by Dean Koontz
“That would be a bad idea,” the surgeon said. “You should wait another week, until she’s fully convalesced, and even then you’re going to have to be cautious with her for a while.”
Late Friday afternoon, when he examined Trix in his office, he spent more than the usual amount of time with her. He determined that her healing was further advanced than usual at the five-week mark. He relented, giving us permission to take her out to dinner that very night.
Giddy with anticipation, we raced home with her to give her a comb-out and to change our clothes. We couldn’t wait to see her eyes light up when she recognized the restaurant, to see the grin that a dish of little meatballs would inspire.
I lifted her into the back of the Explorer again, and we set off into an evening full of promise. Trixie was lying in the cargo space, and Gerda was sitting in the backseat, holding the leash so Trixie wouldn’t try to roam while in transit and perhaps be rocked off her feet.
A smart dog never stops surprising you with its sudden insights and the power of its perceptions. The trip to the restaurant involved four surface streets, a freeway, and another surface street, and we never followed that route to anything else. As I drove the first four streets and the freeway, Trixie lay in her depressive indifference, but when I followed the exit ramp and turned right on the fifth and final surface street, she startled Gerda by scrambling to her feet in the cargo space, pulling the leash taut. She looked out of the windows, left and right—and her tail began to swish.
“She knows where we’re going,” Gerda said. “How can she know?”
We were still more than a mile from the restaurant, but Trix grinned, panted happily, and used her tail as she had not used it in a week.
By the time we reached our destination and parked, every muscle in her body was tensed. She faced the tailgate with such anticipation that she seemed to be saying, Open the darn thing or I’m going right through it.
In spite of her excitement, she allowed herself to be lifted out and gently set down. Then, as if propelled by her rotating tail, she strained to the limit of her leash and led us past the main entrance to the restaurant, along a promenade that served an open-air shopping plaza, and around to the patio on the back of the establishment.
Gustaf greeted us, lavished attention on Trixie, and led us to a table overlooking the promenade. When Gerda and I were served our first course, Short Stuff received a dish of the miniature meatballs.
For the rest of the evening, she either sat at the railing that encircled the patio or lay with her chin on the bottom horizontal and her face between two staves, watching with interest as people—and a few dogs—strolled past on their way to and from the shops. Her tail did not continuously move in broad sweeps, but it never fell entirely still, either. The tip of it twitched, twitched, twitched, because she knew that her long confinement was over and that soon she would be allowed to go on long walks and to play again. She had her life back, life was good, and she was never depressed thereafter.
All breeds of dogs have a sense of smell much greater than that of any human being, some of them merely thousands of times greater, some tens of thousands. It’s possible that Trixie caught a thread of scent unique to the Swedish restaurant even when we were a mile away from it and even though she was inside an SUV.
Researchers once concocted a complex odor in a lab and taught a bloodhound to react to it in a specific fashion. Then they took the hound to the bottom of Manhattan Island, while others on the team traveled to the upper end of the borough, thirteen miles away. At the top of Manhattan, at a prearranged time, the researchers pulled the stopper out of a bottle of the laboratory-brewed stinky stuff and saturated a cloth with it. They waved the cloth in the air. They had chosen a day when a breeze moved north to south across the island, and they clocked the wind speed with anemometers at both the upper and lower locations. Less than a minute after the breeze should have carried the singular scent from one end of the island to the other, through one of the largest cities in the world, through millions of people and through a miasma of uncountable smells, the talented hound detected it and reacted to it, although the molecules must have been widely dispersed by air currents.
Trixie was no bloodhound. However, originally bred to work with hunters, golden retrievers are blessed with a sophisticated sense of smell. The restaurant was only a mile or so away, not thirteen miles, and a only few thousand people, not many millions, occupied the territory between our SUV and the restaurant. She might have snared an unraveling ribbon of scent from the air.
But I suspect that the other and no less amazing explanation is the correct one. We’d taken her to that restaurant by the same route on at least thirty occasions, and at the end of each fifteen-minute journey, she had received a dish of miniature meatballs. I think she learned that series of right and left turns and the approximate times between each turn, and associated that pattern of travel with the meatball treat. Her eruption out of listless depression into tail-wagging delight at the instant that I turned right onto the last street in the route is too meaningful to discount.
Or maybe she just read our minds.
XIX
“may i tell you a wonderful truth about your dog?”
THE SECOND NOVEL I wrote after Trixie came to us was From the Corner of His Eye, a massive story, an allegory that had numerous braided themes worked out through the largest cast of characters I had to that time dared to juggle in one book. The central theme around which the others wound was expressed by a character in the novel, a black minister named H. R. White, in a famous sermon of his, and I used part of that sermon as an epigraph prior to chapter one:
“Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil.”
I don’t work with outlines, character profiles, or even notes. I start a novel with only a premise and a couple of characters who intrigue me. Therefore, I was daunted but also exhilarated by the prospect of showing that theme, that truth, in dramatic action, which is what a novel must do—show, not tell. The task seemed immense, but after leaping into new territory with False Memory, I learned that the more overwhelming a project seemed to be, the more fun it was, as well.
