Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  You clang your staff on the sidewalk to bring Clovis to heel and claim the right-of-way, and the idiot diverts into the street to pass, his dog bouncing along like something out of a Disney cartoon. A parked BMW with a canvas tarp over it is between the dogs, but the Aussie stands up on its hind legs and paws at the air, then drops into a crouch with his tail stump wagging in a frisky puppy challenge. Clovis instantly forgets all his training and lurches off the curb snarling, intent on an entirely different kind of play.

  Most people get the message right away, but this fool just stops in the street and says, “Hi, buddy! You wanna play, don’t you?”

  Clovis rears up on his hind legs, dangling by his leash like a botched lynching. You barely hold him back, slamming the rod into the concrete beside his ear as you politely ask, “Get your dog under control, would you?”

  The asshole laughs at you! “My dog is under control, lady. He just wants to play. Maybe since you’re the one with the aggressive dog and no manners, you could maybe walk in the street…”

  “I have the right of way,” you say, but the niceties of dogwalking etiquette as laid out by Cesar Milan are lost on this idiot. “So back the fuck up.”

  “You shouldn’t talk to people like dogs, and you shouldn’t treat your dog like a machine. Have a nice day, anyway.” Loping off, he claps his hands and his dog dances around him on its hind legs, nipping at his sweatpants and tugging them down just enough that one flabby, pimpled asscheek winks at you before he disappears around the corner.

  Right or wrong, the loser of any argument is the one who broods on it after the last word. When you tell your clients that, they nod as if you were a Brahmin from Shangri-La. But you hyperventilate and fume about the encounter all the way home, where you find a kilo of still-steaming dogshit on the neatly trimmed Bermuda grass parking strip in front of your house. Clovis goes berserk trying to annihilate the offending turd with his pee, then to eat it. It takes the can, the rod and the air horn to drive him back into the house.

  You try all your vaunted refocusing techniques to put it behind you, but it gnaws at you all through your sessions with clients. Mrs. Mossadegh is agoraphobic and needs kid gloves, but you lash out at her and send the widow into a panic attack. Scratch yoga, insert alcohol.

  You have much bigger issues on your radar: shooting another infomercial next week, and a pitch for a regular segment on a nationally syndicated afternoon talk show. But you feel violated, as if you’ve been assaulted in the street. How dare he raise his voice and flaunt his apathy like you’re the defective one? Where did this lazy eunuch shithead get the balls to talk to you like that? And his dog, somehow a part of him where her own dog was not a friend or even a reliable tool. And he knows where you live…

  Option 1: bag the shit, then return it to him via his mailbox. But you have no idea where he lives. No, you should follow him home and…

  Option 2: Wait until he believes you’ve forgotten him, and then…Escalate. Your heart races as you get up before five and slip into a vintage Danskin metallic green leotard, black Adidas track pants and new Saucony running shoes. You collect your platinum-blonde shoulder-length razor-cut into a tight bun that takes seven years off your face and put on a trucker hat that says SHOW ME YOUR TITS, all the while mentally rehearsing a host of withering snarky attacks that you must’ve been composing in a fitful sleep.

  Clovis feeds off your tension, jumping on you and gouging divots out of the Mothersbaugh designer wallpaper in the entry hall. As soon as the door opens, he jerks you out onto the porch and down the stairs. He knows what’s bothering you, and he has the scent.

  You jog down Stonebridge, Clovis humping along like a quadruple-amputee bodybuilder on a ‘roid rage vendetta. You only want to spot your enemy and track him back to his lair. Merely knowing where he lives will give you parity, and the peace of mind to decide how this will proceed.

  Clovis drags you from flowerbed to rock garden, whining and wringing out every drop of moisture to cover the Aussie’s omnipresent spoor. The bastard pissed everywhere, claimed the whole neighborhood. Clovis leads you up a blind cul-de-sac, then seems to lose the scent. You look over the daunting array of postmodern palaces crowding the edge of a bluff overlooking the San Fernando Valley, and your heart sinks. Your own house is prime real estate, but still a two-bedroom bungalow on stilts facing the wrong way like a clueless chaperone. If he lives in one of these, then he can buy and sell you. Unless he’s just sponging off an old bandmate, running the Kato Kaelin act, walking the dogs and cleaning the pool.

