INSTALLMENTS IX and X

PASSAGES

CHAPTER 33

Crouched behind gauze in the dead of night, I was brought secretly in my traveling bag past uniformed guards and lifted in an elevator to join the Object of My Devotion and others of the self-selected pack who kept watch inside a ring of curtains. There, That Which Had Been In My Bed Before Me lay waiting to be released from the cruel leashes hung to its arms by needles. Other packs huddled near us, behind their own curtains, in their own circles. I could hear their cries; they could hear our cries, I’m sure. The air was alive with the high-pitched songs of bags dripping blood or salt water.

The odor of fluids used to clean scissors at the Groomerama clung to my fur, and I felt sure that Lilly’s mother spent her nights in a similar worrying place, acquiring the same scents among other huddling circles, with others in white clothing and rubber soled shoes. I noticed many such shoes worn by those pretending not to notice me. Baby Lilly seemed far away; I avoided the thought of her.

Within the ring of curtains I answered to the name of Solace, acknowledging my role in some plan never spoken of, though now obvious, that even before That Which Had Been In My Bed Before Me took off, it was intended my eleven and half pounds of consolation be already in place beside the Object of My Devotion.

For now, the skeleton we watched emerging from its flesh sat eager to be diverted. Inspired by an enthusiastic audience, and assisted by the Object of My Devotion I performed, and with pleasure, the hula, the tango, and the Bunny Hop Hop Hop. Word of my capers spread surreptitiously along the passageways. Strays from other packs drawn close around other bodies, came to watch, and keep the secret that I was there at all.

When what we circled slept soundly, the night watch dispersed and the Object of My Devotion led me wandering through the streets on meandering paths, delaying our return home to the torment of the telephone. In a thicket of maples turning red with the fall, we unexpectedly encountered game, a feastful of squirrels. Prey drive drove me to distraction. I was mad to tree the beasts, and strained against appeals to call off the hunt.

I strained, too, against restrictions keeping me from the females of my kind.

CHAPTER 34

My brothers were dangerously stupid, my sisters malicious. That was all the distinction I had made between sexes until, beginning with the enticing Teeny Maria and the intimidating Princess, my encounters with the bewildering variety of lady terriers (big ones, little ones, fluffy ones, red ones) made me yearn to know them all. By croons, warbles and earnest trills I tried to interest those I met in the pastimes I had been initiated into by Princess on the porch. Many dogs were willing to consider my propositions, but the Object of My Devotion jealously restrained me from all but the most innocuous sniffs.

I was hauled away also from the banquet of delicacies freely set out for curbside dining. I was more successful eating from the gutter than with girls or squirrels. I learned, before the Object of My Devotion could notice or prevent me, to snatch in silence and swallow in haste.

Back home the editors of History's Mysteries Magazine called often, hoping to offer their readers something, perhaps, a 500 word account of mermaids off the coast of Patagonia. The Object of My Devotion tried diverting interest to historic sirens instead. I found it fascinating, though my opinion was not shared, that Magellan’s men took such pleasure in what is now Rio de Janiero, they grew reluctant to part company with their hostesses, the maidens of the local Guarani tribe. Right after Christmas the Captain-General commanded the mariners to ship out and discover Buenos Aires. Wailing rejoinders could be heard down the coast for miles.

As insistent as any Guarani maid, the Begetters made frequent calls ordering the Object of My Devotion meet them at some place, time, and day significant enough to them, but not, it seemed to him. Following his obedient retreat from Tierra del Fuego, The Object of My Devotion had turned contrarily obdurate.

We returned to the tethered soul whose matters seemed to be coming to a close, or so it was thought among the watchfull self-selected pack. To shore up their spirits they read aloud to each other. Listening to them read, I forgot where I was, or where I was going, just as besotted as when sighting squirrels, sniffing tails, or snagging cheese from the streets. That which had been in my bed before me called for old favorites: stories of knights and their ladies.

CHAPTER 35

There came a time when That Which Had Been In My Bed Before Me was bound by a harness, its arms lashed to the bedrails to stop its bony hands from pulling out the worst leash of all, the one thrust down its throat.

Under such restraints there could be no speech. Communication was accomplished, by reciting an alphabet until a nod indicated what to mark upon a pad. The enormous effort needed to form the simplest words and the necessary economy in choosing any words at all elevated as simple a sentence as See Spot, Fun to an incontestable command in consequence of which I was held up to view the smile twisted around the breathing tube.

