by Neil Gaiman
“Got a head for business, must have,” he says about you, “be wanting to eyeball where your money goes.”
“Well, it is mine,” you say, then with a glance back at the pet store: “People eat dogs sometimes. Not here, but…”
“Get hungry enough, yeah, I can see that, my stomach gets to growling too loud, I’d eat me a Benji-burger too.”
“It’s wrong, eating dogs, no matter where they do it,” and he nods along with you, sharing a soft spot for man’s best friend. Or maybe he’ll agree with anything as long as food is coming, so you don’t mention the T-shirt that you own with the wolf’s head in the center, between two slogans: save the wolf above, then underneath, predators keep the balance.
It’s midmorning and the Dairy Queen isn’t busy and the young woman with the dreadlocks behind the counter has no smiles for you or your new best friend, looking at him as if she’s seen him too many times before, and you along with him.
“So you let that fool shame you into buying his breakfast for him,” she says when you order, resenting it and why not, she’s the one with the job and the grocery bills.
“No, no shame. My family’s Norwegian, we didn’t do slavery.” “Well, so nice to see someone with a clear conscience for a change,” she says, very unimpressed. “He want anything to drink?”
You turn to check, but your undercover cop pal is off in the corner, clowning with another just like him who’s rattling a newspaper.
“Give him a Hi-C,” you decide, “keep him from getting scurvy for a few more days.”
A corner of her mouth tics, as though tugged by a marionette string, you’ve almost made her laugh, or laugh for another reason instead of at you, at liberal Caucasian guilt too pervasive to be assuaged by pushing a nervous dollar or two away from your body before remembering somewhere else you have to be.
He trots into the restroom before the food is ready, is still there when it’s up, so you carry it to a table and wait, checking to see how ignored you are. You unwrap the burger and peel the bun back on its ligaments of cheese, exposing thick goo, mostly bright primary colors, unnatural, like a squashed animal in a subversive children’s book.
When he emerges from the restroom you’ve been guarding his food for a couple of minutes, as you rise he showers you with gratitude and the mingled fumes of malt liquor and tooth decay.
“God bless you, God bless you,” he says, overdoing it, you’re embarrassed, and when you leave him you return to the place where he found you, to finish your time with the puppies, who once again compete for your affections. Seems like everybody’s glad to see you today.
You tap on the glass and it stirs their blood, with furiously wagging tails they swat each other’s faces, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and you know if the world works the way it’s supposed to, these are just the ones who should inherit it.
It always comes back to canids for you, nothing else on earth as untarnished as the societies of dogs and dingoes, jackals and hyenas, coyotes and the progenitors of them all, the wolves, the beautiful wolves, with their tender and baleful eyes, said by an old Indian legend to have been the only human attribute to take when the gods tried to turn the animals into men. But human beings can only wish that their rites of dominance and submission were as pure.
You’ve always been entrenched on the canine side of that wide and irreconcilable schism between cat people and dog people, where each camp recognizes the inferiority of the other but only the dog people are right. Cat people laugh, haughty, say that they prefer felines because of their independence, their autonomy and self-reliance; say that dog people crave brainless obedience. But the true dog people know just how far self-reliance goes when trying to escape a pack on the hunt; know that what cat people are really identifying with is sleepy-eyed lazy indolence. Most cats, if they could, would be on welfare.
Since childhood you’ve preferred the company of canines, you sense a kinship that transcends species and they know it too, will defer to your mastery to a degree approaching the telepathic. Your impulses become theirs, their instincts inform your own, when you were a boy the area dogs would gather around you, nuzzling with their long toothy muzzles. You could strip down and roll with them, with young and old, they would accept you into their society of scents and sensibility as if recognizing some better part of you, beneath your hairless skin and flat face, you, the strangely-furred pug who walks on two legs. Cats aren’t the only ones who bring blood offerings, so you pretended you had some use for dead squirrels, for broken-necked tabbies, and no, you never once actually thought you were a dog, no matter what anyone said, and ever since then you’ve understood that the human animal is primarily characterized by arrogant stupidity and soft throats, a combination that constantly courts extinction.
Just as they see into you, so too do you see into them, they are Nietzsche’s abyss with the reciprocal gaze, or maybe the abyss is you. Show you a worthy dog and you’ll see past the millennia of taming, see past civilization’s dulling to the sharp primal edges beneath, the wolf behind those eyes. Except for poodles, pampered and self-loathing inside, and dachshunds, which are less dogs and more sorrel-haired rats.
The rest, it’s why they like you so, you know their ancestral secret and respect it, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and already you’re cocking an expectant ear toward the sky, listening for the howl that will split the city, then the world.
So enlivened are you by the day’s gift of the panhandler that you decide not to return to work. Instead you walk, not wanting to miss anything now that your senses are primed, you can track down further opportunities for trickery like any efficient hunter, blending into the landscape. You wear lots of gray and black because you live around lots of concrete and asphalt.