The day I started From the Corner of His Eye, Gerda walked Trixie, combed her, and brought her to my office. After the you’re-as-sweet-as-peaches-this-morning tummy rub, Trixie curled up on her bed in my office—she had beds in six rooms—and watched me from the corner of her eye as I ransacked my mind for the opening lines of the new book. An hour later, I had a first chapter unlike any that I had ever produced previously, and I wondered if some heretofore unrecognized sinister and self-destructive part of my mind might be setting me up for failure. The opening made a series of narrative promises that seemed impossible to fulfill:
Bartholomew Lampion was blinded at the age of three, when surgeons reluctantly removed his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer, but although eyeless, Barty regained his sight when he was thirteen.
The sudden ascent from a decade of darkness into the glory of light was not brought about by the hands of a holy healer. No celestial trumpets announced the restoration of his vision, just as none had announced his birth.
A roller coaster had something to do with his recovery, as did a seagull. And you can’t discount the importance of Barty’s profound desire to make his mother proud of him before her second death.
The first time she died was the day Barty was born.
January 6, 1965.
In Bright Beach, California, most residents spoke of Barty’s mother, Agnes Lampion—also known as the Pie Lady—with affection. She lived for others, her heart tuned to their anguish and their needs. In this materialistic world, her selflessness
was cause for suspicion among those whose blood was as rich with cynicism as with iron. Even such hard souls, however, admitted that the Pie Lady had countless admirers and no enemies.
The man who tore the Lampion family’s world apart, on the night of Barty’s birth, had not been her enemy. He was a stranger, but the chain of his destiny shared a link with theirs.
Eyes removed yet sight regained? Caused somehow by a roller coaster and a seagull and love for his mother? His mother, who died twice? I had no idea what any of this meant or how I would deliver on these bizarre narrative promises. One of my favorite reviews of the novel appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune, where the critic said in part: “His opening is like a man announcing he will juggle bowling balls while frying eggs and piloting a hot-air balloon. Preposterous—but Koontz then proceeds to do it, and much more.” He described accurately my concern as I sat in my office, reading that first chapter over and over. A hot-air balloon, indeed.
Over the years, when a story took a seemingly illogical or an incomprehensible twist, I learned that my subconscious or maybe my intuition was at work and that I should trust it. Eventually, the story would evolve to a point where the twist made perfect sense, and I was always amazed that on some level I had known all along what I was doing even while doubts bombarded my conscious mind.
But From the Corner of His Eye would have the most complex set of themes and the largest cast of characters that I had ever tackled. And now it opened with what appeared to be narrative promises highly difficult if not impossible to fulfill.
The more I observed Trixie, however, the more confident I felt about being able to write this challenging book. The protagnosists of Corner were people who suffered pain and terrible losses but who refused to embrace cynicism and who strove either to work their way back toward a condition of innocence or (in the case of the children in the cast) tried to hold fast to their innocence in a corrupted world. My revelation that Trixie’s intelligence and sense of wonder revealed that she had a soul and the revelation that the innocence of her soul was the source of her constant joy prepared me to write convincingly about Agnes and her son, Barty. Junior Cain, the vicious yet hapless antagonist, embodied the fourth revelation I received from watching Trixie: that the flight from innocence so characteristic of our time is a leap into absurdity and insanity. Not only had Trixie prepared me to write this book, but she also had at least in part inspired it.
Because Trixie restored my sense of wonder to its childhood shine, I decided that having composed the first chapter, I had to write this story because I couldn’t rest until I knew what had happened—and would happen—to blind Barty and to his mother.
FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE took a week short of a year to write, and by the middle of 2001, I was deep into another novel that proved no less complex and would wind up nearly as long, One Door Away From Heaven. On a working Saturday, I delayed Trixie’s afternoon feeding by half an hour, until four o’clock, and then knocked off for the day. After she inhaled her kibble, finished licking her chops, and returned to the bowl to be certain she had not missed a kibble or two, we set out on an hour-long walk.
When you walk a dog regularly in the same community, you develop a group of acquaintances who are walking their dogs, too. Often you stop and chat for a couple of minutes, usually to swap dog stories, to talk about dog parks and dog beaches and dog treats and dog toys and dog illnesses and dog doctors and dog books and, you know, just dogs in general.
Most of the time, the other people don’t ask your name and don’t volunteer their names, not because they are obsessed with privacy but only because it doesn’t cross their minds that our names matter in this particular social network. We are dog guardians, and that’s usually all we need to know about one another, because we do know the names of one another’s dogs.
Every time I encountered a new person with a dog I had never seen before, that person’s first question to me went like this: “She’s a beautiful golden. What’s her name?” I introduced Trixie, complimented the newcomer’s dog, and asked its name. If the dog’s name was Sparky, the man walking him was known to me thereafter as “Sparky’s dad.” When Gerda came home from a walk with our girl, I’d ask if she met anyone, and she’d say, “Pookie’s mom recommended this cafe that allows dogs on the patio, and Barney’s dad says they have some fabulous new plush toys at Three Dog Bakery.”
