White Dialogues

by Bennett Sims

  ‘“No respect.”’

  ‘Right. Exactly. Then he says that the woman began tracing in another direction—he’s still holding your palm this whole time, remember—and that she told him here was a second mark, etched into him in ancient China, where he had worked under similar conditions on the Great Wall. Which my dad obviously milks, mugging at you and slapping his thigh with his free hand, like, “Damn!”’

  ‘I’m confused. Are you supposed to know this is a joke?’

  ‘No, he’s telling it like an actual story, like what actually happened to him.’

  ‘So he goes on with the story.’

  ‘Right. True story. The woman started to trace a final line in his hand, he tells you, this one leading down to his wrist—his own finger meanwhile tracing down to your wrist—and she gasped even louder this time. Said she’d never encountered such an eloquent line. In this past life, she told him, he says, he’d been a guard dog, a ferocious cur kept right there in New Orleans, standing watch on some levee job site for the Corps of Engineers. He was tied to a sturdy live oak by a choke chain around his throat and left out all night to bark, scaring off burglars or vandals.’

  ‘A levee, huh.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘“No respect. Even as a dog I’m a plumber.”’

  ‘Basically verbatim.’

  ‘Is that the punchline?’

  ‘Not quite there yet. It turns out he was such a ferocious and terrible guard dog, the palm reader told him, he says—and here he’s like subtly and maybe even subconsciously squeezing your hand—that he would pass each night leaping against the choke chain to bark at passersby, yanking the chain again and again to its full length and gnashing his teeth at the darkness.’

  ‘A regular ol’ Cujo, your dad.’

  ‘It gets worse. Because while burglars knew better than to ever jump the fence, one night a neighborhood kid wandered into the levee site by accident, and the dog—doing what it thought was its duty—actually snapped the chain to chase him down and ripped the kid’s throat to ribbons. The next morning, the palm reader told him, the foreman arrived at the levee site to find the dog loose, wagging his tail and grinning, his muzzle and whiskers still sticky with gore. And when he looked past the dog and saw the boy’s body, he was so outraged—like with guilt and revulsion—that he strung the dog up then and there, hanging him by his own choke chain from one of the oak’s branches, so that that collar became the noose and the necklace that he wore to hell. My dad says he smirked and asked the woman how she could tell so much from one measly line in his palm, and she smiled too, and replied that it wasn’t his palm she’d been looking at—it was the collar of lines around his throat.’

  ‘Spooky.’

  ‘And he tells you that she leaned forward to touch two fingers to his neck—now he’s actually palpating his own thick neck, with his free hand, while still holding on tight and squeezing you with his other hand—and she said it was just as she suspected. That his throat’s deeply rutted lines were a leftover soul impression, engrained in him from this past life’s hanging from the choke chain. And she claimed that she could even feel where the collar had left a ring of scar tissue embedded under the muscle, mystically unhealed and metempsychotically preserved across his various intervening reincarnations. Here, while telling the story, my dad will stop palpating his throat a moment and chuckle. It’s funny, he’ll muse, but he really can feel the so-called scar tissue, right where she said it was. Probably it was just stress knots in the muscle, from work, and as for the cock-and-bull about his canine life, that was obviously an act: there had been no shortage of notorious news stories about guard dogs killing kids, and this was doubtless something she’d scripted to deliver to all her customers.’

  ‘“And yet…”’

  ‘Right: and yet, nevertheless, he says, it was impressive about the neck. At this point he invites you to go ahead and feel, right here, and he thrusts out his throat to you and takes your hand in his and gently guides it to his jugular, letting you run your fingertips over the leathery flesh there, kneading deep to try to feel the stuff yourself, leaning in closer and closer until—’

  ‘I think I see where this is going.’

  ‘Until without warning, when you’re least expecting it, my dad springs forward like a mastiff from his kennel, eyes gone white and his mouth roaring RAR RAR RAR with rabid passion, the spittle flying in your face, gnashing his teeth at you point-blank.’