Work, too, is camouflage, was camouflage long before you even realized it, after awakening to your deepest nature. You log manifests and dispatch messengers, you help the city stay in touch with itself, for whatever that’s worth, old people do the same when senility takes hold and all anyone ever wishes is that they’d just shut up. If you really wanted to be happy you’d work in a pet store somewhere, but you tried that once already, and were fired when they caught you trying to smuggle all the dogs to freedom, even if they misunderstood everything, suspected you of planning to sell the stock to experimental medical laboratories, although they couldn’t figure out why you’d left the dachshunds behind.
After an hour of feeling the city’s shifting crust beneath your boots you take respite in a neighborhood bar, you’ve never seen or been seen here before, it’s beneath your usual dignity but happy hour begins early and seems to draw a clientele that needs it more than most. Paradoxically, all of them ignore each other.
You’re minding your own business when she comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You’ve had the darkened booth to yourself for less than the duration of your first drink, or the cigarette that she lit around the time she watched you sit down.
“I don’t mean to interrupt or anything, if you’ve got your heart set on sitting here alone, but if you wish you weren’t, I, I know how you feel, you don’t have to anymore, then neither would I, I mean it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”
A refill. She’ll want a refill, it’s as good as predestined. “We don’t have to talk or anything, not if you don’t want to, it’s just that drinks taste better when you’re with someone.”
She talks with her hands held rigidly before her, a conscious effort to keep them from trembling, and doing a better job with her hands than she’s managing with her voice.
“Would you mind not smoking, that’s all I ask,” you tell her. “I have a very sensitive nose.”
Her nervous hand dives toward the ashtray, she grinds out the butt, not a problem for her, then she’s fanning the wisps away and lands in the booth, across the table, she and her purse and her glass with its lonely, rattling ice cubes.
“My name’s Merilee,” she says.
You nod
. “As in, ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream’?”
She looks at you blankly, how could you be making such a mistake? “No, no, it’s spelled—” She catches herself. “Oh, you’re joking, I get it.” She slaps her forehead, lets it slide halfway down her arm, embarrassed.
You buy her another drink to go with your second, making an educated guess that she’s had a two-drink head start on you. When you catch sight of the booth in the mirror behind the bar you scan the reflection for the way you look together, the story it tells.
Two years ago you might’ve belonged together, but no longer, she left you and now she wants to come back, she’s had a rougher time of it than she thought, it shows in the puffiness along her jowls and under her eyes, while you have prospered, triumphed over the pain, and while you feel pity for her you’re not the same person she left, so how could you take her back?
Briefly you wonder who he was, if you’ve envisioned what has been, or what is still to come.
“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I, you don’t have to go anywhere right away?” she asks.
“Well, I have a dog I’ll need to feed eventually.”
Her eyes mist over with sorrow, as though she’s heard better excuses in her day, but is still willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, she has hope, clings to it. “What’s his name?”
“Fenris.” “What kind of name is that?” she asks, so you tell her it’s Scandinavian, just like you, and it brightens her afternoon, she believes you now, she says nobody would just make up a name like that and asks what breed of dog Fenris is.
“He’s more of a wolf, actually.”
With widening eyes, “You keep a wolf in the city, isn’t that dangerous?” “Not for Fenris. He thrives on it.” “I’ll bet you don’t have many problems with your neighbors.” “Not anymore.” “That’s funny, you don’t strike me as one of those guys who has to have the meanest dog around,” she tells you, it’s a fumbled compliment. “I knew this guy, well, lived with him for a month if you must know, it was Rottweilers or nothing for him. He was as hairy as the dogs, almost. But you, you have such a cultured look if you don’t mind me saying so, like you could be an artist maybe. And your voice, I could listen to you talk for hours.”
Which sounds like a threat, as she drinks two to your one, a ratio Merilee seems to have some experience with. Her hands start and stop for her cigarettes so often you lose count, her fingers drum with nerves and pretty soon the situation arrives where you know it’s been heading all along. She tries not to cry over things she can’t even tell you about, worries what you must think of her, with her eyes she begs you not to judge too harshly. She dumps her soul at your feet, skinned and raw.
“Loneliness is a cancer,” she says with frozen tears and a lurch in her voice, “and it never gets tired of eating at you day after day.”
It touches you like nothing else she’s said or done. “I know exactly what you mean.” You point to the front window, overlooking the sidewalk. “Walking around out there today, how many people did I see, do you think? Five thousand? Five thousand and they’re all selectively deaf, selectively blind. I might as well not exist for all they care. I could stand on a streetcorner and shout at the top of my lungs, and they’d hear me almost as well as they’d hear a gnat buzzing near their ears. They only want to know about you when they can take something from you.”
“Like your kids,” she murmurs with a faraway gaze. “The world quit feeling, if it ever did in the first place,” and you’re saying more than you should but she’s made you talkative, “so we may as well just give it back.”
Give the world back to where, to whom, she wants to know. But you’re canny enough to smile and shake your head as if to admit you’re only spouting off, you’ve never thought it through. Merilee says she’ll be right back, she scoots off toward the restroom with purse in tow and while she’s gone you hold her glass and swirl it, checking to see how ignored you are.
