Abnormal Occurrences

by Thomas Berger

  Mrs. Bowers lowered the dog to the floor and simpered as it scurried through the doorway between kitchen and dining room. “I don’t suppose the little thing can be housebroken as yet.”

  “That’s your problem,” said Vernon, who hated to have to apply his fine mind to a practical particular as opposed to meditating on universal abstractions, and he resented the new pet for putting him on the spot this way.

  Mrs. Bowers, who had followed the puppy out of the kitchen, now popped her head back into the doorway to note, “Little so-and-so did some business on the dining-room carpet, but just peepee.” She left for a second, then reappeared. “Oops, spoke too soon.”

  While she was collecting cleanup equipment, the puppy ambled back into the kitchen, where, bending to show arched eyebrows and pursed lips, Vernon asked, “Did you make poopoo?”

  To which his new pet answered, “Sure.”

  Vernon’s expression changed completely. “What?” His mother returned at that point, and to her he said, “I swear that dog just spoke to me.”

  She acknowledged the remarkable news by gesturing with a dustpan.

  “I swear,” Vernon repeated, and to the puppy he said, “Speak!”

  But the doggy had lost such interest as it had ever had in the matter and was sniffing at the point at which the refrigerator abutted the wall.

  “He smells that mouse I saw run in there last winter,” said Mrs. Bowers.

  “Now, Mom,” Vernon, said, “please try to keep your mind on this. That dog can talk. Do you realize the moneymaking potential?” He squatted. “Here, boy! C’mere, puppy.” Numerous repetitions of the summons finally succeeded in luring the little dachshund to wriggle to his vicinity if not quite within reach. “Say something!” Vernon implored. “Show how you can talk...At least say ‘sure’ again.”

  On the point of turning away at the conclusion of its brief attention span, the puppy hesitated and said, quite clearly, “Okay.”

  Vernon recognized immediately that while “sure” might resemble some natural sound that a dog was capable of uttering, “okay,” with its two pure vowels and one of the sharpest of consonants, did not come close to any variation of bark, growl, howl, whine, or yelp.

  “There you go!” Vernon exulted. But when he looked for his mother’s reaction, he saw that once again she had left the room, and when she returned with a dustpan load of excrement, it was at the trot toward the ground-floor lavatory, nose wrinkled, face averted from her burden: scarcely the time to bring her to a halt.

  The experience was representative of the subsequent occasions on which Vernon sought to demonstrate to his parents the dog’s powers of speech: either they were out of earshot of, if present, the animal would not say a word. And if he had had friends for this or any other use, he would not have bought the puppy in the first place. So here I am, he said in his internal monologue, with the big break I have been looking for, but there’s a hitch in it, so it’s useless. How can I make a buck out of a talking dog if nobody but me ever hears it?

  As it turned out, the little Dackel could not only speak but could read Vernon’s mind. Hearing the foregoing in (presumably) its inner ear, the puppy looked up at its master and said, “Teevee.”

  “What channel?” Vernon asked, but the dog spoke nothing further at the moment, which was its way: provide only a cogent word or very short phrase at any given time, make of it what you would, it was only a puppy, not a windbag demagogue. Vernon had come to terms with that situation. He turned on the television and began to surf, and in no time at all he found a daytime talk show to which a young woman had brought a cocker spaniel which theoretically could sing “Happy Birthday,” snatches of classic Broadway show tunes, and the first word of the drinking song from La Traviata.

  The host, Skeeter Wales, whom some older viewers might recognize from his earlier career as the lead juvenile in a long since cancelled sitcom, was telling the audience, “...no guarantees, folks. As you know if you been watchin’ us for a while, we give these animals a shot, and they’ll talk up a storm in auditions and rehearsals and while waitin’ in the green room to come on, but once they get in front of the cameras they clam up. What the hey, no harm done maybe, but it would be nice if one of them came through... Now today we have Sophie Van Meter of Provo, Utah, and her dog Wendy...”

