Outside the Dog Museum

by Carroll, Jonathan

  I looked from her to the Sultan, but the room was moving in big bobs and waves and everyone was in funny motion. Later I learned Saru is famous for earthquakes, so these men knew what was happening much sooner than Fanny and I. The Sultan bent over and pulled his feet from the boots. Then he fell down when the hotel literally leaned to one side.

  Fanny and I were knocked off the couch. I’d just enough time to grab her before we started rolling again. The sound of screeching, twisting metal and exploding glass was the world.

  I barely heard the others shouting in Arabic. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt. The Sultan.

  “Out to the hall, Harry! Get away from the windows!” He dragged me backward by the shirt. I held Fanny in a headlock. I saw he was barefoot. The barefoot Sultan in a ski suit in a California earthquake. I started laughing. He wasn’t laughing. The door was open and we staggered out.

  In the hall one of his men lay crushed under a gigantic fallen support beam. He must have died seconds before because his teeth were still chattering. That small fatal clicking sound was alone for a moment, then the roar of the outside world fell on us again.

  How long does a big earthquake last? Thirty seconds? But it ain’t over when you think it’s over. Like a cow, the skin of the earth may stop twitching a moment against us flies, but not for long.

  On the floor in the hall, all our arms entwined in a pathetic attempt at protection, we looked up as one when things stopped. Looking suspiciously at each other with hope and dread, as if one of us were about to start the whole thing again, our heads raised more and more as the cease-fire held.

  “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  “Are you all right, Fan?”

  “I think you broke my neck, but besides that, I’m just ducky.” She started to get up but the Sultan grabbed her arm and jerked her back down.

  “Don’t move! This is not over.”

  It wasn’t. The aftershocks came fast and just as viciously. We rode that floor like Ahab clinging to the side of Moby Dick.

  “When does it fucking stop?” Fanny moaned as things shook and rolled on from bad to worse.

  “Go to the doorway! We must be in a doorway. The floor’s too dangerous!”

  His voice sounded sure and scared; perfect in that instant to convince me to move. Also he was right—doorways do offer the most protection in a quake because that’s where the supports of a building are centered.

  Scuttering over on our knees, I saw the bottoms of the royal bare feet were sliced and bleeding. Turning around as another aftershock rose and rolled, I went to the dead servant and jerked off his shoes.

  “Take these!” I stuck out my left hand, loafers dangling.

  At the other end of the hall a window crashed and something blew in. I saw a dark blur at tremendous speed coming my way. Dropping the shoes, I knew, knew, it would hit me.

  Before I could move, the Sultan shouted something like “Kou-carry!” or “Kou-karies!” and a black telephone insulator fell dead out of the air at my feet.

  The earth screamed, but the Sultan of Saru and I looked across a million miles and a million years of silence:

  You just did magic.

  That’s right—and saved your ass.

  That was all that passed between us then in lieu of the fact our world was still doing the cha cha cha. Did Fanny see his miracle? No. Did anyone else see him save me? No, because his other smilers were running around, trying to find us a way out of there before the Westwood Muse Hotel decided to give up the ghost and collapse.

  A smiler I later knew as Djebeli came staggering toward us, waving. He said something loud in Arabic. The Sultan got to his feet and pulled Fanny with him. “There is a staircase that’s still all right!”

  By the time we reached the stairwell, the tremors had stopped again.

  “Hurry. It still might not be over.”

  In retrospect, running down a hotel staircase in the middle of an earthquake isn’t the world’s dandiest idea, but you’re doing something then and that’s worth everything. Moving, not lying on the floor scared shitless and hoping to God it’ll stop.

  The stairwell looked okay—a few broken concrete stairs, a steel banister bowed and gracefully bent like a silver swan’s neck—but all essentially navigable. We took the plunge without a second’s pause.

  Fanny Neville has a magnificent head. Now that’s love, huh? Racing down the cracked steps of hell into guaranteed more hell at ground level, I marveled even then at her terrific head in front of me. It’s a big one for someone so small, but you don’t really notice that at first. First you see the seal black hair combed and sprayed tight to the head, natural plum lips, the big little-girl eyes—

  “Stop! Don’t move!”