A time came when the ghost of That Which Had Been In My Bed Before Me did no more than wait to sail away. We who waited to be left behind listened intently to a story, read aloud from The Sword in the Stone, a book about the young King Arthur, whose tutor, a great necromancer, spoke as if in the room with us.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

CHAPTER 36

The passageway that connects the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean is 334 miles long. On the Atlantic Coast, several hundred miles south of Buenos Aires, it begins in secret, in a bay of shallow water colored green and backed with mountains. What seems like a creek leads to a vast inner pool. The land surrounding this pool is a prairie, stretching flat, with few landmarks. It is not clear where this body of water empties, or how. From there another narrow channel leads to another and larger inner pool, so large the end cannot be seen. This is not the Pacific. That end is still to be reached. There is another narrow exit to be found and gone through before emerging in the place so long sought it was called by its first European discoverer the Cape of Desire.

In this long and convoluted passageway, more accurately called a strait, Magellan lingered 38 days before passing out onto an unknown Ocean.

There were delights within this passageway, a bay, for instance, with meadows of brightly colored flowers backed with mountains, where waterfalls spilled along walls of sweet-smelling evergreens, and fish jumped in the air so high they were flying, and they did it not only to hunt food but for the sheer joy of the thing.

There were moments of eerie astonishment and foreboding, as when the mariners came upon a cluster of houses, the first signs of other humans in these parts. It was not a town, it was a city of the dead, shelves on stilts where the Indians left their dead. There were hundreds of them, sewn into cases of bird feathers. There at the end of the world, the wind whistled around them and the Portuguese, who were not large men, stood astonished to realize that the bodies were six and a half feet tall.

They saw no living person, though they hoped that what they saw all around them gave evidence of other humans. There were small fires everywhere, like stars in the sky, and Magellan called the land Tierra del Fuego, tierra from same root for terriers, meaning earth; del fuego, of fire. The country itself was called after a dog, Patagon, known for his big feet.

Because of the time of the year and the closeness to the Antarctic Pole, it was dark only three to five hours at night. The rest of the time there was light and they sailed. Even so it took longer than they thought, even after they’d climbed a mountain and sighted the exit, still they didn’t make passage, but went back on a fruitless errand, as far back as the creek, to look for one of their ships, which, though it had been among the first to discover the strait, had secretly mutinied and sailed back to Spain.

At the exit the water flows in two directions at once. One side rushes out, the other floods back in. Both currents are mighty, and they meet with a crash like thunder between towering mountains of ice and snow. Magellan wept when he saw the ocean spread before him, and he sailed onto the nameless sea, so calm he called it the Pacific.

Just so, the self-selected pack around the hospital bed waited as the spirit made its passage from one ocean to the next. There were calms, there were valleys of delight, there was eerie foreboding, there were unexpected and fruitless detours. There were times when the long sought passage out seemed near, and easy, and yet, was once again delayed.

CHAPTER 37

Moments of that cold fall come when recalled, always present in my memory.

I sit vigil behind the ring of curtains, waiting with the Object of My Devotion among the self-selected pack surrounding That Which Had Been In My Bed Before Me. What we watch sleeps. What moments of lucidity there are we greet as if a diver has risen to the surface of the sea with a pearl.

That Which Had Been In My Bed Before Me has open running sores on its legs. Sometimes it raves.

At home, phone calls from the Begetters unnerve the Object of My Devotion enough to agree to go to something called a fitting.

Sometimes at night, between home and our vigil, I slink past the shuttered storefront of the Groomerama. Is my darling Teeny Maria yet captive in the back? Does the Groomerama honcho still force her to his bidding? Is she thinking of me, as I of her? Has she escaped with her fellow prisoners?

Try as I might, I detect no marks of fugitives on the street posts, the garbage cans, the fire hydrants, the letterboxes, nor any of the other places where it is usual to post notice. On all of these I am careful to leave my own sign, hoping that, if Teeny Maria has eluded her captors she will come to join me, but the weather changes and the rain falls. The marks I have so carefully left all wash away.

I greet feral cats in the streets, trying to lick noses, but the Amazons spit and hiss.

It is early afternoon. The air conditioner hums, though if the windows were open it would be chilly inside the ring of curtains where That Which Had Been In My Bed Before Me is soon to leave the bed it lies in now. The Object of My Devotion thinks of lying in the bed, too, and with me, thinks of kissing the bony hands that rest above the rising and falling sheet. Instead, he looks at his watch, hands a piece of paper to someone watching and we leave.

Carried hidden in my bag near the hallway exit I sense a moving mop. At the ominous sight I howl. The Object of My Devotion covers quickly, ducking around a corner. Pretending to be the source of the sound he howls, too. His cries die away, and she who mops carries on, evidently used to such sounds, already forgotting what she heard.

The phone is ringing as we arrive home. The Object of My Devotion grabs for the receiver, then confirms to his Begetters, curtly, that he is just now leaving to meet them. He fails to mention he is carrying me with him.

