Issue 2:02 | Fiction | Ken Wainio

 

Dog Story

Excerpt from STARFUCK (New Native Press, 1996)

Ken Wainio

 

Wagner: "By dogs that are expertly trained

The wisest man is entertained.” --Goethe

 

Spring is not my favorite season. I prefer the starkness of winter, geometric black trunks squeezed out on white canvas, sky the color of a frozen pond. Not stasis but equilibrium, chaotic nature held in checkmate, inside a bright fire and the order of my thoughts.

 

I had retreated to our family cabin in late May just when the weather was becoming warm and the trees were parading like drag queens full of screaming birds. Wild flowers soared up and down the green slopes dropping bombs of pollen, exploding reds, yellows, violets and golds. Delirious bees thundered in the meadows, dragonflies chased their reflections in ponds of snow melt, and Spite Creek plunged down the narrow jaw of Haymaker Gorge to the Widow Hole where many a boy, imitating the local Indian puberty rite, had failed to jump the chasm and been fatally baptized in frothing rage, stone teeth sharp as blades. Both Herb and I had completed the jump as boys, though I only by jackknifing on my belly and dragging myself over the edge.

 

Thank God for Herb. He had a hot meal waiting for me at the cabin along with a quantum of bourbon. I told him exactly what I had to and no more. "Seems to me you're doing more than just hiding out here, Lester. Kind of worries me."

 

"Look, Herb . . . you must have read about it in the papers. I need time to be alone and sort things out before any legal proceedings. It's important the government doesn't find me before I can finish ordering my papers. Anyway, I don't believe you're doing anything illegal in hiding me out a few weeks . . . I mean nobody's even thought of looking for me here yet . . .”

 

"Maybe won't either. Them secret agent boys ain't all they're made out to be," he said, digging into a slab of berry pie. "But don't you worry about me. Far as I'm concerned, this Martian athlete's foot or whatever it is is your own business."

 

Herb brought me up food and bourbon twice a week. He could carry two hundred pounds on his back if he had to. He came up at night, knowing the path like the back of his hand, usually leaving the supplies quietly on the porch while I snored within. I saw him only twice after our first meeting and then only for a few minutes.

 

I had never taken a psychoactive substance before, but the effects of the earthly ones, anyway, are well documented and I expected an immediate high. But it took over twenty-four hours to "come on," as they say, and by that time I had foolishly ingested all six capsules in my lust for result.

 

It was twilight of the second day. Sitting on the porch absorbed in my thoughts as usual, always looking within for what I have come to learn is right in front of me, I suddenly noticed the landscape was completely alive. The trees, grass, brush, rocks, mountains and sky were one living, breathing biosphere. I experienced a sensation I can describe only as an orgasm of my entire physical being, not limited to my present physiognomy, but to every cell I had ever owned down to my first one: The meeting of my father's sperm with my mother's egg. This was a telescoping event that seemed to take place at the speed of light.

 

I relived all my experiences in great detail, a panorama of events which was my childhood, adolescence and adulthood, right up to the present, a kind of cinematic recall which then launched itself at the same speed into my future cells. But what I found here was so confusing, so alarming I could no longer concentrate, for the being that I was dissolved inexplicably into other strange beings, some human, some animal, finally into the landscape itself of which I was an integral part. I saw nothing but the chair where my arms and legs should have been and glancing for my reflection in the window, I found only the suggestive trees swaying beyond. Correspondingly a voice in my head said: "You are now one with us."

 

At first I thought the voice was coming from Popo, Herb’s dog, with whom I had been more or less in telepathic communication. He was sitting at my feet, watching me intently, and it was then I realized we weren't in communication with each other, but mutually with this entity: Starfuck, presumably.

 

"Who are you?" screamed every cell in my body.

 

"Everyone and no one," came the extrasensory reply. There was nothing further.

 

Gradually I became aware of my body again. There was a pleasant sensation of freedom as earlier in the experience and I was able to suddenly rise from my chair and wing invisibly about the clearing in which the cabin was situated.

 

Skimming the treetops, I flew down the mountain and followed the highway into town. The pedestrians were clearly unaware of me, though I had the sensation of still having an image, even if I couldn't see myself anymore than they could.

