Outside the Dog Museum

by Carroll, Jonathan

  “Was I going crazy? Was Mark Jupien a saint? Or God? Was this how God came to men on earth? Was that why I’d always been able to see an aura around him? I was so in love and in so much pain … .

  “Only when some of both started to subside did I realize that what I was seeing behind him were the northern lights doing their frantic magical dance across the sky. Something we were rather used to, living so far north.

  “But if you have never seen them, the only way I can describe them to you is to say, Imagine what I thought those lights were when I opened my eyes and saw them for the first time that day. When I woke from my shock of pain, and for a moment looked up into the face of the boy I adored. I lived a miracle of possibility then that has lifted and will reassure me for the rest of my life.”

  part two

  “the very talented back of my head”

  As yet the new city seemed forbidden to me, and the strange

  unpersuadable landscape darkened as though I didn’t exist.

  Even the nearest Things didn’t care whether I understood them.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE,

  “The Vast Night”

  I WAS DANCING WITH the cleaning woman when the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it, Harry. You look like heart-attack city.”

  Frances Place moved across my living room floor like a panther on ball bearings. She didn’t walk so much as glide, and when she glided, you didn’t seem to see any moving parts—she just was here and then she was there and you had to think about how she did it.

  Like Lucia, the beautiful parking attendant at the Westwood Muse Hotel, Frances came to Hollywood to become famous but ended up cleaning apartments to tide her over between jobs as a dancer. She was only a so-so cleaner, but in the months she’d worked for me, she’d taught me dances like The Razorblade and The Horse’s Neck, which I thought was fair trade for some dust mice under the bed or mysterious crust on a kitchen shelf. Both Fanny and Claire were convinced Frances and I were doing the horizontal rhumba as well as our other dances, but they were wrong. I think I vaguely feared what it’d be like to go to bed with her, judging from the way she moved both on and off the dance floor; I’d already been screwed by one earthquake.

  “Oh hello, Frances. Is Harry here?”

  “Hi, Fanny. Nice haircut. Yes, he’s in the living room.”

  Fanny came staggering in with a Tin-Tin haircut and a suitcase as big as her.

  “Jesus, Harry, what’ve you been doing? You look completely fucked out.” She shot a lethal look at Frances.

  “Hiya, Tin-Tin. We’ve been dancing. Frances was showing me how to do The Funky Chicken.”

  “I’ll bet. Are you packed? We’ve got to be at the airport in two hours.”

  I pointed to the corner where my little black bag stood alert and ready to go.

  “What’s in there, three bottles of cologne? Are you planning on buying all new clothes in Saru?”

  “Fanny, there are two essential differences between men and women: Most women would rather shop than fuck, and women always pack everything, no matter how long the trip or where they’re going.”

  “That’s the most obnoxious thing I’ve heard all week.”

  Frances did a slow, deep knee bend. “Sometimes I’d rather shop than fuck.”

  “See! Now look at the size of your suitcase, Fanny. I rest my case.”

  “Harry, first we’re going to Austria, where it’s cold. Then to Saru, where it’s hot. Doesn’t it make sense to take some clothes?”

  “Yes, but all my clothes are freeze-dried. They fit into small envelopes. When I need them, I put a drop of water on them and they open up.

  “I’m taking a shower, then we can go.”

  Big Top was lying on the floor in the bathroom, one of his normal stations. I always assumed it was because he liked the feeling of cold tiles on his stomach. He was also the only animal I’d ever known who liked to bathe. Depending on his mood, he would often walk into the shower with you, then stand with his eyes closed and not move while the water soaked him.

  “Is your bag packed, dog?” I turned on the water and stood looking at the spray, thinking about something Claire had once said after making love. I’d asked her what it’d been like. Without a second’s pause she said, “Like a waterfall at night.”

  “What the hell am I doing, Big Top? Thinking about how sweet she is, but I’m about to fly off with Fanny to Cuckooville. Does any of this make sense to you?”