Reading the newspaper at breakfast one morning, I saw a photo of a couple we met sometimes on our dog walks. They had been given some community-service award. A day or two later, I remembered the article and said to Gerda, “Gizmo’s dad and mom do a lot of good work for at-risk kids, got this award, photo in the paper.”
Gerda said, “What’re their names?”
I stared at her blankly.
She said, “Surely the paper didn’t just refer to them as ‘Gizmo’s dad and mom.’”
“The story didn’t even mention Gizmo,” I said. “Which goes to show you how worthless most newspaper articles are. They never get the real story.”
I am sure I read those people’s names. I just didn’t retain them because I already knew them as Gizmo’s mom and dad, and that told me the most essential thing I needed to know for the limited social context in which we related to one another. If during daily walks you encountered a guy without a dog but with a third eye in his forehead, and if later at dinner you told your spouse, “I ran into Three Eyes this morning, had a nice little chat about designer sunglasses,” the dinner conversation would not be significantly enhanced if you knew his real name was Jim Smith.
After encountering the same woman—Wally’s mom—two or three times a week for over three years, during walks with Trixie, she crossed the street to me one morning, leading Wally, and said, “I owe you an apology. I didn’t realize who you were.”
“I’m Trixie’s dad,” I replied.
She said, “I’ve been reading your books for years, I love them, I’ve seen your pictures on the jackets, and for some reason I just didn’t make the connection.”
We chatted about books for a minute or two, and then I asked her name, since she now knew mine.
“I’m Wally’s mom,” she said, and we both laughed, and then she told me that Ralph’s Supermarket had finally restocked Frosty Paws.
Ten minutes after we parted, I realized she hadn’t answered my question. I still didn’t know her name.
I am quite sure that at home that evening, she said something to her husband like: “I asked Trixie’s dad when he has a new book coming out, and he said next month.”
In Harbor Ridge, in addition to people walking their dogs, Gerda and I frequently encountered the grandfather of an Indian family who lived on the next block. He required the assistance of a walker, one of those models with wheels, and he proceeded at a slow but steady pace across the flat streets on top of the ridge, venturing out twice a day for what must have been a one-mile constitutional each time. I was impressed by his commitment to remaining active.
He had a round, merry face and a warm smile, and his slight musical accent was charming. And he always wanted to reach down and stroke Trixie’s head while we exchanged pleasantries about the weather or about something in the news.
One day, as Trixie and I approached him, he said, “May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog?” I said that nothing would please me more, and he said, “Perhaps you know what she is. Do you know what she is?”
Assuming he wanted to know her breed, I said, “She’s a golden retriever.”
“Yes, she is,” he replied, “but that’s not what I mean. In our religion, we believe in reincarnation. We live many times, you see, always seeking to be wiser than in our previous life, wiser and more virtuous. If we eventually lead a blameless life, a perfect life, we leave this world and need not endure it again. Between our human lives, we may be reincarnated as other creatures. Sometimes, when someone has led a nearly perfect life but is not yet worthy of nirvana, that person is reincarnated as a very beautiful dog. Whe
n the life as the dog comes to an end, the person is reincarnated one last time as a human being, and lives a perfect life. Your dog is a person who has almost arrived at complete enlightenment and will in the next life be perfect and blameless, a very great person. You have been given stewardship of what you in your faith might call a holy soul.”
The grandfather’s voice and manner were enthralling, and his comments about Trixie were so kind and sweet that I thanked him and said we’d always thought she was special. He said, “Tell your wife what I have told you,” and I assured him that I couldn’t wait to tell her and would do so as soon as I got home.
This might seem strange, but I walked a block before it occurred to me to connect his words to the incident in which I told Trixie that I knew she was an angel masquerading as a dog, and to the night that she seemed to take a tour of the upstairs with a presence invisible to me. A not unpleasant chill traveled my spine.
As a Christian, I do not believe in reincarnation, but I believe there was something unique and significant about Trixie. Many people recognized that uniqueness and expressed their perception of it in different ways. Frequently, when we were on a restaurant patio with Trix, other customers, having watched her during dinner, stopped by our table to say a word about her, and more often than referring to her beauty or to her good behavior, they said, “She’s really special, isn’t she?” We always said, “Thank you. We think she’s very special.” But after the grandfather told me what he believed her to be, I was more than previously aware of how often the word special was used to describe her.
Our friends Andy and Anne Wickstrom, whom we had known since my college years and who grow more interesting—or maybe just more strange—year by year, came to stay with us for a week in our new house. They were taken with Trixie, and she with them, and the five of us had a grand time. A month or so after they had returned home to the East Coast, we were chatting on the phone, and Anne said that they had tried to tell friends about Trix, to convey how special she was, but eventually realized that words and anecdotes simply were inadequate to make anyone fully understand Short Stuff’s magical personality and appeal.