Chapter 9: Anika

Anika, Anika
Sin or death
The darkness of Dick's life,
The fire that froze him,
The ruin he always longed for

Your sisters called you Ann,
Because they hated you.
Your mother called you Ann,
Because she hated you.
Your father never called you anything at all.

But Dick called you Ka,
Because it meant soul.
And he called it love--
The thing you showed him--
The hunger and the surety of loss.

Chapter 8: Three of Four Sisters

Ah. As I was saying, Dick had four sisters. Three were older than him.

First came Petra and Susan. When I was born, Dick was sixteen and Petra and Susan already had almost a full decade on him. They weren't twins--Petra was a year older--but I find it impossible to think of either on her own. Together, they have being, but separately they fade into ghostly impalpability. Physically speaking, both took after their mother. Which is to say both were big strapping Dutch girls that were not much to look at. It wasn't that they were ugly, or even butch. I don't think either were frustrated dykes. Both had faces that when you looked closely enough turned out to be equipped with moderately pretty features. It was precisely that you had to look closely enough. Otherwise what appeared framed under their cropped blond heads of hair were irremediably fuzzy visages.

If Father and Mother Scholten hoped that Petra would be the rock upon which the transplanted-Scholtens-of-the-plains would continue on into the next generation, this hope would ultimately prove thwarted. Last I heard Petra didn't marry until she was forty and the one boychild she saw into the world turned out severely autistic. Susan never did marry. She seemed always to be dating but for some reason I can't help thinking that wherever she is in the world today she carries her hymen with her intact.

I don't know. Maybe it was just their square bodies and small droopy breasts. Even I tended to avoid their legs to hump and I was always rather indiscriminate. Undoubtedly, I've just outed myself as a sexist. Perhaps what I long for most in my hypothetical reader is that one withering glance that will justly dismiss me as irrelevant forever.

But I hope no too cruel words will spill out of me for Willy, the youngest, Dick's baby sister, Wilhemina. She was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, otherwise known as Brittle Bone Disease. By the time I left the farm, two years after I was born, when I was fourteen, Willy had undergone at least four hip operations. Pins inserted, pins removed, pins replaced. She seemed almost always to be on crutches or else in a wheelchair. Scholten Sr. doted on her. He always looked at her in a way that suggested he was personally responsible for her condition. As if God crippled her to punish him for some unspecified and unspeakable sin. Or maybe he felt guilty simply because she was so utterly isolated in her pain. In any case, Willy seemed the only child that could bring out the parent in the hardened old farmer.

Dick was a good brother to her. He instinctively knew when to help Willy and when to let her help herself. He showed no guilt around her because he felt none and had none. Not about her. It wasn't that he was trying, but he was just always around whenever she needed him. And he strangely shared her passion for entertainment gossip. I'd often lie at their feet in the evenings as they watched Mary Hart report Hollywood's latest marriage or latest divorce. As for Petra and Susan, Dick had a kind and decorous respect for them that never deepened into anything more than mild interest in their lives and persons. As far as I could tell this did not bother either of them at all. In the end it seemed everyone in the family paired off: Petra with Susan, Willy with Scholten Sr., Mrs. Scholten with God,...

and Dick with Anika.

Chapter 7: Etiquette is etiquette

I must say I do not like pooping indoors.

The last time it happened I was still at the farm. I was young: not yet seven, not yet a man. After the family dinner, Dick's oldest sister Petra fed me the fat she'd shaved off her pork chop and by the wee hours of the morning it had already worked its way through the many miles of my digestive system. Dick refused to respond to my muted petitions. So I went in the kitchen. Then I slunk back to Dick's room and onto the bed. A short time later I hear Scholten Sr. roar. He bursts into the room, yelling after me, scaring the shit (no pun intended) out of Dick. I scramble out the door between his bowl-legs and he comes chasing after me. Finally, he gets me cornered on the living room couch. I'm shaking for fear of my life and he lays into me with a hard open hand. On my face, the side of my head, my exposed flank. Grabs me then by my neck-scruff, takes me to the kitchen and puts my nose into the still soft coils to teach me a lesson.