  That has to be it. Nobody rich enough to afford an eight bedroom with a view like this wanders around baked with his dog at this hour.

  Then you come around the corner, and he ambushes you.

  He’s just across the street, bouncing a tennis ball to tease his stupid Aussie puppy, who springs and bounces around like he should be wearing a cape.

  “Good morning, mean lady!” he calls out. He’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday.

  You’re not ready for this. Head down, you give Clovis a taste of the rod. It strikes sparks off the pavement and rings like a tuning fork, making your hand go numb. The numbness seems to vibrate all throughout your toned, taut body.

  “Is this far enough away, your majesty?” He capers around on the opposite sidewalk as you haul a suddenly frozen Clovis onto the shaggy lawn of a misbegotten Cape Cod ranch house that’s been up for sale for over a year, and probably will be forever, with Coldwell Bankers rep Megan Larsen showing it. You back up under an unruly magnolia tree with blossoms like cabbages. For some reason, their perfume smells like gasoline.

  The idiot tosses his tennis ball down the street. The Aussie bounds after it in a flurry of matted flukes and floppy, adorable ears. Clovis growls real low like a semi approaching a steep hill. You feel your phone vibrating in your breast pocket. You don’t keep your phone there, don’t have a breast pocket.

  “You’re breaking the law,” you tell him. “Make a citizen’s arrest,” he says, stroking the puppy and trying to wrench the tennis ball out of his mouth.

  Fuck him, he’s not worth it. Keep walking. There are ten phones vibrating under your skin. “If you want to play games with me, little boy, you better be ready to learn how grown-ups play.”

  “You know, maybe if you played with your dog instead of trying to play games with people, maybe you wouldn’t both be so miserable—”

  He throws the tennis ball down the tree-shadowed street. His dumb dog goes galloping after it.

  Clovis bolts. The leash burns your hand racing through your grip. The end of it pops loose and Clovis shoots off the curb as if from a cannon.

  “Clovis, No!” you scream, or you remember saying it, anyway.

  The Aussie pauses to clock Clovis and turns to meet him for a jolly frolic. Clovis leaps and catches the Aussie by the throat and tosses his head to snap the puppy’s neck and lay bare a dizzying lacework of muscles, tendons and arteries. Before you can drop the rod and get out the nickel can, before the dumbass dog owner can call his dog’s name, it’s dead meat flying in Clovis’s wake.

  You would be first to argue that it was wrong, but in the moment, all you can feel is the grim satisfaction of the vindicated. And right or wrong, that takedown was, in a word, awesome. If you’d seen it on YouTube, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to stand up and cheer.

  We’re even, you think. Suck on that. If it stopped here, it would be perfect. Clovis stops just long enough to lift a leg over his fresh kill, then turns and pounds after its owner. The idiot gets maybe ten long strides towards the driveway of the empty house when Clovis bowls him over, throwing his undulating torso into the wild flurry of legs and battening down on his left ankle. The dog owner pitches face-first into the shit-strewn lawn and tries to speed-crawl through dandelions and sun-bleached junk mail towards—what? His Achilles tendon is gone, so he isn’t getting up. With Clovis on his back, there’s no going anywhere.

  You run at your dog shouting and wav
ing your arms, but you stop just short of grabbing his collar. He could kill this man, but if you interfere, he might just seriously harm you. And then your bond would be broken. He’ll have to be put to sleep.

  You should do something, but your mind can only make a decision by playing the scripts you trot out for your helpless clients. What would the celebrated life coach tell a sucker to do, in such a situation?

  “Please, stop! Get him off!” The man screams, or tries to, but his lungs are so clotted he can only hack phlegm in his assassin’s face. He bats ineffectually at Clovis with a moldy phonebook, trying valiantly to shove it into the snapping jaws. The mutt already tore off one ear and made meatloaf of his right hand, but the screaming seems to drive him to new heights of ferocity, and he goes for the source. Fixing his massive jaws over the man’s face, he battens down like a nutcracker, jerking it from side to side, looking for that telltale snap—

  You grab the collar and yank on his choke-chain, but he won’t let go. When you finally pull him off, Clovis takes half the man’s face with him.

