Doctor Rat

by William Kotzwinkle

  Naturally we look among us for leaders, for those dogs who might be able to interpret the subtleties of the scent and communicate more of it to us. And from the forest above the city, the wild dogs appear.

  “Deceitful dog!”

  We have several such dogs in the laboratory, stray mutts who are attempting to inflame our youth with revolutionary material. Naturally, we cut the dogs’ vocal cords as soon as they enter the lab, but it’s not enough, for as I’m sure you are aware, we animals have wordless communication, based on sensory impulses more subtle than language.

  I’ve suggested to the Learned Professor time and again that we rats be given our own separate wing, but no. All the animals are here in one enormous room and we may have to pay dearly for it. Our current heatstroke study is utilizing a particularly rebellious mongrel dog, brought in from some alleyway, and he’s filled with vicious propaganda. They have him chained to a treadmill inside a heated glass cage. He runs here, day in and day out, toward his death, which can come none too soon for me. I wish he’d drop dead from heat prostration this very moment, so I wouldn’t have to listen to his twaddle.

  He goes on night and day, sending us his inflammatory images. He’s mute, but he’s skillfully using the intuitive wavelength for his dastardly messages. I’m sure you can feel them in the air. His imagery is extremely fine and suggestive. A rat will be lying here, making a real contribution to science by having his trachea severed, and suddenly he’ll be completely plugged into a revolutionary image. His whole body will be suffused with the feeling of freedom. Such feelings cannot be permitted, as you know.

  “Good afternoon, Learned Professor!” Here comes the Learned Pro again, but of course he doesn’t acknowledge my greeting, for his intuitive wavelength is encrusted. It’s a great pity because somehow I’ve got to get across to him the fact that he’s got dangerous revolutionaries in his lab.

  Oh my, here comes his lovely graduate assistant, her long blond hair curling softly around her shoulders. I’d certainly consider a copulation plug with her. Her ears would quiver as I stroked her on the neck, and after applying digital stimulation to her pelvis, you’d see a sudden curvature in her back, as she surrendered to my learned copulation-response test. Her superficial genitalia would appear in their characteristically blue color, matching her eyes, and she’d run around the wheel several times excitedly, then look at me apprehensively knowing that I, a vigorous white male, would attempt copulation seventy times in twenty minutes, with one or two ejaculations, ha ha!

  I do hope I’ve got that right. Having been castrated at birth, I have no real firsthand knowledge of the matter. Naturally I keep my eyes and ears open here in the lab and I make careful field observations whenever a female begins stretching and bracing nervously. This blonde alongside the learned Professor is exhibiting every sign of entering her cycle of maximum sexual receptivity. She makes me feel dizzy, makes me start running around my turntable, round and round. It’s a 12-inch metal disc (for more, see my learned paper, “Rats on the Wheel,” Psy. Journ., 1963). I’ve really got it clicking now. The cyclometer says I’ve already done fifteen revolutions!

  That’s enough to keep me in shape for a while. Now I must continue my rounds. Being a Learned Mad Professor, I’ve been given complete run of the maze table, which affords me points of contact with nearly every other section of the lab.

  “Doctor Rat, I feel very strange.”

  “Certainly you do. Aren’t you the rat who’s being constantly crammed with wholly unsuitable food?”

  “Yes, Doctor Rat, but this has nothing to do with that.”

  “What week of the diet are you in?”

  “My fourth.”

  He has two weeks to go and then death will ensue, according to schedule. “I wouldn’t worry about the way you feel, son. It’s probably just the onset of keratinization of the corneal epithelium. You can’t see straight is all.”

  “Doctor Rat, it’s not a physical problem.”

  “They’ve had you in the maze, have they? Driven you slightly whacky, I imagine. Don’t let it bother you. Once you go completely mad, you’ll qualify for a degree in psychology.”

  “Doctor, it’s not a mental problem either.”

  “Not physical and not mental? My boy, what else is there?”

  “My spirit.”

  “Calcified kidneys and brittle bones, that’s all that’s troubling you, with maybe a little hyperirritability.”

