by Bennett Sims
‘He’s made his bed, mentally, so to speak.’
‘Pretty much. And in this particular case, he had cast his lot with biking off. So what if? What would happen? What he decided to do was keep pedaling, zooming blocks and blocks beyond his neighborhood, miles, with the greyhound chasing the whole way. He tells me that the fantasy became explicitly surreal and dreamlike, at this point. In no time at all he had biked outside of city limits altogether. He entered some deserted Hitchcockian countryside, pedaling down a narrow dirt road in the middle of vast cornfields, all while the indefatigable greyhound—which he still couldn’t see but could hear the horrible huffing of—heaved its body behind him. And here a terrible realization struck MacDougall, he tells me. For at last he understood: the greyhound was never going to give up the chase. It had been bred to keep up the chase. Any other dog, any other breed, and he might have been fine. But all MacDougall had accomplished by mounting the bike was transforming himself into a racetrack rabbit, a robotic bait zooming away on a tantalizing circuit, which the greyhound was happy to chase for dozens and dozens of miles, at top speed, if it had to. Because this and nothing else was what it—the dog, down to its very DNA—had been bred for centuries if not millennia to do. MacDougall says that the logic of his dread was vertiginous. The fantasy was infinite now, he realized: it never could reach a conclusion. He would be stuck in his own head, being chased by the greyhound, forever. For the harder that he pedaled, the more determined the greyhound would be to catch him; and the more determined the greyhound was to catch him, the harder he would have to pedal. His terror of the dog spurred him to flee, which spurred the dog, which spurred his terror, ad infinitum, until MacDougall became mired in this morbid Möbius strip almost, self-perpetuating and impossible to stop. Even as his fear of being fed on fed into his flight, his flight was feeding into the dog’s desire to feed on him, which fed right back into his fear, creating this like literal feedback loop of—’
‘All right all right I get it.’
‘He says that in the fantasy he kept biking farther and farther through the Hitchcockian cornfields until finally the fantasy selfaborted. When his mind couldn’t compute the feedback loop, he suddenly snapped his eyes open: the street was empty. In real life, the guy and his greyhound were long gone. But MacDougall’s heart was pounding and his palms were slicked with sweat, and he had to stand there another ten minutes before he’d calmed down. That was when he realized that fleeing the dilemma would always be worse than facing the dilemma.’
‘The dilemma?’
‘Okay, recall the thought experiment from earlier. The old lady in the white tennis outfit and sun visor with the golden retriever. The retriever is still sprinting toward him and MacDougall’s still standing there standing his ground, because he knows—from his unspeakable experience with the greyhound—never to try running in the fantasy. So the dog is about to attack MacDougall while its owner watches, and the dilemma is that he has two options. One, he can spare the dog. Instead of killing this woman’s pet before her very eyes, he can be manly and self-sacrificing: just shield himself as best he can and bravely let the retriever have at him until the woman calls it off. Figures the worst-case scenario is a bite wound or two. Maybe the woman doesn’t call it off, and MacDougall has to wait for some bystander on the street to intervene.’
‘Or option two.’
‘Two is that he can defend himself. As with the feral-dog fantasy, he can dish out Tae Kwon Do with extreme prejudice, roundhousing the retriever or else grabbing its skull and twisting its neck. The only problem is that if he does this, then he’s left standing there with a limp ragdoll in his hands, holding this dead dog, and when he looks up across the street, whom should he see but the little old lady in the tennis outfit and sun visor? Watching on in horror. The tears streaming down her grief-reddened face. Even worse in this respect would be if he didn’t kill the dog, at least not cleanly. If instead it somehow managed to sink its teeth into his forearm, such that MacDougall had to kneel down over the beast on the sidewalk and pound its head into the ground with his fist, the way UFC dudes do on TV, trying to pry its jaws apart. And the whole time the little old lady watching on and weeping, calling out her dying dog’s name while he brains it.’
‘The name!’
