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Dogs Are Merely Magic Enablers
Jun. 10th, 2015 11:09 amMax is in Antigua, Guatemala for six weeks doing the Spanish language immersion thang.
He emailed that he’d arrived safely, and that he was perplexed by the city’s odd post-apocalyptic ambiance – the cobblestone walkways, the strange Baroque rubble. Apparently, he hadn’t read up on the great earthquake of 1773, so devastating it nearly toppled the Spanish Conquest so that Spain’s king, Charles III, had to order the relocation of the capital city to the Valley of the Hermits, 30 miles to the east (today’s Guatemala City.)
Naturally I wanted to impress the kid with his mother’s vast knowledge of local history and anthropology, so I started foraging around in my trove of journals, thinking that I could pass some scribblings from my own 2002 trip to Guatemala off on him as spontaneous prose outpourings.
Unfortunately, I hardly wrote anything in my journal while I was in Guatemala – or in the months after I returned, though I did write a horror novel that took place in Guatemala.
I did find this fragment, though. Reading it across a gulf of 13 years, I think it’s quite good in a Hideous Kinky kinda way:
How anyone could bring a child so young to the Third World was beyond Lucy's comprehension. Beautiful though the village was, packs of feral dogs roamed its cobbled streets, and sewage drained directly into the lake where the hippies swam. Lucy, of course, was the type of mother who didn't want to let her kids out of the backyard without first checking to make sure their vaccinations were in order. But Teresa and Milo were artists, free-spirited. Maybe they knew something Lucy didn't.
Teresa and Milo had turned Lucy on to the cheap eats at the commodor, the café frequented by adventuresome tourists and the more intellectual among the townsfolk.. Lunch had become a standing date in the three days since Lucy had arrived. A vegetable platter with boiled potato, shredded carrots, a mound of avocado.
The little girl refused to touch any of it.
"Eva, you have to eat," Teresa said, frowning at the child.
The little girl ignored her. "Tell me more about the magic dog," she begged Lucy. She had the enormous blue eyes and long blonde hair of a character in an old-fashioned children's book: Alice in a Highland Tropic Wonderland. "The dog can fly, right?"
"I'm not sure the dog can fly," Lucy said. "I think you just order up special dreams from the dog."
"Eva, leave Lucy alone and eat," said Teresa. "Carrots. Eat the carrots. Milo and I practically lived on carrots until we sold our first painting."
The commodor fronted a concrete playground. Two boys swung on a truck tire attached to a swing set. Eva watched.
"It's amazing how high those kids can go, isn't it?" said Milo.
"The dog can fly," Eva said. "I know the dog can fly."
"Eva has a dog, don't you Eva?" said Teresa.
"Xena," the little girl nodded. She would look just like her mother in another thirty years or so, Lucy thought, if she had her mother's cash flow problems.
"Cats can fly," Lucy said. "When it comes to magic, cats are the ones to trust. Dogs are merely magic enablers."
"What's an enabler?" asked the little girl.
"Grown up stuff," Teresa said. She picked up Eva's fork and shoveled carrots on to it.
One of the skinny dogs was sniffing for scraps along the wall that separated the playground from the commodor terrace. It was an ugly dog with its scrappy coat and ragged tail, but it had enormous, appealing eyes like the cow in a Christmas manger scene. From its belly hung teats that had been sucked so dry they were just flaps of skin. The boys leapt down off their tire. One of them picked up a stick.
"Eat," said Teresa, bringing the fork up to her daughter's lips.
The boy with the stick walked up to the dog and hit it. Hard. The dog yelped but didn't move. The boy hit it again.
Lucy glanced over at mother and daughter. Tears in the little girl's eyes.
"I was just like that when I was her age," said Teresa, fork in mid-air. "It killed me to see an animal in pain. Eva, people are so poor here that there isn't enough food to feed the doggies which is why you need to eat your –"
The little girl shook her head, unpersuaded. "I don't like carrots," she said.
