Agent to the Stars

by John Scalzi

  “Tom,” Carl said, and then glanced down at Joshua. “Is this Joshua’s friend?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, and turned to Joshua. “Say hello, Joshua.”

  “Hello, Joshua,” Joshua said.

  Carl was momentarily startled but recovered quite a bit quicker than I did. “Cute,” he finally said.

  “Thanks. I love that joke,” Joshua said.

  “Would one of you mind telling me how Joshua got in there?” Carl said.

  “His dog friend was old and had a heart attack, and Joshua decided to inhabit the body,” I said.

  “I’ve also melded with the dog’s personality,” Joshua said. Carl furrowed his brow. “You mean your personality is part dog?”

  “If you throw a stick, will I not fetch?” Joshua intoned. “If you scratch my backside, will I not jerk my leg? If you show me a cat, will I not chase? Sorry, Tom.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Tom,” Carl said, “I’m hoping this isn’t your idea of how to bring our peoples together. Joshua appears happy to be a dog, but I don’t think that’s the form that we want the Yherajk to take for their grand debut.”

  “Believe me, it’s not,” I said. “But I think letting him be a dog for a while has some interesting aspects.”

  “Explain,” Carl said.

  “Well, for one thing, it finally allows him to interact with humans besides you and me,” I said. “I can take him places now. He’s not going to get the full human experience, to be sure, but he’s going to see more of the place than he would trapped in my house all the time. And maybe the interaction will give us some ideas to go on for how we finally do introduce the Yherajk.”

  “Joshua?” Carl said.

  “Being a dog isn’t optimal for observation,” Joshua said. “But it’s better than what I was doing, which was watching cable television and going into online chat rooms. And I’m having fun. I am the Alpha Dog of the Universe. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

  Carl turned his attention back to me. “What is your plan?” “I don’t have one at the moment,” I said. “I thought I’d just take him places and let him look around. You know, be a professional dog walker for a while.”

  “He’s good at it,” Joshua volunteered, “and he needs the exercise.”

  “Quiet, you,” Carl said to Joshua. Joshua immediately looked like a dog who knows he’s taken a dump in the wrong place in the house. I never would have told Joshua to be quiet. But then, I’m not his dad.

  “I can’t have you wandering around with a dog,” Carl said. “That Van Doren character is still floating around out there. We have to keep you busy.” Carl thought for a few moments, then turned back to Joshua.

  “Can you act?” Carl asked Joshua.

  “I’m pretending to be a dog, aren’t I?” Joshua said.

  Carl buzzed Marcella. “Get me Albert Bowen, if you please, Marcella,” he said, and clicked her off . He turned to me. “You have anything going on in the next few days?”

  “Not really. I got Michelle Beck a reading for Hard Memories, but that’s not until next week. Amanda’s handling all the rest of my clients. I’m free,” I said.

  “Good,” Carl said. “Albert Bowen and I went to college together. He’s a vet and a trainer, and handles animal casting for commercials and television. Let’s see what we can do with this.”

  Marcella’s voice came over the speakerphone. “Albert Bowen holding for Carl Lupo,” she said, and clicked off.

  “Hey, Al,” Carl said.

  “Wolfman!” Bowen said on the other end. Carl twitched slightly at the nickname. College familiarity was probably the only reason Carl let him get away with it. “Haven’t heard from you in a while, my friend. What can I do for you?”

  “I got an interesting potential client, Al,” Carl said. “Animal trainer from the Yukon Territory. Trains dogs. One of my agents did a trek up the Pacific coastline about a year ago and found this guy doing a show outside of Whitehorse. Smartest damned dogs you ever saw. The agent managed to convince the guy to ship one of the dogs down for a week, to see if they might have a future in commercials and films. I think they might, and if it works out, we’re going to represent the trainer.”

  “The trainer shipped one of the dogs?” Bowen said. “He didn’t come down himself?”

  “Said he didn’t need to. Sent the agent a manual with hand signs. Said that’s all he’d need, the dog would understand. I told you these were smart dogs, Al.”