  You almost blow the airhorn in his ears, but then drop it when you notice the quiet. You look around. The street is empty. The house next door is under construction, and the crew won’t be showing up until tomorrow. The sun has just begun to insinuate itself into the grey soup of smog that obscured the valley. Fat Sunday newspapers lay on driveways and dewy lawns. Hungover and medicated and dead to the world, the neighborhood has not heard or seen anything.

  For a moment there, you felt a sickening hole in the pit of your gut, a sucking wound that threatened to drag you into a vortex of shame when you needed to be at your best. But it was not shame or guilt at all. It was good old-fashioned fear at the loss of control, at the quicksand of consequences opening up underfoot. Every aspect of your life could change for the worse forever and ever, just because your dog had an accident.

  Clovis sits at attention, oblivious to the weeping, faceless horror crawling in the weeds with a Thai bistro menu stuck to his three-fingered right hand. Clovis apparently had no problem swallowing the lost digits.

  “Okay,” you keep saying, like the robotic voice in a car with the door standing open. You are the person anyone in such a situation would look up to. You thrive on crises. Like working out a cramp, you pace and say, “Okay,” until the sinkhole in your gut fills in. You suddenly felt quite giddy, as if you just snorted pure MDMA. This situation is still yours to fuck up.

  Your house is two blocks away. Your chances of running home and returning with the Cayenne before someone else finds the mess are negligible. And besides, he isn’t dead.

  He should really get to a hospital. Right now, he’s…grievously fucked. If he dies, then that’s the end. If he survives as a mangled sideshow freak, he’ll be around your neck for the rest of your life. It’ll be like divorcing a stranger. But you can’t bring yourself to do it, not right here. The silence is a bubble that could burst at any moment.

  And then, like you always do, you simply snap out of it and just start fixing it. Running for the front door of the house, you use your iron rod to snap the realtor’s box off the doorknob and get the key. The house has a Bel Air Patrol sign out front like every house on this street, but it’s weathered and cracked, and the alarm is shut off.

  You kick and cuss Clovis into the guest bathroom and shut the door, then race outside to pick up the Aussie.

  A huge splash of blood decorates its passage in the shape of a big bird with wings outstretched. You almost throw up when its floppy fifty-pound weight sags like hot trash in your arms, its bowels relaxing and pinching out a runny racing stripe down your leg. You run into the empty house and down the hall to the garage, drop the corpse on the concrete floor and run back outside.

  The dog owner still hasn’t caught his breath. Blood and the loose flap of face completely obscure his eyes, and he only makes it worse with his right hand. “Help me,” he moans. His voice is reedy, breathless even for a smoker. His skin is cold and clammy. Going into shock.

  “I’m going to help you,” you say. “Just calm down and try to get up. Let me help you inside. I can stop the bleeding, that’s what’s important.”

  “Call 911…call—”

  You get into his pocket just ahead of him and take his cell phone. “I’ll take care of you.”

  If you lived here, you’d be home now. Furnished with Italian modernist drek from the showrooms going out of business down on Ventura, and cream deep pile shag carpet alternated with blonde hardwood floors. Empty rooms look small and yet daunting to buyers. Bad taste hides bad space. It’s easier to picture living in a house if it seems like someone else is already there, and doing it wrong.

  Every room has its own air freshener. The living room smells like evergreen, the kitchen like fresh cookies, the dining room like pumpkin pie.

  Goddamit, he’s bleeding everywhere. You detour into the garage and lay him on a moving blanket against the washer-dryer combo. With his shoelaces, you make tourniquets for his hand and ankle. His face drizzles blood everywhere, but it’s all capillary blood—no arterial splashing, at least. He’s not liable to die, but he isn’t certain to stay put, either.

