The Night Listener and Others (21 page)

After too short a time they rose and walked back, back the way they had come. It seemed to Michael that they ran where he would have crawled. He could feel Anne’s arm around him, could feel the wind cool on his flesh, could feel Anne’s hair, black as the sea’s depth, brush his cheek , whisper at his ear, and then another reality impinged—

—a reality of a three-piece suit, a leather chair beneath him, his hands resting on its arms, and Dr. Wagner beside him, gazing into his face with a loving concern.

“Welcome back,” Wagner said softly.

Michael could not speak. He felt as though he had been wrenched in time and place, experienced sudden confusion that approached panic before he remembered what he had done, why he was there. He looked at his right hand, and was surprised when he found Anne’s hand missing. He spread his fingers apart, examined them, looked down at his shod feet. He could still feel the sand. “It was all a lie,” he said huskily. “None of it was true.”

“You saw it,” said Wagner. “You were there. Weren’t you?”

“There was no
there
to be!” Michael said with an anger that startled and unmanned him. He knew that he should have felt smug, triumphant. He felt neither.

“You were lying then,” the doctor said. “I suspected you were.”

“Did you?”

“Annabel Lee, wasn’t that it?” Wagner smiled gently. “A fairly simple allusion.”

“If you knew it was a lie, why did you do it? Let me take it?”

“Mr. Lindstrom, half of what my patients want to relive are lies. They never happened. At least not as grandly as most of them remember. But if that’s what they want, that’s what they can have. At last.”

“But that’s…a fraud…”

“Not really. The rooms are inside. I just provide the key.”

“For such simple things? My friend, and his home run?”

“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was only a single, maybe even only a walk. That doesn’t matter.
Now
it’s a home run. Not many of us have those perfect moment. Not even one. Life can be very sad when one has to pretend to remember happiness.”

“You sell dreams,” Michael said.

“No.” Wagner’s face was expressionless, his tone flat. “I sell the heart’s desire. Sometimes what was, but more often what should have been.”

Michael held up an admonishing finger, then saw it tremble, and lowered it guiltily. “I’m going to…to tell about this,” he said, his lower lip quivering. “This cannot, should not happen.”

“If you feel you must, you may,” Wagner said calmly. “I’m not sure what exactly you’ve found that you consider worthy of exposing, but you’re welcome to whatever it is. Just one thing—think about it for a day or two. Before you start writing. And ask yourself if your knowledge will make any difference to those who come to me. Ask yourself if they don’t already know what you know.

“And ask yourself too, if the truth be known, whether people will stop coming to see me, or whether more will start to come.”

Michael tried to stop shaking. “Why do you do this?”

“Because I can. Because it helps to ease the pain.”

“What if I don’t
want
my pain eased?” Michael flared. “Or what if I
have
no pain?”

“Then you shouldn’t have come here. I am, after all, a doctor. My purpose is healing.”

Michael made no reply.

“If you have no more questions, there are other patients I must see.”

Michael stood up. “This is not…the last of this,” he said, before he moved to the door.

“No,” Dr. Wagner said. “I don’t suppose it is.”

Maggie was in the kitchen when Michael Lindstrom arrived home. When he embraced her, her bare arms felt rough and leathery, her hair was the texture of straw against his cheek. Her smile was stiff and unfriendly, a stranger’s smile, and her voice, as she tried to draw out his secrets over dinner, was cawing, strident. He stayed up late that night, and drank more than was customary for him.

The following day, when Dr. Wagner was told by his receptionist that Michael Lindstrom had made a second appointment, he was not surprised. The doctor prided himself on his ability to recognize deep pain, pain that would be long in healing, healing that would leave scars as deep as the pain that had made them necessary.

The Pack

They didn’t remember rising. They were just dead one minute, up and around the next. Those whose noses were crushed were the lucky ones. They couldn’t smell the others, and they couldn’t smell themselves. That was the worst of it for those whose were still working.