CHAPTER 38

From a cab to a train to a cab to, of all strange things, a shopping mall. I am not welcome, and I do not care. I relieve myself as best I can. There is no grass, not a blade, all is concrete, odorless, not even gravel to scratch at, certainly no bare soil. I relieve myself meaninglessly into the air.

The Object of My Devotion, in as much a daze as I, leads me in, past glaring guards to a store that rents formal wear. His brother and father are there, too. They are getting dressed into black and white costumes, tying black pleated harnesses around their middles and black silk collars around their necks.

Lilly’s Grandmother is there too, supervising. Neither Lilly nor her mother is in evidence. The Object of My Devotion is ready to let me roam, but Lilly’s Grandmother, concerned that I might sprinkle my hair on the black cloth demands that I be contained. My bag is placed on the floor, the hatch to it left open, and in it I sit, thinking of what is happening where we have just been.

The Object of My Devotion now undresses and redresses into what is called a tuxedo. It does not fit as well as the two he has at home, but it matches his brother’s and his father’s, which seems to be the point. All three men look alike now, which seems to be the point.

The phone rings in the store. The shop girl answers it with a stock greeting, then calls for the Object of My Devotion, who harnessed and collared in black silk, dwarfed by an over-sized jacket, picks up the receiver, listens, and puts the phone down without comment. No one asks what the phone call concerns.

Other jackets are tried on, until one fits. The coats that remain are put back on hangars that clink against each other on a rolling rack. There is a foul smell of dry-cleaning. Good byes are exchanged; it is said all will see each other in a few days. We leave the store. The Object of My Devotion moves to release me, but once again his mother reminds him that my hairs might ruin the cleanliness of the suit, and so I remain hanging from his arm in my bag. The suit he is taking home with him hangs high from his other arm. The clear plastic shrouding it flutters in the air like flames.

CHAPTER 39

I am sitting in the car in my bag. Lilly’s Grandmother is driving us to the train station. The Object of My Devotion has been very quiet for a while. “Do you want to know what’s going on?” he asks.

"No," is the answer.

There is some chitchat about other relatives arriving from Florida.

We do not go back inside the ring of curtains. We go home. We never go back inside the ring of curtains. For days the Object of My Devotion sits quietly at his desk, ignoring the phone, which rings and rings without him picking it up. The tuxedo hangs in the closet.

A package arrives in the mail. The Object of My Devotion opens it to find the album of my photographs. Looking at my picture, on the cover, lying on a lacy pillow as if on a cloud, he places the album last seen within the ring of curtains softly softly softly softly into a drawer and out of sight. He takes up another book and reads aloud. There is no else to listen but I, Spot.

Ecclesiastes, Chapter 9, verses 2-7,9

All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.

This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.

Live joyfully with those whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which are given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

CHAPTER 40

The Object of My Devotion sat motionless. The time would come, I knew, when my nose shoved under his hand would remind him to pet me, when the sight of my empty bowl would lead to thoughts of food, and my short sharp bark prompt him to get up and take me out on necessary business. As before, I, Spot, by doing nothing but living, would recall the Object of My Devotion to life.

What would happen to the Object of My Devotion, though, if for some reason we two were separated? If I were to pass away, what bring him to his senses? If he passed away, what would give my life sense? As loud as a dog howls, the wind blows the sound away; as pungent as our marks, the rain washes them clean. Then I remembered Merlyn and Arthur and Ecclesiastes -- whose marks, read aloud, had outstood rain and wind -- and I knew what to do.

I resolved to write a book. I knew it would be hard. I knew my ambition would be laughed at, considering I couldn’t even read yet. I said nothing at the time, but I began to think that if I wrote a book I would find a way to come to the Object of My Devotion when called -- even after death – and should he die before me I would find a way to recall our life together.

I did not at that time know what shape my book would take, nor did I know the subject, nor the style, nor even what language in which it would be written. I did not then know for what audience it would be written. More important than any of these, I had discovered my purpose for writing a book, and that purpose would drive form, style and language before it.

I am small, small even by the standards of my kind, but my will is large, and I turned my will towards purposes other than straining my leash to eat garbage off the streets, to pursue inconsequential sexual encounters with strangers, to mark upright objects as my own, to chase after squirrels who might lead me off my path.

When we terriers bite down on what we chase, our jaws lock. Rather than release our catch, we must be torn off it. Yet, had I bitten off more than I could chew? In the word dogged itself, I found inspiration. In the higher class to which Rat Terriers belong, the strain of Feists, I had sturdy roots. Feisty and dogged I was and so the necessary skills could be mastered. The practical difficulties could be overcome, the distractions of my daily life and my propensity to nap could be superseded. These trials undergone and gone beyond evidence of which lies cracked in half behind you, the other half lies ahead.

END OF PART ONE OF I, SPOT

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