  Fanny, Djebeli, and I all froze on command. I was still thinking about her head, so it took a moment to realize we’d halted.

  “Come on, let’s go!”

  Leading our pack, the Sultan turned and looked at me. “Something bad’s in here, Harry. Earthquakes come from the anger of the dead. They bring dangerous things out of the earth with them. I can feel—” He put up a hand as if to silence himself.

  But not me. “Screw the dead! Let’s go while we can.” I moved down the steps and reached for Fanny.

  “Wait!”

  A floor below the door opened and a couple came slowly out onto the landing. The man looked up at us.

  “Can we use these stairs?”

  Pulling Fanny along, I started down. “I don’t know, man, but I ain’t stopping to think about it!”

  “Harry, please don’t move. There are jinn!”

  In my state I thought he was talking about the people on the stairs—the fact they were both wearing jeans. “It’s okay, sir, they’re very popular. Let’s just get the fuck out of here!”

  The man was still holding the door open and a dog came out. A dog I knew well, having fed him that morning before leaving my apartment: Big Top.

  He looked at me with his normal expressionless stare, then gestured with his head to follow him. The kind of casual, flick-of-the-chin-toward-one-shoulder, Humphrey Bogart head toss, real cool.

  “Can you get us out of here, Big?”

  He looked at me stonily, turned around and went back through the door. I started after him.

  Fanny squeezed my hand. “What’re you doing, Harry? You’re not going back in?”

  “It is a verz! Follow it, Harry, it’s a verz.”

  The man on the landing and his girlfriend started down the stairs. “I’m not following no dog. C’mon, Gail.”

  I was already moving, but had to ask over my shoulder. “What’s a verz?”

  The Sultan and Djebeli were close behind. “A guardian. A guide.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It speaks with its eyes. Hurry!”

  Whether Big Top was a verz or not, I knew he was full of magic. I’d seen it before. That’s why I asked for his help. He was the shaman’s dog. I’ll tell you about it later.

  As the door swung shut, there was a thunderous boom from somewhere immediately above. Big Top trotted blithely down the hall followed by four not-blithe people.

  Everything was chaos—a sofa lay split almost in half out in the corridor, a chandelier scattered in hundreds of diamonds and glittery slivers over the brown couch and floor. The Sultan yelped. I remembered his bare feet.

  Big Top took a left. Incredibly, rock music started playing nearby. A song called “Sundays in the Sky” that was too familiar—a hit I’d heard so often that I wanted to wring its neck. But here in the middle of disaster, it sounded wonderful and reassuring—an angel’s voice singing, hold on, you will get through this.

  Then there was another body—a child’s. Black and green and pink sweatshirt. United Colors of Benetton. Water sprayed down one of the halls, steam shot furiously from behind a door on another. Big Top went fast, then slow, never looking one way or the other. No uncertainty. There was also no time to think if we should be d
oing this: We needed a verz to get us out of there and onto the street.

  Like being slapped very hard and in shocked, frozen silence taking moments to realize what’s happened, the world outside finally began to howl its disbelief and pain. First the sound of what must have been an air-raid siren calling its all clear. Then the smaller, insect-shrill cries of moving sirens: ambulances, fire trucks, police cars. Even six stories up in the hotel, their wavering wails came from every direction.

  On the fourth floor Big Top led us into a room with its door ajar. Inside, everything was in perfect order except the doors to the balcony, which were both open. Curtains flapped wildly in and out of the room.

  The dog went to these doors and stood by them, tail wagging. Why there? Why had he stopped?

  The Sultan went over and hesitantly walked out onto the balcony.

  “There is a tree here! We can climb down on it. It is very big!”

  “Why? Why not use the stairs?”

  Djebeli pointed at Big Top. “The verz. He knows something we don’t. Come.”

  Outside, the branches of our lifesaver tree waved cheerfully. A moment later they were gone with a crash. The Sultan jumped back, shouting in Arabic. The dog started barking.