Rusty’s nose worked just fine, and the stench annoyed him. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to get it out of his nostrils, ever be able to scent game again. The leader ought to be able to scent the pack’s prey. And he was the leader, there was no doubt of that. He was the biggest, for one thing. A mutt, to be sure, but there was a lot of German shepherd in him, and his thin, taut frame indicated that either a Great Dane or a Doberman had participated in a train pulled on his mother or grandmothers. He was also in the best condition of the motley crew gathered around him, which wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot.

Jesus, Rusty thought, they looked like shit. Fluffy in particular, one of the few he knew. He had humped her damn near every time she’d been in heat, but had never connected well enough to impregnate her. She was a mutt too, a small, yellow, long-haired bitch who had always carried her tail up and waving, as if to advertise the availability of her hindquarters, grotesquely large and swollen by the compression of her stomach where the 4x4 had mashed her. Her rear had had no choice but to split apart, and what Rusty remembered as tight and hot organs had given whelp to strands of dirt-caked gut on which she sat, resting her unbroken forepaws on a thick loop of her intestine. Rowdy was the only other he knew, an old, old dog who had been dead a long, long time. He’d been run over many times, left to be simmered by hot summer rains and fried in the skillet of high-noon asphalt. He lay on the grass more like a well-used welcome mat than a dog. It seemed that only the hemisphere of his skull had not been flattened, and dry, puckered little things that Rusty figured were eyes watched him from that mass of fur and splintered bone, and waited for him to offer a plan.

For a plan was what was needed. There had to be a purpose in what had happened, in what had drawn them all here together.

A plan. Rusty shivered at the thought. And then he shivered again at the thought of
thought
. His mental processes seemed so complex now, and he could tell that those of the others were similar. There had been such
simplicity
before awakening—looks and growls and barks and motions that indicated all the necessities of canine existence:

Play!

Eat!

Shit!

Roll in it!

Fuck!

But now there was far more than could be communicated by
You smell my asshole, I’ll smell yours
. Now there was memory and subtlety and, at long last, understanding of everything Rusty had seen and heard while he lived with the people who had called themselves his family. He knew what family was now, understood it. Males who fucked, bitches who whelped, them and the pups living together, enslaving the dogs, making them trade their freedom for food from cans (vomitous horsemeat shaped like a fat cylinder, the rings of the lid impressed upon the first bite), making them give up the heritage of the pack for a stroke once or twice a day, walk on the end of a leash, an occasional flight of liberty when a bitch in heat might be fucked, a pile of dung might be rolled in, a wounded rabbit tormented and eventually killed.

And what response from the humans when these joy were over? A newspaper on the nose, the end of a leash on the hindquarters, stinging the anus, burning the balls. Torture, pure and simple. And then at last, after a lifetime of cowering and cringing and tail-wagging and licking the hand of the goddamned male and his bitch and their pups, after
years
of that, when the only thing you want to do is lie and rest, then the final visit to the Great Devil in his white coat, the spurt of the needle, the ultimate injection, oh yes, he knew, he’d lain by the fireplace many times while the “family” watched that show on the television (television—Christ, he even knew its name now! And
Christ
, he could even curse like the humans had!). He had seen the actor pretend to be the vet and kill the dogs with sorrow on his pasty, blotchy face, and Rusty’s “family” had watched too, snuffling, the bitch wiping away tears and the male blinking, pretending his own tears weren’t there, when all the time they knew that when Rusty got old and tired, they’d take him to the
real
Great Devil as soon as he sneezed, or puked on the carpet, or shit in the house.

And if not the Great Devil, then dogs died as Rusty and all who now surrounded him had died—crushed, battered, squashed, splattered by the cars, the trucks, the great, stupid machines that carried the humans everywhere because their legs were so weak, so slow.

“Did they ever try to stop?” Rusty clearly wondered, and the thoughts were like words to the others. They heard, and thought, and he heard in return.

“Stop?” The word came from Rowdy, and in Rusty’s mind it was festooned with ornaments of flayed fur. It sounded like Rowdy looked. “They
tried
to hit me. And they did. Too old to get out of the way. Just crossing the road. Just wanted to get to the cool of the oak trees and take a good long piss against them. Took me down. One great flash of yellow fire, and that was all. Next thing I remember, I’m crawling here, moving like a rug, dragging myself along like nothing’s ever moved before, like nothing should be
able
to move. And why? There’s got to be a reason why. I’m older than you, seen more, heard more, maybe now I understand more. But I don’t understand why. There’s got to be a reason.”

