The Land of Laughs (24 page)

Dr. Dolittle in Galen. Dr. Dolittle in Cloud-Cuckooland. It was the same goddamned thing.

I taught a creative-writing course once at my school. The kids were mad for writing brutal, horrible stories about beheadings and rapes and drug overdoses. At the end of them, the only way the “authors” could get out of the blood-soaked morasses they’d created was to say, “Keith rolled over in bed and touched Diana’s silky blond hair. Thank God it had all just been a dream.”

Talking dogs, a modern Prometheus who used an orange fountain pen instead of clay, a sexy daughter who gave you a hard-on just brushing her teeth, who slept with you and Elmer Fudds in baseball caps, and who may or may not have given past boyfriends heart attacks. “Thomas rolled over in bed and touched the bull terrier. ‘You were only having a dream, dear,’ it said.”

But what was I supposed to do? Go on with the research for the book? Go on writing it? I got halfway home in the car before all of it started to drive me out of my mind.

“What the hell am I going to do now?” I slammed the still cold black steering wheel with the flat of my hand and pulled over at a gas station that had a public telephone out front.

“Anna?”

“Thomas? Hi.”

I wondered if Richard was there. That would have been perfect. “Anna, what am I supposed to do now? Now that I know everything. What do you want me to do?”

“Why, write the book, of course!”

“But why? You don’t want anyone to know about this. Look, even if my book turns out to be good enough to publish, the whole world will freak out when they read about it. Your Galen will become like … I don’t know … Like some kind of mecca for weirdos. Your father will be a joke, because no one is ever going to believe any of it. And those who do will be the scum of the earth.”

“Thomas?” Her voice floated into the telephone booth from another planet. The heat from my body started to fog the windows around me, and the illuminated face of the Pepsi-Cola clock in the gas station office had stopped at ten after four.

“Yes?”

“Thomas, there is much more that I have got to tell you about this.”

I put my hand on my temple. “
More?
What more could there be, Anna?”

“There is. The most important part. I will tell you about it tomorrow. You’re very late now, so go home and we’ll talk about it then. Have a good night, my friend. And, Thomas? Everything will be all right. You know the most shocking parts now. The other things are just P.S.’s. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

The fog was just creeping up the windows. A carload of kids went by just as I was hanging up. One of them held a bottle out the window and waved at me with it. A ribbon of foamy liquid came out and hung in the air like a frozen pennant before it fell and broke on the ground.

“Thomas, I know what’s going on with you and Anna.”

I was working on a mouthful of acorn squash that had been topped with brown sugar and burned black in the oven. Saxony and Julia Child. I pretended to chew until I remembered that you don’t really chew acorn squash — you gum it once or twice and then swallow it. I put my fork down on the edge of the yellow plate, careful to make as little noise as possible.

Sax took a roll from the bread basket and tore it in half. She picked up her knife and daintily buttered one puffy piece. The silence held. You wanted to squint your eyes and stick your fingers deep into your ears. It was coming. Something loud and explosive. She picked up the other half of her roll and wiped it around her plate, very cool.

“Did you think I didn’t know?”

My heart pounded.

“No, I don’t know, Saxony. I’m not good at being a secret agent.”

“I’m not good either, but you know, I think I knew what was going on almost as soon as it happened. Really. Do you believe that? I’m not just saying it.”

“No, I know that. I can believe you. My mother always knew when my father was … up to something. I guess when you get to know a person well, then it’s not hard to see when they’re acting oddly.”

“Exactly.” She took a short sip of 7-Up. I was able to look at her for the first time since she dropped the bomb. Her face was slightly flushed, but perhaps it was just the stuffy room. I’m sure my face looked like Chief Thunderthud’s.

“Do you love her?” She kept her glass in her hand. She put it against one of her cheeks and I saw the bubbles fizzing up the side.

“Oh, Sax, I don’t know. Everything is so crazy now. I’m not saying that as an excuse, please understand. Sometimes I feel like I’ve just been born and am having menopause at the same time.”

She put the glass down and pushed it away from her. “Is that why you went to her?”