  ‘Tell me he didn’t do this to Dougall.’

  ‘Well that’s the thing. This was my dad’s favorite joke. Pounced on any opportunity. If someone made an unwitting reference to reincarnation, palmistry, voodoo, or even New Orleans, he’d sidle into the conversation sly as anything and announce, you know, has he got a story about reincarnation, palmistry, voodoo, or New Orleans. My whole life, growing up—at all my parents’ football parties, when the adults were gathered around the coffee table eating chips and dip and drinking beer and laughing—I would keep one eye on my dad. Because no matter what conversation he and the other adults were having, I could tell—I could just tell—that the bastard was sitting there biding his time. Lying in wait and listening for the least mention of reincarnation, palmistry, voodoo, or New Orleans. Assuming he wasn’t insidiously steering the conversation in that direction himself. It could be like watching a cat hunt birds, at times—his grace and patience. It got to where you started to wince whenever you heard a newcomer say, some uninitiated friend, “I’ve been reading about reincarnation lately.” You just knew it was coming. My dad didn’t miss it. He’d been waiting for it the whole night. The gleam in his eye.’

  ‘So, what? MacDougall comes over one weekend and says, “Mister Cookie, Mister Cookie, do you believe in reincarnation?”’ ‘Close enough. My dad and MacDougall are talking, and MacDougall says something that leaves him wide open, and I see the gleam. And from behind MacDougall I’m shaking my head like Noooo! in slow-motion, the way you do when someone strikes a match near a gas leak. But how’s Dad supposed to know? We don’t have a dog. He’s never seen MacDougall burst into tears. And it’s not as if I’ve given him any prior warning.’

  ‘You let it happen.’

  ‘I was transfixed.’

  ‘You did nothing.’

  ‘The second my dad took MacDougall’s hand in his hand, it was over for me: I could only stand there, helpless and paralyzed, and watch with nightmare dread as the joke unfolded.’

  ‘MacDougall falls for it.’

  ‘Because of course he does. He’s twelve, thirteen.’

  ‘He leans in to feel the neck.’

  ‘My dad hasn’t barked for half a second before he’s blubbering, “Mister Cookie, Mister Cookie!”’

  ‘“Get him off me, get him off me.”’

  ‘Exactly. I don’t need to tell you that my dad was mortified. He made it up to MacDougall, and we never talked about it.’

  ‘Only MacDougall’s secretly traumatized.’

  ‘Never does come back to my house. Always an excuse, a scheduling conflict, so that whenever we hang out it has to be at his place. But his face darkens over at any mention of my dad, and I can tell he’s getting real introspective and troubled. Stuck in a thought rut. Like the memory of my house—like my house itself—is something to avoid.’

  ‘The shame of it.’

  ‘The scene of some crime. Years later, we’re in high school, I finally ask him—you know, “Doogie, what’s the deal with dogs?”’

  ‘He’s still afraid of them?’

  ‘I mean he’s not bursting into tears anymore, no. He’s got a little more grip on himself, and he’s even more or less a normal kid, by this point. But if we’re in the neighborhood, someone’s walking their dog, he’ll still freeze in this kind of barely disguised terror until the dog’s gone. Trying to pass it off like he’s checking the time or tying his shoes, but you watch his eyes, he’s always got one eye on the dog. Not blinking. Pulse jackhammering in his throat. Which one day I finally ask
him, like—what, were you bitten as a kid? Is there some root to all this? No, he says, nothing like that. Not that he can remember. And I say come on, there has to be something—you have to have suffered some traumatic childhood bite, right? Maybe even in infancy. Like a repressed snap or nip or snarl. Anything. No, no, he’s quite sure. He even asked his parents, and they couldn’t remember anything. It really was an irrational phobia, causeless, just something he was born with.’

  ‘Bitten in a past life maybe.’