I'll never understand why people do that. I guess they must think it's some kind of punishment to make a dog smell or taste his own shit. I guess they don't realize the sheer amount of information packed in and radiating out of it. To us, it's quite the opposite of revolting. It's irresistible. Indeed it's much like writing. It gives us a strong indication of where we are in life, where we've come from and where we're going.

Anyway, the beating sufficed to instill me with a strong sense of etiquette. Later that evening, Scholten Sr. came round and made motions that he forgave me. Can you imagine? I had never cared much for him before that event. His small leathery brown face and hard glassy eyes didn't give out a lot of love to latch onto. After that, though, I hated him. The hate would grow further as I became more aware of the depths to which he had adversely affected his son.

But right now all that is secondary. It's Saturday afternoon and nobody has come. Red is still dead, and I haven't been outside since last evening. I will go downstairs, in the furnace-room where Red set up his grow-op. Perhaps the plants will be able to read my shit and come to understand what I think of them. Or maybe in their primary perceptiveness they already know.

Chapter 6: Theodore, Oliver and Eliza

Will this story have a reader? I know I presume a lot in presuming a reader. But in all times and places hacks have found their willing victims to take in their hackneyed constructions. Ergo the possibility must be there. I guess if all else fails I can count on God. If God didn't exist, bad writers would have to invent Him. Poor God: His omniscience dooms Him to be a captive audience to everything that happens, to deeds and stories and lives that aren't worth the energy or the ink or the blood that underwrites them. This Infinite Passivity of the Deity, this Infinite Capacity for Suffering, is this not the terrible price God must pay to be God?

But if I had a reader, perhaps she or he would be wondering why, in this epic prose poem of my life, I have focused predominantly upon a figure that is not my own self, and, moreover, that is not even of my own species. This is not just because I expect that if I had a reader, she or he would be human (dogs being infinitely more discriminating in their readerly tastes and far more averse to obvious juvenalia) and therefore I needs talk about humans so as to better maintain her or his interest. It should go without saying that the story of any one being is always and already the story of other beings, and that in narrating my own life I must inevitably tell some part of the lives of others. And for a house dog like myself, this means that my life has been to a large extent composed of the lives of other humans.

Obviously, however, I did have my own adventures in those earliest days, that had no reference, or only oblique reference, to Dick. If a farm is a big place for a human being, it's a sevenfold multiverse for a dog, that most curious of creatures. (I don't know where the idea arose that cats were the curious ones... how can something so lazy standoffish and selfabsorbed be considered curious?) Besides the cats, the cattle, the pigs, the horses, the chickens, the geese, the spiders, the grasshoppers, the ants, the migrant birds, and all my other animal cousins, there were at least six to eight other dogs that were permanent residents besides Bessie and me.

Three were my age.

There was my friend Theodore. The humans called him Daniel, if not because of the biblical overtones, then because it rhymed with Spaniel. We were preformed to be friends. Nothing ever came between us, not one single scrap of the most delicious leftovers. Usually we did what I wanted, and usually he would follow my lead. But I never sadistically abused his devotion and he never masochistically abased himself to please me. I saw that happen between Dick and one of his friends and it was something I rather would have not seen.

Then there was Oliver. I guess if I had to admit to a racial bias--a difficult thing, as I aspire to be as open-minded as possible--it would be against smooth fox terriers. Maybe it was just my experience with Oliver, who was the first of the kind I ever met. As much as I was certain Theo and I were preformed to be friends, I was sure God intended Oliver and I to be mortal and spiritual enemies. The horrible irony--that again God must have contrived for some purpose totally obscure to me--was that Oliver's human name was Reggie. It was especially rough whenever Dick would call Oliver over and pet him and say tender things to him with my name. And Oliver would just mildly look over at me and smile that cold smile of his. I was bigger than him, but he was quicker ... and smarter. A thing that took me six months to learn he could learn in a day. The worst thing was that whenever he boasted about his abilities or his accomplishments, or whenever he mocked me for my physical or mental awkwardness, he always did it with a kind of unflappable mildness that made it very difficult to respond to without making oneself look touchy or reactive and resentful. But all those things I could deal with. What I couldn't deal with was the claim he had on the heart of my first love.

