Outside the Dog Museum

by Carroll, Jonathan

  “Hah! The important things in life are free. Look at love! Do you pay for love?”

  “No, but after getting it, I’ve had to ‘pay’ a hell of a lot to keep it. Wait till you’ve been around Fanny Neville a while. You’ll see exactly what I mean.”

  “I think it is only fair to tell you, Radcliffe. I have asked Fanny to marry me.” New Sultan or not, he looked at me with a young man’s doubt and insecurity.

  I suppose I should’ve felt shocked or provoked, but the image of the viper-tongued Ms. Neville as spouse to the head of state of a desert kingdom was so zany that I bit back a smile instead of calling for a sword and challenging him to a duel. “What did Fanny say?”

  He straightened his shoulders and stuck out his chin. “That she would think about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she said yes.”

  “How come you want to marry her? She’s got the temper of a badger. Plus isn’t it a little soon to be proposing?”

  “No. I think life with her would be generous and peaceful. I know she is partly in love with you, but I’m willing to accept that for now. People change. And gradually she’ll see I’m better for her than you. She even said herself the only reason you want people around is to keep you busy till you get back to work on your buildings. She thinks the only thing you can love is your work.”

  “Fanny said that?”

  “More than once.” He said it simply and with the dignity of truth. He could have gloated or rubbed my nose in it, but didn’t. I appreciated that. Fanny and I had fought so much and she’d said many astute things, but coming from this man who loved and wanted her so much, the words did far more damage than she’d ever managed in our tussles.

  “Listen, what if instead of money, I offered you something better, something that will amaze you?”

  Still smarting from his Fanny news, I caught only a part of what he said and none of it registered. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You already have a great deal of money. What if, instead of this fee for your work, I paid you in magic?” One bird sang alone somewhere near. The sun was growing insistent above us and this man had just made a real offer—no tease or trick in his voice. There are moments in life of such importance that it feels like the day, your heart, your fate all suddenly stop and stand still, awed by what’s happening or what’s about to.

  “I’m listening. Go on.”

  “When I was young, they taught me certain things a Sultan of Saru might need when he is ruling. My father and all of the previous Sultans knew them. One of these things I will show you now will prove this magic I mentioned is possible. But don’t think I do it to show off! That’s one of the first lessons you learn when they start to teach you these powers: If you ever use them in a wrong or selfish way to get something for yourself in life, then you are fucked. I, for example, would love to use what I know to win Fanny, but that is out of the question. Too bad for me. Point out what kind of car you like, Radcliffe.” He gestured around with out-flung arms, as if he were one of those lovably rabid salesmen on television in L.A. who, wearing cowboy hats or riding giant turtles, try to get you to “come on down” to their used car lots.

  Mercedeses, Lincolns, the Saru-biquitous Range Rovers, all stood around in shiny splendor. I was keen to see what he was going to do, so I scanned the ranks like a real prospective buyer. Sticking out like a gaudy bum from all of that other swanky iron was a lollipop-green Lada, a Russian automobile that looks and drives like a telephone booth on wheels.

  I pointed to it. “How about the Lada?”

  Hassan looked at the green car with his head slightly tilted, as if listening to secret inner voices. Then he gave the smallest nod and walked to it through the other cars.

  As if ashamed, or being shunned for its ugliness and cheapness by the more formidable machines, the Lada stood apart from the others at the place where the gravel bordered the lawn.

  He put his hand on the roof and patted it. “This is my car, but that’s all right. It is a real car—they do not cost much, they’re well built, and when you ride you feel the whole road. I like that.”

  “I would’ve thought you’d own one of these big boys—” I remembered the pictures of him in trendy magazines.

  “No, no. To father’s despair, I always liked Ladas. My father …” He said nothing else for a time, only rested his hands on the green roof and sighed.

  “My father loved beautiful things. He believed in them, if I can say it that way. It was very hard for him to hold himself in and not buy more.” Looking first inside the car and then at me, Hassan walked around the side. While speaking, he slowly continued to circle. One time, two, three … I thought at first he was checking for something—dents on the outside or whatever—but after the third or fourth go-round my eyes began to narrow.

  “When you are raised with money in every pocket, and people are down on their knees to you from the day you are born, you have a hard time staying human. My father did a very good job of being a great ruler, but he learned a taste early for beautiful things. I am different because I was sent away to a private school from a very early age.” Round and round and round. My eyes narrowed more and watched him oh so closely. Round and round. What-was-he-doing?

  “At this school I grew up with many American kids who were spoiled, but spoiled in the way they had so much money they could afford the luxury of hating the school and their parents and everything they came from. We all wore lumberjack shirts and smoked dope when we could get it and said ‘fuck the rich.’ We really didn’t mean that, but we said it and it gave us a little perspective about our lives. These kids knew where I came from and who I was, but to the son of the president of United States Steel or Ford, a prince is only amusing. It was a good experience because I was not used to being treated like an equal, but it was not what my father expected. He wanted me to learn perfect English and Western economics there, which I did, but I also learned Pink Floyd and how to wear jeans with holes in the ass.”