“There’s a reason,” said a young but twisted thought, and the pack turned what was left of their heads and looked with what was left of their eyes at another dog. Sparks was the name his “family” had given him. He had enough eyes to serve all of them. They had been pushed from their sockets by whatever vehicle had struck him. One looked one direction, one the other, so that his ovoid gaze seemed allencompassing. “There’s a
good
reason. To devour what devoured us. To eat what ate us away.”

The thought struck a flame in Rusty, and he licked his chops with a caked tongue. “The family,” he thought. “Humans.”

The compressed muscles of Spark’s haunches pulsed in a futile effort to wag his tail. “Humans.”

Rusty looked around the ring of broken creatures. Dry, parchment tongues panted in agreement, those tails wagged that could, heads nodded, even one that dangled from a thick strand of neck muscle that was barely visible beneath the sheep dog’s shaggy hair. “It must be,” Rusty thought. “Why otherwise would we have been given life once more, given knowledge, understanding, the complexity of thought necessary to finally realize the perfidy of our persecutors?”

“There may be no reason like that,” stated a broken-faced dachshund, its jaw and snout poking at right angles to each other. “It may rather be a situation akin to the kind of entertainment that the ‘families’ watch on the television—radiation, chemicals, nitrates from manure on the farms oozing out of the soil and into…the soul. There may be no purpose at all, merely a random chain of events.”

“I for one,” thought Sparks, “do not believe in a purposeless cosmos.”

“You believe in God, then?” inquired the dachshund.

“I believe in
Dog
.” Sparks grinned, and Rusty thought the effect was hideous.

“Fuck your palindromes, and fuck your philosophy,” mentally growled a junkyard dog whose middle resembled a veterinarian’s anatomical chart. “All I know is that I’m back and I’m pissed and though I don’t have much of a stomach to digest it with, I want to tear out some humans guts, and get a little back.

“I did not say,” clarified the dachshund, “that I did
not
want that as well. I simply feel there may be no moral or theological justification of such acts. But whether there are or are not, I’d like to rip some humans myself. ‘Wiener,’ they called me. ‘Little Wiener.’ And that was only the first of many injuries, both mental and physical.”

“Whatever the reason,” thought Rusty, “we have all returned, and we all have the same basic drive, as Sparks so eloquently put it, to devour what devoured us. We are a pack, and together we can triumph.”

Fluffy resettled her forepaws on her filthy bowels. “They may come after us, try to kill us.”

“We’re already dead, bitch,” thought Sparks. “If we’re moving around in
this
condition, bullets aren’t going to be too effective, do you think?”

“But in this condition,” she replied, “do you think we’ll be able to pull down humans? I mean, look at Rowdy.”

“It’s true,” Rowdy thought, “I’m not as spry as I used to be. But I do have means of locomotion, albeit slow. If the more active of you can bring our prey down, I can still participate in the final rending. Pieces of teeth remain in here, sharp, capable of cutting.” And a mass of compressed fur rose up so that Rusty and the others could see smooth bits of yellow beneath. Rusty’s newfound imagination could not, however, conceive of those pitiful bits of enamel abrading human flesh, if, indeed, they were still attached to what remained of Rowdy’s jaw. Still, Rowdy was one of the pack.

This last thought he communicated to the others, and they agreed that the stronger would pull down the prey, but not finish it until all were there to share in the death and the eating.

“Can we eat?” wondered a desiccated terrier.

“We can try,” Rusty thought. “Perhaps it will pass through us, perhaps it will be only symbolic. But still, this should be the law of the pack—to devour what devoured us.”

Rusty lifted his head and tried to catch the sound of traffic to determine the whereabouts of a road. To scent gasoline or exhaust would have been impossible with the stench of carrion in his nose. Finally, from far away he heard the sound of an engine. “Come. Let’s hunt.”