That was Eliza. I can't say what she was for sure. Sometimes I look back on her as a cross between truth and beauty. The best I can say is that she had retriever in her. Her coat was thick gold and rust. The smell of it has stayed with me all my days. The Scholtens called her Mischa. I thought it almost as beautiful as her real name. The happiest memory of my earliest years is of the summer day in the tall grass behind the house when Eliza and I exchanged kisses and vowed to each other that one day we would be married. The saddest memory of that same time is of the summer day behind the chicken coop when I encountered her sharing the same kiss and making the same vow with my mortal and spiritual enemy...

Chapter 5: Etymology of Spirit

So. As I was saying, Dick named me Spirit. His parents thought it was a cute name. In some vague way, it perhaps even appealed to their rustic religiosity--an essentially pure strain of Dutch Calvinism. Dick was happy, perhaps even a bit proud, to let them think that way. The truth is, though, he purloined my name from the title of a song of a band that Dick's parents would have judged morally abhorrent and would have severely punished him for secretly listening to. I refer to the band Nirvana and the song "Smells like Teen Spirit." To parade the esoteric truth of my name even more, Dick would often call me Teeny. I guess between Spirit and Teeny Dick's parents thought he was covering both my personality and my appearance--for I was the runt of Bessie's otherwise all-girl litter.

The elder Scholtens would never have imagined Dick capable of such duplicity. They could hardly be blamed for this. In appearance Dick was a child of light. Summer bleached his hair platinum, while winter transmuted it to gold. Likewise with the seasons his wiry body oscillated between alabaster and bronze. More than this, he was polite, conscientious, and reasonably hard-working--both on the farm and at the Christian school he attended in Lethbridge. Perhaps the more he felt he had something to hide, the more he tried to merge with the image of moral purity he felt his parents projected onto him. He didn't entirely imagine this parental expectation. Despite the fact that it was the "90s," and that Dick was by no means the "first-born" (he was the second youngest), his parents really did expect him to take over the farm. Even when he was 16, his age the year that I was born, it went without saying in the family that if he did go away to college, it would be to study agricultural science, after which he would return and take over operations.

Maybe such an expectation seems crude or backwards. Probably in some sense it is. Dick himself would later rant about how his parents were stuck in the past. But that very notion presumes that "the times" move forward in a uniform way, that when things change in one place they automatically change everywhere. A dog's eye-view, however, does not show the present as one thing that people either accept or resist. It sees the present as a collision of all kinds of different times: a little piece of the Calvinist past existing alongside some as yet-unnamed and unrecognized future. Maybe beneath this chaos of time-fragments there is an underlying order. Nobody would argue with the possibility, because nobody would argue that things are precisely what they seem. And who knows? Maybe beneath the possible deeper order is an even deeper possible chaos and so on and so forth until the dizziness of the regress between chaos and order makes you puke.

On the other hand, if it's so obvious that nothing's ever what it seems, than why did almost everyone accept Dick's shining seeming for real? There was one who didn't: Anika. Ann. Annie. Ka. But then, as far as I'm concerned, it was her who split him in two in the first place.

Chapter 4: It's too late to cry

Chapter 3: Names and Pedigree

I was born 105 years ago on the Scholten farm in Iron Springs, Alberta (Canada, North America, Earth, etc.). That would have been in about 1992. My mom's name was Bessie. By one of those rarest of coincidences, Bessie was also her human name. Everyone's heard of it happening before, but I've never personally known anydog else that it's happened to, nor has any of the dogs I've known known it to have happened to any of their acquaintances. It was Dick Scholten who somehow named her with her real name. He named me too. He was my first master, really the only one I've ever had or considered as such--out of sheer love. (A dog's love is about the purest form of love there is. It's like sunshine: pure and powerful and streaming and practically endless.) Anyway, in those earliest mythic days I thought he'd keep me with him forever. But here am I now, a hundred years later and fourteen thousand miles away, keeping watch over a corpse.

