She is always busy and today the temperature is dropping. So she splits wood and I lie next to her, paws outstretched, belly on cold ground, panting breath outflowing, white. Memory huge and bleeding, not keeping to one track, mammalian but skipping, skipping.
She is ferocious with energy. She is mad. The chips fly everywhere and so do the split logs. Splinter, splinter, splinter: kindling. The insides of trees smell sweet; sharp.
Arnold Wentworth watches from his wheelchair at the window. She is not angry at him. We brought him here. It was an arduous journey. But my kind likes journeys. Their imperativeness pulls us, gives us purpose. We know we will find you, eventually. Take us for a ride, throw us out of the car and drive off. We will think you made a big mistake and make it home again.
Split and long crunch of log-fiber. She does not know me, but I know her. She used to be different, and I was too. I am her memory-device, but she has lost the key. This happened before our memories were beamed down to us; among us. Our thoughts, our feelings, re-edited and re-cut events—some true, some false, but all completely manipulative—emanate from the Allover Station in a constant flood. Some of us knew it was coming, or at least suspected, and took steps. The three of us in our strange symbiosis are immune, but we have to live out here, alone. People would notice. And there are those who want to find us.
A pale flare curves against gathering storm clouds. It comes from Evan’s Ridge, which used to be a tourist town but which is now a rebel stronghold. They have a missile launcher hidden in a bread delivery truck—at least that’s what Jake says. I even hear the small pop when the missile hits the floater, but she cannot; her senses are dimmer than mine.
I would not have guessed how many people just wanted, needed, an excuse to use weapons. Everything went to hell fast—overnight, it seemed, and everywhere. Individuals joyously got out their guns, knives, bombs, and missiles. Nations happily suspended diplomatic relations and declared war. We are safe here, at least today. Elizabeth still believes she can change people, that Arthur’s smacks can do that.
The worst memories, the deepest, most searing, and most universal, are inside a small, protective bubble. The bubble is inside of me.
She has no idea.
Perhaps I am loving this too much, watching her, being with her. Putting off what needs to be done. But I am in heaven.
I hear it before her, the low sound of the truck engine, the hiccup of the driver shifting gears, and jump up, stiff, growling. Alerted, she lowers her ax and stands waiting, wondering: is this the time? She picks up the pistol she left on the rock next to the chopping block. “Who is it, girl? Get him, Daisy!”
By now, I’ve recognized the sound of Jake’s truck, relax, and run down the steep hidden road wagging my tail. Jake, a local farmer Elizabeth has known since she was a teenager, brings us supplies. Food, gasoline for the generator so we can save the propane in the big buried tank, and local news. Not regularly. The dead-end tree-hidden dirt road below us also goes to property he owns, so it is far more likely that the smoke from our woodstove would give us away than Jake’s visits. But this has been a vacation hideaway for years, so we could be anyone. Jake understands the need for not revealing who we are.
I was cast off, taken for a ride, thrown out of the car, but I came back. I will always come back. I am a dog.
Rain strikes the leaves, making them shiver. Fall is almost over and they are few. By tomorrow, according to the weathernews that is so submerged in my brain that I no longer have to access it deliberately, the trees will be cloaked in ice.
Jake gone, Elizabeth continues to split wood, glancing at the sky nervously. Weather is just about the only kind of uncorrupted television information she can get now. The rest of television, a million stations, with no exaggeration, is sheer entertainment, even what they call the news. I call it the Allover Station because every station and all of the news is the same, essentially. The weight of Allover draws everyone in, together, the same way a hearth fire would. It is almost impossible to resist. It is so full of death and murder and pain that we take it for granted that this is the way of the world and nothing can be done.
They are wrong.
Truth comes in the form of newspods, released into the air, drawn hither and yon by the magnetic call of those who swallowed the black-market pill that gives them access to a million independent podders. They call these newspods smacks: you get smacked with the truth, every once in a while; the pod, an electromagnetic bundle of information, smacks your face—really, just a light caress—and then true news—if you believe the source—unfolds within you.
Arnold Wentworth was a smacker, one of the most well-known and respected. The smacks were in the air, tangible things, like seeds adrift in the wind, after we all knew that it was truthuseless on the airwaves. He composed and sent smacks, and they were not the right smacks because they too often told the truth. He was Elizabeth’s mentor, and her fury and her wit brought him here. Many people believed Arnold Wentworth—so many that he was considered to be a threat to the government and tortured. Millions of people worldwide took the Arnold Wentworth Pill, disseminated on the black market. All based on the deepest trust, and Arnold, over the years, had earned that trust.
Now only Elizabeth has Arnold’s smack code. Only she can release his smacks.
I am a forbidden creature—or at least I would be in Allover. My brain is my entire body, every bit of it pressed into many functions at once, for I am a memory dog, the only one of my kind. I am adrift in places and thoughts that are not really here. Here is quickly baring branches, lake marsh behind with ice creeping across its surface, low gray sky and gray geese flying, honking, saying simply go, go, go, their amazing brains taken up by getting there, by magnetism. Here is the pile of supplies Jake deposited on the porch before driving away. Here is the strict chop of her ax, her low muttered “Fuck them all!” which issues as rhythmically as the downblow of the blade and its thunk into the block beneath the split log, fuck them all, thunk, fuck them all, thunk, fuck them all. The pile of split wood grows. The man watches from the window and I am thankful that I do not have his memories too, for they are hideous.