  ‘Sure, maybe he was the kid my dad killed. But I say to him, basically, tell me what it is you’re afraid of. Walk me through your worst case. Say we’re in the neighborhood, a lady with a dog comes by, you freeze—what is passing through your head?’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘He says it’s a fantasy. All his life, when he sees a dog, he can’t help playing this one fantasy in his mind’s eye. A kind of recurring daydream or waking nightmare. The fantasy is a big what-if scenario involving the dog. What if it spots him. What if it can tell he’s afraid. So when MacDougall freezes stone cold on the sidewalk and stares at the dog from across the street, he says, what’s passing through his head is that all these gears are turning: he’s imagining the worst that could happen. He takes my example for an illustration. Say MacDougall sees a lady with a dog. An older woman, white tennis outfit and sun visor, walking a golden retriever on the opposite sidewalk. The retriever is trotting happily alongside its owner, tongue hanging out. But internally, MacDougall is already asking himself: what if? What if the retriever spots him? He imagines that it stops trotting and pauses on the sidewalk. In the fantasy, its body goes rigid with tension the second it sees MacDougall. The lady, oblivious, stops walking as well. Thinking the dog just needs to pee. And maybe it makes a show of nosing the monkey grass, as if it’s interested in some scent there. But in truth it’s merely buying time to eye MacDougall. Even as it snuffles the grass, it keeps raising its liquid eyes to peer clear across the street at him, meeting his own eyes with a prison-yard stare. What would I do if this actually happened, is what MacDougall’s asking himself. And the answer is that he’d have to will himself to remain perfectly still. The last thing he wants to do, in the fantasy as in real life, is break into a run or any other sudden movement that will provoke the dog. Nor can he leave until the dog does, obviously. Whenever it lowers its snout to the grass, it keeps its wet dark eyes rolled upward slightly, to let him know it’s watching.’

  ‘You’re right. He would hate this movie.’

  ‘Too much grist for his mill—his fantasy’s sinister enough as it is. Because no matter how long he stands there, the retriever just keeps sniffing the grass. As for the woman, she remains completely duped by this little ruse of its. She has no idea what telepathic transactions are passing between her dog and MacDougall. Maybe she bends down to murmur something into the creature’s flappy ear, urging it to hurry up and “do its business.” But MacDougall is its only business. It has no other business in mind. Something about MacDougall has set it off, he can tell. A mistake or misunderstanding has taken place inside the dog, and it thinks that he means some harm to the woman.’ ‘The woman being essential.’

  As in?’

  ‘As in an intrinsic component of the horror of the fantasy. It’s never with loose or wild dogs, the fantasy.’

  ‘I ask him that. Claims to have zero fear of wild dogs. If he sees a loose dog in the street, no owner in sight, or even if there’s a pack of them, his what-if scenario is over in seconds. Just reaches its logical conclusion. Oh, there’s something I forgot to mention.’

  ‘That “MacDougall Lewis” is an anagram for “Sic a dog: maul well”?’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘How long have you been working on that?’

  ‘Pretty much all night.’

  ‘It’s that by this time in high school, MacDougall’s started doing Tae Kwon Do: a blue-belt already, real little bad-ass in training. I mean he spends every afternoon after school in his backyard, punching posts for the numbness—got these knuckles like bamboo shoots—and doing flexibility stretches for his high kicks.’

  ‘Great. Got it. Jean-Claude van Dougall.’

  ‘Well the point is that, with wild dogs, the what-if scenario doesn’t terrify him. Even if they attack him all at once, he figures he gets some bites, some blood loss, flesh wounds at worst. But he’s sparred with multiple assailants down at the dojo. He knows that he can roundhouse kick the dogs or karate chop their spines or pry their jaws apart until they snap or snap their necks, if he has to, in the fantasy. It’s an action movie for him. He loves it. Dogs are flying off him, he may as well have nunchuks. But with domesticated dogs it’s different. That’s how he explains it to me. He says that his fear is more emotional or even philosophical in nature than strictly speaking physical. He’s afraid of being attacked not because of the injuries he might sustain, but because of all the emotional and even philosophical implications that that attack would entail.’