The true tale of the D_________ family, in other words – the amazingly beautiful little girl, Annabella; her warring parents, Dori and Joe.
Two days before I left San Marco la Laguna, I was woken up by Joe at 4am – Annabella was having a seizure. I was a nurse; he figured I’d know what to do.
Annabella’s forehead was scalding hot so I figured she was having a febrile seizure. I dispatched Joe for a bottle of Carol’s (NHRN) best bourbon – Carol and Joe were sleeping together, unbeknownst to Dori so I figured that even though Carol was/is remarkably coldhearted, she would pony up her stash – and proceeded to give her alcohol baths while we waited for the launcha that would ferry her back to Pana, which is what passes for civilization along the shores of Lake Atitlan.
Later, in her kitchen, trying not to be obvious about grilling me for details – Where did they go? I wasn’t through with him! – Carol told me she thought Annabella was acting out.
“She thrives on the attention,” Carol said.
This was extreme even for Carol.
“Carol,” I said. “She had a really high fever. Sometimes, when kids run high fevers, they have seizures. I can assure you: This was not something she was doing for attention.”
Carol narrowed her eyes at me. “Her parents are miserable together – anyone can see that.”
“That may be true, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with what just happened with that kid.”
“She’s reflecting her parents’ situation,” Carol said.
###
Carol Reports occasionally drift to me still as part of the flotsam and jetsam of general gossip: She’s written more novels; one of them got made into a movie; the movie bombed at the box office. She remarried, a rich lawyer with a very big house in the Oakland hills. The rich lawyer has pancreatic cancer and will likely die soon, leaving Carol a rich widow what with the life insurance and the market value of the very big house in the Oakland hills.
I think of Carol as another one of those women whose psychic mana is so-o-o powerful that the men they marry realize on some subliminal level that they’ve got to sacrifice themselves to make that mana stronger – Erica and Maria are the other two women I’ve known like that. Gil conveniently developed a brain tumor when Erica didn’t need him around anymore; Chris forgot to close a hatch on his Cessna, crashed his plane into the Simi Hills. One might be tempted to describe such women as “Black Widows,” but I think that misses the more subtle nuances.
Carol is a pretty unpleasant human being, but I will say, too, that she was one of the best writing teachers I’ve ever had in my life. She really taught me a lot about the craft of writing – which is odd because her own fiction remains the gurgley, obsessively personalized stuff, a kind of high-brow Jodi Picault, that I find really, really difficult to read. Maybe she was parroting back stuff she learned from Salinger.
Dori and Joe divorced shortly after they got back to the States.
Dori was very, very bitter when she found out about Carol and Joe – I kept in touch with her for a while – but being an eminently practical woman despite this crazy, mixed up notion that she was an artist, decided to move to (ulp) Alabama.
“It’s cheap,” she told me.
Dori opened up a gallery in Birmingham, and manages to support herself through that, her art, and regional art tours. She remarried.
Annabella grew into a breathtakingly gorgeous young woman.
I don’t know what happened to Joe.
###
I seldom read through any of my past journals, so getting caught back up in 2002 again, through my own words, was an odd experience. I came home from Guatemala and immediately began writing Saturday Night in the Sky. I sleep-walked through my various domestic duties. I mostly wrote in my journal about the act of creation – how crazy difficult it was, how it subsumes one, how it mixes up the polarities so that your imagination becomes the real world and everything else becomes a kind of grayed-out phantom universe.
That was the year that Ben’s mother had her heart attack, and Ben flew off to New York to sit at her bedside for many weeks.
That was also the year that I found out about Ben’s affair. That discovery was what finally jolted me out of my creative reverie.
“I didn’t want to tell you because I thought it might keep you from being able to finish the novel,” Ben said.
But I knew that was a lie. If I hadn’t done the detective work, he never would have told me.
Really, I should have ended the marriage then.
But I didn’t.
My 2002 journal is filled with the names and half-finished stories of people I no longer remember. It’s hard to salvage the stories when you don’t know/remember what led up to them, what happened next.