  “Hmmph. I’ll have to see it before I believe it,” Bowen said.

  “Well, Al, that’s my plan. I’m going to send the agent over with the dog. The agent’s name is Tom Stein, and the dog’s name is Joshua. You want to give the dog a look-see and tell me what you think? And if you can use him in any commercials over the next week or so, that’d be good with us. The trainer has given us free rein for this week only.”

  “Who is this guy?” Bowen said.

  “Not going to say, Al,” Carl said. “Company secret until we have a deal signed. But if you like what you see, I think we can work out an exclusive contract for your casting company. Work for you?”

  “Hell, yes, Carl,” Bowen said. “Have them come up today around one. We’ll put the dog through the paces and I’ll get back to you by tomorrow morning. You know where my ranch is?”

  “Valencia, if I’m not mistaken,” Carl said.

  “Right you are,” Bowen said. “Take the Magic Mountain exit, go left, and head into the hills for five miles. Can’t miss it. We’ll be looking forward to seeing them.” Carl and Bowen did their good-bye pleasantries and hung up.

  “Yukon Territory? Whitehorse?” I said.

  Carl smiled broadly. “I’d like to see anyone check up on that whopper,” he said.

  Al Bowen met us in the driveway of his ranch, clearly eager to meet Joshua. That is, until he saw him.

  “This is the dog?” Bowen said, after we made our introductions. It was clear that he didn’t think Joshua was any great prize. But the same could be said of him; Al Bowen was one of those guys who looked like he had spent far too much of his life being a roadie for the Grateful Dead.

  “That’s him,” I said. “He’s really more intelligent than he looks.”

  “I hope so,” Bowen said, and knelt down. “He’s not a biter, is he?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  Bowen held out his hand to let Joshua sniff him. Joshua declined. Bowen took hold of Joshua’s snout and took at look at his gums, then felt down Joshua’s body.

  “How old is this dog?” he finally asked.

  “Eight years, I think,” I said.

  Bowen snorted. “He’s twice that if he’s a year, Tom,” he said, straightening up. “I have to tell you, if Carl hadn’t vouched for this animal, I’d turn you around right now. Come on, let’s go this way.” He led us past the ranch house, into the back.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Bowen said. “It’s nothing big, just a couple thousand acres. Family land, you know. Been in the family since the 1800s. Thought I might have to sell it in the seventies, but then I got my vet degree and started doing this. Pays the bills. Got quite a menagerie here—dogs, cats, pigs, horses, even some llamas. We had a herd of cattle we’d rent out for stampede scenes, but there’s not much call for that recently. Had to turn most of them into cat food.” We stopped at an enclosed yard that looked like an obstacle course.

  “What is this?”

  “Well, this is a training track,” Bowen said. “If we want to have an animal do something complicated, like run through a house and open a window, we’ll sort of create that here and run them through it until it gets hardwired into their brains. I figure that dog of yours has a repertoire of tricks. Tell me what they are, and we’ll set up the track and run him through a couple.”

  “That’s not the way he was trained,” I said.

  Bowen looked at me like I was a bad peyote flashback. “What d
o you mean?” he said.

  “Well, as I understand it, he’s sort of trained the other way. Set up the track the way you want it, and tell him what to do, and he’ll do it.” I was making all this up, and this sounded reasonable to me.

  But apparently it didn’t sound that way to Bowen. “Look, Tom,” he said. “I don’t know what fool chase Carl has you running, or if you’ve pulled a fast one on Carl. But every dog has to be trained for specific tasks. I love and respect dogs, but even the smartest ones can’t just be told to do something brand new and then do it. That’s just not the way their brains work.”

  “Mr. Bowen, before you say it can’t be done, why don’t we try it first?” I said. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

  Bowen looked irritated, and then he laughed. “Fine, then,” he said. “Give me a minute to prepare the track.” He went into the enclosed area and began moving things around.