‘Exactly—this is what horrifies MacDougall above all. The fact that as this mankiller is trying to rip into his throat, some woman is calling, “Duke! Duuuuke!” Its name is Duke! It wants to tear him to pieces, and its name is Duke. Or its name was Duke—that’s precisely what’s so horrible. The little old lady thinks that this is still her dog, that she can call out “Duke” and that it will answer. But in reality Duke has left “Duke” far behind: it has already gone feral, retreated into some nameless part of itself. The woman can shout “Duke!” all day long and receive no response. It doesn’t know Duke from Adam. MacDougall and the dog are alone now, stranded on the nameless side of its mind.’
‘This being the philosophical dimension of his fear in the fantasy.’
‘That there is something pre-symbolic inside the dog. Some primordial core. Like a little black tailbone, Tefloned against interpellation: the name rolls right off it. You can domesticate your dog, train it as a puppy and give it a name, but somewhere deep inside there will always be this wild residuum. The part of your dog that’s not your dog. The past life—the species memory—that’s still preserved inside it. Hence the horror of rabies: rabies is what uncages that namelessness.’
‘Cujo stops being Cujo the moment the bat bites him.’
‘This detail would not have escaped MacDougall’s attention, no. He would invite us to consider the prominence of the dog’s name in the movie. How people keep calling “Cujo!” How the movie’s even called Cujo. The whole point is that the dog has a name. It’s not a wild dog that’s terrorizing people, it’s somebody’s pet. That’s gone and betrayed its name. Which is a thousand times more frightening, from MacDougall’s point of view. Now other monsters, they don’t even need names. If it’s a shark movie, the title’s just the most salient body part: jaws—what’s going to bite you. If it’s subterranean sandworms, the title’s just their calling card, their like signature seismological tocsin: tremors—what warns you they’re coming. Naturally we refer to the shark as Jaws and the worms as Tremors, colloquially, but these aren’t names the way Cujo’s a name. What’s terrifying about Cujo is precisely that he’s called Cujo. Or that he used to be. Or so MacDougall would say, if he were sitting here with us tonight.’
‘And so that’s the philosophical component of his fear. Whereas the emotional component…’
‘Oh sure. The emotional component is this very discrepancy. All the guilt he’d feel. That the woman, standing there and weeping over the retriever, thinks MacDougall is killing Duke. Good old Duke: Duke who licks her grandkids, Duke who chases after a soggy tennis ball in the dog park, Duke who can roll over and writhe like in a Western when you make a finger-and-thumb gun at him. She thinks poor Duke has attacked MacDougall, inexplicably, and that MacDougall is killing him. Whereas actually Duke stopped being Duke the moment he attacked. The state this retriever is in, he’s not going to be fetching tennis balls or playing dead, to say the least. He’s forgotten all that. So MacDougall is technically killing everything that isn’t Duke: he’s being attacked by what’s-not-Duke inside Duke. And the heartbreaking part is that the woman can’t know this, she just can’t know. Watching and weeping like that, in the fantasy.’
‘Presumably wild dogs dodge these philosophical and emotional complications by dint of—what?—they don’t have owners or names?’
‘There’s no dilemma there.’
‘But with a dog on a leash, every time MacDougall sees one, this is what’s going through his head.’
‘Well he’s weighing it. What his mind is doing when it executes the thought experiment is deliberating. Could I fend off this dog awhile? Or is this a dog I would have to beat to death immediately? Is there a tree nearby I could
climb? Or is this a dog that could outrun me to the tree?’
‘Could I hide in the station wagon with my kid, like this mom here, or would Cujo just stalk around the car slobbering the windows?’
‘And the owner, too. She’s part of the fantasy’s what-if algorithm as well. Is this owner a person who would understand? If I killed her dog, would she know why I had to do what I was doing? Or would I break her heart by doing it? In short, he’s asking himself what the worst that could happen is. The thing you have to remember, it’s the dilemma that frightens him. Its twin horns. More I mean than any physical danger posed by the dog itself. That’s why a yapping Chihuahua freezes him up just as much as some foaming Doberman type.’
‘Even as a kid, this fantasy.’
‘His whole life! I couldn’t believe it. But when I ask him about it in high school, he tells me that for as long as he can remember he’s been conducting the fantasy. All those times in grade school, at all our sleepovers, that was what was scaring him. When the Boston terrier barreled at him and he burst into tears, and when he yelled out for someone to get it off him, get it off him, it wasn’t being bitten that he was afraid of.’