  “No, Doctor, it’s the very deepest part of me that I’m talking about.”

  “You mean deeper than a number eight French rubber catheter tube with a depressed eye can go?”

  “Deeper, much deeper.”

  “Are you trying to tell me, a Learned Mad Doctor, that there is some part of the rat as yet unknown to man?”

  “My light, Doctor, the light inside me…”

  “…introduced through the rectum…”

  “I saw a fountain of light inside me. Doctor, we come from that fountain.”

  “We come from the copulation plug, my lad. How old are you?” It’s unfortunate that we don’t have better sex education here in the laboratory. This is what comes of inserting glass rods into the vaginas of virgins.

  “I’m ageless, Doctor, and timeless.”

  The poor overstuffed rat looks at me with such a gleam in his eyes that I’m certain he’s being injected with small quantities of sodium amytal. There he goes, hobbling away to talk with the other rats, and spread his doctrine. I haven’t got time for such things. Death is freedom, that’s the all-inclusive doctrine.

  The wild dogs, then, are our leaders. They say they’ve been on the scent for years, and it has led them here, to this great gathering of dogs. Now we’ll move together, and move we do, out of the empty lot at the edge of town and into the forest, the wild dogs in the lead. Here they show their clear supremacy, going through the brush with paws that are swift and sure. They have the scent in their noses, and so do we. There are dogs on all sides, yapping through the trees and bushes.

  Several old dogs are in our midst, their bellies fat and their eyes weak. Nonetheless they hold firm to the general movement. Those who abandon the march do so because the other scent—the scent of home—proves too strong for them.

  I smell it, that old temptation. All of us, except the wild dogs, have to smell it because it’s very strong, compounded of love, longing, and easy meals. We can smell it in the wind, we can smell it on the ground, we can smell it all around us and we run from it, knowing its danger. There are many heavy hearts though, and mine is one of them, for my masters are good and kind, thoughtful and gentle…

  But through the forest we plunge, putting the past behind us. We drink at little woodland streams, we sever our ties. And the stray dogs, who know the woods so well, race about us, inspiring us with their calls.

  “Come on, dogs, come on!” they cry, and it’s a wonderful, thrilling cry. The wild dogs are saturated with the mysterious scent, and inflamed by it—not mad, but rapturous, and their rapture is contagious. We run on, leaving love behind us.

  In its place is a feeling of solidarity such as I forgot existed: to be with one’s own, to follow one’s own law, to hear the sound of one tongue speaking in the wind, with sunlight coming through the leaves, lighting the forest floor. I see a bright hallway of trees ahead of me, endless and beautiful. Out here, racing toward the sunset, my heart is my own and I’m free!

  “Where are we bound for?” cry some of the doubtful dogs, their old homes still claiming them by a long leash.

  “Just follow your nose, brother!” cries a laughing wild one, and away he leaps, with a fantastic spring in his legs. He’s one of the intoxicated, so deep in the scent he seems to be flying along. The sight of his tail disappearing down the golden hallway sets me racing still faster, to catch him, to run with him at the very head of the pack. I exert myself to the fullest, enjoying my run. Without human eyes upon me, I’m unself-conscious. I’m myself, a dog in motion, howling and happy. />
  We follow that hallway of gold until it turns crimson, and still we run toward the setting sun. Now is the most beautiful running, with all figures blending into one, with all dogs looking the same, one mood upon us all. Where have I done this before? It seems so familiar—yet it’s unlike anything I can remember from puppyhood on. But somewhere, sometime—in dreams, perhaps—I’ve run like this with my brothers, in the twilight of the day.

  Feelings so pure and delicate assail my senses I can’t restrain my barking. I yap, I howl, call to them all, saying, “Do you remember, do you remember?”

  And “Yes!” they answer. “Yes, we remember!”

  “What do you remember?”

  “This, this!” they cry, as we run, down the wooded hillside, into the crimson valley, an open sky above our head.

  We decide upon the valley as our lodging for the night. It’s near water, and the sun is gone. We lie down and one by one the dogs at the rear of our run come into the valley and join us.