  “Fuck it—I think we just lost our way out of here.” Fanny turned and started for the door.

  Big Top, who was normally sweet on Fanny Neville, ran from the balcony and, blocking the door, started snarling and snapping at her. He looked vicious, prehistoric.

  “Big, get out of here!”

  “A helicopter!”

  The whack-whack of a rotor came up louder and louder, drowning out even the dog. What more could happen?

  Djebeli ran to the balcony, saw whatever it was, and yelled, “It’s Khaled! We’re saved!”

  You forget titles and who you’re suffering with in the middle of an earthquake. Luckily in our case it was a Sultan—and Sultans have money and power and loving subjects. They also have devoted minions who go looking for them in helicopters when they’re in trouble.

  Khaled swooped down the side of the Westwood Muse Hotel in a gold-and-black chopper that looked like a high-tech bug from heaven. I later learned the Sultan himself was a professional helicopter pilot and always had one on call wherever he went. The first thing I saw of this one was the garish seal of Saru on its weaving tail.

  The cockpit dipped into view and a pilot with sunglasses and a million-dollar smile waved gayly at us.

  “How come he’s so happy?”

  The Sultan waved back. “He is always happy when there’s trouble. Stand back—he is going to shoot.”

  I looked out the door and the guy was aiming some kind of bizarre-looking rifle at us. Over the “wopping” of the blades there was a bang and something shot through the balcony doors: a beautiful thick rope. His Majesty, the Sultan of Saru, grabbed it and insisted Fanny and I go out first. I didn’t argue.

  When I was fifteen and about as full of shit as one could be, my father shipped me off to an Outward Bound survival school for a few weeks one summer to humble me a little. We climbed mountains, fought forest fires, once even rescued a woman who’d fallen into a glacial crevasse. It was a tough, interesting experience that gave me some important perspective. But what’s remained most has been the banal realization you can never really say you know another until you’ve seen them under fire. One fat guy there was everyone’s friend in base camp, but poisoned down into a cowardly, selfish, dangerous SOB when we were hanging off the side of an obsidian cliff or walking through a forest of burning treetops.

  The converse of that is how remarkably the Sultan behaved the day of the earthquake. On the ground again, he sent Khaled off in the helicopter to help wherever he could. And after finding a pair of shoes, the ruler of one and a half million people joined diggers outside the hotel trying to save those trapped beneath rubble. We did this too, of course, but he not only jumped right in, he jumped-right-in: When a hole of any size was opened, he was the first to go in burrowing for life below. Time and again I’d hear a shout and, looking up, see only the bright pants of his ski suit leaping into a pile of smoking rock as if it were something soft.

  Hours later, when we had a chance to sit down and eat some Red Cross sandwiches, I noticed that his borrowed shoes—a pair of white canvas sneakers—were blood red almost to their tops. I nudged Fanny and pointed at them. She nodded and said in a quiet, loving murmur, “He’s been working the whole time with those cut-up feet. The man is my hero.” Which summed it up perfectly.

  He saw us looking at those poor feet and, grinning sheepishly, held one up for our inspection. “Next time I will wear some shoes to the earthquake, huh?”

  “We were just saying how impressed we are by what you did today.”

  He shrugged and slowly unwrapped a piece of chewing gum I offered him.

  “The only thing we can do is try to give life back some of the justice it loses sometimes. Is trying to save people’s lives right? I don’t know. All I can say is our intentions are good. I read about a man who said, ‘God’s memory is failing and that’s why there are so many tragedies and terrible things like this today happening in life: God doesn’t remember the justice or goodness He gave the world in the beginning. So it’s Man’s job to try and put it back.’” He put the gum in his mouth, but took it out again and pointed it at us. “I do not agree with this. It’s a fool’s line. But I liked the idea about putting justice back into life. It’s like our lives are dolls that have gotten rips in them and have lost some of their …” He snapped his fingers, looking for the right word. “ … their …”

  “Stuffing?”