This made me think that I should be a bit more diligent about recording the various stories that are happening now.
He emailed that he’d arrived safely, and that he was perplexed by the city’s odd post-apocalyptic ambiance – the cobblestone walkways, the strange Baroque rubble. Apparently, he hadn’t read up on the great earthquake of 1773, so devastating it nearly toppled the Spanish Conquest so that Spain’s king, Charles III, had to order the relocation of the capital city to the Valley of the Hermits, 30 miles to the east (today’s Guatemala City.)
Naturally I wanted to impress the kid with his mother’s vast knowledge of local history and anthropology, so I started foraging around in my trove of journals, thinking that I could pass some scribblings from my own 2002 trip to Guatemala off on him as spontaneous prose outpourings.
Unfortunately, I hardly wrote anything in my journal while I was in Guatemala – or in the months after I returned, though I did write a horror novel that took place in Guatemala.
I did find this fragment, though. Reading it across a gulf of 13 years, I think it’s quite good in a Hideous Kinky kinda way:
How anyone could bring a child so young to the Third World was beyond Lucy's comprehension. Beautiful though the village was, packs of feral dogs roamed its cobbled streets, and sewage drained directly into the lake where the hippies swam. Lucy, of course, was the type of mother who didn't want to let her kids out of the backyard without first checking to make sure their vaccinations were in order. But Teresa and Milo were artists, free-spirited. Maybe they knew something Lucy didn't.
Teresa and Milo had turned Lucy on to the cheap eats at the commodor, the café frequented by adventuresome tourists and the more intellectual among the townsfolk.. Lunch had become a standing date in the three days since Lucy had arrived. A vegetable platter with boiled potato, shredded carrots, a mound of avocado.
The little girl refused to touch any of it.
"Eva, you have to eat," Teresa said, frowning at the child.
The little girl ignored her. "Tell me more about the magic dog," she begged Lucy. She had the enormous blue eyes and long blonde hair of a character in an old-fashioned children's book: Alice in a Highland Tropic Wonderland. "The dog can fly, right?"
"I'm not sure the dog can fly," Lucy said. "I think you just order up special dreams from the dog."
"Eva, leave Lucy alone and eat," said Teresa. "Carrots. Eat the carrots. Milo and I practically lived on carrots until we sold our first painting."
The commodor fronted a concrete playground. Two boys swung on a truck tire attached to a swing set. Eva watched.
"It's amazing how high those kids can go, isn't it?" said Milo.
"The dog can fly," Eva said. "I know the dog can fly."
"Eva has a dog, don't you Eva?" said Teresa.
"Xena," the little girl nodded. She would look just like her mother in another thirty years or so, Lucy thought, if she had her mother's cash flow problems.
"Cats can fly," Lucy said. "When it comes to magic, cats are the ones to trust. Dogs are merely magic enablers."
"What's an enabler?" asked the little girl.
"Grown up stuff," Teresa said. She picked up Eva's fork and shoveled carrots on to it.
One of the skinny dogs was sniffing for scraps along the wall that separated the playground from the commodor terrace. It was an ugly dog with its scrappy coat and ragged tail, but it had enormous, appealing eyes like the cow in a Christmas manger scene. From its belly hung teats that had been sucked so dry they were just flaps of skin. The boys leapt down off their tire. One of them picked up a stick.
"Eat," said Teresa, bringing the fork up to her daughter's lips.
The boy with the stick walked up to the dog and hit it. Hard. The dog yelped but didn't move. The boy hit it again.
Lucy glanced over at mother and daughter. Tears in the little girl's eyes.
"I was just like that when I was her age," said Teresa, fork in mid-air. "It killed me to see an animal in pain. Eva, people are so poor here that there isn't enough food to feed the doggies which is why you need to eat your –"
The little girl shook her head, unpersuaded. "I don't like carrots," she said.
The true tale of the D_________ family, in other words – the amazingly beautiful little girl, Annabella; her warring parents, Dori and Joe.