 

I visited my brother in his house at the edge of Smoker Gulch. He was watching TV, having apple pie and coffee. I attempted to speak to him mentally, but he didn't hear or recognize me for what I was, merely glancing abstractedly about the room a few times as if he had misplaced something important. I tried to move an object to gain his attention, but in this regard I was quite the ghost. Something told me I would need a very large amount of Martian Acid to achieve such a feat. The thought depressed me and simply thinking longingly of my cabin, I found myself back in the chair, Popo at my feet.

 

Night came on and I dissolved in the stars. They were now microcosmical as they had last night been infinitely far. Like the cells in my body I could touch all of them. I could feel the very limit of the cosmos, where fourteen billion years ago our universe was born. It had the skin of a child at this far edge, the incomprehensible womb of nothingness beyond. I was very much in a state of bliss, at rest in a jeweled sea of indescribable colors. The idea of black empty space between planets and galaxies was cause for mirth. I was one with the cosmic rays which make up intergalactic space. The darkness of infinity was no more than the stuff between my cells. Even the fearful graves of light itself, black holes, those coffins of matter where particle and wave meet, weren't cause for alarm. I experienced them only as tiny hemorrhages on my infinite body, which was likewise inexplicably finite.

 

Dawn and I was the sun, its living breath and being, of which the other suns likewise radiated their own private heliosphere of electrically charged particles, all respirating individually at the heart of darkness, each breath of which was millions and millions of years.

 

Soon I found I had arms and legs again and a reflection in the mirror. I could move around normally with the only side effect that I was ravenous. I ate a huge breakfast and felt extraordinarily clear till about noon when I awoke from a short nap feeling the void in every pore of my body. The minute black holes, so insignificant the previous night, had become a hideous cancer, a contortion of matter squeezing me back into myself like a reversed process of metamorphosis, now taking up all space. The anguish was unspeakable, a pain at once emotional as it was physical.

 

Thus addicted I understood the suffering of the genius, grasped his void without his gold, the hideous metaphysical tedium of the artist isolated from his own vision, trapped in a dull world with billions of violent, pusillanimous beings only a few of whom even suspect another "life" even exists. A "useless" life which renders the ordinary unbearable. You can't imagine the grating impotence, the rage and humiliation of being trapped in this helpless state, just as if you were separated by light years of space from the planet to which you belong. No, you will find yourself praying for ignorance, that you might once again hunker mindlessly down with your fellows, the living dead, and go on bungling till doomsday, for there is nothing else for it but the peace of oblivion. Not for the genius, anyway.

 

I had recourse only to an eastern brand of negativism, the comforting knowledge that everything blows away and so forth; a spiritual ruse akin to table tapping, hollow as our western attempt to immortalize the personality, whether anything survives the body or not; no more than a cosmological shell game to amuse the natives while their land is stolen and culture destroyed. Of course much of the information necessary for spiritual and biological evolution (they are the same!) is codified in ancient texts, but the religious controllers have done their best to bastardize and disguise original insight. How convenient a passive Buddha or the legitimate suffering of a savior Christ while a handful of invisible monsters work the controls of millions of years. How unspeakably disgusting.

Now I understood the objective conceit of science, the need to erect around itself a cause and effect barrier to everything apparently insensible. A kind of little house on the prairie of chaos, more dreary than the search for hen's teeth.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

And when I awoke I found myself gazing placidly at the back of my own head. This was something new. I hadn’t as yet experienced this form of out of the body delirium and I lay there more or less contentedly waiting for what would happen next. Nothing did for some time.

 

Then my other suddenly yawned, stretched, and rolled slowly over to look me directly in the eyes. Had I actually become two, some kind of Martian clone, I wondered? I was answered by a horrible shriek of recognition, or perhaps it was just a shriek of total bewilderment on the part of my double self, much more upset by the spectacle than I. His eyes were completely insane with horror, unlike my own, which to the last had remained calm, despite my wasted appearance. He leapt to his feet, howling in terror, and began senselessly stomping about the cabin smashing the furniture and shitting and pissing all over himself.