  Exhausted, we speak little, wanting just to lie quiet for a while, as the stars slowly appear. Some of us bathe in the water, and some are still chasing around the edge of the pack exuberantly, but most of us lie still, tongues hanging out. The leaders take the center and form a single powerful unit, which we know must represent our will. And at the outer edge, too, there are strong watchers, seated and alert.

  As I lie in the stillness, listening to the little brook beside me, the scent seems to be part of me. At the same time I know it’s scattered like mist all around us. But that my own body is part of its chemistry, I can’t deny.

  “Where are we bound for?” ask some of the dogs again.

  “Lie still, brothers,” say the dogs of the center.

  “What a smell, what a smell,” says one old dog, limping out of the shadows. His hair is long and filled with burrs, and his eyes are watery. But he seems not to notice the bad shape he’s in, so rapt is he in the wonder of the smell. “Always this smell,” he says, lying down with the wild dogs. We see that he’s forgotten his body, with all its old-dog woes. He’s the first one to sleep and we see him twitch and run in his dreams, as if he were young again. He whimpers in the night, and he roars and when we wake in the morning he’s dead and we eat him.

  “Doctor Rat, Doctor Rat…”

  A young female calling to me from her cage. She needs my special counseling, as she’s all in a tizzy about the bandages on her belly. “Yes, my dear, are your bandages too tight?”

  “They cut a hole in my stomach!”

  “Yes, of course. It’s so that they’ll be able to insert a plastic window there in order to watch your embryonic ratlings develop.”

  “I hate it! I’ll gnaw it off! I’ll bite through the bandages!”

  “Please, my dear, don’t be hysterical.” I must say she’s not showing the scientific attitude at all. We’ve got to have that window there, so that we can insert a thin hair through it and tickle the little ratlings as they grow inside her. It’s part of a new program, for which I’m preparing extensive notes. A great deal can be learned by tickling an embryo with a hair, but naturally only the most advanced graduate students are qualified for such tickling. How, then, can we expect this female rat to have any appreciation of the fine points of the Stomach-window Program? Nonetheless, it is my duty to make her more receptive to the learned hair.

  “Please don’t let them hurt me, please…”

  I think a little song might cheer her up:

  “Oh scaly skin and dandruff

  with hemorrhagic sores,

  come and look inside us,

  they’ve provided us with doors!”

  I must move along here to the next cage, where a special magnesium diet has caused fatal clonic convulsions:

  “Oh loss of hair and nervousness,

  diarrhea too,

  goiter and spasticity

  combined with Asian flu!”

  “Doctor Rat, I can no longer eat!”

  “Aren’t you the lad whose teeth have been trained to grow into a complete circle, piercing the roof of the mouth?”

  “A nightmare, Doctor Rat. My mouth’s a nightmare.”

  “We’re watching you with keen interest, my boy. There’s a chance the teeth may actually grow right up and pierce your brain. Come along and sing with me! Sing:

  Irregular ovulation and

  destruction of the thymus

  chronic lymphedema and

  amputation of the penis!”

  Excuse me, the Learned Professor has picked me up and is tying a string around my upper incisors at the moment. I am now permitted to hang by my teeth in the air as part of a new Insight Therapy Program—what fun, swinging back and forth here.

  “Fight them, Doctor Rat! Bite them!”

  A young radical rat shouting from his cage. Thus has our youth been corrupted by that goddamn blabber-mouth dog with his intuition-pictures. A rat may be waiting for decapitation, and suddenly he will see an intuitive play of pictures in his brain, sent there by this infernal dog on the treadmill. The rat will seem to participate in the scene, running with the wild dogs. The high intelligence of the dogs makes them very potent broadcasters, and being here under stress conditions adds power to their wavelength. Our lab is buzzing with revolutionary feelings. “You cock-sucking cur, how dare you sow dissent among these happy rats!”