  His tail thumped on the floor but the eyes stayed closed. I took off my clothes looking at a crack in the wall the earthquake had made. “Why do we always want to be someplace else? Venasque used to say that. And where is he, now that I need him? Being dead is no excuse.

  “You know what I’d tell Venasque if he were around? Hey, I just realized this! I’d tell him I don’t want to design buildings anymore because I can’t see any people in them. I see these big beautiful buildings but not one person inside. Like San Francisco in On the Beach, or an abandoned movie set.” The realization so excited me that I flung a towel around my middle and, leaving the shower on, went back to the living room.

  Music was blasting. Fanny and Frances were standing next to each other, doing a dance step to Frances’s lead.

  “Fanny, I just had an epiphany in the bathroom!”

  “I hope you have Kaopectate for it.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Wait a minute, willya, Harry? Frances is showing me something.”

  Besides the step, both of them were smoking and had cigarettes stuck in the same corner of their mouths. Nicotine choreography.

  “The hell with you both. My epiphany is more important than The Stroll.” I turned around and headed back to the shower.

  “Harrrry …”

  “Forget it!”

  I was hurt by her indifference. This was something important, although I could only catch the first vague scent of it in the immediate air.

  Architecture is either creating space, or whittling it down: The glass is half-empty or half-full. In my heyday I liked to think we were creating new space, consequently better and more fulfilling ways by which one could both experience and view life. But I’d recently read somewhere, “Perhaps in all cities the past so overbalances the present that they are more dead than alive; certainly the ones which inspire pilgrimages and far-fetched love are the deadest, where one goes for the remains not the activity.” This led me to think architecture has always been the death of space—like big-game hunting, we kill it and then mount its massive head looking permanently startled and glassy-eyed on our wall.

  “Hey, Big Top! Look out, huh?”

  All these deep thoughts kept me from seeing the dog, sitting stolidly in the middle of the shower stall. Stumbling over him, I snatched the soap off its metal perch and went to work on my last United States wash.

  Halfway through washing my hair I saw the building. Hands on my head and a foot against the dog, I opened my eyes and saw, as if projected against the shower door, what looked at first like a cross between a steel birthday cake and an old-time railroad steam engine standing on its nose. My first thought was, Fanny’s pulling another prank. Once, when I was taking a shower, she’d scared the shit out of me by attacking me à la Psycho with a rubber knife. But this wasn’t that. This was a three-foot-high projection of a building on the inside of a wet, translucent glass door. Only water, steam, the dog, and I were inside, so how the thing even got there I didn’t know. Baffled but fascinated, I reached out and tried to touch it. Nothing to touch. Only a picture as distinct and three-dimensional as a hologram and looking like a building by Takamatsu. All I could think of was a lavish, eccentric cathedral to some steel-cold deity: a nightmare prayer to God as inscrutable machine.

  Big Top started to bark. He stood there yakking away at the thing like he’d gone mad.

  “Harry, what’re you doing? Why’s the dog in there?”

  I saw someone on the other side of the door and just as Fanny pulled the
door open, the picture disappeared.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Fanny, go to my library and get down the book about Takamatsu!”

  “Why—”

  “Just get me the fucking book!”

  I leapt out of the shower and dried off in two seconds. Big Top got a quick rub with the same towel. I left him there three-quarters damp, wagging his tail.

  Frances was vacuuming the couch and gave me only a glance as I scooted by her in a pair of rumpled pants and nothing else.

  Fanny was standing with her back to the door, hands on hips, looking at the shelves of books in the room I used as a study.

  “You’ve got every Japanese architect here but naturally I can’t find him.”

  “Right here.” I took the book down and opened to his ingenious Ark Dental Clinic in Nishina, Japan. Shin Takamatsu is the only real star of what I’ve always called Robot Love architecture. Buildings for a time in the future when machines have long ruled and Mankind’s around only to oil their wheels, stand in awe, and feel pointless. Everything Takamatsu designs, wrote one critic, is “unbelievably heavy, forbidding, frightening, but sculpturally brilliant, a sort of locomotive architecture with nuts and bolts and steel plates, great circles and huge diagonals.”