 

I tried to get up to calm him down, but found I couldn't rise from all fours. I likewise discovered I had no hands or knees, but stiff springy legs covered with fur and a black snout reaching far out into my line of vision like the nose of a ship. The truth hit me at the same time as the foot of my old self and I crashed back into a corner, yelping in pain. I suddenly realized that I had traded bodies with Popo!

 

Reeling from the kick, I began my own frantic leaping about the cabin unable to control my pet's body. It was like being in a small boat during a bad storm. Try as I would to gain my balance and avoid both Lester the dog and the flying objects in the room, I was unable to stay on my feet for more than a few seconds. I kept keeling over and kicking my legs in the air, either that or helplessly flipping around like a beached fish. Finally my poor Popo wearing my body plunged out the door screaming at the top of his lungs and bore away into the trees.

 

Once the dogman was gone I was able to rest, lying for a few minutes in the middle of the floor panting and contemplating my paws. By degrees I found myself gravitating into my new home, a very strange sensation, and gradually I could stand up and move around without tipping over. But then all the habits of the dog came to the fore and I was unable to keep from biting and scratching, licking my ass and my genitals, beating my tail and whimpering nervously. It was all so astonishingly unique I couldn't get a grip on myself, in order to go out and try to succor poor me, and poor Popo, if that were possible.

 

I now had a much increased visual field, as my eyes were on either side of my head, and I was perceiving a greatly intensified spectrum of colors, an array of shimmering pastels outdoing even the ocular marvels of my first Martian Acid trip. It was like being inside a painting by Kandinsky or Max Ernst.

 

And the smells! My God the smells were overwhelming. I could suddenly pick up and instantly categorize a hundred different odors at once. Plants, animals, various natural or manmade stenches, all the various musks and excrements and decaying stuff of the forest outside the door came to me in one wild rush.

 

And the sounds! I could hear sounds like never before. Distant ones as well as close ones, like an insect scratching up the wall outside or a spider spinning its web under the house. Likewise I could zoom in on particular sounds in the woods, finally making out, at quite some distance, through all the screeching, digging, thumping, chattering, grinding, hissing, and rustling that is the great outdoors, the screams and stumbling footfalls of my new body's old master. It was marvelously exciting and I could not keep from bounding around the cabin in a paroxysm of canine joy despite my obviously all too human concerns.

 

Finally I did gain control of myself and venture outside, straining to pick up the pathetic cries. They had stopped quite suddenly, as had the crashing brush and footfalls, and I had a very icy feeling in my doggy heart.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Raising my nose, more to take advantage of my new radar, that is -- my sense of hearing, rather than that of smell, for the wind was against me, I was able to pinpoint more or less the region where my crazed man-pet had vanished: Haymaker Gorge.

 

I launched myself into the trees at full speed, several times bashing into a trunk or fallen log, my judgment of distance being not what it was. Dogs, at least this one, evidently have very little ability to scan out obstructions. You think you have a clear path ahead and then bang -- there's something in front of you. I think it's because we're so close to the ground. Or maybe it's because we move so fast on all fours, constantly leaping ahead into the unknown. I tried to slow myself down, but my new body still had at least half a mind of its own, and insisted on charging recklessly ahead at top speed.

 

I was soon in earshot and then eyesight of Haymaker Gorge cutting a hysterical slash through the mountainside. My own spicy human scent was strong in my nostrils; I traced it right to the jagged edge of my boyhood jumping spot, the gash in the world that had tested my manhood. The scent went right over into the roaring froth and disappeared like so much pepper and salt. There was no question Popo wearing my body could have completed the jump. He had gone over and doubtlessly perished.

 

I knew where I would find my remains: A quarter mile downstream at the Widow Hole where the gorge peters out to a cold boil. I made my way along the edge, bounding over boulders, zigzagging back into the woods where necessary, finally coming down the trail on the edge of the cliff where the raging idiocy terminated in a kind of natural washing machine. There, agitating around in the rocky shallows, was my lifeless body.

 

I waited for the thing to come around and latched onto a wrist with my teeth. I was surprisingly strong for my size and had no trouble dragging the body onto the sandbar. I could see at once there could have been no hope of revival, even had I been instantly on the scene. The head had been bashed to a pulp. The neck broken and the stomach slashed open.