‘He was afraid—’
‘He was afraid of what he might do to it! Afraid he might snap the little rat’s neck, right in front of all of us. Even as its owner was standing there, yelling its useless, unavailing name.’
‘And your dad.’
‘Good call. MacDougall brings that up himself. He admits to me that he had been completely caught off guard by my dad’s joke but that hands down the most terrifying part of it was when he had had to shout “Mister Cookie, Mister Cookie” to try to get my dad to stop. Because there was a second there when my dad didn’t hear him. And didn’t stop. And for the first time in his life MacDougall was brought face to face with what was nameless in man. He tells me that he had never conducted the fantasy with a human being before but that in that split second of fear he compressed the entire what-if scenario down to one instant, to one eidetic flash, and in the unfolding of the flash he saw that if my dad actually were to attack him—if my dad had some primordial core in him, which wouldn’t respond to a name and couldn’t be caged in a name, some past-life kernel left over in him from his canicular preexistence—MacDougall knew what he was prepared to do. He saw in the fantasy’s flash, in all awfulness, what he was capable of.’
‘Obviously not planning to wring your dad’s neck. Twelve, thirteen years old.’
‘No, but he admits to me—he tells me this—that out of the corner of his eye he noticed a steak knife nearby, lying on the dinner table. And in that moment, he says, he was worried he’d have to stab my dad. Right in the throat, where the dog scars were. The thought sickened him, but he knew he’d do it. He’d carried this murderous memory around with him for years afterward, he said. Too ashamed to share it.’
‘Wherefore the face-darkening.’
‘Right.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Oh you just know he’s the kind of guy now, goes around poisoning neighbors’ dogs. There isn’t really even any question.’
‘You keep up with him?’
‘Lost touch in college. I looked for him on Facebook recently. I think he’s working admin at the old alma mater.’
‘What about your dad? You ever tell him about you and Dougall’s talk?’
‘No. No, I never did.’
‘Hey now. Now your face is darkening.’
‘I just remembered something, is all.’
‘Come on, man. Don’t hold out on me. Did Dougall poison your dad’s dog or something?’
‘No, nothing like that. I just never made the connection before now. Between this particular memory and MacDougall. I must have forgotten all about him by the time it happened. But talking about him tonight, it’s funny. How I didn’t see it.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘The thing is, after my mom died, Dad actually did end up getting a dog. A little mixed-breed beagle. He lived alone with it awhile, over a decade, and around sixty he retired. He’d been doing construction for forty-something years, and the work had taken its toll on his body: overweight, bad back, heart attack. He was pretty run-down. Big guy—’
‘“Barbican.”’
‘Obese. Had to stay sprawled out on the floor or the couch for his back half the day. Walking in Wal-Mart got him winded, so you’d see him in those little electric wheelchairs they have, puttering down the grocery aisles. Long story short he was not throwing Frisbees and sticks around in the backyard anymore for the beagle. But it kept him company, and besides, it was no spring chicken itself—probably a nonagenarian or something, in dog years. They fell apart together. The dog was in even sorrier shape, in the end. Stone blind for one thing, with these gaseous white eyeballs. Had to navigate the living room by memory, and was constantly being flabbergasted by the furniture. Staggering into sofas, nightstands, et cetera. Sometimes my dad’d find it trapped under a chair, penned in between the legs, walking back and forth and bumping off the railings. Just the most depressing thing. Incontinent, too. There was a while there it could still smell where outside was—the greenness of grass, sunshine—and it would hobble on its decrepit legs to the doggy door. Stagger out, do its business, stagger back in. But at some point the effort got to be too great and it just started going wherever: living room, bedroom, kitchen, it didn’t care. My dad, with the weight and the back, he was in no shape to follow the dog around all day and watch for when it needed to go and pick it up and carry it outside himself. He took pity on it and let it have the run of the house. Nor were his efforts to sweep up its messes especially Herculean. Which after only say a weekend of neglect they’d need to be: to go find all the blind dog’s crap and piss puddles around the house, and then to mop them, really was an Augean job, for someone in my dad’s condition. So he lay on the carpet, stretching his spine, surrounded by all the droppings that the dog in its blindness had left, and he dreaded the day when it would finally die. For my part, I was ambivalent about the dog’s death. On the one hand, it was my dad’s only companion; on the other, I didn’t exactly relish the thought of him lying around in a sea of its filth. Every now and then I’d ask him whether he’d considered the needle. Just putting it to sleep and giving it the dignified end.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Like it was his wife or something.’