  “Yes, ‘stuffing.’ God gave us these dolls in the beginning, but if they begin to lose their stuffing, we must find the right materials to fill them again. Is this Juicy Fruit? Aah! I like Juicy Fruit gum—it’s so sweet.”

  “But we didn’t make earthquakes! Auschwitz, okay, but what did man have to do with what happened today?”

  “Now you’re talking with a monkey’s tongue, Fanny. Man is responsible for everything. Why do you think we control the planet? Why do all the other animals worship us? Everything in life is our work—Auschwitz, earthquakes. Good things too! We just do not want to recognize and accept the fact it is all our doing.

  “Listen, I will tell you a funny story. A woman I know went into a restaurant here where you get the food yourself. She got her meal and put it down on the table but forgot to buy a drink, so she took some coins and left her tray to get one. When she returned, a very fat black man was sitting at her table eating her meal! Sitting there with a smile on his face, eating her food!

  “Now she sits down very angry, pulls her tray back across the table and starts eating her food. But this crazy man will not stop. Still smiling, he reaches over and takes her soup. Then he takes the salad! She is driven so crazy by this, she must suddenly go to the bathroom badly.

  “When she comes back from the bathroom, thank God the man is gone, but so is her tray of food and handbag too! Now he’s stolen her money! She runs to the cashier and says, ‘Did you see the big black man go? He ate my lunch and stole my bag!’ The cashier says, ‘We’ll call the police. Where were you sitting?’ ‘Right over there!’ the woman responds. She turns around and points to her table. Only what she sees makes her scream: One table in front of where she was sitting with this bad black man is a tray full of food and her handbag on the seat.”

  “Huh?”

  Hooting with laughter, Fanny turned to me and said, “The woman sat at the wrong table! She ate the black guy’s lunch, not vice versa.”

  “And he let her! He was very friendly and smiled the whole time she was stealing his food.

  “This woman acts like Mankind, Fanny: He always wants to blame himself on others. That’s why there is a devil. We created him because he is convenient. And then sometimes when we really have no one else, we put the fault on God. But God is like this black man—He smiles at us when we eat His lunch, but doesn’t stop us fro
m doing it.”

  HOW CLAIRE STANSFIELD COULD eat! Hard to believe looking at her in the hospital, barely able to take a straw in her swollen, ripped mouth.

  Since this is my story, I get to digress one last time and bring in this last major cast member. It won’t take long—I’ll just tell about the first time we met, six months before the earthquake.

  She was the friend of a friend who gave me her number and said we’d like each other. Over the phone she sounded strong and calm. She had a high reedy voice; sometimes she lisped a word. It was Sunday afternoon. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “Only watching the rain on the window.” Rainy days made her feel like a little girl again.

  “How come? Listen, Claire, what are you doing? I mean right now? Would you like to go out?”

  “Of course.”

  Of course! Not “Wellll, I don’t know” or “Let me check my Filofax” or some other coy syrup you’d have to stir and stir until it dissolved into “all right.” Of course. Superb.

  We met at Café Bunny because rain was still blitzing down and the place was halfway between our apartments. We’d recognize each other because I’d been told she had a great head and looked like a Burne-Jones painting. As you can tell, I love women’s heads. Fanny has a great one, even in an earthquake. Claire too. But she said if I missed her head, she was wearing a sweatshirt that said “Big Stuff” on it—the name of her design store. Before hanging up, she also said she was nervous about meeting Harry Radcliffe. I said I was nervous about meeting a great head.

  “Hi, Harry? Will you think I’m awful if I order lunch right away? I haven’t eaten all day.” Hers was a great head but rather than being beautiful, what I liked most was she had a true face: square chin, long straight mouth, green eyes as direct and no-nonsense as a bridge.

  We started off talking about our mutual friend, Claire’s store, my buildings. She ordered Wiener schnitzel and a stein of beer. She cut giant golden pieces that looked like breaded continents. Despite chewing each one slowly, the whole thing was gone before I’d finished my coffee and cheesecake.