesis even further, implying that it was Edison’s stern denial of his own secret yearning for the strapping Slav that compelled him to expel Golakov from his household.
But the first translation of Golakov’s letters from the original Bulgarian, by doctoral candidate L. G. Turo of Rutgers, sheds a novel light on these fanciful speculations. And although it is indeed likely that Golakov and Edison had an altercation on the day of the firing, there is scant evidence to suggest that the businessman-inventor and his faithful manservant enjoyed anything other than a purely platonic rapport.
Curiously, as the translation illustrates, the beginnings of the rift between master and domestic can be traced to an elephant execution on Coney Island.
When Edison offered to kill Topsy the elephant, in 1903, he had already lost the so-called war of the currents. It had been a war of both commerce and science, and the otherwise successful inventor had lost calamitously on both fronts. Having campaigned bitterly to persuade the public that his direct-current system was safer than its rival, alternating current—a technology harnessed by Nikola Tesla and owned by George Westinghouse—Edison was proved wrong by 1896, when alternating current won the day, and by 1897 he had sold off the last shares in his old electricity company.
But in the course of the public-relations battle, he had adopted a perverse strategy: Although opposed to the death penalty, he had promoted an electric chair that would use AC to execute convicts and thus showcase its lethality. And further to defame the rival form of current, he helped an engineer named Harold Brown publicly execute stray dogs, calves and horses with AC—despite his own professed belief in kindness, later to be quoted by animal-rights advocates. “Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution,” he said. “Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
In any case, by 1903 the inventor had long since turned his attention to motion picture technology, then in its infancy. He had patents on some of the first motion picture machines, and when he heard there was an elephant in the area who was slated for execution, he stepped in and suggested a lethal dose of AC. His men would both set up and record the electrocution.
Topsy, the elephant in question, was a disgruntled circus and work animal who had suffered the pains of forced labor, captivity, neglect and abuse. She had responded by killing three men, the last of whom fed her a burning cigarette.
Simple shooting would not have been theatrical enough, for her owners, Thompson & Dundy of Coney Island’s Luna Park, had decided to make an example of the rogue. (The execution of an
imals, an odd extension of a medieval practice, assumes the animal is a moral agent, accountable to the law and therefore punishable in a formal and public context. It is noteworthy that the elephant was not being euthanized or exterminated, as vermin would, but penalized for her sins against God and man by execution qua execution. The ramifications of this apparent subversion, whereby the ultimate punishment—viz., death—also comprises the ultimate elevation/reward, are of course multifold.)
To put a just end to Topsy, therefore, an effective method was sought. Poisoning was tried but failed. Hanging was next considered, then dismissed when the ASPCA objected. (Despite its unpleasantness, to say nothing of sheer difficulty, this method would be used in 1916 in East Tennessee, on a five-ton elephant named Mary.) Finally Edison made his offer, and, ironically, though it was the unsavory nature of AC he would demonstrate with his movie, the ASPCA did not object to the method—perhaps because it was a new technology, and as such must be regarded as superior.
So Edison sent his technicians to the site of the execution and had them engineer and film the condemned animal’s fiery death. They attached electrodes to her body, strapped on sandals and set up their camera. The brief filmstrip that resulted still survives, a few grainy, gray seconds. It shows the creature being led, swaying gently, to the place of her doom; there, a white fire rages around her body. She collapses onto her side.
Edison himself was not present at the electrocution. As always, his attentions were claimed by a busy schedule. But according to Golakov, whose letters to a sister in Bulgaria were never mailed and therefore found their way into the boxes of household documents transferred to the Edison archives by the Mina Miller Edison estate, he was deeply fixated on the resulting filmstrip. The valet claimed that Edison—blithe, boastful, pragmatic to a fault and not prone to introspection or idleness—watched the filmstrip privately on a regular basis. He further claimed that Edison often conversed with it, addressing his remarks to the image of the dying elephant.
Here it should be observed that the footage, still extant and now publicly available on various Internet sites, represents an early example of what has since come to be called a “snuff” film—that is, a film that records the willful killing of an unwilling subject. Actual human snuff films have only very rarely come to light, and exist in American culture chiefly as mythic fetish objects, but animal snuff films, whose production is not for the most part illegal, are relatively common.
In Golakov’s voluminous letters, a number of the Edison/Topsy monologues are rendered. Most were reportedly delivered late at night or in the small hours of the morning, when the businessman-inventor liked to work; at these times he alone was awake in the house, and during pauses in his labor chose to closet himself in his study with one of his Projecting Kinetoscopes, watching as the blaze rose around the charring elephant’s wood and copper-shod feet.
Frequently the monologues concerned matters of business and technology too arcane to be detailed herein: the vicissitudes of carbon filaments and ore extraction, efficiency improvements at the West Orange facility, various properties of nickel hydrate. But often they were deeply personal, and, according to Golakov, Edison must have found in the elephant a faithful listener, at least at first, for his talks began as tranquil ruminations that tapered into silence only when the businessman-inventor nodded off in his leather armchair. As the disquisitions continued over weeks and months, however, they took on an argumentative tone. It seemed the elephant had begun to rebuke the businessman and had even had the temerity to dispute his assertions.
As Golakov presents them, the conversations are of course one-sided, with lengthy pauses into which Golakov believed the burning elephant’s rebuttals and queries would have been interposed. A typical excerpt from these enigmatic “exchanges,” on the subject of Edison’s fear of oral copulation/death, is set forth below.