“No, no, I went with her because I wanted her. I’m not blaming that on anybody but me.”

“That’s very nice of you.” A little venom spilled over into her voice, and I was damned glad of it. Until then she had been deadly calm and objective. I listened to the last fight my parents had before my mother walked out and took me back to Connecticut. Everything there too was so cool and calm … they could just as easily have been discussing the stock market.

“What do you want me to do, Sax? Do you want me to go?”

She blinked and fingered the tablecloth. “You can do whatever you want, Thomas. I don’t own you.”

“No, please, come on. What do
you
want?”

“What do I want? Why are you asking me that kind of question now? I wanted you, Thomas. I still
do
want you. But does that make any difference at this point?”

“Do you want me to stay here with you?” I balled up my napkin and looked at it in my fist. Saxony loved using real linen napkins at every meal. She hand-washed and ironed them once a week. She had bought two green, two powder-blue, two brick-colored ones that she rotated constantly. I felt like a piece of shit.

I looked up and she was staring at me. Her eyes were full. A tear spilled up over the edge and moved down her pink cheek. She held her napkin to her face and looked at me again. I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“I have no right to hold you to anything, Thomas.” She was breathing deeply, irregularly. She began a sentence, stopped, and didn’t try again. She looked at her lap and shook her head. She brought the napkin to her eyes and said, “Oh,
shit
!”

I unballed my napkin and tried to fold it very carefully along its original crease mark.

A woman met me at the door. She was smiling, and grabbing my hand, squeezed it tightly.

“Uh, hi, uh, how are you?”

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” Her smile was a little crazy. I wondered where Anna was.

“No, I’m sorry, but I don’t.” I tried a winning smile and lost.

“Arf-arf. Bowwow.” She grabbed my shoulders and hugged me.

“
Petals?
”

“Yes indeed, Petals! But a little different now, wouldn’t you say?”

“My
God
! You mean you really …”

“Yes, Thomas, I told you that it was over. I’m back from that life and I’m me again. Me. Me. Me.” She patted herself on her full chest. She couldn’t stop beaming.

“I don’t know … Jesus. I don’t know what to say. I mean, uh, congratulations, I’m really happy for you. I just, uh …”

“I know, I know. Come on in. Anna is in the living room. She wanted me to meet you as a surprise.”

I swallowed and tried to clear my throat. My voice sounded like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. “It’s … it’s, uh, some surprise.”

Anna was sitting on the couch drinking coffee from a thick porcelain mug. She asked me if I wanted some, and when I said yes, she looked at Petals, or rather at Wilma, who danced out of the room to get another cup.

“Are you still upset about what I told you?”

“Saxony knows about us, Anna.” I sat dawn in a chair facing her.

She picked up the cup again, and holding it in two hands, brought it to her mouth. She peeked at me over the rim. “How did she react?”

“I don’t know. As you’d expect. Half-good, half-lousy. She started crying after a while, but it wasnt anything big and weepy. She’s pretty tough, I guess.”

“And how do you feel?” She sipped her coffee but kept her eyes on me. Thin smoke from the cup moved quickly out from beneath her breath.

“How do I feel? Shitty. How do you think I feel?”

“You’re not married to her.”

I grimaced and drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair. “Yes, I know — I’m not married to her, I’ve got no obligation to her, everybody around here is a free agent … I’ve gone through that whole spiel in my head a thousand times, but I still feel shitty.”

She shrugged and licked the rim of her cup. “All right. I just wanted —”

“Look, Anna, don’t worry about it, okay? It’s my thing, and I’ve got to work it out.”

“It is partly mine, Thomas.”

“Yes, okay, fine, it’s all of ours. But let’s just sit on it and see what happens, okay? I just spent the whole night fighting, and I don’t feel like talking any more about it this morning. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Neither of us said anything until my coffee came. Then I remembered that the woman serving it to me had supposedly been a dog the night before. As she passed it to me, I secretly sniffed to see if she smelled like a dog.

Anna said something that I didn’t catch. I stopped sniffing and looked at her. “Excuse me?”