Racially speaking, I'm a black lab. Bessie was what you'd call a purebred and so was Jake. I never thought of Jake as my dad, and not just because he lived on the farm across the highway. This may be strange for humans, but while every dog recognizes his mother, we don't really recognize the concept of fatherhood. At best, we have the sketchy category of "sire." But even that's antiquated dog-ese. Basically nowadays every other dog is either your mother or your friend or your enemy and after awhile even your mother just becomes your friend or your enemy.

There were six of us in our litter, me and my five sisters. That was the second miraculous coincidence: there were six kids in the Scholten clan too, Dick and his five sisters. I guess it was out of some kind of identification that Dick picked me out and kept me. One of my sisters ended up on the neighbor's farm with Jake. They called her Lady, but I always thought she was kind of a bitch. The other four were given away and never to be seen again. So basically while I lived on the farm, it was just me and my mom.

Dick named me Spirit, but my real name was Reggie. I don't know why I put that last statement in the past tense. I guess from time to time I still identify myself with the name. Usually though I feel beyond the reach of proper names--dog or human--altogether. I'm anyone or no-one. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Chapter 2: Decision

The morning's getting on, and I've barked myself hoarse. I have to be careful because the water in my dish is running low. Granted, I could probably nudge the toilet lid up if I tried hard enough.

Someone will come eventually. Red had friends, some good for him, some plain wrong. Both sets were always dropping by. And there's his kids, the twins, Sally and Zach. They're going to be right fucked up when they find out. I hope they're not the ones who are going to find him like this.

I thought to stave off the howling crazies I'd write my story. This may sound strange to a human reader. But yes, dogs can write. In fact, dogs are the ordained scribes of the universe. The original writers. The only writers. There is no piece of writing that has not first been written by a dog. Human writing is simply the transcriptions of things originally put down by dogs. Obviously we don't write with pens, paper or keyboards. We just inscribe our thoughts directly into reality. These thoughts then assemble themselves in libraries on the inner planes. Human writers frequent these repositories in their dreams, leaf through the selections, and then imperfectly transcribe what they've read when they wake up. Every dog knows this.

Another thing: every dog grows up with the pressure of writing something. If you don't write something, you don't get transmoleculerized to a dogstar when you die. Or if you do--because one of your friends has written you into his story--you wind up in some shitty sector of the afterlife service industry. Not the happiest fate. Like most of the dogs I know, I've spent my life postponing this moment. I know and have used all the excuses: I need more life experience, haven't yet sniffed enough butts, just need to go for a walk first to clear my thoughts... But really, I'm 105 years old. Time is running out. The time that takes for time to run out is the time to write your ticket to the dogstar.

Undoubtedly, the only human who'd transcribe this is himself a hack or amateur. But I'm no picky beggar. Besides, there's the extra motivation of absenting myself from the presence of that corpse over there.

So here goes.

Black Dog Barking: Chapter 1

Why is it whenever a person walking past sees me in the window barking they always seems to assume I'm barking at them, and not for them? Just now two girls went by, a blond and a brunette. They saw me. They heard me. They even blew me kisses. But did they come up to the window? Did they stop and think that maybe I wasn't barking at them, and that maybe I wasn't even barking at that cheeky rabbit on the neighbor's dewy lawn, but that maybe there was an emergency in here, that I needed their help? If only someone would come up to the window and look in, look past me, they'd see what was wrong. They'd see the dead man on the floor. They'd see Red. He was my ... well, I can't really call him my master. He looked after me. Fed me. Took me for walks. Played with me. Talked to me. Kept me company. He was a good man. He died a few hours ago. It must have been at four or five in the morning. I don't want to say how. I know, but right now I can't say. I just wish someone would come. I need to get out of here. I need to chase that rabbit down and rip him to pieces.