  This could continue to spiral out of control, or you could end it right now. Ask yourself, as you do when divining the good or evil of anything, what purpose would such a decision serve, and whether it could succeed. This makes it so much easier to live in a cruel and crappy world and not constantly flagellate yourself about injustices from child abuse to genital mutilation in Africa and Tyler Perry movies. Would it work? Would it get you what you want?

  The backyard looks out on a steep, brush-choked canyon. Coyotes would find him and his stupid dog before anyone else, and nobody would suspect—

  Jesus, it’s easy to think like a villain. Is this who you’ve always been? Are you a bad person? No, you’re a problem solver. Weak people let circumstances run them over. Problem solvers rise above, and get shit done.

  Clovis whines and paws the bathroom door.

  Bad person or no, you didn’t ask for any of this. You could let it ruin the rest of her life, and take comfort in having done the “right thing.” Or you could take the obvious solution. Right here and so simple, that you would be betraying her deepest principles, if you didn’t act on it.

  Why the hell don’t you just do it?

  You go out the side yard and sprint home. You get a deluxe first aid kit left over from Sasha the suicidal performance artist and a smorgasbord of painkillers and anxiety medications collected from every other ex. All the way back, you tell yourself you’re just going to stabilize him and maybe try to get him to see sense about the attack, before you call the police. As long as nobody (human) has died, there’ll be no fallout. You might even come out of it a hero.

  He’s halfway to the front door when you came back in. You go to the bathroom door and open it. Clovis barges out and makes a beeline for the dog owner. Wait until the idiot can smell his own flesh on Clovis’s breath before stomping on his leash and stopping the dog close enough to lick the man’s nose.

  “I’ll take care of you,” you say again, and press a clean gym sock soaked in ether over his face. He slumps into your arms and you drag him back into the garage.

  It takes an hour, just to stitch his hand. The severed Achilles tendon is above your pay grade––you learned how to stop bleeding and close holes from Sasha’s many artistic misadventures, but you’re no surgeon.

  The face is a challenge you actually enjoy, like arts and crafts from summer camp. Despite your best efforts, the semicircular flap of exquisitely articulated muscle from the hairline to the bridge of the nose now looks like a slab of chuck steak stitched to his head. Slather the results with Polysporin and garnish with hot pink self-adhesive bandages, and serve.

  He really seems to appreciate it, once he wakes up. “I’m really sorry about what I said earlier,” he says, as near as you can tell. You fed him some painkillers during and after the operation, so he sounds pretty dopey
. “It was very insensitive of me. Thank you for saving my life.”

  You blush. “I’m sorry, too…that you got hurt…but you know, you were asking for trouble.”

  He smiles, which would look kind of cute, if the upper left quadrant of his face wasn’t swelling and turning blue. “What’re you trying to do, here?”

  “Why can’t you admit that you were at fault?” “Wha…?” Now he laughs, which isn’t nearly as cute. “He’s not a bad dog.” “I’m sure…under the right, um…” “He never attacks unless he’s provoked.”

  He smiles again, looking stupid, but now you start to think he’s playing possum. “Maybe you’re right. It’s just one of those things. Shit happens, right? Let the lawyers sort it out. But you have to call 911.”

  You make a big production of thinking about it before answering, “No.” “What do you mean, No?” “We’ll settle this here. Now. Between us. No lawyers.” “Lady, I’m bleeding to death—” “No, you’re not. I fixed it.” “Nonetheless…” He sniffs, wrinkles his nose. “Are you baking cookies?” “Let’s talk about you, okay? Your dog shit in front of my house—” “What’s that got to do with anything?” “And your dog was off-leash, and you had no way to control him, and you were playing a provocative game in an inappropriate place.”

  “So, I was asking for it, is that what…I got what I deserved, is that what you want to hear? I’m sorry I made your dog attack me?”

  “Don’t twist my words. You made my dog angry…” “You’re not angry because of your dog,” he gasped. “Your dog is angry because of you.” He looks fit to bust into a rant, but then he notices something behind you. His face cracks open, tears squirting out of his stitches. “Oh my God, Cutter…”

  “What kind of name is that?” you blurt before it comes together. Aussie…middle-aged geek…Toecutter from Mad Max. “I’ll take care of it.”