  What I’d seen in the shower was something I was sure he’d created. Only now, looking at photographs and drawings of his work, did I realize there were other things about the building Takamatsu’s work didn’t have. Humor, for one. Simply put, there was something innately funny about the building on the shower door. As if whoever drew it was telling the kind of joke that didn’t make you smile until ten minutes later—when you howled.

  “What’s going on, Harry?”

  “I think Venasque’s trying to tell me something.” I had my eyes closed. When I opened them again, Big Top was coming into the room, his tail still wagging.

  WHAT’S THE WORD IN Saru for airport?”

  “I don’t know. Aeroporto?”

  We’d been met at my place by a smiling chauffeur driving a limo that looked like it belonged in a cartoon. Judging from the outside, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if there’d been a small swimming pool inside.

  For some peculiar reason, many people today think riding in a limousine is just this side of nirvana. But I have never ridden in one without being acutely embarrassed. People look in (or try to look in through those smoked windows) with expressions of hope or disgust. Mostly disgust. But those who are interested gape until you emerge and they see you’re only another Nobody with some money to waste. Ho hum.

  Anyway, this prairie schooner had the requisite telephone, television, bar … and it made me feel like throwing up. Plus the chauffeur spoke no English and looked like a terrorist on speed.

  “Does this man know where he’s going?”

  “I’m not sure. You can take La Cienega to the airport but it’s the long way.”

  “Maybe he wants us to enjoy the ride.”

  “I feel like a black record producer in this car.”

  “Harry, now you’re a racist?”

  “I’m not a racist—I’m a ‘tastist’: Anyone who thinks these cars are classy has living rooms full of crushed velvet furniture.” I got out a pad of paper and pen from my briefcase and pulled down one of the nifty little tables big enough to hold a martini glass. I went to work sketching from memory the building I’d seen in the shower. Fanny took out a Walkman and plugged herself in.

  As I worked, the building became clearer and clearer in my mind. I had no doubt Venasque had had something to do with its appearance. Before he died he’d made a number of allusions to the fact he would be gone soon but would leave Big Top behind to keep an eye on things till I was really ready to go again. That is why I wasn’t surprised on the day of the earthquake to see the dog in the hotel. And why I was more delighted than surprised to see this building an hour ago.

  “Magic is just what you don’t know, Harry,” Venasque would say. “More often than not, it’s God bored trying to tell us something and using other means.

  “So don’t jump back when it happens, or is given to you. There’s a reason, a specific reason for it when it does. But people are usually so shocked by it that they either run away screaming, or think there are wires attached—someone somewhere’s tricking them. Wrong, Harry—it’s a gift. Unless you’re a jerk, you don’t ask why a gift’s given or what it cost—you appreciate and use it.”

  “Hey, hallo?”

  I looked up from my drawing and saw the chauffeur’s smile in the rearview mirror. He was holding something in his hand, offering it to me.

  “Saru! Saru!”

  It was a heavy coffee-table book that he could barely support with one hand. I took it and smiled my thanks to him.

  Fanny unplugged one ear and said much too loud (the disease of the Walkman listener), “WHAT’S THAT?”

  “A book on Saru.”

  “Let me see it when you’re done.” She put the earphone back in.

  I am obnoxious, but sometimes Fanny outdid me in that department, if only by the way she phrased things or the timbre of her voice. There was almost never a “Please” or “May I?” It all came out sounding like a cop telling you to pull over. We’d talked about it before, but she had the additional bad habit of getting aggressively defensive about things when she realized she was wrong. I wasn’t on her side that day anyway because of her indifference to my epiphany, so that infuriating tone of voice encouraged me to throw the book out the window rather than hand it over.