‘In sickness and in health.’
‘“I can’t give up on her!” “So she’s an old dog!” “She wouldn’t put me to sleep!”’
‘Not like this mom here. Look at her. Beating on Cujo with a baseball bat. Cold-blooded.’
‘If the beagle’d gone rabid my dad would have been absolutely defenseless, no question.’
‘Old Cooge. Battered to death by his own neighbor.’
‘I wouldn’t count Cujo out just yet. He may look dead, but I bet he’s got some gas left in the tank.’
‘What was her name anyway? The beagle?’
‘Clarabelle. As I said, I was ambivalent about her dying. I knew it was only a matter of time. Whenever I called my dad to check up, I braced myself to hear him say she’d passed. Preparing myself to console him and so on. Well finally I call one day, we’ve been talking an hour, and after a pregnant pause he says, “And there’s some sad news about little Clarabelle.”’
‘Oh jeez.’
‘Found her under his bed, died in her sleep. He’s getting choked up as he tells me this. Eventually he just says, “And I think that’s all I’m going to say about that.”’
‘Poor guy. Natural causes, though, right? This isn’t where Dougall comes in?’
‘No, listen. We’re on the phone, and I ask him, you know, did he bury her? And there’s this long silence at the other end of the line. And in that silence I recognize what a grotesque question this is. Of course he didn’t bury her. How could he have buried her? My dad, can’t walk ten feet in a Wal-Mart to pick up a loaf of bread, is supposed to go out in the backyard with a s
hovel and dig down in the dirt to bury his dead dog? But when he finally responds, what he says is, “Yep,” in this quick, clipped voice. And I don’t ask him any follow-up questions. Because I don’t have to. In that moment I know: I know exactly what he did with Clarabelle. In my mind’s eye I can see it. It unfolds in a vivid flash, the entire scene. I see my dad putting Clarabelle’s body into a black trash bag. It breaks his heart, but what else is he going to do? I see him toting her down the driveway to the garbage can, wheezing the whole way—hobbling, from the pain in his back and from the weight of the bag—and slinging the corpse unceremoniously into the trash.’
‘You don’t think—’
‘What else? He just couldn’t bring himself to admit it to me. Too ashamed. Broken up over it. That he couldn’t give his own dog a proper burial. A little stake in the ground with her name on it.’
‘Her name.’
‘In retrospect, in a weird way, it feels as if MacDougall won or something. Got his revenge. As if this was my dad’s punishment for springing the joke on him, all those years ago. I can’t explain it.’
‘Karma.’
‘Not that MacDougall could have even known about Clarabelle. Or ever thought about me or my dad, for that matter—it’d been years. But I still can’t shake the image of him rubbing his hands together somewhere, grinning at the news.’
‘Working that MacDougall voodoo.’
‘The ironic twist of fate. The cosmic comeuppance. Just as my dad had pretended to be a dog, and ignored the sound of his own name, so he had to lose his dog to namelessness. And not by way of rabies—not by a bite from a wild bat. But by his own hand. That’s the tragic aspect. His punishment was that he had to throw her away himself, like some common greasy pizza box. He who had loved her so much and refused to euthanize her and treated her with human dignity was the very same one who, in the end, had to reduce her to this primordial core. Because by depriving her of a dignified burial, he was depriving her too of her name: she wasn’t Clarabelle in that trash can, just some cold dead animal, which is what she would have to remain for all eternity, decomposing up on the landfill. And he was the one who had done it. He and no one else had cast her out, back into that dark part of herself, and for the rest of his life he’d have to live with that.’