Two days before I left San Marco la Laguna, I was woken up by Joe at 4am – Annabella was having a seizure. I was a nurse; he figured I’d know what to do.
Annabella’s forehead was scalding hot so I figured she was having a febrile seizure. I dispatched Joe for a bottle of Carol’s (NHRN) best bourbon – Carol and Joe were sleeping together, unbeknownst to Dori so I figured that even though Carol was/is remarkably coldhearted, she would pony up her stash – and proceeded to give her alcohol baths while we waited for the launcha that would ferry her back to Pana, which is what passes for civilization along the shores of Lake Atitlan.
Later, in her kitchen, trying not to be obvious about grilling me for details – Where did they go? I wasn’t through with him! – Carol told me she thought Annabella was acting out.
“She thrives on the attention,” Carol said.
This was extreme even for Carol.
“Carol,” I said. “She had a really high fever. Sometimes, when kids run high fevers, they have seizures. I can assure you: This was not something she was doing for attention.”
Carol narrowed her eyes at me. “Her parents are miserable together – anyone can see that.”
“That may be true, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with what just happened with that kid.”
“She’s reflecting her parents’ situation,” Carol said.
###
Carol Reports occasionally drift to me still as part of the flotsam and jetsam of general gossip: She’s written more novels; one of them got made into a movie; the movie bombed at the box office. She remarried, a rich lawyer with a very big house in the Oakland hills. The rich lawyer has pancreatic cancer and will likely die soon, leaving Carol a rich widow what with the life insurance and the market value of the very big house in the Oakland hills.
I think of Carol as another one of those women whose psychic mana is so-o-o powerful that the men they marry realize on some subliminal level that they’ve got to sacrifice themselves to make that mana stronger – Erica and Maria are the other two women I’ve known like that. Gil conveniently developed a brain tumor when Erica didn’t need him around anymore; Chris forgot to close a hatch on his Cessna, crashed his plane into the Simi Hills. One might be tempted to describe such women as “Black Widows,” but I think that misses the more subtle nuances.
Carol is a pretty unpleasant human being, but I will say, too, that she was one of the best writing teachers I’ve ever had in my life. She really taught me a lot about the craft of writing – which is odd because her own fiction remains the gurgley, obsessively personalized stuff, a kind of high-brow Jodi Picault, that I find really, really difficult to read. Maybe she was parroting back stuff she learned from Salinger.
Dori and Joe divorced shortly after they got back to the States.
Dori was very, very bitter when she found out about Carol and Joe – I kept in touch with her for a while – but being an eminently practical woman despite this crazy, mixed up notion that she was an artist, decided to move to (ulp) Alabama.
“It’s cheap,” she told me.
Dori opened up a gallery in Birmingham, and manages to support herself through that, her art, and regional art tours. She remarried.
Annabella grew into a breathtakingly gorgeous young woman.
I don’t know what happened to Joe.
###
I seldom read through any of my past journals, so getting caught back up in 2002 again, through my own words, was an odd experience. I came home from Guatemala and immediately began writing Saturday Night in the Sky. I sleep-walked through my various domestic duties. I mostly wrote in my journal about the act of creation – how crazy difficult it was, how it subsumes one, how it mixes up the polarities so that your imagination becomes the real world and everything else becomes a kind of grayed-out phantom universe.
That was the year that Ben’s mother had her heart attack, and Ben flew off to New York to sit at her bedside for many weeks.
That was also the year that I found out about Ben’s affair. That discovery was what finally jolted me out of my creative reverie.
“I didn’t want to tell you because I thought it might keep you from being able to finish the novel,” Ben said.
But I knew that was a lie. If I hadn’t done the detective work, he never would have told me.
Really, I should have ended the marriage then.
But I didn’t.
My 2002 journal is filled with the names and half-finished stories of people I no longer remember. It’s hard to salvage the stories when you don’t know/remember what led up to them, what happened next.
This made me think that I should be a bit more diligent about recording the various stories that are happening now.