  “‘Is he a biter?’” Joshua said, under his breath. “I almost nipped off his nose, just for that one.”

  “Behave yourself, Joshua,” I said. “You think you can handle this?”

  “Deep in the bowels of my intellect, I have the knowledge necessary to pilot an interstellar spacecraft,” Joshua said. “I think I should be sufficiently competent to walk and jump.”

  “No need to get testy,” I said.

  “Sorry,” Joshua said. “Personally, I think I’m a fine dog. Remind me to pee on this guy’s shoes before we go.”

  Bowen came back to our side of the enclosure and opened it to let us through.

  “Let me walk you through this,” he said.

  “You can just tell me,” I said. “That should be fine.”

  Bowen smirked. “All right, then. Here’s what I want. I want your dog to leap over that plastic fence over there, come back around this way to this”—he motioned to a window with a shade on it—“and grab the blind string in his mouth to open the blind. Finally, I want him to go all the way back there”—He pointed to what looked like a kid’s playhouse—“there’s a doorbell button on the right side of the door that he should be able to press. Have him press it, turn around, sit, and bark back at us.”

  “Is that all?” I said.

  “Son,” Bowen said. “It would take the better part of a year for a dog to learn something this complicated. If your dog can get just one of these things on the first try, he qualifies as the smartest dog in the history of dogs.”

  “Joshua,” I snapped my fingers as if to make him heel. He sauntered over and sat, looking at me. I pointed to the plastic fence.

  “Jump!” I said. I then moved my arm over to the blind.

  “Pull!” I said. I then moved my arm over to the playhouse doorbell.

  “Press!” I said. I then made a spinning motion with my hand, and mimed my hand sitting.

  “Bark!” I said.

  Joshua shot me a look that clearly said, give me a fucking break.

  “Go!” I said. He sprinted off.

  “Mary mother of God in a lobster bib,” Al Bowen said, roughly twenty seconds later.

  “I thought he was a little sloppy about the blinds,” I said. They were, in fact, slightly crooked.

  “Listen,” Bowen said. “I’ve got a Mighty Dog commercial scheduled here for the day after tomorrow. Tell me you can make it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We start shooting at ten-thirty,” Bowen said. “Try to be here by seven. This is smartest dog I’ve ever seen in my life, but he’s still going to need a lot of grooming work.” He shook his head and walked away.

  Joshua walked up. “Well?” he said.

  “You’re going to be in a Mighty Dog commercial,” I said.

  “Well, all right, then,” Joshua said. “I would hate to be associated with anything that wasn’t one hundred percent pure beef, you know.”

  CHAPTER Thirteen

  On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany began World War II by bombing the hell out of the Polish capital of Warsaw. By September 27, the Germans were dipping their feet in the Vistula river, which bisects the city; shortly thereafter, the Jews of Warsaw were herded into the Warsaw Ghetto—500,000 of them, initially, in an area roughly one mile square. In July of 1942, the Nazis began deporting the Jews en masse from the ghetto. Between July 22 and October 3, 300,000 were deported to the various concentration camps—Treblinka and Chelmno were the closest to the city of Warsaw—and exterminated. In April of 1943, the 40,000 or so Jews who remained in the ghetto were attacked by the Nazis. They fought back, heroically, for three weeks. And then nearly all of them were killed.

  One who survived was Rachel Spiegelman. In pre-War times, Rachel and her family were well-to-do professionals; the daughter and granddaughter of physicians, Rachel herself had studied law and worked as the office manager of her husband’s law firm. In addition to Polish and Yiddish, she spoke German and English, and had even been to America as a child, to visit family members who had emigrated there. She was a daughter and wife of privilege, and the fall from having servants and summer homes to living six to a room in the ghetto was a long one.

  And yet, inasmuch as one can in the circumstances, Rachel thrived. She was tough-minded and sensible—and also formidable. When the Nazis informed the ghetto residents that they were to form Jewish councils that would oversee housing, sanitation, and manufacturing production, she forbade any member of her family from joining the councils, declaring that those who worked with the Germans were leading the rest to the slaughter. When her husband disobeyed her and served on a council, Rachel threw him out of the room that they shared with Rachel’s parents, her brother, and her brother’s wife.