  The Lada had begun to shrink.

  I’d been listening carefully to him and thus not registering what was going on right in front of me. His tale of the poor little rich boy away at private school suckered me into looking away while the magician started to work. But when I realized, it took only seconds to know this man wasn’t, couldn’t be, working an illusion or ruse: He was shrinking a full-size automobile by walking around it. No abracadabra, no zim-zams, only circles round and round a one-ton green Russian box, and every one made it smaller.

  “What are you doing, Hassan?”

  He kept moving. It kept shrinking. “Giving you a choice, Mr. Famous Architect. Showing you what is possible and giving you a choice.”

  It was down to the size of a VW Bug. He kept talking. I was watching but not listening. What car’s smaller than a VW? That size. Smaller. Then it was no longer … . No adult could get into something that size, even if they bent like a pocket knife. Maybe a child. Yes, a child might’ve gotten in. But another circle and too late—too small even for a child. A dog could get in this time. A small dog.

  Hassan kept walking, talking quietly. The car was now down to the size of a couch. Round once more. Too small to sit on. A rug. Round and round. A radio. A loaf of bread. Where it stops nobody knows. The two of us were still alone out there. The bird still sang. The expression on Hassan’s face had turned from calm to naughty, as if he had something more up his sleeve and was about to show it.

  “What do you think, Radcliffe?” He stopped when it was the size of three or four cigarettes laid side to side, a Dinkytoy, a half piece of toast. Its brilliant unnatural green spotted the white gravel like fresh paint. It wasn’t so different in color from the grass. Small enough now to be overlooked in the grass. Easily.

  Hassan bent down and, picking it up, held it out for me to see. When I reached for it, tentatively, he snatched it back and shook his head.

  “Watch.” He put it in his mouth whole, chewed not very long, swallowed. Gone.

  Thank God I�
��d been around Venasque enough to see plenty of astounding things. Otherwise I’d have obeyed my guts at that moment and started running.

  “That didn’t happen. You didn’t eat your car. You just ate your car!”

  “I ate my car, Mr. Radcliffe. Right in front of you.”

  “You ate your car. It was that big and then it was this big and then you ate it! I saw. I saw you do it.” I began to hyperventilate. The inside of my head grew light and pink and full of dizzy. I couldn’t stop talking. Venasque said never doubt miracles—only your own reaction to them.

  “This is a very fucking seriously scary situation, Your Highness. You just shrunk a big fucking car and ATE it! I mean, that is not what I wanted to see today, okay? So will you pretty pretty pretty please tell me what you’re doing so my head doesn’t detach in the next minute? Pretty please? I want to get out of this country. I really want to get out—”

  “Shoosh. Shoosh. Calm. Everything is all right. I only did that so you know and can believe me. I am now going to give you the choice.” He raised his left arm out to the side. “Money here.” Right arm out, other direction. “Magic here. I will pay you with whatever you choose.”

  “What magic? What are you talking about?”

  His elbows came in close to his sides, both hands pointed at me like a cowboy holding two guns. “It’s simple: I’ll give you the money you asked for, or I’ll give you one wish and guarantee that it’ll come true. Nothing else as payment—only one wish, but for whatever you want.”

  “You can do that?”

  “You saw what I can do. Yes, I have that power.”

  “Why didn’t your father use it to save himself?”

  “Because it is not allowed. I told you. We can use it only to help Saru. If you build the museum, you are helping the country.”

  My mouth was terribly dry. I kept trying to lick my lips but without any luck. I looked at the sun. I looked at Hassan. His hands dropped to his sides and he shrugged. “Either is yours if you choose to do it.”

  I licked my lips with a tongue like pumice. “Promise on the honor of your father.”

  He put up his right hand and closed his eyes. “I promise on the honor of my father that I can do this.”

  “I’ll also want an ironclad contract that says if you can’t, you pay cash.”

  “Agreed.”

  Venasque, my life, the breakdown, work—all crossed my mind like the vein network seen in an eye when, looking into a light, you catch a certain angle. Everything interconnected, everything of a piece.

  “I’ll do it for two wishes.”

  He shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “But I’d use the first one for someone else. It wouldn’t be for me. That’s fair. One for me and the other for another.”

  “Who is this other, Fanny?”

  “No, someone else.”

  “Claire Stansfield?”

  “You know about her?”

  “Fanny tells me everything,” he said proudly. “You are disgracing yourself, bargaining like we are in the market! I am not selling eggplants or rugs. I will not invite you into my shop for a glass of mint tea while we discuss terms. I offer you the miraculous, Harry Radcliffe. One wish. If you’re a good man, you’ll accept and give it to her. Help your friend with it.”

  “Why give me this choice, Hassan? Why not pay money? You can afford it. Why even offer a wish?”

  “Because I promised my father before he died. It was his idea. He thought you were a good man and deserved the chance to be given the choice. I argued against it but he prevailed. He was my father and I honor his wishes.”

  “He really liked me, didn’t he?”