She looked at the other woman. “Let us talk alone for a while, all right, Wilma?”

“Of course, Anna. I’ve got to get that casserole ready for dinner. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to cook again. I never thought that I’d say that!” She left, but the click of her high heels going away made me think of dog’s toenails skittering across wooden floors.

“Is it really true, Anna? About Wilma?”

“Yes. Father got mad at the Inklers years ago for mistreating their children. He couldn’t stand any kind of child abuse. When he found out that they were beating their son, he changed them into dogs. Don’t look so skeptical, Thomas. He created them — he could do whatever he wanted with them.”

“So he turned them into bull terriers?”

“Yes, and they would stay that way until Gert Inkler died. Then Wilma would be changed back into a woman. Father didn’t want them around together again as a human couple. If they stayed together as dogs, that didn’t bother him. He hated dogs.” She snickered and stretched her arms out luxuriantly to the sides.

“Then are all of the animals in Galen people?”

“Many of them. But Nails and Petals were the only ones who could speak. Father made them that way on purpose. Remember, dogs can go places and do things that people can’t. That’s one of the reasons why Nails was living at Goosey Fletcher’s house when you came. Normally the two of them stayed here with me. You didn’t know it, but Nails spent a lot of time spying on you two.”

I remembered all of the times he had come in in the morning, or slept on the bed with us at night, been in the room when we had made love… .

“All of the bull terriers in town are people. Father thought that they were the least offensive because they are so comical-looking. He said that they might as well be interesting to look at if we had to have them around.”

I put my hand on my forehead. I was surprised to find it so cool. There were things that I wanted to say, but I had no way to say them then. I drank some coffee and it gave me back some voice.

“All right, if he didn’t like them, then how come he didn’t just erase them? Get out the old ink eradicator and finish them off? Christ, I don’t know what the hell I’m saying here anymore. Why the
fuck
did you have a dog spying on me?” I wrenched up out of my chair and without looking at her walked over to the wmdow.

A little girl in a yellow rain slicker rode by on a wobbly and battered bicycle. I wondered what she had been — a canary? A carburetor? Or always just a kid?

“Thomas?”

The bicycle disappeared around a corner. I didn’t feel like talking to her. I felt like taking a nap at the bottom of the ocean.

“Thomas, are you listening to me? Do you know why I’m letting you do this? Why I am letting you write this biography? Why I’m giving you all of this information on my father?”

I turned around and looked at her. The phone rang and brought its shrill curtain down between us. She didn’t answer it. We waited five-six-seven rings for it to stop: it finally did. I wondered if it might have been Saxony.

“Over there on my desk is a black notebook. Pick it up and look at page 342.”

The notebook was unlike the one I had seen the night before. It was gigantic. It must have been fourteen inches long and had five or six hundred pages in it. I leafed through from the very back, and all of the pages were filled with the France scribble. The pages under my left thumb leaped from page 363 to 302, so I had to stop and flip back.

The ink color changed throughout the book; 342 was written in a kind of violent green: “The great problem here is that whatever I have created in Galen may only be a figment of my imagination. If I die, is it then possible that they will die along with me because they have come from my imagination? An intriguing and horrible thought. I must look into this possibility and make provision for it. What an incredible waste that would be!”

I closed the book on my index finger and looked at Anna. “He was afraid that Galen would disappear after he died?”

“No, not the physical Galen — only the people and the animals that were his. He didn’t create the town — only the people.”

“I guess he was wrong then, huh? I mean, everybody is still here, aren’t they?” Way off in the outside distance a train hooted.

“Yes, but not completely. Before Father died, he had written the history of the town up until the year three thousand —”

“Three
thousand
?”

“Yes, three thousand and fourteen. He was still working on it when he died. Absolutely unexpectedly. He lay down for a nap one afternoon and died. It was horrible. Everyone here was terrified that they all would disappear the moment he passed away, so when it actually did happen and things remained the same, we were jubilant.”

“Anna, do you know the story by Borges, ‘The Circular Ruins’?”

“No.”