  The revolutionary mutt looks at me with red and squinting eyes. You perceived the subtlety of his broadcast, didn’t you, with his sly insinuations of some sort of freedom to be gained by following a peculiar scent? But I know the truth and I’m shouting it to all: “The scent is five percent formaline, Brother Rats, and the only freedom you’ll ever have is death! Death is freedom, that’s the slogan!”

  “Hurray for Doctor Rat!”

  “You tell ’em, Doc.”

  “Thank you, friends and fellow supporters, thank you for your confidence. As you know, the rat is man’s best friend. You’ve seen the advertisements in Modern Psychology Magazine: “The Rat Is Our Friend.” Are we going to allow this wonderful friendship to go down the drain along with the cerebrospinal fluid? A rat must give his all! That’s our purpose, that’s why we’re here on earth!”

  My throat is certainly getting inflamed from all this. But I can’t allow seventy-five years of laboratory experimentation to be pushed aside by a few revolutionary voices. This dog is in a powerful position, however, running here in our midst, tongue hanging out, legs flopping as the treadmill turns him, on and on. I’ve told the Learned Professor to jack up the heat in the dog’s cage, so we can be finished with him soon. But the Learned Pro turns a deaf ear toward everything I say.

  In the meantime, the dog has made numerous converts to his revolutionary cause. The whole Hemorrhagic Sore Cage has gone over to him. And I taught those ungrateful rats how to sing! What betrayal!

  “Brother Rats, how can you be so easily swayed by this dirty dog? Look there, to your left. Look at the recipient rat on the surgical table. He’s having a hole bored in his head. Listen to him screaming. The fresh tumor is being plunged into his brain tissue. In two or three weeks he’ll be groveling around, the tumor increasing, obstructing all his bodily movements. That’s reality, foolish rats. That’s scientific reality, not a lot of stupid doggie drivel.”

  “Ah, go chase your tail, Doc. You’re washed up around here!”

  Those rats need to be shocked a few times down Maze Alleys A and D. They’ve lost all respect for my office. But I’m happy to see one of those rowdy rebel leaders being led to the cardiac puncture table. He’s struggling, his teeth showing white and vicious.

  “Fellow rat, now that your supreme scientific moment has come, don’t you want to have a change of heart? Give your all to science happily. Set an example for these other young rats.”

  Several revolutionaries quickly move in front of me. “Don’t say another word, Rat. Don’t mock him in his agony.”

  “Mocking? Who’s mocking? I’m here to eulogize the fellow, to write h
im up in glowing terms in the Newsletter. If you’ll permit me to pass…”

  The rebels block the way. The Learned Professor is feeling the rat’s chest for the point of maximum palpitation. There, he’s got it now, his thumb and forefinger on the fourth, fifth, and sixth ribs.

  Now comes the needle, 26-gauge, half an inch long. The plunger is grasped and the needle is pushed slowly into the rat’s heart. The Learned Pro will be withdrawing about 10 cc’s of blood and that should finish this rebel off.

  Good heavens! The blood is squirting right out of the rat’s heart into the Learned Professor’s eye! The Learned Pro is looking around puzzled as the blood drips down his cheek. I certainly won’t be able to use this item in my Newsletter.

  Everywhere around me—little accidents, little problems. It’s the effect of the revolutionary dogs, and I fear it’s going to spread like wildfire.

  My front paws are tied, but my rear legs are free on the treadmill and forced to run, to go nowhere inside a glass cage. My tongue is hanging out, my body weary. The men have heated the glass cage I’m in, so that it seems I’m running beneath the blazing sun, on and on, going nowhere.

  I’ve been on this treadmill all week, and still I’m running, on and on, saliva dripping heavily from my mouth, mixed with bitter bile. The men stand and watch me as I run. I’m caught here, tied and heated, choking with thirst, my body soaked with sweat, my insides churning with pain. Hot like a desert, on and on I run…

  …run…run…run…run…run as the wheel keeps turning, keeps clicking. Bright hot coils surround me on all sides, baking me, my cage an oven.

  Run. Tongue out, dry and cracked. Run. Legs burning, my skin blistering, I retch up my bilious guts.