  I said it to bait him, but to my surprise he answered solemnly, “He liked you very much. He thought you had a very talented back of your head.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It is an old belief in Saru. We say there are two men inside each of us, except they are not aware of the fact they share the same space. One looks in one direction, one the other.”

  “You mean like the Janus figure?”

  “No, as far as I understand, Janus is one man alone looking both forward and backward over his life and taking it all into consideration. Here they say the point of life is getting the two ‘sides’ of your head, the men inside, to realize they are there and that it would be much more effective if they worked together. We believe that’s why people behave so strangely—sometimes the man in front decides, sometimes he sleeps and the man in back decides. The man in the front of your head is logical and pragmatic, the one at the back is a dreamer, an artist. People say here, ‘A good front,’ or ‘Radcliffe has a very talented back of the head.’ It’s a quick way to describe a person’s character.”

  “Sounds like watered-down Freud to me.”

  “It’s not so different, except they were saying it here a thousand years before Sigmund Freud.”

  “Touché. I’ll do it.”

  “You don’t want more time to decide?”

  “I’ve decided. How do we do this?”

  “Say, ‘I accept the wish and will do what I can.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “Only that.”

  “Sounds a little skimpy for this deal. You give me a cosmic wish, I give you a billion-dollar building, and that’s all I have to say?”

  “It’s a deal between God, you and Saru. He does not need a thirty-page contract.”

  “Or a notary public, huh? One last thing—what if my wish was for you to die, Hassan? What would happen then?”

  “Nothing. I am protected for now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He wasn’t. The flash across his eyes said he wasn’t sure of anything.

  “Is that your wish? That I die?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to want you dead, Sultan. ‘I accept the wish and will do what I can.’”

  Nothing happened. The sky didn’t crack, no oceans roared. The only thing I felt was some sweat rolling slowly down my back. “What happens now?”

  He put out his hand and we shook, hands tightly gripped; looking each other in the eye. “Now you can make your wish. Or whenever you like. It will happen.”

  Still shaking, I looked down at our hands and thought how appropriate—hands. I said to Hassan and Whomever Else was in on this, “I wish that Claire Stansfield is given back her hand.”

  “Say it again, Radcliffe. Say it for yourself this time.”

  “I wish Claire Stansfield is given back her hand.”

  WE LANDED IN VIENNA about nine in the evening. I’d insisted on a commercial flight from Saru rather than return on the royal jet, mostly because I was tired of being surrounded by people I had to talk to. More than anything else, I wanted to be alone to let my brain work in silence. Too much had gone on in the last days without a chance to be properly processed and considered. It was as if my mind was a file room where recently, instead of putting things in their proper places, people had simply opened the door, thrown papers on the floor and walked out again. I may be a genius and have a very talented back of the head, but my mind works slowly and cautiously. It is an old man, looking at ideas under a magnifying glass and bright light, turning them every which way before making any decisions.

  On the flight back I sat in first class next to a man who kept telling me in happy bad English his name was Rabbit Hat when translated from German. Finally I told Mr. Hasenhüttl I heard him the first six times and didn’t care what his name meant.

  Either he understood or caught the homicidal tone of my voice, which fortunately sent him back to his Saru Air magazine. Besides his unfortunate name and manner, Rabbit Hat also had the bad habit, or good revenge, of sucking his teeth with foul vigor. Just when you thought or hoped he’d gotten that poppy seed or piece of meat out and blessed silence returned, he went back to work in there with short wisps and whistles and hard sucks that kept me from doing anything, other than devising ways to torture and kill him. Luckily he got up at one
point and spent what I guess was a long time in the bathroom because when he returned, I’d slipped into the sweetest little cat nap. Soon, however, dinner was served and this sucking monster, this Austrian from hell, decided I needed to be awakened for it. Tap Tap Tap on the arm. “Hello?” Tap Tap Tap. “Hello? Time to eat, Hello, you!” Tap—

  “Stop that!” I jerked out of sleep like he’d stung me.

  Pouting, he pointed at the table in front of me. It was down and on it sat a tray with a chicken leg hidden by a slice of pineapple topped by a zip of whipped cream, fat golden pellets of potato too geometric to be healthy, and other edibles that could only cause despair.

  My gaze stopped on a fork and the idea of stabbing my neighbor in the head with it came and went. Instead I closed my eyes and prepared for the drop back into sleep.

  Tap Tap Tap.

  “I don’t want dinner. Leave me alone, please.”

  Tap Tap—I grabbed his fingers before the third tap and held them. “Don’t touch me again. Don’t talk to me. Don’t suck your teeth.” I rang for the stewardess. She came quickly, having been warned who I was by the Sultan’s people.

  “Miss, this man is annoying me. I want you to find me another seat immediately.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but there are no free seats in first class.”

  “Then I’ll move back to tourist. Just get me another seat now.”

  After she scurried off, Hasenhiittl said quietly in perfect, unaccented English, “Gee whiz, Radcliffe, I’d’ve thought you were tougher than that. You sounded like a faggot hair dresser. ‘Just get me another seat now.’” He imitated a swishy gay’s whining voice.