Here is free from feeling my own memories. Mostly.
I still know them, though. Knowing is a form of enormous selfishness.
I revel, for now, in knowing: Wendy. Jolly. Elizabeth.
And me: Mike. Sometimes I remember. My name is Mike.
Arnold may heal eventually. He cannot talk, not yet, but is beginning to. He had a stroke—a specially administered stroke. Tears well constantly and creep down his face and he cannot or does not bother to wipe them away.
I nudge his resting hands with my long nose from time to time and his hand sometimes stirs and rests on my head. I get little from him, but whatever I get is becoming stronger. Perhaps he is recovering. From her, I get electric anger, stabbing fury, the energy that still cannot be words. She moves quickly, bringing in armfuls of split wood and clonking them onto the pile next to the hot stove. It is too hot in here, but maybe it is good for Arnold. She hauls in the supplies, too, piling them up on the kitchen table, getting them in out of the rain.
She was not always so angry. She was in love with Arnold. She podded lyrically to him, and the pods, I know, unfolded within him, potent flowers of information, sharp and intense as her, and he could not help answering. After a year of this, he left his wife, and his wife reported him, out of jealousy and sadness, and the government came because of the truth of his pods and now we are left with what-once-was-Arnold.
I am memory. And memory is pain. But I was made strong enough to bear it. For I made myself. I—the self that knows myself—cannot get out of the bargain, the deep-being of my cells. Oh, I could be killed; I could die if injured. I cannot, though, knowingly cause injury to myself. I am like a robot in this regard. I did this because I so often contemplated suicide, so often thought of the tree speeding toward me as I drove, or the wrists in the bathtub, or the gun in the drawer. This dance around oblivion tired me tremendously, but with a long-regarded plan, and then in an instant of strength and resolve, I did away with it.
Rain turns to snow outside. Elizabeth plays jazz on the radio, even as the Allover Station, behind her, fills the screen with silent written opinion-molding headlines and alerts. Right now we hear an Oscar Peterson piece. It is a special talent of mine, one I was pleased to retain: a jazz encyclopedia. I can tell who plays, instantly, who sings. The sounds are horizontal planes that slide across one another. Mostly they stay distinct, but sometimes, precisely, they intersect. With a dog’s fine ears, augmented by songbird genes, I find my pleasure. It is not the only reason I stick with her, but it is a plus: jazz. The wood in the stove snaps and pops. We are a joyous popping rhythm laced with the anger that is always there, that makes her movements quick and impatient, that erodes her heart with anger-generated substances.
She wheels Arnold to the shower room and I pad along behind. I hope it’s warm enough now, she says, and unbuttons his shirt, unbuckles his belt, slides off his clothes, tests the temperature of the water, and rolls him under it, wheelchair and all. Water draws his gray-black curly hair straight down his face, over his eyes. Her long, blonde, pulled-back hair holds beads of water in the fine tendrils around her face.
“Juh,” he says. “Juh.”
“Uh, huh,” she says. “Good.” But her face does not say good. I think he is trying to say the name of his first wife, Jane. He is saying more consonants now. “Guh.” And then, his eyes shift and he looks right at me. “Muh.”
Elizabeth twists off the taps and grabs a towel from a pile on a nearby chair. She rubs Arnold’s hair. She lifts his chin and looks into his eyes, kisses him swiftly, sighs, and gets his shoulders. “Grab hold,” she says and he obediently grasps the bar in front of him and pulls himself up, shaking, his pale skin sagging from his ribs, his chest hair white although he is only fifty. They made him old. She briskly dries his back, his buttocks, the backs of his legs, and plops a dry towel onto the wheelchair seat. “Okay.” He gasps and falls back into his chair. She’s dried his face, so the wet tracks are new tears. She is gentle; her anger abates when she touches him. I am glad for her; I am sad for her; I am simply a wraith of emotion, rising around her. I nudge her elbow; she pats my head absently.
After she dries and dresses him, he sits on the couch. He can sit up without falling over. Every day she makes him exercise, moves his limbs, tries to make him reach, or grip, or try to repeat sounds or words after her.
“Kuh,” he says, slowly, drawing out the sound. “Kuuuuuh.”
I lie on my side by the stove into which she has shoved her split logs. The television is on, tuned low. She thinks it helps Arnold. All that is on it is stuff, stuff, stuff. Lies that they call news, celebrities, murders, gossip. A low, growling sigh escapes me as I relax into the warmth.
I think of Arnold’s first face, when they were colleagues, not lovers, and I was Elizabeth’s husband. Are these my memories? Hers? Jolly’s? I no longer know.
That is what is so wonderful.
It is getting too hot in the cabin. I scratch the door, she lets me out, and I lie on the porch, on guard.
Mist flows in and obscures some of the details. Everything is still there, behind the mist, like brilliant red and yellow maples on a far ridge. You know they are there, you just can’t see them. Think of the cloud, with its wind-driven fringes, as beautiful. Think of your mind as weather. Think of your brain as a storm. Arnold is stuck in a storm, locked, unable to move.
Being a dog is a joyful thing…