  She then organized her neighborhood to operate around the councils and clashed with them repeatedly over their edicts. With a young Pole who was rumored to be her lover, she operated a black market, somehow finding meat and sweets when the Germans allowed only turnips and beets to be sent into the ghetto. When the Nazis ordered the Jewish councils to find “volunteers” for deportation, Rachel, working desperately, found her neighbors work in armament plants or hid them, delaying but ultimately failing to stem the death flow out of the ghetto. She fought alongside the remaining Jews during the ghetto uprising for two weeks, one of the very few women left in the ghetto to do so; in the third week, against her better judgment, she attempted to escape the ghetto with her young Pole. They actually did it, only to be turned in by one of the Pole’s “friends.” He was shot and killed; she was sent to Treblinka.

  From April until the beginning of August, Rachel slaved in the camp; on August 3, it was decided that she was no longer needed. She was sent a mile up the road to Treblinka II, where the “bathhouses” were. These bathhouses were connected to huge diesel engines that pumped in carbon monoxide—deadly, but not very efficient. It typically took nearly a half hour before the hundreds crammed inside the “bathhouses” died. It was a long and terrifying death, and between 700,000 and 900,000 people died that way, in that camp.

  On August 3, however, there were some surprising deaths at Treblinka II; namely, an SS officer and several guards. They were killed by some of the Jews who worked at the camp, performing the executions, excavating the corpses for gold teeth and other valuables, and transporting the bodies to mass graves. The Jews chose that day to attempt a revolt, and while it was not successful, over two hundred Jews escaped the camp during the chaos. Rachel was one of them. Most of the escapees were eventually recaptured or killed. Rachel was not. Rachel went north, eventually finding passage to Sweden. After the war ended, she emigrated from there to the United States.

  Rachel’s story would be remarkable enough if it had ended there. But it did not. Once Rachel arrived in the United States, she was outraged to discover that her adopted country, the one that had fought for the freedom of Europe, was dealing with Black Americans like the Germans dealt with the Jews. Even some of the laws were effectively the same—no intermarriage, segregated schools and services, and violence either ignored or actively condoned by those who
se job it was to keep the peace. “There are black shirts beneath those white robes,” she would later write.

  So she did something about it. She went back to law school and got her J.D.—and the next day got on a bus to Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of Dixie. She passed the bar and set up shop: a female, Jewish lawyer, offering legal services to black sharecroppers and factory workers. Her office was firebombed twice in the first month. The next, someone drove by and put a bullet through her window. It ricocheted and struck her in the leg. She went to the hospital to have it removed, and was denied medical help by the emergency room resident, who refused to work on a “nigger-loving Jew.” Rachel responded by prying out the bullet herself, right there, slamming it down on the resident’s clipboard, and walking out under her own power. Then she sued the hospital and the resident. She won. Her office was firebombed again.

  She stayed on—on through the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, when she bought her first car to avoid riding the buses and ferried black friends to and from work. On through the Birmingham protests of 1963, when she was arrested twice by white policemen and bitten three times by their dogs. On through Martin Luther King’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, when she and King walked arm-in-arm as they strode past her offices, now staffed with partners—half of them black.

  Just before she died in 1975, she wrote in Time magazine, “I feel the work I have done was the work I was destined to do. I know what it is to lose my rights and to be told that I have no right to exist, to see my family, my friends and my humanity stripped away from me. These are hard memories, couched in sorrow and anger. But I also know what it is to see others begin to gain their rights and their humanity, to be told, yes, you are our brothers and sisters. Come join us at the family table, and be welcome. My work, though such a small part of a larger whole, has helped to make this a reality. It makes those hard memories a little easier to bear, because these memories—they are glorious.”

  This is the woman that Michelle Beck wanted to portray. Could she do it?