  ‘So in the case of the retriever.’

  ‘In the case of the retriever, it’s integral that the owner remain oblivious. If she notices the dog’s agitation at all, she has to misinterpret it, scanning the street for a squirrel or cat or something. Because another intrinsic component of the horror of the fantasy is how alone MacDougall and the dog are in their standoff. The owner can’t have the slightest idea that this dog, her pet, has just turned on a primal or an atavistic dime, metamorphosing itself into a man-eater on its master’s behalf. That’s why she keeps such a flimsy grip on its leash.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Because the next what-if in the fantasy is obvious: what if the dog—maintaining spine-chilling eye contact with MacDougall at this point—lunges forward in one sudden, terrible motion, tearing the leash outright from the old woman’s hand? That’s what fills MacDougall with dread. What does he do? All it seems he can do is remain standing stock-still on the sidewalk, watching in terror as the dog—sprinting toward him now and barking—churns the ground with its galloping legs. There would be no point in running, MacDougall knows, for the retriever would retrieve him in seconds. His flight would only provoke the animal, frenzying it to a keener bloodlust. He says he’s conducted this fantasy countless times with countless breeds of dogs—anytime one passes him in the street, his mind automatically executes the thought experiment—and that of all the different versions of the fantasy, for him the absolute worst and most nightmarish version, the only time the fantasy ever left him cold with sweat, was when he decided to go ahead and try to flee. Says he’s never even bothered budging a foot since then. Doesn’t even let himself consider it.’

  ‘Clearly you wouldn’t want to flee in a situation like this one here: trapped in a station wagon, St. Bernard under the car.’

  ‘Well what happened with Dougall was that he was walking his bike home from school one day and he saw a greyhound about a block off. A lean, ash-colored animal, being led on an extendable leash by a jogger. The dog didn’t notice him, but the mere sight of it was enough to set off the gears of his fantasy. So MacDougall paused there on the sidewalk while his mind did its thing, working its way methodically through all the familiar steps. He imagined the greyhound spotting him, stopping short. There was the nosing around in the monkey grass and the periodic sidelong glances at MacDougall. The ratcheting tension. Then at last the lunge that breaks the leash, the bark like clockwork. Except now what was different?’

  ‘The bike.’

  ‘Right. This time MacDougall had his bike with him, in the fantasy as in real life. And so he wondered: what if I got on this bike? What would happen if I just mounted it and pedaled away? The answer, of course, is that the greyhound chased him. Even as he was looking straight ahead, zooming away on his bike in the fantasy, MacDougall could somehow still tell—as in a dream—that the dog was racing right behind him. He could feel it sprinting on its skeletal legs, keeping perfect pace with the bike. He could even hear the gre
yhound’s horrible huffing, a choked salivary sound as its whole body heaved to keep up with his machine.’

  ‘This is miserable.’

  ‘And remember that back in real life MacDougall was standing frozen on the sidewalk, fantasizing all this. Meanwhile, in the fantasy itself, he was biking away, hightailing it down the middle of the road, which, like a road in a nightmare, was completely empty except for him and his pursuer. So MacDougall knuckled down in the fantasy, leaning into the bike’s handlebars and pedaling harder, waiting for the greyhound to give up the chase.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just bike home? In the fantasy?’

  ‘Then what? He’d still have to get off the bike to get inside, and the greyhound would be right there, at his front door. No, all he could do was keep biking and hope that it quit. Note too that stopping the fantasy is not a real option, for him: he can’t simply open his eyes and wake up. The way MacDougall’s mind works, he’s in a kind of trance, an almost obsessive-compulsive trance. Has to answer every branch of the what-if for himself. Every decision entails a consequence, so he’s stuck standing there until he’s ramified the scenario to its likeliest conclusion.’