“I won’t do it. Filthy. Anyway, she … No, I tell you. No. You women are all the same. Selfish, and can’t invent worth a damn. Harlots all … That, that wet thing … ugh. Like old cow’s tongue, or pigs’ feet. Disgusting … Makes her a slut, Topsy. Wantonness! Nothing less. A wife’s duty lies in … Do not interrupt me … I should have killed you three times if I killed you at all … Yes … yes … I know. I know. I am very sorry … I said I was sorry! … Is it green? Are there fields? Oh: and is the sun bright?”
Yet Golakov’s letters reflect nothing so much as a longing on Edison’s part for the approval of the boiling elephant. It is not clear to what degree this imputation is a fiction originating with the domestic, whose mind was almost surely affected by his daily use of the diacetyl-morphine cough remedies then sold widely by Bayer; certainly there have been no corroborating reports of any mental infirmity on Edison’s part. But Golakov’s documentation of Edison’s most intimate personal habits, relationships and opinions bears up well under close scrutiny and does reflect a credible familiarity with the businessman-inventor. Since the inventor had suffered a partial loss of hearing, it is not impossible that he may have welcomed the silence of a celluloid companion. And while almost certainly not accurate in all regards, Golakov’s notations clearly have a documentary value in elucidating aspects of the event.
On occasion Edison appears to have conducted philosophical debates with the moving image, defending a rational humanism for which the roasting elephant berated him.
“I am Man. Man has his own destiny! … Impractical, I’m afraid. Exhumation and shipping alone … I have no time for messing about with your bones, my stubborn pachyderm … Commonality? With every breath each of us on this earth inhales a molecule from Caesar’s final respiration. And likewise a molecule from Brutus’s breath, as the traitor raised a hand to stab his noble emperor. Does that make us Caesar? Does it make us Brutus? … Children, oh, hmm … I have several myself; barely remember their names. What? You had none! You trudged under a yoke all the days of your … what? False pachyderm! How you lie! Animals do not dream of that which has not transpired. A pachyderm cannot dream of her unborn children … Observation, clearly. I am Man; I can see. I have seen for myself how insensate you are. A pachyderm is not given to flights of fancy … There is no God in the Church, no: not there. But I begin to see Him. I see Him nonetheless … Contradiction? Leave me be. I have work before me.”
In the months leading up to the incident that brought about Golakov’s dismissal, the conversations he records become increasingly agitated and hyperbolic. Indeed a sort of rageful ecstasy is manifest:“How you shame me! You torment me with your humility! … Murdering pachyderm! I know well what you did. You are no saint! … Do not play the victim, my crafty friend. Do not play the innocent! … Together, you say? Together! Yes we will!”
At some point, writes Golakov, the elephant evidently became a sort of priestly figure or godhead, despite this antagonistic dynamic. Before her ghostly image, the businessman-inventor would kneel to pray, meditate and ask for absolution.
Edison was still a freethinker then; it was only circa 1920 that the inventor would begin to speak publicly of building machines to communicate with the dead. In his early life the brash businessman openly ridiculed religion and notions of a soul and an afterlife; yet even at the time he had a chronic weakness for magicians and occultists and was an admirer of both Madame Blavatsky and well-known billet reader Bert Reese.
In fact, it was not long at all after his dismissal of Golakov that the businessman would execute an abrupt about-face in terms of his religious leanings—and in the final decade of his life, far from being the out-spoken atheist of his youth, he would ridicule those “fool skeptic[s]” who dared to doubt the existence of God.
Certainly it is true that his second wife Mina, eighteen years his junior, was a staunch Methodist sometimes said to have believed the doctrine of evolution to be the work of Satan the deceiver. But Edison did not always hold the female intellect in high esteem, and he is unlikely to have been swayed by the young woman’s pious fundamentalism. It is probable that his newfound
faith had its genesis elsewhere.
In any case, it is Golakov’s intrusion upon his employer’s devotions that seems to have precipitated the termination of his employment. The valet had for some time been pilfering from Edison’s personal supply of cocaine toothache drops, which he then used in combination with his heroin cough medicine to produce effects of euphoria and allay anxiety. (He recommended both popular tonics to his sister.) On the occasion in question, a quiet evening in late September, he had ingested both remedies in some quantity, alternating quite neatly between them. As he sat quaffing a nightcap in Edison’s closet (the closet featured a slatted door), he had a good view of the scene in the study.
“The giant’s stately presence,” writes Golakov, “had Mr. Edison transfixed.”
He laid himself out on the floor in joyful submission to the flickering vision, and he spoke to her as he always did, but with more emotion. “How you glow, noble beast, in the infinite moment before your own death!” He rested his forehead on the rug and trembled. “How many times have you died? A thousand times you have died, a thousand and a thousand. I have seen it, like the millions of stars in the sky. And still you speak to me: You hold me in your dead eyes. I know your terrible power.” Rising to his feet, hands clasped in supplication, he choked back a sob as he said this, and I began fearing for his sanity. “Yes: yes: yes. You are the Savior. But I see now that you do not forgive me … what did you say to me? … I hear you. You say: I do not forgive. You say: This is my gift to you: I will never forgive: Now and forever, you are not forgiven.”
At this moment, according to the valet, Edison began weeping piteously. In his own state of artificially enhanced excitation, the valet apparently felt compelled to leap out of his hiding place, and, shocked by the sight, the businessman-inventor fell flat on his face, only to recover when his burly valet lifted him off the floor.