  The cocker spaniel failed to sing a note, responding to its mistress’s wheedlings, admonitions, and edible treats with a series of stock canine expressions—the big-eyed optimist, the tail-wagging team player, and the show of tongue that anthropomorphizing pet owners see as a grin—and utter silence. Host Wales elevated genial shoulders, saying, “Dayjaw view all over again! Too bad, Sophie, thanks a lot, and you too, Wendy.”

  As woman and dog pranced off, seemingly as proud as if they had triumphed, Wales looked into the camera. “Offer still stands. Anybody got a dog can say a recognizable word or sing any part of a well-known melody on the air, we’ll put you on. Get in touch with us on the website, Skeeterdotcom.”

  Damn! Vernon reflected. That would be the perfect opportunity, but I can’t even get this dog to talk in front of my folks.

  He was unaware that the puppy had returned to the living room from the kitchen, where Vernon’s mother was trying unsuccessfully to paper-train it, distributing pages of the local weekly across the vinyl tiles, but the animal was careful always to pee in the narrow gaps between the sheets. She would also take it into the backyard at times, but the little thing was still too young to understand what, other than chase insects, it was supposed to do in fresh air and on grass.

  At his feet, the dog responded again to its master’s thoughts, saying, “Fine.”

  “You mean you’ll be fine on Skeeter Wales’s show? You’ll really say something?”

  “Sure,” said the puppy, playfully pawing at Vernon’s shoelaces.

  Vernon realized he would be undertaking an enormous risk to his amour-propre if the dog failed to deliver; he might make a fool of himself on coast-to-coast television, which would be just what all those jerks he had disdained in school and college would be waiting for. Nevertheless he took the plunge.

  The dog, at last given a name, one of audience-appealing potential, proved a hit, a smash, a blockbuster, beginning with Skeeter Wales’s introduction, “Folks, let’s have a big welcome for Vernon Bowers and little Sausage,” and the first appearance of that rust-colored furry tube mounted on four short, quick-striding legs; no one could keep a straight face. But when Sausage clearly enunciated, “Hi, Skeeter!” the consequent din set a record for decibels and duration.

  Wales leered into the camera. “Lemme say this, folks: you are witnessing something historical.”

  For comic effect, Vernon had led the dachshund onstage with a leash, but raised the little animal in his arms while it spoke. Now, neglecting nothing to exploit his big break, he volunteered to let Wales hold Sausage while he, its owner, left the set. “Proving,” he said to the camera, with an aplomb that seemed to reflect a professionalism of many years, “I’m not a ventriloquist!”

  “Hey,” yelped Skeeter, “good call! I never thought of that.”

  While Vernon was in the wings, watching a monitor, Wales, his big bland pale human face against Sausage’s sleek head with its beady bright eyes and glistening black-tipped snout, asked the dog, “Who’s your daddy?”

  “Vernon,” said Sausage.

  Show-biz offers began to pour in even before the Wales show signed off, and Vernon soon contracted with an agent who specialized in animal performers, a business manager, a press agent, and a team of trainers whose job it was to keep the dog in tiptop shape through exercise and diet, of which the former was okay with Sausage because workouts could be caninely considered as games, but the little fellow was not too keen on being fed kibble that had been formulated in the interests of nutrition and not flavor. While it generally reserved its powers of speech for public performances, rarely even addressing Vernon in private, Sausage did voice terse complaints at mealtime (n
ow, to add insult to injury, scheduled but once a day), e.g., “Bad!” followed by spitting a morsel on the floor beside the dish; “Lousy!”; “No!” amusing those in his entourage, not including Vernon, who was usually distracted by the realization of his formerly idle dreams of avarice: Sausage was signed to star in a primetime sitcom, with a spinoff movie to be shot when the TV show was on hiatus, and the dog-food commercial campaign, in which the pooch himself pronounced the name of the product, was to kick off during the first commercial break of the Superbowl telecast.

  “Notice,” observed one of the team of trainers to the colleague who usually attended Sausage on the treadmill sessions, “he doesn’t call it ‘garbage’ or ‘crap’.”