  I took a deep breath, opened to the first page. And started smiling right away because there, in the daft, hilariously bad English of a hack translated by an even worse translator, was the standard orgasmic introduction to a book of this sort.

  “Saru has launched itself into the late twentieth century with a speed that touches on transgression. It has always been a maverick amongst its Middle East brethren states, but since the midseventies, when the Sultan launched his first Six-Year Plan, there has been no stopping this country from taking distinct advantage of its glorious natural resources, oil and natural gas, and using them to place itself even further on top of the world map.”

  That oatmeal went on for twenty painful pages, but I read it all, in between glances out the window to see if we really were going toward the airport and not Disneyland.

  The contrast between the Los Angeles out my window and the photographs in the book was appalling. Like the other Arab countries I’d visited, the real Saru appeared to be a beautiful sand land full of emptiness and unearthly quiet: a place for religious zealots who had their choice of deserts to disappear into to find God; a country where people built fires three thousand years ago and you could stand on a windy mountain and see camel caravans or black bedouin tents off in the distance. It reminded me of driving across Jordan and seeing, a hundred miles from Amman and then again deep in the sand hills of Wadi Rum, men standing motionlessly by the side of the road, doing nothing. Looking serene as dead saints, they didn’t appear to be going or coming from anywhere. Just there, maybe for all time. It struck me as both spooky and marvelous; it hinted that if I only knew a little of how things worked here, I’d discover some new and very important facts of life. There was none of the fatal despair or angry madness on their faces that is seen on the motionless ones dying slowly on the street corners in Los Angeles or other American cities.

  Unfortunately the book also had too many pictures of the graceless, ultramodern buildings that didn’t fit into the natural landscape at all but had been thrown up presto chango as soon as the bottomless pits of oil had been discovered in Saru forty years before.

  For example, one Sultan had had vague socialist leanings, so someone in his cabinet had commissioned Felix Förcher, Walter Ulbricht’s favorite architect, to build a university complex that looked as if it belonged in the middle of Volgograd rather than a desert. What made me even angrier, looking at the other shameless abortions in the book (by some pretty damned fam
ous people!), was that I knew exactly what a number of these architects had done: either pulled something out of a drawer that’d been around for years because no one wanted to build it, or rubbed their hands together thinking, Oh boy, now I get to try out every wacky notion I’ve ever dreamed of because no matter what I come up with, they’ll build it and pay me a fortune. Screw the needs of people, the geography of the site, the demands the building would have to fulfill over the years. Wotton, rewriting Vitruvius, said “Well-building hath three conditions: Commodity, Firmness, and Delight.” What cynics or scoundrels like Forcher had done in places like Saru was delight their bank accounts, or whims, and fucked the rest with no further ado.

  Closing the book on a finger, I swore to myself that whatever I designed for this Sultan of Saru, it would incorporate everything I could find out about his country, the people, the culture. Sure, it would have Radcliffe’s signature on it, but unlike other work I’d done, that signature would be very small and at the bottom of the picture. In fact, one might even need a magnifying glass to find it. I thought about those mysterious men on the desert road. Make something for them. Make something they could stand in forever and be content.

  THE FLIGHT TO VIENNA was funny and uneventful. Big Top had to be pushed into his cage/prison by three handlers who were not a bit happy about the fact he farted continually while they pushed. Ah, stinky revenge.

  From Vienna the Sultan wanted us to fly in his private jet to Salzburg and then drive on to Zell am See, but both Fanny and I agreed we’d rather spend a couple of nights in Vienna and take the train to his mountain town.

  Fanny didn’t know it, but there was another reason why I wanted to stop off there. The man who had been with Venasque when he died, Walker Easterling, lived in Vienna, and I wanted to talk to him about the old man’s last day. Easterling had called me from the Santa Barbara hospital to say Venasque had had a stroke and was in a coma. But when Sydney and I got there in the middle of the night, I was much too upset to have any kind of logical, calm discussion about details.