 

I sat for a long time at my old master's side, somehow unable to firmly grasp the terrifying thing for what it was: My own corpse. Clearly I had no chance of ever returning to my old form, yet there was no sense of finality. I felt no remorse or even fear, just an intense curious fascination. Everything was too new for me at this point to surrender myself to a bout of mourning. I simply gazed at the mutilated face that had been my own for forty-six years, as if to commit every feature to memory, and then, without repugnance, no, with something like joy, I inserted my sharp pointed snout through the hole in the abdomen, shoved it deep into the chest cavity, latched onto the heart and wrenched it out. The blood in this sacred region was still warm and I gobbled my sorry pump in a few bites. I then sampled the intestines, nibbled the liver, chewed and spat out the adrenal glands, and finished my meal with the genitals. I knew I had to eat myself, or part of myself, not only for the drug with which my tissue was satiated, but for the nutritious cathartic rush, the transformation of my human energy into its new form -- no mean totemic rite of auto-cannibalism, but a fortification of my extraterrestrial powers.

 

Everything tasted the same, neither good nor bad, as dogs I discovered have almost no sense of taste. No animal does. That can be determined simply by observing the relish with which they go about their toilet, or the way they gobble the most disgusting debris found in the street. That manufacturers of pet food get away with the advertising they do astonishes me, as if a cat or dog, after feasting on its own butt, gives a damn about gourmet-flavored tidbits. They favor certain kinds of foods not only for the nutrients, but the smells -- and I can tell you anything bloody or foul-smelling is high on a dog's list. It makes them delirious with pleasure. I now almost go out of my own head every time I think of a ripe road kill.

 

 

Glowing with abundant new energy, I dug a deep hole in the sand and buried myself. Then lay down on top and howled the whole night through, scaring the daylights out of every other animal in the vicinity. I don't really know why I did this, some atavism of my old pet, I suppose. He was, in a way, still in there with me. We had forged a precarious union.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

The days that followed were filled with weird genius. I had not only to take full charge of this new monster, but to figure out a course of action. That I should not at least attempt to get out of this poor animal state was unthinkable. I had to try, and for this I needed Martian Acid, and there was only one other person on the planet that could supply me with it.

 

Also I had to stop the bastard, or at least keep him from propagating a whole line of monsters such as myself. Whatever this organization called Starfuck was in essence, I couldn't begin to say, as other than simply being in a bewildering new state, I was experiencing no fresh contact with aliens of any sort, save the other animals in the forest around me. I had to deal with them on a completely new level.

 

I was now able to enter into their world on a much more intimate plain, one in which I didn't know how to behave. My still human awareness was taken up by constantly new and challenging sensations, while at the same time I had to propel this unruly canine around without its true nature dominating every situation. And that was a ceaseless struggle. My habits and instincts were still those of the dog, and I had to pay close attention to every detail in order to keep from flinging myself at full tilt after this or that animal that happened by, from barking hysterically at nothing, from rolling in filth, from rushing into ridiculous fights with other dogs, with cats, with various rodents and birds. Even reptiles and insects couldn't be left alone. The dog in me insisted on launching itself upon any hapless thing in its path, and these other parties were only too happy to put up a good fight. I was continually getting my face clawed. I was covered with vicious bites, mostly insect. I itched and farted constantly from eating the wrong things. The same skunk nailed me twice when I stumbled upon its nest. Some kind of flaming rodent bit me on the nose when I stuck my snout in its hole. A bear took offense to my chasing a squirrel into its den and gave me a nasty slash and several times kids with firearms took potshots at me.

 

I persevered and after two or three days managed to get control of myself. I learned to stay out of the way of other bitchy, crazed things groveling around in the woods and to above all avoid men. There was a huge search party headed by my brother rifling through the countryside and I didn't under any conditions want to be captured. I was the last surviving test specimen, or so thought central intelligence, and I'm sure they would have carved me to bits looking for the secret. I had taken pains to conceal the body. It was better they didn't know what had happened to me, at least for now. They might find out more than was good for me, or for anybody else in the world for that matter, if an autopsy were performed. Only I was forgetting one important detail which didn't occur to me till I was thousands of miles away: The bloody tracking signal imbedded in my shoulder.

 

Thus I went far off in the Blue Ridge Mountains, to get myself together and hatch the plot of my salvation.

 

* * *