  “Because dogs like garbage and shit, right?”

  “You got it.”

  But all concerned were soon to learn that the dachshund, who was growing like gangbusters and within no time at all was the equivalent of a teenager in human terms and was similarly willful, would not tolerate being taken lightly. With its keen ear for any speech in its vicinity, Sausage had acquired quite a vocabulary of foul invectives, and its testiness found expression in nonlinguistic ways as well: urinating in places that would serve to make a point, among them various human ankles; leaving turds in conspicuous situations; and, ever more frequently, nipping persons with the robust adult teeth that had replaced the stinging needles of puppyhood, choppers that could do real damage. Though thus far the animal restrained itself from the kind of biting that might maim, those that had to deal with the problem were wary. The dog provided their income; they were expendable, as Sausage was not.

  With the burgeoning of Sausage’s career, Vernon Bowers was ever less directly involved with his former pet. He preferred dealmaking and the income that derived from it and became a highroller at prominent venues of gambling, to which he traveled by private jets and stretch limos full of flashy women, iced effervescence, and sturgeon roe.

  Print articles and TV commentary had at first gushed with awe and admiration of Sausage’s unique talent, but as the animal’s name became a household word they turned negative, embracing the scepticism of animal behaviorists, authorities on linguistics who quoted Wittgenstein’s bon mot to the effect that if a lion could speak we would probably not understand what it said, and zoologists who insisted that a dog, lacking a human sort of larynx, as well as the requisite area of the brain, was anatomically incapable of producing authentic speech.

  Vernon’s position on such attacks was that they only made Sausage better known, upping the fees and further enriching himself—but not just that, as he revealed in the rare personal interview he gave to a female newsweekly reporter whose fetching ways suggested to male subjects more than was ever delivered: according to Vernon, Sausage lived equally high on the hog in doggy terms, being fed on Kobe beef and regularly furnished with healthy bitches in heat.

  Dorothy Hornbeck’s subsequent bylined piece offered evidence that this account was cut from the whole cloth by a barefaced liar, a former member of the dog’s retinue having revealed to her that a hardworking Sausage had yet to engage in any kind of sex but humping the legs of the human beings around him, and was fed only a highly restrictive diet of high-protein, low-fat gruel.

  On reading the widely publicized article, a grandstanding US senator called for an investigation, and a militant animal-rights group found another justification for fire-bombing a pet-food warehouse.

  Eventually the vogue for Sausage began to recede when people were inured to the once devastating effect of the dog’s ability to speak a few words and short phrases, confirming the old law that a novelty must lose its appeal when it is no longer novel. So what else can you do for me, doggy? was the question to be answered before another year was out. Meanwhile, Vernon’s parents had shared in none of their son’s success, aside from the opportunity to swagger before their neighbors, and now, impoverished by a series of home repairs and medical expenses not covered by their HMO, his mother, formerly a smoker, had contracted emphysema and the senior Bowers was trying to recuperate after his second coronary episode. Learning of this state of affairs from an email sent by an envious cousin (“you dirty bastard, you always were a selfish, heartless little prick even as a snotnosed kid”), Vernon got a bright idea that promised not only to reverse Sausage’s decline in public estimation but also to benefit his ailing parents, to whom now that he was successful he wished to be benevolent.

  Accompanied by a sizable posse consisting not only of his own employees but also a number of media types, Vernon took the dog back East to meet his folks for the first time since leaving home. Overwhelmed by the honor, they would have expressed apologies for distracting their son from his important work for the country had he not put a stop to the kind of thing that would not have looked good when reported, especially when he had taken pains to set up the meeting at a luxurious nursing residence for wealthy seniors and not at the Bowers’s now shabby home.

  Deposited in the lap of Vernon’s mother, Sausage was immediately so fascinated by the oxygen tube to her nostrils that a worried handler quickly transferred the dog to Vernon’s dad, in a companion wheelchair nearby.

  “Well, haven’t you turned out to be the one,” said he, trying to pat the little head with tremulous hands.