When she returns your trick is done, you can tell she’s tried to freshen up, she’s washed the smudges from around her eyes.
“What was that about your kids?” you ask, and at first she’s hesitant but you persist, you really want to know.
“Anybody can make a mistake. It was only bathwater, it didn’t feel too hot to me.” She’s a talking shell. “So what about you, what’s the worst thing you ever did? You owe me one now, y’know.”
“Earlier today this guy came up asking for money for food, so I took him to get a cheeseburger,” and before you can finish she’s asking what’s wrong with that, it sounds positively saintly. “But while he was in the restroom I put ground glass in the sandwich. He was drunk enough, I doubt he even noticed. The glass was pretty finely-ground to begin with.”
Merilee blinks at you, her face is as blank as unshaped clay, in her bovine eyes you see the future, see how she’ll continue to propagate more kids that may or may not be taken from her bungling hands and what kind of specialized monsters and parasites they’ll turn out to be, the world doesn’t need them, although that’s all academic now. Or will be in a few more hours.
She slaps her forehead and laughs. “You’re joking again! You really had me going for a minute, you have the strangest sense of humor, did anybody ever tell you that?”
“No, never,” and now you’re checking the time, how many hours since tricking the panhandler, the glass should be well on its way into his aching digestive tract by now, small intestine for sure, indigestible razor dust cutting soft tissues along its peristaltic journey, if he’s drinking, and he probably is, his thin blood will leak out that much sooner.
“I like you,” Merilee says, and you nod toward her glass and tell her to drink up, every last drop, for it’s time you should be on your way, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and the end of everything that’s overdue already.
It always comes back to history for you, most history being cyclical, because of the fundamental stupidity of human herds that never learn, or less often the realization that sometimes the old ways really are best. New generations must discover this on their own, why should they take anyone’s word for anything?
Some months ago you first felt it, felt that cold wind blow to you from across the ocean, from Norway, home of your ancestral genes and much that you hold dear. For a few years it’s been going on and you never even knew, until your chance encounter with a small newspaper article, which led you to a more detailed magazine article, which triggered your search for all that you could find on the subject of the Norwegian church-burnings.
A war has been declared, fought mostly in the middle of the night, churches a thousand years old, some of them, set aflame and razed to the ancient ground, burned in the name of old gods once sacred to Viking lips and warriors’ blades. The newly churchless blame it on devil worshippers, poor Lucifer gets dragged into everything, if the pious have no greater sense of their own ancestry than that, then they’re no better than poodles and dachshunds, maybe they really should be burned out. The culprits are musicians in most instances, modern-day sons of Odin and Thor, evidently they’ve had quite enough of missionaries and meddling, would’ve put a stop to it, too, if only they hadn’t been born a thousand years too late.
From across the Atlantic and cold North Sea you cheer them on, their fiery tricks are the vanguard of revolution, the world is about to shake itself down like a tick-infested hound and these are the first true signs, and you’re a natural part of the rest.
Ragnarok is coming.
You hear it on its way, heard it trying to break through into the world a month ago, and the month before, and the month before that, you weren’t ready then but now you are, you’ve remembered everything, now it’s almost the second Thursday of the month again and it all depends on you.
So enlivened are you by this final countdown that you decide not to go home, in polls you’ve read wherein people share what they’d do if they knew they had but another day to live, and nobody eve
r says they would sleep more.
You’re minding your own business when she comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You’ve taken a break from your spree of tricks, both feet are aching in their boots. The blistered soles of your feet throb while you sit on the bench at the bus stop, your blisters have popped and feel raw inside sticky socks.
“You look kind of stressed,” she tells you. “Suck you off to relieve some of that tension? Twenty bucks.”
Vitality. She’ll want your life’s vitality, it’s as good as predestined. She can’t be more than fourteen and possibly younger, her body still has that slim, straight look of a boy’s, no curves anywhere, or perhaps it’s poor nutrition.
“Come on, you got a car nearby? I’ll do you there, do you so good your grandpa’ll come. No, wait, if you had a car, like, what would you be doing waiting for the bus?”
“You’re new at this, aren’t you?” you ask. “Yeah, I’ve got these virginal lips, they’ve never known a man’s thing. Is that what you want?” She’s pouting like a magazine cover, hard little urchin’s face softening beneath a floppy hat, hair snaking from beneath in tangled dark strands and both knees of her jeans are dirty. “Okay, fifteen and we’ll go find somebody else’s car. There’s gotta be one unlocked around somewhere.”
“Do your parents know you do this?” “Oh yeah, sure, I’m like sending them a postcard every week, ‘Hope you’re fine, I still don’t swallow.’ So what planet are you from, anyway, do they even have blowjobs there?” She rolls her eyes. “Ten, okay? It’s as low as I go.”
“You know what you need?” you tell her, because now you know that you can make a difference in her life, grant it some grace here at the end. “You need a dog.”
“Whoa, no, I’m all, okay, like I’ve done some weird things to get by, but I’m not into animal scenes, you really are a freak—”