  For its part, a silent Sausage evaded the caresses for a moment or two of canine protocol, performing a sniffing onceover, at the conclusion of which its tail signaled an okay that was expanded by, at the other end of the long cylinder, a protruding red tongue.

  “Would you look at that?” asked Mr. Bowers. “He wants to kiss his grampa. I feel better already.” And soon he was as good as his word, rising from the wheelchair to move slowly but not feebly about the room, walking farther than he had in the previous month, and after an hour in Sausage’s presence, even though the dog had not been permitted to come close enough to interfere with her oxygen apparatus, Vernon’s mother pulled the tube away from her nose and announced that her lungs were on the mend, she could just feel it.

  This was just what Vernon had had in mind. It had been proven sometime since that the company of pets was therapeutic to the ill, old, and infirm, but according to his research, nothing had been done by way of commercial exploitation on the national level. So he set about the creation of Dogdocs, Inc., with Sausage as honorary CEO, selling franchises across the USA to local branches that would provide canine visitors to hospitals and nursing homes for fees shared by the institutions, HMOs, and Medicare, with a low copay by the patient. It took a while for the business to reach the functional level, given the Byzantine complexity of getting federal and state accreditations, but eventually all was in place, and hundreds then thousands of dogs were gainfully employed in treating the afflicted, a process consisting of no more than being petted, with reciprocal hand- and/or face-licking and of course glowing eyes and wagging tails, but was remarkably efficacious beyond the capacity of statistical measurement.

  “Just how often,” Vernon was asked in interviews, “do these dogs really heal anybody, and of what illnesses?”

  “That could never be proved,” was his routine answer. “What is self-evident, though, is how much better patients feel when they pet a dog, whereas many medical procedures, however effective—and sometimes they aren’t—make the patient miserable.”

  “So this cure is an illusion?”

  “No. But the illusion may be curative.”

  And while there were doctors who were disparagers, others doubted that the dogs could do any harm, so long as the animals had no diseases that could be communicated to human beings, and to be sure did not bite or make noises that would disturb other patients.

  Vernon’s parents eventually died but certainly no sooner than if they had not enjoyed canine therapy and perhaps a good deal later. In any event their last years were more pleasant than had they not been regularly visited, when he could spare the time, by their son, who was now renowned and much sought after as a humanitarian.

  Sausage
too finally passed on, having acquired even more fame as a healer than he ever had as a talker, for the evident reason that making people feel better about their health is more appreciated than just amusing them with what, however miraculous, remains a novelty. A bronze statue of the eminent dachshund was erected in the park near that of Balto the noble sled dog who brought the serum to Nome.

  “Why, as the person nearest him,” Vernon was asked in an obituary interview, “do you think Sausage never spoke publicly again after leaving show business?”

  “Maybe he thought he had said it all.”

  “Did he talk privately with you?”

  “I don’t feel I am at liberty to answer that,” said Vernon, “since Sausage can’t be here to speak for himself.”

  The Apotheosis Of Dr. Poon

  SOME YEARS AGO, BEFORE the era of “reality” television, I was associate producer of a series entitled Courage. We went under the seas with skin divers, climbed mountains, stalked polar bears, that sort of thing. Perhaps, when you were younger, you saw the show; many Americans did—though not multimillions of them, which is the principal reason we lasted only two seasons. Perhaps you even enjoyed it. If so, it is not my intention to reflect disdainfully on your taste when I herewith reveal publicly for the first time that certain portions of it were faked. We used motion-picture film in those days.

  For example: the camera, hand-held by a crew member wearing waders, followed an anaconda across that Paraguayan pond and onto the far bank, whereupon the serpent turned and gave battle, flinging its giant coils around our Indian guide, and had all but choked the life out of him when, with a final desperate slash with his machete, he cut himself free—though, in deference to the snake lobby (already influential if not as vocal as it is today), that conclusion had to be inferred by the audience: no reptile was hurt, not even the phony one we used for most of the footage.